From Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States
*** (This means I cut out some of the article. You’re welcome.)
In fact, it was because they came from a settled culture, of tribal customs and family ties, of communal life
and traditional ritual, that African blacks found themselves especially helpless when removed from this.
They were captured in the interior (frequently by blacks caught up in the slave trade themselves), sold on
the coast, then shoved into pens with blacks of other tribes, often speaking different languages.
The conditions of capture and sale were crushing affirmations to the black African of his helplessness in the
face of superior force. The marches to the coast, sometimes for 1,000 miles, with people shackled around
the neck, under whip and gun, were death marches, in which two of every five blacks died. On the coast,
they were kept in cages until they were picked and sold. One John Barbot, at the end of the seventeenth
century, described these cages on the Gold Coast: