The slave route from Africa to the Americas is as old as the contact between Europe and the New World itself, and the slave route across the Sahara is older still. Hence to describe the lives of ordinary people in western Africa during the era of slavery would require an examination of the whole of African history over the past five hundred years and more. And in Africa, as in Europe and the Americas, there was tremendous change over this period and extensive variation at any point in time. Life in 1807, when Britain and the United States outlawed the slave trade, was considerably different than in 1492, when Columbus first sailed to the Caribbean. Hence to give an impression of how people in Africa lived during the era of transatlantic slavery is also to understand how the lives of people changed over the course of the slave trade. In 1492, a coup d’état brought a Muslim ruler, Askia Muhammad, to the throne of the great empire of Songhay, and for the next hundred years, Songhay ruled much of West Africa. As empires have always done, Songhay's influence extended to areas beyond its military control. At this time, the slavery of Africans in the Americas was in its infancy. Yet, in 1593, a military invasion from Morocco across the Sahara destroyed Songhay, and much of the internal cohesion of western Africa came to an end, precisely when transatlantic slavery emerged as the principal means of exploiting the agricultural and mineral wealth of the Americas. The lives of ordinary people changed because of this monumental collapse of Songhay. Similarly, the changes imposed by European abolition of the slave trade after 1807, although confusing and often delayed in their impact, were also monumental. Hence the first task in considering how people lived during the slavery era is to identify the differences over time that affected both people who were forced, through slavery, to cross the Atlantic and those who remained behind in Africa. Africa in 1492 or 1593 was not the same as in 1807, any more than Europe and America were.

When Captain Binger traveled the Niger bend between 1887 and 1889, he saw numerous villages that had been drained of their lifeblood or left in ruins by violent conflicts that had left their mark in the form of fortifications. Above all he was struck by the region's depopulation, which threatened to compromise the potential for colonial exploitation of the country. But these conditions did not prevail throughout the entire area. Prosperous towns were engaged in trade, war parties were living in ostentation, and rulers were collecting taxes from their subjects. The misery of the peasants’ lives contrasted with the opulent luxury of the courts and caravansaries. The black slave trade, and slavery itself, did not exert a uniform effect upon all of Africa.

The UNESCO research projects focusing on The Silk Routes and The Slave Routes were launched at just the right time to remind us that globalization is not a novel dimension of the history of humanity. Not only am I among those who analyze capitalism as a worldwide system from its very inception, but I have also found it pertinent to recall that prior to the sixteenth century, societies were not at all isolated from one another but rather competing within regional systems (and perhaps within one global system). To underestimate this fact is to condemn ourselves to a misunderstanding of the very dynamics of change within societies. At the same time, I maintain that in the history of the world, capitalism represents a qualitative rupture that had its beginnings around 1500. Accordingly I emphasize the distinction that must be made between the integrated structure of the worldwide capitalist system and the protocapitalist elements that are to be found in earlier societies; I also underline the specificity of the contrast between centers and peripheries, which is unique to global capitalism and which differs from previous forms of polarization.

The history of the African slave trade, despite its importance and role in world development, was not scientifically studied until 1930, and even since then few books and papers have been devoted to the subject. Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, this history has been the focus of sensational publications that underline and broadly interpret a smattering of highly emotional events. A conspiracy of silence cloaks the subject, as though shame still weighs upon the shoulders of Western society. In Africa, the same silence seems to favor consigning all memory of the collaborators to oblivion. In the last twenty years, the situation has begun to change. Several international conferences have brought together white and black historians. The Anneaux de la mémoire (Chains of Memory) exposition in Nantes enjoyed considerable success, and in 1994 UNESCO launched a decade-long cultural program called La Route de l'esclave (The Path of Slavery).

Antao Gonçalves, a Portuguese explorer, began the slave trade in 1445 with the first purchase of slaves on the African coast: “nine Blacks and some gold powder in exchange for European merchandises.” Portuguese sailors continued this trade until the end of the fifteenth century. The slaves, black for the most part, were brought to Portugal or sold in the markets of Lagos, which were crowded with buyers seeking colored servants. These slaves also served in the development of the Atlantic Isles (Sao Tome, and the Cape Verde Islands) where their knowledge of agriculture and their endurance for labor were of great value. As we know, the conquistador's enslavement of indigenous people to develop the New World followed soon after its discovery, but the Indians, a fragile workforce, could not take the hard labor of the mines and fields. The obvious solution was to replace them with black slaves. Thus began the triangular trade at the start of the sixteenth century. For the next four centuries this commerce would continue to grow. It would become the largest trafficking of slaves that humanity has ever known, as well as the dominant feature in dealings between Europe and Africa south of the Sahara. The frequency and density of the human cargoes extracted from Africa would intensify until the trade's peak in the last third of the eighteenth century. Although relatively short (1800-1880), the period of underground trade that followed nonetheless inflicted a particularly significant drain on an already anemic continent.

At the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, change was fast and furious: the exploration of coastal Africa by the Portuguese, the exploration of the West Indies by the Spanish, the extermination of the island Indians, the importation of black slaves to the Iberian peninsula, then the expansion of the slave trade to the American colonies - in short, the much-heralded inauguration of European colonization overseas, with all of its attendant horrors. All of this is adequately known, it seems; the purpose of the present article is not to rehearse this history, even in summary. But if chronology has any value here, it is in making clear that, while the massacre of the Arawaks and the Caribbean Indians quickly attracted attention, eliciting protests that were to be renewed in the following centuries, the black slave trade and black slavery began somewhat discreetly, as if it took quite some time for the esprits libres in Europe to take notice of it. Over the three centuries leading up to the French revolution, blacks were transferred from their native countries to the American colonies. In Europe, these three centuries saw the development of Enlightenment thought, the revolt against domination by the Church, the call for human rights, and the will to democracy. The parallel is superficial, but troubling nevertheless: four facts appear to be linked together, and not merely chronologically: the massacre or de facto subjugation of the Indians, the trade and enslavement of blacks, and colonization. Is the last of these not the cause of and the key to understanding the other three - as well as a number of other phenomena?

Freedom was, quite naturally, a dream cherished by every Brazilian slave. The desire for manumission - a more reliable route to freedom than the path of flight or revolt - was based on the experiences of other slaves in Brazil, a country open to all sorts of social adaptation practices. Consequently, the charters of liberty granted by masters and registered in notarial records have proved a rich source for the study of certain aspects of slavery itself. The similarity between the title of the present article and that of the 1979 work To Be a Slave in Brazil reflects the fact that since the publication of that book, other authors have added to the bibliography on the subject of manumitted Brazilians, thus confirming the important role of this social group whose close connections with the slaves themselves were described in my previous study. In their experience of life, the manumitted slaves regularly encountered pitfalls that served as constant reminders of their skin color. Moreover, the daily lives of African blacks on the market, who at the time were merely African captives shipped to Brazil in various stages of youth and various degrees of adaptation to their slave status - along with the experiences of creole slaves (that is, those born in Brazil), of free-able slaves in the process of attaining freedom, of freed slaves, of children and grandchildren of manumitted slaves (who were therefore born free) - must all be understood not only in the context of their legal status but also and especially in the light of their subtly nuanced lives.

Black Africans who were brought to Cuba as slaves represented a variety of origins and belonged to linguistic groups that were as divergent as their cultural backgrounds. A huge majority, however, originated in the Congo basin. The last officially recorded arrival of a slave ship in a Cuban port took place in 1873.

It would be impossible to classify expressions of Bantu origin that were used in the slave trade. The arbitrary label “Congo” has been applied to most such expressions with a view to noting and suggesting a kinship with the cultural and religious heritage branching off from the Bantu linguistic trunk.

The recognition of Africa's contribution to American culture involves accepting an inheritance that is both part of the national heritage and part of the identity and cultural profile of each of our societies. By encouraging its complete assimilation into our history, this recognition also involves the study and dissemination of the culture, which in turn will enable the millions of Afro-Americans spread across the continent to participate in the process of building the future. Once properly recognized, this cultural heritage will produce a rich form of métissage and generate pluralism.

For three decades, studies of the African slave trade and the system of slavery have proliferated. Conferences have been held one after another: in Copenhagen (1974), New York (1978), Port-au-Prince (1978), Washington, Harvard University (1979), Manchester (1982), Nantes (1985), Madrid (1988), Paris, Port-au-Prince, Saint-Louis, Dakar (all in 1989), Nantes (1993), and Nouakchott (1995). Numerous specialists from universities in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and the Americas (Brazil, the United States, and Canada) have convened to compare the results of their research. Year after year, archival records have been brought to bear and the bibliography has grown ever longer. A number of studies of oral tradition have been undertaken in Africa.

Born in 1799 in Moscow, Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin - who has been called the “founder of poetic and literary language in Russian” (Belinski, Turgenev), “the first of the Russians” (Dos-toyevski), “the first Russian artist-poet” (Belinski), “the original model for Russian identity” (Grigoriev), “an extremely rare and perhaps unique phenomenon of the Russian spirit” (Gogol), “the sun of the Russian intellectual conception of the world” (Dostoyevsky) - could trace his roots back to African ancestors. His mother, Nadine Hanibal, was the granddaughter of “The Negro of Peter the Great,” Abraham Petrovich Hanibal, who at the beginning of the eighteenth century fell victim to the black slave trade with the Ottoman Empire.