people were stolen
By: Corey Harris
We know that the majority of Black people in North America today are largely the descendants of people taken from regions now associated with the modern nations of Senegal, Mali, Gambia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia (aka upper Guinea); the southern regions of Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana and eastern Ivory Coast (aka lower Guinea); and the western regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola (Central Africa). When we consider the size of the continent, these areas represent only about 15% of Afrika's total area. Each of these regions produced empires rich in cultural traditions as well as smaller kingdoms and city states.
There is a common misconception that slaves were taken from Afrika. No, people were stolen, sold and then later enslaved. They were not dull brutes or blank slates lacking culture, waiting for white people to write upon them. These were individuals skilled in arts and trades that colonial whites knew nothing about, such as brick making, rice cultivation. Though a great number of slaves performed back-breaking manual labor on large and small plantations, many others were highly valued for their skills, even to the extent that they were often hired out by the slave master to work for other whites in the area. (This was the status of the great skilled and literate revolutionaries of the 19th century such as Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner; this made them a real threat to the established order.
Perhaps this explains why slave revolts were so common, and why travel was forbidden during slavery: white security and the maintenance of the system demanded it.) Slavery was a system with a clear process on how to break, maintain, and breed free labor. (Though the now famous 'Willie Lynch letter' has been exposed as a hoax, the practices it describes were most definitely part and parcel of the enslavement process.) Those who survived the middle passage were then subjected to the brutal process of enslavement which began when they were chained in Afrika to be sold off to Europeans to be regarded as nothing more than livestock. So we are talking here about people of diverse origins and trades, with differences in status and age. These are people who were loved members of a community, parents, sons, daughters, uncles, aunts, cousins.
They knew their family history and their cultural identity was intact. In short, they were civilized peoples with their own languages, faiths, traditions, and concepts of law. They were enslaved because of the need for cheap, skilled labor. Their rich and highly developed cultures did not die out just because of a change of venue. But it did bear the scars, the whips and the chains as it developed into a new branch of that same old Afrikan tree from which it sprung. It was this Afrikan culture, taken from diverse groups from a relatively small area that is the soil from which Black culture grew into what it is today.
