Title: Why Did African Chiefs Participate In The Transatlantic Slave Trade? | by Francis Korkor | Mother-Afrika | Medium
Headings: 
Why Did African Chiefs Participate In The Transatlantic Slave Trade?
Content: Ancient societies also saw this arrangement as a reasonable punishment for prisoners of wars. So the type of slavery that was going on in Africa before the Europeans, was not slavery established for the sole purpose of trading human for profit, but was for the purpose of not killing their enemies after a battle. It must be noted that this pre-existing slavery in Africa before Europeans arrived, was not regulated by any entity. As with any unregulated system, some unscrupulous tribal warriors could have corrupted it to some extent but capturing and selling more and more slaves than other tribes, but even then the system was just not made for trading and transporting millions and millions of people. Remember in those days, anyone buying slaves was buying them because he could send them to rich households in the Islamic states as servants. 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.