The Slave Trade
Via
Jimmy L. Shirley Jr.
I found this excerpt on the National Park Service website:
The
circumstances which gave rise to the Underground Railroad were based on
the transportation of Africans to North America as part of the Atlantic
slave trade. About twelve million Africans were transported across the
Atlantic to the Western Hemisphere in the 400 years from 1450 to 1850.
The problem here, and this is a huge, non-technical problem, is that Columbus sailed in 1492.
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Resistance to lifetime servitude began with the first Africans forcibly
brought to the Western Hemisphere in the 1500s, and resistance continued
until the last emancipations in the Americas. For the former British
colonies which became the United States, colonial-era resistance and
early antislavery activities are the base on which the Underground
Railroad was built. Without resistance, there would have been no need
for the extensive legal codes which upheld property rights in human
beings or for the brutal intimidation which always existed just beneath
the surface of this coercive social system.
More @ NPS
Valerie Protopapas
ReplyDeleteAnd we must never forget WHERE THEY CAME FROM AND WHO SOLD THEM - and it wasn't whites.
An African Chief on the matters of trade between himself and Europeans: “We want three things: powder, ball and brandy; and we have three things to sell: men, women and children."
Considering the African slave trade, Zora Neale Hurston, considered one of the pre-eminent writers of twentieth century African-American literature decried, “…but the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw was: my people had sold me…My own people had exterminated whole nations and torn families apart for a profit before the strangers got their chance for a cut. It was a sobering thought."
In an attempt to end the slave trade, British diplomat Wilmot, explained to King Gelele: "England has been doing her utmost to stop the slave trade in this country. Much money has been spent, and many lives sacrificed to obtain this desirable end, but hitherto without success. I have come to ask you to put an end to this traffic and to enter into some treaty with me." But Gelele refused, saying: "If white men came to buy, why should I not sell?" Trying another tactic, Wilmot then asked how much money Gelele required to make an end to the trade, but again, he was rebuffed. Said the King, "No money will induce me...I am not like the kings of Lagos and Benin. There are only two kings in Africa, Ashanti and Dahomey: I am King of all the Blacks. Nothing will compensate me for the loss of the slave trade."
Gelele also told British diplomat Burton, "If I cannot sell my captives taken in war, I must kill them, and surely the English would not like that!” As a result, Gelele, despite the formal end of the slave trade and its interdiction by the Europeans and New World powers, continued slavery as a domestic institution: his fields were primarily cared for by slaves, and slaves became a major source of 'messengers to the ancestors', in other words, sacrificial victims in ceremonies.