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Here's the thing there was no notion of "African Brotherhood" back then, heck not even today. Human beings are territorial and competitive and Africans are no different. They didn't feel any kinship with subjugated tribes simply because their skin was Black.
I would disagree with Africans selling their own brothers. Just because they are all from the same Continent does not mean that they are all the same. Look at Europe. You have Germanic, Flemish, Slavs, Celts, Scandinavians. And Africa is an even larger continent. The tribes that sold slaves to the Europeans were usually the stronger tribes that had asserted territorial dominance by defeating a rival tribe in battle. This rival tribe was most likely different in the way that Slavic peoples are different from Germanic tribes.
Without the help of the dominant African tribes, Europeans would have succumbed to the climate and nature in Africa. The slave trade would have probably still existed, but wouldn't be nearly as successful.
Wow you really don't know much. I've linked up a simple wiki post with plenty of references to begin informing yourself. Your relative lack of knowledge on the subject is quite stunning.
Something else needs to be added. Until the Europeans leared that quinine could be used to cure and prevent malaria which occured in the mid 19th century. Africa had a defense far more powerful than any firearm for keeping Europeans off most of Africas shores and on their ships the lowly plasmodium a disease agent that looks like an amoeba, attacks your liver and kills. You got malaria from this and Africa also had Yellow Fevevr and Sleeping Sickness. Africa got a real bad reputation in Europe for being a land of death and misfortune and even though they mapped its coast in the 15th century were largely ignorant of its interior for centuries until armed with the medical knowledge of things like quinine which by the way came from native Americans who got it from making a tea with a native to the new world herb. Quinine originally came from the Amazon like another herb that you chewed to make you feel better called the coca leaf (cocaine). Europeans also learned to make quinine by synthetic means but by this time slavery had been abolished in Europe and the Americas and other places controled by Europeans.
Without the help of the dominant African tribes, Europeans would have succumbed to the climate and nature in Africa. The slave trade would have probably still existed, but wouldn't be nearly as successful.
Europeans barely even need to leave their ships to buy/trade slaves... Europeans had no interest in Africa until really the mid-1800s when they began to trek inland and journey to the beginnings of civilization.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cuebald
They were armed. These were tribesmen who hunted for a living.
Many of the natives who were sold to the slave traders were captured in battle by their rivals. However, if the ship wasn't full, the traders would force the sellers on board as well as the men and women they had just purchased from them.
This was in pre-iron age Africa, and their stone weapons were no match for Spanish swords and Portuguese warriors. They were, however, armed.
Actually, Sub-Saharan Africans in pre-European times did develop iron weapons. Timbuktu was even a scholarly center pre-Age of Discovery. It's just that they had a lot of conditions keeping them from competing with Europe and Asia in the technology/discovery field.
Yeah, it is a shame that slavery ever occurred in this country. Question is, how many ancestors of slavery would still be living in African nations living such a wonderful life there, had there not been slavery?
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