68 Joseph E. Inikoriined. First, we propose to show that the slave trade had an ascertainable direct
negative impact on the economic development processes in Africa; secondly,
that, while it lasted, it prevented the growth and development of 'normal'
international trade between Africa and the rest of the world.
The first direct negative impact was its retardative or contractionary
effects on African population during a period of over 400 years. This is an
issue on which historians hold differing views.^41 With regard to Africa south
of the Equator, there seems to be a general consensus of opinion among them
that external slave trade led to an outright depopulation in the Congo-Angola
region, broadly defined. As for West Africa, there is disagreement as to whether
it led to an outright depopulation, but what no one seems to contend is that,
at best, the population there was stationary during the period of the external
slave trade—that is, the rate of population growth was equal to the rate of
population loss due to that trade.
One general weakness of the existing studies of the subject is that popu-
lation movements in Africa have been related only to the Atlantic slave trade.
A proper understanding of African demographic processes in the period 1451—
1870 requires an assessment of population losses due to the external slave trade
in all its branches. Also, even in the Atlantic trade, only the numbers of slaves
actually exported are considered, when it is known that the processes leading
to the export of those numbers—the wars, raids and other methods of slave
gathering ; the long march to the coast ; the ' warehousing ' of slaves on the coast
awaiting shipment; the long keeping of slaves in ship holds before the vessels
actually departed the African coast with their full cargoes—involved population
losses that probably have been far in excess of the numbers actually exported.
The most serious weakness, however, is that no effort has been made to assess,
albeit roughly, the additional population the slaves exported would have
produced in Africa had they been left there.
It is difficult to make such an estimate. In the first place, no data exist
on birth rates and survival rates in Africa at this time. Even if they existed the
data would not have reflected the effects of the slave trade on birth and survival
rates through its retardative effects on economic growth and the high incidence
of war. On the other hand, the Africans exported were all people in their prime
of life so that the rate of reproduction among them should have been higher
than that of the rest of society left behind.
One way of getting round the problem would have been to employ the
reproduction rates among the Africans received in the slave-importing territories
of the Americas. But this, again, poses problems. Of all the slave-receiving
territories in the Americas it was only in the United States that the imported
Africans achieved some rate of net natural increase during much of our period.
In the other territories, the effect of a lengthy journey from Africa by sea,
strange disease environment, the harsh conditions of plantation slavery,