West Africa In 1580

West Africa in 1580
In Central and West África, the great inland kingdoms of Malí and Ghana were influenced (and largely converted) by Islam, and these kingdoms had traded with the Muslim world for hundreds of years. From the beginning, slaves were among the articles of trade. These earliest enslaved Africans were crimináis, war captives, and people sold by their relatives to settle debts. NewWorld demand increased the slave trade and changed it. Some of the coastal kingdoms of present-day Togo and Benin entered the trade as middlemen. They conducted raids into the interior and sold their captives to European slavers. Nearly all of the Africans enslaved and brought to America by this trade were natives of the western coastal rain forests and the inland forests of the Congo and CentralÁfrica.
About half of all Africans who were captured, enslaved, and sent to the Americas were Bantu-speaking peoples. Others were from smaller ethnic and language groups. Most had been farmers in their homeland. The men hunted, fished, and tended animáis, while women and men worked the fields cooperatively and in large groups. They lived in kin-based villages that were parts of small kingdoms. Theypracticed polygyny (men often had several wives, each of whom maintained a sepárate household), and their societies tended to give very specific spiritual duties to women and men. Adolescent girls and boys were inducted into secret societies in which they learned the sacred and sepárate duties of women and men. These secret societies provided supernatural help from the spirits that governed taskssuch as hunting, farming, fertility, and childbirth. Although formal política! leaders were all men, older, privileged women exercised great power over other women. Thus enslaved African peoples in the New World carne from societies in which women raised children and governed each other, and where men and women were more nearly equal than in America or Europe.
European Exploratíon
In thecentury before Columbus sailed to America, Western Europeans were unlikely candidates for worldwide exploration. The Chínese possessed the wealth and the seafaring skílls that would have enabled them to explore, but they had I ¡Ule interest in the world outside of China. The Arabs and other Islamic peoples also possessed wealth and skills. But they expanded into territories that were next to them — andnot across uncharted oceans. The Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople in 1453 and by the 1520s had nearly reached Vienna. These conquests gave them control over the overland trade routes to Asia as well as the sea route through the Persian Gulf. The conquests also gave them an expanding empire to occupy their attention.
Western Europeans, on the other hand, were developing the necessary wealthand technology and a compelling need to explore. A group of new monarchs were making nation-states in Britain and in continental Europe — states with unprecedentedly large treasuries and military establishments. The population of Western European nations was growing, providing a tax base and a labor forcé for new classes of large landholders. These "élites" provided markets for goods that wereavailable only through trade with Asia. When the expansión of Islam gave control of eastern trade routes to Islamic middlemen, Western Europeans had strong incentives to find other ways to get to Asia.
They were also developing sailing technology and knowledge of currents and winds to travel long distances on the open sea. The Portuguese led the way. They copied and improved upon the designs of Arabsailing ships and learned to mount cannons on those ships. In the 15th century they began exploring the west coast of África— bypassing Arab merchants to trade directly for African gold and slaves. They also colonized the Madeira Islands, the Azores, and the Cape Verde Islands and turned them into the first European slave plantations.










The European explorers were all looking...