The Return of the Tidal Flow of the Middle Passage

By Jacob Oluwatayo Adeuyan

This book is a high profile reference book on the ordeal and ugly situations that befell the African continent; its people; its economy and why it was impossible for the continent to achieve much in the areas of scientific fit, natural development and social backwardness when is to be compared to other continents of the world. African people are never lazy folks as it was erroneously believed and propagated by some nationalities from other places of the world. If history was to be believed, African continent was one of the first places of the world where civilization and technology started even when others from other regions of the world were still looking for what to hold to support their walking exercise. Africa was one of the first fast growing Continent of the world in the acquisition of science and other human related knowledge, the study of solar system and other planets from its God given bank of knowledge. Universities of Timbuktu and Cairo is in a better position to attest to this fact from their records.The turn around of events that choked-up the people of the early generations of the continent began during the escalation of slave trade era. The relationship between an African person and their kings (Obas), the Chiefs and the Nobles on one hand and the down-trodden people that constituted the larger population of the community on the other created an un-level ground that benefited the former than the later. The advantage of absolute respect that the former was enjoying from the lower class was now being used on them when the trade was booming. African culture is a culture that gives absolute respect and honor to the elders and the well-to-do personalities among its community. When the hunting for slaves was at its peak in the West Coast of Africa for example, this class of well-to-do people were the intermediaries between the Oyinbos (white men) and the African slave traders who were then living at cities along the coast.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Aug 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781463424084

Jacob Oluwatayo Adeuyan

Olu. Adeuyan is blessed with passion for knowledge search from the key geographical locations of the world. He received his B.Sc (Hons) Applied Geology from Kiev Geological College Ukraine in the Old USSR in 1971; LLB (Hons) JD Law Degree from the University of Wolverhampton - UK in 1995 and Master of Business Administration (MBA) Information Technology in the class of year 2000 from Morgan State University, Baltimore Maryland - USA. He worked in various places at nearly all the continents of the world with world class Engineering Firms, private organizations and governments. He was one of the first indigenous geo-scientists that was deployed from the Geological Survey of Nigeria in 1971 to work with the Russian geo-scientists on mineral deposit investigations for the needed geological materials for the establishment of Nigerian Steel Complex at Ajaokuta - Nigeria. In 1976, he decided to opt out from the Federal government employment to establish his own private Engineering Consulting Firm - Goetek (Nig) Services a company consulting on soil engineering to Civil Engineering Firms in the country, investigation of underground water table and drilling of Boreholes for government agencies, public schools and investigation of mineral deposits for private companies. In 1991, he moved to the United Kingdom. While In London where he now sojourned, he worked for some Civil Engineering Companies on road and building work contracts as soil engineer and during this period in 1992, he registered at the university of East London to read Law. He later transferred to University of Wolverhampton where he completed his Law degree in 1995. After graduation, he travelled to the U.S. to join his children who were already living in America. On getting to America he sought employment with a reputable engineering company in Maryland (Engineering Consulting Services Ltd where he worked for a lenghty period of time before joining GeoSciences Engineering Consultants Ltd. His passion for knowledge search prompted him to enrole at Morgan State University in the MBA program of School of Graduate studies and at a record time he finished at the class of 2000 and went back to his employment before he finally stopped working in 2002 because of an acute heart ailment. He has been productively managing his time to write books and consult on business and some engineering projects. He has successfully writen six books on various topics on human development. He is blessed with children and grand children, some resident in the U.S and some in Nigeria, his country of origin. He has travelled to so many places of the world where he enjoyed friendship with responsible and articulate persons of diverse professional and cultural background. He is as well a renowned politician in his home base - Nigeria, Europe and America, also an elder in his church - Vine Yard of Comfort (CAC Worldwide). His hobbies are gardening, research and travelling.

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© 2011 by Jacob Oluwatayo Adeuyan. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 08/24/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4634-2410-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4634-2409-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4634-2408-4 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011910924

Printed in the United States of America

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Dedication

This Book is Dedicated to my African Brothers and Sisters in the Universe.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1—The Root of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Chapter 2—The Ordeals of the Middle Passage When Crossing the Atlantic Ocean

Chapter 3—Who were the real culprits of the Criminal Act of Slave Trade?

Chapter 4—Devastating Effects of Slavery on the Economy of African Continent

Chapter 5—Some of The Horrible Legacies That Slavery Left Behind in the Continent of Africa

Chapter 6—At Last, the African Slaves arrived at their Unknown Destinations

Chapter 7—Plantation Life of the Slaves in the USA

Chapter 8—Slavery life in the British and French Caribbean

Chapter 9—The Demise of Slavery

Chapter 10—The Tumult of Slavery Reform

Chapter 11—Haitian Revolution

Chapter 12—Global Legacy of Slavery

Chapter 13—The American Civil War

Chapter 14—Who was Abraham Lincoln in American Politics & National Development

Chapter 15—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Chapter 16—Barak Husein Obama—The 44th President of the United States of America

Introduction

Undoubtedly people live in two worlds just the way other creatures do. We as people including other creatures live and inhabit the natural world which was created over the Earth’s five-billion-years history through physical, chemical and biological processes. This is the first world. The second world is our own creation which includes the homes we live; the automobile machines we use to transport ourselves and our needs from point A to point B; the farmland we plough to produce foods we eat; the factories that produces our domestic needs; the laboratories where our scientific discoveries first came into realities; the different economic portfolio that make up the substance of our existence and other economic developments that added beauty to our individual life styles.

We accept responsibilities for events that happened in our own world because we are the architects of those events, but not for what happens in the natural world. Those that happened in the natural world are easily attributable to the acts of God simply because they do not fall into the categories of the events we can control. We therefore pass-on those events to the door steps of the Supreme Being we call God. Such things as storms, draughts and floods are certainly free of our own control and they are exempted from our individual or corporate responsibilities. Whenever they occur, no one is to be blamed but only to accept them as natural occurrences.

The title of this book and its contents falls within the second category of the world we live in because those events that are connected with the happenings of all occurrences mentioned throughout the entire text were man-made events that were employed to satisfy the trend of events of those periods that they occurred. Therefore it will seem unfair for anyone to attribute any part of those events that played major roles during those occurrences to the first category of our world definition. Concerning the Trans-Atlantic slave trade which factually decimated large numbers of innocent people from a particular race of the world and sent them out of their places of origin to an unknown destinations, which was against their wishes left much to be remembered by the generations of such affected race.

Certainly much have been written, discussed, talked about at individual closets of the people and at open market places concerning these inhuman, murderous and wicked actions of one race against the other, which the memory of the time and period is almost fading away or being forgotten to a certain level. But no matter what the healing processes and methods applied to heal those wounds, the scars would forever remain conspicuously on the foreheads of the afflicted persons. Surely, mother Africa is the victim whose children were decimated and forcefully taken away from her courtyard to unknown foreign lands through journey of no return to her beautiful courtyard that is filled with baobab trees that provided shade and natural oxygen for the healthy existence of her children especially during the scourging sun radiating around the line of equator.

Mother Africa was seriously injured and afflicted with the worst level of degradation and shame while her children were reduced to the lowest level of humanity during the period of slave trade. There is certainly no amount of sweet coated propaganda that would make this aged mother not to think of her almost twenty million children that were forcefully taken away from her smooth laps to a faraway distance land all in the process of pleasing the economic development of her mates in the committee of world continent.

The waters of her territory became troubled; her cities became desolated; her villages were raised down and burnt into ashes; the growth of her children became stagnant; her unborn babies died in the wombs of their mothers because of the cruel treatments meted out to pregnant women on their journey to the fortresses at the coastal cities through the jungles; many of her children died on the voyage and their bodies were used to feed the fishes of the ocean; those who survived the passage began a new hard-life at their various places of destinations. Although the aged mother remained disillusioned for a while and was unable to think right for sometime because of all these troubles but when she had serious discussions with the Supreme Being that sent all of them unto the Earth, new strategies were mapped out for her continued existence.

When the Portuguese first sailed down the Atlantic coast of Africa in the 1430s, they were not interested in the capturing of humans but were more interested in the trade of gold and other commodities from their home continent. Ever since Mansa Musa, the King of Mali, made his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1325, with 500 slaves and 100 camels (each carrying gold), and the news reached Europe and other places of the world, his Empire became synonymous with enormous wealth and the Atlantic coast began to attract the dangerous interests of the Europeans. In an exchange for gold mined at the Akan deposits, the Portuguese merchants brought into the coast copper wares, cloth, tools, wines and horses and later included arms and ammunitions to get African gold. During this period, there was a small market for African slaves that were mainly used as domestic workers in Europe and as labor to work on the sugar plantations of the Mediterranean.

Before the arrival of the Portuguese into African territory, there had been the use of slaves in carrying out trades by the Muslim merchants as porters on the Trans-Saharan routes and for sale in the Islamic Empire. But when the Portuguese merchants came, they found that they could make considerable gains in their gold transportation by the slaves from one trading post to another as it was being done by their African Muslim counterparts they met on the ground. At the start of 1470s, the Portuguese had reached the Bight of Benin and in the 1480s they had out-distanced the Muslim trading territory when they reached the Kongo coast of the continent. The first of the major European trading forts Elmina, was founded on the Gold Coast in 1482 which later became a major trading facility for slaves purchased along the slave river of Benin.

The following data represented the currently researched statistical figures of slaves exported from Africa on the Trans-Atlantic route derived from tables 2 : 1 and 3 : 1 of Transformations in Slavery by Paul E. Lovejoy, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

The successful voyage of Vasco da Gama to India in the 15th century saw a turning around of the use of slaves in domestic services or as porters into plantation workers when sugar plantations were established on Madeira, Canary, and Cape Verde Islands. Rather than trading slaves back to Muslim merchants and era, there was now emerging market for agricultural workers in those plantations and by 1500 the Portuguese had transported approximately 81,000 slaves of African origin to those various markets. The Portuguese involvement in the trade now opened doors for other European countries such as England, and France to enter the race of human destruction and degradation.

The Atlantic slave trade, which mainly comprised the forceful removal of persons against their wishes and intentions from their places of origin to remote destinations and which actually decimated the growth and development of the affected people during the 15th through to 19th centuries constituted an act of willful damage to the physical and mental life existence of black race throughout the universe. European and American slave traders in collaboration with their African agents transported most of the over 10 million enslaved Africans from their quiet and beautiful homelands to areas in tropical and sub-tropical America, where the vast majority of them both men and women worked as laborers on large agricultural plantations without adequate compensations for their labor and under unhygienic conditions that resulted into untimely death of many of them. Those that survived this holocaust period and season left one or two fable stories behind for their offshoots about their places of origin, their people and how sweet and nourishing the natural milk from their mother’s breast was when they suck it to sleep quietly on her chest at night.

During this period under discussion, the European and North American slave merchants exchanged merchandise like cloth, wines, wares, glasses and other household utensils for slaves along the 5600 km (3500 miles) of Africa’s western and west central Atlantic coasts. The majority of African slaves went to Brazil, the Caribbean Islands and the Spanish—speaking regions of South and Central America. Smaller numbers were taken to Atlantic Islands, Continental Europe and English—speaking areas of the North American mainland. Out of approximately 12 million slaves that left Africa via the Atlantic trade, more than 10 million of them safely arrived at their destinations while the remaining ones were dead and used to feed the creatures of the Sea during the dreadful voyage.

The obnoxious trade called slave trade left conspicuous scars on the bodies of both the victims and their oppressors called slave owners. The mass movement of this particular race from its place of origin to distant locations of the world had enormous impact and consequences at the new locations that they were transported to. Undoubtedly, it gave permanent changes to the structure of the racial, social, economic, political, and cultural make-up of the people of those areas that imported people en-mass into its territories just to satisfy temporary economic gains of the time and moment. It will also leave a legacy of racism to those nations that benefited from the intended trade for which such movement was targeted. Many of the nations that enjoyed the benefits of the then mass movement are today still struggling to overcome the disadvantages that slavery brought into their formally peaceful territories. What goes around must surely come around as time and ugly events would always have their tolls on such nations or people that planned and executed the act of slavery against its fellow human beings.

Chapter 1

The Root of the Atlantic Slave Trade

The major reason that prompted the trans-Atlantic slave trade was brought about when the need to develop agricultural plantations in the New World came into being and when intensive labor capabilities were required to work on those plantations to the economic advantages of the then land owners. Dependency on human skill was actively the only way to accomplish this fit as the development of technological machineries to supplement or take over this important and necessary sector was just not available as at then. Every bit of agricultural input and output had to be carried out by humans from planting to harvesting and even to production levels of the then economy. Before the massive shipment of slaves from the west and central African coasts to the Americas, organized workforce etiquette in form of serfdom was already in places in some parts of the world especially in the Middle East where the Europeans crave cane sugar as soon as they encountered it in the 11th century during their early crusade in the Middle East.

They clearly saw the intensive and strenuous labor works that were involved in the production of sugar in the areas of its planting, harvesting and final processing of the commodity for export. There was therefore no doubt in their minds that if they should invest and make gains in this type of business, they would require the skills of able bodied men and women who were being immuned to the climatic conditions of the geographical areas where their plantations were to be sited. Initially sugarcane plantations were being established to produce sugar for European markets around the tropics of the Western Hemisphere but when Christopher Columbus discovered America, mass exodus of people from Europe to the Americas in search of green pastures escalated the demand for large human labor to work on the new plantations.

New techniques on how to fully work up the labor of those humans called slaves now began to evolve as planters could work them in every inhuman ways from dawn to dusk in order to bring to the local factories the canes before it rotted-off in the fields. The prevailing labor code system in the Western Mediterranean region of the time was feudal serfs who were legally bound to work on the land owned by their landlords but when the shift was moving out of this region to totally different locations, harsh and harder conditions were attached to the use of labor on plantations. Among the earliest slaves that worked on the Mediterranean regional plantations were the Slavic people and the use of them continued up to the middle of 15th century when the demand for sugar grew and the plantations spread west-ward reaching Spain and Portugal.

Because of the intensive labor works on the plantations, the Portuguese sailors who had previous contact with the regions of the Atlantic Ocean especially the continent of Africa began to explore all possibilities about how to move people en-mass from their home bases to the plantations in the tropical islands such as Madeira, the Canary Islands and Sao Tome, all of which by this time emerged as major sugar producers of the world. Gradually, the system was expanding and later moved towards American territories. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Northeast Brazil and the Caribbean Islands had become the leading sugar producing areas of the world. Subsequently, the British colonies of mainland North America were in the process of importing slaves into their territories to grow tobacco, rice, and indigo and later into the 19th century when the business was at its peak, they included the planting of cotton and other agricultural produce to the existing commodities that was to require more intensive labor works.

The New World plantation owners were now looking for large and inexpensive labor force to work for them. Initially the Native Americans were their obvious choice, but when the rate of mortality through such diseases as smallpox. mumps and measles, which the Europeans introduced into the new region and to which the Native Americans lacked immunity was becoming alarming, they had to sought for alternative labor force from other areas to fill up the vacuum. Their alternative choice was from Africa where the people came from an environment where those who survived into adolescent ages had acquired some sort of natural immunity to such diseases as smallpox, mumps and measles, as well as to the tropical diseases such as malaria and yellow fever. The race to African coastal areas to bring slaves to fill the vacuum already created through the above mentioned reasons started in earnest.

The alternative source of labor supply from Africa was not the original plan of the owners of plantations but when they had problems with the native America and the European indentured servants—criminals sentenced to labor or those that were obligated to work for a certain period of time to off-set their passage bills from Europe to America, it became obvious that they had to sought for cheaper and larger quantity of people to work for them on the plantations. One of the major problem they had initially with the white colored set of people was that they could easily escape and blend with the members of the colony’s white ruling class because of the same skin color they all carry. Secondly, the white-colored slaves or laborers too suffer the same fate of death arisen from the malady of malaria and yellow fever diseases just as the members of the white ruling class.

The philosophy of this era was that the African people coming to live in the New World carry with them every tendency to live three to five times longer than the white laborers under the same difficult situations and conditions on the plantations, and longer still than the Native Americans. The question of skin color was later made to be paramount in the minds of the plantation owners as the slaves from Africa could not run away from their masters and blend easily with the community the way the white slaves could do. Any attempt for them to escape usually cost many of them many more years of incarceration and severe punishments after they would have been caught and returned to the original owners/masters. For this reason, they were regarded as the best economic solution to plantation owners who were ready to suck them to the marrows.

As the agricultural produce business was growing, so also the business of slave trade of Trans-Atlantic was expanding and being enjoyed by its operators both in Europe, America and Africa. On average, more than 25,000 slaves were crossing the Atlantic Ocean annually and after 1700, the business grew much more rapidly to its peak in the 1780s when a staggering number of 80,000 African slaves arrived on American shores. The categories of men and women that were shipped to the New World were mainly matured people that were able to work hard and pay for the amount invested on them right from the first day of their captivity from their home bases including the profits to be accrued after sale at slave markets in America.

Chapter 2

The Ordeals of the Middle Passage When Crossing the Atlantic Ocean

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At the beginning of the 18th century into half of the 19th century, a period spanned over 150 years African continent was the only continent of the world that suffered the worst level of degradation from the hands of other fellow human beings of the world. The slave trade operators both in Africa and else where had no respect for any class of people brought to their fort market places for sale. Along the West coast of Africa, from the Cameroon in the south to Senegal in the north, the Europeans built some sixty forts that served as trading posts mainly for this obnoxious trade. The European sailors would bring to the territory rum, cloth, guns and other house-hold utensils to trade them in an exchange for human beings to be transported across the Atlantic Ocean to the land of never-to-return back to their mother land Africa.

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The system by which these human beings were been transported across the Ocean was reported to be the worst of its kind in the history of mankind. The unkind transportation situations that they were subjected to during the voyage by the middle merchants who were not yet the end users of the slaves were too barbaric to remember. On their getting to the homes of their end users, the slaves would work on the crops at the plantations; they would clean their homes, yards and tender their lawns; they would look after their children’s welfare and general cleanliness; do the cooking and laundry; all for no pecuniary remunerations except for the crunch of bread that dropped from the kitchen table and the badly affected grains of wheat or corn for their daily meals. A case that frequently comes to the minds of people when the situation memory of the time knocked at the doors of their hearts was that of 11 years old boy called Olaudah Equino who was a son of an African tribal leader from an Ibo clan of Nigeria. He was kidnapped in 1755 from his home base at that tender age and he was one of the almost 12 million Africans that were sold into slavery during this horrible period in the life of mother-Africa.

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Photo of Olaudah Equino

In the autobiography of this slave boy he wrote that I believe there are few events in my life that have not happened to many. One would agree with him that one out of the many he referred to here was the conditions meted out to many Africans that were forced and displaced from their home bases as free people and brought to strange land in faraway South America, the Caribbean and the North America for no interested purpose of their own at all. At the forts, the European merchants would wait for the African traders to bring in their human commodities for negotiated prices and for the exchange of some useless materials such as looking mirrors, used clothes and caps and worn-out kitchen utensils.

On of the popular traders of this era on the West coast of Africa was a European man named Nicholas Owen.