Abdullah Ibrahim Quotes

The Atlantic Slave Trade was greatest planned accumulation of wealth that the world has ever known.

The Caribbean is such an apocalyptic place, whether it's the decimation of the indigenous populations by the Europeans, whether it's the importation of slaves and their subsequent being worked to death by the millions in many ways, whether it's the immigrant processes which began for many people, new worlds ending their old ones.

There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I've heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery.

The history of slavery and the complication of slavery is that it is an international concept. It is something that affected people who were our people. For example, there were people from the west of Nigeria who were taken by the hundreds of thousands and brought to Louisiana. I'm Igbo; my family is Igbo. So it is a story that I'm connected to.

Decolonization actually boosted slavery. As foreign powers withdrew from the colonies, people were enslaved by their own countrymen. And we see it in Africa, we see it in Asia.

Muslims conducted organized raids into Africa to enslave Negroes. These were then sold in the slave bazaars of Mecca, Baghdad, Tripoli and other places in the Islamic world. This trade was only stopped by the European powers in the nineteenth century.

Brazil imported more enslaved Africans than any other American nation and was the last country in the hemisphere to abolish the institution, in 1888.

I think enslavement has evolved to what may seem appropriate to this day's generation. Modern enslavement is imprisonment.

The first Black Migration to this country was forced migration. It was the Middle Passage.

No one thinks of Mexico and Peru as black. But Mexico and Peru together got 700,000 Africans in the slave trade. The coast of Acapulco was a black city in the 1870s. And the Veracruz Coast on the gulf of Mexico and the Costa Chica, south of Acapulco are traditional black lands.

Some people try to get you out of slavery for you to be their slave.

People … are frequently visited by the Mambari as slave-dealers. This trade causes bloodshed; for when a poor family is selected as the victims, it is necessary to get rid of the older members of it, because they are supposed to be able to give annoyance to the chief afterward by means of enchantments

Africans became enslaved mainly through four ways: first, criminals sold by the chiefs as punishment; secondly, free Africans obtained from raids by African and a few European gangs, thirdly, domestic slaves resold, and fourthly, prisoners of war …. additional points to be addressed are the Arab slave trade in Afrika, occurring almost 1,000 years prior to the European slave trade, and continues even today…

In the early 1800s, both Spain and Portugal disseminated the smallpox vaccine throughout the Americas via the 'arm to arm of the blacks,' that is, enslaved Africans and African-Americans, often children, who were being moved along slave routes as cargo from one city to another to be sold.

The invention of the African American, or the Haitian or Jamaican, is a consequence of the transatlantic slave trade.

The slave trade was globalism. Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know.

The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.

These poor wretches were stolen from their homes, carried to a strange country, and sold to servitude, from which they sought to escape on the first occasion which offered.

Slavery, properly so called, is the establishment of a right which gives to one man such a power over another as renders him absolute master of his life and fortune.

Slavery takes hold of few, but many take hold of slavery.

People can be slave-ships in shoes.

People-trafficking is modern day slavery. There are more slaves today than there were at the height of the slave trade.

Abolitionists believe that, as all men are born free, so all who are now held as slaves in this country were born free, and that they are slaves now is the sin, not of those who introduced the race into this country, but of those, and those alone, who now hold them and have held them in slavery from their birth.

Slavery in West Africa, and in Rome and in the Mediterranean, was something different than slavery in America.

Slavery was not a bad day on the job. It was not your boss yelling at you. It was not hard work for little pay. This was a full system of human subjugation.