I found this Article on the internet and I was totally shocked at what I read. What people teach in the schools about Slavery is so insignificant when compared to the what actually happened. People seem to be trying to down play this event in history and make it seem as if it was only a couple of million people suffered. I started doing research about the trans atlantic slave trade and I could not believe what I was reading, I was shocked to discover that the ships used in the slave trade were own by Jews and even opperated by Jews. So it bothers me a little when I hear people say, “that was a long time ago, get over it,” and then call me a racist for presenting the facts:
This is a Quote from Rabbi Marc Lee Raphael:
“Jews also took an active part in the Dutch colonial slave trade; indeed, the bylaws of the Recife and Mauricia congregations (1648) included an imposta (Jewish tax) of five soldos for each Negro slave a Brazilian Jew purchased from the West Indies Company. Slave auctions were postponed if they fell on a Jewish holiday. In Curacao in the seventeenth century, as well as in the British colonies of Barbados and Jamaica in the eighteenth century, Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade. In fact, in all the American colonies, whether French (Martinique), British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated.
“This was no less true on the North American mainland, where during the eighteenth century Jews participated in the ‘triangular trade’ that brought slaves from Africa to the West Indies and there exchanged them for molasses, which in turn was taken to New England and converted into rum for sale in Africa. Isaac Da Costa of Charleston in the 1750’s, David Franks of Philadelphia in the 1760’s, and Aaron Lopez of Newport in the late 1760’s and early 1770’s dominated Jewish slave trading on the American continent.”
Rabbi Dr. Marc Lee Raphael is the editor (since 1988) of American Jewish History, the journal of the American Jewish Historical Society at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. He has been Rabbi of Bet Aviv in Columbia, MD since 1998. He is also the Nathan and Sophia Gumenick Professor of Judaic Studies, Professor of Religious Studies and Chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at The College of William and Mary.
This is a quote by Jacob Rader Marcus:
“All through the eighteenth century, into the early nineteenth, Jews in the North were to own black servants; in the South, the few plantations owned by Jews were tilled with slave labor. In 1820, over 75 percent of all Jewish families in Charleston, Richmond, and Savannah owned slaves, employed as domestic servants; almost 40 percent of all Jewish householders in the United States owned one slave or more. There were no protests against slavery as such by Jews in the South, where they were always outnumbered at least 100 to 1….But very few Jews anywhere in the United States protested against chattel slavery on moral grounds.” United States Jewry, 1776-1985 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), p. 586.
It totally seems like a cover up and an attempt to keep people misinformed about the past. I asked a Junior High Afrikan American student what did the school teach them about slavery, and the student replied: “they told us that blacks were only made to pick cotton and to work hard.”
I found this Article on this Article at www.mobilization2-21.com writen by By Jack Crawford
Many of you have seriously questioned the claims of some of our people regarding the African Holocaust. In your minds, it sounds like an exaggeration when it is said that 100 million Africans were murdered or just died due to slavery. You must remember to include all those who died because of slavery: people killed as a direct result of the wars that were caused by the slave trade, those who died or were murdered on the journey of up to 400+ miles to the coast, those killed by the miserable slave castles on the coast of Africa and of course, the people who died during the absolutely intolerable conditions of the “middle passage” on slave ships or in the “seasoning” process where your ancestors were taught to be slaves. To understand the enormity of the number you must first focus on a few facts that are not emphasized by the slavery “apologists” you usually read.
Here are a few facts:
1. Europeans took Africans away for about 450 years starting in 1441. The Arabs were in this business several hundred years before the Europeans (starting in circa 750 AD). In the US, we often start the discussion in 1619 but by then there were already millions of enslaved Africans in Cuba, Haiti, Brazil and elsewhere in the Americas. .
2. Africans were taken many places including the US, the West Indies, Central and South America, Europe, India, Arabia, virtually everywhere.
3. Warfare and village raiding were the primary sources of slave acquisition. Many people died. While it is true that some greedy African kings sold their own subjects to the Europeans this was not the only source of slaves. Slave raiding by foreigners was not uncommon.
Look on your bookshelf and pull out a copy of the World Almanac. Turn to the section where they have world population data. Here is what I find (1990 edition, page 539; in other editions just look up “world population”):
| Continent | ||||
|
Millions: |
1650 |
1750 |
1850 |
1950 |
|
Africa |
100 |
95 |
95 |
200 |
|
Europe |
100 |
140 |
265 |
530 |
Interesting?? Just look at the numbers. During the 200-year period from 1650 to 1850, there was a 165 million increase in the European population. The population of Africa declined. You might say, quite correctly, that the Africans were being transported to the “New World.” However, so were Europeans. Besides, the African population of all North and South America in 1850 was, maybe, 20-25 million maximum. Thus, we are missing a bunch of folks; by any measure (that is, unless you think white folks simply multiply faster than we do).
No!! That cannot be. The math is really not so hard to understand. Consider these estimates:
For every 100 healthy survivors of a raid on a village, you can bet that 200 were left dead or maimed for life. Remember, no one volunteered for slavery. We fought bitter fratricidal wars with each other to generate slave captives. (Read: Before the Mayflower by Lerone Bennet, Jr.)
Of that 100 captives, on average only 70 made it to the coast. Many died along the way. Some brokenhearted, some suicides, some just physically unable to make the trip. Imagine, if someone captured you, killed your family and told you to march 400+ miles from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Many of you would die too! Many of the weaker or wounded captives would be viciously shot as stragglers just to convince the strong to march on.
Of the 70 reaching the slave prison on the coast, maybe 50 lived to board the slave ship. If this gives you problems, talk to someone you trust who has visited those most heinous slave castles on the West Coast of Africa; like Elmina or Cape Coast in Ghana. Or even worse, Goree Island in Senegal. Up to 1000 people crowded into a filthy, hot room, for weeks, months, sometimes up to a year. I’ve been there. One visit will haunt you for the rest of your life. Visitors will tell you they still hear the cries of misery in those dungeons. Here, warriors from different sides that may have raided each other’s villages were chained together and were rudely awakened that they had both been deceived into war by the same common enemy. And don’t overlook those who were killed as a part of the early “seasoning” process. I’ve read where people were cut in half by guns or canon fire just to scare the remaining folk to cooperate.
Of the, say 50 or so people that board the ship, generally 25-35% die in the miserable conditions of the “middle passage” from disease, murder (mutiny was common) or suicide along the way. It was not uncommon for Africans to jump overboard or refuse to eat and die to avoid life as a slave. It is said that sharks often followed slave ships because so many bodies were thrown overboard. There are also numerous examples of slavers throwing their cargo overboard to collect the insurance. (Read: Malcolm X On Afro-American History or Eyewitness Accounts of Slavery in the West Indies by Paiewonsky)
So maybe 35 people from the original group land in the West Indies (or other parts of the Americas). We are not done yet. You can’t take someone who has always been free and immediately expect him (or her) to accept slavery. No — seasoning is required. Breaking-in. Like a horse or a mule or a bull. Here is where the new masters teach you what happens to difficult slaves. An example was made, sometimes using a pregnant woman suspended from a tree. The white man would cut open her stomach and stomp the unborn baby — just to show you who’s boss. This may cut the number to 30. (Read: From Slavery to Freedom, J H Franklin)
Not done yet. In the West Indies especially, it was considered to be more economic to import new slaves than to prolong the lives of those already in residence. Thus, of the 30, often 80% were dead from disease, malnutrition and simply being worked to death within five years. (Read: C Columbus & the African Holcoaust by J H Clarke)
If you still question the 100 million dead figure, just do the math yourself. We started with 300 people. 100 left the village. 50 got on the boat. 35 landed in America. 6 were alive five years later. These are my estimates based on my reading of various authors. However, no one can dispute the numbers in the almanac. Where are the missing people????? The answer is simple: they were murdered directly or indirectly at the hands of the European and Arab slavers and their African lackeys (yes, Africans were participants). My guide at Elmina castle told me that for every African captive that reached the coast for transshipment, 12-15 people died in the wars, resultant starvation and the trek to the shore. If this is true, you can take the modest estimates of Newsweek saying 13 million left Africa, add 20% who did not survive the slave forts, the result yields about 15 million. Multiply that by 12 and you get 180 million lost. The world population figures are making more sense, huh?
And remember – the slave trade from East Africa to the Arabian countries, India and China started much earlier -several hundred years earlier. And this trade continued long after the Europeans had had their fill. If you investigate further, you’ll even find out that the continued slave trade by the Arabs was one of the key rationalizations the Europeans used to justify colonizing Africa – to end the Arab slave trade.
The holocaust did not end there. The “colonial” period started in 1884. Although it is rarely discussed, slavery was reestablished by the Belgians, the French and the British in several parts of Africa. The Belgian Congo (now Republic of the Congo) alone experienced a population decrease of 10-20 million people in the first 25 years of foreign rule. Millions of Africans were maimed, tortured and murdered during colonialism. (Read “King Leopold’s Ghost,” by Adam Hocschild for more background on the early colonial stage of he African Holocaust. This ugly period of history was almost totally covered up.)
If anyone cares to suggest that we are wrong to suggest that this was indeed a holocaust should read S.E. Anderson’s book, “The Black Holocaust for Beginners.” This may not be written in scholarly language. It may be full of pictures and illustrations. One may even suggest that it is a children’s book. But it is not. It is clear, factual and very much to the very raw point. It is worth reading.
After you finish Holocaust take a look at the December 1997 piece that Newsweek ran on slavery. They used John Hope Franklin, a respected historian, as one of their sources. Yet they started the discussion as if slavery in the Americas began at Jamestown in 1619. Then they used 13 million as the number of people that died. How dare them! This is arrogance at a master level. I place it with the denials of some Nazi apologists who deny their roles in the wholesale murders of Jews, Poles, Russians, Gypsies, homosexuals, cripples and Africans. There are many Japanese who are similarly trying to pretend that the rape of Nanking (killing 300-500 thousand people) and the murders of another 300,000 by using germ warfare experiments never happened. How these people live with the existence of the overwhelming evidence that is available is beyond reason or imagination.
Today, the ravages of slavery and colonialism still take a toll on our people everywhere. Africans in America and in the Motherland suffer with poor self-images and various other issues which result in all kinds of negative behaviors. The residual stigmas of slavery and colonialism are very mush in evidence today. We kill each other. We try to emulate the physical appearances of our slavemaster / colonizer. We ridicule dark skin and nappy hair. We worship God-images falsely created in the image of Europeans. And oh yes! How ridiculous it appears to an outsider to see African men wearing old-fashioned wigs to participate in the judicial systems of former British colonies.
The current national borders of most African countries were drawn in Berlin in 1884 when Europeans carved Africa up like a Christmas turkey. In the process they never considered the existing borders of kingdoms and national homelands. These arbitrarily drawn borders created several “Yugoslavias” where ethnic and tribal fighting continues. Why, for example, is it that the Tutsi people are in Rwanda, Congo, Burundi and Uganda? Of course, this helps the foreign interests maintain a great deal of control when we fight each other. Other key examples are Nigeria/Biafra and Angola where very bloody modern wars have persisted over longstanding ethnic disagreements.
The Conclusion
In order to build a higher structure, we must inspect our foundation. Lies and misconceptions are like cracks in our foundation, and we must first deal with these things and quit sweeping it under the carpet and bring the truth to light.
“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”