Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

by Howard W. French

IN THE SPACE OF LESS THAN two hundred years, from the early fourteenth century to the end of the fifteenth, the course of world history changed in more lastingly transformative ways than it had during any comparable period in previous human experience.

It was during this time span that all the world’s major population centers on each of its continents were brought into permanent and sustained contact with one another for the first time, generating the most profound of consequences.

But after 1448, others took note of the fast-rising numbers of Black slaves being taken from the shoulder of Africa, and with once reliable sources of slaves in eastern Europe and the Middle East drying up or cut off after the Muslim capture of Constantinople in 1453, sentiments shifted back fatefully in the Navigator’s favor.

BY THE 1450S, ACCORDING to Henry’s chronicler Cadamosto, the slave-trading station built at Henry’s behest at Arguim, an island off modern-day Mauritania, was supplying eight hundred to a thousand slaves a year to a burgeoning Portuguese market in Africans. As ridiculous as a comparison to Alexander now sounds, in terms of human capital, this amounted to an immense bounty for those times, and ships began departing Portugal for Africa in large convoys to partake in the traffic.

The rush to get in on the slavery business was such that even the bishop of Algarve outfitted a caravel to acquire slaves on the continent’s coast, helping launch the Catholic Church’s long history of profiting from African bondage.

Framed at its simplest, gold had led the Portuguese to slaves, and slaves drove the expansion of a lucrative new industry, sugar, which would transform the world like few products have in history, and in doing so would also produce one of history’s greatest human tolls.

1441 the leader of one expedition, a man named Antáo Gonçalves, skirmished with a man identified as a Moor who was walking with a camel, and then returned to the same site at nightfall, where he captured a woman he described as a “black Mooress.” Some consider this woman of unknown name to have been the index case, or first victim, in the formation of the transatlantic slave trade centered on dark-skinned Africans. This is not because she was sent to the Americas, which of course was then still undiscovered, but because of the significance apparently attached to her race, which from this point onward became an increasingly important criterion of eligibility for enslavement among Europeans.

In this way, the notion that the Black peoples who inhabited this part of Africa, which was coming under exploration by Europeans for the first time, were uniquely wretched and lacking in the redeeming attributes of civilization by virtue of their color was first mobilized in the 1440s. And this idea was married with another, equally damning thought: these were pagans, perfectly distinct in religious terms from the Moors whom the Portuguese recognized as Muslims, and hence, even though mortal enemies, people who were, like themselves, nonetheless “of the Book.”

From this early date, the Portuguese had begun to actively employ both of these ideas to provide justification for their impressment of Blacks as slaves. But as they encountered African societies with robust states in the decade ahead, the European newcomers would have to temper these views, recognizing the real limitations of their power in far-off lands and bowing to local laws about human bondage, at least temporarily.

THE IDEA OF BLACKS as stateless and godless brutes, bereft not only of civilization but also of any effective means of collective defense, may have served as an important juridical European rationale for Black slavery in the late Middles Ages, but Portugal’s real-world experience of Africa and of Africans in the ensuing years could not have been more different.

“savage to slave,”

Bennett’s words describe the radical elision or compression usually employed to explain how the world went from the era of first maritime contacts between Europeans and “Guinea,” i.e. the land of Blacks, in the 1440s, to the takeoff of a true transatlantic slavery roughly a century later.

Western culture has labored long and hard to perpetuate ideas of precolonial Africa as a space of unadulterated primitivism and lack of human capacity for advancement. Therefore, this leap from savage to slave—meaning a supposedly seamless progression from the Iberian-led “discovery” of sub-Saharan Africa to the birth of a trade in slaves into the New World—feels for many like a transition that hardly merits explaining.

Europeans alone were the avatars of reason, enterprise, and progress. Under the circumstances, the Blacks of “Guinea”—uncivilized and more or less without defense—loomed as if naturally as available victims and as the obvious solution to an impending severe labor shortage.

And although one rarely hears about it, this mode, one that would involve not just palaver, but mutual recognition of sovereignty and the full and complex range of statecraft, would dominate European relations with sub-Saharan Africa well into the seventeenth century, and involve the dispatching of ambassadors, the creation of alliances, formalized trade arrangements, and even treaties.

This shift in strategies came about in part from the Portuguese realization that an expanding African frontier was the most important overseas maritime theater and potentially biggest “prize” for Europe anywhere.

was due, rather, to the critical contributions that Africa began to make to European wealth and prosperity

West Africa was of such import that it was referred to as the “New World” decades before the discovery of the Americas, and tapping the wealth of this region was so vital to Lisbon that it considered Black Africa to be the Portuguese Main, in much the same way the Spanish would come to regard the American mainland. And lest one imagine this to be an obscure detail, Portugal, as we will shortly see, waged the first naval battles in history fought between European powers outside of that continent’s own waters off West Africa in order to retain preeminence over its rivals there.

In addition, it seems that word spread rapidly through coastal African communities about the strange and violent new ship-borne outsiders. So fast, indeed, that it forced the Portuguese to venture farther and farther south and then eastward along the continent’s coast in order to ensure a sufficient yield in captives. That is because once they had raided any spot along the coast, on learning the news, villagers far and wide would have been made wary of further visits by whites.

Black Africans did not, by and large, live in unorganized societies without clear and well-established hierarchies and elaborate belief systems of their own devising, as the newcomers had initially imagined. In fact, along the coast of present-day Senegal, they learned that many Blacks lived under the rule of kings, and where not kings, usually formal chieftaincies. More than mere customs, whether or not preserved in writing, many of these African societies had what we would recognize today as laws. They

the mid-fifteenth century, the Jolof had only recently freed themselves from vassalage to Mali, and they were therefore deeply familiar with the great empires of the nearby Sudan. This partially Islamized society would have also possessed clear knowledge of the dynasties that had long controlled the Maghreb, as well as a large part of Iberia. No small number of Arabic-speaking traders lived in their midst, and if only for that reason alone, the Jolof almost certainly had some advance notion or knowledge of the Europeans as well.

In 1488, a Jolof prince named Bumi Jeléen traveled to Portugal to seek Lisbon’s support amid something Iberians were intimately familiar with themselves, a raging succession struggle.

It is a small irony of history that Portugal’s big advances in Africa came only on the heels of Prince Henry’s death in November 1460.

In 1486, Portuguese ships exploring the eastern end of the Niger River delta, which their countrymen had first reached in 1471, found five snaking channels nested in a vast mangrove-forested water world. They called them the Slave Rivers, giving a clear sense of what they were looking for.

There, the newcomers were welcomed at Gwaton, a thriving port on the River Osse, which they used as their base. Gwaton, they soon discovered, was a commercial satellite of the Bini Kingdom (henceforth Benin, as it came to be known in most European languages), whose origins dated to the eleventh century.†

Kwamena Ansa,

The kingdom was also endowed with a highly centralized government, regulated trade, a police system, and an army that could field more than 100,000 soldiers. The Benin monarchy, led by kings who bore the title oba, maintained tight control over economic affairs through royal guilds that oversaw the production of both arts and high-value commercial products, like the fine textiles that it traded throughout the region.

nothing could match the main draw of slaves. And the Portuguese were pleased to discover an existing supply in slaves rooted in Benin’s wars with neighboring peoples.

There is nothing in the historical record to suggest that if Africans had widely adopted Christianity it would have materially altered the trajectory of the transatlantic slave trade. In Benin, and then Kongo, the Portuguese made early, earnest efforts at conversion. The overall impression one gets, though, is that the missionary work of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was mostly about providing religious and ideological cover for the horrors of the recent innovation we now know as chattel slavery, not to mention an intra-European competition for legitimacy and prestige in which the Catholic Church and a global contest with Islam played outsized roles.

In their early encounters with Europeans bearing religious agendas, it must be said that Africans similarly suffered from no lack of ulterior motives. The Beninese oba seems to have calculated that indulging the whites in a discussion about their faith, and even allowing some modest and carefully controlled experiments in conversion, was a small price to pay if this could win him access to Portuguese weapons and other forms of assistance in fighting an ongoing war against a neighboring people, the Idah.

Then, around 1514, Benin began restricting the commerce in slaves, first by banning the sale of male war captives, who were probably deemed of greater value to Benin as assimilable subjects. For African rulers, adding people in this way was the only realistic solution to increasing one’s power in the near and medium terms.

Deprived of a supply of slave labor, the Portuguese, whose agents in the Bight of Benin were dying by the score from endemic tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever, eventually had to close their feitoria, or “factory.”

What is most noteworthy about this episode in Afro-Portuguese relations in the early sixteenth century is that Benin always remained firmly in control of the terms of engagement with the Europeans, obliging the outsiders to broadly conform to its customs and protocols, and ultimately shutting off the supply of slaves when it no longer perceived the trade to be in its interest. In fact, with the Portuguese playing the game of bilateral relations for the most part on Benin...

Portugal would nonetheless come back to the river delta region, helping to turn it into one of the most prolific sources of A...

The airplane would be making a brief stopover in Accra, the capital of Ghana, which meant that TAP was operating an airplane route today that re-creates a nearly five-century-old itinerary that retraces one of the most important economic circuits in the history of the world. It did so by linking Portugal, Ghana, and São Tomé, much as slave- and gold-carrying ships of the sixteenth century had.

São Tomé, which lies practically on the Equator about 200 miles west of present-day Gabon, was discovered in 1471.

They had also learned from their experience (and that of the Spanish) of other islands off the African coast—places like Madeira, the Canary Islands, and the Cape Verde islands—where the ability to produce lucrative cash crops, especially sugar, was making early African imperialism so financially profitable.

1492, Spain expelled an estimated 100,000 Jews, mostly from Castile and Granada, who streamed into Portugal; for a time afterward Jews may have amounted to as much as a tenth of the Portuguese population. The country’s rulers were highly ambivalent about this sharp spike in the Jewish population, at once eager to benefit from the absorption of new wealth and the skills and knowledge that they brought, but aware of the deep currents of antisemitic sentiment that existed throughout Iberia.

Thus, Jews were given a terrible choice: convert to Christianity or leave the country. Many chose the latter, with some going to Cape Verde or the Upper Guinea region of the African mainland, where some of them went on to mix with local communities. Others eventually made their way to the New World, which was just then about to be opened up, with some of them becoming important to the story of booming sugar production.

The surviving documentary evidence from this period is thin, but that record suggests as many as six hundred of the Jewish newcomers perished soon after their arrival on the island. The remainder, however, would form an important constituent of an entirely new and important social hybrid that emerged as a by-product of Portuguese-African contact in the early crucibles of the trade in gold and slaves: Creole culture.* This Jewish population seems to have played an important role in São Tomé’s innovations in sugar production, and in sugar’s subsequent commercialization in Europe. From an early date, Lisbon took care to supply African women for the pleasure and convenience of the settlers, and with an idea to breeding more colonists. Beyond that, Creole peoples, who were racially mixed and spoke new languages and dialects that derived from the blending of their varied origins, would play an essential role in the creation of the new, ocean-spanning civilization

The trade in slaves on the continent that began almost immediately with the settlement of São Tomé was so lucrative, in fact, that European degradados, sent there under a form of indentured servitude, quickly began trying to flee the island in order to set themselves up on the African mainland to enter the business illegally on their own accounts.

São Tomé

São Tomé deserves an equal, if distinct renown—or infamy, one that has so far largely eluded it. This 330-square-mile island would be the last stop in the Eastern Hemisphere for sugar cultivation. The practice arrived after a long and halting westward migration, which began in prehistory in New Guinea and moved to India and then to the Near East. Finally, with the Crusades, it took hold in the extremities of southern Europe. With the progress of Iberian navigation, sugar cultivation expanded into the Atlantic world, notably the Canaries and Madeira.

In the approach to sugar cultivation practiced on these Atlantic islands, which depended on lots of specialized roles for workers, one can also find an early seed of the intense division of labor that is more commonly identified with capitalism and the beginnings of industrialization.

Their most important innovation, though, stands out both in terms of its impact on the lives of the human beings brought by force to work there and in the way it shaped the global economy, society, and geopolitics of the next five hundred years. Here, for the very first time, we find fully racialized slavery for the production of processed agricultural exports into foreign markets. São Tomé’s plantations, in other words, were designed for and run exclusively on the basis of the violent domination of Black African slave labor. This would prove to be the indispensable killer apparatus of modernity.

São Tomé put sugar on the road to becoming the mass consumer product we nowadays take for granted.

As if all of this was not remarkable enough, the history of São Tomé stands out for even more important but widely overlooked features. It was the first in a long run of Black slave societies created for and lucratively run by Europeans, places where slaves vastly outnumbered their masters (think Barbados, Jamaica, parts of Brazil, and the cotton-growing heartland of the American South).

Overall, until 1820, four times more Africans were brought across the Atlantic to the New World than Europeans.

Relatedly, São Tomé was the first place conceived from the very outset as a site for the conversion of Black men and women into chattel. Not for nothing, this word shares a common root with “cattle,” and it means dehumanized beasts of burden.

OBVIOUS RELICS OF THE physical legacy of slavery and of the era in which it was built are surprisingly scarce in São Tomé. The “great houses” of the plantation society are few, even as ruins, and those that survive are secreted in mountains on heavily forested cul-de-sacs.