By Me. Tales Pinto
As in many moments in the history of mankind, also in Africa, slavery it was an institution present in some civilizations. Since remote antiquity, slavery was practiced on the continent, just as it had been practiced in Greece, Rome, feudal Europe (in a residual form) and in the East.
But the internal slavery of the African continent was different from the slave trade that came into force after the conquests of African territories by the Portuguese and other European peoples from the 15th and 16th century onwards. The main difference was that slavery in Africa did not have the commercial character adopted after the development of the slave trade across the Atlantic Ocean.
One of the systems that existed in black Africa was the jonya , widespread in western Sudan, Niger and Chad. The jon he was the captive, a slave linked to a lineage and who could not be ceded or sold, having the right to most of what he produced. In this system belonged to the State and its political apparatus.
Among the Cubas, for example, there was only sporadic sale of slaves. The population increase also represented the increase in the power of the monarch, which led to the stimulation of the procreation of slave women. Their children were born free and their grandchildren were incorporated into society. For these reasons, the sale of slaves was almost non-existent.
Skilled workers who were slaves were also not sold in many African societies. Commercial slavery, which in some places replaced jonya , began to gain strength with the Islamization of some areas of the African continent, mainly in the North.
However, mass enslavement occurred with the opening of trade routes in the Atlantic. The commercial connection of the African continent with Europe and America turned the slave into one of the main export products, generating great profits for the elite of several African societies. This situation increased the number of slaves compared to the old systems existing in Africa and ensured the exploitation of the vast territories newly discovered in America.