form an underlying foundation for many of the tensions between Sierra Leone which contributed to the initial lack of economic prosperity for the settlement of freed slaves. Initial interactions founded these tensions. Newly arrived freed slaves that settled in colonies in Sierra Leone employed local Africans to help with building their settlements. However, despite this aid, the strains on the settlers in terms of disease and disorder caused the initial settlements to fail. After this failure, more freed slaves attempted to settle again at a different time of the year. They were warned that if they behaved improperly, local African rulers would take them and sell them on slave ships (Braidwood 1994). Indigenous Africans challenged this arrival of settlers and aggravated them, and settlers requested defense supplies from Europe for fear of being massacred (Braidwood 1994). One of the shortfalls of Thompson’s perspective is that he seems to be unaware of the magnitude of the tensions between indigenous Africans and freed slaves. Tribal chiefs led movements in resistance to European influence, and Thompson is largely ignorant of this. The Temne chiefs who sold Freetown to British abolitionists initiated a series of misunderstandings that would later incite conflict between the groups. This founded some of the conflicts between indigenous Africans and Europeans, but Tribal chiefs were not only provoked by European influence. The decline of the slave trade also meant that tribal
The lives of natives were reduced to nothing but machines of profit. In The Black Man’s Burden, Edward Morel argued that, “To reduce all the varied and picturesque and stimulating ways of savage life to a dull routine of endless toil for uncomprehended ends, to break social ties and disrupt institutions; to stifle natural desires and crush mental development… to kill the soul in a people - this is a crime which transcends physical murder.” European nations withered away at the very character of the nations they subjected to their rule. Their very culture was destroyed, replaced with monotonous slavery. Because of this, African kings made it clear they wouldn’t stay idle. In a quote from Machemba, the king of Yao to a German commander, he explained “I have listened to your words but can find no reason why I should obey you - I would rather die first… [T]o be your subject, that I cannot be. If it should be war you desire, then I am ready, but never to be your subject. I do not fall at your feet, for you are God’s creature just as I am.” The African nations were hoping for friendship between them and Europe, but they wouldn’t be subjected to their rule and would rather go to war. Instead of the vast benefits of actual trade between two sovereign nations, Europeans dismantled any further chance of
One of the different ways Africans reacted was their way of resistance against the Europeans. Various political leaders would rather have themselves
Africa had been the target of colonialism and slavery for many years. The colonies that European’s developed during fifteenth and sixteenth century were the main reason that started slave trade in Africa.
The Europeans would attempt to turn the different African tribes against each other and started many tribal wars throughout Africa. When a tribe was conquered, the remaining members would be transported back to Europe and the Americas in order to be sold into slavery, and their villages would be raided for any potential riches the Europeans could sell or use. Creating these tribal wars gave the Europeans money and also eliminated possible enemies from the land.
Ted Conover’s book, New Jack, is about the author's experiences as a rookie guard at Sing Sing prison, in New York, the most troubled maximum security prison. He comes to realize that being a correctional officer isn’t an easy task. This is shown from the beginning when he is required to attend a 7 week training program to become a correctional officer. He comes to realize what inmates have to endure on a daily basis. Throughout his experience into a harsh culture of prison and the exhausting and poor working conditions for officers, he begins to realize that the prison system brutalizes everyone connected to it. New Jack presents new ideas of prisons in the United States in the ways facilities, corrections officers, and inmates function with
As previously mentioned, there were independent or free states in Africa during European occupation. One of these free states was Ethiopia. Although Ethiopia was economically and socially free, it rightfully still disagreed with the injustice that occurred in Africa (Document 2). Moreover and more specifically into the injustice that occurred, slave ships embodied this very damage to Africa and its people. Through this European network of trade, they were prospering.
In her book, Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman challenges Jerry Rawlings’ notion of freedom by responding with “Had Rawlings asked, “‘Are we yet free?’ most Ghanaians would have answered with a resounding, ‘No.’ This ‘no’ resonated on both sides of the Atlantic”(pg 126). The capitalistic spirit that possessed the Europeans enabled them to disrupt the untouched country of Africa and capture its children to satiate their wealth aspirations. In the meantime, the Europeans took the land from the Native Americans through genocidal practices and claimed it as their gift from God. Although some claim that the capitalist ventures of the Europeans during the colonial period and the 19th century were beneficial for all and rooted in innocence, it ultimately caused the physical and cultural death of the Native Americans and African-origin peoples and has led to the day to day suffering of their descendants.
The real reason, however, was because the “Indian proximity to their native groups encouraged rebelliousness and frequently, escape”(Doc 6). The majority of Africa did not encourage this kind of trade but could do nothing about it. Nobody wanted to become a slave, so people would lie low and not stand up for one another. Once places like Portugal used slave labor, other nations began to use the same technique because it seemed to work(Doc
The reactions made a small number of African natives was to resist diplomatic responses that promised the ability to maintain peace with the nations of Europe. When diplomacy failed, Africans resisted with violence, while others drew upon their religious traditions for strength in remaining independent. Yet another reaction among Africans was to encourage other Africans to fight back. Some Africans, meanwhile, complied with – and even willfully participated in – the continent’s colonization by Europeans.
Europe and Africa. The population decrease was not just due to slave trade which some African kings were said to have agreed to but Europeans would come into Africa and capture citizens forcefully. Historian Patrick Manning, makes the claim that “the coastal exports of young adult slaves, twice as many men as women, tended to transform the structure of the population and the organization of society”. Manning believes that if Europe didn’t take so much of the people of Africa, Africa could have been sufficient enough to support itself in advances. Walter Rodney, another historian that sides with Manning notes that “Europeans obtained slaves by trading rather than raiding” (Northrup, 89). The used violence, such as, warfare, trickery, banditry, and kidnapping to force these people out of there homes
When the Europeans scrambled to colonize Africa, the reactions of the natives was progressively more apprehensive. At first the natives found that they could be peaceful with this strange new white man. Soon after, though, they found that these new men mistreated and cheated them greatly, and had superior military technology. Given these new conditions of the relationship the Africans decided it was in their best interest to take up arms against the Europeans and try to rid themselves of the harmful White Man.
Fast forward to the years 1890-1910, when Leopold’s sole focus was on the Congo Free State, the rich cargo being exported out of the colony, and convincing the Western world that the work being done in Africa was for the health and wealth of Africans. In fact, Africans, many who lived in peaceful civilizations, were subject to forced labor and horrible atrocities. Soldiers infiltrated the Congo Free State, often stealing the Africans’ food, goods, and committing mass killings (Hochschild 229). The colonization of Africa was not a peaceful one, as Stanley stated “combat was always part of exploring” (Hochschild 49). Whereas Europeans had the latest rifles and even elephant guns, Africans were armored with primitive spears and bows and arrows. Before infrastructure had been established, porters were used to carry steamboat pieces, provisions, and sometimes ivory. These porters were often starved and worked to death, as Edmond Picard, a Belgian senator, described when he visited the Congo in 1896:
* 50. Slaves frequently ran away and occasionally staged violent rebellions such as that led by a slave named Tacky in Jamaica in 1760. European planters sought to prevent rebellions by curtailing African cultural traditions, religions, and languages.
The article describes the “imperial pressures” 2 to end slavery put on the British post-United States Civil War by the United States creation of Liberia. There was a large anti-slavery movement in the early nineteenth century, and legislation did pass through, however, those who had benefitted from the British trade, figure such as Eddoo, who did not wish to lose all of their labor force, so slave owners worked to find a way around this new system. Although there were some native figures in politics, like James Hutton Brew, “Imperial activity in West Africa was conducted in part by the Sierra Leonean and Liberian settlers themselves, as well as by certain influential individuals acting on behalf of the colonial governments, anti-slavery societies, or their own interests”.2 Meaning, although there were Africans in government, the British still had supreme say and power over the colonies. The British government did eventually outlaw slavery, but “West African colonial governments’ and colonists’ imperial ideology of ‘Civilization, Commerce, and Christianity’’2 found loopholes around these new ordinances as seen in the Abina trial. Although slavery was technically ended in the early nineteenth century, due to the power and influences over the countries at the time, slavery was not ended until much
Although the Kenyans were the native people of their country, however, they went through a lot of insolence and maltreatment by the whites. The attitudes of the British can be fairly described in the secondary source, “The East African Slave Trade”, in which the picture on the right depicts how even after the slaves were freed in America in 1865, however, many African Americans continued to work on the tobacco and cotton plantations where they had formerly worked as slaves. This type of behavior and arrogance to the black people overall, was replicated in the continued use of a black women or man in the picture on the British tobacco package until about the 1960s. The Africans had to go through a lot they were given low wages to work long shifts with horrible conditions, while the whites “(invasive species)” were having a time of leisure. It can be said or concluded that Britain made the Kenyans seem to be the strangers of their own country. Another evidence of the lessening of the Africans rights can be seen in this statement which was initiated in a book called “imperial societies” by an African women who was being exposed to prostitution, “They knew that the house belonged to a women who never had a husband, so they knew it was safe to come because the owner had no