They conducted raids into the interior and sold their captives to European slavers. Nearly all of the Africans enslaved and brought to America by this trade were natives of the western coastal rain forests and the inland forests of the Congo and Central Africa. About half of all Africans who were captured, enslaved, and sent to the Americas were Bantu-speaking peoples. Others were from smaller ethnic and language groups. Most had been farmers in their homeland. The men hunted, fished, and tended animals, while women and men worked the fields cooperatively and in large groups. They lived in kin-based villages that were parts of small kingdoms. They practiced polygyny , and their societies tended to give very specific spiritual duties to women and men. Adolescent girls and boys were inducted into secret societies in which they learned the sacred and separate duties of women and men. These secret societies provided supernatural help from the spirits that governed tasks such as hunting, farming, fertility, and childbirth. Although formal political leaders were all men, older, privileged women exercised great power over other women.
Thus enslaved African peoples in the New World came from societies in which women raised children and governed each other, and where men and women were more nearly equal than in America or Europe. CEuropean Exploration In the century before Columbus sailed to America, Western Europeans were unlikely candidates for worldwide exploration. The Chinese possessed the wealth and the seafaring skills that would have enabled them to explore, but they had little interest in the world outside of China. The Arabs and other Islamic peoples also possessed wealth and skills. But they expanded into territories that were next to them-and not across uncharted oceans. The Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople in 1453 and by the 1520s had nearly reached Vienna. These conquests gave them control over the overland trade routes to Asia as well as the sea route through the Persian Gulf. The conquests also gave them an expanding empire to occupy their attention. Western Europeans, on the other hand, were developing the necessary wealth and technology and a compelling need to explore. A group of new monarchs were making nation-states in Britain and in continental Europe-states with unprecedentedly large treasuries and military establishments. The population of Western European nations was growing, providing a tax base and a labor force for new classes of large landholders.
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