Black African Slave Traders
From http://www.pbs.org/wonders/Episodes/Epi3/slave_2.htm

Historically, West Africa is associated with the slave, gold and ivory trades, perhaps most often the former. West Africa is also the place of origin of vodou, the only indigenous African religion to survive the trans-Atlantic slave trade and remain in practice in the Americas today. The historical roots of racial discrimination in the United States today can be traced back to North American slavery and the kidnapping of more than 20 million Africans. It is easily assumed, therefore, that the African slave trade pit brutal, gun-wielding European slaver traders against unsuspecting, passive African victims. While the Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, English and French slave traders were often brutal, they were not always working alone -- many Africans were also complicit in this victimization. Precolonial empires such as Dahomey and Ashanti (located in what is now Benin and Ghana), where slave ports at Ouidah and Elmina flourished, accumulated enormous wealth and power as a result of the trade of their fellow Africans.

In fact, Europeans often acted as junior partners to African rulers, merchants, and middlemen in the slave trade along the West African coast from the mid-15th century on. Two factors contributed to this dependency: the coastal geography and the diseases of West Africa. Seasonal wind patterns along the Atlantic coast of Africa generated heavy surf and dangerous crosscurrents, which in turn buffeted a land almost entirely lacking in natural harbors. Hazardous offshore reefs and sandbars complicated the matter even further for seafarers along the West African coast. European commerce in West Africa took place, therefore, most often on ships anchored well away from shore and dependent on skilled African canoe-men whose ability to negotiate across the hazardous stretch of water between the mainland and the waiting ships made the Atlantic trade possible. Even in places where Europeans were able to conduct trade on the mainland, their presence was limited by an epidemiological situation that impeded their livelihood and threatened their lives. Malaria, dysentery, yellow fever, and other diseases reduced the few Europeans living and trading along the West African coast to a chronic state of ill health and earned Africa the name "white man's grave." In this environment, European merchants were rarely in a position to call the shots.

Furthermore, when Europeans first initiated a trading relationship with West Africans in the mid-15th century they encountered well-established and highly-developed political organizations and competitive regional commercial networks. Europeans relied heavily on the African rulers and mercantile classes at whose mercy, more often than not, they gained access to the commodities they desired. European military technology was not effective enough to allow them this access by means of force on a consistent basis until the 19th century. Therefore it was most often Africans, especially those elite coastal rulers and merchants who controlled the means of coastal and river navigation, under whose authority and to whose advantage the Atlantic trade was conducted.

Domestic slave ownership as well as domestic and international slave trades in western Africa preceded the late 15th-century origins of the Atlantic slave trade. Since most West African societies did not recognize private property in land, slaves functioned as one of the only profitable means of production individuals could own. West Africans, therefore, acquired and expressed wealth in terms of dependent people, whether as kin, clients, or slaves. Moreover, caravan routes had long linked sub-Saharan African peoples with North Africa and the wider Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds. Not only was slavery an established institution in West Africa before European traders arrived, but Africans were also involved in a trans-Saharan trade in slaves along these routes. African rulers and merchants were thus able to tap into preexisting methods and networks of enslavement to supply European demand for slaves. Enslavement was most often a byproduct of local warfare, kidnapping, or the manipulation of religious and judicial institutions. Military, political, and religious authority within West Africa determined who controlled access to the Atlantic slave trade. And some African elites, such as those in the Dahomey and Ashanti empires, took advantage of this control and used it to their profit by enslaving and selling other Africans to European traders.

It is important to distinguish between European slavery and African slavery. In most cases, slavery systems in Africa were more like indentured servitude in that the slaves retained some rights and children born to slaves were generally born free. The slaves could be released from servitude and join a family clan. In contrast, European slaves were chattel, or property, who were stripped of their rights. The cycle of slavery was perpetual; children of slaves would, by default, also be slaves.

Although the historical reality is sometimes difficult to accept by African Americans who still face racial discrimination over a century after the abolition of slavery, African complicity in the slave trade neither justifies today's social problems nor minimizes their seriousness. Fifteenth-century Africa, was not a homogenous group of people. Some African elites benefited from the enslavement of their rivals, their enemies, their poor, and other
* culturally foreign groups from the 15th century through the 18th and even into the 19th centuries. Class, language, religion, gender, and ETHNICITY divided Africans,
and it was along these lines that certain Africans participated in the slave trade. Understanding the dynamics of African complicity in the slave trade is important in understanding Africans as historically active and diverse human beings. This understanding should not detract from the horrors of the slave trade or from its American legacy of inequality and racism.

By Zayde Antrim

||  SLAVE KINGDOMS EPISODE  ||

By Sean Bryson

Copied below is a posting called "Black Anger" that I made some time ago on a Yahoo group .

On many occasions I have heard angry and resentful Black people make reference to the slave trade. Much of Black anger and resentment in this country towards white people, stems from the taught indoctrination regarding the slave trade.

Much of the PC indoctrination to make white people feel guilty, and under some sort of obligation towards black people, ( and minority groups generally ) stems from the same sort of indoctrination.

Perhaps black people could benefit from the knowledge that during the slave trade days it was always the Black African who held all of the ACE cards, not us whites ! We did not have the manpower on our sailing ships to undertake the wholesale capture of thousands of warriors. Whites did not enslave most of the slaves that were taken from Africa, they had already been enslaved and made ready for sale by Black African slave traders.

They would be sold to any buyer, not just White Europeans.

In those days the more wealthy of the Black African slave traders used to send their children ( Sons only ! ) to be educated in European schools, who would then return home to run the family business, the slave trade. This practice went on for the entire duration of the European involvement with Black African slave traders.

These pupils would introduce themselves as the sons of African Chiefs, or Kings. The truth is that they were the sons of Black African slave traders.
It was the White European who ultimately used his power to outlaw this trade, which was overwhelmingly enforced, by the British Navy of the day.

Despite this, Black African slave traders continued their RACIST ethnic cleansing, for many many years afterwards. The savagery of the Black African slave trader to his fellow African surpassed anything meted out by the White slavers. The wholesale castration of all captured males with a stone knife against a rock, before being marched to the coast to be sold, caused massive loss of life. This is just one of the many barbarities of the time.

Africa still suffers with appalling Black on Black, inter tribal racism today !!

I suppose that all things are relative to the times that we live in. But in the days of the slave trade because of the Black on Black brutality in Africa, many people thought that being a slave to a White man was the lesser of two evils. This was one of the main arguments against the abolition of slavery many years ago. That the abolition of Slavery in the White world, would condemn many Black African slaves to a far worse fate.

Even today, it is Far - Far - better, to be a member of a minority group in a White country, than anywhere else on this planet !!

It would not be wrong to suggest that a lot of the negative attitudes that White people have / had towards Black people, stems from the days of the slave trade.

And without a doubt a lot of the Black anger and resentment towards White people stems from the falsehoods being taught about the slave trade.

To perpetuate this inaccuracy regarding the slave trade, is nothing less than the deliberate attempt to demonize the White race, and cultivate Black anger against White people. What's going on ?

And only White people ever get called Racist !!
WHY ? Find out here ... Click!

PO Box 849, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho 83816 .Visit our Bookstore

Cinque, the Amistad Hero, Was Himself a Slave-Trader

For 20 interminable minutes in "Amistad," Steven Spielberg lingers over scenes of whites torturing black slaves with the lurid attention of a pornographer. The rest of the film--the fine courtroom oratory, the black & white solidarity, abolitionist "idealism"--is all window-dressing to persuade the liberal intellectuals in the theatre audience to feel good about Spielberg's anti-white horrorshow.

But the core message of "Amistad" can be summed up in two words from the ghetto: Hate Whitey.

With Amistad, Steven Spielberg, hailed as a latter-day secular Jewish saint, has set the cause of harmonious race relations back decades.

He perpetrated a similar ruse in "Schindler's List." His stratagem in that flick was to demonize the German people but to do so within the framework of a humanist gloss. So the putative hero, Schindler, is a German and nominally, a Christian.

From there, Spielberg was able to mount a demonic stereotype that no one but a Jew could get away with in these hyper-sensitive, "human rights" times. Spielberg stereotyped the entire German army--every one, to a man--as black-jacketed minions of Satan.

Amistad is equally pathological. If we shed the window-dressing, it's a sado-masochist ritual. Sadistic whites torture noble blacks. Noble blacks retaliate, and we watch them dismember trembling and quivering white villains who are shown on their knees begging for mercy.

An honest film about slavery is needed, but Spielberg will never be the one to furnish it. Such a film would entail three components, all of them forming the critical element missing from Amistad--context.

1. Cameras would detail the horrors of the black-on-black slave trade on the Dark Continent itself, where black chiefs captured, shackled, tormented and sometimes massacred their fellow Africans. The survivors of this terrible ordeal were sold to the Europeans.

2. Cameras wouild detail the horrors of the white on white slave trade emanating from Britain. Court historians like to pretend that the phenomenon of the "press gang" (armed men who kidnapped whites by force) was chiefly an activity of the British navy. In fact, the naval press gang was made possible by the precedent established by gangs of 17th century kidnappers (originally called "kid nabbers") who stole ("nabbed") children (kids) by guile or with a blow on the head, for shipment to the colonies for sale as slave labor. The very word kidnapping has its origin in this white enslavement.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, whites were whipped to death in the Continental Army and the US Navy
(where the lethal practice was known as "flogging through the fleet")
This was an age of cruelty and to suggest that only blacks experienced cruel treatment or that they were singled out for it, is the sort of subversive mendacity that can only heighten black racial paranoia.

3. Where in 19th century Africa could a slave receive the kind of hearing that white Christians gave Joseph Cinque and his little band? Ours was an extraordinary civilization, deeply flawed, but incomparably just and humane compared with what prevailed in Asia and Africa at the time.

Moreover, Spielberg's Amistad hoax is defeated by a solitary historical fact:
Joseph Cinque was himself a slave trader, selling his fellow blacks into this horror after he himself was set free by a US court.

Amistad producer Debbie Allen calls this destabilizing fact a "rumor." She'd better. If the thinking public, black and white, discover that "noble" Cinque later sold his own people in the very manner he condemned, then there will be a second mutiny, this time against Spielberg and his shameless hoaxing.

Here is Samuel Eliot Morrison, one of the most distinguished of American historians, writing in his "Oxford History of the American People," (New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1965), p. 520:

"The most famous case involving slavery, until eclipsed by Dred Scott's, was that of the Amistad in 1839. She was a Spanish slave ship carrying 53 newly imported Negroes who were being moved from Havana to another Cuban port. Under the leadership of an upstanding Negro named Cinqué, they mutinied and killed captain and crew. Then, ignorant of navigation, they had to rely on a white man whom they had spared to sail the ship.

"He stealthily steered north, the Amistad was picked up off Long Island by a United States warship, taken into New Haven, and with her cargo placed in charge of the federal marshal. Then what a legal hassle! Spain demanded that the slaves be given up to be tried for piracy, and President Van Buren attempted to do so but did not quite dare.

"Lewis Tappan and Roger Sherman Baldwin, a Connecticut abolitionist, undertook to free them by legal process, and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court. John Quincy Adams, persuaded to act as their attorney, argued that the Negroes be freed, on the ground that the slave trade was illegal both by American and Spanish law, and that mankind had a natural right to freedom.

"The court with a majority of Southerners, was so impressed by the old statesman's eloquence that it ordered Cinqué and the other Negroes set free, and they were returned to Africa. The ironic epilogue is that Cinqué, once home, set himself up as a slave trader."

(End quotation from historian Samuel Eliot Morrison)

Any time German-Americans or white Southerners try to advance a truthful historical thesis that happens to be revisionist we are wrongly smeared as being "just like Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels."

Now that we know Hollywood director Steven Spielberg is advancing fraud in Amistad and calling it history, he ought to be rightly compared with another highly skilled Jewish illusionist, next to whom "Jupp" was a paragon of veracity. Spielberg's Amistad movie is reminiscent of nothing less than the poisonous Communist lies of Stalin's propagandist, Ilya Ehrenburg.

--Michael A. Hoffman II Copyright©1997

Hoffman's illustrated, 137 pp. paperback history book, "They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America," is an ideal antidote to "Amistad mania."

$9.95 single copy. Two for $18. Three for $25. Plus shipping.

Book rate shipping: $2.00 first book. 75¢ each additional book. Priority (first class) shipping: Add $5.00 Overseas add 30% in US funds/bank. Orders accompanied by cash and money orders shipped immediately. Personal checks must clear the bank before books will ship.

Order from: Independent History & Research, Box 849, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho 83816

Hoffman is available to debate, on talk radio or online, the subject of white vs. black enslavement in early America. Producers may mailto:hoffman@hoffman-info.comfor scheduling.

To view "Black" novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud's lawsuit against Spielberg concerning his theft of her thunder
(and her made-up story), locate Chase-Riboud v. Dreamworks, Inc. at: http://www.law.cornell.edu/amistad/complaint.html

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