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Status:
"It Can't Rain All The Time"
(set 26 days ago)
Location: North Pacific
15,754 posts, read 7,590,375 times
Reputation: 2576
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rocko20
Wrong. Race is a genetic construct, not a social construct. Africans did "sell their own" just like the African Americans today are "shooting our own" or the Tutsi and Hutu people "slaughtered their own" during the Rwanda genocide. We're all the same race with the same sub-Sahara African ancestry. Hell, the entire justification for the Transatlantic slave trade was that some humans were not apart of the "human race."
Anyone can distinguish their own race/ethnicity/nationality to justify intraracial violence and atrocities. Which is what many black Americans did when we participated in American slavery. Yes, black Americans were slaveowners too, sorry for the breaking news.
Slaveowner is not synonymous with being white anymore than being a slave was synonymous with being black. Part of being apart of the African diaspora, is accepting what your own racial group did to your ancestors and why. The truth is that we don't value ourselves as a racial group and it's why we commit these atrocities against eachother.
As I was following the chaos that erupted in South Africa over their president Zuma being arrested --- the post comments under the videos, most said --- 'looks like something that would happen in the u.s., not Africa'; I thought, funny.
Where as race is a genetic construct, no race has cornered the market on death and destruction they can cause at any given moment. History is full of global violence ... and we've all be enslaved by our own.
I've heard about Libya's kidnapping and enslaving people for a number of years now. This abomination shows no sign of stopping. God help those poor victims.
Status:
"It Can't Rain All The Time"
(set 26 days ago)
Location: North Pacific
15,754 posts, read 7,590,375 times
Reputation: 2576
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bentonite
I've heard about Libya's kidnapping and enslaving people for a number of years now. This abomination shows no sign of stopping. God help those poor victims.
The origin of the "N-word" is ultimately from the Latin nigreos, meaning "black" through the different Romance languages of Europe during the colonization period.
The origin of the British colonialist designations for Niger and Nigeria come from what the local people called the river that connects them: The Tuareg name Egerew N-igerewen. British colonialists determined the boundaries of Niger and Nigeria and coined those names on what the locals called their river. The local people did not originally use "Niger" and "Nigeria" for their lands.
That's weird.
"Africa" as a continent was not a concept of the inhabitants at that time. The Sub-Saharan, Western peoples considered themselves members of tribes with different tribal boundaries than those political entities delineated by European colonizers.
Nor was "negro" a concept among them. The majority of Africans enslaved by other Africans considered themselves a tribe that had enslaved members of rival tribe.
The only thing that prevents Niger from becoming the N word is the long vowel sound of the I. The short I and there it is. The enslaved came from different parts of the West Coast of Africa. Each enslavement area was known for having different skills. The N word was originally used by the slave traders to describe to the slave buyer the location from which his human cargo originated from. Negro and Niger may be of Greek or Latin origin, but the N word is from the good old USA. Check some slave sale ads.
If you think about it the enslaved had to be young to endure the slave voyage, plus the young would bring a higher price at sell. The females could bear more children ($$$) and the young men could provide productive labor for more years. Check the Slave voyage websites.
Sub - Saharan is a modern term that is an attempt to make the Sahara a barrier to the exchange of commerce and ideas between Africans who resided in the north and Africans who resided in the south. The Sahara was no barrier to exchanges between the TRIBES of the NORTH and tribes of the south and exchange have occurred for centuries. This term should not be used to describe Africa. Just say Northern or Southern Africa if you must. Sub Saharan, another Western ruse like the "Middle East".
The maps that the Portuguese and Spanish slavers used of Africa (available) clearly labels a part of a wide area north of Guinea as Negro-land, the Arabs referred to it as Bilad Al Sudan or Land of the Blacks and the French enslavement of these people was referred to as the Ordeal of Canaan. It seems that the people of that area may not have been indigenous. Of course, the Africans did not call themselves Negroes they used the name of their tribe or clan.
Ancient Mali used to have the most gold output in the known world. Gold and Salt were both lucrative....and both mined with a lot of slaves. While Europe was starting to not be a backwater dump, and began thinking about the Renaissance and countries that occupied more than living room....Mali spanned inland to a vast degree.
But as has happened time and time again, empires rise and fall. Mali was no different. Different tribes could change allegiance quickly....as we saw recently in Afghanistan....and suddenly Mali became supplanted in the East by the Songhai, who were forming their own empire. To the North, Morocco, whose proxies at one point claimed nearly half the Iberian peninsula, were also a problem for the Malinese, and wars continued. Mali became easier to invade than Castille/Portugal and so it became a target as well.
Where there is war and havoc there are opportunities for slave taking. And in the 1600's suddenly there was a tremendous demand for slaves for a whole new frontier to be developed. That frontier soon came back however, as European influence throughout an already beaten down western frontier began to carve up Africa....as European countries tried desperately to disallow their colonies from trading outside their respective groups. The last remaining one still fancies itself as special. The Commonwealth (no not the Lithuanian-Polish one).
If you want to find slavery in an area's past...look no further than mining.
If you want to see slavery along a river or just in general in Mali/Ghana....you can still see it today...if you want to look for it. The French invasion in 2012 was in part because former slaves were being returned to their old masters.
Very few, if any, of us, can go too far without finding when our ancestors were held in bondage. None of this makes it right, but perhaps we can all glean a little hope from it that, by making things better for the next generation, we can continue to make things better.
It’s not hard to find info about African Americans controlling slaves. No one should not know this. It proves nothing, other than the desperation of people forced into horrific stuations. These folks cannot be blamed. They were prisoners trying to survive. One may not agree with their decisions- go through what they went through - then call me.
Is someone really trying to blame black folk? The not black folk I think could be blamed, maybe, are those who captured, kidnapped and sold their fellow people to the grungy white guys. Starvation is bad and - still goes on in the US. Gosh. I don’t know. It’s hard to find fault with desperate, hungry people vs. an effete well armed European monster.
This issue shouldn’t be tossed about among folks who aren’t expert historians because - because. The same goes for Indigenous folks (no Europeans “discovered ‘America’, they just stole it by genocide - and slavery and coercing native Americans to denounce their culture, mission schools taught them about the Bible and how to be good servants. Folks who had lived on this land for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
No one “discovered” this land - every bit of it was and had been populated forever. Think about your town. Or state. It’s very likely it’s based on an indigenous name - millions of people were already here.
Indians were killed because - look it up. Some were enslaved, most were killed. African Americans - slaves were bigger, stronger, displaced (“Indian” savages were pesky because their land was being taken and they succumbed to European diseases - my great grandma was sent to a mission school - to learn the Bible, do laundry and sewing. “Servant school.”
What caught my attention was him saying that Africans controlled the source of the slaves from the begining to the end of the slave trade. Is that a bigger African role than many would have thought?
Quote:
Originally Posted by AntonioR
It should be widely known that many of the people sold by the Africans as slaves to the Europeans were members of rivaling tribes that were captured by Africans. It wasn't Europeans going inland to capture these peoples.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bentonite
You left our Arabs. Christians, Jews, and Muslims, as well as people who practiced native African religions, all profited from the slave trade.
People rarely want to know the truth about a horrendous subject such as slavery. It's easier to blame certain people and leave it at that.
I saw slavery myself as recently as 1996, in southern Morocco. Tuareg tribes brought Saharan and sub-Saharan Africans to Morocco to trade and sell. It was terrible.
When I was first taught about the African slave trade by my father back when I was about nine or ten, I was led to believe that the slaver ships just grabbed people off the beach, brought them back to America, and that the white slavers knew nothing about the slaves, except that they could work. Obviously that's not the way it happened. The slaves had to have been, by and large, purchased from willing sellers. Tribal rivalry and, as the video in the OP pointed out, European "divide and conquer" strategies had to play a part. In addition to the role of malaria and yellow fever in felling Europeans who tried to colonize or dominate Africa beyond small coastal forts or cities, there was another problem which I address in the response to paperwing (link) below; the immunity of Africans (and Asians) to European diseases. Europe shared a land mass with Africa and Asia so smallpox et. al. did not have nearly the decimating effect that it did in the Americas and Australia.
It’s not hard to find info about African Americans controlling slaves. No one should not know this. It proves nothing, other than the desperation of people forced into horrific stuations. These folks cannot be blamed. They were prisoners trying to survive. One may not agree with their decisions- go through what they went through - then call me.
Are you saying the prisoners on the ship sold themselves into slavery? I don't understand your post but the gist of this thread is that the original vendors of slaves to the slaver ships was other African tribes or merchants.
Quote:
Originally Posted by paperwing
Is someone really trying to blame black folk? The not black folk I think could be blamed, maybe, are those who captured, kidnapped and sold their fellow people to the grungy white guys. Starvation is bad and - still goes on in the US. Gosh. I don’t know. It’s hard to find fault with desperate, hungry people vs. an effete well armed European monster.
It is the ultimate racism to say that blacks who sold blacks get a free pass because, since their economy allegedly wasn't great "what else were they going to do"? If they are people they should bear moral responsibility for selling their brethren.
Quote:
Originally Posted by paperwing
This issue shouldn’t be tossed about among folks who aren’t expert historians because - because. The same goes for Indigenous folks (no Europeans “discovered ‘America’, they just stole it by genocide - and slavery and coercing native Americans to denounce their culture, mission schools taught them about the Bible and how to be good servants. Folks who had lived on this land for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
No one “discovered” this land - every bit of it was and had been populated forever. Think about your town. Or state. It’s very likely it’s based on an indigenous name - millions of people were already here.
Indians were killed because - look it up. Some were enslaved, most were killed. African Americans - slaves were bigger, stronger, displaced (“Indian” savages were pesky because their land was being taken and they succumbed to European diseases - my great grandma was sent to a mission school - to learn the Bible, do laundry and sewing. “Servant school.”
The Native Americans largely, but not entirely, died from the smallpox virus, see 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. When Hernando de Soto hit the mainland of Florida in or about 1539, he left after exploring. His pigs and other animals remained. Those animals were disease vectors, spreading smallpox, diphtheria and other diseases against which the Native Americans lacked any immunity. Death rates throughout the continent are estimated at 90-98%, most having died before ever laying eyes on a white man. The remaining societies were demoralized and unorganized. Clearly, you don't reserve 100% of a continent for 2%-10% of the people. This significantly did not happen in Africa, where the people had at least partial immunity to these dreaded diseases. Thus, the Americas and Australia filled with "white" people; Africa and Asia did not despite some colonial penetration and, yes, exploitation.
As far as the migration to the Americas, people move. The Native Americans themselves came via Beringia, often called the "land bridge" from what is now Siberia to what is now Alaska. It was quite a bit wider than a "bridge'; it appeared to be ordinary dry land where presumably people lived and groups continued on migrating. When what is now the Bering Sea's waters lapped up on and then sundered the "land bridge" (climate change prehistoric style) people continued to live and multiply on both the American and Asiatic side.
As far as the arrival of the Europeans, if people stayed where they came from the Great Rift Valley of Africa would be awfully crowded. It is in the nature of humans to develop, advance and migrate. Most of the people that started White immigration to the New World were sick of the entrenched power of religious authorities and governments and sought a way out.
Quote:
Originally Posted by paperwing
The truth of our history needs to be taught.
Yes it does; it it not some diatribe with an agenda.
Plus, if the thread is to personify "Africa" which others have mentioned is not really helpful given the distict locations, we whave to be willing to accept a few things:
1. Africa was having a hard time. In Egypt, things were giving way to the Ottoman Empire, which was quite advanced. Morocco was losing out to Europe in today's "Spain" and Mali was imploding. At the same time Ethiopia was doing fantastic and Kilwa was growing powerful with greater international trade. It is no accident that the slaves were found in areas of decline.
2. Kilwa especially ran into Portugal, which was running around Africa because nobody could break the Ottoman Empire's hold on spices. Portugal took over some trading ports....including a brief interlude with Kilwa actual and in the process came to dominate that trade route, leading to other European powers not being able to use without taxation, but also to a general decline of the more locally sourced trade.
3. Spain announces they have found a different, and thus not taxed, route to India. Of course this is the new world which smallpox found a great [lace to live. As supply chains grew stronger and sustainable trade became possible and profitable, the demand to import labor was put in place. Not just in the South, but throughout the Caribbean.
There are a great many nuances that can be explored and further understood, especially when it's accepted that, at the time, acquiring a slave was viewed as little more than one acquires a Roomba today or an employee that cannot quit. Further north it was acquiring a servant, generally indentured. It was common and the economic reality of the day. It wasn't wrong at the time. It was the reality of how far we've come since then.
Where the history gets hard to talk about is when people from the present look at it, have very real suffering and in their own lives as a result of racism and try and append the two. In the New World, slavery became racist, likely because with this smörgåsbord of different European countries suddenly mixing it remained one of the last easy to identify differences of a very simple...I'm not one of you, you're not one of us. Which is exactly what we see in the peanut butter smoothing that follows. White and Black. The segregation in the South was horrible in instituting racism for the ages....and in the eyes of early proponents....racism became justified once a system of then Republican and sometimes Black leaders was cast upon them by the Union. History teaches us that defeating a nation militarily does little in gaining acceptance. Now the South started the civil war, sot there was nothing else the North could have done, but had peace been maintained, and equipment improved, I can't wonder if suddenly you have a huge upswing in freedom for slaves because the old ways are unfprofitable, while at the same time those closest to the actual conditions of growing crops may not have had a series of tremendous improvements from which they themselves could benefit.
Status:
"It Can't Rain All The Time"
(set 26 days ago)
Location: North Pacific
15,754 posts, read 7,590,375 times
Reputation: 2576
Quote:
Originally Posted by artillery77
Plus, if the thread is to personify "Africa" which others have mentioned is not really helpful given the distict locations, we whave to be willing to accept a few things:
1. Africa was having a hard time. In Egypt, things were giving way to the Ottoman Empire, which was quite advanced. Morocco was losing out to Europe in today's "Spain" and Mali was imploding. At the same time Ethiopia was doing fantastic and Kilwa was growing powerful with greater international trade. It is no accident that the slaves were found in areas of decline.
2. Kilwa especially ran into Portugal, which was running around Africa because nobody could break the Ottoman Empire's hold on spices. Portugal took over some trading ports....including a brief interlude with Kilwa actual and in the process came to dominate that trade route, leading to other European powers not being able to use without taxation, but also to a general decline of the more locally sourced trade.
3. Spain announces they have found a different, and thus not taxed, route to India. Of course this is the new world which smallpox found a great [lace to live. As supply chains grew stronger and sustainable trade became possible and profitable, the demand to import labor was put in place. Not just in the South, but throughout the Caribbean.
There are a great many nuances that can be explored and further understood, especially when it's accepted that, at the time, acquiring a slave was viewed as little more than one acquires a Roomba today or an employee that cannot quit. Further north it was acquiring a servant, generally indentured. It was common and the economic reality of the day. It wasn't wrong at the time. It was the reality of how far we've come since then.
Where the history gets hard to talk about is when people from the present look at it, have very real suffering and in their own lives as a result of racism and try and append the two. In the New World, slavery became racist, likely because with this smörgåsbord of different European countries suddenly mixing it remained one of the last easy to identify differences of a very simple...I'm not one of you, you're not one of us. Which is exactly what we see in the peanut butter smoothing that follows. White and Black. The segregation in the South was horrible in instituting racism for the ages....and in the eyes of early proponents....racism became justified once a system of then Republican and sometimes Black leaders was cast upon them by the Union. History teaches us that defeating a nation militarily does little in gaining acceptance. Now the South started the civil war, sot there was nothing else the North could have done, but had peace been maintained, and equipment improved, I can't wonder if suddenly you have a huge upswing in freedom for slaves because the old ways are unfprofitable, while at the same time those closest to the actual conditions of growing crops may not have had a series of tremendous improvements from which they themselves could benefit.
The slave trade out of Africa is still ongoing. History isn't done yet.
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