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At the very beginning of chapter 5, Michael Gomez states that 29 percent of the total Africans imported as slaves were taken from the Sierra Leone and Gold Coast. These peoples had very complex social structures and lived in polities and in addition to this had egalitarian tendencies as well. Gomez analyzes the social structures of the people of the Sierra Leone and Gold Coast, giving us context for the experiences that these people had while brought over as slaves to the Americas, (Gomez, 88). The notion of gender organization by gender as something that persisted after a transition into slavery gives us insight into how deeply rooted and powerful these social and political structures were.
Viktoriya Shalunova writes about this in her response: “In some of these societies women were in leadership roles. The capturing and enslaving of women may have been in consequence to the fact that they were often skilled farmers in cotton and other crops, also possessing many skills, and despite their lower physical capabilities then men, they were still incredibly useful to the cultivation of American crops.” These societies were comparable to European powers in their political organization. This is significant because while Europeans have naval exploration as a way of commanding the spaces around them, African peoples such as the Sierra Leone have not been considered as comparable. The widespread discussion about African societies in lower level education at the time when European demand for slavery increased still does not meet up with the current consensus in the field of Atlantic history. These political systems of the Sierra Leone are significant because they offer us a unique view of how these enslaved peoples operated under oppression.