038840engo 2

Ideological, doctrinal, philosophical,

religious and political aspects

of the African slave trade

S. U. Abramova

'There is no topic in African history on which so much has been written and

yet so little known as the Atlantic slave trade. ' These words belong to Daaku,^1

the African historian. Indeed, hundreds of studies and popular books have

been written on the 400-year-long slave trade. It had a significant impact on

man's history: there is hardly a single work on the history of Africa, America

or the West Indies and few studies on the history of Europe that do not con-

tain at least one chapter on the export of slaves to the New World.

One hundred years have gone by since Africans ceased to be transported

to the New World, but disputes on the slave trade and its place in world history

still continue. This paper attempts to give a concise account of the reasons

behind the slave trade, its development and appraisal by contemporaries, and

what it gave to the peoples involved in it.

Development of the slave trade

In 1441, an expedition headed by Antam Gonsalvez and Nuno Trista brought
back ten captives from Africa to Europe. Some of these captives assured their
captors that they would be handsomely rewarded if they returned their captives
to Africa. Gonsalvez shipped the captives back to Africa where he received
in exchange ' ten blacks, male and female, from various countries... ' and
various goods including '... a little gold dust'.^2
Several slaves, with a splendid retinue, were sent as a gift to Pope Eugene
IV. The others were sold in Lisbon at an extremely high price.
Following this first profitable sale of Africans the Portuguese sailors
began to bring back slaves from every voyage to Africa.
Pacheco Pereira wrote that in his day (late fifteenth century) from the
coastal areas embracing Senegal and Sierra Leone alone 3,500 slaves, and at
times even more, were carried off yearly,^3 although the capture of slaves was
not the main object of the first Portuguese expeditions. At that time, however,
the population in some European countries was rather small and slave labour
was widely used, for instance, in the countries of the Iberian peninsula. But