The European Slave Trade as a Basic Factor in African Underdevelopment

Chapter 4 focuses on Europe’s role in underdeveloping Africa up to 1885. Rodney begins with a discussion of the slave trade. Although the evidence is scant, low estimates suggest that 10 million enslaved Africans arrived in the Americas through warfare, trickery, banditry, and kidnapping. This does not account for the captives who died before and during the Atlantic crossing. Europeans especially preferred young, able-bodied men in their early 20s, which shrank Africa’s work force and curtailed its birth rate. The precise impact of the slave trade on Africa’s population remains unknown. Comparisons with other continents, however, suggest it had a dramatic effect:

No one has been able to come up with a figure representing total losses to the African population sustained through the extraction of slave labor from all areas to all destinations over the many centuries that slave trade existed. However, on every other continent from the fifteenth century onwards, the population showed constant and sometimes spectacular natural increase; it is striking that the same did not apply to Africa (109).

Rodney provides a table comparing Africa’s population growth to that of Europe and Asia. The statistics show that Europe and Asia’s populations grew by a multiple of around four from 1650 to 1900.