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Maafa

2011-02-21T00:54:07Z

DBaba: Undid revision 415043573 by 75.27.240.219 (talk); agreed

{{redirect|African Holocaust|the [[Steel Pulse]] album|African Holocaust (album)}}
[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped [[African American]] slave, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, April 2, 1863]]
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The '''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') refers to the 500 years of suffering of [[Black people|Africans]] and the [[African diaspora]], through [[slavery]], imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name="African Holocaust Special"/> The terms also refer to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 /> The term ''Maafa'' is derived from the [[Swahili language|Swahili]] term for [[disaster]], terrible occurrence or great [[Tragedy (event)|tragedy]],<ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref><ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |year=2004 |page=1}}</ref> while the term African Holocaust, derived from a Greek word meaning ''sacrificial burning'', is preferred by other scholars to emphasize the intentional character.

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history.<ref name="Maafa of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/html_ah/holocaustspecial.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title=African Holocaust: Holocaust Special}}</ref> When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref> Historically, the enslavement of Africans by white people was mostly referred to as the [[Atlantic slave trade]], a phrase that has been criticized for emphasizing the commercial aspects of the African persecution, in keeping with a European or White American historiographical viewpoint.

==Beyond slavery==
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title=African Holocaust: Dark Voyage}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{See also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title='The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{Bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 ''Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro'']. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing...in the pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 ''The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation'']. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea{{Citation needed|date=April 2010}} of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of Ghana and the [[Yoruba People|Yoruba]] of Nigeria had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Europeans would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title=African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade}}</ref>{{Dead link|date=December 2010}}

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum era|antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".<ref name="African Holocaust Special">{{cite web | url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/html_ah/holocaustspecial.htm | title= African Holocaust Special | publisher=African Holocaust Society | accessdate=2007-01-04}}</ref>

==Arab slave trade==
{{Main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in [[Yemen]]]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning (Professor)|Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning">Manning (1990) p.10</ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane."<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title=African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade|accessdate=2004-10-01 |archiveurl = http://web.archive.org/web/20040916000038/http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm |archivedate = September 16, 2004}}</ref>{{Dead link|date=December 2010}}
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berber people|Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a 16th century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under British-controlled Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title=18th century Boom}}</ref>

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title=Arab Slave Trade}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]] and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title=Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was incorrectly considered Arab despite his predominately African ancestry. His father was a coastal African Swahili while his mother was a Muscat Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip's mother was an Arab and his father was from the African Swahili coast.

==Scale==
{{Main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title=How Europe underdeveloped Africa}} (marxists.org)</ref>{{Dead link|date=December 2010}} It has been estimated by Scholars like Karenga and Walter Rodney that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/>{{Dead link|date=December 2010}} Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="African Holocaust Special"/><ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/>{{Dead link|date=December 2010}}

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/>{{Dead link|date=December 2010}} Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title=African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title=Effects on Africa}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref><ref>http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2523/ Dr. Joy Leary</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. Dr. Joy DeGruy Leary speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.<ref>http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=b6d699be4a8ccc0e7125890ae0963a65</ref>

==Economics of slavery==
{{Unreferenced section|date=June 2010}}
[[Image:Triangular trade.png|thumb|250 px|right|Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "[[Middle Passage]]". African slaves were thenceforth traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe to complete the "[[Triangular Trade]]".]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar. The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the 18th century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{Unreferenced section|date=June 2010}}
{{Main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:Colonial Africa 1914 map.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late 19th century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the 19th century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Citation needed|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later. The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a [[racialized]] system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Citation needed|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Persecution of Africans after slavery==
{{Expand section|date=November 2008}}
{{globalize/USA|date=December 2010}}
{{Unreferenced section|date=June 2010}}
[[Image:JimCrowInDurhamNC.jpg|thumb|250px|In the United States, [[Jim Crow Laws]] maintained the disenfranchisement of many [[African Americans]] until the latter half of the 20th century.]]
The persecution of Africans continued outside colonialist Africa, and beyond colonialism. Although social progress was made during the [[Reconstruction era of the United States|Reconstruction]] period, the post-Reconstruction era has been characterized as the [[nadir of American race relations]], in which Southern hardship and bitterness came to manifest in overt hostility against African Americans, and particularly in the phenomenon of [[lynching]]. Lynching became a means of terrorizing African Americans in the post-Reconstruction period. In the 20th century, [[Jim Crow laws]] came to codify white privilege in the United States.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]].{{Citation needed|date=June 2010}} Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side effect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title=Removal of Agency from Africa|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|250px|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title=Problem with Maafa}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly no accident. The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>{{Dead link|date=December 2010}}

Some [[Afrocentric]] scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the denial of the validity of the African people's humanity is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are said by some to be deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture. Others, however, feel that avoidance of the term "trade" is apologetic act on behalf of capitalism, absolving capitalist structures of involvement in human catastrophe.{{Citation needed|date=December 2010}}

==Further reading==
* ''The Black Holocaust For Beginners'', by S.E. Anderson
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{Reflist|2}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Democides]]
[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]
[[Category:African slave trade]]

[[ca:Maafa]]

Mandodari

2010-09-23T18:01:59Z

DBaba:

{{Hdeity infobox 
| Image = Ravi Varma-Lady Giving Alms at the Temple.jpg
| Image_size = 230px
| Caption = "Lady Giving Alms at the Temple" by [[Raja Ravi Varma]], used by ''the Week'' to illustrate Mandodari<ref name="ayyer"/>
| Name = Mandodari
| Affiliation = [[Rakshasa]], ''Panchakanya''
| Devanagari = मंदोदरी
| Sanskrit_Transliteration = Mandodarī
| Abode = [[Lanka]]
| Consort = [[Ravana]], [[Vibhisana]]
}}

'''Mandodari''' ({{lang-sa|मंदोदरी}} {{IAST|Mandodarī}}, lit. "soft-bellied";<ref>[http://books.google.co.in/books?id=1jRWziY9m4cC&pg=PA429&dq=mandodari+hipped&hl=en&ei=8YkUTL3ZJoi4rAeLjvWlCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=mandodari%20hipped&f=false Rāmopākhyāna: the story of Rāma in the Mahābhārata p.429]</ref> [[Tamil language|Tamil]]: Montotari; [[Khmer language|Khmer]]: Mandogiri; [[Malay language|Malay]]: Mandudaki; [[Thai language|Thai]]: Mantho Dewi) is the Queen Consort of [[Ravana]], the [[Rakshasa|demon]] king of [[Lanka]], according to the [[Hinduism|Hindu]] epic ''[[Ramayana]]''. The ''Ramayana'' describes Mandodari as beautiful, pious and righteous. She is extolled as one of the ''panchakanya'' ("five virgins"), the recital of whose names is believed to dispel sin.

Mandodari was the daughter of the King of [[Asura]]s (demons), [[Mayasura]] and the ''[[apsara]]'' Hema. Mandodari bore Ravana three sons: [[Meghanada]] (Indrajit), [[Atikaya]] and [[Akshayakumara]]. According to some Ramayana adaptations, Mandodari was also the mother of [[Sita]], the wife of [[Rama]] who was infamously kidnapped by Ravana.

Despite her husband's faults, Mandodari loves Ravana and advises him to follow the path of righteousness. Mandodari repeatedly advises Ravana to return Sita to Rama, but her sagacious advice falls on deaf ears. Her love and loyalty to Ravana are also praised.

Different versions of the Ramayana record her ill-treatment at the hands of Rama's monkey generals to disturb a sacrifice by Ravana or to destroy her chastity, which protected Ravana's life. An incident also records how [[Hanuman]] tricked her to disclose the location of a magical arrow, which would be used by Rama to kill Ravana. After Ravana's death, [[Vibhishana]] - Ravana's younger brother who had joined forces with Rama and was responsible for Ravana's death - marries Mandodari on the advice of Rama.

==Birth==
''Uttara Ramayana'' narrates a story about the birth of Mandodari. [[Mayasura]], the son of Kashayapa was married to the apsara Hema. They had two sons Mayavi and Dundubhi, but grieved for a daughter, so they started performing penance to seek the favour of god Shiva.<ref name = "Mani476"/>

Meanwhile, an apasara named Madhura arrived at Mount Kailash – the abode of Shiva, to pay her respects to him. In absence of his wife Parvati, Madhura had “clandestine” coitus with Shiva. When Parvati returned, she found traces of ashes from Shiva’s body on the breasts of Madhura. Agitated, Parvati cursed Madhura to live in a well as a frog for twelve years. Shiva consoled Madhura and blessed her that she would become a beautiful woman after twelve years and be married to a great valorous man. After twelve years, Madhura became a beautiful maiden again and cried out loudly from the well. Maya and Hema who were performing penance nearby answered her call and adopted her as their daughter. They brought her up as Mandodari.<ref name = "Mani476"/>

==Marriage and later life==
[[File:Ravana.jpg|thumb|200px|Mandodari married the demon-king of Lanka, Ravana.]]
Once, Ravana came to the house of Maya and fell in love with Mandodari. Mandodari and Ravana were soon married with Vedic rites. Mandodari bore Ravana three sons: [[Meghanada]], [[Atikaya]] and [[Akshayakumara]].<ref name = "Mani476"/>

Despite Ravana's faults, Mandodari loved him and was proud of his strength. She was aware of Ravana's weakness towards women.<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/><ref name="ayyer"/> A righteous woman, Mandodari tries to lead Ravana to righteousness, but Ravana always ignores the discerning advice of his wife. She advises him to not to subdue the ''[[Navagraha]]'', the nine celestial beings that govern one's destiny and not to seduce [[Vedavati]], who would be re-born as Sita and cause the destruction of Ravana.<ref name="ayyer"/>

Ravana kidnaps [[Sita]], the wife of the exiled prince of [[Ayodhya]], [[Rama]] - an incarnation of god [[Vishnu]]. Mandodari advises Ravana to return Sita to Rama, but to no avail. Mandodari knows it will this lust that would bring the downfall of Ravana.<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/><ref name="ayyer"/>

Mandodari is described as a beautiful woman in Valmiki’s Ramayana. When [[Hanuman]] - the monkey messenger of Rama - comes to Lanka in search of Sita, he is stupefied by Mandodari’s beauty when he enters Ravana’s bed chambers and mistakes Mandodari as Sita.<ref name = "Mani476">Mani p. 476</ref> When Hanuman finally tracks Sita, he finds Ravana threatening to kill Sita unless she marries him. Ravana raises his sword to behead Sita when she refused, Mandodari saves Sita by holding Ravana's hand. Mandodari says that murder of a woman is a heinous sin and thus Ravana should not kill Sita. She requests Ravana to entertain himself with his other wives and leave the thought of having Sita as his wife. Ravana spares Sita's life, but does not forgo his wish to marry Sita.<ref>Wheeler p. 338</ref> Though Mandodari considers Sita inferior to her in beauty and ancestry, Mandodari acknowledges Sita's devotion to Rama and compares her to goddesses like [[Sachi]] and [[Rohini (nakshatra)|Rohini]].<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/>

When all attempts for a peaceful return of Sita fail, Rama declares war on Ravana's Lanka. Before the final battle against Rama, Mandodari makes a last attempt to dissuade Ravana, but to no avail.<ref>Wheeler p. 365</ref> Finally, Mandodari stands by her husband in the final battle like an obedient and faithful wife,<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/> though she also advises her son Meghanada alias Indrajit ("One who had conquered [[Indra]] - the god-king of heaven") to not to fight Rama.<ref>Wheeler p. 370</ref>

The ''Valmiki Ramayana'' narrates: finally when all of Ravana's sons and warriors die, Ravana organizes a ''[[yajna]]'' ("fire sacrifice") to assure his victory. Rama sends a troop of monkeys headed by Hanuman and the monkey prince [[Angada]] to destroy this ''yajna''. The monkeys create havoc in Ravana's palace, but Ravana continues the ''yajna''. Finally, Angada drags Mandodari by her hair in front of Ravana. Mandodari pleads to her husband to save her and reminds him what Rama is doing for his wife. The enraged Ravana abandons the ''yajna'' and strikes Angada with his sword. With the ''yajna'' disturbed, Angada's purpose is served and he leaves Mandodari and escapes. Mandodari again implores Ravana to surrender Sita to Rama, but he refuses.<ref>Wheeler pp. 373-4</ref> Other Ramayana adaptations present more gruesome description of the incident. The ''[[Krittivasi Ramayan]]'' narrates that the monkeys dragged Mandodari and tore off her clothes. In ''Bicitra Ramayana'', it is Hanuman who humiliates Mandodari. The Thai adaptation ''[[Ramakien]]'' narrates of a symbolic rape of Mandodari. Hanuman sleeps with her in the form of Ravana and destroys her chastity, which protected Ravana's life.<ref>Lutgendorf p. 211</ref>

Finally, Ravana fights the final duel with Rama. Rama initially fails to kill Ravana with his ordinary arrows, but finally kills with a magical arrow. While Valmiki's Ramayana narrates that the magical arrow was given to Rama by Indra, in other versions often the magical arrow is hidden in Mandodari's bed chambers or under her bed. While Mandodari is engrossed in worshipping goddess [[Parvati]] for Ravana's well-being during the time, Hanuman disguised as a [[Brahmin]] comes to the place and after winning her confidence, tricks her into revealing the secret location of the arrow. Hanuman then seizes this arrow and gives it to Rama, leading to Ravana's end.<ref>Lutgendorf pp. 154, 217</ref> Then, Mandodari appears at the death scene of Ravana - in a disarrayed state and laments his death.<ref name = "Mukherjee39">Mukherjee p. 39</ref><ref>Wheeler p. 382</ref> In this battle, Mandodari loses her husband, her sons and her kinsmen.<ref name="Bhattacharya"/>

After the death of Ravana, Rama advises Vibhishana to take Mandodari as his wife, even though he already had a wife. A theory suggests that Ravana's race may have had matrilineal families and thus, to restore order in the kingdom after Ravana's death, it was necessary for Vibhishana to marry the reigning queen to get the right to rule.<ref name = "Shashi"/> Another theory suggests it may be a non-[[Aryan]] custom to marry the reigning queen.<ref name="Bhattacharya"/> The marriage between Mandodari and Vibhishana is purely an "act of statesmanship", rather than a marriage based on their "mutual sexual interference".<ref name = "Shashi"/> Mandodari may have agreed to marry Vibhishana, her younger brother-in-law as this would lead the kingdom to prosperity and stability as allies of Rama's Ayodhya and she would continue to have say in governance.<ref name="Bhattacharya"/> Another reason of the marriage could that an alternative to such a marriage could be suicide for Mandodari, which was averted by Rama.<ref name = "Shashi">Shashi p. 222</ref>

==Mother of Sita?==
[[Image:Ravi Varma-Ravana Sita Jathayu.jpg|thumb|right|Ravana abducts Rama's wife, Sita. According to some ''Ramayana'' adaptations, Ravana was abducting his own daughter, from a union with Mandodari.]]
Though Valmiki's Ramayana does not record Mandodari as being the mother of Sita, some later adaptations of the Ramayana depict Mandodari as the mother of Sita or at least the cause of the latter's birth.

The ''Adbhuta Ramayana'' narrates: Ravana used to store the blood of sages he killed in a large pot. Once sage Gritsamada was practicing penance to acquire goddess Lakshmi as his daughter and stored milk from Darbha grass, purified with [[mantra]]s in a pot so that Lakshmi would inhabit it. Ravana poured the milk from this pot into his blood pot. Mandodari was frustrated seeing the evil deeds of Ravana, so she decides to commit suicide by drinking contents of the blood-pot, which is described to be more poisonous than poison, but instead of dying, Mandodari gets pregnant with the incarnation of Lakshmi due to the power of Gritsamada's milk. Mandodari buries the foetus in [[Kurukshetra]], where it is discovered by Janaka, who named her Sita.<ref name = "Mani721"/><ref>Shashi pp. 14-15, Sarga VIII of Adbhuta Ramayana</ref>

The ''[[Devi Bhagavata Purana]]'' says: when Ravana wanted to marry Mandodari, Maya warned him that her horoscope indicated her first-born would destroy her clan and should be killed. Ignoring Maya’s advice, Ravana buried his first child by Mandodari in a casket in Janaka’s city, where it was discovered and grew up as Sita.<ref name = "Mani721"/> [[Jain]] adaptations of the Ramayana like ''Vasudevahindi'', ''Uttara-purana'' et al. also state that Sita was the daughter of Ravana and Mandodari, and was abandoned as she was prophesied to be the cause of the end of Ravana and his family.<ref>Shashi p. 237</ref>

In the [[Malay language|Malay]] adaptation ''Seri Rama'' and [[Java]]nese ''Rama Keling'', Ravana wants to poccess Mandodari, the mother of Rama, but instead marries a pseudo-Mandodari, who looks like the real one. Rama's father has a union with this pseudo-Mandodari, resulting in the birth of Sita, who is nominally Ravana's daughter.<ref>Shashi p. 243</ref>

According to the ''Ananda Ramayana'', king Padmaksha got Padma - an incarnate of goddess Lakshmi as his daughter. When her marriage was organized, Rakshasas (demons) killed the king. The grief-stricken Padma jumped into fire. Ravana discovered her body - which had turned into five jewels - in the fire and took it to Lanka sealed in a box. One day, Mandodari opened the box and fought Padma inside it and advised Ravana to cast off the box containing the ill-fated Padma, who led to the doom of her father. When the lid of the box was closed, Padma cursed Ravana that she will return to Lanka and cause his doom. Ravana buried the box in the city of Janaka, who discovered Padma and brought her up as Sita.<ref name = "Mani721">Mani p. 721</ref>

==Assessment==
<blockquote>
Ahalya Draupadi Kunti Tara Mandodari tatha 
panchakanya smare nityam mahapataka nashanam 
 
Remembering ever the virgins five -[[Ahalya]], [[Draupadi]], [[Kunti]], [[Tara (Ramayana)|Tara]] and Mandodari 
Destroys the greatest of sins.<ref name="panchakanya">{{cite journal|last=Devika|first=V.R.|title=Women of substance: Ahalya|journal=[[The Week (Indian magazine)|The Week]]|date = October 29, 2006|volume = 24|issue = 48|page = 52}}</ref>
</blockquote>

Orthodox Hindus remember the ''panchakanya'' - the five virgins or maidens in this daily prayer, though none of them is considered an ideal woman, who could be emulated.<ref>Mukherjee p. 36</ref><ref name = "Mukherjee48ff">Mukherjee pp. 48-9</ref> Mandodari with Ahalya and Tara belong to the ''Ramayana'', while the rest are from the ''[[Mahabharata]]''.<ref name="Bhattacharya">{{cite web|url=http://www.boloji.com/hinduism/panchkanya/pk01.htm|title=Panchkanya: Women of Substance|last=Bhattacharya|first=Pradip|date=1999-2010|publisher=Boloji Media Inc|accessdate=15 June 2010}}</ref> Among the five [[mahabhuta|elements]], Mandodari is equated to water - "turbulent on the surface and deep in her spiritual quest".<ref name="ayyer"/> The writer Dhanalakshmi Ayyer says:<ref name="ayyer"/>
<blockquote>
Her story is a reminder that the universal denigration of a group, based on the behaviour of a few, cannot cloud the greatness of the individual. Mandodari defies the stereotype of this racism. She is simple, unswerving and self-effacing, driven by the light of knowledge which gives meaning to solid materialism in an age that is shrouded by impulse, passion and desire. She is the instrument that awakens the mind and counsels reason when irrationality becomes the core being. That she goes unheard and unheeded does not change her path... To her, the [[dharmic]] part is inward-looking, while the role of the dutiful wife is the external self. Mandodari thought that her duty to her husband on issues of morals and values ended with her telling him what she thought of his actions. She neither put up any brave fight to stop him nor considered it her duty to do so.
</blockquote>

Mandodari's role is short in the Ramayana. She is described as a pious and righteous royal lady.<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/><ref name="ayyer">{{cite journal|last=Ayyer|first=Dhanalakshmi |title=Women of substance: Mandodari : Pure as water|journal=[[The Week (Indian magazine)|The Week]]|date = October 29, 2006|volume = 24|issue = 48|pages = 50–1}}</ref> Compared to the rest of the ''panchakanya'', Mukherjee considers Mandodari's life as "less colourful and eventful". He adds: "Mandodari seldom got prominence ... Her image lacks substance and fades quickly",<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/> though he stresses on her love and loyalty against her husband.<ref name = "Mukherjee48ff"/> Pradip Bhattacharya, author of the book ''Panchkanya: Women of Substance'' notes that: "There is hardly anything special that Valmiki (Ramayana) has written about her (Mandodari) except that she warns her husband to return Sita and has enough influence to prevent his raping her."<ref name="Bhattacharya"/>

==References==
; Notes
{{Reflist|2}}

; Books
* {{cite book|last=Lutgendorf|first=Philip|title=Hanuman's tale: the messages of a divine monkey|year=2007|publisher=Oxford University Press |location=US}}
*{{ cite book|author = Mani, Vettam|title = Puranic Encyclopaedia: A Comprehensive Dictionary With Special Reference to the Epic and Puranic Literature|publisher = Motilal Banarsidass|year = 1975|location = Delhi|isbn = 0842-60822-2}}
* {{cite book|last=Mukherjee|first=Prabhati|title=Hindu Women: Normative Models |year=1999|publisher=Orient Blackswan|location=Calcutta|isbn=81 250 1699 6}}
* {{cite book|last=Shashi|first=S. S.|title=Encyclopaedia Indica: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh|series=Encyclopaedia Indica|volume=21-35|year=1998|publisher=Anmol Publications PVT. LTD}}
* {{cite book|last=Wheeler|first=James Talboys |title=The History of India from the Earliest Ages: The Rámáyana and the Brahmanic period|volume=II|year=1869|publisher=N. Trübner|location=London|url = http://books.google.co.in/books?id=C1DRAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA373&dq=mandodari+Angada&as_brr=3&cd=2#v=snippet&q=mandodari%20&f=false}}

{{Ramayana}}
{{HinduMythology}}

[[Category:Characters in the Ramayana]]

[[id:Mandodari]]
[[ja:マンドーダリー]]
[[ru:Мандодари]]
[[th:นางมณโฑ]]

Mandodari

2010-09-23T18:00:14Z

DBaba: /* Mother of Sita? */

{{Hdeity infobox 
| Image = Ravi Varma-Lady Giving Alms at the Temple.jpg
| Image_size = 230px
| Caption = "Lady Giving Alms at the Temple" by [[Raja Ravi Varma]], used by ''the Week'' to illustrate Mandodari<ref name="ayyer"/>
| Name = Mandodari
| Affiliation = [[Rakshasa]], ''Panchakanya''
| Devanagari = मंदोदरी
| Sanskrit_Transliteration = Mandodarī
| Abode = [[Lanka]]
| Consort = [[Ravana]], [[Vibhisana]]
}}

'''Mandodari''' ({{lang-sa|मंदोदरी}} {{IAST|Mandodarī}}, lit. "soft-bellied";<ref>[http://books.google.co.in/books?id=1jRWziY9m4cC&pg=PA429&dq=mandodari+hipped&hl=en&ei=8YkUTL3ZJoi4rAeLjvWlCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=mandodari%20hipped&f=false Rāmopākhyāna: the story of Rāma in the Mahābhārata p.429]</ref> [[Tamil language|Tamil]]: Montotari; [[Khmer language|Khmer]]: Mandogiri; [[Malay language|Malay]]: Mandudaki; [[Thai language|Thai]]: Mantho Dewi) is the Queen Consort of [[Ravana]], the [[Rakshasa|demon]] king of [[Lanka]], according to the [[Hinduism|Hindu]] epic ''[[Ramayana]]''. The ''Ramayana'' describes Mandodari as a beautiful, pious and righteous. She is extolled as one of the ''panchakanya'' ("five virgins"), the recital of whose names is believed to dispel sin.

Mandodari was the daughter of the King of [[Asura]]s (demons), [[Mayasura]] and the ''[[apsara]]'' Hema. Mandodari bore Ravana three sons: [[Meghanada]] (Indrajit), [[Atikaya]] and [[Akshayakumara]]. According to some Ramayana adaptations, Mandodari was also the mother of [[Sita]], the wife of [[Rama]] who was infamously kidnapped by Ravana.

Despite her husband's faults, Mandodari loves Ravana and advises him to follow the path of righteousness. Mandodari repeatedly advises Ravana to return Sita to Rama, but her sagacious advice falls on deaf ears. Her love and loyalty to Ravana are also praised.

Different versions of the Ramayana record her ill-treatment at the hands of Rama's monkey generals to disturb a sacrifice by Ravana or to destroy her chastity, which protected Ravana's life. An incident also records how [[Hanuman]] tricked her to disclose the location of a magical arrow, which would be used by Rama to kill Ravana. After Ravana's death, [[Vibhishana]] - Ravana's younger brother who had joined forces with Rama and was responsible for Ravana's death - marries Mandodari on the advice of Rama.

==Birth==
''Uttara Ramayana'' narrates a story about the birth of Mandodari. [[Mayasura]], the son of Kashayapa was married to the apsara Hema. They had two sons Mayavi and Dundubhi, but grieved for a daughter, so they started performing penance to seek the favour of god Shiva.<ref name = "Mani476"/>

Meanwhile, an apasara named Madhura arrived at Mount Kailash – the abode of Shiva, to pay her respects to him. In absence of his wife Parvati, Madhura had “clandestine” coitus with Shiva. When Parvati returned, she found traces of ashes from Shiva’s body on the breasts of Madhura. Agitated, Parvati cursed Madhura to live in a well as a frog for twelve years. Shiva consoled Madhura and blessed her that she would become a beautiful woman after twelve years and be married to a great valorous man. After twelve years, Madhura became a beautiful maiden again and cried out loudly from the well. Maya and Hema who were performing penance nearby answered her call and adopted her as their daughter. They brought her up as Mandodari.<ref name = "Mani476"/>

==Marriage and later life==
[[File:Ravana.jpg|thumb|200px|Mandodari married the demon-king of Lanka, Ravana.]]
Once, Ravana came to the house of Maya and fell in love with Mandodari. Mandodari and Ravana were soon married with Vedic rites. Mandodari bore Ravana three sons: [[Meghanada]], [[Atikaya]] and [[Akshayakumara]].<ref name = "Mani476"/>

Despite Ravana's faults, Mandodari loved him and was proud of his strength. She was aware of Ravana's weakness towards women.<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/><ref name="ayyer"/> A righteous woman, Mandodari tries to lead Ravana to righteousness, but Ravana always ignores the discerning advice of his wife. She advises him to not to subdue the ''[[Navagraha]]'', the nine celestial beings that govern one's destiny and not to seduce [[Vedavati]], who would be re-born as Sita and cause the destruction of Ravana.<ref name="ayyer"/>

Ravana kidnaps [[Sita]], the wife of the exiled prince of [[Ayodhya]], [[Rama]] - an incarnation of god [[Vishnu]]. Mandodari advises Ravana to return Sita to Rama, but to no avail. Mandodari knows it will this lust that would bring the downfall of Ravana.<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/><ref name="ayyer"/>

Mandodari is described as a beautiful woman in Valmiki’s Ramayana. When [[Hanuman]] - the monkey messenger of Rama - comes to Lanka in search of Sita, he is stupefied by Mandodari’s beauty when he enters Ravana’s bed chambers and mistakes Mandodari as Sita.<ref name = "Mani476">Mani p. 476</ref> When Hanuman finally tracks Sita, he finds Ravana threatening to kill Sita unless she marries him. Ravana raises his sword to behead Sita when she refused, Mandodari saves Sita by holding Ravana's hand. Mandodari says that murder of a woman is a heinous sin and thus Ravana should not kill Sita. She requests Ravana to entertain himself with his other wives and leave the thought of having Sita as his wife. Ravana spares Sita's life, but does not forgo his wish to marry Sita.<ref>Wheeler p. 338</ref> Though Mandodari considers Sita inferior to her in beauty and ancestry, Mandodari acknowledges Sita's devotion to Rama and compares her to goddesses like [[Sachi]] and [[Rohini (nakshatra)|Rohini]].<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/>

When all attempts for a peaceful return of Sita fail, Rama declares war on Ravana's Lanka. Before the final battle against Rama, Mandodari makes a last attempt to dissuade Ravana, but to no avail.<ref>Wheeler p. 365</ref> Finally, Mandodari stands by her husband in the final battle like an obedient and faithful wife,<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/> though she also advises her son Meghanada alias Indrajit ("One who had conquered [[Indra]] - the god-king of heaven") to not to fight Rama.<ref>Wheeler p. 370</ref>

The ''Valmiki Ramayana'' narrates: finally when all of Ravana's sons and warriors die, Ravana organizes a ''[[yajna]]'' ("fire sacrifice") to assure his victory. Rama sends a troop of monkeys headed by Hanuman and the monkey prince [[Angada]] to destroy this ''yajna''. The monkeys create havoc in Ravana's palace, but Ravana continues the ''yajna''. Finally, Angada drags Mandodari by her hair in front of Ravana. Mandodari pleads to her husband to save her and reminds him what Rama is doing for his wife. The enraged Ravana abandons the ''yajna'' and strikes Angada with his sword. With the ''yajna'' disturbed, Angada's purpose is served and he leaves Mandodari and escapes. Mandodari again implores Ravana to surrender Sita to Rama, but he refuses.<ref>Wheeler pp. 373-4</ref> Other Ramayana adaptations present more gruesome description of the incident. The ''[[Krittivasi Ramayan]]'' narrates that the monkeys dragged Mandodari and tore off her clothes. In ''Bicitra Ramayana'', it is Hanuman who humiliates Mandodari. The Thai adaptation ''[[Ramakien]]'' narrates of a symbolic rape of Mandodari. Hanuman sleeps with her in the form of Ravana and destroys her chastity, which protected Ravana's life.<ref>Lutgendorf p. 211</ref>

Finally, Ravana fights the final duel with Rama. Rama initially fails to kill Ravana with his ordinary arrows, but finally kills with a magical arrow. While Valmiki's Ramayana narrates that the magical arrow was given to Rama by Indra, in other versions often the magical arrow is hidden in Mandodari's bed chambers or under her bed. While Mandodari is engrossed in worshipping goddess [[Parvati]] for Ravana's well-being during the time, Hanuman disguised as a [[Brahmin]] comes to the place and after winning her confidence, tricks her into revealing the secret location of the arrow. Hanuman then seizes this arrow and gives it to Rama, leading to Ravana's end.<ref>Lutgendorf pp. 154, 217</ref> Then, Mandodari appears at the death scene of Ravana - in a disarrayed state and laments his death.<ref name = "Mukherjee39">Mukherjee p. 39</ref><ref>Wheeler p. 382</ref> In this battle, Mandodari loses her husband, her sons and her kinsmen.<ref name="Bhattacharya"/>

After the death of Ravana, Rama advises Vibhishana to take Mandodari as his wife, even though he already had a wife. A theory suggests that Ravana's race may have had matrilineal families and thus, to restore order in the kingdom after Ravana's death, it was necessary for Vibhishana to marry the reigning queen to get the right to rule.<ref name = "Shashi"/> Another theory suggests it may be a non-[[Aryan]] custom to marry the reigning queen.<ref name="Bhattacharya"/> The marriage between Mandodari and Vibhishana is purely an "act of statesmanship", rather than a marriage based on their "mutual sexual interference".<ref name = "Shashi"/> Mandodari may have agreed to marry Vibhishana, her younger brother-in-law as this would lead the kingdom to prosperity and stability as allies of Rama's Ayodhya and she would continue to have say in governance.<ref name="Bhattacharya"/> Another reason of the marriage could that an alternative to such a marriage could be suicide for Mandodari, which was averted by Rama.<ref name = "Shashi">Shashi p. 222</ref>

==Mother of Sita?==
[[Image:Ravi Varma-Ravana Sita Jathayu.jpg|thumb|right|Ravana abducts Rama's wife, Sita. According to some ''Ramayana'' adaptations, Ravana was abducting his own daughter, from a union with Mandodari.]]
Though Valmiki's Ramayana does not record Mandodari as being the mother of Sita, some later adaptations of the Ramayana depict Mandodari as the mother of Sita or at least the cause of the latter's birth.

The ''Adbhuta Ramayana'' narrates: Ravana used to store the blood of sages he killed in a large pot. Once sage Gritsamada was practicing penance to acquire goddess Lakshmi as his daughter and stored milk from Darbha grass, purified with [[mantra]]s in a pot so that Lakshmi would inhabit it. Ravana poured the milk from this pot into his blood pot. Mandodari was frustrated seeing the evil deeds of Ravana, so she decides to commit suicide by drinking contents of the blood-pot, which is described to be more poisonous than poison, but instead of dying, Mandodari gets pregnant with the incarnation of Lakshmi due to the power of Gritsamada's milk. Mandodari buries the foetus in [[Kurukshetra]], where it is discovered by Janaka, who named her Sita.<ref name = "Mani721"/><ref>Shashi pp. 14-15, Sarga VIII of Adbhuta Ramayana</ref>

The ''[[Devi Bhagavata Purana]]'' says: when Ravana wanted to marry Mandodari, Maya warned him that her horoscope indicated her first-born would destroy her clan and should be killed. Ignoring Maya’s advice, Ravana buried his first child by Mandodari in a casket in Janaka’s city, where it was discovered and grew up as Sita.<ref name = "Mani721"/> [[Jain]] adaptations of the Ramayana like ''Vasudevahindi'', ''Uttara-purana'' et al. also state that Sita was the daughter of Ravana and Mandodari, and was abandoned as she was prophesied to be the cause of the end of Ravana and his family.<ref>Shashi p. 237</ref>

In the [[Malay language|Malay]] adaptation ''Seri Rama'' and [[Java]]nese ''Rama Keling'', Ravana wants to poccess Mandodari, the mother of Rama, but instead marries a pseudo-Mandodari, who looks like the real one. Rama's father has a union with this pseudo-Mandodari, resulting in the birth of Sita, who is nominally Ravana's daughter.<ref>Shashi p. 243</ref>

According to the ''Ananda Ramayana'', king Padmaksha got Padma - an incarnate of goddess Lakshmi as his daughter. When her marriage was organized, Rakshasas (demons) killed the king. The grief-stricken Padma jumped into fire. Ravana discovered her body - which had turned into five jewels - in the fire and took it to Lanka sealed in a box. One day, Mandodari opened the box and fought Padma inside it and advised Ravana to cast off the box containing the ill-fated Padma, who led to the doom of her father. When the lid of the box was closed, Padma cursed Ravana that she will return to Lanka and cause his doom. Ravana buried the box in the city of Janaka, who discovered Padma and brought her up as Sita.<ref name = "Mani721">Mani p. 721</ref>

==Assessment==
<blockquote>
Ahalya Draupadi Kunti Tara Mandodari tatha 
panchakanya smare nityam mahapataka nashanam 
 
Remembering ever the virgins five -[[Ahalya]], [[Draupadi]], [[Kunti]], [[Tara (Ramayana)|Tara]] and Mandodari 
Destroys the greatest of sins.<ref name="panchakanya">{{cite journal|last=Devika|first=V.R.|title=Women of substance: Ahalya|journal=[[The Week (Indian magazine)|The Week]]|date = October 29, 2006|volume = 24|issue = 48|page = 52}}</ref>
</blockquote>

Orthodox Hindus remember the ''panchakanya'' - the five virgins or maidens in this daily prayer, though none of them is considered an ideal woman, who could be emulated.<ref>Mukherjee p. 36</ref><ref name = "Mukherjee48ff">Mukherjee pp. 48-9</ref> Mandodari with Ahalya and Tara belong to the ''Ramayana'', while the rest are from the ''[[Mahabharata]]''.<ref name="Bhattacharya">{{cite web|url=http://www.boloji.com/hinduism/panchkanya/pk01.htm|title=Panchkanya: Women of Substance|last=Bhattacharya|first=Pradip|date=1999-2010|publisher=Boloji Media Inc|accessdate=15 June 2010}}</ref> Among the five [[mahabhuta|elements]], Mandodari is equated to water - "turbulent on the surface and deep in her spiritual quest".<ref name="ayyer"/> The writer Dhanalakshmi Ayyer says:<ref name="ayyer"/>
<blockquote>
Her story is a reminder that the universal denigration of a group, based on the behaviour of a few, cannot cloud the greatness of the individual. Mandodari defies the stereotype of this racism. She is simple, unswerving and self-effacing, driven by the light of knowledge which gives meaning to solid materialism in an age that is shrouded by impulse, passion and desire. She is the instrument that awakens the mind and counsels reason when irrationality becomes the core being. That she goes unheard and unheeded does not change her path... To her, the [[dharmic]] part is inward-looking, while the role of the dutiful wife is the external self. Mandodari thought that her duty to her husband on issues of morals and values ended with her telling him what she thought of his actions. She neither put up any brave fight to stop him nor considered it her duty to do so.
</blockquote>

Mandodari's role is short in the Ramayana. She is described as a pious and righteous royal lady.<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/><ref name="ayyer">{{cite journal|last=Ayyer|first=Dhanalakshmi |title=Women of substance: Mandodari : Pure as water|journal=[[The Week (Indian magazine)|The Week]]|date = October 29, 2006|volume = 24|issue = 48|pages = 50–1}}</ref> Compared to the rest of the ''panchakanya'', Mukherjee considers Mandodari's life as "less colourful and eventful". He adds: "Mandodari seldom got prominence ... Her image lacks substance and fades quickly",<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/> though he stresses on her love and loyalty against her husband.<ref name = "Mukherjee48ff"/> Pradip Bhattacharya, author of the book ''Panchkanya: Women of Substance'' notes that: "There is hardly anything special that Valmiki (Ramayana) has written about her (Mandodari) except that she warns her husband to return Sita and has enough influence to prevent his raping her."<ref name="Bhattacharya"/>

==References==
; Notes
{{Reflist|2}}

; Books
* {{cite book|last=Lutgendorf|first=Philip|title=Hanuman's tale: the messages of a divine monkey|year=2007|publisher=Oxford University Press |location=US}}
*{{ cite book|author = Mani, Vettam|title = Puranic Encyclopaedia: A Comprehensive Dictionary With Special Reference to the Epic and Puranic Literature|publisher = Motilal Banarsidass|year = 1975|location = Delhi|isbn = 0842-60822-2}}
* {{cite book|last=Mukherjee|first=Prabhati|title=Hindu Women: Normative Models |year=1999|publisher=Orient Blackswan|location=Calcutta|isbn=81 250 1699 6}}
* {{cite book|last=Shashi|first=S. S.|title=Encyclopaedia Indica: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh|series=Encyclopaedia Indica|volume=21-35|year=1998|publisher=Anmol Publications PVT. LTD}}
* {{cite book|last=Wheeler|first=James Talboys |title=The History of India from the Earliest Ages: The Rámáyana and the Brahmanic period|volume=II|year=1869|publisher=N. Trübner|location=London|url = http://books.google.co.in/books?id=C1DRAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA373&dq=mandodari+Angada&as_brr=3&cd=2#v=snippet&q=mandodari%20&f=false}}

{{Ramayana}}
{{HinduMythology}}

[[Category:Characters in the Ramayana]]

[[id:Mandodari]]
[[ja:マンドーダリー]]
[[ru:Мандодари]]
[[th:นางมณโฑ]]

Mandodari

2010-09-23T17:53:53Z

DBaba:

{{Hdeity infobox 
| Image = Ravi Varma-Lady Giving Alms at the Temple.jpg
| Image_size = 230px
| Caption = "Lady Giving Alms at the Temple" by [[Raja Ravi Varma]], used by ''the Week'' to illustrate Mandodari<ref name="ayyer"/>
| Name = Mandodari
| Affiliation = [[Rakshasa]], ''Panchakanya''
| Devanagari = मंदोदरी
| Sanskrit_Transliteration = Mandodarī
| Abode = [[Lanka]]
| Consort = [[Ravana]], [[Vibhisana]]
}}

'''Mandodari''' ({{lang-sa|मंदोदरी}} {{IAST|Mandodarī}}, lit. "soft-bellied";<ref>[http://books.google.co.in/books?id=1jRWziY9m4cC&pg=PA429&dq=mandodari+hipped&hl=en&ei=8YkUTL3ZJoi4rAeLjvWlCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=mandodari%20hipped&f=false Rāmopākhyāna: the story of Rāma in the Mahābhārata p.429]</ref> [[Tamil language|Tamil]]: Montotari; [[Khmer language|Khmer]]: Mandogiri; [[Malay language|Malay]]: Mandudaki; [[Thai language|Thai]]: Mantho Dewi) is the Queen Consort of [[Ravana]], the [[Rakshasa|demon]] king of [[Lanka]], according to the [[Hinduism|Hindu]] epic ''[[Ramayana]]''. The ''Ramayana'' describes Mandodari as a beautiful, pious and righteous. She is extolled as one of the ''panchakanya'' ("five virgins"), the recital of whose names is believed to dispel sin.

Mandodari was the daughter of the King of [[Asura]]s (demons), [[Mayasura]] and the ''[[apsara]]'' Hema. Mandodari bore Ravana three sons: [[Meghanada]] (Indrajit), [[Atikaya]] and [[Akshayakumara]]. According to some Ramayana adaptations, Mandodari was also the mother of [[Sita]], the wife of [[Rama]] who was infamously kidnapped by Ravana.

Despite her husband's faults, Mandodari loves Ravana and advises him to follow the path of righteousness. Mandodari repeatedly advises Ravana to return Sita to Rama, but her sagacious advice falls on deaf ears. Her love and loyalty to Ravana are also praised.

Different versions of the Ramayana record her ill-treatment at the hands of Rama's monkey generals to disturb a sacrifice by Ravana or to destroy her chastity, which protected Ravana's life. An incident also records how [[Hanuman]] tricked her to disclose the location of a magical arrow, which would be used by Rama to kill Ravana. After Ravana's death, [[Vibhishana]] - Ravana's younger brother who had joined forces with Rama and was responsible for Ravana's death - marries Mandodari on the advice of Rama.

==Birth==
''Uttara Ramayana'' narrates a story about the birth of Mandodari. [[Mayasura]], the son of Kashayapa was married to the apsara Hema. They had two sons Mayavi and Dundubhi, but grieved for a daughter, so they started performing penance to seek the favour of god Shiva.<ref name = "Mani476"/>

Meanwhile, an apasara named Madhura arrived at Mount Kailash – the abode of Shiva, to pay her respects to him. In absence of his wife Parvati, Madhura had “clandestine” coitus with Shiva. When Parvati returned, she found traces of ashes from Shiva’s body on the breasts of Madhura. Agitated, Parvati cursed Madhura to live in a well as a frog for twelve years. Shiva consoled Madhura and blessed her that she would become a beautiful woman after twelve years and be married to a great valorous man. After twelve years, Madhura became a beautiful maiden again and cried out loudly from the well. Maya and Hema who were performing penance nearby answered her call and adopted her as their daughter. They brought her up as Mandodari.<ref name = "Mani476"/>

==Marriage and later life==
[[File:Ravana.jpg|thumb|200px|Mandodari married the demon-king of Lanka, Ravana.]]
Once, Ravana came to the house of Maya and fell in love with Mandodari. Mandodari and Ravana were soon married with Vedic rites. Mandodari bore Ravana three sons: [[Meghanada]], [[Atikaya]] and [[Akshayakumara]].<ref name = "Mani476"/>

Despite Ravana's faults, Mandodari loved him and was proud of his strength. She was aware of Ravana's weakness towards women.<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/><ref name="ayyer"/> A righteous woman, Mandodari tries to lead Ravana to righteousness, but Ravana always ignores the discerning advice of his wife. She advises him to not to subdue the ''[[Navagraha]]'', the nine celestial beings that govern one's destiny and not to seduce [[Vedavati]], who would be re-born as Sita and cause the destruction of Ravana.<ref name="ayyer"/>

Ravana kidnaps [[Sita]], the wife of the exiled prince of [[Ayodhya]], [[Rama]] - an incarnation of god [[Vishnu]]. Mandodari advises Ravana to return Sita to Rama, but to no avail. Mandodari knows it will this lust that would bring the downfall of Ravana.<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/><ref name="ayyer"/>

Mandodari is described as a beautiful woman in Valmiki’s Ramayana. When [[Hanuman]] - the monkey messenger of Rama - comes to Lanka in search of Sita, he is stupefied by Mandodari’s beauty when he enters Ravana’s bed chambers and mistakes Mandodari as Sita.<ref name = "Mani476">Mani p. 476</ref> When Hanuman finally tracks Sita, he finds Ravana threatening to kill Sita unless she marries him. Ravana raises his sword to behead Sita when she refused, Mandodari saves Sita by holding Ravana's hand. Mandodari says that murder of a woman is a heinous sin and thus Ravana should not kill Sita. She requests Ravana to entertain himself with his other wives and leave the thought of having Sita as his wife. Ravana spares Sita's life, but does not forgo his wish to marry Sita.<ref>Wheeler p. 338</ref> Though Mandodari considers Sita inferior to her in beauty and ancestry, Mandodari acknowledges Sita's devotion to Rama and compares her to goddesses like [[Sachi]] and [[Rohini (nakshatra)|Rohini]].<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/>

When all attempts for a peaceful return of Sita fail, Rama declares war on Ravana's Lanka. Before the final battle against Rama, Mandodari makes a last attempt to dissuade Ravana, but to no avail.<ref>Wheeler p. 365</ref> Finally, Mandodari stands by her husband in the final battle like an obedient and faithful wife,<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/> though she also advises her son Meghanada alias Indrajit ("One who had conquered [[Indra]] - the god-king of heaven") to not to fight Rama.<ref>Wheeler p. 370</ref>

The ''Valmiki Ramayana'' narrates: finally when all of Ravana's sons and warriors die, Ravana organizes a ''[[yajna]]'' ("fire sacrifice") to assure his victory. Rama sends a troop of monkeys headed by Hanuman and the monkey prince [[Angada]] to destroy this ''yajna''. The monkeys create havoc in Ravana's palace, but Ravana continues the ''yajna''. Finally, Angada drags Mandodari by her hair in front of Ravana. Mandodari pleads to her husband to save her and reminds him what Rama is doing for his wife. The enraged Ravana abandons the ''yajna'' and strikes Angada with his sword. With the ''yajna'' disturbed, Angada's purpose is served and he leaves Mandodari and escapes. Mandodari again implores Ravana to surrender Sita to Rama, but he refuses.<ref>Wheeler pp. 373-4</ref> Other Ramayana adaptations present more gruesome description of the incident. The ''[[Krittivasi Ramayan]]'' narrates that the monkeys dragged Mandodari and tore off her clothes. In ''Bicitra Ramayana'', it is Hanuman who humiliates Mandodari. The Thai adaptation ''[[Ramakien]]'' narrates of a symbolic rape of Mandodari. Hanuman sleeps with her in the form of Ravana and destroys her chastity, which protected Ravana's life.<ref>Lutgendorf p. 211</ref>

Finally, Ravana fights the final duel with Rama. Rama initially fails to kill Ravana with his ordinary arrows, but finally kills with a magical arrow. While Valmiki's Ramayana narrates that the magical arrow was given to Rama by Indra, in other versions often the magical arrow is hidden in Mandodari's bed chambers or under her bed. While Mandodari is engrossed in worshipping goddess [[Parvati]] for Ravana's well-being during the time, Hanuman disguised as a [[Brahmin]] comes to the place and after winning her confidence, tricks her into revealing the secret location of the arrow. Hanuman then seizes this arrow and gives it to Rama, leading to Ravana's end.<ref>Lutgendorf pp. 154, 217</ref> Then, Mandodari appears at the death scene of Ravana - in a disarrayed state and laments his death.<ref name = "Mukherjee39">Mukherjee p. 39</ref><ref>Wheeler p. 382</ref> In this battle, Mandodari loses her husband, her sons and her kinsmen.<ref name="Bhattacharya"/>

After the death of Ravana, Rama advises Vibhishana to take Mandodari as his wife, even though he already had a wife. A theory suggests that Ravana's race may have had matrilineal families and thus, to restore order in the kingdom after Ravana's death, it was necessary for Vibhishana to marry the reigning queen to get the right to rule.<ref name = "Shashi"/> Another theory suggests it may be a non-[[Aryan]] custom to marry the reigning queen.<ref name="Bhattacharya"/> The marriage between Mandodari and Vibhishana is purely an "act of statesmanship", rather than a marriage based on their "mutual sexual interference".<ref name = "Shashi"/> Mandodari may have agreed to marry Vibhishana, her younger brother-in-law as this would lead the kingdom to prosperity and stability as allies of Rama's Ayodhya and she would continue to have say in governance.<ref name="Bhattacharya"/> Another reason of the marriage could that an alternative to such a marriage could be suicide for Mandodari, which was averted by Rama.<ref name = "Shashi">Shashi p. 222</ref>

==Mother of Sita?==
[[Image:Ravi Varma-Ravana Sita Jathayu.jpg|thumb|right|Ravana abducting the wife of Rama - Sita, who according to some Ramayana adaptations, was Mandodari's and his own daughter.]]
Though Valmiki's Ramayana does not record Mandodari as being the mother of Sita, some later adaptations of the Ramayana depict Mandodari as the mother of Sita or at least the cause of the latter's birth.

The ''Adbhuta Ramayana'' narrates: Ravana used to store the blood of sages he killed in a large pot. Once sage Gritsamada was practicing penance to acquire goddess Lakshmi as his daughter and stored milk from Darbha grass, purified with [[mantra]]s in a pot so that Lakshmi would inhabit it. Ravana poured the milk from this pot into his blood pot. Mandodari was frustrated seeing the evil deeds of Ravana, so she decides to commit suicide by drinking contents of the blood-pot, which is described to be more poisonous than poison, but instead of dying, Mandodari gets pregnant with the incarnation of Lakshmi due to the power of Gritsamada's milk. Mandodari buries the foetus in [[Kurukshetra]], where it is discovered by Janaka, who named her Sita.<ref name = "Mani721"/><ref>Shashi pp. 14-15, Sarga VIII of Adbhuta Ramayana</ref>

The ''[[Devi Bhagavata Purana]]'' says: when Ravana wanted to marry Mandodari, Maya warned him that her horoscope indicated her first-born would destroy her clan and should be killed. Ignoring Maya’s advice, Ravana buried his first child by Mandodari in a casket in Janaka’s city, where it was discovered and grew up as Sita.<ref name = "Mani721"/> [[Jain]] adaptations of the Ramayana like ''Vasudevahindi'', ''Uttara-purana'' et al. also state that Sita was the daughter of Ravana and Mandodari, and was abandoned as she was prophesied to be the cause of the end of Ravana and his family.<ref>Shashi p. 237</ref>

In the [[Malay language|Malay]] adaptation ''Seri Rama'' and [[Java]]nese ''Rama Keling'', Ravana wants to poccess Mandodari, the mother of Rama, but instead marries a pseudo-Mandodari, who looks like the real one. Rama's father has a union with this pseudo-Mandodari, resulting in the birth of Sita, who is nominally Ravana's daughter.<ref>Shashi p. 243</ref>

According to the ''Ananda Ramayana'', king Padmaksha got Padma - an incarnate of goddess Lakshmi as his daughter. When her marriage was organized, Rakshasas (demons) killed the king. The grief-stricken Padma jumped into fire. Ravana discovered her body - which had turned into five jewels - in the fire and took it to Lanka sealed in a box. One day, Mandodari opened the box and fought Padma inside it and advised Ravana to cast off the box containing the ill-fated Padma, who led to the doom of her father. When the lid of the box was closed, Padma cursed Ravana that she will return to Lanka and cause his doom. Ravana buried the box in the city of Janaka, who discovered Padma and brought her up as Sita.<ref name = "Mani721">Mani p. 721</ref>

==Assessment==
<blockquote>
Ahalya Draupadi Kunti Tara Mandodari tatha 
panchakanya smare nityam mahapataka nashanam 
 
Remembering ever the virgins five -[[Ahalya]], [[Draupadi]], [[Kunti]], [[Tara (Ramayana)|Tara]] and Mandodari 
Destroys the greatest of sins.<ref name="panchakanya">{{cite journal|last=Devika|first=V.R.|title=Women of substance: Ahalya|journal=[[The Week (Indian magazine)|The Week]]|date = October 29, 2006|volume = 24|issue = 48|page = 52}}</ref>
</blockquote>

Orthodox Hindus remember the ''panchakanya'' - the five virgins or maidens in this daily prayer, though none of them is considered an ideal woman, who could be emulated.<ref>Mukherjee p. 36</ref><ref name = "Mukherjee48ff">Mukherjee pp. 48-9</ref> Mandodari with Ahalya and Tara belong to the ''Ramayana'', while the rest are from the ''[[Mahabharata]]''.<ref name="Bhattacharya">{{cite web|url=http://www.boloji.com/hinduism/panchkanya/pk01.htm|title=Panchkanya: Women of Substance|last=Bhattacharya|first=Pradip|date=1999-2010|publisher=Boloji Media Inc|accessdate=15 June 2010}}</ref> Among the five [[mahabhuta|elements]], Mandodari is equated to water - "turbulent on the surface and deep in her spiritual quest".<ref name="ayyer"/> The writer Dhanalakshmi Ayyer says:<ref name="ayyer"/>
<blockquote>
Her story is a reminder that the universal denigration of a group, based on the behaviour of a few, cannot cloud the greatness of the individual. Mandodari defies the stereotype of this racism. She is simple, unswerving and self-effacing, driven by the light of knowledge which gives meaning to solid materialism in an age that is shrouded by impulse, passion and desire. She is the instrument that awakens the mind and counsels reason when irrationality becomes the core being. That she goes unheard and unheeded does not change her path... To her, the [[dharmic]] part is inward-looking, while the role of the dutiful wife is the external self. Mandodari thought that her duty to her husband on issues of morals and values ended with her telling him what she thought of his actions. She neither put up any brave fight to stop him nor considered it her duty to do so.
</blockquote>

Mandodari's role is short in the Ramayana. She is described as a pious and righteous royal lady.<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/><ref name="ayyer">{{cite journal|last=Ayyer|first=Dhanalakshmi |title=Women of substance: Mandodari : Pure as water|journal=[[The Week (Indian magazine)|The Week]]|date = October 29, 2006|volume = 24|issue = 48|pages = 50–1}}</ref> Compared to the rest of the ''panchakanya'', Mukherjee considers Mandodari's life as "less colourful and eventful". He adds: "Mandodari seldom got prominence ... Her image lacks substance and fades quickly",<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/> though he stresses on her love and loyalty against her husband.<ref name = "Mukherjee48ff"/> Pradip Bhattacharya, author of the book ''Panchkanya: Women of Substance'' notes that: "There is hardly anything special that Valmiki (Ramayana) has written about her (Mandodari) except that she warns her husband to return Sita and has enough influence to prevent his raping her."<ref name="Bhattacharya"/>

==References==
; Notes
{{Reflist|2}}

; Books
* {{cite book|last=Lutgendorf|first=Philip|title=Hanuman's tale: the messages of a divine monkey|year=2007|publisher=Oxford University Press |location=US}}
*{{ cite book|author = Mani, Vettam|title = Puranic Encyclopaedia: A Comprehensive Dictionary With Special Reference to the Epic and Puranic Literature|publisher = Motilal Banarsidass|year = 1975|location = Delhi|isbn = 0842-60822-2}}
* {{cite book|last=Mukherjee|first=Prabhati|title=Hindu Women: Normative Models |year=1999|publisher=Orient Blackswan|location=Calcutta|isbn=81 250 1699 6}}
* {{cite book|last=Shashi|first=S. S.|title=Encyclopaedia Indica: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh|series=Encyclopaedia Indica|volume=21-35|year=1998|publisher=Anmol Publications PVT. LTD}}
* {{cite book|last=Wheeler|first=James Talboys |title=The History of India from the Earliest Ages: The Rámáyana and the Brahmanic period|volume=II|year=1869|publisher=N. Trübner|location=London|url = http://books.google.co.in/books?id=C1DRAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA373&dq=mandodari+Angada&as_brr=3&cd=2#v=snippet&q=mandodari%20&f=false}}

{{Ramayana}}
{{HinduMythology}}

[[Category:Characters in the Ramayana]]

[[id:Mandodari]]
[[ja:マンドーダリー]]
[[ru:Мандодари]]
[[th:นางมณโฑ]]

Mandodari

2010-09-23T17:47:18Z

DBaba:

{{Hdeity infobox 
| Image = Ravi Varma-Lady Giving Alms at the Temple.jpg
| Image_size = 230px
| Caption = "Lady Giving Alms at the Temple" by [[Raja Ravi Varma]], used by ''the Week'' to illustrate Mandodari<ref name="ayyer"/>
| Name = Mandodari
| Affiliation = [[Rakshasa]], ''Panchakanya''
| Devanagari = मंदोदरी
| Sanskrit_Transliteration = Mandodarī
| Abode = [[Lanka]]
| Consort = [[Ravana]], [[Vibhisana]]
}}

'''Mandodari''' ({{lang-sa|मंदोदरी}} {{IAST|Mandodarī}}, lit. "soft-bellied";<ref>[http://books.google.co.in/books?id=1jRWziY9m4cC&pg=PA429&dq=mandodari+hipped&hl=en&ei=8YkUTL3ZJoi4rAeLjvWlCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=mandodari%20hipped&f=false Rāmopākhyāna: the story of Rāma in the Mahābhārata p.429]</ref> [[Tamil language|Tamil]]: Montotari; [[Khmer language|Khmer]]: Mandogiri; [[Malay language|Malay]]: Mandudaki; [[Thai language|Thai]]: Mantho Dewi) is the Queen Consort of [[Ravana]], the [[Rakshasa|demon]] king of [[Lanka]], according to the [[Hinduism|Hindu]] epic ''[[Ramayana]]''. The ''Ramayana'' describes Mandodari as a beautiful, pious and righteous. She is extolled as one of the ''panchakanya'' ("five virgins/maidens"), remembering whose names is believed to destroy sin.

Mandodari was the daughter of the King of [[Asura]]s (demons), [[Mayasura]] and the ''[[apsara]]'' (celestial dancer) Hema. Mandodari bore Ravana three sons: [[Meghanada]] (Indrajit), [[Atikaya]] and [[Akshayakumara]]. According to some Ramayana adaptations, Mandodari was also the mother of [[Sita]], the wife of god [[Rama]] and the chief heroine of the Ramayana, who was kidnapped by Ravana and led to his destruction.

Despite her husband's faults, Mandodari loves Ravana and advises him to follow the path of righteousness. Mandodari repeatedly advises Ravana to return Sita to Rama, but her sagacious advice falls on deaf ears. Her love and loyalty to Ravana are also praised.

Different versions of the Ramayana record her ill-treatment at the hands of Rama's monkey generals to disturb a sacrifice by Ravana or to destroy her chastity, which protected Ravana's life. An incident also records how [[Hanuman]] tricked her to disclose the location of a magical arrow, which would be used by Rama to kill Ravana. After Ravana's death, [[Vibhishana]] - Ravana's younger brother who had joined forces with Rama and was responsible for Ravana's death - marries Mandodari on the advice of Rama.

==Birth==
''Uttara Ramayana'' narrates a story about the birth of Mandodari. [[Mayasura]], the son of Kashayapa was married to the apsara Hema. They had two sons Mayavi and Dundubhi, but grieved for a daughter, so they started performing penance to seek the favour of god Shiva.<ref name = "Mani476"/>

Meanwhile, an apasara named Madhura arrived at Mount Kailash – the abode of Shiva, to pay her respects to him. In absence of his wife Parvati, Madhura had “clandestine” coitus with Shiva. When Parvati returned, she found traces of ashes from Shiva’s body on the breasts of Madhura. Agitated, Parvati cursed Madhura to live in a well as a frog for twelve years. Shiva consoled Madhura and blessed her that she would become a beautiful woman after twelve years and be married to a great valorous man. After twelve years, Madhura became a beautiful maiden again and cried out loudly from the well. Maya and Hema who were performing penance nearby answered her call and adopted her as their daughter. They brought her up as Mandodari.<ref name = "Mani476"/>

==Marriage and later life==
[[File:Ravana.jpg|thumb|200px|Mandodari married the demon-king of Lanka, Ravana.]]
Once, Ravana came to the house of Maya and fell in love with Mandodari. Mandodari and Ravana were soon married with Vedic rites. Mandodari bore Ravana three sons: [[Meghanada]], [[Atikaya]] and [[Akshayakumara]].<ref name = "Mani476"/>

Despite Ravana's faults, Mandodari loved him and was proud of his strength. She was aware of Ravana's weakness towards women.<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/><ref name="ayyer"/> A righteous woman, Mandodari tries to lead Ravana to righteousness, but Ravana always ignores the discerning advice of his wife. She advises him to not to subdue the ''[[Navagraha]]'', the nine celestial beings that govern one's destiny and not to seduce [[Vedavati]], who would be re-born as Sita and cause the destruction of Ravana.<ref name="ayyer"/>

Ravana kidnaps [[Sita]], the wife of the exiled prince of [[Ayodhya]], [[Rama]] - an incarnation of god [[Vishnu]]. Mandodari advises Ravana to return Sita to Rama, but to no avail. Mandodari knows it will this lust that would bring the downfall of Ravana.<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/><ref name="ayyer"/>

Mandodari is described as a beautiful woman in Valmiki’s Ramayana. When [[Hanuman]] - the monkey messenger of Rama - comes to Lanka in search of Sita, he is stupefied by Mandodari’s beauty when he enters Ravana’s bed chambers and mistakes Mandodari as Sita.<ref name = "Mani476">Mani p. 476</ref> When Hanuman finally tracks Sita, he finds Ravana threatening to kill Sita unless she marries him. Ravana raises his sword to behead Sita when she refused, Mandodari saves Sita by holding Ravana's hand. Mandodari says that murder of a woman is a heinous sin and thus Ravana should not kill Sita. She requests Ravana to entertain himself with his other wives and leave the thought of having Sita as his wife. Ravana spares Sita's life, but does not forgo his wish to marry Sita.<ref>Wheeler p. 338</ref> Though Mandodari considers Sita inferior to her in beauty and ancestry, Mandodari acknowledges Sita's devotion to Rama and compares her to goddesses like [[Sachi]] and [[Rohini (nakshatra)|Rohini]].<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/>

When all attempts for a peaceful return of Sita fail, Rama declares war on Ravana's Lanka. Before the final battle against Rama, Mandodari makes a last attempt to dissuade Ravana, but to no avail.<ref>Wheeler p. 365</ref> Finally, Mandodari stands by her husband in the final battle like an obedient and faithful wife,<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/> though she also advises her son Meghanada alias Indrajit ("One who had conquered [[Indra]] - the god-king of heaven") to not to fight Rama.<ref>Wheeler p. 370</ref>

The ''Valmiki Ramayana'' narrates: finally when all of Ravana's sons and warriors die, Ravana organizes a ''[[yajna]]'' ("fire sacrifice") to assure his victory. Rama sends a troop of monkeys headed by Hanuman and the monkey prince [[Angada]] to destroy this ''yajna''. The monkeys create havoc in Ravana's palace, but Ravana continues the ''yajna''. Finally, Angada drags Mandodari by her hair in front of Ravana. Mandodari pleads to her husband to save her and reminds him what Rama is doing for his wife. The enraged Ravana abandons the ''yajna'' and strikes Angada with his sword. With the ''yajna'' disturbed, Angada's purpose is served and he leaves Mandodari and escapes. Mandodari again implores Ravana to surrender Sita to Rama, but he refuses.<ref>Wheeler pp. 373-4</ref> Other Ramayana adaptations present more gruesome description of the incident. The ''[[Krittivasi Ramayan]]'' narrates that the monkeys dragged Mandodari and tore off her clothes. In ''Bicitra Ramayana'', it is Hanuman who humiliates Mandodari. The Thai adaptation ''[[Ramakien]]'' narrates of a symbolic rape of Mandodari. Hanuman sleeps with her in the form of Ravana and destroys her chastity, which protected Ravana's life.<ref>Lutgendorf p. 211</ref>

Finally, Ravana fights the final duel with Rama. Rama initially fails to kill Ravana with his ordinary arrows, but finally kills with a magical arrow. While Valmiki's Ramayana narrates that the magical arrow was given to Rama by Indra, in other versions often the magical arrow is hidden in Mandodari's bed chambers or under her bed. While Mandodari is engrossed in worshipping goddess [[Parvati]] for Ravana's well-being during the time, Hanuman disguised as a [[Brahmin]] comes to the place and after winning her confidence, tricks her into revealing the secret location of the arrow. Hanuman then seizes this arrow and gives it to Rama, leading to Ravana's end.<ref>Lutgendorf pp. 154, 217</ref> Then, Mandodari appears at the death scene of Ravana - in a disarrayed state and laments his death.<ref name = "Mukherjee39">Mukherjee p. 39</ref><ref>Wheeler p. 382</ref> In this battle, Mandodari loses her husband, her sons and her kinsmen.<ref name="Bhattacharya"/>

After the death of Ravana, Rama advises Vibhishana to take Mandodari as his wife, even though he already had a wife. A theory suggests that Ravana's race may have had matrilineal families and thus, to restore order in the kingdom after Ravana's death, it was necessary for Vibhishana to marry the reigning queen to get the right to rule.<ref name = "Shashi"/> Another theory suggests it may be a non-[[Aryan]] custom to marry the reigning queen.<ref name="Bhattacharya"/> The marriage between Mandodari and Vibhishana is purely an "act of statesmanship", rather than a marriage based on their "mutual sexual interference".<ref name = "Shashi"/> Mandodari may have agreed to marry Vibhishana, her younger brother-in-law as this would lead the kingdom to prosperity and stability as allies of Rama's Ayodhya and she would continue to have say in governance.<ref name="Bhattacharya"/> Another reason of the marriage could that an alternative to such a marriage could be suicide for Mandodari, which was averted by Rama.<ref name = "Shashi">Shashi p. 222</ref>

==Mother of Sita?==
[[Image:Ravi Varma-Ravana Sita Jathayu.jpg|thumb|right|Ravana abducting the wife of Rama - Sita, who according to some Ramayana adaptations, was Mandodari's and his own daughter.]]
Though Valmiki's Ramayana does not record Mandodari as being the mother of Sita, some later adaptations of the Ramayana depict Mandodari as the mother of Sita or at least the cause of the latter's birth.

The ''Adbhuta Ramayana'' narrates: Ravana used to store the blood of sages he killed in a large pot. Once sage Gritsamada was practicing penance to acquire goddess Lakshmi as his daughter and stored milk from Darbha grass, purified with [[mantra]]s in a pot so that Lakshmi would inhabit it. Ravana poured the milk from this pot into his blood pot. Mandodari was frustrated seeing the evil deeds of Ravana, so she decides to commit suicide by drinking contents of the blood-pot, which is described to be more poisonous than poison, but instead of dying, Mandodari gets pregnant with the incarnation of Lakshmi due to the power of Gritsamada's milk. Mandodari buries the foetus in [[Kurukshetra]], where it is discovered by Janaka, who named her Sita.<ref name = "Mani721"/><ref>Shashi pp. 14-15, Sarga VIII of Adbhuta Ramayana</ref>

The ''[[Devi Bhagavata Purana]]'' says: when Ravana wanted to marry Mandodari, Maya warned him that her horoscope indicated her first-born would destroy her clan and should be killed. Ignoring Maya’s advice, Ravana buried his first child by Mandodari in a casket in Janaka’s city, where it was discovered and grew up as Sita.<ref name = "Mani721"/> [[Jain]] adaptations of the Ramayana like ''Vasudevahindi'', ''Uttara-purana'' et al. also state that Sita was the daughter of Ravana and Mandodari, and was abandoned as she was prophesied to be the cause of the end of Ravana and his family.<ref>Shashi p. 237</ref>

In the [[Malay language|Malay]] adaptation ''Seri Rama'' and [[Java]]nese ''Rama Keling'', Ravana wants to poccess Mandodari, the mother of Rama, but instead marries a pseudo-Mandodari, who looks like the real one. Rama's father has a union with this pseudo-Mandodari, resulting in the birth of Sita, who is nominally Ravana's daughter.<ref>Shashi p. 243</ref>

According to the ''Ananda Ramayana'', king Padmaksha got Padma - an incarnate of goddess Lakshmi as his daughter. When her marriage was organized, Rakshasas (demons) killed the king. The grief-stricken Padma jumped into fire. Ravana discovered her body - which had turned into five jewels - in the fire and took it to Lanka sealed in a box. One day, Mandodari opened the box and fought Padma inside it and advised Ravana to cast off the box containing the ill-fated Padma, who led to the doom of her father. When the lid of the box was closed, Padma cursed Ravana that she will return to Lanka and cause his doom. Ravana buried the box in the city of Janaka, who discovered Padma and brought her up as Sita.<ref name = "Mani721">Mani p. 721</ref>

==Assessment==
<blockquote>
Ahalya Draupadi Kunti Tara Mandodari tatha 
panchakanya smare nityam mahapataka nashanam 
 
Remembering ever the virgins five -[[Ahalya]], [[Draupadi]], [[Kunti]], [[Tara (Ramayana)|Tara]] and Mandodari 
Destroys the greatest of sins.<ref name="panchakanya">{{cite journal|last=Devika|first=V.R.|title=Women of substance: Ahalya|journal=[[The Week (Indian magazine)|The Week]]|date = October 29, 2006|volume = 24|issue = 48|page = 52}}</ref>
</blockquote>

Orthodox Hindus remember the ''panchakanya'' - the five virgins or maidens in this daily prayer, though none of them is considered an ideal woman, who could be emulated.<ref>Mukherjee p. 36</ref><ref name = "Mukherjee48ff">Mukherjee pp. 48-9</ref> Mandodari with Ahalya and Tara belong to the ''Ramayana'', while the rest are from the ''[[Mahabharata]]''.<ref name="Bhattacharya">{{cite web|url=http://www.boloji.com/hinduism/panchkanya/pk01.htm|title=Panchkanya: Women of Substance|last=Bhattacharya|first=Pradip|date=1999-2010|publisher=Boloji Media Inc|accessdate=15 June 2010}}</ref> Among the five [[mahabhuta|elements]], Mandodari is equated to water - "turbulent on the surface and deep in her spiritual quest".<ref name="ayyer"/> The writer Dhanalakshmi Ayyer says:<ref name="ayyer"/>
<blockquote>
Her story is a reminder that the universal denigration of a group, based on the behaviour of a few, cannot cloud the greatness of the individual. Mandodari defies the stereotype of this racism. She is simple, unswerving and self-effacing, driven by the light of knowledge which gives meaning to solid materialism in an age that is shrouded by impulse, passion and desire. She is the instrument that awakens the mind and counsels reason when irrationality becomes the core being. That she goes unheard and unheeded does not change her path... To her, the [[dharmic]] part is inward-looking, while the role of the dutiful wife is the external self. Mandodari thought that her duty to her husband on issues of morals and values ended with her telling him what she thought of his actions. She neither put up any brave fight to stop him nor considered it her duty to do so.
</blockquote>

Mandodari's role is short in the Ramayana. She is described as a pious and righteous royal lady.<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/><ref name="ayyer">{{cite journal|last=Ayyer|first=Dhanalakshmi |title=Women of substance: Mandodari : Pure as water|journal=[[The Week (Indian magazine)|The Week]]|date = October 29, 2006|volume = 24|issue = 48|pages = 50–1}}</ref> Compared to the rest of the ''panchakanya'', Mukherjee considers Mandodari's life as "less colourful and eventful". He adds: "Mandodari seldom got prominence ... Her image lacks substance and fades quickly",<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/> though he stresses on her love and loyalty against her husband.<ref name = "Mukherjee48ff"/> Pradip Bhattacharya, author of the book ''Panchkanya: Women of Substance'' notes that: "There is hardly anything special that Valmiki (Ramayana) has written about her (Mandodari) except that she warns her husband to return Sita and has enough influence to prevent his raping her."<ref name="Bhattacharya"/>

==References==
; Notes
{{Reflist|2}}

; Books
* {{cite book|last=Lutgendorf|first=Philip|title=Hanuman's tale: the messages of a divine monkey|year=2007|publisher=Oxford University Press |location=US}}
*{{ cite book|author = Mani, Vettam|title = Puranic Encyclopaedia: A Comprehensive Dictionary With Special Reference to the Epic and Puranic Literature|publisher = Motilal Banarsidass|year = 1975|location = Delhi|isbn = 0842-60822-2}}
* {{cite book|last=Mukherjee|first=Prabhati|title=Hindu Women: Normative Models |year=1999|publisher=Orient Blackswan|location=Calcutta|isbn=81 250 1699 6}}
* {{cite book|last=Shashi|first=S. S.|title=Encyclopaedia Indica: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh|series=Encyclopaedia Indica|volume=21-35|year=1998|publisher=Anmol Publications PVT. LTD}}
* {{cite book|last=Wheeler|first=James Talboys |title=The History of India from the Earliest Ages: The Rámáyana and the Brahmanic period|volume=II|year=1869|publisher=N. Trübner|location=London|url = http://books.google.co.in/books?id=C1DRAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA373&dq=mandodari+Angada&as_brr=3&cd=2#v=snippet&q=mandodari%20&f=false}}

{{Ramayana}}
{{HinduMythology}}

[[Category:Characters in the Ramayana]]

[[id:Mandodari]]
[[ja:マンドーダリー]]
[[ru:Мандодари]]
[[th:นางมณโฑ]]

Mandodari

2010-09-23T17:45:56Z

DBaba:

{{Hdeity infobox 
| Image = Ravi Varma-Lady Giving Alms at the Temple.jpg
| Image_size = 230px
| Caption = "Lady Giving Alms at the Temple" by [[Raja Ravi Varma]], used by ''the Week'' to illustrate Mandodari<ref name="ayyer"/>
| Name = Mandodari
| Affiliation = [[Rakshasa]], ''Panchakanya''
| Devanagari = मंदोदरी
| Sanskrit_Transliteration = Mandodarī
| Abode = [[Lanka]]
| Consort = [[Ravana]], [[Vibhisana]]
}}

'''Mandodari''' ({{lang-sa|मंदोदरी}} {{IAST|Mandodarī}}, lit. "soft-bellied";<ref>[http://books.google.co.in/books?id=1jRWziY9m4cC&pg=PA429&dq=mandodari+hipped&hl=en&ei=8YkUTL3ZJoi4rAeLjvWlCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=mandodari%20hipped&f=false Rāmopākhyāna: the story of Rāma in the Mahābhārata p.429]</ref> [[Tamil language|Tamil]]: Montotari; [[Khmer language|Khmer]]: Mandogiri; [[Malay language|Malay]]: Mandudaki; [[Thai language|Thai]]: Mantho Dewi) is the Queen Consort of [[Ravana]], the [[Rakshasa|demon]] king of [[Lanka]], according to the [[Hinduism|Hindu]] epic ''[[Ramayana]]''. The ''Ramayana'' describes Mandodari as a beautiful, pious and righteous royal lady. She is extolled as one of the ''panchakanya'' ("five virgins/maidens"), remembering whose names is believed to destroy sin.

Mandodari was the daughter of the King of [[Asura]]s (demons), [[Mayasura]] and the ''[[apsara]]'' (celestial dancer) Hema. Mandodari bore Ravana three sons: [[Meghanada]] (Indrajit), [[Atikaya]] and [[Akshayakumara]]. According to some Ramayana adaptations, Mandodari was also the mother of [[Sita]], the wife of god [[Rama]] and the chief heroine of the Ramayana, who was kidnapped by Ravana and led to his destruction.

Despite her husband's faults, Mandodari loves Ravana and advises him to follow the path of righteousness. Mandodari repeatedly advises Ravana to return Sita to Rama, but her sagacious advice falls on deaf ears. Her love and loyalty to Ravana are also praised.

Different versions of the Ramayana record her ill-treatment at the hands of Rama's monkey generals to disturb a sacrifice by Ravana or to destroy her chastity, which protected Ravana's life. An incident also records how [[Hanuman]] tricked her to disclose the location of a magical arrow, which would be used by Rama to kill Ravana. After Ravana's death, [[Vibhishana]] - Ravana's younger brother who had joined forces with Rama and was responsible for Ravana's death - marries Mandodari on the advice of Rama.

==Birth==
''Uttara Ramayana'' narrates a story about the birth of Mandodari. [[Mayasura]], the son of Kashayapa was married to the apsara Hema. They had two sons Mayavi and Dundubhi, but grieved for a daughter, so they started performing penance to seek the favour of god Shiva.<ref name = "Mani476"/>

Meanwhile, an apasara named Madhura arrived at Mount Kailash – the abode of Shiva, to pay her respects to him. In absence of his wife Parvati, Madhura had “clandestine” coitus with Shiva. When Parvati returned, she found traces of ashes from Shiva’s body on the breasts of Madhura. Agitated, Parvati cursed Madhura to live in a well as a frog for twelve years. Shiva consoled Madhura and blessed her that she would become a beautiful woman after twelve years and be married to a great valorous man. After twelve years, Madhura became a beautiful maiden again and cried out loudly from the well. Maya and Hema who were performing penance nearby answered her call and adopted her as their daughter. They brought her up as Mandodari.<ref name = "Mani476"/>

==Marriage and later life==
[[File:Ravana.jpg|thumb|200px|Mandodari married the demon-king of Lanka, Ravana.]]
Once, Ravana came to the house of Maya and fell in love with Mandodari. Mandodari and Ravana were soon married with Vedic rites. Mandodari bore Ravana three sons: [[Meghanada]], [[Atikaya]] and [[Akshayakumara]].<ref name = "Mani476"/>

Despite Ravana's faults, Mandodari loved him and was proud of his strength. She was aware of Ravana's weakness towards women.<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/><ref name="ayyer"/> A righteous woman, Mandodari tries to lead Ravana to righteousness, but Ravana always ignores the discerning advice of his wife. She advises him to not to subdue the ''[[Navagraha]]'', the nine celestial beings that govern one's destiny and not to seduce [[Vedavati]], who would be re-born as Sita and cause the destruction of Ravana.<ref name="ayyer"/>

Ravana kidnaps [[Sita]], the wife of the exiled prince of [[Ayodhya]], [[Rama]] - an incarnation of god [[Vishnu]]. Mandodari advises Ravana to return Sita to Rama, but to no avail. Mandodari knows it will this lust that would bring the downfall of Ravana.<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/><ref name="ayyer"/>

Mandodari is described as a beautiful woman in Valmiki’s Ramayana. When [[Hanuman]] - the monkey messenger of Rama - comes to Lanka in search of Sita, he is stupefied by Mandodari’s beauty when he enters Ravana’s bed chambers and mistakes Mandodari as Sita.<ref name = "Mani476">Mani p. 476</ref> When Hanuman finally tracks Sita, he finds Ravana threatening to kill Sita unless she marries him. Ravana raises his sword to behead Sita when she refused, Mandodari saves Sita by holding Ravana's hand. Mandodari says that murder of a woman is a heinous sin and thus Ravana should not kill Sita. She requests Ravana to entertain himself with his other wives and leave the thought of having Sita as his wife. Ravana spares Sita's life, but does not forgo his wish to marry Sita.<ref>Wheeler p. 338</ref> Though Mandodari considers Sita inferior to her in beauty and ancestry, Mandodari acknowledges Sita's devotion to Rama and compares her to goddesses like [[Sachi]] and [[Rohini (nakshatra)|Rohini]].<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/>

When all attempts for a peaceful return of Sita fail, Rama declares war on Ravana's Lanka. Before the final battle against Rama, Mandodari makes a last attempt to dissuade Ravana, but to no avail.<ref>Wheeler p. 365</ref> Finally, Mandodari stands by her husband in the final battle like an obedient and faithful wife,<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/> though she also advises her son Meghanada alias Indrajit ("One who had conquered [[Indra]] - the god-king of heaven") to not to fight Rama.<ref>Wheeler p. 370</ref>

The ''Valmiki Ramayana'' narrates: finally when all of Ravana's sons and warriors die, Ravana organizes a ''[[yajna]]'' ("fire sacrifice") to assure his victory. Rama sends a troop of monkeys headed by Hanuman and the monkey prince [[Angada]] to destroy this ''yajna''. The monkeys create havoc in Ravana's palace, but Ravana continues the ''yajna''. Finally, Angada drags Mandodari by her hair in front of Ravana. Mandodari pleads to her husband to save her and reminds him what Rama is doing for his wife. The enraged Ravana abandons the ''yajna'' and strikes Angada with his sword. With the ''yajna'' disturbed, Angada's purpose is served and he leaves Mandodari and escapes. Mandodari again implores Ravana to surrender Sita to Rama, but he refuses.<ref>Wheeler pp. 373-4</ref> Other Ramayana adaptations present more gruesome description of the incident. The ''[[Krittivasi Ramayan]]'' narrates that the monkeys dragged Mandodari and tore off her clothes. In ''Bicitra Ramayana'', it is Hanuman who humiliates Mandodari. The Thai adaptation ''[[Ramakien]]'' narrates of a symbolic rape of Mandodari. Hanuman sleeps with her in the form of Ravana and destroys her chastity, which protected Ravana's life.<ref>Lutgendorf p. 211</ref>

Finally, Ravana fights the final duel with Rama. Rama initially fails to kill Ravana with his ordinary arrows, but finally kills with a magical arrow. While Valmiki's Ramayana narrates that the magical arrow was given to Rama by Indra, in other versions often the magical arrow is hidden in Mandodari's bed chambers or under her bed. While Mandodari is engrossed in worshipping goddess [[Parvati]] for Ravana's well-being during the time, Hanuman disguised as a [[Brahmin]] comes to the place and after winning her confidence, tricks her into revealing the secret location of the arrow. Hanuman then seizes this arrow and gives it to Rama, leading to Ravana's end.<ref>Lutgendorf pp. 154, 217</ref> Then, Mandodari appears at the death scene of Ravana - in a disarrayed state and laments his death.<ref name = "Mukherjee39">Mukherjee p. 39</ref><ref>Wheeler p. 382</ref> In this battle, Mandodari loses her husband, her sons and her kinsmen.<ref name="Bhattacharya"/>

After the death of Ravana, Rama advises Vibhishana to take Mandodari as his wife, even though he already had a wife. A theory suggests that Ravana's race may have had matrilineal families and thus, to restore order in the kingdom after Ravana's death, it was necessary for Vibhishana to marry the reigning queen to get the right to rule.<ref name = "Shashi"/> Another theory suggests it may be a non-[[Aryan]] custom to marry the reigning queen.<ref name="Bhattacharya"/> The marriage between Mandodari and Vibhishana is purely an "act of statesmanship", rather than a marriage based on their "mutual sexual interference".<ref name = "Shashi"/> Mandodari may have agreed to marry Vibhishana, her younger brother-in-law as this would lead the kingdom to prosperity and stability as allies of Rama's Ayodhya and she would continue to have say in governance.<ref name="Bhattacharya"/> Another reason of the marriage could that an alternative to such a marriage could be suicide for Mandodari, which was averted by Rama.<ref name = "Shashi">Shashi p. 222</ref>

==Mother of Sita?==
[[Image:Ravi Varma-Ravana Sita Jathayu.jpg|thumb|right|Ravana abducting the wife of Rama - Sita, who according to some Ramayana adaptations, was Mandodari's and his own daughter.]]
Though Valmiki's Ramayana does not record Mandodari as being the mother of Sita, some later adaptations of the Ramayana depict Mandodari as the mother of Sita or at least the cause of the latter's birth.

The ''Adbhuta Ramayana'' narrates: Ravana used to store the blood of sages he killed in a large pot. Once sage Gritsamada was practicing penance to acquire goddess Lakshmi as his daughter and stored milk from Darbha grass, purified with [[mantra]]s in a pot so that Lakshmi would inhabit it. Ravana poured the milk from this pot into his blood pot. Mandodari was frustrated seeing the evil deeds of Ravana, so she decides to commit suicide by drinking contents of the blood-pot, which is described to be more poisonous than poison, but instead of dying, Mandodari gets pregnant with the incarnation of Lakshmi due to the power of Gritsamada's milk. Mandodari buries the foetus in [[Kurukshetra]], where it is discovered by Janaka, who named her Sita.<ref name = "Mani721"/><ref>Shashi pp. 14-15, Sarga VIII of Adbhuta Ramayana</ref>

The ''[[Devi Bhagavata Purana]]'' says: when Ravana wanted to marry Mandodari, Maya warned him that her horoscope indicated her first-born would destroy her clan and should be killed. Ignoring Maya’s advice, Ravana buried his first child by Mandodari in a casket in Janaka’s city, where it was discovered and grew up as Sita.<ref name = "Mani721"/> [[Jain]] adaptations of the Ramayana like ''Vasudevahindi'', ''Uttara-purana'' et al. also state that Sita was the daughter of Ravana and Mandodari, and was abandoned as she was prophesied to be the cause of the end of Ravana and his family.<ref>Shashi p. 237</ref>

In the [[Malay language|Malay]] adaptation ''Seri Rama'' and [[Java]]nese ''Rama Keling'', Ravana wants to poccess Mandodari, the mother of Rama, but instead marries a pseudo-Mandodari, who looks like the real one. Rama's father has a union with this pseudo-Mandodari, resulting in the birth of Sita, who is nominally Ravana's daughter.<ref>Shashi p. 243</ref>

According to the ''Ananda Ramayana'', king Padmaksha got Padma - an incarnate of goddess Lakshmi as his daughter. When her marriage was organized, Rakshasas (demons) killed the king. The grief-stricken Padma jumped into fire. Ravana discovered her body - which had turned into five jewels - in the fire and took it to Lanka sealed in a box. One day, Mandodari opened the box and fought Padma inside it and advised Ravana to cast off the box containing the ill-fated Padma, who led to the doom of her father. When the lid of the box was closed, Padma cursed Ravana that she will return to Lanka and cause his doom. Ravana buried the box in the city of Janaka, who discovered Padma and brought her up as Sita.<ref name = "Mani721">Mani p. 721</ref>

==Assessment==
<blockquote>
Ahalya Draupadi Kunti Tara Mandodari tatha 
panchakanya smare nityam mahapataka nashanam 
 
Remembering ever the virgins five -[[Ahalya]], [[Draupadi]], [[Kunti]], [[Tara (Ramayana)|Tara]] and Mandodari 
Destroys the greatest of sins.<ref name="panchakanya">{{cite journal|last=Devika|first=V.R.|title=Women of substance: Ahalya|journal=[[The Week (Indian magazine)|The Week]]|date = October 29, 2006|volume = 24|issue = 48|page = 52}}</ref>
</blockquote>

Orthodox Hindus remember the ''panchakanya'' - the five virgins or maidens in this daily prayer, though none of them is considered an ideal woman, who could be emulated.<ref>Mukherjee p. 36</ref><ref name = "Mukherjee48ff">Mukherjee pp. 48-9</ref> Mandodari with Ahalya and Tara belong to the ''Ramayana'', while the rest are from the ''[[Mahabharata]]''.<ref name="Bhattacharya">{{cite web|url=http://www.boloji.com/hinduism/panchkanya/pk01.htm|title=Panchkanya: Women of Substance|last=Bhattacharya|first=Pradip|date=1999-2010|publisher=Boloji Media Inc|accessdate=15 June 2010}}</ref> Among the five [[mahabhuta|elements]], Mandodari is equated to water - "turbulent on the surface and deep in her spiritual quest".<ref name="ayyer"/> The writer Dhanalakshmi Ayyer says:<ref name="ayyer"/>
<blockquote>
Her story is a reminder that the universal denigration of a group, based on the behaviour of a few, cannot cloud the greatness of the individual. Mandodari defies the stereotype of this racism. She is simple, unswerving and self-effacing, driven by the light of knowledge which gives meaning to solid materialism in an age that is shrouded by impulse, passion and desire. She is the instrument that awakens the mind and counsels reason when irrationality becomes the core being. That she goes unheard and unheeded does not change her path... To her, the [[dharmic]] part is inward-looking, while the role of the dutiful wife is the external self. Mandodari thought that her duty to her husband on issues of morals and values ended with her telling him what she thought of his actions. She neither put up any brave fight to stop him nor considered it her duty to do so.
</blockquote>

Mandodari's role is short in the Ramayana. She is described as a pious and righteous royal lady.<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/><ref name="ayyer">{{cite journal|last=Ayyer|first=Dhanalakshmi |title=Women of substance: Mandodari : Pure as water|journal=[[The Week (Indian magazine)|The Week]]|date = October 29, 2006|volume = 24|issue = 48|pages = 50–1}}</ref> Compared to the rest of the ''panchakanya'', Mukherjee considers Mandodari's life as "less colourful and eventful". He adds: "Mandodari seldom got prominence ... Her image lacks substance and fades quickly",<ref name = "Mukherjee39"/> though he stresses on her love and loyalty against her husband.<ref name = "Mukherjee48ff"/> Pradip Bhattacharya, author of the book ''Panchkanya: Women of Substance'' notes that: "There is hardly anything special that Valmiki (Ramayana) has written about her (Mandodari) except that she warns her husband to return Sita and has enough influence to prevent his raping her."<ref name="Bhattacharya"/>

==References==
; Notes
{{Reflist|2}}

; Books
* {{cite book|last=Lutgendorf|first=Philip|title=Hanuman's tale: the messages of a divine monkey|year=2007|publisher=Oxford University Press |location=US}}
*{{ cite book|author = Mani, Vettam|title = Puranic Encyclopaedia: A Comprehensive Dictionary With Special Reference to the Epic and Puranic Literature|publisher = Motilal Banarsidass|year = 1975|location = Delhi|isbn = 0842-60822-2}}
* {{cite book|last=Mukherjee|first=Prabhati|title=Hindu Women: Normative Models |year=1999|publisher=Orient Blackswan|location=Calcutta|isbn=81 250 1699 6}}
* {{cite book|last=Shashi|first=S. S.|title=Encyclopaedia Indica: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh|series=Encyclopaedia Indica|volume=21-35|year=1998|publisher=Anmol Publications PVT. LTD}}
* {{cite book|last=Wheeler|first=James Talboys |title=The History of India from the Earliest Ages: The Rámáyana and the Brahmanic period|volume=II|year=1869|publisher=N. Trübner|location=London|url = http://books.google.co.in/books?id=C1DRAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA373&dq=mandodari+Angada&as_brr=3&cd=2#v=snippet&q=mandodari%20&f=false}}

{{Ramayana}}
{{HinduMythology}}

[[Category:Characters in the Ramayana]]

[[id:Mandodari]]
[[ja:マンドーダリー]]
[[ru:Мандодари]]
[[th:นางมณโฑ]]

Maafa

2010-06-14T00:03:54Z

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{{Cleanup|date=June 2010}}

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped [[African American]] slave, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, April 2, 1863]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
{{for3|African Holocaust|the [[Steel Pulse]] album|album}}

The '''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') refers to the 500 years of suffering of [[Black people|Black Africans]] and the [[African diaspora]], through [[slavery]], imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title=The Maafa, African Holocaust}}</ref>{{Dead link|date=June 2010}} The terms also refer to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 /> The term ''Maafa'' is derived from the [[Swahili language|Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy,<ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref><ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref> while the term African Holocaust, derived from a Greek word meaning ''sacrificial burning'', is preferred by other scholars to emphasize the intentional character.

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history.<ref name="Maafa of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/html_ah/holocaustspecial.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title=African Holocaust: Holocaust Special}}</ref> When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref> Historically, the enslavement of Africans by white people was mostly referred to as the [[Atlantic slave trade]], a phrase that has been criticized for emphasizing the commercial aspects of the African persecution, in keeping with a European or White American historiographical viewpoint.

==Beyond slavery==
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title=African Holocaust: Dark Voyage}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{See also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title='The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{Bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 ''Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro'']. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing...in the pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 ''The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation'']. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea{{Citation needed|date=April 2010}} of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of Ghana and the [[Yoruba People|Yoruba]] of Nigeria had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used{{What?|date=June 2010}} to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities..<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title=African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum era|antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture{{What|date=June 2010}}, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{Main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in [[Yemen]]]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning (Professor)|Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning">Manning (1990) p.10</ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade.{{Fact|date=June 2010}} Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane."<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title=African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berber people|Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under British-controled Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title=18th century Boom}}</ref>

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title=Arab Slave Trade}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]] and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title=Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{Main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title=How Europe underdeveloped Africa}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated by Scholars like Karenga and Walter Rodney that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/><ref>{{cite web | url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/html_ah/holocaustspecial.htm | title= African Holocaust Special | publisher=African Holocaust Society | accessdate=2007-01-04}}</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title=African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title=Effects on Africa}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref><ref>http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2523/ Dr. Joy Leary</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. Dr. Joy DeGruy Leary speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.<ref>http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=b6d699be4a8ccc0e7125890ae0963a65</ref>

==Economics of slavery==
{{Unreferenced section|date=June 2010}}
[[Image:Triangular trade.png|thumb|250 px|right|Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "[[Middle Passage]]". African slaves were thenceforth traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe to complete the "[[Triangular Trade]]".]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar. The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Citation needed|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{Unreferenced section|date=June 2010}}
{{Main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Citation needed|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Citation needed|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Citation needed|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a [[racialized]] system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Citation needed|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Persecution of Africans after slavery==
{{Expand|date=November 2008}}
{{globalize/USA}}
{{Unreferenced section|date=June 2010}}
[[Image:JimCrowInDurhamNC.jpg|thumb|250px|In the United States, [[Jim Crow Laws]] maintained the disenfranchisement of many [[African Americans]] until the latter half of the 20th century.]]
The persecution of Africans continued outside colonialist Africa, and beyond colonialism. Although social progress was made during the [[Reconstruction era of the United States|Reconstruction]] period, the post-Reconstruction era has been characterized as the [[nadir of American race relations]], in which Southern hardship and bitterness came to manifest in overt hostility against African Americans, and particularly in the phenomenon of [[lynching]]. Lynching became a means of terrorizing African Americans in the post-Reconstruction period. In the 20th century, [[Jim Crow laws]] came to codify white privilege in the United States.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]].{{Fact|date=June 2010}} Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side effect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title=Removal of Agency from Africa|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|250px|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title=Problem with Maafa}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|date=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are said by some to be deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture. Others, however, feel that avoidance of the term "trade" is apologetic act on behalf of capitalism, absolving capitalist structures of involvement in human catastrophe.

==Further reading==
* ''The Black Holocaust For Beginners'', by S.E. Anderson
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{Reflist|2}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Democides]]
[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

[[ca:Maafa]]

Maafa

2010-04-12T00:54:20Z

DBaba: Undid revision 355415451 by Ruckersville101 (talk)

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped [[African American]] slave, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, April 2, 1863]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
:''African Holocaust redirects here. See also [[African Holocaust (album)]]''

The '''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') refers to the 500 years of suffering of [[Black people|Black Africans]] and the [[African diaspora]], through [[slavery]], imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"}}</ref> The terms also refer to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 /> The term ''Maafa'' is derived from the [[Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy,<ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref><ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |year=2004 |page=1}}</ref> while the term African Holocaust, derived from a Greek word, is preferred by other scholars to emphasize the intentional character.

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history.<ref name="Maafa of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/html_ah/holocaustspecial.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Holocaust Special"}}</ref> When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref> Historically, the enslavement of Africans by white people was mostly referred to as the [[Atlantic slave trade]], a phrase that has been criticized for emphasizing the commercial aspects of the African persecution, in keeping with a European or White American historiographical viewpoint.

==Beyond slavery==
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{Bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing...in the pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of Ghana and the [[Yoruba People|Yoruba]] of Nigeria had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities..<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum era|antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in [[Yemen]]]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning (Professor)|Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning">Manning (1990) p.10</ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berber people|Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]] and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangular trade.png|thumb|250 px|right|Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "[[Middle Passage]]". African slaves were thenceforth traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe to complete the "[[Triangular Trade]]".]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Citation needed|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Citation needed|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Citation needed|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Citation needed|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Citation needed|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a [[racialized]] system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Citation needed|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Persecution of Africans after slavery==
{{Expand|date=November 2008}}
{{globalize/USA}}
[[Image:JimCrowInDurhamNC.jpg|thumb|250px|In the United States, [[Jim Crow Laws]] maintained the disenfranchisement of many [[African Americans]] until the latter half of the 20th century.]]
The persecution of Africans continued outside colonialist Africa, and beyond colonialism. Although social progress was made during the [[Reconstruction era of the United States|Reconstruction]] period, the post-Reconstruction era has been characterized as the [[nadir of American race relations]], in which Southern hardship and bitterness came to manifest in overt hostility against African Americans, and particularly in the phenomenon of [[lynching]]. Lynching became a means of terrorizing African Americans in the post-Reconstruction period. In the 20th century, [[Jim Crow laws]] came to codify white privilege in the United States.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side effect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|250px|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are said by some to be deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture. Others, however, feel that avoidance of the term "trade" is apologetic act on behalf of capitalism, absolving capitalist structures of involvement in human catastrophe.

==Further reading==
* ''The Black Holocaust For Beginners'', by S.E. Anderson
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Democides]]
[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

[[ca:Maafa]]

Benutzer:GWRo0106/Red Summer

2010-03-10T15:50:39Z

DBaba:

'''Red Summer''' describes the bloody race riots that occurred during the summer and early autumn of 1919. In most instances, whites attacked African Americans in more than two dozen American cities, though in some cases blacks responded in groups to a single action against one of their number, notably in Chicago. [[Chicago]], [[Washington, D.C.]] and [[Elaine, Arkansas]] witnessed the greatest number of fatalities.<ref name=nyt>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C04E7D61F30E033A25756C0A9669D946896D6CF "For Action on Race Riot Peril," October 5, 1919], accessed January 20, 2010. This newspaper article includes several paragraphs of editorial analysis followed by Dr. Haynes' report, "summarized at several points."</ref>
[[Image:chicago-race-riot.jpg|thumb|right|594px|A white gang looking for African Americans during the Chicago Race Riot of 1919]]

==Name==
[[James Weldon Johnson]] coined the term "Red Summer." Employed since 1916 by the [[National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]] (NAACP) as a field secretary, he built and revived local chapters of that organization. In 1919, he organized protest against the racial violence of 1919.<ref name=erickson>Alana J. Erickson, "Red Summer" in ''Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History'' (NY: Macmillan, 1960), 2293-4</ref><ref name=cunningham> George P. Cunningham, "James Weldon Johnson," in ''Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History'' (NY: Macmillan, 1960), 1459-61</ref>

==Context==
With the manpower mobilization and military draft of World War I and immigration from Europe cut off, the industrial cities of the [[Northern United States|North]] and [[Midwestern United States|Midwest]] experienced severe labor shortages. Northern manufacturers recruited throughout the South and an exodus ensued.<ref name=kennedy /> By 1919, it was estimated that 500,000 African Americans had emigrated from the [[Southern United States|South]] to the industrial cities of the [[Northern United States|North]] and Midwest during [[World War I]].<ref name="nyt" /> African-American workers filled new positions as well as many jobs formerly held by whites. In some cities, they were hired as strikebreakers, especially during strikes of 1917.<ref name=kennedy>David M. Kennedy, ''Over Here: The First World War and American Society (NY: Oxford University Press, 2004), 279, 281-2</ref> This increased resentment and suspicion among whites, especially the working class. Following the war, rapid [[demobilization]] and the removal of [[price controls]] led to inflation and unemployment that increased competition for jobs.

During the [[First Red Scare|Red Scare]] of 1919-20 following the Russian Revolution, anti-Bolsehvik sentiment quickly replaced the anti-German sentiment of the [[World War I]] years. Many politicians and government officials, along with a large part of the press and the public, feared an imminent attempt to overthrow the government of the United States and the creation of a new regime modeled on that of the Soviets. In that atmosphere of public hysteria, radical views as well as moderate dissents were often characterized as un-American or subversive, including the advocacy of racial equality, of labor rights, or even the rights of victims of mob violence to defend themselves. Close ties between recent European immigrants and radical political ideas and organizations fed those anxieties as well.

==Events==
[[File:AR elaine riot.jpg|right|thumb|"The Gazette" Elaine, Arkansas October 3, 1919]]
In the fall of 1919, Dr. George E. Haynes, an educator employed as Director of Negro Economics at the U.S. [[United States Department of Labor|Department of Labor]], produced a report on that year's racial violence designed to serve as the basis for an investigation by the U.S. [[United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary|Senate Committee on the Judiciary]]. It cataloged 26 separate riots on the part of whites attacking blacks in widely scattered communities.<ref name=nyt />

In addition, he reported that at least 43 African Americans were lynched, while another eight men were burned at the stake between January 1 and September 14, 1919.<ref name="nyt" />

Unlike earlier race riots in U.S. history, the 1919 riots were among the first in which blacks responded resistance to the white attacks. [[A. Philip Randolph]] defended the right of blacks to commit violence in self-defense.<ref name=erickson />

Martial law was imposed in [[Charleston, South Carolina]],<ref name=nyt /> where men of the U.S. Navy led the race riot of May 10, in which Isaac Doctor, William Brown, and James Talbot, all black men, were killed.<ref name=enc>Walter C. Rucker, James N. Upton. ''Encyclopedia of American Race Riots''. Volume 1. 2007, page 92-3</ref> Five white men and eighteen black men were injured in the riot.<ref name=enc /> A Naval investigation found that four U.S. sailors and one civilian--all white men--were responsible for the outbreak of violence.<ref name=enc />

The race riot in [[Longview, Texas]] early in July led to the deaths of at least four men and the destruction of the African-American housing district in the town.<ref name=nyt />

On July 3, The [[10th Cavalry Regiment (United States)|10th U.S. Cavalry]], a segregated African-American unit founded in 1866, was attacked by local police in [[Bisbee, Arizona]].<ref>Rucker, Walter C. and Upton, James N. ''Encyclopedia of American Race Riots'' (2007), 554</ref>

In Washington, D.C., white men, many in military uniforms, responded to the rumored arrest of a black man for rape with 4 days of mob violence, rioting and beatings of random black people on the street. When police refused to intervene, the black population fought back. Troops tried to restore order as the city closed saloons and theaters to discourage assemblies. A summer rainstorm had more of an effect. When the violence ended, 10 whites were dead, including 2 police officers, and 5 blacks. Some 150 people had been the victims of attacks.<ref name=young />

The NAACP sent a telegram to President Wilson to point out:<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E05EFDC1638E13ABC4A51DFB1668382609EDE "Protest Sent to Wilson," July 22, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref>

:...the shame put upon the country by the mobs, including United States soldiers, sailors, and marines, which have assaulted innocent and unoffending negroes in the national capital. Men in uniform have attacked negroes on the streets and pulled them from streetcars to beat them. Crowds are reported ...to have directed attacks against any passing negro....The effect of such riots in the national capital upon race antagonism will be to increase bitterness and danger of outbreaks elsewhere. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People calls upon you as President and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the nation to make statement condemning mob violence and to enforce such military law as situation demands.
{{ quote box2
| quote = "The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People respectfully enquires how long the Federal Government under your administration intends to tolerate anarchy in the United States?"
| source = -''NAACP telegram to President Woodrow Wilson'' August 29, 1919
| width = 300px
| align = right
| halign = left
| bgcolor = #EDEDED
}}

In [[Norfolk, Virginia]], a white mob attacked during the homecoming celebration for African-American soldiers. At least six people were shot, and local police called in [[United States Marines|Marines]] and Navy personnel to restore order.<ref name=nyt />

The summer's greatest violence occurred during [[Chicago Race Riot|rioting in Chicago]] starting on July 27. Chicago's beaches along Lake Michigan were segregated in practice, if not by law. A black youth who swam into the area customarily reserved for whites was stoned and drowned. Blacks responded violently when the police refused to take action. Violence between mobs and gangs lasted 13 days. The resulting 38 fatalities included 23 blacks and 15 whites. Injuries numbered 537 injured, and 1,000 black families were left homeless.<ref>''Encyclopedia Britannica'': [http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/110488/Chicago-Race-Riot-of-1919 "Chicago Race Riot of 1919"], accessed January 24, 2010</ref> Some 50 people were reported dead. Unofficial numbers were much higher. Hundreds of mostly black homes and businesses on the South Side were destroyed by mobs, and a militia force of several thousand was called in to restore order.<ref name=nyt />

At the end of July the Northeastern Federation of [[National Association of Colored Women|Colored Women's Clubs]], from their Providence, Rhode Island convention, denounced the rioting and burning of negroes' homes then happening in Chicago and asked Wilson "to use every means within your power to stop the rioting in Chicago and the propaganda used to incite such."<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9903E3DF1F3BEE3ABC4953DFBE668382609EDE "Negroes Appeal to Wilson,"" August 1, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref> At the end of August the NAACP protested again, noting the attack on the organization's secretary in Austin, Texas the previous week. Their telegram said: "The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People respectfully enquires how long the Federal Government under your administration intends to tolerate anarchy in the United States?" <ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9B04EEDF103DE533A25753C3A96E9C946896D6CF Negro Protest to Wilson," August 30, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref>
[[Image:Omaha Riot Will Brown.jpg|thumb|Will Brown, lynched during the 1919 riot in Omaha, Nebraska]]
During the Knoxville, Tennessee race riot at the end of August, a mob stormed the county jail to release 16 white prisoners, including convicted murderers. Turning to the African-American business district, the mob killed at least seven and wounded more than 20 people.<ref>''Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture'': [http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=K025 Knoxville Riot of 1919], accessed January 25, 2010</ref><ref>Robert Whitaker, ''On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice that Remade a Nation'' (NY: Random House, 2008), 53</ref>

At the end of September, the [[Omaha Race Riot of 1919|race riot in Omaha, Nebraska]] witnessed violence on the part of a white mob of more than 10,000 who burned the county courthouse and destroyed property valued at more than a million dollars. One man, Will Brown, was lynched. Troops under the command of Major General [[Leonard Wood]], friend of [[Theodore Roosevelt]] and a leading candidate for the Republican nomination for President in 1920, restored order.<ref>David, Pietrusza, ''1920: The Year of Six Presidents'' (NY: Carroll & Graf, 2007), 167-72</ref>

The [[Elaine Race Riot|Elaine, Arkansas riot]] was different in that it occurred in the rural South. It began when a white man intent on arresting a black bootlegger was shot by blacks who, warned of possible trouble, were defending a meeting of black sharecroppers, the local chapter of the [[Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America|Progressive Farmers and Household Union]]. White landowners then formed a group to attack the African-American farmers. Five whites and between 100 and 200 blacks died as a result. Arkansas Governor [[Charles Hillman Brough]] appointed a Committee of Seven, prominent local white businessmen, to investigate. It concluded that the sharecroppers' Union, a Socialist enterprise, was "established for the purpose of banding negroes together for the killing of white people." That story made headlines like this in the ''[[The Dallas Morning News|Dallas Morning News]]'': "Negroes Seized in Arkansas Riots Confess to Widespread Plot; Planed Massacre of Whites Today." Several agents of the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation spent a week interviewing those involved{{ndash]]though they spoke to none of the sharecroppers{{ndash}}and reviewing documents. They filed a total of 9 reports making it clear that there was no evidence of a conspiracy on the part of the sharecroppers to murder anyone. Their superiors at Justice ignored their analysis. Seventy-nine blacks were later tried and convicted, with 12 sentenced to death, and the remainder accepted terms of up to 21 years. Appeals of their cases went to the [[U.S. Supreme Court]] which reversed the verdicts because of how their trials had been conducted. The ruling resulted in an expansion of federal oversight of state treatment of defendants' rights.<ref>Robert Whitaker, ''On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice that Remade a Nation'' (NY: Random House, 2008), 131-42. Whittaker's work is a detailed account of the Arkansas events, not a general study of the Red Summer.</ref>

==Chronology==
Based on Haynes' report as summarized in the ''New York Times'' except as noted.<ref name=nyt />
{| class="wikitable"
|-
|
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date
! Place
|-
| '''May 10 '''
|[[Charleston, South Carolina]]
|-
| '''May 10'''
|[[Sylvester, Georgia]]
|-
| '''May 29'''
|[[Putnam County, Georgia]]
|-
| '''May 31'''
|[[Monticello, Mississippi]]
|-
| '''June 13'''
|[[New London, Connecticut]]
|-
| '''June 13'''
|[[Memphis, Tennessee]]
|-
| '''June 27'''
|[[Annapolis, Maryland]]
|-
| '''June 27'''
|[[Macon, Mississippi]]
|-
| '''July 3'''
|[[Bisbee, Arizona]]
|-
| '''July 5'''
|[[Scranton, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 6'''
|[[Dublin, Georgia]]
|-
| '''July 7'''
|[[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 8'''
|[[Coatesville, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 9'''
|[[Tuscaloosa, Alabama]]
|-
| '''July 10'''<ref>Robert Whitaker, ''On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice that Remade a Nation'' (NY: Random House, 2008), 51</ref>
|[[Longview, Texas]]
|-
| '''July 11'''
|[[Baltimore, Maryland]]
|-
| '''July 15'''
|[[Port Arthur, Texas]]
|-
|}
|
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date
! Place
|-
| '''July 19'''
|[[Washington, D.C.]]
|-
| '''July 21'''
|[[Norfolk, Virginia]]
|-
| '''July 23'''
|[[New Orleans, Louisiana]]
|-
| '''July 23'''
|[[Darby, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 26'''
|[[Hobson City, Alabama]]
|-
| '''July 27'''
|[[Chicago, Illinois]]
|-
| '''July 28'''
|[[Newberry, South Carolina]]
|-
| '''July 31'''
|[[Bloomington, Illinois]]
|-
| '''July 31'''
|[[Syracuse, New York]]
|-
| '''July 31'''
|[[Philadelphia]], Pennsylvania
|-
| '''August 4'''
|[[Hattiesburg, Mississippi]]
|-
| '''August 6'''
|[[Texarkana, Texas]]
|-
| '''August 21'''
|[[New York City, New York]]
|-
| '''August 29'''
|[[Ocmulgee, Georgia]]
|-
| '''August 30'''
|[[Knoxville, Tennessee]]
|-
| '''September 28'''
|[[Omaha, Nebraska]]
|-
| '''October 1'''
|[[Elaine, Arkansas]]
|-
|}
|-
|}

==Responses==
{{ quote box2
| quote = "We appeal to you to have your country undertake for its racial minority that which you forced Poland and Austria to undertake for their racial minorities."
| source = -''National Equal Rights League to President Woodrow Wilson'' November 25, 1919
| width = 300px
| align = left
| halign = left
| bgcolor = #EDEDED
}}
Protests and appeals continued for weeks. A letter in late November from the [[National Equal Rights League]] used Wilson's international advocacy for human rights against him: "We appeal to you to have your country undertake for its racial minority that which you forced Poland and Austria to undertake for their racial minorities."<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A0CEED71031E03ABC4E51DFB7678382609EDE "Ask Wilson to Aid Negroes," November 26, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref>

In September 1919, in response to the Red Summer, the [[African Blood Brotherhood]] formed to serve as an "armed resistance" movement.

===Haynes report===
The Haynes report of October 1919<ref name=nyt /> was a call for national action. Haynes said that states had shown themselves "unable or unwilling" to put a stop to lynchings. The fact that white men had been lynched in the North as well, he argued, demonstrated the national nature of the overall problem: "It is idle to suppose that murder can be confined to one section of the country or to one race." He then connected lynchings to riots:

:Persistence of unpunished lynchings of negroes fosters lawlessness among white men imbued with the mob spirit, and creates a spirit of bitterness among negroes. In such a state of public mind a trivial incident can precipitate a riot.

:Disregard of law and legal process will inevitably lead to more and more frequent clashes and bloody encounters between white men and negroes and a condition of potential race war in many cities of the United States.

:Unchecked mob violence creates hatred and intolerance, making impossible free and dispassionate discussion not only of race problems, but questions on which races and sections differ.

===Press coverage===
In mid-summer, in the middle of the Chicago riots, a "federal official" told the ''New York Times'' that the violence resulted from "an agitation, which involves the I.W.W., Bolshevism and the worst features of other extreme radical movements." He supported that claim with copies of negro publications that called for alliances with leftist groups, praised the Soviet regime, and contrasted the courage of jailed Socialist Eugene V. Debs with the "school boy rhetoric" of traditional black leaders. The ''Times'' characterized the publications as "vicious and apparently well financed," mentioned "certain factions of the radical Socialist elements," and reported it all under the headline: "Reds Try to Stir Negroes to Revolt."<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E07E0D71638E13ABC4051DFB1668382609EDE "Reds Try to Stir Negroes to Revolt," July 28, 1919], accessed January 28, 2010</ref>

In response, black leaders like Bishop Charles Henry Phillips of the [[Christian Methodist Episcopal Church|Colored Methodist Episcopal Church]] asked blacks to shun violence in favor of "patience" and "moral suasion." Though stating his opposition to any propaganda favoring violence he also said: "I cannot believe that the negro was influenced by Bolshevist agents in the part he took in the rioting. It is not like him to be a traitor or a revolutionist who would destroy the Government. But then the reign of mob law to which he has so long lived in terror and the injustices to which he has had to submit have made him sensitive and impatient." <ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E07E0D71638E13ABC4051DFB1668382609EDE "Denies Negroes are 'Reds'," August 3, 1919], accessed January 28, 2010. Phillips was based in Nashville, Tennessee.</ref>

In presenting the Haynes report in early October, ''The New York Times'' provided a context his report did not mention. Haynes documented violence and inaction on the state level. The ''Times'' saw "bloodshed on a scale amounting to local insurrection" as evidence of "a new negro problem" because of "influences that are now working to drive a wedge of bitterness and hatred between the two races." Until recently, the ''Times'' said, black leaders showed "a sense of appreciation" for what whites had suffered on their behalf in fighting a civil war that "bestowed on the black man opportunities far in advance of those he had in any other part of the white man's world." Now militants were supplanting Booker T. Washington, who had "steadily argued conciliatory methods." The ''Times'' continued:<ref name =nyt />

:Every week the militant leaders gain more headway. They may be divided into general classes. One consists of radicals and revolutionaries. They are spreading Bolshevist propaganda. It is reported that they are winning many recruits among the colored race. When the ignorance that exists among negroes in many sections of the country is taken into consideration the danger of inflaming them by revolutionary doctrine may [be] apprehended.... The other class of militant leaders confine their agitation to a fight against all forms of color discrimination. They are for a program on uncompromising protest, 'to fight and continue to fight for citizenship rights and full democratic privileges.'

As evidence of militancy and Bolshevism, the ''Times'' named [[W. E. B. Du Bois|W.E.B. Du Bois]] and quoted his editorial in the publication he edited, ''[[The Crisis]]'': "Today we raise the terrible weapon of self-defense....When the armed lynchers gather, we too must gather armed." When the ''Times'' endorsed Haynes' call for a bi-racial conference to establish "some plan to guarantee greater protection, justice, and opportunity to negroes that will gain the support of law-abiding citizens of both races," it endorsed discussion with "those negro leaders who are opposed to militant methods." The only "militant method" it cited was a call for self defense.

In mid-October government sources again provided the ''Times'' with evidence of Bolshevist propaganda targeting America's black communities. This account did not blame Red agitation for recent racial violence, but set Red propaganda in the black community into a broader context, since it was "paralleling the agitation that is being carried on in industrial centres of the North and West, where there are many alien laborers." Vehicles for this propaganda about the "doctrines of Lenin and Trotzky" included newspapers, magazines, and "so-called 'negro betterment' organizations." Quotations from such publications contrasted the recent violence in Chicago and Washington, D.C. with "Soviet Russia, a country in which dozens of racial and lingual types have settled their many differences and found a common meeting ground, a country which no longer oppresses colonies, a country from which the lynch rope is banished and in which racial tolerance and peace now exist." The ''Times'' cited one publication's call for unionization: "Negroes must form cotton workers' unions. Southern white capitalists know that the negroes can bring the white bourbon South to its knees. So go to it."<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=950CE4DA1038EE32A2575AC1A9669D946896D6CF "Reds are Working among Negroes," October 19, 1919], accessed January 28, 2010.</ref>

Coverage of the root causes of the events in Elaine, Arkansas evolved as the violence stretched over several days. A dispatch from Helena, Arkansas to the ''New York Times'' datelined October 1 said: "Returning members of the [white] posse brought numerous stories and rumors, through all of which ran the belief that the rioting was due to propaganda distributed among the negroes by white men."<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=990DE7DF1038EE32A25751C0A9669D946896D6CF "None Killed in Fight with Arkansas Posse," October 2, 1919], accessed January 27, 2010</ref> The next day's report added detail: "Additional evidence has been obtained of the activities of propagandists among the negroes, and it is thought that a plot existed for a general uprising against the whites." A white man had been arrested and was "alleged to have been preaching social equality among the negroes." Part of the headline was: "Trouble Traced to Socialist Agitators."<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=950CE0DF1038EE32A25750C0A9669D946896D6CF "Six More are Killed in Arkansas Riots," October 3, 1919], accessed January 27, 2010</ref> A few days later a Western Newspaper Union dispatch captioned a photo using the words "Captive Negro Insurrectionists."<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9B01E4DD1E30E13ABC4A52DFB6678382609EDE "[untitled]" October 12, 1919], accessed January 27, 2010</ref>

===Government activity===
[[J. Edgar Hoover]], then at the very start of his career in government, provided an analysis of the riots to the Attorney General. He blamed the July Washington, D.C. riots on "numerous assaults committed by Negroes upon white women." For the October events in Arkansas, he blamed "certain local agitation in a Negro lodge." A more general cause he cited was "propaganda of a radical nature." He charged that socialists were feeding propaganda to black-owned magazines like ''[[The Messenger Magazine|The Messenger]]'', that in turn aroused their black readers. The white perpetrators of violence went unmentioned.<ref name=young>Kenneth D. Ackerman, ''Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties'' (NY: Carroll & Graf, 2007), 60-2</ref> As chief of the Radical Division within the U.S. [[United States Department of Justice|Department of Justice]], Hoover began an investigation of "negro activities" and particularly targeted Marcus Garvey because he thought his newspaper ''[[Negro World]]'' preached Bolshevism.<ref name=young />

==See also==
*[[African Blood Brotherhood]]
*[[First Red Scare]]
*[[Mass racial violence in the United States]]

==References==
{{reflist|colwidth=30em}}

==Further Reading==
* Dray, Philip. ''At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America'', New York: Random House, 2002
* Tuttle, William M., Jr. ''Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919''. 1970. ''Blacks in the New World''. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996

[[Category:1919 riots]]
[[Category:1919 in the United States]]
[[Category:Anti-communism in the United States]]
[[Category:History of the United States (1918–1945)]]
[[Category:Race riots in the United States]]
[[Category:Presidency of Woodrow Wilson]]

[[ro:Vara roşie din 1919]]
[[uk:Червоне літо 1919]]

Maafa

2010-02-19T23:52:52Z

DBaba:

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped [[African American]] slave, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, April 2, 1863]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
:''African Holocaust redirects here. See also [[African Holocaust (album)]]''

The '''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') refers to the 500 years of suffering of [[Black people|Black Africans]] and the [[African diaspora]], through [[slavery]], imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The terms also refer to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 /> The term ''Maafa'' is derived from the [[Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy,<ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> while the term African Holocaust, derived from a Greek word, is preferred by other scholars to emphasize the intentional character.

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history.<ref name="Maafa of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/html_ah/holocaustspecial.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Holocaust Special"|}}</ref> When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref> Historically, the enslavement of Africans by white people was mostly referred to as the [[Atlantic slave trade]], a phrase that has been criticized for emphasizing the commercial aspects of the African persecution, in keeping with a European or White American historiographical viewpoint.

==Beyond slavery==
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{Bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing...in the pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of Ghana and the [[Yoruba People|Yoruba]] of Nigeria had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities..<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum era|antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in [[Yemen]]]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick_Manning_(Professor)|Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]] and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangular trade.png|thumb|250 px|right|Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "[[Middle Passage]]". African slaves were thenceforth traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe to complete the "[[Triangular Trade]]".]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a [[racialized]] system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Persecution of Africans after slavery==
{{Expand|date=November 2008}}
{{globalize/USA}}
[[Image:JimCrowInDurhamNC.jpg|thumb|250px|In the United States, [[Jim Crow Laws]] maintained the disenfranchisement of many [[African Americans]] until the latter half of the 20th century.]]
The persecution of Africans continued outside colonialist Africa, and beyond colonialism. Although social progress was made during the [[Reconstruction era of the United States|Reconstruction]] period, the post-Reconstruction era has been characterized as the [[nadir of American race relations]], in which Southern hardship and bitterness came to manifest in overt hostility against African Americans, and particularly in the phenomenon of [[lynching]]. Lynching became a means of terrorizing African Americans in the post-Reconstruction period. In the 20th century, [[Jim Crow laws]] came to codify white privilege in the United States.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side effect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|250px|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are said by some to be deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture. Others, however, feel that avoidance of the term "trade" is apologetic act on behalf of capitalism, absolving capitalist structures of involvement in human catastrophe.

==Further reading==
* ''The Black Holocaust For Beginners'', by S.E. Anderson
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}
[[Category:Democides]]
[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

[[ca:Maafa]]

Maafa

2010-02-19T23:28:57Z

DBaba: Undid revision 345045416 by 204.193.81.6 (talk)

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped [[African American]] slave, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, April 2, 1863]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
:''African Holocaust redirects here. See also [[African Holocaust (album)]]''

The '''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') refers to the 500 years of suffering of [[Black people|Black Africans]] and the [[African diaspora]], through [[slavery]], imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The terms also refer to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 /> The term ''Maafa'' is derived from the [[Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy,<ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> while the term African Holocaust, derived from a Greek word, is preferred by other scholars to emphasize the intentional character.

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history.<ref name="Maafa of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/html_ah/holocaustspecial.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Holocaust Special"|}}</ref> When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref> Historically, the enslavement of Africans by white people was mostly referred to as the [[Atlantic slave trade]], a term that has recently been criticized of emphasizing only commercial aspects from a European or White American point of view and not the suffering of Africans.

==Beyond slavery==
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{Bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing...in the pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of Ghana and the [[Yoruba People|Yoruba]] of Nigeria had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities..<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum era|antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in [[Yemen]]]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick_Manning_(Professor)|Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]] and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangular trade.png|thumb|250 px|right|Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "[[Middle Passage]]". African slaves were thenceforth traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe to complete the "[[Triangular Trade]]".]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a [[racialized]] system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Persecution of Africans after slavery==
{{Expand|date=November 2008}}
{{globalize/USA}}
[[Image:JimCrowInDurhamNC.jpg|thumb|250px|In the United States, [[Jim Crow Laws]] maintained the disenfranchisement of many [[African Americans]] until the latter half of the 20th century.]]
The persecution of Africans continued outside colonialist Africa, and beyond colonialism. Although social progress was made during the [[Reconstruction era of the United States|Reconstruction]] period, the post-Reconstruction era has been characterized as the [[nadir of American race relations]], in which Southern hardship and bitterness came to manifest in overt hostility against African Americans, and particularly in the phenomenon of [[lynching]]. Lynching became a means of terrorizing African Americans in the post-Reconstruction period. In the 20th century, [[Jim Crow laws]] came to codify white privilege in the United States.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side effect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|250px|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are said by some to be deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture. Others, however, feel that avoidance of the term "trade" is apologetic act on behalf of capitalism, absolving capitalist structures of involvement in human catastrophe.

==Further reading==
* ''The Black Holocaust For Beginners'', by S.E. Anderson
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}
[[Category:Democides]]
[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

[[ca:Maafa]]

Maafa

2010-01-31T03:54:49Z

DBaba: Undid revision 341025687 by Aztroy (talk); spam

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., April 2, 1863]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
'''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is a word derived from the [[Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history.<ref name="Maafa of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/html_ah/holocaustspecial.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Holocaust Special"|}}</ref> When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{Bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing...in the pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of Ghana and the [[Yoruba People|Yoruba]] of Nigeria had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities..<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in [[Yemen]]]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick_Manning_(Professor)|Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]] and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangular trade.png|thumb|250 px|right|Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "[[Middle Passage]]". African slaves were thenceforth traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe to complete the "[[Triangular Trade]]".]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a [[racialized]] system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Persecution of Africans after slavery==
{{Expand|date=November 2008}}[[Image:JimCrowInDurhamNC.jpg|thumb|250px|In the United States, [[Jim Crow Laws]] maintained the disenfranchisement of many [[African Americans]] until the latter half of the 20th century.]]
The persecution of Africans continued outside colonialist Africa, and beyond colonialism. Although social progress was made during the [[Reconstruction era of the United States|Reconstruction]] period, the post-Reconstruction era has been characterized as the [[nadir of American race relations]], in which Southern hardship and bitterness came to manifest in overt hostility against African Americans, and particularly in the phenomenon of [[lynching]]. Lynching became a means of terrorizing African Americans in the post-Reconstruction period. In the 20th century, [[Jim Crow laws]] came to codify white privilege in the United States.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side effect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|250px|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are said by some to be deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture. Others, however, feel that avoidance of the term "trade" is apologetic act on behalf of capitalism, absolving capitalist structures of involvement in human catastrophe.

==Further reading==
* ''The Black Holocaust For Beginners'', by S.E. Anderson
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}
[[Category:Democides]]
[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

[[ca:Maafa]]

Benutzer:GWRo0106/Red Summer

2010-01-26T01:50:32Z

DBaba: /* Events */

[[Image:chicago-race-riot.jpg|thumb|right|594px|A white gang looking for African Americans during the Chicago Race Riot of 1919]]
'''Red Summer''' describes the bloody race riots that occurred during the summer and early autumn of 1919. In most instances, whites attacked African Americans in more than two dozen American cities, though in some cases blacks responded in groups to a single action against one of their number, notably in Chicago. [[Chicago]], [[Washington, D.C.]] and [[Elaine, Arkansas]] witnessed the greatest number of fatalities.<ref name=nyt>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C04E7D61F30E033A25756C0A9669D946896D6CF "For Action on Race Riot Peril," October 5, 1919], accessed January 20, 2010. This newspaper article includes several paragraphs of editorial analysis followed by Dr. Haynes' report, "summarized at several points."</ref>

==Name==
[[James Weldon Johnson]] coined the term "Red Summer." Employed since 1916 by the [[National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]] (NAACP) as a field secretary, he built and revived local chapters of that organization. In 1919, he organized protest against the racial violence of 1919.<ref name=erickson>Alana J. Erickson, "Red Summer" in ''Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History'' (NY: Macmillan, 1960), 2293-4</ref><ref name=cunningham> George P. Cunningham, "James Weldon Johnson," in ''Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History'' (NY: Macmillan, 1960), 1459-61</ref>

==Context==
In 1919, it was estimated that 500,000 African Americans had emigrated from the [[Southern United States|South]] to the [[Northern United States|North]] and Midwest industrial cities for work during [[World War I]].<ref name="nyt" /> African-American workers filled many jobs left empty by whites who had joined the military or new ones created by the war mobilization. In some cities, they were hired as strikebreakers, especially during strikes of 1917. This increased resentment and suspicion among whites, especially the working class. Following the war, rapid [[demobilization]] and the removal of [[price controls]] led to inflation and unemployment.

This was the period of the [[First Red Scare|Red Scare]] of 1919-20 following the Russian Revolution and rise of the Bolsheviks. In that context, anyone who advocated racial equality, labor rights for African Americans, or the right of self-defense were all branded as radicals or revolutionists. The unrest was intensified by anxieties about changing attitudes brought by recent European immigrants, some of whom were members of radical political or labor organizations who openly advocated the violent overthrow of the government.

==Events==
[[File:AR elaine riot.jpg|right|thumb|"The Gazette" Elaine, Arkansas October 3, 1919]]
In the fall of 1919, Dr. George E. Haynes, an educator employed as Director of Negro Economics at the U.S. [[United States Department of Labor|Department of Labor]], produced a report on that year's racial violence designed to serve as the basis for an investigation by the U.S. [[United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary|Senate Committee on the Judiciary]]. It cataloged 26 separate riots on the part of whites attacking blacks in widely scattered communities.<ref name=nyt />

In addition, he reported that at least 43 African Americans were lynched, while another eight men were burned at the stake between January 1 and September 14, 1919.<ref name="nyt" />

Unlike earlier race riots in U.S. history, the 1919 riots were among the first in which blacks responded resistance to the white attacks. [[A. Philip Randolph]] defended the right of blacks to commit violence in self-defense.<ref name=erickson />

[[United States Navy]] sailors led the [[Charleston, South Carolina]] race riot of May 10, which resulted in the killing of Isaac Doctor, William Brown, and James Talbot, all black men.<ref name=enc>Walter C. Rucker, James N. Upton. ''Encyclopedia of American race riots''. Volume 1. 2007, page 92-3</ref> Five white men and eighteen black men were injured in the riot.<ref name=enc /> A Naval investigation found that four U.S. sailors and one civilian--all white men--were responsible for the outbreak of violence.<ref name=enc />

The race riot in [[Longview, Texas]] early in July led to the deaths of at least four men and the destruction of the African-American housing district in the town.

On July 3, The [[10th Cavalry Regiment (United States)|10th U.S. Cavalry]], a segregated African-American unit founded in 1866, was attacked by local police in [[Bisbee, Arizona]].<ref>Rucker, Walter C. and Upton, James N. ''Encyclopedia of American Race Riots'' (2007), 554</ref>

In Washington, D.C., white men, many in military uniforms, responded to the rumored arrest of a black man for rape with 4 days of mob violence, rioting and beatings of random black people on the street. When police refused to intervene, the black population fought back. Troops tried to restore order as the city closed saloons and theaters to discourage assemblies. A summer rainstorm had more of an effect. When the violence ended, 10 whites were dead, including 2 police officers, and 5 blacks. Some 150 people had been the victims of attacks.<ref name=young />

The NAACP sent a telegram to President Wilson to point out:<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E05EFDC1638E13ABC4A51DFB1668382609EDE "Protest Sent to Wilson," July 22, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref>

:...the shame put upon the country by the mobs, including United States soldiers, sailors, and marines, which have assaulted innocent and unoffending negroes in the national capital. Men in uniform have attacked negroes on the streets and pulled them from streetcars to beat them. Crowds are reported ...to have directed attacks against any passing negro....The effect of such riots in the national capital upon race antagonism will be to increase bitterness and danger of outbreaks elsewhere. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People calls upon you as President and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the nation to make statement condemning mob violence and to enforce such military law as situation demands.
{{ quote box2
| quote = "The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People respectfully enquires how long the Federal Government under your administration intends to tolerate anarchy in the United States?"
| source = -''NAACP telegram to President Woodrow Wilson'' August 29, 1919
| width = 300px
| align = right
| halign = left
| bgcolor = #EDEDED
}}

In [[Norfolk, Virginia]], mobs attacked returning African-American soldiers and destroyed the local African-American neighborhood. At least six people were shot before [[United States Marines|Marines]] were called in by local police to subdue rioters.

The summer's greatest violence occurred during [[Chicago Race Riot|rioting in Chicago]] starting on July 27. Chicago's beaches along Lake Michigan were segregated in practice, if not by law. A black youth who swam into the area customarily reserved for whites was stoned and drowned. Blacks responded violently when the police refused to take action. Violence between mobs and gangs lasted 13 days. The resulting 38 fatalities included 23 blacks and 15 whites. Injuries numbered 537 injured, and 1,000 black families were left homeless.<ref>''Encyclopedia Britannica'': [http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/110488/Chicago-Race-Riot-of-1919 "Chicago Race Riot of 1919"], accessed January 24, 2010</ref>

50 people were reported dead. Unofficial numbers were much higher. Hundreds of mostly black homes and businesses on the South Side were destroyed by mobs, and a militia force of several thousand was called in to restore order.

At the end of July the Northeastern Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, from their Providence, Rhode Island convention, denounced the rioting and burning of negroes' homes then happening in Chicago and asked Wilson "to use every means within your power to stop the rioting in Chicago and the propaganda used to incite such."<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9903E3DF1F3BEE3ABC4953DFBE668382609EDE "Negroes Appeal to Wilson,"" August 1, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref> At the end of August the NAACP protested again, noting the attack on the organization's secretary in Austin, Texas the previous week. Their telegram said: "The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People respectfully enquires how long the Federal Government under your administration intends to tolerate anarchy in the United States?" <ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9B04EEDF103DE533A25753C3A96E9C946896D6CF Negro Protest to Wilson," August 30, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref>
[[Image:Omaha Riot Will Brown.jpg|thumb|Will Brown, lynched during the 1919 riot in Omaha, Nebraska]]
During the Knoxville, Tennessee race riot at the end of August, a mob stormed the county jail to release 16 white prisoners, including convicted murderers. Turning to the African-American district, the mob killed at least seven and wounded more than 20 people. <ref>Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture: [http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=K025 Knoxville Riot of 1919], accessed January 25, 2010</ref>

At the end of September, the [[Omaha Race Riot of 1919|race riot in Omaha, Nebraska]] witnessed violence on the part of a white mob of more than 10,000 who burned the county courthouse and destroyed property valued at more than a million dollars. One man, Will Brown, was lynched.

The [[Elaine Race Riot|Elaine, Arkansas riot]] was atypical. It occurred in the rural South, and violence was directed at agricultural sharecroppers rather than black industrial workers. It began when a white man was shot when trying to break up a meeting of black sharecroppers trying to organize a union. White landowners then formed a group to attack the African-American farmers. Five whites and between 100 and 200 blacks died as a result. Seventy-nine blacks were later tried and convicted, with 12 sentenced to death, and the remainder accepted terms of up to 21 years. Appeals of their cases went to the [[U.S. Supreme Court]] which reversed the verdicts because of how their trials had been conducted. The ruling resulted in an expansion of federal oversight of state treatment of defendants' rights.

==Chronology==
{| class="wikitable"
|-
|
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date
! Place
|-
| '''May 10 '''
|[[Charleston, South Carolina]]
|-
| '''May 10'''
|[[Sylvester, Georgia]]
|-
| '''May 29'''
|[[Putnam County, Georgia]]
|-
| '''May 31'''
|[[Monticello, Mississippi]]
|-
| '''June 13'''
|[[New London, Connecticut]]
|-
| '''June 13'''
|[[Memphis, Tennessee]]
|-
| '''June 27'''
|[[Annapolis, Maryland]]
|-
| '''June 27'''
|[[Macon, Mississippi]]
|-
| early '''July'''
|[[Longview, Texas]]
|-
| '''July 3'''
|[[Bisbee, Arizona]]
|-
| '''July 5'''
|[[Scranton, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 6'''
|[[Dublin, Georgia]]
|-
| '''July 7'''
|[[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 8'''
|[[Coatesville, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 9'''
|[[Tuscaloosa, Alabama]]
|-
| '''July 11'''
|[[Baltimore, Maryland]]
|-
| '''July 15'''
|[[Port Arthur, Texas]]
|-
|}
|
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date
! Place
|-
| '''July 19'''
|[[Washington, D.C.]]
|-
| '''July 21'''
|[[Norfolk, Virginia]]
|-
| '''July 23'''
|[[New Orleans, Louisiana]]
|-
| '''July 23'''
|[[Darby, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 26'''
|[[Hobson City, Alabama]]
|-
| '''July 27'''
|[[Chicago, Illinois]]
|-
| '''July 28'''
|[[Newberry, South Carolina]]
|-
| '''July 31'''
|[[Bloomington, Illinois]]
|-
| '''July 31'''
|[[Syracuse, New York]]
|-
| '''July 31'''
|[[Philadelphia]], Pennsylvania
|-
| '''August 4'''
|[[Hattiesburg, Mississippi]]
|-
| '''August 6'''
|[[Texarkana, Texas]]
|-
| '''August 21'''
|[[New York City, New York]]
|-
| '''August 29'''
|[[Ocmulgee, Georgia]]
|-
| '''August 30'''
|[[Knoxville, Tennessee]]
|-
| '''September 28'''
|[[Omaha, Nebraska]]
|-
| '''October 1'''
|[[Elaine, Arkansas]]
|-
|}
|-
|}

==Responses==
{{ quote box2
| quote = "We appeal to you to have your country undertake for its racial minority that which you forced Poland and Austria to undertake for their racial minorities."
| source = -''National Equal Rights League to President Woodrow Wilson'' November 25, 1919
| width = 300px
| align = left
| halign = left
| bgcolor = #EDEDED
}}
[[J. Edgar Hoover]], then at the very start of his career in government, provided an analysis of the riots to the Attorney General. He blamed the July Washington, D.C. riots on "numerous assaults committed by Negroes upon white women." For the October events in Arkansas, he blamed "certain local agitation in a Negro lodge." A more general cause he cited was "propaganda of a radical nature." He charged that socialists were feeding propaganda to black-owned magazines like ''[[The Messenger Magazine|The Messenger]]'', that in turn aroused their black readers. The white perpetrators of violence went unmentioned.<ref name=young>Kenneth D. Ackerman, Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare , and the Assault on Civil Liberties'' (NY: Carroll & Graf, 2007), 60-2</ref> As chief of the Radical Division within the U.S. [[United States Department of Justice|Department of Justice]], Hoover began an investigation of "negro activities" and particularly targeted Marcus Garvey because he thought his newspaper ''[[Negro World]]'' preached Bolshevism.<ref name=young />

Protests and appeals continued for weeks. A letter in late November from the [[National Equal Rights League]] used Wilson's international advocacy for human rights against him: "We appeal to you to have your country undertake for its racial minority that which you forced Poland and Austria to undertake for their racial minorities."<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A0CEED71031E03ABC4E51DFB7678382609EDE "Ask Wilson to Aid Negroes," November 26, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref>

In September 1919, in response to the Red Summer, the [[African Blood Brotherhood]] formed to serve as an "armed resistance" movement.

The Haynes report of October 1919<ref name=nyt /> was a call for national action. Haynes said that states had shown themselves "unable or unwilling" to put a stop to lynchings. The fact that white men had been lynched in the North as well, he argued, demonstrated the national nature of the overall problem: "It is idle to suppose that murder can be confined to one section of the country or to one race." He then connected lynchings to riots:

:Persistence of unpunished lynchings of negroes fosters lawlessness among white men imbued with the mob spirit, and creates a spirit of bitterness among negroes. In such a state of public mind a trivial incident can precipitate a riot.

:Disregard of law and legal process will inevitably lead to more and more frequent clashes and bloody encounters between white men and negroes and a condition of potential race war in many cities of the United States.

:Unchecked mob violence creates hatred and intolerance, making impossible free and dispassionate discussion not only of race problems, but questions on which races and sections differ.

In presenting the Haynes report, however, ''The New York Times'' provided a context his report did not mention. Haynes documented violence and inaction on the state level The ''Times'' saw "bloodshed on a scale amounting to local insurrection" as evidence of "a new negro problem" because of "influences that are now working to drive a wedge of bitterness and hatred between the two races." Until recently, the ''Times'' said, black leaders showed "a sense of appreciation" for what whites had suffered on their behalf in fighting a civil war that "bestowed on the black man opportunities far in advance of those he had in any other part of the white man's world." Now militants were supplanting Booker T. Washington, who had "steadily argued conciliatory methods." The ''Times'' continued:<ref name =nyt />

:Every week the militant leaders gain more headway. They may be divided into general classes. One consists of radicals and revolutionaries. They are spreading Bolshevist propaganda. It is reported that they are winning many recruits among the colored race. When the ignorance that exists among negroes in many sections of the country is taken into consideration the danger of inflaming them by revolutionary doctrine may [be] apprehended.... The other class of militant leaders confine their agitation to a fight against all forms of color discrimination. They are for a program on uncompromising protest, 'to fight and continue to fight for citizenship rights and full democratic privileges.'

As evidence of militancy and Bolshevism, the ''Times'' named [[W. E. B. Du Bois|W.E.B. Du Bois]] and quoted his editorial in the publication he edited, ''[[The Crisis]]'': "Today we raise the terrible weapon of self-defense....When the armed lynchers gather, we too must gather armed." When the ''Times'' endorsed Haynes' call for a bi-racial conference to establish "some plan to guarantee greater protection, justice, and opportunity to negroes that will gain the support of law-abiding citizens of both races," it endorsed discussion with "those negro leaders who are opposed to militant methods." The only "militant method" it cited was a call for self defense.

==See also==
*[[African Blood Brotherhood]]
*[[First Red Scare]]
*[[Mass racial violence in the United States]]

==References==
{{reflist}}

* Dray, Philip. ''At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America'', New York: Random House, 2002
* Tuttle, William M., Jr. ''Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919''. 1970. ''Blacks in the New World''. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996

[[Category:1919 riots]]
[[Category:1919 in the United States]]
[[Category:Anti-communism in the United States]]
[[Category:History of the United States (1918–1945)]]
[[Category:Race riots in the United States]]

[[ro:Vara roşie din 1919]]
[[uk:Червоне літо 1919]]

Benutzer:GWRo0106/Red Summer

2010-01-26T01:49:28Z

DBaba: /* Events */

[[Image:chicago-race-riot.jpg|thumb|right|594px|A white gang looking for African Americans during the Chicago Race Riot of 1919]]
'''Red Summer''' describes the bloody race riots that occurred during the summer and early autumn of 1919. In most instances, whites attacked African Americans in more than two dozen American cities, though in some cases blacks responded in groups to a single action against one of their number, notably in Chicago. [[Chicago]], [[Washington, D.C.]] and [[Elaine, Arkansas]] witnessed the greatest number of fatalities.<ref name=nyt>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C04E7D61F30E033A25756C0A9669D946896D6CF "For Action on Race Riot Peril," October 5, 1919], accessed January 20, 2010. This newspaper article includes several paragraphs of editorial analysis followed by Dr. Haynes' report, "summarized at several points."</ref>

==Name==
[[James Weldon Johnson]] coined the term "Red Summer." Employed since 1916 by the [[National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]] (NAACP) as a field secretary, he built and revived local chapters of that organization. In 1919, he organized protest against the racial violence of 1919.<ref name=erickson>Alana J. Erickson, "Red Summer" in ''Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History'' (NY: Macmillan, 1960), 2293-4</ref><ref name=cunningham> George P. Cunningham, "James Weldon Johnson," in ''Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History'' (NY: Macmillan, 1960), 1459-61</ref>

==Context==
In 1919, it was estimated that 500,000 African Americans had emigrated from the [[Southern United States|South]] to the [[Northern United States|North]] and Midwest industrial cities for work during [[World War I]].<ref name="nyt" /> African-American workers filled many jobs left empty by whites who had joined the military or new ones created by the war mobilization. In some cities, they were hired as strikebreakers, especially during strikes of 1917. This increased resentment and suspicion among whites, especially the working class. Following the war, rapid [[demobilization]] and the removal of [[price controls]] led to inflation and unemployment.

This was the period of the [[First Red Scare|Red Scare]] of 1919-20 following the Russian Revolution and rise of the Bolsheviks. In that context, anyone who advocated racial equality, labor rights for African Americans, or the right of self-defense were all branded as radicals or revolutionists. The unrest was intensified by anxieties about changing attitudes brought by recent European immigrants, some of whom were members of radical political or labor organizations who openly advocated the violent overthrow of the government.

==Events==
[[File:AR elaine riot.jpg|right|thumb|"The Gazette" Elaine, Arkansas October 3, 1919]]
In the fall of 1919, Dr. George E. Haynes, an educator employed as Director of Negro Economics at the U.S. [[United States Department of Labor|Department of Labor]], produced a report on that year's racial violence designed to serve as the basis for an investigation by the U.S. [[United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary|Senate Committee on the Judiciary]]. It cataloged 26 separate riots on the part of whites attacking blacks in widely scattered communities.<ref name=nyt />

In addition, he reported that at least 43 African Americans were lynched, while another eight men were burned at the stake between January 1 and September 14, 1919.<ref name="nyt" />

Unlike earlier race riots in U.S. history, the 1919 riots were among the first in which blacks responded resistance to the white attacks. [[A. Philip Randolph]] defended the right of blacks to commit violence in self-defense.<ref name=erickson />

[[United States Navy]] sailors led the [[Charleston, South Carolina]] race riot of May 10, which resulted in the killing of Isaac Doctor, William Brown, and James Talbot, all black men.<ref name=enc>Walter C. Rucker, James N. Upton. ''Encyclopedia of American race riots''. Volume 1. 2007, page 92-3</ref> Five white men and eighteen black men were injured in the riot.<ref name=enc /> A Naval investigation found that four U.S. sailors and one civilian--all white men--were responsible for the outbreak of violence.<ref name=enc />

The race riot in [[Longview, Texas]] early in July led to the deaths of at least four men and the destruction of the African-American housing district in the town.

On July 3, The [[10th Cavalry Regiment (United States)|10th U.S. Cavalry]], a segregated African-American unit founded in 1866, was attacked by local police in [[Bisbee, Arizona]].<ref>Rucker, Walter C. and Upton, James N. ''Encyclopedia of American Race Riots'' (2007), 554</ref>

In Washington, D.C., white men, many in military uniforms, responded to the rumored arrest of a black man for rape with 4 days of mob violence, rioting and beatings of random black people on the street. When police refused to intervene, the black population fought back. Troops tried to restore order as the city closed saloons and theaters to discourage assemblies. A summer rainstorm had more of an effect. When the violence ended, 10 whites were dead, including 2 police officers, and 5 blacks. Some 150 people had been the victims of attacks.<ref name=young />

The NAACP sent a telegram to President Wilson to point out:<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E05EFDC1638E13ABC4A51DFB1668382609EDE "Protest Sent to Wilson," July 22, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref>

:...the shame put upon the country by the mobs, including United States soldiers, sailors, and marines, which have assaulted innocent and unoffending negroes in the national capital. Men in uniform have attacked negroes on the streets and pulled them from streetcars to beat them. Crowds are reported ...to have directed attacks against any passing negro....The effect of such riots in the national capital upon race antagonism will be to increase bitterness and danger of outbreaks elsewhere. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People calls upon you as President and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the nation to make statement condemning mob violence and to enforce such military law as situation demands.
{{ quote box2
| quote = "The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People respectfully enquires how long the Federal Government under your administration intends to tolerate anarchy in the United States?"
| source = -''NAACP telegram to President Woodrow Wilson'' August 29, 1919
| width = 300px
| align = right
| halign = left
| bgcolor = #EDEDED
}}

In [[Norfolk, Virginia]], mobs attacked returning African-American soldiers and destroyed the local African-American neighborhood. At least six people were shot before [[United States Marines|Marines]] were called in by local police to subdue rioters.

The summer's greatest violence occurred during [[Chicago Race Riot|rioting in Chicago]] starting on July 27. Chicago's beaches along Lake Michigan were segregated in practice, if not by law. A black youth who swam into the area customarily reserved for whites was stoned and drowned. Blacks responded violently when the police refused to take action. Violence between mobs and gangs lasted 13 days. The resulting 38 fatalities included 23 blacks and 15 whites. Injuries numbered 537 injured, and 1,000 black families were left homeless.<ref>''Encyclopedia Britannica'': [http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/110488/Chicago-Race-Riot-of-1919 "Chicago Race Riot of 1919"], accessed January 24, 2010</ref>

50 people were reported dead. Unofficial numbers were much higher. Hundreds of mostly black homes and businesses on the South Side were destroyed by mobs, and a militia force of several thousand was called in to restore order.

At the end of July the Northeastern Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, from their Providence, Rhode Island convention, denounced the rioting and burning of negroes' homes then happening in Chicago and asked Wilson "to use every means within your power to stop the rioting in Chicago and the propaganda used to incite such."<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9903E3DF1F3BEE3ABC4953DFBE668382609EDE "Negroes Appeal to Wilson,"" August 1, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref> At the end of August the NAACP protested again, noting the attack on the organization's secretary in Austin, Texas the previous week. Their telegram said: "The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People respectfully enquires how long the Federal Government under your administration intends to tolerate anarchy in the United States?" <ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9B04EEDF103DE533A25753C3A96E9C946896D6CF Negro Protest to Wilson," August 30, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref>
[[Image:Omaha Riot Will Brown.jpg|thumb|Will Brown, lynched during the 1919 riot in Omaha, Nebraska]]
During the Knoxville, Tennessee race riot at the end of August, a mob stormed the county jail to release 16 white prisoners, including convicted murderers. Turning to the African-American district, the mob killed at least seven and wounded more than 20 people. <ref>Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture: [http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=K025 Knoxville Riot of 1919], accessed January 25, 2010</ref>

At the end of September, the [[Omaha Race Riot of 1919|race riot in Omaha, Nebraska]] witnessed violence on the part of a white mob of more than 10,000 who burned the county courthouse and destroyed property valued at more than a million dollars. One man, Will Brown, was lynched.

The [[Elaine Race Riot|Elaine, Arkansas riot]] was atypical. It occurred in the rural South, and violence was directed agricultural sharecroppers rather than black industrial workers. It began when a white man was shot when trying to break up a meeting of black sharecroppers trying to organize a union. White landowners then formed a group to attack the African-American farmers. Five whites and between 100 and 200 blacks died as a result. Seventy-nine blacks were later tried and convicted, with 12 sentenced to death, and the remainder accepted terms of up to 21 years. Appeals of their cases went to the [[U.S. Supreme Court]] which reversed the verdicts because of how their trials had been conducted. The ruling resulted in an expansion of federal oversight of state treatment of defendants' rights.

==Chronology==
{| class="wikitable"
|-
|
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date
! Place
|-
| '''May 10 '''
|[[Charleston, South Carolina]]
|-
| '''May 10'''
|[[Sylvester, Georgia]]
|-
| '''May 29'''
|[[Putnam County, Georgia]]
|-
| '''May 31'''
|[[Monticello, Mississippi]]
|-
| '''June 13'''
|[[New London, Connecticut]]
|-
| '''June 13'''
|[[Memphis, Tennessee]]
|-
| '''June 27'''
|[[Annapolis, Maryland]]
|-
| '''June 27'''
|[[Macon, Mississippi]]
|-
| early '''July'''
|[[Longview, Texas]]
|-
| '''July 3'''
|[[Bisbee, Arizona]]
|-
| '''July 5'''
|[[Scranton, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 6'''
|[[Dublin, Georgia]]
|-
| '''July 7'''
|[[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 8'''
|[[Coatesville, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 9'''
|[[Tuscaloosa, Alabama]]
|-
| '''July 11'''
|[[Baltimore, Maryland]]
|-
| '''July 15'''
|[[Port Arthur, Texas]]
|-
|}
|
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date
! Place
|-
| '''July 19'''
|[[Washington, D.C.]]
|-
| '''July 21'''
|[[Norfolk, Virginia]]
|-
| '''July 23'''
|[[New Orleans, Louisiana]]
|-
| '''July 23'''
|[[Darby, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 26'''
|[[Hobson City, Alabama]]
|-
| '''July 27'''
|[[Chicago, Illinois]]
|-
| '''July 28'''
|[[Newberry, South Carolina]]
|-
| '''July 31'''
|[[Bloomington, Illinois]]
|-
| '''July 31'''
|[[Syracuse, New York]]
|-
| '''July 31'''
|[[Philadelphia]], Pennsylvania
|-
| '''August 4'''
|[[Hattiesburg, Mississippi]]
|-
| '''August 6'''
|[[Texarkana, Texas]]
|-
| '''August 21'''
|[[New York City, New York]]
|-
| '''August 29'''
|[[Ocmulgee, Georgia]]
|-
| '''August 30'''
|[[Knoxville, Tennessee]]
|-
| '''September 28'''
|[[Omaha, Nebraska]]
|-
| '''October 1'''
|[[Elaine, Arkansas]]
|-
|}
|-
|}

==Responses==
{{ quote box2
| quote = "We appeal to you to have your country undertake for its racial minority that which you forced Poland and Austria to undertake for their racial minorities."
| source = -''National Equal Rights League to President Woodrow Wilson'' November 25, 1919
| width = 300px
| align = left
| halign = left
| bgcolor = #EDEDED
}}
[[J. Edgar Hoover]], then at the very start of his career in government, provided an analysis of the riots to the Attorney General. He blamed the July Washington, D.C. riots on "numerous assaults committed by Negroes upon white women." For the October events in Arkansas, he blamed "certain local agitation in a Negro lodge." A more general cause he cited was "propaganda of a radical nature." He charged that socialists were feeding propaganda to black-owned magazines like ''[[The Messenger Magazine|The Messenger]]'', that in turn aroused their black readers. The white perpetrators of violence went unmentioned.<ref name=young>Kenneth D. Ackerman, Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare , and the Assault on Civil Liberties'' (NY: Carroll & Graf, 2007), 60-2</ref> As chief of the Radical Division within the U.S. [[United States Department of Justice|Department of Justice]], Hoover began an investigation of "negro activities" and particularly targeted Marcus Garvey because he thought his newspaper ''[[Negro World]]'' preached Bolshevism.<ref name=young />

Protests and appeals continued for weeks. A letter in late November from the [[National Equal Rights League]] used Wilson's international advocacy for human rights against him: "We appeal to you to have your country undertake for its racial minority that which you forced Poland and Austria to undertake for their racial minorities."<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A0CEED71031E03ABC4E51DFB7678382609EDE "Ask Wilson to Aid Negroes," November 26, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref>

In September 1919, in response to the Red Summer, the [[African Blood Brotherhood]] formed to serve as an "armed resistance" movement.

The Haynes report of October 1919<ref name=nyt /> was a call for national action. Haynes said that states had shown themselves "unable or unwilling" to put a stop to lynchings. The fact that white men had been lynched in the North as well, he argued, demonstrated the national nature of the overall problem: "It is idle to suppose that murder can be confined to one section of the country or to one race." He then connected lynchings to riots:

:Persistence of unpunished lynchings of negroes fosters lawlessness among white men imbued with the mob spirit, and creates a spirit of bitterness among negroes. In such a state of public mind a trivial incident can precipitate a riot.

:Disregard of law and legal process will inevitably lead to more and more frequent clashes and bloody encounters between white men and negroes and a condition of potential race war in many cities of the United States.

:Unchecked mob violence creates hatred and intolerance, making impossible free and dispassionate discussion not only of race problems, but questions on which races and sections differ.

In presenting the Haynes report, however, ''The New York Times'' provided a context his report did not mention. Haynes documented violence and inaction on the state level The ''Times'' saw "bloodshed on a scale amounting to local insurrection" as evidence of "a new negro problem" because of "influences that are now working to drive a wedge of bitterness and hatred between the two races." Until recently, the ''Times'' said, black leaders showed "a sense of appreciation" for what whites had suffered on their behalf in fighting a civil war that "bestowed on the black man opportunities far in advance of those he had in any other part of the white man's world." Now militants were supplanting Booker T. Washington, who had "steadily argued conciliatory methods." The ''Times'' continued:<ref name =nyt />

:Every week the militant leaders gain more headway. They may be divided into general classes. One consists of radicals and revolutionaries. They are spreading Bolshevist propaganda. It is reported that they are winning many recruits among the colored race. When the ignorance that exists among negroes in many sections of the country is taken into consideration the danger of inflaming them by revolutionary doctrine may [be] apprehended.... The other class of militant leaders confine their agitation to a fight against all forms of color discrimination. They are for a program on uncompromising protest, 'to fight and continue to fight for citizenship rights and full democratic privileges.'

As evidence of militancy and Bolshevism, the ''Times'' named [[W. E. B. Du Bois|W.E.B. Du Bois]] and quoted his editorial in the publication he edited, ''[[The Crisis]]'': "Today we raise the terrible weapon of self-defense....When the armed lynchers gather, we too must gather armed." When the ''Times'' endorsed Haynes' call for a bi-racial conference to establish "some plan to guarantee greater protection, justice, and opportunity to negroes that will gain the support of law-abiding citizens of both races," it endorsed discussion with "those negro leaders who are opposed to militant methods." The only "militant method" it cited was a call for self defense.

==See also==
*[[African Blood Brotherhood]]
*[[First Red Scare]]
*[[Mass racial violence in the United States]]

==References==
{{reflist}}

* Dray, Philip. ''At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America'', New York: Random House, 2002
* Tuttle, William M., Jr. ''Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919''. 1970. ''Blacks in the New World''. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996

[[Category:1919 riots]]
[[Category:1919 in the United States]]
[[Category:Anti-communism in the United States]]
[[Category:History of the United States (1918–1945)]]
[[Category:Race riots in the United States]]

[[ro:Vara roşie din 1919]]
[[uk:Червоне літо 1919]]

Benutzer:GWRo0106/Red Summer

2010-01-26T01:47:37Z

DBaba: /* Events */

[[Image:chicago-race-riot.jpg|thumb|right|594px|A white gang looking for African Americans during the Chicago Race Riot of 1919]]
'''Red Summer''' describes the bloody race riots that occurred during the summer and early autumn of 1919. In most instances, whites attacked African Americans in more than two dozen American cities, though in some cases blacks responded in groups to a single action against one of their number, notably in Chicago. [[Chicago]], [[Washington, D.C.]] and [[Elaine, Arkansas]] witnessed the greatest number of fatalities.<ref name=nyt>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C04E7D61F30E033A25756C0A9669D946896D6CF "For Action on Race Riot Peril," October 5, 1919], accessed January 20, 2010. This newspaper article includes several paragraphs of editorial analysis followed by Dr. Haynes' report, "summarized at several points."</ref>

==Name==
[[James Weldon Johnson]] coined the term "Red Summer." Employed since 1916 by the [[National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]] (NAACP) as a field secretary, he built and revived local chapters of that organization. In 1919, he organized protest against the racial violence of 1919.<ref name=erickson>Alana J. Erickson, "Red Summer" in ''Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History'' (NY: Macmillan, 1960), 2293-4</ref><ref name=cunningham> George P. Cunningham, "James Weldon Johnson," in ''Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History'' (NY: Macmillan, 1960), 1459-61</ref>

==Context==
In 1919, it was estimated that 500,000 African Americans had emigrated from the [[Southern United States|South]] to the [[Northern United States|North]] and Midwest industrial cities for work during [[World War I]].<ref name="nyt" /> African-American workers filled many jobs left empty by whites who had joined the military or new ones created by the war mobilization. In some cities, they were hired as strikebreakers, especially during strikes of 1917. This increased resentment and suspicion among whites, especially the working class. Following the war, rapid [[demobilization]] and the removal of [[price controls]] led to inflation and unemployment.

This was the period of the [[First Red Scare|Red Scare]] of 1919-20 following the Russian Revolution and rise of the Bolsheviks. In that context, anyone who advocated racial equality, labor rights for African Americans, or the right of self-defense were all branded as radicals or revolutionists. The unrest was intensified by anxieties about changing attitudes brought by recent European immigrants, some of whom were members of radical political or labor organizations who openly advocated the violent overthrow of the government.

==Events==
[[File:AR elaine riot.jpg|right|thumb|"The Gazette" Elaine, Arkansas October 3, 1919]]
In the fall of 1919, Dr. George E. Haynes, an educator employed as Director of Negro Economics at the U.S. [[United States Department of Labor|Department of Labor]], produced a report on that year's racial violence designed to serve as the basis for an investigation by the U.S. [[United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary|Senate Committee on the Judiciary]]. It cataloged 26 separate riots on the part of whites attacking blacks in widely scattered communities.<ref name=nyt />

In addition, he reported that at least 43 African Americans were lynched, while another eight men were burned at the stake between January 1 and September 14, 1919.<ref name="nyt" />

Unlike earlier race riots in U.S. history, the 1919 riots were among the first in which blacks responded resistance to the white attacks. [[A. Philip Randolph]] defended the right of blacks to commit violence in self-defense.<ref name=erickson />

[[United States Navy]] sailors led the [[Charleston, South Carolina]] race riot of May 10, which resulted in the killing of Isaac Doctor, William Brown, and James Talbot, all black men.<ref name=enc>Walter C. Rucker, James N. Upton. ''Encyclopedia of American race riots''. Volume 1. 2007, page 92-3</ref> Five white men and eighteen black men were injured in the riot.<ref name=enc /> A Naval investigation found that four U.S. sailors and one civilian--all white men--were responsible for the outbreak of violence.<ref name=enc />

The race riot in [[Longview, Texas]] early in July led to the deaths of at least four men and the destruction of the African-American housing district in the town.

On July 3, The [[10th Cavalry Regiment (United States)|10th U.S. Cavalry]], a segregated African-American unit founded in 1866, was attacked by local police in [[Bisbee, Arizona]].<ref>Rucker, Walter C. and Upton, James N. ''Encyclopedia of American Race Riots'' (2007), 554</ref>

In Washington, D.C., white men, many in military uniforms, responded to the rumored arrest of a black man for rape with 4 days of mob violence, rioting and beatings of random black people on the street. When police refused to intervene, the black population fought back. Troops tried to restore order as the city closed saloons and theaters to discourage assemblies. A summer rainstorm had more of an effect. When the violence ended, 10 whites were dead, including 2 police officers, and 5 blacks. Some 150 people had been the victims of attacks.<ref name=young />

The NAACP sent a telegram to President Wilson to point out:<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E05EFDC1638E13ABC4A51DFB1668382609EDE "Protest Sent to Wilson," July 22, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref>

:...the shame put upon the country by the mobs, including United States soldiers, sailors, and marines, which have assaulted innocent and unoffending negroes in the national capital. Men in uniform have attacked negroes on the streets and pulled them from streetcars to beat them. Crowds are reported ...to have directed attacks against any passing negro....The effect of such riots in the national capital upon race antagonism will be to increase bitterness and danger of outbreaks elsewhere. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People calls upon you as President and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the nation to make statement condemning mob violence and to enforce such military law as situation demands.
{{ quote box2
| quote = "The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People respectfully enquires how long the Federal Government under your administration intends to tolerate anarchy in the United States?"
| source = -''NAACP telegram to President Woodrow Wilson'' August 29, 1919
| width = 300px
| align = right
| halign = left
| bgcolor = #EDEDED
}}

In [[Norfolk, Virginia]], mobs attacked returning African-American soldiers and destroyed the local African-American neighborhood. At least six people were shot before [[United States Marines|Marines]] were called in by local police to subdue rioters.

The summer's greatest violence occurred during [[Chicago Race Riot|rioting in Chicago]] starting on July 27. Chicago's beaches along Lake Michigan were segregated in practice, if not by law. A black youth who swam into the area customarily reserved for whites was stoned and drowned. Blacks responded violently when the police refused to take action Violence between mobs and gnags lasted 13 days. The resulting 38 fatalities included 23 blacks and 15 whites. Injuries numbered 537 injured, and 1,000 black families were left homeless.<ref>''Encyclopedia Britannica'': [http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/110488/Chicago-Race-Riot-of-1919 "Chicago Race Riot of 1919"], accessed January 24, 2010</ref>

50 people were reported dead. Unofficial numbers were much higher. Hundreds of mostly black homes and businesses on the South Side were destroyed by mobs, and a militia force of several thousand was called in to restore order.

At the end of July the Northeastern Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, from their Providence, Rhode Island convention, denounced the rioting and burning of negroes' homes then happening in Chicago and asked Wilson "to use every means within your power to stop the rioting in Chicago and the propaganda used to incite such."<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9903E3DF1F3BEE3ABC4953DFBE668382609EDE "Negroes Appeal to Wilson,"" August 1, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref> At the end of August the NAACP protested again, noting the attack on the organization's secretary in Austin, Texas the previous week. Their telegram said: "The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People respectfully enquires how long the Federal Government under your administration intends to tolerate anarchy in the United States?" <ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9B04EEDF103DE533A25753C3A96E9C946896D6CF Negro Protest to Wilson," August 30, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref>
[[Image:Omaha Riot Will Brown.jpg|thumb|Will Brown, lynched during the 1919 riot in Omaha, Nebraska]]
During the Knoxville, Tennessee race riot at the end of August, a mob stormed the county jail to release 16 white prisoners, including convicted murderers. Turning to the African-American district, the mob killed at least seven and wounded more than 20 people. <ref>Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture: [http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=K025 Knoxville Riot of 1919], accessed January 25, 2010</ref>

At the end of September, the [[Omaha Race Riot of 1919|race riot in Omaha, Nebraska]] witnessed violence on the part of a white mob of more than 10,000 who burned the county courthouse and destroyed property valued at more than a million dollars. One man, Will Brown, was lynched.

The [[Elaine Race Riot|Elaine, Arkansas riot]] was atypical. It occurred in the rural South, and violence was directed agricultural sharecroppers rather than black industrial workers. It began when a white man was shot when trying to break up a meeting of black sharecroppers trying to organize a union. White landowners then formed a group to attack the African-American farmers. Five whites and between 100 and 200 blacks died as a result. Seventy-nine blacks were later tried and convicted, with 12 sentenced to death, and the remainder accepted terms of up to 21 years. Appeals of their cases went to the [[U.S. Supreme Court]] which reversed the verdicts because of how their trials had been conducted. The ruling resulted in an expansion of federal oversight of state treatment of defendants' rights.

==Chronology==
{| class="wikitable"
|-
|
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date
! Place
|-
| '''May 10 '''
|[[Charleston, South Carolina]]
|-
| '''May 10'''
|[[Sylvester, Georgia]]
|-
| '''May 29'''
|[[Putnam County, Georgia]]
|-
| '''May 31'''
|[[Monticello, Mississippi]]
|-
| '''June 13'''
|[[New London, Connecticut]]
|-
| '''June 13'''
|[[Memphis, Tennessee]]
|-
| '''June 27'''
|[[Annapolis, Maryland]]
|-
| '''June 27'''
|[[Macon, Mississippi]]
|-
| early '''July'''
|[[Longview, Texas]]
|-
| '''July 3'''
|[[Bisbee, Arizona]]
|-
| '''July 5'''
|[[Scranton, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 6'''
|[[Dublin, Georgia]]
|-
| '''July 7'''
|[[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 8'''
|[[Coatesville, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 9'''
|[[Tuscaloosa, Alabama]]
|-
| '''July 11'''
|[[Baltimore, Maryland]]
|-
| '''July 15'''
|[[Port Arthur, Texas]]
|-
|}
|
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date
! Place
|-
| '''July 19'''
|[[Washington, D.C.]]
|-
| '''July 21'''
|[[Norfolk, Virginia]]
|-
| '''July 23'''
|[[New Orleans, Louisiana]]
|-
| '''July 23'''
|[[Darby, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 26'''
|[[Hobson City, Alabama]]
|-
| '''July 27'''
|[[Chicago, Illinois]]
|-
| '''July 28'''
|[[Newberry, South Carolina]]
|-
| '''July 31'''
|[[Bloomington, Illinois]]
|-
| '''July 31'''
|[[Syracuse, New York]]
|-
| '''July 31'''
|[[Philadelphia]], Pennsylvania
|-
| '''August 4'''
|[[Hattiesburg, Mississippi]]
|-
| '''August 6'''
|[[Texarkana, Texas]]
|-
| '''August 21'''
|[[New York City, New York]]
|-
| '''August 29'''
|[[Ocmulgee, Georgia]]
|-
| '''August 30'''
|[[Knoxville, Tennessee]]
|-
| '''September 28'''
|[[Omaha, Nebraska]]
|-
| '''October 1'''
|[[Elaine, Arkansas]]
|-
|}
|-
|}

==Responses==
{{ quote box2
| quote = "We appeal to you to have your country undertake for its racial minority that which you forced Poland and Austria to undertake for their racial minorities."
| source = -''National Equal Rights League to President Woodrow Wilson'' November 25, 1919
| width = 300px
| align = left
| halign = left
| bgcolor = #EDEDED
}}
[[J. Edgar Hoover]], then at the very start of his career in government, provided an analysis of the riots to the Attorney General. He blamed the July Washington, D.C. riots on "numerous assaults committed by Negroes upon white women." For the October events in Arkansas, he blamed "certain local agitation in a Negro lodge." A more general cause he cited was "propaganda of a radical nature." He charged that socialists were feeding propaganda to black-owned magazines like ''[[The Messenger Magazine|The Messenger]]'', that in turn aroused their black readers. The white perpetrators of violence went unmentioned.<ref name=young>Kenneth D. Ackerman, Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare , and the Assault on Civil Liberties'' (NY: Carroll & Graf, 2007), 60-2</ref> As chief of the Radical Division within the U.S. [[United States Department of Justice|Department of Justice]], Hoover began an investigation of "negro activities" and particularly targeted Marcus Garvey because he thought his newspaper ''[[Negro World]]'' preached Bolshevism.<ref name=young />

Protests and appeals continued for weeks. A letter in late November from the [[National Equal Rights League]] used Wilson's international advocacy for human rights against him: "We appeal to you to have your country undertake for its racial minority that which you forced Poland and Austria to undertake for their racial minorities."<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A0CEED71031E03ABC4E51DFB7678382609EDE "Ask Wilson to Aid Negroes," November 26, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref>

In September 1919, in response to the Red Summer, the [[African Blood Brotherhood]] formed to serve as an "armed resistance" movement.

The Haynes report of October 1919<ref name=nyt /> was a call for national action. Haynes said that states had shown themselves "unable or unwilling" to put a stop to lynchings. The fact that white men had been lynched in the North as well, he argued, demonstrated the national nature of the overall problem: "It is idle to suppose that murder can be confined to one section of the country or to one race." He then connected lynchings to riots:

:Persistence of unpunished lynchings of negroes fosters lawlessness among white men imbued with the mob spirit, and creates a spirit of bitterness among negroes. In such a state of public mind a trivial incident can precipitate a riot.

:Disregard of law and legal process will inevitably lead to more and more frequent clashes and bloody encounters between white men and negroes and a condition of potential race war in many cities of the United States.

:Unchecked mob violence creates hatred and intolerance, making impossible free and dispassionate discussion not only of race problems, but questions on which races and sections differ.

In presenting the Haynes report, however, ''The New York Times'' provided a context his report did not mention. Haynes documented violence and inaction on the state level The ''Times'' saw "bloodshed on a scale amounting to local insurrection" as evidence of "a new negro problem" because of "influences that are now working to drive a wedge of bitterness and hatred between the two races." Until recently, the ''Times'' said, black leaders showed "a sense of appreciation" for what whites had suffered on their behalf in fighting a civil war that "bestowed on the black man opportunities far in advance of those he had in any other part of the white man's world." Now militants were supplanting Booker T. Washington, who had "steadily argued conciliatory methods." The ''Times'' continued:<ref name =nyt />

:Every week the militant leaders gain more headway. They may be divided into general classes. One consists of radicals and revolutionaries. They are spreading Bolshevist propaganda. It is reported that they are winning many recruits among the colored race. When the ignorance that exists among negroes in many sections of the country is taken into consideration the danger of inflaming them by revolutionary doctrine may [be] apprehended.... The other class of militant leaders confine their agitation to a fight against all forms of color discrimination. They are for a program on uncompromising protest, 'to fight and continue to fight for citizenship rights and full democratic privileges.'

As evidence of militancy and Bolshevism, the ''Times'' named [[W. E. B. Du Bois|W.E.B. Du Bois]] and quoted his editorial in the publication he edited, ''[[The Crisis]]'': "Today we raise the terrible weapon of self-defense....When the armed lynchers gather, we too must gather armed." When the ''Times'' endorsed Haynes' call for a bi-racial conference to establish "some plan to guarantee greater protection, justice, and opportunity to negroes that will gain the support of law-abiding citizens of both races," it endorsed discussion with "those negro leaders who are opposed to militant methods." The only "militant method" it cited was a call for self defense.

==See also==
*[[African Blood Brotherhood]]
*[[First Red Scare]]
*[[Mass racial violence in the United States]]

==References==
{{reflist}}

* Dray, Philip. ''At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America'', New York: Random House, 2002
* Tuttle, William M., Jr. ''Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919''. 1970. ''Blacks in the New World''. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996

[[Category:1919 riots]]
[[Category:1919 in the United States]]
[[Category:Anti-communism in the United States]]
[[Category:History of the United States (1918–1945)]]
[[Category:Race riots in the United States]]

[[ro:Vara roşie din 1919]]
[[uk:Червоне літо 1919]]

Benutzer:GWRo0106/Red Summer

2010-01-26T01:44:49Z

DBaba: /* Responses */

[[Image:chicago-race-riot.jpg|thumb|right|594px|A white gang looking for African Americans during the Chicago Race Riot of 1919]]
'''Red Summer''' describes the bloody race riots that occurred during the summer and early autumn of 1919. In most instances, whites attacked African Americans in more than two dozen American cities, though in some cases blacks responded in groups to a single action against one of their number, notably in Chicago. [[Chicago]], [[Washington, D.C.]] and [[Elaine, Arkansas]] witnessed the greatest number of fatalities.<ref name=nyt>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C04E7D61F30E033A25756C0A9669D946896D6CF "For Action on Race Riot Peril," October 5, 1919], accessed January 20, 2010. This newspaper article includes several paragraphs of editorial analysis followed by Dr. Haynes' report, "summarized at several points."</ref>

==Name==
[[James Weldon Johnson]] coined the term "Red Summer." Employed since 1916 by the [[National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]] (NAACP) as a field secretary, he built and revived local chapters of that organization. In 1919, he organized protest against the racial violence of 1919.<ref name=erickson>Alana J. Erickson, "Red Summer" in ''Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History'' (NY: Macmillan, 1960), 2293-4</ref><ref name=cunningham> George P. Cunningham, "James Weldon Johnson," in ''Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History'' (NY: Macmillan, 1960), 1459-61</ref>

==Context==
In 1919, it was estimated that 500,000 African Americans had emigrated from the [[Southern United States|South]] to the [[Northern United States|North]] and Midwest industrial cities for work during [[World War I]].<ref name="nyt" /> African-American workers filled many jobs left empty by whites who had joined the military or new ones created by the war mobilization. In some cities, they were hired as strikebreakers, especially during strikes of 1917. This increased resentment and suspicion among whites, especially the working class. Following the war, rapid [[demobilization]] and the removal of [[price controls]] led to inflation and unemployment.

This was the period of the [[First Red Scare|Red Scare]] of 1919-20 following the Russian Revolution and rise of the Bolsheviks. In that context, anyone who advocated racial equality, labor rights for African Americans, or the right of self-defense were all branded as radicals or revolutionists. The unrest was intensified by anxieties about changing attitudes brought by recent European immigrants, some of whom were members of radical political or labor organizations who openly advocated the violent overthrow of the government.

==Events==
[[File:AR elaine riot.jpg|right|thumb|"The Gazette" Elaine, Arkansas October 3, 1919]]
In the fall of 1919, Dr. George E. Haynes, an educator employed as Director of Negro Economics at the U.S. [[United States Department of Labor|Department of Labor]], produced a report on that year's racial violence designed to serve as the basis for an investigation by the U.S. [[United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary|Senate Committee on the Judiciary]]. It cataloged 26 separate riots on the part of whites attacking blacks in widely scattered communities.<ref name=nyt />

In addition, he reported that at least 43 African Americans were lynched, while another eight men were burned at the stake between January 1 and September 14, 1919.<ref name="nyt" />

Unlike earlier race riots in U.S. history, the 1919 riots were among the first in which blacks responded resistance to the white attacks. [[A. Philip Randolph]] defended the right of blacks to commit violence in self-defense.<ref name=erickson />

[[United States Navy]] sailors led the [[Charleston, South Carolina]] race riot of May 10, which resulted in the killing of Isaac Doctor, William Brown, and James Talbot, all black men.<ref name=enc>Walter C. Rucker, James N. Upton. ''Encyclopedia of American race riots''. Volume 1. 2007, page 92-3</ref> Five white men and eighteen black men were injured in the riot.<ref name=enc /> A Naval investigation found that four U.S. sailors and one civilian--all white men--were responsible for the outbreak of violence.<ref name=enc />

The race riot in [[Longview, Texas]] early in July led to the deaths of at least four men and the destruction of the African-American housing district in the town.

On July 3, The [[10th Cavalry Regiment (United States)|10th U.S. Cavalry]], a segregated African-American unit founded in 1866, was attacked by local police in [[Bisbee, Arizona]].<ref>Rucker, Walter C. and Upton, James N. ''Encyclopedia of American Race Riots'' (2007), 554</ref>

In Washington, D.C., white men, many in military uniforms, responded to the rumored arrest of a black man for rape with 4 days of mob violence, rioting and beatings in the city black neighborhoods and of individual blacks seen on the street. When the police refused to intervene, the back population fought back. Troops tried to restore order as the city closed saloons and theaters to discourage assemblies. A summer rainstorm had more of an effect. When the violence ended, 10 white were dead, including 2 police officers, and 5 blacks. Some 150 people had been the victims of attacks.<ref name=young />

The NAACP sent a telegram to President Wilson to point out:<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E05EFDC1638E13ABC4A51DFB1668382609EDE "Protest Sent to Wilson," July 22, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref>

:...the shame put upon the country by the mobs, including United States soldiers, sailors, and marines, which have assaulted innocent and unoffending negroes in the national capital. Men in uniform have attacked negroes on the streets and pulled them from streetcars to beat them. Crowds are reported ...to have directed attacks against any passing negro....The effect of such riots in the national capital upon race antagonism will be to increase bitterness and danger of outbreaks elsewhere. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People calls upon you as President and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the nation to make statement condemning mob violence and to enforce such military law as situation demands.
{{ quote box2
| quote = "The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People respectfully enquires how long the Federal Government under your administration intends to tolerate anarchy in the United States?"
| source = -''NAACP telegram to President Woodrow Wilson'' August 29, 1919
| width = 300px
| align = right
| halign = left
| bgcolor = #EDEDED
}}

In [[Norfolk, Virginia]], mobs attacked returning African-American soldiers and destroyed the local African-American neighborhood. At least six people were shot before [[United States Marines|Marines]] were called in by local police to subdue rioters.

The summer's greatest violence occurred during [[Chicago Race Riot|rioting in Chicago]] starting on July 27. Chicago's beaches along Lake Michigan were segregated in practice, if not by law. A black youth who swam into the area customarily reserved for whites was stoned and drowned. Blacks responded violently when the police refused to take action Violence between mobs and gnags lasted 13 days. The resulting 38 fatalities included 23 blacks and 15 whites. Injuries numbered 537 injured, and 1,000 black families were left homeless.<ref>''Encyclopedia Britannica'': [http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/110488/Chicago-Race-Riot-of-1919 "Chicago Race Riot of 1919"], accessed January 24, 2010</ref>

50 people were reported dead. Unofficial numbers were much higher. Hundreds of mostly black homes and businesses on the South Side were destroyed by mobs, and a militia force of several thousand was called in to restore order.

At the end of July the Northeastern Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, from their Providence, Rhode Island convention, denounced the rioting and burning of negroes' homes then happening in Chicago and asked Wilson "to use every means within your power to stop the rioting in Chicago and the propaganda used to incite such."<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9903E3DF1F3BEE3ABC4953DFBE668382609EDE "Negroes Appeal to Wilson,"" August 1, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref> At the end of August the NAACP protested again, noting the attack on the organization's secretary in Austin, Texas the previous week. Their telegram said: "The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People respectfully enquires how long the Federal Government under your administration intends to tolerate anarchy in the United States?" <ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9B04EEDF103DE533A25753C3A96E9C946896D6CF Negro Protest to Wilson," August 30, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref>
[[Image:Omaha Riot Will Brown.jpg|thumb|Will Brown, lynched during the 1919 riot in Omaha, Nebraska]]
During the Knoxville, Tennessee race riot at the end of August, a mob stormed the county jail to release 16 white prisoners, including convicted murderers. Turning to the African-American district, the mob killed at least seven and wounded more than 20 people. <ref>Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture: [http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=K025 Knoxville Riot of 1919], accessed January 25, 2010</ref>

At the end of September, the [[Omaha Race Riot of 1919|race riot in Omaha, Nebraska]] witnessed violence on the part of a white mob of more than 10,000 who burned the county courthouse and destroyed property valued at more than a million dollars. One man, Will Brown, was lynched.

The [[Elaine Race Riot|Elaine, Arkansas riot]] was atypical. It occurred in the rural South, and violence was directed agricultural sharecroppers rather than black industrial workers. It began when a white man was shot when trying to break up a meeting of black sharecroppers trying to organize a union. White landowners then formed a group to attack the African-American farmers. Five whites and between 100 and 200 blacks died as a result. Seventy-nine blacks were later tried and convicted, with 12 sentenced to death, and the remainder accepted terms of up to 21 years. Appeals of their cases went to the [[U.S. Supreme Court]] which reversed the verdicts because of how their trials had been conducted. The ruling resulted in an expansion of federal oversight of state treatment of defendants' rights.

==Chronology==
{| class="wikitable"
|-
|
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date
! Place
|-
| '''May 10 '''
|[[Charleston, South Carolina]]
|-
| '''May 10'''
|[[Sylvester, Georgia]]
|-
| '''May 29'''
|[[Putnam County, Georgia]]
|-
| '''May 31'''
|[[Monticello, Mississippi]]
|-
| '''June 13'''
|[[New London, Connecticut]]
|-
| '''June 13'''
|[[Memphis, Tennessee]]
|-
| '''June 27'''
|[[Annapolis, Maryland]]
|-
| '''June 27'''
|[[Macon, Mississippi]]
|-
| early '''July'''
|[[Longview, Texas]]
|-
| '''July 3'''
|[[Bisbee, Arizona]]
|-
| '''July 5'''
|[[Scranton, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 6'''
|[[Dublin, Georgia]]
|-
| '''July 7'''
|[[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 8'''
|[[Coatesville, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 9'''
|[[Tuscaloosa, Alabama]]
|-
| '''July 11'''
|[[Baltimore, Maryland]]
|-
| '''July 15'''
|[[Port Arthur, Texas]]
|-
|}
|
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date
! Place
|-
| '''July 19'''
|[[Washington, D.C.]]
|-
| '''July 21'''
|[[Norfolk, Virginia]]
|-
| '''July 23'''
|[[New Orleans, Louisiana]]
|-
| '''July 23'''
|[[Darby, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 26'''
|[[Hobson City, Alabama]]
|-
| '''July 27'''
|[[Chicago, Illinois]]
|-
| '''July 28'''
|[[Newberry, South Carolina]]
|-
| '''July 31'''
|[[Bloomington, Illinois]]
|-
| '''July 31'''
|[[Syracuse, New York]]
|-
| '''July 31'''
|[[Philadelphia]], Pennsylvania
|-
| '''August 4'''
|[[Hattiesburg, Mississippi]]
|-
| '''August 6'''
|[[Texarkana, Texas]]
|-
| '''August 21'''
|[[New York City, New York]]
|-
| '''August 29'''
|[[Ocmulgee, Georgia]]
|-
| '''August 30'''
|[[Knoxville, Tennessee]]
|-
| '''September 28'''
|[[Omaha, Nebraska]]
|-
| '''October 1'''
|[[Elaine, Arkansas]]
|-
|}
|-
|}

==Responses==
{{ quote box2
| quote = "We appeal to you to have your country undertake for its racial minority that which you forced Poland and Austria to undertake for their racial minorities."
| source = -''National Equal Rights League to President Woodrow Wilson'' November 25, 1919
| width = 300px
| align = left
| halign = left
| bgcolor = #EDEDED
}}
[[J. Edgar Hoover]], then at the very start of his career in government, provided an analysis of the riots to the Attorney General. He blamed the July Washington, D.C. riots on "numerous assaults committed by Negroes upon white women." For the October events in Arkansas, he blamed "certain local agitation in a Negro lodge." A more general cause he cited was "propaganda of a radical nature." He charged that socialists were feeding propaganda to black-owned magazines like ''[[The Messenger Magazine|The Messenger]]'', that in turn aroused their black readers. The white perpetrators of violence went unmentioned.<ref name=young>Kenneth D. Ackerman, Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare , and the Assault on Civil Liberties'' (NY: Carroll & Graf, 2007), 60-2</ref> As chief of the Radical Division within the U.S. [[United States Department of Justice|Department of Justice]], Hoover began an investigation of "negro activities" and particularly targeted Marcus Garvey because he thought his newspaper ''[[Negro World]]'' preached Bolshevism.<ref name=young />

Protests and appeals continued for weeks. A letter in late November from the [[National Equal Rights League]] used Wilson's international advocacy for human rights against him: "We appeal to you to have your country undertake for its racial minority that which you forced Poland and Austria to undertake for their racial minorities."<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A0CEED71031E03ABC4E51DFB7678382609EDE "Ask Wilson to Aid Negroes," November 26, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref>

In September 1919, in response to the Red Summer, the [[African Blood Brotherhood]] formed to serve as an "armed resistance" movement.

The Haynes report of October 1919<ref name=nyt /> was a call for national action. Haynes said that states had shown themselves "unable or unwilling" to put a stop to lynchings. The fact that white men had been lynched in the North as well, he argued, demonstrated the national nature of the overall problem: "It is idle to suppose that murder can be confined to one section of the country or to one race." He then connected lynchings to riots:

:Persistence of unpunished lynchings of negroes fosters lawlessness among white men imbued with the mob spirit, and creates a spirit of bitterness among negroes. In such a state of public mind a trivial incident can precipitate a riot.

:Disregard of law and legal process will inevitably lead to more and more frequent clashes and bloody encounters between white men and negroes and a condition of potential race war in many cities of the United States.

:Unchecked mob violence creates hatred and intolerance, making impossible free and dispassionate discussion not only of race problems, but questions on which races and sections differ.

In presenting the Haynes report, however, ''The New York Times'' provided a context his report did not mention. Haynes documented violence and inaction on the state level The ''Times'' saw "bloodshed on a scale amounting to local insurrection" as evidence of "a new negro problem" because of "influences that are now working to drive a wedge of bitterness and hatred between the two races." Until recently, the ''Times'' said, black leaders showed "a sense of appreciation" for what whites had suffered on their behalf in fighting a civil war that "bestowed on the black man opportunities far in advance of those he had in any other part of the white man's world." Now militants were supplanting Booker T. Washington, who had "steadily argued conciliatory methods." The ''Times'' continued:<ref name =nyt />

:Every week the militant leaders gain more headway. They may be divided into general classes. One consists of radicals and revolutionaries. They are spreading Bolshevist propaganda. It is reported that they are winning many recruits among the colored race. When the ignorance that exists among negroes in many sections of the country is taken into consideration the danger of inflaming them by revolutionary doctrine may [be] apprehended.... The other class of militant leaders confine their agitation to a fight against all forms of color discrimination. They are for a program on uncompromising protest, 'to fight and continue to fight for citizenship rights and full democratic privileges.'

As evidence of militancy and Bolshevism, the ''Times'' named [[W. E. B. Du Bois|W.E.B. Du Bois]] and quoted his editorial in the publication he edited, ''[[The Crisis]]'': "Today we raise the terrible weapon of self-defense....When the armed lynchers gather, we too must gather armed." When the ''Times'' endorsed Haynes' call for a bi-racial conference to establish "some plan to guarantee greater protection, justice, and opportunity to negroes that will gain the support of law-abiding citizens of both races," it endorsed discussion with "those negro leaders who are opposed to militant methods." The only "militant method" it cited was a call for self defense.

==See also==
*[[African Blood Brotherhood]]
*[[First Red Scare]]
*[[Mass racial violence in the United States]]

==References==
{{reflist}}

* Dray, Philip. ''At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America'', New York: Random House, 2002
* Tuttle, William M., Jr. ''Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919''. 1970. ''Blacks in the New World''. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996

[[Category:1919 riots]]
[[Category:1919 in the United States]]
[[Category:Anti-communism in the United States]]
[[Category:History of the United States (1918–1945)]]
[[Category:Race riots in the United States]]

[[ro:Vara roşie din 1919]]
[[uk:Червоне літо 1919]]

Benutzer:GWRo0106/Red Summer

2010-01-23T03:54:49Z

DBaba: /* Events */

'''Red Summer''' describes the bloody race riots that occurred during the summer and early autumn of 1919. Whites attacked African Americans in more than two dozen American cities. [[Chicago]], [[Washington, D.C.]] and [[Elaine, Arkansas]] witnessed the greatest number of fatalities.<ref name=nyt>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C04E7D61F30E033A25756C0A9669D946896D6CF "For Action on Race Riot Peril," October 5, 1919], accessed January 20, 2010. This newspaper article includes several paragraphs of editorial analysis followed by Dr. Haynes' report, "summarized at several points."</ref>
{{ quote box2
| quote = "We appeal to you to have your country undertake for its racial minority that which you forced Poland and Austria to undertake for their racial minorities."
| source = -''National Equal Rights League to President Woodrow Wilson'' November 25, 1919
| width = 300px
| align = right
| halign = left
| bgcolor = #EDEDED
}}
==Name==
[[James Weldon Johnson]] coined the term "Red Summer." Employed since 1916 by the [[National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]] (NAACP) as a field secretary, he built and revived local chapters of that organization. In 1919, he organized protest against the racial violence of 1919.<ref name=erickson>Alana J. Erickson, "Red Summer" in ''Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History'' (NY: Macmillan, 1960), 2293-4</ref><ref name=cunningham> George P. Cunningham, "James Weldon Johnson," in ''Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History'' (NY: Macmillan, 1960), 1459-61</ref>

==Events==
[[File:AR elaine riot.jpg|right|thumb|"The Gazette" Elaine, Arkansas October 3, 1919]]
In the fall of 1919, Dr. George E. Haynes, an educator employed as Director of Negro Economics at the U.S. [[United States Department of Labor|Department of Labor]], produced a report on that year's racial violence designed to serve as the basis for an investigation by the U.S. [[United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary|Senate Committee on the Judiciary]]. It cataloged 26 separate riots on the part of whites attacking blacks in widely scattered communities.<ref name=nyt />

In addition, he reported that at least 43 African Americans were lynched, while another eight men were burned at the stake between January 1 and September 14, 1919.<ref name="nyt" />

Unlike earlier race riots in U.S. history, the 1919 riots were among the first in which blacks responded resistance to the white attacks. [[A. Philip Randolph]] defended the right of blacks to commit violence in self-defense.<ref name=erickson />

[[United States Navy]] sailors led the [[Charleston, South Carolina]] race riot, which resulted in the killing of Isaac Doctor, William Brown, and James Talbot, all black men.<ref name=enc>Walter C. Rucker, James N. Upton. ''Encyclopedia of American race riots''. Volume 1. 2007, page 92-3</ref> Five white men and eighteen black men were injured in the riot.<ref name=enc /> A Naval investigation found that four U.S. sailors and one civilian--all white men--were responsible for the outbreak of violence.<ref name=enc />

The race riot in [[Longview, Texas]] led to the deaths of at least four men and the destruction of the African-American housing district in the town.

The [[10th Cavalry Regiment (United States)|10th U.S. Cavalry]], a segregated African-American unit founded in 1866, was attacked by local police in [[Bisbee, Arizona]].<ref>Rucker, Walter C. and Upton, James N. ''Encyclopedia of American Race Riots'' (2007), 554</ref>

In Washington, D.C., five days of unrest left six dead and 150 wounded.

In [[Norfolk, Virginia]], mobs attacked returning African-American soldiers and destroyed the local African-American neighborhood. At least six people were shot before [[United States Marines|Marines]] were called in by local police to subdue rioters.

After five days of the [[Chicago Race Riot|rioting in Chicago]], 50 people were reported dead. Unofficial numbers were much higher. Hundreds of mostly black homes and businesses on the South Side were destroyed by mobs, and thousands of militia troops were called in to restore order.

During the Knoxville, Tennessee race riot, a mob stormed the county jail to release 16 white prisoners, including convicted murderers. Turning to the African-American district, the mob killed at least seven and wounded more than 20 people. <ref>[http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=K025 Knoxville Riot of 1919]</ref>

One man was lynched and $1,000,000 in property damage, including burning of the county courthouse, was caused by white mob of more than 10,000 people during the [[Omaha Race Riot of 1919|race riot in Omaha, Nebraska]].

The [[Elaine Race Riot|Elaine, Arkansas riot]] was atypical. It occurred in the rural South, and violence was directed agricultural sharecroppers rather than black industrial workers. It began when a white man was shot when trying to break up a meeting of black sharecroppers trying to organize a union. White landowners then formed a group to attack the African-American farmers. Five whites and between 100 and 200 blacks died as a result. Seventy-nine blacks were later tried and convicted, with 12 sentenced to death, and the remainder accepted terms of up to 21 years. Appeals of their cases went to the [[U.S. Supreme Court]] which reversed the verdicts because of how their trials had been conducted. The ruling resulted in an expansion of federal oversight of state treatment of defendants' rights.

==Chronology==
[[Image:chicago-race-riot.jpg|thumb|right|594px|A white gang looking for African Americans during the Chicago Race Riot of 1919]]

[[Image:Omaha Riot Will Brown.jpg|thumb|Will Brown, lynched during the 1919 riot in Omaha, Nebraska]]
{| class="wikitable"
!align="center" colspan="6"|'''Riots during the Red Summer of 1919'''
|-
! Date
! Place
|-
| '''May 10 '''
| [[Charleston, South Carolina]]
|-
| '''May 10'''
| [[Sylvester, Georgia]]
|-
| '''May 29'''
| [[Putnam County, Georgia]]
|-
| '''May 31'''
| [[Monticello, Mississippi]]
|-
| '''June 13'''
| [[New London, Connecticut]]
|-
| '''June 13'''
| [[Memphis, Tennessee]]
|-
| '''June 27'''
| [[Annapolis, Maryland]]
|-
| '''June 27'''
| [[Macon, Mississippi]]
|-
| early '''July'''
| [[Longview, Texas]]
|-
| '''July 3'''
| [[Bisbee, Arizona]]
|-
| '''July 5'''
| [[Scranton, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 6'''
| [[Dublin, Georgia]]
|-
| '''July 7'''
| [[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 8'''
| [[Coatesville, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 9'''
| [[Tuscaloosa, Alabama]]
|-
| '''July 11'''
| [[Baltimore, Maryland]]
|-
| '''July 15'''
| [[Port Arthur, Texas]]
|-
| '''July 19'''
| [[Washington, D.C.]]
|-
| '''July 21'''
| [[Norfolk, Virginia]]
|-
| '''July 23'''
| [[New Orleans, Louisiana]]
|-
| '''July 23'''
| [[Darby, Pennsylvania]]
|-
| '''July 26'''
| [[Hobson City, Alabama]]
|-
| '''July 27'''
| [[Chicago, Illinois]]
|-
| '''July 28'''
| [[Newberry, South Carolina]]
|-
| '''July 31'''
| [[Bloomington, Illinois]]
|-
| '''July 31'''
| [[Syracuse, New York]]
|-
| '''July 31'''
| [[Philadelphia]], Pennsylvania
|-
| '''August 4'''
| [[Hattiesburg, Mississippi]]
|-
| '''August 6'''
| [[Texarkana, Texas]]
|-
| '''August 21'''
| [[New York City, New York]]
|-
| '''August 29'''
| [[Ocmulgee, Georgia]]
|-
| '''August 30'''
| [[Knoxville, Tennessee]]
|-
| '''September 28'''
| [[Omaha, Nebraska]]
|-
| '''October 1'''
| [[Elaine, Arkansas]]
|-
|}

==Causes and analysis==
The riots were sparked by postwar tensions of [[racism]], [[unemployment]], [[inflation]], and violence by radical political groups. In 1919 it was estimated that 500,000 African Americans had emigrated from the [[Southern United States|South]] to the [[Northern United States|North]] and Midwest industrial cities for work during the period bookmarked by [[World War I]].<ref name="nyt" /> During the war, African-American workers filled many jobs left empty by whites who had joined the military, or new ones created by the war mobilization. In some cities, they were hired as strikebreakers, especially during strikes of 1917. All of these actions increased resentment and suspicion among whites, especially the working class. Following the war, rapid [[demobilization]] and a lack of [[price controls]] led to inflation and unemployment. The resulting [[competition]] for jobs between [[whites]] and [[Black people|blacks]] was fierce. European-American workers resented displacement by less expensive laborers, including the many new African-Americans added to the rapidly growing cities.

The unrest was intensified by anxieties about changing attitudes brought by recent European immigrants, some of whom were members of radical political or labor organizations, including communists, the [[International Workers of the World|I.W.W.]], and anarchists such as [[Luigi Galleani]], who openly advocated the violent overthrow of the government and '[[propaganda by the deed]]'. This was the time of the [[First Red Scare|Red Scare]], after the Russian Revolution and rise of the Bolsheviks. African Americans who were attracted to the idea of an independent African-American government based on Marxist principles, such as [[Cyril Briggs]], those who were attracted to socialism or communism as a political philosopy, such as [[W. E. B. Du Bois]], and even those who advocated racial equality, labor rights for African Americans, or the right of self-defense were all branded as radicals or revolutionists. The [[Jamaica]]n poet [[Claude McKay]], then a [[Communist]], wrote his poem [http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/mckay.html "If We Must Die"] in response to the situation.

Following 5 days of rioting in Washington, D.C., the NAACP sent a telegram to President Wilson to point out:<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E05EFDC1638E13ABC4A51DFB1668382609EDE "Protest Sent to Wilson," July 22, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref>

:...the shame put upon the country by the mobs, including United States soldiers, sailors, and marines, which have assaulted innocent and unoffending negroes in the national capital. Men in uniform have attacked negroes on the streets and pulled them from streetcars to beat them. Crowds are reported ...to have directed attacks against any passing negro....The effect of such riots in the national capital upon race antagonism will be to increase bitterness and danger of outbreaks elsewhere. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People calls upon you as President and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the nation to make statement condemning mob violence and to enforce such military law as situation demands.
{{ quote box2
| quote = "The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People respectfully enquires how long the Federal Government under your administration intends to tolerate anarchy in the United States?"
| source = -''NAACP telegram to President Woodrow Wilson'' August 29, 1919
| width = 300px
| align = right
| halign = left
| bgcolor = #EDEDED
}}
Similarly, at the end of July the Northeastern Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, from their Providence, Rhode Island convention, denounced the rioting and burning of negroes' homes then happening in Chicago and asked Wilson "to use every means within your power to stop the rioting in Chicago and the propaganda used to incite such."<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9903E3DF1F3BEE3ABC4953DFBE668382609EDE "Negroes Appeal to Wilson,"" August 1, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref> At the end of August the NAACP protested again, noting the attack on the organization's secretary in Austin, Texas the previous week. Their telegram said: "The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People respectfully enquires how long the Federal Government under your administration intends to tolerate anarchy in the United States?" <ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9B04EEDF103DE533A25753C3A96E9C946896D6CF Negro Protest to Wilson," August 30, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref>

Such protests and appeals continued for weeks. A letter from the [[National Equal Rights League]] used Wilson's international advocacy for human righst against him: "We appeal to you to have your country undertake for its racial minority that which you forced Poland and Austria to undertake for their racial minorities."<ref>''New York Times'': [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A0CEED71031E03ABC4E51DFB7678382609EDE "Ask Wilson to Aid Negroes," November 26, 1919], accessed January 21, 2010</ref>

In September 1919, in response to the Red Summer, the [[African Blood Brotherhood]] formed to serve as an "armed resistance" movement.

The Haynes report of October 1919<ref name=nyt /> was a call for national action. Haynes said that states had shown themselves "unable or unwilling" to put a stop to lynchings. The fact that white men had been lynched in the North as well, he argued, demonstrated the national nature of the overall problem: "It is idle to suppose that murder can be confined to one section of the country or to one race." He then connected lynchings to riots:

:Persistence of unpunished lynchings of negroes fosters lawlessness among white men imbued with the mob spirit, and creates a spirit of bitterness among negroes. In such a state of public mind a trivial incident can precipitate a riot.

:Disregard of law and legal process will inevitably lead to more and more frequent clashes and bloody encounters between white men and negroes and a condition of potential race war in many cities of the United States.

:Unchecked mob violence creates hatred and intolerance, making impossible free and dispassionate discussion not only of race problems, but questions on which races and sections differ.

==See also==
*[[African Blood Brotherhood]]
*[[The Communist Party and African-Americans]]
*[[First Red Scare]]
*[[Mass racial violence in the United States]]

==References==
{{reflist}}

* Dray, Philip. ''At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America'', New York: Random House, 2002
* Zinn, Howard. ''Voices of a People's History of the United States''. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004
* Tuttle, William M., Jr. ''Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919''. 1970. ''Blacks in the New World''. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996

[[Category:1919 riots]]
[[Category:1919 in the United States]]
[[Category:Anti-communism in the United States]]
[[Category:History of the United States (1918–1945)]]
[[Category:Race riots in the United States]]

[[ro:Vara roşie din 1919]]
[[uk:Червоне літо 1919]]

Maafa

2009-08-29T19:15:00Z

DBaba:

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
'''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is a word derived from the [[Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history.<ref name="Maafa of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/html_ah/holocaustspecial.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Holocaust Special"|}}</ref> When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing...in the pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of Ghana and the [[Yoruba People|Yoruba]] of Nigeria had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities..<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in [[Yemen]]]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]] and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangular trade.png|thumb|250 px|right|Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "[[Middle Passage]]". African slaves were thenceforth traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe to complete the "[[Triangular Trade]]".]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Persecution of Africans after slavery==
{{Expand|date=November 2008}}[[Image:JimCrowInDurhamNC.jpg|thumb|250px|In the United States, [[Jim Crow Laws]] maintained the disenfranchisement of many [[African Americans]] until the latter half of the 20th century.]]
The persecution of Africans continued outside colonialist Africa, and beyond colonialism. Although social progress was made during the [[Reconstruction era of the United States|Reconstruction]] period, the post-Reconstruction era has been characterized as the [[nadir of American race relations]], in which Southern hardship and bitterness came to manifest in overt hostility against African Americans, and particularly in the phenomenon of [[lynching]]. Lynching became a means of terrorizing African Americans in the post-Reconstruction period. In the 20th century, [[Jim Crow laws]] came to codify white privilege in the United States.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side effect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|250px|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are said by some to be deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture. Others, however, feel that avoidance of the term "trade" is apologetic act on behalf of capitalism, absolving capitalist structures of involvement in human catastrophe.

==Further reading==
* ''The Black Holocaust For Beginners'', by S.E. Anderson
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}
[[Category:Democides]]
[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

[[ca:Maafa]]

Maafa

2009-06-28T14:42:45Z

DBaba:

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
'''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is a word derived from the [[Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history.<ref name="Maafa of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/html_ah/holocaustspecial.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Holocaust Special"|}}</ref> When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing...in the pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the Ashanti of Ghana and the Yoruba of Nigeria had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities..<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in [[Yemen]]]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]] and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangular trade.png|thumb|250 px|right|Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "[[Middle Passage]]". African slaves were thenceforth traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe to complete the "[[Triangular Trade]]".]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Persecution of Africans after slavery==
{{Expand|date=November 2008}}[[Image:JimCrowInDurhamNC.jpg|thumb|250px|In the United States, [[Jim Crow Laws]] maintained the disenfranchisement of many [[African Americans]] until the latter half of the 20th century.]]
The persecution of Africans continued outside colonialist Africa, and beyond colonialism. Although social progress was made during the [[Reconstruction era of the United States|Reconstruction]] period, the post-Reconstruction era has been characterized as the [[nadir of American race relations]], in which Southern hardship and bitterness came to manifest in overt hostility against African Americans, and particularly in the phenomenon of [[lynching]]. Lynching became a means of terrorizing African Americans in the post-Reconstruction period. In the 20th century, [[Jim Crow laws]] came to codify white privilege in the United States.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side effect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|250px|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are said by some to be deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture. Others, however, feel that avoidance of the term "trade" is apologetic act on behalf of capitalism, absolving capitalist structures of involvement in human catastrophe.

==Further reading==
* ''The Black Holocaust For Beginners'', by S.E. Anderson
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}
[[Category:Democides]]
[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

[[ca:Maafa]]

Benutzer:GWRo0106/Red Summer

2009-01-06T00:09:08Z

DBaba: /* Riots */ add requested citation

'''Red Summer''', coined by author [[James Weldon Johnson]], is used to describe the bloody race riots that occurred during the [[summer]] and [[autumn]] of [[1919]]. [[Race riot]]s erupted in several cities in both the [[North]] and [[South]] of the [[United States]]. The three with the highest number of fatalities happened in [[Chicago]], [[Washington, D.C.]] and [[Elaine, Arkansas]].{{Fact|date=May 2008}}

==Events==
According to a period analysis of the events, there were 26 separate riots in communities and cities across the United States where [[Black people|blacks]] were the victims of physical attacks.<ref>[http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9C04E7D61F30E033A25756C0A9669D946896D6CF&oref=slogin "For action on race riot peril"], ''The New York Times''. October 5, 1919. Retrieved 5/26/08.</ref>

The riots were sparked by postwar tensions of [[racism]], [[unemployment]], [[inflation]], and violence by radical political groups. In 1919 it was estimated that 500,000 African Americans had emigrated from the [[Southern United States|South]] to the [[Northern United States|North]] and Midwest industrial cities for work during the period bookmarked by [[World War I]].<ref>[http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9C04E7D61F30E033A25756C0A9669D946896D6CF&oref=slogin "For action on race riot peril"], ''The New York Times''. October 5, 1919. Retrieved 5/26/08.</ref> During the war, African-American workers filled many jobs left empty by whites who had joined the military, or new ones created by the war mobilization. In some cities, they were hired as strikebreakers, especially during strikes of 1917. Some disaffected black workers joined radical political organizations such as the [[African Blood Brotherhood]] or the [[Communist Party of the United States|Communist party]], which [[The Communist Party and African-Americans|targeted blacks]] for recruitment. All of these actions increased resentment and suspicion among whites, especially the working class. Following the war, rapid [[demobilization]] and a lack of [[price controls]] led to inflation and unemployment. The resulting [[competition]] for jobs between [[whites]] and [[Black people|blacks]] was fierce. European-American workers resented displacement by less expensive laborers, including the many new African-Americans added to the rapidly growing cities.

The unrest was intensified by anxieties about changing attitudes brought by recent European immigrants, some of whom were members of radical political or labor organizations, including communists, the [[International Workers of the World|I.W.W.]], and anarchists such as [[Luigi Galleani]], who openly advocated the violent overthrow of the government and '[[propaganda by the deed]]'. This was the time of the [[First Red Scare|Red Scare]], after the Russian Revolution and rise of the Bolsheviks. African Americans who were attracted to the idea of an independent African-American government based on Marxist principles, such as [[Cyril Briggs]], those who were attracted to socialism or communism as a political philosopy, such as [[W.E.B. DuBois]], and even those who advocated racial equality, labor rights for African Americans, or the right of self-defense were all branded as radicals or revolutionists. The [[Jamaica]]n poet [[Claude McKay]], then a [[Communist]], wrote his poem [http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/mckay.html "If We Must Die"] in response to the situation.

Unlike earlier race riots in U.S. history, the 1919 riots were among the first where there was an organized black resistance to the white attacks, in part due to the rise of the "armed resistance" movement led by the African Blood Brotherhood. The Elaine, Arkansas riot was less typical of others; it took place in the rural South and violence was directed not against black industrial workers, but agricultural sharecroppers.

===Riots===
Between January 1 and September 14, 1919 at least 43 African Americans were lynched, with an additional eight men burnt at the stake.<ref>[http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9C04E7D61F30E033A25756C0A9669D946896D6CF&oref=slogin "For action on race riot peril"], ''The New York Times''. October 5, 1919. Retrieved 5/26/08.</ref>

{| class="wikitable"
!align="center" colspan="6"|'''Events during the Red Summer of 1919''' (chronological order)<ref>[http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9C04E7D61F30E033A25756C0A9669D946896D6CF&oref=slogin "For action on race riot peril"], ''The New York Times''. October 5, 1919. Retrieved 5/26/08.</ref>
|-
! Date
! Place
! Event
|-
| '''[[May 10]] '''
| [[Charleston, South Carolina]]
| [[United States Navy]] sailors led the [[Charleston Race Riot]], killing at least one man and causing the city to live under [[martial law]] for several weeks.
|-
| '''May 10'''
| [[Sylvester, Georgia]]
| One reported dead.
|-
| '''[[May 29]]'''
| [[Putnam County, Georgia]]
|
|-
| '''[[May 31]]'''
| [[Monticello, Mississippi]]
|
|-
| '''[[June 13]]'''
| [[New London, Connecticut]]
|
|-
| '''June 13'''
| [[Memphis, Tennessee]]
|
|-
| '''[[June 27]]'''
| [[Annapolis, Maryland]]
|
|-
| '''June 27'''
| [[Macon, Mississippi]]
|
|-
| early '''July'''
| [[Longview, Texas]]
| The [[Longview Race Riot]] led to the deaths of at least four men and the destruction of the African-American housing district in the town.
|-
| '''[[July 3]]'''
| [[Bisbee, Arizona]]
| The [[10th Cavalry Regiment (United States)|10th U.S. Cavalry]] was attacked by local police.<ref>Rucker, Walter C. and Upton, James N. ''Encyclopedia of American Race Riots''. 2007, page 554</ref>
|-
| '''[[July 5]]'''
| [[Scranton, Pennsylvania]]
|
|-
| '''[[July 6]]'''
| [[Dublin, Georgia]]
| Two reported dead.
|-
| '''[[July 7]]'''
| [[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania]]
| Race riots throughout the city; at least one dead
|-
| '''[[July 8]]'''
| [[Coatesville, Pennsylvania]]
|
|-
| '''[[July 9]]'''
| [[Tuscaloosa, Alabama]]
|
|-
| '''[[July 11]]'''
| [[Baltimore, Maryland]]
|
|-
| '''[[July 15]]'''
| [[Port Arthur, Texas]]
|
|-
| '''[[July 19]]'''
| [[Washington, D.C.]]
| During the [[Washington, D.C. Riot (1919)|Washington, D.C. Race Riot]], five days of unrest led to six killed and 150 wounded.
|-
| '''[[July 21]]'''
| [[Norfolk, Virginia]]
| Mobs attacked returning African-American soldiers and destroyed the local African-American neighborhood. At least six people were shot before [[United States Marines|Marines]] were called in by local police to subdue rioters.
|-
| '''[[July 23]]'''
| [[New Orleans, Louisiana]]
|
|-
| '''July 23'''
| [[Darby, Pennsylvania]]
|
|-
| '''[[July 26]]'''
| [[Hobson City, Alabama]]
|
|-
| '''[[July 27]]'''
| [[Chicago, Illinois]]
| After five days of the [[Chicago Race Riot]], 50 people were reported dead; unofficial numbers were much higher. Hundreds of mostly black homes and businesses on the South Side were destroyed by mobs, and thousands of militia troops were called in to restore order.
|-
| '''[[July 28]]'''
| [[Newberry, South Carolina]]
|
|-
| '''[[July 31]]'''
| [[Bloomington, Illinois]]
|
|-
| '''July 31'''
| [[Syracuse, New York]]
|
|-
| '''July 31'''
| Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
|
|-
| '''[[August 4]]'''
| [[Hattiesburg, Mississippi]]
|
|-
| '''[[August 6]]'''
| [[Texarkana, Texas]]
|
|-
| '''[[August 21]]'''
| [[New York City, New York]]
|
|-
| '''[[August 29]]'''
| [[Ocmulgee, Georgia]]
| One reported dead.
|-
| '''[[August 30]]'''
| [[Knoxville, Tennessee]]
| During the [[Knoxville Race riot]], a mob stormed the county jail to release 16 white prisoners, including convicted murderers. Turning to the African-American district, the mob killed at least seven and wounded more than 20 people.
|-
| '''[[September 28]]'''
| [[Omaha, Nebraska]]
| One man was lynched and $1,000,000 in property damage, including burning of the county courthouse, was caused by white mob of more than 10,000 people during the [[Omaha Race Riot of 1919|Omaha Race Riot]].
|-
| '''[[October 1]]'''
| [[Elaine, Arkansas]]
| The [[Elaine Race Riot]] was provoked in an altercation as a white man was shot when trying to break up a black sharecropper organizing meeting. White landowners then formed a group to attack the African-American farmers. Five whites and between 100 and 200 blacks died as a result. Seventy-nine blacks were later tried and convicted, with 12 sentenced to death, and the remainder's accepting terms of up to 21 years. Appeals of their cases went to the [[U.S. Supreme Court]] which found them not guilty because of how their trials had been conducted. The ruling resulted in an expansion of federal oversight of state treatment of defendants' rights.
|-
|}

==See also==
*[[African Blood Brotherhood]]
*[[The Communist Party and African-Americans]]
*[[First Red Scare]]
*[[Mass racial violence in the United States]]
*[[1919 United States anarchist bombings]]
*[[Paris Peace Conference, 1919#Japanese approach|Racial equality proposal, 1919]]

==References==
{{reflist}}
* [http://www.edhelper.com/ReadingComprehension_35_381.html Red Summer - A Season of Fear]
*Erickson, Alana J. ''Red Summer.'' In ''Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History''. New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1996.
*[http://www.iww.org/en/culture/articles/zinn14.shtml Repression Against the IWW]
* Dray, Philip. ''At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America'', New York: Random House, 2002.
* Zinn, Howard. ''Voices of a People's History of the United States''. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004.
* Tuttle, William M., Jr. ''Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919''. 1970. ''Blacks in the New World''. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.

[[Category:1919 riots]]
[[Category:1919 in the United States]]
[[Category:Anti-communism]]
[[Category:History of anti-communism in the United States]]
[[Category:History of the United States (1918–1945)]]
[[Category:Race riots in the United States]]
[[Category:Riots in Philadelphia]]

[[ro:Vara roşie din 1919]]

Maafa

2008-11-29T06:51:30Z

DBaba: /* Persecution of Africans after slavery */

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
'''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is a word derived from the [[Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history as would be the case with [[Holocaust| Nazi Germany's Holocaust of the Jews]]. When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba people|Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in [[Yemen]]]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]]and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangular trade.png|thumb|250 px|right|Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "[[Middle Passage]]". African slaves were thenceforth traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe to complete the "[[Triangular Trade]]".]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Persecution of Africans after slavery==
{{expand}}[[Image:JimCrowInDurhamNC.jpg|thumb|250px|In the United States, [[Jim Crow Laws]] maintained the disenfranchisement of many [[African Americans]] until the latter half of the 20th century.]]
The persecution of Africans continued outside colonialist Africa, and beyond colonialism. Although social progress was made during the [[Reconstruction]] period, the post-Reconstruction era has been characterized as the [[nadir of American race relations]], in which Southern hardship and bitterness came to manifest in overt hostility against African Americans, and particularly in the phenomenon of [[lynching]]. Lynching became a means of terrorizing African Americans in the post-[[Reconstruction]] period. In the 20th century, [[Jim Crow laws]] came to codify white privilege in the United States.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|250px|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

Maafa

2008-11-29T06:51:18Z

DBaba: /* Academic legacy of the African holocaust */

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
'''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is a word derived from the [[Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history as would be the case with [[Holocaust| Nazi Germany's Holocaust of the Jews]]. When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba people|Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in [[Yemen]]]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]]and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangular trade.png|thumb|250 px|right|Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "[[Middle Passage]]". African slaves were thenceforth traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe to complete the "[[Triangular Trade]]".]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Persecution of Africans after slavery==
{{expand}}
The persecution of Africans continued outside colonialist Africa, and beyond colonialism. Although social progress was made during the [[Reconstruction]] period, the post-Reconstruction era has been characterized as the [[nadir of American race relations]], in which Southern hardship and bitterness came to manifest in overt hostility against African Americans, and particularly in the phenomenon of [[lynching]]. Lynching became a means of terrorizing African Americans in the post-[[Reconstruction]] period. In the 20th century, [[Jim Crow laws]] came to codify white privilege in the United States.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|250px|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

Maafa

2008-11-29T06:50:32Z

DBaba: /* Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa */ start this section

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
'''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is a word derived from the [[Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history as would be the case with [[Holocaust| Nazi Germany's Holocaust of the Jews]]. When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba people|Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in [[Yemen]]]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]]and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangular trade.png|thumb|250 px|right|Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "[[Middle Passage]]". African slaves were thenceforth traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe to complete the "[[Triangular Trade]]".]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Persecution of Africans after slavery==
{{expand}}
The persecution of Africans continued outside colonialist Africa, and beyond colonialism. Although social progress was made during the [[Reconstruction]] period, the post-Reconstruction era has been characterized as the [[nadir of American race relations]], in which Southern hardship and bitterness came to manifest in overt hostility against African Americans, and particularly in the phenomenon of [[lynching]]. Lynching became a means of terrorizing African Americans in the post-[[Reconstruction]] period. In the 20th century, [[Jim Crow laws]] came to codify white privilege in the United States.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
[[Image:JimCrowInDurhamNC.jpg|thumb|250px|In the United States, [[Jim Crow Laws]] maintained the disenfranchisement of many [[African Americans]] until the latter half of the 20th century.]]

The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|250px|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

Maafa

2008-11-29T06:35:43Z

DBaba: /* Arab slave trade */

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
'''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is a word derived from the [[Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history as would be the case with [[Holocaust| Nazi Germany's Holocaust of the Jews]]. When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba people|Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in [[Yemen]]]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]]and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangular trade.png|thumb|250 px|right|Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "[[Middle Passage]]". African slaves were thenceforth traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe to complete the "[[Triangular Trade]]".]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
[[Image:JimCrowInDurhamNC.jpg|thumb|250px|In the United States, [[Jim Crow Laws]] maintained the disenfranchisement of many [[African Americans]] until the latter half of the 20th century.]]

The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|250px|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

Maafa

2008-11-29T06:33:58Z

DBaba: /* Beyond slavery */ drop image; overused, and the caption (which i authored) is contradicted in some texts

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
'''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is a word derived from the [[Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history as would be the case with [[Holocaust| Nazi Germany's Holocaust of the Jews]]. When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba people|Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]]and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangular trade.png|thumb|250 px|right|Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "[[Middle Passage]]". African slaves were thenceforth traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe to complete the "[[Triangular Trade]]".]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
[[Image:JimCrowInDurhamNC.jpg|thumb|250px|In the United States, [[Jim Crow Laws]] maintained the disenfranchisement of many [[African Americans]] until the latter half of the 20th century.]]

The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|250px|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

Maafa

2008-11-29T00:28:39Z

DBaba:

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
'''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is a word derived from the [[Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history as would be the case with [[Holocaust| Nazi Germany's Holocaust of the Jews]]. When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|left|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba people|Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]]and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangular trade.png|thumb|250 px|right|Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "[[Middle Passage]]". African slaves were thenceforth traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe to complete the "[[Triangular Trade]]".]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
[[Image:JimCrowInDurhamNC.jpg|thumb|250px|In the United States, [[Jim Crow Laws]] maintained the disenfranchisement of many [[African Americans]] until the latter half of the 20th century.]]

The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|250px|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

Maafa

2008-11-29T00:28:03Z

DBaba: /* Academic legacy of the African holocaust */

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
'''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is a word derived from the [[Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history as would be the case with [[Holocaust| Nazi Germany's Holocaust of the Jews]]. When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|left|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba people|Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]]and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangular trade.png|thumb|250 px|right|Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "[[Middle Passage]]". African slaves were thenceforth traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe to complete the "[[Triangular Trade]]".]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
[[Image:JimCrowInDurhamNC.jpg|thumb|250px|In the United States, [[Jim Crow Laws]] maintained the disenfranchisement of many [[African Americans]] until the latter half of the 20th century.]]
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|250px|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]

The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

Maafa

2008-11-29T00:27:52Z

DBaba: /* Questions of terminology */

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
'''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is a word derived from the [[Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history as would be the case with [[Holocaust| Nazi Germany's Holocaust of the Jews]]. When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|left|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba people|Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]]and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangular trade.png|thumb|250 px|right|Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "[[Middle Passage]]". African slaves were thenceforth traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe to complete the "[[Triangular Trade]]".]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
[[Image:JimCrowInDurhamNC.jpg|thumb|250px|In the United States, [[Jim Crow Laws]] maintained the disenfranchisement of many [[African Americans]] until the latter half of the 20th century.]]

The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

Maafa

2008-11-29T00:27:14Z

DBaba: /* Questions of terminology */

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
'''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is a word derived from the [[Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history as would be the case with [[Holocaust| Nazi Germany's Holocaust of the Jews]]. When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|left|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba people|Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]]and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangular trade.png|thumb|250 px|right|Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "[[Middle Passage]]". African slaves were thenceforth traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe to complete the "[[Triangular Trade]]".]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
[[Image:JimCrowInDurhamNC.jpg|thumb|250px|In the United States, [[Jim Crow Laws]] maintained the disenfranchisement of many [[African Americans]] until the latter half of the 20th century.]]

The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|250px|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

Maafa

2008-11-29T00:21:26Z

DBaba: /* Academic legacy of the African holocaust */

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
'''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is a word derived from the [[Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history as would be the case with [[Holocaust| Nazi Germany's Holocaust of the Jews]]. When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|left|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba people|Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]]and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangular trade.png|thumb|250 px|right|Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "[[Middle Passage]]". African slaves were thenceforth traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe to complete the "[[Triangular Trade]]".]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
[[Image:JimCrowInDurhamNC.jpg|thumb|250px|In the United States, [[Jim Crow Laws]] maintained the disenfranchisement of many [[African Americans]] until the latter half of the 20th century.]]

The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

Maafa

2008-11-29T00:14:41Z

DBaba: /* Economics of slavery */

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
'''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is a word derived from the [[Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history as would be the case with [[Holocaust| Nazi Germany's Holocaust of the Jews]]. When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|left|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba people|Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]]and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangular trade.png|thumb|250 px|right|Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "[[Middle Passage]]". African slaves were thenceforth traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe to complete the "[[Triangular Trade]]".]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

Maafa

2008-11-29T00:14:01Z

DBaba: /* Economics of slavery */

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
'''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is a word derived from the [[Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history as would be the case with [[Holocaust| Nazi Germany's Holocaust of the Jews]]. When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|left|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba people|Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]]and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangular trade.png|thumb|250 px|right|Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "[[Middle Passage]]". African slaves were thenceforth traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe, completing the so-called "[[Triangular Trade]]".]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

Maafa

2008-11-29T00:12:35Z

DBaba: /* Economics of slavery */

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
'''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is a word derived from the [[Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history as would be the case with [[Holocaust| Nazi Germany's Holocaust of the Jews]]. When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|left|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba people|Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]]and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangular trade.png|thumb|250 px|right|Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "[[Middle Passage]]". African slaves were thenceforth traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe.]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

Maafa

2008-11-29T00:11:53Z

DBaba: /* Economics of slavery */ better image, new caption

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
'''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is a word derived from the [[Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history as would be the case with [[Holocaust| Nazi Germany's Holocaust of the Jews]]. When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|left|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba people|Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]]and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangular trade.png|thumb|250 px|right|Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "Middle Passage". African slaves were thenceforth traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe.]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

Maafa

2008-11-29T00:03:54Z

DBaba: /* Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa */

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
'''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is a word derived from the [[Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history as would be the case with [[Holocaust| Nazi Germany's Holocaust of the Jews]]. When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|left|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba people|Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]]and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangle trade euro.png|thumb|150 px|right|Slave trade routes]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonisation of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

Maafa

2008-11-29T00:02:57Z

DBaba:

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
'''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is a word derived from the [[Swahili]] term for disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history as would be the case with [[Holocaust| Nazi Germany's Holocaust of the Jews]]. When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|left|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba people|Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]]and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangle trade euro.png|thumb|150 px|right|Slave trade routes]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonization of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

Maafa

2008-11-29T00:01:13Z

DBaba: /* Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa */ better image

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
'''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is a word derived from a [[Swahili]], meaning disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>{{cite book|last=Cheeves |first=Denise Nicole |title=Legacy |date=2004 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history as would be the case with [[Holocaust| Nazi Germany's Holocaust of the Jews]]. When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|left|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba people|Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]]and the need to de-focus European slaving activities, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangle trade euro.png|thumb|150 px|right|Slave trade routes]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonization of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica 1914.png|thumb|right|300px|Map depicting European claims to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* [[Ivan van Sertima|van Sertima, Ivan]]. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

Maafa

2008-10-31T00:47:50Z

DBaba: /* Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa */

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{African American topics sidebar|right}}
The word '''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is derived from a [[Swahili]] word meaning disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>Nicole Cheeves, Denise. ''Legacy''. 2004, page 1.</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

While Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history as would be the case with [[Holocaust| Nazi Germany's Holocaust of the Jews]]. When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor [[Marimba Ani]]'s 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|left|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba people|Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]], some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangle trade euro.png|thumb|150 px|right|Slave trade routes]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonization of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica.png|thumb|right|300px|Map showing European possessions in the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]]]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and Abyssinia ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* Van Sertima, Ivan. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism| ]]

Maafa

2008-03-28T05:08:48Z

DBaba: /* Curse of Ham */

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{AfricanAmerican|right}}
The word '''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is derived from a [[Kiswahili]] word meaning disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>Nicole Cheeves, Denise. ''Legacy''. 2004, page 1.</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse. Thus the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor Marimba Ani's 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|left|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham (son of Noah)|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]], some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangle trade euro.png|thumb|150 px|right|Slave trade routes]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonization of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica.png|thumb|right|300px|''Map showing European claimants to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]'']]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and [[Abyssinia]] ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans in history has long been controversial in terms of [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* Van Sertima, Ivan. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.themaafa.com St Paul Community Baptist Church Commemoration of The MAAFA]
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net africanholocaust.net African Holocaust]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism|*]]

Maafa

2008-03-28T05:05:44Z

DBaba:

[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{AfricanAmerican|right}}
The word '''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is derived from a [[Kiswahili]] word meaning disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>Nicole Cheeves, Denise. ''Legacy''. 2004, page 1.</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse. Thus the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor Marimba Ani's 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|left|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]], some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangle trade euro.png|thumb|150 px|right|Slave trade routes]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonization of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica.png|thumb|right|300px|''Map showing European claimants to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]'']]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and [[Abyssinia]] ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans in history has long been controversial in terms of [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* Van Sertima, Ivan. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.themaafa.com St Paul Community Baptist Church Commemoration of The MAAFA]
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net africanholocaust.net African Holocaust]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism|*]]

Maafa

2008-03-28T05:04:30Z

DBaba: /* Beyond slavery */

[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|right|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{AfricanAmerican|right}}
The word '''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is derived from a [[Kiswahili]] word meaning disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>Nicole Cheeves, Denise. ''Legacy''. 2004, page 1.</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse. Thus the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor Marimba Ani's 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|left|200px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]], some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangle trade euro.png|thumb|150 px|right|Slave trade routes]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonization of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica.png|thumb|right|300px|''Map showing European claimants to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]'']]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and [[Abyssinia]] ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans in history has long been controversial in terms of [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* Van Sertima, Ivan. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.themaafa.com St Paul Community Baptist Church Commemoration of The MAAFA]
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net africanholocaust.net African Holocaust]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism|*]]

Maafa

2008-03-28T05:02:18Z

DBaba: /* Curse of Ham */

[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|right|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{AfricanAmerican|right}}
The word '''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is derived from a [[Kiswahili]] word meaning disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>Nicole Cheeves, Denise. ''Legacy''. 2004, page 1.</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse. Thus the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor Marimba Ani's 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|left|200 px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries,<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref> when it began to be used as a justification or rationalization of slavery, to suit the economic and ideological interests of the elite.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]], some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangle trade euro.png|thumb|150 px|right|Slave trade routes]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonization of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica.png|thumb|right|300px|''Map showing European claimants to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]'']]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and [[Abyssinia]] ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans in history has long been controversial in terms of [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* Van Sertima, Ivan. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.themaafa.com St Paul Community Baptist Church Commemoration of The MAAFA]
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net africanholocaust.net African Holocaust]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism|*]]

Maafa

2008-03-28T05:00:10Z

DBaba:

[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|right|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{AfricanAmerican|right}}
The word '''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is derived from a [[Kiswahili]] word meaning disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>Nicole Cheeves, Denise. ''Legacy''. 2004, page 1.</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse. Thus the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor Marimba Ani's 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|left|200 px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries.<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref>

The justification of slavery through the sins of Ham was convenient to the economic and ideological interests of the elite; with the emergence of the slave trade, this racialist reading of the Bible was utilized by Europeans, and later by white American settlers, to morally excuse the exploitation of the African people as labor.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]], some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangle trade euro.png|thumb|150 px|right|Slave trade routes]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonization of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica.png|thumb|right|300px|''Map showing European claimants to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]'']]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and [[Abyssinia]] ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans in history has long been controversial in terms of [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* Van Sertima, Ivan. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.themaafa.com St Paul Community Baptist Church Commemoration of The MAAFA]
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net africanholocaust.net African Holocaust]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism|*]]

Maafa

2008-03-28T04:59:36Z

DBaba: /* Curse of Ham and racism */ too much curse of ham, here

[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|right|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{AfricanAmerican|right}}
The word '''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is derived from a [[Kiswahili]] word meaning disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>Nicole Cheeves, Denise. ''Legacy''. 2004, page 1.</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse. Thus the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor Marimba Ani's 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|left|200 px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries.<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref>

The justification of slavery through the sins of Ham was convenient to the economic and ideological interests of the elite; with the emergence of the slave trade, this racialist reading of the Bible was utilized by Europeans, and later by white American settlers, to morally excuse the exploitation of the African people as labor.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]], some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangle trade euro.png|thumb|150 px|right|Slave trade routes]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonization of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica.png|thumb|right|300px|''Map showing European claimants to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]'']]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and [[Abyssinia]] ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans in history has long been controversial in terms of [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* Van Sertima, Ivan. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.themaafa.com St Paul Community Baptist Church Commemoration of The MAAFA]
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net africanholocaust.net African Holocaust]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism|*]]

Maafa

2008-03-28T04:59:13Z

DBaba: /* Early European interpretations */

[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|right|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{AfricanAmerican|right}}
The word '''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is derived from a [[Kiswahili]] word meaning disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>Nicole Cheeves, Denise. ''Legacy''. 2004, page 1.</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse. Thus the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor Marimba Ani's 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|left|200 px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries.<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref>

The justification of slavery through the sins of Ham was convenient to the economic and ideological interests of the elite; with the emergence of the slave trade, this racialist reading of the Bible was utilized by Europeans, and later by white American settlers, to morally excuse the exploitation of the African people as labor.

===Curse of Ham and racism===
Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

The Jewish involvement in the trade is a controversial one due to the publishing of work by the [[Nation of Islam]] and [[Dr. Tony Martin]], which have both been accused of anti-Semitism. However, [[Arnold Wiznitzer]] states in his book ''Jews in Colonial Brazil'' that Jewish people were involved in aspects of the trade.<ref name="JewsinBrazil">{{cite web|url=http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7162(196009)331%3C179%3AJICB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P Jews in Colonial Brazil (1960), pp. 72-3; [Note: Wiznitzer, Arnold Aharon, educator; Born in Austria, December 20, 1899; Ph.D., University of Vienna, 1920; Doctor of Hebrew Literature, Jewish Theological Seminary of America; Emeritus research professor, University of Judaism, Los Angeles; Contributor to historical journals in the United States and Brazil including the Journal of Jewish Social Studies and the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society. Former president, Brazilian-Jewish Institute of Historical Research|publisher="JSTOR"|title="Jews in Colonial Brazil by Arnold Wiznitzer "|}}</ref> Slave ownership by Jews is also echoed in the work of Jewish author [[Cecil Roth]]:
"The Jews of the Joden Savanne [Surinam] were also foremost in the suppression of the successive negro revolts, from 1690 to 1722: these as a matter of fact were largely directed against them, as being the greatest slave-holders of the region".<ref>History of the Marranos (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1932), p. 292 by [[Cecil Roth]]</ref>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]], some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangle trade euro.png|thumb|150 px|right|Slave trade routes]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonization of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica.png|thumb|right|300px|''Map showing European claimants to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]'']]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and [[Abyssinia]] ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans in history has long been controversial in terms of [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* Van Sertima, Ivan. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.themaafa.com St Paul Community Baptist Church Commemoration of The MAAFA]
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net africanholocaust.net African Holocaust]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism|*]]

Maafa

2008-03-28T04:58:57Z

DBaba: /* Islamic versions of the 'Curse of Ham' */ cutting this, as off topic

[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|right|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{AfricanAmerican|right}}
The word '''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is derived from a [[Kiswahili]] word meaning disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>Nicole Cheeves, Denise. ''Legacy''. 2004, page 1.</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse. Thus the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor Marimba Ani's 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|left|200 px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

===Early European interpretations===
The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries.<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref>

The justification of slavery through the sins of Ham was convenient to the economic and ideological interests of the elite; with the emergence of the slave trade, this racialist reading of the Bible was utilized by Europeans, and later by white American settlers, to morally excuse the exploitation of the African people as labor.

===Curse of Ham and racism===
Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

The Jewish involvement in the trade is a controversial one due to the publishing of work by the [[Nation of Islam]] and [[Dr. Tony Martin]], which have both been accused of anti-Semitism. However, [[Arnold Wiznitzer]] states in his book ''Jews in Colonial Brazil'' that Jewish people were involved in aspects of the trade.<ref name="JewsinBrazil">{{cite web|url=http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7162(196009)331%3C179%3AJICB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P Jews in Colonial Brazil (1960), pp. 72-3; [Note: Wiznitzer, Arnold Aharon, educator; Born in Austria, December 20, 1899; Ph.D., University of Vienna, 1920; Doctor of Hebrew Literature, Jewish Theological Seminary of America; Emeritus research professor, University of Judaism, Los Angeles; Contributor to historical journals in the United States and Brazil including the Journal of Jewish Social Studies and the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society. Former president, Brazilian-Jewish Institute of Historical Research|publisher="JSTOR"|title="Jews in Colonial Brazil by Arnold Wiznitzer "|}}</ref> Slave ownership by Jews is also echoed in the work of Jewish author [[Cecil Roth]]:
"The Jews of the Joden Savanne [Surinam] were also foremost in the suppression of the successive negro revolts, from 1690 to 1722: these as a matter of fact were largely directed against them, as being the greatest slave-holders of the region".<ref>History of the Marranos (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1932), p. 292 by [[Cecil Roth]]</ref>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]], some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangle trade euro.png|thumb|150 px|right|Slave trade routes]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonization of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica.png|thumb|right|300px|''Map showing European claimants to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]'']]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and [[Abyssinia]] ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans in history has long been controversial in terms of [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* Van Sertima, Ivan. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.themaafa.com St Paul Community Baptist Church Commemoration of The MAAFA]
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net africanholocaust.net African Holocaust]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism|*]]

Maafa

2008-03-23T03:54:35Z

DBaba: /* Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa */

[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|right|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{AfricanAmerican|right}}
The word '''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is derived from a [[Kiswahili]] word meaning disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>Nicole Cheeves, Denise. ''Legacy''. 2004, page 1.</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse. Thus the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor Marimba Ani's 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|left|200 px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

===Islamic versions of the 'Curse of Ham'===
Early Islamic literature also believed in a link between dark skin and Noah's son Ham.<ref name=gberg>Goldenberg, David M. ''The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam''. 2003, page 101-2.</ref> Several seventh and eighth century Islamic sources contend that Ham's offspring, owing to a curse, were born with black skin.<ref name=gberg /> This story is repeated for centuries with various different themes and twists, even appearing in the ''[[One Thousand and One Nights]]'', in which Noah blesses Shem turning him white, while cursing Ham and turning him black.<ref name=gberg /> At least as early as the 9th century, dark-skinned intellectuals of the Muslim world were disputing these characterizations of dark-skin origins.<ref name=gberg />

In one 9th century version of the 'Curse of Ham', Ham lies with his wife on the ark, against the wishes of Noah, and the child who is born of the union is black-skinned.<ref name=gberg106>Goldenberg, David M. ''The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam''. 2003, page 106.</ref>

===Early European interpretations===
The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries.<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref>

The justification of slavery through the sins of Ham was convenient to the economic and ideological interests of the elite; with the emergence of the slave trade, this racialist reading of the Bible was utilized by Europeans, and later by white American settlers, to morally excuse the exploitation of the African people as labor.

===Curse of Ham and racism===
Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

The Jewish involvement in the trade is a controversial one due to the publishing of work by the [[Nation of Islam]] and [[Dr. Tony Martin]], which have both been accused of anti-Semitism. However, [[Arnold Wiznitzer]] states in his book ''Jews in Colonial Brazil'' that Jewish people were involved in aspects of the trade.<ref name="JewsinBrazil">{{cite web|url=http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7162(196009)331%3C179%3AJICB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P Jews in Colonial Brazil (1960), pp. 72-3; [Note: Wiznitzer, Arnold Aharon, educator; Born in Austria, December 20, 1899; Ph.D., University of Vienna, 1920; Doctor of Hebrew Literature, Jewish Theological Seminary of America; Emeritus research professor, University of Judaism, Los Angeles; Contributor to historical journals in the United States and Brazil including the Journal of Jewish Social Studies and the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society. Former president, Brazilian-Jewish Institute of Historical Research|publisher="JSTOR"|title="Jews in Colonial Brazil by Arnold Wiznitzer "|}}</ref> Slave ownership by Jews is also echoed in the work of Jewish author [[Cecil Roth]]:
"The Jews of the Joden Savanne [Surinam] were also foremost in the suppression of the successive negro revolts, from 1690 to 1722: these as a matter of fact were largely directed against them, as being the greatest slave-holders of the region".<ref>History of the Marranos (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1932), p. 292 by [[Cecil Roth]]</ref>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]], some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangle trade euro.png|thumb|150 px|right|Slave trade routes]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonization of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica.png|thumb|right|300px|''Map showing European claimants to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]'']]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and [[Abyssinia]] ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans in history has long been controversial in terms of [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* Van Sertima, Ivan. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.themaafa.com St Paul Community Baptist Church Commemoration of The MAAFA]
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net africanholocaust.net African Holocaust]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism|*]]

Maafa

2008-03-23T03:52:55Z

DBaba: /* Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa */

[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|right|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{AfricanAmerican|right}}
The word '''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is derived from a [[Kiswahili]] word meaning disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>Nicole Cheeves, Denise. ''Legacy''. 2004, page 1.</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse. Thus the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor Marimba Ani's 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|left|200 px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

===Islamic versions of the 'Curse of Ham'===
Early Islamic literature also believed in a link between dark skin and Noah's son Ham.<ref name=gberg>Goldenberg, David M. ''The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam''. 2003, page 101-2.</ref> Several seventh and eighth century Islamic sources contend that Ham's offspring, owing to a curse, were born with black skin.<ref name=gberg /> This story is repeated for centuries with various different themes and twists, even appearing in the ''[[One Thousand and One Nights]]'', in which Noah blesses Shem turning him white, while cursing Ham and turning him black.<ref name=gberg /> At least as early as the 9th century, dark-skinned intellectuals of the Muslim world were disputing these characterizations of dark-skin origins.<ref name=gberg />

In one 9th century version of the 'Curse of Ham', Ham lies with his wife on the ark, against the wishes of Noah, and the child who is born of the union is black-skinned.<ref name=gberg106>Goldenberg, David M. ''The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam''. 2003, page 106.</ref>

===Early European interpretations===
The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries.<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref>

The justification of slavery through the sins of Ham was convenient to the economic and ideological interests of the elite; with the emergence of the slave trade, this racialist reading of the Bible was utilized by Europeans, and later by white American settlers, to morally excuse the exploitation of the African people as labor.

===Curse of Ham and racism===
Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

The Jewish involvement in the trade is a controversial one due to the publishing of work by the [[Nation of Islam]] and [[Dr. Tony Martin]], which have both been accused of anti-Semitism. However, [[Arnold Wiznitzer]] states in his book ''Jews in Colonial Brazil'' that Jewish people were involved in aspects of the trade.<ref name="JewsinBrazil">{{cite web|url=http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7162(196009)331%3C179%3AJICB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P Jews in Colonial Brazil (1960), pp. 72-3; [Note: Wiznitzer, Arnold Aharon, educator; Born in Austria, December 20, 1899; Ph.D., University of Vienna, 1920; Doctor of Hebrew Literature, Jewish Theological Seminary of America; Emeritus research professor, University of Judaism, Los Angeles; Contributor to historical journals in the United States and Brazil including the Journal of Jewish Social Studies and the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society. Former president, Brazilian-Jewish Institute of Historical Research|publisher="JSTOR"|title="Jews in Colonial Brazil by Arnold Wiznitzer "|}}</ref> Slave ownership by Jews is also echoed in the work of Jewish author [[Cecil Roth]]:
"The Jews of the Joden Savanne [Surinam] were also foremost in the suppression of the successive negro revolts, from 1690 to 1722: these as a matter of fact were largely directed against them, as being the greatest slave-holders of the region".<ref>History of the Marranos (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1932), p. 292 by [[Cecil Roth]]</ref>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]], some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangle trade euro.png|thumb|150 px|right|Slave trade routes]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonization of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica.png|thumb|right|300px|''Map showing European claimants to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]'']]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the so-called "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and [[Abyssinia]] ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans in history has long been controversial in terms of [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* Van Sertima, Ivan. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.themaafa.com St Paul Community Baptist Church Commemoration of The MAAFA]
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net africanholocaust.net African Holocaust]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism|*]]

Maafa

2008-03-23T03:51:18Z

DBaba: /* Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa */

[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|right|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{AfricanAmerican|right}}
The word '''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is derived from a [[Kiswahili]] word meaning disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>Nicole Cheeves, Denise. ''Legacy''. 2004, page 1.</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse. Thus the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor Marimba Ani's 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|left|200 px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

===Islamic versions of the 'Curse of Ham'===
Early Islamic literature also believed in a link between dark skin and Noah's son Ham.<ref name=gberg>Goldenberg, David M. ''The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam''. 2003, page 101-2.</ref> Several seventh and eighth century Islamic sources contend that Ham's offspring, owing to a curse, were born with black skin.<ref name=gberg /> This story is repeated for centuries with various different themes and twists, even appearing in the ''[[One Thousand and One Nights]]'', in which Noah blesses Shem turning him white, while cursing Ham and turning him black.<ref name=gberg /> At least as early as the 9th century, dark-skinned intellectuals of the Muslim world were disputing these characterizations of dark-skin origins.<ref name=gberg />

In one 9th century version of the 'Curse of Ham', Ham lies with his wife on the ark, against the wishes of Noah, and the child who is born of the union is black-skinned.<ref name=gberg106>Goldenberg, David M. ''The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam''. 2003, page 106.</ref>

===Early European interpretations===
The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries.<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref>

The justification of slavery through the sins of Ham was convenient to the economic and ideological interests of the elite; with the emergence of the slave trade, this racialist reading of the Bible was utilized by Europeans, and later by white American settlers, to morally excuse the exploitation of the African people as labor.

===Curse of Ham and racism===
Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

The Jewish involvement in the trade is a controversial one due to the publishing of work by the [[Nation of Islam]] and [[Dr. Tony Martin]], which have both been accused of anti-Semitism. However, [[Arnold Wiznitzer]] states in his book ''Jews in Colonial Brazil'' that Jewish people were involved in aspects of the trade.<ref name="JewsinBrazil">{{cite web|url=http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7162(196009)331%3C179%3AJICB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P Jews in Colonial Brazil (1960), pp. 72-3; [Note: Wiznitzer, Arnold Aharon, educator; Born in Austria, December 20, 1899; Ph.D., University of Vienna, 1920; Doctor of Hebrew Literature, Jewish Theological Seminary of America; Emeritus research professor, University of Judaism, Los Angeles; Contributor to historical journals in the United States and Brazil including the Journal of Jewish Social Studies and the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society. Former president, Brazilian-Jewish Institute of Historical Research|publisher="JSTOR"|title="Jews in Colonial Brazil by Arnold Wiznitzer "|}}</ref> Slave ownership by Jews is also echoed in the work of Jewish author [[Cecil Roth]]:
"The Jews of the Joden Savanne [Surinam] were also foremost in the suppression of the successive negro revolts, from 1690 to 1722: these as a matter of fact were largely directed against them, as being the greatest slave-holders of the region".<ref>History of the Marranos (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1932), p. 292 by [[Cecil Roth]]</ref>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]], some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangle trade euro.png|thumb|150 px|right|Slave trade routes]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonization of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica.png|thumb|right|300px|''Map showing European claimants to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]'']]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the so-called "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and [[Abyssinia]] ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall, a mixture that encouraged internecine conflict and disunity.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans in history has long been controversial in terms of [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* Van Sertima, Ivan. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.themaafa.com St Paul Community Baptist Church Commemoration of The MAAFA]
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net africanholocaust.net African Holocaust]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism|*]]

Maafa

2008-03-23T03:49:50Z

DBaba: /* Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa */

[[Image:BrotherSlave.jpg|thumb|200px|right|''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?'' One of the most visible [[abolitionist]] symbols of the 19th century, this emblem first appeared circa 1837.<ref>Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M. ''The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader''. 2004, page 266.</ref>]]
{{Pan-African|left}}
{{AfricanAmerican|right}}
The word '''Maafa''' (also known as the '''African Holocaust''' or '''Holocaust of Enslavement''') is derived from a [[Kiswahili]] word meaning disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy.<ref>Nicole Cheeves, Denise. ''Legacy''. 2004, page 1.</ref><ref name=oj>Harp, O.J. ''Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx''. 2007, page 247.</ref> The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the [[African diaspora]], through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.<ref name=oj /><ref name="Swagga Definition of Maafa">{{cite web|url=http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm|publisher=Swagga|title="The Maafa, African Holocaust"|}}</ref> The term also refers to the social and academic policies that were used to invalidate or appropriate the contributions of African peoples to humanity as a whole,<ref name=oj /> and the residual effects of this persecution, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=boyd9 />

Maafa can be considered an area of study within [[African history]] in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse. Thus the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on [[African people]]s globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional [[Eurocentric]] voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of [[Pan-Africanism]].

Usage of the term ''Maafa'' to describe this period of persecution was popularized by Professor Marimba Ani's 1994 book ''Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora''.<ref>Barndt, Joseph. ''Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century''. 2007, page 269.</ref><ref>Dove, Nah. ''Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change''. 1998, page 240.</ref><ref name=morris>Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. ''The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community''. 2002, page x.</ref><ref name=joneswest>Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. ''Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education''. 2002, page 178.</ref>

==Beyond slavery==
[[Image:Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave.jpg|thumb|left|200 px|Whipped slave, Baton Rouge, La., [[April 2]] [[1863]]]]
The Maafa or African Holocaust morally distinguishes domestic slavery in Africa from the commercial ventures of the European and Arab trade in captive Africans, focusing on the consequences and legacy of these foreign interventions in Africa. The term is not limited to demographic significance, in the aggregate population losses, but also references the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage"|}}</ref>

In terms of legacy, the Maafa also includes the academic and social forces which categorized Africans into color labels, and the ramifications of this economic, social, political, and legal disenfranchisement, as manifest in contemporary society.<ref name=oj />

== Curse of Ham ==
{{see also|Ham|Curse of Ham}}
The "curse of Ham" was one moral rationalization underlying the slave trade.<ref name="Tavis">{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1548811|publisher="[[npr]]"|title="'The Curse of Ham': Slavery and the Old Testament"|}}</ref> The curse of Ham interpretation of the Bible stems from {{bibleverse||Genesis|9:20-27|}}, which relates the story of [[Noah]]'s family, soon after the [[Deluge (mythology)|flood]]. Noah declares of Ham's son Canaan, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Because Ham's sons and their descendants were believed by biblical genealogists to be the people of Africa, these readings of the Bible also assumed that Ham must have been "born black... contrary to the common dictation of nature."<ref>Priest, Josiah. [http://books.google.com/books?id=ilcSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA91&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPR1,M1 Bible Defence of Slavery: And Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro]. 1852, page 34.</ref> This explanation of biblical events also helped to account for the origins of dark-skinned people.

This reading of biblical scripture was far from universal. One 19th century critic suggested that, even if this tenuous theory of a curse were legitimate, the cursed children of Ham were as likely to be European as African, except in the "oblique and sinister and not very generous bearing [of the] pro-slavery mind."<ref>Hall, Marshall. [http://books.google.com/books?id=_noFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA88&dq=%22a+servant+of+servants%22+ham+slavery#PPA90,M1 The Two-fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emanicipation]. 1854, page 90.</ref>

===Islamic versions of the 'Curse of Ham'===
Early Islamic literature also believed in a link between dark skin and Noah's son Ham.<ref name=gberg>Goldenberg, David M. ''The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam''. 2003, page 101-2.</ref> Several seventh and eighth century Islamic sources contend that Ham's offspring, owing to a curse, were born with black skin.<ref name=gberg /> This story is repeated for centuries with various different themes and twists, even appearing in the ''[[One Thousand and One Nights]]'', in which Noah blesses Shem turning him white, while cursing Ham and turning him black.<ref name=gberg /> At least as early as the 9th century, dark-skinned intellectuals of the Muslim world were disputing these characterizations of dark-skin origins.<ref name=gberg />

In one 9th century version of the 'Curse of Ham', Ham lies with his wife on the ark, against the wishes of Noah, and the child who is born of the union is black-skinned.<ref name=gberg106>Goldenberg, David M. ''The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam''. 2003, page 106.</ref>

===Early European interpretations===
The equating of blackness with darkness of the soul has been traced back to antiquity, with some historians finding such thinking in the thought of, for instance, [[Philo]] and [[Origen]].<ref>Goldenberg, D. M. (2005) ''The Curse of Ham: Race & Slavery in Early Judaism, Christian'', Princeton University Press</ref> In the [[Middle Ages]], European scholars of the Bible picked up on the [[Talmud]] idea of viewing the "sons of Ham" or [[Hamitic|Hamites]] as cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins. Though early arguments to this effect were sporadic, they became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries.<ref>Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, "William and Mary Quarterly LIV (January 1997): 103–142. See also William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham,"American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 15–43</ref>

The justification of slavery through the sins of Ham was convenient to the economic and ideological interests of the elite; with the emergence of the slave trade, this racialist reading of the Bible was utilized by Europeans, and later by white American settlers, to morally excuse the exploitation of the African people as labor.

===Curse of Ham and racism===
Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery.<ref name=FRLee>Felicia R. Lee, ''[http://www.racematters.org/noahscurseslaverysrationale.htm Noah's Curse Is Slavery's Rationale]'', Racematters.org, November 1, 2003</ref> According to Benjamin Braude, the curse of Ham became "a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."<ref name=FRLee/>

The Jewish involvement in the trade is a controversial one due to the publishing of work by the [[Nation of Islam]] and [[Dr. Tony Martin]], which have both been accused of anti-Semitism. However, [[Arnold Wiznitzer]] states in his book ''Jews in Colonial Brazil'' that Jewish people were involved in aspects of the trade.<ref name="JewsinBrazil">{{cite web|url=http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7162(196009)331%3C179%3AJICB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P Jews in Colonial Brazil (1960), pp. 72-3; [Note: Wiznitzer, Arnold Aharon, educator; Born in Austria, December 20, 1899; Ph.D., University of Vienna, 1920; Doctor of Hebrew Literature, Jewish Theological Seminary of America; Emeritus research professor, University of Judaism, Los Angeles; Contributor to historical journals in the United States and Brazil including the Journal of Jewish Social Studies and the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society. Former president, Brazilian-Jewish Institute of Historical Research|publisher="JSTOR"|title="Jews in Colonial Brazil by Arnold Wiznitzer "|}}</ref> Slave ownership by Jews is also echoed in the work of Jewish author [[Cecil Roth]]:
"The Jews of the Joden Savanne [Surinam] were also foremost in the suppression of the successive negro revolts, from 1690 to 1722: these as a matter of fact were largely directed against them, as being the greatest slave-holders of the region".<ref>History of the Marranos (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1932), p. 292 by [[Cecil Roth]]</ref>

==Slavery in Africa==
Some aspects of the slave trade were controlled by indigenous Africans themselves. Several African nations such as the [[Ashanti]] of [[Ghana]] and the [[Yoruba]] of [[Nigeria]] had economies depending solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans. Extenuating circumstances demanding exploration are the tremendous efforts European officials in Africa used to install rulers agreeable to their interests. They would actively favor one African group over another to deliberately ignite chaos and continue their slaving activities.<ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

==European slave trade==
This system of enslavement was held to reflect a divine ethno-social dynamic, placing whites as masters above blacks as slaves. There was the presumption of a divine legitimacy in the corporeal system of subjugation and oppression, a system which was motivated and maintained by greed and ignorance and only excused with Christianity, and sometimes even with the idea of, to some extent, Christianizing a "heathen" people. Some defenders of slavery in the United States' South in the [[antebellum]] period, for instance, argued that blacks in the United States were becoming "elevated, from the degrading slavery of savage heathenism to the participation in civilization and Christianity".<ref>Conser, Walter H. ''God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America''. 1993, page 120.</ref>

Christian belief became the context for the cultural prevalence of European culture, European names became Christian names and those who adopted or were forced into Christianity automatically adopted European culture in an attempt to become more "Christian".

==Arab slave trade==
{{main|Arab slave trade}}
[[Image:Slaves Zadib Yemen 13th century BNF Paris.jpg|thumb|left|250px|13th century slave market in the Yemen]]
The oriental slave trade is sometimes called Islamic slave trade, but religion was hardly the point of the slavery, states [[Patrick Manning]], a professor of World History.<ref name="Patrick Manning"> Manning (1990) p.10 </ref> Many Arabs were Christian, Jewish and also indigenous Arab faiths. Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Furthermore, usage of the terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" implicitly and erroneously treats Africa as it were outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world. Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn points out that the Arab trade was rarely a [[chattel]] trade and some argue more "humane." <ref name="Afrikan involvement in Atlantic Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/kwaku/afrikan_involvement.htm|publisher="Kwaku Person-Lynn"|title="African involvement in Atlantic Slave Trade"|accessdate=2004-10-01}}</ref>.
In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension.
In the 8th century [[Africa]] was dominated by [[Arab]]-[[Berbers]] in the north: Islam moved southwards along the [[Nile]] and along the desert trails. The [[Solomonic dynasty]] of [[Ethiopia]] often exported [[Nilotic]] slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian [[sultanates]] (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of [[Adal Sultanate|Adal]] (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia).<ref>Pankhurst (1997) p. 59</ref> The Arab (African identifying as Arab) [[Tippu Tib]] extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the [[Gulf of Guinea]], the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan [[Hamoud bin Mohammed of Zanzibar|Hamoud bin Mohammed]].<ref>Ingrams (1967) p.175</ref> The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|}}</ref>.

===Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans===
Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some [[Arabs]] were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.<ref name="Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the [[Transatlantic slave trade]]. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the [[Americas]] was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of [[Islamaphobia]], some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.<ref name="Myths About Arab Slave Trade">{{cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|}}</ref>
[[Image:Tippu Tip.jpg|thumb|150px|left|Tippu Tip was considered Arab because his father was Arab]]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President [[Anwar Sadat]] had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry.<ref>[http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute]</ref> Similarly, 19th century slave trader [[Tippu Tip]] is often identified as [[Arab]]<ref>[http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip]</ref> despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves.<ref>[http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders]</ref>

According to [[J. Phillipe Rushton]], Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

{{cquote|Although the [[Koran]] stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "[[Zanj]]" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.<ref>''Race, Evolution, and Behavior'', unabridged edition, 1997, by J. Phillipe Rushton pg 97-98</ref>}}

==Scale==
{{main|Atlantic slave trade|Arab slave trade}}
There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref> It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the [[middle passage]]. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population">{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"|}} (marxists.org)</ref>

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%.<ref name="Walter Rodney on population"/> Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.<ref name="Legacy of the African Holocaust">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|}}</ref>

==Effects==
Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar [[Maulana Karenga]] puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Effects on Africa"|}}</ref>

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture."<ref name=outof /> Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities",<ref name=outof /> linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.<ref name=boyd>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 7-8.</ref> Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."<ref name=outof1>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 251.</ref>

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of [[marriage]]. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored.<ref name=boyd /> Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away.<ref name=boyd /> These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions,<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 113.</ref> were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",<ref name=boyd9>Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. ''Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience''. 2006, page 9.</ref> an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

==Economics of slavery==
[[Image:Triangle trade euro.png|thumb|150 px|right|Slave trade routes]]

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the [[Seven Years' War]] in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of [[New France]] to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of [[Guadeloupe]].

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian [[Walter Rodney]] estimates that by c.1770, the King of [[Dahomey]] was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as [[Jamaica]], [[Trinidad]], and [[Barbados]] and the territory of [[British Guiana]] gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, [[St. Dominigue]] (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}

==Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa==
{{main|Colonization of Africa}}
[[Image:ColonialAfrica.png|thumb|right|300px|''Map showing European claimants to the African continent at the beginning of [[World War I]]'']]
In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the so-called "[[Scramble for Africa]]", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only [[Liberia]] and [[Abyssinia]] ([[Ethiopia]]) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after [[World War II]], when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

[[Colonialism]] had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the [[Congo River]] appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between [[Belgium]] and [[France]] along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or [[Sub-Saharan Africa]], some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example [[Rhodesia]] ([[Zimbabwe]]) and [[South Africa]], systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans [[political power]] far in excess of their numbers. In the [[Congo Free State]], which was the personal property of King [[Leopold II of Belgium]], the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

European intervention often undermined the local [[Balance of power in international relations|balance of power]], creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity: peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the [[sphere of influence]] under which they happened to fall.

In what are now [[Rwanda]] and [[Burundi]], two ethnic groups [[Hutus]] and [[Tutsi]]s had merged into one culture{{Fact|date=March 2008}} by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,{{Fact|date=March 2008}} [[Belgium]] instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term [[Hutu]] originally referred to the agricultural-based [[Bantu]]-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term [[Tutsi]] referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally [[Hamitic]], and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.{{Fact|date=March 2008}} Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

==Academic legacy of the African holocaust==
The persecution of Africans in history has long been controversial in terms of [[historiography]]. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".<ref>Fredrickson, George M. ''The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality''. 1988, page 112.</ref>

[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]] traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.<ref name="Agency and Africa">{{cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="[[Owen 'Alik Shahadah]]"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005}}</ref>

==Questions of terminology==
[[Image:BLAKE12.JPG|thumb|right|The term "Slave Trade" has been criticized for subsuming human suffering in commercial venture.<ref name=diouf>Diouf, Sylviane Anna. ''Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies''. 2003, page xi.</ref> This 1796 [[William Blake]] print inverts that effect, as a man dangles by his rib in the horrible foreground, while a slave ship is relegated to the distant corner, emphasizing the human condition as the central concern.<ref>Wood, Marcus. ''Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America''. 2000, page 38-9.</ref>]]
The term ''African Holocaust'' is preferred by some academics, such as [[Maulana Karenga]], because it implies intention.<ref name="Ethics on Reparations">{{cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="[[Ron Karenga]]"|title="Problem with Maafa"|}}</ref> One problem noted by Karenga is that the word ''Maafa'' can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term ''holocaust'', however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21}}</ref>

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term ''Maafa'' to ''African Holocaust'',<ref>Tarpley, Natasha. ''Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity''. 1995, page 252.</ref> because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.<ref name=morris /> The term ''Maafa'' may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the ''Holocaust'' serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."<ref name=outof>Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. ''Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies''. 2000, page 250.</ref> Other arguments in favor of ''Maafa'' rather than ''African Holocaust'' emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."<ref name=joneswest />

The terms "[[Transatlantic Slave Trade]]", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.<ref name=diouf /> With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "[[collateral damage]]" of a commercial venture.

==Further reading==
* ''Let The Circle Be Unbroken'', by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* Van Sertima, Ivan. ed. ''The Journal of African Civilization.''
* Rodney, Walter. ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.'' Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* ''World's Great Men Of Color.'' Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* ''The Negro Impact on Western Civilization.'' New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro and the Making of the Americas.''
* ''The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam'' by John Hunwick

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.themaafa.com St Paul Community Baptist Church Commemoration of The MAAFA]
* [http://www.africanholocaust.net africanholocaust.net African Holocaust]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]

{{Pan-Africanism}}

[[Category:Labor]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Slave trade]]
[[Category:European colonisation in Africa]]
[[Category:History of Africa|Africa]]
[[Category:Pan-Africanism|*]]