Way Black History Fact - Accounts of White Slavers Kidnapping Africans

not comfortable with our own history. So and the second part of the show, of course, we're going to talk about other ways that America happened upon slaves. Anyway, the peoples of West Africa had a rich and varied history and culture long before European slavers arrived. They had a wide variety of political arrangements, including kingdoms, city states, and

other organizations, each with their own languages and culture. The Empire of Songhai and the kingdoms of Mali, Beanin and Congo were large and powerful, with monarchs having complex political structures governing hundreds of thousands of subjects and other areas. Political systems were smaller and weaker, relying on agreements between people at village level, as in the sixteenth century War torn Europe, the balance of power between political states and

groups was constantly changing. Art learning and technology flourished, and Africans were especially skilled in subjects like medicine, mathematics, and astronomy, as well as domestic goods. They made fine luxury items in bronze, ivory, gold, and terra cotta for both local use and trade. West Africans had traded with Europeans through merchants in North Africa for centuries. The first traders to sail down the West African coast were the Portuguese in

the fifteenth century. Later the Dutch, British, French, and Scandinavians followed. They were mainly interested in precious items such as gold, ivory, and spices, particularly pepper. From the first contract's, European traders kidnapped and brought Africans for sale in Europe. However, it was not until the seventeenth century, when plantation owners wanted more and more slaves to satisfy the increasing demand for sugar in Europe, that transatlantic slaving became the dominant trade.

European traders captured some Africans in raids along the coast, but bought most of them from the local African or African European dealers. These dealers had a sophisticated network of trading alliances, collecting groups of people together for trade. Most of the Africans who were captured were enslaves, sorry were captured in battles or were kidnapped, though some were sold into slavery for debt and its punishment. The captives were marched to the coast often and during long journeys of

weeks or even months, shackled to one another. At the coast, they were imprisoned in large stone forts built by European trading companies or in smaller wooden compounds. All right, now, I'm going to share a bit from the New York Times magazine discussing piracy is not all slaves were bought. Okay.

Sometime in sixteen nineteen, a Portuguese slave ship, the Sao Jowl Bautista, traveled across the Atlantic Ocean with a hole filled with human cargo, captive Africans from Angola in southwestern Africa, the men, women and children, most likely from the kingdoms of Nyongo and Congo, and the horrific journey bound for a life of enslavement in Mexico. Almost half the captives had died by the time the ship was seized by

two English pirate ships. The remaining Africans were taken to Point Comfort, a point near Jamestown, the capital of the English Colony of Virginia, which the Virginia Company of London had established twelve years earlier. The colonist John Rolfe wrote to Sir Edwin Sandy's of the Virginia Company that in August sixteen nineteen a dutch Man of war had arrived in the colony and brought not anything but twenty and an odd negros, which the governor and Cape merchant bought

for virtuals. The Africans were most likely put to work in tobacco fields that had recently been established in the area. So for folks that are not able to stick around for the second part of the show, you know, we just want you to know that not all slaves were bought and sold by Africans into slavery, although there is a whole conversation that we have had and will continue to have about that many slaves work indeed kidnapped from Africa using piracy and other means.