5 
In which la Belinguere entertains Sieur Michel Jajolet de la Courbe to an African-American meal on the west coast of Africa (June 1686)
How West Africa exchanged men for maize and manioc
Sieur Michel Jajolet de la Courbe had spent the morning buying slaves in Albreda, a trading lodge in the small state of Niumi, on the northern banks of the Gambia River.1 As a managing director of the Compagnie des Indes, la Courbe commanded the French coastal settlement of Saint-Louis. After a long journey upriver and an uncomfortable night, disturbed by a violent thunderstorm and the unwanted attentions of clouds of mosquitoes, he had risen early that morning to greet the village headman, who arrived at the trading post promptly at eight o’clock. The two men shared the requisite drink–as the chief English factor in Niumi commented, ‘without brandy there is no trade’–before the Africans inspected the ivory la Courbe had brought with him as payment.2 A price per slave was agreed upon and the captives were paraded before the French slave trader. Those he regarded as defective were rejected and then payment was made for those he had chosen. Once the deal was done, la Courbe was taken to the nearby village. Mats were set out for him under a large fig tree, and while the women all came to stare at him, he was entertained by a group of musicians playing wooden wind instruments and beating on drums.3
Later he was taken to meet a prominent figure in Senegambia’s slave trade. La Belinguere was the glamorous daughter of the former ruler of Niumi. She was tall and beautiful and la Courbe was enchanted.4 She was wearing ‘a small Portuguese-style corset which emphasized her figure’ underneath an ‘elegant man’s shirt’ and a beautiful African prestige cloth for a skirt. Her manner was gracious and her conversation–conducted in a mix of Portuguese, French and English–was assured. Clearly, the Frenchman noted in his account of the meeting, she was accustomed to doing business with men of various nations.5 She lived in a house that was square in the Portuguese style, rather than round, and whose mud walls were coated in white lime. La Belinguere embodied the cultural interchange that took place along the West African coast in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. With her stylish mixing of customs she was the product of the Atlantic trading world that connected Europe, Africa and the Americas.
The Frenchman and his African hostess sat on mats on the veranda of la Belinguere’s house to eat a meal with a similarly intriguing melange of flavours and foodstuffs, many of which were new to la Courbe. In Niumi, where most people could only afford flesh on celebratory occasions, the quantity of meat included in the spread served to demonstrate la Belinguere’s elite status.6 They were served two boiled chickens as well as an elaborate dish of seasoned minced chicken that had been stuffed back into its skin so that it looked as if it were a whole chicken.7 La Courbe was less impressed by the ingenuity of this deception than by the food he had never before encountered. He judged the small, round, flat millet cakes, known as batangue, ‘not at all bad’. These were a distinctively Senegambian contribution to the meal, as millet was the local staple crop. A dish of beautifully prepared rice heavily seasoned with chillies was even more surprising. Rice was another African staple but chillies were American and unfamiliar to la Courbe, who explained to his readers that they were ‘green or red fruit, shaped like a cucumber and with a taste resembling that of pepper’.8 West Africa had its own peppery spice in malaguetta pepper–known to medieval Europeans as ‘grains of paradise’–but American chilli peppers grew like weeds in the West African climate and were popular with the people of Niumi. To this day, Gambian stews have a reputation for being the fieriest on the continent.9
The bananas la Courbe and la Belinguere ate for dessert were by the seventeenth century well established in Africa, even though they had originally come from East Asia. The Frenchman pronounced them ‘very sweet, and extremely good’ but was more excited by his first encounter with another American interloper: the pineapple. They ate it with wine and sugar to counter its supposedly corrosive effect on the stomach, and la Courbe thought it much better than but ‘somewhat like a sugared rennet apple’.10 La Belinguere politely tried the brandy la Courbe had brought her as a gift.
After leaving la Belinguere, la Courbe journeyed on to Gilfroid (Juffure), where he visited the English trading station. Here the interchange between cultures taking place on African soil was also apparent. The station was built in the Portuguese style and surrounded by a garden where the English cultivated European cabbages and cauliflowers; tropical vegetables like yams; and New World crops such as manioc and potatoes, which la Courbe reported tasted like boiled chestnuts. Here the Frenchman observed the curious pineapple plant growing, with the large fruits balanced on a stem like an artichoke coming out of a crown of prickly thistle-like leaves. While la Belinguere had served la Courbe a sweet and mildly intoxicating African wine made from the fermented sap of a palm tree, the English drank their visitor’s health from a large silver bowl of punch, made with brandy, sugar and lime juice and–adding a touch of the East Indies to the medley–spiced with nutmeg.11
The French and the English had begun arriving on the West African coast in the mid seventeenth century, their ships loaded with guns, cotton, alcohol, glassware, iron bars and copper bowls, which they traded for slaves. It was the Portuguese who had opened up the African coastline to Europe when they discovered how to negotiate the difficult winds that persistently blow from the north-east, driving ships out of sight of land into the Atlantic Ocean. They succeeded in rounding Cape Bojador in 1434, and a decade later discovered that if on the voyage home they counter-intuitively sailed first in a north-westerly direction, they could pick up trade winds that would blow them back towards the European continent.12 The Portuguese were seeking access to Africa’s gold, but soon tapped into the West African slave trade, bringing the first consignment of slaves to reach Europe by sea back to Lisbon in 1434. Their advances in navigation opened up the Atlantic Ocean to European seafarers and eventually led to the discovery of the Americas, where the Portuguese introduced sugar into Brazil and began to transport Africans across the Atlantic to work on the plantations. In the mid seventeenth century other Europeans–French, Prussians, Danes, Swedes, Dutch and the English–joined the Portuguese on the West African coast, all jostling for a share of the lucrative slave trade.
Markets for African slaves had opened up in the tobacco and rice plantations of North America, but it was rising European demand for West Indian sugar that did most to propel the growth of the British slave trade during the eighteenth century. The great majority of those carried away from the African coast in British ships were taken to the West Indies. Conditions on the islands were so appalling that on reaching them the life expectancy of slaves was only seven years.13 Therefore the plantations needed a continual flow of new supplies of Africans.
In Senegambia, the French and the English competed with each other, constantly trying to partition the region into exclusive zones of commercial influence. European power, however, was much more limited in Africa than it was in the Americas, where Europeans dominated and destroyed the peoples they encountered. Even in 1800, after 300 years of interaction, the European presence in West Africa was confined to just over 60 forts and factories dotted along a 3,000-mile stretch of coastline. Dilapidated, vulnerable to siege and manned by a rabble of ragtag soldiers, these forts were often indefensible in the case of a concerted attack. European merchants were frequently intimidated and occasionally murdered by the local rulers. Except for a few trading posts established along the course of the rivers, Europeans hardly penetrated into the interior of the continent.14
The purpose of la Belinguere and la Courbe’s dinner had been to cement trading relations. The Frenchman was aware that he was acting in a treacherous world where the motives of each side were often only dimly understood by the other and in which relationships were unstable and contingent. Despite the fact that he found his dinner companion charming, he recognised that she was a potential enemy who could easily choose to scheme against him. In fact he described her as ‘the reef on which many white men had shipwrecked’. When he departed after the meal, having presented her with gifts of coral and amber, he likened himself to Ulysses leaving the home of the enchantress Circe.15
Just how dangerous la Belinguere could be if disappointed or annoyed was brought home to the English when they fell out of favour with her a few months later. La Belinguere was invited to a party at the English fort on James Island at the entrance to the Gambia River. During the course of the evening a fight broke out and she was injured by a knife wielded by Captain Cornelius Hodges, a brutal and unsavoury man. (When his African mistress had given birth to a black baby, he was said to have accused her of infidelity, crushed the infant in a mortar and fed it to dogs.) Angered by the incident, the chief of Niumi, Jenung Wuleng Sonko, took the English factor at Juffure hostage and confiscated his trade goods. When the head agent on James Island tried to negotiate with Sonko, he was also taken hostage. Meanwhile, la Belinguere joined forces with the French and began recruiting a network of merchants to break the English monopoly over the slave trade along the upper river. Eventually a neighbouring African ruler intervened and brought about a reconciliation. The English had to pay 200 iron bars to free their unfortunate compatriots. The incident demonstrates the power of the Africans, who were able to use the competition between the Europeans to play one side off against another.16
In order to participate in the slave trade, Europeans had to adapt to African trading practices. The most effective way to gain access to slaves was to establish a patron–client relationship with an African chief. The English paid the chief of Niumi 20 gallons of rum a year in order to establish their right to first choice of any slaves that he had to sell. But when the Portuguese had arrived on the West African coast in the fifteenth century, they discovered that the best way to cement this patron–client relationship was for the traders to marry women from the chief’s wider family. In this way they became affiliated to him through kinship ties and were treated preferentially. The women who entered into these alliances were known as nharas (a corruption of the Portuguese senhorita). No mere pawns, they were often active participants in their husbands’ affairs, translating and mediating for the men, who were ignorant not only of African languages but also the nuances of African politics and culture.17
By the seventeenth century, these unions had given rise to a community of Luso-Africans living along the coast and on the shores of the main trading rivers. They bore Portuguese names, claimed to be Catholic, lived in Portuguese-style houses, wore European clothing and spoke a Portuguese creole.18 It was this mixed community that acted as the cultural brokers between the British and the French and Senegambia’s African rulers. The ledgers from the English fort on James Island list 31 men and several women (known among the English as signares) with Portuguese names through whom the English conducted their business. According to la Courbe, it was the Luso-African signares who controlled ‘almost all the trade of Senegal. They own female slaves who they send far away into the country to buy hides [cotton cloth, grain and other foodstuffs] which they carry for more than 15 leagues on their heads… they buy them cheaply, and when they have gathered a considerable number they bring them to the fort on boats.’19 La Belinguere was one such woman. The daughter of a chief, she had been married to several Luso-African traders and become rich and powerful in her own right. It was said that her fortune was worth 40,000 gold livres.20
Thus the Africa the Europeans encountered was not a backward continent where they were able to simply impose their will. When they arrived looking for slaves, they were tapping into an established trade. Indeed, slavery was integral to the fabric of African society and slaves were not necessarily treated as mere chattels. Usually captured in a raid, they were put to work growing crops for the nobility on plantations, mining gold, carrying goods along trading routes, weaving cloth, pounding millet and cooking food. But they also occupied trusted positions within the households of African kings and nobles, acting as administrators, guards and warriors. In the villages, they were often assimilated into the community, caring for children, working in the fields and processing and preparing food alongside the free women of the family.21 Englishmen stationed on the island of Gorée at the mouth of the Gambia River in the 1770s and 1780s remarked that it was ‘impossible to distinguish the [slaves] from free men’.22
‘The Slave Trade’. The text which ran along the bottom of the print read: ‘Lo, the poor captive with distraction wild, views his dear partner torn from his embrace. A different Captain buys his wife and Child, What time can from his Soul such ills erase?’
Those slaves who were surplus to requirements had since the twelfth century been transported across the Sahara Desert to the Muslim world around the Mediterranean basin.23 Now the insatiable demand for a steady stream of miserable captives to feed the maws of the European slave ships created a burgeoning new market. It was the fate of 12–15 million Africans to be sold into the Atlantic slave trade. With the arrival of the Europeans, West Africa was inexorably drawn into the Atlantic economy.
The Atlantic slave trade placed an immense strain on West Africa’s agriculture. The loss of millions of fit and able men and women increased the ratio of dependants to every worker from 65 to 80. The demand for food was particularly intense on the coast. The men and women who were sold to the Europeans were often captured far inland. In Senegal they were purchased 300 miles upriver and brought down to the coast by boat when the water was high in the rainy season. They then had to be held there for several months until the weather and winds were favourable for the transatlantic ships to arrive. Coastal agriculture reoriented to feed the large numbers of captives waiting to embark for America. And once the ships arrived, although they were provisioned with Irish salt beef and butter, cheese and hardtack, they needed to take on substantial quantities of additional food to sustain the slaves on the middle passage across the Atlantic. Even though the importance of the food supply to the workings of the slave trade was rarely acknowledged by the Europeans, the market in foodstuffs that developed in West Africa during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries underpinned the Atlantic trade.24
When famine afflicted the region, it affected the slave trade. In the eighteenth century, West Africa was hit by a prolonged period of dry weather, and periodic droughts sent the cost of food skyrocketing.25 A French company employee at Saint-Louis complained in 1726 that a hogshead of millet that would normally have cost four livres in iron now cost between 30 and 35 livres in coral. The English governor John Hippisley noted in 1766 that famine had increased the cost of corn on the Gold Coast to ‘six times what it is in Ordinary Years’.26 If the Europeans had sufficient stocks of food themselves, famines could work in their favour. Owners would sell off any slaves they could not feed, and the desperate sold themselves into slavery in order to escape death by starvation. When Senegal was hit by famine between August 1715 and February 1716, the French filled five ships with 1,190 slaves. But when their own stocks of food ran low, the Europeans ran into difficulties. In 1750, the French were forced to turn 500 slaves awaiting shipment to the Americas out of the fort at Saint-Louis as they could not feed them.27
Surprisingly, demographic estimates suggest that while the population of West Africa did not grow over the 300 years of the slave trade, it did remain stable.28 The region managed to achieve the remarkable feat of sustaining its population and the slave trade by holding back women: only about a quarter of the Africans transported to the Americas were female. This was not because there was a greater demand for male slaves in the New World, but because there was reluctance in Africa to sell women. Female slaves were used as concubines and so they allowed the men that were left in Africa to maximise the number of children they fathered. In this way they helped to compensate for the loss of young men. Slave birth rates were low, however, and female slaves were valued less for their fertility and more because African food production depended upon their labour. Traditionally, men cleared the land, but once the trees had been chopped down and troublesome roots had been dug up, it was women who prepared the soil, sowed, weeded, harvested and processed the crops.29 While Senegambia had been one of the first parts of Africa to supply slaves to the Europeans, in the first half of the eighteenth century the region became more important as a supplier of food.30
The only way to increase food production was to bring new land under cultivation and employ more slaves to plant, tend and reap the crops. Indeed, in the first half of the eighteenth century, Senegambia probably imported more slaves than it exported.31 They were concentrated near the trading ports and set to work in the fields. La Courbe witnessed an African aristocrat standing ‘in the middle of his field, with his sword at his side and his spear in his hand’ supervising the work of a gang of newly caught naked slaves who wielded their iron hoes as if possessed to the beat of ‘the energetic music of six griots, who played drums and sang’.32 No doubt agricultural productivity in the region was also improved by the exchange of slaves for the flat iron bars the blacksmiths fashioned into hoes and machetes.33
The millet they grew was sold to the European merchants, and as the Europeans moved along the coast, other areas were integrated into the food supply chain.34 In what is now south-eastern Nigeria the cultivation of yams intensified. Ships’ captains did not like to take yams as a food supply for the middle passage because they were bulky and took up too much room in the hold, besides being prone to turn putrid. But Africans from the Bight of Benin preferred yams above all else, and the slaves’ tendency to become ill and refuse to eat when they were given unfamiliar foods placed the Europeans under pressure to take on at least some.35
The African–American sea route also opened a channel whereby a host of American plants and foodstuffs entered West African agriculture.36 It was not just the elite who grew pineapples and experimented with chilli peppers: ordinary African farmers embraced a range of American crops. The two that enabled them to withstand drought and the sustained loss of agricultural workers were maize and manioc (cassava).
The earliest mention of maize in West Africa dates from 1534, when a Portuguese document lists it being loaded onto slave ships as provisions in São Tomé.37 It seems that the Portuguese islands just off the coast were the launch pad into mainland West Africa for many American crops. The Portuguese planted sugar there in the 1470s and later brought over a range of American foodstuffs to feed the slaves who worked on the plantations. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries maize spread along the Gold Coast, where it was referred to as ‘Indian sorghum’ or ‘white man’s grain’. Two crops of maize could be grown in the same time span as one crop of sorghum, and because it ripened more quickly it filled the hungry gap when last year’s reserves had been eaten and before the yam and sorghum could be harvested.38 Maize was not more nutritious than yams but it was easier to store. It was therefore a useful food to give to the slaves when they were being transported across the Atlantic.
Maize never replaced millet in the affections of the Senegambian people: it was grown by farmers in the region to sell to European slave ships.39 However, it eventually displaced both sorghum and millet in Benin, Ghana, Nigeria and Togo, Angola and Cameroon. An Akan proverb in Ghana refers to maize as ‘the chief among foods’, while in Nigeria, Yoruba folk tales feature mysterious maize figures, and a distinctive ‘maize cob roulette’ pattern is used to decorate pottery.40 Today maize is so integrated into African cultures that villagers regard it as an indigenous, ‘traditional’ crop that has always been part of the African landscape, and are surprised to learn that it was introduced to the continent only relatively recently.41
When in 1594 the British privateer Sir Richard Hawkins captured a Portuguese slave ship on its way from Brazil to the Guinea coast, it was carrying a cargo of cassava or manioc as slave provisions.42 The Portuguese had learned to value this Amerindian root in their Brazilian colony. It was drought-resistant, high-yielding and required little labour to cultivate. Its one great disadvantage was that it was incredibly labour-intensive to process. First the roots had to be soaked in water for up to three days. It was then possible to slip off their skins; the Africans sometimes bypassed this stage, which resulted in a dark and bitter flour. Once the skins had been taken off, the roots were set to soak for another twenty-four hours until they were soft enough for the tough filaments to be removed. Then they were grated and the toxic prussic acid squeezed out of the mass of pulp. Once this process was complete, it could be left to dry in the sun and eventually ground into flour. Manioc meal was easily transportable and, if properly stored, lasted for months.43
Manioc was introduced to the Bights of Benin and Biafra and western central Africa by the Portuguese, whose slave-trading activities in the eighteenth century were concentrated on these parts of the coast.44 Around the port of Ouidah in the Bight of Benin domestic slaves were set to work planting cassava, which they processed into flour to sell to the slaving ships.45 In western central Africa manioc spread along slave-trading routes.46 European visitors travelling on the Zaire River in the nineteenth century were struck by the eerie all-female settlements along the riverbanks, with not a man or child in sight. These were slave villages where cassava was grown to supply the trading canoes.47
Africans valued manioc for its resistance to drought, the fact that it was impervious to the depredations of locusts, and because it was easy to store, as the mature roots could be left in the ground for up to two years. Besides fitting in well with African ecology, soft maize and manioc flour suited local cookery. Sorghum and millet were made into breads or porridges, stiff pastes of a polenta-like consistency. Maize could be treated in much the same way. Slave cooks at the British fort of Elmina Castle on the Gold Coast would soak dry maize grains in water before grinding them. They would then mix the maize mush with a little water and leave it to ferment. The soft paste could be wrapped in waxy leaves and baked. The resulting kenkey soon became the staple food along the Gold Coast, and workmen referred to their wages as ‘canky-money’.48 By the end of the eighteenth century, maize had superseded most indigenous grains throughout large parts of West Africa. In an effort to save millet from extinction, the kings of Dahomey reserved it for royal use, thus hoping to turn millet consumption into a statement of high status.49
By deploying female slaves to grow maize and manioc, West African farmers substantially increased the number of available calories in the food supply.50 This meant that West Africa was able to supply the Atlantic slave trade with men and food while also nourishing enough men, women and children to maintain the population. But the exchange of men for maize had tragic consequences. Manioc was transferred into the Old World with the knowledge of how to process it into an edible food. But the introduction of maize was marred by its arrival in Africa without the technique necessary to optimise its nutritional potential. The proteins and B vitamins present in maize occur in an exceptionally indigestible form. Mesoamericans had learned to break the maize down so as to release these nutrients by boiling the grains in a mixture of water and slaked lime made from burnt seashells. Only if left to soak in this mixture for a day or two before it was ground did maize became a nutritionally satisfactory food. As early as 1600, a Dutch visitor to the Gold Coast noticed that those who relied on maize for their staple food developed ‘scabs and itch… [and] are plagued with great boils’, symptoms of pellagra, or niacin deficiency.51 West African children weaned only on maize porridge would apparently receive plenty to eat but became apathetic and irritable, a condition their mothersnamed kwashiorkor. This is now recognised as a disease caused by protein deficiency. Thus, the slave trade bequeathed to Africa a form of hidden malnutrition that was to plague the continent in the following centuries.