Aboard the Slave Ship
>> Tuesday, September 4, 2012
Can you imagine being held captive on A Slave Ship? On a two month journey from Africa to the Americas, separated from family, eating mush, seeing people you've grown close to during your treacherous journey being thrown to the sharks that follow your vessel.
Here are your sleeping accommodations:
Many people do not want to be reminded of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. We're supposed to forget it because it was a long-time ago; however, slavery still exists in the world, and America, in many forms, whether it be human trafficking for sexual exploitation and sweat shop labor, domestic servitude in many societies, or the warehousing of Black Men in the U.S. often called the "Prison Industrial Complex."
Today, my History professor played The O'jays' song, "Ship A'hoy." The song is an appropriate accompaniment for our text, Marcus Rediker's "Slave Ship: A Human History." The book approaches the European-dominated Transatlantic Slave Trade, in which cheap manufactured goods from Europe were shipped to Africa in exchange for labor (human beings) that (who) was (were) shipped to the Americas for raw materials. He approaches the "drama" focusing on the trade as a commercial set of transactions that affected everyone, including not only enslaved Africans, but the crews who worked in the trade, and merchants who sponsored and "invested" in the sale of human beings. Simply: It's a story of human beings and the machines that carried them.
The O'jays also provokes another memory. Besides a profound connection to the plight and suffering of my unnamed ancestors who survived the Maafa, I remember my first experience with Leadership Excellence's workshop, "The Middle Passage." The experiential workshop exposes participants to a sliver of a glimpse of what our ancestors experienced: pre-colonial life, Middle Passage, enslavement, Jim Crow, Civil Rights/Black Power Movement, to our present condition.
So I write this to honor those who came before me. Both those who would rather die than serve White Supremacy and Capitalism, as well as those who endured in order for us to breathe and breed in hopes that one day, we would see a freedom that shines brighter than the gold coin in the sky.
