Upper Guinea region was a highly propitious ground upon which to found a transcontinental business in slaves. That is because it had already become a kind of “shatter zone” over the previous two centuries; this occurred as Kaabu, a Malinke empire, expanded coastward, both to the west and south, from its heartland in what is today southwestern Mali and collided with other kingdoms that lay in its path, creating a “mêlée of peoples,” in the phrase of the historian Walter Rodney. “Indeed, the whole of the Upper Guinea offered ample opportunities for conflicts between ethnic groups, localized wars
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