Africa has seen many horrors in its long history and it is hard to say what is worst the holocausts, the slavery, or just the overtaking of the european government. Slavery for the continent began in the 16th century and lasted till the 19th and in it's time took many millions of lives and ripped apart numerous villages and families leaving the native people in a state of panic and distress.
The African slave trade has a few different titles in our history supported by the white man the most common are the Atlantic slave trade and the transatlantic slave trade. They supplied the New World of colonies with workers/slaves by shipping over packed boats of slaves across the sea. Most slave traders we stationed in West Africa and Central Africa and obtained their merchandise (slaves) by trading, raids and kidnapping. This was a very disturbing process that supplied the Americas with between 9.4 and 12 million slaves but that does account for the ones who didn't make it there. More than five times as many slaves were taken to the Americas over Europe because they were more in need. In the americas there were developing colonies who needed slaves to work their plantations and in the mines. Mainly slaves were shipped to Brazil, the Spanish empire and the Carribean.
The white man saw the slave trade as just a means of work or a way around work but the Africans saw it differently. Africans called the trading Maafa which means "holocaust." These people witnessed a loss of a nation and a way of life. The trading of slaves killed off or tore apart many different cultures and beliefs leaving us with missing pieces to parts of Africas' history. To add to the all this miscommunication of this period there rumors/myth among the white man that slaves went willingly and enjoyed their lives of misery. This is proven untrue by the number of revolts and killing slaves committed in the quest for freedom. Due to slavery we find the most displacement of African in the American Continents.
Around the time of 1787 is when people first started to protest the act of slavery and question the moral rights of it. Many countries contributed to the abolishement of the slave trade but Denmark in 1792 was the first to but a ban on it soon followed by Britian. Britain then slowly tried to convert everyone to the belief that the slave train was immoral but the owning of slaves was permitted. It was a very hypocritical approach. But finally in 1831 when Brazil finally abolished slavery there was a global agreement that their would be no more slaves. Thought Brazil and Cuba agreed their would be no more there was still an illegal trade till the1 1860's but that to was eventually shut down.
4 comments:
I wonder if any of the slave traders ever felt guilty about what they were doing. Hard to imagine that everyone was so nonchalant about it.
You have the same picture as another fellow blogger, but its a very powerful image. People taking advatange of others for that long is so mind blowing from the 16-19th century?!
Thinking about slavery too much can really make your brain start to boil. It makes you realize how much of human history has been brutally and needlessly cruel.
Nice post. The history of how slavery was stopped world wide is very interesting. America was one of the last to outlaw it!
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