“For over 200 years, powerful kings in what is now the country of Benin captured and sold slaves to Portuguese, French and British merchants. The slaves were usually men, women and children from rival tribes — gagged and jammed into boats bound for Brazil, Haiti and the United States…. Wait! The United States were formed in 1789 and The United Stated Had Declared Slavery Unconstitutional… Whoopi is way off base unless she apologizes for her ancestors capturing and selling slaves….

“My Nigerian great-grandfather sold slaves”

Published

  • European buyers tended to remain on the coast

  • African sellers brought slaves from the interior on foot

  • Journeys could be as long as 485km (300 miles)

  • Two captives were typically chained together at the ankle

  • Columns of captives were tied together by ropes around their necks

  • 10%-15% of captives died on the way

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http://edition.cnn.com/WORLD/9510/ghana_slavery/

CAPE COAST, Ghana (CNN) — For centuries along the West African coast, millions of Africans were sold into slavery and shipped across the Atlantic to the Americas.

The middlemen were European slave traders based in forts like Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle, now a tourist attraction and a somber reminder of a brutal crime against humanity.

That crime is usually blamed entirely on the European outsiders who inflicted slavery on African victims. But new research by some African scholars supports a different view – – that Africans should share the blame for slavery.

“It was the Africans themselves who were enslaving their fellow Africans, sending them to the coast to be shipped outside,” says researcher Akosua Perbi of the University of Ghana. (88K AIFF sound file or 88K WAV sound)

Based on her studies, Perbi says that European slave traders, almost without exception, did not themselves capture slaves. They bought them from other Africans, usually kings or chiefs or wealthy merchants.

The question is, why did Africans sell their own people?

For a thousand years before Europeans arrived in Africa, slaves were commonly sold and taken by caravans north across the Sahara.

Sharing the guilt for slavery may be disturbing and painful for Africans, but researchers say their objective is clear.

“They’re trying to uncover the facts so that people will take a lesson from the evil of the past and say ‘no more,'” says Kwame Arhin of the Institute of African Affairs.

And there is one thing they insist they are not doing.

“I’m not trying to shift blame or to make the Europeans feel less guilty,” explains Perbi.

For what many believe was the world’s greatest crime against humanity, there is more than enough guilt to share….. NO! The guilt Is Not Shared By Everyone. The people in the Northern States had outlawed it.. No guilt!

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…”in 1998 when Yoweri Museveni, the (black) president of Uganda, told an audience including Bill Clinton: “African chiefs were the ones waging war on each other and capturing their own people and selling them. If anyone should apologize it should be the African chiefs. We still have those traitors here even today.”

See:https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/18/africans-apologise-slave-trade

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