Reparations: Overlooking African Complicity in the Slave Trade

FrontPage Magazine ^ | By John Perazzo

[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.

[DBCJR]

The Irish were actually treated worse than the slaves. Ever read “Time on the Cross”?

[triSranch]

No but after checking it out I will now, thank you.
We do know a little about such, so it will be interesting to read.

Here's ya a little read By John Martin http://trisranch.com/id82.html
A little history background http://trisranch.com/tsrid1.html

http://willingtonontheway.org/history.htm

I do question myself sometimes as to why the government is so scared?.. a little inside Irish humor..I've never seen washington so upset, we will go easy on them when it's all said and done.
I, but we do know war and are no stranger to it..Started back there during that little ruckus called the Reformation.