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Slavery had a profound effect on all Africans, but it affected men and women differently. It treated men individually, women as a caste. Africans of both sexes were enslaved and transported; but of Africans involved in trading, only men profited. After the British and French governments abandoned the slave trade, it was taken over by Angolans, Brazilians, Americans, Dutch, English, and French commercial firms that insinuated themselves along the coast. Backed with capital from their lineage, African men ran these new commercial centres as merchant lords over all-male households. They charged Europeans customs fees, regulated local business, provided auxiliary services, and sent goods to the interior on credit. A successful man called his household his "town" and demonstrated status in the old way — collecting wives, clients, and slaves. He educated his sons and nephews, trained them in the business, and gave them a patrimony in slaves.

Some slaves remained slaves even after the decline of the "peculiar institution": they were "slaves of the church," agricultural and household slaves attached to missions. Missionaries required agricultural slaves to marry and live in clusters near the mission. All household slaves were male — boys and young men; women could not enter mission houses. After the missionaries left, the "slaves of the church" went on living in all-male enclaves. Both sexes were impressed to serve an overlord to work on his or her behalf; but owners valued women as providers — of food, sex, and children — and men as worker-sons being trained to take over an all-male institution.

Kongo

In dealings between Africans and Europeans, only formal political power counted; Europeans were comfortable dealing man-to-man with Africans but would not accept female African leaders. In dealings with Europeans, African men gained power — and cash. No longer dependent on women, they could buy food and goods that wives had formerly provided. Exposed to new languages and customs, they gained education and experience as merchants and brokers. In time, matrilineal inheritance faded and women's elite status crumbled; they became wives, not sisters, sequestered at home and segregated at public events.2 Some merchants reportedly offered visiting European men sexual use of their wives or daughters. Territories like Kongo may have remained sexually integrated even after class stratification, but they were now transformed into patriarchal societies in which only men functioned publicly and women were relegated to back rooms. As social mobility increased for men, it decreased for women.

People in the interior still followed the old ways, but the foreclosure of women from coastal commerce kept women out of the new commercial world. Women found new markets for their crops, supplying the barracoons (pens for slaves awaiting export) near the coast. When slave trade ended, they sold foods like groundnuts to Europeans for cash. As commerce expanded, women offered more variety at local markets and opened roadside food stands to cater to commercial caravans. But barter was still the rule: few women had cash, needed to purchase European goods.

Aside from commerce, the only way to get rich was by tribute. The old tribute system had died; men now controlled roads and markets, and granted titles. On the coast almost every man, even a low-level worker, could afford a slave; slaves were in such demand that they could negotiate their working conditions. But female slaves could rise in status only through marriage and motherhood, and all wives — royal, free, or slave — did field work. No woman had leisure; rich men's wives had only the help of co-wives. Some scholars believe that women may perhaps have preferred polygyny because it lessened their workload. Some co-wives developed close bonds. There were virtually no women in politics; Kongo was now an outpost in a Western commercial network in which women had lost most of their power.