How Population Scarcity Shaped Africa

Ethnic violence, the Resource Curse and civil wars are often quoted to explain the development deficit in Africa. But a relatively little-known factor that can explain Africa’s position today is its historically low population density and its eventual role in facilitating the slave trade .

Africa was historically a chronically underpopulated continent. In 1900, the populations of the largest cities in West and East Africa were Accra (21,000) and Mombasa (30,000). While parasites and diseases played a key role in decimating populations, the other menace was the African elephant.

Adult elephants consume 150 kilograms of vegetation a day. In 1800, there were close to 25 million elephants in Africa (compared to 400,000 today). and without guns, they rampaged through the land. It was only by the end of the twentieth century that almost all elephants were confined to reserves.

All of this put a premium on human beings in Africa. Wherever political power developed, it focussed on the control of the scarce resource – people, instead of the abundant one – land. This goes a long way in explaining the continent’s long history of slavery. Before the rise of the trans-Atlantic trade, there was a thriving indigenous trade within Africa and one which was driven by the Arabs.

On the Arabian peninsula, slavery existed for hundreds of years before the birth of Islam and the Arab invasions of North Africa in the seventh century. The invasions were associated with large volumes of slave taking and paved the way for an enduring slave trade. North Africans were initially exported as enslaved people, but the Islamisation of the occupied North African countries – Islam proscribed the enslavement of Muslims – led to caravan trading that procured slaves south of the Sahara.

By the 16^th century, with the rise of sugar and later, cotton, the horrific trans-Atlantic trade picked up. (Earlier piece on the bloody history of Cotton)

African state formation began in the context of indigenous slavery, but more of it occurred against the backdrop of the international slave trade. After 1700, the insatiable appetite for plantation labour in the Americas weakened moral obligations in African societies and any sense of mutual dependence between leaders and their subjects. States prospered through constant warfare to obtain captives for sale on the coast. Partly under the influence of Arab practice, African warlords built slave armies that in turn captured and enslaved more people.

Arab and European traders industrialised African slavery and turned enslaved people into pure chattels. In turn, it was raiding captives for export that determined the relative strength of warrior states in West and Central Africa. Slave raiding also, in the forested areas of coastal West Africa, led to the growth of militarised secret societies focused on slave capture and frequently led by traditional hunters. Full membership of these secret societies was conferred when a candidate took his first captive. A substantial share of slave trading was small scale, involving part-time and private individuals handling a few captives. Since the slave trade also required the provision of a previously unnecessary food surplus, and thousands of barrels of fresh water, to victual slave ships, it shaped other aspects of local African economies. A new economy grew up to service the slave trade.

The export of slaves was eventually accompanied by the development of more powerful African states, but this did little to prevent the carving up of the continent by the Europeans, beginning from the late nineteenth century.

All of this from Joe Studwell’s ‘How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World’s Last Developmental Frontier’

Image Source: The Slave Market in Zanzibar, 1860