12 years a dummy by gollygee
http://upload.democraticunderground.com/10026958032I brought his whole thesis over (but unless you are exceptionally bored you may not want to read the whole thing). Note the bold and move on would be my advice.
Star Member gollygee (17,921 posts)
Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders
I guess today is a good day for reading about history. The gist of it is that there are cases of lighter, mainly northern Islamic Africans, participating in the slave trade of darker Africans, and particularly those they considered to be "heathens." There is not evidence of people selling members of their own community into slavery. Africa is not a country. It is a large continent. It is made up of different groups of people. And even the slavery northern Africans participated in was a European invention and was not a major part of their economy the way the slave trade was in America.
To say "Africans did it too" or that they are just as guilty of participating in the slave trade is to make a racist false equivalence, and to intentionally try to downplay what Europeans and white Americans did.
http://raceandhistory.com/selfnews/viewnews.cgi?newsid1076859043,27424,.shtml
In looking at the issue of Colourism I could not help seeing the links between the role of Islam in Africa and the role of Africans in the slave trade. The book, Islam and the Ideology of Slavery by John Ralph Willis is very helpful in looking at the almost imperceptible link between the enslavement of 'kufir' non-Muslims or infidels, and the belief that Black Africans were not only heathens but inherently inferior. This is not a new thought and certainly not one that originated with the Muslims coming into Africa. Several Jewish exegetical texts have their own version of the mythical Curse of Ham being blackness. Given the common origins of these two major religions, it is thus not surprising that both Jews and Muslims played some of the most important roles in the enslavement of Black Africans next to the Europeans.
(snip)
Historians did not often record or think of the ethnicity of these 'Africans' who sold their brothers and sisters into slavery. As part of our distorted historical legacy, we too in the Diaspora buy the idea that all Africans were uniform and 'brothers', but the true picture, especially at this time was not so. Centuries of contact with Europe, Asia, North Africa produced several colour / class gradients in the continent, divisions fostered by the foreigners. This may have been especially prominent in urban and economic centres. When we combine the converting, military force of Islam sweeping across western and eastern Africa placing a virtual economic stranglehold on villages and trading centers that were Kufir, with the intermixing of lighter-skinned Muslim traders from the North and East Africa creating an unprecedented population of mixed, lighter skinned Africans who began to form the elites of the trading classes we can see how a society begins to change.
(snip)
Many towns and villages converted to Islam because of the protection that the military banner of Islam could offer them in a changing economic, political and social landscape. But the more damaging result was the many light skinned, converted Africans, children of mixed encounters that now felt a sense of superiority over their dark skinned, black African counterparts. Colourism is indeed of ancient vintage. The truth of the matter is that fair skinned Arabs' racist attitude towards Blacks existed even before they invaded Africa. The evidence for this can be found in how they dealt with the Black inhabitants of Southern Arabia before they entered Africa as Muslims. Discerning readers and thinkers can look at this and many other accounts of this time and get a clearer picture of the inherent racism of this situation. When we combine this with the desire for African slave labour by Europeans it was no large feat for these often lighter skinned, Islamized Africans to enslave the black kufir, whom they barely endowed with a shred of humanity. And of course jumping on their bandwagon would have been those black Africans with deep inferiority complexes, who would have been only too eager to do the duty of the 'superior' Muslims in an effort to advance themselves. These facts are certainly not hidden and the patterns are everywhere, even today but it is we who do not like to see. For centuries we certainly have not been conditioned for Sight.
This leads us to another direct way colourism played itself out in the slave trade and this is in the 'type' of Africans who were enslaved. The biggest victims of slavery were undoubtedly the darkest Africans of what was called the "Negroid" type. If you look at old maps and documents by early European explorers you can note that the parts of the continent that they explored was divided by their crude definitions of what they saw as different African ethnicities. The regions of West and Central Africa were seen as the place of the "Negroes" which was distinct from Ethiopian Africans and even more so the lighter, more Arabized North Africans. We cannot say that NO Africans we taken from the north, but by and large most slaves that came to the West Indies, Americas etc were of the type mentioned above.
----------------
And an article mentioned in the above article, by Oscar L. Beard, Consultant in African Studies:
http://www.reunionblackfamily.com/apps/blog/show/11782086-we-did-not-sell-each-other-into-slavery
We Did Not Sell Each Other Into Slavery
The single most effective White propaganda assertion that continues to make it very difficult for us to reconstruct the African social systems of mutual trust broken down by U.S. Slavery is the statement, unqualified, that, "We sold each other into slavery." Most of us have accepted this statement as true at its face value. It implies that parents sold their children into slavery to Whites, husbands sold their wives, even brothers and sisters selling each other to the Whites. It continues to perpetuate a particularly sinister effluvium of Black character. But deep down in the Black gut, somewhere beneath all the barbecue ribs, gin and whitewashed religions, we know that we are not like this.
(snip)
Africans did not enslave themselves in the Americas. The European slave trade was not an African venture, it was preeminently a European enterprise in all of its dimensions: conception, insurance, outfitting of ships, sailors,factories,shackles, weapons, and the selling and buying of people in the Americas.
Not one African can be named as an equal partner with Europeans in the slave trade. Indeed, no African person benefited to the degree that Europeans did from the commerce in African people...no African community used slavery as its principal mode of economic production. We have no example of a slave economy in West Africa. The closest any scholar has ever been able to arrive at a description of a slave society is the Dahomey kingdom of the nineteenth century that had become so debauched by slavery due to European influence that it was virtually a hostage of the nefarious enterprise. However, even in Dahomey we do not see the complete denial of the humanity of Africans as we see in the American colonies.
You need not read the responses to postulate what they might be. I will only bring one or two. But let me caution; this is a highly contentious thread which may, even as I type, be swirling round the drain.... I could almost hear the alert buttons being pushed!
blm (94,316 posts)
1. Much appreciated.
Those furthering the RW defense and apologia on this and other issues should be called out and their propaganda corrected.
Imagine what it must have felt like to oppose Hitler at a Bund rally...then read below...
Bluenorthwest (36,593 posts)
32. But Europeans did not invent the slave trade, Arabic slave trade in Africa started in the 8th
Century, hundreds of years before the Europeans followed suit with their own version, even more brutal in some ways but most certainly not the original. 8th Century though the 19th, between 10 and 18 million people were bought and sold in the Arabic slave trade.
I don't think it is right to deny literally hundreds of years of slave trade by the Arabic world. That's just history. Plenty of room to criticize European and American slave trades without absolving those who practiced it first, longest and in huge numbers. Those slaves they kidnapped and sold were also human beings. This went on for hundreds of years.
Well
golly gee wasn't this fun. DU need to watch this and reflect:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCis1U1nFR0[/youtube]
