One of the points that Joe Miller makes in Way of Death is that for newly enslaved Africans bound for the Americas, the horrors of the trans-Atlantic journey had already begun in the African interior. Those designated for sale to Europeans endured a forced march to the coast that was (a) terrible in pretty much every way; Miller estimates that about a quarter of new slaves died before they even reached the slave ship (b) long. The second part is especially relevant here because the journey would have taken the slave caravan through quite a bit of inhabited territory, including stopping in the occasional village. There was ample opportunity for rumors and gossip to spread among the slavers, the slaves, and the village hosts. And, equally important, there was ample opportunity for the new slaves to escape. Not only does this point to another means of news transmission, it offers another example of African awareness of white slavers' involvement and agendas. In Angola, for example, the area of Kisamba actually because quite well known for local rulers being willing to shelter fugitive slaves to keep them out of Europeans' hands.

Unfortunately, most contemporary documentation of the experience of Atlantic-bound slaves in Africa--almost all of it from Central Africa--comes from Europeans. (West Africa is a little more complex situation in terms of long-distance trade, because the trans-Saharan trade to the Maghreb and the Near East was centuries old--and white Europeans had no qualms about dealing with Arab traders instead of white ship captains if it made the better profit. This was probably a fairly small fraction of European involvement in the African slave trade, but the trans-Saharan trade overall adds a layer of complexity). That said, there are a few reasons to take seriously some of the European reports about central African slaves' perceptions.

First, as slavers, the involved Europeans had at least some interest in slaves being able to work. A related concern that emerges on both sides of the Portuguese imperial Atlantic, is the web of behavioral/emotional/physical symptoms called banzo (sometimes banzamento), which seems to mean an enduring melancholia with a sense of longing and loss mixed in. A Portuguese petition from 1689 notes:

Once they [new slaves] were branded with the royal stamp, they become absorbed by thoughts about their fate in Brazil and become banzado, which causes many of them to die. (trans. Ferreira)

Definitely as time went on, the fate of slaves across the Atlantic was deeply entrenched along the African slave coasts. The (Portuguese) governor of Luanda around 1800, Miguel Antonio de Mello, was keen on mustering "Brazil!" as a psychological weapon to enforce obedience still in Africa. The Luanda authorities even threatened local slaveowners with the forced deportation of their slaves if the owners "let" them misbehave in public."There is no other punishment so deeply felt and feared," Mello noted, "as being sent away to America." He also made the connection between deportation to Brazil and the condition of banzo among slaves.

As if slavery wasn't bad enough--as if disease and malnutrition and injury and abuse wasn't bad enough--as if deportation wasn't bad enough--it is apparent that up and down the central African coast, at least, different peoples nurtured variations on the same essential fear of the white slave traders. Specifically: cannibalism.

Different versions of this fear are recorded (by Europeans). The slaves passing through Luanda, it seems, were aware of one malicious rumor/belief that white people sought to cook/fry Africans and extract oil from their dead bodies. At Cassanje, further inland, the fear was straightforward murder and consumption. And Francisco Damiao Cosme, the leading physician in Angola in the late 18th century, recorded a range of gruesome terrors from the different populations of slaves he encountered. Some feared that white people wanted to turn the insides of deported slaves into cheese. Others believed their bones would be ground up and used as gunpowder.

So even though these are the records of Europeans and not the words of Africans, the underlying similarity yet topical differences points to the spread of rumors, enduring over a long frame of time. Accusations/fears of cannibalism against other groups of people, anthropologists recognize and historical research tends to confirm, are typically rooted in a view of that group as "barbaric" or uncivilized in some way. (Although this point is most commonly raised with respect to European views of various island peoples, I recently read a stomach-churning article on accounts of outsider cannibalism in medieval Islamic sources--including a picture-perfect occurrence of the "shipwrecked sailors stranded on a desert island and taken before the cannibal king" topos! Reference here.)

But in the context of sub-Saharan African religious beliefs, there seems to be something more at work. A frequent belief in African traditional religions, such as among the Wimbum people, is a close connection between witchcraft (here tfu) and actual or psychic (soul) cannibalism. This connection, I think, helps drive home just how real the psychological terror of "America" and the white traders could be among Africans who believed they were facing it, might face it, or--if they were the few and lucky--had narrowly escaped from it.

Further reading:

• Joseph Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830, ch. 11
• Roquinaldo Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil in the Era of the Slave Trade, ch. 4
• Kalle Kanonoja, "Atlantic Slave Trade and Melancholia of Enslaved Africans: A View from the Southern Atlantic," is an unpublished paper, but it's free on academia.edu and analyzes banzo from a disability studies and medical history perspective--definitely worth a read

Hi! My first answer here, I'm quite excited. I can help with the mythological part, but only just a bit and you'll see why. So let's get down to it.

Short answer is: we're not aware of any mythological reason, myth, prophecy or something related, as to "why" they were taken. There are no holy scriptures in West African religions. They certainly did know where they were being taken. There is one myth pertaining to one particular Orisha that goes in search of the slaves in the New World, however. There are no recorded myths about what they did when they found them here or anything of the sort, just about the search.

In the introduction to the rare, rare book Dieux D'Afrique - Orixás, deuses yoruba na África e no Novo Mundo - by the franco-brazilian Pierre Verger, he states that from historical records he could find and source, the idea was basically playing the natives against one another, trading slaves and other goods for manufactureds and firearms - weapons which in turn would help the local kings, tribes or chieftains win their conflicts, raids and thus produce more slaves. He described the loose collection of city-states and regions as micro-states if my memory isn't failing me. Ostensibly, if one asked where exactly where they being taken, the answer was "the New World."

Here we go back to mythology, as the general culture was deeply tied to religion. Most African leaders and Kings were said to be descended directly from the Orishas, as while they were indeed divine and inferior only to Olodumaré, the monotheistic-like creator of everything, they had lived among humans at one time or the other, and their myths were basically that of their people. Nana, Verger exemplifies, which is an older female orisha, is said to have migrated from east-central Africa to West Africa once upon a time, and indeed her tribe did do that - or so the story goes because I don't remember the particular proof he offers for this. Because, most disheartening to historians, it's all very much oral tradition and what's left of it even today is closely guarded by the high priests and priestesses. It's why Verger became one himself.

So at the Portuguese ports and inland forts, for example the São João Batista de Ajudá at Benin, the colonial power would have an arrangement with the local king or chieftains. Good, and the first records pertaining the religion also start to pop up. Jesuits and missionaries of this time were not that much worried about understanding much of the Oyo/Benize/Dahomey/Assorted people's cultures and religions, and mostly passed judgement of what they saw, but they did record parts of it. Because while it was mostly oral tradition, the iconography was very much plentiful with that book and some other works like what this site has about the main Osun temple in Nigeria having amazing examples, some of the spirits worshiped were represented by sculptures with long phalluses. Among mild representations of the others, the Portuguese missionaries focused particularly on those and classified them as devils, as such the religion as a whole worshiped demons, and that was that. They did not record anything about a native prophecy about slaves being taken or anything of the kind, so no point speculating if there was.

Different from what happened in North America, the Portuguese were a bit more lax in their enforcement of things - not that they were any less cruel or willing to, they just didn't seem to be able to stomp it all out. The Yoruba religion and culture survived, firstly hidden in the senzalas and then even already somewhat syncretic by the time of the second and last Brazilian emperor. Ogum, for example, which is one of the war Orisha in Africa - think the greek Ares and this is him - was syncretic to St George the Dragonslayer here in Southeastern Brazil, and the oral history of Umbanda does state that the slaves that fought in the War of Paraguay - specifically in Humaitá - called upon Ogum to protect them. Badass, right?

Here's the problem. Details vary by a lot sometimes. While the Portuguese didn't stomp it all out, they did disrupt it. Ogum, for example, was syncretized to a different saint in Bahia by some accounts (like Santo Antonio). Because there's also no one single religion back in Africa, although the Yoruba is the most well-preserved one, so there can't be a single "truth" in all of this. Here in Brazil we got, so you have an idea, 4 main lines:

1 - Candomblé Ketu (yoruba language root)

2 - Candomble Jeje (Fon people language root)

3 - Candomble Angola (no idea language root, honestly)

4 - Umbanda - the syncretic faith with Catholicism

Cuba even has Santeria. There are people pursuing "pure" Yoruba rites. Each of these has a slightly different mythos, slightly different practices - or wholly different in some cases - and most important traditions they follow and want to pass forward. Worse, the four are still mixing even today. "Umbandomblé" is a term we use when a former Umbanda house starts doing things as one of the Candomble lines, and Candomble does "mesa branca" when they're mostly concerning themselves about spiritual guides and not orixas. Each high priest or priestess decides what's in and what's out, as such much knowledge is lost, altered, or otherwise not recorded as "one" singular source. Works well enough.

I'll be dealing with Ketu from now on to answer that mythos, which is what I follow so that the oral tradition reached me. First and foremost: Pierre Verger in the book makes a huge exception when talking about Oxalá - the most important and powerful of the orishas. It's the only he explains the three main subtypes of - Oxala proper, Oxalufã the old, and Oxaguiã the young (really don't know the English spelling for them, sorry).

Remember when I said that each had an earthly life among humans? The city of Ejigbo is one such example, being the city that Oxaguiã conquered and where he became Elejigbô - king of Ejigbo. They still do the Atori festival every year, in honor of one particular itan about a seven-year drought brought about by a curse.

One day, however, he heard that his people where being taken imprisoned to far away lands. He was none too pleased and went around inquiring where they were being taken. And so, people told him they were being taken across the ocean to new lands.

Oxaguiã then hopped on the trunk of a tree, since he could not touch salt water, being a funfun orisha (white) and started his own crossing. It took way long, and while he was there riding the waves he met one of the Yemonjá sisters, the orisha of all oceans. Oxaguiã was young, strong and brave, and that Yemonja liked those traits. After a time, they fell in love and had a baby. They called the baby Ogunjá - the white Ogun (pretty vicious if you ever believe any priest) - and the baby was also strong, as had been his father and mother, and soon wanted to go to war too. And so he went, and his mother went with him, and so she was called Yemonja Ogunté. They now had a beautiful family, but Oxaguiã could not abandon his kingdom back in Africa, and so he went back after some time. Ogunja would spend some time with his mother, then some time with his father, warring and learning, learning and warring, a beautiful family indeed.

One version, common in many websites, has the first passage as "One day, all Orishas heard that people were being enslaved, and so did Oxaguiã, who came atop a tree trunk across the ocean..." but the rest then stays the same. But as I said, none deal with that they did once in the New World, just the search quest.

Generally, yes, they were aware of what the slave trade was at least by the early decades of the eighteenth century. There was indeed a slave trade within Africa prior to the 17th century, when the slave trade began to take off. The system of slavery was different, and was not based upon race, but rather ethnicity and religion (remember, "Africa" did not exist the way we think of it. A pan-African consciousness arose out of the experience of enslavement, a process some scholars have recently argued occurred on the slave ship itself. See Sowande Mustakeem's new book Slavery at Sea Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage). For example, a person from Dahomey could not be enslaved by another Dahomian unless they committed a crime which stripped them of their citizenship, such as murder. However, they would enslave people of other ethnicities or religions as they were "others." Robin Law's book Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving Port describes the ways in which Africans conceptualized slavery, particularly as they arrived at Ouidah, one of the large ports of disembarkation in West Africa. Boubacar Barry also describes the complexities of this trade for Senegambia in Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade.

I think the best source for information about how slaves thought about slavery is themselves. Olaudah Equiano wrote about his first experience encountering a slave ship in his 1789 biography "The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment which was soon converted to terror when I was carried on board. I was immediately handled and tossed up to see if I were sound by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits and that they were going to kill me. Their complexion too differing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke united to confirm me in this belief. Indeed such were the horrors of my views and fears at the moment, that, if ten thousand worlds had been my own, I would freely parted with them all to have exchanged my condition with that of the meanest slave in my own country."

By the 19th century, most Africans were well acquainted with what the slave trade was because of how rapidly it expanded during the 18th century. I think this image from Slate does a good job of showing how pervasive slavery was and how rapidly it grew. European nations were already colonizing the African coast and encroaching further into the interior to exploit both the natural resources of Africa as well as Africans themselves.

John Thornton's book Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World is possibly one of the best broad studies of slave trading and how different African ethnicities both engaged in and opposed slavery and the slave trade. He notes "The widespread belief among many Africans exported as slaves that they had been sold to cannibals to be cooked and eaten was not simply a bizarre way of interpreting their fate. It was also a way of saying that they were the victims of a plot involving greedy and selfish people. Some central Africans such as the Imbangala, rootless raiders in Angola, literally engaged in cannibalism as a way of displaying their power and their unconcern for the larger community. In central African ideology, such people were witches, and their power was often manifested in holding political office, owning wealth in goods or people, or being able to attack others violently. The reaction against power misused in this way, expressed as opposition to cannibalism, the symbol of witchcraft, was a reaction against a whole complex of social injustices, including taking, holding, and selling slaves. In the case of the slaves in the Atlantic world, it was an indictment of the whole system that led to their enslavement, from capture in wars waged by the power-hungry for their own aggrandizement to the sale of slaves to greedy shippers and plantation owners. (pp. 316-17)"

edit: formatting

To whoever answers this question I also wonder if the knowledge of the details of slavery would have meant anything in that context? My understanding is that "Africans" wouldn't have had a significant sense of solidarity at that point in time, and there wouldn't have been any inherent sense of unity based on skin color alone. So if you learned that horrible things were being done to your political enemies, would it have mattered much?

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