Africa Had A Hardy Populace

Africa had a hardy populace in the middle of the seventeenth century.  It withstood the cumulative strain begun in the middle of the sixteenth century by the slave trade to America, while the earlier drain to Islamic countries did not end until the twentieth century.  It can only have done so by benefit of some sort of biological vigor.  Its defiance of European diffusion offers further proof of health.  Africa, unlike Brazil, did not open to the Portuguese in the sixteenth century without protecting itself.  Travelers’ tales give glimpses of close-knit peasant communities living in pleasant harmonious villages, later ruined by the nineteenth-century European onslaught.
 
Europeans may have persevered in their efforts to seize lands in Africa if they had not been stopped at the coasts by disease.  Recurrent or constant fevers, dysentery, phthisis, and dropsy, as well as parasites, all took their toll.  They were as great an obstacle to advance as the courage of the warlike tribes.  Also, the rivers were broken by rapids and bars.  Who would sail up the wild waters of the Congo?  The American adventure and trade with the Far East were activating all available energy in Europe, whose attentions in any case lay elsewhere.  Africa delivered of its own accord gold dust, ivory, and men, and cheaply too.  Why ask more of it?  As for the slave trade, it did not signify the numbers of people we too freely assume.  Limited in degree, even towards America, by the capacity of the transport ships.  By way of comparison, total Irish immigration between 1769 and 1774 amounted to 44,000, or fewer than 8,000 a year.