SLAVERY IN AFRICA
It is a historic fact that forms of slavery existed in Africa as elsewhere in the world. People were 'sold' for cattle, goods or money, or exiled as prisoners of war and in Africa this was as true as elsewhere in the world. Arab dealers in enslaved labour worked with victorious African warlords to provide goods for this market.
However, with the capture, imprisonment and shipment of millions of Africans across the Atlantic by Europeans, the often benign practise of slavery reached the heights of horror. The brutality of the Middle Passage where slaves who survived the filth of below decks preferred to jump overboard than continue to their destinations. Some were pushed. Those who reached the Americas were trapped in a bondage of cruelty, barbarity, inhumanity and ungodly human behaviour for which there is no historical parallel.
Those and their descendants who survived to Emancipation, found themselves the victims of Poverty, Racism, Colonialism, Indentureship, and Mis-Education. The countries and ghettoes in which they presently survive in the Continent and the African Disapora, reflect the miserably results of the past 3000 years of African history. No other peoples and tribes suffer so congenitally from malnutrition, famine, disease, illiteracy, unemployment, substandard housing, and crime.
These negative effects of 300 years of African enslavement must be REPAIRED in order to restore the African people to the social and economical condition which would have been their natural inheritance, if their Continent had not been depleted of its strongest and best people to become the unpaid, forced labour to build and enrich other nations.
Though forms of slavery still exist in undeveloped regions of Africa (and Asia, Latin America and Europe) nowhere has slavery manifested in the base format which was the hallmark of European enslavement.
The debt for that cruelty, inhumanity and satanic behaviour has not yet been paid.
BARBARA MAKEDA BLAKE HANNAH - Moderator - International Reparations Support Group