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Ghana ARRIVAL OF THE EUROPEANS
Early European Contact and the Slave Trade
When the first Europeans arrived in the late fifteenth century,
many inhabitants of the Gold Coast area were striving to
consolidate their newly acquired territories and to settle into a
secure and permanent environment. Several immigrant groups had yet
to establish firm ascendancy over earlier occupants of their
territories, and considerable displacement and secondary migrations
were in progress. Ivor Wilks, a leading historian of Ghana,
observed that Akan purchases of slaves from Portuguese traders
operating from the Congo region augmented the labor needed for the
state formation that was characteristic of this period. Unlike the
Akan groups of the interior, the major coastal groups, such as the
Fante, Ewe, and Ga, were for the most part settled in their
homelands.
The Portuguese were the first to arrive. By 1471, under the
patronage of Prince Henry the Navigator, they had reached the area
that was to become known as the Gold Coast because Europeans knew
the area as the source of gold that reached Muslim North Africa by
way of trade routes across the Sahara. The initial Portuguese
interest in trading for gold, ivory, and pepper so increased that
in 1482 the Portuguese built their first permanent trading post on
the western coast of present-day Ghana. This fortress, Elmina
Castle, constructed to protect Portuguese trade from European
competitors and hostile Africans, still stands.
With the opening of European plantations in the New World
during the 1500s, which suddenly expanded the demand for slaves in
the Americas, trade in slaves soon overshadowed gold as the
principal export of the area. Indeed, the west coast of Africa
became the principal source of slaves for the New World. The
seemingly insatiable market and the substantial profits to be
gained from the slave trade attracted adventurers from all over
Europe. Much of the conflict that arose among European groups on
the coast and among competing African kingdoms was the result of
rivalry for control of this trade.
The Portuguese position on the Gold Coast remained secure for
almost a century. During that time, Lisbon leased the right to
establish trading posts to individuals or companies that sought to
align themselves with the local chiefs and to exchange trade goods
both for rights to conduct commerce and for slaves whom the chiefs
could provide. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
adventurers--first Dutch, and later English, Danish, and Swedish--
were granted licenses by their governments to trade overseas. On
the Gold Coast, these European competitors built fortified trading
stations and challenged the Portuguese. Sometimes they were also
drawn into conflicts with local inhabitants as Europeans developed
commercial alliances with local chiefs.
The principal early struggle was between the Dutch and the
Portuguese. With the loss of Elmina in 1642 to the Dutch, the
Portuguese left the Gold Coast permanently. The next 150 years saw
kaleidoscopic change and uncertainty, marked by local conflicts and
diplomatic maneuvers, during which various European powers
struggled to establish or to maintain a position of dominance in
the profitable trade of the Gold Coast littoral. Forts were built,
abandoned, attacked, captured, sold, and exchanged, and many sites
were selected at one time or another for fortified positions by
contending European nations.
Both the Dutch and the British formed companies to advance
their African ventures and to protect their coastal establishments.
The Dutch West India Company operated throughout most of the
eighteenth century. The British African Company of Merchants,
founded in 1750, was the successor to several earlier organizations
of this type. These enterprises built and manned new installations
as the companies pursued their trading activities and defended
their respective jurisdictions with varying degrees of government
backing. There were short-lived ventures by the Swedes and the
Prussians. The Danes remained until 1850, when they withdrew from
the Gold Coast. The British gained possession of all Dutch coastal
forts by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, thus making
them the dominant European power on the Gold Coast.
During the heyday of early European competition, slavery was an
accepted social institution, and the slave trade overshadowed all
other commercial activities on the West African coast. To be sure,
slavery and slave trading were already firmly entrenched in many
African societies before their contact with Europe. In most
situations, men as well as women captured in local warfare became
slaves. In general, however, slaves in African communities were
often treated as junior members of the society with specific
rights, and many were ultimately absorbed into their masters'
families as full members. Given traditional methods of agricultural
production in Africa, slavery in Africa was quite different from
that which existed in the commercial plantation environments of the
New World.
Another aspect of the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade
on Africa concerns the role of African chiefs, Muslim traders, and
merchant princes in the trade. Although there is no doubt that
local rulers in West Africa engaged in slaving and received certain
advantages from it, some scholars have challenged the premise that
traditional chiefs in the vicinity of the Gold Coast engaged in
wars of expansion for the sole purpose of acquiring slaves for the
export market. In the case of Asante, for example, rulers of that
kingdom are known to have supplied slaves to both Muslim traders in
the north and to Europeans on the coast. Even so, the Asante waged
war for purposes other than simply to secure slaves. They also
fought to pacify territories that in theory were under Asante
control, to exact tribute payments from subordinate kingdoms, and
to secure access to trade routes--particularly those that connected
the interior with the coast.
It is important to mention, however, that the supply of slaves
to the Gold Coast was entirely in African hands. Although powerful
traditional chiefs, such as the rulers of Asante, Fante, and
Ahanta, were known to have engaged in the slave trade, individual
African merchants such as John Kabes, John Konny, Thomas Ewusi, and
a broker known only as Noi commanded large bands of armed men, many
of them slaves, and engaged in various forms of commercial
activities with the Europeans on the coast.
The volume of the slave trade in West Africa grew rapidly from
its inception around 1500 to its peak in the eighteenth century.
Philip Curtin, a leading authority on the African slave trade,
estimates that roughly 6.3 million slaves were shipped from West
Africa to North America and South America, about 4.5 million of
that number between 1701 and 1810. Perhaps 5,000 a year were
shipped from the Gold Coast alone. The demographic impact of the
slave trade on West Africa was probably substantially greater than
the number actually enslaved because a significant number of
Africans perished during slaving raids or while in captivity
awaiting transshipment. All nations with an interest in West Africa
participated in the slave trade. Relations between the Europeans
and the local populations were often strained, and distrust led to
frequent clashes. Disease caused high losses among the Europeans
engaged in the slave trade, but the profits realized from the trade
continued to attract them.
The growth of anti-slavery sentiment among Europeans made slow
progress against vested African and European interests that were
reaping profits from the traffic. Although individual clergymen
condemned the slave trade as early as the seventeenth century,
major Christian denominations did little to further early efforts
at abolition. The Quakers, however, publicly declared themselves
against slavery as early as 1727. Later in the century, the Danes
stopped trading in slaves; Sweden and the Netherlands soon
followed.
The importation of slaves into the United States was outlawed
in 1807. In the same year, Britain used its naval power and its
diplomatic muscle to outlaw trade in slaves by its citizens and to
begin a campaign to stop the international trade in slaves. These
efforts, however, were not successful until the 1860s because of
the continued demand for plantation labor in the New World.
Because it took decades to end the trade in slaves, some
historians doubt that the humanitarian impulse inspired the
abolitionist movement. According to historian Walter Rodney, for
example, Europe abolished the trans-Atlantic slave trade only
because its profitability was undermined by the Industrial
Revolution. Rodney argues that mass unemployment caused by the new
industrial machinery, the need for new raw materials, and European
competition for markets for finished goods are the real factors
that brought an end to the trade in human cargo and the beginning
of competition for colonial territories in Africa. Other scholars,
however, disagree with Rodney, arguing that humanitarian concerns
as well as social and economic factors were instrumental in ending
the African slave trade.
Data as of November 1994
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