slavers. Second, as a consequence but, paradoxically, in
opposition to the first process, warring and slaving
ultimately destroyed whatever order and legitimate state
authority existed in sub-Saharan Africa. Apart from warfare,
slaves were also kidnapped and captured by small-scale
raiding. The law also became a tool of enslavement. No
matter what crime you committed, the penalty was slavery.
The English merchant Francis Moore observed the
consequences of this along the Senegambia coast of West
Africa in the 1730s:
Since this slave trade has been us’d, all
punishments are changed into slavery; there
being an advantage on such condemnations,
they strain for crimes very hard, in order to
get the benefit of selling the criminal. Not only
murder, theft and adultery, are punished by
selling the criminal for slave, but every trifling
case is punished in the same manner.
Institutions, even religious ones, became perverted by
the desire to capture and sell slaves. One example is the
famous oracle at Arochukwa, in eastern Nigeria. The oracle
was widely believed to speak for a prominent deity in the
region respected by the major local ethnic groups, the Ijaw,
the Ibibio, and the Igbo. The oracle was approached to
settle disputes and adjudicate on disagreements. Plaintiffs
who traveled to Arochukwa to face the oracle had to
descend from the town into a gorge of the Cross River,
where the oracle was housed in a tall cave, the front of
which was lined with human skulls. The priests of the
oracle, in league with the Aro slavers and merchants, would
dispense the decision of the oracle. Often this involved
people being “swallowed” by the oracle, which actually
meant that once they had passed through the cave, they
were led away down the Cross River and to the waiting
ships of the Europeans. This process in which all laws and
customs were distorted and broken to capture slaves and
more slaves had devastating effects on political
centralization, though in some places it did lead to the rise
of powerful states whose main raison d’être was raiding
and slaving. The Kingdom of Kongo itself was probably the