Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links

The west coast of Africa juts far out into the Atlantic Ocean and follows an easterly course through the Niger delta. It then turns sharply south near the equator and becomes a much narrower region called Central Africa. Bantu language group speakers have lived in this region for thousands of years. In this chapter, we will discuss West Central Africa, the region that supplied enslaved Africans to the Americas in staggering numbers throughout the entire period of the transatlantic slave trade, and Mozambique in Southeast Africa along the Indian Ocean, a region where the Atlantic slave trade began early on a small scale and escalated during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.

In many other regions of Africa deeply affected by the Atlantic slave trade, Europeans were often confined to their fortresses or trading stations along the coasts or short distances up navigable rivers; or they were forced to trade from their ships anchored along the coast. In contrast, from the very beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, Portuguese and Afro-Portuguese merchants, officials, soldiers, missionaries, and peddlers penetrated deeply into the interior of the kingdom of Kongo and the Angolan hinterlands east of Luanda and Benguela, the two major ports that they established on the coast of Angola.

During the many centuries before Portuguese caravels arrived off the coasts of West Central Africa in 1472, the region had been isolated from the trans-Saharan camel caravan trade as well as the maritime trade routes along the coast of East Africa.² When the Portuguese first arrived, they did not find societies large and complex enough to support systematic trade—that is, until 1483, when they reached the kingdom of Kongo. Its capital, Mbanza Kongo, was located inland south of the Zaire (Congo) River. The kingdom of Kongo had long-established internal trade routes, markets, and a shell currency (nzimbu). Portuguese trade with the kingdom of Kongo first involved the exchange of copper bangles and ivory for Portuguese luxury goods and the services of technical advisers. In 1486, the Portuguese settled the island of São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea and developed a sugar industry there. During the 1490s, the Portuguese began to demand slaves to ship to São Tome.

Joseph Inikori and Nicolás Ngou-Mve deny that slavery existed in West Central Africa before the Portuguese arrived. Inikori argues that slavery in Africa before the Atlantic slave trade was more like feudalism in medieval Europe than like African slavery in the Americas—an opinion previously expressed by John Thornton with regard to the kingdom of Kongo.³ Jan Vansina explains that initially “dependents” in the kingdom of Kongo were sold. They were outsiders living in families and villages where clear-cut social distinctions were made based on lineage and descent in accordance with the principle that “people who lived together ought to be related to one-another.”⁴ Costa e Silva describes a transitory servile group, people of foreign origin captured in wars or raids, criminals alienated or removed from society, persons who had lost the protection of their own people. Their descendants were destined to be absorbed by the society.⁵ Thus several prestigious historians have argued that West Central Africa had no experience with hereditary slavery or the export of slaves before the Portuguese arrived. The Atlantic slave trade from West Central Africa escalated after 1500 and increased sharply between 1520 and the late 156os, when over 7,000 slaves per year were exported, mainly to the Gold Coast via São Tomé.⁶

West Central Africans suffered deeply from the early, direct, and continuous presence of the Portuguese and Brazilian maritime slave traders and the Afro-Portuguese originating in São Tomé and from the rivalry among the European powers involved in the Atlantic slave trade. The fragile, vulnerable polities of the kingdom of Kongo were fractured by rivalries among Portuguese officials, merchants, missionaries, fleets, soldiers, and settlers from the Iberian Peninsula as well as from São Tome and Brazil and by itinerant traders (pombeiros) penetrating far into the interior. These intrusive factions promoted warfare in order to increase the supply of captives sent across the Atlantic as slaves. They intrigued and fought among themselves, recruiting West Central African clients to serve as allies against each other. The various orders of rival Catholic missions sent to Christianize the kingdom of Kongo and later Angola intrigued among themselves as well. Some of these missionaries made private fortunes in the slave trade. Although several rulers of the kingdom of Kongo expressed eloquent opposition to the slave trade, their objections had little impact in West Central Africa. John Thornton argues that it was not slavery and the slave trade that provoked the indignation of the kings of Kongo, but rather the flouting of their traditional rules and laws regulating enslavement and slavery.⁷

In 1568, the Jaga invaded the kingdom of Kongo. The Portuguese used—and some scholars have said created—the Jaga (described perhaps sensationally as cannibalistic mercenaries) to attack the kingdom of Kongo, forcing its rulers to seek Portuguese protection at the price of withdrawing their opposition to the slave trade. Although various African polities allied themselves with the Jaga, it has been argued that the Jaga were used primary by the Portuguese as an instrument of political control and expansion of their slave trade.⁸ The Jaga terrorized the Kwanza River Valley between 1590 and 1640 and ultimately settled in several regions of Angola in polities named the Ovimbundu Kingdoms. Later rulers, including some in the Ovimbundu area, claimed this militaristic heritage, which was layered with magical beliefs.

By the mid-sixteenth century, Portugal began to focus away from the kingdom of Kongo to regions farther south. In 1575, Portugal established the port of Luanda under the illusion that this region was rich in silver, and Luanda emerged as a slave trade port directly under Portuguese control. Portugal invaded Luanda’s hinterland to obtain captives from the wars it provoked. By 1622, the kingdom of Ndongo, under the rule of Ngola a Kiluanje, was carved out of the region south of the kingdom of Kongo with Portuguese backing. Having become well entrenched in Luanda and its hinterland, the Portuguese made Luanda the focus of their Atlantic slave trade and the major Atlantic slave trade port of West Central Africa. Over the centuries, Angola remained the major area from which Portuguese and Brazilian traders shipped enslaved Africans to the Americas.

The Dutch played the major role in undermining Portuguese control of the slave trade in Africa and spread it to new regions. Between 1580 and 1640, the crowns of Spain and Portugal were merged. The Dutch revolted against the Iberian kingdoms and challenged Portuguese rule all along the coast of Africa as well as in Brazil. As warfare among Portuguese and Dutch traders and their African clients escalated, African rulers and polities sometimes allied themselves with the Dutch: most notably the famous queen Nzinga and her northern neighbors defending the hinterland of Luanda from the Portuguese. Many captives of these wars were sold to the Portuguese slave traders at Luanda and ended up in Spanish America as well as in Brazil. After the Portuguese and the Dutch eventually signed a peace treaty, they left their African “allies” stranded.⁹

The Dutch could not ship enough slaves from Luanda because the AfroPortuguese retired to the Bengo River and to Massangano, a fortress on the Kwanza River, blocking the slave trade routes from the interior to Luanda. The Dutch had to resort mainly to the slave trade of the kingdom of Soyo and its port Mpinda on the Atlantic coast near the mouth of the Zaire (Congo) River. Africans shipped from Mpinda were largely Kikongo language group speakers. This trade was halted by warfare in 1642. In 1648, a Brazilian fleet expelled the Dutch from Luanda. In 1654, a Brazilian militia expelled them from Recife, the last Dutch stronghold in Brazil. Dutch traders exported about 2,064 enslaved West Central Africans between 1580 and 1639,11,504 between 1640 and 1649 while they occupied Luanda, 785 between 1650 and 1659, and 7,337 between 1658 and 1674.¹⁰ Because of the Brazilian role in expelling the Dutch from Brazil as well as from Luanda, their penetration of the Angola market with their popular rum, and the easy sail between West Central Africa and Brazil, Brazilians took over much of the slave trade from Luanda. It became largely a direct trade bypassing Portugal. Angola became to a great extent a Brazilian rather than a Portuguese colony.

There is no doubt that the early, continuous, active, and overwhelming presence of these intruders in West Central Africa and the recruitment of African clients by factions among them contributed heavily to extensive warfare, instability, famines, and depopulation. Surviving refugees migrated to remote, defendable places.¹¹In 1657, a Portuguese army sided with the rivals of the Kongolese king Garcia, who had allied himself with the Dutch. The Portuguese invaded the kingdom of Kongo, routing its army and killing off most of its leadership at the Battle of Mbwila in 1665. Nevertheless, by 1670, the Portuguese were defeated, driven out, and did not return for 100 years. But, by 1689, the kingdom of Kongo was a spent force. It had become a poor, decentralized kingdom. Its capital, São Salvador, had disappeared. Its remaining Catholic missionaries left for Luanda, where many of them enriched themselves, often in the slave trade. A new generation of wealthy and highly competitive slavers fought over the legacy of the Catholic kingdom of Kongo of the early sixteenth century.

Between 1680 and 1715, there was constant, disruptive warfare. With widespread famine, the price of food sharply rose. Villages were burned, and their inhabitants fled. The kingdom of Kongo disintegrated amid unrelenting internal warfare. Many of the helpless Kongolese, nobles as well as commoners, were seized as slaves. They were sold to Luanda and later to the Vili traders, who funneled growing numbers of enslaved Africans from the Loango Coast into the Atlantic slave trade. Although there was some smuggling of slaves by northern European traders from smaller ports south of Luanda, Portugal and Brazil dominated at Luanda and its hinterlands and at Benguela, the port it established south of Luanda. The northern European traders—Dutch, English, and French—dominated along the Loango Coast north of the Congo/Zaire River.

Several truly outstanding historians have studied the kingdom of Kongo because of the unusually rich documentation, which includes reports by Portuguese officials and missionaries of several orders, along with correspondence between the kings of Kongo and the crown of Portugal. There are also high-quality accounts by Dutch travelers and traders. Nevertheless, the continued impact of the kingdom of Kongo in Africa as well as in the Americas is not clear. By 1689, the kingdom of Kongo had collapsed and enslaved West Central Africans were brought increasingly from regions farther north, south, and east. Certainly, a substantial number of these Africans came from the region of the old kingdom of Kongo or places influenced by it long after it had disintegrated. But it seems reasonable to conclude that more West Central Africans arriving in North America during the seventeenth century were Christianized than those arriving during the eighteenth century; most of the latter came via the Loango Coast, where Christian missionary efforts were late, extremely weak, and short lived, although substantial numbers of Christianized Angolans were being shipped via the Malebo Pool to the Loango Coast for export to the Americas. When the Atlantic slave trade from the Loango Coast became significant, it was controlled by the northern European powers—the Dutch, the French, and the English—who were less motivated to Christianize and baptize departing Africans than were the Portuguese and Brazilian slave traders. Yet, even in Luanda and the kingdom of Kongo, indigenous African religious influence on Portuguese Catholicism remained strong.¹²

The slave trade along the Loango Coast got off to a very slow start. The Dutch began trading there in 1595, but they did not buy slaves. They confined their purchases to ivory, cloth, and red dyewoods. By 1639, the Dutch traders could only purchase 200 slaves annually at the port of Loango and 100 at Malemba. Between 1630 and 1670, the Vili ranged far and wide, trading a variety of goods, but they became increasingly involved in the slave trade. By the last quarter of the seventeenth century, a Dutch, an English, and a French slave trade began to develop along the Loango Coast. The English became active there after 1675 and the French after 1700. As late as 1702-3, it took nine to ten months to collect a cargo of slaves along the Loango Coast, while at Whydah on the Slave Coast it took only two to three months. Between 1706 and 1714, few ships came to the Loango Coast for slaves. The northern Europeans had to trade from ships at anchor. They were not allowed to establish trading posts. But, by 1717, the slave trade started to increase.¹³

During the eighteenth century, the northern European powers traded mainly along the Loango Coast while the Portuguese and Brazilians continued to focus on Angola. Since slave trade networks operated both above and below the Congo River, there was considerable overlap among African ethnic groups sold from Luanda, Angola, and the Loango Coast. Slave traders from the Loango Coast managed to cross the tumultuous Congo River at a few places. They penetrated south and west into Angola in their search for slaves. Nevertheless, Kongo speakers were sent mainly from the Loango Coast to North America and Kimbundu speakers (broadly designated as Angolans) to Brazil and to the southeast coast of Spanish America. West Central Africans brought to the Caribbean and the United States were mainly from the Loango Coast and were most likely closely related Kongo language group speakers.

The French dominated the Loango Coast slave trade throughout the eighteenth century until the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, which was followed closely by the slave uprising in St. Domingue/Haiti in 1791. In 1794, the French National Assembly ended slavery in all French colonies. British slave traders took over the port of Cabinda on the Loango Coast. During the last two decades of the eighteenth century and the long period of open, legal slave trade below the equator during the first half of the nineteenth century, there was a large, sustained spike in the Atlantic slave trade from Bantulands.

Our best estimate is that West Central Africans were about 45 percent of the enslaved Africans landed in the Americas. They were clustered most consistently in Brazil but in very substantial numbers throughout the Americas as well. The price of slaves in Brazil was generally lower than elsewhere, because voyages within the South Atlantic system were relatively short. Prices for West Central Africans were also relatively cheap due partially to the large number of enslaved West Central Africans “produced” by the holocaust resulting from the occupation by outsiders. Although the South Atlantic system of winds made for a quick, easy voyage from West Central Africa to southeastern Brazil, mortality was high. During the Atlantic crossing, the “cargo” remained the property of the Luanda-based, mainly Luso-African slave traders until it was sold in Brazil. The Portuguese and Brazilian maritime slave traders therefore were less motivated to try to reduce mortality, opting for tight packing of their victims, reduced food and water, and other deadly cost-saving measures. ¹⁴

Voyages from West Central Africa to North America, the circum-Caribbean, and the north coast of South America took much longer than voyages from Upper and Lower Guinea. Because of greater distances and unfavorable winds and currents, these voyages required larger ships, bigger crews, and more supplies, resulting in higher shipping costs and higher disease and death rates among the “cargo” as well as the crew. Nevertheless, West Central Africans were brought in large numbers to almost all regions in the Americas during the entire transatlantic slave trade and were clustered over time and place, partially because of their ready availability, lower prices, and, except for those from Gabon, the lower incidence of revolt.¹⁵

We have seen that most West Central Africans brought to French and Spanish colonies in the Americas were recorded in documents as Kongo, while most West Central Africans brought to British colonies were recorded as Angolans. Although there were some other ethnic designations recorded for West Central Africans in the Americas, the use of broad identity designations on this scale is characteristic of West Central Africa alone and reflects the unique characteristics of this region, making for a fundamental unity among broad diversity.

Vili traditions hold that almost all the Kongo language group speakers, including those from the kingdom of Kongo as well as all the kingdoms along the Loango Coast, claimed common descent from the same woman, Nguunu. Because of shortages of land, her four sons migrated and formed new kingdoms. There were several kingdoms located along the Loango Coast. From north to south, they were the kingdoms of Mayumba, Chikongo, Loango, Kakongo, and Ngoyo. Their many dialects were not immediately mutually intelligible but nevertheless very closely related. Jan Vansina has reconstructed and roughly dated the great time depth and close interactions among West Central Africans using linguistic data. He has recently restated the fundamental linguistic and cultural unity of West Central Africans.¹⁶

During the late sixteenth century, Duarte Lopes wrote that Kongo and Kimbundu, the two major Bantu sublanguage groups spoken in West Central Africa, were as linguistically similar as Spanish and Portuguese. Alonso de Sandoval described Kimbundu dialects, despite their variations, as mutually intelligible. Thus language barriers among West Central Africans were weak. The speakers of the different tongues could learn to communicate with each other within a few weeks.

This pattern of fundamental unity amid diversity is a mirror of the general patterns of the societies of the region. Families were almost entirely matrilineal (calculating descent and providing for inheritance on the mother’s side) and virilocal (living in the village of the father). The mbanza, the town or village, was the major polity and often the main basis for self-identification. The towns were generally sparsely populated. Social divisions were based on classes, occupational groups, households, or kin groups. Lineages were spread far and wide through exogamous marriage. Villages were grouped into districts ruled, at least in theory, by kings, whose powers were quite limited, and the level of autonomy of districts and villages was great. The rules of descent in these kingdoms sharply undermined their stability. After the death of a king, regents were not allowed, and any matrilineal descendant of a deceased king could claim the crown. Thus the number of possible candidates for king grew over time. In the kingdom of Kongo, efforts to change this pattern to primogeniture, by which only the eldest son of the king could succeed him, were opposed by the Portuguese and therefore unsuccessful.¹⁷

The geography of much of this region led to fragmentation as well. Many of the populated regions of the kingdom of Kongo consisted of deep forests, hills, and steep mountain slopes cut into ridges by streams and topped by high, cultivable plains. Small villages were located in places protected by high escarpments and difficult jungles. Small, but thickly populated islands in the Congo River remained independent of the kingdom of Kongo and paid no tribute.¹⁸ During escalating warfare after the Atlantic slave trade began, women, children, and old people took refuge in these towns. Nicolás Ngou-Mve has discussed the correlation between the accelerating Atlantic slave trade and intensified warfare in West Central Africa. He counted in Kongo and Angola (Ndongo) nineteen wars between 1603 and 1607, sixteen between 1617 and 1620, six in 1626, and sixteen in 1641 and 1642. Of the 3,480 Portuguese soldiers that came into Luanda between 1575 and 1594, over 91 percent (n = 3,180) died.¹⁹

West Central Africans were agriculturists relying heavily on slash-and-burn agriculture. They were miners of iron, gold, and copper; metallurgists; potters and weavers; hunters and fishermen. By the early seventeenth century, they cultivated several varieties of corn brought in from the Americas by the Portuguese. Manioc (cassava) was not widely cultivated there before the eighteenth century. These food crops, especially manioc, were fairly easy to store and highly transportable. Other foods domesticated by Native Americans over several millennia were raised, including peanuts, sweet potatoes, and pineapples. The Native American crops helped compensate to some extent for the population loss caused by escalating warfare resulting largely from the Atlantic slave trade. Bananas, plantains, citrus fruits, beans, Benin pepper, yams, sugar cane, and palm trees for oil and light wine were other important crops. Food crops were cultivated almost entirely by women. While many Kongo slaves were likely to have been Christians or at least formally baptized before they were brought to the Americas, after the kingdom of Kongo disintegrated and Catholic missionaries fled to Angola, more Kongo were perhaps likely to practice less adulterated traditional Bantu religions. The presence of Christian missionaries along the Loango coast was very brief.

Patterns in Southeast Africa were different. Madagascar was a seminal regionfor the Atlantic slave trade to English colonies, partially because of its important rice industry, a major source of the technology transfer of this crop to the Americas. But Mozambique was by far the major region in Southeast Africa from which enslaved Africans were imported. Its slave trade began with relatively small numbers and then escalated and lasted very late. During the Dutch occupation of Luanda (1641-48), the Portuguese focused on slaves from Mozambique. During the last half of the eighteenth century, French slavers populating the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean (Mauritius and Reunion) were delighted to find high-quality and relatively inexpensive slaves being sold in Mozambique. French slave traders brought some of them to the Caribbean, overwhelmingly to St. Domingue (Haiti) during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. French slave traders brought 51 “cargoes” from Mozambique to St. Domingue. French voyages were 86.8 percent (t = 68) of voyages from Mozambique recorded in The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database for that quarter. It is certain that some of the slaves brought from Mozambique were transshipped from St. Domingue to Louisiana and probably to other colonies as well. After St. Domingue’s slaves revolted in 1791, the slave trade from Mozambique became largely a Brazilian/Portuguese operation. After 1808, when the British outlawed the transatlantic slave trade north of the equator, Mozambique became an important source of Africans brought mainly to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Voyages from Mozambique were 16.1 percent (n = 250; t = 1,556) of the recorded voyages arriving in Rio de Janeiro between July 25, 795, and December 31, 830. The number of recorded slaves arriving from Mozambique between 1811 and 1830 was 68,846 (25 percent; t = 272,942). Thus, although there was a significant Atlantic slave trade from Mozambique, it began on a relatively small scale and developed late. French and British slave traders were very active in Mozambique between the 1850s and 1870s, collecting “contract workers” to ship to the Caribbean, but they were “produced” exactly in the way slaves were.

It is clear why the Atlantic slave trade from Southeast Africa lasted so late. The European anti-slave trade treaty system and anti-slave trade patrols began later than along the Atlantic Coast, and the treaty was inadequately enforced. Before the late nineteenth century, there were few anti-slave trade patrols in the Indian Ocean. Currents from the Congo River swept ships rounding the southern tip of Africa far out to sea, which in effect enabled them to avoid the coastal patrols. The ivory trade had produced the highest-quality ivory in Africa especially prized in India, but it was in decline. Hungry Brazilian, Portuguese, Cuban, Spanish, U.S., French, and Arab slave traders swarmed to Mozambique throughout most of the nineteenth century.

Frederic Elton, the British consul at Mozambique during the 1870s, described this devastation:

The fear of slave-dealers’ raids—their tracks are marked by many a burned and desolated settlement—has engendered a suspicious uneasiness among the villagers for so many years, that it has now become an innate feature of the Makua character, is marked upon their faces, and colors every action of their lives at the present day. No communication with a stranger or with an adjoining tribe is allowed without express permission from a “baraza” of chiefs. The Lomwé country, lying between Makuani and the Lake Nyassa, Mosembé, and Mwendazi, may not be visited under pain of capital punishment, without the headman of the subdivision of the tribe to which the intending traveler belongs referring for leave to higher authority. Tracks of land are purposely laid waste and desolated upon the frontiers, where armed scouts, generally old elephant hunters, continually wander, their duty being to report at the earliest moment any approach of strangers, who are invariably treated as enemies.²¹

Studying the patterns of introduction of this massive number of West Central Africans into the Americas over the centuries is far from simple. Many of them came from small villages and towns and identified most strongly with local places rather than broader, stratified polities. Their geographic and ethnic identifications are complicated by the use of broad and conflicting terminology by European slave traders as well as in documents created in the Americas. We have seen that British slave traders generally referred to all of West Central Africa as Angola and British colonists generally called all West Central Africans Angolans. French and Spanish documents tended to list all West Central Africans as Kongo. Brazilian documents often used names of ports to describe them. In early Peru, the term “Angola” was used, probably because the slaves there were coming overwhelmingly from Luanda. Except for some late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century runaway slave advertisements in Jamaican newspapers that gave “Mungola” as a nation designation, notarial documents in Louisiana and St. Domingue that listed substantial numbers of Mondongue, and Mary Karasch’s study of travelers’ accounts from nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, we have relatively little information about specific ethnicities from West Central Africa in documents in the Americas. Nevertheless, it is reasonably safe to conclude that, regardless of the designations used by the British as opposed to the French, Spanish, and Portuguese, most of the Bantu speakers brought to North America and the Caribbean after 1700 were Kikongo language group speakers brought from the Loango Coast and most of those brought to Brazil were Kimbundu language group speakers brought from Angola. As was indicated earlier in this chapter, leading experts in history, anthropology, and linguistics assure us that West Central Africans shared very closely related languages and cultures.

It is hard to overestimate the numbers and the universal presence of West Central Africans throughout the Americas. Although they have often been discussed within the framework of slavery in Brazil, they were prominent in Spanish America after 1575 and thereafter almost everywhere in the Americas. The Brazilian sugar industry began to develop during the last few decades of the sixteenth century and became a major cornerstone of Portuguese wealth. Native American labor was used heavily during its early stages, but enslaved Africans proved to be more productive and somewhat easier to control. Increasing numbers of West Central Africans arriving on voyages from Luanda, Angola, diluted the clustering of Greater Senegambians in sixteenth-century Brazil and Spanish America. They began to arrive in large numbers by the 1590s and quickly became the main source of labor. Escalating Portuguese military action in Kongo and Angola, warfare between the Portuguese and the Dutch who recruited allies and clients among Africans to fight each other, and the introduction of rum by the Dutch during the 1640s at Mpinda and then by the Brazilians at Luanda fueled a growing export of enslaved Angolans to Spanish America as well as to Brazil.²² The Portuguese asiento traffic to Spanish America between 1595 and 1640 brought in increasing numbers of Angolans. The vast majority of the slave trade voyages of identified coastal origin arriving in Veracruz, Mexico, came from Luanda, Angola, and a large minority of such voyages to Cartagena de Indias embarked from Luanda as well. Although during most of the sixteenth century the vast majority of enslaved Africans were brought to Spanish America from Greater Senegambia/Upper Guinea, by the late sixteenth century Luanda, Angola, rose in importance as an African port of origin for all of the Americas. During the seventeenth century, Kongo and Angola predominated in notarial documents in Costa Rica.²³ Africans arriving in eastern Cuba were overwhelmingly from Luanda for several reasons. When ships from Luanda were heading to Cartagena and Veracruz and their “cargo” was in precarious condition, they were sometimes unloaded and sold in Santiago de Cuba. Some of them were skilled copper miners and were used to develop the copper mines near Santiago.²⁴

They worked on sugar estates and in silver mines in Mexico. Voyages arriving in the Rio de la Plata, the Spanish American region along the South Atlantic coast directly below Brazil, came overwhelmingly from Angola as well. During the first half of the seventeenth century, West Central Africans entered Upper Peru from the east coast of Spanish America via the Rio de la Plata. This traffic brought in about 1,500 to 3,000 enslaved Africans from Angola each year. Traces of them are found in sale documents of slaves in Charcas, Bolivia, between 1650 and 1710. Those of identified African ethnicities were mainly West Central Africans (n = 51). Only seventeen were from Upper Guinea. The West Central Africans were heavily female (thirty-one females, twenty males), probably domestics.²⁵

After Portugal regained its independence from Spain in 1640, the Portuguese monopoly of the maritime trade to Africa collapsed. By the early eighteenth century, the northern European slave traders in West Central Africa operated mainly along the Loango Coast stretching south from Mayombe through the coast north of the Congo River. They began importing substantial numbers of West Central Africans to their colonies in the Americas. The Loango Coast had exported few slaves during the seventeenth century and then grew slowly during the early eighteenth century.²⁶ Thereafter, this slave trade escalated, bringing enormous numbers of Kongo to the Caribbean and to the United States. Although the British usually called them Angolans, they were almost certainly mainly Kongo. Angola continued to supply Brazil with huge numbers of enslaved Africans during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

West Central Africans were brought to the United States in large numbers. ²⁷ During the decade of the 1730s, the majority of documented transatlantic slave trade voyages to South Carolina arrived from West Central Africa. They were referred to as Angolans in documents recorded in South Carolina, but they were with little doubt overwhelmingly Kongo collected mainly along the Loango Coast by British slave traders. There were very few voyages from West Central Africa to South Carolina between 1740 and 1800, no doubt because of fears resulting from the Kongo-led Stono Uprising in 1739. Voyages from West Central Africa to South Carolina did not resume in significant numbers until a few years before the foreign slave trade to the United States was outlawed on January 1, 18o8.

In Louisiana after 1770, Africans recorded as Kongo were most heavily clustered on estates in Orleans Parish and after 1803 in St. Charles Parish immediately upriver as well. Sugar plantations were booming in both parishes. The proportion of Kongo listed in documents spiked between 1800 and 1820. Shortly after the United States acquired the Louisiana Territory in late 1803, the foreign slave trade to Louisiana was outlawed. The illegal slave trade appears to have focused very heavily on West Central Africa, although some of the Kongo in Louisiana documents could have been transshipped legally from Charleston before 1808. Between 1801 and 1805, twenty-three voyages (41.1 percent of all voyages) arrived in South Carolina from West Central Africa. In 1806-7, 39 voyages (36.1 percent of all voyages) arrived from this region. Evidence from Louisiana documents after 1803 indicates that some of these Kongo Africans were transshipped there from Charleston.

The Kongo were less prominent farther up the Mississippi River, where Africans from the Bight of Benin and from Greater Senegambia continued to predominate through 1820. Many of the Kongo men—but none of the women—were ruptured from heavy lifting. The proportion of Kongo listed with family ties was substantially lower than among other African ethnicities. It appears that these smuggled Kongo, heavily male, were used for intense gang labor in the sugar industry. The percentage of males among the Kongo and the male/female price differential increased.²⁸

During the nineteenth century, the proportion and numbers of peoples from Bantulands brought to the Americas grew sharply. When Britain signed treaties with Spain and Portugal in 1817 to end the transatlantic slave trade to the Americas in return for a substantial payment, Portugal reserved her right to continue the slave trade below the equator until 1830. Anti-slave trade patrols were not active below the equator before 1842. In 1826, after Brazil became independent, it signed a treaty with Britain to end its import of slaves in return for British recognition of the new nation’s sovereignty. But the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil increased through 1850.²⁹ As a result, growing proportions of West Central Africans were brought to all regions of the Americas, further contributing to the clustering of Africans from this region. The Kongo presence in Cuba during the nineteenth century has been understated, partially because some Cubans appear to be ashamed of the Kongo and more proud of the Yoruba. We have seen that in Mozambique the slave trade, euphemistically called the trade in “contract laborers,” continued well into the last half of the nineteenth century.

Smuggling of enslaved Africans from all coasts continued throughout the nineteenth century. During the wars for Latin American independence (1808- 21), piracy and slave smuggling escalated in the Caribbean, Florida, and the Gulf South of the United States. Anne Perotin Dumont described the pirates and smugglers as “corsaires de la liberté.” ³⁰ Regardless of this flattering designation, they were deeply involved in smuggling slaves. Evidence from African ethnicities recorded in American documents indicates that many of the ships captured by pirates originated in West Central Africa and that smugglers had direct ties with West Central African suppliers. The smugglers’ networks involved illicit traders to and from Cuba, Guadeloupe, and Florida. The Lafitte brothers, pirates operating from Barataria, Louisiana, and then from Galveston, Texas, smuggled new Africans into Louisiana during the early nineteenth century. Slave trade ships bringing new Africans to Cuba were their main targets.³¹ It is clear that these ships were coming mainly from West Central Africa. After 1819 when the foreign slave trade to Cuba was outlawed by a treaty between Britain and Spain, the entrenched network of pirates became very active smuggling enslaved Africans into Cuba. Africans smuggled into the north coast of the Gulf of Mexico were from the same ethnicities smuggled into Cuba: mainly Kongo, Igbo, and Ibibio. Table 2.2 (in chapter 2) demonstrates that the Kongo and the “Kalabarí” (Bight of Biafra) were 55 percent of the slaves sold in Cuba between 1790 and 1880. Surprisingly, the Lucumí (Yoruba) were only 9 percent. Manuel Moreno Fraginals’s studies of African ethnonyms listed on Cuban sugar and coffee estates shows that the Lucumí/Yoruba rose from 8.22 percent (n = 354) of these ethnicities between 1760 and 1769 to 8.38 percent (n = 453) between 1800 and 1820 and then to 34.52 percent (n = 3,161) between 1850 and 1870. There are no data for the period between 1821 and 1849, when the Lucumí were no doubt beginning to be introduced in large numbers.

The same two African coasts, West Central Africa and the Bight of Biafra, became major sources of the slave trade to the British West Indies during the nineteenth century. Despite great distances and unfavorable winds and currents, one-fourth of the enslaved Africans introduced into five British West Indies colonies during the early nineteenth century were West Central Africans. They were referred to overwhelmingly as Kongo, obviously because these colonies had previously been French except for Trinidad, which, however, had been settled mainly from Martinique.

After 1830, anti-slave trade patrols recaptured even fewer Africans from Bantulands than from Upper or Lower Guinea because West Central Africa was not patrolled before 1842 and less effectively patrolled than Upper and Lower Guinea thereafter. Much information for the nineteenth century recorded in The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database comes from ships captured by anti-slave trade patrols. Before 1830, these patrols operated legally only north of the equator,, which meant that the proportion of the nineteenth-century maritime slave trade from Upper and Lower Guinea, the patrolled areas, came to be overstated compared to those of West Central and Southeast Africa. Thus historians studying documented transatlantic slave trade voyages shipped to the Americas during the nineteenth century are likely to underestimate voyages originating in Central Africa. After the legal Atlantic slave trade ended, “emancipados” and “contract” laborers, in good part West Central Africans, continued to be introduced into the Caribbean in substantial numbers. East Central Africans, mainly from Mozambique, were taken to Brazil in large numbers before the legal slave trade ended there in 1830 and surely through 1850, when the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil was finally effectively suppressed.³²