1.11 Global Africans

In the 1400s Portuguese ships sailed down Africa's west coast, looking for a sea route to West African gold that would bypass the trans-Saharan caravans (1.5). By the late 1400s, trade between West African kingdoms and Portugal in gold, goods and enslaved people was growing steadily. Portugal built a trading fort at Elmina, on the Gold Coast, in 1482.

Slavery already existed in many hierarchical West African societies, usually for war captives, debtors or people convicted of crimes. Some African rulers grew richer and stronger by selling captives to the Portuguese. But this early trade was much smaller than what came later, and it differed from the lifelong, inherited, race-based slavery built in the Americas (2.8).

Trade brought more Europeans to West Africa and more sub-Saharan Africans to Iberian port cities, especially Lisbon in Portugal and Seville in Spain. ('Iberian' refers to Spain and Portugal, which share the Iberian Peninsula.) By the 1500s, Africans made up a large share of Lisbon's population: estimates for the mid-1500s run from about one in ten residents to one in five, the figure the course uses.

Africans in these cities were free and enslaved, and they filled many roles: domestic workers, boatmen, guards, entertainers, street vendors and even knights. Members of African ruling families made the trip too, as ambassadors, as students and for religious reasons, reaching Lisbon, Rome and other Mediterranean ports. Kongo's Afonso I, for example, sent young nobles to study in Portugal (1.9).

The required source, The King's Fountain (Chafariz d'El-Rey), is a painting of a busy Lisbon square from around 1570–1580. Africans appear across the scene in many roles. One detail shows João de Sá Panasco, an African Portuguese knight, riding a horse, near two African noblemen in European clothes carrying swords. Elsewhere you can find an African court guard and Muslim African traders. The painting is evidence that Africans were a visible, varied part of European city life well before the slave trade reached its peak.

In the mid-to-late 1400s, Portugal colonized islands off Africa's west coast, including Cabo Verde and São Tomé. There it set up plantations growing cotton, indigo (a plant used for blue dye) and especially sugar, worked by enslaved Africans. São Tomé became one of the world's major sugar producers in the early 1500s.

By 1500, about 50,000 enslaved Africans had been taken from the continent to work on these islands and in Europe. The island system of large plantations, one cash crop and enslaved African labor became the model for slave-based economies in Brazil, the Caribbean and North America.