USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -A strong African influence pervades music, dance, the arts, literature, speech forms, and religious practices in Latin America and the Caribbean. Africans, whether as slaves or free immigrants, brought a variety of different cultural influences to the New World.

Detailed explanation-2: -Ivory, gold and other trade resources attracted Europeans to West Africa. As demand for cheap labour to work on plantations in the Americas grew, people enslaved in West Africa became the most valuable ‘commodity’ for European traders. Slavery existed in Africa before Europeans arrived.

Detailed explanation-3: -In the first 150 years of the trade, West Central Africa supplied nine out of ten African people destined for a life of slavery in the Americas. Except for a fifty-year period between 1676 and 1725, West Central Africa sent more slaves to the Americas than any other region.

Detailed explanation-4: -It hampered Africa’s mercantilist economy by halting its capacity to be transformed into a capitalist economy. Moreover, it started the systemic and continuous process of economic exploitation and social and political fragmentation that Europeans later institutionalized through colonization and neocolonization.