Posted on 12/27/2005 8:59:34 AM PST by kiriath_jearim
Ghana's Uneasy Embrace of Slavery's Diaspora
By LYDIA POLGREEN Published: December 27, 2005
CAPE COAST, Ghana - For centuries, Africans walked through the infamous "door of no return" at Cape Coast castle directly into slave ships, never to set foot in their homelands again. These days, the portal of this massive fort so central to one of history's greatest crimes has a new name, hung on a sign leading back in from the roaring Atlantic Ocean: "The door of return."
Ghana, through whose ports millions of Africans passed on their way to plantations in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, wants its descendants to come back. Taking Israel as its model, Ghana hopes to persuade the descendants of enslaved Africans to think of Africa as their homeland - to visit, invest, send their children to be educated and even retire here.
"We want Africans everywhere, no matter where they live or how they got there, to see Ghana as their gateway home," J. Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey, the tourism minister, said on a recent day. "We hope we can help bring the African family back together again."
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Hopefully, no one in Ghanna will let it slip that it was muslim blacks/north Africans who rounded up members of smaller/weaker tribes and gathered them for sale to the white man
As they had done among themselves for centuries.
And as is still done today.
As I recall, only ONE African leader has ever apologized to the African diaspora for slavery. I wish I could find out who it was...
"Like any family reunion, this one is layered with joy and tears. For African-Americans and others in the African diaspora, there is lingering hostility and confusion about the role Africans played in the slave trade.
"The myth was our African ancestors were out on a walk one day and some bad white dude threw a net over them," Mr. Gates said. "But that wasn't the way it happened. It wouldn't have been possible without the help of Africans."
This was buried in the end of the article.
Wow, I never knew that. I would love to have a source on that if you have one handy.
Wasn't this foolishness portrayed in the "Roots" miniseries? I seem to recall white men in colonial dress chasing Africans through the bush and netting Levar Burton.
There are plenty:
http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/slavetra.html
http://africanhistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa040201b.htm
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=4686
http://debate.org.uk/topics/trtracts/t12.htm
I believe it was Mathieu Kerekou of Benin, formerly known as the French colony of Dahomey, built around the kingdom of Danxome, which played an major role in the slave trade.
Actually, the slave trade on the coast (what you porbably mean by "sale to the white man") was controlled by coastal states. South of the Guinea Coast, there were few, if any Muslims. In fact, most important slave traders in central Africa after the 17th century were Christian states such as the kingdom of Kongo, which did a brisk business with the Portuguese.
True, but that was 200 or so later. Read the links.
I read the links. Two give competent histories of the Continental and trans-Saharan slave trade. The fourth one is a fairly amateur musing on religion and history -- provocative but not authoritative. I couldn't find in any of them a mention of Arab merchants on the coast selling people on to European slave ships.
Crime? By whose law?In Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Thomas Sowell points out that slavery was an accepted institution before the time of Moses and Pharoh, and even before the time of Joseph. And slavery was an accepted institution worldwide. In pagan Greek and Roman culture, in Buddhist culture, in Hindu culture, in early Christian culture when it came along, and certainly in Islamic culture when it came along.
Nobody wanted to be a slave, obviously, but everybody wanted to have slaves; today many people would like to own a horse, without having the slightest desire to be a horse owned by somebody else. Slavery was just part of what was. And if it had been up to the Buddhists and the Hindus and the Muslims, the institution of slavery might be just as commonplace to this very day.
But as Christendom became influential worldwide, Christian culture changed. America became a nation holding forth the exemplar of freedom, while simultaneously having a huge and growing slave population - and America fought its most painful war over secession, which was about slavery. Britain acquired a worldwide empire, while becoming so antipathetic to slavery that it went to the expense of maintaining a squadron of warships off the western coast of Africa for the sole purpose of suppressing the transAtlantic slave trade.
There was nothing exceptional about the Christians not wanting to be slaves, or to have their relatives in slavery - but Christians, alone among the world's cultures, came to abhor the idea of slavery for anyone. It was Christian influence alone which has, over the past two centuries or so, delegitimated slavery as an institution.
So spare us the selfrighteousness about Christians buying slaves a century and a half ago. It was Christians alone - primarily English speaking Christians - who taught the world (insofar is it has in fact learned) that slavery is a crime.
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