Submitted by ICE-9 via The Burning PlatformSlave [sleyv] from Middle English, from Old French sclave, from Medieval Latin sclāvus (“slave”), from Late Latin Sclāvus (“Slavic Person”), from Byzantine Greek Σκλάβος (Sklábos), from Proto-Slavic slověninъ …
The
seminal image many 50+ year old Americans have regarding the West
African slave trade’s operating model can be traced back to the 1977
television miniseries Roots. Some of you may recall sitting in
front of your CRT television screen unknowingly watching the roots of a
future social justice movement unfold before your eyes as a gang of
European men magically appear deep within the Heart of Darkness wielding
nets, superior numbers, and incredible brutality and snatch up a young
and happy Kunta Kinte from his ancestral homeland.
Like
me, I bet the knot in your gut got tighter at each stage as Kunta Kinte
was first shipped off in chains to a slave depot, sold at auctioned,
and finally sent to America where his foot got cut off and he was
renamed Toby. The miniseries was a monumental success at implanting
those first seeds of suburban white guilt into what had previously been
infertile terrain. Afterwards, many Americans could never innocently
watch OJ Simpson run through airports in quite the same way.
Roots
was the initial vector that dug its pernicious roots into the formerly
oblivious white collective consciousness. It succeeded where back in
the 1960s continuous years of three minute lead story action clips on
the Six O’clock Evening News showing groups of helpless
southern Negroes getting pummeled by police truncheons and slammed with
water cannons had failed. Thus those January nights back in 1977
unleashed the power of humanized myth that unequivocally proved superior
to the old ways of cold impersonal facts. It was through this new
found power of myth and the visceral emotions it conjured that a
primordial wokeness was spawned.
Today, when discussing even the
most oblique references to slavery in America, the emotions ignite,
misguided passions reign supreme, facts equate to racism, and the
phenomenology of history devolves into one where history becomes but a
construct derived to aid and abet a white supremacist patriarchy. Case
in point – according to current woke orthodoxy, evil cis-male
Europeans just up and sailed 3,500 miles south to forgotten lands like
Zenaga, trekked hundreds of miles inland without roads, maps, or
logistic support, and – according to some extraordinary unverified
estimates – kidnapped up to six million innocent Africans.
But was this the reality on the ground in West Africa circa
1619, or did Europeans instead rely on intermediaries to conduct their
dangerous, high opex dirty work and if so, who were these
intermediaries? Do Americans have an accurate understanding of the West
African slavery supply chain, or have they instead meekly decided to go
along to get along and ingest without question a toxic narrative that
is an antipathy encumbered product tainted by a combination of pop
culture and political agenda? And last, did slavery in West Africa
materialize out of thin air with the first appearance of Europeans, or
did it exist long before their arrival?
The answer to this last
question is both morally and legally significant, as it could nullify
any and all claims to both tangible and ethical debts of reparation
borne by ancestral liability. For if Caucasian Americans are
collectively guilty – including those who immigrated here after
the Civil War – as a result of their ancestors’ theoretical
participation in the West African slave trade, would not a basis be
equally established to extend slavery’s collective culpability to
African Americans if it were shown that their ancestors too participated
to an equal degree in the West African slave trade? Would not equal
culpability on both ancestral sides of the Atlantic nullify any and all
claims by one party against the other? Further still, if slavery in
West Africa was shown to be prevalent long before the arrival of
Europeans, based on the premise of hereditary culpability, then slavery
in America could no longer exist as some kind of alleged “Original Sin”.
The
forthwith exposition can be considered a template for countering the
unreasonable and fanciful woke dogma surrounding the realities of West
African slavery and specifically, the false claims regarding Europe’s
and America’s sole complicity in this industry. It is an attempt –
described here in broken wokespeak – to deconstruct the prevailing
narrative derived to aid and abet a People of Color aligned, non-binary,
trans-supremacist heterarchy. Let us begin our journey of enlightenment.
The Songhai Empire as Gateway to Europe’s Appetite for African Slaves
Between the 4th and early 16th
centuries AD, through a succession of kingdoms that included Wagadou
(Ghana), Mali, and Songhai, the West African Sahel was among the
wealthiest regions on earth during a period when most of Europe wallowed
in medieval feudalism. Prior to the discovery of the Americas, West
Africa was the world’s largest source of gold – so much gold in fact
that when the Malian king Mansa Musa visited Mecca during his 14th
century hajj, his 60,000 strong retinue (including 12,000 slaves)
distributed so much gold that he crashed its value and created a decade
of economic chaos on the Arabian peninsula.
The Niger River during
this time possessed six times more arable land than the Nile. In the
adjacent Sahara to the north, Africans operated extensive salt mining
operations. With the arrival of the Arabs in the 8th century
AD, a prodigious iron smelting and blacksmithing industries occupied
entire villages from one end of the Sahel to the other. The West
African political economy was such that no king ever enforced strict
ownership over the entirety of his realm, so after the millet harvest an
African peasant could earn good extra income panning for alluvial gold,
mining iron ore, harvesting trees to make charcoal fuel for iron
smelting, or travelling north to labor in the salt mines.
The
Sahel during this period was awash in food and gold and large prosperous
cities like Gao grew into architectural wonders. So what happened that
would drain not only the wealth of an established long-standing power
center yet leave nothing behind but piles of dirt from what were
formerly majestic structures of timber and adobe brick? The short
answer is that it all fell to pieces due to horses.
In the 9th and
10th centuries AD, trade caravans from what are today Morocco and
Algeria began regularly making their way south through the Sahara desert
during the winter months. These caravans initially brought with them
manufactured goods and luxury items to exchange for gold, ivory,
specialty woods, animal skins, and salt. But during the 13th
century these caravans started supplying a vital military component to
the various competing rulers of the Sahel – Barb horses. Ownership of
horses gave each ruler a cavalry, and ownership of large herds could
facilitate military superiority over rivals.
The Malian, Hausa,
Mossi, Bornu, Kanem and Songhai cavalries regularly battled each other
for over three hundred years to what could be considered an equilibrium
sometimes punctuated with transient victories and an occasional ebb or
flow of juxtaposed borders. Continuous combat was made possible only by
a steady supply of Barb horses from the Maghreb, a market that traders
were happy to oblige as the supply of gold from the Sahel appeared
endless.
But with its monsoonal climate and tropical diseases like
trypanosomiasis, the Sahel Africans found it difficult to breed horses –
the local Dongola sub-breed had a short life expectancy – and thus a
steady flow of imported Barb horses were required to both replenish the
high equine mortality rates and maintain at least military parity with
the surrounding kingdoms. These imported horses were expensive and were
initially paid for with alluvial gold, which was starting to go into
productive decline during the 15th century at about the same
time the Songhai king Sonni Ali Ber led a successful campaign to defeat
his enemy Mali and consolidate rule over the Sahel from Lake Chad to the
Cap-Vert peninsula. So the height of Songhai power coincided with
maximum operating costs to retain that power just as alluvial gold
production from the Niger River went into decline.
Saddled with
the mounting expense of maintaining many cavalry regiments stretching
across an 1,800 mile expanse, the Songhai lords began to launch slave
raids upon the various Sahel peoples. So as the 15th and 16th
centuries progressed, slaves rather than gold became more and more the
medium of exchange between the Songhai lords and the horse traders of
the Maghreb. As these traders brought more and more slaves to the
Mediterranean coast of North Africa, most were purchased by Arabs but
many were sold on to Europeans where they were employed as domestic
servant in wealthy cities like London and Antwerp and were considered a
high status symbol – the “negars and blackmoores” of 16th century
Elizabethan England. So it was not the Europeans that first procured
slavery in West Africa, but the Songhai themselves that introduced
Europe to African slaves via Arab and Berber intermediaries. Europeans
at this time were a minor end customer, where the primary slave demand
was provided by Arabs.
As the 16th century ground out successive
years, the gold really began to play out. Continuous and devastating
slave raids depopulated the Niger River goldfield regions – crashing not
only gold but also food production – and drove its inhabitants onto
marginal lands that had been earlier deforested to manufacture charcoal
for the formerly prodigious iron smelting industry. Over a period of
200 years the once prosperous Sahel was transformed into a land
inhabited by subsistence food scavengers and all powerful cavalry lords
where the incessant demand for horses laid economic waste to this once
prosperous region.
With Songhai power in the late 16th
century at its nadir as a result of internecine strife and succession
wars among the dead king Askia Daoud’s many sons, the Sultan of Morocco,
Ahmad al-Mansur, took advantage of the ensuing political instability
and sent a military expedition across the Sahara and in 1591 these 4,000
Moroccans and their cannons defeated the Songhai at the battle of
Tondibi.
Thus with the defeat of the powerful Songhai Empire the
coast of West Africa south of the Arab stronghold Nouakchott was left
wide open to European maritime exploitation. By 1625 the Dutch had
established a permanent settlement at Gorée and the Portuguese likewise
at Portudal, both located in modern day Senegal. These initial European
forays onto West African soil provided the vital resupply anchorage
that enabled further permanent settlements along the entirety of the
Gulf of Guinea and as far south as Namibia. And it is at this point
where the Kunta Kinte mythology begins with the permanent settlement of
Europeans on African soil who allegedly trekked hundreds of miles inland
into dangerous areas they did not control to randomly kidnap happy
Africans into slavery. Was this the reality on the ground in Africa
back in 1619? The Angolan experience provides the answers.
The Angolan Model of Contracted Slave Procurement
The
gradual encroachment of European settlements down the Atlantic coast of
West Africa did not lead to immediate mass colonization as malaria and
tsetse flies kept out all but the hardiest and most rapacious
adventurers. But how did these Europeans procure so many slaves to
service the burgeoning and incredibly profitable sugar and tobacco
charters of the Caribbean? The Kunta Kinte procurement model would have
eventually led to depopulation of the local areas as the traditionally
semi-mobile Africans would have just up and moved out of reach like they
did to avoid the Songhai lords, and Africans were beginning to adopt
European weapons in their defense. So – how did so many Africans end up
as slaves in the Americas despite their overwhelming numbers back in
Africa?
The answer lies in the Angolan model which was by no means confined to this region alone. During the first half of the 16th
century the Portuguese established a permanent trading station at the
port of Soyo, a province within the Kingdom of Kongo on the south bank
at the mouth of the Congo River. The significance of Soyo was it
established the first European occupation in West Africa outside the
provenance of the tsetse fly, and with trypanosomiasis absent, colonists
could settle and import European livestock for the first time on the
African Atlantic coast. Entire families of Portuguese colonists began
to arrive and by 1575 the city of Luanda was founded, followed by
Benguela in 1587. With Angola’s drier, more temperate climate, these
early European colonists got to the business of building homes, clearing
land, farming, fishing, and raising their livestock. But one thing
they did not do was get to the business of travelling hundreds of miles
inland to hunt down and capture slaves. They left that to others – and
these others weren’t Europeans.
Soon after the Portuguese planted
their flag at Soyo, they granted a trade monopoly to the Kingdom of
Kongo which ruled over what is now northwestern Angola. But as Portugal
established colonies to the south of Soyo, these new colonies were
located in lands claimed by Kongo but occupied by Ambundu peoples of the
N’Dongo and Kisama states within the Kwanza River valley. Because of
the trade monopoly specifics granted to Kongo, the Bakongo could sweep
through the Kwanza River valley and capture the local Ambundu and sell
them into slavery to the Portuguese, but the Ambundu could not capture
these Bakongo raiders and sell them into slavery to the same customer.
This egregious injustice incensed the N’Dongo king to the point of
declaring war on – not the Portuguese – but the Bakongo in an attempt to
break the discriminatory trade monopoly. The Ambundu were successful
and in 1556 they defeated the Bakongo in a war fought not to end the
enslavement of their fellow Africans, but to extend to themselves the
right to capture, enslave, and sell their Bakongo neighbors to the
Portuguese.
Despite the N’Dongo victory and elimination of Kongo
influence in the Kwanza River valley, the Portuguese insisted on
upholding their original trade agreement, so the Kongo trade monopoly
remained in place with the Ambundu still cut out of all commercial
activity with the Portuguese. Realizing they had prosecuted a war for
nothing, the N’Dongo spent the next several decades threatening
colonists and harassing Portuguese interests up and down the Kwanza
River valley without any penetration into the colonial economy. In 1590
N’Dongo had had enough of the commercial status quo so it allied itself
with its eastern Ambundu neighbor Matamba and together they declared
war on all Portuguese interests across Angola.
This war led the Portuguese to construct a network of fortalezas
up and down the Angolan coastline and after years of protracted
violence the Portugal finally defeated the N’Dongo in 1614. Portugal’s
first act after victory was to invite their old trading partner – the
Bakongo – to commence mop-up operations across the Kwanza River valley
in order to clear out the defeated Ambundu and bring them in chains to
the new network of fortalezas, which not only served as troop garrisons and acropoli
for the local inhabitants, but also as slave depots that accommodated
the swelling numbers of captured Ambundu before being auctioned off and
sent to Brazil.
With the defeat of the Ambundu the N’Dongo
matriarchal dynasty fled east to their ally Matamba. There, a royal
refugee named N’Zinga M’Bandi betrayed the hospitality shown her by
Matamba and began secret negotiations with Luanda for a return of the
Ambundu to the Kwanza River valley. N’Zinga M’Bandi secured agreements
that not only deposed the sitting Matamban queen – handing her the crown
by subterfuge – but also convinced the Portuguese to nullify their long
standing trade monopoly granted to the Kingdom of Kongo which, in
effect, established the Ambundu peoples in the slave procurement
business.
The new Matamban queen made haste regarding her
political and business affairs and quickly consolidated N’Dongo and the
neighboring Kasanje states under her rule. By 1619, Queen N’Zinga had
grown her realm into the most powerful African state in the region using
the wealth generated from her industrial scale slave procurement
undertaking. Within a few decade of Queen N’Zinga’s ascension, the
regions surrounding central Angola were depopulated of not only the
rival Bakongo peoples, but of its Ovimbundu, Ganguela, and Chokwe
peoples too.
The lucrative Angolan slave trade not only flourished
under female African leadership, but grew scientific and efficient and
continued unabated until the Portuguese crown outlawed the colonial
slave trade in 1869. However, avarice and ingenuity always prevail so
after this slavery prohibition a vibrant slave black market continued
unabated as abolition only served to drive up the price of slaves and
therefore the incentive to procure them in the field. These lucrative
smuggling operations from Angola lasted up until the day its primary
customer Brazil abolished slavery in 1888.
Today the dominance of
the Ambundu peoples in the business, political, and military affairs of
modern day Angola is directly traced to the business acumen,
organizational skills, and operational efficiency that the Ambundu
peoples’ developed during their 269 year monopoly over slave procurement
in Angola. From the tens of thousands of their fellow African
“brothers” and “sisters” that the Ambundu sold into slavery, they
accumulated incredible wealth that enabled them to occupy a position of
respect, influence, and near equality in colonial Angola unparalleled
anywhere in colonial Africa. They became, in a sense, the “Master
Ethnicity” of the region.
Twilight of the Woke Idols
The irony behind the etymology for the word slave, lost upon the woke and the allies of Critical Race Insanity, is that slave
derives from ancient words describing Caucasian Slavic peoples. If
slavery were at the core of the “American Experience”, America long ago
would have adopted a word for slave that describe African peoples just as the Romans employed Sclāvus
to describe a Slav. But in the 402 years since 1619, Americans have
not made this linguistic transition because there is an older and deeper
collective history of slavery that can be traced back millennia to
Eastern Europeans who constitute a large proportion of the American
population.
Yet somehow this deeper history has not affected
Caucasians of eastern European descent – even the generational poor – in
the same way it has tormented the collective psyche of African
Americans. Maybe these demons are not so much the product that African
Americans were once slaves, but instead a manifestation of the incessant
bombarded of acerbic messages from the Academia-Media-Technocracy
Complex demanding that African Americans play the role of perpetual
victims and that they deserve some abstract redress from those who
themselves have never benefitted from systemic anything.
Or is
there a deeper pathological diagnosis, a sepsis of personal ontology
whereby the current woke narrative is a desperate attempt at mass
cognitive dissonance to blot out the humiliating reality that one’s
ancestors were traded in bulk by one’s own kind for the likes of a
horse?
Africans were one of many peoples in a long line of slaves
procured by Europeans but they are the last group before the
prohibitions of the Utilitarian campaigns of universal human rights put
an end to the practice. Thus it is this ‘Last In, First Out” queuing
that gives African Americans claim to their title of “systemic victims”
without regard to the broader history of European slavery during the
preceding two millennia – including Medieval feudalism. The reality on
the ground for centuries in Europe was that slave relations were between
Caucasian Master and Caucasian slave.
And with the advent and
maturing scientific efficiency of institutions such as central banking,
nation states, denominational religions, non-governmental organizations,
together with the application of mass psychology, one finds upon
further scrutiny that this predominant relationship between Master and
slave has changed little over the millennia. We Americans are, in a
sense, all slaves – caught in a systemic nexus of control with few
options of escape. Therefore, claims of “systemic injustice” and
demands for redress are nothing more than demands to be promoted from
field hand to domestic slave unless the true, invisible system of
enslavement is abolished for all Americans.
Slavery
existed for millennia throughout the entirety of the Bantu populated
African continent prior to the arrival of Europeans. African slaves
were captured, worked hard in the millet fields, scolded, beaten, sold
multiple times, raped, and murdered well before the first European
footprint was impressed on a West African beach. Slavery was the
natural African social condition, it continued as Europeans colonized
the continent, and in some places it continues today after most
Europeans have left. Thus any conception of an “Original Sin” borne by
Americans through ancestry lies not with Caucasians, but with those of
African ancestry as Africans themselves were the origination point for
the West African slavery supply chain where they occupied the roles of
contractor, planner, procurer, and transporter to distribution hubs.
The
indigenous Africans were, in modern terms, the Chief Operating Officers
of the West African slave trade. Europeans played the roles of
wholesale customer, clearing house, and retail distributor of a product
offered to them by brazen and entrepreneurial local rulers who amassed
great wealth from their endeavors and whose ancestors today are the
beneficiaries of an “ethnic privilege” derived from this wealth and
societal status as former Masters.
The truth is that this seminal
enduring image created with Kunta Kinte’s abduction is a fraud and was
fabricated to not only impugn the Caucasian audience and henceforth
brand them evil and complicit through ancestry, but was also consciously
constructed to expiate the guilt surrounding the ugly and brutal truth
that Africans themselves were the culpable party. Had indigenous
Africans not captured and sold so many of their brethren into slavery,
there would likely be very few African Americans today.
Epilogue
The
woke will never mention the 800 years of an East African slave trade
conducted by Arab merchants up and down the Indian Ocean coast. The
woke won’t utter a word regarding present day slavery across the Sahel
countries of Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, and Sudan. One hears only
silence from the woke when one mentions the “Systemic Ethniscism” that
permeates every Bantu nation where wealth and power are concentrated
into the hands of a dominant ethnic group.
The woke ignore the 3,000+ freed African slaves who show up in the ante bellum
US census who were granted manumission, inherited plantations from
their former owners, and kept the slaves. No woke person ever admits
that American Indians owned African slaves nor will they / them accept
that slavery permeated Nahuatl culture even as they / them espouse the
virtues of Greater Aztlán. And the woke will never accept that it was
Europeans who eventually stamped out slavery within the Bantu cultural
world despite it being the natural human condition there for centuries.
And, most importantly, the woke will never acknowledge that all
Americans are trapped in a nexus of corporate, bureaucratic,
technological, and psychological control where the true “American
Experience” has devolved into one where everyone is a slave
serving invisible Masters. Until these Masters’ hands are removed from
every lever of power and influence in our nation – by any means
necessary – abstractions like “equality” and “equity” are nothing more
than job promotions on the American plantation. The woke will never
become unwoke because they love their servitude, it has opened the door
for them to serve an irresponsible existence free of rationality, logic,
true meaning in their existence. Through their wokeness, they have
essentially been freed from Freedom – they can place no hope in death,
and their blind lives are so abject that they are envious of every other
fate. The world should let no fame of theirs endure; both true Justice
and Compassion must disdain them.
One final comment about those
4,000 Moroccans at the Battle of Tondibi. The invading Moroccan army
was commanded by a one Judar Pasha, but he was not always known by this
name. Judar was born Diego de Guevara, an inhabitant of the Spanish
region of Andalusia who as a boy was captured by Arab slave raiders,
packed off in chains to Morocco, and sold into slavery to the Moroccan
Sultan. And just like Kunta Kinte, Diego’s name got changed, but where
Kunta Kinte had his foot cut off, Judar was castrated and forced to
serve this foreign Sultan as a eunuch. But we will never see a TV
miniseries where an Arab slave wrangler hangs one Diego de Guevara
upside down by his ankles, thrashes him with a bull whip, and screams
repeatedly, “Your name is not Diego, your name is Judar!”
