Slave Trade

The triangular trade is a term showing trade between three regions. The best known type of triangular trade was the transatlantic slave trade, which started in about the 15th century and slowed down in the 1800’s, however, since it had been going on for over 1000 years, it was difficult to end it. Slavery still continued through the 1930’s.

The transatlantic slave trade usually followed a route forming the shape of a triangle. First, European traders left ports and headed towards Africa’s West Coast. When they were there, they traded their goods for people. The European traders loaded the people they bought onto very crowded ships. Below is a diagram of a ship that the people were loaded onto. The ships only had enough room for each person to lay down and were only fed one or two times a day. The European traders took the African people to the Americas. The trip from Asia to the Americas took 6-8 weeks. Once they were in the Americas, the African people who had survived the trip were loaded off the ship and the Europeans traded the Africans as slaves for goods such as sugar, coffee, tobacco, rice. Later, they started trading for cotton, which was produced by the slaves from before.

Children during slavery

Children were commonly enslaved as prisoners of warfare. In some places of West Africa, kidnapping was a popular way to enslave children. They were usually taken while working in fields, walking around a town, or playing outside of their parents view. Families sometimes sold their children into slavery so their food scarcity would end. Children were also sold into slavery because they were poor in health, required special needs, or to repay debts or crimes their parents or relatives had committed.

Child labor today

You may not think about it, but there is still child labor going on today. Most child labor is in agriculture.

I will use child labor in the Ivory Coast and Ghana as an example. Ghana and the Ivory Coast are low-wage countries, and their average income per day is below half a dollar.

Many workers are cocoa farmers. Ghana and the Ivory coast produce half the world’s supply of cocoa. To realize how little children make for how much they work, let’s use the value of a chocolate bar. Only 5% of the money we pay for a chocolate bar goes to the workers.

Children also face some dangers while working on a cocoa farm. 

Chemicals: children don’t usually wear protection while spraying pesticides. 

Sharp tools: When the cocoa pods grow, the worker cut them from the trees with sharp tools such as machetes. 

Heavy loads: after the beans are taken out of the pods, they are carried in large, heavy loads to drying racks. 

Long hours in the sun: workers spend a lot of time out in the sun while packing beans into sacks and loading them on trucks.

Child labor also goes on in many other countries, I just decided to use Ghana and the Ivory Coast as an example. Now when you buy a chocolate bar, or something with chocolate, think about how much kids in Ghana and the Ivory Coast have worked for you to be able to eat that chocolate bar, and how little money they made from it.

Images from:

"The Numbers Behind Child Labor." National Geographic. N.p., n.d. Web. 31 Jan. 2016. <http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/2015-09-26-data-points-children-behind-child-labor/>.