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Dept. of Black Studies

				The Europeans enslaved the Antilles Indians wherever they could. This caused their rapid disappearance and they were therefore not as available for slave labor. Thanks to initiative of a Spanish priest (Bartholomew de Las Casas), the solution to this dearth of man power was found in the large scale importation of slaves from Africa. These slaves came from all parts of the West coast of that continent, from the mouth of the Senegal river to the Cape of Good Hope, but especially from the Eastern Guinea coast (today's Ghana, Togo, Dahomey, and Nigeria coast) and the Congo-Angola coastal region. Africa at this time was at a decisive turn of its history. Since the Portuguese navigators succeeded in diverting the flow of the gold trade, which made the richness and fame of the great Sudanese Empires, the economy of the interior states gradually fizzled out. The last blow being struck in 1591 with the destruction of the Songhai Empire by a Moroccan army. The coastal states the rose in importance , particularly in Eastern Guinea. While the Atlantic trade at first enriched the coastal states, it soon forced these newly formed Kingdoms to rapidly become esclavagist, because of the above mentioned needs in the developing American states. War being the best way to obtain slaves to be sold to Europeans, a permanent and general state of conflict, disunity and chaos resulted for the next centuries, and all hopes of progress for Africa was put to an end. On the coast of Eastern Guinea, the rise of Ashantee and Dahomey Kingdoms long preceded Columbus' time. Dahomey, whose great period was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was to give Haiti its main, though unofficial religion - the Voodoo and play an important part in the development of its Creole language. Even today, the language of Dahomey is still the ritual language of Voodoo priests. In that time, a very important center of civilization existed in the area of the Yoruba and Edo speaking countries. Corresponding approximately to the former southwestern state of Nigeria, they were divided in kingdoms among which were Oyo, Ife, and Benin. Their societies were basically agricultural but there was also a varied and important production in handicrafts. There were extensive cities and prosperous trade, which found a ready means of exchange in the cowry shell currency. Their culture originated from the city of Ife, whose art of terra-cotta and brass beads, is world famous as one of the summits of mondial art. The Angola-Congo coast in 1500 was on the verge of having the only experience of a mixed Afro-European culture: the kingdom of Congo, christianized by the Portuguese. But the attempt was ephemeral. Facing the esclavagist enterprises of the Sao-Tome slave dealers, the Congolese expelled the Portuguese at the beginning of the 17th century. It must be noted that the places of origin of the Americas' Black slaves (North, Central, South and West Indies) far from being primitive, had an evolved civilization of their own. Black Africa, in the West African interior and the East coast, knew the written culture in Arabic and Swahili, as early as the 14th century. On the West coast, the culture was more oral even though a form of written literature can also be found. That last character, together with the religious importance of mask in the statuary, and of the cultural importance music and dance as a vehicle for cultural information, was perpetuated in the West Indies. Thus, in Columbus' time some of the main characters of the modern West Indies could be foreseen. In the tragedy that will follow Columbus arrival in the new world, the Europeans have the leading part. The technological superiority of European developing states coupled with their greed swiftly overcame local Indian societies. It even overtook African societies which at the onset worked in association with them. But the tragedy of slavery, in its forceful transfer of African was to give the "new world" its most durable specificity.