The author writes that the Atlantic slave trade "brought ruin to West Africa." Why do you think Atlantic/slave

trade was such a disaster for West Africa even though slavery had already existed on the continent for centuries? What were key differences in the two

types of slavery?

The Atlantic slave trade was the process by which European powers bought slaves in the West African nations in exchange for small goods, and moved these slaves to their colonies in America. Thus, Africans who were subjected to slavery had to cross the Atlantic Ocean and there they would be forced to work in conditions of extreme violence.

Slavery in West Africa was a phenomenon that already existed prior to the arrival of Europeans. There, the tribal kings who managed to subdue other peoples used the enemy ex-combatants and other men of those tribes as slaves in their kingdoms. With the arrival of the Europeans, the objective of slavery only changed, since now these tribal chiefs benefited through trade and not through the direct use of slave labor. Even so, from the arrival of the Europeans, this practice became widespread, due to the economic and political importance that it had for these tribal chiefs and kings. Thus, campaigns for slaves whose ultimate goal was to enrich African kings through the sale of these people began to take place. In this way, the transatlantic slave trade had an enormous impact on the demographic component of these populations, since a very high percentage of their men were taken as slaves, with which the population of these groups tended to decrease markedly.

A great difference between both types of slavery was that, at the beginning, tribal chiefs took as slaves those people who had been defeated in battle, with which slavery had an ideological component based on submission, and not on the concept of race or ethnicity that was the ideological component that sustained slavery exercised by Europeans.