Before we talk about the colonial experiences faced by United States and Africa, it should be first noted that the first wave of colonisation came from the Portuguese, The Portuguese conquest of Ceuta, during the early 15th century. This conquest began with the Colonisation of America, which expanded to Africa for the sole interest of slave trade.
First lets talk about America:
Soon after its discovery and its potential for commercial and religious use, the Portuguese wasted no time to bring in their religion to control there newly found land. They forced their religion and brand any other religion as enemies to Christ.
After a few years, other European countries saw the potential of these foreign lands and sought to gain control for themselves. Countries such as Netherlands, England and France were one of the first ones to start their conquest in hopes of finding riches from native colonies such as Aztecs and Incas over the 16th century.
Even before the arrival of Europeans, slavery existed. Some tribes would capture and enslave people from other tribes and sometimes execute them in the name of God. The Europeans used this and started exercising their control over the lands, in the form of slavery and manual labor
As the Europeans settled in the American lands, they also brought in alien diseases, which the natives were not immune to. This resulted in a large decline in the native population. With the decline in manual labor, the Europeans sought to other sources for manual labor such as Africa.
By the 18th century the amount of Black slavery completely overwhelmed the American Native Slavery. Africans, who were taken aboard slave ships to the Americas, were primarily obtained from their African homelands by coastal tribes who captured and sold them. These African tribes raided several villages and captured all able-bodied tribesmen who could do any form of labor. The high incidence of disease nearly always fatal to Europeans kept nearly all the slave captures activities confined to native African tribes. Rum, guns and gunpowder were some of the major trade items exchanged for slaves.
The majority of the slaves were made to work in sugar colonies in Brazil. The life expectancy here was abnormally short and the number of slaves had to be continually replenished.
Now lets talk about Africa:
The Colonisation in Africa first began in the 7th century with the settlements of Arab merchants on the Swahili coast. This trans Saharan trade allowed a small number of cities in Africa to develop Arab currency. Soon after the Europeans came and started colonising their own territories. Major European powers such as Britain, Portugal and France had already colonised major parts of Africa. New powers such as Italy and Germany had to scramble for whatever lands that were left out.
In Africa, Slavery, too, existed but in the form of domestic labor. When someone had done a bad deed, he/she was sentenced to be a slave for a particular amount of time. That person would still retain his social stature. There were different kinds of slavery that existed such as Domestic Service, where people were to work in houses and do the cooking for the family etc. and military slavery, where people were involved in training for their tribes military services and for hunting.
After the arrival of European colonialists, they entirely changed the meaning of Slavery and traded their resources for slaves as Men, women and children. During that time the Europeans did not consider the lives of African people to be equal to their own. They were treated as objects to be traded in the barter with African tribal chieftains.
These slaves were then sent to European ships and sent to their plantations in America where they were forced to work as lifeless laborers as plantation workers.
This Dark history will forever remain permanent in the book of History. The ideology of slavery still exists in some parts of the world. But that form is become obsolete thanks to today’s power of social media, which has helped, spread awareness throughout the globe.
I personally think that we are still pretty far from absolute abolishment of slavery in every corner of the world, but even a journey of a thousand miles begins with a