 |
| Open Theism Discussion Board > Public Forums > Tearing down walls > Excerpts From "The End Of Racism" | Forum Quick Jump
|
| 
writerdad
Registered Member
Date Joined Jun 2001
Total Posts : 448
| Posted 7/18/2002 9:38 AM (GMT -6) |   | Dinesh D'Souza is the author of an book called the End of Racism. It provides a lot of food for thought.
From the chapter An American Dilemma Was Slavery a Racist Institution?
He writes:
Native Indians practiced slavery on each other, long before Europeans arrived to practice it on them. For several tribes in the American northwest, slaves comprised between 1o and 15 precent of the population. The Cherokee emploed "slave catchers" to retrieve wounded combatants from other tribes, although the Cherokee preferred to kill enemies rather than take them captive. In some Indian tribes, slaveowners proved how wealthy they were by how much they could afford to consume and waste: large numbers of slaves were routinely killed in potlatch ceremonies. Among the Tupinamba of Brazil, who adpoted an esprecially harsh version of this practice, slaves were segregated from the community, then subjected to ceremonial denunciation and abuse, then taunted with the possibility of escape, then ritually hunted down, massacred, and eaten.
Some white liberal scholars such as Gary Nash down play African slavery, insisting that "the scale of it was small and it involved personal service, often for a limited period of time." But Nash's account, for which he provides no evidence, is contradicted by recent studies which show that slavery was widespread in Africa from antiquity. The three most powerful medieval kingdoms of Ghana, Songhai, and Mali all relied on slave labor. Nor were these slaves exclusively black Africans: the emperor Mansa Musa, for example, purchased Turkish slaves for his court in Mali. White Europeans who were shipwrecked off the west coast of Africa were also enslaved. The Ashanti of West Africa customarily enslaved all foreigners. Claims of the benign quality of African slavery are hard to square with such reports as slaves being tortured at the discretion of their owners, or executed en masse to publicly commemorate the deaths of the kings of Dahomey.
Far from being limited in scope, African slavery was both widespread and uncontroversial. Paul Lovejoy argues that "in the American context, slavery was introduced from the outside and always relied on the importance of slaves " while "in Africa slavery evolved from indigeous institutions." Indeed in a recent study, John Thornton shows that slavery was far more deeply imbedded in Africa than in Europe because Europeans recognized land as the primary source of private wealth whereas "slaves were the only form of private revenue-producing property recognized in African law." No wonder that tribal chiefs in Africa, working through Arb middlemen, were able to sell millions of blacks to Europeans. The transatlantic slave trade reuired a vast increase in volume, but no fundamental modification of the institutions and values of Africa. According to Basil Davidson in The African Slave Trade:
The notion that Europe altogether imposed the slave trade on Africa is without any foundation in history...Those Africans who were involved in the trade were seldom the helpless victims of a commerce they did not understand: on the contrary, they responded to its challenge. They exploited its opportunities.
Contrary to popular belief, Europeans did not typically invade African tribes to chase down and capture slaves. Many slaves were already slaves in Africa. Warfare and kidnapping for the purpose of acquiring slaves was a speciality of African kingdoms such as Dahomey, Ashanti, Sierra Leone, gambia, and the Congo. As middlemen, the Arabs frequently participated in slave raids. At times African raids reached such a point that Europeans complained about unpredictability: "the Negro who sold you slaves last month might find himself captured and sold a few days later."
Income from the slave trade made many African chiefs and tribes rich. Smaller African states on the Gold Coast urged Europeans to construct forts to protect the valuable merchandise from raids by inland African kingdoms. Perhspa African complicity in the slave trade is epitomised in the proposition advanced to Europeans by an African chief in the early nineteenth century: We want three things: power, ball and brandy, and we have three things to sell: men, women and children." The grim reality of the African slave trade bewteen Africa and America was summed up by Zora Neale Hurston, the great black writer of the Harlem Renaissance, in the early part of the Twentieth century:
The white people held my people in slavery here in America. They had bought us, it is true, and exploited us. But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw was: my people had sold me...My own people had exterminated whole nations and torn families apart for a profit before the strangers got their chance at a cut. It was a sobering thought. It impressed upon me the universal nature of greed and glory.
| | Back to Top | | |
 | Forum Information | Currently it is Monday, November 09, 2026 10:58 AM (GMT -6)
There are a total of 97,718 posts in 6,040 threads.
In the last 3 days there were 0 new threads and 0 reply posts. View Active Threads
|
Forum powered by dotNetBB v2.42EC SP3
dotNetBB © 2000-2026 |
|
|