Posted on 11/16/2001 1:23:34 PM PST by tberry
Facing Facts About Africa & Slavery
he simpleminded vision of Africa in Alex Haley's "Roots" has made it hard for many Afro-Americans to see the shortcomings of Islam and black Africa clearly.
The picture became less fuzzy for those who were at Columbia University on Wednesday night when the American Anti-Slavery Group co-hosted an organization of Muslims from the African nation of Mauritania, who are here as part of an international movement to end slavery.
The speakers included Nasser Yessa, foreign secretary of SOS Slaves Mauritania, who works out of Paris; SOS's North American representative, Moctar Cheine, and Ahmeimidi Khaliva, who was born into slavery but escaped at age 25 and now, in his 40s, has harrowing tales to tell.
Nasser Yessa was born into a slave-owning family, but he rejected the chattel tradition after coming under the influence of French democratic ideas and the writings of Jews who survived World War II's death camps.
He said slavery has existed in his country for more than 800 years and was practiced all around black Africa long before the Europeans came along and joined in. That is a fact that is bound to disturb those who don't want to hear ill about the motherland.
Yessa formed his organization in 1995 along with Boubacar Messaoud, another who was born a slave in Mauritania. Messaoud is still in his country working against slavery, where it is supposedly illegal. It has, in fact, been outlawed three times since 1905 but continues to thrive. Muslim slaves, the audience was told, are taught that if they disobey their masters, they won't go to paradise when they die.
Yessa said that his organization declined to sign the propositions agreed on at the recent international conference on racism in South Africa because "they refused to address slavery in Africa under Islamic regimes, slavery under black regimes, racism among Arabs and tribal hatreds that have led to slaughter among black Africans."
Yessa and Cheine said they have often been condemned as tools of the Zionists or the whites because of their criticisms of fellow Muslims and black Africans. This should be familiar to those Afro-Americans who have long been frowned upon for pulling the covers off race hustlers, rabble-rousers, leaders of hate cults, buffoon academics and so on.
Yessa, who is a devoted Muslim, said that justice must come before religion, that all who do not respect the rights of others should be exposed before the eyes of the world and that there should be an international standard of human rights and dignity that focuses world policy.
He is well aware of the fact that such ideas came from Western society but thinks of them, rightly, as part of his human heritage, not conceptions that he was automatically alienated from because he was born into another culture.
Yessa and Cheine wondered why their cause has yet to be embraced by Afro-American leadership. I told them the leadership has yet to grow up on such questions but that we are now on the verge of a new era in which their movement will become more and more important.
For information on SOS and the movement at large, go to iabolish.com — you will learn much.
E-mail: scrouch@edit.nydailynews.com
Islam and slavery go together like a wink and a smile.
So did slavery and the old south. Nothing new here.
Actually, there are two things new here: first of all, WE don't do it anymore; and, secondly, it was NEW only when it got to this country; they'd been doing it for years.
Oh, and they are STILL doing it and we're not; I'm sure that fact really bothers you.
The slaves in the old south owe their passage there to Islam, which sold them in the first place.
It bothered my ancestors. That's why they went South for a couple years to end. But you see, the people who do these things do it out of ignorance and stupidity, and the thing that needs to be done is to go in and stop them and educate them. It took a long time in the South, but we finally did it.
Not so for the most part. Islam was primarily only an alternate buyer of secondary choice, and mostly in areas more directly sub-saharan. Most blacks were bought directly from blacks. In fact, one of the reasons slavery was ended earlier in England the European states with commercial shipping fleets is that the crews found the blacks to make excellent sailors as well as merchants. Southerners never caught on because they were largely too lazy to work at that kind of hard labor such a ship-building or sailing. If you couldn't do it from a hammack with a black wench, it wasn't interesting to them.
I see. Here in this country, the South did it for money.
Over in Africa, if they do it, it's not because it's for money -- it's because they're too uneducated to not know any better?
BS
Guess he also missed the article a couple of years ago about the numerous slave bodies that were discovered buried under a building in NEW YORK CITY.
No, in the south it was done in ignorance. The negative aspects of it and the fiscal and moral decline of the south were well documented, the slave owning minority of the south that made fortunes on it actively hid the facts from the general populace. The minority were either idiots or hypocrits, the rest ignorant.
The profits for cotton were far outweighed by the loss in the rest of the southern economy and pshychological damage done in the creation of the white trash class.
Actually, Boston integrated in it's schools in the early 1820's. The South in the 1960's. It is true that Boston regressed as the Democrats and the socialists undermined the old systems and beliefs in the late 19th and early 20th century, but the North never sunk anywhere near the depths of the south.
Slavery ended in PA and MA in 1780. By 1828, the last few slaves above the Mason Dixon line were freed. As for the Southern climate, if that was true, northern agriculture would not have significantly out produced southern agriculture. The North hay crop alone was worth more that the southern cotton crop.
Guess he also missed the article a couple of years ago about the numerous slave bodies that were discovered buried under a building in NEW YORK CITY
Before the general enlightenment on the topic at the end of the 18th century in civilization, there were slaves in the north, though they were primarily served as house servants and not slave labor in the fields. The south, on the other hand, consistently regressed socially and financially as it increased it's number of slave laborers at hard labor.
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