KONKOMBA HISTORY, CULTURE, RELIGION, ECONOMY

While the slave trade devastated the peasantry who saw their children, and especially their daughters, taken away by brigands or armed bands to be sold to dealers, it enriched the cabessairres (appointed by local kings to negotiate with traders ) and the agents and traders in the towns as well as the nobility, the battle-hardened soldiers and the sycophants attached to the royal courts. By a perversion of memory, the sumptuousness of the plundering kings and their cabessaires has left its mark on the area in its remembrance of the flourishing slave trade and the glories of the past, while the memory of their peasant victims has been effaced by their poverty.

Claude Meillassoux, The Slave Route, UNESCO