I won't refer to north Africa here because both in terms of slaves and in terms of genetics the populations are considerably different from what is commonly referred to as Africa in people's minds....as stated, the north Africans of the time were slave traders of Europeans amongst others.

I'll state....just because you always seem to focus upon Europeans (no surprise there), the Arab slave trade was bigger and existed for much longer than the European one.

Also Africa's own internal slave trade, existed long before, continued on and in some cases still does.

The excuse of de-population of the continent of Africa from slavery to explain their lack of civilisational progress is highly dubious in my view.

I've said this before, but when the Europeans first turned up in Africa, before any slave trade had been set up, they found, to their amazement, that the wheel hadn't been invented. The idea that the difference in developmental progress was their fault beggar's belief. They were still fighting their wars with spears and cloth based shields.

So the evidence of massive civilisational divide was already in Africa before Europeans turned up.....it already discounts your argument straight from the off.

Then you have the numbers involved....and it's fair to say the numbers are hard to estimate and are disputed...however the continent of Africa is huge and from the numbers I've seen on slavery the estimated numbers come to around 11-15 million for the European and 15-20 million from the Arab....that's all spread over centuries. It doesn't hold up as a civilizational block, especially as the elites and intellectual class wouldn't have regularly been amongst the slaves.

Obviously I regard slavery as a human debasement and crime. However, it was commonplace in the world, and it was the British who outlawed it first.

In fact, instead of blaming others it is likely that without the investments from foreign cultures into Africa that the civilisational divide would have continued apace.

The attempts to blame the west for Africa's failures reminds me very much of the 'Life of Brian' clip where they are blaming the Romans for their ills.

[Link]

Edited by Stirlingsays (24 Mar 2022 2.23am)

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)

I see you are back on your Africans are genetically inferior rant

Don’t argue with me argue with The Encyclopaedia Brittanica from where I cut and pasted my quote.

In the mid 16th century our forests and those of Ireland were denuded for ship building.

It was like the reverse of natural selection, we took the biggest, strongest and healthiest

You can easily observe the effects of that still today. Thinner forests, poorer trees and faltering recovery.

Actually most were already cut down 100s of years previously for furnaces in the bronze and iron age. I got fed up with listening to the silly history of Ireland about it. When researched I found the British navy largely used teak from India. I was genuinely surprised. I had believed all the English Oak propaganda too.
Funnily enough, large landed and royal estates preserved the forests we have as us plebs would certainly have preferred to be warm in winter, rather than freeze to death. So we better thank our landlords for their conservation efforts and apologise to India for deforestation.

Red and Blue Army!

Linking the last 2 topics - did you know that although the song "Rule Britannia" is generally held to be about British colonialism and empire building and the British slave, it was in fact a poem set to music, to celebrate the rise and development of the Royal Navy to the level where the Barbary pirates no longer raided either British coastal fishing vessels or the coast to take their slaves.

Hence, the "Britians never, never, never shall be slaves"

A stairway to Heaven and a Highway to Hell give some indication of expected traffic numbers

Gipsy is in the woke lexicon. If it was Diddycoy Hill that would be a different matter.