The slave trade
within the African continent
Mbaye Gueye
The slave trade was a very ancient practice in Africa. The Europeans did not
invent it. They only exploited it by impelling the Africans to ' derive the greater
part of their resources from it'.^1 With the coming of the Europeans, the volume
of the trade swelled to huge proportions, causing widespread social upheaval
in Africa.
Unfortunately we do not have all the necessary material on the internal
slave trade. We cannot attempt to make even a rough assessment of its mag-
nitude from currently available sources. The little information we do possess
is either fragmentary or written long after the event, comes mostly from the
colonial authorities and deals more with the struggle to suppress the domestic
slave trade than with the trade itself.
Prior to foreign intervention, the slave trade was undoubtedly practised
in Africa but on an extremely small scale. It was devised chiefly as a means of
reintegrating into society individuals who had been cut off from their families
following a war or other catastrophe. For the organization of African society
does not allow for isolation and individualism. The African ideal is that of a
community existence based on powerful family ties with a view to a 'well-
ordered, secure life'.^2 People only count in so far as they are part of a harmoni-
ous, homogeneous entity. In these conditions, a man on his own formerly
had no chance of survival. Enslaving peoples whom natural or other disasters
had cast adrift was a useful means of providing them with a social framework
relevant to their expectations in life. Those who purchased them gave them a
new identity. The slaves would give up their own patronyms for that of their
new master. This type of integration did not jeopardize the group and could
not fundamentally disturb the original balance of the community for it con-
cerned only a tiny minority of individuals.
It was the steadily increasing demand for slaves a a result of foreign
intervention in the affairs of the continent which brought about a fairly sub-
stantial increase in the volume of the trade, hitherto restricted to transactions
on a narrow local scale. The material advantages to be gained by trading in
slaves were an incentive to some of the clans, especially in medieval times, to
intensify their raids on neighbouring tribes, to have something to barter for