Free Republic

I don’t mean to bash Mr. Yerby, who opined that “North American slavery [was] indisputably the most abysmally cruel system of bondage in the whole of human history,” but his opinion is objectively disputable. See what you think. The following is from 2010. I was reminded of it when a guest in this post pointed out that Americans were not the first to export black Africans as slaves. I share it every now and then, usually when someone assumes that I know nothing about the 1400-year-long sacking of my father's home continent. But, with past slaving and slave-holding being all...

Los Angeles blogger Juliette Ochieng has a lot in common with the man who might be the next president, Barack Obama. A lot. Both were born to Kenyan fathers of the same tribe (the Luo) from the same province (Nyanza), and both of their fathers came as boys to America aboard the same airplane. Growing up, neither Ochieng nor Obama knew their fathers, who both abandoned their American mothers and left their American-born children behind. Both of their fathers returned to Africa in the early 1960s and became friends, bonding at Kenyan bars over their favorite drink — Scotch. Both...