One of the first things I read made me sick; that
back in the 14th century the image of Africans held by Muslims
was: “ black people were submissive to
slavery because Negroes have little that is essentially human and have
attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals”. Even though they still wanted slaves, I was
impressed that the Europeans figured out they did not have to use guns and the
like to get their slaves, but they actually wanted to do so peacefully and wait
off the coast in their ships. This was
made easier for them due to the fact that a lot of the Africans were willing to
trade slaves for goods, money, guns and gunpowder as well as tobacco and
alcohol. I had not realized that during
the slavery years, that the amount of slaves that went to North America was
only 3.6% compared to such large percentages going to the Caribbean and
Brazil. They mention a few times of the
elite Africans selling their own people as slaves or trading them for goods was
also surprising but made perfect sense when Equiano spoke of one of the homes
where he stayed had the same language spoken and they lived with the same customs
he knew at his own home. The King of
Portugal had told his people they only had to write a letter to him asking what
they wanted and King Alfonso finally
wrote one, asking that he not allow the tradesman that came to their village to
totally disrupt their way of doing things. The people of the village no longer wanted their relatives sold off to
other countries. Another ridiculous
subject was the way that Osei Bonsu was so irritated that the King of England
wanted to stop shipping slaves. Making
fun of the fact that this would be the humane thing to do and stating that the
book (Quran) made by God tells them to buy slaves and teach them good
things…Very different to see views of someone who was put into slavery at the
very young of age of 11 to reading about the African elites that facilitated
traffic of slaves, then go to a letter from the same country, asking their King
to stop letting the countries he is dealing with, come into their kingdom and
take what they want. Seems that in the
end, the only people wanting the slaves were the top officials in countries
that made most of their wealth from the slave trade.
No comments:
Post a Comment