Gold and Slaves on the Gold Coast

Abstract

One of the many oddities of early Afro-European trade in West Africa was the transfer of captives from Benin to be sold to Africans on the Gold Coast, through the agency of the Portuguese. There are only a few references to this phenomenon, and none give any clear idea of its scope or ramifications. It has been suggested that was primarily in quest of slaves to meet the demands of the barter trade on the Gold Coast that the Portuguese in 1485 first penetrated the coastal swamp belt and made contact with the kingdom of Benin.1 They established a factory at Benin the following year; and Pacheco Pereira (writing about 1506-1508) gave the impression that the Benin/Mina trade had long been in existence.2 Wars, in which Benin was constantly engaged, provided captives who were transported to Sao Thome some to serve the sugar planters of that island and others to be re-exported. Gold Coast supplies came through Sao Thome, and this commerce apparently continued for about four decades into the sixteenth century. A figure of 2,060 was quoted in April 1529, while in August 1535 a vessel sailing from Sao Thome to Elmina took 80 slaves.3 These two isolated figures provide no basis for a quantitative assessment, but the Benin/Elmina run represented a short vital sector of the international commercial network of which Africa became a part after the overseas expansion of Europe. Due to its own inadequacy with regard to saleable goods, Portugal was forced to obtain commodities from other parts of Africa to purchase gold on the Gold Coast. Benin was particularly important because (apart from slaves) it supplied cotton cloths and beads, both of which were in great demand on the Gold Coast. It seems extremely likely that Portugal entered an existing trade between these two portions of the West African coast a conclusion drawn by some scholars, and one that is full of pointers towards the respective evolution and specialization of the two regions.4

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 49 citations exist upstream.