Friday

                            Musings and History

Quote of the day:

“The next time a prostitute solicits you for business, ask her for the clergyman's rate.”

                                            George Carlin

Due to the length of this issue there will not be a trivia question.

What is the difference between “tamed” and “domesticated” animals? In a book I am reading it is this. A tamed animal is like the Indian elephants that are used in the timber industry but it takes at least 20 years for one of them to get large enough and trained enough to be useful. A domesticated animal is like cows, chickens, dogs, etc. They mature fairly quickly and can be bred into many varieties. Some animals cannot be domesticated for a variety of reasons even though they mature relatively quickly. An example is the African cape buffalo. They are bovine (cows) but the are some of the most temperamental and downright dangerous beasts out there. The zebra has never been domesticated because they absolutely will not breed in captivity. Cheetahs will not either. The reason is the females insist on going through a mating ritual that covers miles of running and sparring. If this don't happen, the female does not ovulate and rejects all suitors.

This is a little different from my normal format but ignorance combined with arrogance really bothers me. The following may be offensive to some but I didn't make this stuff up, y'all, this is what happened.

I saw a TV show about Thomas Jefferson and his Monticello estate in Virginia. The “host” was a minor TV personality that was so smug and arrogant it was distracting from the guided tour by the manager of the estate. When the guide pointed to some small buildings and said “These were the slave quarters.” The host said “You mean that he was a slave holder...that changes everything I thought about him.” That just goes to show how stupid and ignorant people are about the history of slavery in the world and the United States in particular. Let me say this about that. Ulysses Grant's wife had slaves, the wharves and piers of New York and Philadelphia and many other projects in these United States were built by slave labor. I am not defending that vile practice but it it just the way things were back then and you cannot apply present day morality to past years...time, people and values change. I feel the need the give a brief history of slavery in the western hemisphere. When I say that I mean from the eastern end of the Mediterranean sea including Africa to the west coast of North and South America.

The first written acknowledgment of slavery was by clay tablets written in cuneiform describing the exploits of several kings of city-states in Mesopotamia or Iraq/Iran. These tablets are over 7,000 years old. The kings regaled in the number people they captured, enslaved and used as trade items. The Jews in their Babylonian and Egyptian captivity are an example.

There are hundreds of descriptions of battles going back 4,500 years where the Egyptians also captured and enslaved their enemies and used them in barter and trade.

Every nation in ancient north Africa including Carthage and Tripoli were involved in slave trade for profit.

The same can be said for ancient Greece, the Balkan countries, certainly the Roman empire and nearly every other European country. Eventually the Europeans did not call them slaves they were called vassals or serfs but the results were same...they were chattel.

About the 400 AD the Vikings began raiding the west coast of the Europe via the English Channel and sailing up different rivers in search for gold, silver, anything of value and yes, people to enslave. They reached their peak about 700 AD and had a regular pipeline to providing slaves to the “Rus” or the tribes that border the Volga River. They eventually became the Russians. That is why today there are blond and red haired people in Russia even though that trait is not in their ancestry except for slaves.

The Dutch opened sugar plantations in the Windward and Leeward islands in the eastern Caribbean about the same time the settlers in what later became the United States also established huge plantations on the eastern seaboard all of which cried out for slave labor. This was about 1630AD. The first documented use of slaves in America was at the Plymouth Ma. colony in about the year 1624 when a Dutch slave ship stopped at Plymouth and traded slaves for food to get them back across the Atlantic and home. The Dutch knew the need for slaves existed and sailed down the west coast of Africa and worked out a trade agreement with several kings of the independent nations therein. These kings would provide slaves for the Dutch trade goods including firearms. The kings were African and would send search parties inland to capture other Africans to be sold as slaves. The difference was the kings were Muslim and the Koran forbade the enslaving of other Muslims but anyone else was fair game. Enslaving a person of the same race was not an issue, their religion was.

The Spanish saw how wealthy the Dutch were becoming by trading dry good for slaves, sailing over to the new colonies and selling the slaves for sugar (worth its weight in gold in Europe), gold or precious gems and sailing home much richer than they left.

The Spanish were unsure of the morality of all of this and asked the Pope for guidance. The Pope decreed that it was OK to enslave others as long as they were not Catholic...more religion. The Spanish and English joined this new enterprise and a flood of slave ships sailed south from Europe to the “Slave”, “Gold” and “Ivory” coasts of west Africa and took care of business.

The Spanish found a better source of wealth in plundering the Inca, Maya and Aztec by stealing their mountains of gold, silver and precious gems while enslaving them to work in their own mines. By the way, the Inca, Maya and Aztecs also used slave labor in their mines before the Spanish came.

In 1641 King Charles I got fed up with the constant rebellion of the Irish and in the span of 10 years killed 500,000 Irish and enslaved 300,000 Irish men, women and children and sold them mostly to the sugar plantations on Barbados.

As the settlers in the US moved west they found that the Native Americans would enslave people if it was to their advantage. The tribes would do a census from time to time and if they found there were more of their tribe dying than were being born they had no problem with raiding other sources for women to be child bearers in their tribe so they wouldn't go extinct. They were not particular about their race...just so they were women. There were exceptions...the Mexican Apache and Comanche was heavy into the slave trade and would hold bi-yearly “Fairs”in Santa Fe to buy, sell and trade their slaves. In the “Trail Of Tears” when the Cherokee and Creek were forced from their lands in the Carolinas and northern Georgia there was a military report that said “they left their villages with everything they and their slaves could carry.”

In 1807 the United States after doing a detailed census showing that there was more slaves being born than were dying, banned further importing of slaves but the buying, selling and trading of the existing slaves continued unchecked until December of 1865.

The same thing happened on the plantations in the Caribbean and further slaves were not needed. The slave trade in the trans-Atlantic expired.

Guess what happened next. Gold and diamonds were discovered in South Africa and y'all know what was needed to operate those mines. A slave market was opened off the eastern coast of Africa on the island of Zanzibar and is still operating to this day. It is estimated that there have been more slaves sold in Zanzibar by a factor of 4 than were sold on the east coast of Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas.

Slavery is not dead...it is alive and well on the east coast of Africa and there does not appear to be an end to it. There was a blonde high school girl from Birmingham Al. that disappeared without a trace while on a senior high school trip to Aruba, a Dutch owned property. I would not be surprised if she went through Zanzibar at one time or another, blondes are at a premium. Like I said, I did not make all of this up, this is what happened like it or not.

                         Thanks for listening   I can hardly wait until tomorrow