markellion's video: Reminder of the epicenes of the African slave trade

Perry Noble http://books.google.com/books?id=vdxBAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA181 =onepage&q=&f=false Seventy years later (1884=85) anxiety to promote the welfare of the Negro was announced as one of the motives for the Berlin conference. Europe and America undertook to employ every means to end the inland slave= trade. Muhammadan states for the first time in history participated with Christian powers in an enterprise of philanthropy. Their presence recalls the homely rhyme that "when the devil was sick, the devil a monk would be", for the sincere endeavors of Egyptian and Zanzibari rulers of Islamry were inspired by European influences. Though Christendom succeeded between 1817 and 1877 in ending the export of slaves to America and in hampering that to the orient, the inland traffic grew worse. From 1875 to 1890 Africa lost sometimes five hundred thousand, sometimes one million inhabitants annually. In 1890 America, Europe, Persia and Zanzibar "in the name of God" confessed that the European powers were morally accountable for the devastation, and resolved at Brussels to secure peace for Africa, to complete such slight results as they had already obtained since 1885 and to guarantee the extermination of the traffic. Belgium has since accomplished something, Britain a little, the others less toward the redemption of their pledges for their respective realms. Bottom of page 427 The Wesleyan-Methodist magazine http://books.google.com/books?id=7w4EAAAAQAAJ&pg=RA4-PA427&dq= =onepage&q=&f=false What country in the world," exclaims Captain Sullivan, "could stand such a constant drain on its population?" The evil of thus rendering that great continent agriculturally barren, checking all trade and produce, cannot but be felt throughout the world, perhaps for centuries to come. William Pitt, The Younger. 1759-1806. 352. From His Speech On The Abolition Of The Slave-trade . April 2, 1792. http://books.google.com/books?id=_SoQAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PA451&dq= =onepage&q=&f=false Yes, we give them enough of our intercourse to convey to them the means, and to initiate them in the study, of mutual destruction. We give them just enough of the forms of justice to enable them to add the pretext of legal trials to their other modes of perpetrating the most atrocious iniquity. We give them just enough of European improvements to enable them the more effectually to turn Africa into a ravaged wilderness. http://books.google.com/books?id=_SoQAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PA452&dq= =onepage&q=&f=false "Do you think nothing of the ruin and the miseries in which so many other individuals, still remaining in Africa, are involved, in consequence of carrying off so many myriads of people? Do you think nothing of their families which are left behind of the connections which are broken? of the friendships, attachments, and relationships that are burst asunder! Do you think nothing of the miseries in consequence, that are felt from generation to generation? of the privation of that happiness which might be communicated to them by the introduction of civilization, and of mental and moral improvement? A happiness which you withhold them so long as you permit the slave-trade to continue. What do you know of the internal state of Africa? You have carried on a trade to that quarter of the globe from this civilized and enlightened country. but such a trade, that, instead of diffusing either knowledge or wealth, it has been the check to every laudable pursuit. Instead of any fair interchange of commodities; instead of conveying to them, from this highly favored land, any means of improvement; you carry with you that noxious plant by which everything is withered and blasted; under whose shade nothing that is useful or profitable to Africa will ever flourish or take root. Long as that continent has been known to navigators, the extreme line and boundaries of its coasts is all with which Europe is yet become acquainted; while other countries in the same parallel of latitude, through a happier system of intercourse, have reaped the blessings of a mutually beneficial commerce. But as to the whole interior of that continent you are, by your own principles of commerce, as yet entirely shut out: Africa is known to you only in its skirts. Yet here you are able to infuse a poison that spreads its contagious effects from one end of it to the other, which penetrates to its very center, corrupting every part to which it reaches. You there subvert the whole order of nature; you aggravate every natural barbarity, and furnish to every man living on that continent motives for committing, under the name and pretext of commerce, acts of perpetual violence and perfidy"