But what was Africa like during the early years of the slave trade with the West? And to what was owed the modernization of Africa? European colonization perhaps?
The condition of slavery itself, in Africa, was explored in an interesting book by Jason Hill....
He believes that slavery was an assumed way of life for those who did not have the Judeo-Christian view, from Genesis, that we were made to be free.
"The recent thought-provoking book by Professor Jason D. Hill
compares the peoples on the continent of Africa with the Europeans for the purpose of explaining the willful acceptance of slavery by both the former and the latter. It was not that the Africans didn’t have the technology or the weapons to resist slavery imposed on them……
it was that they saw no problem with the condition. It was European’s advancement, due to
concepts derived from religion, right and wrong, justice, the importance of each human life, that had moved the European from a customization with such a condition."
.Professor Hill writes:
“We must remember that the beginning of African chattel slavery preceded all ideas of race as biological typology and the racism distinctly associated with them. These did not appear in Western culture before the eighteenth century.
In the nineteenth century, German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel noted in his magisterial work,
Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, that
slavery itself was a necessary stage in historical development
made possible by the African indigenes themselves. He notes that, lacking any conception of justice or right, the African evinces a “complete contempt for man and a respect for life itself.”
He goes on to say that “slavery is the basic legal relationship in Africa,” a place where the distinction between master and slave is completely endemic and accepted as natural. For Hegel,
in a culture where human life has little or no value, the enslavement of Africans by Europeans is at least partially necessary on the premise that it can educate the African to have consciousness of his freedom.” Jason D. Hill, “What Do White Americans Owe Black People.”
