Congo: A study of African Slavery Y6B by Miss Pasquini

bcbhistory — 2015-05-07 15:50:19 UTC

"When Europeans began imagining Africa beyond the Sahara, the continent they pictured was a dreamscape, a site for fantasies of the fearsome and the supernatural. (…) [A Monk] claimed that Africa contained one-eyes people who used their feet to cover their heads. A geographer announced that the continent help people with one leg, three faces, and the heads of lions. In 1459, an Italian Monk declared Africa the home of the ROC - a bird so large that it could carry an elephant through the air."

Gabriela and Rita: They didn't know what was actually in Africa because they hadn't been there so information was made up and turned into legends.

Maybe people tried to seek for attention by making up these legends.

bcbhistory — 2015-05-07 15:53:44 UTC

"Almost no one in Europe was in a position to know wether Africa contained giant birds, one eyed people, or anything else. "

Marta and Julian: Europeans didn't know a lot about Africans - that's why the legends started.

bcbhistory — 2015-05-07 15:56:29 UTC

"As in much of Africa, the kingdom [of Congo] had slavery. The nature of African slavery varied from one area to another and changed over time, but most slaves were people capture in warfare. Other had been criminals, debtors, or were given away by their families as part of a deal. (…) In other ways, African slavery was more flexible and benign than the system Europeans would soon establish in the New World. [In Africa] over a generation or two, slaves could often earn or be granted their freedom, and free people and slaves sometimes intermarried. "

Alex and Daniel D.:There was slavery in Africa though it was very different to slavery in America. In Africa's system you could more flexibility and more "caring for the other" - even slaves than in the other countries.

The slavery within Africa was part of their culture, but the European system was forced onto them.

bcbhistory — 2015-05-07 16:01:38 UTC

"Nonetheless, the fact that trading in human beings existed in any form, turned out to be catastrophic for Africa, for when Europeans showed up, ready to buy endless shiploads of slaves, they found African chiefs wiling to sell.?

Because the chiefs were used to slavery they weren't against selling people to Europeans

bcbhistory — 2015-05-07 16:07:01 UTC

"The lust for slave profits engulfed even some of the priests, who abandoned their preaching, took black women as concubines, kept slaves themselves, and sold their students and converts into slavery."

Steve and Alejandro: Priests are giving up on their activities to sell slaves because that gives them more money.

Even though it was bad and against the religion they do it anyway because they want money.

Money was above religion

bcbhistory — 2015-05-07 16:11:25 UTC

"One problem [about studying Congo] is that nearly all of this vast river of words [about Congo] is by Europeans or American. There was no written language in the Congo when Europeans first arrived, and this inevitably skewed the way that history was recorded. (…) we do not have a full-length memoir or complete oral history of a single Congolese during the period of the greatest terror. Instead of African voices from this time there is largely silence."

Tomas and WonJun: We don't know what the local people thought about all of these because there is no register. We only know one side of the story. Even if the Congolese tried to leave some record, we believe the European traders would stop them. That was done on purpose so people wouldn't see the Congolese side that could be shocking (Hilde)

bcbhistory — 2015-05-07 16:15:22 UTC

"For Europeans, Africa remained the supplier of valuable raw materials - human bodies and elephant tusks. But otherwise they saw the continent as faceless, blank, empty, a place on the map waiting to be explored, one [continent] that could be described by a phrase that says more about the seer than the seen: The Dark Continent."

Elsa, Lotte, Hilde: They only cared about the money they could make there.They wouldn't think about the people there, just saw the land and the profit. Africans were treated like objects that could be bought and used until they ran out of life (work to death).