154 Mbaye Gueye
ends slung behind their necks.i0 They were given just enough food to keep
them going from one stage to the next. At each halt they were put in irons
before being allowed to go to sleep.^51 The slave-drivers would take it in turns
to keep watch over them until it was time to depart. All along the way the
caravan would leave a trail of human beings who were no longer able to endure
the fatigue and hunger in its wake, to be devoured by the hyenas and jackals.^22
Those who could not keep up with the rest of the caravan would be driven on
with whips, and those who could not go on form sheer exhaustion would be
slain in cold blood in front of their terrified companions, and their bodies left
to the wild beasts.^23 This implied that the same punishment would be inflicted
on any slave showing any signs of ill-will. Human bones laid strewn all along
the routes that led from the interior to the trading posts.
These gruesome slave-trains were made up of long lines of
haggard, emaciated men, worn out by the lack of food, dazed by the blows they were
dealt, doubled over with the weight of their loads; crippled, spindle-legged women
covered in hideous wounds and forced to help themselves along with long sticks; old
people completely spent, bent double with fatigue and age.^24When after several days' march in the silence of those African desert trails
they would reach the trading posts, it was only the first stage in their grim
Odyssey.
At the trading stations, the African merchants would bide their time
over the sale of their slaves in anticipation of substantial profit margins. If the
price they were offered was too low they would refuse to sell. While they were
waiting for the highest bid, they would deposit their captives in the neighbouring
villages, and there the slaves would be chained together, unable to move, until
such time as they would be purchased by the agents of the European companies.
From there they would be dispatched to the coastal termini where they would
be kept until there were enough of them to warrant shipment to America.
As the slaves were bought up by the traders, they were shackled together
two by two with collars and chains until their turn came to be sent down to
the coast. The device used was ' an iron chain five or six feet long with a flat
iron collar at one end which would be fitted around their necks and clasped in
such a way that it could not be unlocked without tools '^25 Once the whole
operation was settled, the merchants would return home.^26
The slave trade organized in this way was not the only means of supplying
the European traders with slaves. For States like Benin, Ashanti and Dahomey
were not prepared to bow to a system in which they were merely middlemen.
At the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century,
first Ashanti and then Dahomey resolved to put an end to their inland position
and open up a window to the coast in order to trade directly with the Europeans.