The historian A. G. Hopkins in 1973 called the collapse in demand for enslaved people and the growth of plantation agriculture of crops such as groundnuts and maize in 19th-century Africa ‘the crisis of adaptation’. Hopkins argued that the sudden rupture with the patterns of external supply (of textiles, currencies such as cowries, firearms and alcohol) and demand (for enslaved Africans) wrought an economic crisis for the elites who had cemented their power during the Atlantic slave trade. In the 18th century, these patterns had enabled the development of powerful states across West Africa, from Fuuta Tooro (in the north of modern Senegal) and Fuuta Djalon (Guinea-Conakry) in the west, to Asante (Ghana), Oyo (Nigeria) and Dahomey (Benin) towards the east. However, these states depended on the European demand for slaves for military power: thus, when the transatlantic slave trade collapsed in the early 19th century, so did the economic foundations of their power.
Therefore, in the first decades of the 19th century, this economic crisis became a political one as well. As European traders moved away from their centuries-old demand for enslaved persons, they began to focus on commodities – cash crops. In doing so, they established the parameters of the cash-crop economies that characterise much of the African economic landscape to this day: coffee began to be grown in Angola for export, cotton in Mozambique, and the trend continued.
The expansion of cash cropping was deeply connected to the large increase in slavery on the continent during the 19th century, as production of the groundnuts and maize that today give us domoda and kenkey increased, alongside that of crops such as cotton and palm oil. This growth in plantations required a large increase in organised labour; following the patterns set in New World plantations, this labour demand was often met through expanding the use of slavery, shaping the sort of labour relations we’ve seen in the Fuuta Djalon. This eventually came to public attention in the first years of the 20th century when the Cadbury company found itself in a scandal. Cadbury sourced more than half of its cocoa from the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea, where the labour was still being provided by ‘contract labourers’. These workers had been sent by Portuguese agents from Angola along the old slave-trading routes. They worked in conditions little different from the slavery of earlier times. In 1908, Cadbury withdrew its share of the São Tomé and Príncipe market and looked instead to the Gold Coast, developing the cocoa interests that mean that Ghana is still one of the world’s largest cocoa producers.