Read Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa for Free Online Page A

different: a rush to sell as many Africans as possible into slavery.
    Soon, many of those same missionaries were mounting expeditions hundreds of miles from the coast, sowing panic and chaos among the inland peoples who were thrust into deadly competition against one another, and indeed against Kongo, in the capture of slaves for shipment to the New World.
    It has become fashionable in discussions of the European slave trade to object that Africans were themselves great slavers long before the white man ever set foot on the continent. But seen against the failure of Western education to give generation after generation of students a clear picture of the horrors of Europe’s imperial conquest, this insistence strikes one as little more than an attempt to change the subject. The prior existence of slavery in Africa is undeniable fact, but there can be little comparison between the age-old institution of African slavery, in which captives were typically absorbed and assimilated into the culture that captured them, and the industrial scale of Europe’s triangular slave trade, and even less with its dehumanizing impact and brutality.
    Where was the humanity of the “civilized” Europeans during the early years of the rush to dehumanize Africans, who were traded just as coolly as one would truck in timber or coal? Indeed, even the Catholic conventions of the day legitimized the inhuman treatment of “pagans.”
    Where the African practice of slavery hurt most was in helping plant the seed in the European mind for the immense traffic that followed. The first Europeans who traded in African slaves were in reality more interested in acquiring gold. But when the early Portuguese travelers learned of abundant production of gold near places like El Mina (The Mine), in present-day Ghana, they paid for the metal with slaves captured elsewhere along the coast, and discovered that the Fanti people who lived in that coastal area were eager buyers.
    Surprisingly, to this day, there has been little willingness to contemplate the true impact of over four centuries of slavery on Africa. Slavery’s cost to the continent did not
merely
involve the loss of untold millions of souls who died along the bone-strewn footpaths where captives in chains were driven to the coast, or perished in the horrific Middle Passage. Nor, finally, can it be measured in the ten million or so hardy survivors who ultimately reached the Americas. There was an immense social impact on Africa, too.
    As the Portuguese trade in slaves flourished, the English, French, Danes and Swedes were attracted to it as well. Steadily, what had begun as a good business, at least when seen from the narrow perspective of the elite in the African societies who provided slaves, turned into an unmitigated disaster, one that destroyed not only the weaker societies that were preyed upon, but also the stronger kingdoms that were the predators.
    By the 1700s, each year sixty thousand slaves on average were being shipped across the Atlantic from West and Central Africa. This figure does not begin to take into account the number of people killed in the violent slaving raids that ripped through the African countryside, disrupting life in all but the most desolate corners of the continent, as far inland as the dry escarpments of Dogon-land. All the while, in a foreshadowing of what, 450 years later, was to befall the feeble commodity-based economies put in place by the Europeans during the colonial era, the terms of trade in Africa’s slave business were steadily whittled down until the market price of a slave was essentially zero.
    At the outset, Europeans paid for their black captives with horses, then with guns and cheap manufactured goods like copper kettles, cloth and shaving bowls, then with crude metal bars. By the peak of the trade, when the death and destruction had softened up the continent for the colonialism that was soon to come, the Europeans were engaging in outright asset