Buying Slaves in Africa
How did an African become a slave? At first, white slave traders simply went on kidnapping raids, but this proved too dangerous for the Europeans. Instead, they established hundreds of forts and trading stations along Africa’s West Coast. Local African rulers and black merchants delivered captured people to these trading posts to sell as slaves to European ship captains.
About 50 percent of the slaves were taken as prisoners during the frequent tribal wars occurring among the West African kingdoms. Another 30 percent became slaves as punishment for crimes or indebtedness. The remainder were kidnapped by black slave traders.
An African trader usually transported his slaves to a coastal trading station by binding them around the neck with leather thongs, each slave about a yard distance from each other. There were often 30 or 40 in a string. The factor living at the trading station negotiated a price between the African slave trader and the slave ship captain.
After making a deal with the factor, the traders transported the slaves in large canoes to the ship, riding at anchor just beyond the thundering surf. The factor supervised the branding and loading of the slaves onto the ship. For land-bound Africans who had never seen it before, the ocean was a terrifying sight. Some slaves tried to escape by jumping into the sea, only to be devoured by sharks.
Gustavus Vassa, an African slave who later gained his freedom and wrote an account of his life, described his experience boarding a slave ship:
I was immediately handled and tossed up to see if I were sound by some of the crew and I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits and that they were going to kill me.... When I recovered, I found some black people about me. I asked if we were to be eaten by these men with horrible looks, red faces and long hair.
