United Nations, New York, 8 February, 2011-The European Union (EU) today reaffirmed its long-standing commitment to effective multilateralism with a strong United Nations at the core. "Regional organisations are building blocks for global governance, with a dual responsibility --first, a responsibility to enhance security, development and human rights in their own region, and second, to support UN efforts to promote these goals around the world," the 27-member Union's High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Catherine Ashton, told the Security Council. Full story: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=37488&Cr=european+union&Cr1=
 "Redemption song" Bob Marley
Your horoscope for Wednesday February 09, 2011
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General Daily Horoscope Influences
The Moon's shift into sensual Taurus at 6:22 am EST reflects our need for simple pleasures. We know what we want today and are determined to reach our goals, although sweet Venus' hookup with passionate Pluto complicates relationship dynamics. Our desires grow more intense, even if we try to avoid an emotional connection, as the earthy Taurus Moon harmoniously trines Venus and Pluto. However, complexity is the price we now must pay for intimacy. Listen to more about today on Rick Levine's Daily Planet Pulse Video.
 | Leo Horoscope for you
You have a low tolerance today for anyone who isn't willing to stand up for what he ...
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| SEOUL, South Korea (AP) Yonhap news agency reports Somali pirates free South Korean ship and its 43 crew members.
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| Good afternoon,
I want you to know about a new opportunity to connect with the White House called "Advise the Advisor." It’s a pretty simple idea: one of the President's advisors posts a short update about what’s going on here at the White House and poses a question for anyone to answer.
So earlier this week, I took the first shot. My question was about how innovation impacts the economy in communities across the country and what barriers to innovation should be on our radar.
Take a look and share your thoughts:
We've already received some great feedback. Take this response from Chuck in California:
Our community is rural. We need better access to high-speed Internet...I know that there are many pressing needs in our country, but I hope that, in the long term, some provision will be made to include rural and remote communities in the digital surge that is sweeping the world.
Communities like Chuck’s are why President Obama is travelling to Marquette, Michigan tomorrow. Marquette is a small town that's using high-speed wireless Internet to help businesses grow and students gain access to a wider array of education opportunities through distance learning.
In Marquette, the President will talk about his plan to win the future by out-innovating, out-educating and out-building the rest of the world. Part of that plan is a new National Wireless Initiative that will help extend the next generation of wireless coverage to 98 percent of Americans and help businesses ship their goods, products and ideas anywhere in the world. This initiative will help address a broader problem: today only 65 percent of American households have broadband access compared to 90 percent in South Korea.
Our team here is going to review all of the answers we get in by the end of the day Friday and pull together a report we’ll publish to WhiteHouse.gov. So if you have thoughts about innovation in America, take a moment to share them:
Thank you,
David Plouffe
Senior Advisor to the President
P.S. If you want to be the first to see the next "Advise the Advisor" video, make sure you’re getting our Daily Snapshot email:
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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 | |
By Walter White Jr., 1968
 The story of the slaves in America begins with Christopher Columbus. His voyage to America was not financed by Queen Isabella, but by Luis de Santangelo, who advanced the sum of 17,000 ducats (about 5,000 pounds-today equal to 50,000 pounds) to finance the voyage, which began on August 3, 1492. Columbus was accompanied by five 'maranos' (Jews who had foresworn their religion and supposedly became Catholics), Luis de Torres, interpreter, Marco, the surgeon, Bemal, the physician, Alonzo de la Calle and Gabriel Sanchez (1).Gabriel Sanchez, abetted by the other four Jews, sold Columbus on the idea of capturing 500 Indians and selling them as slaves in Seville, Spain, which was done. Columbus did not receive any of the money from the sale of the slaves, but he became the victim of a conspiracy fostered by Bemal, the ship's doctor. He, Columbus, suffered injustice and imprisonment as his reward. Betrayed by the five maranos (Jews) whom he had trusted and helped. This, ironically, was the beginning of slavery in the Americas (2).The Jews were expelled from Spain on August 2, 1492, and from Portugal in 1497. Many of these Jews emigrated to Holland, where they set up the Dutch West Indies Company to exploit the new world.
In 1654, the first Jew, Jacob Barsimson, emigrated from Holland to New Amsterdam (New York) and in the next decade many more followed him, settling along the East Coast, principally in New Amsterdam and Newport, Rhode Island. They were prevented by ordinances issued by Governor Peter Stuyvesant from engaging in the domestic economy, so they quickly discovered that the territory inhabited by the Indians would be a fertile field. There were no laws preventing the Jews from trading with the Indians.
The first Jew to begin trading with the Indians was Hayman Levy, who imported cheap glass beads, textiles, earrings, armbands and other cheap adornments from Holland which were traded for valuable fur pelts. Hayman Levy was soon joined by Jews Nicholas Lowe and Joseph Simon. Lowe conceived the idea of trading rum and whiskey to the Indians and set up a distillery in Newport, where these two liquors were produced. Within a short time there were 22 distilleries in Newport, all of them owned by Jews, manufacturing and distributing 'firewater.' The story of the debauching of the Indians with its resultant massacres of the early settlers, is a dramatic story in itself
1619: the Dutch begin the slave trade between Africa and America 1621: Holland forms the Dutch West India Company to invade the Spanish and Portuguese colonies and takes control of Guyana (colonies of Demerara, Essequebo, and Berbice)
1621: The state of Maranhao is separated from Brazil with a governor in Sao Luis
1623: The Dutch seize Bahia from Portuguese Brazil with help from the Portuguese Jews and expand in the Northeast
1624: The Catholic Church foments anti-government riots in Ciudad de Mexico
1629: Brazilian paulistas/mamelucos (slave gatherers) attack the Jesuit missions
1629: The Dutch conquers Pernambuco from Portugal
1631: To escape the Brazilian paulistas/mamelucos, the Jesuit missions of Paraguay/Argetina move inland and found Candelaria
1635: France conquers Martinique, Guadeloupe and Dominique 1637: Holland captures Portugal's main trading post in Africa, Elmira . Marriage of John Bass and Elizabeth Tucker
On 14 August 1638, John Bass, a settler in Norfolk County, Virginia, married a local woman, Keziah Elizabeth Tucker. She was the daughter of a baptized Christian Nansemond leader known as Robin. Bass was born 7 September 1616. Both Robin and his daughter Elizabeth were converts to Christianity. [6] They received English names at their baptisms. Some Nansemond claim descent from this marriage. [4] Based on her research, Dr. Helen C. Rountree says that all current Nansemond descend from this marriage, making the tribe a family affair. [5] Paul Heinegg traced the family, noting that some descendants married into white families, while others married into African-American ones, becoming part of each culture. In the 18th century, both William Bass (son of John) and his son William Bass obtained certificates certifying they were only of English and Nansemond descent. [6]
A Nansemond family from Norfolk County, VA at the beginning of the 20th century.
The photo at left shows members of the Weaver and Bass families, ca. 1900:
"William H. Weaver is sitting; Augustus Bass is standing behind him. The Weaver family were indentured East Indians (from modern-day India and Pakistan) who were free in Lancaster County by about 1710. By 1732 they were "taxables" [note: free blacks and Indians had to pay a tax in Virginia and North Carolina] in Norfolk County and taxable " Mulatto" landowners in nearby Hertford County, North Carolina by 1741. By 1820 there were 164 "free colored" members of the [Weaver] family in Hertford County. In the 1830s some registered as Nansemond Indians in Norfolk County." (photo, Smithsonian Institution, "Nansemond Indians, ca. 1900.")
In the late 20th century, Paul Heinegg's extensive research in colonial records revealed the origins of many free people of color in Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay Colony. Some free African Americans (as people of color were chiefly defined under the binary system of segregation) were descended from slaves who were freed as early as the 17th century. But, most descended from unions of white women, indentured or free, and African or African American men, indentured, free or slave. There were also some indentured men from present-day India and Pakistan who intermarried with European and African women. Some of the early Native Americans who adopted English customs also married into these families or to English settlers, as noted for Keziah Elizabeth Tucker in the 17th century, above. [6]In many cases such free families migrated to frontier areas of Virginia and North Carolina, to purchase land and be relatively free of the racial strictures of the coastal plantation areas. In some areas, descendants formed communities known as tri-racial isolates. [6] Some groups who have identified culturally as Native Americans, like the Nansemond in the Tidewater area, have succeeded in gaining recognition as Native American tribes by Virginia or North Carolina. The Nansemond were affected by English colonial pressures in the 17th century and split apart. Those who were Christianized and had adopted more English customs stayed along the Nansemond River as farmers. "The other Nansemonds warred with the English in 1644, fled southwest to the Nottoway River, and had a reservation assigned them there by the Virginia colony. By 1744 they had ceased using the reservation and gone to live with the Nottoway Indians [note: this was an Iroquoian-language tribe] on another reservation nearby... In 1806 the last surviving Nansemond on the Nottoway Reservation died." The Nansemond sold their reservation in 1792 and were known as "citizen" Indians. [5]Nansemond today
Today, the Nansemond have about 200 tribal members. [7] As a "citizen tribe", they gained recognition by Virginia in 1984. [8] The disruption of wars and loss of records in Virginia would make it difficult for them to provide the extensive documentation needed for Federal recognition. The current Chief is Barry "Big Buck" Bass. [7]They hold monthly tribal meetings at the Indiana United Methodist Church (which was founded in 1850 as a mission for the Nansemond). The tribe co-hosts an annual powwow in June in Chesapeake, and has an annual powwow every year in August. The tribe has also operated a museum and gift shops. [3]Mattanock
The Nansemond are the only state-recognized tribe in Virginia that have not purchased land for their tribe. But, they are trying to get the city of Suffolk to give up 100 acres (0.40 km 2) of an 1,100-acre (4.5 km 2) riverfront park. They want to use this land to reconstruct Mattanock, a town of their ancestors. They plan to attract tourists by demonstrating their heritage. [7] The tribe has enlisted the help of Helen C. Rountree, whose research helped identify Mattanock Town's location. The village would utilize archaeological and other research to assure the proper dimensions of longhouses to be built on the site. [9]They have been trying to obtain the area for more than 10 years as a place to put a cultural center, the Mattanock village, tribal offices, pow wow grounds and a meeting place. The Suffolk task force on the project, made up mostly of non-Indians, has supported giving the site to the Nansemond. Suffolk's mayor, E. Dana Dickens III, has come out in support of the project as well, saying of the proposed museum and village, "It certainly can be a big part of Suffolk's tourism." The tribe has had to supply detailed plans for the project, including drawings. They have also had to submit documentation to the Mattanock Town task force that explains the type of non-profit foundation that will be created once the deed to the land is given to the tribe. All the Nansemond need now is the approval of the Suffolk City Council. [9] As of 2009, the tribe is still trying to acquire the land. [7]Federal recognitionThe Nansemond and other Virginia tribes have not been accorded Federal recognition by the US government, but a bill to recognize six tribes has been introduced into both houses of Congress. It would cover the following: Chickahominy Indian Tribe; Eastern Chickahominy Indian Tribe; Upper Mattaponi Tribe; Rappahannock Tribe, Inc.; Monacan Indian Nation; and Nansemond Indian Tribe. [10] In 2009 supporters again proposed the "Thomasina E. Jordan Indian Tribes of Virginia Federal Recognition Act". By June 2009 the bill passed the House Committee on Natural Resources and the US House of Representatives. A companion bill was sent to the Senate the date after the bill was voted on in the House. That bill was sent to the Senate's Committee on Indian Affairs. On October 22, 2009 the bill was approved by the Senate committee and on December 23 was placed on the Senate's Legislative calendar. This is the furthest the bill has gotten in the Congressional process. [11][12] The bill currently has a hold on it placed for "jurisdictional concerns" as Senator Tom Coburn (R-Ok) believes requests for tribal recognition should be processed through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a process the Virginia tribes cannot utilize because of Walter Plecker. [13]References |
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