A Kick in the Belly. Stella Dadzie
the warrior Hausa queen of Zazzau (modern-day Zaria), led an army of over 20,000 in her wars of expansion and surrounded her city with defensive walls that are known to this day as ganuwar amina or ‘Amina’s walls’. Described in Hausa praise songs as ‘a woman as capable as a man’, she reigned for over thirty-five years.3
There was also Beatriz Kimpa Vita (1684–1706) of the Congo, who insisted that Jesus was an African and whose call to Congolese unity was taken as a direct challenge to the designs of European slavers and missionaries. Burnt at the stake as a heretic together with her infant son, her spiritual influence spread so far and wide that enslaved Haitians used the words from one of her prayers as a rallying cry when they rose in rebellion almost a century later.4
Over 200 years after Ana Nzinga’s rule, warrior queen Yaa Asantewaa came to embody this spirit of female resistance when, as the chosen leader of the Ashanti in their struggle against British colonialism, she denounced her fellow chiefs for allowing their king, the Asantehene, to be seized and exiled. In her words:
Now I have seen that some of you fear to go forward to fight for our king. If it were the brave days of Osei Tutu, Okomfo Anokye and Opuku Ware I, chiefs would not sit down to see their king taken without firing a shot. No white man could have dared to speak to the Chief of Asante in the way the governor spoke to you chiefs this morning. Is it true that the bravery of Asante is no more? I cannot believe it, it cannot be! I must say this: if you, the men of Asante, will not go forward, then we will. I shall call upon my fellow women. We will fight the white men. We will fight till the last of us falls on the battlefield.5
Yaa Asantewaa, born in 1840, would have been around sixty when she was elected to lead an army of 5,000 in the Ashanti war of resistance against the British at the turn of the twentieth century. Described by the British as ‘the soul and head of the whole rebellion’, she is thought to have been the mother or aunt of a chief who had been sent into exile with the king. Although she was eventually defeated and exiled herself, she remains a Ghanaian national she-ro and a figure of inspiration to this day for her refusal to bow down to colonial rule.
This is not to suggest that recalcitrant men didn’t play an equally important role in resisting the theft of their people. In 1720, Tomba, chief of the Baga, attempted to organise an alliance of popular resistance that would drive the traders and their agents into the sea. The Oba (kings) of Benin are also reputed to have been opposed to the trade for many years.6 King Agaja II of Dahomey, whose reign lasted from 1718 to 1740, is said to have been so incensed by the incursion of traders into his kingdom that he raised an army of intrepid women to help resist them. A letter, thought to have been dictated and sent by Agaja to the English king, George II, in 1731, even went so far as to propose an alternative scheme of trade, substituting the export of human beings with exports of home-grown sugar, cotton and indigo.7
On second thought, King Agaja may not be the best example of male agency. His palace was ‘a virtual city of women, experienced in the mechanics of government’ – close to 8,000 women, whose roles included blocking or promoting outsiders’ interests. Said to have exercised choice, influence and autonomy, they wielded considerable authority and power. This ferocious army of Amazonian ‘soldieresses’ was legendary both for the warriors’ physical prowess and their elevated status. They called themselves N’nonmiton (‘our mothers’) and others saw them as elite, aloof and untouchable.
As bodyguards to the king, they were trained to display speed, courage and physical endurance on the battlefield, and expected to fight to the death to protect him. Their fearsome, ruthless legacy is remembered to this day.8
There were other kings who resisted, too. According to Carl Bernard Wadstrom, who made a voyage to the coast of Guinea in 1787, the King of Almammy was so opposed to the trade that he enacted a law forbidding the transport of slaves through his territory. Wadstrom was an eyewitness when the king returned gifts sent by the Senegal Company in an attempt to win him over, declaring that ‘all the riches of that company would not divert him from his design’. Even toward the end of the eighteenth century, by which time the trade was well entrenched, the inhabitants of the Grain Coast were known both for their reluctance to trade in slaves and their habit of attacking European slavers who attempted it.
Sadly, back in Europe, such protests fell on deaf ears. After all, why concern themselves with the plight of Africans when there were such huge profits to be made? Aside from copious supplies of rum and gin, which created their own dependency, one of the most lucrative exports to Africa at the time was guns. Between August 1713 and May 1715, the Royal African Company ordered no less than 11,986 fusees, pistols, muskets and Jamaica guns for export to the Guinea coast,9 the latter made specifically for the slave trade and known for their habit of exploding the first time they were fired.10 King Tegbesu of Dahomey (King Agaja’s successor) is said to have complained bitterly that a consignment of English guns had exploded when used, injuring many of his soldiers. In 1765, a fairly typical year, 150,000 guns were exported to Africa from Birmingham alone – the beginnings of an ignominious arms trade that has killed or maimed millions of Africans and has continued unchecked into the twenty-first century.
Before long, power and guns would become inextricably linked, with the price of a slave costing anything from one to five guns, depending on the location of the sale. Soon captive Africans, typically prisoners of war, had replaced gold, ivory, pepper and redwood as the primary currency. Meanwhile, resident European factors, whose ‘palavers’ with less scrupulous local rulers left them well placed to stir up local rivalries, were often charged with deliberately fomenting unrest in a cynical move to increase demand for guns and the resulting supply of captives.
The truth is although it was Europeans who organised the triangular trade in their scramble for profit and influence, they could not have done so without co-opting some extremely power-hungry Africans. The collusion of chiefs and indigenous traders was the inevitable by-product of a system that thrived on avarice. Elmina, like hundreds of other forts and trading posts along the West African coast, would soon become a busy commercial hub, its predominantly European occupants dependent on local communities for water, fresh food, transport and, in some cases, even armed protection.
Bogus treaties with local chiefs may have given Europe’s traders an initial foot in the door, but their success – and, on some occasions, their very survival – came to rely on the services of local people: boatmen, domestic servants, messengers, traders, brokers, interpreters and so-called ‘wenches’. For them and their descendants, this trade in fellow humans would ultimately become a way of life. Treacherous currents and diseases that could devastate an entire crew encouraged European ships to anchor far offshore for their own safety. The trade would have died an early death but for the expertise of local boatmen, who were handsomely rewarded for ferrying people and goods to and from the waiting ships. If they were fortunate enough to escape capture themselves, it was only because their skills in handling the canoes, sometimes as long as eighty feet and able to carry over 100 people, were vital to the endless traffic between ship and shore.
Within 200 years, what began as a Portuguese monopoly in 1490 had become a free-for-all. As the British, French, Danish, Dutch, Prussians, Spanish and Swedish jostled with the Portuguese for strategic dominance of the coastal forts and supply routes, competition was fierce, often deadly. Elmina Castle, seized by the Dutch in 1642, changed hands several times until finally, over two centuries later, it fell under British control. A similar fate befell Cape Coast Castle, Anomabu and many other forts and trading posts, 100 of which had been built on the Gold Coast alone. Meanwhile, in the Americas, the establishment of plantations for growing sugar, tobacco, cotton, rice, coffee and other produce led to a declining interest in Africa’s gold reserves and an ever-growing demand for ‘black ivory’. This steady drain of men and women, paupers and princesses alike, would deplete the continent’s most precious resource for centuries to come. Africa is, as we know, still in recovery.
To begin with, back in Europe, the traffic in human lives provoked few moral qualms. Initially characterised by mutual curiosity and respect, relationships between Africans and Europeans only began to change once the trade became established. Slavery was a lot easier to defend if its victims could be vilified, and the justifications, however crude, were easily swallowed