GROUP 1

Slavery was taking place long before the intervention of the Europeans. In Africa losers of war would become slaves to the winning tribe and the owners of the slaves might have sold those slaves to Europeans in exchange for food and other supplies. There were also slave catchers that would catch other Africans and sell them to Europeans.

Six African male slaves with two armed traders. The restraints consist of heavy pieces of wood, about 5 feet long, forked at one end. The fork fits around a slave's neck, and is secured with a large iron bolt that fits through holes drilled in the ends of the fork. Each slave carries on his shoulder the handle of the forked wood securing the slave behind him. The slaves are marched in single file in this fashion. Five or six armed traders could in this way transport as many as 50 slaves over great distances.

Mandingo Slave Traders and Coffle, Senegal, 1780's

There were five main ways by which slaves were obtained both internal use and external demand. These were: Warfare, market supply, raiding and kidnapping, tribute and pawning. Prisoners of war were enslaved and they usually constituted the largest proportion of the total slave output. Warfare was rife among the savanna and forest states of West, East, Central and Southern Africa. The jihads of the 19th century, waged from Senegambia in the west to the Red Sea in the east resulted in the enslavement of thousands of people.

The Atlantic slave trade, also known as the transatlantic slave trade, was the enslavement and transportation, primarily of African people, to the colonies of the New World that occurred in and around the Atlantic Ocean. It lasted from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Most enslaved people were shipped from West Africa and Central Africa and taken to North and South America to labor on coffee, cocoa and cotton plantations, in gold and silver mines, in rice fields, the construction industry, timber, and shipping or in houses to work as servants.

The shippers were, in order of scale, the Portuguese, the British, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, and North Americans. European- and American-owned fortresses and ships obtained enslaved people from African slave-traders, though some were captured by European slavetraders through raids and kidnapping. Most contemporary historians estimate that between 9.4 and 12 million Africans arrived in the New World, although the actual number of people taken from their homes is considerably higher.

Some Africans were offered to Europeans by their African owners. When they saw what a profit they could make, they started capturing members of neighboring tribes just to sell them to the white men. When the slave trade was at its height, it was just about like any business ordering supplies - the traders would request a certain number of slaves and the local suppliers would have them waiting. Very few were physically captured by the white slave traders.

The slaves in the Americas (including the Caribbean) came overwhelmingly from West Africa, from the areas that are now Mali, Mauretania, Senegal, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Ghana & Nigeria for example.

-Group 1 Members: Jelani Lofters Jonathan Scott Gabrielle Douglas Rojeau Tomlin Cameron Hayles Richard Curtis And Last but not Least Ayana Harmer