Wondering About Life Expectancy Impact of European Involvement in West Africa

There is considerable interest in the Atlantic slave trade. Europeans traded guns and ammunition as well as other goods there for slaves over a period of three and a half centuries. Not only were millions of people taken from the region, the slave traders (often using imported weapons) conducted war and slave raids for those centuries. I have read about the disruption that the weapons trade with Native Americans had in early North American colonial history, as coastal tribes used guns and ammunition acquired from the colonists to displace tribes further west. One can assume that the slave trade and weapons trade had similar and worse impact on the peoples of West Africa.

I have read about the high death rates of Europeans trying to live in West Africa, especially due to their vulnerability to malaria. I have similarly read of the high death rates of former slaves repatriated to Sierra Leone and Liberia. But I was wondering about the introduction of European diseases into West Africa. The Sahara would have provided a barrier to overland transmission of bacterial and viral diseases before the Europeans developed the sailing technology to explore the coast of West Africa.

A history of Sub-Saharan Africa By Robert O. Collins and James McDonald Burns states that Smallpox was introduced to West Africa by European explorers as early as the 16th century, that typhus, tuberculosis and the plague were introduced in the 17th century, and the sexually transmitted syphilis was introduced there from the western hemisphere via Europe in the 16th century.

The impact of new diseases, depopulation due to the extraction of slaves, and of conflict made more deadly by new weapons, added to the preexisting threats of malaria, yellow fever and other tropical diseases, may well have triggered the destruction of agricultural and trade patterns. The Columbian exchange proved disastrous for the Native American populations, but it occurs to me that the European-West African exchange may have been similarly disastrous for West African peoples.