JOEL 3:3 AND REV 11:9-10 (WINE AS GIFTS IN THE SLAVE TRADE)

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Joel 3:3 And they have cast lots for my people; and have given a boy for an harlot, and sold a girl for wine, that they might drink.

Rev 11:9 And they of the people and kindreds and tongues and nations shall see their dead bodies three days and an half, and shall not suffer their dead bodies to be put in graves. 10And they of the people and kindreds and tongues and nations shall see their dead bodies three days and an half, and shall not suffer their dead bodies to be put in graves.

Rum and other alcoholic beverages played a crucial role in the African slave trade. English slave trader John Atkins (cited in Craton, Walvin, and Wright 1976:28) described the specific demands at different trading regions, but believed alcohol was "everywhere called for." African historian Lynn Pan (1975:7) argued that the only exception to the alcohol-for-slaves model was in the northern stretches of the slave trade where Islam was strongly entrenched. Yet, even in Muslim controlled areas, alcohol use and the alcohol trade were strong. For example, in the early sixteenth century, Portuguese traveler Valentim Fernandes (1506-1510:16-18) described the availability of numerous types of locally made wine in the Senegal region, including wine made from honey, grains, and palm sap. According to Fernandes, the Wolofs, a partially Muslim group from the Senegal region, "are drunkards who derive great pleasure from our wine."

Much of the alcohol introduced into the African trades entered in the context of gift giving. European slave traders were expected to provide alcoholic beverages to all those involved in the securing slaves. Slave trader William Bosman's guidelines for the Dutch West India Company included regulations that the ship's captain make daily presentations of brandy to the King and the principal traders (cited in Postma 1990:365). The Dutch may have been to blame for what many traders considered a "disagreeable and burdensome custom." According to slave trader John Barbot,

Their design at first was only to draw off the Blacks from trading with Portugueses; but those having once found the sweet, could never be broke of it, tho' the Portugueses were actually expelled from all the places of trade they had been possessed of on the coast; but it became an inviolable custom for all Europeans. (Barbot 1746:260)

Dashee, dassy, and bizy became standard terms along the African coasts for gifts of alcohol dispensed prior to trading (Atkins 1735 cited in Craton, Walvin, and Wright 1976:32; Barbot 1746:142; Rodney 1970:180). According to Atkins (1735 cited in Craton, Walvin, and Wright 1976:32) the African trader "never cares to treat with dry Lips." Bosman (1705:404) reported that the Africans at Whydah were great lovers of strong liquors, who expected their dassy, and "he that intends to Trade here, must humour them herein, or he shall not get one Tooth [elephant tusk]." Gift giving, which often involved elaborate rules, was implemented to appease state leaders and integrate even peripheral African social groups into the Atlantic trade (Thornton 1992:66-67).

Rum and other alcoholic beverages also entered Africa as part of larger trading packages. David Eltis and Lawrence Jennings (1988:948) estimated that in the decade of the 1680s, alcohol represented 12.5% of West African imports and that, a century later, alcohol represented 9.7% (Table #1). This ancillary use of alcohol is evident among all major slave trading nations. In the 1720s, brandy was reported to be one of the principal commodities imported by the French at the slave trading port at Whydah and documents of the Dutch Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie show that more than 10 percent of trading packages consisted of alcoholic beverages (Saugera 1995:247; Law 1991:202; Postma 1990:104). By the late eighteenth century, slave traders from New England and Brazil were each annually exporting about 300,000 gallons of rum to West and West Central Africa (Pan 1975:8; Williams 1944:80; McCusker 1989:492-497; Curto 1996).

The modern western perception of alcohol as a profane fluid has often been evoked to amplify the insidiousness of European slave trading. According to Cuban historian Fernando Ortiz (1947:25), rum "was always the cargo for the slaver's return trip, for with it slaves were bought, local chieftains bribed, and the African tribes corrupted and weakened." Historian Eric Williams wrote,

Rum was an essential part of the cargo of the slave ship, particularly the colonial American slave ship. No slave trader could afford to dispense with a cargo of rum. It was profitable to spread the taste for liquor on the coast. The Negro dealers were plied with it, were induced to drink till they lost their reason, and then the bargain was struck. (Williams 1944:78)

Modern attitudes about the vulgarity of alcoholic beverages have helped magnify the evils of the slave trade. But the reality of rum's part in the trade is more mundane than the images so passionately depicted. West and West Central Africans were familiar with the potentially disastrous effects of excessive alcohol use prior to European intervention, which precluded the type of social devastation that accompanied the alcohol trade to Native Americans in North America.