Some slave traders justified themselves by asserting they were doing the blacks a favor – better to be a slave in a Christian country than free in a heathen one. (Even if true, that has to be measured against the thousands, perhaps millions, who died in the Middle Passage – their bodies thrown into the Atlantic and their souls, presumably, into Hell.)
Some more historical perspective: The Europeans did not introduce slavery to Africa; it had been an institution there time out of mind. You could become a slave by being captured in war and having no relatives rich or concerned enough to ransom you; or as punishment for crime; or by being captured by bandits who sold you far from home; or, of course, by being born to a slave mother. White traders occasionally raided for slaves, but typically they simply bought persons enslaved already; and bought them from blacks.
What the Europeans did bring to West Africa, and had never existed there before, was a highly profitable export market for slaves. Which gave the bandits an incentive to be even more aggressive and enterprising, and the kings and chiefs to make war just for the sake of capturing marketable prisoners and to treat ever lighter offenses as punishable by enslavement. It was that “African Holocaust” that caused the West African nations and proto-nations to be disrupted and depopulated so disastrously in the 17th and 18th Centuries.
My source on this is Michener’s Chesapeake, so I could easily be wrong, but didn’t they typically have a mass baptism of sorts for the slaves before they loaded them on the ships?
I am not very familiar with the history of Africa, but I thought I remember reading that Africa was actually pretty sophisticated, wealthy and civilized before it was decimated by the slave trade. Some regions had more of the hunter-gatherer societies, but I remember hearing about wealthy kings, beautiful cities and advanced socieites that were centers of art and learning. (Timbuktu was famous for its university, wasn’t it?)
I remember a piece by a Black American photojournalist who had gone to Africa for an assignment.
He told a story of how he was travelling down a road and saw a young man who had just had his hand cut off for stealing. That’s when it hit him. He was college educated, had a pretty good job, had a camera that cost years of salaries of the people he was taking pictures of, had flown over on a jet. And here on a dirt road a guy was holding a bloody stump where his hand used to be.
And the realization was that slavery had indeed brought his forebears to America, and despite their suffering, he was damn glad of it.
I can’t find anything resembling the story, it was a syndicated piece printed in a newspaper, I’m pretty certain. If any Dopers can help, it’s out there someplace.
I did find This Piece that paints a similar picture, but it’s not by the same author.
Well that and colonialism. Look at what King Leopold II did to the Congo. His mercenaries were cutting the hands off of the native people as trophies. That’s it. Not because they rebelled, but to prove they were there.
Ancestors just aren’t that “personal” and it is hard to make it so. Furthermore, any question in which we talk about what we would “wish” on our ancestors is already unrealistic. An ancestor isn’t your mother or father. Most of us have ancestors that we wouldn’t even be able to communicate with, yet alone develop any sort of bond with. Also, “wishing” misfortune on another person to better your lot in life isn’t really the same thing as recognizing that because of your ancestors misfortune you are now better off than you would have ben if your ancestors hadn’t gone through that misfortune.
Also…“unspeakable brutality of slavery” that’s a bit much. I’m not arguing that slavery in the United States was a good thing, but it also wasn’t the worst thing in history, either. And many slaves kept in the United States would probably be very unwilling to trade places with people living in other parts of the world “free.”
Some slaves even developed bonds of friendship with their masters, that persisted both through and after the Civil War. If it was “unspeakable brutality” I don’t think we’d be seeing that.
Partially true and partially untrue. Sub-saharan Africa did have a few major civilizations, but there is a lot of pressure to make sub-saharan civilizations more glamorous than they actually were for a variety of political reasons.
Many of the major African empires like the Mali, Ghana, and Songhai had already collapsed before any major contact with Europeans. It’s also arguable if these empires would have reached the sophistication they had if not for the influences of the more advanced muslim states to the north.
So can we at least agree that the people who really got screwed were the Africans who were shipped to Haiti? Slavery back then and third world poverty now.
Not to mention the need of some people to downplay just how much they actually did achieve so that they can claim that Africa never produced much in the way of culture or society.
Mali was in serious decline before the specific intervention of Europeans, (Songhai’s destruction was more directly brought about by Moroccan interference)–much as Mycenae collapsed, Athens collapsed, Rome collapsed, and Charlemagne’s brief empire collapsed. That hardly indicates that they would not have been replaced by other societies if left to themselves, just as the empires of Europe and the Mediterranean spawned successor societies that rose to become empires. Ghana was an established empire 300 years before the birth of The Prophet. While Muslim incursions certainly helped those regions advance in literacy and trade, it hardly diminishes the status of African societies to note that they were just as smart as Europeans in borrowing what they could from the more advanced Muslim societies.
Really, tom, is there any need to be snide here? No matter how you look at it, sub-Sahara Africa was something of a backwater. The real action was in North Africa, Asia and Europe.
My tone matched the tone to which I replied. The “real action” varied from century to century and continent to continent. While I suspect that environmental factors would have limited the number and sizes of civilizations on the African continent prior to the development of modern transportation and medicine, characterizing the societies that did develop as some sort of backwater with the clear implication that they could not have ever rivaled Europe or Western Asia is based on a desire to minimize European and Arab destruction rather than on a dispassionate examination of the facts.
They would have only bothered to raise such arguments in the face of actual objections to the slave trade. Barring some portion of society raising those objections, they simply treated it as a business and did not bother to rationalize it. When the practice was simply the enslavement of war captives, the numbers were limited to surrendered soldiers and isolated villages. Wars were not launched for the purpose of taking slaves until the foreign markets in Arabia and the Americas were opened, changing the dynamic of slave trading.
Oh, good! The “they did it too” argument. Given that no one in this thread has been arguing that the Europeans and Arabs were morally inferior to the Africans they enslaved, this is irrelevant. The issue is whether earlier slave trading and later colonization disrupted African development. Strip miners and forest clear-cutters were often local people. That did not reduce the destruction they visited upon the land.
Furthermore, written language was curiously absent. Ethiopia had a system of writing. No other African nation or culture had. Some, after they converted to Islam, acquired literacy – but only in Arabic; they never tried using Arabic letters to write their native languages. Nobody’s sure why, but there are speculations in this thread. Without some kind of writing, there’s only so far a civilization can advance.
This type of question irks me to no end. Just so you know upfront where I’m coming from.
The only way this question makes logical sense is it you interpret it to mean “Are Africans living in America better off than Africans living in Africa?”
How many times does it need to be said that “black people” are more than just Africans living in America? Not only would the descendants of slaves not exist had there not been slavery (as John Mace points out), but the descendants of American slaves as we know them today would not exist had the Master Johns and Billy Bobs not dipped their wicks into their African imports and produced mixed-nut offspring. So why would we treat their descendants as if they are ethnically equivalent to Africans, even in a philosophical discussion such as this one? It’s enough to make my head explode, the way “black” is always treated as if it represents a pure, mono-ethnic breed.
According to this cite, the US census in 1860 reported that 39 percent of free blacks in Southern cities were " mulattoes". Twenty percent (20%) of urban slaves were considered such. That means that (at a minimum) 25% of blacks in Southern cities were walking around with big portions of European blood in their veins. That 25% estimate doesn’t include the number of blacks who had “mulatto” grandparents and great grandparents, either. Genetic studies have also shown that between 1% and 2% of slaves on rural plantations were fathered by white men. This study found that the average black American is 25% “white”.
So all these numbers (plus the fact that my own face visually screams “Massa Henry done hit that” everytime I look in the mirror) tells me that the eternal question “Was slavery a good thing for black people?” is too stupid to address with anything approaching a factual answer.
How about I start a thread which ask this questions: “Are the black descendants of American slavemasters better off than the white descendants of American slavemasters?” Would there be any debate as to who came out on top?
Is Egypt no longer in Africa? I know we’re talking about sub-Saharan Africans, but it seems curious to me that the whole northern part of the continent is often annexed to other places when we talk about African achievements. The Nubians (the Coptics) had a written language going back to the medievil times. Do they not count as African?
Swahili was written in Arabic centuries ago, correct? Are you suggesting that Europeans/Arabs were actually behind this advancement, not the speakers?
That’s a good question. Why doesn’t someone ask that of some the current genocidal civil war torn african nations, that are no longer “powerful and literate cultures” and are instead back to eating “bush meat”?
We don’t need to ask them. Everyone with a basic comprehension of history recognizes that when a society is disrupted at the most basic level, its surviving members tend to revert to barbarism–thus my earlier allusions to Mycenae, Rome, ninth century Europe, and so forth.
And, since the affected societies were disrupted at the low end of the typical rise-and-fall patterns of ancient societies, they had even less chance to survive. And, of course, we all know how well civilization survived in the former Yugoslavia, even with all of Europe making tut-tutting noises over their shoulders for twelve years.
Unless you’re claiming that the Africans who were brought to the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had no descendants your objection is really just a quibble. Nobody other than you claimed that people living in America now are Africans. But there are obviously people living in America now who are the descendants of people who lived in Africa as recently as 300 years ago.
So has anybody done any research on what percentage of the white population has some degree of African blood? Remember, prior to the civil rights movement, there were unknown numbers of blacks “passing” for white. And of course, there was a great deal of intermarriage between whites and American Indians; many whites brag about having Indian ancestors even when they have little or no real evidence of it.
I’ve often suspected that there really aren’t very many “pure” gene pools in North America.