Posted on 02/11/2002 7:09:50 PM PST by Matchett-PI
The Black Roots of Slavery
"SO WE REALLY can't blame the Europeans--we sold ourselves, " said the African-American tourist to his African guide.
"It takes two," replied the guide. "Greed! Money!"
"Greed," echoed the tourist.
This conversation was from a 1998 episode of The History Channel concerning the African slave trade.
The common version of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the version taught in school and popularized by the TV miniseries Roots is not true. This version had Europeans invading inland Africa, capturing Africans, enslaving them and spiriting them off to the Americas. This version is more fiction than fact--a fact well known by many African-Americans. I recall a magazine article, written some years ago by an African journalist, in which he tells of members of black organizations in Harlem inveighing against the Africans who enslaved them.
Rarely, if ever, did Europeans travel to the African inland. Maps from the period indicate that Europeans knew nothing of the African interior. Before the trans-Atlantic trade, there was a thriving trans-Saharan slave trade. Slave trading was an entrenched institution in Africa, well before the arrival of the Europeans. This I learned from the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Of course none of this will be found in the mainstream media or in Hollywood. What you will find is the leftist anti-American version, which portrays slavery as an invention of white Europeans who invade Africa and abscond with slaves. However, the African slave trade more resembled a Venetian trading expedition than a Viking raid.
The slave trade was an economic partnership initially between Arabs and Africans. It was later the Europeans entered the market. There is documentary evidence to indicate that the relationship between the African slave sellers and their European customers was quite collegial. Even to the extent that the offspring of African sellers were taken to England and America to be educated there and returned home.
The slave trade with the Europeans was so profitable for African nations that when Britain abolished the trade in 1807, many African nations protested. The Chief of the Ashanti nation wanted to know "if the slave trade was so good before why is it so bad now?"
African women also were involved in the business. One, Fenda Lawrence, operated a slave trading business on an island in the Gambia River. She later traveled to the colony of Georgia with an affidavit according her the rights of a free person.
There were many free blacks in the American colonies. They were enfranchised and as early as 1641, Mathias De Sousa, were elected to legislatures. These free blacks owned slaves--some for philanthropic reasons, as Carter G. Woodson suggests. However as John Hope Franklin wrote, "...free Negroes had a real economic interest in the institution of slavery and held slaves in order to improve their economic status."
The census of 1830 lists 965 free black slave owners in Louisiana, owning 4,206 slaves. The state of South Carolina, lists 464 free blacks owning 2,715 slaves. How ironic it is that so many blacks owned so many slaves in South Carolina. Yet, no one seemed to mention this during the flag controversy.
Some blacks served in the Confederate army, which is another omission in our popular culture. The movie Glory did not happen to mention that blacks served in the Confederate army. It did give the impression that the black soldiers in the 54th Massachusetts were former slaves-- which was not true.
Unfortunately the average American is unaware of these historical facts. Yet despite leftist academicians the true history is being told--mostly by African and African-American political leaders, historians, and journalists.
In 1998, President Clinton visited Uganda and offered an apology to Africans for slavery. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni replied, " African chiefs were the ones waging war on each other and capturing their own people and selling them. If anyone should apologize, it should be the African chiefs. We still have those traitors here even today."
Just within the past few months African Director Roger Ngoan M'Bala, from Cote d 'Ivoire, made a movie Adanggaman that delves into the origin of the African slave trade. The movie seems to be shown everywhere except the United States. Predictably M'Bala is being criticized as absolving whites from guilt. What M'Bala is really doing is revealing that there is enough guilt to go around for everybody.
Before Congress votes for reparations let them vote when all the facts are known-not just the facts that those politicians, lawyers, and " community activists " who exploit the issue for their own personal gain want known.
Michael P. Tremoglie is a freelance writer currently working on his first novel, and an ex-Philadelphia cop. E-mail him at elfegobaca2@earthlink.net.
This sets the record straight.
But we already know the shake-down artists don't care about the truth, if they did, they'd be over there in Africa asking for reparations.
They're just petty criminal mentalities looking for the deepest pockets.
People weren't enslaved because they were Black but because they were weak. The slavers didn't say: "Let's find some Blacks to enslave." Rather they said: "Let's find some weak group to enslave." Historically, Africans were enslaved (often by other Africans or Arabs or Europeans for that matter) beacause they didn't have as many guns as the enslavers.
Reparations are irrelevant, and destructive to dealing with the realities of life when those directly harmed are long dead.
Some just seem to have a hard time adding 2+2. Those must be the ones Marx was talking about.
BTTT
A couple months ago I watched a miniseries about free blacks in New Orleans before the Civil War. Can anyone give me the title which I've forgotten? It had to do with the lightskinned pretty black young women making arrangements to be essentially concubines to rich white men in return for education and property for their offspring.
Thank heaven for labor slaving devices. I wonder if the reason slavery was relegated to history in most countries had more to do with the invention of the steam engine, etc. than to any increase in moral enlightenment.
Less you take offense at the term liberal democracy, consider that the most conservative freeper today is more liberal than anyone alive 300 years ago.
The Soviet experience (in the state-run industries) shows the lack of productivity of slave-labor. It's not only the physical work; a free worker will also use his (or her) mind to make more money. A slave (those with slave mentality) just "work to rules" and no more.
If the offense of Slavery were less extended; if it were confined to some narrow region; if it had less of grandeur in its proportions; if its victims were counted by tens and hundreds, instead of millions, the five headed enormity would find little indulgence. All owuld rise against it, while religions and civilization would lavish there choicests efforts in the general warfare. But what is wrong when done to one man cannot be right when done to many. If it is wrong thus to degrade a single soul - if it is wrong to degrade you Mr. President, - it cannot be right to degrade a whole race. And yet this is deniced by tthe barbarous logic of Slavery, which, taking advantage of its won wrong, claims immunity because its Usurption has assumed a front of audacity that cannot be safely attacked. Unhappily, there is Barbarism elsewhere in the world; but American Slavery, as defined by existing law, stands forth as the greatest organized Barbarism on which the sun now shines. It is without single peer. Its author, making it, broke the die.
If curiosity carries us to the origin of this law - and here I approach a topic often considered in this Chamber- we shall confess again its barbarism. It is not derived from common law, that fountain of liberty; for this law, while unhappily recognizing a system of servitude known as villienage, secured to the bondmn privileges unknown to the American slave; protected his person against mayhem; protected his wife against rape; gave his marriage equal validity with the marriage of his master, and surrounded his offspring with generous presumptions of freedom, unlike that rule of yours by which the servitude of the mother is necessarily stamped upon the child. It is not derived from Roman law, that fountain of tyranny for two reasons- first, because this law, in its better days, when its early rigors were spent - like the common law itself - secured to bondman privileges unknown to the American slave - in certain cases of cruelty rescued from his master - prevented the separation of parents and children, also of brothers and sisters - and even protected him in the marriage relation; and secondly, because the Thirteen Colonies were not derived from any of those countries which recognized Roman Law, while this law, even before the discovery of this continent, had lost all living efficacy. It is not derived from the Mahomedan law; for under the mild injunctions of the Koran, a benignant servitdue, unlike yourse, has prevailed, where the lash is not allowed lacerate the back of a female; where no knife or branding-iron is employed upon any human being to mark him as the property of his fellow-man; where the master is expressly enjoined to listen to the desires of his slave for emancipation; and where the blood of the master, mingling with his bond-woman, takes her from the transferable character of a chattel, and confers complete freedom upon her offspring. It is not derived fro the Spanish lawl for this law contains humane elements, unknown to your system, borrowed, perhaps, from the Mahomedan Moors who so long occupied Spainl and, besides, our Thirteen colonies had no umbilical connection with Spainl. Nor is it derived from English statutes or American statutes; for we have the positive and repeated averment of the Senator from Virginia [Mr. Mason] and also other Senators that in not a single State of the Union can any such statutes be found. From none of these does it come.
No, sir; not from any land of civilization is this Barbarism derived. It comes from Africa; ancient nurse of monstersl from Guinia, Dahomey, and Congo. There is its origin and fountain. This benighted region, we are told by Chief Justice Marshall in a memorabe Judgement, (The Antelope, 10 Wheaton R., 66) still asserts a right, discarded by Christendom, to enslave captives taken in war; and this African Barbarism is the beginning of American Slavery. And the Supreme Court of Georgia, A Slave State, has not shrunk from the conclusion. "Licensed to hold slave property," says the Court, "the Georgia planter, held the slave as a chattel; either directly from the slave trader, or from those who held under him, and he from the slave-captor in Africa. The property of the planter in the slave, became, thus, the property of the original captor." (Neal vs Farmer, 9 Georgia Reports, p. 555.) It is natural that a right, thus derived in defiance of Christendom, and openly founded on the most vulgar Paganism, should be exercised, without any mitigaging influence of Christianity; that the master's authority over the person of his slave- over his conjugal relations - over his parental relations - over the employment of his time - over all his acquisitions, should be recognized, while no generous presumption inclines to Freedom, and the womb of the bond-woman can deliver only a slave.
From its home in Africa, where it is sustained by immemorial usage, this barbarism, thus derived and thus developed, traversed the ocean to American soil. It entered on board that fatal slave ship "built in the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark," which in 1629 landed its cruel cargo at Jamestown, in Virginia, and it has boldly taken its place in every succeeding slave-ship from that early day till now - helping to pack the human freight, regardless of human agonyl surviving its countless victime plunged beneath the waves; and it has left the slave-ship only to travel inseperable from the slave in his various doom, santioning by its barbarous code every outrage, wheter of mayhem or robbery, of lash or lust, and fastening itself upon his off-spring to the remotest generation. Thus are the barbarous perogatives of barbarous half-naked African chiefs perpetuated in American slave masters, while the Senator from Virginia, [Mr. Mason] perhaps unconscious of their origin - perhaps desirous to secure for them the appearance of a less barbarous pedigree - tricks them out with the phrase of the Roman law, discarded by the common law, partus sequitor ventrum, which simply renders into ancient Latin an existing rule of African barbarism, recognized as an existing rule of American Slavery.
Such is the plain juridical of the American slave code, which is now vaunted as a badge of civilization. But all law, whatever may be its juridical origin, whether English or Mahomedan, Roman or African, may be traced to other and ampler influences in nature, sometime of Right, and sometimes of Wrong. Surely the law which blasted the slave trade as piracy punishable by death had a different inspiration from that other law, which secured immunity for the slave trade thoughout an immense territory, and invested its supporters with political power. As there is a higher law above, so there is a lower law below, and each is felt in human affairs.
It's convenient for them to blame destruction and mayhem on the white man. Somehow in their minds, in a perverted way, that justifies their actions.
The US Census before the Civil War shows the same thing, with the south barely contributing 10% of the tax income to the Federal government while sucking out more than half of it. The south was well on along the road to economic failure, and though the majority of Americans were racial bigots, they also could easily see the pending ecomonic doom of the South and they knew the cause to be slavery.
Slavery still exists in Africa.
Slavery in Africa is predominantly white Muslim Arabs enslaving black Christians and animists. It is dispicable, and what is even more disgusting is the unwillingness of so-called "black leaders" in the U.S. to condemn this slavery.
Seems that the "black-leaders" don't want to offend the Arab-Muslim ... and certainly the black-Muslims don't seem to be bothered by a little enslavement of Christians (even if the slaves are black!!)
Forget what happened 150 years ago ... look at what is happening RIGHT NOW.
Africa doesn't seem to be a very nice place to be.
And for those in this country who want reparations .. . if they get ANYTHING... they get the payment AFTER they return to "mother-Africa" (for good!!). America is a great country .. . and any those here who embrace the ideas (and don't ask for handouts) ... there is no better place. For those who think that they are "entitled" to something... just try to find a better place. [Ken Hamblin wrote a book ... "Pick a Better Country" ... a GREAT READ. And another black author wrote how thankful he was to be an American, after visiting the horror that is Africa. He realized the odds would be against him if he had been born in Africa.]
Mike
They didn't.
The Republic of Venice had a thriving slave trade in Slavs (the word origin for "slave" comes from "Slav") captured by Tartars and sold in the Black Sea ports. Slavs in the eastern Adriatic were also captured and sold as slaves. Between 1414 and 1423, 10,000 eastern European slaves were sold on the Venetian market.
Large numbers of these white slaves were taken to North Africa and sold by the Venetians in Egypt.
I'd heard that about the cotton gin but had forgotten it. Thanks for your informative reply.
If you haven't read the book, do so.
The word "slave" comes from "Slav". During the time of the Roman empire, the main source of slaves was the Slavic people in what's now Russia and Ukraine. They weren't armed and organized, and so were easy prey
beacause they didn't have as many guns as the enslavers.
It's ALWAYS a good idea to have at least as many guns as anybody who might have ideas about enslaving you...something to keep in mind the next time Chuck Shumer spouts off about more gun control being needed
uhhh, if the European slave traders had not brought Africans to the New World as slaves, I'm thinking there would be no black nationalism in the New World, because any blacks here would be here by *choice*. Isn't that kind of obvious?
Are you? Have you seen this?:
Slave trade: a root of contemporary African Crisis
"The past is what makes the present coherent," said Afro-American writer James Baldwin, and the past "will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly."
Why go back five centuries to start an explanation of Africa's crisis in the late 1990s? Must every story of Africa's political and economic under-development begin with the contact with Europe? The intention is not to produce another nationalist tract on how whites, driven by lust for material possession and armed with firearms, gin and a bag full of tricks, subjugated innocent Africans who were living blissfully close to nature. The reason for looking back is that the root of the crisis facing African societies is their failure to come to terms with the consequences of that contact.
Portuguese seamen first landed in Africa in the fourth decade of the fifteenth century. From the outset they seized Africans and shipped them to Europe. In 1441 ten Africans were kidnapped from the Guinea coast and taken to Portugal as gifts to Prince Henry the Navigator. In subsequent expeditions to the West African coast, inhabitants were taken and shipped to Portugal to be sold as servants and objects of curiosity to households. In the Portuguese port of Lagos, where the first African slaves landed in 1442, the old slave market now serves as an art gallery.
Portuguese adventurers who sailed southeast along the Gulf of Guinea in 1472 landed on the coast of what became Nigeria. Others followed. They found people of varying cultures. Some lived in towns ruled by kings with nobility and courtiers, very much like the medieval societies they left behind them. A Dutch visitor to Benin City wrote in around 1600: "As you enter it, the town appears very great. You go into a great broad street, not paved, which seems to be seven or eight times broader than the Warmoes Street in Amsterdam...The houses in this town stand in good order, one close and even with the other, as the houses in Holland stand..." More than a century earlier Benin exchanged ambassadors with Portugal. But not all African societies were as developed. Some enjoyed village existence in primeval forests remote from outside influences.
Economics was the driving force
From the outset, relations between Europe and Africa were economic. Portuguese merchants traded with Africans from trading posts they set up along the coast. They exchanged items like brass and copper bracelets for such products as pepper, cloth, beads and slaves - all part of an existing internal African trade. Domestic slavery was common in Africa and well before European slave buyers arrived, there was trading in humans. Black slaves were captured or bought by Arabs and exported across the Saharan desert to the Mediterranean and Near East.
In 1492, the Spaniard Christopher Columbus discovered for Europe a 'New World'. The find proved disastrous not only for the 'discovered' people but also for Africans. It marked the beginning of a triangular trade between Africa, Europe and the New World. European slave ships, mainly British and French, took people from Africa to the New World. They were initially taken to the West Indies to supplement local Indians decimated by the Spanish Conquistadors. The slave trade grew from a trickle to a flood, particularly from the seventeenth century onwards.
Portugal's monopoly in the obnoxious trade was broken in the sixteenth century when England followed by France and other European nations entered the trade. The English led in the business of transporting young Africans from their homeland to work in mines and till lands in the Americas.
Most slaves sold by Africans
Estimates of the total human loss to Africa over the four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade range from 30 million to 200 million. At the initial stage of the trade parties of Europeans captured Africans in raids on communities in the coastal areas. But this soon gave way to buying slaves from African rulers and traders. The vast majority of slaves taken out of Africa were sold by African rulers, traders and a military aristocracy who all grew wealthy from the business. Most slaves were acquired through wars or by kidnapping. The Portuguese Duatre Pacheco Pereire wrote in the early sixteenth century after a visit to Benin that the kingdom "is usually at war with its neighbours and takes many captives, whom we buy at twelve or fifteen brass bracelets each, or for copper bracelets, which they prize more." Olaudah Equiano, an ex-slave, described in his memoirs published in 1789 how African rulers carried out raids to capture slaves. "When a trader wants slaves, he applies to a chief for them, and tempts him with his wares. It is not extraordinary, if on this occasion he yields to the temptation with as little firmness, and accepts the price of his fellow creature's liberty with as little reluctance, as the enlightened merchant. Accordingly, he falls upon his neighbours, and a desperate battle ensues...if he prevails, and takes prisoners, he gratifies his avarice by selling them." Equiano was born in 1745 in an area under the kingdom of Benin. At the age of ten he was kidnapped by slave hunters who also took his sister. He was more fortunate than most other slaves. After serving in America, the West Indies and England he was able to save for and buy his freedom in 1756 at the age of twenty-one.
Ottobah Cugoano, who was about 13 years old when he was kidnapped in 1770 in Ajumako in today's Ghana, had no doubt the shared responsibility of Africans for the horrid business. Referring to his own capture Cugoano wrote after he regained his freedom "I must own, to the shame of my own countrymen, that I was first kidnapped and betrayed by some of my own complexion, who were the first cause of my exile and slavery." But he added, "If there were no buyers there would be no sellers." By the same token, if there were no sellers there would be no buyers.
A profitable trade
European slave buyers made the greater profit from the despicable trade, but their African partners also prospered. Many grew strong and fat on profits made from selling their brethren. Tinubu square, commercial centre of today's Lagos and home to Nigeria's Central Bank, is named after a major nineteenth century slave trader. Madam Tinubu was born in Egbaland and rose from rags to riches by trading in slaves , salt and tobacco in Badagry. She later became one of Nigeria's pioneering nationalists.
Africa's rulers, traders and military aristocracy protected their interest in the slave trade. They discouraged Europeans from leaving the coastal areas to venture into the interior of the continent. European trading companies realised the benefit of dealing with African suppliers and not unnecessarily antagonising them. The companies could not have mustered the resources it would have taken to directly capture the tens of millions of people shipped out of Africa. It was far more sensible and safer to give Africans guns to fight the many wars that yielded captives for the trade. The slave trading network stretched deep into the Africa's interior. Slave trading firms were aware of their dependency on African suppliers. The Royal African Company, for instance, instructed its agents on the West coast "if any differences happen, to endeavour an amicable accommodation rather than use force." They were "to endeavour to live in all friendship with them" and "to hold frequent palavers with the Kings and the Great Men of the Country, and keep up a good correspondent with them, ingratiating yourself by such prudent methods" as may be deemed appropriate.
Africans faced with a new world
Contact with Europe opened new images of the world for the African elite and presented them with products of a civilisation which as the centuries passed became more technologically differentiated from their own. The slave trade whetted their appetite for the products of a changing world. Sadly it was not only tinpot rulers who were mesmerised by the glitters of western artefacts. An African slave in Cuba in the nineteenth century recalled how his people were captivated by the bright colour of European manufacturers. "It was the scarlet which did for the Africans: both the kings and the rest surrendered without a struggle. When the kings saw that the whites were taking out these scarlet handkerchiefs as if they were waving, they told the blacks, "Go on then, go get a scarlet handkerchief" and the blacks were so excited by the scarlet they ran down to the ships, like sheep and there were captured."
European traders saw the advantages of helping African kings and chiefs realise their desire to acquire western culture, if not for themselves then for their children. Hugh Crow, who commanded the last British slave ship to leave a British port, wrote "It has always been the practice of merchants and commanders of ships to Africa, to encourage the natives to send their children to England as it not only conciliates their friendship, and softens their manner, but adds greatly to the security of the traders." With their children in Europe, African chiefs were likely to be more accommodating, knowing full well their offspring could be held as ransom.
European powers also hoped that by entertaining African princes in Europe to win the friendship of their fathers. By far the most important reason why African rulers and traders participated in the slave trade was their desire for its material rewards and the power it brought. They were obsessed with the variety of goods available through the trade. Locally produced equivalents of some merchandise, like cloth and jewellery, existed but greater satisfaction and prestige was got from having imported varieties. The man with a warehouse full with goods from abroad was a powerful figure in the community, able to buy favours and influence with his ill-gotten wealth.
African traders resist abolition of obnoxious trade
When Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 it not only had to contend with opposition from white slavers but also from African rulers who had become accustomed to wealth gained from selling slaves or from taxes collected on slaves passed through their domain. African slave-trading classes were greatly distressed by the news that legislators sitting in parliament in London had decided to end their source of livelihood. But for as long as there was demand from the Americas for slaves, the lucrative business continued.
English missionary and abolitionist Thomas Buxton wrote in 1840 that the best way to suppress the slave trade was to offer Africa's slaving elites legitimate business that would give them means to satisfy their hunger for Western goods. "The African has acquired a taste for the civilised world. They have become essential to his. To say that the African, under present circumstances, shall not deal in man, is to say he shall long in vain for his accustomed gratification." This was the crux of the African condition.
The slave trade business continued in many parts of Africa for many decades after the British abolished it. For as long as there was demand for slave labour in the Americas, the supply was available. The British set up a naval blockade to stop ships carrying slaves from West Africa, but it was not very effective in suppressing the trade. Thousands of slave ships were detained during the decades the blockade was in operation. One Lieutenant Patrick Forbes, a British naval officer, estimated in 1849 that during a period of 26 years 103,000 slaves were emancipated by the warships of the naval blockade while ships carrying 1,795,000 slaves managed to slip past the blockage and land their cargo in the Americas.
British efforts to suppress the trade made it even more profitable because the price of slaves rose in the Americas. The numerous wars that plagued Yorubaland for half a century following the fall of the Oyo empire was largely driven by demand for slaves. Reverend Samuel Johnson wrote of the subjugation of neighbouring Yoruba kingdoms by Ibadan war-chiefs in the 1850s: "Slave-raiding now became a trade to many who would get rich speedily." It took the intervention of British colonialism to impose peace in Yorubaland in 1893. Slave trading for export ended in Nigeria and elsewhere in West Africa after slavery ended in the Spanish colonies of Brazil and Cuba in 1880. A consequence of the ending of the slave trade was the expansion of domestic slavery as African businessmen replaced trade in human chattel with increased export of primary commodities. Labour was needed to cultivate the new source of wealth for the African elites.
What if the West not abolish slavery? Had Europe not decided to end the slave trade and the New World ceased demanding chattel labour, the transatlantic trade might still be rolling today. The ending of the obnoxious business had nothing to do with events in Africa. Rulers and traders there would have happily continued to sell humans for as long as there was demand for them. One can only imagine how more determinedly African merchants would have clung on to the business as goods offered by European buyers became more attractive with changes in Western technology. How many souls would African chiefs have been prepared to trade for a television or a car? It is a disturbing thought.
To highlight the role of the African elites in the slave trade is not to argue the obvious that they were morally depraved like the Europeans who bought slaves from them. It is to show that the corrupt leadership that undermines democracy and economic development in African countries today has a long history. The selfishness and disregard for the welfare of fellow humans manifest in the sacking of national resources by modern African leaders also motivated the pillaging of the human resources of the continent in times past.
A long history of corrupt African rulng classes
Some African writers, seeking to maximise the culpability of Europe in the slave trade, minimise the part played by African rulers and traders or explain it as the result of white trickery. Such distortion of history may make the moral case against European imperialism seem sharper, but it does nothing to aid the understanding by Africans of a critical period of their history. African slavers acted out of their own volition and for their self interest. They took advantage of the opportunity provided by Europe to consume the products of its civilisation. The triangular slave trade was a major part in the early stages of the emergence of the international market. The role of slave-trading African ruling classes in this market is not radically different from the position of the African elite in today's global economy. They both traded the resources of their people for their own gratification and prosperity. In the process they helped to weaken their nations and dim their prospects for economic and social development.
The slave trade had a profound economic, social, cultural and psychological impact on African societies and peoples. It did more to undermine African development than the colonialism that followed it. Through the trade the continent lost a large proportion of its young and able bodied population. Guyanese historian Walter Rodney cites in his book 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa' one estimate showing that while Europe's population more than quadruped between 1650 and 1900, Africa's population rose only by 20 per cent during the same period. The loss of work-force was not more serious than the damage to the social and economic fabric of the society and the undermining of the confidence of Africans in their historical evolution.
The transatlantic slave trade and slavery were major elements in the emergence of capitalism in the West. As Karl Marx noted, they were as pivotal to western industrialisation as the new machinery and financial systems. Slavery gave value to the colonies in the New World which were crucial in the development of international trade. Trinidadian historian Eric Williams showed in his well-researched book Capitalism and Slavery, that the slave trade and slavery helped to make England the workshop of the world. Profit from slave-worked colonies and the slave trade were major sources of capital accumulation which helped finance the industrial revolution. The transportation of slave transformed British seaport areas into booming centres. One Englishman calling himself 'A Genuine "Dicky Sam", had no doubt about the link between the slave trade and prosperity of seaport city of Liverpool. "Like the magical wand, the traffic worked wonders; once poor, now rich; once ignoble, now great. Churches have been built and grand legacies bequeathed to all sorts of charities."
Europeans built empires, Africans drunk gin
While Europe invested profits from the trade in laying the foundation of a powerful economic empire, African kings and traders were content with wearing used caps and admiring themselves in worthless mirrors while swigging adulterated brandy bought with the freedom of their kinsmen. Virtually all the items imported during the nefarious business were for consumption or weapons for waging wars. A slave ship's manifest published in 1665 listed items carried for sale to Africans as old hats, caps, salt, swords, knives, axe-heads, hammers, belts, sheepskin gloves, bracelets, iron jugs and even "cats to catch their mice." One African trader calling himself Grandy King George was quite specific in his demand. He wrote to a slave captain: "send me one lucking-glass, six foot long by six foot wide." He also asked for an armchair, a gold mounted cane and a stool." The more common imports were alcohol, guns and gunpowder , salt and textiles. The quality of the items shipped to Africa was inferior - the spirits were adulterated and the guns designed for the African market.
Africa's contemporary history may have been different had its rulers and traders demanded capital goods for use in building the economy rather than trinkets and booze. As it was, the slave trade arrested economic development in Africa. The loss in human resources had dire consequences for labour dependent agricultural economies. Any possibility that the internal dynamics of African society could have led to the development of capitalism and industrialisation was blocked by the slave trade. The few existing manufacturing activities were either destroyed or denied conditions for growth. Cheap European textiles, for instance, undermined local cloth production. Samuel Johnson wrote in the late nineteenth century about Yorubaland: "Before the period of intercourse with Europeans, all articles made of iron and steel, from weapons of war to pins and needles, were of home manufacture; but the cheaper and more finished articles of European make, especially cutlery, though less durable are fast displacing home-made wares." The predominance of the slave trade prevented the emergence of business classes that could have spearheaded the internal exploitation of the resources of their societies. The slave trade drew African societies into the international economy but as fodder for western economic development.
Africa devastated by slave trade wars
Inter-communal wars waged to procure slaves were intensely destructive of human lives. Tens of thousands of people were slaughtered in a single skirmish. The wars and rampant kidnappings fuelled hostility and suspicion between communities. Distrust was a basic requirement for individual and communal survival. The slave trade arrested and distorted the cultural development of African societies. It affected the meaning people gave to the world and their place within it. Increased uncertainty of life gave added force to superstitious beliefs and customs. People sought salvation and protection from the spiritual world. They paid homage to gods to safeguard themselves and their families from misfortune. The psychological impact of the dehumanising trade was crippling. There was constant anxiety caused by perpetual fear of being captured and herded away like common animals to a place of no return. Some Africans believed that whites took slaves to eat them.
Whites assert racial superiority
It was during the slave trade and slavery that white people affirmed their superiority over blacks. It is not difficult to understand why white traders who bought black people for price of adulterated brandy and packed them onto slave ships like cattle could consider themselves to be superior. Though most were illiterate, crude and drunken, white slave traders were free men herding flocks of human cattle. As the centuries passed Europeans became more and more scornful of black people. By the nineteenth century various theories of black inferiority were developed and used to justify the colonisation of Africa. During the slave trade Africans came to believe themselves to be inferior. They lost confidence in themselves, their culture and their ability to development. The late Afro-American civil rights leader Martin Luther King's comment that few people realise the extent that slavery had "scarred the soul and wounded the spirit of the black man," holds true not only with respect to the descendants of the Africans who arrived in the New World but also the descendants of those left behind. "The backwardness of black Africa," said the late Senegalese president Leopold Senghor, "...has been caused less by colonialism than by the Slave Trade."
Would the history of Africa have been turned out differently had it's leaders taken the advice of eighteenth century French thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau. He said: "If I were chief of one of the African peoples, I declare that I would have a gallows set up at the frontier, on which I would hang, without mercy, the first European who dared enter the country, and the first citizen who tried to leave it." Perhaps if more African rulers had militarily resisted the design of the better armed Europeans their peoples might have paid a bloody price, as did the Indians in the Americas who fought to keep their lands and expel the white intruders. Before Columbus arrived in Hispanoila in 1492, the native population of North America was perhaps 40 million. By 1900, in the U.S. less than quarter of a million remained, scattered among 1,500 remote reservations.
Africa's underdevelopment was not inevitable
Would Africans have suffered the same genocide had they tried to end the slave trade? Unlikely. It is doubtful that the human cost of resistance would have been greater than the many millions of Africans killed in slave producing wars as well as those eaten by sharks after being jettisoned during the Atlantic crossings. We cannot know for certain. It seems more likely that Europe would have had to look elsewhere for cheap labour. It was one thing for European nations to use military might to protect their coastal trading posts and subdue disgruntled local chiefs, it would have been an entirely different matter for them to penetrate the interior of the continent and fight the hundreds of war that fed the slave trade.
The cost of such ventures would have made the price of slaves unattractive to the plantation owners in the Americas. As the historian Philip Curtin noted " If the prices of African-born slaves had not been competitive with those of labour from other sources - native born or European - the slave trade could never have come into existence, no matter what the epidemiological consequences of movement across the Atlantic."
Had cheap Africans not been available to work the land and mines of the 'New World', white planters and landowners would have sought other sources of cheap labour. They would have made more use of the native population and also turned more to Europe for labour. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries large numbers of poor whites were shipped to the 'New World', most involuntarily, to work on plantations, mines and as servants. Some poor whites kidnapped on European streets were sold in the West Indies much in the same way as Africans were. Indentured servants, convicts and deportees from Europe were often treated not much better than black slaves. But as the transatlantic slave trade boomed, the number of whites in forced labour decreased. It was because of the relative cheapness of African slave labour, and therefore the plantation owners' preference for them, that the trade in white labour ended. This gave rise to what Afro-American writer William DuBois described as the replacement of "a caste of condition by a caste of race." Had the costs of black slaves been much dearer, Europe might have become a major source of unfree labour.
By Tunde Obadina - Director of Africa Business Information Services © Copyright Africa Economic Analysis 2000
A free man farming for himself will make more productive use of a given acre of land, than a slave who only works as hard as he has to (and loafs when the overseer isn't watching). Therefore, free farmers can out-bid slave owners for land, and still earn a profit. As soon as the country filled up (through immigration and expanding population) and all the useful farmland was taken, slavery would have been rendered uneconomical.
HUMANITY FOR SALE
"In Sudan, people are a commodity to be bought and sold. In part one of our eight-part special report, Sun columnist Linda Slobodian discovers the cruel practice is still going on and talks to those who are risking their lives to end it forever.
SUDAN -- Slavery. It's supposed to be something that ended long, long ago.
The Israelites were brutalized in bondage -- until, the Bible tells us, Moses came along to set them free. Black slaves seized from Africa suffered terribly at the hands of plantation owners in the old American south. Abolitionists brought an end to that in the 19th century. And so, under the eyes of human-rights watchdogs, the world became ivilized, intolerant of the cruel practice of slavery.
Or so I believed.
Then came the allegations about it going on in Sudan. And so I went there to investigate. And found a sickening truth.
Slavery thrives in 1997.
Go here to read: THE SLAVE TRAIL--An eight-part special report 1997
But I believe Keyes, Sowell and Williams would oppose calls for reparations.
The modern descendants of slaves brought here in chains in admittedly miserable, soul-gutting conditions who are now calling for reparations need to remember a few things:
They should not only be glad to be in America, they should be glad to be ANYWHERE !
Had that NOT happened, the blood of their ancestors would have run into the earth over there several centuries ago and these modern day would-be "plaintiffs" would not even exist.
And should the great-great-great grandchildren of the approximately 3,000 SLAVE OWNING BLACK plantation owners in this country also be subject to PAYING these reparations?
If so, how do we find THEM?
Robert Hitt Neill tells of attending a Tennessee Mountain Writer’s Conference years ago with several other authors. Among them was Alex Hailey, celebrated author of “Roots.” Watching a TV news show, a group of them watched a demonstration in a Southern state against the “Rebel” flag incorporated into that state’s flag. The very next report covered a famine in Africa. Graphic images showed dead bodies, starving children with distended tummies and runny noses and dying people covered with flies, too weak to brush them away.
Mr. Hailey intoned in a low, serious voice:
“Every time an American black sees a story like that, they should find a Confederate flag and kiss it.” He then pointed to the TV screen and continued, “Because these would be me and my descendants, except for American slavery. I thank God that my family and I are here instead of there.”
Notice how "North America"(which also includes Canada and Mexico) is switched with "U.S."
The Indian-descended population of Mexico is far in excess of 40 million, while I doubt that the pre-Columbus Indian population of what is currently the US was more than a few million.
And it only gets WORSE closer to 1860
Some blacks served in the Confederate army, which is another omission in our popular culture. The movie Glory did not happen to mention that blacks served in the Confederate army. It did give the impression that the black soldiers in the 54th Massachusetts were former slaves-- which was not true.
Say it ain't so stainless!! Kind of blows lincoln's American vision that has been forced down our throats straight to heck doesn't it?
The issue of reparations will kill the RAT party, if blacks push for it.
I'll admit the story sounds good, except when you look at the factual record. Kind of like "Pay not attention to the man behind the curtain" isn't it?
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