Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery

Chapter 2. ‘‘The Number of Women Doeth Much Disparayes the Whole Cargoe’’: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and West African Gender Roles

Chapter 2 ‘‘The Number of Women Doeth Much Disparayes the Whole Cargoe’’: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and West African Gender Roles The images that set African women so firmly apart from their European counterparts would resonate in myriad ways on the shores of Western and West Central Africa. European traders originally enticed by gold soon turned their attention to human cargo, and over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries slave ships would cross the Atlantic with growing frequency. Even as they constructed images designed to ease their own passage into the economy of slave trading, European traders and travelers left evidence of the social and cultural environments from which they wrenched African women. Slave traders who took African women from their homes engaged in more than a theft of bodies—they pilfered fragmented systems of knowledge around the economies of work, family, and beliefs that would inform the future of these women in America in ways that were radically distorted from their pasts. To fully reconstruct the gendered lives of African women and men before they were enslaved is, obviously, impossible. But one can appreciate the impact of women’s transport on developing African American cultures. African women carried their pasts into the Americas just as surely as did enslaved men. Notwithstanding the predominant images of captive African men, African women and children together made up the majority of those transported to the Americas during the entirety of the transatlantic slave trade. While women were never the majority of the transports, it was only among involuntary migrants from the African coasts that anything approaching the sex ratio of societies of origin was reproduced in the Americas. The notion of a male majority in the trans-Atlantic trade is fundamentally flawed and, in light of evidence to the contrary, the conclusions that have emerged from Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and West African Gender Roles 51 assumptions about male majorities among transported Africans need to be reconsidered.1 If African women were a significant proportion of those forcibly transported to the Americas, they were an overwhelming share of all female migrants, both voluntary and involuntary.2 As they assessed their surroundings in the Americas, European settlers would have been struck by the prevalence of African women; particularly in relation to women of European descent. Slave traders bought and sold significant numbers of African women and European settlers purchased them and put them to work on American fields: how did that shape emergent notions of racial slavery? How did those women, in turn, navigate their enslavement in ways both similar to and divergent from male captives? And how do we understand the ways in which women’s reproductive identities intersected with the demands of forced labor, both for the men who enslaved them and for the women themselves? An appreciation of the demographic reality of the slave trade allows us to more fully understand the importance and impact of sex ratios and West African gender roles on emergent culture in the Americas. Transport On February 12, 1678, English slave traders loaded three recently purchased women and the same number of men on the Arthur, a slave ship anchored in the Callabar River, at the Bight of Biafra, West Africa. The ship’s factor, George Hingston, paid the ‘‘kinge of New Callabarr’’ thirty copper bars for each woman; for each man he paid thirty-six.3 The following day, canoes brought eighteen women and fourteen men to the ship. The next day, only three canoes approached the Arthur and Hingston purchased three men, one woman, and some yams with which to feed them. For the next six and a half weeks this piecemeal loading pattern continued: small numbers of women and men purchased each day from individual canoes. Assuming that the three women who boarded the ship on February 12 survived, they would watch from the cramped cargo bays with increasing despair as more and more women, men, and children joined them in the hold.4 It would slowly dawn on these women and men that their capture was irrevocable and that their future was in the process of complete transformation. As they struggled to locate themselves in relation to the violation of their capture, their sense of community would be gendered in various ways. Between February 10 and March 28, Hingston daily purchased groups of women and 52 Chapter 2 men: three men and three women...