Miss Kelly

Finally - Africans Apologizing for Slavery

As Kathy Shaidle of Five Feet of Fury says, now here's an apology for slavery that I can really get behind:

"Traditional African rulers should apologise for the role they played in the slave trade, a Nigerian rights group has said in a letter to chiefs."

" 'We cannot continue to blame the white men, as Africans particularly the traditional rulers, are not blameless,' said the Civil Rights Congress. "The letter said some collaborated or actively sold off their subjects."

"...on behalf of the buyers of slaves, the ancestors of these traditional rulers 'raided communities and kidnapped people, shipping them away across the Sahara or across the Atlantic'."

The complicity of Africans in the African slave trade goes unstated in the calls for slavery reparations here in the U.S.  Nor is there any mention of the extensive Arab slave system, which lasted longer than the European and American involvement in the slave trade and involved millions more AFrican slaves. 

Slavery in Mauritania

Slavery still widespread in Mauritania today:

"In the Saharan Islamic state, a centuries-old system of bondage is resisting the rise of democracy in the largely desert former French colony.  Herding camels or goats out in the sun-blasted dunes of the Sahara, or serving hot mint tea to guests in the richly carpeted villas of Nouakchott, Mauritanian slaves serve their masters and are passed on as family chattels from generation to generation."

"... A shocking anomaly in the 21st century, this is widely accepted in a racially diverse, hierarchical society dominated by a Moorish elite and a brand of Islam that preaches submission.  'It's like having sheep or goats. If a woman is a slave, her descendants are slaves,' said Boubacar Messaoud, who was born a slave and is now his country's leading anti-slavery campaigner. He says a 1981 decree outlawing slavery is a dead letter and slavery is alive in Mauritania, with all its manifestations of non-paid work, punishment, forced sex and other abuses."

"...Diplomats in Nouakchott say the outgoing junta declined an offer from the European Union to fund an investigative study.  'It's probably fairly widespread. In the houses of the Moors, you see young black boys serving tea. I don't know what their work contracts are but I would not like to have theirs,' said one diplomat, who asked not to be named. He said Mauritania's new president, to be elected in a March 25 run-off between two white Moor frontrunners, would have to tackle slavery and enduring social and racial inequality."

From the article, a little history lesson about slavery in sub-Saharan Africa:

"Historians say slavery developed in Mauritania from the 7th century, when Arab invaders pushed south into Sub-Saharan Africa, bringing their Islamic religion which explicitly allowed the enslavement of non-believers. This blossomed into a Trans-Saharan Slave Trade that captured black Africans several centuries before the peak of the European-run Atlantic Slave Trade."

More on modern slavery here, and more about slavery in Mauritania here. 

If only the slavery reparations folks would fight to put and end to modern slavery.

If only Muslims in the West would stop rationalizing and defending slavery.