Were There 'Mulatto' Slave Traders?

100 Amazing Facts About the Negro: A father-son story illustrates dynamics of the trade in humans.

Illustration from Your History (1940), by John A. Rogers


(The Root) -- Amazing Fact About the Negro No. 50: What's behind the legend of the mixed-race slave trader Joel A. Rogers called "Mongo John"? 


A Diabolical System


First, slaves were captured in wars that African leaders waged for a variety of reasons, some specifically for the purpose of generating bodies to be sold to market for the New World slave trade. As the historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood state, a significant number of the slaves shipped across the Atlantic began their horrific journey as by-products of capture in these wars. 

Others were captured illicitly "by African bandits and gangs who operated in hard-to-control areas, forests and so on, and hit as people were going to market or sailing on the rivers," as Thornton and Heywood wrote in an email. 

Still others were enslaved by judicial means. Overall, some 90 percent of all of the Africans destined for the nightmare of slavery in North and South America and the Caribbean began their journeys in one of these three ways, and, Thornton and Heywood estimate, one-third of the Africans were captured by other Africans.

The African elites brought their victims to the coast and sold them to slave traders who operated through a variety of trading places, as David Eltis explained to me by email. Some were sold at "factories," the residence of a European or African trading agent or agents (or factors) of a slaving company, established in strategic locations along the African coast. Some were sold at coastal forts, in Senegal, the Gambia and Guinea-Bissau. "South of the latter (Guinea-Bissau) to the Gold Coast (Ghana), there was a large number of small, but fortified, trading posts." Then from Ghana east to the Togo boundary today there were about 40 castles of varying size. 

Further east, from Little Popo in Dahomey [Benin] to Lagos, Nigeria, "the flow of slaves was controlled by African polities, and the Europeans had agents and storehouses under the protection of an African ruler," Eltis continued. "From the Niger Delta to Northern Angola, there were no permanent European posts at all, so each slave ship would negotiate with the African polity, and Europeans would not have had a permanent land-based presence, though the Congo River had a lot of European-controlled barracoons [enclosures to hold the enslaved] in the last 25 years of the trade." The exception to all of this was Luanda, in Angola. It was "the biggest trading site of all, which was Portuguese-controlled, as was Mozambique island," where there would be warehouses and holding yards.