Who buys globes anymore, I wondered as I stood near one, waiting for some items to come up for auction. This was a floor-model, with a wooden leg and 12-inch ball.
With time on my hands and a touch of curiosity, I decided to play around with it, the way most of us do when we see a globe or a ball. I spun it around, feeling like a giant looking down at the world at my fingertips, searching first for my little spot on it: my continent, my country, all in one sweep.
I didn’t just stop at my corner of the world; I twirled it around to Africa, wondering what the map-makers had done with the homeland of my ancestors. I eyed the countries, and realized that they had the names given to them by their European colonizers long ago and re-taken by them in the last century.
Federation of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Union of South Africa (now just South Africa), Belgian Congo (formerly Zaire, now Democratic Republic of the Congo), Nyasaland (now Malawi).
As I headed west along the perimeter of the continent, my eyes landed on two words that stopped me: “Slave Coast.” Instantly, I knew what that meant; it was where thousands of ships landed on the West Coast of Africa and robbed it of its people for the slave trade in North America, South America and other places.
This map bearing colonial names and the Slave Coast designation must be old map, I surmised. So I started looking for a production date but could not find one. Printed on the globe, though, were the names of the maker and the cartographer: Replogle Globes Inc., Chicago. Cartographer Gustav Brueckmann.
The company was founded in 1930 and is still making globes. Its website has a guide for dating them – find the former name of your country and check the year next to it: The map at auction appeared to be from the 1960s, and the colonial names seemed to confirm this, because most of them dated back to the 1960s. The map also included steamship routes, which were once prevalent but no more.
I Googled to see what I more I could find about the Slave Coast. It wasn’t a bit of our country’s past that was in my history school books.
When I think of the slave trade in West Africa, Senegal’s Goree Island and its “Door of No Return” come to mind. Many folks have traveled to the island’s House of Slaves to pay their respects to the millions of Africans who were traded there. I’d heard little about this coast around the curve from it that saw millions more loaded aboard ships bearing British, French, Danish, Spanish, Portuguese and other flags.
The area dubbed the Slave Coast was in the Gulf of Guinea under the western hip of Africa, near the countries of Togo, Benin and Nigeria. On land, it bore European trading stations of African people captured by Europeans and African tribes, and other commodities. Slavery was not new to African cultures; it had long been a custom among some peoples, but they were treated as indentured servants.
The coast was one of the major trading areas from the 16th to 19th centuries, with the most extensive during the 18th and 19th centuries. From 2 million to 11 million Africans were moved from ports there to North and South America, according to estimates I found on several websites. While many of them came to the United States, the majority ended up in Brazil and the Caribbean.
Africans were also shipped from the East African coastal areas of Mozambique, the Zambezi Valley, and such interior countries as Mali, Chad, Somalia and Ethiopia.
Africa had its other coasts with similar names: the Gold Coast (which supplied Africans for slavery) near Ghana, the Ivory Coast near what is now known as Cote d’Ivoire and the Pepper Coast or Grain Coast near Liberia.
I wasn’t around when the globe sold, but my curiosity got me to wondering about its worth. Christie’s in New York sold a Replogle 12-inch desktop terrestrial lamp globe (with the oceans colored black) in 2000 for $345. On one site, I found desktop globes from the 1930s to 1970s selling for $40 to $395 by Replogle and other companies. You can get some for even less on eBay.
