I recently read James H. Sweet’s 2011 book, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World, and he described the expansionist kingdom of Dahomey, led by King Agaja, as enslaving many Gbe-speaking people from the ‘Mina coast’ region and selling them to Europeans. In particular, he explained how and why it seems likely that Agaja strategically sold off spiritual leaders and gifted healers in order to increase his power and quash dissent, thus leading to a strong presence of healing traditions in Brazil, for example.
I am aware of fairly large numbers of enslaved Yoruba arriving in the Americas, especially in Cuba, Brazil, Trinidad...What situations on the continent led to the enslavement of Yoruba people? Also, is there any similar evidence besides the continued presence of Yoruba religiosity in the Americas that many Yoruba healers/spiritual leaders were enslaved for political reasons?
Thank you.
The complicated political and military relations between Dahomey, the Yoruba kingdom of Oyo, communities north of Ilorin like Nupe that were outside of Oyo's direct control and various slave-raiding groups in the Cross River and Niger Delta regions led to small numbers of Yoruba speakers being sold into the Atlantic slave trade before 1780 or so, though much more so for Oyo's adversaries, particularly Dahomey.
However, most scholars trace the mass enslavement of many Yoruba-speakers to the weakening and eventual collapse of the Oyo Empire in a disastrous civil war. Adeagbo Akinjogbin's War and Peace in Yorubaland gives a good narrative and analytic overview of the sequence of events. A key element in the collapse was the structural tension in Oyo's political institutions between the alaafin (king) and his court, particularly the bashorun (chief minister)--Oyo had a limited monarchy with many institutional checks and balances in the kingdom's structure which blossomed into serious internal conflicts in the 1770s. Possibly as a result of these conflicts, the Alaafin Abiodun lost a number of military campaigns during his rule and his son seized the throne, which provoked an open civil war in 1793.
The resulting breakdown of Oyo left many of its communities vulnerable to raids by neighboring societies like Dahomey and Nupe or forced Yoruba populations to flee persecution and attack by internal enemies only to become vulnerable to enslavement as a result. Consequently, Yoruba-speakers flooded into the Atlantic slave trade in the first quarter of the 19th Century, just as the trade began to shift notably to Brazil and Cuba. As detailed by Michael Gomez in his book Reversing Sail, Yoruba-speakers also became influential in the coastal cities of what later became Nigeria and some of them actually returned from the Americas to these cities, often having learned English or Portuguese, which increased their overall visibility within the Atlantic world and in the African diaspora.