When European explorers and traders visited West Africa in the sixteenth century, they noticed the high value given to these beads and so started importing them in mass quantities from Europe. What followed was similar to the story of O'Keefe, but given the tiny size of the beads and the much larger size of the population, it was a slower, more covert process with bigger and more tragic consequences. Slowly but surely, Europeans were able to purchase a lot of the precious resources of Africa for the beads they acquired back home for very little.
