Has The US "Enslaved" Africa?

[fyrenza]

The way I remember history,
it was Africans that first sold their own people to Slavers,
so I don't believe that any of us/US can be blamed
for that which was some universally accepted economic practice.

IF I remember correctly, it didn't take too long for us/US to see the error of our ways,
in regard to that sort of thinking,
with the latest date given by Wiki (http://December 6, 1865 - The Thirteenth Amendment of the US Constitution was ratified officially abolishing slavery. This freed the remaining holdout slaver owners in Kentucky who had resisted abolition until this point. The last of the American slaves were finally free.) being December 6, 1865,
for the total abolition of slavery in America,
which was about 148 years ago.

A mere 50 ~ 70 generations, later,
AFTER "freedom,"

here we are, finally trying to figure out what went wrong.

Discuss?

[Captain Obvious]

I'd say China's doing a better job nowadays.

[The Wash]

Colonialization ended when? US corporations moved out of African when? CIA involvement in Africa ended when?

[fyrenza]

I'd say that ^they've^ been around for a LOT less than 148 years, so ...

In fact, I don't recall America ever participating in any colonization efforts ...
unless you want to count our "territories?"

[fyrenza]

Perhaps the better question would be : The US corporations/CIA moved IN, when?

[The Wash]

If this thread is about "The United States Enslaving Africa" then I will say the United States has never enslaved Africa. We all done now?

[fyrenza]

I'm sorry ~ I thought that was what we were talking about.

My bad.

And, yes ~ I suppose we're done.

[shaarona]

The way I remember history,
it was Africans that first sold their own people to Slavers,
so I don't believe that any of us/US can be blamed
for that which was some universally accepted economic practice.

IF I remember correctly, it didn't take too long for us/US to see the error of our ways,
in regard to that sort of thinking,
with the latest date given by Wiki (http://December 6, 1865 - The Thirteenth Amendment of the US Constitution was ratified officially abolishing slavery. This freed the remaining holdout slaver owners in Kentucky who had resisted abolition until this point. The last of the American slaves were finally free.) being December 6, 1865,
for the total abolition of slavery in America,
which was about 148 years ago.

A mere 50 ~ 70 generations, later,
AFTER "freedom,"

here we are, finally trying to figure out what went wrong.

Discuss?

You might find this very interesting. Its written from the POV of an economist.

http://www.afbis.com/analysis/slave.htm

Slave trade: a root of contemporary African Crisis
By Tunde Obadina
"The past is what makes the present coherent," said Afro-American writer James Baldwin, and the past "will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly."
Why go back five centuries to start an explanation of Africa's crisis in the late 1990s? Must every story of Africa's political and economic under-development begin with the contact with Europe? The intention is not to produce another nationalist tract on how whites, driven by lust for material possession and armed with firearms, gin and a bag full of tricks, subjugated innocent Africans who were living blissfully close to nature. The reason for looking back is that the root of the crisis facing African societies is their failure to come to terms with the consequences of that contact.

Portuguese seamen first landed in Africa in the fourth decade of the fifteenth century. From the outset they seized Africans and shipped them to Europe. In 1441 ten Africans were kidnapped from the Guinea coast and taken to Portugal as gifts to Prince Henry the Navigator. In subsequent expeditions to the West African coast, inhabitants were taken and shipped to Portugal to be sold as servants and objects of curiosity to households. In the Portuguese port of Lagos, where the first African slaves landed in 1442, the old slave market now serves as an art gallery.

Portuguese adventurers who sailed southeast along the Gulf of Guinea in 1472 landed on the coast of what became Nigeria. Others followed. They found people of varying cultures. Some lived in towns ruled by kings with nobility and courtiers, very much like the medieval societies they left behind them. A Dutch visitor to Benin City wrote in around 1600: "As you enter it, the town appears very great. You go into a great broad street, not paved, which seems to be seven or eight times broader than the Warmoes Street in Amsterdam...The houses in this town stand in good order, one close and even with the other, as the houses in Holland stand..." More than a century earlier Benin exchanged ambassadors with Portugal. But not all African societies were as developed. Some enjoyed village existence in primeval forests remote from outside influences.
Economics was the driving force

continued.