ABSTRACT
Europe’s early motivation for involvement in Africa was primarily economic. The Portuguese were the fi rst to arrive in Africa in the latter part of the fi fteenth century and were concerned to trade, by leave of the local kings, in the commodities which the continent had to offer; by the early part of the sixteenth century they had built up a substantial pattern of trade across the Sahara Desert between Europe and the several kingdoms of West Africa. Various stretches of the West African coast were indeed named after the commodities in which this trade was conducted – the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast. This trade, though initiated by the Portuguese, was later joined by the other powers of Europe and was, for 250 years after the middle of the sixteenth century, exceedingly profi table for all concerned, although the price of this was paid by Africans in terms of sheer brutality, enforced exile from their homeland and family separation. Not until the fi rst part of the nineteenth century was this trade brought to an end but, sadly, by that time a pattern had been set for the treatment of Blacks by Whites which was to endure in a rather different form far into the twentieth century.
