**3.3 RQ3: What are the Sources, Transit, or Destination Points of Slavery in Africa?**

A. Sources and destination points of slavery

Sources of the slave trade imply the avenues through which traffickers obtain their supply of human beings for slavery or enslavement. Many of the enslaved people transported to the New World (United States, Brazil, and many Caribbean islands) originated from Africa, specifically from Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Mali; West-Central Africa, including Angola, Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gabon; and West African nations - Ghana, Ivory Coast, the Bight of Biafra (including parts of present-day eastern Nigeria and Cameroon), an inlet of the Atlantic on Africa's western coast that was a hub of extensive slave-dealing operations.


A summary of the sources and destination points include the following:

**Table 1.** *Elements of human trafficking.*

	- i. From developing nations/continents to industrialized nations/ continents: This is usually from developing nations; they are transported and harbored through a variety of places to ultimately get them to the destination point and then sell them into servitude in industrialized nations. The slave trades out of Africa to Europe and the United States represent one of the most significant forced migrations and enslavement in history [27]. The main destination points for traditional slave trading were Brazil (45%), the Caribbean (22%), the British and French (10%), the Spanish Americas (12%), and North America (<4%) [27, 28]. Italy and Arabian nations are mostly the destination points for modern-day slavery [29, 30].
	- ii. *Poor Country to another poor country:*

**Table 2** presents the embankment points during the slave trade era' in Africa, especially from West-Central Africa (45%), Benin (16%), Biafra (13%), the Gold Coast (10%), and Senegambia (6%) as obtained from the slave voyages website and culled from Bertocchi [27].

The transportation routes for slave movement between 1400 and 1900 were the trans-Saharan, Indian Ocean, Red Sea, and trans-Atlantic slave trades.

i. *The Indian ocean slave trade*

This entails the embarkment of slaves from East Africa delivered to the Middle East and various parts of Asia — India and plantation islands in the Indian Ocean [32]. During this period, more women were embarked as slaves compared to their male counterparts [33–36].

ii. *The red sea slave trades*

The Red Sea slave trade was basically the embarkment of slaves from inland ethnic regions close to the Red Sea to the Middle East and India [32]. Some of the slaves captured from sub-Saharan Africa (mainly Zanj) and the Caucasus (mainly Circassians) were engaged as sex slaves in certain regions of the Middle East up until the twentieth century. About 1.25 million slaves were also captured and shipped from Western Europe by the Barbary Pirates between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries [18].



*Embarkment points for slaves from Africa.*

*Twenty-First Century Slavery: A Psychosocial Exploration of Human Trafficking, Migrant… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.113170*

### iii. *The trans-Saharan slave trades*

The trans-Saharan slave trade embarked slaves from the sub-Saharan desert to North Africa [32].

#### iv. *The trans-Atlantic slave trade*

Between 1529 and 1850, more than 12 million Africans (young men and women) were embarked, as slaves mostly from West, West-Central, and East African coasts to work in European colonies and plantations in the Americas. They were forced to undertake the Middle Passage journey across the Atlantic Ocean [37–39]. The ratio of males who embarked during this period was larger than their female counterparts [33–36].

Slave embarkment got to its peak between 1780 and 1790, with more than 80,000 slaves per year being transported from Africa [38]. This was further intensified during the nineteenth century with the embarkment of between three to four million people annually (**Table 3**) [40].

**Table 4** shows that the largest proportion of enslaved persons instead of slaves shipped from Africa across the Atlantic was transported to the Eastern coast of Latin America and the Caribbean, especially Haiti and Jamaica.

### v. *Sources and destination points of modern-day slavery*

Sources of trafficked persons in the modern-day slave trade are Thailand, China, Nigeria, Albania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine. With modern-day slavery, the most common destinations for victims of human trafficking are Thailand, Japan, Israel, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Turkey, and the United States.
