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

by Howard W. French

Nowadays, the consensus estimate on the numbers of Africans brought to the Americas hovers around 12 million. Lost in this atrocious but far too neat accounting is the likelihood that another 6 million Africans were killed in or near their homelands during the hunt for slaves, before they could be placed in chains. Estimates vary, but between 5 and 40 percent perished during brutal overland treks to the coast, or while being held, often for months, in barracoons, or holding pens, as they awaited embarkation on slave ships. And another 10 percent of those who were taken aboard died at sea during an Atlantic transit that constituted an extreme mental and physical test for all those who were subjected to it. When one considers that Africa’s total population in the mid-nineteenth century was probably around 100 million, one begins to gauge the enormity of the demographic assault that the slave trade represented.