Istwa Nou

The Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin, roughly the coasts of modern Ghana, Togo, Benin and western Nigeria, together supplied about a quarter of all the people carried across the Atlantic in the slave trade. The Gold Coast earned its European name from what it sold first. Gold brought the Portuguese there in the fifteenth century and paid for the castles built along that shore. After 1700 the balance turned, and ports such as Anomabu and Cape Coast Castle became among the busiest embarkation points on the continent. The Bight of Benin, working through Ouidah and later Lagos, remained one of the largest suppliers to the Americas through the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth. The two coasts ended differently. Gold Coast shipments were largely shut down by the early 1820s, once British cruisers were enforcing abolition from forts the British already held there, while Ouidah and Lagos went on selling for another forty years.