Africa’s Great Civilizations: The Atlantic Age

This is Episode 5.

According to Henry Louis Gates, “about 24% of the ancestors of the African-American people” are descended from slaves brought from West Central Africa (Angola and Congo). From Angola, 2.8 million slaves were exported from Luanda and another 800,000 were exported from Benguela. 1/4th of all African slaves exported to the New World originated in Angola. The vast majority of these slaves ended up on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean in Portuguese Brazil.

I thought this episode was great. I really enjoyed the part about the Sokoto Caliphate which was the second largest slave society in the world. In 1900, the Sokoto Caliphate in northern Nigeria still had around 2.5 million slaves. Slavery endured in Africa long after it was abolished in the New World. In fact, it still exists in some countries like Mauritania and Sudan. I know Guinea had slavery well into the French colonial era. It was only abolished by the force of European public opinion.

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41 Comments

  1. There is an ancient step pyramid deep in the jungles of West Africa, but it obviously wasn’t built by the darkies. It was probably constructed by the same unknown people who built the step pyramids in Latin America.

  2. The five millennia of white civilization are brief. A few poems, a few sculptures, some fancy buildings …

    The forcible transfer, on an industrial scale, of Negroes into the white world has at last brought that civilization to an end.

    It’s over, whitey.

      • You mean the ship that brought blacks into England? From Jamaica? Which is—part of Africa?

          • I didn’t say anyone forced anyone onto the Windrush, my British co-commenter. I said the forcible transfer of blacks into the white world—a transfer of which you might have heard, one that was spread across centuries—has at last brought white civilization to an end.

            That the transfer was forcible is hardly of importance in this context. What is important is that whites brought a completely-alien breed to live among them.

          • Well, yes—which the whites made into part of the white world. Why you make non-points rather than try to see the white situation clearly is a mystery to me.

          • The Caribbean was never really suitable for whites until air conditioning. It’s the place where Triangular postage stamps used to come from but now it’s overrun with our dark brethren.

    • No one is dumber or more pathetic than a white anti-White. White self hatred is sick!

      • The collective work of Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht really doomed the white civilization. Human Rights and Genocide being two terms coined by the good Esquires of Lwów.

  3. The slaves that were brought to the Americas were already slaves from birth. Their great grandparents had been enslaved by the powerful West African Kingdoms, which had conquered them. Therefore, they never had any freedom to lose in the first place. The “slave Catcher’s” were Arabs from Zanzibar, who carried out expedions deep into the East African interior. The slaves they took ended up in the eastern Islamic World.

    But, H.L. Gates is telling it like it is. Which is something Yankee/ SJW types don’t want to hear. On another programme, he told Boston area high school students about the tobacco plantations in the Connecticut River Valley, the Boston slave market and that the largest plantation in America was in what is now Manhattan. They were surprised. They said that they were taught that slavery had only existed in the South.

    • It’s funny that most Americans don’t know the full extent of slavery and the slave trade in the U.S., and believe that it was only a southern issue. The South was just more suitable for plantation slavery, but that doesn’t mean that an attempt wasn’t made in the North, or that Northerners didn’t play a large role in the trade or benefit heavily from the trade or plantation system. Many of the planter families in my area were Yankees who bought/started plantations in the South as a business.

      This site has been around for at least ten or more years: http://slavenorth.com

      I’m a Southerner, but I’m not tied to a romantic past of a well-ordered society governed by a noble planter aristocracy. I want an independent South, because I am a Southerner and I want more local control for myself and my people. The Washington, New York, Los Angeles model does nothing for me, and I don’t want to be swallowed up by transplants and immigrants, or have racial agitators create constant instability and violence.

      The funny thing about the official view that slavery benefited only the South, and that Southerners were the only players in the game, is that most Southerners were just small farmers scratching out a living on poor land. Southern planters and Yankee shippers, traders and manufacturers definitely benefited, but the ironic thing is that northern factory workers benefited far more than the southern small farmers who were competing with slavery. Northern and midwestern farmers also benefited from not having to compete directly with slavery.

      Like my ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, I would side with the home team today, and the cause is more clear today than it was 150 years ago, when the mostly not-so-privileged sons of the South were led into battle by the planter elites against the financial and industrial elites of the Northern system, which was largely manned by free farmers and industrial workers who benefited far more from slavery than their Southern foes in the opposite trenches ever did. I think a good case can be made for my point of view.

  4. Very cool series.

    But it is somewhat marred by the little bespectacled man’s constant insistence that the Africans were “geniuses”.

    No, they weren’t.

  5. I spent the better part of a year in Angola. It was a lot like South Dallas only with bigger insects.

  6. Could be fascinating but Dr. Mr. Henry Gates Louis Gates Henry Louis III Jr. will be sticking his face in front of the camera all the time.

    Good producers keep their face behind the lens. Does Ken Burns stick his face all over the camera?

  7. Nice piece, but I am not going to take the time to watch the videos. I wondered if it was a joke when I saw the headline “Africa’s Great Civilizations”! Anyway, glad that PBS is pointing out that Negroes owned other Negroes, including long after White men set them free.
    Hey everyone, check out my brief essay on southern Indiana resistance to the Yankee during the WBTS via the KGC (and my local connection). https://putnamlibertynotes.wordpress.com/2017/03/03/french-lick-indiana-and-the-knights-of-the-golden-circle/

  8. A great revolutionary thought: Muslims can’t enslave muslims. They can only enslave non-muslims. I feel so much better now. Amazing they fought like hell, not to abolish slavery but to obtain the right to trade in slaves.

  9. Gates said 12.5 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic. I believe Pat Buchanan stated only about 600,000 slaves arrived in America. I doubt the remaining 11.9 million ended up in the Caribbean and South America. This guy has the Establishment behind him.

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