Page 69 - Volume 1_Go home mzungu Go Home_merged with links

Prelude to m’zungu colonisation of Africa

"Veni, Vidi,"

ɡ
̩
The m'zuŋ u Slave Trade

“When one tries to measure the effect of European slave trading on the African continent,
it is essential to realize that one is measuring the effect of social violence rather than

trade in any normal sense of the word. ”

"How Europe Underdeveloped Africa" 44
Walter Rodney (1972)
*****

" The Atlantic slave trade, transatlantic slave trade, or Euro-American slave trade involved
the transportation by slave traders of various enslaved African people, mainly to the

Americas. The slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle
Passage, and existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The vast majority of those who
were enslaved and transported in the transatlantic slave trade were people from Central

and West Africa, who had been sold by other West Africans, or by half-European
"merchant princes" to Western European slave traders (with a small number being

captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids), who brought them to the
Americas.

***
The major Atlantic slave-trading nations, ordered by trade volume, were the Portuguese,
the British, the Spanish, the French, the Dutch, and the Danish.

***
The Atlantic slave trade is customarily divided into two eras, known as the First and
Second Atlantic Systems. Slightly more than 3% of the enslaved people exported from

Africa were traded between 1525 and 1600, and 16% in the 17th century.

***
The First Atlantic system was the trade of enslaved Africans to, primarily, South
American colonies of the Portuguese and Spanish empires. During the first Atlantic
system, most of these traders were Portuguese, giving them a near-monopoly.

***
The Second Atlantic system was the trade of enslaved Africans by mostly English,

French and Dutch traders and investors. The main destinations of this phase were the
Caribbean islands Curaçao, Jamaica and Martinique, as European nations built up
economically slave-dependent colonies in the New World.

***