The African Slave Trade

What do you think?

Notes: Slavery Slavery is when people are considered to be the property of another person. The African Slave Trade was a mass involuntary migration of Africans to the Americas.

Read and annotate Although other people, both white and Native American, have been held as slaves in North America, the experience of the African people who were forced to come to North America as slaves was more unusual, because there are more slaves living in the new countries they were being brought to than natives or European settlers.

The Middle Passage

Notes The Triangular Trade is the name given to the trading of goods and slaves between Europe, Africa and the Americas. The Middle Passage was the specific route from Africa to the Americas that the slaves were taken on. Coastal African states would capture and sell their enemies – the interior African states – to the Europeans. Interdependence is when two groups need each other and lean on each other to get what they both want. Europeans wanted slaves and raw goods, Africans wanted gold and supplies.

Together! For weeks, months, sometimes as long as a year, captured Africans waited in the dungeons of the slave factories scattered along Africa's western coast. They had already made the long, difficult journey from Africa's interior to the coast -- but just barely. Out of the roughly 20 million who were taken from their homes and sold into slavery, half didn't complete the journey to the African coast, most of those dying along the way.

Now You! Read and annotate with your partner!

Exit Ticket (answer on your index card!) 1.What was the Great Dying? 2.Which continents were involved in the African Slave Trade? 3.How do you know that the slave trade was involuntary? 4.What is the most important fact you learned about the African Slave Trade today?