African Unification Front
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REGARDING THE IMPACT OF INTER-AFRICAN ETHNICITY IN SLAVERY
It is important to understand that the discourse on the role of ethnicity in slavery in Africa is highly exaggerated and is a neocolonial distortion of our history. The slave economic system is just as complex and as multifaceted as any other world economy. The slave economy produced its own vicious cycles, and although some communities survived the worst of its effects, all of Africa's communities were adversely mangled by its many-sided effects.
The current understanding of ethnicity in Africa is as much a product of slavery, more so than it was a catalyst for slavery. African ethinicity in ancient times was most certainly was not the cause of slavery. Africans who sold other Africans were not making an ethnic consideration based in the normal impulses of their cultures, but perhaps one of desparation, powerlessness, and tragic social failure. Perhaps the situation is more akin to the tragic existence of the black ghettoes in America, with all of its complexity. It is remiss to blame gang warfare on ethnicity in the slums, in the same way that it is remiss to blame slavery on ethnicity. Everyone understands that there are underlying structural reasons responsible for the violence in America, beyond street addresses or neighborhoods.
In other words, it is too simplistic to understand slavery simply as one ethnic group selling members of another because they belong to a different clan. It is important to understand that for communities that were robbed of young people, they bought slaves for augmentation of their communities (this is a major difference from New World slavery). For those that lost lands during slave wars, they had ended up raiding and kidnapping for a living because they couldn't grow food. Big groups separated into smaller more mobile, independent and self-sufficient, other groups adopted militarism in order to survive, others amalgamated into super-alliances big enough to dominate slavery, and still others prefered strict isolation and withdrew from contact with other groups.
The strategies necessary to survive and thrive in the milieu of international slavery in past centuries are numerous, some brilliant and others brutal. Scarification, psychological warfare, language, architecture, farming technics, changes in customs, adoption of religion, etc., were all important as survival methods. The evidence of these adaptations are still visible and operative in African society today, and they are what define the diffrences between groups, they are the ethnicity of Africans.
In the final analysis, Africans are one people. We all became slaves when one of us put in bondage. Even today the free live on borrowed time and an illusion of freedom. In fact we are still sufferng the consequences of the international slave trade in African humans. In the LA it is a 45-Colt in the hands of a 17yr old 'Blood' or 'Crip', in Kismayu (Somalia) it is a 17 yr old Technical with a Kalashnikov, in Kisangani (Congo) it is a 17yr old with a bazooka, in (Montego bay) Jamaica it is a 17yr old with a blade, in Kailuhan (Sierra Leone) it is the same kid with a grenade, machete, arrow, spear shaft, stone, club etc.
Let us not get carried away with the flags and the uniforms of different African groups, nor should we be confused by the names on the map. The African people is one people, it is in the grinder of neocolonialism, just as slavery was a grinder. Now we have wage slavery, racism, racial profiling, bad terms of trade for Africans, EU and US foreign policy, economic exclusion for the Caribbean, dumping of toxic waste in Africa, IMF extrotion, massive national debt, lack of disease management regimes, and a raft full of Pandora's surprises on the way. We are disunited because of major stress and abuse at the hands of a world that fails to recognize our humanity, a world that is crushing us, not because of our ethnic differences, but because we are African.
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