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Eternal Ancestors - Buddha's Relics: The Icon and Sanctity in Asia - Part 1 of 4 http://www.metmuseum.org/special/eternal_ancestors/african_more.asp Presented in conjunction with the exhibition "Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary," these lectures examine the legacy of one of Africa's greatest artistic movements. They address the larger significance of the region's most celebrated sculptural works by considering the historical context and spiritual impetus for their creation, their impact on the Western avant-garde, and parallels with other major world traditions. Buddha's Relics: The Icon and Sanctity in Asia Denise Patry Leidy, curator, Asian Art
The original Black Relgions and Prophets in the Ancient Civilizations of
I write without the fear of man, I am writing for my God, and fear none but himself; they may put me to death if they choose—(I fear and esteem a good man however, let him be black or white.) I forbear to comment on the cruelties inflicted on this Black Man by the Whites, in the Park Street M EETING H OUSE, I will leave it in the dark!!!!! But I declare that the atrocity is really to Heaven daring and infernal, that I must say that God has commenced a course of exposition among the Americans, and the glorious and heavenly work will continue to progress until they learn to do justice.
The Chinese Lao-Tien-Yeh glyph (above left) and the Egyptian Aten symbol ... http://www.grahamphillips.net/eden/eden_4.htm ,Similarity between the language, songs, stories and ceremonies used in the Chinese Border Sacrifice songs and in the Bible, provide evidence that Shang Di in Chinese history is the same as El Shaddai as revealed to those who were scattered from Mesopotamia's Plains of Shinar.Slavery of Pacific Islanders. The sad story of Blackbirding http://t.co/zQwX9Ek
UNTOLD BLACK HISTORY: The Black Chinese http://t.co/fTtXMv7
Thus, in less than 300 years (Gen. 11:10-26) from the Noah's Flood to Abraham, early migrations arrived from Babel into China bringing with them an understanding of God. Jewish Role in the African Slave Trade http://t.co/5eksdwO ,
Dr. Runoko Rashidi introduces Historical African influence on Cambodian Civilization. Matlock 2000: "Jesus and Moses are Buried in India, Birthplace of Abraham and the Hebrews", by Gene D. Matlock, Authors Choice Press, San Jose, imprint 5220 S 16th, Ste 200, Lincoln, NE 68512, Nov. 2000, $24, http://www.iuniverse.com. The lost tomb of Jesus" BANNED in India http://t.co/4aoYt22 , The Great Name is Yahshua not Jesus PT 1 of 8 http://t.co/gAlU7cE ,Good Times Messiyah Yahshua falsely called "Jesus" http://t.co/upF2PMj ,The Face of Yahshua, who the world falsely calls "Jesus" http://t.co/gJQ2hdk ,Why the Lost Tomb of Yahshua is NOT a fraud http://t.co/bKWlutU ,ANTHROPOLOGY Citing evidence from anthropology for his thesis, Shukla notes:
Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2011/01/18/Philip_K_Howard_Fixing_Broken_GovernmentCommon Good founder Philip K. Howard argues for a complete overhaul of United States bureaucracy. "America needs a new operating system," he says. Is it time for the U.S. to reboot? ----- Philip K. Howard is a conservative who inspires standing ovations from liberal audiences (short example here). He says that governance in America -- from the capitol to the classroom -- has achieved near-total dysfunctionality by accumulating so many layers of piecemeal legalisms that the requirements of navigating them has replaced any hope of getting actual justice or effectiveness. Most attempts to fix the problems have made them worse. Howard thinks they can be fixed in a way that restores core functionality. Howard is the author of Life Without Lawyers and Death of Common Sense and is the founder and chair of Common Good, a reform advocacy nonprofit. - The Long No... more
Simply a Christian exposing the evil of the World. The reality is that many will expose the Truths of the world elite and the secrets done behind closed doors. (Maxwell, Jones, Freeman, Lennon and etc...)The question is what are the intentions of the persons exposing the evil? If the person does not believe in the same God and partake of the same beliefs as you can you trust them? Or will they tell you some Truth, mixed with a lie? Well Texx Marrs hasn't changed and exposes even many false Christians partaking in the deception of many. Word of advice: always compare a person by their words and their actions. Many people may talk of these things, but will they tell you that this has already been written in the scrolls of the past from the Prophets of The Lord of Host? Please remember that the Bible was canonized by Rome, but the scrolls date back way before Rome was. Don't look at Rome to see Christianity, for anyone who reads knows that they don't follow the Word of God. Onl... more Atlantic triangular slave trade
Diagram illustrating the stowage of African slaves on a British slave ship.
Depiction of the Triangular Trade of slaves, sugar, and rum with New England instead of Europe as the third corner.
The best-known triangular trading system is the transatlantic slave trade, that operated from the late 16th to early 19th centuries, carrying slaves, cash crops, and manufactured goods between West Africa, Caribbean or American colonies and the European colonial powers, with the northern colonies of British North America, especially New England, sometimes taking over the role of Europe. [1]The use of African slaves was fundamental to growing colonial cash crops, which were exported to Europe. European goods, in turn, were used to purchase African slaves, which were then brought on the sea lane west from Africa to the Americas, the so called middle passage. [2]A classic example would be the trade of sugar (often in its liquid form, molasses) from the Caribbean to Europe or New England, where it was distilled into rum. The profits from the sale of sugar were used to purchase manufactured goods, which were then shipped to West Africa, where they were bartered for slaves. The slaves were then brought back to the Caribbean to be sold to sugar planters. The profits from the sale of the slaves were then used to buy more sugar, which was shipped to Europe, etc. The first leg of the triangle was from a European port to Africa, in which ships carried supplies for sale and trade, such as copper, cloth, trinkets, slave beads, guns and ammunition. [3] When the ship arrived, its cargo would be sold or bartered for slaves. On the second leg, ships made the journey of the Middle Passage from Africa to the New World. Many slaves died of disease in the crowded holds of the slave ships. Once the ship reached the New World, enslaved survivors were sold in the Caribbean or the American colonies. The ships were then prepared to get them thoroughly cleaned, drained, and loaded with export goods for a return voyage, the third leg, to their home port. [4] From the West Indies the main export cargoes were sugar, rum, and molasses; from Virginia, tobacco and hemp. The ship then returned to Europe to complete the triangle. However, because of several disadvantages that slave ships faced compared to other trade ships, they often returned to their home port carrying whatever goods were readily available in the Americas and filled up a large part or all of their capacity with ballast. Other disadvantages include the different form of the ships (to carry as many humans as possible, but not ideal to carry a maximum amount of produce) and the variations in the duration of a slave voyage, making it practically impossible to pre-schedule appointments in the Americas, which meant that slave ships often arrived in the Americas out-of-season. Instead, the cash crops were transported mainly by a separate fleet which only sailed from Europe to the Americas and back. The Triangular trade is a trade model, not an exact description of the ship's route.
New England also benefited from the trade, as many merchants were from New England, especially Rhode Island, replacing the role of Europe in the triangle. New England also made rum from the Caribbean sugar and molasses, which it shipped to Africa as well as within the New World. [6] Yet, the "triangle trade" as considered in relation to New England was a piecemeal operation. No New England traders are known to have completed a sequential circuit of the full triangle, which took a calendar year on average,according to historian Clifford Shipton. [7] The concept of the New England Triangular trade was first suggested, inconclusively, in an 1866 book by George H. Moore, was picked up in 1872 by historian George C. Mason, and reached full consideration from a lecture in 1887 by American businessman and historian William B. Weeden. [8]
The song "Molasses to Rum" from the musical 1776 vividly describes this form of the triangular trade. Other triangular trades
The term "triangular trade" also refers to a variety of other trades.
The civil rights movement of the 1960's have left many people with the belief that the slave trade was exclusively a European/USA phenomenon and only evil white people were to blame for it. This is a simplicistic scenario that hardly reflects the facts.
Thousands of records of transactions are available on a CDROM prepared by Harvard University and several comprehensive books have been published recently on the origins of modern slavery (namely, Hugh Thomas' The Slave Trade and Robin Blackburn's The Making Of New World Slavery) that shed new light on centuries of slave trading.
What these records show is that the modern slave trade flourished in the early middle ages, as early as 869, especially between Muslim traders and western African kingdoms. For moralists, the most important aspect of that trade should be that Muslims were selling goods to the African kingdoms and the African kingdoms were paying with their own people. In most instances, no violence was necessary to obtain those slaves. Contrary to legends and novels and Hollywood movies, the white traders did not need to savagely kill entire tribes in order to exact their tribute in slaves. All they needed to do is bring goods that appealed to the kings of those tribes. The kings would gladly sell their own subjects.
This explains why slavery became "black". Ancient slavery, e.g. under the Roman empire, would not discriminate: slaves were both white and black (so were Emperors and Popes). In the middle ages, all European countries outlawed slavery (of course, Western powers retained countless "civilized" ways to enslave their citizens, but that's another story), whereas the African kingdoms happily continued in their trade. Therefore, only colored people could be slaves, and that is how the stereotype for African-American slavery was born. It was not based on an ancestral hatred of blacks by whites, but simply on the fact that blacks were the only ones selling slaves, and they were selling people of their own race. (To be precise, Christians were also selling Muslim slaves captured in war, and Muslims were selling Christian slaves captured in war, but neither the Christians of Europe nor the Muslims of Africa and the Middle East were selling their own people).
Then the Muslim trade of African slaves came to a stop when Arab domination was reduced by the Crusades. (Note: Arabs continued to capture and sell slaves, but only in the Mediterranean. In fact, Robert Davis estimates that 1.25 million European Christians were enslaved by the "barbary states" of northern Africa. The USA bombed Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli in 1801 precisely to stop that Arab slave trade of Christians. The rate of mortality of those Christian slaves in the Islamic world was roughly the same as the mortality rate in the Atlantic slave trade of the same period.)
Christians took over in black Africa, though. The first ones were the Portuguese, who, applying an idea that originally developed in Italian seatrading cities, and often using Italian venture capital, started exploiting sub-Saharan slaves in the 1440s to support the economy of the sugar plantations (mainly for their own African colonies of Sao Tome and Madeira).
The Dutch were the first, apparently, to import black slaves into North America, but black slaves had already been employed all over the world, including South and Central America. We tend to focus on what happened in North America because the United States would eventually fight a war over slavery (and it's in the U.S. that large sectors of the population would start condemning slavery, contrary to the indifference that Muslims and most Europeans showed for it).
Even after Europeans began transporting black slaves to America, most trade was just that: "trade". In most instances, the Europeans did not need to use any force to get those slaves. The slaves were "sold" more or less legally by their (black) owners. Scholars estimate that about 12,000,000 Africans were sold by Africans to Europeans (most of them before 1776, when the USA wasn't yet born) and 17,000,000 were sold to Arabs. The legends of European mercenaries capturing free people in the jungle are mostly just that: legends. A few mercenaries certainly stormed peaceful tribes and committed terrible crimes, but that was not the rule. There was no need to risk their lives, so most of them didn't: they simply purchased people.
As an African-American scholar (Nathan Huggins) has written, the "identity" of black Africans is largely a white invention: sub-Saharan Africans never felt like they were one people, they felt (and still feel) that they belonged to different tribes. The distinctions of tribe were far stronger than the distinctions of race.
Everything else is true: millions of slaves died on ships and of diseases, millions of blacks worked for free to allow the Western economies to prosper, and the economic interests in slavery became so strong that the southern states of the United States opposed repealing it. But those millions of slaves were just one of the many instances of mass exploitation: the industrial revolution was exported to the USA by enterpreuners exploiting millions of poor immigrants from Europe. The fate of those immigrants was not much better than the fate of the slaves in the South. As a matter of fact, many slaves enjoyed far better living conditions in the southern plantations than European immigrants in the industrial cities (which were sometimes comparable to concentration camps). It is not a coincidence that slavery was abolished at a time when millions of European and Chinese immigrants provided the same kind of cheap labor.
It is also fair to say that, while everybody tolerated it, very few whites practiced slavery: in 1860 there were 385,000 USA citizens who owned slaves, or about 1.4% of the white population (there were 27 million whites in the USA). That percentage was zero in the states that did not allow slavery (only 8 million of the 27 million whites lived in states that allowed slavery). Incidentally, in 1830 about 25% of the free Negro slave masters in South Carolina owned 10 or more slaves: that is a much higher percentage (ten times more) than the number of white slave owners. Thus slave owners were a tiny minority (1.4%) and it was not only whites: it was just about anybody who could, including blacks themselves.
Moral opposition to slavery was widespread even before Lincoln, and throughout Europe. On the other hand, opposition to slavery was never particularly strong in Africa itself, where slavery is slowly being eradicated only in our time. One can suspect that slavery would have remained common in most African kingdoms until this day: what crushed slavery in Africa was that all those African kingdoms became colonies of western European countries that (for one reason or another) eventually decided to outlaw slavery. When, in the 1960s, those African colonies regained their independence, numerous cases of slavery resurfaced. And countless African dictators behaved in a way that makes a slave owner look like a saint. Given the evidence that this kind of slavery was practiced by some Africans before it was practiced by some Americans, that it was abolished by all whites and not by some Africans, and that some Africans resumed it the moment they could, why would one keep blaming the USA but never blame, say, Ghana or the Congo?
The more we study it, the less blame we have to put on the USA for the slave trade with black Africa: it was pioneered by the Arabs, its economic mechanism was invented by the Italians and the Portuguese, it was mostly run by western Europeans, and it was conducted with the full cooperation of many African kings. The USA fostered free criticism of the phenomenon: no such criticism was allowed in the Muslim and Christian nations that started trading goods for slaves, and no such criticism was allowed in the African nations that started selling their own people (and, even today, no such criticism is allowed within the Arab world).
Today it is politically correct to blame some European empires and the USA for slavery (forgetting that it was practiced by everybody since prehistoric times). But I rarely read the other side of the story: that the nations who were the first to develop a repulsion for slavery and eventually abolish slavery were precisely those countries (especially Britain and the USA). As Dinesh D'Souza wrote, "What is uniquely Western is not slavery but the movement to abolish slavery".
(To be completely fair, what was also unique about the western slave trade is the scale (the millions shipped to another continent in a relatively short period of time), and, of course, that it eventually became a racist affair, discriminating blacks, whereas previous slave trades had not discriminated based on the color of the skin. What is unique about the USA, in particular, is the treatment that blacks received AFTER emancipation, which is, after all, the real source of the whole controversy, because, otherwise, just about everybody on this planet could claim to be the descendant of an ancient slave). (That does not mean that western slave traders were justified in what they did, but placing all the blame on them is a way to absolve all the others). To this day, too many Africans, Arabs and Europeans believe that the African slave trade was an USA aberration, not their own invention.
By the time the slave trade was abolished in the West, there were many more slaves in Africa (black slaves of black owners) than in the Americas. Negro slave owners 1848: France abolishes slavery 1851: The population of the USA is 20,067,720 free persons and 2,077,034 slaves 1865: the Union defeats the Confederates and slavery is abolished in the USA Number of Africans deported by Arabs to the Middle East: about 17 million
Number of Africans deported to the Americas by the Europeans: about 10-15 million (about 30-40 million died before reaching the Americas).
European slave trade by destination
Brazil: 4,000,000 35.4%
Spanish Empire: 2,500,000 22.1%
British West Indies: 2,000,000 17.7%
French West Indies: 1,600,00 14.1%
British North America: 500,000 4.4%
Dutch West Indies: 500,000 4.4%
Danish West Indies: 28,000 0.2%
Europe: 200,000 1.8%
Total 1500-1900: 11,328,000 100.0%
Source: "The Slave Trade", Hugh Thomas, 1997
By century
1500-1600: 328,000 (2.9%)
1601-1700: 1,348,000 (12.0%)
1701-1800: 6,090,000 (54.2%)
1801-1900: 3,466,000 (30.9%), including French and Portuguese contract labourers
Source: "Transformations in Slavery", Paul Lovejoy, 2000
By slave-trading country
Portugal/Brazil: 4,650,000
Spain: 1,600,000
France: 1,250,000
Holland: 500,000
Britain: 2,600,000
U.S.A.: 300,000
Denmark: 50,000
Others: 50,000
Total: 11,000,000
Source: "Slave Trade", Hugh Thomas, 1977 |
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