Did the colonisers reduce blacks to slaves ?

On the contrary, they released them, despite the violent shock of the arrival of a revolutionary lifestyle by contrast with the customs in place.

For the great majority of African societies, slavery constituted one of the fundamental institutions of their economic and social system: the slave was the only currency prevailing everywhere, and the possession of numerous slaves classified the master in the social hierarchy. The production of this “commodity” was ensured by tribal wars – some of which had no other purpose than the raid – and by the judicial system: civil (the enslavement of the insolvent debtor and his family) and criminal ( in punishment for murder, adultery, black witchcraft, and uncompensated theft). There is nothing pejorative about this observation: slavery – whatever our current perception – corresponds to a certain stage in the evolution of societies, and was practised by all peoples.

From the 1st century AD, Africa was renowned in the East for the ease with which slaves could be obtained there. Opone and Zanzibar supplied the Persian Gulf, Iran, India, and Indonesia. Rebellious slaves even created short-lived kingdoms there.

The introduction of the camel in Africa from the second century onwards and the spread of Islam from the seventh century gave rise to new trends: the trans-Saharan slave trade was added to the Asian one. It mainly supplied North Africa, but also, more marginally, Mediterranean Europe, in shortage of labour for the cultivation of sugar cane.

Quite naturally the French colonists of the Antilles, faced with the same problem, resorted to the existing trade, which thus created new outlets, via the west coast of Africa and the Gulf of Guinea. The Americans followed: they produced cotton, an even more labour-intensive crop than sugar cane. The Spanish problem was different. From the start of the Conquista, their Council of the Indies prohibited the reduction of the Indians into slavery: the Spanish colonists therefore also turned to the existing African market to procure the servants, labourers, and workers they needed.

The Atlantic trade was however short-lived: three centuries, compared to the nineteen centuries of the Arabic one. The first blacks arrived in America, with sugar cane, around 1500, but from 1808 trafficking was prohibited by Great Britain and the United States. However, it still took about fifty years to effectively end the traffic in slave ships, which had become outlaws. As for the Arab slave trade, which could no longer direct itself except towards the Indian Ocean, it fell to the King of the Belgians Leopold II, to root out the last roots of it by his anti-slavery campaigns of the 1890s in eastern Congo.

As for the internal slave trade, the European powers had put an end to it when they occupied the interior of Africa: the prohibition of slavery, like that of other degrading and inhuman practices, was self-evident. But if European colonization abolished slavery, it resurfaced with decolonization. Mauritania, Nigeria, and Sudan, to name but a few, have resumed trade in men. Elsewhere, it reappears under other forms: the discharge of debts, the fictitious leasing etc.

Finally, we must point out a fundamental difference between the two forms of trafficking: the Arab and the Atlantic: the first, which involved the greatest number of men for the longest period, left no trace, other than negative, in the cultural evolution of humanity, for want of having left sufficient survivors who have retained their identity; the second, relatively brief, brought out Afro-Caribbean, Afro-American and Afro-Amerindian cultures with tens of millions of representatives.