NEW in 2004. Akosua Adoma Perbi, A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana from the 15th to the 19th Century (ISBN 9988-550-32-4),  Sub-Saharan Publishers, P O Box 358, Accra, Ghana.

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• Manning, Patrick, Slavery and African Life, Cambridge, 1990
  • Chapter 5: The economics and morality of slave supply.
    
    86    Why did Africans supply slaves for sale, either on domestic or intercontinental markets? . . . .I will discuss the limits of African knowledge, the constraints of social institutions, the pressures of economic logic and the dilemmas of African moral judgment.
    
    87    Africans . . . did not then accept the notion of a common African identity . . . there existed no possible realistic basis for . . . a vision of African unity in the early days of the slave trade.
    
    88    the only principles on which Africans opposed slavery were narrow self-interest of a family, ethnic group, or state.
    
    91    the captive was desocialized, depersonalized, degendered and decivilized upon capture. . . He or she was held within a family group, but had no rights: slaves became and remained the other.
    
    92    Trade in slaves . . . required the support and protection of political authorities.   . . .  in Asante . . ., the kings exercised rights and responsibilities over all slaves, but they did not own all the slaves within their realms.
    
    100    On the one hand the slave trade served the interests of an elite.  The slave-trading elite grasped the best cloths and liquor, the most prestigious luxury goods, and most of the firearms.  . . . On the other hand, the slave trade involved all levels of society.
    
    101    African complicity in the slave trade systematically reinforced the primacy of narrow self-interest and of short-term economic calculations.
    
    102    . . . slave raiders, slave merchants, and slave owners devised ways to distance themselves from the fact that they were dealing in bodies for cash. . . . it is impossible to explain African slavery without emphasis on the role of money.
    
    107    enslavement can be seen as a disease which, once launched on its course, might continue to spread even after the prices of slaves had declined to the point where it became unprofitable.
    
    109    In the wake of imperialistic condemnation of slavery and of African life generally, the memory of African sacrifice to the evolving Atlantic economy was lost. That memory was a casualty of colonization. It was lost not only to the European colonizers and to inhabitants of the New World, but to many of the colonized in Africa.
    
    Chapter 6: Patterns of Slave Life
    
    124    . . . slavery was corruption: it involved theft, bribery, and exercise of brute force as well as ruses.  Slavery may thus be seen as one source of precolonial origins for modern corruption. The whole story of corruption involves weaving together flaws inherent in African society, the influence of the slave trade, the influence of colonial rule, and the pressures of the mid-twentieth century.

OTHER REFERENCES

Fage, J. D., Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Context of West African History, Jour Afr Hist X 3 1969 393-404

Fynn, J.K., Oral Traditions of Fante States No. 4 Edina (Elmina)

Fynn, J.K., The Structure of Greater Asante - Another View JHSG XV(1) 1974

Klein, A. Norman, West African Unfree Labor Before and After the Rise of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Lovejoy, Paul (ed), The Ideology of Slavery in Africa, Beverly Hills 1981

Miers, Suzanne and Igor Kopytoff (eds), Slavery in Africa, Madison Wisconsin 1977

Ogot, Heinemann and J E Inikori, Africa in World History: the export slave trade from Africa and the emergence of the Atlantic economic order

Perbi, Akosua Adoma, A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana from the  15th to the 19th Century,  Sub-Saharan Publishers, P O Box 358, Accra, Ghana. 2004 ISBN 9988-550-32-4

Reynolds, Edward, Trade and Economic Changes in the Gold Coast 1807-1874, Longmans, 1974

Rodney, Walter A, History of the Upper Guinea Coast, OUP 1970

Singleton, Theresa A, The Slave Trade Remembered On The Former Gold And Slave Coasts, Slavery & Abolition 1999 20(1) 150-169