Istwa Nou

Upper Guinea is the stretch of West African coast running from Senegambia down past Sierra Leone. It supplied roughly 12 percent of everyone embarked in the Atlantic slave trade, and it accounts for more than 40 percent of every shipboard rebellion in the record. West Central Africa, which supplied a far larger share of captives than any other region, produced proportionally far fewer risings. The gap is too wide to be an accident of what survived in the archives, and it has been argued over since it was first measured. Distance explains part of it, since ships on that coast worked close to shores their captives could recognise. The political condition of the region is likely the rest. Where people are enslaved through war, the hold fills with men who have fought alongside each other and know how to organise, and organisation is what a rising on a ship requires. The people in the hold were never interchangeable, and the men who bought and shipped them understood that well enough to price it.