Some History

Between 1500 and 1867, over 12 million Africans were loaded onto slave ships bound for the Caribbean and Americas. Well over 30,000 voyages from Africa to the Americas have been documented, 12,000 of which were British, carrying over 3.3 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. Numbers and statistics alone cannot convey the horror of the experience. However, the records provide detailed information on some aspects of this tragedy. Africans (who could have been bought, sold, captured, kidnapped, enslaved as punishment or for acts of war) were forced to walk through the interior until they reached the coast. Most would be chained and crowded into river canoes and sailed along routes from the interior to awaiting European slavers on the coast. Others were taken to holding forts along the West Coast of Africa, where they were placed in barracoons or holding cells, sometimes waiting for many days or weeks for the slave ships to collect them. The conditions in the forts were inhumane and many died while waiting to be collected.

Between 350 and 800 Africans were packed into the holds of slave ships, which sailed directly to the Americas and Caribbean to sell their ‘cargo’ and to collect slave-produced goods such as sugar, tobacco, ivory and gum for resale in Europe. This journey, known as the ‘Middle Passage’ was brutal, terrifying and dehumanising. Africans were branded, stripped naked for the duration of the voyage, packed and secured in irons to platforms below deck and made to lie in their own vomit and filth. Diseases such as dysentery, or smallpox, infected people who were forced to stay below deck, sometimes until death. Their bodies would eventually be removed and thrown overboard. The ship’s crew helped to maintain the inhumane conditions, whipping, punishing and ridiculing the Africans, often raping the African women on board. It is known that around two million Africans lost their lives during the crossing. Once in the Americas or Caribbean, Africans were ‘prepared’ for sale. All attempts to reduce the obvious affects of the cruelty on board the slave ships were made and the ‘seasoning’ process, which ‘prepared’ Africans for plantation life, began.