Posted on 02/17/2009 7:02:14 PM PST by DBCJR
CALLS FOR REPARATIONS are all the rage among our contemporary "civil rights" crusaders. These shrewd individuals have chosen to direct their extortion efforts toward such American corporations as Aetna, New York Life, and Chase Manhattan Bank which are charged with having profited, in one way or another, from slavery more than 137 years ago. They understand that such companies’ deep pockets and fears of bad publicity make them likely to eventually cough up some cash in exchange for the privilege of not having their names perpetually smeared.
What the moral icons of the "civil rights" establishment never mention, however, is that many African societies also profited handsomely from selling slaves to the West, and thus strongly supported the transatlantic slave trade. As one historian points out, the stronger black states of the coastal regions "managed to monopolize the traffic with the hinterland [and] prospered amazingly." Numerous African kingdoms gained their might and prosperity entirely from slaving. It is likely, in fact, that the transatlantic slave trade actually created more employment for African dealers than for their European counterparts. Though the slave trade is generally described as having uniformly demoralized all Africans, the slave-dealing societies of the Gold Coast that prospered because of slavery bitterly opposed Britain’s abolition efforts. Tribal leaders in Gambia, the Congo, and Dahomey actually sent delegations to London and Paris to argue against abolition. The rulers and merchants of Senegal demanded that their territory be classified as a French "protectorate" rather than a "colony," so they could legally continue dealing slaves.
During the middle third of the nineteenth century, African demand for slaves increased tremendously. As Western purchasers dropped out of the market, there was a profusion of African people left vulnerable to slavers in their own homelands. Because of this surplus, slaves became available at sharply reduced prices, thereby making their ownership more attractive to African buyers. Thus, after 1830 vast stretches of the continent saw a dramatic rise in the enslavement of blacks. In the 1830s the slave population of Zanzibar alone exceeded 100,000. In western Sudan, slaves became so numerous that they comprised a majority of the area’s population in the second half of the nineteenth century. As of 1870 in one southern Nigerian city, 104 families owned a combined total of more than 50,000 slaves, an average of almost 500 per family. Overall after 1850, black African purchasers acquired more slaves than were exported to the Occident and Orient combined. The typical African purchaser of the period was determined to squeeze from his slaves all the labor he could, forcing them to work excessively long hours and making their lives almost unbearable.
East Africa’s plantation economy peaked between 1875 and 1884, when the Kenyan coast had some 45,000 slaves 44 percent of its total population. The Ethiopian highlands and the areas east of Lake Chad, where slaves had comprised only 4 percent of the region’s inhabitants back in 1820, were one-third slave by 1900. Also by the end of the nineteenth century, slaves constituted between one-third and one-half of all people living in the vast Sahelian grasslands stretching from the Atlantic coast of Senegal to the shores of Lake Chad. Near some commercial centers the proportion reached an astounding 80 percent. As of 1900, northern Nigeria’s Sokoto caliphate an area roughly the size of California contained at least 2.5 million slaves.
Those who criticize the West for its historical participation in the transatlantic slave trade never mention that abolition was a uniquely Western idea originating in Great Britain, the largest slave-trading nation of its time. In one of the great achievements of human history, Britons united to pressure their own government to legislate slavery out of existence by 1807. Members of Parliament were amazed to find themselves inundated by petitions demanding slavery’s abolition. One particular month, in fact, saw the delivery of more than 800 petitions containing some 700,000 signatures. It was not slavery, but rather this unprecedented moral impulse to ban it, that was truly unique in human history. The fact that the African kings of the nineteenth century shared none of the West’s moral imperative for ending human bondage is somehow dismissed as irrelevant by our "civil rights" messiahs. They focus exclusively on the sins of white society demanding all manner of payments and apologies while the black societies that willingly co-created the slave trade escape all moral condemnation.
Monday, February 02, 2009
OBAMA’S COMMUNIST/MOSLEM COUSIN
For three days in December 2007, Kenya slid into chaos as ballot counters steadily took what appeared to be a presidential election victory for the challenger and delivered it to the incumbent.
As tensions mounted, Kenneth Flottman sat in Nairobi and grew increasingly frustrated. He had in his hands the results of an exit poll, paid for by the United States government, that supported the initial returns favoring the challenger, Raila Odinga.
Mr. Flottman, East Africa director for the International Republican Institute, the pro-democracy group that administered the poll, said he had believed that the results would promptly be made public, as a check against election fraud by either side. But then his supervisors said the poll numbers would be kept secret. (snip)
An examination by The New York Times found that the official explanation for withholding the poll — that it was technically flawed — had been disputed by at least four people involved in the institute’s Kenya operations.
The examination, including interviews and a review of e-mail messages and internal memorandums, raises questions about the intentions and priorities of American observers as Kenyans desperately sought credible information about the vote.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Raila Odinga is Obama’s Moslem/Communist cousin and the one who burned Christians alive in their churches. I wondered why the US government would bother with an exit poll.
read/view more
http://noiri.blogspot.com/2008/10/llke-ayers-another-obama-just-in.html
AND
http://noiri.blogspot.com/2008/10/obama-with-communist-cousin-odinga.html
AND these graphic photos of Odinga’s rioting
http://noiri.blogspot.com/2008/07/obama-family-political-methods-warning.html
Posted by Alan Peters at 11:39 PM
....and the slave trade continues in Africa to this day.
See # 2
All true but irrelevant. This is about "economic justice" and correcting the flaws that Obama has miraculously detected in the original Constitution.
In other words it's a "get whitey" thing.
The Irish, and the Chinese, however were just worked to death for free.
So who's due more in the reparations field?
A book, Time on the Cross, compares the benefits & hardships of slavery vs the Northeastern sweatshops that immigrants worked in. Slaves were treated much better.
I have just recently heard that the Babylonians and Egyptians were most likely descendants of Noah’s son Ham, who had black or dark skin. These nations would be the first occurrences in recorded history of the institution of slavery.
Irony, eh?
My maternal forebears were African slaves. First owned by African blacks, then traded to Arabs, and then sold to a Dutch/Belgian family. The master’s wife got ‘curious’ with one slave and the resulting fruit was discreetly shipped back for adoption by west European immigrants living near Sicily. From where shall I get my reparations? Burundi? Somalia? ING?
I am left to wonder why slavery is not appropriately treated as a disgrace upon the history of all those involved, and not just those nations which moved away from these horrific ‘traditions’ and now enjoy prosperity. If leftist agitation is the proper measure, the sin appears to be contemporary relative success.
There are thousands of slaves in the U.S. right now. Illegals, young girls, and women from third world countries are being held as slaves as we speak.
And the fact is the losing tribes, instead of normally being killed off by the victors, were SOLD by the winning tribes to be slaves in the new world. Gee would it have been better for their millions of descendants living in America today if they would just have been killed off by the winning tribes, like the normal custom was?
The Jews held slaves as well, as have just about every nation under the sun. To the victor go the spoils.
So, if you think about it, they owe US money!
Illegals, young girls, and women from third world countries are being held as slaves as we speak...”
Did you see the specials on MSNBC over the weekend? (I know, but sometimes they do have decent documentaries) It is amazing that such things can happen in this country and not a peep from the media.
Truth is, going far enough back, everyone is a descendant of somebody done wrong. Who pays the reparation? I didn’t do it and wouldn’t do it. Why should I pay? Who is going to pay me for whatever was done to whatever ancestor I had that was done wrong?
Fact is reparations is a property law concept they are applying to a civil rights issue. It is the Native Americans who have a reparations claim - and they are cashing in at the smoke shops and casinos.
oh... pleazzze, give me a friggin break...
I’m 1/2 American Choctaw indian and I’m sick of this “you owe me” attitude of the blacks.
Fact is reparations is a property law concept they are applying to a civil rights issue. It is the Native Americans who have a reparations claim - and they are cashing in at the smoke shops and casinos.
It seems to me we ought to support reprations. Those harmed by Federal government quotas and set asides deserve to be compensated. :)
Sounds like a class action to me.
None for the Irish, thank you.
We got our slavery payment during and after the Revolution. We got America, the U.S. of A., home of the brave and “we are not giving it back”!!.
The english..I mean Washington have short memorys, the Irish don’t.
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