Negro resistance to slavery
and the Atlantic slave trade
from Africa to Black America
Oruno D. Lara
Introduction—approaches to the problemIn order to study the Atlantic slave trade and the slave system one must first
review a number of problems and order them according to the way they link
up. Before such research is undertaken a preliminary remark is called for:
central to this vast set of problems is their common denominator—which
should be studied in the general History of Africa—the Negro. Captured in the
course of wars or raids, dragged on foot, stocked and then embarked on slave
ships, an African was treated as a piece of merchandise before being sold into
slavery on the American plantations. This human merchandise has been written
about in two connections : (a) in connection with the slave trade, from the time
it seized the African in Africa up to the time it sold him in America; and (b)
in connection with the slave system in which the African was forced to work
under a colonial regime.
At the beginning of any survey of the slave trade, mention must also be
made of the historical links between sugar, monoculture and Negroes. These
three elements in combination remain a constant of the slave system and colo-
nial society. The slave trade is approached by historians in two ways, according
to their geographic and social environment. In the first case, the heritage of
colonial history weighs heavily, the mother country and the colony being
regarded as forming a whole. With this approach, interest is centred on Europe,
and the various questions are considered separately instead of being seen as a
whole in relation to the different government policies. For example, the French
West Indies are regarded as appendages of France in French history and there
is no link with the other West Indies or with the American mainland. They are
studied, casually, in connection with the economic history of a port such as
Marseilles, Bordeaux, Nantes or Saint-Malo where an attempt is made to
follow the fortunes of natives of these towns after they went out to the Indies.
Adopting this approach, the Negro workers may be totally disregarded and
only the colonists studied.^1 Or again the study may be centred on the slaves,
but without seeing the dynamics of the system and wondering, after summing
up a whole series of case histories, whether the fate of the slaves was not