Originally Posted by Tark

You're kidding right? ever stopped to think why the blacks would do that? The colonist came into africa(and no i dont mean it in the litteral way it took lots of time for them to actually phisically go into the middle of africa) and basicly started controling the black with land, money and power. Sort of corupting them from the start.

Africans would have slaves for themselfs capturing enemy tribesmen but on a way smaller scale and keping them in there respective regions...but the only reason why slavery got so big is that the European forced them to sell them for overseas markets. They would sell them to the european is because they had to in order to keep there land. Its at a certain point became Sell Slaves to European nations or you will become the slave. Obviously the choice isint hard to make.

Yes some tribes becam richer but blamin the Africans for the downfall of it civilisation is compleatly absurd!

Originally Posted by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_slave_trade

Source of slaves

All three slave-trading routes tapped into local trading patterns. Europeans or Arabs in Africa very rarely mounted expeditions to capture slaves. Lack of people and the prevalence of disease prevented any widespread gathering of slaves by Europeans and other non-Africans. Local rulers were very rarely open to allowing groups of armed foreigners to enter their lands.[10] It was far easier and more common to make use of existing African middlemen and slave traders. Slavery has been present in Africa for millennia, and still is today even with children, though some historians prefer to describe African slavery as feudalism, arguing it was more like the system that controlled the peasantry of Western Europe during the Middle Ages or Russia into the 19th century than slavery as it was practiced in the Americas.[11]

The slaves came from many different sources. About half came from the societies that sold them. These might be criminals, heretics, the mentally ill, the indebted and any others that had fallen out of favour with the rulers. Little is known about the details of theses practices before the arrival of Europeans, and so it is difficult to tell if the number of people considered as undesirables was artificially increased to provide more slaves for export. It is believed that capital punishment in the region nearly disappeared since prisoners became far too valuable to dispose of in such a way.[12]

Another source of slaves, comprising about half the total, came from military conquests of other states or tribes. It has long been contended that the slave trade greatly increased violence and warfare in the region due to the pursuit of slaves, but it is hard to provide evidence to prove this; warfare was certainly common even before slave hunting had added such an extra inducement.[13]

For the Atlantic slave trade, captives were purchased from slave dealers in West African regions known as the Slave Coast, Gold Coast, and Côte d'Ivoire were sold into slavery as a result of a defeat in warfare. In the Bight of Biafra near modern-day Senegal and Benin, some African kings sold their captives locally and later to European slave traders for goods such as metal cookware, rum, livestock, and seed grain. Previous to the voyage, the victims were held in "slave castles" and deep pits where many died from multiple illnesses and malnutrition. Conditions were even worse in the Middle Passage across the Atlantic where up to a third of the slaves died en route.