What was life like in Africa before there were slaves?
Mally has the beginnings of a good answer, with a few changes. Yes, slavery had existed in Africa for centuries before the Portuguese showed up (and this is why the nations of Africa accepted the slave trade without uniting to fight it), but the indigenous form of slavery was not exactly the same as what was brought in by the Europeans. African slavery had become sort of like Serfdom in Russia, the enforced labor was for the payment of debts and the result of losses in warfare. The main change the Europeans brought into slavery in Africa was they figured out how to use slavery as a weapon of conquest and national destruction. Specifically, a European trading company would introduce western technology such as cloth, jewelry, tools and most importantly guns (which either were unavailable in Africa or were so much cheaper that Aficans could not compete with them). Then the Europeans would announce that they would only accept SLAVES in exchange for the new products that had displaced the i
