Chattel Slavery in Africa Today
This material is from http://www.anti-slavery.org/pages/reports/silent.html
Abolitionist Samuel L. Cotton issues a call to action Words to the New World Africans
"Are there not other of my African American brothers and sisters who have, like me, fantasized about traveling back in time to prevent the rape of our ancestral homeland, Mother Africa? Or of leading the charge of unbound African warriors, up from the hold of the slave ship Zion, to slay the enslavers on its deck and emancipate its terrified cargo?... Well, a window in time reopened. Now what are we going to do about it?"
Samuel L. Cotton is a member of the American Anti-Slavery Group's board of advisors, and director of the Committee Against Slavery in Mauritania and Sudan (CASMAS). In 1995, while a graduate student at Columbia, Sam first learned about modern day African slavery, and in December of that year traveled to Mauritania to see black chattel slavery for himself.
Sam's visit to Mauritania had a profound effect, and prompted him to write the book Silent Terror: A Journey into Contemporary African Slavery. Excerpted below are the book's prologue and epilogue, which eloquently make the case for a neo-abolitionist movement to fight slavery in North Africa. Sam challenges all Americans -- and African Americans in particular -- to seize this opportunity for action.
Prologue
It is December 23, 1995, and a steel ship, Flight 562, bound for Dakar, Senegal, surges and shudders in a storm somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. Above me, a video screen begins to appear, opening slowly below the overhead luggage rack. The silent screen indicates the aircraft’s progress by displaying a small plane moving slowly from the U.S. coastline to the west coast of Africa. As the screen flashes off and on, it appears to me, after two hours into the flight, that the small plane has hardly moved. Not being one who likes to sit for long period of time, I tell myself to relax and accept that this is going to be a long flight. Anxious, I turn from the screen and begin to gaze out the window.
My eyes follow the silver wings of the aircraft as they stretch proudly out in the frigid air, capturing and reflecting the sun’s rays. I contemplate the soft appearance of the clouds and listen to the hum of the aircraft’s engines. Gradually, the cloud cover begins to thin until it dissolves into a view of that great body of water known as the Atlantic Ocean.
For me, the water visible below is more than an ocean. It is a watery grave. A memorial. A liquid tombstone. In that gray expanse, below the white caps, lie millions of my ancestors who were either seduced by suicide’s siren call, consumed by disease, or swallowed by storm-tossed seas with an appetite for wooden ships and their tormented cargo.
My thoughts, tranquil moments ago, fill with the history of a race jerked brutally off track—a race that has never recovered. My eyes mist as I contemplate the ocean and re-enter that space and time when my people were defeated and humiliated. I attempt to flee from these memories by turning away from the window and sinking back into my seat, but my spirit is locked in an embrace with the brutal past of my ancestors.
* * *
I am not your usual passenger. No, the man of color seated in 22F is a traveler devoid of the usual enthusiasms, for I undertook this journey after being stripped of all my illusions. I am neither joyful nor expectant, nor am I one of those sentimental tourists on holiday, eagerly anticipating the sights and sounds of his first trip to Africa. Rather, I am surrounded by sadness, and in my manner there is a hint of fear.
I am a haunted man. Haunted by myriad thoughts that crawl in and out of my consciousness. Sometimes these thoughts dance quietly below the surface. Other times they burst forth loud and insistent, demanding attention. It is these thoughts, along with the ancestral whisperings, that are the force driving my trip. My reflections are the children of research, born in the early morning hours and dusky evenings of days lost listening to countless interviews of Africans caught in nightmarish circumstances.
The Africans I spoke to were from Mauritania and Sudan. Interviewing them meant hours of gazing into pained faces that relate strange and terrible stories of human degradation and death. The written and oral evidence overwhelmed me. It was the evidence, after all, that took on a life of its own and commanded me to go to Africa.
The Legacy of Slavery
I, like most African Americans, have contended and wrestled for decades with a rage born of remembrance—a resentment fomented by the poignant images of Africans being captured, bound, and shipped into the horrors of slavery. Many African Americans have been driven by these images to travel to the shores of West Africa. They can be seen in Senegal among the crowds at Gorée Island, standing in the “Doorway of No Return,” or off the coast of Ghana, walking among the slave “castles.” They walk slowly and linger in the corners and stairwells of these hellish sites—the terrible places where the degradation of a race began.
In these places, the great grandchildren of slaves, survivors of a holocaust, contend with a terrible mixture of emotions. Their passions are produced by the realization that the fort before them housed their shackled ancestors in their last days on African soil before a long and miserable voyage delivered them into the hands of cruel masters. A wet eye, a sigh, and then a wisp of white hot anger rises slowly within the hearts and minds of these New World Africans as they recall these events. From the dark recesses of their racial memories, storms appear on the psychic horizon. Epithets begin to dance in their throats. Emotional forces take on a power of their own and occasionally fight their way clear, escaping the lips as curses and bitter mutterings.
Such acid expressions of resentment and grief can only be cooled and soothed by a belief that many African Americans hold: that buying and selling of black African slaves ended in the distant past. Such a belief, however, is both myth and illusion. I was cursed with the death of that illusion in the year preceding this trip, when it became clear to me that the enslavement of black Africans did not stop with the demise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The reality, instead, is that on this very day and in this very hour, even as you read these pages, black Africans are being bought and sold in at least two northwestern African countries.
Today.
Now.
* * *
The book you are about to read is a documented response to this atrocity. It is an expression of moral outrage. It is an instrument designed to inform, to disturb, to prick the moral nerve of all who read it and, I hope, elicit some moral reaction from the world community.
As a man of African descent, I am outraged that other African men and women have been forced to live for centuries in a debased state as a result of slavery and oppression. As a human being, I have a need to be reassured of the world’s humanity, a hunger to see some sign of moral indignation over the continued enslavement and debasement of black people. It is especially important for me to see that those who worship Islam, whether they are white or black, say or do something about the abuse and enslavement of their black spiritual brothers and sisters. I pray that this book will be a means by which the ongoing enslavement of Africans will become an important issue, not only to them, but all African Americans, Americans, Africans, and other people around the world.
When that which was done in the dark is brought into the light, when evils are exposed, such as those related to slavery, invariably the character of those who grasp the horrors of the revelation are tested. It is easy to rant and rage against horrors lost in antiquity, to express bitterness and anger for those tortured souls now asleep in death, or to shake one’s fists at ghosts. The difficulty lies in opposing a living adversary whose rapacious appetites are hell-bound to decimate all that one holds dear in the here and now.
It is a profound experience when your adversary confronts you in battle. When the plunderer points to his spoils and hurls a challenge that finds its mark in the very center of your being: “Yes, I did it! Now what are you going to do about it?” It is then that you must look deep inside yourself and bring forth a response that puts an end to the rivalry. That silences the foe. That squashes the threat.
What will be done about slavery in Africa today?
History rarely gives us a chance to confront a tormentor previously lost to time and place. Are there not other of my African American brothers and sisters who have, like me, fantasized about traveling back in time to prevent the rape of our ancestral homeland, Mother Africa? Or of leading the charge of unbound African warriors, up from the hold of the slave ship Zion, to slay the enslavers on its deck and emancipate its terrified cargo?
Well, a window in time reopened. Now what are we going to do about it?
The modern-day curse of slavery in Mauritania and Sudan presents us simultaneously with a challenge and a blessing—indeed, an opportunity to end this madness, once and for all. Will we African Americans continue to do as we have done in the past? Will we play down the role being played by the Arabs in supporting and extending the vile trade in black flesh? Will we exonerate them while turning a baleful gaze on more familiar conspirators or on newly discovered ones? Will we point solely to the White “Christian soldiers” who perpetrated the Middle Passage. Or will we singularly chastise a few dead Jewish merchants who financed and profited from it?
Will those of us who follow Islam take action to rise up and reprove their Islamic kin who even today enslave fellow Muslims or turn a blind eye to enslavement simply because the skin color of the oppressed is different from their own?
Will those of us in leadership positions—those who stand at the helm of organizations that in the past have been quite vocal about slavery, apartheid, and racial injustice—be seen in the first charges of this battle?
What will we do about this issue of slavery, not that which we know of in the past, but which still exists on African soil today?
In the final analysis, each and every one of us must examine the evidence with our own hearts and with our own consciences and decide where we stand on this issue.
Whether you choose to close your eyes and ignore it, preferring instead to shake your fists at the ghosts of the distant past—or whether you decide to join the ranks of the modern-day abolitionist movement and add your voice to others joined in protest—one thing is clear: until the enslavement of African men, women, and children vanishes from the face of this earth forever, this discussion will go on.
Click here and buy the book:
Abolitionist Samuel L. Cotton issues a call to action Words to the New World Africans
"Are there not other of my African American brothers and sisters who have, like me, fantasized about traveling back in time to prevent the rape of our ancestral homeland, Mother Africa? Or of leading the charge of unbound African warriors, up from the hold of the slave ship Zion, to slay the enslavers on its deck and emancipate its terrified cargo?... Well, a window in time reopened. Now what are we going to do about it?"
Samuel L. Cotton is a member of the American Anti-Slavery Group's board of advisors, and director of the Committee Against Slavery in Mauritania and Sudan (CASMAS). In 1995, while a graduate student at Columbia, Sam first learned about modern day African slavery, and in December of that year traveled to Mauritania to see black chattel slavery for himself.
Sam's visit to Mauritania had a profound effect, and prompted him to write the book Silent Terror: A Journey into Contemporary African Slavery. Excerpted below are the book's prologue and epilogue, which eloquently make the case for a neo-abolitionist movement to fight slavery in North Africa. Sam challenges all Americans -- and African Americans in particular -- to seize this opportunity for action.
Prologue
It is December 23, 1995, and a steel ship, Flight 562, bound for Dakar, Senegal, surges and shudders in a storm somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. Above me, a video screen begins to appear, opening slowly below the overhead luggage rack. The silent screen indicates the aircraft’s progress by displaying a small plane moving slowly from the U.S. coastline to the west coast of Africa. As the screen flashes off and on, it appears to me, after two hours into the flight, that the small plane has hardly moved. Not being one who likes to sit for long period of time, I tell myself to relax and accept that this is going to be a long flight. Anxious, I turn from the screen and begin to gaze out the window.
My eyes follow the silver wings of the aircraft as they stretch proudly out in the frigid air, capturing and reflecting the sun’s rays. I contemplate the soft appearance of the clouds and listen to the hum of the aircraft’s engines. Gradually, the cloud cover begins to thin until it dissolves into a view of that great body of water known as the Atlantic Ocean.
For me, the water visible below is more than an ocean. It is a watery grave. A memorial. A liquid tombstone. In that gray expanse, below the white caps, lie millions of my ancestors who were either seduced by suicide’s siren call, consumed by disease, or swallowed by storm-tossed seas with an appetite for wooden ships and their tormented cargo.
My thoughts, tranquil moments ago, fill with the history of a race jerked brutally off track—a race that has never recovered. My eyes mist as I contemplate the ocean and re-enter that space and time when my people were defeated and humiliated. I attempt to flee from these memories by turning away from the window and sinking back into my seat, but my spirit is locked in an embrace with the brutal past of my ancestors.
* * *
I am not your usual passenger. No, the man of color seated in 22F is a traveler devoid of the usual enthusiasms, for I undertook this journey after being stripped of all my illusions. I am neither joyful nor expectant, nor am I one of those sentimental tourists on holiday, eagerly anticipating the sights and sounds of his first trip to Africa. Rather, I am surrounded by sadness, and in my manner there is a hint of fear.
I am a haunted man. Haunted by myriad thoughts that crawl in and out of my consciousness. Sometimes these thoughts dance quietly below the surface. Other times they burst forth loud and insistent, demanding attention. It is these thoughts, along with the ancestral whisperings, that are the force driving my trip. My reflections are the children of research, born in the early morning hours and dusky evenings of days lost listening to countless interviews of Africans caught in nightmarish circumstances.
The Africans I spoke to were from Mauritania and Sudan. Interviewing them meant hours of gazing into pained faces that relate strange and terrible stories of human degradation and death. The written and oral evidence overwhelmed me. It was the evidence, after all, that took on a life of its own and commanded me to go to Africa.
Evidence, clear and insistent, that trading in black slaves was occurring in the North African countries of Mauritania and Sudan. Yes, Africa, in 1997, was still suffering from the same sickening humiliation that once almost destroyed her: human bondage. Her past was her present, and her present was her past.
The Legacy of Slavery
I, like most African Americans, have contended and wrestled for decades with a rage born of remembrance—a resentment fomented by the poignant images of Africans being captured, bound, and shipped into the horrors of slavery. Many African Americans have been driven by these images to travel to the shores of West Africa. They can be seen in Senegal among the crowds at Gorée Island, standing in the “Doorway of No Return,” or off the coast of Ghana, walking among the slave “castles.” They walk slowly and linger in the corners and stairwells of these hellish sites—the terrible places where the degradation of a race began.
In these places, the great grandchildren of slaves, survivors of a holocaust, contend with a terrible mixture of emotions. Their passions are produced by the realization that the fort before them housed their shackled ancestors in their last days on African soil before a long and miserable voyage delivered them into the hands of cruel masters. A wet eye, a sigh, and then a wisp of white hot anger rises slowly within the hearts and minds of these New World Africans as they recall these events. From the dark recesses of their racial memories, storms appear on the psychic horizon. Epithets begin to dance in their throats. Emotional forces take on a power of their own and occasionally fight their way clear, escaping the lips as curses and bitter mutterings.
Such acid expressions of resentment and grief can only be cooled and soothed by a belief that many African Americans hold: that buying and selling of black African slaves ended in the distant past. Such a belief, however, is both myth and illusion. I was cursed with the death of that illusion in the year preceding this trip, when it became clear to me that the enslavement of black Africans did not stop with the demise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The reality, instead, is that on this very day and in this very hour, even as you read these pages, black Africans are being bought and sold in at least two northwestern African countries.
Today.
Now.
* * *
The book you are about to read is a documented response to this atrocity. It is an expression of moral outrage. It is an instrument designed to inform, to disturb, to prick the moral nerve of all who read it and, I hope, elicit some moral reaction from the world community.
As a man of African descent, I am outraged that other African men and women have been forced to live for centuries in a debased state as a result of slavery and oppression. As a human being, I have a need to be reassured of the world’s humanity, a hunger to see some sign of moral indignation over the continued enslavement and debasement of black people. It is especially important for me to see that those who worship Islam, whether they are white or black, say or do something about the abuse and enslavement of their black spiritual brothers and sisters. I pray that this book will be a means by which the ongoing enslavement of Africans will become an important issue, not only to them, but all African Americans, Americans, Africans, and other people around the world.
Epilogue: WORDS TO THE NEW WORLD AFRICANS
When that which was done in the dark is brought into the light, when evils are exposed, such as those related to slavery, invariably the character of those who grasp the horrors of the revelation are tested. It is easy to rant and rage against horrors lost in antiquity, to express bitterness and anger for those tortured souls now asleep in death, or to shake one’s fists at ghosts. The difficulty lies in opposing a living adversary whose rapacious appetites are hell-bound to decimate all that one holds dear in the here and now.
It is a profound experience when your adversary confronts you in battle. When the plunderer points to his spoils and hurls a challenge that finds its mark in the very center of your being: “Yes, I did it! Now what are you going to do about it?” It is then that you must look deep inside yourself and bring forth a response that puts an end to the rivalry. That silences the foe. That squashes the threat.
What will be done about slavery in Africa today?
History rarely gives us a chance to confront a tormentor previously lost to time and place. Are there not other of my African American brothers and sisters who have, like me, fantasized about traveling back in time to prevent the rape of our ancestral homeland, Mother Africa? Or of leading the charge of unbound African warriors, up from the hold of the slave ship Zion, to slay the enslavers on its deck and emancipate its terrified cargo?
Well, a window in time reopened. Now what are we going to do about it?
The modern-day curse of slavery in Mauritania and Sudan presents us simultaneously with a challenge and a blessing—indeed, an opportunity to end this madness, once and for all. Will we African Americans continue to do as we have done in the past? Will we play down the role being played by the Arabs in supporting and extending the vile trade in black flesh? Will we exonerate them while turning a baleful gaze on more familiar conspirators or on newly discovered ones? Will we point solely to the White “Christian soldiers” who perpetrated the Middle Passage. Or will we singularly chastise a few dead Jewish merchants who financed and profited from it?
Will those of us who follow Islam take action to rise up and reprove their Islamic kin who even today enslave fellow Muslims or turn a blind eye to enslavement simply because the skin color of the oppressed is different from their own?
Will those of us in leadership positions—those who stand at the helm of organizations that in the past have been quite vocal about slavery, apartheid, and racial injustice—be seen in the first charges of this battle?
What will we do about this issue of slavery, not that which we know of in the past, but which still exists on African soil today?
In the final analysis, each and every one of us must examine the evidence with our own hearts and with our own consciences and decide where we stand on this issue.
Whether you choose to close your eyes and ignore it, preferring instead to shake your fists at the ghosts of the distant past—or whether you decide to join the ranks of the modern-day abolitionist movement and add your voice to others joined in protest—one thing is clear: until the enslavement of African men, women, and children vanishes from the face of this earth forever, this discussion will go on.
Click here and buy the book:
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