Willful Amnesia

I'd like to expand a bit on my post about Slavery just below this one...  

A friend of mine and I were talking about Slavery, especially as it applies to the U.S. here in 2020.  He sent me a link to an interesting article on a website called "The World," which is a part of PRI (Public Radio International). You can read the article HERE. 

The article is about Africa's role in the slave trade, and how it's only recently that Blacks have begun to come to terms with it.  It focuses on the story of one woman, Mona Boyd.  Ms. Boyd and her husband were both successful business people in Boston, Massachusetts before deciding that they did not want to raise their son in the U.S.  So they moved to Ghana. 

Blacks don't like to talk about the role that their own ancestors played in the slave trade.  But for every buyer, there had to be a seller.  And who was selling their own countrymen to the European buyers?  Right, African kings and tribal leaders.  Here's an interesting section of the article:  

“There is a willful amnesia about the roles that we played in the slave trade,” said Nat Amarteifio, a local historian who’s also a former mayor of Accra, Ghana's capital.

Let's be honest, the U.S. didn't invent modern Slavery.  It had been going on for centuries, certainly well before the 1400's when the Portugese arrived in Africa with guns to trade for people.  This was, we might note, also well before Columbus sailed the ocean blue.  Now, eventually the British colonies in "the New World" (later, the United States) would become a major participant in the slave trade, for sure.  So it's not like we're completely blame-free.  And we ultimately did abolish Slavery - at great cost. 

The point of all of this is that we need to keep things in perspective.  Attributing the blame for Slavery to the U.S. might make you feel good, but...  Remember who it was who willingly sold their countrymen into Slavery in exchange for guns and things that would help them in their never-ending wars against other tribal leaders.  It's time that somebody stood up and said, "Whoa...wait a minute...there are two sides to every story."

https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-08-20/willful-amnesia-how-africans-forgot-and-remembered-their-role-slave-trade?fbclid=IwAR1lieSw-87upXxJiI_9kdqxm1-UuFmzPHBarNW3o_3qu49RVrwNZbUGXxo