Captives Transported

Uprami Patel
Feb 10, 2016
3 min read

Starting from seventeenth-century, hundreds of thousands of Africans were captured and transported to British North America, part of huge forcible migration whose numbers are staggering: ten million survivors. In the 1990s, activists introduced a new word, Maafa (meaning Disaster in Kiswahili) to describe the ‘black holocaust of the slave trade, enslavement, and colonization. In 1619 the first sizeable shipment of Africans in English-speaking North America, the colonies that became the United States. The African trade grew dramatically before being declared illegal after 1808 and ending in the nineteenth century The last known slaver from Africa to the states was the Wanderer, which landed 409 Africans on the coast of South Carolina in 1858. Over the course of the seventeenth-century, racial slavery took shape, in laws and judicial decisions that by 1680 were defining enslavement in Virginia. Revised in 1696 and made comprehensive in 1712. By the eighteenth century, slavery had taken form and become identified with Africans and their descendants by race. Most of the seventeenth-century Africans and their descendants lived and died anonymously. In the eighteenth-century age of the Enlightenment, however, individuality began to count. The first written ex-slave narratives date back from the eighteenth-century. For the first time, they gave readers in Europe and the Americas the sense of what it is like to be captured, transported and enslaved. The chapter talks about memoirs and autobiography of to different individuals, Ayuba Sulieman Diallo and Olaudah Equiano. Both of them come from widely separated regions in West Africa, and also different generations, offer overlapping as well as contrasting views from their experience. Africans as well as Europeans were mutually benefitted with the Atlantic trade. The African Aristocrats allowed kidnappers free rein and collected taxes on captives passing through their realms. European monarchs chartered and taxed the private companies engaged in the Atlantic slave trade. even though slavery was made illegal in 1808, illegal shipments still continued till mid-nineteenth century. Slavery existed in Africa and another part long before the organization of Atlantic slave trade. Slaves in Africa were captives of war who served as household laborers. Americans often think of Africa as one country and Africans as same people. According to this way of thinking, Africans were raiding and capturing “their own people”, an unconscionable act. The captors and captives came from different ethnic groups. The captors were from well-organized kingdoms and captives were usually people who lacked well-armed rulers and armies.

I learned a couple of interesting things like African slavery was neither racial nor hereditary: the offsprings of slaves could escape the stigma of slave origins. About two-thirds of slaves transported across the Atlantic were males because African captors preferred women captives. Over-time African suppliers reoriented the trade toward the young. in the last century of the Atlantic trade, one-quarter of slaves was children. This was because their foundation was easier to shape as a kid, they were less resistant and had a longer lifespan. The passage from ordinary life to the Atlantic coast was divided into three phases: first, the capture and march to the Atlantic coast; second, the ocean voyage from Africa to the Americas: and third, transfer from the initial American point of disembarkation to the workplace.

Memorable quotations:

“The middle passage was physically dangerous and psychologically traumatic” and "The trip produced predictable outcomes among those who survived: depression, shock, insanity" (pg. 35).
“Severed from their roots, African Americans could not help build their old countries’ national economics, as did so many immigrants from other lands” (pg. 37).
African-American artist Hayden said he “hoped to correct the false impression of our past, to reveal something of its heroic and human aspects” (pg. 40). I chose these quotations because first one paints a picture of how slaves were horribly treated and kept in miserable conditions. The second quote shows how racial persecution destroyed or affected their future, identity and origins. The last quote gives a encourages to better their past and look for something more positive.

Olaudah Equiane survived as a child the so called Middle Passage. The 'Middle Passage' referred to the long transatlantic crossing taking the enslaved Africans away from their homeland to work on the plantations of the West Indies and Americas. The Abolitionists produced many reports detailing the awful conditions of the 'Middle Passage'. They argued that slaves were crowded aboard the ships, where they were forced to live in extremely cramped conditions.