Arabs: Setting the standards

The racist enslavement of Africans began with the rise of Islam circa 700 AD. Pre-existing racist attitudes coupled with a quest to convert non-believers led Arabs to barbarically torment Africans. Any one who was not a Muslim could be enslaved. Arab raiders would decimate an African village, killing the older women and men. Young people would be enslaved. Girls of any age would be violated and raped. Boys would be taken to eunuch stations to be castrated. This was the actions of civilised devoutly religious people for over 1300 years.

Europeans: The birth of ignorampance

The devoutly religious Europeans entered into the arena of destruction in 1482, the Portuguese built Elmina Castle in Ghana to facilitate the extraction of Africans, gold and ivory. The trade in Africans accelerated steadily after 1492, when the European discovery of the Americas. They required labourers to develop and maintain the plantation system which were established by Europeans in the New World!

At the height of the slave trade there were over sixty castles crammed together on a stretch of coast less than 300 miles long off West Africa.

It takes a visit to a Elmina Castle to bring home the horror of the word ‘dungeon’. The castle has an underground cell where male slaves were kept, sometimes for months at a time. The cells are as close to hell as human beings can get. They are hot, and there is no light and fresh air. Slaves were branded, thrown into these unsanitary holes with their open wounds, and starved, some shackled to the walls. There they waited in their own waste, waste which after 200 years had raised the floor by two feet. That is what you walk on when you visit the dungeon at Cape Coast. It is a place filled with the moans and crying of ghosts. The screams of those who were driven insane echo down through the centuries from the scratches they made in the walls with their fingers. Many died, and their bodies were thrown into the sea outside the castle. A thousand men were crowded into a space that would make 150 people panic. Five hundred females at a time, mostly young girls were thrown into similar conditions another dungeon. Soldiers would take their pick of the young girls. Those who survived the months of waiting were stripped naked, both male and female, and herded through a dark, narrow tunnel to the beach, the waiting ships and an unimaginable future.

Estimates vary, but somewhere between 50 million and 100 million people were captured, enslaved and brought to the Americas. Millions more died in the slave raids and in the dungeons.