377OHMS
Registered: Feb 2005
Posts: 6497 |
07-07-12 02:41 AM
Quote from Mercor:
You are an ignorant ass......
The slave trading posts in West Africa had no soldiers, just a small crew of ship operators. They could have been captured without any problem.
They were there to accept Africans brought to them from the African tribes themselves. By the 19th century all slave trade was illegal except in the continent of Africa. The only supply of slaves at that time were Africans.
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http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/slavetra.html
What these records show is that the modern slave trade flourished in the early middle ages, as early as 869, especially between Muslim traders and western African kingdoms. For moralists, the most important aspect of that trade should be that Muslims were selling goods to the African kingdoms and the African kingdoms were paying with their own people. In most instances, no violence was necessary to obtain those slaves. Contrary to legends and novels and Hollywood movies, the white traders did not need to savagely kill entire tribes in order to exact their tribute in slaves. All they needed to do is bring goods that appealed to the kings of those tribes. The kings would gladly sell their own subjects. (Of course, this neither condones the white traders who bought the slaves nor deny that many white traders still committed atrocities to maximize their business).
This explains why slavery became "black". Ancient slavery, e.g. under the Roman empire, would not discriminate: slaves were both white and black (so were Emperors and Popes). In the middle ages, all European countries outlawed slavery (of course, Western powers retained countless "civilized" ways to enslave their citizens, but that's another story), whereas the African kingdoms happily continued in their trade. Therefore, only colored people could be slaves, and that is how the stereotype for African-American slavery was born. It was not based on an ancestral hatred of blacks by whites, but simply on the fact that blacks were the only ones selling slaves, and they were selling people of their own race.
Excellent post.
I always loved the old Cornel Wilde movie "The Naked Prey" which happened to depict southern africans being enslaved and sold by northern africans without any resistance.
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