August 06; 2019 (GMN) - Part of a 15-members Congressional Black Caucus junket, they have been in Ghana to “mark ‘The Year of Return’ and the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Jamestown Virginia,” according to Pelosi.
The Door of No Return, a part of the Cape Coast Castle, stands as a reminder of the evils of slavery it marks the exit from dungeons under the castle where African slaves were held in merciless conditions until marched through that door to be packed on ships and transported to Europe and the Americas. Estimates are that 11 million African slaves ended up in the Americas; of those only roughly 400,000 came to the British colonies and the subsequent United States. The vast bulk (10 million-plus) were sold to buyers in the Caribbean and Central and South America.
European slave traders have rightly been pilloried for their central role in the transport and sale of other human beings for profit, and for their inhuman treatment of those they considered less than human. And, of course, Americans of the 17th through 19th Centuries have been condemned for being an avid market for the purchase of slaves and maintenance of slavery as an acceptable institution of society.
Little, of course, has been said concerning the fact that until modern times slavery had always been part and parcel of life in every civilization of the world the powerful enslaved the weak; the conquerors subjugated their victims; empires imposed their culture on client states and conscripted “non-citizens” to forced labor. That was the way of the world. To the victor go the spoils.
Even less has been said of the fact that though the American colonists enslaved over 400,000 Africans, a blight on our national history accounts for only about 4% of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Where is the clamor for the guilty nation-states of Central and South America and the West Indies to acknowledge their huge part in this evil and to offer their mea culpa? Or is the United States to be held to a different standard than nations elsewhere? Source: (News Agencies)
