The Atlantic slave trade could not have operated on the scale it did without an extensive network of African intermediaries who moved enslaved people from the interior to the coast. These middlemen, working within and between African kingdoms, were essential to the functioning of the trade.
European traders were generally confined to coastal fortresses and could not safely venture into the interior. They depended entirely on African partners to supply them with enslaved people. Those partners ranged from the rulers of powerful kingdoms like Dahomey and Ashanti, who organised large-scale military raids, to smaller-scale traders who purchased enslaved people in interior markets and walked them to the coast.
The coastal trading networks were sophisticated commercial operations. African merchants negotiated prices, managed transport, provided food and water for captives on the march to the coast, and organised the holding facilities where enslaved people waited for ships. They understood the European market and adjusted their supply accordingly. When European demand increased, African supply networks expanded to meet it.
This commercial relationship was not one of powerless Africans coerced by powerful Europeans. At the coast, African rulers often held considerable leverage. They could refuse to sell to particular European traders, play competing European nations off against each other, and impose their own terms on transactions. European traders who offended powerful African rulers could find themselves excluded from trade entirely.
The existence of this network matters for the reparations argument because it means the Atlantic slave trade was a genuinely collaborative enterprise between European buyers and African sellers. Both parties profited. Both parties bear moral responsibility. A reparations framework that places all responsibility on European governments while ignoring the African side of this transaction is not a serious historical or moral accounting.
