Throughout his ordeal from the Yorubaland to the Americas, the Europeans treated the Yoruba slave as non-human, and subjected him to unimaginable cruelty. Slavery was legal in all the British colonies in the so-called New World. Slaves and their progeny were the property of an owner. Slaves were owned until they died. They could be bought and sold, and they were sold under contract law. Descendants of 3 of the 5 permanent UNSC members – America, Britain, and France - were Slave owners.
1. The Yoruba peoples were the most enslaved Africans.
Slaves were kidnapped mainly from the so-called Slave Coast, the coastal parts of the old Yoruba Empire; present-day Togo, Benin Republic and Western Nigeria. These areas in those times were the most densely populated on the continent of Africa. The Yoruba were urban dwellers. In the 400 years from 1400 to 1800, up to 10 million Yoruba were forcibly removed from the Homeland and shipped like cargo to the Americas. The vast majority were shipped to South and Central America and the Caribbean; a million or so to North America. There are today more than 30 million Yoruba descendants in the Diaspora, domiciled preponderantly in Brazil, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States.
2. The Yoruba slaves suffered the most appalling, degrading and inhuman treatment.
The horror of the transatlantic voyage for the captured Yoruba slaves is very difficult to believe or comprehend. The slaves were shipped in slave decks worse than cargo. The slave journey started lonely and frighteningly; the slave surrounded by strangers in an alien and hostile environment. Many slaves had never before seen or travelled in water crafts. The slaves were shoved into slave decks in the bowel of the ship. Designed to house as many slaves as possible, the deck was only a few feet high so that the slaves were sardine-packed, shackled together lying down. At least a third or more of the Yoruba slaves died or were murdered on the transatlantic journey. Death was routine, caused by disease, malnutrition, sea sickness or suffocation.
Remarks on the slave-trade ... Printed and sold by Samuel Wood, No. 362 Pearl-Street [1807].
‘Here is presented to our view, one of the most horrid spectacles—a number of human creatures, packed, side by side, almost like herrings in a barrel, and reduced nearly to the state of being buried alive, with just air enough to preserve a degree of life sufficient to make them sensible of all the horrors of their situation. To every person, who has ever been at sea, it must present a scene of wretchedness in the extreme; for, with every comfort, which room, air, variety of nourishment, and careful cleanliness can yield, it is still a wearisome and irksome state. What then must it be to those, who are not only deprived of the necessaries of life, but confined down, the greater part of the voyage, to the same posture, with scarcely the privilege of turning from one painful side to the other, and subjected to all the nauseous consequences arising from sea-sickness, and other disorders, unavoidable amongst such a number of forlorn wretches? Where is the human being that can picture to himself this scene of wo, without, at the same time, execrating a trade, which spreads misery and desolation where-ever it appears? Where is the man of real benevolence, who will not join heart and hand, in opposing this barbarous, this iniquitous traffic?’
On arrival in their colonies, the European colonists treated their Yoruba slaves worse than beasts of burden. As non-indigenes in a strange land, the Yoruba slaves were easy to auction, control and coerce. Slaves were considered property because they were African, and their status as property was enforced with unbelievable violence. Slaves were subjected to whipping, shackling, hanging, beating, burning, mutilation, branding, rape, and imprisonment for just about anything; disobedience, perceived infractions, re-assertion of dominance. Pregnant slaves were not spared. Slaves were used as sexual objects, concubines or sex slaves. Women were made to produce children to make more slaves. Men and boys too were sexually abused.
Frederick Douglass in his autobiography ‘My Bondage and My Freedom’ (1855) at p. 103 wrote:
‘The cowskin ... is made entirely of untanned, but dried, ox hide, and is about as hard as a piece of well-seasoned live oak. It is made of various sizes, but the usual length is about three feet. The part held in the hand is nearly an inch in thickness; and, from the extreme end of the butt or handle, the cowskin tapers its whole length to a point. This makes it quite elastic and springy. A blow with it, on the hardest back, will gash the flesh, and make the blood start. Cowskins are painted red, blue and green, and are the favorite slave whip. I think this whip worse than the "cat-o'nine-tails." It condenses the whole strength of the arm to a single point, and comes with a spring that makes the air whistle. It is a terrible instrument, and is so handy, that the overseer can always have it on his person, and ready for use. The temptation to use it is ever strong; and an overseer can, if disposed, always have cause for using it.’
Slaves were branded like cattle for identification or for punishment. Others were castrated, had teeth pulled out or had ears amputated. Runaway slaves bore shot gun wounds and dog bites. Some were made to wear heavy, thick metal collars.
Louis Cain in: G.P. Rawick The American Slave: a Composite Autobiography: From sundown to sunup: the making of the Black community (1972) at p. 58 described the punishment of a fellow slave as follows:
‘One nigger run to the woods to be a jungle nigger, but massa cotched him with the dog and took a hot iron and brands him. Then he put a bell on him, in a wooden frame what slip over the shoulders and under the arms. He made that nigger wear the bell a year and took it off on Christmas for a present to him.’
The experience of the average male slave was to be ‘robbed of wife, of children, of his hard earnings, of home, of friends, of society, of knowledge, and of all that makes his life desirable.’ (Brigadier General Ty Seidule in Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause (2020))
3. The transatlantic slavery continually for 400 years deprived the Yorubaland of its most productive population.
Nunn in ‘Understanding the long-run effects of Africa’s slave trades’ VoxEU eBook (2017) summarised data from a series of studies that he and his colleagues had conducted on the matter over the years. They found as follows. The transatlantic slavery had negative impact on African societies and led to the long-term impoverishment of West Africa. In the 1800s, Africa’s population was half of what it would have been but for the transatlantic slavery. Pervasive insecurity and violence associated with the transatlantic slavery retarded institutional, social and economic development. The countries where most slaves were taken became the poorest on the continent. The parts of Africa that was the most developed supplied the largest number of slaves. But for the transatlantic slavery, 99% of the income gap between Africa and other developing nations would not exist; Africa would have a similar level of development as Asia or Latin America. Much of Africa’s poor performance today could be explained by the 400 years of slave raiding. The transatlantic slavery resulted in deterioration in local, ethnic legal and political institutions and governance. Other cultural consequences of the transatlantic slavery included polygamy, from a skewed sex ratio, as males were the most taken as slaves. The transatlantic slavery created the conditions for the subsequent European colonisation of Africa by the European powers.
4. The value of slaves to the Slave owners
Slavery became an institutional and legal practice within 50 years of the first Yoruba slaves arriving in North America. Enslaved Yoruba peoples provided the easy solutions to the economic problems of the Colonists. They were a cheap and reliable source of labourers, and domestic servants. In the 1700s New York, for example, about 25% of households had one or more slaves to do the household chores.
William and Cain in ‘Measuring Slavery in 2020 Dollars’, MeasuringWorth, 2023 (URL: www.measuringworth.com/slavery.php have presented, for the first time, macroeconomic and microeconomic dimensions of slavery in values measured in today's dollars.
a. Property value of slaves
Historically, slaves were expensive. Indeed, the average slave price in 1850 in America was roughly equal to the average price of a house. William and Cain estimated a price range of $14,000 to $240,000 per head in today’s money during the antebellum period. $40,000 is the more commonly used average over the 400 years of transatlantic slavery. An estimated 10 million slaves were extracted from Yorubaland in that period. This amounts to about $410 billion in total.
b. Income value of slaves
This is the expected labour services that a slave would provide in a working life of say 50 years. The average slave was expected to work for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week and 52 weeks of the year. William and Cain estimated the income value in America to range from $60,000 to $184,000 in today’s money with an average of $114,000. The slave population in America was 4 million in that period. This amounts to about $456 billion in total. America accounted for only about 10% of the slave numbers. The sum is even more immense when the entire slave population in the New World is considered.
c. Relative output from the slavery
This is a measure of the amount of income or wealth compared to the total output of the economy in America. According to William and Cain, the wealth tied up in slaves was a large proportion of the total wealth of the nation. The relative output of a $400 slave in America in 1850 was estimated at $3.4 million in today’s money. It was as high as $14 million in 1818. The Slave owners as a group had considerable economic power, and their Total Estates were quite large, 15.9 percent of the 1860 total. The holder of 10 slaves ranked in the top 1% of the distribution. The total slave wealth was close to $13 trillion in today’s money, roughly 77 percent of GDP today. And, America accounted for only about 10% of the total slave population.
5. Britain and America compensated Slaver owners but not their victims.
Following the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, to compensate slave owners for the loss of their slaves, the British government borrowed £20 million (equivalent to £30 billion today), 40% of the Treasury’s annual income or about 5% of the British GDP. The loan was one of the largest in history. British taxpayers were repaying it up until 2015. On 16 April 1862, the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act was enacted, and slave owners were compensated up to $300 (equivalent to $10,125 today) for each freed slave. By contrast, the Yorubaland and the Yoruba peoples have received no recompense or restitution for their enslavement.
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