Black History

Quoted text is credited to the research conducted by Dr. Runoko Rashidi, the Great Scholar, Historian, Author, and Lecturer.

Black European History: “To address the story of black people in Europe, certainly addresses the history of slavery and the history of European colonialism. The relationship between the two continents began with mutual respect and curiosity. The history begins, as so much in the modern world, with the business expansion of European culture.”

700 years Ago Europe Was Far Behind Africa: “While Europeans had always known about Africa, they hadn’t known much. Their desire to make money made Africa interesting. The first real substantial relationships Europeans forged with Africans were with the Islamic civilizations and traders of North Africa.”

“These two groups had been in sporadic but undefined contact all through the European Middle Ages. In the fifteenth century, the major Islamic civilizations were beginning to decline in power, but not in their impressiveness. The Europeans were amazed by what they saw, especially in the Sudanese empire.”

Europe & Africa – Mutual Interest in Trade: “The modern history of Europe and Africa is overwhelmingly saturated with Europeans forcibly deporting Africans into European states. Equally Europeans forced political, social, religious, and economic practices on Africans during the colonial period and afterward. Europeans were as much interested in African culture as they expected the Africans to be interested in theirs. During this heady period at the start of the cultural exchange between the two hemispheres, Africans regularly came to Europe to study Western culture; in 1518, for example, Henry of the Congo traveled to the Vatican and became the first bishop of the Congo. All this would change, however.”

Trade in Slavery Begins: “The two hemispheres were headed for a collision. The tragedy that broke this initial historical pattern was slavery. The European trade in Africans begins right at the start of European relations with Africa. This initial slave trade, however, was small. The trade itself had begun long before the Europeans ever cast a jealous eye on the land of Africa. The Islamic civilizations and traders of North and Western Africa had a booming traffic in black slavery as they marched Africans across the Sahara to regions in the east. Surprisingly, slavery was not racially based in most of human history; racial slavery, that is, slavery that is predicated on race as a way of separating slave from free, is a creation of the seventeenth century. Slavery has been a constant in human history.”

Not Always Based on Color: “The only period of time in which slavery has not been a major part of the human experience is within the last two hundred years. Slavery has one and only one motive: economic. Slave labor is cheap labor; it is purchased at the price of the survival of the laborer. It is not necessarily efficient labor, however, for people do not really invest themselves in coerced work. Most of human history is characterized by low production economies; these low production economies produce just enough to survive for the majority of the workers in the economy. In such an economy, slavery, or coerced labor, is one of the most common solutions to maintain a large, low productive economy.”

“Throughout most of human history, human beings were drawn from conquered populations, defeated armies, and sold into slavery by rulers or their families. People were slaves by virtue of being slaves; there were no racial, ethnic, or physical markers of slavery or subsistence servitude. Such was the situation that the Europeans encountered and traded in. When the Portuguese forged contacts with the Islamic civilizations and traders of North Africa, they diverted much of this trade to Europe, including the Islamic traffic in native black people. The Portuguese, however, were not satisfied with trade with North Africa and pushed down the western coast of the continent.”

Portugal Leads the Way: “In 1441, a group of Portuguese in West Africa discovered a village of black natives and, to make some money, attacked them and kidnapped as many as they could. As a result began the European traffic in black people. By 1854, the Portuguese were importing thousands of Africans per year into Portugal to work as indentured servants. This traffic, however, was far different from the character of the later slave trade; after a specified period, indentured servants were freed. It was not possible to be born a slave in Portugal. The children of indentured servants were free.”

“This would be the case throughout the sixteenth century. The Africans kidnapped by the Portuguese were baptized, many were educated, and they all integrated into the lower classes of Portuguese society. Africans and Europeans intermarried; to this day, most Portuguese are of mixed blood. This early trade in human lives was relatively small.”

Europe and Free Labor and the Rise of Black People: Europe would not be Europe without the free and coerced labor of Africans who were enslaved. Africans brought skills with them to Europe– building, farming/caring for land, art, and music; all shared with Europeans as their blood, sweat, and tears blew in the wilderness. African men fought their battles. African women nursed European babies.

Africans wove themselves into the fabrics of European cultures and as Maya Angelou wrote,

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.