From Africa to the Heart of the GOP

CHAPTER 1

“Twin Relics of Barbarism”

In July 2003 while on a trip to Africa, President George W. Bush expressed dismay over the darkest chapter in America’s past during a visit to Goree Island in Senegal–a place that stands in infamy because it was the disembarkation point for countless Africans sold into slavery.  Today liberal conventional wisdom portrays the slave trade as a white man’s crime and denounces America as the worst perpetrator for the exploitation of innocent Africans.  In truth, the reprehensible human chattel industry has been around nearly as long as mankind has existed, and in too many places it remains extant today.  Individual miscreants from every civilized nation tolerated, sanctioned, executed, and profited from the slave trade–a shameful demerit in collective history.  Although people of African origin constituted the only group ever legally enslaved in the United States, slaves of all races and ethnicities have been similarly subjugated at various times around the world.  That anyone was ever considered property in America is a terrible truth from our primarily glorious past.  However, a less discussed and possibly even more disturbing facet of trans-Atlantic slavery is the reality that many Africans bought and sold their fellow citizens too.  The slave trade prospered in Africa for centuries before there was a United States of America and even before the inauguration of intercourse between Africa and the West.

Slavery a Worldwide Phenomenon

Yale University African History Professor Robert Harms, a specialist in trans-Atlantic slavery explained that “the slave trade could not have endured for four centuries and carried nearly twelve million people out of Africa without the cooperation of a huge network of African rulers and merchants.”  According to Long Island University Political Science Professor Amechi A. Okolo, “there was nothing unusual in finding out that Africans had enslaved Africans long before Europeans arrived on the scene.  In fact, the reverse would have been empirically significant because slaves existed in most societies as part of historical dialectics of mankind.”  University of Nebraska English Professor Oyekan Owomoyela explained how even when Westerners joined in the long-running chattel trade, they collaborated with the continent’s natives; “Africans unquestionably participated in the trans-Atlantic slave trade as procurers for the European slave buyers.”  Furthermore, Africa’s greatest external exploiter was not America or any Western entity.  Former Reagan White House aide Dinesh D’Souza revealed “the Arab world, which was the first to import large numbers of slaves from Africa … played an important role as middlemen in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and contemporary research suggests that between the 7^th and the 19^th centuries they transported more than 14 million black slaves across the Sahara and the Red Sea–a larger number than were shipped to the Americas.”  John Jay College Anthropology Professor Kojo Dei confirmed the long history of African slaves sold into non-Western bondage:  “Prior to the beginning of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the fifteenth century, which linked Africa to Europe and the Americas, slaves had been exported by Africans from the African continent to Middle Eastern or Muslim countries.”

President Bush was right to perorate while paying his respects on Goree Island, “in the struggle of the centuries, America learned that freedom is not the possession of one race.”  But we can never forget that America’s guilt is far from solitary.  The entire world including Africa bears the shame of sustaining the buying and selling of human beings.  Fortunately, much of the world now brands such behavior as a crime against humanity.

A second equally factitious assumption about slavery is that it disappeared long ago.  Kansas’ Republican Senator Sam Brownback, one of the strongest voices for the modern-day victims, delineated just how widespread “the peculiar institution”–as it was once called in the South–remains today:

Slavery is a worldwide practice, with at least 27 million people in bondage.

It comes in numerous forms and is always degrading.  Young men from

northeast Brazil are forced into slave labor in Amazonia