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African Conceptions of Gender and the Slave Traffic
G. Ugo Nwokeji
| THE gender and age
structure of the transatlantic slave trade is critical to understanding
the development of societies of the Atlantic rim. From the broad
perspective of contact between the Old World and the New, two salient
characteristics of that structure have emerged from the recent literature.
First, as is now well known, males predominated in the Atlantic
slave trade, though compared to other branches of pre-nineteenth-century
migration, both coerced and free, females and children were well
represented. Second, the proportion of African women and children
carried across the Atlantic was far from constant or uniform; sex
and age ratios varied strongly by region and over time.1
Attempts to explain these broad patterns have generally focused
on the economic functions of slaves on both sides of the Atlantic,
but especially the requirements of the plantation complexes of the
Americas, without which a transatlantic slave trade would not have
existed. Even though New World planters demanded men, they quickly
discovered that enslaved African women had a high work rate.2
Planters forced black men and women alike to labor in the fields,
and the price differential between males and females was generally
much lower in the Americas than in Africa.3
African gender studies have rarely focused on the era of the Atlantic
slave trade.4
Economic historians have generally avoided gender questions, and
historical demographers who address the issue have usually assumed
uniform sex and age ratios for all African regions. To the latter
group of scholars, the main question to be resolved was the proportion
of men among those forced to leave Africa.5
The few historians who have explored the gender structure of the
slave trade see the predominance of males in overseas export as
more a function of supply than of demand. For them, African suppliers
of captives channeled women and children away from the Atlantic
and men toward it. Women could be sold for more in domestic African
slave markets, whereas men commanded higher prices in markets supplying
the Atlantic.6
Women thus constituted the large majority of slaves in Africa. A
recent survey of available price data in African regional markets
confirms this hypothesis.7
The discovery of the high value Africans placed on women is especially
helpful in suggesting that African conceptions of gender helped
shape the structure of the Atlantic slave trade. But this new emphasis
on the ability of Africa to shape the pattern of coerced migration
still means that it is the economic function of slaves and market
forces that receives the most attention. Although social processes
are acknowledged, the emphasis remains on market forces, which crystallized
in three overlapping markets—Atlantic, Saharan, and domestic—and
generated significant price differentials. |
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