e:\doc\web\97\06\machet.txt


From:             MachetT@aol.com
Date sent:        Fri, 15 Aug 1997 09:09:43 -0400 (EDT)
To:               arthurhu@halcyon.com
Subject:          Re: How many slaves died on the ships? 100M or 100,000?


Hundreds of millions died during the largets holocaust the world has ever
known, the Middle Passage which, as I said before, lasted for hundreds of
years from the Potugues to the  Spanish enslavement to the American
enslavement.  I haven't read the information since 1991 at Emory but I will
look back into my notebooks and give you the references on tuesday.  Why is
that hard for you to believe?  100,000 is the absurd figure and there were
way more than 100 million Africans on the continent...just becasue Europe
didn't take a full census of the continent of Aquibolan/Africa doesn't mean
that those people weren't there.  it is true that there already slave trading
societies on the continent (brazil is populated by Angolans who were sold to
the portugues/spanish by Congolese traders) and the Portuguese didn't have to
go into the interior to capture Africans so they didn't know who was there.
 There were so many culutral differences that the concept of enslavement was
misunderstood in that African slaves in Africa were mostly allowed to be
citizens and statesmen for the nations they were given to, sort of like
todays employer/employee relationship.  The difference in land ownership was
also a factor.  When  Euros came there and here(america) and bought land,
they concluded that the land was completely thiers while Africans and Native
Americans considered that the Euros just bought ACCESS to the land and it was
the property of the ALMIGHTY that man was allowed to use, not exclusive for
the person with a deed.