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The Slave Trade and Development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Claude Meillassoux

Extract

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When Captain Binger traveled the Niger bend between 1887 and 1889, he saw numerous villages that had been drained of their lifeblood or left in ruins by violent conflicts that had left their mark in the form of fortifications. Above all he was struck by the region's depopulation, which threatened to compromise the potential for colonial exploitation of the country. But these conditions did not prevail throughout the entire area. Prosperous towns were engaged in trade, war parties were living in ostentation, and rulers were collecting taxes from their subjects. The misery of the peasants’ lives contrasted with the opulent luxury of the courts and caravansaries. The black slave trade, and slavery itself, did not exert a uniform effect upon all of Africa.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 45 , Issue 179 , September 1997 , pp. 23 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

Notes

1. Capitaine Binger, Du Niger au golfe de Guinée (Paris, 1892).

2. Variously Cabessaire, Cabecherre, Capchère, etc. (from the Portuguese caboceiro, in the Crónica de Guiné, ca. 1452, cabeceira): a person serving as middleman in transactions with European merchants. R. Mauny, Glossaire des expressions et termes locaux employés dans l'Ouest africain (Dakar, 1952).

3. In the context of the slave trade, the term “captive” refers to those individuals who had been captured but not yet sold to a master whom they would serve as slaves. Exported captives were also known as “pieces of India.”

4. Camisado: An armed attack carried out at night or dawn in order to take the enemy by surprise.

5. Surplus product: the product available above and beyond the quantity neces sary for the producer's subsistence; surplus labor: the labor available above and beyond that which is necessary to maintain the worker.

6. I use the term “state,” rather than “status,” to designate this legal and social void in which the slave is suspended.

7. A vernacle had precarious access to a small plot of land, which he worked to produce all or part of his own food.

8. A vernacle was authorized to reside in a small dwelling with a woman and possibly with her offspring.

9. In this regard, we might wonder whether in North America, where by 1750 the demographic reproduction of slaves had reached a higher ratio than in many other slave-owning countries, vernacles did not make up the majority of the servile population. Although their masters treated them as inferior and dependent beings, the insurgent men and women referred to as “slaves”- who were often literate and educated - would seem to belong rather to the category of venacles.

10. Mauny's Glossaire des expressions et termes locaux employés dans l'Ouest africain (see note 2) defines an ancre as a small barrel with a capacity of approximately 50 liters; a rodome is a pint bottle of brandy (1685).

11. Ibid. Mauny's list of terms for these fabrics includes platilles, acrocs, anabas, bretagnes, siamoises, sucretons, and guinées.

12. Ibid. These included caladary, Bajutapeaux, birampot, zingua, neganepaux, salapoury.

13. Ibid. Signare (from the Portuguese senhora meaning lady): “An unmarried mulatress, living conjugally with a European.”

14. Mauny's Glossaire supplies the French terms for some of these adornments: tacou, olivettes, verrots et bevises, conte carbé, galets, margriette et pesans.

15. For a list of currencies, see Mauny, Glossaire.

16. K. Polanyi, Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies (New York, 1968), pp. 261–279.