Africa

J

2

Abolition of the Slave Trade

How the Atlantic slave trade came to be abolished has been the subject of ongoing historical debate. The traditional view argued by British historians for much of the 20th century was that the abolition of the slave trade was the result of a humanitarian campaign spearheaded by a handful of prominent British philanthropists. This view was challenged in the mid-20th century by historians who argued that it was hard economics, not humanitarian concerns, that ended the slave trade. According to this view, by 1800 colonial plantations were declining in profitability, while the spread of industry in Britain (see Industrial Revolution) was becoming increasingly profitable, making the slave trade unnecessary.

Many historians now agree that the complete story of abolition was in fact very much more complex than either of these positions. Both economics and philanthropy were involved, though which was the more powerful force remains a subject of debate. Another factor, often overlooked, was African opposition to slavery, both in the form of slave rebellions in the Caribbean and resistance within Africa itself.

By 1817 the major European powers had officially banned the slave trade, but it still continued, and even increased at times, until slavery itself was completely abolished (in 1865 in the United States and in the 1880s in Cuba and Brazil). While there were still markets for slaves the trade continued, despite patrols by a British naval antislavery squadron. The British captured a number of slaving ships and freed their captives in Sierra Leone, which had been annexed as a British colony. Later in the century Britain and other European powers would use the anti-slave-trade campaign as a justification for seizing further African territory, and eventually for their colonization of the continent.

J

3

Coastal and Forest Regions

Africans powers had not been consulted in the official European ban on slave trading, and states in many areas, eager to acquire European firearms, continued to supply the European, American, and Brazilian ships that evaded the ban. One such area was the Yoruba lands of present-day southern Nigeria, which had not previously been a great supplier of captives for sale into slavery. But when the Fulani jihad spread southward from Sokoto in the 1820s it destabilized the Yoruba state of Oyo and prompted warfare across the whole of Yorubaland. Increasing numbers of Yoruba war captives were subsequently transported to the Lagos lagoon for export as slaves. This provided the British with the excuse to seize control of Lagos in 1851 in the name of suppressing the slave trade. In reality it provided the British with a colonial foothold. They declared Lagos a colony in 1861 and, over the next 40 years, gradually extended British control over the whole of what was to become the colony of Nigeria.

---

---

The Kingdom of Dahomey, in what is now southern Benin, used the Yoruba wars as an opportunity to break free of Oyo domination and assert its independence. With the backing of a large standing army, Dahomey’s kings built a highly efficient and powerful centralized state. Dahomey’s wealth was originally derived from the slave trade, but as the trade was suppressed in the mid-19th century, the king turned to the exploitation of the region’s numerous oil palm plantations. Palm production that was not directly controlled by the state was taxed in a highly efficient manner. When the French took over the territory at the end of the century, they estimated that it contained 40 million palm trees.

The Ashanti Kingdom, in what is now Ghana, was the largest and most powerful West African forest state throughout most of the 19th century. Ashanti derived its wealth from the production of gold dust, which it traded with British, Danish, and Dutch traders on the coast. Consequently, the region was known to Europeans as the Gold Coast. The British sought to control the gold trade, and allied themselves with the coastal Fante people, bitter rivals of the Ashanti, to keep Ashanti from monopolizing the trade. Ashanti and British forces clashed in the mid-1820s, but signed a peace treaty in 1826. In the 1840s the British bought a string of Danish forts along the coast and in 1872 purchased the Dutch fort of Elmina. This left Britain the sole European power in the area. The king of Ashanti challenged the rising colonial power by invading the British-held coast in 1873, sparking the Second Ashanti-British War. A British counterinvasion in 1874 penetrated deep into the Ashanti heartland where British forces sacked the Ashanti capital of Kumasi. The British withdrew, but Ashanti had been fatally weakened and finally fell to British forces in 1896.

To the west, at the mouth of the Sénégal River, the French held the trading towns of Saint-Louis, Gorée, Dakar, and Rufisque. These were important bases for access to trade in gum arabic (used in dying cloth) and groundnuts from the interior. The inland Wolof state of Fouta Toro imposed taxes on most of this trade, however, and in response the French sent an army up the Sénégal River valley in the 1850s. By 1858 the army had defeated the Wolof and established a protectorate over the region. In the process the French clashed with the jihad army of Umar Tal, which prompted him to turn east, toward the upper Niger River, where he founded the Tukolor Empire.

Over the course of the 19th century Sierra Leone grew rapidly, as the British transported freed African captives from all over West Africa to the colony. These mixed groups of Africans communicated in Creole (or Krio), a mixture of English and African languages, and they were known collectively as Creoles. Starting in the 1820s groups of freed African Americans began settling to the east of Sierra Leone in a region they named Liberia. These Americo-Liberians established Liberia as an independent nation in 1847.

K

East Africa to the 1870s

By the 19th century foreign powers dominated the East African coast, but in the inland regions indigenous Africans still largely controlled their own fates. The southern Arabian sultanate of Oman extended its influence to the northern Swahili coast in the 17th century, expelling the Portuguese from the Kenyan coast by 1700 and from the island of Zanzibar in 1729. To the south, along the Mozambique coast, the Portuguese remained the dominant trading power. This region supplied captives to meet the rising French demand for slave labor on sugar plantations on Mauritius and other French-held Indian Ocean islands.

In the interior, west of Lake Victoria, the lakeside kingdom of Buganda had grown to surpass Bunyoro, its older rival, in regional strength. To their south, Rwanda and Burundi had become powerful mountain kingdoms. The Nyamwezi people of the interior of present-day Tanzania were professional traders, carrying ivory between the lake kingdoms and the coast. Meanwhile, in the north, the Christian empire of Ethiopia continued to be a regional power in the highlands, while the Ottoman Empire controlled the coastal region of Eritrea.

K

1

19th-Century Swahili Coast

As the slave trade waned in West Africa in the 19th century, it was peaking on the East African coast. By this time Brazil had become one of the main markets for the trans-Atlantic trade. Restrictions on the slave trade drove up prices in West Africa, and starting in the 1820s it became more economical for Brazilian slavers to venture around southern Africa to Mozambique. There they found a well-established slave trading system supplying local Portuguese needs as well as those of French sugar planters on various Indian Ocean islands. Afro-Portuguese settlers, known as prazeros, in the Zambezi River valley used private slave armies to hunt and raid for ivory and slaves to sell on the coast. North of the Zambezi, the Yao people played a similar role as professional raiders and traders between southern Malawi and northern Mozambique.

Meanwhile, under the rule of Sayyid Sa‘īd ibn Sultan, the sultanate of Oman was rising in power along the northern half of the Swahili coast. Starting in the 1820s the sultan encouraged Omani Arabs to set up clove plantations on the large offshore islands of Zanzibar and Pemba. Worked by slave labor from the mainland, these plantations became so successful that in 1840 Sayyid Sa‘īd moved his primary residence to Zanzibar itself. The growth of Omani plantations prompted a huge increase in the demand for slave labor. By the 1850s Zanzibar’s slave market had become the largest of its kind in Africa. Apart from local needs on the clove plantations, by the 1860s Zanzibar was exporting 60,000 slaves a year, mostly to Arabia and the Persian Gulf. The increasing demand for slaves stimulated expeditions by Swahili-Arab and Nyamwezi slaving caravans into the African interior, to the Great Lakes region and beyond.

Following the 1873 death of Scottish missionary-explorer David Livingstone, who had done much to bring the horrors of the African slave trade to the attention of Europeans, the British forced the closure of Zanzibar’s slave market. By then, however, Britain’s demand for East African ivory had reached such heights that slave labor continued to be used to transport it to the market in Zanzibar. In the last decades of the 19th century, Britain was to make the suppression of the inland slave trade its moral justification for the colonization of much of the region.

K

2

Political Developments in Ethiopia

Ethiopia had been independent and regionally powerful for 1,000 years before facing a political crisis in the 19th century. Before the 17th century Ethiopia had a roving capital which moved from province to province, helping the Ethiopian emperor retain effective central authority. However, in the 17th century Gondar (Gonder) gradually became the fixed capital, allowing Ethiopia’s regional nobility to develop a stubborn autonomy in their isolated valleys. Ethiopia became an increasingly fragmented feudal state until the mid-19th century, when Ethiopia’s relative security was threatened by the expansion of Egyptian control over southern Sudan. In response, a provincial leader named Kassa Haylu developed a trained army equipped with modern firearms and artillery. In 1855 he seized the Ethiopian throne and declared himself Emperor Theodore II.

Theodore saw that if he did not modernize Ethiopia’s military and unify the empire, it was in danger of being overrun by more powerful external enemies. He expanded his own fighting force, and built it into a modern national army. He stripped the hereditary provincial nobility of powers and appointed paid governors and judges to take their places. Fearing the power of the Ethiopian Church, Theodore seized much of its land and limited the number of clergy. These efforts to forge national unity made Ethiopia more powerful but earned Theodore many enemies.

In 1868, following a minor diplomatic row, Theodore arrested some British consular officials. In response, Britain invaded with an army of 30,000 men. The Ethiopian Church helped convince the majority of Ethiopian nobility to abandon their emperor in his hour of need. Left with only 4,000 men, Theodore’s army was easily overrun and he himself committed suicide. The British withdrew, leaving Europeans with the erroneous notion that Ethiopia could easily be captured in the future if the need arose.

Theodore’s successor, Johannes IV, regained the support of the Ethiopian Church and regional nobility by restoring their hereditary powers and privileges. In doing so he was able to summon a large enough army to defeat an Egyptian invasion in 1875, but at the expense of entrenching the feudal system into the fabric of Ethiopian economy and society.