Kevin Baldeosingh
Are the descendants of Africans in the Caribbean better off than the descendants of Africans who remained on the continent?
It might seem obvious that the Africans who were captured and sold to the European slave traders were not. For one thing, over the five centuries of the Atlantic slave trade, two million of the 13 million enslaved Africans died during the voyage to the New World. Put statistically, there was a 15 per cent chance of dying on the Middle Passage between Africa and the Americas. But, in order to determine which group was better off at this stage, it is necessary to know the risk of dying for those who remained in Africa.
Such data does not exist, however. But there is information showing that life in West and Central Africa was no bed of roses. Slavery itself was already long-established in Africa by the time the Europeans arrived in the 15th century, with Muslim traders controlling the trans-Saharan route and, even after, accounting for 40 per cent of the slaves who were taken from Africa between 1,500 and 1,800. The death toll on this Mideast route was around 75 per cent, with about 18 million Africans dying between the 7th to 19th centuries, as compared to 16 million in the Atlantic slave system from 1452 to 1807, according to researcher Matthew White in his book Atrocities.
That 16 million includes the ten to 12 million slaves who died even before reaching the ports. Historian Patrick Manning has constructed a mathematical model which suggests that almost 12 million people were kept within Africa as slaves. “An estimated total of four million people lost their lives as a direct result of enslavement within Africa, while many others died young because of the hard conditions of slave life,” Manning writes in a well-known paper titled The Slave Trade: The Formal Demography of a Global System. A tract written by a Catholic priest, Baltasar Barriera in 1605 lists the methods of enslavement on the upper Guinea coast. These included capture of prisoners in war; practising witchcraft; murder; and incitement against rulers. Historian Paul Lovejoy in his book Transformations in Slavery notes that “Slaves were killed at funerals and sacrificed at religious occasions and state functions.”
In respect to slaves acquired through war, Lovejoy observes that warfare was widespread in Africa and increased after the Europeans started buying slaves. “Between 1600 and 1800, the five Hausa states of Gobir, Zamfara, Kano, Katsina and Zazzau fought dozens of wars...The Yoruba kingdom of Oyo initiated a series of wars that resulted in the enslavement of many people,” he writes. “...By the 18th century, moreover, political rivalries on the Gold Coast had provoked a number of wars, and the resulting turbulence [provided] a steady stream of slaves ready for export.”
Manning notes, “From 1700 to 1850, the population of sub-Saharan Africa as a whole stagnated or declined in size because of the mortality of captives, the drain of slaves, and continued high mortality resulting from social insecurity. This was precisely the period in which the populations of Europe, the Americas, and Asia began to grow rapidly.” However, the vast majority of the 11 million who did make it to the Americas left no descendants at all. This is especially true of the Caribbean and South America where sugar cane was grown since, unlike tobacco and cotton in North America, the hard labour often resulted in early deaths and, for the women, lowered fertility.
However, Herbert Klein, one of the world’s leading historians on slavery in Latin America, argues that the life of the enslaved was not that much harder, in terms of physical exertion and consequent effects, to that of the freed persons. He writes: “Although contemporaries and later commentators have speculated endlessly about the life expectancy of slaves, it is apparent that it was not that different from that of the free populations in the societies in which they lived.”
But anthropologist Lorena Madrigal in her book Human Biology of Afro-Caribbean Populations writes: “It is undeniable that African slaves in the Caribbean (excepting Barbados, had an exceedingly low fertility...although it is likely that the slave women sometimes controlled their fertility as an act of resistance against their enslaved state, it is perhaps more likely that the low fertility of slaves was a result of low fecundity due to under-nutrition, overwork, disease load (particularly uterine and vaginal infections), amenorrhea, depression and lack of exposure to coitus rather than due to effective contraception measures.”
This, however, was also true of slavery within Africa. “Despite other important factors, slave families appear to have been reluctant to have children,” writes Lovejoy, “...in part because it limited mobility and in part because it was cheaper and easier to buy children.”
Historian Hugh Thomas in The Slave Trade notes that “The discrepancy between the figures for the population of slaves and for their import shows...slaves were expected to die after ten years or so.” If this expectation was accurate, most slaves died around 30 to 40 years of age. For this reason, the plantations could not rely on reproduction to replenish their slave labour but had to keep importing more human beings. Between 1630 and 1770, for example, Barbados received about 360,000 enslaved Africans but in 1770, the island’s population included a mere 70,000 slaves. In Jamaica between 1655 and 1807, about 750,000 enslaved Africans came to the island. But, when slavery was abolished in 1834, there were just 310,000 Africans there. Nearly all the African-Caribbean persons alive today come from the two million Africans still alive in 1807. The former British colonies had just over 700,000 former slaves after Emancipation was proclaimed.
Another theory holds that the descendants of Africans in the Caribbean are more prone to diseases such as hypertension, diabetes and obesity, precisely because of the physiological advantages which allowed them to survive the Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas in the first place. In a paper in The Atlantic Slave Trade, scientists Thomas W Wilson and Clarence E Grim propose that “fatal sodium depletion was a major contributor to high mortality...and those who survived were more capable fo conserving sodium than those who did not. In today’s high dietary sodium environment in the Western Hemisphere, these ‘sodium conserving descendants of African slaves may be more susceptible to ‘salt sensitive’ hypertension...”
After all the horrors and trauma of slavery, what has been the outcome for West and Central Africans and African-Caribbeans? Table 2 provides comparative measures for five African countries which supplied most of the slaves during the Atlantic trade, and six Caribbean countries which were former British colonies.
As the figures show in Table 2, the Caribbean has a much higher murder rate than the African countries. On the other hand, the African countries have a much higher death rate, because of infant mortality and low life expectancy due to disease, especially Aids. As for human development, as measured by the United Nations, the Anglophone Caribbean scores an average of 69 out of 100. The African nations score 46.
It seems then, that the average Caribbean person is better off today than the average African. This, however, was at the cost of millions of people killed and brutalised through one of humanity’s most shameful eras.