[Niles Crane]

Originally Posted by TheDaddy

What wasn't mentioned either I bet was the fact most of the capturing and selling was done by other Africans to the white man.

The vast majority of slaves sold to Europeans by African rulers were already slaves, prisoners of war or criminals within society and refusal by the local powers to collaborate with the colonialists would see them captured along with their people anyway - as happened with any Kings who refused. In addition, to fulfil the European demand, enslavement became almost an inevitable consequence of crime or capture during war - to such an extent, war between kingdoms was sponsored and encouraged by colonialists.

"Sell to the Europeans or be sold to the Europeans"

Your simplification is misleading scape-goating, which is no better than ignoring the indigenous involvement and laying all the work at the hands of Europeans. On that and the original subject of this thread:

The viewpoint that “Africans” enslaved “Africans” is obfuscating if not troubling. The deployment of “African” in African history tends to coalesce into obscurantist constructions of identities that allow scholars, for instance, to subtly call into question the humanity of “all” Africans. Whenever Asante rulers sold non-Asantes into slavery, they did not construct it in terms of Africans selling fellow Africans. They saw the victims for what they were, for instance, as Akuapems, without categorizing them as fellow Africans. Equally, when Christian Scandinavians and Russians sold war captives to the Islamic people of the Abbasid Empire, they didn’t think that they were placing fellow Europeans into slavery. This lazy categorizing homogenizes Africans and has become a part of the methodology of African history; not surprisingly, the Western media’s cottage industry on Africa has tapped into it to frame Africans in inchoate generalities allowing the media to describe local crisis in one African state as “African” problem

– Dr. Akurang-Parry, Ending the Slavery Blame

---------- Post added at 22:44 ---------- Previous post was at 22:28 ----------

Originally Posted by Osem

Correct, they skirted around that bit (and we all know why).

My post however relates to the trade in white Europeans being taken to North Africa and forced into slavery which I had no idea existed on the scale estimated and seems to have been largely overlooked by historians. I've just been asking my eldest about his school's coverage of the slave trade at and he's heard nothing about this aspect of it either.....

I knew about it. But then i also know about the prosperous pre-colonial African kingdoms like Mali, Ashanti, Carthage, Ethiopia, Nubia etc.

Your son hasn't heard anything about it because he's being taught about the Atlantic slave trade not slavery in general or every period through history. The same reason, i assume, he's not being taught about the prevalent contemporary slavery or African history outside of the Atlantic slave trade, besides perhaps a bit about Ancient Egypt.