Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, September 7, 1993 TAG: 9401150003
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEN WOODLEY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But the project must be honest enough to include the role of Africans who sold Africans to European traders. If it does not accurately reflect the diverse face of slavery, then building a monument and museum would be worse than doing nothing. If we are to honor the victims of a diabolical practice, we must do so honestly or that honor is tainted and any lesson we might learn will be based on falsehoods. Half-stories, like half-truths, shouldn't be told.
There is no excuse nor any pardon for those who bought and sold other human beings. Slavery is the result of something in our human nature that mankind has been struggling to overcome since pre-historic times, but the practice of slavery was not confined to any one race, nor any one continent or century. Read the Bible and any decent history book.
The slavery which brought Africans to America was part of a trade triangle that saw textiles and other goods shipped to Africa where the ships were re-loaded with slaves, purchased in most instances from willing African chieftains.
The cruelty began with the wartime capture or kidnapping of African men, women, and children by rival African ethnic groups, and their long march from the interior to the coast. The grueling march was often hundreds of miles long, and many died before they were ever sold to Europeans. Those who survived were inhumanly crowded and packed below deck on slave ships.
The Portuguese were the first to reach what is now Nigeria and was then a leading slave-trading area. The Portuguese developed a slave trade in the 1400s with African chiefs. Two hundred years later, the Kingdom of Dahomey controlled the Benin area and the kingdom was largely based on slave trade, trading fellow-Africans to European traders for firearms and other goods. Constant wars with other African slave-trading states eventually led to Benin's decline.
Africans, history clearly shows, were major partners in the capture and sale of Africans to European traders. And common sense tells us that it would be impossible for early 17th Century Dutch traders to travel by foot hundreds of miles into Africa and capture huge numbers of Africans. The Dutch would have been slaughtered had they attempted to do so.
In fact, the interior exploration of the African continent by Europeans was in no small measure the result of those opposed to slavery seeking an alternative to slave trade with other Africans. Frequently, European traders waited off-shore in their ships for the word from African chiefs that they had slaves to sell or trade.
Mortality rates on a slave ship were horrific. It was not unusual for more than 25 percent of the Africans to die during the voyage. Conditions aboard ship for Africans bound for the grotesquely named New World were horrendous.
Yes, let's build a monument and museum to those who survived slavery in The New World and helped build that new world into the greatest nation on the globe. But let's do so truthfully.
To perpetuate the myth that Europeans were solely responsible for the enslavement of Africans in the so-called New World would be a terrible disservice to everyone in this state. The sooner we all realize the common history and fault-filled human nature we all share, the sooner and more truly we will bond together as a people to heal the racial divide that still separates so many.
The monument and museum are proposed for Jamestown because that may be where African slaves first set foot in North America. But we must remember how that journey into slavery began. Build a monument and museum that tell the truth, or don't build anything at all.
A lie is worse than silence.
\ Ken Woodley is editor of The Farmville Herald.
by CNB