The World полностью

His kingdom, Dahomey (today’s Benin) was founded by three brothers who around 1600 carved their own realms. Now Houegbadja, third ahosu (king) of the Alladaxonou family, united many of the Fon people, building a capital Abomey, where twelve palaces stood decorated with bas-reliefs recording the history of the kingdom and depicting sacred ancestors. Houegbadja presided over a complex court, always sheltered by a slave bearing a parasol, and escorted by a guard of female warriors who later became the vanguard of Dahomean armies. Every year, he held a festival that included military parades, the receiving of tribute and the ceremonies of xwetanu at which 500 and sometimes as many as 4,000 slaves were decapitated, often by female bodyguards, as offerings to the king’s ancestors. The kings were sacred but were elected by a council of princes and a family of priests; on their deaths, thousands of slaves were sacrificed.

Houegbadja received muskets for slaves, an incentive for African kings to capture more prisoners, but this implies a lack of agency on their part: the rivalry of these kingdoms, still barely understood by Europeans, led to wars just as such rivalries did in Europe and Asia. African wars, like those in Asia, yielded slaves. What was unique was the demand for chattel slavery in the Americas. African rulers sacrificed some of their slaves – though most others were later freed – but now a new European version of this servitude – chattel slavery – was being formalized. It is unlikely African leaders who sold enslaved captives to the Europeans initially understood that they were selling them into a new crueller bondage, designed to supply the tobacco and later sugar plantations of the Americas, though later they would surely have known the details. Most Africans believed that Europeans were cannibals and that slaves were destined to be eaten.

It was Portugal’s sugar empire of Brazil that was the voracious furnace of chattel slavery, its appetite and profits being the catalysts for this new global conflict. In 1530, the Portuguese exported a new plant to Brazil – sugar cane – but they were slow to develop their vast colony. By 1548, some 3,000 Amerindians were slaving in six sugar mills, but the Amerindians were being wiped out by disease, slave labour and suicide until in 1570 the king, prompted by the Jesuits, forbade the enslavement of the indigenous peoples unless they were captured in a ‘righteous war’. Mixed-race warlords known as bandeirantes, most famously António Raposo Tavares, launched saltos (raids) into the interior killing and enslaving thousands. The Amerindians struck back and launched messianic revolts, the sandidades, that justified yet more saltos. By the end of the century, around 50,000 slaves had been worked to death, creating shortages that were filled by Africans.

Sugar changed the world. It was not just a product, it was a destroyer and maker of worlds on both sides of the Atlantic. The trade now expanded into a vast diabolic enterprise. Portuguese planters migrated to Brazil, where they were enriched by the sugar and slave industries. By 1600, this involved 30,000 Portuguese with 15,000 African slaves; by 1620, there were 50,000 Portuguese ruling the same number of African and Amerindian slaves. After that, African slaves started to outnumber Amerindians and the trade became frenzied: by 1650, a total of 250,000 had been brought to Brazil and in many areas 75 per cent of the populations were slaves.

Luanda was the gateway of the new trade; the kingdoms between today’s Angola and Congo were its hunting grounds: between 1502 and 1867, around 2.8 million Africans were traded through Luanda. North America never challenged the scale of Brazil: of the estimated eleven million transported across the Atlantic, 4.9 million were delivered to Brazil. The slaves were seized in raids by African rulers. Those of lesser value, the old and sometimes children too young or too sick to work, were often killed.

At Pombe and other slave markets, they were sold to pombeiros who marched them, guarded by other slaves, in coffles across Africa. Out of slaves captured in Angola, it was estimated that 10 per cent died during capture, 22 per cent on the way to the coast. At the coast, those who had survived the journey were confined within hulking slave castles along the coast from Luanda in the south-west, to Elmina in west Africa. In the crowded dungeon barracks – barracoons – they were systematically broken, chained and branded, men whipped, females raped, as part of their ‘seasoning’. Killings and rapes took place only yards from luxurious European dining rooms and chapels. The slaves were depersonalized, known as peças (pieces) or cabeças (heads) or ‘Guinea ebony’. Ten per cent of those enslaved died in the castles.