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
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