Did the Harvard Professor Write “Stupidly”?

Flopping Aces ^ | 05-23-10 | Wordsmith

[Starman417]

A month and a day ago, Henry Louis Gates wrote a remarkable op-ed for the NYTimes, "How to End the Slavery Blame-Game".

"Remarkable" because of who wrote it (and I suppose remarkable whenever the NYTimes prints something that actually makes us believers in American exceptionalism stand up and cheer).

If the Nation of Islam is booing it, then you know the Harvard professor must have said something right.

Here's part of what he wrote:

While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.

For centuries, Europeans in Africa kept close to their military and trading posts on the coast. Exploration of the interior, home to the bulk of Africans sold into bondage at the height of the slave trade, came only during the colonial conquests, which is why Henry Morton Stanley’s pursuit of Dr. David Livingstone in 1871 made for such compelling press: he was going where no (white) man had gone before.

How did slaves make it to these coastal forts? The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.

Read more at floppingaces.net...

[Taffini]

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[Mack the knife]

The article didn’t mention that the Africans (mostly of the Muslim persuasion) enslaved more Europeans than Europeans enslaved Africans [attribution to Thomas Sowell].

Many of the male Europeans became Galley Slaves — which had a rather short survival rate, while the females became household slaves. The Koran not only allowed it, but encouraged it.

[Poincare]

To be honest, I think most of it was just tribal. Give an aggressive tribe some gold or better weapons, and they’ll gladly crush their rivals for you.

Actually a number of tribes pressed some of their own into slavery on a basis of some "eugenic" ideas. And some other tribes killed their own that didn't have the desired physical or mental properties.