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

stripping.
    Africans were purchased using shovelfuls of shiny, indestructible cowry shells, which the Europeans introduced as a unit of exchange and loaded into their ships as ballast in Indian Ocean ports of call such as the Maldives. Bit by bit, the tonnage in useless shells was replaced by enchained men, women and children as the slavers took on their living cargo along a huge stretch of the African coast, from present-day Angola in the south to Mauritania in the northwest.
    The cost of the slave trade in terms of sheer population loss was nothing short of catastrophic. The continent had always been underpopulated because of its poor soils and difficult climate, and because of the endemic diseases that have plagued mankind in Africa ever since the species emerged there. Some demographers calculate that had there not been an Atlantic slave trade, by 1850 the total population of the continent would have been about seventy million, or 40 percent higher than the actual population at the time.
    But in the end, what may represent the most damaging legacy of all is that the Western slave industry, like its Arab-run twin, which was concentrated in East Africa, fueled mass migration and generalized warfare among Africans, as neighbor was pitted against neighbor, society against society. Europeans had created a thirst for their goods, and for the quick profit that came from trading in fellow humans, which Africans used to buy them. The ensuing scramble wiped out the intricate and inherently conservative social codes that prevailed in one society after another. In the space of a generation, or even less in many instances, the authority of king or chief, and the respect for communal laws and customs that had kept people finely tuned with their local environment over centuries, was destroyed.
    “For Africans, enslavement was a threat that compounded the uncertainties of existence—a fear at the back of the mind, dulled by familiarity perhaps, an ache that induced a lingering fatalism in society as it passed from generation to generation,” writes John Reader in his illuminating survey,
Africa: A Biography of the Continent.
“Kidnapping, capture, enslavement threatened villagers in various parts of West Africa for up to 400 years: 20 generations lost some kinsmen to the slavers, or saw their neighbors routed. . . . The pre-existing political economies in which chiefs and elites commanded the respect and occasional material tribute of their subjects were transformed into systems controlled by warlords and powerful merchants who obliged indebted chiefs and elites to collect slaves as payment against forced loans.”
    In the kingdom of Kongo, this threat was clearly perceived by the first African sovereign to face it. The king when Portugal’s slave trade went industrial, Affonso, was an enthusiastic and remarkably flexible modernizer. A fervent convert to Christianity, he quickly learned to read and write, and by reputation came to know the Scriptures better than the monks sent to spread the faith in his land.
    Affonso immediately sensed the potential threat to his culture inherent in its collision with expansionist Europe. And although he recognized the disadvantages his people faced against the technologically superior outsiders, as leader of his own well-organized empire of two million, he was no less self-confident.
    For Affonso, preserving his empire meant buying time: absorbing as much Western learning as he could, and adapting it in ways that would not destroy Kongolese culture. Sons from his court were sent to be schooled in Portugal, and Affonso constantly begged the missionaries and other envoys from Lisbon to send more teachers in order to fortify his elite. The footrace between slavery and education proved to be no contest in the end, though, and Affonso watched in growing despair as the threads that held his realm together came unstitched. Even his relatives became caught up in the slave trade, if not as slavers, then as