How did the Columbian Exchange affect the African people?
2 Answers
It caused mass African migration, African populations to grow, African empires to topple, and racism against slaves to emerge.
Explanation:
The Columbian Exchange caused many things including new crops and raw resources to spread to Europe. This also caused them to find new fertile and sunny lands near the equator since most of the land in Europe sucked since Europe was pretty far north of the equator.
Because of this, the Europeans uses Native Americans mostly in Latin America to work their plantations in order to get rich due to the newer concept of capitalism. However, to diseases from Europeans to Natives since Europeans lived in cramped areas with dirty animals, the Native American slave population began dying off.
The Europeans then turned to Africa to buy slaves due to their large slave export industry especially in kingdoms like Mali. So then a large amount of slaves were bought from these African kingdoms. However, so many were bought that the kingdoms were beginning to run out of slaves or were beginning to question the morality of this mass deportation.
So then the European merchants mainly consisting of the Portuguese began to sell a lot of guns and materials to small tribes so that they could catch a few slaves. Then the gun wielding Africans easily defeated and enslaved many other villages without guns. They also toppled large kingdoms- especially the Swahili coastal states. So many Africans were forced into slavery and sold to the Europeans. Then they were forced to migrate to the Americas where they worked in plantations for the rest of their lives.
This looks like the population will decline, right? Wrong. Although slave export was extremely high, what was higher was the birth rate and life expectancy of an African due to new American crops introduced by the Colombian exchange that were part of the exchange for slaves. Because of this, the African population jumped by the millions, but without a centralized government and only tribes.
Now moving onto the Americas. Having a dark skin color was easier to identify as a slave since all Africans had really dark skin and most were slaves. Because of this, the concept of skin color and slavery began to merge into the concept of racism. This was supported by the theory of social Darwinism, where the most "fit" socially will naturally dominate the more primitive.
The Columbian Exchange changed the culture of many African people to an Agricultural economy based on the cultivation of maize.
Explanation:
Maize was an invention of the PreColumbian Americans. After Maize was brought back to Europe it quickly found a home in Africa.
The Bantu People of West Africa using the cultivation of Maize and superior steel weapons spread rapidly across Africa. When Europeans reached South Africa they found that the cultivation of maize had preceded them.
