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African Nations Involved in the Slave Trade
The slave trade was the horrific trafficking of Africans as enslaved persons to the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. It was a catastrophe of violence, extraction, and human degradation—driven above all by external demand and imperial systems, but also, tragically, involving some African states and networks.
The key truth: some African states took part in slave trading, but Africa as a whole did not. Out of roughly 2,000 African ethnicities, evidence links around 30 population groups to slave trading, while 1,970 are not tied to it in the evidence cited here.
Between 1500 AD and 1890 AD, more than 22,000,000 Africans were sold into slavery according to R. A. Austen (1979). Around 6,856,000 were sold east: 3,956,000 across the Sahara and 2,900,000 across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Around 15,000,000 were trafficked across the Atlantic. According to the British National Archives, 70% of all Africans sold into slavery in the Americas were transported by Portugal and Britain.
Important context: this history must not be weaponised by the far-right or by racial propagandists. The existence of some African participation does not dilute European, Ottoman, Arab, or wider imperial responsibility, and it does not justify collective blame against Africans. Human exploitation has appeared in many regions of the world. What matters here is accuracy, scale, and moral clarity.
Scroll down for the case studies, context, safeguards against misuse, and sources ↓
This history demands precision, not propaganda
The easiest way to lie with history is to take a true detail and strip it of scale, proportion, and structure. Yes, some African states and elites participated in slave trading. But that fact sits inside a much larger system driven by massive outside demand, maritime power, commercial finance, and imperial transport networks controlled overwhelmingly beyond Africa.
It is also crucial to distinguish between some states and all Africans. The same continent that contained polities implicated in slaving also contained thousands of communities that were raided, sold, displaced, brutalised, and permanently damaged by those systems. The victims were overwhelmingly African. The extraction of human beings from African societies weakened families, institutions, political stability, and long-term development.
Good history resists two temptations at once: it refuses romantic denial, and it refuses racialised abuse masquerading as honesty.
Ten precolonial states or regimes discussed in the record
The examples below come from the text you provided and have been arranged for clarity. They do not represent Africa as a whole. They represent documented cases within a much larger and more painful history.
1. Dahomey
The Kingdom of Dahomey was a West African kingdom located in present-day Benin. It became a major source of enslaved persons for the Atlantic slave trade, raiding nearby settlements for captives. In the 1720s, King Agaja expanded Dahomey by taking over Allada in 1724 and Whydah in 1727, giving Dahomey control over key coastal slave ports such as Porto Novo and Ouidah.
With those coastal cities in its hands, Dahomey became known as a major market for slave exports and profited heavily from the trade. It raised slave prices, which attracted the attention of the more powerful Oyo Empire. Dahomey was defeated in the 1740s and became tributary to Oyo for roughly 100 years. Its participation in the Atlantic trade continued until 1852, when Britain—having long been one of the major customers of that very trade—forced Dahomey to end it.
The monarchy’s dependence on the trade appears starkly in a reported statement by King Gezo in the 1840s:
“The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth…the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery…”
2. Morocco
The Alawite Dynasty in Morocco took part in the Trans-Saharan slave trade. Major slave markets existed in Tangiers, Marrakesh, and Fez, where enslaved people were sold openly. During expansion wars, the Alawite state captured Africans and sold many of them into wider Middle Eastern slave systems. Morocco also functioned as a major centre of the Arab slave trade. Research published in the book Black Morocco by academic Chouki El Hamel suggests the trade finally ended in 1950.
The legal framework under Islamic law differed from the slavery systems that developed in the Americas. Slave women who bore children to their masters could gain freedom with their children, and those children could inherit property and receive education. That meant some sultans, judges, and prominent officials had slave ancestry. This was very different from the perpetual hereditary slavery that hardened in North America, where the son of a free man and an enslaved woman could remain enslaved.
Morocco also sourced captives from Europe through the activities of Barbary corsairs, who captured and enslaved Europeans including Spaniards, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Greeks, Portuguese, Italians, Irish, Scandinavians, Russians, Georgians, and others travelling in inadequately armed ships. The largest group of Europeans enslaved by Moroccans were the Spanish.
3. Ottoman Algeria
The Regency of Algiers, which existed from 1518 to 1830 as part of the Ottoman Empire, was a major player in slave trading. According to published research, it enslaved both Africans and Europeans, often in connection with the activities of Barbary pirates. Large slave markets operated in the region, with captives sold through Trans-Saharan routes as well as obtained through raiding, warfare, and trade.
The system lasted until 1830, when conflict with France contributed to the end of Ottoman rule in Algeria.
4. Egypt
Egypt was a major player in the Trans-Saharan and later wider slave trade systems. The text dates a key turning point to 641 AD, with the Muslim conquest of Egypt by the Rashidun Caliphate, after which trade routes linking Egypt to Mecca and the Middle East became more firmly established.
Later, Egypt became part of the Ottoman Empire in the 1500s. Millions of enslaved persons were taken from Egypt to Asia and that the trade ended in the 1900s after British pressure intensified when Egypt defaulted on its debts. Because of its long history in these systems, Egypt is included here as one of the African polities deeply implicated in slave trading routes.
5. Kanem-Bornu
The Kanem Bornu Empire, based across parts of present-day Cameroon, Chad, and Nigeria, lasted from around 700 to 1900 AD. By around 900 AD, enslaved persons had become a principal commodity, and by the end of the 15th century roughly 5,000 slaves were traded annually according to research.
Initially, enslaved people were sold through the Trans-Saharan trade. Later, the empire also became implicated in the Transatlantic trade. Around two million slaves walked through the slave route in their empire. Kanem Bornu raided non-Muslim neighbouring kingdoms for captives, especially in times of economic need. Eventually, the empire itself was invaded, and its role in the trade ended.
6. Kingdom of Allada
The Kingdom of Allada, located in southern Benin, reached the peak of its power in the 16th century and became a centre of the Atlantic slave trade. It supplied captives through raids and attacks on neighbouring polities, then sold them onward to European slave traders bound for the Americas.
As a coastal kingdom, Allada controlled a major Atlantic slave port. Even after the kingdom itself declined, the coast remained significant in the wider trade. In 1724, Dahomey invaded Allada, and many of Allada’s own people were then sold into slavery—an especially grim reminder that systems of predation can consume those who participate in them.
7. Aro Confederacy
The Aro Confederacy was a political union in present-day south-eastern Nigeria. According published research, the Aro were among the leading exporters of slaves to Europe and the Americas from 1690 to 1902, with estimates suggesting around 850,000 slaves were exported overseas.
Once the Aro gained the upper hand in the slave trade, they launched wars and raids to capture more captives. The confederacy drew cohesion from the Chukwu oracle of Aro, which helped unify the region into a large trading network. This made the Aro an especially important case in the history of internal West African slave-trading structures linked to Atlantic demand.
8. Ashanti Empire
The Ashanti Empire, based in present-day Ghana, was formed in 1700 and participated in the slave trade until the 19th century. According to research, its economy rested heavily on the trade in gold and slaves.
Its army often functioned as an instrument for capturing people in war. Those captives could be kept within the empire as enslaved labourers or exported across the Atlantic to the Americas. The Ashanti case therefore sits within the broader history of states that combined warfare, commerce, and human trafficking in ways shaped by Atlantic demand.
9. Songhai Empire
The Songhai Empire, one of the largest states in African history, was based in western Africa. Slave trading formed a substantial part of the empire’s economy. According to published research, slaves were used internally to transport goods, and literate enslaved people could sometimes rise to administrative roles, though many were also exported in the Transatlantic trade through European buyers.
Captives were often procured through raids and wars with neighbouring peoples, especially the Kru and Baga. Songhai therefore illustrates how internal and external uses of slavery could exist side by side inside a major precolonial state.
10. Mali Empire
The Mali Empire, based in present-day Mali from roughly 1235 to 1670 AD, was deeply engaged in trade—including trade in enslaved people through the Trans-Saharan route. Slave labour was common, and captives were also exported. According to research, thousands were enslaved in raids and wars waged by the empire over time.
Slavery was later abolished under French colonial rule, though forms of descent-based slavery have persisted in parts of northern Mali. This reminds us that the afterlives of slavery are often stubborn and do not disappear the moment the law changes.
How to stop this history being abused by the far-right
There is a predictable bad-faith move that appears whenever this subject is raised: someone points to African participation and tries to use it to excuse, flatten, or racialise the wider history of slavery. That move fails on several levels.
Scale matters
The Transatlantic slave trade operated on a scale that depended heavily on European shipping, European finance, European legal systems, and European plantation demand. The National Archives figure that Portugal and Britain transported 70% of all Africans sold into slavery in the Americas—is not a decorative footnote. It is structural.
Most Africans were victims, not perpetrators
Evidence links around 30 population groups out of 2,000 African ethnicities to slave trading. That means the overwhelming majority are not implicated by that evidence base and should not be collectively blamed.
Slavery was global, but not identical
Many societies in world history practiced forms of slavery. That does not erase the distinct brutality, racialisation, hereditary structure, and Atlantic-industrial scale of the slavery system built in the Americas.
Moral honesty is not racial propaganda
The mature response is to tell the truth in full: some African states participated; European, Arab, Ottoman, and wider imperial systems drove enormous demand; and African societies suffered catastrophic damage. Precision is the antidote to propaganda.
The right lesson is not “Africans did it to themselves.” The right lesson is that exploitative systems often recruit local intermediaries while remaining driven by larger structures of demand and power.
This history is tragic, complicated, and morally serious
The slave trade was a horrific system that exploited the people of Africa for personal and material gain. It is deeply sad that some African states took part in that exploitation. Their participation should be neither denied nor exaggerated beyond proportion. Historical honesty demands something more demanding than that: proportion, context, and moral seriousness.
The stain of slavery set Africa back in devastating ways. It damaged communities, weakened institutions, and tore millions of people away from their societies. But accuracy also requires us to remember that Africa was not simply the location of this crime. Africans were its principal victims.
The task is not to simplify the past until it flatters someone. The task is to tell it truthfully enough that it can no longer be abused.
Myth of No Civilisations
The slave trade did immense damage—but Africa’s story is far older, wider, and richer than the catastrophe imposed on it.
Myth of No Civilisations restores the deeper civilisational record too often erased by shallow narratives. It examines more than 320,000 years of African history, showing that the continent was never a blank backdrop waiting for outside actors to make it historically relevant.
- Rebuilds the deeper history that slavery and colonial narratives often obscure.
- Explains African governance, trade systems, law, medicine, education, and intellectual traditions.
- Gives readers the wider framework needed to resist both denial and racist misuse.
- Helps place traumatic history inside a truthful and much larger African timeline.
Questions readers may ask
Tap a question to expand the answer.
Did some African states participate in the slave trade?
Yes. Some African states and networks participated in slave trading, especially in response to larger external demand. But that is very different from saying Africa as a whole was responsible.
Does African participation reduce European responsibility?
No. European empires, merchants, shipping systems, plantation economies, and legal structures were central to the scale and operation of the Transatlantic trade. Local participation does not erase system-level responsibility.
How many Africans were trafficked according to the figures in this article?
More than 22,000,000 Africans were sold into slavery between 1500 AD and 1890 AD, including roughly 15,000,000 across the Atlantic and 6,856,000 eastward across Saharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean routes.
Can this history be used to say “Africans sold themselves”?
No. That phrase is historically sloppy and morally manipulative. It erases the scale of outside demand, collapses a vast continent into a few implicated states, and ignores that Africans were the overwhelming victims of the trade.
Why include this history at all if it can be misused?
Because honest history matters. The answer to misuse is not concealment. It is context, proportion, and precision. Bad-faith actors thrive on simplification; good history removes that oxygen.
References cited in the text
- Law, Robin. “Dahomey and the Slave Trade: Reflections on the Historiography of the Rise of Dahomey.” The Journal of African History, vol. 27, no. 2, 1986, pp. 237–267. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/181135. Accessed 12 Mar. 2021.
- John Wright (2002) Morocco: the last great slave market?, The Journal of North African Studies, 7:3, 53-66, DOI: 10.1080/13629380208718473
- Reed P.P. (2009) Algerians, Renegades, and Transnational Rogues in Slaves in Algiers. In: Rogue Performances. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230622715_3
- Arsenault, Natalie and Rose, Christopher. “Africa Enslaved: A Curriculum Unit on Comparative Slave Systems for Grades 9-12” Available Online. Accessed 12 Mar. 2021.
- Smith, Abdullahi (1972). Ajayi, J.F. Ade; Crowder, Michael (eds.). The early states of the Central Sudan, in History of West Africa, Volume One. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 168–172, 199–201. ISBN 0231036280.
- Law, Robin. “The Slave Trade in Seventeenth-Century Allada: A Revision.” African Economic History, no. 22, 1994, pp. 59–92. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3601668. Accessed 12 Mar. 2021.
- Oriji, J.N. “THE SLAVE TRADE, WARFARE AND ARO EXPANSION IN THE IGBO HINTERLAND.” Transafrican Journal of History, vol. 16, 1987, pp. 151–166. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24328626. Accessed 12 Mar. 2021.
- Green, Toby. A fistful of shells : West Africa from the rise of the slave trade to the age of revolution (Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle-Version ed.). London. p. 108, 247. ISBN 978-0-241-00328-2.
- David C. Conrad (2009). Empires of Medieval West Africa.
- Eric Hahonou & Lotte Pelckmans. West African Anti-Slavery Movements: Citizenship Struggles and the legacies of slavery. Stichproben. Wiener Zeitschrift für kritische Afrikastudien Nr. 20/2011, 11. Jg., 141‐162. Available online
I would like to know if in the ten countries mentioned the Africans who did the enslaving were what we call Blacks and if the people they enslaved were also Blacks. Because Northern Africa isn’t necessarily populated with Blacks but Caucasians (it is my understanding). In filling out my details, I do not have a website, I am an individual interested in this topic.
Caucasians is an antiquated idea, the Caucasus mountains are closer to India and Persia than Western Europe. North Africa are Africans that speak Arabic due to the Islam conquest. Prior to speaking Arabic they spoke Latin, greek and or North Africa languages. The majority of their dna ancestry comes from Africa with 17% contribution from the Levant (Arabian peninsula). Having a light skin is not unique to Europe. Just like having a “black” is not unique to Africa. There are indigneous black people in Asia and the Pacific.
Arguably you wouldn’t refer to those people as “African’s” due to the fact they had to have migrated from the continent prior to the victor of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus.
Thank you for this article. 95% of what I read says that European descents White Americans, are the entire fault of slavery. I am confused on the numbers of enslaved, mentioned in the opening paragraph. They do not add up to 22,000,000.
Thank you. Gnic
You are probably used to seeing the trans-Atlantic trade figures. 15m shipped from Africa to the Americas, 3m died on the way, 12m disembarked. The extra 7m relates to the Trans-Sahara slave trade and Indian Ocean/ Red Sea Arab trade in Africans. 22m is a scholarly figure for the total across multiple routes.
This article seems to assume that all slavery was the enslavement of Africans. Actually, Africans were only a fraction of the total slave population over the millenia. For example, the enslavement by the Muslims of eastern Europe’s peoples is why they became known as “slavic” peoples.
There is definitely no such assumption that slavery only happened to Africa. The website focusses on African History which is a part of world history because it is often ignored. Africa sits within the world and is not the only population that experienced the slave trade.
The article was focused on Africa and it’s enslavement and slave trade. Clearly it was not on global enslavement as every continent has it’s own history of slavery since ancient times.
The article made no such claim about Africa being the only place that inhabited slavery. This is from a specific time and area of history, the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
I have always wondered where my descendants come from. I was always taught as a child that we were taken from our homeland by Europeans. Slave trading is as old as the world. No different in Europe than in Africa. As an adult, I realize it was the human greed of Europeans and Africans combine sold my ancestors for consumer goods, weapons, and alcohol. What a very sad and deprave time that was. What would be the story if Africa fought against this injustice? How powerful could we have been?
Hahaha 🤣
Same thought.
You may not have learned the full history of what happened during the slave raids. Some Africans resisted, violently and non-violently. Over-generalisations happen when we don’t distinguish between the zones that were involved in the slave raid – either involuntarily like the Kingdom of Kongo, or voluntarily like the Kingdom of Whydah and Dahomey.
Accounts of the transatlantic slave trade often downplay the role of man-hunts, kidnapping or self-defence by Africans. Man-hunts involved sailing along the West African coast, and stopping at random at places Portuguese raiders thought would be suitable for their purpose, initiating unprovoked attacks. In one example from 1446, all members of an expedition led by Nuno Tristão were massacred near the Cape Verde peninsula in present-day Senegal.
If you search online for the letter of the King of Kongo to the King of Portugal, you will find that you can’t over generalised about either Africa or Europe.
1970 out of 2000 ethnic groups in Africa didn’t conduct any slave raids, or leave any historical records that within their own societies they performed slavery.
From everything I’ve read – of the 15m transported in the transatlantic slave trade, 95% were trafficked to Hispaniola and South America and the Caribbean by the Spanish and Portuguese. 5% By the British and French to what is now USA (388,000) and Canada (30,000). The opening paragraph is misleading in that it omits Spanish, French and Dutch participation entirely, and places equal distribution of the volume to the British proportionate to the Portuguese. It also doesn’t list (at all) – that the British were the ones that outlawed the trade and actively ended it by disrupting the established trade channels by the other countries. It’s important as in this modern era of retribution and political debate – the blame seems to be places almost entirely on the country that played a much smaller part, and isn’t getting credit for ending it.
The focus of this article was African nations involved in the slave trade. I wrote another article about the non-African countries that took part in the slave trade in Africans.
https://thinkafrica.net/slave-trade/amp/
Britain transported the 2nd largest number of slaves between 1500 and 1833. If you take the overall content on this website into consideration, I add balance to how much everyone gets blamed. For instance I am not silence on the fact that some African kingdoms took part in the slave trade. Likewise I also don’t pretend like all African civilisations were slave trading societies. Some opposed slavery.
https://thinkafrica.net/10-nations-that-didnt-take-part-in-the-slave-trade/amp/
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Thank you for this clear and informed comment on the term “caucasian” as well as “black” skin in other ethnicities around the world other than Africa.
Thank you for this interesting, insightful, and thought provoking article. And thank you for the comments on the use of the descriptor Caucasian.
As a mixed race person with very fair skin, I get labelled “Caucasian” all the time. It irks me, as we don’t label people Mongoloid or Negroid any more. What was a ridiculous, racist way of labelling humanity has now become an incorrect attempt at political correctness.
DNA testing has shown I have no Caucasian dna, all Western European and west African (18% according to the dna tests 😂 My father was olive skinned, his mother darker. Our African heritage has never been a secret, but to have a percentage made me laugh. If we used outmoded racial profiling, would I be a mulatto? 😂)
It saddens me to think that some of my ancestors were taken as war prizes, and sold on as slaves, subject to abuse and cruelty. But they survived, and they live on in my family.
We must acknowledge the past, learn from it, and continue to grow.
Again, thank you. As I said, our African heritage has never been a secret, we knew we must have descended from people taken as slaves, but it’s interesting to learn where it came from, and how.
is it because you HAVE to blame white people?
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Some African slaves were sold by African captors not all of them. A lot of African slaves were also captured in slave raids by Europeans and Arab slave raiders.
Can you site your source for “slave raids by Europeans and Arab slave raiders”?
1. https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-12672 John Hawkins is one example of a slave raider. 2. Black Morocco is a book that explains how the king of Morocco used to fund slave raids.
There is lots of accepted evidence that they launched slave raids. It is mostly “economic historians” who tend to have lazy narrations.
Thank you for this very interesting article as too often the active involvement of African countries in the slave trade is forgotten. It makes me mad that Britain – a previously white nation – seems to constantly be given the lion’s share of the blame about the slave trade and being asked for apologies and reparations. Why aren’t the African countries who sold their own people being asked to apologise and pay reparations? And what about those who traded in white slaves as well. Where are their apologies to European/white countries?
I don’t have an answer for you. In case you didn’t know some of these nations have already release official apologies. The second point I should make is that only some African nations took part in the Atlantic slave trade. A lot of slaves were kidnapped free people. Most African nations did not sell their own people.
https://thinkafrica.net/anti-slavery-africa/
Maybe because the west came to look for the business the African were merely supplying
Hence not the initiators?
Kindly allow me to contextualise and correct uninformed over-generalisations. The United States is a former colony of Britain; records of commercial relationships have been extensively studied by the UK Bank of England, UK Banks like the Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays Plc, UK largest insurance companies, and prominent UK universities. The information I am about to explain is publicly available and misrepresentations could have been avoided by doing proper research.
Such a statement comes from not knowing the specifics of history of the transatlantic slave trade.
This is why it’s really important to review all the evidence, and not just let Hollywood tell you African History. What I mean is that we need to do some research, consider various sources, particularly academic ones, and not entertainment sources.
1. Did Most Africans Slave Raid or Slave Trade? The continent has 2,000 ethnicities. There is direct evidence that 30 ethnicities were involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. There is NO evidence 1,970 ethnicities were involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Tell me, is 1970/ 2000 = most Africans? Where 5.7 million Africans was taken from the region of the Kingdom of Kongo, we have a letter by King Afonso of Kongo stating
“And we cannot reckon how great the damage is, since the mentioned merchants are taking every day our natives, sons of the land and the sons of our noblemen and vassals and our relatives, because the thieves and men of bad conscience grab them wishing to have the things and wares of this Kingdom which they are ambitious of; they grab them and get them to be sold; and so great, Sir, is the corruption and licentiousness that our country is being completely depopulated,
“That is why we beg of Your Highness to help and assist us in this matter, commanding your factors that they should not send here either merchants or wares, because it is our will that in these Kingdoms there should not be any trade of slaves nor outlet for them. Concerning what is referred [to] above, again we beg of Your Highness to agree with it, since otherwise we cannot remedy such an obvious damage.”
I repeat “because it is our will that in these Kingdoms there should not be any trade of slaves nor outlet for them.”
2. What is called slavery by Europeans when they talk about African History?
Forced labour was practiced for various reasons, such as to punish murder, rape, grievous bodily harm, witchcraft, kidnapping, or treason. This form of forced labour is called convict labour, it’s not the same as chattel slavery. In European history or Asian history, we don’t call convict labour slavery. In illiterate societies, a practice called pawnship finance which is similar to mortgages was used which is not the same as chattel slavery. Prisoners of war were however treated as chattel slaves. Some societies did not have any slavery such as the Khoikhoi, the Kikuyu, the Tivs, the Igede, and the Herero. It isn’t accurate to claim the whole of Africa practiced slavery. That would be a geographic over-simplification. People trying to absolve Europe of responsibility usually focus on the 30 or so societies that were involved in the slave trade but ignored about 1,970 societies that didn’t.
3. Europeans sat on a ship and all Africans brought them kidnapped Africans. Consider this summary of the career of John Hawkins:
“While several other Englishman had already taken slaves from Africa by the mid-15th Century, John Hawkins effectively set the pattern that became known as the English slave trade triangle.
Early in his career, he led an expedition in which he violently captured 300 Africans in Sierra Leone and transported them to Spanish plantations in the Americas. There he traded them for pearls, hides, and sugar. His missions were so lucrative that Queen Elizabeth I sponsored his subsequent journeys and provided ships, supplies and guns. She also gave him a unique coat of arms bearing a bound slave.
With three major slavery expeditions in the 1560s, Hawkins prepared the path for the slave triangle between England, Africa and the New World. English goods were traded in West Africa, slaves were captured and trafficked on the notorious middle passage across the Atlantic, and cargo produced in the New World was transported back to England.
His four voyages to Sierra Leone between 1564 and 1569 took a total of 1200 Africans across the Atlantic to sell to the Spanish settlers in the Caribbean island of Hispaniola.”
Source: Royal Museums Greenwich
https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/john-hawkins-admiral-privateer-slave-trader
4 Extending the logic of black people sold their own people.
Europeans also sold themselves. That’s what the word slave comes from. Till today, Eastern Europeans are called Slavs.
There is substantial historical evidence to support the claim that Europe enslaved 10 million or more of its own people. The transatlantic slave trade is well-known, but it is often overlooked that Europe also had a significant history of internal slavery. During the medieval period, the slave trade thrived in Europe, with cities like Venice, Genoa, and Barcelona serving as major slave markets. Additionally, the Ottoman Empire and its expansion into southeastern Europe led to the enslavement of millions of Europeans, particularly from the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Moreover, the colonization of the New World by European powers also resulted in the enslavement of indigenous peoples. These practices were often intertwined with the transatlantic slave trade, as European colonizers sought to exploit both African and indigenous populations for labor. Numerous sources support this view, including historical accounts, primary documents, and academic research. Some recommended sources for further reading on the topic include “White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America” by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, “Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800” by Robert C. Davis, and “The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870” by Hugh Thomas.
Claiming Africans sold their own people is inaccurate because it assumes Africa which is a continent was a country. Africa was and still is a continent. If we are going to start using that logic, Europe sold way more of its own people than Africa did.
Utter rubbish. That’s close to the story the Nazis created not the truth. The origin of the term slave is thought to originate from peoples of Central Europe who developed a common language which in an ancient dialect was something similar to what is now known in English as Slavic ( meaning a common tongue) These peoples were later often in the servitude of the Byzantine ( Greek) empire and the terminology for slave is thought to be adopted from that. However there are many more theories as many relate to peoples who had no written languages. Slavery is common place throughout most of the short history of human civilisation. It still exists today sadly. Much even still within Africa.
This particular article has a narrow focus. It is a list of 10 African nations that participated in the slave trade. As an article with a narrow focus, it doesn’t cover the same focus certain other articles I have published with a narrow focus. The title is not the origin of slavery. The title is also not a global survey of the distribution of slavery. The title overall should be taken into consideration when judging an article with a narrow focus. The article is accurate and an introduction to a list of 10 African nations that participated in the Transatlantic slave trade. Africa had about 2000 nations, many were multiethnic, and about 1970 of then did not to our knowledge participate in the transatlantic slave trade
every one always trying to change history based on their dumb sensibilities…Noahs three sons is where every people group come from. and i dont care if you dont like it.
I hope and pray that another 400 years wouldn’t come and folks will still be lamenting about the ills and effects of slavery while staying as the permanent underclass.