Ngaoundéré University, Cameroon
Travel Scholarship Recipient

Ghana Reflections:
Josep Yves Zoa Zoa

(Translated from French by Ted Maris-Wolf, College of William and Mary, USA)

From August 8 to 12, 2007, we attended an international conference in Ghana organized by the Omohundro Institute entitled, “The bloody Writing is for ever torn”: Domestic and International Consequences of the First Governmental Efforts to Abolish the Atlantic Slave Trade. During this one-week gathering of highly trained researchers from Africa, America, and Europe, we discussed the widespread consequences of the abolition of the slave trade throughout the Atlantic world. Indeed, the first contacts between Africans and Europeans gave birth to an odious and tragic system of exchange—the transatlantic slave trade—that flourished from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The consequences of this extraordinary system would be enormous and catastrophic for all involved.

One must underscore what Joseph Ki-Zerbo has written, that the slave trade was not a premeditated operation. Those who left for the holy route to the spices of India knew what they were going to seek but were unaware of what they were going to find and how they were going to find it. In this way, Europeans always arrived to make wholesale commerce of black Africans. Was this practice merely an imitation of that which Africans, themselves, had been participating in for many years? Since the Middle Ages, slavery had been practiced everywhere in Africa; this had marked a certain level of social life, a certain evolution of society. But the transatlantic system that Africa experienced over the span of four centuries exceeded ones of simple local exchange.

The consequences serve as a proof of the magnitude of the phenomenon. We deplore the fact that in the course of human history, Africa has known massive depredation by those who were stronger, significant loss of those who were weaker, and widespread capture of the most vulnerable tribes. Moreover, a massive migration of peoples was triggered, creating a veritable no man’s land in interior regions and overpopulated zones along the coast. It is estimated that the lives of about ten million human beings were disrupted by this horrific system of exchange.

In the realms of politics and economics, the consequences were just as dramatic. Large, midsized, and small empires across the continent were weakened by the slave trade. Though, as Ki-Zerbo reminds us, black Africa witnessed the creation of vast empires and civilizations from the Niger River to the fragrant shores of the Indian Ocean between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, the slave trade gave birth to new systems that unraveled these empires. African economic vitality also suffered tremendous blows, as the economic structure of the continent was fundamentally modified through profound changes that accompanied the borrowing of European practices, the exchange of new commodities, etc.

Africa—as a whole—was disrupted by contact with the West. The extent and manner of this disturbance are still difficult to understand even today and are increasingly becoming the objects of considerable scholarly attention.