## “Africans” – “Arabs” – “Whites” collaboration in slave trade, in “African” slaves trade
## Focus on social relations an indispensable necessity
## Vibrant times. Abolition of wage-labour based commodity production and hierarchies AS SUCH are on the agenda of human species. Recent lockdowns of factories throughout the world has made our time more vibrant. Global wage-workers the radical social subject. Globe is the arena. Seven billion are the participants.
## Discriminations on innumerable pretexts have been an intrinsic part of hierarchies. Discriminations widen the support base of a hierarchy. And, identity politics that support AND oppose discriminations, both aid hierarchies. Formation of the state of Israel should suffice as an example.
## The desperation borne of the increasingly dysfunctional wage-labour based commodity production has increased attempts to revive region and religion based identity politics that had petered out. Nation-country as an inclusive and exclusive entity. Religion as an inclusive and exclusive entity. Gender-Caste-Skin Colour- …. as inclusive and exclusive entities.
## And, in attempts to hold on to wage-labour based commodity production, the proponents of wage-slavery in place of slavery in the nineteenth century are being glorified by some. Religion is being hailed for its role in the abolition of slavery. The drive to spread wage-work in the world (imperialism two) in the nineteenth century is being felicitated for its forced abolition of slavery. By the way, earlier imperialism’s role was in imposing money-market relations throughout the world in the 16th-17th-18th centuries that massively increased slavery in the world is sidestepped.(1500-1800, Imperialism One : Imposing money-market relations throughout the world. 1800-1960s, Imperialism Two : Spreading wage-labour based commodity production in the world).
All this came up on receipt of an article from a friend : “Africa’s role in slavery” by Martin Henry in The Gleaner (Jamaica).
Some selections from this article that follow should be of interest. More interesting would be Voltaire’s novel Candide.
It needs to be re-stated that instead of person/group, focus on social relations and their dynamics in hierarchical formations that our ancestors have been through and we are in the midst of, is an indispensable necessity to contribute creatively to the emerging non-hierarchic social formation.
From the article, “Africa’s role in slavery” :
# Early 20th century black writer of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston : “…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 …”.
# African kings were willing to provide a steady flow of captives, who they said were criminals or prisoners of war doomed for execution. Many were not …
# When France and Britain outlawed slavery in their territories in the early 19th century, African chiefs who had grown rich and powerful off the slave trade sent protest delegations to Paris and London. Britain abolished the slave trade and slavery itself against fierce opposition from West African and Arab traders.
# Basil Davidson in his book, “The African Slave Trade” : “… Those Africans who were involved in the trade were seldom the helpless victims of a commerce that they did not understand : On the contrary, they responded to its challenges. They exploited it’s opportunities.”
# Until the 18th century, very few Europeans had any moral reservations about slavery … In the Arab world, which was the first to import large numbers of slaves from Africa, the slave traffic was cosmopolitan. Slaves of all types were sold in open bazaars. The Arabs played an important role as middlemen in the trans-atlantic slave trade, and research data suggest that between 7th and the 19th centuries, they transported more than 14 million black slaves across the Sahara and the Red Sea …
# Tunde Obadina (a director of Africa Business Information Services) : “When Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, it not only had to contend with opposition from white slavers, but also from African rulers who had become accustomed to wealth from selling slaves or from taxes collected on slaves passed through their domain. African slave-trading classes were greatly distressed by the news that legislators sitting in Parliament in London had decided to end their source of livelihood. But for as long as there was demand from the Americas for slaves, the lucrative business continued.”
# “Slave trading for export”, Obadina notes, only “ended in Nigeria and elsewhere in West Africa after slavery ended in the Spanish colonies of Brazil and Cuba in 1880. A consequence of the ending of the slave trade was the expansion of domestic slavery as African businessmen replaced trade in human chattel with increased export of primary commodities. Labour was needed to cultivate the new source of wealth for the African elites.”
# Thomas Sowell (black conservative American scholar) : “Incredibly late in human history, a mass moral revulsion finally set in against slavery — the first in 18th century England, and then during the 19th century, throughout Western civilisation … Africans, Arabs, and Asians continued to resist giving up their slaves. Only because Western power was at its peak in the 19th century was Western imperialism able to impose the abolition of slavery around the world — as it imposed the rest of its beliefs and agendas, for good or evil.”
# Ghanaian politician and educator Samuel Sulemana Fuseini acknowledged that his Asante ancestors accumulated their great wealth by abducting, capturing, and kidnapping Africans and selling them as slaves.
# Ghanaian diplomat Kofi Awoonor : “I believe there is a great psychic shadow over Africa, and it has much to do with our guilt and denial of our role in the slave trade. We, too, are blameworthy in what was essentially one of the most heinous crimes in human history.”
# In 2000 : Benin publicised President Mathieu Kerekon’s apology for his country’s role in “selling fellow Africans by the millions to white slave traders”.
“We cry for forgiveness and reconciliation”, said Luc Gnacadja, Benin’s minister of environment and housing.
Cyrille Oquin, Benin’s ambassador to the United States : “We share in the responsibility for this terrible human tragedy.”
# In 2001, the president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, who is himself the descendant of generations of slave-owning and slave-trading African kings, urged Europeans, Americans, and Africans to acknowledge publicly and teach openly about their shared responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade.
# Ivory Coast film director Roger Gnoan M’bala : “It’s up to us to talk about slavery, open the wounds of what we’ve always hidden and stop being puerile when we put responsibility on others …”
# Mali only legally abolished slavery in 1960 and hundreds of thousands of people were still enslaved there in 2015, despite the law.
# Thomas Sowell : “Nothing could be more jolting and discordant with the vision of today’s intellectuals than the fact that it was businessmen, devout religious leaders and Western imperialists who together destroyed slavery around the world. And if it doesn’t fit their vision, it is the same to them as if it never happened.”