African American Slave Trade Political And Social Dynamics

African American Slave Trade Political And Social Dynamics

Introduction

The term African-American is especially used to refer to blacks living in North America. Other terms are sometimes used to refer to African-Americans from a particular locality, such as Afro-Brazilian or Afro-Jamaican. The Latin American and Caribbean regions were the first areas of the Americas to be populated by African immigrants, and the majority of their descendants still live in those regions.

Early Immigration and Slavery

Most of the earliest black immigrants to the Americas were natives of Spain and Portugal--men such as Pedro Alonso (1468-1505), a navigator who accompanied Columbus on his first voyage, and the black colonists who helped de Ovando (1460?-1518) form the first Spanish settlement on Hispaniola in 1502. The name of Nuflo de Olano (b. 1490?) appears in the records as that of a black slave present when Vasco de Balboa sighted the Pacific Ocean in 1513.

With three companions, he spent eight years traveling overland to Mexico City, learning several Indian languages in the process. Later, while exploring what is now New Mexico, he lost his life in a dispute with the Zuñ Indians.

Juan Valiente (d. 1553), another black, led Spaniards in a series of battles against the Araucanian Indians of Chile between 1540 and 1546. Although Valiente was a slave, he was rewarded with an estate near Santiago and control of several Indian villages.

Between 1502 and 1518, Spain shipped out hundreds of Spanish-born Africans, called Ladinos, to work as laborers, especially in the mines. Opponents of their enslavement cited their weak Christian faith and their penchant for escaping to the mountains or joining the Indians in revolt. Proponents declared that the rapid diminution of the Indian population required a consistent supply of reliable work hands. Free Spaniards were reluctant to do manual labor or to remain settled (especially after the discovery of gold on the mainland), and only slave labor could assure the economic viability of the colonies.

Beginning of the African Slave Trade

By 1518, the demand for slaves in the Spanish New World was so great that King Charles I of Spain (who, as Holy Roman Emperor, was known as Charles V), sanctioned the direct transport of slaves from Africa to the American colonies. The slave trade was controlled by the Crown, which sold the right to import slaves (asiento) to entrepreneurs.

By the 1530s, the Portuguese were also using African slaves in Brazil. From then until the abolition of the slave trade in 1870, at least 10 million Africans were forcibly brought to the Americas: about 47 percent of them to the Caribbean islands and the Guianas; 38 percent to Brazil; and 6 percent to mainland Spanish America. About 4.5 percent went to North America, roughly the same proportion that went to Europe.

The greatest proportion of these slaves worked on plantations producing sugar, coffee, cotton, tobacco, and rice in the tropical lowlands of northeastern Brazil and in the Caribbean islands. Most of them came from the sub-Saharan states of West and ...