The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (The Illegitimate And Legitimate Trade) JSS3 Nigerian History Lesson Note

EARLY EUROPEAN CONTACT WITH NIGERIA TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE 

Slavery is the treatment of human beings as properties, deprived them of their rights. It is the practice of owning human beings as property especially for use as forced labourers. Trans-Atlantic slave trade is therefore the trade in slave across the Atlantic Ocean. It involved majorly the Europeans coming to Africa to buy slaves, and then transported them to European plantation to work. The products of their labour (raw materials) were then transported across the Atlantic to Europe. In the mid-fifteenth century, Portuguese ships sailed down the West African coast in a maneuver designed to bypass the Muslim North African who had monopoly on the trade of sub-Sahara gold, spices and other commodities that Europe wanted. Factors that led to slave trade include: 

1. Growth of plantation 
2. The rush to produce sugar 
3. Cheap labour 
4. Slave as a property 
5. Religious factor 
6. Military factor 

The ending of the Atlantic slave trade and its replacement by what contemporaries called ‘legitimate’ (i.e. non-slave) trade – principally in agricultural produce, such as palm oil and groundnuts – during the nineteenth century has been one of the central themes in the historiography of western Africa since the beginnings of serious academic study of African history in the 1950s. 

Basil Davidson, in his classic study of the impact of the Atlantic slave trade on Africa, published originally in 1961, held that the slave trade had had a profound and essentially destructive effect on the African societies involved in it. Paradoxically, however, he argued that the ending of the trade in the nineteenth century was also negative and disruptive in its impact: The development of “legitimate” trade was the final phase of private and official British efforts to find a positive alternative to the traffic in slaves. 

Earlier aspects of such constructive interest had included the founding of the colony at Sierra Leone in 1787 as a refuge for liberated slaves, the missionary movement designed to bring Christianity to the region, and programs of exploration sponsored by learned societies and scientific groups, such as the Londonbased African Association. The principal commodities of legitimate trade were palm oil and palm kernels, which were used in Europe to make soap and as lubricants for machinery before petroleum products were developed for that purpose. 

Although this trade grew to significant proportions–palm oil exports alone were worth £1 million a year by 1840-it was concentrated near the coast, where palm trees grew in abundance. Gradually, however, the trade forced major economic and social changes in the interior, although it hardly undermined slavery and the slave trade. Quite the contrary, the incidence of slavery in local societies actually increased.

Initially most palm oil (and later kernels) came from Igboland, where palm trees formed a canopy over the densely inhabited areas of the Ngwa, Nri, Awka, and other Igbo peoples. Palm oil was used locally for cooking, the kernels were a source for food, trees were tapped for palm wine, and the fronds were used for building material. It was a relatively simple adjustment for many Igbo families to transport the oil to rivers and streams that led to the Niger Delta for sale to European merchants. 

The rapid expansion in exports, especially after 1830, occurred precisely at the time slave exports collapsed. Instead, slaves were redirected into the domestic economy, especially to grow the staple food crop, yams, in northern Igboland for marketing throughout the palm-tree belt. As before, Aro merchants dominated trade, including the sale of slaves within Igboland as well as palm products to the coast. They maintained their central role in the confederation that governed the region. 

The Niger Delta and Calabar, which once had been known for the export of slaves, now became famous for the export of palm oil, so much so that the delta streams were given the name the “oil rivers.” The basic economic units in each town were “houses,” familyoperated entities that were also the focus of loyalty for those employed in them. A “house” included the extended family of the trader, both his retainers and slaves. 

As its head, the master trader taxed other traders who were members of his “house” and was obligated to maintain a war vessel, which was a large dugout canoe that could hold several tons of cargo and dozens of crew, for the defense of the harbor. Whenever a trader could afford to keep a war canoe, he was expected to form his own “house”. Economic competition among these “houses” was so fierce that trade often erupted into armed battle between the large canoes. Because of the hazards of climate and disease for Europeans and the absence of any authority responsive to their interests on the mainland, European merchants ordinarily moored their ships outside harbors or in the delta and used the ships as trading stations and warehouses. 

In time, however, they built depots onshore and eventually moved up the Niger River to stations established in the interior, like that at Onitsha, where they could bargain with local suppliers and purchase products likely to turn a profit. Some European traders switched to legitimate business only when the commerce in slaves became too hazardous.