![]()
LET US BEGIN WITH A FEW REAL ANSWERS TO OLD QUESTIONS
The Slave trade was not a statistic, however astronomical. The slave trade was people living, lying, stealing, murdering, dying. The slave trade was a black man who stepped out of his house for a breath of fresh air and ended up, ten months later, in Georgia with bruises on his back and a brand on his chest.
The slave trade was a black mother suffocating her newborn baby because she didnāt want him to grow up to be a slave.
The slave trade was a ākindā captain forcing his suicide-minded passengers to eat by breaking their teeth, though, as he said, he was ānaturally compassionate.ā
The slave trade was a bishop sitting on an ivory chair on a wharf in the Congo and extending his fat hand in wholesale baptism of slaves who were rowed beneath him, going in chains to the slave ships.
The slave trade was a greedy [African] king raiding his own villages to get slaves to buy brandy.
The slave trade was a pious captain holding prayer services twice a day on his slave ship and writing later the famous hymn: āHow Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds.ā
The slave trade was deserted villages, bleached bones on slave trails and people with no last names. It was Caesar negro, Anglo negro and Negro Mary.ā¦
āLerone Bennett: Before the Mayflower
WHEN DID THE BLACK HOLOCAUST BEGIN?
It began with the Arab slave trade of around 700 AD, with Europeans (Portuguese) entering the picture around 1442.
āTHE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE: 1995ā
African Americansā¦are comforted only by the assurance that the buying and selling of Black Africans ended in the distant past. But such a belief is myth.
It has become clear that the enslavement of Black Africans did not stop with the demise of the Atlantic Slave Trade. That on this very day and hour, as you read this, there are Black people being bought and sold in two North African countries [Mauritania & Sudan].
āRoutine punishments for the slightest fault Include beatings, denial of food and prolonged exposure to the sun, with hands and feet tied together. Serious infringement of the masterās rule can mean prolonged tortures, as documented in a report by Africa Watch. These include:
The ācamel treatment,ā where a human being is wrapped around the belly of a dehydrated camel and tied there. The camel in then given water to drink until its belly expands enough to tear the slave apart.
The āinsect treatment,ā where insects are put into a personās ears. The ears are waxed shut. The arms and legs are bound. The person goes insane from the bugs running around in his head.
The āburning coals,ā where the victim is sealed flat, with his legs spread out. He is then buried in sand up to his waist until he cannot move. Coals are placed between his legs and are burnt slowly. After a while, the legs, thighs, and sex of the victim are burnt. There are other gruesome torturesā none of which is fit to describe in a family newspaper āstates Africa Watch.ā āSamuel Cotton, The City SUN [Feb.7,1995]
Were Africans always enslaved by whites and Arabs?
NO!
Were and are people of African descent less intelligent than white folks?
Of course not!
Did white Europeans ādiscoverā Africans swinging from trees in the ājunglesā of Africa and bring them ācivilization?ā
Of course not! (Unless virtual genocide is your idea of ācivilization.ā)
Were Africans steeped in superstition and ignorant of Science & Technology?
Of course not!
Humanity had its beginnings in Africa more than 3 million years ago with the first beings to walk upright and have opposable thumbs to grab and control sticks and stones as extensions of the hand. In other words, Africans invented tools and weapons to help themselves not only survive but thrive as well. To this date, the earliest bones of human beings were and are still being found in the Olduvai Gorge in east Africa, a region covering an area almost as big as the United States.
Over a million years ago, humans began migrating out of the Olduvai Gorge region in search of food and shelter. Others stayed in the rich, fertile regions around the Nile Valley, which runs through Africa for thousands of miles (longer than the distance between New York and Los Angeles!). About 250,000 years ago, early Africans began a major diet shift that helped increase brain size. They began to live longer (to about 40 years), walk more upright, create larger and more complex social relations which, in turn, helped them have more babies that survived to adulthood.
Around 50,000 years ago, some of these extended families and clans began to settle around the southern region of the Olduvai Gorge and began to establish control over their foodāfarming! They discovered the relationships between soil, rain, rivers, sun and phases of the moon and living things. This settling down gave them more time to think about their world and the universe around them. Men and women were engaged in this effort to understand everything. Eventually, men became the dominant figures within their societies (although there were exceptions found in Africa and elsewhere where women were the dominant political force). Social relations become even more complex, and a hierarchy developed, i.e., priests and priestesses who possessed knowledge of Nature and divine rulers; āaverageā men and women who had to work long, hard hours to compensate for those who did not work.
We have evidence of one of these early, highly developed societies in a region we call Zimbabwe today. It is a FACT that Africans were smelting iron some 40,000 years ago! (That is not a misprint! Smelting was done in the area now called Tanzania, not far south of the Olduvai Gorge, the location of L.S.B. Leakeyās findings of the earliest humanoid skulls.) Smelting iron requires a serious division of labor (miners, farmers, metalworkers, huntersā¦), an apprenticeship educational system, excellent hunting techniques and weaponry, and knowledge of how and where to trade.
This knowledge and culture spread north along the rivers and valleys that flowed into the Nile River. After about 20,000 more years of learning through trial and error and observation, the Africans of the Nubian/Kush region (today we call it the Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia) developed a very sophisticated civilization. This is not to say that there were no other equally sophisticated civilizations. Rather, to date, we have more archaeological evidence of the Kush people than, say, the Ishongo people of the Congo region or the people of Zimbabwe. What we do know about this region of Africa is that for thousands of years the people developed their intellect and knowledge of Nature to such a high degree that...
