1 - Philanthropy and Humanitarianism Left Out in the Cold, 1830–84/85

Summary

There is virtually no doubt that it was in the quest for trade and geographical knowledge that Europe came to West Africa, and therefore to the Bight of Biafra, our region of interest in this study. This was in the fifteenth century. After that it was the slave trade across the Atlantic that sustained for over three hundred years the interest that Europe developed in West Africa in the process of that quest. During those three hundred years and more, the relationship that existed between Europe and West Africa was run on Europe's side by its private businessmen operating as individuals, groups, and organized companies of merchants. Then came the abolition of the slave trade, from 1807 onward, which Britain initiated and championed and which inaugurated the era of more or less sustained intervention by European governments in the affairs of West Africa. Thus, 1807 stands out in the history of Euro—West African relations on two grounds—it marks the beginning of the end of the transatlantic slave trade and the onset of that official European engagement with West Africa which was to end in the colonization of the region by Europe for about a century.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the slave trade and its by-product, slavery, occupied and continues to occupy a prominent place in the history and historiography of West Africa, a fact that is clear from even a cursory glance through any general history of the region for the period 1500–1900. There were two segments to the trade—the external segment which covered the slave trade in the Atlantic and from there to the New World, and the internal segment which covered the slave trade in the hinterland of the Atlantic coast of West Africa. The existing state of scholarship on the subject suggests that we appear to know more about the history, economics, and sociology of the external segment than we do about the internal segment. If we take up, for instance, the history of the movement to abolish the trade, we have on the external side such great classics as Sir Christopher Lloyd's The Navy and the Slave Trade, A. Mackenzie-Grieve's Last Years of the African Slave Trade, Reginald Coupland's The British Anti-Slavery Movement, and Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery, but little or nothing on the internal side to compare them with.