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DO U REMEBER THE DAYS OF SLAVERY
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Time Zone: USA (Eastern Standard)
Messenger: ROOK FARI SELAH Sent: Today 10:24:52 AM
Chapter One
DO YOU REMEMBER THE DAYS OF SLAVERY?
Part I
Slavery and the Roots of Resistance
The atrocities of the Atlantic trade in human cargoes formed an indelible part of the consciousness of the African people of the New World as they daily toiled to produce wealth for Europe. The horrific Atlantic slave trade lasted for more than four hundred years and involved three continents - Africa, Europe and America.
Every Western European State, from Sweden in the North to Portugal in the South, participated in the commerce which was to change world history. The aboriginal peoples of the Caribbean and Central America were virtually exterminated in the wake of the search for gold and silver. In Jamaica and Barbados, the indigenous Arawak population and the Caribs were murdered by the buccaneers and pirates who roamed between the islands.
The Spanish were the most active in the Caribbean, a region of perhaps 50 insular settlements and over 2000 miles of sea. The sea dominates the region, with societies ranging from a few square miles and population of a few hundred to the large island of Cuba with a territory of over 44,000 square miles.
It was in the waters of the Caribbean Sea that the European pirates fought each other for supremacy. The island of Jamaica was central to the struggle of the pirates, situated as it is in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, on the direct sea routes between North and South America, and between Europe and Panama. As a central station of the pirates, the notoriety of this island reached its zenith with the concentration of plunderers and explorers at Port Royal. The wealth accumulated from the piracy on the high seas and the plunder of the Central American civilisations went towards the setting up of plantations to provide sugar, tobacco and cotton for Europe.
Piracy on the high seas was transformed into piracy on land to exploit the labour of first the Indians, and later the African slaves. Christopher Columbus, the adventurer who laid the foundations for the Spanish military occupation of the region, had previously traded in slaves on the Upper Guinea Coast of Africa. Portuguese explorers had arrived in West Africa shortly before the middle of the 15th century and immediately started seizing Africans and taking them to work as slaves in Europe. This elementary trade was soon superseded by large-scale trade, when the European traders and bankers realised that they could earn enormous profits by using the labour of Africans to exploit the enormous wealth of the Americas.
This long-distance trade effected a form of organisation and support which strengthened Europe in the same way in which Africa was weakened. By the end of the Civil War in Britain, the English merchants, with the support of the Crown, threw all their resources into the slave trade. By the beginning of the 18th century Britain was the dominant slave trade State, ruling the high seas and binding the Spaniards with the right to supply slaves to Spanish colonies in British ships.
There was hardly a trading or manufacturing town in Britain which was not in some way connected with the triangular trade. In this trade, ships fitted out by European nations sailed to Africa, where slaves were bought for trinkets, cloth, guns, or alcohol diluted with sea water. These African slaves were then taken to the Americas where they were sold in return for goods produced by the very same slave labour. The precise numbers of Africans taken in this trade will never be known, because many perished in the Middle Passage (between West Africa and the Caribbean). It has been estimated that over 15 million Africans landed alive in this hemisphere, but for every African who reached the West, there was one who was killed in the process of the slave hunt, and between 25-35 percent died during the crossing of the Atlantic.1
This savage trade laid the foundations for the primitive accumulation of capital to be re-invested in Europe, which ultimately made Europe the most powerful continent, such that by the 19th century they could militarily subjugate the richest continent on earth - Africa.
Eric Williams was very precise and detailed in illustrating the connections between British capitalism and the enslavement of Africans.2 The wealth accrued to Europe was the other side of the barbarism and destruction unleashed on Africa. The African countryside, especially along the West Coast, was depopulated as the European nation states set about organising one of the biggest transportations of slaves in the annals of world history. The forts dotted along the coastline of West Africa today are the bloodstained records of a process which initiated the present underdevelopment and poverty in Africa.
Though the subjugation of the African societies was slow, it was a cumulative process which in the end engulfed even those functionaries who participated as intermediaries for Europe. Once the trade in slaves had begun, it was beyond the capacity of any single African State in any part of Africa to change the situation. The combined naval and economic power of the European nations, which were moving from feudalism to capitalism, ensured a level of technological superiority in important spheres of production, especially in the production of weapons. What the Europeans did was to take advantage of the divisions within Africa in choosing their allies. In the process, incipient differences between clans and embryonic nation states (called tribes by Europeans) were exploited; so that if the Europeans saw two sets of Africans at war with each other, they supported one side and helped them to achieve victory so as to be able to obtain captives.3
The Europeans managed to get prisoners of war from both sides. One group would be supported with guns made in France, while another group would be supported by the Danes, and yet another group by the Portuguese, but the end result was that Africans were sold and carried across the seas.
War and violence prevented the consolidation and unification of the nation state, such that even those societies which had developed beyond communalism to form powerful kingdoms4 were weakened. As the most productive units of the society, the young and able-bodied, were sold into bondage, the challenge of eking out an existence was so much more arduous that those who remained were prone to epidemics and diseases. The ecological balance was changed in such a way that the depopulation was followed in later years by periodic catastrophes of rinderpest and tsetse fly infestation.
During the whole period there were African chiefs and headmen who were prepared to sell their fellow men in exchange for the trinkets of Europe. And yet these Africans, who allowed whites to build forts and send out raiding parties (graphically documented in Alex Haley's Roots in the capture of Kunta Kinte), did not have any control over the trade. Though it was only in the last resort that the invaders needed to use armed force, they were not hesitant to use this force, even against their 'allies' who had previously hunted slaves in the interior. Walter Rodney, in his reconstruction of the history of the Upper Guinea Coast, remarked that the only order or production which was possible was that imposed by the Europeans.
"Order, for instance, was introduced only in the sense that Europeans ceased direct raiding and turned to trade. But rapine and plunder, organised merchants, kidnapping that bred more kidnapping, deterioration in the customary law - all these lay behind the façade of relatively orderly and peaceful agreements between European slavers and coastal chiefs
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