The European Slave Trade as a Basic Factor in African Underdevelopment

• Africans only became slaves when they reached a society where they worked as a slave

• Shipments were all by Europeans to markets controlled by Europeans, and this was in the interest of European capitalism

• Process by which captives were obtained on African soil wasn’t trade; it was through warfare, trickery, banditry, and kidnapping → social violence

• General picture of destructiveness

• Mortality in transshipment: 15-20%

• Massive loss to the African labour force was critical because it was composed of able-bodied young men and young women who were healthy

• Fewer babies were born

• Regarding population, Africa had an abnormal record of stagnation due to the trade in slaves

• Population loss

• Population growth played a major role in European development in providing labour, markets, and the pressures which led to further advance

• Social violence

• The consequences of slaving on agricultural activities in Africa were negative

  • Famines

  • When able-bodied men left their homes as migrant labourers, that upset the farming routine in the home districts and often caused famines

• Slaving prevented the remaining population from effectively engaging in agriculture and industry, and it employed professional slave hunters and warriors to destroy rather than build

• Parts of Africa left free by export trends in captives were affected by the tremendous dislocation

• Several European imports were competing with and strangling African products

• The majority of the imports were of the worst quality even as consumer goods

Technical Stagnation and Distortion of the African Economy in the Pre-Colonial Epoch

• Technological advances in Europe vs. stagnation of technology in Africa

  • Technological stagnation because people forgot even the simple techniques of their forefathers

• Europe benefitted technologically from its external trade contacts, while Africa either failed to benefit or actually lost

• European traders succeeded in putting an end to the expansion of African cloth manufacture

  • African producers were cut off from the increasing demand for cloth

• Loss of development opportunity

• The slave trade was a direct block, removing millions of youth who are the human agents from whom inventiveness springs

  • Those who remained were preoccupied about their freedom rather than with improvements in production

• The nature of Afro-European trade was highly unfavorable to the movement of positive ideas and techniques from the European capitalist system to the African pre-capitalist system of production

• There had to be both willingness on the part of Europeans to transfer technology and African socio-economic structures capable of making use of that technology and internalizing it

• Europeans deliberately ignore those African requests that Europe should place certain skills and techniques at their disposal

• Capitalism has always discouraged technological evolution in Africa and blocked Africa’s access to its own technology

• In Africa, there was disruption and disintegration at the local level

• Dependent on Western Europe

• Markets of manufactured goods

• There was a decrease in the capacity to achieve economic independence and self-sustaining social progress