At first, the impact of European voyages along the west coast of Africa was not much stronger than in Asia. Tropical diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, and sleeping sickness killed Europeans quickly, so that Portuguese traders often stayed only a short while, as close to the coast as possible. They set up permanent fortified trading posts, but relied on existing trading networks to buy and sell goods. The kings of Portugal made treaties with the rulers of West African states such as Benin, Oyo, and Kongo,
Supplying them with wool and silk cloth, tools, and weapons, in return for gold, cotton cloth, ivory, and slaves.
A few missionaries ventured further inland, first searching for the Christian kingdom of Prester John, and when they never found it, working to convert the people they did meet. They had the greatest success in the kingdom of the Kongo, a powerful state including parts of what is now the Republic of Congo, Zaire, and Angola. Jesuit and Capuchin missionaries gradually learned Kikongo, so that they could hear confessions and preach in the local vernacular; the first book printed in a Bantu language was a bilingual catechism in Portuguese and Kikongo, written in 1556 and printed in 1624.
Kongo was ruled by the manikongo, or king, who had both religious and political power and appointed governors for its six provinces. Converts to Christianity included the manikongo Nzinga Nkuwu (ruled to 1506), who took the Christian name Joao I, the same name as the king of Portugal. The next manikongo, Nzinga Mbemba, whose Christian name was Afonso I (ruled 1506-43), was raised as a Christian, and worked to convert his subjects to Christianity. Many of the ideas of Christianity - a heavenly realm, priests with special powers, an initiation ritual involving water and signifying rebirth, angels and demons - were similar to religious ideas already present in West Africa, which meant it was not difficult for people to accept Christian teachings. The rulers and Kongolese church leaders revised Christian ideas and practices according to their own values, just as Europeans had done when Christianity first spread north from the Mediterranean. Christianity became an important part of Kongolese culture, with so many churches in Mbanza, the capital of Kongo, that people called it “Kongo of the Bell.”
At the same time as Christianity was spreading in the Kongo, another import was beginning to have disastrous effects - sugar. Sugar cane is native to the South Pacific, and was taken to India in ancient times, where farmers learned to turn cane juice into granules that could be stored and shipped easily. It then went to China and the Mediterranean, where islands such as Crete, Sicily, and Cyprus had the right kind of warm, wet climate for growing sugar. The Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa also had this kind of climate, and shortly after they were discovered by Europeans, sugar growing and processing began here. Producing sugar takes both expensive refining machinery and many workers to chop and transport heavy cane, burn fields, and tend vats of cooking cane juice. This means that it is difficult for small growers to produce sugar economically, and what developed instead were large plantations, owned by distant merchants or investors. The earliest sugar plantations in Europe and Africa were worked by both free and slave workers from many ethnic groups, but by the 1480s the workers in many sugar plantations, especially those on the Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa, were all black African slaves.
Columbus saw the possibilities of sugar first-hand when he lived on the island of Madeira, and he took sugar cane cuttings to the Caribbean on his second voyage. The first sugar mill in the western hemisphere was built in 1515 in what is now the Dominican Republic. Brazil also had the right kind of climate, and by the middle of the sixteenth century investors from all over Europe were setting up sugar plantations there. By i6oo Brazil was Europe’s largest source of sugar, and sugar had become a normal part of many people’s diets. Per capita consumption in England was several pounds per person per year, still tiny compared with modern sugar consumption (the United States has the world’s largest per capita sugar consumption, at about 150 pounds a year), but much more than it had been in the Middle Ages, when sugar was such a luxury that people thought of it more as a drug than as a food. Sugar may not be physically addictive, but the human demand for sugar seems insatiable, as long as the price is low enough.
Slavery and shipping kept the price of sugar low. Sugar growers in the Caribbean and Brazil first tried to force native peoples to do the back-breaking labor that sugar demands. In the Caribbean, Spanish settlers (encomenderos) were given rights to compel native labor in the encomienda system, but the native peoples either died or ran away. Few Europeans were willing to wield machetes and haul cane in the hot sun for any amount of wages. The solution was the same one that had worked on the Atlantic islands - import enslaved Africans and set up huge plantations, where large numbers of workers supplied the sugar cane to keep complicated refining equipment running all the time. Slave-traders from West African coastal areas went further and further inland to capture, buy, or trade for more and more slaves. Some rulers tried to limit the slave trade in their areas, but others profited from it, and raiders paid little attention to regulations anyway. They encouraged warfare to provide captives, or just grabbed people from their houses and fields. The slave trade grew steadily, and first thousands and then tens of thousands of people a year, the majority of them men and boys, were taken from Africa to work on sugar plantations. For 350 years after Columbus’s voyage, more Africans than Europeans crossed the Atlantic.
Slaves were marched from the interior of Africa to the coast, where they waited in locked pens to be loaded on to ships. On board, they were crowded into the filthy, stinking space below the decks, sometimes with not enough room to sit up. Food and water were limited for everyone on the ship, and even more so for slaves, who also suffered beatings and brutal treatment at the hands of the crew. On early slave trips as many as half the slaves died on the trip across the Atlantic - later called the “middle passage” - though in time mortality declined as ship-owners realized they could make better profits if they kept the slaves alive. At every stage, slaves resisted their capture by refusing to work, sabotaging equipment, running away, or rebelling. In most islands of the Caribbean and on the South American mainland, communities of escaped slaves, known as “maroons,” came together in forested or swampy areas, free from the control of plantation owners or government officials.
Slavery was a part of many societies around the world in 1500, but the plantation slavery of the New World was different from most other slavery in two ways. One of these was the fact that almost all the slaves were black, and almost all the owners and managers were white, so that plantation slavery had a racial element that slavery in other parts of the world did not. Both European Christians and Arabic Muslims saw black Africans as inferior, barbaric, and primitive, attitudes that allowed them to buy and sell African slaves without any concern. By linking whiteness with freedom and blackness with slavery, the plantation system strengthened these racist ideas; slaves became the ultimate Other, only barely human. In fact, plantation owners came to think of their slaves more as machines than human beings; like machines, slaves would wear out and need replacing. Brazilian owners figured that most slaves would live about seven years, and they calculated the costs of buying new slaves into the price they hoped to get for their sugar. Some Christian missionaries objected to this treatment, especially for slaves who had converted to Christianity, but officially the Catholic and later Protestant churches accepted slavery. Sometimes church leaders even praised slavery, saying that though it might make people’s lives on this earth worse, it gave them the opportunity of getting into heaven by becoming Christian, so in the long run they were better off.
The second new thing about plantation slavery was how much it depended on the international trading networks created as a result of European voyages. Plantations were centered on the monocultural production of one commodity, first mostly sugar, and later other crops such as coffee, indigo, and cotton, which meant that everything else needed on the plantation had to be imported. Ships that brought slaves to the Caribbean and Brazil - and later, in smaller numbers, to North America and the rest of South America - took raw sugar and molasses to Europe. Raw sugar was refined into white sugar in the Netherlands, and used to make sweet wine in Portugal and its Atlantic islands. One kind of sweet wine is still called Madeira, the name of the island where Columbus and his family had lived, and the site of the earliest European sugar plantations. Sugar and wine were shipped to England and other parts of Europe in exchange for cloth, manufactured goods, and machines. Ships took flour and lumber from North America to tropical plantations, and on the way back carried molasses, which was processed into rum. Rum and wine were on every European ship crossing any ocean, for they could be sold at a profit almost anywhere and were part of the crews’ daily rations. West Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean formed three points in what is often called the “triangle trade” of the Atlantic, which will be discussed in greater detail in chapters 12 and 13; any leg of this triangle offered opportunities for wealth.
World History
