A Kick in the Belly. Stella Dadzie

nine months in Old Calabar for a viable cargo, both the crew and their captives suffered high mortality rates before they could set sail.³⁰ Many a captive perished in the disease-ridden holds of ships as they languished off the coast, waiting for the quota to be filled. Others endured the prolonged torture of captivity for months, forced to lie spoon-like in their own excrement, vomit or menstrual blood until the ships were fully loaded.

      Selection for sale involved detailed and intimate inspection, with specially appointed ships’ ‘surgeons’ examining ‘every part of every one of them, to the smallest member, men and women being stark naked’.³¹ Captain Phillips recorded an account of one such transaction in his diary. ‘Our surgeon’, he wrote, ‘is forced to examine the privities of both men and women with the nicest scrutiny’.³² It was also common practice for captives to be branded on the shoulder or breast with a hot iron, to ensure that they could be readily identified by their purchasers. Their suppurating wounds would have been magnets for infection.

      Cruelties like this went with the territory. Traders were not averse to beating or murdering those captives who, on account of ‘being … defective in their limbs, eyes or teeth; or grown grey, or … [victims of] the venereal disease, or any other imperfection’ were rejected by ships’ captains and other European buyers. It is doubtful that any concessions were made to women. These paragons of European civilisation simply turned away when ‘traders frequently beat those Negroes which are objected to by the captains and use them with great severity … Instances have happened … that the traders have dropped their canoes under the stern of the vessel and instantly beheaded them in sight of the captain’.³³

      Of course, brutality is not confined to any one race. It never has been. Both Africans and Europeans were guilty of such atrocities, reflecting contemporary attitudes toward violence on both continents. It is tempting to romanticise Africa by forgetting that slavery and human sacrifice preceded European encroachment or presenting the few chiefs who resisted as paragons of altruism. However, this would be a misrepresentation.

      Having said that, it was the Europeans who initiated and oversaw these transactions, and it was they who established the parameters of what was acceptable. The men involved showed such callous disregard for human life that ex-slave Olaudah Equiano, turning the popular stereotype of African barbarism on its head, remarked: ‘I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me … the white people looked and acted, as I thought, in so savage a manner; for I had never seen among any people such instances of brutal cruelty.’³⁴

      Negroes in the Bilge, 1835 engraving of painting by German artist Johann Moritz Rugendas (Alamy)