Africa Seems Oblivious to Selling its Own to Indo-European Sodomy Vile Killers

DOES ANYONE IN THE AFRICAN GOVERNMENT KNOWS WHAT KINGSHIP GOVERNMENT IS?

Researchers uncover Africans' part in slavery

October 20, 1995

From Correspondent Gary Strieker

CAPE COAST, Ghana (CNN) -- For centuries along the West African coast, millions of Africans were sold into slavery and shipped across the Atlantic to the Americas.

The middlemen were European slave traders based in forts like Ghana's Cape Coast Castle, now a tourist attraction and a somber reminder of a brutal crime against humanity.

That crime is usually blamed entirely on the European outsiders who inflicted slavery on African victims. But new research by some African scholars supports a different view - - that Africans should share the blame for slavery.

"It was the Africans themselves who were enslaving their fellow Africans, sending them to the coast to be shipped outside," says researcher Akosua Perbi of the University of Ghana. (88K AIFF sound file or 88K WAV sound)

Based on her studies, Perbi says that European slave traders, almost without exception, did not themselves capture slaves. They bought them from other Africans, usually kings or chiefs or wealthy merchants.

The question is, why did Africans sell their own people?

For a thousand years before Europeans arrived in Africa, slaves were commonly sold and taken by caravans north across the Sahara.

"Slavery did exist in Africa," says Irene Odotei of the University of Ghana.