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Know more about why people were bought with shells, metal, beads, alcohol and guns. 

Cowrie Shells

 

Taken in their billions to West Africa, cowrie shells represent the beginning of the use of money rather than an exchange of goods for enslaved people. The cowrie shell remains in African culture and thought. The Akan word for cowrie, sedee, is the currency of Ghana today.

 

In the book, African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade, there is oral history from Benin of how items were traded for other items until a king from the interior exchanged enslaved people on the coast to then bring back cowrie shells to the interior. This change in how things were exchanged, is considered the birth of a monetized system.[1]

 

The cowrie shell holds a considerable influence on the thinking of many in the exchange for people. It is almost mythical. The creature itself was seen as a man eater/vampire. This is more in a figurative sense, as the exchange of these shells for people provokes the image of people being eaten. (This links with a lot of thought over depersonalisation, the ‘point of no return,’ loss of identity.)[2]

 

There is imagery in Africa of the cowrie feeding on the drowned bodies of those enslaved people who were lost to the Atlantic, those creatures then being used to purchase more. In the Guin-Mina speaking region of Togo there is a story of cowries growing on the bodies of drowned enslaved people who had resisted capture.

 

Manilla

 

Toby Green in A fistful of Shells highlights the difference between European and West African attitudes to money, when he recalls that the Igbo people used the manilla not as money but as a thing to collect to enter a secret society called Ekpe. Manilla were produced in a number of places in Europe and in the UK, however no connections to the North East have been found.[3]

 

Guns

 

Guns are perhaps the most insidious of the items exchanged, as they were able to create a vicious circle of producing greater conflict and thereby greater numbers of enslaved people to then be exchanged for more guns.[1]  Into the 18th century, guns, starting with flintlock muskets, were the most sought-after item by West African slave traders.

 

Stanley Alpern, in his article What Africans Got for the Slaves: A Masterlist of European Trade Goods further debunks the notion that Africans would settle for European trash. They traded for objects, like the above, that had real value or status for them, or for practical things, such as metal pots, nails, pins etc.[4] Even sugar, grown by enslaved Africans was traded to West Africa for enslaved people.

 

[1] Bellagamba, A., Greene, S.E. and Klein, M.A. (2020) African voices on slavery and the Slave Trade. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.51

 

[2] Bellagamba, A., Greene, S.E. and Klein, M.A. (2020) African voices on slavery and the Slave Trade. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. P. 47-48

 

[3] Green, T. (2021) A fistful of shells: West Africa from the rise of the slave trade to the age of Revolution. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

 

[4] Alpern, Stanley B. “What Africans Got for Their Slaves: A Master List of European Trade Goods.” History in Africa, vol. 22, 1995, pp. 5–43. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3171906. Accessed 14 Apr. 2024.

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