Saigon
Gold Member
I was in Ghana last month and visited a few of the massive slave castles built by the British, Duth and Portuguese and used to ship slaves to the Americas.
The numbers are fairly staggering - the Portuguese alone shipped 4.65 million people. Even tiny Denmark shipped 50,000 slaves. Ghana alone saw 1.5 million people exported from their coastline.
What got me thinking is that slavery doesn't seem to have received a huge amount of media coverage over the years.
I can think of one movie (Spielberg's Amistad) and one TV series (Roots) and a couple of books which refer to it, but not a great deal when one considers how important the trade was to the history of the US.
Even Amistad was made by a Jewish director rather than an African-American one!
Is slavery too sensitive to discuss, or is it just so long ago that no one cares anymore?
The numbers are fairly staggering - the Portuguese alone shipped 4.65 million people. Even tiny Denmark shipped 50,000 slaves. Ghana alone saw 1.5 million people exported from their coastline.
What got me thinking is that slavery doesn't seem to have received a huge amount of media coverage over the years.
I can think of one movie (Spielberg's Amistad) and one TV series (Roots) and a couple of books which refer to it, but not a great deal when one considers how important the trade was to the history of the US.
Even Amistad was made by a Jewish director rather than an African-American one!
Is slavery too sensitive to discuss, or is it just so long ago that no one cares anymore?