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Enslaved child in Zanzibar, c. 1890. The child is chained to the heavy piece of lumber to restict her movement.
Europeans scramble to get a piece of the resources of Afrika.

The Black Chattelization Wars refer to the long series of aggression brought upon Black Peoples by different Non-black groups. Starting at the fall of Roman controled KMT, through the subsequent foreign invasions into Afrika, on to the European warfronts, many times, dehumanization and chattelization of Black people went hand in hand with military conflicts. Throughout these wars, it's estimated that hundreds of millions[citation needed] of Afrikans were killed, and equally, millions were enslaved.

Terminology

Henry Louis Gates
Chinweizu

The term Black Chattelization Wars was coined by Pan-Africanist scholar Chinweizu in an article he wrote in response to Henry Louis Gates's article, Ending the Slavery Blame-Game. Gates argues that Black people's culpability in their enslavement is usually ignored, and most of the blame is placed squarely on non-Black people. In his article, he goes on to state that in analysis of the history of Enslavement,

In his article, What Slave Trade?, Chinweizu contends that blaming Black people for the chattelization of the last half of the second millenium is a woefully inaccurate viewing of history. He contends that in essentially every conflict, there have been those who helped aggressors to conquer the lands of their people, and Black people in Africa were no different. In order to discuss the point in more modern terms, he discusses human trafficking of today, and the trafficking of the Chinese n the 19th century, and how in both instances, there are collaborators, in discussing those events, however, the blame is always placed where it should be. The traffickers.

Another example he cites are Jewish men and women who collaborated with the Nazis. The Jüdische Ordnungsdienst, as the Jewish police in the European ghettos were called, furnished thousands of men for seizure operations. In the Warsaw ghetto alone the Jewish police numbered approximately 2500; in Lodz they were about 1200 men strong; the Lvov ghetto had an Ordnungsdienst of 500 men; and so on." [1]

Chinweizu ends his article saying

Categorizing the enslavement and dehumanization of Black people in the second millennium as Black Chattelization Wars more fully encompasses the events than and blame sharing campaign. Extending the definition wars to the destruction of East Africa by non-black groups in the first millennium helps to explain the position Africans were in 1000 years later when they would encounter Europeans. A position so drained of energy and resources that a proper resistance to European chattelization proved to be near impossible.[2]

Arab War Front (680ce - Present)

Arabo-Black Chattelization Wars
Part of Black Chattelization Wars
Monument to chattelization in Zanzibar.jpg
A slave auction was held near this location in Zanzibar for many years. This is an image of a sculpture, Memory for the Slaves by Clara Sörnäs, concrete, 1998.
Date 639 (639)
Location Arab Conquest of North Afrika, Muslim Conquest of Sahel Region, Arab Conquest of East Afrika
Result Islamization of North and parts of East Afrika, The languages, religions and ways of life of many Black groups in Africa was wiped away and replaced Arabized ways of life.

Africa was thoroughly inundated by Arab traders and warlords shortly after north East Afrika was captured from the remnants of the recently fallen Roman Empire. The Romans had been ruling for over 6 centuries, and in a relatively short period, in the Muslim armies swept over present day Egypt and Libya, and were able to secure bases from which they would be able to take over the rest of the continent. By 711 AD North Afrika was effectively under the control of Arabs. At the same time, other Arab groups were moving south on the continent and warring with Black groups in Eastern, Central and Southern Afrika.

Invasion of the Nile Valley

Script error: No such module "main". By the middle of the first millenium, the Africans in the Nile Valley had been under foreign occupation by multiple different groups. Starting with the Assyrians in the 600's BCE and ending with the Arabs 1000 years later.

First Invasion

Prior to the seventh[3] century, Egypt was ruled as an extension of the ancient Persian empire. Before the Persians, several other groups had ruled over the Nile Valley, mismanaged the country, ruled so brutally that the Africans assumed that their Arab neighbors to the east might relieve some of the pressure. Historian John Henrik Clarke discusses the probable attitude of the residents of the Nile Valley at the time:

United in their new religion, Arab armies swept over the northern Nile Valley, and much of the lands surrounding Arabia. 8 years after Mohammad's death, in 640 CE Arabs, lead by Amir ibn-al-As invaded the Nile Valley. By 642 CE, Egypt was effectively an Arab province[3]. In the following decades, they would go on to take over the rest of north Africa, from the Nile to the Atlantic ocean.

Second Invasion

In the mid 11th century, two Arab tribes, known then as the Beni-Soleim tribe and the Beni-Hilal tribe were expelled from central Arabia, and sent to Egypt. In all, they numbered between 200,000 and 300,000.[4] Because of the warlike posture of these two tribes, they weren't wanted in the Arabian penninsula. They had continually attacked other Arab groups, and in the case of the Beni-Hilal, they even particaped in a sacking of Mecca in 930 while participating in a rebellion against the rulers at that time, the Fatimid Caliphate.
While in Egypt, They didn't cease their warlike behavior. The rulers of egypt deemed them a nuisance, and thus promised them vast lands for grazing to the west. Out west, the Arab tribs were met with groups who were already settled there. The Berbers The The two tribe were nomadic and pastoralists so any foreign settlements they came across were were destroyed and rarely if ever rebuilt. [4].

Modern Arabo-Afrikan wars

The Arab wars of Afrikan Chattelization have continued well into the 21th Century. Chattelization, and Afrikan genocide is openely practiced in places like Sudan and Mauritania.

Use of Islam in the war

Afrikan people were obtained through conquest, tribute from vassal states (in the first such treaty, Nubia was required to provide hundreds of male and females to be enslaved), offspring (children of slaves were also slaves, but since many slaves were castrated this was not as common), and purchase. The latter method provided the majority of slaves, and at the borders of the Islamic Empire vast number of new slaves were castrated ready for sale (Islamic law did not allow mutilation of slaves, so it was done before they crossed the border).

Afrikans were transported to the Islamic empire across the Sahara to Morocco and Tunisia from West Afrika, from Chad to Libya, along the Nile from East Afrika, and up the coast of East Afrika to the Persian Gulf. This trade had been well entrenched for over 600 years before Europeans arrived, and had driven the rapid expansion of Islam across North Africa.

European Theatre

The European Theatre of Chattelization Wars took place across the Afrikan continent from the 1400's through to the 1800's. The vast majority of Afrikans transported to the New World were captured from the central and western parts of the continent. The numbers were so great that Africans who came by way of the European slave trade became the most numerous Old-World immigrants in both North and South America before the late eighteenth century.[5] The South Atlantic economic system centered on making goods and clothing to sell in Europe and increasing the numbers of enslaved Afrikans brought to the New World. This system was crucial to European countries which, in the late 1300's were on the verge of collapsing under the weight of Islamic wars and plagues.

Early

The Portuguese were the first to engage in the European slave trade, and others soon followed. Afrikans were considered chattel cargo by the ship owners, to be transported to the Americas as quickly and cheaply as possible,[6] there to be sold to labor in coffee, tobacco, cocoa, cotton and sugar plantations, gold and silver mines, rice fields, construction industry, cutting timber for ships, and as house servants.

The European traders, ordered by trade volume, were: the Portuguese, the British, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, and the Americans. Current estimates are that more than 80 million were captured 1/3 of whichsurviving to be shipped across the Atlantic,[7] although the actual number purchased by the traders is considerably higher.[8][9][10]

The European theatre of the Black Chattelization war is sometimes called the Maafa by African and African-American scholars, meaning "holocaust" or "great disaster" in Swahili. Some scholars, such as Marimba Ani and Maulana Karenga use the terms African Holocaust or Holocaust of Enslavement. Enslavement was one element of a three-part economic cycle—the triangular trade and its Middle Passage—which ultimately involved four continents, four centuries and millions of people.[11]

Post-Berlin Conference

Script error: No such module "main". The Berlin Conference was a meeting Called for by Portugal and organized by Otto von Bismarck, first Chancellor of Germany, its outcome, the General Act of the Berlin Conference, can be seen as the formalization of the Black Chattelization Wars in regards to the West and Central Afrikan sections of the war. The conference ushered in a period of heightened colonial activity by European powers, while simultaneously eliminating most existing forms of Afrikan autonomy and self-governance. Previously, Europeans dealt with kingdoms on the continent of Afrika from bases and fortresses on coast. After, the the General Act was ratified, most European nations worked to move into the continent.

Modern Euro-Afrikan relations

After the Second World War people in Afrika wanted change. Only Egypt, Liberia and Ethiopia were independent at that point.

In Southern Afrika, European settlers wanted to cut the ties with Britain and Portugal, but retain white minority rule, excluding the indigenous Afrikan population. The fighting resulting from this was violent and destructive to the infrastructure of the countries involved and their independent neighbours. Burdened by apartheid for decades, South Africans were the last people on the continent to attain majority rule. Meanwhile the Cold War conflict between America and the Soviet Union distorted politics at a regional level particularly in Angola and other southern countries.

Attaining economic independence proved harder than gaining political independence. With being free from colonialism, a new form dubbed neocolonialism by Osagyfo Kwame Nkrumah came into existence.

Today, similar to the Black enslavers in the era of the Chattelization Wars and like the plantation overseers and house niggers of ante-bellum USA, the Black colonialists of today operate within the framework and mandate given them by white supremacy, but they add their own peculiar twists to the master's mandate. The executive anarchism of the Nigerian comprador elite just happens to be, perhaps, the most abominable of these local twists to the basic mandate given by white supremacy to its local black agents. [12]

Use of Christianity in the war

Christianity and the BCW are often closely associated because Catholicism and Protestantism were the religions of the European colonial powers[13] and acted in many ways as the "religious arm" of those powers.[14] According to Edward Andrews, Christian missionaries were initially portrayed as "visible saints, exemplars of ideal piety in a sea of persistent savagery". However, by the time the colonial era drew to a close in the last half of the twentieth century, missionaries became viewed as "ideological shock troops for colonial invasion whose zealotry blinded them",[15] colonialism's "agent, scribe and moral alibi."[16]

Christianity is targeted by critics of colonialism because the tenets of the religion were used to justify the actions of the colonists.[17] For example, Toyin Falola asserts that there were some missionaries who believed that "the agenda of colonialism in Africa was similar to that of Christianity".[18] Falola cites Jan H. Boer of the Sudan United Mission as saying, "Colonialism is a form of imperialism based on a divine mandate and designed to bring liberation - spiritual, cultural, economic and political - by sharing the blessings of the Christ-inspired civilization of the West with a people suffering under satanic oppression, ignorance and disease, effected by a combination of political, economic and religious forces that cooperate under a regime seeking the benefit of both ruler and ruled."[18]

Edward Andrews writes:

Historians have traditionally looked at Christian missionaries in one of two ways. The first church historians to catalogue missionary history provided hagiographic descriptions of their trials, successes, and sometimes even martyrdom. Missionaries were thus visible saints, exemplars of ideal piety in a sea of persistent savagery. However, by the middle of the twentieth century, an era marked by civil rights movements, anti-colonialism, and growing secularization, missionaries were viewed quite differently. Instead of godly martyrs, historians now described missionaries as arrogant and rapacious imperialists. Christianity became not a saving grace but a monolithic and aggressive force that missionaries imposed upon defiant natives. Indeed, missionaries were now understood as important agents in the ever-expanding nation-state, or "ideological shock troops for colonial invasion whose zealotry blinded them."[citation needed]

According to Jake Meador, "some Christians have tried to make sense of post-colonial Christianity by renouncing practically everything about the Christianity of the colonizers. They reason that if the colonialists’ understanding of Christianity could be used to justify rape, murder, theft, and empire then their understanding of Christianity is completely wrong. "[19]

According to Lamin Sanneh, "(m)uch of the standard Western scholarship on Christian missions proceeds by looking at the motives of individual missionaries and concludes by faulting the entire missionary enterprise as being part of the machinery of Western cultural imperialism." As an alternative to this view, Sanneh presents a different perspective arguing that "missions in the modern era has been far more, and far less, than the argument about motives customarily portrays."[20]

Michael Wood asserts that the indigenous peoples were not considered to be human beings and that the colonisers was shaped by "centuries of Ethnocentrism, and Christian monotheism, which espoused one truth, one time and version of reality."[21]

Battles in the Black Chattelization Wars

Script error: No such module "main". Many different groups participated in the wars in different periods of history. Being that the subject is so vast, below are a few noteworthy encounters.

Aggressions from Asians

Aggressions from Europeans

From the fall of the Moorish Empire (1491) to present

Proxy internal wars

sources

  1. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Quadrangle Books, Chicago, 1961, p. 310
  2. Butler, Alfred J.; Clarke, John H. (1992). "Introduction". The Arab Invasion of Egypt and the Last 30 Years of Roman Domination. A&B Books Publishers. p. 552. ISBN 1-881316-06-8.
  3. 3.0 3.1 deGraft-Johnson, J.C. (1954). "06 The Muslim Invasion of Africa". African Glory (Book). Black Classic Press. p. 64. ISBN 0933121-03-2.
  4. 4.0 4.1 deGraft-Johnson, J.C. (1954). "08 The Rise of African Empires". African Glory (Book). Black Classic Press. p. 64. ISBN 0933121-03-2.
  5. Curtin, Philip (1969). The Atlantic Slave Trade. The University Of Wisconsin Press. pp. 1–58.
  6. Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named Mannix 1962 Introduction-1–5
  7. John Henrik Clarke, Slave Trade and Slavery (New York: Holt McDougal, 1970), ISBN 9780030841545 , p. 12. "The slave trade prospered, and Africans continued to be poured into the New World. Figures on the subject vary, but it has been estimated that during the years of the African slave trade, Africa lost from 60 to 100 Million people."
  8. Eltis, David and Richardson, David. The Numbers Game. In: Northrup, David: The Atlantic Slave Trade, 2nd edition, Houghton Mifflin Co., 2002. p. 95.
  9. Basil Davidson. The African Slave Trade.
  10. "African Holocaust How Many". African Holocaust Society. Retrieved 2007-01-04. While traditional studies often focus on official French and British records of how many Africans arrived in the New World, these studies neglect to include the death from raids, the fatalities on board the ships, deaths caused by European diseases, the victims from the consequences of enslavement, and trauma of refugees displaced by slaving activities. The number of arrivals also neglects the volume of Africans who arrived via pirates, who for obvious reasons, wouldn't have kept records.
  11. "African Holocaust Special". African Holocaust Society. Retrieved 2007-01-04.
  12. http://www.nathanielturner.com/nigeriaandwhitesupremacy.htm
  13. Melvin E. Page, Penny M. Sonnenburg (2003). Colonialism: an international, social, cultural, and political encyclopedia, Volume 1. ABC-CLIO. p. 496. Of all religions, Christianity has been most associated with colonialism because several of its forms (Catholicism and Protestantism) were the religions of the European powers engaged in colonial enterprise on a global scale.
  14. Bevans, Steven. "Christian Complicity in Colonialism/ Globalism" (PDF). Retrieved 2010-11-17. The modern missionary era was in many ways the ‘religious arm’ of colonialism, whether Portuguese and Spanish colonialism in the sixteenth Century, or British, French, German, Belgian or American colonialism in the nineteenth. This was not all bad — oftentimes missionaries were heroic defenders of the rights of indigenous peoples
  15. Andrews, Edward (2010). "Christian Missions and Colonial Empires Reconsidered: A Black Evangelist in West Africa, 1766–1816". Journal of Church & State. 51 (4): 663–691. doi:10.1093/jcs/csp090. Historians have traditionally looked at Christian missionaries in one of two ways. The first church historians to catalogue missionary history provided hagiographic descriptions of their trials, successes, and sometimes even martyrdom. Missionaries were thus visible saints, exemplars of ideal piety in a sea of persistent savagery. However, by the middle of the twentieth century, an era marked by civil rights movements, anti-colonialism, and growing secularization, missionaries were viewed quite differently. Instead of godly martyrs, historians now described missionaries as arrogant and rapacious imperialists. Christianity became not a saving grace but a monolithic and aggressive force that missionaries imposed upon defiant natives. Indeed, missionaries were now understood as important agents in the ever-expanding nation-state, or "ideological shock troops for colonial invasion whose zealotry blinded them.
  16. Comaroff, Jean; Comaroff, John (2010) [1997]. "Africa Observed: Discourses of the Imperial Imagination". In Grinker, Roy R.; Lubkemann, Stephen C.; Steiner, Christopher B. (eds.). Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History and Representation (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. p. 32.
  17. Meador, Jake. "Cosmetic Christianity and the Problem of Colonialism – Responding to Brian McLaren". Retrieved 2010-11-17. According to Jake Meador, "some Christians have tried to make sense of post-colonial Christianity by renouncing practically everything about the Christianity of the colonizers. They reason that if the colonialists’ understanding of Christianity could be used to justify rape, murder, theft, and empire then their understanding of Christianity is completely wrong.
  18. 18.0 18.1 Falola, Toyin (2001). Violence in Nigeria: The Crisis of Religious Politics and Secular Ideologies. University Rochester Press. p. 33.
  19. Meador, Jake. "Cosmetic Christianity and the Problem of Colonialism – Responding to Brian McLaren". Retrieved 2010-11-17.
  20. Sanneth, Lamin (April 8, 1987). "Christian Missions and the Western Guilt Complex". The Christian Century. The Christian Century Foundation: 331–334. Retrieved 2010-12-02.
  21. Conquistadors, Michael Wood, p. 20, BBC Publications, 2000