Title: Capture and Captives | Slavery and Remembrance
Headings: Capture and Captives
Capture and Captives
Content: Europeans provided a host of tempting goods—textiles, ironware, exotic drinks, and firearms—all in exchange for African captives. Without African middlemen—local traders who had access to internal supplies of captured African peoples—Europeans could never have hoped to acquire more than small batches of Africans. Equally, without the commercial attractions of goods imported by the Europeans, African traders would have had little reason to secure ever more victims from their internal African suppliers. Underlying the commercial exchange of goods for people on the coast were unequal power relations between European and African traders and resulting warfare and violence among various African leaders who provided most of the captives sold to Europeans. Europeans formed alliances with such leaders, providing them with the weapons and means to attack rival African communities, in return for captives. African slavers such as the Asante and Dahomey emerged as powerful states and kingdoms in the eighteenth century, controlling and dominating interior slave trade routes in their respective territories. Widespread turbulence and upheaval resulted from the European demand for slaves, and the transatlantic slave trade stimulated an increase in slavery within Africa itself. Constant and unpredictable violent attacks and kidnapping clearly had a profound and damaging impact on those African populations that were victimized by the slave trade. Many African communities tried to defend themselves from slave traders and raiders by arming or even trading slaves themselves. Others retreated to more defensible geographical regions, such as lakes or escarpments, to escape attacks and capture.