2.3 Capture and the Impact of the Slave Trade on West African Societies

• Capture and march: people were captured inland and marched to the Atlantic coast, a trip that could take months. Many waited in crowded, filthy dungeons in coastal forts.
• The Middle Passage: the ocean crossing took up to about three months. Captives were beaten, humiliated, tortured and raped, and suffered disease and hunger. About 15 percent died on the way. For most, the crossing meant permanent separation from home and family.
• The final passage: on arrival, people were quarantined, sold, often resold, and moved again to distant farms and plantations. This stage could take as long as the first two combined.

The slave trade made capturing people profitable, which encouraged violence. Wars between kingdoms grew worse, partly because European traders exchanged firearms for captives. Some leaders sold soldiers and war captives from rival groups to stay powerful and grow rich.

Some coastal states grew wealthy from the trade, but many inland communities lived under constant threat of raids. Over generations, societies lost millions of young people who would have become leaders, parents and keepers of tradition. The result was long-term instability.

Slave narratives are firsthand accounts by formerly enslaved people. They're history, literature and political writing all at once: authors wrote to end slavery and the slave trade, to prove Black humanity and to argue that people of African descent belonged in society.

Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789) became a bestseller in Britain. In Chapter 2, he describes being kidnapped with his sister as a child in Igbo country, being passed from owner to owner on the way to the coast, and his terror on first seeing a slave ship and its crew. His story gave British readers a vivid picture of the trade at a time when Parliament was debating it.

Scholars debate one point. Some records list Equiano's birthplace as South Carolina, so a few historians think he may have drawn his African chapters from other people's stories. Others argue his account fits what is known about Igbo life. Either way, the narrative was a powerful weapon against the slave trade.

Phillis Wheatley was taken from West Africa as a child and enslaved in Boston. In 1773 she became the first African American to publish a book of poetry. The book opens with an engraving of her seated at a writing desk, believed to be based on a work by Scipio Moorhead, an enslaved artist. It's the earliest known portrait of an individual African American.

In 'On Being Brought from Africa to America', the speaker first thanks 'mercy' for bringing her to Christianity. Then the poem turns on its white Christian readers, who 'view our sable race with scornful eye'. It ends with a reminder that Black people 'May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train' (heaven). Readers still debate how much the poem accepts its era's views and how much it quietly challenges them, but its final lines clearly claim spiritual equality.