Man had not long attained full humanity before he conceived the idea of enslaving instead of, or as well as, eating his enemies or his inferiors. Slavery and the slave trade, however—mere servitude—need not excite great horror or pity when it occurs among people of the same race or the same religion, or in countries which are not far from the home of the enslaved. It is where the state of servitude exists between widely divergent races that it gives rise to abuses, which are obvious even to those who are not sensitive philanthropists.
The Negro, more than any other human type, has been marked out by his mental and physical characteristics as the servant of other races. There are, of course, exceptions to the general rule. There are tribes like the Kruboys of the West African coast, the Mandingo, the Wolof, and the Zulu, who have always shown themselves so recalcitrant to slavery that they have generally been let alone; while the least divergence from the negro stock in an upward direction—such as in the case of the Fula, Gala and Somali—appears to produce an unconquerable love of freedom. But the Negro in a primitive state is a born slave. He is possessed of great physical strength, docility, cheerfulness of disposition, a short memory for sorrows and cruelties, and an easily aroused gratitude for kindness and just dealing. He does not suffer from home-sickness to the over-bearing extent that afflicts other peoples torn from their homes, and, provided he is well fed, he is easily made happy. Above all, he can toil hard under the hot sun and in the unhealthy climates of the torrid zone. He has little or no race-fellowships—that is to say, he has no sympathy for other negroes; he recognizes, follows and imitates his master independently of any race affinities, and, as he is usually a strong man and a good fighter, he has come into request not only as a labourer but as a soldier.
Negro slaves were imported into Lower Egypt as servants in the earliest dynastic times. A few reached Carthage from time to time and many were brought to Imperial Rome; but the determined exploitation of the black races did not begin on a large scale till the Muhammadan conquest of Africa. The Arabs had swept across Northern Africa, and become directly acquainted with the Sudan[99]. Before the promulgation of Islam they traded with the East coast of Africa, and after the Islamic outburst they ruled there as sultans. The secluding of women in harims guarded by eunuchs had come into vogue during the Byzantine Empire; but it was probably a custom of Syrian, Mesopotamian, or Egyptian origin. It was adopted with emphasis among the civilized Mussulmans, and the negro eunuch proved the most efficient and faithful guardian of the gynæceum. So the slave trade developed mightily in the Muhammadan world. Household slaves and eunuchs were imported into North Africa, Arabia, Turkey, and Persia from the Sudan; while in a later century the Emperors of Morocco established their power firmly by importing fighting negroes from Nigeria. Arabia, Persia, and India obtained negroes from the Egyptian Sudan, Abyssinia, and the Zanzibar coast. Into the West coast of India negro slaves were imported from East Africa to become the guards of palaces and the fighting seamen of navies. In the Bombay Presidency these negroes became so useful or powerful that they carved out states for themselves, one or more of which, still ruled by negro princes, are in existence at the present day as dependencies of the Government of India[100].
The final impetus was given to this traffic by the European. When the Spanish, Portuguese and English discovered and settled America they found the native races too few in numbers, too fierce, or too weakly to be suited for compulsory agricultural work; and so early as 1503 African slaves were working in the mines of Hispaniola, brought thither by the Spaniards[101]. A few years later they were being imported into Mexico, Panama and Peru. In 1517 the slave trade between Africa and America was regularly established, Charles V of Spain having granted to a Flemish merchant the exclusive privilege of importing into America 4000 slaves a year. This monopoly was subsequently sold by the concessionaire to a company of Genoese merchants, who struck a bargain with the Portuguese government to supply the slaves from Guinea.
English adventurers, who had first found their way out in Portuguese ships to investigate the spice trade, soon determined to take up the traffic in negro labourers for the plantations in America as being more profitable. John Hawkins, one of the famous seamen of the Elizabethan era, in 1562 took over to the West Indies the first cargo of slaves transported under the British flag. Afterwards made Sir John Hawkins (and adopting a “demi-Moor in his proper colour, bound with a cord” as his crest) he made two other voyages (1564, 1567) to the West coast of Africa, conveying some eight hundred kidnapped or purchased negroes to the West Indies. England did not engage largely in the slave trade on her own account until in the 17th century she commenced to possess Jamaica and other West Indian islands, and to develop the tobacco plantations of Virginia. Then she almost outdid rival nations. The late Dr Robert Brown, in his interesting work, “The Story of Africa,” computed that in a little more than a century, from 1680 to 1786, 2,130,000 negro slaves were imported into the British-American colonies, Jamaica in the course of 80 years absorbing 610,000. Towards the latter end of the 18th century the various European powers interested in America imported on an average over 70,000 slaves a year, the British bringing more than one half, and sometimes a still greater proportion. At first the slaves came chiefly from the Gambia and the other rivers southward to Sierra Leone, and from the Gold Coast, where they were supplied to the Dutch through the incessant wars of the Ashanti people. Later they were brought from Dahomé and Benin, and from the Portuguese possessions of Angola and the Zambezi. Then, as the demand grew, a rich field was tapped in the 18th century in that network of swampy rivers, which we now know as the delta of the Niger river. But slowly there grew up in England, in Denmark, and in the United States a feeling that there was something wrong in this system which imposed so much misery on beings, who, though in some degree inferior to white men, were yet of the same species, since they could interbreed with us and learn to talk our language. That such feelings must have existed at all times was evident from the desire of good men when dying to grant freedom to their slaves. But the feeling as a national one remained dormant, and was not general in England until the close of the 18th century. Here and there cases of a negro prince being sold into slavery attracted attention and sympathy and caused a searching of consciences among enlightened men.
In 1768-72 a great-minded Englishman, Granville Sharp, succeeded by pushing a test case in getting a judicial decision that slavery could not exist in England, and that therefore any slave landing in England became free, and could not be taken back into slavery. In 1787 Wilberforce, Clarkson, and other philanthropists formed themselves into an association to secure the abolition of slavery, and by their exertions in Great Britain a bill was passed in 1807 which did not go to the lengths they desired, but which subjected the slave trade under the British flag to severe disabilities. In 1811 this measure was completed and enforced by another bill declaring the Slave Trade to be a felony punishable by penal servitude. Yet it is doubtful whether, before these acts were passed, the hardships of the slaves transported by sea were so terrible as they became after the restrictions placed on the trade rendered it necessary to carry large numbers of human beings on a single voyage more or less concealed from sight in the hold of the vessel with an utter disregard for sanitary conditions[102]. In these later days, when it was necessary to evade tiresome regulations or to carry on the trade in the face of direct prohibition, the sufferings of the slaves were so appalling that they almost transcend belief. It would seem as though the inhuman traffic had created in Arabs, Negroes and white men a deliberate love of cruelty, amounting often to a neglect of commercial interest; for it would obviously have been more to the interest of the slave raider and the slave trader and transporter that the slaves should be landed at their ultimate destination in good condition—certainly with the least possible loss of life. Yet, as the present writer can testify from what he has himself seen in the eighties and nineties of the last century, a slave gang on its march to the coast was loaded with unnecessarily heavy collars or slave-sticks, with chains and irons that chafed and cut into the flesh, and caused virulent ulcers. The slaves were half starved, over-driven, insufficiently provided with drinking water, and recklessly exposed to death from sunstroke. If they threw themselves down for a brief rest or collapsed from exhaustion they were shot or speared or had their throats cut with fiendish brutality. I have seen at Taveita (now a civilized settlement in British East Africa) boys and youths left in the bush to die by degrees from mortification and protrusion of the intestines owing to the unskilful way in which they had been castrated by the Arabs, who had attempted to make eunuchs of them for sale to Turkish and Arab harims. Children whom their mothers could not carry, and who could not keep up with the caravan, had their brains dashed out. Many slaves (I again write from personal knowledge) committed suicide because they could not bear to be separated from their homes and children. They were branded and flogged, and, needless to say, received not the slightest medical treatment for the injuries resulting from this usage.
So much for the overland journey which brought them to the depôt or factory of the European slave trader on the coast; then began the horrors of the sea passage, the description of which, it must be admitted, refers almost entirely to the ships of civilized nations, like the English, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and Americans, and not to the Arabs and Indians, who carried slaves across from the East coast of Africa to Arabia or India. In the latter case the sailing vessels were not often overcrowded, and the slaves were allowed a fair degree of liberty. In the slave trade with America, especially when it was placed under restrictions and finally penalized, it was the aim of the masters to pack as many slaves as possible on board the vessel, the peril of making one run being only half of what was entailed in making two. Very often the slaves were sent on board stark naked. They were packed like herrings in the hold or on the middle deck, and in times of bad weather, or for reasons of security, were kept under hatches. The stench they produced then was appalling, and many died asphyxiated. On some ships, and where the captain was a humane man, the slaves were occasionally allowed to go on deck, and were watered with a hose; and where the skipper’s commission made it profitable to him to land the slaves in good condition, they received better food, and occasional luxuries like tobacco; but if the slaver were chased by a British cruiser, no scruple was shown in throwing the slaves overboard to drown.
Denmark has the credit of being the first European power to forbid the slave trade to her subjects (1792). Two years later the United States of America forbade their subjects to “participate in the exportation of negroes to foreign countries”; and in 1804 an act (first promulgated in 1794) was revived, which prohibited the introduction of any more slaves into the United States. A long struggle had taken place in Great Britain (many of the Liverpool and Bristol merchants being deeply interested in the slave trade) before, in 1807, an act of Parliament was passed (intensified in 1811) abolishing the slave trade so far as British subjects were concerned. At the Congress of Vienna (1814) France agreed in principle that the slave trade should be done away with, and even signed a treaty providing that whilst the slave trade continued with French colonies it should only be carried on by French subjects. During Napoleon’s hundred days of rule in 1815 a decree was issued ending the slave trade for good and all. In the same year Portugal subjected the slave trade to certain restrictions, but did not finally abolish it till 1830. In 1836 Britain paid Portugal the sum of £300,000 in order to get the export of slaves from any Portuguese possession prohibited. Great Britain had also in 1820 paid £400,000 to Spain to purchase a promise from the Spaniards that they would cease to buy negroes in Africa. Both contracts, though ostensibly agreed to by the Governments concerned, were frequently violated by individuals. In 1814 and 1815 the Dutch and Swedes respectively prohibited the slave trade to their subjects, and a few years later most of the Spanish South American states abolished the slave trade on attaining their independence. Slavery was abolished as a legal condition in all parts of the British dominions by 1840; in Jamaica and the West Indies in 1833, in South Africa 1834-1840, and in India about the same time[103]. Besides the sums mentioned which Britain paid to Spain and Portugal to induce them to give up the traffic in slaves, she distributed twenty millions of pounds amongst slave owners of the West Indies as compensation for the abolition of slavery, and £1,250,000 to those who possessed slaves in Cape Colony when they were emancipated. Add to these sums the millions of money she has spent in founding Sierra Leone as a slave settlement, in helping Liberia[104] (from the same motive), in patrolling the East and West coasts of Africa and the Persian Gulf, and it will be admitted that we have here a rare case of a nation doing penance for its sins, and making that real reparation which is evidenced by a monetary sacrifice.
By 1848 the French had abolished slavery in all their possessions. The Dutch did not do so till 1863; in which year also the status of slavery ceased in the United States. Slavery lingered in some of the South American states until 1840-5. In the Portuguese African possessions slavery was abolished in 1878 and in Spanish Cuba and Porto Rico in 1886; while Brazil remained a slave-holding country until 1888, the final and somewhat abrupt abolition of slavery being one of the causes which led to the downfall of the Emperor. However, long after British or French possessions had ceased to offer inducements to the slave trader to run illegal cargoes, there were sufficient countries in the Western Hemisphere to provide an excellent market for negroes, while the Muhammadan world in the East continued to make greater demands than ever on the Central African slave preserves[105].
To counteract the attempts to evade the law a powerful British squadron swept the West coast of Africa; but in spite of British efforts to intercept slave-trading vessels, these latter continued to run cargoes across to the United States, Cuba and Brazil, and it was not possible for this traffic to be wholly vanquished until the abolition of slavery in those countries closed the last markets to the slave trader. A most interesting light is thrown on the vastness of the area covered by these slave-trading operations in a work by the Rev. S. W. Koelle (a missionary of the Church Missionary Society) published in 1854, entitled “Polyglotta Africana.” Mr Koelle established himself at Sierra Leone for some years and busied himself in collecting from the slaves who were landed there from British cruisers vocabularies of the languages they spoke in their own homes. In this way he took down over 200 languages, which represented most of the tongues of the West coast of Africa, of the upper Niger, of Senegal, of Lake Chad, the South-west African coast as far as Benguela, Nyasaland, the Zambezi delta and the South-east coast of Africa, and even Wadai.
When, at the close of the 18th century, British philanthropists were desirous of repatriating loyalist negroes in North America who wished to return to Africa, the Sierra Leone Company was started, which purchased from native chiefs the nucleus of the present colony of Sierra Leone. Here, for three-quarters of a century, British cruisers landed and set free the slaves that were captured off the West coast of Africa. Zanzibar, on the other side of the continent, became about twenty years ago the eastern analogue of Sierra Leone. Since the British occupation of Egypt, slavery has practically ceased to exist in that country; and owing to the French occupation of Algeria and Tunis, and the influence brought to bear by Britain on Turkey in regard to Tripoli, there is not much traffic in slaves across the Sahara Desert to those countries; though anybody visiting the south of Tunis will be surprised at the large number of negroes in all the villages, showing that quite recently constant supplies must have been received from Bornu and the Hausa states. The devastating slave raids of the Matebele Zulus have been abolished by the British South Africa Company; and similar raids of the Angoni have been put an end to by the British and German Governments in East and Central Africa.
The Arabs of Zanzibar had acquired an evil fame for their gigantic slave raids in East-central Africa. Great Britain, who had assisted to separate Zanzibar from Maskat as an independent state in 1862, began to concern herself a few years later with the slave trade which flourished in those dominions. By 1873 the Sultan of Zanzibar had, after considerable pressure, been induced to make the slave trade illegal in his Sultanate, though it continued to flourish in an illegal manner until the administration of his territories by the British and Germans.
Arabs from ’Oman in South-west Arabia and from Zanzibar pushed ever farther and farther into Central Africa from the East coast until they reached the Upper Congo, where they established themselves as sultans amongst the negroes, and enslaved millions. Here and there they Muhammadanized a tribe like the Wa-yao, Manyema, or Wa-nyamwezi, whom they provided with muskets and made worse slave raiders than themselves. These slave raids in the districts of Lakes Nyasa and Tanganyika, revealed to the world by Livingstone, greatly concentrated the attention of Great Britain on these regions; and one of the intentions of the British Government in establishing a protectorate in South-central Africa was the abolition of the slave trade, which was brought about in 1896, after six years’ campaigns with a small force of Indian soldiers[106], and the placing of two gunboats on Lake Nyasa. At the same time the Belgian officers of the Congo State had attacked and broken up the Arabs, the principal slave-hunters amongst whom were slain or expelled from the Congo. The Germans under the brilliant Major von Wissmann hanged several Arab slave-raiders in East-central Africa, and had completely abolished the traffic of the others. The slave-raiding states of Dahomé and Ashanti, of the Mandingo conqueror Samori, and of the Fula and Nupe Sultans and Vicegerents in Eastern Nigeria had been conquered by France or Britain between 1893 and 1903. Finally between 1904 and 1911, France conquered and occupied Wadai, the most powerful Muhammadan state of the Central Sudan and thus put an end to the slave-raiding of the Maba power which was fast depopulating the heart of Africa; while this action was fortified by the Italian occupation of Tripoli and Cyrenaica (1911). So long as any Muhammadan power held under its direct and uncontrolled sway any part of the African coast, there was bound to be slave-raiding and slave-trading in the interior.
In short, though slavery still exists, avowed or disguised, in many parts of Africa, the slave trade is almost at an end, and slave raids are confined to such parts of Nigeria, S.W. Congoland and Abyssinian Galaland as are not under complete European control.
Abominable as the slave trade has been in filling Tropical Africa with incessant warfare and rapine, it has added much to our knowledge of that continent, and has furnished the excuse or cause of European intervention in many cases, resulting sometimes in a vastly improved condition of the natives when European rule has taken the place of that of Negro or Arab sultans. Its ravages will soon be repaired by a few decades of peace and security during which this prolific, unextinguishable negro race will rapidly increase its numbers. Yet about the African slave trade, as with most other instinctive human procedure, and the movements of one race against another, there is an underlying sense of justice. The White and Yellow peoples have been the unconscious agents of the Power behind Nature in punishing the negro for his lazy backwardness. In this world Natural Law ordains that all mankind must work to a reasonable extent, must wrest from its environment sustenance for body and mind, and a bit over to start the children from a higher level than the parents. The races that will not work persistently and doggedly are trampled on, and in time displaced, by those who do. Let the Negro take this to heart; let him devote his fine muscular development in the first place to the setting of his own rank, untidy continent in order. If he will not work of his own free will, now that freedom of action is temporarily restored to him; if he will not till and manure and drain and irrigate the soil of his country in a steady, laborious way as do the Oriental and the European; if he will not apply himself zealously under European tuition to the development of the vast resources of Tropical Africa, where hitherto he has in many of his tribes led a wasteful unproductive life; then force of circumstances, the pressure of eager, hungry, impatient, outside humanity, the converging energies of Europe and Asia will once more relegate the Negro to a servitude which will be the alternative—in the continued struggle for existence—to extinction. The Negro in some parts of Africa has been given back his freedom that he may use it with a man’s sense of responsibility for the waste of time and opportunities. In not a few European “colonies” or protectorates in Africa the over-ruling white man, or more often the irresponsible trader, planter, prospector and labour recruiter, stills looks upon the Negro race as a people doomed to perpetual serfage. But this mental outlook is fast being modified—under British influence, mainly—into an honest appreciation of native rights to land and produce.
An episode in the history of African colonization which may be most fitly mentioned here, in relation to the effects of the slave trade on West Africa, is the foundation of the negro Republic of Liberia by private agencies in the United States.
When the Napoleonic wars were over and the great western expansion of the United States was beginning, the question—not yet wholly solved—arose: what was to be done with the Negro or Mulatto as citizen, as a free man with every right to a vote? There were already many manumitted negroes in North America and in the West Indies, and their position in the first half of the 19th century was an indeterminate one. As it commenced to be irksome, from the social and ethical problems it involved, an attempt was made (1816-20) by certain benevolent and political societies to solve it by deporting all discontented free negroes and negroids back to Africa, where they might make a new home for themselves and even enjoy the privileged position that the one-eyed man occupies amongst the blind. Great Britain, as we have already seen, had much the same problem to face at an earlier date and answered it by the foundation of Sierra Leone. At first it seemed simplest for the various missionary and philanthropic societies to dump their free negroes on the coast of Sierra Leone (in 1820); but the Governor of that colony seems to have received the proposal rather coldly. The fact was that at Sierra Leone (almost a failure from the “repatriation” point of view) we were beginning to find that it is scarcely easier to plant a Black colony in any part of inhabited Africa than to found a White one; you have to displace some other people, and such indigenes, if asked to choose, would rather make way for an intrusive white element than a band of foreign negroes. And when such negroes or negroids come from America or Asia they resist the African climate, or rather its germ diseases, not much better than Europeans. Probably the Sierra Leone Government had begun by 1820 to think more of the interests of the really indigenous, native tribes of that “colony,” than of the woes and welfare of American ex-slaves.
Being thus rebuffed, the promoters of the expatriation of American free negroes made a hasty compact with the chiefs of the Dē tribe at Cape Mesurado, on the Grain Coast, just beyond the Sierra Leone influence; and in 1821 sent out a large batch of negro and mulatto colonists under the tutelage of American white men. The white men all died of fever or abandoned the enterprise in severe ill-health; but amongst the future colonists was a courageous negro, Elijah Johnson, who by his indomitable courage and resourcefulness kept the infant colony from perishing at the hands of the natives, who had not really understood the transaction by which they were supposed to have sold for a few pounds’ worth of trade goods a considerable tract of coast land. In 1823 however there came out a white man of high character and great abilities, the Rev. Jehudi Ashmun; and he it was who practically founded “Liberia” (as the new settlements were called by the Rev. Robert Gurley of the American Colonization Society, in 1824).
The town which American negroes built on Cape Mesurado was named “Monrovia,” after the President of the United States who formulated the “Monroe” doctrine. Other settlements were made on Cape Mount (Robertsport), at Cape Palmas (Maryland), at Sinô (Greenville), and at Grand Basa. In course of time these grew into two separate republics, “Liberia” and “Maryland.” The existence of the former as a sovereign and independent State was first recognized by Great Britain in 1847; indeed the British Government had not only been very benevolent all through to the struggling Liberian communities, and several times come to their assistance when they were attacked by native forces, but had urged on the American negroes the advisability of their forming a State that European Powers could recognize as a valid government on the Grain Coast. Britain was the first Power to recognize Liberia as a sovereign State. The first President of Liberia, an octoroon American named Joseph Jenkins Roberts, went to England in 1847, was very kindly received by Queen Victoria, and made a treaty with Lord Palmerston and the Colonial Office. He afterwards visited the principal countries of western Europe. In 1857 Maryland was united with Liberia; and this negro republic then (in the eyes of Europe) ruled the West African coast from near Sherbro on the west to the river San Pedro on the east—about 400 miles, an extent of littoral since reduced by about 90 miles.
Yet this State has not so far been a success. American immigration on any large scale ceased with the outbreak of the American Civil War and the emancipation of American slaves. The natives of the Kru coast and of the Muhammadan interior spurned any idea of being governed or taxed by foreign Europeanized negroes; and the Americo-Liberians lacked either the courage or the monetary means to effect a conquest of the regions outside the portions of the coast belt on which they had built their towns and established their plantations. As the more vigorous among the American negroes and mulattoes, who had started the settlement, died out, the younger generation failed to bring a similar degree of energy into the development of their native country. All had their faces far too much turned towards either America or England. English, of course, was and remained the official language of Liberia, its adoption being facilitated by the close connection between the Kru population and British West Coast trade (many Krumen also served, and serve still, in the British Navy); the constitution of the Republic was closely, too closely, modelled on that of the United States; very little interest was taken in the languages, history, manners and customs of the million and a half of Liberian aborigines, or in the wonderful native flora and fauna[107]. With the exception of the journeys of Benjamin Anderson in the sixties of the last century, there arose no Liberian explorer of any note who revealed anything about the geography or natural history of the hinterland. This indeed remained (geographically) a closed book down to 1903, when a series of explorations by British, French, Swiss, German and Dutch explorers at last brought to light by 1910 the main features of Liberian geography and ethnology. British and German traders and pioneers (not Americo-Liberians) alone discovered and worked the gold and diamonds of western Liberia and the rubber forests of the centre and east.
Meantime, from the beginning of the seventies onwards Liberia got into financial difficulties. Attempts to open up the interior were costly in a country of dense forests and unnavigable rivers. A loan was contracted in England in 1871, the proceeds of which were vaguely squandered without results. Another loan in 1906 enabled the Liberian Government to pay off some of its German, Dutch and British creditors; but, although this loan brought about the installation of a British official as head of the Liberian customs, and consequently a vast improvement in the revenue, the disorder in the country’s finances continued. France took occasion to press for a settlement of the inland frontier on terms not favourable to Liberia, though as favourable perhaps as the circumstances warranted. Great Britain had greater vested interests in the country than any other foreign nation, but forbore to press them out of regard for American feelings and a wish not to seem to impinge too much on the French sphere. Germany had trading interests in the country scarcely inferior to those of Great Britain, and but for the American factor would probably have pressed for a German protectorate, an intervention which might have been displeasing to Britain and France, the two limitrophe Powers. In these circumstances the Liberians were encouraged to appeal to their mother-country, the United States; and, after considerable deliberation, an American proposal was made for taking over the control of Liberian finances and a general supervision of Liberian affairs on somewhat the same lines as have been followed by American intervention in Santo Domingo. This was accomplished in the year 1912. What the results will be it is difficult to say.
But for international jealousies, the preferable solution of the Liberian problem would have been fusion with the adjoining colony of Sierra Leone, the coast settlements of which had an origin very similar to that of Liberia, while the use of the English language, laws, forms of Christianity, were common to both. Not a few among the Sierra Leone citizens have attained local eminence in administrative capacities; one or two even have become “world-citizens”; and several have received marks of distinction from British sovereigns. Liberia has produced her noteworthy personalities, men like Dr Edward Wilmot Blyden (a great writer on Africa), and Arthur Barclay, President of Liberia from 1904 to 1911; but they have been men of a European culture and class of mind, and have contributed little to the solution of African problems.