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

by Howard W. French

Establishing reliable numbers for the deaths that occurred during slaving-related warfare, capture, and especially the trek from the interior to the coast from slave-trading regions is probably an impossible task. Some historians have estimated, nonetheless, that as many Africans may have perished in these ways as survived the transatlantic passage. Taking into account the numbers of Africans who died aboard the floating tombs that ferried them across the Atlantic, perhaps as few as 42 percent of the people ensnared into the trade survived long enough to undergo sale in the New World. The historian Joseph Miller has estimated that on top of this horrendous toll, by the end of the three- to four-year “seasoning” period that slaves underwent after their arrival in Brazil (and in other plantation societies), perhaps only twenty-eight to thirty out of every hundred people taken captive in Africa were still alive.* Even though this represented an overall “wastage” rate of human life in the order of two-thirds, for decade after decade, the Portuguese and other major traders treated horrific losses like these as a morally unremarkable cost of “doing business.”