pseudotriton ruber ruber (or can I call you “Red?”),
Notice that I said that your apology didn’t work for me. Perhaps it would for someone else. You needn’t retract it unless… you didn’t mean it.
Wachovia’s apology is also a statement that the behaviors in the past are in opposition to the company’s values today. It’s pretty specific as well: an article in the Charlotte Observer indicates that the researchers were able to identify specific slaves by name.
brickbacon and monstro have alluded to this earlier, but it is important to understand that chattel slavery as practiced by the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and the Spanish was a new invention. (rises to find copy of Stampp’s Peculiar Institution. Can’t find it, but disturbingly notice a Laura Schlesinger book on the shelf.) Anthropologists Ashley Montague and Roger Sanjek have written extensively about this. You might liken African forms of slavery to POW status - and before you rail about the inappropriateness of this comparison, let me say it is a poor approximation, but useful nevertheless. If you lost in a war, or your chief left town, you might become a slave to the victorious group. Your children weren’t slaves by default. You were sometimes looked at with pity, as you might have been very powerful or of high status before you became a slave. It was even possible to achieve a decent social status as a slave. (Note that this was not by any means how it worked out for all slaves in Africa - I’m sure there were horrific examples of treatment in West Africa too.) This brief article explains a little about the nature of West African slavery.
To try to convey Stampp’s work, the combination of chattel status, with the religious justification that permitted God-fearing, Christian White men to treat Blacks as subhuman, was unique in the history of humanity (or at least what we know of it). Yes, some slave owners in the Americas treated their slaves less harshly than others - they were, after all, property. There are examples - in fact, here’s one from my own family - where slaves seemingly didn’t want to leave plantations:
According to my geneological research, the man who owned slaves who are almost certainly my ancestors fell in a well and died. He owned a very small plantation in North Carolina. There were four brothers and their families owned by the plantation owner. Upon his death, his offspring gave the option to his slaves of going free, or staying on the plantation. Two stayed and two left. The two who stayed may have realized in a world where every White man was your superior, you could be lynched, beaten, or kidnapped back into slavery for an even worse master. It doesn’t mean they liked being slaves; it may have meant that they at least knew the temperment of this family and the community.
Take into account the fact that African Americans were strictly prohibited - under penalty of death and dismemberment - to learn how to read and write, a seemingly freed slave could easily be “recaptured” and enslaved by another White man. This is a new wrinkle in slavery as well.
There wasn’t exactly a feedback loop about how different and brutal slavery was in the Americas - many Africans died during the Middle Passage, and not many returned to Africa after experiencing slavery in the New World.
Not to excuse Africans involved in the slave trade, but when the Portuguese and Spanish arrived in West Africa armed with muskets and guns, they either had the option to fight (and be slaughtered as the Europeans had superior weaponry) or attempt to establish trade. Often times “friendly” European traders would kidnap African slave traders, and in a bizarre irony, the slave traders became slaves themselves.
Should West African nations apologize for their role in the slave trade? Absolutely. But so should the many nations and companies involved in chattel slavery. I don’t get the “you apologize first, then we’ll do it” tactic. Similar to what’s taking place today in the treatment of prisoners as a result of the current war - the ideals of this country supercede what the status quo might be. It doesn’t matter to me, as an American, that several other nations have done, and continue to do, horrendous things to their citizens and neighbors. What matters is that we are allegedly a nation that believes in liberty and justice for all, regardless of what others might do.
