![[Canaviais_Sao_Paulo_01_2008_06.jpg]] *Sugar cane* Sugar cane was first developed in the islands of Southeast Asia. Arab traders brought the plant to the Middle East, where Europeans discovered sugar during the crusades and developed a taste for it. Sugar was at first considered an exotic medicinal, but once the Portuguese and Spanish began cultivating cane on the Madeiras and Canary Islands, a European addiction to sugar soon began, replacing honey as the region's main sweetener. ![[ElMina_AtlasBlaeuvanderHem 1.jpg]] *[Elmina Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmina_Castle "Elmina Castle") in the [Guinea coast](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea_\(region\) "Guinea (region)"), present-day [Ghana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghana "Ghana"), was built in 1482 by Portuguese traders and was the first European-slave trading post in Sub-Saharan Africa* Eventually, more than two thirds of all enslaved Africans in the Western Hemisphere were involved in cultivating, harvesting, and processing sugar cane in Brazil and the Caribbean. Sugar was such a lucrative cash crop for plantation owners, that they would import enslaved Africans, work them to death in three to five years, and bring in more. We will examine this history in a later chapter. ![[Manikongo.jpg]] *King Afonso I of Kongo* The Portuguese established the first European colony in sub-Saharan Africa in 1575, which they called Angola, south of the powerful Kongo kingdom on the West African coast. The Kongolese royal family had converted to Christianity and the king tried to negotiate as a peer with the rulers of Portugal. King Afonso was not able to prevent Portuguese slave traders from indiscriminately taking people with high social status in his kingdom as slaves. Generally only criminals and war captives were sold to foreign slavers, not the sons of noblemen or the king’s relatives. It is unclear whether King Afonso tried to ban all trade in slaves, or whether he compromised to avoid antagonizing his European allies. Either way, his ban was ignored and the Portuguese carried off more and more slaves to their sugar plantations on the islands and in Brazil. ![[19068.jpg]] Occasionally the Iberians tried to claim that they were doing Africans a favor by Christianizing them. But conditions on sugar plantations were so harsh that slaves typically only survived a few years. So their conversions were not so much to prepare them for a life as Christians, but to save their souls when they died from overwork and malnutrition. Over the next several centuries, nearly six times more Africans were forcibly sent to the Americas than Europeans who went willingly. In all, about 16 million Africans were shipped to the Americas in chains. About 4 million died on the way and were thrown overboard into the Atlantic. ​ ----- Next: [[3.19 - Primary Source 1 - Kongo Slavery]] Back: [[3.17 - Slavery]]