Why were the slaves taken from Africa?/ Where were they taken to?/ Who sold the slaves to the European slavers

Question

Why were the slaves taken from Africa?/ Where were they taken to?/ Who sold the slaves to the European slavers?/ How did they get them and why did they take them?

Answer 1

Africans were taken from their homes for the purpose of being slaves. They were taken all over the world... Europe, America, the Carribean Islands. While some were captured and forced onto slave ships, many were actually captured by rival African tribes and sold to the slave traders!

Answer 2

Our own African Kings sold the criminals to the white man in exchange for liquor and weapons and foods form other lands. However they were tricked into thinking that they would work for them in Africa they were not aware that they were going to be shipped to foreign lands.

Why because unfortunately Caucasians can be ruthless, evil and hateful. No offense I am not racist. They also went to Africa when they found out that it was the richest continent in the World. The mountains of Africa are filled with diamonds and gold. The greedy one, the thieves stole it.

That's why you don't have any black writers or film makers of horror movies - we don't think up evil stuff like that

Answer 3

Slaves were taken from Africa to work on grounds for production of sugar, coffie, cotton ect.
They were taken to America, South America and the Caribbean, after all the indians (Natives) died out and the Europeans were in need of workers.
There were slave traders stayng in Africa who caught the slaves and sell them to other traders who would ship them to the Atlantic and sell them to slave holders.
The slaves were caught with traps ( effective with children), or hunt down like deers with dogs, and taken from tribes who had slaves from wars.
The reason why they were taken was for cheap workmen and they were more resistant and strong.

Answer 4

Africa is divided up into many countries similar to Europe
Europeans had wars with each other. Germany invaded Poland.
WW2 was a clash of these countries.
So did Africa, they had wars and still are having wars and still are selling their own people as slaves to each other. I am black but I do know that my people can be cruel just as Hitler was cruel to other white people. Right now in Africa many people are suffering unspeakable horrors. Many are dieing of starvation.
Instead of worrying about what happened in the past worry about what is happening now. Worry about durfer.

Answer 5

I can give you one answer. slaves were taken from Africa because this race was the one who most support long journeys and because of their color, they did not burn from the sun. This was one of the most strong race.and according to the Luther King junior page,Early in our country's history, almost all black people came here as slaves. Because people in the south felt they needed cheap labor in building the land and because black people in Africa knew how to farm land like that in the south, they were taken from their homes and forced to come to America. Upon arriving in this country, they were sold to whites as slaved without rights or freedoms. There s also a classic book about this point. The name of the book is "El negrero" in Spanish. It is a cruel story about a Cuban man who used to bring black people to sell them in America.

Answer 6

The Arabs introduced the slave trade to the Europeans. Of course, they (the European) already had the "we are superior" attitude by which they justified their evil actions.

Answer 7

The reason they took African people as slaves because they were black. Period. They took them to Europe, Britain and Portugal for example, and they took them to the States and the Caribbean as well. African people were concidered as animals and the slave owners didnt have to pay them, so they took advantage of buying them.

Answer 8

Slavery is the social or de-facto status of specific persons, usually captives or prisoners (or their descendants), who are considered as property or chattel, for the purpose of providing labor and services for the owner or state without the right of the slave to refuse, leave or gain compensation beyond room and board and clothing. Most slaves, historically, were born into that status as at least one of their parents was a slave. Forms of slavery have occurred in nearly all societies in nearly all periods.

Historically, most slaves ancestors were initially captured in wars or kidnapped in isolated raids but some were sold into slavery by their parents as a means of surviving extreme conditions. Most slaves were born into that status. Ancient warfare often resulted in slavery for prisoners and their families who were either killed, ransomed or sold as slaves. Captives were often considered the property of those who captured them and were looked upon as a prize of war. Normally they were sold, bartered or ransomed. It originally may have been more humane than simply executing those who would return to fight if they were freed, but the effect led to widespread enslavement of particular groups of people. Those captured sometimes differed in ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race from the captors but often were the same as the captors. The dominant group in an area might take captives and turn them into slaves with little fear of suffering the like fate, but the possibility might be present from reversals of fortune, as when Seneca warns, at the height of the Roman Empire,

And as often as you reflect how much power you have over a slave, remember that your master has just as much power over you. "But I have no master," you say. You are still young; perhaps you will have one. Do you not know at what age Hecuba entered captivity, or Croesus, or the mother of Darius, or Plato, or Diogenes?

and when various powerful nations fought among themselves anyone might find himself enslaved. The actual amount of force needed to kidnap individual people for slaves could lead to enslavement of those secure from warfare, as brief sporadic raids or kidnapping often sufficed. St. Patrick recounts in his Confession having been kidnapped by pirates, and the Biblical figure Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers.

Ancient societies characterized by poverty, rampant warfare or lawlessness, famines, population pressures, and cultural and technological lag are frequently exporters of slaves to more developed nations. Today the small and illegal slave trade (mostly in Africa) deals with slaves who are rural people forced to move to cities, or those purchased in rural areas and sold into slavery in cities. These moves take place due to loss of subsistence agriculture, thefts of land, and population increases.

In many ancient cultures, persons (often including their family) convicted of serious crimes could be sold into slavery. The proceeds from this sale were often used to compensate the victims (the Code of Hammurabi (~1800 BC) prescribes this for failure to maintain a water dam, to compensate victims of a flood. The convicted criminal might be sold into slavery if he lacked the property to make compensation to the victims. Other laws and other crimes might enslave the criminal regardless of his property; some laws called for the criminal and all his property to be handed over to his victim.

Also, persons have been sold into slavery so that the money could be used to pay off their debts. This could range from a judge, king or Emperor ordering a debtor sold with all his family, to the poor selling off their own children to prevent starvation. In times of dire need such as famine, people have offered themselves into slavery not for a purchase price, but merely so that their new master would feed and take care of them.

In most institutions of slavery throughout the world, the children of slaves are themselves became the property of the master. Local laws varied as to whether the status of the mother or of the father determined the fate of the child; but were usually determined by the status of the mother. In many cultures, slaves could earn their freedom through hard work and buying their own freedom; this was not possible in all cultures.

The type of work slaves did depended on the time period and location of their slavery. In general, they did the same work as everyone else in the lower echelons of the society they lived in but were not paid for it beyond room and board, clothing etc. The most common types of slave work are domestic service, agriculture, mineral extraction, army make-up, industry, and commerce.[10] Prior to about the 18th century, domestic services were acquired in some wealthier households and may include up to four female slaves and their children on its staff. The chattels (as they are called in some countries) are expected to cook, clean, sometimes carry water from an outdoor pump into the house, and grind cereal. Most hired servants to do the same tasks.

Many slaves have been used in agriculture and cultivation from ancient times to about 1860. The strong, young men and women were sometimes forced to work long days in the fields, with little or no breaks for water or food. Since slaves were usually considered valuable property, they were usually well taken care of. This was not always the case in many countries where they worked on land that was owned by absentee owners. The overseers in many of these areas literally worked the slaves to death.

In mineral extraction, the majority of the work, when done by slaves, was done nearly always by men. In some places, they mined the salt that was used during extensive trade in the 19th century.[11] Some of the men in ancient civilizations that were bought into chattel slavery were trained to fight in their nation’s army and other military services. Chattel slaves were occasionally trained in artisan workshops for industry and commerce.[12] The men worked in metalworking, while the females normally worked in either textile trades or domestic houshold tasks. The majority of the time, the slave owners did not pay the chattels for their services beyond room and board, clothing etc.

Female slaves, mostly from Africa, were long traded to the Middle Eastern countries and kingdoms by Arab traders, and sold into sexual slavery to work as concubines or prostitutes.

In regards to specific African slave trade, the trading of slaves has been carried on for thousands of years in Africa. The first main line of supply passed through the Sahara, to which during and after the Age of Exploration, added itself the Atlantic slave trade, through which slavery became an institution mainly considered to be one of African-derived slaves and non-African slave owners.

Despite its illegality, the African slave trade continues today in parts of the continent. The contemporary slave trade focuses principally on the theft and sale of children into slavery as child soldiers and sex workers; secondarily, on the forced sale of women into slavery, typically for use in the sex trade.

The earliest external slave trade was the trans-Saharan slave trade. Although there had long been some trading up the Nile River and very limited trading across the western desert, the transportation of large numbers of slaves did not become viable until camels were introduced from Arabia in the 10th century. At this point, a trans-Saharan trading network came into being to transport slaves north. There is little hard evidence of numbers, but it has been estimated that from the 10th to the 19th century some 6,000 to 7,000 slaves were transported north each year. Over time this added up to several million people moving north, however the annual numbers were small enough that it is thought by many scholars to have had relatively little demographic impact on either West Africa or the Maghreb. Frequent intermarriages meant that the slaves were quickly assimilated in North Africa. Unlike in the Americas, slaves in North Africa were mainly servants rather than labourers, and an equal or greater number of females than males were taken, who were often employed as chambermaids to women of harems. It was also not uncommon to turn male slaves into eunuchs.[1] Slaves purchased from black slave dealers in West African regions known as the Slave Coast, Gold Coast, and Côte d'Ivoire were sold into slavery as a result of a defeat in black on black tribal warfare. Mighty black kings in the Bight of Biafra near modern-day Senegal and Benin sold their captives internally and then to European slave traders for such things as metal cookware, rum, livestock, and seed grain. Also during this time, the European powers namely Portugal, Spain, France and England, were vying for majority control of the African slave trade, although having little effect on the continual internal black on black, or Arab trading. Great Britain's existing colonies in the Lesser Antilles and their effective naval control of the Mid Atlantic forced other countries to abandon their enterprises due to inefficiency in cost. The English crown provided a charter giving the Royal African Company monopoly over the African slave routes until 1712.

The trade in slaves across the Indian Ocean also has a long history beginning with the control of sea routes by Arab traders in the ninth century. It is estimated that only a few thousand slaves were taken each year from the Red Sea and Indian Ocean coast. They were sold throughout the Middle East and India. This trade accelerated as superior ships led to more trade and greater demand for labour on plantations in the region. Eventually, tens of thousands per year were being taken.[3]

The Atlantic slave trade developed much later, but it would eventually be by far the largest and have the greatest impact. The first Europeans to arrive on the coast of Guinea were the Portuguese; the first European to actually buy slaves in the region was Antão Gonçalves, a Portuguese explorer. Originally interested in trading mainly for gold and spices, they set up colonies on the uninhabited islands of Sao Tome. In the 16th century the Portuguese settlers found that these volcanic islands were ideal for growing sugar. Sugar growing is a laborious undertaking and Portuguese settlers were difficult to attract due to the heat, lack of infrastructure, and hard life. To cultivate the sugar the Portuguese turned to large numbers of African slaves. Elmina Castle on the Gold Coast, originally built by the Portuguese in 1482 to control the gold trade, became an important depot for slaves that were to be transported to the New World.

Increasing penetration of the Americas by the Portuguese created another huge demand for labour in Brazil, for farming, mining, and other tasks. To meet this, a trans-Atlantic slave trade soon developed. Slave-based economies quickly spread to the Caribbean and the southern portion of what is today the United States. These areas all developed an insatiable demand for slaves. From its beginning it is estimated that some 12 million slaves were taken from Africa to the Americas. The result of this trade is one of the largest migrations in history. These numbers are hotly disputed by scholars, precision is quite difficult, yet today the general consensus is that these numbers are fairly reliable. A small number of slaves were also shipped to Europe while some were also transported to other areas of Africa, mostly to South Africa.

In the late 15th century, Europeans (Spanish and Portuguese first) began to explore, colonize and conquer the territory in the Americas. Using weapons such as gun power they easily defeated the indigenous people, whom they named "Indians". The European colonists attempted to enslave some of the Indians to perform hard physical labour, but found they were not good workers, with the poor conditions and diseases like smallpox which the Europeans brought in with them, indigenous numbers gradually decreased. The idea of using africans from sub-Saharan Africa as slaves initially came from the existing Arabian and Persian slave trade along East Africa which Portuguese sailors came into contact with in the 15th century. The Europeans had also noted the West African practice of enslaving prisoners of war (a common phenomenon among many peoples on all of the continents). They soon started bartering these captive slaves with their black slave owners for guns, brandy and other goods, that were only produced outside of Africa, and this gave rise to an increasing demand for black tribes to continue capturing ever more Africans for the purpose of selling them into slavery to white Europeans, but trading with Arabs and other internal black tribes still continued. The African slaves were more resistant to European diseases than the Indians and a regular trade was soon established.

Expanding European empires in the New World lacked one major resource: a workforce. In most cases the Native Americans had proved unreliable (most of them were dying from diseases brought over from Europeans), and Europeans were unsuited to the climate and suffered under tropical diseases. This is where the Africans came in. They were excellent workers: they often had experience of agriculture and keeping cattle, they were used to a tropical climate, resistant to tropical diseases, and they could be "worked very hard" on plantations or in mines.

While often, no one disputes the harm done to the slaves themselves, the effects of the trade on African societies are much debated due to the apparent massive wealth black Africans were making by selling their own enslaved people to the more profitable Europeans. In the 19th century, European abolitionists slowly began to see slavery as an unmitigated evil. This view continued with scholars into the 1960s and 70s such as Basil Davidson, who conceded it might have had some benefits while still acknowledging its largely negative impact on Africa. Today, however, some scholars assert that slavery did not have a wholly disastrous effect on those left behind in Africa.

These scholars assert that the numbers of slaves exported were large, but so was the population from which they were drawn. At its peak, the Atlantic slave trade took about 90,000 slaves per year out of a total population of around 25 million in just Guinea, where the vast majority originated. This number was significant, yet only a moderate annual growth rate in population was enough to sustain it by replacement. Therefore, the slave trade is unlikely to have caused a decrease in the population of West Africa, even as it may have reduced or even halted population growth in some regions.

All three slave-trading routes tapped into local trading patterns. Europeans or Arabs in Africa very rarely mounted expeditions to capture slaves. It was far easier and more common to make use of existing black African middlemen and slave traders. Slavery has long been present in Africa for millennia, as some say it is still today even with children, though some historians prefer to describe African slavery as feudalism, arguing it was more like the system that controlled the peasantry of Western Europe during the Middle Ages or Russia into the 19th century than slavery as it was practiced in the Americas.

The slaves came from many different sources. About half came from the societies that sold them. These might be criminals, heretics, the mentally ill, the indebted and any others that had fallen out of favour with the rulers. Most came from captured tribes in inter-tribal warfare. Little is known about the details of practices before the arrival of Europeans, and so it is difficult to tell if the number of people considered as undesirables was artificially increased to provide more slaves for export. It is believed that capital punishment and human sacrifice in the region nearly disappeared since prisoners became far too valuable to dispose of in such a way.

Another source of slaves, comprising about half the total, came from military conquests of other states or tribes. It has long been contended that the slave trade greatly increased violence and warfare in the region due to the pursuit of slaves, but many argue that it is very hard to find any evidence to prove this; warfare was certainly common even before slave hunting had added such an extra inducement.

Slaves were an expensive commodity, and the traders and rulers of the African states supposedly received a great deal in exchange for condemning some of their population into slavery. At the peak of the slave trade, it is said that hundreds of thousands of muskets, vast quantities of cloth, gunpowder and metals were being shipped to Guinea. Guinea's trade with Europe at the peak of the slave trade—which also included significant exports of gold and ivory—was some 3.5 million pounds Sterling per year. By contrast, the trade of the United Kingdom, the economic superpower, was about 14 million pounds per year over this same period of the late 18th century. Thus, for those left behind in Africa the standard of living increased substantially and the region became divided into highly centralized and powerful nation states, such as Dahomey and the Ashanti Confederacy. It also created a class of very wealthy and highly Europeanized traders who began to send their children to European universities.

Beginning in the late 18th century, reaction against the barbarities of the slave trade led to it being outlawed. France was Europe's first country to abolish slavery, in 1794, but it was revived by Napoleon in 1802, and only banned for good in 1848. In 1807 the British Parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, under which captains of slave ships could be fined for each slave transported. This was later superseded by the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, which freed all slaves in the British Empire. Abolition was then extended to the rest of Europe. The power of the Royal Navy was subsequently used to suppress the slave trade, and while some illegal trade, mostly with Brazil, continued, the Atlantic slave trade would be eradicated by the middle of the 19th century. The Saharan and Indian Ocean trades continued, however, and even increased as new sources of slaves became available. According to Mordechai Abir, with the Russian conquest of the Caucasus, Ethiopia became the primary source to buy slaves for the Muslim world. The slave trade within Africa also increased. The British Navy could suppress much of the trade in the Indian Ocean, but the European powers could do little to affect the intra-continental trade.

The continuing anti-slavery movement in Europe became an excuse, and a trumped up reason, for the European penetration and colonisation of much of the African continent. In the late 19th century, the Scramble for Africa saw the continent rapidly divided between Imperialistic Europeans, and an early but secondary focus of all colonial regimes was the suppression of slavery and the slave trade. In response to this public pressure, Ethiopia officially abolished slavery in 1932. By the end of the colonial period they were mostly successful in this aim, and slavery is still very active in Africa even when it has gradually was moved to a wage economy. Independent nations attempting to westernise or impress Europe sometimes cultivated an image of slavery suppression, even as they, in the case of Egypt, hired European soldiers like Samuel White Baker's expedition up the Nile. Slavery has never been eradicated in Africa, and it commonly appears in states, such as Sudan, in places where law and order have collapsed, at different points in history.