Cruise Through History: Itinerary 13 - Ports of Africa, India and Southeast Asia

By Sherry Hutt

Stories in Itinerary XIII of Cruise through History travel from West Africa in Senegal, along the coast to South Africa and Mozambique, across the Indian Ocean islands to Sri Lanka, and to India, then across Southeast Asia to Vietnam. Across the modern nations, products of the twentieth century, there are themes common to all, though peoples are

• Language: English
• Publisher: Motumas Publishing
• Release date: Dec 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781942153290

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Map West Africa (public domain)

WEST AFRICA

PART I: WEST AFRICA TO 1500

Humans began in Africa and walked across the globe. European and Asian peoples developed language and writing, then filled libraries with histories of their known world. Africa was the great unknown. It was the mysterious continent.

Early people of Africa developed sophisticated civilizations, with great palaces before arrival of Europeans. They fought wars for the same reasons fellow humans across the Sahara Desert and oceans fought; to gain turf and control scarce resources. Their gods rewarded right and punished wrong. In 2000 BCE, a great drought turned the northern plains into the Sahara Desert. People of the grasslands and forests of sub-Sahara were cut off from developments in Egypt. They continued life in groups across the landscape.

In the diaspora, groups came south, deep into the African continent. Then people came into West Africa. Despite later arrivals in West Africa, powerful states developed in West Africa prior to the remainder of the sub-Saharan continent. The reason for the difference was trade. Web-footed camels, adept at crossing hot sands for long distances with little water, carried ancient traders from northwest African coasts into West Africa. Trade brought people together. Groups organized, with leaders, farmers, artisans, and traders.

West Africa was not an area well delineated prior to nation formation. It is regarded as north of the equator and south of the Sahara Desert. It runs from the west coast of the continent and encompasses the Niger, Senegal, and Gambia rivers. This was the domain of powerful civilizations from an early age.

Telling a story of early West Africa is challenging, given that writing came late to the area. Much is known through logs of Arab caravan travelers, such as al-Bakri, who wrote the Book of Routes and Realms, a record of travels from Cordoba, Spain, down the gold caravan route in 1068. He recorded prior oral history. Oral history, passed down by storytellers, is a diligent account, which informs twentieth century academics.

Another scribe relied upon for history of West Africa is Ibn Khaldun, who lived to the beginning of the fifteenth century in Cairo. He wrote of trade centers south of the Sahara, places he had never been.¹ Once Europeans arrived, just prior to 1500, there were diaries, treaties, and military reports, which furnish a European view of events in Africa.²

This story runs from emergence of West African states to arrival of Europeans at the end of the fifteenth century. Light shines here on a continent of sophisticated states, rising through visionary leadership, in cities of mud and stone, some which endure today. Arrival of Europeans changed dynamics in West African society, introducing guns, mass slavery, and external dominance in control of native resources.

Europeans wrote of Africa through a self-reflective lens. This story dispels notions that nothing of merit, valor, or achievement occurred in West Africa prior to arrival of Europeans. Part II of the West Africa story turns to changing economic and political circumstances in the slavery era from the perspective of West Africa communities. Part III begins with control of West Africa by colonial forces, until independence of nations.

Trade in Ancient West Africa

Thirty thousand years ago, people lived as hunter-gathers in the grasslands of West Africa. Armed with wooden spears, they hunted and were hunted by large animals. Gold spilled from mountains. Easily pliable, gold was the metal of adornment.

Iron ore was plentiful. By 1200 BCE iron formed into spear tips and tools enabled humans to triumph over environment. They fed larger populations. Communities came together sharing tasks. Specialized skills and a social structure added to food security.

Languages diversified between communities. Groups identified themselves as a people. They appointed, elected, or acquiesced to a headman or headwoman.

As the Great Drought widened the gulf of sand between people of the north and south, connections were not forgotten. Egypt was distant. Traders from northern Africa came into West Africa by 400 BCE. They brought copper, beads, and salt. People encountered sent them north with gold, metal, and skins of large animals.

At the north end of ancient caravans was Sijilmasa, a city made of mud brick. From this grand trading center, routes developed further north to Marrakech, Fez, and Tiemcen on the Mediterranean coast. Tiemcen was the home of Almoravid Muslims, who swooped down the caravan road in 1050 CE, to conquer the West Africa empire of Ancient Ghana. Almoravids went north into Spain to do battle with El Cid near Valencia.³

The southern end of ancient West Africa caravans extended to Aoudaghost, near gold fields, and further southwest to gold fields of the great city of Djenné. Djenné has roots to 250 BCE. By 750 CE, it was a walled city, which enclosed over eighty acres. It was aptly named, the Gold City. The mosque of Djenné, in the mud and protruding stick architecture of West Africa is a World Heritage Site.

In the twelfth century, Timbuktu rose as the central caravan trading city of West Africa. Legends of a queen Tin have her leading a band of nomadic Berber people south of the Sahara in the fifth century, from present day Algeria. They survived at an oasis in the desert. Legend joins fact, in a what is today central Mali, which grew as an important Muslim education center in the fourteenth century, with three large mosques.⁴

Queen Tin Abuktu tended the oasis, allowing caravan drivers to graze and water cattle. She was known as a reliable guard for possessions of traders, storing gold coming from the south, waiting for trade. Over time, the oasis was known as Timbuktu.⁵

Over centuries, trade went from Timbuktu to Tunis and Cairo. Gold and rhinoceros ivory from West Africa through Sahara caravans, came to coastal Mediterranean ports and into Europe by the thirteenth or fourteenth century. By the late fifteenth century, profits made from gold enticed Portuguese sailors to find direct sources of gold on the Gold Coast of modern Ghana. Their landing forever changed the history of West Africa.

Early States of West Africa.

Djenné Mosque WHS (credit Euronaut GNU)

The first large empire of West Africa was Ancient Ghana. West of the modern state of Ghana, the Ghana was the king of the land of Wagadu, known as the land of gold. Ancient Ghana was noted on Arab maps in 830 CE, although market centers giving rise to the powerful kingdom began in the third century. One Arab source recorded twenty-two kings of Ghana prior to the year 622, and twenty-two kings thereafter.⁶

People of Ancient Ghana were Soninke, the people of Senegal today. Their great ruler Kaya Maghan began as a war chief. He knew his city was a target for bands of warriors, so he raised a large army and conquered nearby trade centers. He allowed Muslim traders from the north to build a city next to his capital. The Ghana palace was built of mud and the Muslim traders built homes of stone. Ghana palace guard dogs wore collars of gold.

The next Ghana king put tips of iron on his spears. So strong was his army of two hundred thousand, that he controlled all West Africa gold fields. He regulated the amount of gold released in the market to keep up prices.

Lavish display of gold from Ghana created envy in gold traders of the north. In 1050, the Ghana empire was attacked by Berbers of north Africa. Led by Abdullah Ibn Yasin, founder of the Almoravids, Berber armies controlled the north end of the gold trade.

Almoravids crossed into Spain, where they vanquished armies of Spanish Christian lords. The black-robbed, severe sect displaced moderate Muslims, originally from Morocco, who amassed wealth in Valencia and Cordoba. The earlier Muslims of Spain enjoyed music, art, and poetry. The Almoravids had no appreciation for art.

Abu Bakr, an Almoravid general, allied with Takur people of West Africa, enemies of Ancient Ghana. In 1076, combined forces controlled Ghana. Devastation of the Ghana empire, caused by the Almoravids, released several vassal states, all of which wanted independence from Almoravids. Abu Bakr died fending off revolts. Takurs seized the trading center of Kumbi Salah in 1203, home of Fulah, other Senegal people.

The Takur could not hold power. In 1240, Mandinka people of Kangaba, another stop on the trade route, seized Kumbi Salah and began the Mali empire. Height of the empire was reached under the Mansa, meaning lord, Kankan Musa. Ruling from 1312 to 1337, Musa tripled the size of the Mali empire to include Timbuktu and Gao, a trading center of the Songhay people. Songhay were peacefully trading in Gao at least two hundred years, while Ancient Ghana, Almoravids, Takur and Mandinka vied for power all around them.

Mansa Musa Depiction of Early Guide Reproduced in the 15th century

The Mali empire was the largest on the continent for two hundred years. In 1324, Mansa Musa traveled through Cairo on his way to Mecca, for his hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage. He gave away so many gold nuggets that he upset the world market for gold. Curious about wealth of the empire, several traders came to Timbuktu from Egypt. In Timbuktu World Heritage Site mosques were built of mud. The traders built themselves homes of brick.

Mansa organized Mali to replicate kingdoms he visited. He appointed a fisheries official and heads of agriculture, forests, and finance. Special courts of Muslim law operated in a vast, decentralized empire.

Lesser mansa than Musa were unable to keep the vast kingdom under control. Songhay, so long quietly subjugated to the rule of others, pillaged the Mali capital of Niani in 1468. Tuareg bands controlled Timbuktu by 1431, making caravans the domain of Tuareg.

The great Songhay leader, Sunni Ali or Ali-ber, dominated West Africa by 1464. In thirty-five years of rule, he was undefeated in battles against Mossi, Dogon, and Fulani people. Muslim historians record Sunni as a tyrant. When Muslims of Timbuktu would not fight Muslim Tuareg holding the city, Sunni required his people chose loyalty over religion. He recognized that for an empire to survive required political cohesion above religion.

Askia Tomb

Revered leader of Songhay was Askia Muhammed, who was born in 1443 and ruled from 1493 to 1528. He commanded loyalty from his people, and administrators, enabling a three year pilgrimage to Mecca, without problems arising at home. Askia invaded Hausa people, expanding the empire further east. When Askia died in 1533, his legacy was a period of peace. Today Songhay comprise less than one million of the population.

Life in West Africa Upon Arrival of Europeans and Guns

By 1500, West Africa experienced stability that comes with loyalty to a political unit rather than a transitory leader. There existed a middle class of bureaucrats and specialized tradesmen. Muslim religion predominated. Muslim sects presented no significant strife. War, drought, and famine had no great effect on regional peace and stability.

Two forces were on the horizon. One came from the north, with new technology in the gun. Moroccans with harquebus, an early rifle, pit Muslim against Muslim in a battle for control of salt in northern West Africa. By 1591, they brought war to Songhay in the quest for gold. Caravan trade was disrupted.

On southern coasts, Portuguese traders arrived in 1518. Portuguese traded for gold. West Africans had slaves to sell. At first, only gold was of interest. Importance of internal caravan cities of trade vanished overnight, as focus turned toward southern coasts.

A NOTE ON SLAVERY IN AFRICA PRIOR TO EUROPEAN SLAVE TRADE: An argument of early anti-abolitionists was that Africans practiced slavery, thus absolving European enslavers of moral responsibility. Slavery between African states, or powerful chieftains, as it was in Rome and other societies, was a means of imprisoning opponents in war, or deviants, like a prison term. Slavery made the enslaved kings men, doing work assigned by the king.⁷

Slavery among African states is distinguished from the European slave trade in several significant ways. The enslaved in African society put themselves at risk by fighting in war, or offending the social good of the group. The European slave trade quickly depleted slaves held in the traditional manner, creating a demand for slaves regardless of how they were taken. With guns supplied by Europeans, African slave catchers and middlemen went far from the coasts to ensnare and kidnap at random men, women, and children.

Kings of African states held slaves as workers, not as chattel. Slaves were housed and fed to keep them productive workers. Beatings were not gratuitous. No African king assumed to own humans. Slavery was often a fluid condition. Slaves could buy or earn freedom. Slaves occasionally married into the ruling family. In at least one instance, a former slave became a king. In the European slave trade, Africans were treated as cargo, beaten into submission, and deprived simple conditions of human existence.

European slavery was race based. Africans were deemed inferior, through lack of knowledge of Africa, its people, and traditions. Dutch, French, and British enslaved people of Asia and India, to work extracting resources, on their home soil, during the colonial era. European slave trade in Africa, depopulated people of a continent, in order to populate other continents and islands, once depopulated of indigenous slaves.

The slavery era and its impact on societies and development of Africa has its own story. The colonial era in Africa also has its own story. They are unpleasant, predicate stories to understanding individual nations, their road to independence, and development today.

Asanti Drum

PART II: SLAVERY ERA IN WEST AFRICA

Americans often regard Africa as the source of slaves over three centuries of the Slavery Era. From the perspective of people and countries of Africa, the Slavery Era was significant and destructive, although in ways different than in the Americas. Impacts to people left behind and communities is a story that goes beyond travails of the slave economy in destinations. This is the story of the slave era on the east side of the Atlantic.

This story must begin with continuing the story of advanced culture during and in spite of European arrival in 1500. Vibrant cultures endured. It was the failure to acknowledge African high culture which fed European race-based political decisions in the colonial era.

Asanti Stool (Tropenmuseum collection)

European entry to Africa began as symbiotic relationships based on trade. Europe craved gold. Africans were delighted to trade gold, nuts, and palm oil for finished goods, such as metal cooking pots, silks and, unfortunately, guns. Guns enabled those who possessed them to dominate those who did not. Guns enabled vassel states to destabilize larger states. Small bands subjegated farmers, who otherwise produced and formed peaceful relationships based on trade. Guns created need for protection in groups, fluid and fickle.

Portuguese exploratory forays to Africa from 1441, were so successful, they were soon followed by Dutch and English trading companies. So competitive were the Dutch and English by the mid-seventeenth century, that pursuit of gold erupted into war between them on African soil. The Dutch and English built castles on coasts of West Africa to protect their interests in trade from each other.

Inception of trade in African humans, begun fortuitously by Portuguese, increased in volume to populate plantations in Brazil. Human trafficking replaced gold as the dominant trade in Africa as a result of Spanish, French, British and Dutch colonization of the West Indies and North America. Once indigenous populations of the western hemisphere perished under slave conditions and exposure to European disease, plantation economies of Europe quickly depleted the population of slaves held at home. They sent traders to Africa for more. The US joined the trade upon independence.

The slave trade, exacerbated by guns, reengineered the social, economic, and political structure of West Africa. When Britain and the United States legislated an end to importing slaves in 1807, but not the end of slavery, illegal trade continued. The great irony is that once Britain ended the slave trade, it became the self-annoited enforcer of abolition of historic African slavery. Eradication of slavery in Africa became the great ruse for the inception of colonialism. That is Part III: Colonial West Africa.

West African States 1500 to 1800

West Africa 1625 (by Gabagool)

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, it was obvious to kings of African states that a volunteer army, called to action in a crisis, was insufficient to protect the kingdom and provide stable community life. Loyalty payments were only collected by kings delivering protection. Standing professional armies were required.

Soldiers traded metal-tipped spears for guns at the turn of the century. States with the latest technology in guns, and most armed soldiers, prevailed in battles. Strategy, strength, and numbers of soldiers ceased to be factors in military dominance.

Moroccan traders came south in 1582, armed with guns, when they raided Songhay settlements in the northern edge of West Africa. The Moroccans were lesser in number. They were armed with the latest guns. They devasted the Songhay.

Meanwhile, Portugese traded guns for gold with states on southern shores of West Africa, including Mossi and Hausa, vassels of Songhay. Weakened Songhay were in no position to demand fealty. Mossi resisted joining the Sonhay empire, and resisted becoming Muslim, until the nineteenth century, when colonized by the French.

Several small Hausa states formed by 1100. By 1400, Hausa states covered a large area south and east of the Songhay empire. Hausa never consolidated into a single empire, thus they could not be conquered by taking a single king or capital. Towns kept separate kings, forming market cooperatives and joining for military protection.

Hausa traded with Egyptian merchants, from whom they obtained muskets. In 1450, a Hausa king sent a raiding party for slaves from other settlements, at the rate of one thousand slaves each month. Slaves were considered the kings men. For two years, slaves built twenty palatial estates. Kings men were soldiers and blended into Hausa.

Preeminence of Hausa did not last. Hausa kings quarreled among themselves, compromising strength in unity. In 1740, Tuareg raids on the Hausa trading center of Karem-Bornu further weakened Hausa. Taureg lacked ability to make war and restore caravan trade, gaining nothing from the raids.

At the close of the eighteenth century, two empires rose, Fulani between the Senegal and Gambia Rivers, in western most West Africa, and Asanti east of the Niger River. Fulani were governed by Muslim imans and Asanti had a central king. Both were stable states, prior to control of commerce by Europeans.

Fulani people were nomads with herds of cattle. They slipped out from dominance of Hausa, to venture to the area of Sengal and Gambia today. Under leadership of a Muslim reformer, they grouped under iman in cities of Futa Jallon, Bondu, and Futa Toro. They remained in a peaceful agrarian existance until 1776.

In inland forests, surrounded by Hausa lived Askan people. Their empire grew so successful by the mid to late seventeenth century, that they expanded to the southern coast of Ghana, now known as the Gold Coast of the modern state of Ghana. The secret to success of the Asanti empire, or as the British record the Ashanti, was their unity.

Golden Stool on Throne 1935

In 1695, a high priest of Asanti, the Okomfo, a man named Anokye, had a vision. His dreams revealed a great empire, whose leaders sat on the throne of the Golden Stool. The leader Osei Tutu received the Golden Stool, and ruled the people to 1717.

Power of the Golden Stool was in its iconic use for small kings to pledge unity in fidelity to the symbol of Asanti leadership. Within Asanti realm movement between villages and trade was safe. Osei Tutu proffered a unified history, where legends of former little kingdoms were meshed into a single Asanti history. Despite three or four wars with the British, Asanti persevered in unity until 1957, and formation of the nation of Ghana.

In three hundred years of stable society, Asanti developed arts and architecture unique to their landscape. Palaces and ritual sites remained impressive until destroyed by the British in the late nineteenth century. Modern Ghana reaches deep into Asanti heritage.

Europeans Change Codes of Slavery and Build an Era of Slave Trade

Elmina Castle Ghana World Heritage Site (Creative Commons Damien Rademecker)

In 1441, Portuguese captain Antam Gonçalves brought the first captives back to Portugal from Africa. On a mission to discover new opportunities for trade, he tracked a man through the jungle until he aprehended him. He held the man for ransome, a common practice of pirates. The man was a member of the royal family, who offered ten slaves in return for his freedom. Conçalves preferred gold. He accepted the slaves and went home.

In 1455, the pope gave Portugal exclusive rights to slave trade in Guinea, in the hopes of new converts to Christianity. Guinea was the name Pope Nicolas V gave to West Africa. Taking slaves was justified as a holy war against pagans and Muslims.

The Portuguese sent Duarte Pacheco Pereira as governor of a trade station. Pereira built Elmina Castle on the Ghana coast from 1520 to 1522. He wrote home describing the wealth of ivory carvings and quality woven mats. He warned of twenty-two foot lizards and fever.

Portugal took few slaves before 1650. In 1518, King Charles of Spain tried to break the Portuguese monopoly by sending a ship to obtain slaves for Cuba, and British privateer John Hawkins tried three times from 1564 to 1567 to obtain slaves. Their efforts were focused on breaking Portugal’s monopoly on trade, any trade, from Africa. Slaves obtained were often taken from them by Africans before reaching ships. Demand for slaves had not yet risen to the point of making daring forays attractive.

Taking slaves from Africa was a side bar to lucrative trade in gold. Initially, Spain, Portugal, Britain and the Dutch obtained slaves in their colonized countries. Later, Africa as a source of limitless free labor went beyond enslavement when pharaohs of Egypt built cities of the Nile Delta in 1400 to 1250 BCE.

To facilitate British trade in Africa, King Charles II awarded a charter to the Royal African Company in 1672. The Company was active for eighty years. In 1752, the Company charter lapsed, enabling open competition to all who wished to trade in Africa. Companies employed slave catcher middlemen, who went far into the interior.

Nations desirous of establishing trade in Africa began by building castles on the coasts. Castles provided a home for the local agent, lodging for officers of merchant ships, and storage for valuable cargo, such as gold, until it could be loaded onto ships. Forty-one castles were built by Europeans in West Africa, into the eighteenth century.

By the mid-seventeenth century, castles held slaves for transport. The Dutch purchased Elmina Castle from the Portuguese.⁸ Britain built its castle, Cape Coast Castle, directly across the narrow inlet to the port in the Gulf of Guinea, on the Gold Coast of present day Ghana. By 1650, forty to fifty slave ships left Ghana every year, from Dutch and English ports combined. Africans watched in 1782, as the Dutch and British went to war in the gulf to control the removal of human and hard assets from Africa.

In 1765, Britain declared all land between the Senegal and Gambia rivers as a British province. In 1778, the French challenged mastery of the delta by the British, by capturing James I castle. Five years later, France and Britain agreed to stand down from claims of a province, to allow open competition for slaves.

Slave trade reached a highpoint in the mid-eighteenth century. By then, one hundred thousand African men, women, and children were taken onto slave ships each year. The currency in exchange was guns. In 1700, the Dutch governor of Elmina castle, William Bosman, wrote to his superiors answering the question of why it was necessary to sell guns to obtain slaves. His answer was: if not us, then the British will.⁹ No doubt, the British used the same substantiation from across the harbor.

Guns assisted Europeans to collect slaves as a direct and indirect result of arming warriors. Initially, African leaders sought guns to arm their warriors as a protection against encroaching armies of other African states. The more guns were distributed, the more they created unequal strength in force. Emboldened chiefs sent forth warriors to settle old grievances, or to take attractive turf. Wars resulted in prisoners. Prisoners would be sold as slaves when slave merchant middlemen came collecting.

Slave collectors went into the jungle, armed to take unarmed people easily captured. People were force-marched to the docks, where dealers asked no questions whether people were war prisoners or were kidnapped. Everyone was at risk.

As trade focused on ports to the south, leaders of interior cities competed for dwindling access to trade. Small armed bands came into villages taking people and goods. Instead of looking to a leader for protection, heads of families armed themselves. Forests were full of people in fear for their safety and those who hunted to feed the growing slave trade.

Insight to the constant crisis existing for the general population is seen in writings of Mungo Park in his 1799 report entitled Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa. Park was educated as a surgeon in Edinburgh. He traveled to Africa in 1796, at the behest of the king of Austria, tasked with assessing trade opportunities. Park was the first European to explore areas of the Gambia River. His goal was to reach Timbuktu, looking for trade opportunities overlooked by other Europeans. Park never reached Timbuktu.

Mungo Park walked to the coast with capitves, a group of freightened souls, who feared whites would eat them. He determined that captives were free people, who had been kidnapped, victims of famine and debt, or who had committed crimes and were free-born people, enslaved by circumstances, and prisoners taken in war. Also among the group, Park noted people born as slaves, who had never known freedom. This small group was less likely to try to escape. The five hundred mile walk to the coast exhausted everyone. Those who could not keep up seemed to disappear. Park boarded the vessel bound for South Carolina, affording him a ride home, on a circuitous route.¹⁰

In 1806, Park returned to Africa, in the area of modern Benin. While walking in the forest, his party came across villagers. There was a stand-off; each party fearful of the other. All whites were suspect as slave traders and all villagers could be armed. Park fired on the villagers and they fired back. He was mortally wounded.

An estimated ten to fifteen million people of Africa were casualties of the slave era, either as slaves, or as deaths associated with slave trade. The labor force of Africa, critical to developing nations, was depleted. By 1800, half the population of Brazil was Africans. On some Caribbean islands, Africans repopulated the island after demise of natives.

Development in Africa, political and economic, was pushed back centuries by the slave trade. Trauma to people of the continent did not end, nor did taking people as slaves stop, when the United States and Britain legislated prohibition of new trade in 1807.

1807: Unwinding the Slave Era into Colonialism

Reports of Mungo Park informed companies to opportunities waiting in Africa. They also educated the general public of horrors of slavery. Jesuits questioned injustice of the slave trade to Spanish royals as early as 1610. As long as slavery was possible and commericially attractive, the practice went unabated. Plantation owners and slave merchants feared that without free labor, the plantation system would collapse.¹¹

Mandingo People by Mungo Park 1790s (Public Domain)

In 1807, governments of Britain and the United States bent to public pressure and enacted laws prohibiting human trade. Slavery was not abolished. New slave imports were illegal.

Once Britain eliminated the slave trade, British in trade castles in West Africa looked at French and Dutch ships loaded with slaves. British viewed the French and Dutch having access to unfair competition. To even the field, British went on a campaign in Africa to be abolitionists with a fervor. Suddenly, Britain considered slavery immoral.

The British mission in Africa altered after 1807, from taking people to taking land of the continent and resources. Valuable resources in Africa included ivory, palm oil, and nuts. Expanding trade into the interior, for resources relegated to lesser priority during the slave era, were viewed as new opportunities.

To maximize profit, British, French, and Dutch, joined by Germans, saw no reason to work through leaders of African states. Leaders were assumed unreliable. Europeans used infrastructure of the slave era, bringing goods to ships in the ports. Trade castles and ships were repurposed to pre-slavery activities. End of the slave era melded quickly and conveniently into the era of colonialism in Africa. A new chapter began.

PART III: WEST AFRICA AND COLONIALISM

Otto von Bismarck Berlin Conference on Africa 1884 (Public Domain)

In 1807, Britain and the United States made human trafficking illegal. As the slave trade ebbed in West Africa, trade in commercial goods resumed a priority position. Elephant and rhinosorous ivory, prized in the European market for billiard balls and piano keys, plus palm oil and nuts were joined by coffee, cotton, and woven cloth. The same players, Britain, France, and the Dutch, joined by Germany, engaged in above-board trade, while slaving continued by Portuguese and Arab traders on the African east coast.¹²

Once Britain abolished slavery, their agents were enthusiastic abolitionists. Britain went to war with the Dutch, French, and Asanti empire, several times in the nineteenth century, to end