Friday, October 26, 2012
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
LAKE ERIE RESELLER: THE MIGHTY BLACK LIGHT
LAKE ERIE RESELLER: THE MIGHTY BLACK LIGHT: Well its been awhile since I blog,I have been busy updating and moving. Now with that said,here is a you should have in your reseller bag of...
Solar Energy Company Touted By Obama Goes Bankrupt
Solar Energy Company Touted By Obama Goes Bankrupt: A California solar panel manufacturer which President Obama had made the poster child of his effort to expand the green economy and grow jobs has filed for bankruptcy, the company announced today. Solyndra said “global economic and solar industry market conditions” forced it to abruptly...
Monday, October 22, 2012
THE ORIGINS of the AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE
The Origins of the African Slave Trade
Back to History | by Piero Scaruffi
In 1807 Britain outlawed slavery. In 1820 the king of the African kingdom of Ashanti inquired why the Christians did not want to trade slaves with him anymore, since they worshipped the same god as the Muslims and the Muslims were continuing the trade like before.
The civil rights movement of the 1960's have left many people with the belief that the slave trade was exclusively a European/USA phenomenon and only evil white people were to blame for it. This is a simplistic scenario that hardly reflects the facts.
Thousands of records of transactions are available on a CDROM prepared by Harvard University and several comprehensive books have been published recently on the origins of modern slavery (namely, Hugh Thomas' The Slave Trade and Robin Blackburn's The Making Of New World Slavery) that shed new light on centuries of slave trading.
What these records show is that the modern slave trade flourished in the early middle ages, as early as 869, especially between Muslim traders and western African kingdoms. For moralists, the most important aspect of that trade should be that Muslims were selling goods to the African kingdoms and the African kingdoms were paying with their own people. In most instances, no violence was necessary to obtain those slaves. Contrary to legends and novels and Hollywood movies, the white traders did not need to savagely kill entire tribes in order to exact their tribute in slaves. All they needed to do is bring goods that appealed to the kings of those tribes. The kings would gladly sell their own subjects. (Of course, this neither condones the white traders who bought the slaves nor deny that many white traders still committed atrocities to maximize their business).
This explains why slavery became "black". Ancient slavery, e.g. under the Roman empire, would not discriminate: slaves were both white and black (so were Emperors and Popes). In the middle ages, all European countries outlawed slavery (of course, Western powers retained countless "civilized" ways to enslave their citizens, but that's another story), whereas the African kingdoms happily continued in their trade. Therefore, only colored people could be slaves, and that is how the stereotype for African-American slavery was born. It was not based on an ancestral hatred of blacks by whites, but simply on the fact that blacks were the only ones selling slaves, and they were selling people of their own race. (To be precise, Christians were also selling Muslim slaves captured in war, and Muslims were selling Christian slaves captured in war, but neither the Christians of Europe nor the Muslims of Africa and the Middle East were selling their own people).
Then the Muslim the trade of African slaves declined rapidly when Arab domination was reduced by the emerging European powers. (Note: Arabs continued to capture and sell slaves, but mostly in the Mediterranean. In fact, Robert Davis estimates that 1.25 million European Christians were enslaved by the "barbary states" of northern Africa. As late as 1801 the USA bombed Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli precisely to stop that Arab slave trade of Christians. The rate of mortality of those Christian slaves in the Islamic world was roughly the same as the mortality rate in the Atlantic slave trade of the same period.)
Christians took over in black Africa, though. The first ones were the Portuguese, who, applying an idea that originally developed in Italian seatrading cities, and often using Italian venture capital, started exploiting sub-Saharan slaves in the 1440s to support the economy of the sugar plantations (mainly for their own African colonies of Sao Tome and Madeira).
The Dutch were the first, apparently, to import black slaves into North America, but black slaves had already been employed all over the world, including South and Central America. We tend to focus on what happened in North America because the United States would eventually fight a war over slavery (and it's in the U.S. that large sectors of the population would start condemning slavery, contrary to the indifference that Muslims and most Europeans showed for it).
Even after Europeans began transporting black slaves to America, most trade was just that: "trade". In most instances, the Europeans did not need to use any force to get those slaves. The slaves were "sold" more or less legally by their (black) owners. Scholars estimate that about 12,000,000 Africans were sold by Africans to Europeans (most of them before 1776, when the USA wasn't yet born) and 17,000,000 were sold to Arabs. The legends of European mercenaries capturing free people in the jungle are mostly just that: legends. A few mercenaries certainly stormed peaceful tribes and committed terrible crimes, but that was not the rule. There was no need to risk their lives, so most of them didn't: they simply purchased people.
As an African-American scholar (Nathan Huggins) has written, the "identity" of black Africans is largely a white invention: sub-Saharan Africans never felt like they were one people, they felt (and still feel) that they belonged to different tribes. The distinctions of tribe were far stronger than the distinctions of race.
Everything else is true: millions of slaves died on ships and of diseases, millions of blacks worked for free to allow the Western economies to prosper, and the economic interests in slavery became so strong that the southern states of the United States opposed repealing it. But those millions of slaves were just one of the many instances of mass exploitation: the industrial revolution was exported to the USA by enterpreuners exploiting millions of poor immigrants from Europe. The fate of those immigrants was not much better than the fate of the slaves in the South. As a matter of fact, many slaves enjoyed far better living conditions in the southern plantations than European immigrants in the industrial cities (which were sometimes comparable to concentration camps). It is not a coincidence that slavery was abolished at a time when millions of European and Chinese immigrants provided the same kind of cheap labor.
It is also fair to say that, while everybody tolerated it, very few whites practiced slavery: in 1860 there were 385,000 USA citizens who owned slaves, or about 1.4% of the white population (there were 27 million whites in the USA). That percentage was zero in the states that did not allow slavery (only 8 million of the 27 million whites lived in states that allowed slavery). Incidentally, in 1830 about 25% of the free Negro slave masters in South Carolina owned 10 or more slaves: that is a much higher percentage (ten times more) than the number of white slave owners. Thus slave owners were a tiny minority (1.4%) and it was not only whites: it was just about anybody who could, including blacks themselves.
Moral opposition to slavery was widespread even before Lincoln, and throughout Europe. On the other hand, opposition to slavery was never particularly strong in Africa itself, where slavery is slowly being eradicated only in our time. One can suspect that slavery would have remained common in most African kingdoms until this day: what crushed slavery in Africa was that all those African kingdoms became colonies of western European countries that (for one reason or another) eventually decided to outlaw slavery. When, in the 1960s, those African colonies regained their independence, numerous cases of slavery resurfaced. And countless African dictators behaved in a way that makes a slave owner look like a saint. Given the evidence that this kind of slavery was practiced by some Africans before it was practiced by some Americans, that it was abolished by all whites and not by some Africans, and that some Africans resumed it the moment they could, why would one keep blaming the USA but never blame, say, Ghana or the Congo?
The more we study it, the less blame we have to put on the USA for the slave trade with black Africa: it was pioneered by the Arabs, its economic mechanism was invented by the Italians and the Portuguese, it was mostly run by western Europeans, and it was conducted with the full cooperation of many African kings. The USA fostered free criticism of the phenomenon: no such criticism was allowed in the Muslim and Christian nations that started trading goods for slaves, and no such criticism was allowed in the African nations that started selling their own people (and, even today, no such criticism is allowed within the Arab world).
Today it is politically correct to blame some European empires and the USA for slavery (forgetting that it was practiced by everybody since prehistoric times). But I rarely read the other side of the story: that the nations who were the first to develop a repulsion for slavery and eventually abolish slavery were precisely those countries (especially Britain and the USA). In 1787 the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in England: it was the first society anywhere in the world opposed to slavery. In 1792 English prime minister William Pitt called publicly for the end of the slave trade: it was the first time in history (anywhere in the world) that the ruler of a country had called for the abolition of slavery. No African king and emperor had ever done so. As Dinesh D'Souza wrote, "What is uniquely Western is not slavery but the movement to abolish slavery".
To be completely fair, what was also unique about the western slave trade is the scale (the millions shipped to another continent in a relatively short period of time), and, of course, that it eventually became a racist affair, discriminating blacks, whereas previous slave trades had not discriminated based on the color of the skin. What is unique about the USA, in particular, is the unfair treatment that blacks received AFTER emancipation, which is, after all, the real source of the whole controversy, because, otherwise, just about everybody on this planet could claim to be the descendant of an ancient slave).
That does not mean that western slave traders were justified in what they did, but placing all the blame on them is a way to absolve all the others.
Also, it is worth noting that the death rate among the white crews of the slave ships (20-25%) was higher than the rate among black slaves (15%) because slaves were more valuable than sailors but nobody has written books and filmed epics about those sailors (often unwillingly enrolled or even kidnapped in ports around Europe when they were drunk).
To this day, too many Africans, Arabs and Europeans believe that the African slave trade was an USA aberration, not their own invention.
By the time the slave trade was abolished in the West, there were many more slaves in Africa (black slaves of black owners) than in the Americas.
Recommended reading:
Bernard Lewis, "Race and Slavery in the Middle East"
The role of Islam in African slavery
African history and the Slave Trade
Negro slave owners
Alexandre Popovic: La revolte des esclaves en Iraq au IIIe/IXe siecle, 1976
Number of Africans deported to the Americas by the Europeans: about 10-15 million (about 30-40 million died before reaching the Americas). Number of Africans deported by Arabs to the Middle East: about 17 million.
European slave trade by destination
Brazil: 4,000,000 35.4%
Spanish Empire: 2,500,000 22.1%
British West Indies: 2,000,000 17.7%
French West Indies: 1,600,00 14.1%
British North America: 500,000 4.4%
Dutch West Indies: 500,000 4.4%
Danish West Indies: 28,000 0.2%
Europe: 200,000 1.8%
Total 1500-1900: 11,328,000 100.0%
Source: "The Slave Trade", Hugh Thomas, 1997
The slave trade was abolished by Britain in 1812, and subsequently by all other European countries. Portugal and France, though, continued to import slaves, although as contract labourers, which they called respectively "libertos" or "engages a` temps". Portugal had a virtual monopoly on the African slave trade to the Americas until the mid 1650s, when Holland became a major competitor. In the period 1700-1800 Britain became the leading "importer".
By century
1500-1600: 328,000 (2.9%)
1601-1700: 1,348,000 (12.0%)
1701-1800: 6,090,000 (54.2%)
1801-1900: 3,466,000 (30.9%), including French and Portuguese contract labourers
Source: "Transformations in Slavery", Paul Lovejoy, 2000
By slave-trading country
Portugal/Brazil: 4,650,000
Spain: 1,600,000
France: 1,250,000
Holland: 500,000
Britain: 2,600,000
U.S.A.: 300,000
Denmark: 50,000
Others: 50,000
Total: 11,000,000
Source: "Slave Trade", Hugh Thomas, 1977
Key dates
700: Zanzibar becomes the main Arab slave trading post in Africa
1325: Mansa Musa, the king of Mali, makes his pilgrimage to Mecca carrying 500 slaves and 100 camels
1444: the first public sale of African slaves by Europeans takes place at Lagos, Portugal
1482: Portugal founds the first European trading post in Africa (Elmira, Gold Coast)
1500-1600: Portugal enjoys a virtual monopoly in the slave trade to the Americas
1528: the Spanish government issues "asientos" (contracts) to private companies for the trade of African slaves
1619: the Dutch begin the slave trade between Africa and America
1637: Holland captures Portugal's main trading post in Africa, Elmira
1650: Holland becomes the dominant slave trading country
1700: Britain becomes the dominant slave trading country
1789: the English Privy Council concludes that almost 50% of the slaves exported from Africa die before reaching the Americas
1790: at the height of the British slave trade, one slave vessel leaves England for Africa every other day
1807: Britain outlaws slavery
1848: France abolishes slavery
1851: The population of the USA is 20,067,720 free persons and 2,077,034 slaves
1865: the Union defeats the Confederates and slavery is abolished in the USA General sources
Monde Diplomatique 1998
David Brion Davis: Lecture Series on the History of Slavery
Hugh Thomas: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade (1997)
Abdul Sheriff: Slaves, Spices and Ivory (1988)
Walter Rodney: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972)
Claude Meillassoux: L'Esclavage en Afrique precoloniale (1975)
Philip Curtin: The Atlantic Slave Trade, A Census (1969)
Joseph Inikori: Forced Migration (1982)
James Rawley: Transatlantic Slave Trade (1981)
Peter Russell: Prince Henry the Navigator (2000)
Robert Davis: Christian Slaves Muslim Masters
Kishori Saran Lal: Muslim Slave System in Medieval India (1994)
Bernard Lewis: Race and Slavery in the Middle East (1992)
Humphrey Fisher: Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa (1986)
Allan Fisher: Slavery and Muslim Society in Africa (1971)
John Thornton: Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (1992)
David Brion Davis: Inhuman Bondage (2006)
Miscellaneous
Education of Slaves
Continuing Education of Slaves
Slavery and public administration
Public administration degree
Slavery and public administration
Slavery healthcare education
MBA in healthcare
Education and healthcare
Editorial correspondence
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Back When we were Negroes-By Charles Richardson
Back When We Were Negroes
Posted on September 1, 2011 by tfdfblog
By Charles E. Richardson
Posted on Sun, Jul. 31, 2011 in the Macon Telegraph
There was a time until the early 1960s when the terms to describe those of African decent, like me — African-American or Black or Afro-American — were almost unheard of. I remember a distinct conversation with a friend discussing descriptive terms for ourselves in 1963 or ’64. The term “black” was just coming into vogue and he didn’t like it one bit. “Call me a Negro,” he said, “but don’t call me black.”
Now, the word “Negro” (publications used a lower case “n”) has almost become a pejorative, so I was a little surprised when my pastor, the Rev. Willie Reid, used it during Thursday’s revival. “Back when we were Negroes,” he said, and listed several things that were different about black life in America back then.
That got me to thinking. Back when we were Negroes in the 1950s, “only 9 percent of black families with children were headed by a single parent,” according to “The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies” by Kay Hymowitz. “Black children had a 52 percent chance of living with both their biological parents until age 17. In 1959, “only 2 percent of black children were reared in households in which the mother never married.” But now that we’re African-Americans, according to Hymowitz, those odds of living with both parents had “dwindled to a mere 6 percent” by the mid-1980s. And check this, in Bibb County, more than 70 percent of the births in the African-American community are to single mothers.
Back when we were Negroes and still fighting in many parts of the country for the right to vote, we couldn’t wait for the polls to open. We knew our friends, family and acquaintances had died getting us the ballot. Dogs and fire hoses were used to keep us away and still we came. But now that we’re African-Americans, in a city of 47,000 registered — predominately black voters — more than 30,000 didn’t show up at the polls July 19.
Back when we were Negroes, we had names like Joshua, Aaron, Paul, Esther, Melba, Cynthia and Ida. Now that we are African Americans, our names are bastardized versions of alcohol from Chivas to Tequila to C(S)hardonney. And chances the names have an unusual spelling.
Back when we were Negroes, according to the Trust For America’s Health’s “F as in Fat,” report, “only four states had diabetes rates above 6 percent. … The hypertension rates in 37 states about 20 years ago were more than 20 percent.” Now that we’re African-Americans, that report shows, “every state has a hypertension rate of more than 20 percent, with nine more than 30 percent. Forty-three states have diabetes rates of more than 7 percent, and 32 have rates above 8 percent. Adult obesity rates for blacks topped 40 percent in 15 states, 35 percent in 35 states and 30 percent in 42 states and Washington, D.C.
Back when we were Negroes, the one-room church was the community center that everyone used. Now that we’re African-Americans, our churches have lavish — compared to back-in-the-day churches — community centers that usually sit empty because the last thing the new church wants to do is invite the community in.
Back when we were Negroes, we didn’t have to be convinced that education was the key that opened the lock of success, but now that we’re African-Americans, more than 50 percent of our children fail to graduate high school. In Bibb County last year, the system had a dropout rate of 53.4 percent.
Back when we were Negroes, the last thing a young woman wanted to look like was a harlot and a young man a thug, but now that we’re African-Americans, many of our young girls dress like hootchie mamas and our young boys imitate penitentiary custom and wear their pants below the butt line.
If I could reverse all of the above by trading the term “African-American” for “Negro,” what do you think I’d do?
Charles E. Richardson is The Telegraph’s editorial page editor. He can be reached
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