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West Africa[edit]
Homann Heirs Map of the local slave trade in West Africa, from Senegal and Cape Blanc to Guinea, the Cacongo and Barbela rivers, and Ghana Lake on the Niger River as far as Regio Auri (1743).

Various forms of slavery were practiced in diverse ways in different communities of West Africa prior to European trade. With the development of the trans-Saharan slave trade and the economies of gold in the western Sahel, a number of the major states became organized around the slave trade, including the Ghana Empire, the Mali Empire, and Songhai Empire. However, other communities in West Africa largely resisted the slave trade. The Mossi Kingdoms tried to take over key sites in the trans-Saharan trade and, when these efforts failed, the Mossi became defenders against slave raiding by the powerful states of the western Sahel. The Mossi would eventually enter the slave trade in the 1800s with the Atlantic slave trade being the main market.

Senegal was a catalyst for slave trade, and from the Homann Heirs map figure shown, shows a starting point for migration and a firm port of trade. The culture of the Gold Coast was based on largely on the power that individuals held rather than the land cultivated by a family. Western Africa, and specifically places like Senegal were able to arrive at the development of slavery through analyzing the aristocratic advantages of slavery and what would best suit the region. This sort of governing that used "political tool" of discerning the different labors and methods of assimilative slavery. The domestic and agricultural labor became more evidently primary in Western Africa due to slaves being regarded as these "political tools" of access and status. Slaves often had more wives than their owners, and this boosted the class of their owners. It is valuable to recognize that slaves were not all being used for the same purpose. European colonizing countries were participating in the trade to suit the economic needs of their countries. The parallel of "moorish" traders found in the desert compared to the Portugese traders that were not as established pointed out the differences in uses of slaves at this point, and where they were headed in the trade.

Historian Walter Rodney identified no slavery or significant domestic servitude in early European accounts on the Upper Guinea region and I. A. Akinjogbin contends that European accounts reveal that the slave trade was not a major activity along the coast controlled by the Yoruba people and Aja people before Europeans arrived. In a paper read to the Ethnological Society of London in 1866, the viceroy of Lokoja Mr T. Valentine Robins, who in 1864 accompanied an expedition up the River Niger aboard HMS Investigator, described slavery in the region:"Upon slavery Mr Robins remarked that it was not what people in England thought it to be. It means, as continually found in this part of Africa, belonging to a family group-there is no compulsory labour, the owner and the slave work together, eat the like food, wear the like clothing and sleep in the same huts. Some slaves have more wives than their masters. It gives protection to the slaves and everything necessary for their subsistence- food and clothing. A free man is worse off than a slave; he cannot claim his food from anyone."With the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, demand for slavery in West Africa increased and a number of states became centered on the slave trade and domestic slavery increased dramatically. Hugh Clapperton in 1824 believed that half the population of Kano were enslaved people. A slave trader of Gorée, c. 1797

In the Senegambia region, between 1300 and 1900, close to one-third of the population was enslaved. In early Islamic states of the western Sahel, including Ghana (750–1076), Mali (1235–1645), Segou (1712–1861), and Songhai (1275–1591), about a third of the population were enslaved. In Sierra Leone in the 19th century about half of the population consisted of enslaved people. Among the Vai people, during the 19th century, three quarters of people were slaves. In the 19th century at least half the population was enslaved among the Duala of the Cameroon and other peoples of the lower Niger, the Kongo, and the Kasanje kingdom and Chokwe of Angola. Among the Ashanti and Yoruba a third of the population consisted of enslaved people. The population of the Kanem (1600–1800) was about one-third enslaved. It was perhaps 40% in Bornu (1580–1890). Between 1750 and 1900 from one- to two-thirds of the entire population of the Fulani jihad states consisted of enslaved people. The population of the Sokoto caliphate formed by Hausas in the northern Nigeria and Cameroon was half-enslaved in the 19th century. Slavery was widespread among Taureg peoples and lasted until at least 1975. Among the Adrar 15 percent of people were enslaved, and 75 percent of the Gurma were enslaved.

When British rule was first imposed on the Sokoto Caliphate and the surrounding areas in northern Nigeria at the turn of the 20th century, approximately 2 million to 2.5 million people there were enslaved. Slavery in northern Nigeria was finally outlawed in 1936.

Slavery in West Africa was not eradicated officially until 1875 but continued to reign as a primary theme of labor for the region. Slavery went well past WWI as aforementioned in Nigeria. The remnants could be found in indentured servitude or domestic slave work.

African Great Lakes[edit]
With sea trade from the eastern African Great Lakes region to Persia, China, and India during the first millennium AD, slaves are mentioned as a commodity of secondary importance to gold and ivory. When mentioned, the slave trade appears to be of a small-scale and mostly involve slave raiding of women and children along the islands of Kilwa Kisiwani, Madagascar and Pemba. In places such as Uganda, the experience for women in slavery was different than that of customary slavery practices at the time. The roles assumed were based off gender and position within the society. First one must make the distinction in Ugandan slavery of peasants and slaves. Researchers Shane Doyle and Henri Médard assert the distinction with the following:

"Peasants were rewarded for valour in battle by the present of slaves by the lord or chief for whom they had fought. They could be given slaves by relatives who had been promoted to the rank of chiefs, and they could inherit slaves from their fathers. There were the abanyage(those pillaged or stolen in war) as well as the abagule(those bought). All these came under the category of abenvumu or true slaves, that is to say people not free in any sense. In a superior position were the young Ganda given by their maternal uncles into slavery [or pawnship], usually in lieu of debts... Besides such slaves both chiefs and king were served by sons of well to do men who wanted to please them and attract favour for themselves or their children.These were the abasige and formed a big addition to a noble household....All these different classes of dependents in a household were classed as Medard & Doyle abaddu(male servants) or abazana(female servants) whether they were slave or free-born.(175)"

In the Great Lakes region of Africa (around present-day Uganda), linguistic evidence shows the existence of slavery through war capture, trade, and pawning going back hundreds of years; however, these forms, particularly pawning, appear to have increased significantly in the 18th and 19th centuries. These slaves were considered to be more trustworthy than those from the Gold Coast. They were regarded with more prestige because of the training they responded to.

The language for slaves in the Great Lakes region varied. This region of water made it easy for capture of slaves and transport. Captive, refugee, slave, peasant were all used in order to describe those in the trade. The distinction was made by where and for what purpose they would be utilized for. Methods like pillage, plunder, and capture were all semantics common in this region to depict the trade.

The Historians Campbell and Alpers argue that there were a host of different categories of labor in Southeast Africa and that the distinction between slave and free individuals was not particularly relevant in most societies. However, with increasing international trade in the 18th and 19th century, Southeast Africa began to be involved significantly in the Atlantic slave trade; for example, with the king of Kilwa island signing a treaty with a French merchant in 1776 for the delivery of 1,000 slaves per year.

At about the same time, merchants from Oman, India, and Southeast Africa began establishing plantations along the coasts and on the islands, To provide workers on these plantations, slave raiding and slave holding became increasingly important in the region and slave traders (most notably Tippu Tip) became prominent in the political environment of the region. The Southeast African trade reached its height in the early decades of the 1800s with up to 30,000 slaves sold per year. However, slavery never became a significant part of the domestic economies except in Sultanate of Zanzibar where plantations and agricultural slavery were maintained. Author and historian Timothy Insoll wrote: "Figures record the exporting of 718,000 slaves from the Swahili coast during the 19th century, and the retention of 769,000 on the coast." At various times, between 65 and 90 percent of Zanzibar was enslaved. Along the Kenya coast, 90 percent of the population was enslaved, while half of Madagscars population was enslaved.

Transformations of slavery in Africa[edit]
Main articles: Arab slave trade and Atlantic slave trade The Door of No Return in Ouidah. Memorial to the slave trade through the port of Ouidah.

Slave relationships in Africa have been transformed through three large-scale processes: the Arab slave trade, the Atlantic slave trade, and the slave emancipation policies and movements in the 19th and 20th century. Each of these processes significantly changed the forms, level, and economics of slavery in Africa. Each left a mark on the demographics affected that we still see today.

Slave practices in Africa were used during different periods to justify specific forms of European engagement with the peoples of Africa. Eighteenth century writers in Europe claimed that slavery in Africa was quite brutal in order to justify the Atlantic slave trade. Later writers used similar arguments to justify intervention and eventual colonization by European powers to end slavery in Africa.

Africans knew of the harsh slavery that awaited slaves in the New World. Many elite Africans visited Europe on slave ships following the prevailing winds through the New World. One example of this occurred when Antonio Manuel, Kongo’s ambassador to the Vatican, went to Europe in 1604, stopping first in Bahia, Brazil, where he arranged to free a countryman who had been wrongfully enslaved. African monarchs also sent their children along these same slave routes to be educated in Europe, and thousands of former slaves eventually returned to settle Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean trade[edit]
Main article: Arab slave trade Nineteenth-century engraving of Arab slave-trading caravan transporting African slaves across the Sahara.

The Arab slave trade, established in the eighth and ninth centuries AD, began with small-scale movement of people largely from the eastern Great Lakes region and the Sahel. Islamic law allowed slavery but prohibited slavery involving other pre-existing Muslims; as a result, the main target for slavery were the people who lived in the frontier areas of Islam in Africa. The trade of slaves across the Sahara and across the Indian Ocean also has a long history beginning with the control of sea routes by Afro-Arab traders in the ninth century. It is estimated that, at that time, a few thousand enslaved people were taken each year from the Red Sea and Indian Ocean coast. They were sold throughout the Middle East. This trade accelerated as superior ships led to more trade and greater demand for labour on plantations in the region. Eventually, tens of thousands per year were being taken. On the Swahili Coast, the Afro-Arab slavers captured Bantu peoples from the interior and brought them to the littoral. There, the slaves gradually assimilated in the rural areas, particularly on the Unguja and Pemba islands.

This changed the slave relationships by creating new forms of employment by slaves (as eunuchs to guard harems and in military units) and creating conditions for freedom (namely conversion—although it would only free a slave's children). Although the level of the trade remained relatively small, the size of total slaves traded grew to a large number over the multiple centuries of its existence. Because of its small and gradual nature, the impact on slavery practices in communities that did not convert to Islam was relatively small. However, in the 1800s, the slave trade from Africa to the Islamic countries picked up significantly. When the European slave trade ended around the 1850s, the slave trade to the east picked up significantly only to be ended with European colonization of Africa around 1900. Between 1500 and 1900, up to 17 million Africans slaves were transported by Muslim traders to the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa.

In 1814, Swiss explorer Johann Burckhardt wrote of his travels in Egypt and Nubia, where he saw the practice of slave trading: "I frequently witnessed scenes of the most shameless indecency, which the traders, who were the principal actors, only laughed at. I may venture to state, that very few female slaves who have passed their tenth year, reach Egypt or Arabia in a state of virginity." Arab slave traders and their captives along the Ruvuma River in Mozambique, 19th century

David Livingstone while talking about the slave trade in East Africa in his journals:"To overdraw its evil is a simple impossibility."Livingstone wrote about a group of slaves forced to march by Arab slave traders in the African Great Lakes region when he was traveling there in 1866: 19th June 1866 - We passed a woman tied by the neck to a tree and dead, the people of the country explained that she had bene unable to keep up with the other slaves in a gang, and her master had determined that she should not become anyone's property if she recovered.

26th June 1866 - ...We passed a slave woman shot or stabbed through the body and lying on the path: a group of mon stood about a hundred yards off on one side, and another of the women on the other side, looking on; they said an Arab who passed early that morning had done it in anger at losing the price he had given for her, because she was unable to walk any longer.

27th June 1866 - To-day we came upon a man dead from starvation, as he was very thin. One of our men wandered and found many slaves with slave-sticks on, abandoned by their masters from want of food; they were too weak to be able to speak or say where they had come from; some were quite young. Zanzibar was once East Africa's main slave-trading port, and under Omani Arabs in the 19th century as many as 50,000 slaves were passing through the city each year.

Chattel slavery, also called traditional slavery, is so named because people are treated as the chattel (personal property) of the owner and are bought and sold as commodities. Typically, under the chattel slave system, slave status was imposed on children of the enslaved at birth. Although it dominated many different societies throughout human history, this form of slavery has been formally abolished and is very rare today. Even when it can be said to survive, it is not upheld by the legal system of any internationally recognized government.

Domestic Slavery refers to the practice of exploiting and exercising control over another to coerce them into performing services of a domestic nature in unacceptable conditions, which can be unrecognizable. Domestic slavery victims live and work in their employers’ household, and perform tasks that include cooking, cleaning and child-care. They work 10 to 16 hours a day and are often on call outside of that time for little or no pay, in poor conditions and with no, or limited, freedom.

Pawnship in Africa lasted from the 17th century to the 19th century. It is where individuals are held as collateral for debts that had been incurred by others. Pawnship is somewhat related to commercial liquidity and the mechanisms by which funds were acquired to promote trade or cover the expenses of funerals, weddings, and religious obligations. Pawnship characterized trade with European and American ships in many parts of Atlantic Africa, but not everywhere, and it was illegal in most of Muslim Africa.

Military slavery is where a slave is systematically trained in an organized way, and employed as a professional soldier by their master. The most famous group of these military slave troops were Central Asian Turks, mamluks- young non-Muslim males who were raised on the Central Asian steppe where they developed horseback riding and archery skills. There is little evidence for use of African military slaves as infantry, but the most famous, detailed cases of the role of African military slaves comes from Egypt.

Human sacrifice is the offering of the life of a human being to a deity. There are two types of human sacrifice. One is the offering of a human being to a god and the second is the entombment or slaughter of slaves intended to accompany the deceased into the afterlife. In various places in Africa, some of the slaves of the deceased were buried alive, or they were killed and buried. Accusations of human sacrifice in ancient and modern times have been far more widespread than the ritual practice ever was.

Slave production, labor-intensive agriculture, demanded a large workforce. it included crops such as sugar cane, tobacco and cotton, which were the main crops and they all required an unlimited and inexpensive supply to assure timely production for the European market. Slaves from Africa offered the solution of slave production. The slave trade between Western Africa and America reached its peak in the mid-18th century.

Central Africa is a large area in which the equator runs through that ranges from desert conditions to the north in to tropical rain forests and mountains in the equatorial region of The Congo. The entire region is roughly the same size as the United States. The countries included in the region vary with different organizations or geographic perspectives. It is located off the west coast of Central Africa.