Title: Why Did African Chiefs Participate In The Transatlantic Slave Trade? | by Francis Korkor | Mother-Afrika | Medium
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Why Did African Chiefs Participate In The Transatlantic Slave Trade?
Content: Not many Islamic households were so rich to demand more than a dozen of household servants. So in terms of scale, slavery was on a much smaller scale than during the trans Atlantic Slave trade that needed millions of people for labour intensive plantation work. The transatlantic slave trade itself began during the 15th century when Portugal, and subsequently other European kingdoms, were finally able to expand overseas and reach Africa. The Portuguese first began to kidnap people from the west coast of Africa and to take those they enslaved back to Europe. It is estimated that by the early 16th century as much as 10% of Lisbon’s population was of African descent. Later with the discovery of the Americas, slaves were sent to plantations in the new world. Of course knowing that black African tribes already had a system of selling their enemy combatants into slavery, the white slave traders were able to entice the African tribal warriors with money to rather sell their enemies to them. They will then turn around and ship them to the Americas. So the Atlantic slave trade instituted by the Europeans, was not for the purposes of preserving the lives of enemy combatants. The sole purpose of this new form of slavery was to exploit and trade the Africans as if they were goods, make huge profits, and also use the African slaves for hard plantation jobs that they the Europeans themselves couldn’t do.