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

by Howard W. French

it is important to consider that in an era when few Africans had yet made return voyages to Europe, and almost none had any picture of the purposes to which Africans were being put in the New World, little synthetic or unified sense of African identity existed. Because of this, there is no reason to assume any common sense of intra-African solidarity, certainly nothing akin to the shared identity that Africans and members of the African diaspora widely celebrate today.* On the Gold Coast, like in Upper Guinea, an organized slave trade that predated the transatlantic market had long-standing connections to Sudanic Africa and to human traffic across the Sahara. But as we will see shortly, even in Central Africa, with its much more tenuous links to intercontinental and long-distance trade, preexisting practices of slavery and of the forms of commerce associated with it meant that when European demand strongly manifested itself in the sixteenth century, local markets quickly responded.