European-African collisions began more than a thousand years before Atlantic slavery.

Evidence

Because one’s sense of the past is so often conceptually distorted by a consciousness whose natural world of things and relationships is the present, it is important to recall that the collisions of the Black and white “races” began long before the events of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that prefigured modern African slavery. The obliteration of the African past from European consciousness was the culmination of a process a thousand years long and one at the root of European historical identity. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 434