The other evening, I was reading through my souvenir book from George Washington’s Mount Vernon and in it, was a story of a slave purportedly to have been 100 years old. He apparently told people that he had been the son of a king in an African village that had been attacked by outside forces. They killed his father and many other of the nobility and sold young men like himself into slavery and that’s how he ended up in Virginia.
One can imagine stories like these having taken place in Africa over many centuries and that white peoples’, and certainly that of the United States’, involvement in all of this would have been a blip on the total timescale of wars and conflict and the slave trade in Africa.
and slavery continues today - blacks enslave blacks in Africa and then there is a very long and continuing story of Arabs keeping Africans as slaves in the Mideast.
Around the 1880s slave autobiographies came into literary vogue. That might have been one of them.
And did he tell about all those black people who petitioned the court to go back into slavery because they were unable to care for themselves?
Did he tell about the slave auctions in Boston and why Massachusetts people could not free their slaves without posting a large bond to cover the cost of caring for them?
Did he talk about the tens of thousands of black people who were slave owners. Some owned hundreds of slaves.