LOIE
Gold Member
- May 11, 2017
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I’ve seen several recent posts about the fact that black people in Africa sold their own people into slavery. It’s been cited as a basis to declare that black people are also at fault and are therefore just as bad as the white people who enslaved them. I am currently reading “Slaves In The Family,” by Edward Ball. In chapter 7 he gives the most thorough explanation of this I have ever heard.
“The coast of Loango, included a port settlement, Cabinda. The Royal African Company, which brought slaves to Charleston, made the Loango coast its trading base, so much so that the company’s records from the 1720s show that all of its ships going to central Africa during that time listed Cabinda as a destination.
Whites had long ago given up making raids themselves and instead operated forts on the coast known as “factories.” These were heavily armed buying centers to which black slave-handlers delivered their merchandise in exchange for guns, rum, and fabric. The captives brought by the black middlemen to the factories had previously been held by chiefs and headmen farther interior, away from the coast. These chiefs rounded up victims in several ways – by staging raids on villages for the purpose of getting prisoners of war, by punishing people in debt through sale into slavery, and sometimes by selling members of their own tribe for personal profit. With this involvement at the source of the capture business, slavery became a shared venture.
Forced labor was practiced in West Africa before the Europeans began to carry people off, but it was not plantation slavery like that in America. West African slavery consisted of the subjugation of whole villages by invading chiefdoms, which led to arrangements that resembled the vassal societies of feudal Europe. As it was in medieval England, the vanquished were required to make oaths of obedience to a piece of land and to work it, giving tribute to the lords in services and crops but holding on to personal identity. By contrast, American slavery meant the denuding of individuals of all rights and property, one person at a time.
In the Asante kingdom of southern Nigeria, for example, a slave could own property, own a slave him or herself, intermarry with the kin of the ruling family, and be an heir to his or her master – none of which rights were held by captive American blacks. When the Europeans arrived on the African coast, this patriarchal system became rapidly more harsh, and the pace and methods of slave capture were sharpened to suit white demand.”
I have believed and am now even more convinced that American slavery was its own evil, not to be compared to or blamed on anyone else.
“The coast of Loango, included a port settlement, Cabinda. The Royal African Company, which brought slaves to Charleston, made the Loango coast its trading base, so much so that the company’s records from the 1720s show that all of its ships going to central Africa during that time listed Cabinda as a destination.
Whites had long ago given up making raids themselves and instead operated forts on the coast known as “factories.” These were heavily armed buying centers to which black slave-handlers delivered their merchandise in exchange for guns, rum, and fabric. The captives brought by the black middlemen to the factories had previously been held by chiefs and headmen farther interior, away from the coast. These chiefs rounded up victims in several ways – by staging raids on villages for the purpose of getting prisoners of war, by punishing people in debt through sale into slavery, and sometimes by selling members of their own tribe for personal profit. With this involvement at the source of the capture business, slavery became a shared venture.
Forced labor was practiced in West Africa before the Europeans began to carry people off, but it was not plantation slavery like that in America. West African slavery consisted of the subjugation of whole villages by invading chiefdoms, which led to arrangements that resembled the vassal societies of feudal Europe. As it was in medieval England, the vanquished were required to make oaths of obedience to a piece of land and to work it, giving tribute to the lords in services and crops but holding on to personal identity. By contrast, American slavery meant the denuding of individuals of all rights and property, one person at a time.
In the Asante kingdom of southern Nigeria, for example, a slave could own property, own a slave him or herself, intermarry with the kin of the ruling family, and be an heir to his or her master – none of which rights were held by captive American blacks. When the Europeans arrived on the African coast, this patriarchal system became rapidly more harsh, and the pace and methods of slave capture were sharpened to suit white demand.”
I have believed and am now even more convinced that American slavery was its own evil, not to be compared to or blamed on anyone else.