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A Dispute On The Popular Beliefs Of

The popular belief of warfare in Pre-Colonial Africa is that of mere tribal wars, a sort of random, "bow and arrow" battle. The accepted view of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade is based on the concept that Europeans bribed, initiated wars, and captured African civilians, all for the sake of the slave trade. In his book, "Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500-1800", John K. Thornton challenges both of these interpretations.
In fact, the author systematically describes in depth the complexity and diversity of different African states. The 300 years that the book covers, all tactics, weapons, and strategies evolved due to what seemed to be trial and error, availability of resources, influence of the Europeans, and motivations.
The way war was waged in the different African nations was primarily based on the location of that particular region. For instance, in the Senegambia and Sierra Leone region, navies had a large part of warfare due to the navigational rivers in the region. Each region described in this book fought wars very differently, but none was as I thought it might be. Warfare in Atlantic Africa, according to John K. Thornton, was very methodical, organized, and certainly more advanced than what I believed prior to reading his book.
A universally accepted image of warfare in Atlantic Africa were either a battle between tribes or a war that Europeans waged for the sake of gaining, either by capture or otherwise, slaves for the slave trade. Through Thornton's writings, I have come to understand these motivations differently. He points out that though most of the regions he speaks of have plenty of European contact, few actually take on a lot of European influence. The warfare that was waged between states was not unlike any other inter-state war, due to political, religious, and/or territorial differences. The capture of slaves was simply an after affect of the conflict. These wars, for the most part, didn't involve Europeans in any way, although...