Slave exports strained African states’ supply capacity within decades of their start

Evidence

For Angola, as early as 1530, Jan Vansina calculates, “the annual export figures were from four to five thousand slaves a year—and if there were no more, this was due only to the lack of ships to carry them.” No wonder Affonso, the Catholic king of the Kongo and collaborator in the trade with the Portuguese Crown, had been shaken enough to write to his “partners” in 1526: “There are many traders in all corners of the country. Every day people are enslaved and kidnapped, even nobles, even members of the king’s own family.” It seems the trade was already exceeding the boundaries of its commercial origins. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 560

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to accounts of African state participation/complicity in the slave trade, relevant to the reader’s arc on the Black radical tradition’s origins and the entanglement of African rulers like Affonso.