SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

By 1450, sub-Saharan Africa was characterized by kingdoms, federations, and decentralized lineage-based polities loosely linked to different environmental, economic, and geographic configurations. In the Sahel region immediately south of the Sahara, the kingdoms of Mali and Songhay thrived off the trans-Saharan trade in gold, slaves, salt, and forest produce. On the fertile Ethiopian highlands, the royal Solomonid dynasty traced its ancestry to the biblical union between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Peoples of the rainforests of central and west Africa, by contrast, organized themselves in decentralized units led by "big men." On the savannah, south and east of the rainforest, rulers of centralized polities prospered from gold, iron, and copper production; the vast herds of cattle that they managed to amass measured their wealth and status. On the east African littoral, elegant Swahili towns had ties with Persia, south Asia, and China.

Contact between these African polities and Europeans increased dramatically from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. While the Atlantic slave trade is the best-known aspect of the early modern European-African encounter, recent historical research suggests that ties were diverse and complicated. Only in the eighteenth century did exports of slaves begin to dominate trade and define the political, economic, and cultural encounter.

EXTENT AND ITEMS OF TRADE

Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal (1394–1460) pioneered ties with the Sahel and west Africa to spread Christian rule and to gain access to African gold. Legends of vast quantities of African gold were common since stories of the Malian King Mansa Musa's (ruled 1307–1332) fabulous riches, displayed during his pilgrimage to Mecca (1324–1325), circulated around the Mediterranean world. Portuguese fleets reached the Senegal River in 1445 and began to exchange slaves and manufactured goods for gold with Akan and Guinea Coast gold traders. By 1455 Portugal declared a monopoly over the west African trade routes, a policy that was further elaborated in the papal treaties of Alcaçovas (1479) and Tordesillas (1494).

In 1498 the Portuguese Captain Vasco da Gama (c. 1460–1524) reached India after Swahili navigators instructed him on the use of the Indian Ocean monsoon winds. King Manuel I of Portugal (ruled 1495–1521), who declared himself "Lord of Conquest and Commerce of India and all Adjacent Lands," sent a number of expeditions to establish trading centers on the east African coast that would help to monopolize trade between India and Europe and would also benefit from existing Indian Ocean trade networks. In 1505 Dom Francisco d'Almeida and his fleet razed the Swahili coastal entrepôt of Kilwa, leading to the surrender of a string of Swahili coastal towns and the establishment of Portuguese naval bases at Sofala, Mozambique, Zanzibar, and Mombasa. Huge and over-loaded Portuguese trading vessels participating in the eighteen-month round voyage between Lisbon to Goa, termed the carreira da India, frequently shipwrecked off the dangerous southeastern African coast. In 1698 Omanis conquered Mombasa and Kilwa and precipitated the decline of Portuguese authority on the central and northeastern African coast. The Portuguese turned to the slave and ivory trade from the southeastern port of Sofala and the Zambezi base of Tete.

In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the extent and intensity of the Atlantic slave trade increased with the involvement of English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese trading companies in the lucrative "triangular trade" between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The trade in slaves typically took place between European ships and African or Euro-African middlemen at coastal entrepôts that received slaves from a chain of trading connections reaching into the African interior. Several West African kingdoms like Benin, Kongo, Oyo, Asante, and Dahomey taxed the trade in slaves, and in some cases were able to limit its deleterious effects on their own subjects. However, rulers who sought to monopolize access to sought-after commodities became increasingly dependent on Atlantic and Indian Ocean trade goods—such as textiles, metals, alcohol, tobacco, gunpowder, and manufactured goods—to secure the economic patronage

networks upon which their political authority rested.

The demographic, political, and economic impact of the export of slaves and import of various European, American, and Asian goods is a subject of lively historical debate. It is estimated that at least thirty million slaves were captured as part of the Atlantic slave trade (although only eleven or twelve million were exported), with many more killed through slave-related raiding and warfare. While imports of foreign commodities at times challenged African productive capacity, African producers were also able to innovate and adapt to the influx of new trade goods.

TREATIES, EMISSARIES, AND SCHOLARS

In the fifteenth century, African emissaries to the royal courts of Europe were more frequent than European emissaries to Africa. The Christian emperors of Ethiopia sent embassies to southern Europe to forge Christian solidarity in the face of Muslim expansion and to hire European artisans.

Portuguese aid for the Ethiopians against coastal Muslims in the early sixteenth century helped to narrow the rift between the Ethiopian and the Latin Christian churches; but the intransigence of dispatched papal officials toward Ethiopian Christianity led the Ethiopians to renounce papal decrees in the early 1630s.

In the 1480s, Portuguese ships brought a number of African royal emissaries to Lisbon, including those from the Kongo kingdom (1484), the kingdom of Benin (1486), and the Wolof kingdom (1487); a second Kongolese delegation set up a center for African studies where Kongolese learned European culture and religion and European missionaries were instructed in Kongolese culture and language. One outcome of this encounter was the conversion of the Kongolese royalty to Christianity and, over the next century, the spread of Christian ideas and icons throughout the central African kingdom.

A number of African scholars trained and taught at European universities. In 1652 the Ethiopian priest Abba Gregoryos studied with the German scholar Job Ludolf, whom he tutored in Ethiopian languages. Anton Wilhelm Amo, who was born on the Gold Coast, lectured in philosophy at German universities and was a participant in the German Enlightenment before he returned to his childhood home in 1748. Jacobus E. J. Capitein (1717–1747) defended his dissertation at the University of Leiden in 1742; in eloquent Latin he argued that slavery was compatible with Christianity since servitude of the body should not hinder freedom of the soul. By contrast, while not a scholarly tract, the freed slave Olaudau Equiano's autobiography, first published in 1789, was crucial in promoting the abolitionist cause.

PERCEPTIONS OF THE OTHER

By the sixteenth century, southern Europeans had extensive contact with peoples of sub-Saharan Africa—Africans made up an estimated 10 percent of Lisbon and 7.5 percent of Seville's population. Iberian perceptions of Africans were mediated by religious discourses and only gave way to racial understandings of difference in the eighteenth century. The Portuguese termed Africans of Islamic faith "Moors" whether they dwelt in the west African Sudan or on the Swahili coast. The Portuguese and Dutch used the term kaffir, adapted from Arabic, for Africans who did not follow Christianity or Islam.

Africans were less accustomed to Europeans, who were generally confined to the coast and rarely lived among them. Perceptions of white-skinned Europeans seem to have been ambivalent; Africans accused them of being wizards, cannibals, or ancestors returned from the dead; but they often welcomed them, if only to acquire their valued goods. Africans described Europeans with particular words that referred to their oceanic origins, peculiar dress, itinerancy, and cunning trade tactics.

See also Slavery and the Slave Trade ; Triangular Trade Pattern .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Capitein, Jacobus Elisa Johannes. The Agony of Asar: A Thesis on Slavery by the Former Slave, Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein, 1717–1747. Translated with Commentary by Grant Parker. Princeton, 2001.

Cohen, William. B. The French Encounter with Africans: White Responses to Blacks, 1530–1880. Bloomington, Ind., 1980.

Debrunner, Hans Werner. Presence and Prestige: Africans in Europe: A History of Africans in Europe before 1918. Basel, 1979.

Equiano, Ouladah. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. Edited by Vincent Carreta. New York, 1995.

Hastings, Adrian. The Church in Africa, 1450–1950. Oxford, 1994.

Lovejoy, Paul E. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. Cambridge, U.K., 1983; 2nd ed., 2000.

Miller, Joseph. Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830. Madison, Wis., 1988.

Northrup, David. Africa's Discovery of Europe, 1450–1850. New York and Oxford, 2002.

Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World: 1400–1800. New York and Cambridge, U.K., 1992; 2nd ed., 1998.

David M. Gordon