(BBC.com) While many European countries are bending over backwards to grovel and apologize for participating in the African slave trade, no apologies are forthcoming from any of the African nations whose chiefs engaged in the slave trade long before White Europeans ever showed up — and continued to profit off of it well into the 20th century — long after the white nations officially abolished it.
Nigerian journalist and novelist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani wrote an article for the BBC about one of her ancestors who was a prominent slave trader — he was so greatly admired that he was considered a local hero for his prowess as a slaver. Africans did not have any moral objections against the slave trade that white Christian Europeans did — to them, it was “just business” and an acceptable way of life.
In fact, successful and wealthy African slave traders were revered — and practically deified — among their own people, which may explain why most Blacks today have a moral problem only with White slave traders, not with their own.
Here we present Nwaubani’s family history in the slave trade without further comment:
My great-grandfather, Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku, was what I prefer to call a businessman, from the Igbo ethnic group of south-eastern Nigeria. He dealt in a number of goods, including tobacco and palm produce. He also sold human beings.
“He had agents who captured slaves from different places and brought them to him,” my father told me.
Nwaubani Ogogo’s slaves were sold through the ports of Calabar and Bonny in the south of what is today known as Nigeria.
People from ethnic groups along the coast, such as the Efik and Ijaw, usually acted as stevedores for the white merchants and as middlemen for Igbo traders like my great-grandfather.
They loaded and offloaded ships and supplied the foreigners with food and other provisions. They negotiated prices for slaves from the hinterlands, then collected royalties from both the sellers and buyers.
About 1.5 million Igbo slaves were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean between the 15th and 19th Centuries.
More than 1.5 million Africans were shipped to what was then called the New World – the Americas – through the Calabar port, in the Bight of Bonny, making it one of the largest points of exit during the transatlantic trade.
Nwaubani Ogogo lived in a time when the fittest survived and the bravest excelled. The concept of “all men are created equal” was completely alien to traditional religion and law in his society.
It would be unfair to judge a 19th Century man by 21st Century principles.
Assessing the people of Africa’s past by today’s standards would compel us to cast the majority of our heroes as villains, denying us the right to fully celebrate anyone who was not influenced by Western ideology.
Igbo slave traders like my great-grandfather did not suffer any crisis of social acceptance or legality. They did not need any religious or scientific justifications for their actions. They were simply living the life into which they were raised.
That was all they knew.
The most popular story I’ve heard about my great-grandfather was how he successfully confronted officials of the British colonial government after they seized some of his slaves.
The slaves were being transported by middlemen, along with a consignment of tobacco and palm produce, from Nwaubani Ogogo’s hometown of Umuahia to the coast.
My great-grandfather apparently did not consider it fair that his slaves had been seized.
Buying and selling of human beings among the Igbo had been going on long before the Europeans arrived. People became slaves as punishment for crime, payment for debts, or prisoners of war.
The successful sale of adults was considered an exploit for which a man was hailed by praise singers, akin to exploits in wrestling, war, or in hunting animals like the lion.
Igbo slaves served as domestic servants and labourers. They were sometimes also sacrificed in religious ceremonies and buried alive with their masters to attend to them in the next world.
….The arrival of European merchants offering guns, mirrors, gin, and other exotic goods in exchange for humans massively increased demand, leading people to kidnap others and sell them.
….When the British extended their rule to south-eastern Nigeria in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, they began to enforce abolition through military action.
But by using force rather than persuasion, many local people such as my great-grandfather may not have understood that abolition was about the dignity of humankind and not a mere change in economic policy that affected demand and supply.
“We think this trade must go on,” one local king in Bonny infamously said in the 19th Century.
“That is the verdict of our oracle and our priests. They say that your country, however great, can never stop a trade ordained by God.”
As far as my great-grandfather was concerned, he had a bona fide trading licence from the Royal Niger Company, a British company that administered commerce in the region in the last quarter of the 19th Century.
So when his property was seized, an aggrieved Nwaubani Ogogo boldly went to see the colonial officers responsible and presented them with his licence. They released his goods, and his slaves.
“The white people apologised to him,” my father said.
Acclaimed Igbo historian Adiele Afigbo described the slave trade in south-eastern Nigeria which lasted until the late 1940s and early 1950s as one of the best kept secrets of the British colonial administration.
While the international trade ended, the local trade continued.
“The government was aware of the fact that the coastal chiefs and the major coastal traders had continued to buy slaves from the interior,” wrote Afigbo in The Abolition of the Slave Trade in Southern Nigeria: 1885 to 1950.
He added that the British tolerated the ongoing trade on political and economic grounds.
They needed the slave-trading chiefs for effective local governance, and for the expansion and growth of legitimate trade.
Sometimes, they also turned a blind eye rather than jeopardise a useful alliance, as seems to have been the case when they returned Nwaubani Ogogo’s slaves.
That incident deified Nwaubani Ogogo among his people. Here was a man who successfully confronted the white powers from overseas. I have heard the story from relatives, and have read about it.
It was also the beginning of a relationship of mutual respect with the colonialists that led to Nwaubani Ogogo being appointed a paramount chief by the British administration.
He was the government’s representative to the people in his region, in a system known as indirect rule.
Records from the UK’s National Archives at Kew Gardens show how desperately the British struggled to end the internal trade in slaves for almost the entire duration of the colonial period.
They promoted legitimate trade, especially in palm produce. They introduced English currency to replace the cumbersome brass rods and cowries that merchants needed slaves to carry. They prosecuted offenders with prison sentences.
“By the 1930s, the colonial establishment had been worn down,” wrote Afigbo.
“As a result, they had come to place their hope for the extirpation of the trade on the corrosive effect over time of education and general civilisation.”
As a paramount chief, Nwaubani Ogogo collected taxes on behalf of the British and earned a commission for himself in the process.
He presided over cases in native courts. He supplied labourers for the construction of rail lines. He also willingly donated land for missionaries to build churches and schools.
…My great-grandfather was renowned for his business prowess, outstanding boldness, strong leadership, vast influence, immense contributions to society, and advancement of Christianity.
The Igbo do not have a culture of erecting monuments to their heroes – otherwise one dedicated to him might have stood somewhere in the Umuahia region today.
“He was respected by everyone around,” my father said. “Even the white people respected him.”
“The negro has been, and still is, thoroughly misunderstood. However severely we may condemn the horrible system of slavery, the results of emancipation have proved that the negro does not appreciate the blessings of freedom, nor does he show the slightest feeling of gratitude to the hand that broke the rivets of his fetters. His narrow mind cannot embrace that feeling of pure philanthropy that first prompted England to declare herself against slavery, and he only regards the anti-slavery movement as a proof of his own importance. In his limited horizon he is himself the important object, and as a sequence to his self-conceit, he imagines that the whole world is at issue concerning the Black man.
The negro, therefore, being the important question, must be an important person, and he conducts himself accordingly, he is far too great a man to work. Upon this point his natural character exhibits itself most determinedly. Accordingly, he resists any attempt at coercion; being free, his first impulse is to claim an equality with those whom he lately served, and to usurp a dignity with absurd pretensions, that must inevitably insure the disgust and abhorrence of the white community.”
—Samuel Baker, “The Albert N’Yanza Great Basin of the Nile” (1866), p. 197
The African slave trade is one of the darkest chapters of world history. It is too bad we have never (seemingly) received an objective historical analysis of the people behind it.
The Jewish Torah allows for genocide and infanticide as well as slavery. They have never rescinded this abhorrent practice. Perhaps the Talmud is there common Law: see:
Abodah Zara 26b: “Even the best of the Gentiles should be killed.
Schulchan Aruch, Choszen Hamiszpat 348, “All property of other nations belongs to the Jews, which are entitled to seize upon it without any scruples.”
So we need to be aware they are antiGentilic and haters of all other peoples. Slavery is the product of such minds of circumcised, segregated, Rabbinic thinking. Ah! lets just called it Satan OS is programmed into there heads.
The “Jewish Torah” is the Talmud. The first five books of the Bible — or the Pentatuch — which the Jews claim to be their “Torah” is not the basis of Judaism, which is a refutation of the Torah — and the entire New and Old Testaments. The Jews did not write The Torah — the Old Testament — rather, the Jews wrote the Talmud. Anyone who has read both of these books should immediately determine that they were not written by the same people.
https://christiansfortruth.com/who-are-jews/
No, Birnie, Jews did not conceive of or invent slavery which was an almost universal practice in the Ancient world, including the pagan/Aryan nations. The great ancient empires all practiced slavery, and the vast majority of slaves were White. Yes, the Old and New Testament condone slavery — but your modern revulsion for slavery has been seared into your mind by the Jewish Marxist progressives as the greatest “sin” ever committed, yet it is not prohibited in the Ten Commandments. And, yes, in the Talmud the Jews reveal their desire to own all of the wealth of the world and enslave the non-Jews, but that has nothing to do with the Bible — it’s a distortion and inversion of the word of God.
Things are building to a crescendo, …….”THE QUEEN has been ordered to pay out billions of pounds by Jamaica after the nation pointed to Britain’s role in administering the former slave colony.”
https://www.express.co.uk/news/royal/1458696/queen-news-Elizabeth-II-Jamaica-slavery-debt-compensation-royal-family-latest
These free-loading Marxist Bolshevik communist dictatoris are pushing the button…..
White people Catholics and Protestants need to put their religious differences asides and break the chains of “White Guilt” and let Jews and Africans pay reparations for slavery that those free-loading Black Marxist aka slaves demand. Catholics and Protestants should call for a Nuremberg trial for the Marxist Bolshevik communist crimes against humanity, for slaughter over one hundred million White Christians in Europe. This would settle the score for once and for all and send the victimhood culture to the dustbin of history.
When I told a god chosen that they should use their nukes and kill the non-god-chosen and have the planet all to themselves, the fool freaked out, because he knows that nuking Europe and America as they constantly threaten, they would be wiped out too….LOL. So, you see Jews can only blackmail those who are comfortable and willing to compromise principles over power, even selling their own for chump change. African’s sold African’s to the Jews and White people (Christians) sell White people to the Jews…..see the Federal Reserve and the Marxist socialist welfare states in all supposedly civilized Western countries….slavery under a new formula.
When I say that African’s sold Africans as slaves, I get blasted, but you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure things out, that without the corrupt African barbarians there would be no trans-Atlantic slave-trade, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/my-great-grandfather-the-nigerian-slave-trader
A recent headline from a Dutch newspaper reads….….“Amsterdam is the first city to apologize for its slavery past: ‘Recognition at last’”
The current mayor keeps up appearance while Surinamese in the Netherlands still serve the slave masters. I had my second laugh about this fraud …..https://www.academia.edu/49493149/Amsterdam_and_the_Afro_Puppet_Show
One thing that is hardly mentioned is the fact that Jews conducted the slave-trade from the comfort of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, after they were expelled from Spain. The Jewish supremacist propaganda machine keeps beating the Christians are guilty drum, but nobody dares to challenge the fraud.
Here we have another rabbi in America that made my stomach turn:
Why Jews should support reparations for slavery:
“Paying reparations to African Americans would not heal generations of trauma, nor would it erase systemic racial injustices. But it would offer some financial redress, and, most significantly, it would start a reckoning that our country desperately needs.” https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-brous-reparations-slavery-jews-holocaust-20180307-story.html
“The Jews of the United States have never taken any steps whatever with regard to the Slavery question. As citizens, they deem it their policy “to have everyone choose whichever side he may deem best to promote his own interests and the welfare of his country.” https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/jews-in-the-civil-war/
Jews put in motion the trans-Atlantic slave trade selling African’s as cattle to Christians in America, from the comfort of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. They were suspicious of the Christian oriented abolitionist movement, because abolishing slavery would take them off the throne as slave merchants and masters.
From the comfort of America Jews set up a new global Marxist Bolshevik communist imperialist slave system of power, oppression, exploitation, and genocide. They control the printing presses of the debt-based blood-for-oil fiat currency, so it is fair to demand that Jews pay reparations to Blacks for the slavery of the past and the current Marxist enslavement that keeps them on the margins in western countries cry victim of racism and blaming White people for their misery. Jews call me crazy when I talk about the Jews and their human-trafficking selling Africans as cattle, but in America you can see the master-slave alliance against White people (Christians) as clear as night and day.
So the Africans were selling slaves to other Africans? What did these slaves do for their African owners? An antebellum adage comes to mind: it takes two slaves to help a third do nothing. If slaves under American White owners were so infamously unproductive, how heinously inefficient must blacks slaves working for black owners have been?
As I have learned from our friends over at American Renaissance, after the Constitution embargoed slave importation in 1808, the jig was up for the Jewish shippers as we doubled down on breeding our own bucks and they were better than the dregs of Africa that we were being shipped. So much better that, in the breeding states, the true “cash crop” between 1808 and 1863 was slaves.
When is the next Great Revival due for, so that we can get more right with God and by consequence stop having the beasts of the field multiplied against us (Exodus 23:29/Leviticus 26:22)?
Here’s to hastening the day when cruse ships are requisitioned, the beasts are loaded upon them, and they’re sent on a one-way all-expenses-paid voyage to Haifa. Or Tema, if we’re feeling charitable.