Enslave 40 people and receive an umbrella and a bottle of whiskey?

UncleTomFord15

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I'm just like: who so ever participated in selling people was a fukced up psycho.

The Arabs. The Euros. And the Africans.

No need to rationalize it for anyone involved.
The difference is two of those groups used the human capital to build some of the most powerful empires to ever exist in human history the other one, got umbrellas and some some alcohol.
 

tuckgod

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If you think a white person straight outta Europe was walking to the Congo and marching nikkas to the shore you’re a retard.

Africans fought hard as fukk to keep the slave trade going and now they’ve sent their mercenary descendants to finish the job.
 

Samori Toure

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To my understanding, both. But @Samori Toure seems more well versed in this subject.

The answer to his question is that people became enslaved in a variety of ways and for a wide variety of reasons, but warfare was by far the way that most people were enslaved as prisoners of war. For example Oyo (Yoruba people) had a civil due to issues of succession of their Alaafins/Obas/Kings. The losing royal families and their allies in Oyo were thrown into slavery. On top of that Dahomey, which had been a small vassal kingdom that had to pay tribute to Oyo realized that the Oyo Civil War had weakened the Oyo monarchy and calvary. That opening allowed Dahomey to attack the western lands of Oyo (modern day Benin and Western Nigeria) with the help of the Europeans.

The Mandingos/Fula/Wolofs had wars and the losers were thrown into slavery. The Ashanti had a war against Dagomba In modern day Central Ghana. Dagomba lost the war and had to pay a tribute in gold each year. The Dagomba could not pay the tribute so the Ashanti allowed them to pay in slaves. So the Dagomba and their kinsmen the Mamprussi and the Mossi attacked various unrelated ethnic groups in modern day Northern and Central Ghana and in Southern Burkina Faso to get enough people as slaves to pay the tribute each year. The Mende, Temne and Limba had wars in Sierra Leone, etc., etc.

There were a large number of people that were captured by a combination of trickery and/or undermining sitting governments. That was the case with the Aro Confederacy in eastern Nigeria and to a large extentin Kongo. The Aro Confederacy used he Juju religion to trick people to going to caves to leave food for their Oracle. Once in the caves the people were kidnapped by ganges of henchmen and taken out through secret passages. The Aro also used mercenaries, notably the Abame, Mbaise, etc., to attack villages in Igboland. In Kongo the ManiKongo/King was undermined by regional chiefs who plotted with the Portuguese to kidnap people, including royal family members and noblemen. Eventually that destabilized Kongo to the point that it imploded and opened the flood gates for slavery in that region. The are many, many other examples.
 

Samori Toure

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I'm just like: who so ever participated in selling people was a fukced up psycho.

The Arabs. The Euros. And the Africans.

No need to rationalize it for anyone involved.

From the Africans stand point it is a lot more complicated than modern people realize. In reality very few Africans actually wanted to engage in the slave trade. It wasn't until African Empires and smaller Kingdoms became destabilized by outsiders (White people) with the help of petty tyrants (chiefs) that slavery exploded after governmental structures, laws and norms had been removed. People gloss over quite a bit of history but slavery was banned in Kingdoms like Nri and in the Empire of Benin. The Mossi were another group who for a while didn't engage in the slave trade, but eventually chaos engulfed west and central Africa which is when things got completely lawless.
 

Neuromancer

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From the Africans stand point it is a lot more complicated than modern people realize. In reality very few Africans actually wanted to engage in the slave trade. It wasn't until African Empires and smaller Kingdoms became destabilized by outsiders (White people) with the help of petty tyrants (chiefs) that slavery exploded after governmental structures, laws and norms had been removed. People gloss over quite a bit of history but slavery was banned in Kingdoms like Nri and in the Empire of Benin. The Mossi were another group who for a while didn't engage in the slave trade, but eventually chaos engulfed west and central Africa which is when things got completely lawless.
Who were the major players forbidding slavery in the Western part of Africa? I feel like we hear so much about Euros banning it but no one ever talks about what African bans looked like.

Or could you point me to books or documents that talk about it? Probably be better that way .
 

Samori Toure

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Who were the major players forbidding slavery in the Western part of Africa? I feel like we hear so much about Euros banning it but no one ever talks about what African bans looked like.

Or could you point me to books or documents that talk about it? Probably be better that way .

The major one was the Empire of Benin. I think that their Oba (I want to say Ensige) banned selling men slaves around 1550 and a few years later he banned selling any slave, which included women and children. That Oba didn't trust the Portuguese and he realized that selling slaves was weakening his empire, because he didn't have laborers to continue to work on his wall and to serve as conscripts in his arms.

Another one was Nri. Those are Igbos in modern day Southeastern Nigeria. Slavery was never allowed in their kingdom and any slaves brought into Nri were automatically freed. The irony of Nri is the Igbos became one of the enslaved groups during the slave trade, which was a result of the Aro Confederacy, who were also Igbos, preying on their own ethnic group. The Aro Confederacy were Igbos who had moved into Cross River region nearer the coast and while their they teamed up with other coastal people and the White man to target the Igbos inland in Nri.

Other than that hardly any of those large kingdoms actively sought out the slave trade. Those kingdoms wealth was built off of controlling and taxing the inland trade routes.
 
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