Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses slavery, abuse, and suicide. This guide uses the word “slave” in quotation only.

“Native-born slaves, he observed, held ‘the Africans in the utmost contempt, stiling them, ‘salt-water Negroes,’ and ‘Guiney birds.’’”

American-born enslaved people referred to new arrivals from Africa using the pejorative term “Salt-water Negroes.” Here the author uses the term to introduce her book, which traces the journey of enslaved African people from the Gold Coast to America and retells the narrative from the perspective of the forced African migrants. In this retelling, we see how “saltwater slaves” established communities that allowed for generations of American-born enslaved people to develop and flourish.

“Understanding of how and why a region that had been an importer of people from elsewhere became an exporter of its own people requires analysis of the relation between emergent institutions of political authority and the Atlantic market economy, by then firmly rooted in the Gold Coast.”

This quote describes the roots of the Gold Coast’s participation in the Atlantic trade of enslaved people. Several states were vying for power within the Gold Coast region, and as such, there was an increased number of prisoners of war. Those in power saw an opportunity in the Atlantic market trade to use their prisoners to obtain firearms and other European goods that would give them an edge in the conflict for political control.

“The human spoils of war produced two forms of wealth: If assimilated as slave laborers and wives, war captives supplied productive and reproductive labor; alternatively, if disposed of through sale, war captives could be made into profitable commodities and exchanged for European goods on the Atlantic coast.”

Commodification is a theme that runs through the book, and here we see the commodification of African prisoners of war by other Africans. These individuals would come to supply the Atlantic trade of enslaved people through their power consolidation in the