The Making Of Slaves In Ancient Africa.

Slavery is the ownership of a person as property and deprivation of the person's basic human rights, dignity and self worth. In the ancient African society of the 16th to 18th Century, the trading of African slaves to the Europeans held sway. Though it was a very risky and dangerous business due to many factors that occurred during the process, it was highly profitable. A slave was sold in exchange for European manufactured goods and other favours. Hence the African people of the ancient times indulged fully in rounding up their own people to sell for slavery.

There were different means of enslavement in Africa. Slaves were recruited in variety of ways, the most populous being recruitment by warfare. When a community invades another and conquers the territory of the weaker community, its people became automatic slaves subject for sale to the white people.

Kidnapping and raiding were another popular methods of acquiring slaves. Kidnapping of unprotected persons and raiding attack on weaker polities by stronger ones. Kidnapping introduced a specialized progression of "man-stealing" whereby children were stolen in market days when parents and capable adults were away from home.

Olaudah Equiano, a West Bank Igbo captured in 1756 recounted thus, "One day, when our people were gone out to their works as usual, and only I and my dear sister were left to man the house, two men and a woman got over our fence and in a moment seized us both, and without giving us time to cry out or make resistance, they stopped our mouths and ran off with us into the woods"

This was a typical description of man-stealing. It was not only  children that were stolen though, adults in secluded places like farms, along quiet roads etc were seized as well.

A brief account of Thomas Clarkson on the procurement of slaves revealed that during the daytime, the African middle men passed through the villages and purchased slaves fairly but at night they broke into huts of the inhabitants, seized men, women and children promiscuously. They obtained higher number of slaves in this manner.

According to Dr Alexander Falconbridge, enslavement owes its chief support more to kidnapping and crimes than wars. In some places, people found committing adultery were sold into slavery by the family that was wronged or by members of the man's family to avoid future embarrassment. Judicial and extra judicial processes were manipulated to get slaves. People who were often quarrelsome, disobedient, suspected witches, chronic debtors and thieves were sold as slaves.

A man who was known to be wicked and considered a threat to life in his lineage group was sold through conspiracy by his kinsmen. Enslavement for many therefore, was a punishment for crimes.

 

Another group of victims were persons who were considered abnormal, including girls who menstruated before the proper age stipulated by the community, women who climbed trees, children whose upper teeth's appeared before the lower ones, or children who walked and talked rather prematurely, twin mothers and their children, people with more than five fingers and toes or lesser and other forms of deformation.

The high profits of slave trade led to gross judicial corruption whereby most people condemned by trial were never guilty but condemned for profit making in order to be sold off for slavery. A venerable chief told David Northrup in 1973 that; "Any person could be accused of being a wicked person. If I were in need of money, and I had a child of a brother or someone like that, I could just go and say, this child of my brother is a wicked person. Then the whole village would say, 'He is a wicked man; let him be sold!' So that the number will be increased according to the demand for money. Any man was free to sell his wife if he had any dislike for the woman or if he needed some money to do other things"

Violators of law, order and cosmological norms were quickly sold as slaves by African men who were in the business of supplying slaves to the white men. Many families and states heavily depended on slave trade for economic wealth and political stability. Economic challenges like famines compelled families to sell some of their people to make a living. Children used to secure a refundable loan were outrightly sold off in a bad situation. King Eyo II recalled that he had seen a famine one year Inna neighbouring country when people sold themselves and children for a few yams and coppers. Also a testimony of an earlier writer recorded by Northrup states that; "one of the major determinants of the enormous number of slaves in Igbo land......was the close juxtaposition of areas of exhausted barren land with areas of great agricultural fertility. In such cases, an exchange of men for yams was the quickest method of securing a more equitable distribution of both population and food" The Aro purchased surplus children as a result of the willingness of families that lacked enough to eat to sell their children to the Aro.

Acquisition of slaves through the medium of oracles was also very effective. Oracles were the highest court of appeal with a high reputation of infallibility, hence they could make wrong judgements and condemn anyone, with punishment of bundling the person to an evil forest to be eaten alive by animals or consumed by the gods but in reality, such persons were sold for slavery.

There were also established slave markets where slaves were traded at the market price without questions of how they were procured.

It is interesting to note that during the slave trade era, European merchants rarely entered the interiors of Africa due to fear of disease and fierce African resistance. They were only directly involved with the enslavement of Africans living at the coast.