32 Michèle Ducketmother countries and vied with foreign nations for the monopoly of the trade :
the French Compagnie du Sénégal et de Guinée was an example. The combina-
tion of these two factors meant that the whole of Europe was involved in this
abominable traffic, deriving enormous profit from it. Having thus attained
world-wide proportions, the slave trade overstepped the boundaries of the slave
economy as such; true, it was the keystone to that economy, but it developed
as an independent form of commerce, one of many, and a particularly lucrative
one. It had its own trading stations and trade routes in Africa itself, involved
in the buying and selling of a new kind of merchandise, the black slave. A
whole set of practices grew up around it, both on land and at sea, designed to
keep the cargo alive, the value of the shipment being carefully assessed in
terms of the price it would fetch at the auction sales.^8 The fact that people
had become accustomed to such high rates of profit, and the very existence of
the 'system' explain up to a point why the slave trade has subsisted to this day.
For the abolition of slavery did not by any means imply the abolition
of the slave trade. Slavery was abolished by Great Britain in 1807, Brazil in
1836, France in 1848, Argentina in 1853 and the United States in 1865, to give
only a few examples. But the slave trade continued to exist to satisfy the demand
for labour in certain countries, and subsequently the demand for 'forced
labour', the modern brand of slavery. Furthermore, in some places, 'a fusion
of the two forms of slave trade, the Atlantic and the Arabized trade', had
occurred; Moorish traders took their slaves to the Niger delta or the Upper
Sangha basin and sold them to European traders.^8 With the slowing down of
slave traffic to America, the older routes were revived and the caravans simply
changed direction without the trade itself being affected.^7
Thus it was that shiploads of slaves continued to pour into the Dutch
colonies until as late as 1862, and into Brazil until 1887. Thus it was that men
like Savorgnan de Brazza and later Monseigneur Augouard had reason to
report numerous cases of transactions in human lives in the Oubangui region
at the end of the nineteenth century.^8 And thus it is that to this day, the United
Nations still receives reports attesting to the continued existence of slavery
and the slave trade in the Arab countries. And yet from the fifteenth to the
twentieth century, there has been no dearth of protests, decrees and laws on
the subject, which ought to have succeeded in eradicating such practices,
whilst the countries of Africa, with their accession to independence, were at
last freeing themselves from the fear of servitude, forced migration and exile.
This calls for a re-examination of history, an investigation of anti-slavery
'opinion': Of what did it consist? Who spoke out against the slave trade and
slavery? What did they say? What were their arguments and what reasons
did they give? Why this struggle? Was it purely a matter of defending the cause
of black slaves, or was there some other underlying cause? What part did the
black people themselves play in that struggle? These are all questions that can