The African Diaspora

Between the 1500s and the 1900s, Europeans forcibly uprooted millions of people from throughout West Africa and West Central Africa and shipped them across the Atlantic in conditions of great cruelty. The transatlantic slave trade was responsible for the forced migration of between 12-15 million people. European slavers dispersed them across the Americas to lead lives of degradation and brutality. As a result, people of African descent are spread throughout the Americas and Western Europe. This is called the African Diaspora. The transatlantic slave trade generally followed a triangle route, where traders set out from European ports towards Africa’s west coast. There they bought people in exchange for goods and loaded them into ships. The voyage

The reason for this is that European (and American) slave traders did not simply go out into the African countryside and kidnap their own slaves. Instead, they bought slaves from the coastal kingdoms. Those kingdoms generally got slaves to sell through war and through raiding against inland tribes. Because the slave traders wanted more slaves, the coastal kingdoms were encouraged to wage more wars and conduct more raids against their neighbours. In addition, those kingdoms were provided with things like guns in exchange for slaves. This helped those kingdoms have more of a capability of waging war. At least in the short term, it helped the coastal kingdoms. Those kingdoms became richer and more powerful because they were able to get guns, money, and other things in exchange for the slaves. However, in the long term, these kingdoms were badly affected by the slave trade because it took millions of men and women in the prime of their lives, which disrupted both the cultures and economies of the African nations. The disruption of their economies meant that African kingdoms were less able to progress, and were unable to effectively resist the Europeans when they started to colonise

However, European states are largely blamed for the slave trade, because of the large implications it had on Africa. African kingdoms were exploited for slaves in return for weapons, gunpowder and gold, which doesn’t compare to the millions of people that have been forcibly relocated to work as slaves. In the BBC News article by Will Ross, it is stated that “There has also been an impact on African culture”. With the loss of millions of people, African states had slowly lost their ability to gain economic, social and cultural independence, because as soon as slavery was abolished, European states immediately returned to colonise most of the continent. Ghana is a prime example of a country that had to deal with the burden of the slave trade where “the scene in many rural areas appears to have changed little with grass thatched mud-walled huts”, this is inadvertently caused by the transatlantic slave trade. If the forced upon slave trade hadn’t been established by European states, then millions of West Africans may have remained in their countries as economically active citizens to further their economic stature, which in turn would result in an industrial revolution amongst West African states, as their agricultural production would have remained