West African Slave Port

Elmina, Ghana, a former slave port, is now a fishing village. Why did the Portuguese, Dutch, and then the British occupy sites like this one along the "Slave Coast?" Where were the slaves kept in this fort until sufficient numbers of them had been collected to fill the slave ships to the "New World?"

Answers:

Profits: Ports like Elmina were very profitable, directly and indirectly, to colonial governments and the merchant class. The Portuguese started to build the fort in 1482 and the Dutch captured this site in 1637. Slaves, about 100,000, were exported for 350 years from Elmina alone!. In 1795 the slave trade in Liverpool, England, resulted in profits of 30 percent. The British sold less than half the total number of trafficked slaves. Dutch, Portuguese, and later U.S. traders were also involved. Ernest Mandel estimates that the various forms of plunder exceeded the cost of the world's industrial capacity by the late 19th century. The slave trade was only possible because Africans, particularly the elites who benefited the most from the slave trade, captured Africans in the interior where mosquitoes, tsetse flies, and crocodiles discouraged Europeans. Inland slaves were usually worth only 1 British Pound whereas on the coast they were valued at 5 British Pounds each.

For more information on this topic, read excerpts from A. D. C. Hyland's THE CASTLES OF ELMINA AND CAPE COAST -- be sure to scroll down to find all the text. Also read William St. Clair, The Grand Slave Emporium: Cape Coast Castle and the British Slave Trade.
Storage: Slaves were kept in cells in the basement.

Portuguese traders set up the slave trade that other European traders followed. African nobles and rulers, such as the King of the Congo and the royal family of Dahomey, bartered humans they had kidnapped or captured in war for horses and European products, including textiles, metal (copper), guns, and alcohol (rum).

From well-documented European sources, there were three major classes of people among the coastal African society: upper class, commoners, and slaves. The Upper Class was comprised of: nobility (afahene, awuranom), politico-military stalwarts (ahenfo, abrafo), mercantile group (abirempon, batafo), priests-ideologists (asafo, abosomfo, asumanfo.) This group engrossed public, political and socioeconomic power. It was of "noble" status. It alone could buy, own and sell slaves, retainers and bonded commoners. An Afahene had slaves, servants and retainers engaged in some twenty different services and functions at his beck and call. As Jean Barbot noted in the 17th century "slaves are one part of the Afahene's riches and property, a commodity in this country." From Kwesi J. Anquandah, Castles and Forts of Ghana, p. 103.

Child slavery is still common in west Africa. Thousands of children are also exported from the region, some to work in the Middle East and Europe as unpaid laborers or for sexual exploitation. Poverty is the cause. The daily wage in rural areas of West Africa is $1 a day. The poor easily get into debt, and some are willing to give up their children for a few dollars. Hence the supply. The demand is created by richer west Africans who want domestic servants and garden workers. Cocoa and cotton farmers need labor. But they are not always willing to pay.

In Africa children are generally treated as mini-adults; from an early age every child will have tasks to perform in the home, such as sweeping or fetching water. It is also common to see children working in shops or on the streets. Poor families will often send a child to a richer relation as a housemaid or houseboy, in the hope that he will get an education. Sometimes the rich relations provide for and treat the child as one of their own, but sometimes the child ends up as little more than a domestic slave. When such children grow up, they may be thrown on to the streets and turn to prostitution to survive.

Poor families who get into debt will traditionally lend a child to the debtor as a bond or to work their way out of the debt. Getting out of debt is difficult, so the children often get sold on. That is where slavery turns from a domestic arrangement into a commercial market. Middlemen buy from parents, or persuade them that the children will be sent to school or get well-paid jobs. Sometimes the children are simply kidnapped. These children, like the ones supposedly on the MV Etireno, are sent across borders, often from poor countries like Mali or Benin to richer ones like Côte d'Ivoire. There they work unpaid on farms or plantations, beaten if they try to run away or forced into prostitution or drug-pushing.

There are no accurate figures, partly because there is no clear definition of slavery, especially for children. The International Labour Organisation says that 250m children between the ages of five and 14 work as slaves, mainly in Asia and Africa. Figures for west Africa are particularly elusive, but thousands of child soldiers have been easily recruited in civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Only 20 African countries out of 53 have ratified a UN convention aimed at eliminating the worst forms of child labor. Even where governments have ratified it, petty officials can be bribed to turn a blind eye. In such countries, freeing child slaves and giving them a home and education would be almost impossible.

Source: The Economist, 21 April 2001 and the Anti-Slavery Soceity.