The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa, 1780–1867 by Daniel B. Domingues da Silva (review)

Daniel Domingues provides a new assessment of what is known about the trans-Atlantic migration of enslaved Africans from west central Africa in its final eighty years. He builds on recent scholarship on Angola and the ports of Luanda and Benguela especially, and in addition adds considerable new information based on solid archival research and statistical analysis of materials on the scale and organization of the traffic. He demonstrates that an overwhelming proportion of those sent to the Americas, especially Brazil, came from much nearer to the coast than previously thought. For Domingues, there was no moving frontier of enslavement that steadily pushed inland based on expanding wars and mechanisms of enslavement.

Domingues draws extensively on archival research in Portugal, Angola, Brazil and Britain, as well as statistical data from Voyages, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. ¹ He demonstrates conclusively that the trade shifted increasingly southwards during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then steadily became more of a trade in males and especially children. After 1807, British suppression efforts reinforced this trend, which was enabled through a complex mercantile system of traders who dominated the trans-Atlantic migration and brokered the trade along the coast north of the Congo River to southern Angola. His study concludes that the majority of the enslaved came from twenty-one linguistic groups and 116 ethnicities, with almost three-quarters identified as Kikongo, Kimbundu and Umbundu. What ethnicity and even language mean is not explained, however. He specifically questions the role of the Lunda Empire, located in the distant interior, in the process of enslavement. The impact on the population of the most affected areas shaped the demography of a region that stretched 200 to 300 kilometres inland and was almost entirely within 400 kilometres of the coast. The Ndongo were the Kimbundu speakers most severely affected by the exodus, while the Umbundu population was only marginally affected. The majority were Kimbundu and Kikongo farmers along the main rivers of the interior, such as the Kwanza in the south and the Bengo and Dande to the north of Luanda. Slave departures peaked between the dry months of May and August, when travel between coast and interior was easiest.

This study is a sophisticated attempt to use quantitative evidence to unravel the complex history of the slave trade in west central Africa, although Domingues tries to argue that he is combining both qualitative and quantitative data. He traces the origins of slaves based on documents from the Courts of Mixed Commission in Havana and Rio de Janeiro for 4,600 individuals after 1830, although strangely not for those who went to Sierra Leone after 1807. He draws on Portuguese documents in Luanda, Benguela and Novo Redondo for the period 1854 to 1856 for 11,264 people, providing a total sample of 15,864 individuals, which he then uses to examine the complete migration of almost 2 million people. Hence his statistical data are largely confined to specific periods, and it can be questioned whether the patterns can be applied to 1780–1867. Although he argues that American demand set the course of the trade, he provides contradictory evidence that African supply was largely determined by African conceptions of gender and age that resulted in the retention of women and the willingness to send children into the trade. He shows that less than half of the departing population comprised adult males, who were most desirable in the Americas, and, even more importantly, that the trade steadily became a migration of children, especially boys.

Domingues argues that political factors, especially war, were less important than previously argued, although only his presentation of the linguistic data from Sierra Leone collected by Koelle really supports this conclusion, and then only for the 1840s. Otherwise, his attempt to demonstrate the reasons for enslavement often refers to civil strife and kidnapping. While he does not underestimate the...