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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (38575)	8/18/2002 11:00:38 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Respond to of 281500

Muslim origins of the slave trade: africanhistory.about.com When the Portuguese first sailed down the Atlantic coast of Africa in the 1430's, they were interested in one thing. Surprisingly, given modern perspectives, it was not slaves but gold. Ever since Mansa Musa, the king of Mali, made his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1325, with 500 slaves and 100 camels (each carrying gold) the region had become synonymous with such wealth. There was one major problem: trade from sub-Saharan Africa was controlled by the Islamic Empire which stretched along Africa's northern coast. Muslim trade routes across the Sahara, which had existed for centuries, involved salt, kola, textiles, fish, grain, and slaves. As the Portuguese extended their influence around the coast, Mauritania, Senagambia (by 1445) and Guinea, they created trading posts. Rather than becoming direct competitors to the Muslim merchants, the expanding market opportunities in Europe and the Mediterranean resulted in increased trade across the Sahara. In addition, the Portuguese merchants gained access to the interior via the Senegal and Gambia rivers which bisected long-standing trans-Saharan routes. The Portuguese brought in copper ware, cloth, tools, wine and horses. (Trade goods soon included arms and ammunition.) In exchange, the Portuguese received gold (transported from mines of the Akan deposits), pepper (a trade which lasted until Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498) and ivory. There was a very small market for African slaves as domestic workers in Europe, and as workers on the sugar plantations of the Mediterranean. However, the Portuguese found they could make considerable amounts of gold transporting slaves from one trading post to another, along the Atlantic coast of Africa. Muslim merchants had an insatiable appetite for slaves, which were used as porters on the trans-Saharan routes (with a high mortality rate), and for sale in the Islamic Empire. The Portuguese found Muslim merchants entrenched along the African coast as far as the Blight of Benin. The slave coast, as the Blight of Benin was known, was reached by the Portuguese at the start of the 1470's. It was not until they reached the Kongo coast in the 1480's that they outdistanced Muslim trading territory. The first of the major European trading 'forts', Elmina, was founded on the Gold Coast in 1482. Elmina (originally known as Sao Jorge de Mina) was modelled on the Castello de Sao Jorge, the first of the Portuguese Royal residence in Lisbon. Elmina, which of course, means the mine, became a major trading centre for slaves purchased along the slave rivers of Benin. By the beginning of the colonial era there were forty such forts operating along the coast. Rather than being icons of colonial domination, the forts acted as trading posts - they rarely saw military action - the fortifications were important, however, when arms and ammunition were being stored prior to trade. Con't ************************************ Funny that Louis Farrakhan didn't want to mention Muslim nations as respondents to this reparations lawsuit. Hawk

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (38575)	8/18/2002 11:01:40 PM
From: FaultLine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

THE CASE FOR REPARATIONS by Robert Fullinwider puaf.umd.edu [excerpt] Making the Case for Reparations Avoiding the confusion about corporate, civic, and personal liability clears the way to explore more fruitfully the positive case for reparations. How should that case go? The argument mounted by Robinson, Verdun, Magee, and other African Americans bases reparations on the great wrong of slavery as well as the more recent wrongs of legally sanctioned discrimination. Further, the argument stresses the purported benefits that whites over the centuries have extracted from slavery, Jim Crow, and a general social system of white supremacy. However, basing reparations on slavery and on the great benefits accrued to whites invite complication and controversy. I suggest the case is actually strengthened by dropping both slavery and the benefits reaped by whites as grounds for reparations. Let me explain. First, although the proposition that whites as a whole have benefited enormously from past racial oppression might seem self-evident, and remains an article of faith among the reparationists, whether slavery and segregation in fact yielded net positive economic benefits to this country and to whom those net benefits flowed (to all or only some whites) are difficult questions to answer. More importantly, trying to answer them is diversionary and unnecessary. A sufficient basis for reparations lies in the wrong done African Americans by the nation, whether or not anyone really benefited from it. After all, the basis of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was not some putative benefit Americans had extracted from the internment of Japanese Americans in 1942-45. The basis was the wrong done to the internees. What wrong to African Americans, then, should current reparations address? Making slavery the basis for reparations is unwise for two reasons. First, doing so invites the retort that America has already paid for the wrong of slavery, not with money but with the blood shed in the Civil War. The attempt successfully to parry this retort leads to complications, since whether to reckon the blood sacrifice of the Civil War as expiation for the sins of the past and how to weigh that sacrifice against any unpaid debt to the newly liberated slaves are questions that invite calculations prone to sophistical quibbling on either side. A second reason it is unwise to base reparations on the fact of slavery is that the passage of time since abolition has now itself become a morally significant factor. Whatever condition they find themselves in, people have the responsibility to make the best of their circumstances, to provide for themselves even if they start with the most meager resources. For example, between 1865 and 1965, millions of immigrants came to America penniless and with little to offer but their physical labor. By dint of hard work, they and their successor generations eventually blended into the larger American fabric. Over time one might have expected a similar process to play itself out for the newly liberated slaves, especially since their numbers would have allowed them to possess considerable political power in several states. Yet this process didn’t occur. Why not? Because, after having made the newly freed slaves citizens, the federal government abandoned them. It allowed southern whites, through terror and law, to recapture control of state governments, disenfranchise African Americans, and, through the apparatus of Jim Crow, reduce them to virtual peonage. Indeed, America’s highest court put its official stamp on state apartheid in its 1896 ruling, Plessy v. Ferguson, a ruling that Justice Harlan, in dissent, accurately predicted would one day be viewed by Americans as no less pernicious than the Court’s fateful decision in Dred Scott. In sum, governments – state and federal – made no effort to vindicate the rights to full and equal citizenship the Civil War Amendments extended to blacks, a failure that prevented African Americans from successfully following the immigrant model. That failure persisted into recent times. The U. S. began to expend real effort toward defending the basic rights of blacks only after the 1954 Supreme Courtruling in Brown v. Board of Education, an effort far from complete today. Had the federal government done nothing after 1865 except vigorously protect the civil and voting rights of blacks, the legacy of slavery would have faded considerably if not wholly by now through the industry of blacks themselves. That the legacy still persists owes much, if not all, to the post-Civil War oppression of African Americans and it is this wrong that offers the most direct and salient basis for reparations. --------------------------- This discussion is Off Topic. Let's drop it please. --fl