The European slave trade grew beyond governing control almost from its start

Evidence

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 Robinson’s core question of how African ruling-class collaboration became self-consuming, echoing the pattern of European ‘partners’ outgrowing their African hosts. — connects to: Linnaean botany’s founding collections depended on slave-based world trade — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 766
• QUESTION: When did African rulers realize collaboration would not stop at their own elites being swept into the trade, and how did the Black radical tradition later read this betrayal?