Vili

The Vili language is native to the Congo, along the coast between Gabon and Angola. It is also spoken in Gabon. Although the people were thought to have migrated to the coast from the inland areas around 1300, the culture derives from a little-known kingdom spanning the 15^th to 19^th century. It was centered in a city named Loango; one of the most advanced civilizations of all Africa. The realm stretched from the north coast of the Congo River to Cape Lopez.

Royalty established strong trading ties with the Dutch and other Europeans, China, India, and some countries in the Mediterranean basin, to prosper and grow; with the first meeting between African and European traders occurring more than one hundred years prior to large scale export of human cargo. The coastline was kept intact and free from foreign settlers (mainly in the 18^th and 19^th century) who would construct outposts, in an effort to benefit from the slave trade. The coastline of the Vili region was a fertile resource for slavers, yielding in the neighborhood of 15,000 Africans a year for export. This protectionism by the Loango kings was maintained, even when the demand for slave labor increased. One of the major sources of revenue for the Africans had been ivory: which by the time of a developed world-wide slave trade, was becoming scarce. It was then they yielded to their trading partners and altered their merchandising to profit in the trade of human flesh on an industrial scale. The new enterprise in the 19^th century heralded the decline of the sovereigns, as their authority, and those of the governors, was challenged by new individuals of wealth. They eventually slipped into economic ruin, along with the Portuguese (who alone were buying and selling between 5,000 and 10,000 human cargo a year for Latin America). One of the world’s most important slaving markets is now a little known, and long-forgotten, footnote to history.

It should be pointed out that the kings of the Vili nation (lest it be forgotten, we can also refer to the rulers of Benin, Dahomey, Congo, and Ashanti) sold slaves for a number of generations: the European incursion and overwhelming demand for commodities was at the tail end of a tradition going back centuries.

One might think that the practices of the pre-colonization Vili would disappear with the abolition of slavery in the West: it did not. Human bondage carried on into the 20^th century with the Dutch rubber harvest and plantations. Salt, laboriously transported from the coast inland, was used to trade for the bodies, as well. Slavery in the area ceased only when French missionaries and their government, put an end to it.