This is never brought up during Black History Month. There’s a mythology that white slave traders ran around the bush kidnapping Africans, but that’s bunk, of course — they’d pretty much all have died. They bought African slaves from Africans. Back then if you lost a war, you either died or were enslaved. That’s just how it worked.
History is history, despite efforts to rewrite it
Amid the global debate about race relations, colonialism and slavery, some of the Europeans and Americans who made their fortunes in trading human beings have seen their legacies reassessed, their statues toppled and their names removed from public buildings.
Nigerian journalist and novelist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani writes that one of her ancestors sold slaves, but argues that he should not be judged by today's standards or values.
My great-grandfather, Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku, was what I prefer to call a businessman, from the Igbo ethnic group of south-eastern Nigeria. He dealt in a number of goods, including tobacco and palm produce. He also sold human beings.
"He had agents who captured slaves from different places and brought them to him," my father told me.
Nwaubani Ogogo's slaves were sold through the ports of Calabar and Bonny in the south of what is today known as Nigeria.
People from ethnic groups along the coast, such as the Efik and Ijaw, usually acted as stevedores for the white merchants and as middlemen for Igbo traders like my great-grandfather.
The amazing and disturbing answer is that students are being taught this lie.
If you think the title’s question is silly, you’re right. But here’s the problem: Increasing numbers of college students today would unhesitatingly respond, “Hell, yes!” to the query. Could it be because that is what they are being taught? I first learned of this misconception about slavery about three years ago, when a professor published the results of 11 years of his quizzing his students at the start of each year on what they knew about American history and Western civilization. By far the most shocking result to emerge from his years of polling is this: Students overwhelmingly believe that slavery “was an American problem . . . and they are very fuzzy about the history of slavery prior to the Colonial era. Their entire education about slavery was confined to America.”... In perusing the FreeTheSlaves website, the first fact that emerges is it was nearly 9,000 years ago that slavery first appeared, in Mesopotamia (6800 B.C.). Enemies captured in war were commonly kept by the conquering country as slaves. And in the 1700s B.C., the Egyptian pharaohs enslaved the Israelites, as is discussed in Exodus Chapter 21. Later, the pagan Greeks participated in slavery, for ancient Sparta as well as Athens relied fully on the slave labor of captives. But Greek slavery paled in comparison to that in ancient Rome. According to historian Mark Cartwright, “slavery was an ever-present feature of the Roman world,” in which “as many as one in three of the population in Italy or one in five across the empire were slaves, and upon this foundation of forced labor was built the entire edifice of the Roman state and society.” By the 8th century A.D., African slaves were being sold to Arab households in a Muslim world that, at the time, spanned from Spain to Persia. By the year 1000 A.D., slavery had become common in England’s rural, agricultural economy, with the poor yoking themselves to their landowners through a form of debt bondage. At about the same time, the number of slaves captured in Germany grew so large that their nationality became the generic term for “slaves”—Slavs.
But you knew that didn't you? The answer is that if you're a millennial and went to an American school you would not know any of that.
Interesting points: most of the slaves crossing the ocean survived (90%) and were allowed to marry.
Most of the slaves the Arabs kept for themselves were women to be used as sex slaves, the men were castrated and became soldiers. Roughly 90% died before reaching the slave markets.
Here's an astonishing fact from the 1860 Census: only 1.4% of free people in the U.S. owned slaves in 1860. The VAST MAJORITY, ~98.6% of free people, did NOT own slaves. The common depiction of the U.S. as a nation brimming with slaveholders is a myth.https://t.co/uJbz5zwpzP
If you believe that white slavers invaded Africa, attacking villages and taking slaves you have been sadly misinformed. that's just not how it worked; for one thing, it's just too inefficient. All white traders had to do was pay African kings and they got all the black slaves they wanted.
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.
Read the whole thing. It's a simplified version, but it's how slavery worked in Africa.
No, I recall quite clearly that the Arabs enslaved vast numbers of your sacred dindus, having most of them castrated along the way. That the dindus themselves retained some 80% of the slaves for their own use — Africa was a vast mass of murderous tribal despotisms riddled with slavery. That the Japanese enslaved Koreans, that the Alaska Skraelingr were mad at Abraham Lincoln for making them release the other Skraelingr they were keeping in bondage, that… well, you get the picture.
388,000 slaves were shipped to the United States. Those exploded into some 38 million today. Even allowing for some recent immigration, a 100-fold increase in population cannot be described as anything except a runaway biological success. Ah, such oppression, such a horror of racism.
At the same time, I suggest you go poke around the Middle East for dindus there. Huh, don’t see any. Wonder if cutting off their “courting tackle” as George McDonald Fraser called it has anything to do with that?
So, what we have in England is a case of a vile invader from a culture that was unabashedly slave-holding and in some countries STILL has slaves, killing people in a country that hasn’t had legal slavery for centuries — some of whom are descendants of a bunch (the British) who did their level best to quash the transatlantic slave trade in toto.
So yes, I do remember. The slave-trading, woman-torturing, murdering, primitive, barbaric enemy of the West — from a culture that took far more slaves — murdered a bunch of people from countries that abhor slavery and that, even during their participation in it, produced a bunch of rank amateurs compared to the skills of the Arabs and the Africans themselves in chaining up legions.
But it’s difficult to detach your lips from those brown posteriors long enough to glimpse the hazy outlines of truth, isn’t it?
Well, this is embarrassing. It appears that devout Muslims have complex rules about who can have sex with their slaves.
The fatwa was among a huge trove of documents captured by U.S. Special Operations Forces during a raid targeting a top Islamic State official in Syria in May. Reuters has reviewed the document, which has not been previously published, but couldn't independently confirm its authenticity.
Among the fatwa's injunctions are bans on a father and son having sex with the same female slave; and the owner of a mother and daughter having sex with both. Joint owners of a female captive are similarly enjoined from intercourse because she is viewed as "part of a joint ownership."
The United Nations and human rights groups have accused the Islamic State of the systematic abduction and rape of thousands of women and girls as young as 12, especially members of the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq. Many have been given to fighters as a reward or sold as sex slaves.
Far from trying to conceal the practice, Islamic State has boasted about it and established a department of "war spoils" to manage slavery. Reuters reported on the existence of the department on Monday.
In an April report, Human Rights Watch interviewed 20 female escapees who recounted how Islamic State fighters separated young women and girls from men and boys and older women. They were moved "in an organized and methodical fashion to various places in Iraq and Syria." They were then sold or given as gifts and repeatedly raped or subjected to sexual violence.
DOS AND DON'TS
Fatwa No. 64, dated Jan. 29, 2015, and issued by Islamic State's Committee of Research and Fatwas, appears to codify sexual relations between IS fighters and their female captives for the first time, going further than a pamphlet issued by the group in 2014 on how to treat slaves.
The fatwa starts with a question: "Some of the brothers have committed violations in the matter of the treatment of the female slaves. These violations are not permitted by Sharia law because these rules have not been dealt with in ages. Are there any warnings pertaining to this matter?"
It then lists 15 injunctions, which in some instances go into explicit detail. For example:
"If the owner of a female captive, who has a daughter suitable for intercourse, has sexual relations with the latter, he is not permitted to have intercourse with her mother and she is permanently off limits to him. Should he have intercourse with her mother then he is not permitted to have intercourse with her daughter and she is to be off limits to him."
Islamic State's rape of female captives has been well documented, but a leading IS expert at Princeton University, Cole Bunzel, who has reviewed many of the group's writings, said the fatwa went beyond what has previously been published by the militants on how to treat female slaves.
"It reveals the actual concerns of IS slave owners," he said in an email.
Still, he cautioned that not "everything dealt with in the fatwa is indicative of a relevant violation. It doesn't mean father and son were necessarily sharing a girl. They're at least being 'warned' not to. But I bet some of these violations were being committed."
The fatwa also instructs owners of female slaves to "show compassion toward her, be kind to her, not humiliate her, and not assign her work she is unable to perform." An owner should also not sell her to an individual whom he knows will mistreat her.
Professor Abdel Fattah Alawari, dean of Islamic Theology at Al-Azhar University, a 1,000-year-old Egyptian center for Islamic learning, said Islamic State "has nothing to do with Islam" and was deliberately misreading centuries-old verses and sayings that were originally designed to end, rather than encourage, slavery.
"Islam preaches freedom to slaves, not slavery. Slavery was the status quo when Islam came around," he said. "Judaism, Christianity, Greek, Roman, and Persian civilizations all practiced it and took the females of their enemies as sex slaves. So Islam found this abhorrent practice and worked to gradually remove it.”
In September 2014 more than 120 Islamic scholars from around the world issued an open letter to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi refuting the group's religious arguments to justify many of its actions. The scholars noted that the "reintroduction of slavery is forbidden in Islam."
There seems to be a difference of opinion within Islam about slavery and what you can do with slaves. Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re saying, these are ISIS warriors who take sex slaves, not true Muslims. But wait: these are Islamic State theologians. Who are you or anyone else to question their faith and deny that they are Islamic and true followers of Muhammad who, lest we forget, was also a warlord, kept slaves and had intercourse with at least one 9 year old girl. In the Muslim faith, Muhammad was the perfect man whose precepts are not to be overthrown. So from the perspective of true Islam, it's the scholars who are trying to deny Muhammad who are the apostates and ISIS represents the real Islam.
Richard Fernandez connects the dots and fleshes out the story that the American media would rather not tell. It doesn't fit the narrative.
One of the little known facts about the kidnapping of schoolgirls by the Boko Haram in Nigeria is that most of the victims are Christians. “
It's an inconvenient fact that this Islmaist group has already sold some of the girls into sex slavery or as ‘brides’ for just £8, as approved in the Koran.
But then news coverage of the schoolgirl’s abduction has for the most part portrayed the Boko Haram without context. To add any sort of context to the accounts of abductions, instructions from Allah, people sold in markets is to raise disturbing questions about things we are taught do not exist. Religious war? Slavery — in Africa? And where on earth do the Boko Haram get their guns and training?
WE have been taught by the American media that these are just lies spread by those radical terrorists in the Tea Party. We have Harry Reid's word on it: "all lies."
Such context as we get are instructions not to seek context lest they inflame us. The Toronto Star has an article arguing that “Boko Haram does not represent Islam,” as if the crime were against Islam with a world-religion itself as victim. “The group responsible for the kidnapping rampage in Nigeria has hijacked a whole faith, steering the public discourse on Islam.” But that raises even more questions. Such as: what group could possibly hijack a religion of hundreds of millions? Al-Qaeda, you say? But isn’t al-Qaeda’s dead?
It appears that the weapons that this faction of Islam uses comes from Libya, the country we "liberated" via "Kinetic Action." Good job, Barry.
