Interesting....

...that the same man who threw a tantrum against the police would now pen a scathing attack on Africans who participated freely in the slave trade:

For centuries, Europeans in Africa kept close to their military and trading posts on the coast. Exploration of the interior, home to the bulk of Africans sold into bondage at the height of the slave trade, came only during the colonial conquests, which is why Henry Morton Stanley’s pursuit of Dr. David Livingstone in 1871 made for such compelling press: he was going where no (white) man had gone before.

How did slaves make it to these coastal forts? The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.

Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in “Roots.” The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.

The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves. “The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia,” he warned. “We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it.”

To be sure, the African role in the slave trade was greatly reduced after 1807, when abolitionists, first in Britain and then, a year later, in the United States, succeeded in banning the importation of slaves. Meanwhile, slaves continued to be bought and sold within the United States, and slavery as an institution would not be abolished until 1865. But the culpability of American plantation owners neither erases nor supplants that of the African slavers. In recent years, some African leaders have become more comfortable discussing this complicated past than African-Americans tend to be.

This information is hardly new but certainly impedes the liberal idea that not only was the slave trade the fault of a single race but that greed and evil know no racial, cultural or national bounds.

I remember a long-ago discussion in university about slavery (in a literature class of all places!). It was determined by upper-middle class white females that white-on-black slavery was wrong but black-on-black slavery was acceptable. No one can express moral equivalence and cowardice like upper middle-class white people. In their privileged sphere of isolation, there is no hunger, no compulsion to do something against their will, no fear. When I heard this rationale for slavery, my jaw dropped. For what it was worth, I made some middling comment about the absolute evil of slavery but- in retrospect- what good did it do? No one seems to remember the indentured servitude of the Irish or care about slave labour of the Chinese, North Koreans, Vietnamese or Cubans today.

Everything is easy for the person who knows only comfort.