tomndebb, do you have any kind of citation that Africans didn’t have chattel slaves before Arabs and Europeans? I find the following (about modern times):
Chattel slaves are owned and traded, not just forced labor. I find it very difficult to believe that there was no chattel slavery until Europeans entered the picture. In fact, I seem to recall some rumors in a book of myths called “The Bible” or something like that, about the Jews being chattel slaves in Egypt, for example …
The Encarta Encyclopedia says:
Chattel slavery … in other words:
Chattel slaves, bought and sold … damn those sneaky Europeans, conning the ancient Egyptians into trading chattel slaves …
However, I’m sure you’ll come back and find some way to blame it on Europeans and Arabs.
During the Russian invasion of Finland in the Great Northern War (1700 - 1721) some 20 000 Finnish Ostrobothnian prisoners of war were sold by Russian officers as slaves, most transported to St. Petersburg for construction work. Just one tenth returned after several years or decades of slave labor.
The Geneva Convention of 1929 allowed belligerents to require work of POWs of less than officer rank (see section III). They were supposed to get paid though, for work that wasn’t related to the upkeep of their camp. Also, no work directly towards the war effort, no dangerous work, work hours to be limited to those of the civilian population, etc.
I don’t dispute this explination, however I do find it used all to often as a convenient excuse to excuse the Africans from having any part of it.
Whether they thought it up or not, isn’t the point, the point is they actively participated in the event.
You could say the same about guns. Africans had a different model of warfare till they got guns. Then all of a sudden they started thinking like Europeans and slaughtering their own people.
You could say the same thing about corruption. Since independence outside of one or two states, all African nations are massively corrupt. I don’t think that corruption is historically part of the African ethic (just my opinion) but it doesn’t matter where they got the idea, they still are employing that idea with excellent efficency.
The problem when you have questions like these is the old “Blame game.” Blacks don’t like to admit they had a hand in the creatig the slavery they decry. Though it’s a different question, one could even argue without Africans to capture other Africans the slave trade would’ve been much more limited or different. (Perhaps they would’ve used breeding farms instead)
Whatever you think of the subject think of it like this:
Adolf Hitler didn’t succeed in killing six million Jews because HE, or HE and A BUNCH OF HIS BUDDIES wanted them dead.
He succeeded because the attitude of his fellow Germans and other Europeans was “Well I don’t agree with killing Jews but if Hitler’s gonna do it, why don’t I look over there.”
I read the autobiography of Hitler’s secretary, who was with him in the buker where he died and she was 19 years old. When she was asked, if she knew what was going on, in terms of the death camps and such, she said “No, I had no idea, but then again, if I had bothered to look, I certainly would’ve seen it.”
That is probably the most telling statement ever when you’re dealing with questions like this.
I really think that we westerners just might be totally incapable of thinking of Africa as a multi-political, multi-linguistical, multi-cultural, multi-historical, multi-religious, multi-ethnic place. If people just took five seconds to think about the multidimensional facets of this block of land we collectively refer to as “Africa” then half of their questions would not even need to be asked.
I mean why did France and England fight against each other so many times throughout their history? Didn’t they know that they were both white?! I swear we are just incapable of thinking of Africa as anything, but a homogeneous block where “the blacks” live.
I’ve seen US Doper’s post questions of the “Do people in Europe do X?” variety which equally manage to lump together a broad range of cultures, histories, languages, attitudes, etc. There may be other reasons for this, but distance and familiarity play a part; the further away (and less familiar) an area is the more we seem to see it as homogeneous (and I’m completely failing to find the cite I recall for this).
Fight my ignorance on this one … were there populations of black people historically living north of the Sahara? I have always believed there were not … but I’ve been wrong more than once. In fact, more than twice …
Traditional slavery in Africa was (and still is) more like the ancient Roman concept of slaves. In many ways, it resembles a caste system. People are born into certain jobs, and those jobs may indeed be jobs serving certain people. But it’s not exactly like someone legally owning another human being. For example, a traditional slave may need to ask for approval to get married. But they would not be bred together like animals, as people sometimes were during the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
It’s bad and it is still a major problem in some areas (I’ve personally hung out with slaves in Mali) but it’s not the same thing as systematic chattel slavery where the slaves are treated as pure commodities. Traditional slaves are still allowed to have fairly normal families, some degree of self-determinism, etc.
Women, of course, have been treated as chattel my most societies through most of history. The line between “marriage” and “slavery” can be iffy in lots of cases.
A final word, in modern times there are plenty of other forms of slavery thriving in Africa (and other places.) From forced marriages, forced child labor on a large and small scale, religious slavery, forced prostitution, etc. there are no shortage of human trafficking issues to get worked up about.
Thanks for pointing this out. During this time period (and back into Medieval times), much of West Africa resembled feudal Europe, with powerful empires, transcontinental trade, complex religions, huge cities, centers of learning, etc. It no more resembled a bunch of “warring tribes” than Germany did during the same time period.
