The Gambia - Slave Trade
As many as 3 million slaves may have been taken from the region during the three centuries that the transatlantic slave trade operated. It is not known how many slaves were taken by Arab traders prior to and simultaneous with the transatlantic slave trade. Most of those taken were sold to Europeans by other Africans; some were prisoners of intertribal wars; some were sold because of unpaid debts, while others were kidnapped. Slaves were initially sent to Europe to work as servants until the market for labor expanded in the West Indies and North America in the 18th century.
While the Songhai Empire was falling, Europe had found The Gambia. Portugal was the first country to establish maritime trade with people on the African coast. By 1456, they had reached The Gambia. Slaves, gold and ivory were brought back to Europe. But in 1588, Portugal sold the exclusive rights to the Gambia River to English merchants. Shortly after this, part of The Gambia was leased by Courland, part of modern-day Latvia and Lithuania. They settled a small island 30 km from the mouth of the river and established a trade base from it.
The Courlanders lived amicably with the Gambians, having established an enduring and respectful relationship with the king of Niumi and chief of Juffure. James Island was taken over by the British in 1661, a mere decade after the Courlanders had founded it. The French and British fought for political and commercial rule over the Senegal and Gambia Rivers for the better part of the late 17th century and into the 18th century. The battle ended in 1783 when the Treaty of Versailles gave control of the Gambia River back to the British.
In 1807, the British Empire abolished slavery. However, their attempts to stop the slave traffic in The Gambia did not work. Since the early 1500s, the beginning of the transatlantic slave trading, more than 3 million people had been taken from this region. James Island had provided a fortress from which traders could dispense smaller boats to go and collect slaves and other goods while harboring their bigger vessels in sheltered, deeper waters.
James Island and Juffure became famous when Alex Haley chronicled his ancestor, Kunta Kinteh, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade in Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976). The historical validity of the village’s description and pre-Civil War genealogy have since been questioned, but Roots received a Pulitzer Prize for its influence in raising interest in African-American history. Strong evidence of continued slave trade by French, Spanish and American traders continued well into the decade after Britain’s Abolition Act had made this illegal.
Slaves were comparatively unimportant during the ?rst two centuries of maritime contact — roughly the period of 1450 to 1650 AD. The Portuguese mariners went down the coast looking for gold, not slaves. The availability of slaves for sale was a fortuitous and unexpected by-product of the gold trade. Yet the first centuries of trade were important, because they established the relationships that continued into the period of more extensive trade that was to follow.
Slaves were available for sale on the Gambia, and the Portuguese began to buy them, though the numbers were not large — perhaps 1,300 a year exported to Europe before 1500 AD, and another 500 a year to the Atlantic islands (not counting Sao Tomé). The second point of coastal contact was the Gold Coast as an entry to the Akan gold fields.
By the 1600s the large agricultural and commercial estates owned by Portuguese, in Brazil, needed more labor, which the Portuguese began to transport from West Africa. Although slavery had existed in Africa for many centuries, the Portuguese developed the trade on a large scale and had a virtual monopoly on it until the mid-16th century, when Britain joined the trade. The success of Portuguese exploration encouraged other Europeans to enter The Gambia River and trade with the local inhabitants. James Island which was to become the main settlement of the Europeans, frequently changed ownership. Thus from the Portuguese, its ownership switched to the Duke of Courland, the Dutch and finally the British. By the 1650s, Portugal had been largely ousted by the French and British.
Most African societies made it a practice to enslave war prisoners, but the victors rarely kept these people as servants. If they came from nearby, it was all too easy to escape, perhaps killing some of the captor’s people in the process. Many, if not most, war prisoners were therefore sold to passing traders, who took them along the trade routes with their other goods to sell them in distant places where escape would be more dif?cult. During the 1700s when the Atlantic slave trade was flourishing, West Africans accounted for approximately two-thirds of the African captives imported into the Americas.
By the mid-seventeenth century, the slave trade had over-shadowed all other trade. The British and French competed for the control of the trade of the area.
With the British abolition of the Slave Trade in their settlements in 1807, they tried to look for a suitable location in The Gambia from where they would be able to monitor the river and stop ships from entering and leaving with slaves. Alexander Grant, sent out from Goree for this purpose, found the fort at James Island to be too far inland and in ruins. He therefore entered into a treaty with the Chief of Kombo in April, 1816 for the cessation of the detached sand bank known as St. Mary's Island. Originally called Banjulo by the Portuguese, Grant named the new settlement, Bathurst after the Colonial Secretary of the time Lord Bathurst.
On 22 August 1848 Lord Denman told the Lords "... the slave trade was one of the worst of human crimes; the most daring violation of the laws of God and man—prompted by the basest motives, productive of the greatest amount of suffering to its victims, and that it most effectually prevented the progress in civilisation and happiness of a very large portion of the human race. It had, therefore, been declared to be a crime 366 of the deepest dye, the perpetration of which the negro might lawfully resist, and in which resistance all others were perfectly justified in aiding him.
"... it had to a great extent been suppressed on various parts of the coast of Africa. True, it was not extinguished; but it had been discouraged and depressed in particular quarters, and had not been able to lift up its head with the same effrontery as it had done before those measures were resorted to. The infamous traffic had been suppressed in the river Quorra, in the Bonny, and also in the Gambia; and he found that, instead of the 12,000 negroes who were formerly exported to Cuba every year, the number had dwindled down to 1,000 in the year 1845. The exportation to Brazil was also materially and gradually reduced. But at the very lowest point of its depression an unfortunate circumstance had tended greatly to increase the trade. "
By 1861 it was impossible to deny that the slave trade was not yet suppressed. It was too true that after all England's sacrifices and exertions Africa was once again desolated with Slave wars, and the Atlantic was once again covered with slave ships. It would be wrong, however, to imagine that England's strenuous and generous efforts had been in vain; the slave trade was not suppressed, but it was enormously diminished. The slave trade had been carried on by the United States, by Central America, by Brazil, by Portugal, by Spain, by Turkey, by France, by England herself; while, by 1860, except Spain, there was not one of those countries that had not renounced this trade, and this result had been mainly due to England's endeavours and example. The single fact that the slave trade had been annihilated along the whole coast of both the Americas was by itself a splendid triumph of British philanthropy. But Spain had sunk so low in the scale of nations, so debased were the minds of her statesmen, that they were quite content to let theirs be the single country stained with the infamy of that crime.
With the slave trade at an end, the British were forced to come up with a new source of wealth to support the fledgling protectorate, which led to the planting of groundnuts. The groundnuts or peanuts are originally South American, were they were grown by Indian communities. (It was introduced to West-Africa (first the Senegambia area) by the Portuguese in the 16th century. Here it spread quickly, though faster in the interior of Africa than along the coast). The harvested nuts are crushed to make oil, which is exported to Europe for use in food manufacture. In the 1950s, Gambia's groundnut production was beefed up as a way to increase export earnings and make the country that much more self-supportive, and today groundnuts remain the chief crop of both Gambia and neighboring Senegal.
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