May 10, 2019 Friday
Bedtime Story
Elikia M'Bokolo on African Slavery
“…the opportunity for immediate profits
made by raiding and the seizure or purchase of trade commodities.”
It would be wrong to say that Africa and
the Africans were only exploited by the Europeans from 15th century
onwards.
Elikia M’Bokolo who is a Congolese
historian and specializes in social, political and intellectual history of
Africa wrote an essay for the French newspaper La Monde:
“The African continent was bled of its
human resources via all possible routes.
Across the Sahara, through the Red Sea, from
the Indian Ocean ports and across the Atlantic.
At least ten centuries of slavery for the
benefit of the Moslem countries (from the ninth to the nineteenth)…
Four million enslaved people exported via
the Red Sea, another four million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean,
perhaps as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and
eleven to twenty million (depending on the author) across the Atlantic Ocean.”
As you can understand from the above text
that Africans had been exploited for centuries before the European powers took
over the deal but it is without doubt that the Atlantic slave trade was by far
the largest both in terms of volume and intensity.
Once again (as earlier in the case of
‘Lincoln’) I would I like to draw your attention to the 1997 work of the
maestro Steven Spielberg “Amistad” that was based on real-life events that took
place on board the 19th century two-masted schooner called La
Amistad that was captained by the Spaniard Don Ramon Ferrer.
This schooner was – unlike as depicted in
the movie (which had quite a few historical inaccuracies) – was not purely a
slave ship but a cargo ship that had in it 53 Mende people.
Mende people are one of the two largest
ethnic groups of Sierra Leone.
Among the 53 Mende captives four were
children and had been kidnapped and illegally transported from Sierra Leone to Havana,
Cuba by a slave ship by the name of Tecora in the year of 1839.
The slave ships of those times were also
known as “Guineamen” as trade trafficking of African slaves often or lot of
times involved the Guinea Cost of West Africa.
In fact there were eight principal areas on
the West coast of Africa which were most popular with Europeans as centers of purchase
and shipping off the slaves to the New World.
These eight sites on the West African coast
were as follows (written in the format of historical name first followed by
modern name/names and the percentage of slaves ferried from these places to the
New World between 1650 to 1900):
(1.) Senegambia (Senegal and the Gambia):
4.8%
(2.) Upper Guinea (Republic if Guinea-Bissau,
Republic of Guinea and Sierra Leone): 4.1%
(3.) Windward Coast (Republic of Liberia
and Ivory Coast): 1.8%
(4.) Gold coast (Ghana and east of Ivory
Coast): 10.4%
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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