Aspects of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Smoking Pipes, Tobacco, and the Middle Passage

This paper briefly addresses tobacco consumption and pipe smoking in Western Africa, and the relevance of these practices to the Atlantic slave trade as well as to the material culture of captive Africans during their forced passage to the New World.2 Tobacco and Pipes in West and West Central Africa Although a New World cultigen, tobacco was introduced to Africa by Europeans and by the very early seventeenth century, it seems to have been well established in West and West Central Africa. Its cultivation was observed in Sierra Leone in 1607, and in 1611 a Swiss surgeon remarked on how soldiers in the Kingdom of Kongo relieved their hunger by grinding and igniting tobacco leaves “so that a strong smoke is produced, which they inhale ” (Hill 1976: 115; Jones 1983: 61 and note 97). Not long after its introduction tobacco became a desired commodity among Africans, and from the mid to late seventeenth century it was one of the trade goods Europeans used to acquire slaves. Most of the tobacco Europeans brought to Africa was intended for slave purchase, but some, probably the cheaper grades – what the French called “tabac de cantine ” – was also distributed to captives on board the slaving vessels (see below). 1 African consumers chewed tobacco, used it as snuff, and also smoked it in pipes they themselves produced. These were frequently short-stemmed clay bowls of one kind or another, so-called “elbow bend ” or “elbow ” pipes, into which a detachable hollow wood tube or reed stem, sometimes of considerable length, was inserted. A wide range of “elbow bend ” pipes, dating from the early seventeenth-century, have been discovered in a variety of West African archaeological sites from the Middle Niger to the coastal areas of Benin and Ghana3 (Figs. 1, 2