This_person
Well-Known Member
Come on. Really? Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo, or any other number of search engines scouring and indexing the web, are your friend. Get busy. And don't just come back here with one account debunking or minimizing their role. Do some real honest open minded research.
The West Africans who most prospered in the transatlantic slave trade were those from the most warlike and tightly organised societies with strong rulers who preyed on their neighbours. These societies would be more likely to wage war on their neighbouring communities, enslave prisoners of war and trade them to the Europeans.
The rulers of these societies usually appointed caboceers (traders) to deal with European slave traders. Many, such as the caboceer from the Fante people, John Currantee, or the leader from the Efik people Ephraim Robin John (known to the European traders as King George) were well-known as canny and ruthless dealers. They were able to communicate in a number of European and African languages. The African slave traders were skilled in using to their advantage the rivalries between the French, the English and the Dutch to get the best prices for their slaves. Often they demanded (and received) ‘gifts’ or ‘custom fees’, known in some quarters as ‘dashee’, from the Europeans.
Some North American people cynically place the blame for the enslavement of African people on the shoulders of African collaborators who participated in the kidnapping of their own people. Impacted by the social destruction wreaked by invading Europeans, a tiny minority of the conquered people did find their own survival by participating in this treachery.
The setting up of collaborators among the colonized population has been a successful tool of domination in every instance of European colonialism around the world. Africa is no exception. Europeans attack societies in Africa, Asia, or the Americas, destroying their traditional economies and long-standing social relationships. A unilateral colonial economy, which starves the people and creates the dependency on the colonial power, is militarily enforced.
Researchers uncover Africans' part in slavery
October 20, 1995
Web posted at: 8:25 p.m. EDT
From Correspondent Gary Strieker
CAPE COAST, Ghana (CNN) -- For centuries along the West African coast, millions of Africans were sold into slavery and shipped across the Atlantic to the Americas.
The middlemen were European slave traders based in forts like Ghana's Cape Coast Castle, now a tourist attraction and a somber reminder of a brutal crime against humanity.
That crime is usually blamed entirely on the European outsiders who inflicted slavery on African victims. But new research by some African scholars supports a different view - - that Africans should share the blame for slavery.
"It was the Africans themselves who were enslaving their fellow Africans, sending them to the coast to be shipped outside," says researcher Akosua Perbi of the University of Ghana. (88K AIFF sound file or 88K WAV sound)
Based on her studies, Perbi says that European slave traders, almost without exception, did not themselves capture slaves. They bought them from other Africans, usually kings or chiefs or wealthy merchants.
The question is, why did Africans sell their own people?
For a thousand years before Europeans arrived in Africa, slaves were commonly sold and taken by caravans north across the Sahara.
"Slavery did exist in Africa," says Irene Odotei of the University of Ghana.
In many African cultures, slavery was an accepted domestic practice, but it was slavery of a different kind. In Africa, the slave usually had rights, protection under law, and social mobility.
"Many house owners would call their slaves as their daughters or sons," says Perbi. "They became part of the kin or family or lineage of the owners." (100K AIFF sound file or 100K WAV sound)
The Atlantic slave trade grew at a time when many African states were at war with each other, taking prisoners that could easily be sold to traders in exchange for guns.
"It's the gun which was a deciding factor in the slave trade -- introduced by Europe," says Odotei.
Seems pretty much everyone agrees - no Jew involvement per se, just Africans catching and selling to Europeans.