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Comment by charlescearl | Hacker News Reader

Most of the Black people in my section of the u.s. were stolen from Congo/Angola. To be precise, those of us whose ancestors came through Charleston, SC enroute to other areas in the southeast.

The devastation upon thriving, sustainable Indigenous economies — because we’re talking about peoples who made rainforests “work” before any human arrived in Europe or Asia — wrought by the trans-Atlantic slave trade from the 1500s onward and European colonialism is documented in Walter Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” among hundreds of other analyses.

The level of eugenics and racism in the comments, let alone ignorance of the last 500 years of human history is incredible.

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If you feel that you belong to that corner of Africa, why you are still in US and not on the route to your homeland? No one is barring you from leaving US! Though, I wonder - what are the people you are going to identify with - descendants of slavers, that massacred tribe of your long gone ancestors?

Not long before Europeans appeared in Congo basin, most of the local natives of area were robbed of their lands by new arrivals of taller black people. Their co-existence with these new masters is nothing less than slavery even in modern times. I wonder... how deep is that box of Pandora, that you want to open? Are you ready to pay for sins of your ancestors or is this exclusive thing to Whites only? Are you even aware, that significant part of Europeans in US initially were brought to US as slaves?

Europeans did not brought slavery to Africa and neither to US, where locals were happily enslaving each other. 500 years ago before arrival of Europeans with rare exceptions, any society in Africa had slavery. History is unpleasant, but that has hardly anything to do with ongoing war, that has reached heat in modern US. Btw, Hitler also eradicated Jews with the exactly same ideas about Aryan race, but you might need to get past 500 years in your history book to realize that.

Your refusal to acknowledge the difference between prisoners of war and the institution of chattel slavery is a disgrace and a consequence of the American education system that manufactures consent for imperialism and colonialism.

Maybe to put it in techy terms, Europeans did slavery at scale. We live in the aftermath of that and the threads are still visible (former colonies are still captive markets that export raw resources, more often than not to their previous colonial master's). We don't live in the global hegemony of the Corsair pirates, so if you want to discuss bondage on the African continent maybe address the context that it didn't form the basis of the global order we live in today.

Hitler is widely regarded as one of history's worst humans for just taking the colonialism European powers did at the time and applying it to Jews and other "undesirables" in Europe. While we're on the topic of America and how it didn't invent racism or slavery, might be worth noting how the Nazis got their idea for lebensraum and racial purity? I'm sure manifest destiny and one drop rules, or the fact that Long Island was the "eugenics capital of the world" played a part.

> Your refusal to acknowledge the difference between prisoners of war

Prisoners of war? They were loot.

We should understand the institution of slavery a little better.

The economy of much of the ancient world was based on slavery. E.g. fighting wars to capture people who could then be used as slaves domestically and sold for trade. The objective of these wars was to capture this human bounty.

Especially in Africa, this was why the wars were fought as slavery was one of the pillars on which the local economies rested, and this is true as far back as we have recorded history -- which is basically the chronicles of Arab slave traders buying slaves from Africa in the 7th Century on.

The richest man in Africa - Mansa Musa - earned his great wealth via slavery, himself owning thousands of personal slaves but capturing many orders of magnitude more and then trading them for gold and other riches during the middle ages. And not only Mali, but all of Africa's great empires were slave societies based on the principles of fighting wars to capture both slaves and territory.

To try to pretend that slavery was a modern invention only practiced in order to sell slaves to Europeans in the 18th Century and later is to ignore the entire (known) economic history of Africa.

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