How African Kings Became Millionaires - The Atlantic Slave Trade

Slavery has existed in Africa for as long as recorded history. Ancient Egypt had slaves toiling away in its fields and on its monuments, ancient Carthage trafficked in slaves across the Mediterranean, and the Ethiopian kings of Aksum wrote proudly of the slaves they took in war. Slaves were also exported from Africa for centuries before Europeans arrived. The Trans-Saharan slave trade lasted for over a thousand years and dragged about 10 million people across the desert to be slaves in the Islamic world. The Indian Ocean also had a similarly long-lasting ocean-going slave trade with about 5 million ending up in slave ships, bound and branded for use in foreign lands. These slaves ended up as labourers, domestic servants, soldiers, or more. Male slaves in the Islamic world were typically castrated which meant that new slaves had to be regularly imported to maintain the population.
For this video, we’ll focus on Western Africa where the Atlantic slave trade was centered. West Africa was removed from the Indian Ocean trade and mostly secure from Islamic slave raids, but slavery was still a feature of life there long before the Atlantic slave trade began. A succession of powerful empires occupied the region which all rested on complex slave systems. The Ghanaian Empire from the 3rd to the 13th century began a tradition of powerful West African imperial states and built much of its wealth through trans-Saharan trading of slaves or goods acquired through slave labor.
The Salt, copper, and gold that made the Mali Empire and Mansa Musa fabulously wealthy were all extracted with slave labor. Domestic slavery was also common and Mali was known to import female slaves from the Mediterranean to act as domestic servants in the households of the elites. Most of the slaves were acquired through conquest of neighboring kingdoms or tribal groups who were too weak to defend themselves from the organized imperial militaries. Successor empires like the Songhai, Jolof, and Kaabu inherited the social and economic structures of slavery and continued to acquire slaves as they scrambled to establish their own territories. Elites in these empires used slaves as a status symbol and ownership of slaves came to represent someone’s wealth and power.

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