Comment: "The Transatlantic Slave Trade"
The Documentary of Trotamundos, "The Tranatlantic Commerce of Slaveof Africans were taken to the New World and sold as slaves.
Context
The engine of the conquest of the American continent, first by the Hispanic monarchy and subsequently by other powers, was the conquest of the natural resources and miners of its own mainly of the southern continent. Where the settlers found fertile land and silver and gold mines.
The desire for cotton, cocoa, tobacco and sugar resulted in the transformation of cultivation lands into large land estates that gave rise to the plantation system that still survives today. That eagerness to gain land and cultivate highly demanded products in Europe was a product of the desire for benefits that was accompanied by the need for cheap and productive workforce. This led to the slave trade that lasted almost three hundred years and from which some powers such as Great Britain and Portugal showed especially.
The African population was arrested in its own continent and taken to ports of the African western coast where they were taken to America and there auctioned to the great landowners with thirst for gold;which managed with the sale of American products to the European market.
All this translated into an imbalance/socioeconomic inequality in which the rich became richer, the poorest and slaves were brutally mistreated and literally forced to work until death, as we will see in the documentary of globetrotters.
Summary of the documentary
It is estimated that between fifteen and twenty million slaves were taken from Africa, of which only one third survived, since the beginning of the slave trade in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Among the slave ports were: New Orleans, Jamaica, Salvador and Santa Lucía. And among the European cities that became rich thanks to this human trade we find: Liverpool, London and Lisbon.
The African continent was a mine of cultures and raw materials such as gold and spices that attracted Europeans. However, with the discovery of the American continent, what begins to covet is African slave labor. Dozens of fortified to arrest the captured Africans, the main exit ports were Cabo Verde, Isla de Gorea, Elmina and Ouidah. Women could pass in the dungeons could pass up to three or four months before being transferred. The dungeons of men were still worse than that of women, where millions of people were captured until the abolition of slavery.
The testimonies of the visitors of these islands and slave houses show the impression that it produces to walk through those corridors and cross the doors through which millions of people say goodbye to Africa to embark towards a destination controlled by those who bought them.
It was not only the Europeans who were linked in the slave trade, some African leaders were participants in practice. Many of these slaves were forced to walk from inside the continent to the port areas where they were waiting to be embarked. One of the most closely linked families was that of Francisco de Souza, transferred from Brazil to control slave trade in Ouidah;whom Virrey was appointed. At present, the documentary mentions that his descendants are proud of his ancestor who does not want to blame and is still a respected family in Ouidah.
On the first trip to America, with an approximate duration of eight weeks, a first stop was made in Ribeira Grande (Cabo Verde) to stock up on food and even more slaves. For merchants, the purchase of slaves in Cabo Verde was tempting because, away from the continent, the strongest survived, who, in addition, to increase their value were baptized. Up to thirty ships could anchor in those waters in the seventeenth century, contributing to the rise of slave trade.
For survivors, explains the documentary, life in the New World, was not better. In Brazil more slaves landed than in any other country. Upon arrival to the continent, slaves were held until they were auctioned to settlers to work on plantations or mines. In 1888 slavery was abolished in Brazil, eighty years after Great Britain and twenty -five after the United States.
The life expectancy of slaves in the plantations was seven years. Slave buyers were cheaper to put them to work until they die and then buy more slaves than to take care of them. The United States and cities such as London, Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid and Lisbon profited from slave labor. As an example, the documentary moves us to London, where they explain that banks financed and benefited from slave trade, a great investment in the time. Link that extended to politics (older mayors, governors, etc.).
The European population that had no link with practice rarely knew the brutality to which the enslaved African population underwent;But some cases that came to trial and the work of characters like Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797), a slave released. People were able to read from their hand, for the first time, authentic testimonies of life to which they were subjected: crowded ships of people, people dying on board and descriptions of what awaited him at the arrival of America. Although he won the moral battle of slavery, he was not a man with a sufficiently large weight to change things, but William Wilberforce if it was and proposed a bill to eliminate slavery in 1791. They needed twenty years to get it and twelve bills.
Although in 1807 slavery was finally abolished in Great Britain and many European countries followed their steps, in the United States the country was divided into two (north -unionists or abolitionist federalists -and southerFor slavery and the meaning of freedom in America. The war lasted 4 years and ended with the victory of Abraham Lincoln and the northern unionists.
The displacement of millions of Africans gave rise to the birth of powerful African-American and Afro-Caribbean cultures that have survived the abolition of slavery, finding demonstrations in martial dance-arts (Capoeira in Brazil), the music resulting from the clash of two cultures (Jazz in New Orleans) or Carnival (in cities linked to transatlantic slaves).
Report on "Fortification of the island Gorge"
For this part of the work I have chosen the island Gorea;Which, declared a World Heritage by UNESCO, was for more than three century an important port of African slave exit to the American continent. Invaded by Portuguese in the fifteenth century, his first house of slaves was built a century later and remained active until 1848, when France abolished slavery. The current museum belonged to a Dutchman who ordered the house of slaves to be built at the end of the 18th century.
As mentioned in the documentary, it is estimated that between fifteen and twenty million African slaves were sold in the American continent. Gorea, in this context, was a very important enclave in the exchange of slave labor. People were transferred even from inside the continent and arrested in the slave house, a kind of prison separated by sex, age and constitution in which many would die before embarking.
The current slave house in a museum that retains the room where men, women, children and fattening room were held. The space where men were piled up is, if possible, more grim than that of women, who in the slave market, had a value for a general rule. Slaves were valued according to the state of health, bust and teeth. Then they were exposed outside the building so that merchants could discuss their price.
The house had the function of intermediary between America and Africa, after being evaluated, they were embarked by a corridor that led to the sea in which they said goodbye to their native continent. Sometimes, the last place where families could be seen;although in the documentary it is mentioned that sometimes families could end up in the same place. In vessels, crowded with each other, they got rid of the sick or considered unable to and many others died in the hard journey to where they were coming. It is estimated that about two million African slaves died on the eight -week trip that separated the two great continents.
On the island of Gorea you can visit the Maison des slaves since the sixties of the last century as a place that remembers the human cost of African slavery;Although not all historians argue that African slaves really went through the still building.
Conclusions
The thirst for gold and land by the great European and subsequent powers United States condemned slavery to millions of people in disastrous conditions of which, at that time, the European population was not completely aware. At present, slavery remains a delicate topic to deal with and on which we cannot get a true idea of human cost, beyond figures and money, which supposed.
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