From: pmmst8@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Paul M Mweene)
Newsgroups: alt.discrimination,alt.politics.correct,soc.culture.african
Subject: Re: Sexist African Males
Date: 15 Apr 92 01:54:41 GMT
Organization: University of Pittsburgh

In article <viking.703149779@vincent1.iastate.edu> viking@iastate.edu (Dan Sorenson) writes:
>	It is interesting to note that Egyptians regularly enslaved
>people, before the Jews it was the Nubians and Libyans.  The fact
>that they were the same color of skin apparently didn't matter.  I


Your statements needs to be clarified. It is generally accepted the Libyans werewhite for most of the time that they were of significance to (Egyptian) history
while the Nubians were and are still among the darkest Africans. In view of the
fore going, your statements would seem at the very least contradictory. Which
colour then were the Egyptians the same as.  And assuming that white skinned 
Asians came to Egypt and left after a 400 year stay as the Jews, what would you
say was the impact on their race of living in Egypt this long ?
Obviosly this question depens on the first answer.

As for slavery being confined to a narrow coastal strip I might mention that
Basil Davidson (already  qouted in another posting) states that there was as 
late as 1904, a path from central Africa to Luanda littered with the skulls of
those of the enslaved who wilted under the hardship that the march from the
interior, often under the weight of an enormous load of ivory and ahead of the
whips of the slave drivers, imposed on their innocent and unfortunate souls.

Further more David Livingstone reported of seeing slave caravans, a totally 
ravaged and an almost depopulated country, when he passed through the are of
Africa where I hail. The people the same selves very vividly recount the atro
cities that their own fathers endured as a result of slavery. And you must
remember that I come from neither the coast nor west Africa.
.

And as for those who say that slavery was always prevalent in Africa, I challenge you to prove. I dispute it. Where and how did Africans enslave other Africans
prior to the transantlantic trade ? True there were occasional wars, which resulted in people being colonised and assimilated in the process. However these were
far and far between, Africa being more than adequate to provide for and accomodate all its citizens.  The demand for slaves in the new world was both the first
cause of African slavery and the fuel for the wars that came to ravage the continent. 

The role of Africans who tacitly or otherwise participated in the enslaving of 
other Africans is analogous to that of the jews who operated the furnaces in th
e conc. camps. It was a case of help to enslave or  be yourself enslaved. And 
this is without any doubt. 

Africans were enslaved and the continent colonised by gun powder. It the naturesof socio economic forces in Europe that forced Europeans to wander as far as Ch
ina where they acquired the knowledge to manufacture the gun powder by which they plundered the rest of the world. 

Slavery ended because the slave economy produced so much as to create conditionsfor the industrial revolution. The primitive industrial society however found it
self in competetion  with the slave economy. The slave economy therefore had to
go. These events are all manifest first in the fact that the English, who havingbecome made the world's power by the trade decided in 1830 to actually deploy
ships in the oceans to prohibit it. The only other reason for this was that the y wanted to preempt the emergence of a rival power by the same method they had
made such good use of. In America this was evident in the civil war where the industrial half of the country took on and defeated the slave dependent economic
region of the country. It should not be one of the illusions that morallity
had a part to play in any of this..

Makala