Compelling evidence of massive African resistance to Atlantic slavery can be found from the very onset of the European colonial arrival on the con-tinent. When the Portuguese gained control of the equatorial island of São Tomé in 1486 they attempted to turn it into a sugar producing colony, with the intensive use of African captive labor. The island served as a base for the re-export of captured African men and women to the Americas.
The sugar production system was disrupted by repeated conflicts among slave merchants, white and mixed-race planters, and by the significant pattern of flight among black captives. These maroons were greatly feared by the colonial authorities and eventually entrenched themselves in fortified settlements deep in the forests. Their consistent and repeated attacks on isolated farms forced the Portuguese to abandon their plans to bring more European settlers to São Tomé.
It was clear to African populations that self-reliance was the only way to survive encroachments from predatory imperial states, armies with superior firepower and equipment, and powerful slave traders and raiders.
For the colonizers, worse still was to come. In 1595 a revolt on São Tomé erupted among the black captives under the leadership of a charismatic figure named Amador. More than half of the enslaved population (estimated at around 10,000 to 12,000) joined the movement, which was one of the first and largest revolts of this type in Atlantic history. The uprising lasted three weeks and led to the massacre of dozens of white and mixed race settlers and widespread damage to sugar plantations. All the black captives in liberated territories were emancipated, and Amador was proclaimed king.
His rebels tried to storm the capital with 5,000 men but were eventually defeated. Yet the insurgents won a moral victory: slave- based sugar production was abandoned on the island in the aftermath of the rebellion, and Amador is now one of São Tomé’s cherished national heroes.
This was not an isolated example in these early stages. Europeans who attempted to travel into the African interior to capture men and women encountered stiff resistance. The sixteenth-century slaver Sir John Hawkins, one of England’s first traders in human captives, recounted how 160 of his crew were cut down at Cape Verde, some 800 kilometers off the west African coast, in the late 1500s by local Africans who fired “invenomed arrows” at them.
It was clear to African populations that self-reliance was the only way to survive encroachments from predatory imperial states, armies with superior firepower and equipment, and powerful slave traders and raiders. Those populations thus developed a range of defensive mechanisms to keep themselves out of harm’s way.
In many respects the most effective (and rational) response was to adopt a visceral suspicion of foreigners, and some communities took this xenophobia to its ultimate conclusion. For example, the Nones, who lived in the forested areas around Thies in Senegambia, fiercely resisted attempts to subdue them and developed the habit of shooting at strangers, especially if they happened to be white. Another community of Sereer people in the region were described by a local missionary as passionate defenders of their liberty and independence, who believed that slavery was a “crime” and did everything to protect their people from being kidnapped in their “little republic of Ndieghem.”
The Lobi and Dagara of Burkina Faso and northern Ghana developed similar reputations. Further south, shipwrecked sailors were well advised to steer clear of the Diola of the Casamance, who would kill them on sight—until the Diola found out that the sailors could be ransomed.
One of the most common forms of self defense was through the organization of local militias. Writing in the eighteenth century about his native Igboland (in today’s southeastern Nigeria), where African slave raiders were a constant menace, the anti-slavery campaigner Olaudah Equiano recalled: “Our whole district is a kind of militia: on a certain signal given, such as the firing of a gun at night, they all rise in arms and rush upon their enemy.”
The main local slave traders in the region were the Aro people, in southeastern Igboland, assisted by Abam mercenaries who travelled inland to kidnap villagers and sell them into transatlantic slavery. Against them, all young men went through extensive training in militias during their adolescent years, learning to use “firearms, bows and arrows, broad two-edged swords and javelins”—a training that many put to use in acts of resistance in the New World, and which their descendants still actively maintained a century later.
Roadblocks were mounted and expected hideouts of assailants in forested areas were monitored. Some communities met the raiders with stones, to the consternation of the slavers, who seemed unprepared to face such opposition. One place still bears the Aro nickname (one can sense the indignation) “those who throw stones at us.” The populations in Akwa (also in southeastern Igboland) formed vigilante groups armed with rifles, built towers where sentinels were posted, and their shots would alert villagers if raiders came within sight.
Faced with increasing attacks from slavers, other communities came together in defensive alliances. One of the most enduring was the kingdom of So, initially formed by the regrouping of seven kingdoms seeking to escape raiding expeditions from Cotonou and Porto-Novo in the Bight of Benin (“So” meant rifle or weapon).
Established in the sixteenth century, So developed several resistance camps in the hinterland, where militias were trained to repel attacks from Portuguese slavers and their local African allies. In the early eighteenth century, the kingdom was led by Linze I, a powerful martial figure who directed a sophisticated network of anti-slavery military patrols on the Wewe river, the main waterway used by regional slave-raiding parties to travel up and down from the Atlantic coast. Linze’s patrols were called “Achti” (“you are without life”), and they were manned by entranced warriors armed with poisonous javelins.
The Ebiri militia defeated their assailants decisively, and this victory thereafter remained an integral part of their collective identity, so much so that they named their settlement Igbo Erughi, “the town the Aro could not capture.”
These fighters carried out their patrolling duties chanting religious hymns to the beat of drums and gongs. They intercepted boats carrying captives, seized their crew and weapons, and ended the lives of many slavers. One of their war songs, still remembered today, was inspired by their killing of a Portuguese trader named Saba-do-Santos.
Likewise the Umuchu, and the Isuochi and Nneato of Okigwe in present-day Nigeria, formed defensive confederations to pool their resources. A variant of the same principle among decentralized communities was the choice of a war leader in times of defensive conflict, as with the Wasulu, a people inhabiting a west African region that today spreads across Mali, Ivory Coast, and Guinea, who effectively confronted slave raids in this way.
These militias did not rely only on military force. Two further examples from communities in present-day Nigeria can be given. The inhabitants of Enugwu-Ukwu dropped poisoned food, water, and wine on the routes they knew the Abam raiders would use; the assailants perished in large numbers and their planned invasion was aborted.
Forced to flee from their original habitations by Abam slave raids, the Ebiri people moved to a new place where they were compelled to confront their attackers again, as they prepared to launch a full-scale invasion. The Ebiri militia defeated their assailants decisively, and this victory thereafter remained an integral part of their collective identity, so much so that they named their settlement Igbo Erughi, “the town the Aro could not capture.”
Another example of collective resistance came from the Kasena people, who lived in dispersed agricultural communities on the northern Gold Coast. The Kasena had no native tradition of slavery: they lacked a word for it in their own language, using a Hausa term instead. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they protected themselves against persistent slave raids from neighboring kingdoms, particularly the Asante; one of their preferred techniques was to greet their assailants with “showers of arrows” with poisoned tips.
Communities developed specialized defensive techniques, often exploiting local topography to their advantage. The hill-based Eggon of central Nigeria were constantly on the lookout for slave raiders when they ventured towards the lowlands to gather wood or look after their crops, and they carried drums and trumpets that sounded the alarm as soon as the enemy was spotted; other communities used flutes and gongs. The villagers would then retreat to the hilltop from where they would launch stones, spears, poisoned arrows, and beehives.
Water was an effective natural defence. Tofinu populations came together to escape the attacks of Dahomean armies and slave raiders in the eighteenth century, and they established themselves in lacustrine communities in southern Benin. The most famous of these havens is the town of Ganvie, whose name is widely accepted to mean “safe at last.”
The Tofinu used canoes to move around and over time developed extensive skills in naval warfare, repelling aggressors by relying on their dexterity with javelins, sledgehammers, swords, and harpoons; they also devised a “particularly ingenious kind of Molotov cocktail.” As we will see in the next chapter, many African communities possessed similar aquatic skills and they were widely deployed by fugitives escaping captivity in the New World.
Fighting back against attempted enslavement was effectively an act of war. In all these places, the warriors who carried out successful attacks against slave raiders were honored—proof not only that resistance took place, but that these acts of self-defense were accorded a high status within their communities.
Raided all year round both from the Sahel and southern Ghana, the Builsa peoples of upper eastern Ghana developed robust techniques of resistance, which they continue to celebrate in their annual Feok festival. These gatherings have helped to forge and pass on a heroic narrative of local struggles against enslavement, by dwelling on the strategies and tactics used by Builsa warriors to overcome their better equipped adversaries.
Generally, the wall perimeter protected the village granary, which was often the first point of attack for slave raiders.
These idealized reconstructions are reinforced by full displays of the traditional armoury and regalia of the Builsa combatants as they went into battle: bows and arrows, spears, cudgels with specially designed serrated edges, horned helmets, smocks with amulets, and memorabilia such as heads, skins, jaws, and tails of wild animals; these objects were morale boosters as well as sources of spiritual support.
Local communities further frustrated slave raiders by denying them easy access to their dwellings. The traditional style of housebuilding in the African outlands, in scattered hamlets typically close to agricultural lands belonging to family or clan members, gave way to the concentration of houses into ever-tighter units.
This defensive pattern was already apparent in a sixteenth-century Portuguese account of a battle in Guinea between the slaver state of Cassanga (allied to the Portuguese) and the followers of a local chieftain, King Bambara. Those followers gained a decisive advantage over the Cassangans by regrouping their dwellings into “fortified positions,” which eventually allowed them to ambush and rout their enemies.
Such defensive settlements became the norm in areas vulnerable to slave-raiding, with individual houses and collective habitations undergoing significant transformations. In coastal Guinea-Bissau, dwellings were “large and well-built,” with “so many doors and rooms that they are more like labyrinths than houses.” In villages in the region, houses were arranged in circles, and the cluster of homes was walled with tall tim-bers with pointed stakes, often with external ditches; there were sentinel towers and gates (called tabancas), which would be closed at night for added security.
In Wasulu territory the remains of some of these walls are still standing; they were made with mud, pebbles, and karite oil, and had holes that could be used by riflemen.
Generally, the wall perimeter protected the village granary, which was often the first point of attack for slave raiders. The assailants would be deterred by these fortifications, as they lacked the means to sustain sieges for any significant length of time. Houses were frequently surrounded by high walls, although these barriers were not always effective against determined predators—Olaudah Equiano and his sister were captured in his native Igboland by a small party of three raiders who jumped over the external wall of his home.
The Builsa communities, like many others, developed the practice of sealing the top of their roofs with sand rather than grass, so that slave raiders would not be able to set them alight. The houses of Senegambian communities were interconnected, to enable easy escape for their inhabitants, and so that neighbors could be warned of imminent danger. These houses typically had only one entrance and no windows, and openings of homes and town gates were very low so that several people could not enter at the same time; the entrances to the dwellings of the Gurunsi were only 70 centimeters high.
Higher ground was the other obvious place of refuge.
Such defensive provisions were not always sufficient, and, when the human and practical costs of resistance in long-established positions became too high, populations moved. Flight was a major form of resistance to enslavement in Africa. Natural conditions that offered greater safety from large armies were often chosen, such as forests, mountains, and hills, and swamps, mangroves, and lakes.
Ganvie, for example, is generally believed to have been founded in the aftermath of the kingdom of Dahomey’s brutal conquest of Allada (1724) and Ouidah (1727), with populations in the surrounding areas fleeing to avoid enslavement. Among the thousands of men and women who were sold into Atlantic slavery at this time were the Allada-native parents of Toussaint Louverture, the future revolutionary leader of Saint-Domingue. Dahomean soldiers were unfamiliar with canoes and were known to be poor swimmers, so water was seen as a particularly valuable protection.
Likewise, victims of slave raids in Gambia in the nineteenth century often fled to MacCarthy Island for protection. The Balanta people in the Guinea-Bissau region were one among many groups known as refoules: hinterland populations forced to flee towards the coast as a result of aggressions from Mandinka communities. The Balanta developed defensive military techniques that relied on the natural protections of mangrove-covered areas, allowing them to ambush and unsettle slave-raiding forces even when the latter enjoyed numerical superiority: the Mandinka word lxzlznto means “those who resist.”
Higher ground was the other obvious place of refuge. From the sixteenth century onwards, communities in the Lake Chad area of western-central Africa became vulnerable to slave raiders from powerful regional empires, and they responded by moving their dwellings to more remote upland regions. The Mofou relocated to the hills of Mikiri, and then Durumi. The Toupouri fled to the Tekem mountains in Chad, where each of its twelve summits was settled by one of the Toupouri clans—a perfect match as the refugees happened to have exactly twelve clans.
These heights provided caverns that were used to hide, store food, and shelter cattle, especially for the Nyem-Nyem, who settled in the caves of Mount Jim, in the mountains of Galim. They even found two springs there, and their descendants in Cameroon still celebrate their effective resistance against slavers and later German colonizers.
Recent archaeological research at places of enslaved memory in Sankana, Gwollu, and Nzulezu in Ghana found surviving evidence of local communities using caves for shelter and religious purposes, and to forge weaponry and ammunition, including gunpowder.
Among the Builsa people, songs are still sung about retreating from slave raiders into rocky and cavernous areas, and then ambushing them. One refrain goes as follows: “let someone be deceived to follow and die in the bush.”
The practical challenges faced by these communities were extraordinary. But so were their responses. They put all the materials they could find to the fullest possible use: rocks served to fortify their dwellings, as weapons against their predators, and as we shall later see as sources of spiritual comfort and strength. They created defense systems based on plants: in Senegambia, many venomous shrubs were cultivated to provide an initial barrier against attack; thorny hedges were used as well, and sometimes village walls were reinforced with bristly plants.
The Nyem-Nyem built an underground tunnel that could lead them to a friendly neighboring community in times of need. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Mount Mandara became another major refuge, local communities built additional stone walls on the flanks to slow down the approach of the enemy. These walls ran along the borders of foothills and in concentric circles around the summits.
Freedom and autonomy were thus tied to sentiments of collective dignity.
For many of these settlements, survival depended on producing food without individuals needing to travel to lower ground, where they might be more exposed. The Kabre of northern Togo had to face slave raiders from three different directions, so they retreated to mountain tops for protection. They evolved specialized farming techniques, building terraces and anti-erosion barriers, and developing intensive agricultural systems.
Opposition to slavery was both widespread and constant across west African territories, from the earliest days of Atlantic slavery, as with the São Tomé rebellion and Lourenio da Silva Mendonia’s vigorous appeal against human bondage to the Vatican, all the way through to the nineteenth century.
This resistance was an indigenous phenomenon, expressing the initiatives of individuals, groups, and communities operating on the ground, drawing largely on their own material and intellectual resources, and their instinctive opposition to enslavement. And as the Amistad insurgency brings out emphatically, this was a tale of conscious and purposeful action, driven by group solidarities, and the search for individual freedom and collective self-determination. In this sense, the rebellion led by Joseph Cinque and his comrades sheds light not only on slave ship insurgencies, but also on the richness of African challenges to enslavement.
This is, above all, a remarkable tale of African fugitive politics. All the facets of resistance evoked here involved working to defy and subvert the existing oppressive slave order—whether by raising and training a militia, waging war against European slavers and slave raiders, spurning the inducements and threats of powerful African states, fortifying village defenses, seeking refuge in other areas, choosing or allying with a military and spiritual leader, appealing to spirits and deities for protection, targeting sailors, settlers, and trading caravans, and planning an escape from a slave barracoon or a breakout from a fort; and, as we have just seen, conceiving and executing uprisings on slave ships.
Even the decision by individuals in west African communities to flee from their servitude and become runaways would typically be reached after a process that would have included taking soundings, learning about escape routes, weighing the risks of success, and considering the fate of family members who might be left behind. It is highly likely that many of those involved in rebellions, as in the Amistad case, were members of militarized secret societies that proliferated across west Africa from the seventeenth century onwards.
Describing African resistance to slavery as a form of fugitive politics enables us, moreover, to confront accounts that, while acknowledging the reality of the resistance of the enslaved, end up depoliticizing it by ascribing it primarily to private emotions such as fear. Most of the populations targeted by slave raiders lived in dispersed communities with long traditions of self-governance and egalitarianism (in terms of a rejection both of centralized rule and of the institution of slavery itself), and they stood up to protect these established ways of life.
Freedom and autonomy were thus tied to sentiments of collective dignity. During the final discussions among the Amistad captives, before they reached an agreement to proceed with the insurrection, one of the decisive interventions came from an old man named Lubos, who observed that “no one ever conquered our nation, and even now we are not taken by fair means.”
Freedom was in this sense inseparable from honor. It was intimately connected to spirituality, too. Those who were taken fought for emancipation, for themselves and their fellow captives, refusing enslavement in the name of moral values that were integral to their understanding of themselves and the world. As one scholar of African religions put it succinctly: “In classical African cultures, religiousness and a sense of the sacred permeated all dimensions of culture and human behaviour. It was from this sensibility, that of religiousness, that Africans derived the mandate and resources to revolt against enslavement.”
This point can be made more broadly. In order to make sense of the underlying ideals of liberty and autonomy that drove the various acts of resistance, we need to appreciate the weight of slavery in African collective life, the profound violation it represented, and the political, social, military, religious, and cultural responses it called forth. These were not distinct but interconnected realms, and the links among them allowed resisters to draw on a wide range of moral and material resources.
Most importantly, this resistance is thought to have significantly reduced the number of captives transported across the Atlantic.
Military training was an integral part of social life; an insurgent leader was a person with prowess as a warrior and privileged access to the spiritual realm; scientific and religious knowledge could be put to social and military ends; and the universe of spirits and gods was inseparable from material struggles for existence and survival. Above all, war and spirituality were closely intertwined.
In 1780 a revolt on a Portuguese slave ship headed from Mozambique to Mauritius was led by a man named Bororo, whose authority over the other enslaved captives rested on their recogni-ion of his religious powers; one of the main Yoruba words for “war” or “battle” was ogun, which was the name of the god of iron as well.
How effective was this resistance? Those who stood up to the slavers on land and at sea often paid a heavy price for their bravery. Many lives were lost repelling attacks by African imperial armies and slave-raiding parties, and many more in the often gruelling marches that enabled vulnerable communities to relocate to safe havens in hills, mountains, and forests. Survival in runaway settlements was no doubt hazardous and many men, women, and children perished, or were recaptured.
If we stay with the slave ship cases, violent rebellions often resulted in high casualty rates among the captives, and when unsuccessful they provoked severe reprisals by the crew—and there were undoubtedly more failures than successes. Probably only around a quarter of the documented rebellions succeeded completely, in the sense that the enslaved were able to break free, take complete control of the ship, and disembark in Africa.
In some instances, only some of the captives were able to escape; in others, the captives were unable to return to land because of their lack of navigational skills, and their ships were found drifting off the African coasts.
But despite these unfavourable odds, African communities did not give up their struggle for freedom. Many of the groups that opposed slavery not only endured over time, but thrived: for example, the Balanta had a high population density during the nineteenth century and devel-oped successful agricultural techniques. And these acts of defiance were far more than symbolic.
The determination to resist enslavement at all costs forced the slavers to remain on their guard, and to redesign the ships so as to make rebellions and suicides less likely, by creating a fortified “barricado” within the deck area and increasing the number of crew members; these measures, in turn, led to an increase in the costs of slave-shipping. Marine insurance lawyers were forced to debate and take into account the humanity of the enslaved, and recognize their desire for freedom.
Most importantly, this resistance is thought to have significantly reduced the number of captives transported across the Atlantic. According to one scholar, as many as one million African men, women, and children were spared enslavement as a direct result of slave ship resistance.
But this is a conservative estimate, as it does not include all those who avoided capture thanks to the defensive actions undertaken by fugitive communities across African coasts and hinterlands. So the real figure of those who escaped enslavement because of the totality of these actions is much higher.
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Excerpted from Daring to Be Free: Rebellion and Resistance of the Enslaved in the Atlantic World by Sudhir Hazareesingh. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, December 2025. Copyright © 2025 by Sudhir Hazareesingh. All rights reserved.
