Mali only legally abolished slavery in 1960 and hundreds of
thousands of people are still enslaved there in 2015, despite the law.
The early 20th-Century black writer of the Harlem Renaissance,
Zora Neale Hurston, bitterly complained that "the white people held my
people in slavery here in America. They had bought us, it is true, and
exploited us. But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw was: 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. It was a sobering
thought. It impressed upon me the universal nature of greed."
African kings were willing to provide a steady flow of
captives. 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. African slaveholders and slave traders didn't think of themselves
or their slaves as 'Africans'. Instead, they thought of themselves in tribal
terms and their slaves as foreigners or inferiors.
According to Basil Davidson, a celebrated scholar of African
history, in his book ‘The African Slave Trade’ explained: "The notion that
Europe altogether imposed the slave trade on Africa is without any foundation
in history...Those Africans who were involved in the trade were seldom the
helpless victims of a commerce they did not understand: On the contrary, they
responded to its challenge. They exploited its opportunities."
Tunde Obadina, a director of Africa Business Information
Services, has acknowledged the importance of Britain, and other Western
countries, in ending the slave trade. "When Britain abolished the slave
trade in 1807," he has written, "it not only had to contend with
opposition from white slavers, but also from African rulers who had become accustomed
to wealth gained 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." Obadina goes on to
say, "Slave trading for export 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. The ending of the obnoxious business had nothing
to do with events in Africa. Rulers and traders there would have happily
continued to sell humans for as long as there was demand for them."
Ghanaian politician and educator Samuel Sulemana Fuseini has
acknowledged that his Asante ancestors accumulated their great wealth by
abducting, capturing, and kidnapping Africans and selling them as slaves.
Ghanaian diplomat Kofi Awoonor has also written: "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 officials from Benin publicised President Mathieu
Kerekou'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 Oguin, Benin's ambassador to the United States, acknowledged:
"We share in the responsibility for this terrible human tragedy."
A year later, 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.
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 the 7th and the 19th centuries, they transported more than 14 million
black slaves across the Sahara and the Red Sea, as many or more than were
shipped to the Americas, depending on the estimates for the transatlantic slave
trade.
Both the slave sellers and the slave owners made money from
the slave trades. However, the slave owners made significant more money.
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