Africa , that prides itself as the cradle of mankind , has had an unfortunate history precisely because the continent is resource rich . Rather than this positive attribute creating a firm foundation , it has actually been the source of endless instability .
The continent was for a long time referred to as the dark continent because of its forbidding topography and the fact that so little was known about the territory as there was little communication between Europe and Africa .
Traditionally , trade was the way communities got in touch with each other and Europe was aware of the eastern remote areas where silk and spices were abundant and elaborate trade routes connected China and India to Europe through the middle east .
Ancient Egypt , a civilization that lasted for three thousand years , with its existence inextricably tied to the Nile was so dominant that it defined Africa and if one referred to it by its original name of Kemet it meant ‘ black land ’.
What was known of the rest of Africa was those lands that bordered the Mediterranean Sea and through successive conquests by European and Islamic powers had become players in the European and near East geopolitics .
The unforgiving Sahara Desert formed a natural barrier to the south lands and the largely unknown and uncharted waters surrounding Africa discouraged adventurous seamen from venturing too far from the known navigable routes .
It should be noted that as early as the tenth century Arab seamen had sailed down the African eastern coast as far down as Zambia and there was a thriving trade relation with the Bantu people creating the Zanj Empire controlled by the Omani sultanate .
This happy state of affairs of Africa being the ignored continent came to an unfortunate end due to developments in Europe sparked by the industrial revolution and the discovery of new lands in the Americas .
The need to create a reliable supply of raw materials to keep the production lines running in Europe gave rise to a sharp increase in demand for cheap labor to man the plantations that were being set up in the new world .
The local inhabitants were unwilling to be conscripted into the back-breaking forced labor that was the lot of those who worked in the plantations and soon the plantation owners realized that Africa had an abundant and suitable human resource for exploitation .
That is when the rain began to beat the indigenous African as they became willing participants to the atrocious and dehumanizing trade that was to have a profound and lasting effect on the African continent .
Slavery , as an institution , has existed amongst all communities as long as recorded history but the scale and inhumanity exhibited in the slavery involving the black people reached an unprecedented level and made slavery peculiarly a black man ’ s issue .
It is too tempting and convenient to point accusing fingers towards the avaricious and cruel white slave trader and his customer the plantation owners in the new world and forget that this pernicious trade would never have worked without the cooperation of the African .
The African never foresaw that the selling off of people of his ilk , albeit from different African communities , was one day going to come back and haunt him as the mistreatment of a black person enabled the mistreatment of any black person .
The enthusiastic involvement of the African in the selling off of members of his race for short term financial and territorial gain was a road the African should never have taken especially since he was unaware of the life the slaves were destined for .
By an unfortunate coincidence the Arab trader on the east coast had also set up plantations growing spices that were in great demand in Europe and Asia and they too turned to slave trade to provide the needed cheap labor , again with the connivance of the African .
Between 1500 and 1870 when slave trade started and ended , an estimated fifteen million Africans from West Africa were kidnapped and frog-matched into waiting ships to be transported to a life of misery , abuse and permanent separation from the homeland .
There were many recorded incidences of resistance to the slave trade on the African continent but they were all suppressed , again with the aid of fellow Africans . Those who do not value themselves are unlikely to be valued by others .
The formal end of the slave trade , a feat achieved not by Africans but by the same people who started it , now perceiving it as being morally indefensible , did not translate into the emancipation of the black people .
The freeing of slaves , after four centuries , in which the perception of the African , supported by law , had been reduced to a mere commodity , a chattel to be owned and sold at will and not that of a fellow human being , persisted and still persists today .
The freed slave was neither assimilated or accepted into the new world , he was neither repatriated nor compensated for all those years of exploitation and he was kept purposedly at the periphery of the country he now called home . The ideal of equality was a myth .
It is extremely frustrating to note that the declaration of independence which states that all men are created equal , did not envisage a black person as a man . There has also been no effort to rectify the constitution to recognize the Americanness of emancipated slaves .
Even the bloody civil war was not fought over the moral issue of slavery but the politics and the economics of slavery . The south refused and continues to refuse to integrate the former slaves into a new and equitable economic order .
The millions of Africans that died during the capture , forced marches to the coast , transportation across the seas and the crushing working conditions in the plantations are statistics conveniently swept under international rugs and forgotten . In contrast , the six million Jews that died during the holocaust are immortalized in history as the face of racial prejudice and the perpetrators of the crimes were hunted down and prosecuted . Even the act of denying the holocaust is a recognized criminal act .
The Jews will not allow the world to forget that it was complicit in the crime against Jews as they stood by and allowed the heinous massacre to take place . Why is there no equivalent African push to recognize the African plight . Why has that road not been taken ?
The international community went a step further and actually organized the repatriation and resettlement of Jews to a location in their former homeland with protection even though the move antagonized and destabilized Palestine .
The end of slave trade heralded for the