Black Lives Matter… to Whom?

“The organization of the slave trade was structured to have the Europeans stay along the coastlines, relying on African middlemen and merchants to bring the slaves to them,” said Toyin Falola, a Nigerian professor of African studies at the University of Texas. “The Europeans couldn’t have gone into the interior to get the slaves themselves.” Wikipedia.

People often tell the truth… just not the whole truth. The best propaganda is all true and completely false at the same time. Take the current Black Lives Matter movement and its associated deluge of white American guilt.

The Dutch, Portuguese, British, and Spanish traders who brought African slaves to the Caribbean and the Americas did not, themselves, mount expeditions into the dark jungles and kidnap thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children and haul them back to their waiting slave ships. They put into African ports in African cities run by African governments and merchants, had their boats serviced, vittled, and watered, let their men have shore leave, and negotiated with the black traders for their cargos of cod fish, molasses, tobacco, and rum in exchange for ivory and slaves.

The slaves were prisoners of war in inter-tribal warfare, or they were criminals whose crimes earned a sentence of slavery in the African justice system of the day, or sometimes sold into slavery to pay a debt. Families sometimes sold children into slavery due to debt. As the black traders realized that they could make a lot of money trading in slaves, more crimes became punishable by slavery and out and out kidnappings occurred between rival tribes.

The courts and the merchants always have their hands in each other’s pockets.

Even Joseph Cinque, who led the revolt against the Spanish slave ship, Amistad, went back to Nigeria after being freed by the US Supreme Court under the expert defense by John Quincy Adams, and took up trading, quite possibly in the lucrative business of slaves.

While we are meting out retribution to American whites for their ancestor’s sins, what about the sins of those who kept the slave markets of the Americas well stocked? How about the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the British shipping companies and the banks that financed and grew rich off their expeditions? They were the main corridor of the Cod fish, molasses, rum, and slaves conveyor belt across the Atlantic.

Or the black slave traders on the African Slave Coast? Those were the rich port cities with their warehouses of cargo and their stockades of black slaves that were controlled by African royals and merchants. Or the legal system that cast people into those stockades for crimes and unpaid debts and the captured civilians, through warfare or kidnapping, brought to those markets like so many bales of hay? They were as guilty, even more so, than white people living in America today. How do their descendants escape the torrents of slaver guilt?

There was a long, well organized, efficient, and well monied production line from jungle to village to tribe to port city to shipping lanes to final destinations on the auction blocks in places like Atlanta and Barbados, each step greased by banker’s gold. 

Shouldn’t they all be held accountable?