John Amoda: Henry Louis Gates and the Slavery Blame Game, Part 2
[John Amoda is professor emeritus of political science at the City College of New York.]
OUR new understanding of the scope of African involvement in the slave trade is not historical guesswork. Thanks to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, directed by the historian David Eltis of Emory University, we know the ports from which more than 450,000 of our African ancestors were shipped out to what is now the United States (the database has records of 12.5 million people shipped to all parts of the New World from 1514 to 1866). About 16 percent of United States slaves came from Eastern Nigeria, while 24 percent came from the Congo and Angola.
Through the work of Professor Thornton and Heywood, we also know that the victims of the slave trade were predominantly members of as few as 50 ethnic groups. This data along with the tracing of Blacks’ ancestry through DNA tests is giving us a faster understanding of the identities of both the victims and the facilitators of the African slave trade.
Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore the untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romantized version that our ancestors were kidnapped unawares by evil White men like Kunta Kinte was in Roots.
The truth, however, is much more complex: Slavery was business, highly organised and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike”....
Read entire article at Vanguard (Nigeria)
OUR new understanding of the scope of African involvement in the slave trade is not historical guesswork. Thanks to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, directed by the historian David Eltis of Emory University, we know the ports from which more than 450,000 of our African ancestors were shipped out to what is now the United States (the database has records of 12.5 million people shipped to all parts of the New World from 1514 to 1866). About 16 percent of United States slaves came from Eastern Nigeria, while 24 percent came from the Congo and Angola.
Through the work of Professor Thornton and Heywood, we also know that the victims of the slave trade were predominantly members of as few as 50 ethnic groups. This data along with the tracing of Blacks’ ancestry through DNA tests is giving us a faster understanding of the identities of both the victims and the facilitators of the African slave trade.
Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore the untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romantized version that our ancestors were kidnapped unawares by evil White men like Kunta Kinte was in Roots.
The truth, however, is much more complex: Slavery was business, highly organised and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike”....