African+Slave+Traders

Excerpt from: @http://www.uncp.edu/home/berrys/courses/hist101/hist101_lecture_notes.html Within Africa itself, slavery had existed for centuries. It was accepted, there as elsewhere, without question as a part of human organization and as just another sign and method of accumulating wealth. One became a slave by being an outsider or an infidel, by being captured in war, by transgressing the laws of one's society, or by selling oneself into bondage to make money for one's family. For centuries, African societies had been involved in an overland slave trade that transported black slaves from West Africa across the Sahara to the Roman Empire and the Middle East. When the Portuguese made landfall on the west coast of Africa in the 1440s, then slaves were just another commodity the Africans traded with their new European trading partners. The Atlantic slave trade was of only minor commercial importance until European expansion to the New World created a vast shortage of labor. The Spanish needed miners to work the gold and silver deposits of South and Central America. Then, the Spanish, Dutch, and English needed agricultural slaves to work sugar, rice, and tobacco plantations. This new demand for laborers dramatically changed the tempo and character of the Atlantic slave trade. Where before Africans had sold into slavery criminals or captives taken in war, now they went out actively to capture huge cargoes of what came to be called "black gold." Thus began the largest forced migration in human history, as over the next four centuries, 12 million Africans were dragged from their homes to work the brutal plantations of the New World. It is impossible now to imagine what it would have been like to have been captured and sold into this new form of slavery. The first shock usually came when African slave traders attacked a village at night, setting fire to huts, killing any [people] who resisted, and yoking the remainder together in neck braces of wood and leather.
 * African Slave Traders**