From the beginning, they seized Africans and shipped them to Europe to be sold as servants and objects of curiosity to households (Obadina pp). Today, in the Portuguese port of Lagos, where the first African slaves landed in 1442, the old slave market now serves as an art gallery (Obadina pp). In 1472, the Portuguese sailed southeast along the Gulf of Guinea and landed on the coast of what became Nigeria, then other Europeans followed (Obadina pp). These Europeans found people of varying cultures, some lived in villages, others lived in towns ruled by kings with nobility and courtiers, similar to their own medieval societies (Obadina pp). Relations between Europe and Africa were economic, and European merchants traded with Africans from trading posts established along the coast, exchanging items such as brass and copper bracelets for products such as pepper, cloth, beads, and slaves – "all part of an existing internal African trade" (Obadina pp). Long before European slave buyers arrived, domestic slavery and trading in humans was common in Africa (Obadina pp). Black slaves were captured or bought by Arabs and then exported across the Saharan desert to the Mediterranean and Near East (Obadina pp).

             When Spaniard Christopher Columbus discovered for a New World for Europe, the find proved disastrous for both the "discovered" people but also for Africans, and marked the beginning of a triangular trade between Africa, Europe and the New World (Obadina pp). As slave ships, mainly British and French, took native Africans to the New World, they were initially taken to the West Indies to supplement the local Indians who had been all but exterminated by the Spanish Conquistadors (Obadina pp). Beginning as a trickle, the slave trade grew to a flood from the seventeenth century onwards, and Portugal"s monopoly was broken during the sixteenth century when England, France and other European nation entered the trade (Obadina pp).