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How would it feel if someone came by ship with rope and enslaved you or me?
African peoples had tribal nations and traditions. They respected forests and earth’s natural resources and had dances and chants and didn’t bother anyone. They rejoiced in the biodiversity of the African continent.
Then suddenly these ships came to Ivory Coast and other West African shores and they took ropes tying up innocent people …. I watched the movie series “roots” and I saw Amistad…. And I see what they did to Kunta Kinta and others like him. It was terrible.
These people never did that to Europeans ever . Never did they send boats to UK or America with ropes … then tell you you’re going to be auctioned off to some plantation owner , whipped and beat, and then forced to plow fields for all of life and the slave kids never get to be free and where in the Bible was this in scripture that this is how you operate as a human being?
Doesn’t it even get told in the Bible that Moses freed the Hebrews… the ancestors of the original covenant with God that freedom from slavery was celebrated with the parting of the Red Sea ? And the land of milk and honey
And then these kind folks who were racistly discriminated against just because their natural skin pigment is better suited for equatorial UV rays with more melanin so they don’t die of melanoma or squamous cell skin cancer , Were callously just slurred at, deprived of their education , forced into slavery . It’s very hypocritical that Jefferson was also a slave owner
Slavery over the ages was always the stronger group overpowering the weaker individuals. Most of history it was local groups... all the way back to Mesopotamia... so the enslaved individual was of the same ethnic group. It was not until the 16th century that Europeans started purchasing enslaved people from tribal leaders in Africa... who had a long history of enslaving others.
Slavery of people who were black was not because they were black, it was because they were a vulnerable population and easily exploited.
Human trafficking and enslavement still happens today. Lots of data available using Google.
Is this what they teach about the slave trade in school these days -- Africans innocent and naive, Europeans cunning and evil, no hint of nuance between these two cartoonish extremes?
Interesting how you focus on the European slave trade while the Arab slave trade was considerably more extensive and brutal. Or, for that matter, how you ignore the African slave trade. Europeans didn't have to wander very far into the forests to round up these "innocent" Africans -- Africans were all too happy to round up members of rival tribes and bring them from the interior to the coast for the waiting ships.
And it wasn't Africans who brought an end to the international African slave trade, it was Europeans -- primarily Great Britain -- who not only spent their own blood and treasure to patrol the African coast to intercept slave ships but actually had force African tribes to stop selling each other off.
Oh no -- would that be considered "cultural imperialism?"
Slavery was standard operating procedure before the first ancient Sumerian city state conquered and enslaved the others in 5000 BC.
African tribes were capturing and enslaving each other long before a single white man was involved.
It was African warriors who captured and sold other Africans to European and Middle Eastern slave traders destined for Europe, America, and the Carribean. It is not as if Indy Jones dove into the middle of darkest Africa to harvest black slaves. They were captured by other black African warriors and then sold to middle men of the slave trade. How about asking why that was necessary? It was just common practice and had been for many thousands of years.
Was slavery necessary?
Nope. It was just accepted as historically "normal".
Many white slaves were captured by Muslims during the time of the crusades and Holy wars. Many white slaves were captured for thousands of years before that.
Businesses always try to reduce labor costs, and slavery was a prime way to do that back to circa 10,000 BC or earlier. It was standard operating procedure, especially before the time of Christ.
Black Africans got their turn because during the movement toward the enlightenment of man, the idea came about that people should not be slaves. It was wrong to own another human being, and so white people came to stop owning other white people in slavery. Sadly, black people were seen as sub-human rather than just normal human, and as such it did not offend people's morals during this era to own black human beings.
Slavery is always and everywhere evil, but that is just how it was.
The practice of white people having white slaves went on for many thousands of years. The practice of white people having black slaves went on for about 250 years. If you ask me, they got off easy.
Slavery has always been evil. It just took forever for modern man to universally accept that.
And oh by the way, illegal slavery still exists today -- much of it currently in Africa. That is something you might want to check into.
You should see what Arab traders did to the African slaves they purchased. Europeans didn’t enter the jungle to capture Africans for slavery. They, the Europeans, would have been easily defeated and themselves turned into slaves. It was Africans capturing Africans to put into slavery selling them to anyone willing to buy.
Vikings sailed along the European coastlines, capturing white slaves. The Roman empire had many slaves. Slavery wasn't unique to Africans and it continues today, particularly in Arabic countries.
Watching a couple of fictional movies is hardly the way to learn history.
And the Barbary white slave trade between the 16th and 19th century. North Africans periodically raided along the Mediterranean coast and as far as Britain and Ireland seizing whites and forcing them into servitude.
Slavery is one sad facet of the human condition throughout history. All of us have slaves and slave masters in our ancestry somewhere. African slavery is what comes to mind but there were and are other kinds. That fact does not excuse or gloss over the brutality that was employed, and the deplorable conditions imposed on slave populations in the Americas and elsewhere. Slavery has taken different forms and our version of generational chattel slavery, entwined with a brutal agricultural economy, was particularly oppressive.
OP wrote: "It's very hypocritical that Jefferson was also a slave owner." We hear this a lot. Jefferson and Washington were creatures of a different time just as we are of our own time. The same is true of the African slave traders in their day or the Aztecs or the Romans or Chinese. Slave owners could turn to philosophers like Aristotle, and others, and religious teachings that refer to slavery as if it is a natural and normal thing. We believe differently but we cannot impose our rules and values on someone who lived and died so long ago. But we can, and do, benefit by their advances and innovations. Furthermore, we know of some famous slaves -- Aesop and St. Patrick were both slaves at some point in their lives.
We have written accounts of slave traders arriving in boats and grabbing people off the shores and villages of ICELAND and taking them to the slave markets of North Africa. There is a reason people in Southern Italy and Sicily lived in walled settlements up in the hills and mountains, which you can still see to this day. One was malaria which people noticed they got in hot climates close to water, and also because for centuries various invaders/marauders captured people near the coast and enslaved them.
The biggest slave market in Europe around the 8th century (hope that date is correct) was Dublin, Ireland. St a Patrick was first taken to Ireland as a slave.
The word “slave” comes from Slav, because the Slavs would be captured from what is now Eastern Europe/the Balkans and taken by boat along the rivers to the Black Sea, which opens out to the Mediterranean and then sold and traded in Egypt, Arab areas and North Africa. They were usually traded by the Vikings/Norse Men who came down the great rivers in Europe in boats.
When Ghengis Khan and his sons created the largest land empire the world have ever known, they came all the way into modern day Russia and Iran. Any city resisting the invaders would be burned to the ground and thousands slaughtered, with survivors sold into slavery. You can imagine the numbers we are talking about as the Khans came all the way from Mongolia and swept across the Eur-Asian continent.
The Romans of course enslaved huge amounts of people. Roman citizens were far outnumbered by slaves. Most of the large Roman roads, aqueducts and monuments were built using slave labor. As in the ancient world were the pyramids of Egypt and large ancient monuments.
What about the Bible, where the early books are thousands of years old and frequently mentions slavery? The Jews themselves were enslaved in Egypt and moved by force to Babylon (Iraq) in a later period.
Yes the chattel slavery that was practiced in what is now the USA was horrific and it went on much longer than just two hundred years. But slavery is sadly as old as humankind.
All of us have slaves and slave masters in our ancestry somewhere. .
No, we don't. None of my ancestors were slave masters, slave traders or related.
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