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Africans

Mon, 2006-10-23 08:05 — diaspora confederacy
Teaser: 

The largest, and the most important migration of peoples to conquered Turtle Island were the 80-100 million captured Africans sold as slaves in the emerging capitalist economy of the "New World." Without the theft of millions of people's labor, without the systematic desecration of their humanity, the invaders could not have created the empire of affluence and global terror that we now refer to as the "u.s." The historical enslavement of Africans is, both materially and psychologically, the most pervasive and foundational ingredient of our present miserable condition in this society.

The mass robbery of human beings instigated by European Christian invaders grew to be such a profitable endeavor that some among the African population began capturing and offering up their own for the thousands-of-miles journey to the insane degradation of the New World. Confined in a state of wretchedness comparable only to the likes of modern factory farms, more than half of the African "cargo" of the slavers died on passage to "the Americas" and were thrown into the sea like simple debris of a business enterprise.

Body: 

Africans were stolen from dozens of nations throughout the west coast of Africa, as well as somewhat from the internal regions. The numerous languages, cultural and spiritual practices of the Africans were systematically undermined by the slave system. In the West Indies, Africans were "broken" for their eventual task of cultivating vast quantities of cotton, tobacco, indigo and sugar cane on plantations throughout the Caribbean and the southeastern united states.

It is this breaking of human beings that best exemplifies the experience of the Diaspora. Nations and families ruthlessly divided, the women raped by the master, the children sold "down the river." Native dance and music forbidden and forced underground, indigenous names obliterated by the master's name. Native religions and languages banned and replaced by the slaveholder's Christianity and English.

Having endured nearly three centuries of slavery, and another full century of apartheid terror, descendants of Africans in america have been almost entirely stripped of all legitimate sense of being African and have been given, in trade, the offensive and meager identity as an African-American.

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