Passage To Africa Quotes

We have inherited a fear of memories of slavery. It is as if to remember and acknowledge slavery would amount to our being consumed by it. As a matter of fact, in the popular black imagination, it is easier for us to construct ourselves as children of Africa, as the sons and daughters of kings and queens, and thereby ignore the Middle Passage and centuries of enforced servitude in the Americas. Although some of us might indeed be the descendants of African royalty, most of us are probably descendants of their subjects, the daughters and sons of African peasants or workers.

Circumstances can have a motive force by which they bring about events without aid of human imagination or apprehension. On such occasions you yourself keep in touch with what is going on by attentively following it from moment to moment, like a blind person who is being led, and who places one foot in front of the other cautiously but unwittingly. Things are happening to you, and you feel them happening, but except for this one fact, you have no connection with them, and no key to the cause or meaning of them. [...] - a passage outside the range of imagination, but within the range of experience.

This was all strictly run-of-the-mill Victorian patter, striking only for the fact that a man who had so exerted himself to see the world afresh had returned with such stock observations. (And, really, very little has changed; one need only lightly edit the foregoing passages - the crude caricatures, the question of human inferiority, and the bit about the baboon - to produce the sort of profile of misbegotten Africa that remains standard to this day in the American and European press, and in the appeals for charity donations put out by humanitarian aid organizations.)

You know the Romans were fond of bloodshed. North Africa was one of many places where the Roman Empire had its arenas. It was their amphitheatre which, with the passage of time, had enlarged with the vanishing of many rocks. But, thank God, man has changed and, after six hundred years, that bloody sport has ended.

At every point along the passage from African to New World markets, we find a stark contest between slave traders and slaves, between the traders’ will to commodify people and the captives’ will to remain fully recognizable as human subjects.

What does Africa — what does the West stand for? Is not our own interior white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the coast, when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or the Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage around this continent, that we would find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the Mungo Park,the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher,of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes — with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition,with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.

As Sylviane Diouf points out, “Of the dozen deported Africans who left testimonies of their lives, only [Olaudah] Equiano, [Mahommah Gardo] Baquaqua, and [Ottobah] Cugoano referred to the Middle Passage.”36 Eight of the ten narratives collected in Philip Curtin’s Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans From the Era of the Slave Trade (1967) recount experiences of the Middle Passage. “They give us some notion of the feelings and attitudes of many millions whose feelings and attitudes are unrecorded,” writes Curtin. “Imperfect as the sample may be, it is the only view we can recover of the slave trade as seen by the slaves themselves.”37 Ten years after Curtin’s work, the scholar Terry Alford would exhume from the bowels of oblivion the events of the life of Abd al-Rahman Ibrahima, published as Prince among Slaves: The True Story of an African Prince Sold into Slavery in the American South.

The slave ship at sea reduced African captives to an existence so physically atomized as to silence all but the most elemental bodily articulation, so socially impoverished as to threaten annihilation of the self, the complete disintegration of personhood. Here their commodification built toward a crescendo that threatened never to arrive, but to leave the African captives suspended in an agony whose language no one knew.

Turning captives into commodities was a thoroughly scientific enterprise. It turned on perfecting the practices required to commodify people and determining where those practices reached their outer limits (that is, the point at which they extinguished the lives they were meant to sustain in commodified form). Traders reduced people to the sum of their biological parts, thereby scaling life down to an arithmetical equation and finding the lowest common denominator.

On any basic figure of the Africans landed alive in the Americas, one would have to make several extensions- starting with a calculation to cover mortality in transshipment. The Atlantic crossing, or “Middle Passage,” as it was called by European slavers, was notorious for the number of deaths incurred, averaging in the vicinity of 15-20 per cent. There were also numerous deaths in Africa between time of capture and time of embarkation, especially in cases where captives had to travel hundreds of miles to the coast. Most important of all (given that warfare was the principal means of obtaining captives) it is necessary to make some estimate of the number of people killed and injured so as to extract the millions who were taken alive and sound. The resultant figure would be many times the millions landed alive outside of Africa, and it is that figure which represents the number of Africans directly removed from the population and labor force of Africa because of the establishment of slave production by Europeans.

Delay The warmth Of the smooth rocks In the sun Ripples On the surface Of pools in the surf And on the beach The rush Of colour In every destination The uninterrupted flight plan Vanishing acts Flashbacks and passages Rare appearances of family The timeless dance The swift motion Of the perfect match Of leaves against grass Chameleon-like and provocative This season is festive Uncomplicated Filled with high hopes A portrait of a family My demands are small Summer is when you'll be home From school More grown up than before.

Mom, what about the story you were going to tell Katie?” “Oh, yes. Queen Elizabeth. When she came to Kenya for a visit in 1952, she and Prince Philip stayed at Treetops. It’s a hotel not far from here. The rooms are at treetop height. She sipped tea on the open veranda while the elephants and other wild animals came to the watering hole below. Her father, King George IV, had been ill but seemed to have recovered, so the trip to Africa didn’t pose a conflict.” “Was he the one who stuttered? I remember seeing a movie about him,” Katie said. “Yes, that was the same king,” Eli answered for his mom. “What happened is that he took a turn for the worse and passed away while Princess Elizabeth was at Treetops. Since communication between England and Africa was so slow, she didn’t know her father had died until after they had left Treetops, and they stopped for lunch at the Aberdare Country Club, where we just ate.” “Really? The queen of England ate at that same restaurant?” “Yes. Only she didn’t yet know she was the queen of England. Word hadn’t reached her. The great statement about Treetops is that Elizabeth went up the stairs to her room that night as a princess, and when she descended those same stairs the next morning, she was the queen of England.” “I love stories like that,” Katie said. “I mean, it’s sad that her father died while she was in Africa, but what a rite of passage that moment was. She was doing what was on the schedule for that day, and by the time she put her head on her pillow that night, everything had changed.” As

The violence exercised in the service of human commodification relied on a scientific empiricism always seeking to find the limits of human capacity for suffering, that point where material and social poverty threatened to consume entirely the lives it was meant to garner for sale in the Americas. In this regard, the economic enterprise of human trafficking marked a watershed in what would become an enduring project in the modern Western world: probing the limits up to which it is possible to discipline the body without extinguishing the life within. The aim in the case being economic efficiency rather than punishment, this was a regime whose intent was not to torture but rather to manage the depletion of life that resulted from the conditions of saltwater slavery. But for the Africans who were starved, sorted, and warped to make them into saltwater slaves, torture was the result. It takes no great insight to point to the role of violence in the Atlantic slave trade. But to understand what happened to Africans in this system of human trafficking requires us to ask precisely what kind of violence it requires to achieve its end, the transformation of African captives into Atlantic commodities.

Whereas the slave cargoes gathered on the African coast reconfigured the normative boundaries of social life, the slave communities in the Americas exploded those boundaries beyond recognition. If an Akan-speaking migrant lived to complete a year on a west Indian sugar estate, he or she was likely by the end of that time to have come into close contact with unrelated Akan strangers as well as with Ga, Guan, or Adangbe speakers in the holding station on the African littoral, with Ewe speakers on the slave ship, and with Angolans, Biafrans, and Senegambians on the plantation. This was the composite we call diasporic Africa—an Africa that constituted not the continent on European maps, but rather the plurality of remembered places immigrant slaves carried with them. Like any geographic entity, diasporic Africa varies according to the perspective from which it is surveyed. Viewed from a cartographic standpoint (in essence, the view of early modern Europeans), diasporic Africa is a constellation of discrete ethnic and language groups; if one adopts this perspective, the defining question becomes whether or not the various constituent groups in the slave community shared a culture. Only by approaching these questions from the vantage point of Africans as migrants, however, can we hope to understand how Africans themselves experienced and negotiated their American worlds. If in the regime of the market Africans’ most socially relevant feature was their exchangeability, for Africans as immigrants the most socially relevant feature was their isolation, their desperate need to restore some measure of social life to counterbalance the alienation engendered by their social death. Without some means of achieving that vital equilibrium thanks to which even the socially dead could expect to occupy a viable place in society, slaves could foresee only further descent into an endless purgatory.

And one of the things that has most obstructed the path of discipleship in our Christian culture today is this idea that it will be a terribly difficult thing that will certainly ruin your life. A typical and often-told story in Christian circles is of those who have refused to surrender their lives to God for fear he would “send them to Africa as missionaries.” And here is the whole point of the much misunderstood teachings of Luke 14. There Jesus famously says one must “hate” all their family members and their own life also, must take their cross, and must forsake all they own, or they “cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26–27, 33). The entire point of this passage is that as long as one thinks anything may really be more valuable than fellowship with Jesus in his kingdom, one cannot learn from him. People who have not gotten the basic facts about their life straight will therefore not do the things that make learning from Jesus possible and will never be able to understand the basic points in the lessons to be learned. It is like a mathematics teacher in high school who might say to a student, “Verily, verily I say unto thee, except thou canst do decimals and fractions, thou canst in no wise do algebra.” It is not that the teacher will not allow you to do algebra because you are a bad person; you just won’t be able to do basic algebra if you are not in command of decimals and fractions. So this counting of the cost is not a moaning and groaning session. “Oh how terrible it is that I have to value all of my ‘wonderful’ things (which are probably making life miserable and hopeless anyway) less than I do living in the kingdom! How terrible that I must be prepared to actually surrender them should that be called for!” The counting of the cost is to bring us to the point of clarity and decisiveness. It is to help us to see. Counting the cost is precisely what the man with the pearl and the hidden treasure did. Out of it came their decisiveness and joy. It is decisiveness and joy that are the outcomes of the counting.

By pointing to the captain’s foolhardy departure from standard procedure, the officials shielded themselves from the disturbing image of slaves overpowering their captors and relieved themselves of the uncomfortable obligation to explain how and why the events had deviated from the prescribed pattern. But assigning blame to the captain for his carelessness afforded only partial comfort, for by seizing their opportunity, the Africans aboard the Cape Coast had done more than liberate themselves (temporarily at least) from the slave ship. Their action reminded any European who heard news of the event of what all preferred not to contemplate too closely; that their ‘accountable’ history was only as real as the violence and racial fiction at its foundation. Only by ceaseless replication of the system’s violence did African sellers and European buyers render captives in the distorted guise of human commodities to market. Only by imagining that whiteness could render seven men more powerful than a group of twice their number did European investors produce an account naturalizing social relations that had as their starting point an act of violence. Successful African uprisings against European captors were of course moments at which the undeniable free agency of the captives most disturbed Europeans—for it was in these moments that African captives invalidated the vision of the history being written in this corner of the Atlantic world and articulated their own version of a history that was ‘accountable.’ Other moments in which the agency and irrepressible humanity of the captives manifested themselves were more tragic than heroic: instances of illness and death, thwarted efforts to escape from the various settings of saltwater slavery, removal of slaves from the market by reason of ‘madness.’ In negotiating the narrow isthmus between illness and recovery, death and survival, mental coherence and insanity, captives provided the answers the slave traders needed: the Africans revealed the boundaries of the middle ground between life and death where human commodification was possible. Turning people into slaves entailed more than the completion of a market transaction. In addition, the economic exchange had to transform independent beings into human commodities whose most ‘socially relevant feature’ was their ‘exchangeability’ . . . The shore was the stage for a range of activities and practices designed to promote the pretense that human beings could convincingly play the part of their antithesis—bodies animated only by others’ calculated investment in their physical capacities.

As the years go by and I grow older, I feel compelled to record my experiences in wartime Germany. It is important that my children, grandchildren and future generations know about the difficult times we all endured and of the horrors that existed in Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Due to my advanced age and present condition, I am aware of the urgency to document my memories. If I fail in this, I will fail those who follow me, for they will never know!” Adeline Perry This book had its origin many years ago when Adeline Perry tried to recount her experiences and found that she would become overcome by her emotions every time she tried. The horrors and trials that she had experienced, plus the responsibility of raising her two daughters proved to be overwhelming. It was not until the twilight of her life when her daughters gently persuaded her to try again so that future generations might hear and perhaps learn from her experiences. In fact a good portion of these manuscripts were written while she was in the care of Hospice and only now survive because of immense personal strength and devotion to her family and the desire that what had happened to her would never happen again. Her daughter, and my wife, Ursula can take a great deal of pride in the effort it took to make these manuscripts a reality. After Adeline’s passing I had the privilege to develop the book Suppressed I Rise. Staying true to her story I gave her the authorship of the first edition of this book, which adhered to, and did not exceed what she had left in her original manuscripts. This book which was printed in limited numbers became an instant success and deserved more exposure. Readers also felt that there were questions that went unanswered requiring a follow-up. How did Adeline justify going to Germany prior to World War II? What happened to her marriage to Richard and how did she resume her own life, as a single mother, when she returned to South Africa! With additional reflections by her daughters Brigitte Grigsby and Ursula Bracker, and travel to the areas discussed in Suppressed I Rise, I expanded the book to include the prewar years. I also corrected minor contradictions and factual discrepancies that were inadvertently caused by the passage of time. Talking to people in Germany I confirmed some of what had happened including the hanging of the Russian prisoner of war. The book has now become a powerful example of not only personal courage but also of human tragedy. It is a book that I am proud to have written and share in the concept that it was a story that had to be told.

The third prong of this same project was immigration restriction. Progressives understood that if you kept these supposedly degraded people out in the first place, it would not be necessary to segregate them, sterilize them or restrict their marriage prospects. In 1924, progressives won a huge victory with the passage of the Immigration Act that sharply curtailed immigration by preferring northern Europeans or “Nordics” and discriminating against immigrants from Asia, Africa, South America, and even southern and central Europe.

PROGENY OF THE MIDDLE PASSAGE The leaky little tubs which the sea devours are the granddaughters of those slave ships. Today’s slaves, though no longer called by that name, enjoy the same freedoms as their grandparents who were driven by the lash to the plantations of America. They do not simply depart: they are pushed. No one emigrates by choice. From Africa and from many other places, the desperate flee wars and droughts and exhausted lands and poisoned rivers and empty bellies. Shipments of human flesh are nowadays the most successful export from the south of the world.

As the riches from the slave trade from Africa to the New World poured forth to the Spaniards, to the Portuguese, to the Dutch, and lastly to the English, the biblical passage would be summoned to condemn the children of Ham and to justify the kidnap and enslavement of millions of human beings, and the violence against them. From the time of the Middle Ages, some interpreters of the Old Testament described Ham as bearing black skin and translated Noah’s curse against him as a curse against the descendants of Ham, against all humans with dark skin, the people who the Europeans told themselves had been condemned to enslavement by God’s emissary, Noah himself.

I learned from half-heard conversations between my parents that Ceylon was not somewhere that we Tamils would prosper. So Ceylon was bad; Africa was good.

Extended kinship groups - sometimes located on one plantation, more commonly extended over several - became the central units of slave life, ordering society, articulating values, and delineating identity by defining the boundaries of trust. They also became the nexus for incorporating the never-ending stream of arrivals from the seaboard states into the new society, cushioning the horror of the Second Middle Passage, and socializing the deportees to the realities of life on the plantation frontier. Playing the role of midwives, the earlier arrivals transformed strangers into brothers and sisters, melding the polyglot immigrants into one. In defining obligations and responsibilities, the family became the centerpole of slave life. The arrival of the first child provided transplanted slaves with the opportunity to link the world they had lost to the world that had been forced upon them. In naming their children for some loved one left behind, pioneer slaves restored the generational linkages for themselves and connected their children with grandparents they would never know. Some pioneer slaves reached back beyond their parents' generation, suggesting how slavery's long history on mainland North America could be collapsed by a single act. Along the same mental pathways that joined the charter and migration generations flowed other knowledge. Rituals carried from Africa might be as simple as the way a mother held a child to her breast or as complex as a cure for warts. Songs for celebrating marriage, ceremonies for breaking bread, and last rites for an honored elder survived in the minds of those forced from their seaboard homes, along with the unfulfilled promise of the Age of Revolution and evangelical awakenings. Still, the new order never quite duplicated the old. Even as transplanted slaves strained their memories to reconstruct what they had once known, slavery itself was being recast. The lush thicket of kin that deportees like Hawkins Wilson remembered had been obliterated by the Second Middle Passage. Although pioneer slaves worked assiduously to knit together a new family fabric, elevating elderly slaves into parents and deputizing friends as kin, of necessity they had to look beyond blood and marriage. Kin emerged as well from a new religious sensibility, as young men and women whose families had been ravaged by the Second Middle Passage embraced one another as brothers and sisters in Christ. A cadre of black evangelicals, many of who had been converted in the revivals of the late eighteenth century, became chief agents of the expansion of African-American Christianity. James Williams, a black driver who had been transferred from Virginia to the Alabama blackbelt, was just one of many believers who was 'torn away from the care and discipline of their respective churches.' Swept westward by the tide of the domestic slave trade, they 'retained their love for the exercises of religion.

In Zimbabwe, what it meant was that you spent your money as soon as you got it - delay and prices would have gone up. London’s Guardian newspaper reported that pension funds were not sending some clients statements because their savings were worth less than the price of a stamp.

That Nohle consented to appear before the commission at all was a testament to the willingness of thousands of black South Africans to set aside their deep yearning to see their abusers put behind bars. I remember standing with her in one of the cells where Biko had lain damaged and inert. I asked her then, a year and a half before the commission set to work, whether she could ever be reconciled with the people who had so mutilated her life. She turned on me, her eyes cold and piercing, her body taut with controlled anger, and said: ‘There is hatred in me, and it is for them to try to rub out that hatred. You must have the truth first and then you can think about reconciliation. I don’t agree when they say, “Let bygones be bygones, let’s try to forget about the past and try to reconcile.” Reconcile what?

The earliest blacks to arrive in North America were not the shackled Africans who were forced to migrate from Africa to the New World during the journey called the Middle Passage in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some of the first Africans or people of African descent to step foot on the American continent were navigators, translators, and other seamen who worked aboard European ships during the Age of Exploration in the fifteenth century. Some who sailed were free, while other were enslaved.

The Seaflower was one of several New England vessels bound for the West Indies with Native slaves. But by 1676, plantation owners in Barbados and Jamaica had little interest in slaves who had already shown a willingness to revolt. No evidence exists as to what happened to the Indians aboard the Seaflower, but we do know that the captain of one American slave ship was forced to venture all the way to Africa before he finally disposed of his cargo. And so, over a half century after the sailing of the Mayflower, a vessel from New England completed a transatlantic passage of a different sort.

In the narrative of the left, Australia was a boring outpost of the British Empire until Gough Whitlam became prime minister, formally ended the White Australia policy, instituted multiculturalism and gave Aborigines land rights. Whitlam’s brief government was certainly a cultural watershed, but not everything that happened before 1972 is irrelevant and not all that happened afterwards is admirable. Australia was never quite the antipodean England of left-wing mythology. People from Africa, Asia and many of the countries of Europe were aboard the early convict fleets, as would be expected in a representative sample of London’s jails. In the 1830s, after the Myall Creek massacre, white men were hanged for the murder of Aborigines. Among the Gold Rush influx were thousands of Chinese, quite a few of whom stayed after the gold they’d chased ran out. The first decade of Australia’s national existence, which brought the passage of the ‘White Australia’ legislation, also saw our first Chinese-speaking MP, Senator Thomas Bakhap.

Mobile's AfricaTown: Published timelines of African-American history invariably mention that the last slave ship to bring Africans to North America was the *Clotilde* … what they never explain is how this happened 50 years after the United States banned the importation of slaves. The explanation is both trivial and tragic. Timothy Meaher, a wealthy Mobile shipbuilder, made a wager over a few whiskies that he could elude federal agents… …While descendents of the Clotilde captives still hold reunions in the area, there is little physical evidence of this community’s origins, except for the bust of Cudjoe Lewis… …Lewis (who was originally called ‘Kazoola’) died in 1945, possibly the last surviving slave-ship captive in America.

The Warburg family is the most important ally of the Rothschilds, and the history of this family is at least equally interesting. The book The Warburgs shows that the bloodline of this family dates back to the year 1001.[28] Whilst fleeing from the Muslims, they established themselves in Spain. There they were pursued by Fernando of Aragon and Isabella of Castile and moved to Lombardy. According to the annals of the city of Warburg, in 1559, Simon von Cassel was entitled to establish himself in this city in Westphalia, and he changed his surname to Warburg. The city register proves that he was a banker and a trader. The real banking tradition was beginning to take shape when three generations later Jacob Samuel Warburg immigrated to Altona in 1668. His grandson Markus Gumprich Warburg moved to Hamburg in 1774, where his two sons founded the well-known bank Warburg & Co. in 1798. With the passage of time, this bank did business throughout the entire world. By 1814, Warburg & Co had business relations with the Rothschilds in London. According to Joseph Wechsberg in his book The Merchant Bankers, the Warburgs regarded themselves equal to the Rothschild, Oppenheimer and Mendelsohn families.[29] These families regularly met in Paris, London and Berlin. It was an unwritten rule that these families let their descendants marry amongst themselves. The Warburgs married, just like the Rothschilds, within houses (bloodlines). That’s how this family got themselves involved with the prosperous banking family Gunzberg from St. Petersburg, with the Rosenbergs from Kiev, with the Oppenheims and Goldschmidts from Germany, with the Oppenheimers from South Africa and with the Schiffs from the United States.[30] The best-known Warburgs were Max Warburg (1867-1946), Paul Warburg (1868-1932) and Felix Warburg (1871-1937). Max Warburg served his apprenticeship with the Rothschilds in London, where he asserted himself as an expert in the field of international finances. Furthermore, he occupied himself intensively with politics and, since 1903, regularly met with the German minister of finance. Max Warburg advised, at the request of monarch Bernhard von Bülow, the German emperor on financial affairs. Additionally, he was head of the secret service. Five days after the armistice of November 11, 1918 he was delegated by the German government as a peace negotiator at a peace committee in Versailles. Max Warburg was also one of the directors of the Deutsche Reichsbank and had financial importances in the war between Japan and Russia and in the Moroccan crisis of 1911. Felix Warburg was familiarized with the diamond trade by his uncle, the well-known banker Oppenheim. He married Frieda Schiff and settled in New York. By marrying Schiff’s daughter he became partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Paul Warburg became acquainted with the youngest daughter of banker Salomon Loeb, Nina. It didn’t take long before they married. Paul Warburg left Germany and also became a partner with Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in New York. During the First World War he was a member of the Federal Reserve Board, and in that position he had a controlling influence on the development of American financial policies. As a financial expert, he was often consulted by the government. The Warburgs invested millions of dollars in various projects which all served one purpose: one absolute world government. That’s how the war of Japan against Russia (1904-1905) was financed by the Warburgs bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co.[31] The purpose of this war was destroying the csardom. As said before, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, James P. Warburg said: “We shall have a world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government

Susi, to whom this snake is known in the Shupanga tongue as "Bubu," describes it as about twelve feet long, dark in colour, of a dirty blue under the belly, with red markings like the wattles of a cock on the head. The Arabs go so far as to say that it is known to oppose the passage of a caravan at times. Twisting its tail round a branch, it will strike one man after another in the head with fatal certainty. Their remedy is to fill a pot with boiling water, which is put on the head and carried under the tree! The snake dashes his head into this and is killed—the story is given for what it is worth.

one of the duties of the U.S. Navy, going all the way back to the early 1800s, the days of the Barbary pirates of North Africa, involves showing the flag. Safe passage of Navy ships ensures unmolested transit of merchant shipping, always the main conduit of all overseas trade whether in 1800 or 2000. Port calls projected U.S. influence ashore and kept markets open. Freedom of the seas, like all freedoms, must be exercised or it will atrophy.

Most Saturdays, as my own middle passage approached, I accompanied my mother to a protest march of one kind or another, against South Africa, against the government, against nuclear bombs, against racism, against cuts, against the deregulation of the banks or in support of the teachers’ union, the GLC or the IRA. The purpose of all this was hard for me to grasp, given the nature of our enemy. I saw her on television most days—rigid handbag, rigid hair, unturned, unturnable—and always unmoved by however many people my mother and her cronies had managed to gather to march, the previous Saturday morning, through Trafalgar Square and right up to her shiny black front door. I remember marching for the preservation of the Greater London Council, a year earlier, walking for what felt like days—half a mile behind my mother, who was up at the front, deep in conversation with Red Ken—carrying a placard above my head, and then, after that got too heavy, carrying it over my shoulder, like Jesus at the Crucifixion, lugging it down Whitehall, until finally, we got the bus home, collapsed in the lounge, switched on the TV and learned that the GLC had been abolished earlier that same day. Still I was told there was “no time for dancing” or, in a variation, that “this was not the time for dancing,” as if the historical moment itself forbade it. I had “responsibilities,” they were tied to my “intelligence,” which had been recently confirmed by a young supply teacher up at the school who had thought to ask our class to bring in “whatever we were reading at home.” It

Opening European Trade with Asia Marco Polo was an Italian merchant whose travels introduced Europeans to Central Asia and China. In the 13th century the traditional trade route leading to China was overland, traveling through the Middle East from the countries of Europe. Marco Polo established this trade route but it required ships to carry the heavy loads of silks and spices. Returning to Italy after 24 he found Venice at war with Genoa. In 1299, after having been imprisoned, his cell-mate recorded his experiences in the book “The Travels of Marco Polo.” Upon his release he became a wealthy merchant, married, and had three children. He died in 1324 and was buried in the church of San Lorenzo in Venice. Henry the Navigator charted the course from Portugal to the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa and is given credit for having started the Age of Discoveries. During the first half of the 15th century he explored the coast of West Africa and the islands of the Atlantic Ocean, in search of better routes to Asia. Five years after Columbus discovered the West Indies, Vasco da Gama rounded the southern point of Africa and discovered a sea route to India. In 1497, on his first voyage he opened European trade with Asia by an ocean route. Because of the immense distance around Africa, this passage became the longest sea voyage made at the time.

The estimates vary. Anywhere from ten to twenty-five million Africans died in slave ships en route from Africa to the Americas. A lifetime of bondage awaited those who survived the passage. This massive crime against humanity–the enslavement and exploitation of tens of millions of human beings–is an American holocaust. (The extermination of the Native American population is another.) Yet one can scour the commemorative architecture of the nation's capital and find little evidence that America's racial holocaust ever occurred.

Paul R. Linde in his 1994 book, Of Spirits and Madness: An American Psychiatrist in Africa. “Major mental illness cuts across all cultures,” Linde writes. “Amazingly enough, or maybe not, acutely psychotic people in Zimbabwe appear very similar to those in San Francisco. . . . They suffer from disorganized thoughts, delusions, and hallucinations. The content of the symptoms, however, is very much different . . . Zimbabweans do not report hearing auditory hallucinations of Jesus Christ, rather they report hearing those of their ancestor spirits. They are not paranoid about the FBI, rather they are paranoid about witches and sorcerers.”1

America: “Don’t worry; God never said that or anything like that. That was just Jeremiah back in ‘pre-scientific times’ using hyperbole and figures of speech.” At least that is the news media interpretation of the passage. The news media proved the “apple” in Eden was an “apricot,” Christ wore a Roman Catholic shroud, Eve was a black woman in South Africa named “Lucy,” Hell was a Dark Age figment of the imagination, Christ was a fornicator, Paul was a homosexual, and homosexuals are not to be killed in the Bible (Lev. 19, 20); they are to be given access to your children. That is the news media. That is the news media in 1995.   “Shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?

Derrien had issued his battle cry, he annulled it by order of Vichy. “November 8, we fight everybody,” he wrote privately. “November 9, we fight the Germans. November 10, we fight nobody. November 10 (noon), we fight the Germans. November 11 (night), we fight nobody.” Perhaps no passage written during the war better captured the agony of France and the moral gyrations to which her sons were subject.

If U-boats torpedoed a transport during the Atlantic passage, how many destroyers should be left behind to pick up survivors? Hewitt was not certain he could spare any without jeopardizing the task force, and the prospect of abandoning men in the water gnawed at him. Had word of the expedition leaked? Every day he received reports that someone, somewhere had been talking too much.

Reminiscences of yet a young life's battles and hard struggles came surging into the mind in quick succession: events of boyhood, of youth, and manhood; perils, travels, scenes, joys, and sorrows; loves and hates; friendships and indifferences. My mind followed the various and rapid transition of my life's passages; it drew the lengthy, erratic, sinuous lines of travel my footsteps had passed over. If I had drawn them on the sandy floor, what enigmatical problems they had been to those around me, and what plain, readable, intelligent histories they had been to me! The loveliest feature of all to me was the form of a noble, and true man, who called me son. Of my life in the great pine forests of Arkansas, and in Missouri, I retained the most vivid impressions. The dreaming days I passed under the sighing pines on the Ouachita's shores; the new clearing, the block-house, our faithful black servant, the forest deer, and the exuberant life I led, were all well remembered. And I remembered how one day, after we had come to live near the Mississipi, I floated down, down, hundreds of miles, with a wild fraternity of knurly giants, the boatmen of the Mississipi, and how a dear old man welcomed me back, as if from the grave. I remembered also my travels on foot through sunny Spain, and France, with numberless adventures in Asia Minor, among Kurdish nomads. I remembered the battle-fields of America and the stormy scenes of rampant war. I remembered gold mines, and broad prairies, Indian councils, and much experience in the new western lands. I remembered the shock it gave me to hear after my return from a barbarous country of the calamity that had overtaken the fond man whom I called father, and the hot fitful life that followed it. Stop!

It was the genius of Orseolo to fully understand that Venice's growth, perhaps its very survival, lay far beyond the waters of the lagoon. He had already obtained favorable trading agreements with Constantinople, and, to the disgust of militant Christendom, he dispatched ambassadors to the four corners of the Mediterranean to strike similar agreements with the Islamic world. The future for Venice lay in Alexandria, Syria, Constantinople, and the Barbary Coast of North Africa, where wealthier, more advanced societies promised spices, silk, cotton, and glass — luxurious commodities that the city was ideally placed to sell on into northern Italy and central Europe. The problem for Venetian sailors was that the voyage down the Adriatic was terribly unsafe. The city's home waters, the Gulf of Venice, lay within its power, but the central Adriatic was risky to navigate, as it was patrolled by Croat pirates. Since the eighth century these Slav settlers from the upper Balkans had established themselves on its eastern, Dalmatian shores. This was a terrain made for maritime robbery. From island lairs and coastal creeks, the shallow-draft Croat ships could dart out and snatch merchant traffic passing down the strait. Venice had been conducting a running fight with these pirates for 150 years. The contest had yielded little but defeat and humiliation. One doge had been killed leading a punitive expedition; thereafter the Venetians had opted to pay craven tribute for free passage to the open seas. The Croats were now seeking to extend their influence to the old Roman towns farther up the coast. Orseolo brought to this problem a clear strategic vision that would form the cornerstone of Venetian policy for all the centuries that the Republic lived. The Adriatic must provide free passage for Venetian ships, otherwise they would be forever bottled up. The doge ordered that there would be no more tribute and prepared a substantial fleet to command obedience.

As the riches from the slave trade from Africa to the New World poured forth to the Spaniards, to the Portuguese, to the Dutch, and lastly to the English, the biblical passage would be summoned to condemn the children of Ham and to justify the kidnap and enslavement of millions of human beings, and the violence against them.

We’re passing the burning ground, mum, at the foot o’ the slave market,” Maitland explained, overhearing my question. He pointed toward the shore, where a plume of white smoke rose from behind a screen of bayberry bushes. “They burn the bodies of the slaves who don’t survive their passage from Africa,” he explained. “First they unload the living cargo, and then, as the ship is swabbed out, the bodies are removed and thrown onto the pyre here, to prevent sickness spreading into the town.

in the growing darkness, I recalled hearing a report that sea-eroded beads, thought to have been worn by Africans whose dead bodies were thrown off ships en route to the New World, had washed up on the shores of West Africa. I envisioned a path of red beads undulating with the currents on the ocean floor and tracing the Middle Passage from West Africa to America, the path Mandy had followed from Ghana to Virginia. The

The harsh demographic regime of the region furthermore meant that over the course of a typical decade planters would have to buy total numbers of new slaves equivalent to 30 percent of those present at the decade’s beginning simply to prevent their slave populations from decreasing. In Virginia, the slave population experienced almost no natural increase in the first decade of the eighteenth century, and conditions were no better in the Carolina lowcountry. The truth was that West Indian slave masters soon gave up trying to keep their Negroes alive long enough to breed up a new generation and instead routinely bought replacement slaves year in and year out. Survivors of the slave ship thus drew future migrants into saltwater slavery by the engine of their labor. Once converted into sugar (or tobacco or rice or any of the other staple commodities), the labor of those already in saltwater slavery cycled back to African shores to pull still more captives into circulation, thus ‘buying’ more bodies to sustain the chain of captive migrants that bound Africa to the Americas.

The individual stories of saltwater slavery form the antithesis of historical narrative, for they feature not an evolving plot of change over time, but rather a tale of endless repetition that allows no temporal progression. Every protagonist was a pioneer, blazing a trail on the same ground traveled by predecessors in saltwater slavery, but without the benefit of historical memory. It is a narrative in which time seems to stand still.

The migrant chain that connected Africa to America was seemingly endless, however, and its length was due primarily to the market. Africans made to ‘buy more’ Africans were thus compelled to be the agents of their own exploitation by an economic system that consumed the very lives of slaves. At stake for Africans was whether an American generation of African lineage would emerge and, more important still, also whether that generation could sustain itself by the fruit of its social networks, rather than by its labor, as bought and sold on the market.

It is not just that ‘traumatic events’ disrupt ‘attachments of family, friendship, love, and community’ or ‘shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others.’ More fundamentally, trauma specialist Judith Herman asserts, trauma directly disrupts the very ‘systems of attachment and meaning that link individual and community.’ Thus, another specialist has defined traumatic events as ones ‘that cannot be assimilated with the victim’s “inner schemata” of self in relation to the world.’ The ‘work of reconstruction,’ Herman writes, ‘actually transforms the traumatic memory, so that it can be integrated into the survivor’s life story.

Undoing their objectivization as goods to be bought and sold, therefore, required not only that captives escape the physical hold exerted on them by the forts, factories, and other coastal facilities used to incarcerate them but, more difficult still, that they reverse their own transformation into commodities, by returning to a web of social bonds that would tether them safely to the African landscape, within the fold of kinship and community. For most, as we have seen, distance made return to their home communities impossible. The market, they learned, made return to any form of social belonging impossible as well. If they managed to escape from the waterside forts and factories, their value resided not in their potential to join communities as slave laborers, wives, soldiers, or in some other capacity, but rather in their market price. For most, the power of the market made it impossible to return to their previous state, that of belonging to (being ‘owned’ by) a community—to being possessed, that is, of an identity as a subject. Rather, the strangers the runaways encountered shared the vision of the officials at Cape Coast Castle: the laws of the market made fellow human beings see it as their primary interest to own as commodities these escaped captives, rather than to connection them as social subjects. More often than not, then, captives escaped only to be sold again. As Snelgrave’s language articulates so clearly, the logic of the market meant that enslavement was a misfortune for which no buyer needed to feel the burden of accountability. Indeed, according to the mercantile logic in force, buyers (of whatever nationality) could not bear the weight of political accountability. Buying people who had no evidence social value was not a violation or an act of questionable morality but rather a keen and appropriate response to opportunity; for this was precisely what one was supposed to do in the market: create value by exchange, recycle someone else’s castoffs into objects of worth. Thus, then, did the market exert its power—through its language, its categories, its logic. The alchemy of the market derived from its effectiveness in producing a counterfeit representation; it had become plausible that human beings could be so completely drained of social value, so severed from the community, that their lives were no longer beyond price: they could be made freely available in exchange for currency. The market painted in colors sufficiently believable as to seem true the appalling notion that ‘a human being could fail to be a person.

The imperatives of a market that valued people as commodities interposed a nearly impassable gulf between captives and any community that might claim them as new members. Captives learned that when they reached the littoral, their exchangeability on the Atlantic market outweighed any social value they might have. The price put on their persons pushed most captives beyond the possibility of eventual reintegration as members in any community. The crisis of captivity on that coast, in other words, was that only with great difficulty or great luck could the prisoners’ ‘commodity potential’ be masked or converted back into social currency.

The ledger’s double-entry pages and the neat grid of the invoice gave purposeful shape to the story they told. Through their graphic simplicity and economy, invoices and ledgers effaced the personal histories that fueled the slaving economy. Containing only what could fit within the clean lines of their columns and rows, they reduced an enormous system of traffic in human commodities to a concise chronicle of quantitative ‘facts.’ Thus, Mary Poove writes, ‘like the closet, the conventions of double-entry bookkeeping were intended to manage or contain excess.’ Instruments such as these did their work, then, while concealing the messiness of history, erasing from view the politics that underlay the neat account keeping. The slave traders (and much of the modern economic literature on the slave trade) regarded the slave ship’s need for volume as a self-evident ‘fact’ of economic rationalization: the Board of Trade’s reports, the balance pursued in the Royal African Company’s double-entry ledgers, the calculations that determined how many captive bodies a ship could ‘conveniently stow,’ the simple equation by which an agent at the company’s factory at Whydah promised ‘to Complie with delivering in every ten days 100 Negroes.’ But the perceptions of the African captives themselves differed from the slave trader’s economies of scale and rationalized efficiency of production. What appears in the European quantitative account as a seamless expansion in the volume of slave exports—evidence of the natural workings of the market—took the form of violent rifts in the political geography of the Gold Coast. People for whom the Atlantic market had been a distant and hazy presence with little direct consequence for their lives now found themselves swept up in wars and siphoned into a type of captivity without precedent.

Mortality on the Atlantic produced a crisis of enormous proportions, as Africans labored under the cumulative weight of these deaths that remained unresolved. . . . Entrapped, Africans confronted a dual crisis: the trauma of death, and the inability to respond appropriately to death. This indirect violence, arguably, was the most abject experience of the captives’ Atlantic crossing.

Indeed, the classic situation of the slave is that of the ‘socially dead person.’ But if religion, in the form of ancestor worship, ‘explains how it is possible to relate to the dead who still live,’ how, asks the sociologist Orlando Patterson, ought society to ‘relate to the living who are dead,’ that is to say, to the socially dead? Patterson has insisted that the social death imposed by slavery entails a process involving the two contradictory principles of marginality and integration. Thus, the slave, like the ancestor, is a ‘liminal’ being, one who is in society but cannot ever be fully of society. ‘In his social death,’ Patterson asserts, ‘the slave . . . lives on the margin between community and chaos, life and death, the sacred and the secular.’ Patterson suggests, moreover, that in many slaveholding societies the social death of the slave functioned precisely to empower him to navigate, in his liminality, through betwixt-and-between places where full members of society could not. In some societies, the liminal status of the slave empowered him to undertake roles in the spiritual world, such as handling the bodies of the deceased, that were dangerous to full members of society. ‘Being socially dead, the captives were able to move between the living and the dead without suffering the supernatural harm inevitably experienced by the socially alive in such boundary crossing.’ Among precolonial African societies, Patterson has observed, ritual practices associated with enslavement also worked to ‘give symbolic expression to the slave’s social death and new status.

The African as immigrant was not an inevitable by-product of the traffic in human commodities but rather a creation of his or her own arduous making. It is this that distinguishes African displacement in the Atlantic slave trade from all other emigration. Slaves’ full personhood was the crux of the contest between Africans and those who commodified them. Traders and masters alike confronted the universal contradiction inherent in the idea of human beings as property; conceding that the slave had a will, in order to better devise means to control it, was not an acknowledgement of the slave’s personhood. The African slave, a victim of forced migration, cannot, then, be taken for granted as immigrant subject. This displaced being had to restore through her unassisted agency the pulse of social integration that saltwater slavery threatened to extinguish. That the Africans enslaved in America were immigrants was thus not an axiomatic truth, but rather one Africans had to fight for. Those who lived to walk away from the slave ship had to address the problem of their unique displacement and alienation. They did so in three ways that gave distinctive shape to their effort to build meaningful life in a new world. First, they engaged with the cognitive problem of orientation: Where are we now that we have escaped the slave ship? Second, they created kinship and community out of the disaggregated units remaining after the market’s dispersal of its human wares. Third, they came to terms with the saltwater journey’s haunting imprint on their communities, regularly reinforced by the slave ships’ return to deposit still more saltwater slaves on these unfamiliar shores.

On average, 20 percent of the Africans carried into the Atlantic in the seventeenth century died at sea, and 40 percent of cargoes experienced mortality levels above that benchmark.

[I]t is easy to confuse European interest in preserving life to prevent economic loss with positive concern for the captives’ human welfare. But to interpret the regime of the slave ship in that way is to be duped by the slave traders’ rhetoric—a language of concealment that allowed European slaving concerns to portray themselves as passive and powerless before the array of forces (including the agency of the captives themselves) outside their control. Slave merchants and their backers disguised from themselves the ugly truth that the Atlantic regime of commodification took captives from fully realized humanity and suspended them in a purgatory in between tenuous life and dishonorable death.

Africans began life in the Americas as subjects profoundly shaped by their Atlantic experience, and the communities they created in the Americas were organized around solutions to the specific problems they faced. The cultures they produced do not reflect the simple transfer and continuation of Africa in the Americas but rather reflect the elaboration of specific cultural content and its transformation to meet the particular needs of slave life in the Atlantic system: their need to reassert some kind of healthy relationship to ancestors; to manage death; to produce social networks, communities, and relations of kinship; to address the imbalance of power between black and white; to stake a claim to their bodies to counter the plantation economy’s claim to ownership. In this sense, the cultural practices of diasporic Africa could have meaning only outside Africa. Shared Atlantic experience and memory served as a touchstone for new cultural practices that emerged in the New World diaspora. Only through the capacity and willingness to invent and experiment—to grow and change the cultural tools carried in memory and create new ones to meet the demands of this new world—could Africans hope to remain recognizable to themselves as human beings in a system that held so much of their humanity in callous and calculated disregard. African immigrants retained that foothold in ways determined by the varied circumstances of their slavery: the immigrant slave might adapt a remembered ritual practice to new applications in American slavery or explore and perhaps ultimately adopt an entirely novel practice. The means were extraordinarily diverse because of the great variety of settings and conditions in which the colonial economies of the Americas enslaved human beings. The continuity Africans needed was not the static, ossifying connection of conformity of practice—doing things in the present as they had been done in the past, even when the context of past cultural forms no longer corresponded to the needs and circumstances of the present. Rather, the connection Africans needed was a narrative continuity between past and present—an epistemological means of connecting the dots between there and here, then and now, to craft a coherent story out of incoherent experience.

A new awareness of the integral role that social networks play in long-distance migration goes beyond traditional ‘rational-choice and decision-making models’ drawn from classical economics that content themselves with explaining migration as the outcome of a ‘cost-benefit analysis of the most favorable destination.’ According to recent theory, something more than the push and pull of differential labor markets, hunger, or the search for religious freedom sends people into long-distance emigration. Voluntary migrations do not depend merely on autonomous individuals weighing the costs and benefits of uprooting themselves. Rather, social networks and relationships bind uprooted people on to another like the links in a chain. ‘Chain migration’ is sustained from within, and indeed ‘can become self-perpetuating,’ as ‘each act of migration itself creates the social structure needed to sustain’ further migration. News of another’s good fortune in a distance place, information about unforeseen opportunities, invitations to follow in another’s migratory footsteps, or a familial obligation to do so—the long reach of social relations such as these are the incentive that draws people into exile in other lands and accounts for the enormous scale of some systems of international migration.

The cultural tools people employ to make sense of displacement are the means by which migrants guard against that shattering or implosion of self and attachment. Without these tools, the disruption of migration leaves disintegration in its wake that neither the individual immigrant nor the community of immigrants can bear.

the San Francisco departed, eighty-odd members of local Gold Coast communities had been offered as commodities in exchange for the goods the ship delivered, and had now become cargo themselves, en route toward the slave market at Cartagena.29

They claim that the mass infusion of nonwhite populations into Europe and the United States—which has never been democratically approved of by any of the host populations and has instead been foisted upon them—violate this passage in 1948’s United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. The howling double standard—i.e., the fact that no one is forcing Africa, Asia, or Israel to “diversify” while cramming diversity into every majority-white nation on earth—has led to Robert Whitaker’s famous phrase “Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white.

…American men actually engage most in hunting and fishing. The desire of men in wealthy societies to re-create the food-gathering conditions of very primitive people appears to be an appropriate comment on the power of the hunting drives discussed earlier. Not only is hunting expensive in many places – think of the European on safari in Africa – but it is also time-consuming, potentially dangerous, and frequently involves considerable personal discomfort. Men do it because it is ‘fun’. So they say, and so one must conclude from their persistent rendition of the old pattern. What is relevant from our point of view is that hunting, and frequently fishing, are group activities. A man will choose his co-hunters very carefully. Not only does the relative intimacy of the hunt demand some congeniality, but there is also danger in hunting with inept or irresponsible persons. It is a serious matter, and even class barriers which normally operate quite rigidly may be happily breached for the period of the hunt. Some research on hunters in British Columbia suggests the near-piety which accompanies the hunt; hunting is a singular and important activity. One particular group of males takes along bottles of costly Crown Royal whisky for the hunt; they drink only superior whisky on this poignant re-creation of an ancient manly skill. But when their wives join them for New Year's celebrations, they drink an ordinary whisky: the purely formal and social occasion does not, it seems, merit the symbolic tribute of outstanding whisky. Gambling is another behaviour which, like hunting and sport, provides an opportunity in countless cultures for the weaving of and participation in the web of male affiliation. Not the gambling of the London casino, where glamorous women serve drinks, or the complex hope, greed, fate-tempting ritual, and action of the shiny American palaces in Nevada, and not the hidden gambling run by racketeers. Rather, the card games in homes or small clubs, where men gather to play for manageable stakes on a friendly basis; perhaps – like Jiggs and his Maggie – to avoid their women, perhaps to seek some money, perhaps to buy the pleasant passage of time. But also to be with their friends and talk, and define, by the game, the confines of their intimate male society. Obviously females play too, both on their own and in mixed company. But there are differences which warrant investigation, in the same way that the drinking of men in groups appears to differ from heterosexual or all-female drinking; the separation of all-male bars and mixed ones is still maintained in many places despite the powerful cultural pressures against such flagrant sexual apartheid. Even in the Bowery, where disaffiliated outcast males live in ways only now becoming understood, it has been noted that, ‘There are strong indications that the heavy drinkers are more integrated and more sociable than the light. The analytical problem lies in determining whether socialization causes drinking or drinking results in sociability when there is no disapproval.’ In the gentleman's club in London, the informally segregated working man's pub in Yorkshire, the all-male taverns of Montreal, the palm-wine huts of west Africa, perhaps can be observed the enactment of a way of establishing maleness and maintaining bonds which is given an excuse and possibly facilitated by alcohol. Certainly, for what they are worth in revealing the nature of popular conception of the social role of drinking, advertisements stress the manly appeal of alcohol – particularly whisky – though it is also clear that there are ongoing changes in the socio-sexual implications of drinking. But perhaps it is hasty to regard the process of change as a process of female emancipation which will culminate in similarity of behaviour, status, and ideals of males and females. The changes are still too recent to warrant this. Also, they have been achieved under sufficiently self-conscious pressure...

The African Humid Period seems to have ended relatively quickly, taking a couple of thousand years before being replaced by a much drier climate, and this started a process of desertification that forced many animals and human inhabitants to the outer edges of the immense desert. There would have been passages through the area that vanished as the harsh climate inexorably clawed at the mountains and hills, turning them into the sand that obliterated all traces of their ever having been there. By about 600 BCE, the terrain and habitat had become much less hospitable, so much so that it was no longer possible to use horses and oxen to carry commodities.

I know it difficult to teach of 6 billion people to love each others... But atleast some can give up hate... Just trail of thoughts for you.. The beings on the planet came to existance. Somehow.. Not willing to debate about the source being God or Science.. Then they started evolving and adapting with the natural srrounding.. Some went to Africa the nature burnt their skins and raised the melanin content in their bodies and made them "Blacks".. Some went to Europe the same malanin was washed away as wasnt required and they became "Whites".. And the most fortunate like us came to Southern Asia and became "Browns" Similar was the case with adaptation to the fooding habits too... These habits took ages to settle in and were forced by nature... With passage of time humans gathered some wisdom and wanted too move away from the natural coarse of life designed by nature for them. In most of the ancient paintings found people have been shown killing or exploiting others.. In most of the recorded history maximum elaboration is about Battles and Wars. Where winners were always HEROES and losers were VILLAINS.. In recorded history very few VILLAINS actually won final wars. People started choosing the Victorious as heroes out of fear. The victorious could define and dictate terms to the society. This continues for ages till further evolution of human brains started. The evolution of human brains led to disloyalty towards the victorious and powerful rulers. Their brains taught them the power of togetherness clubbed with conspiracy could uproot the rulers. They started resisting the powerful. May be this is the time when something called religions came to existence to tame the behaviour of Man from the fear of unknown... i.e. Heaven and Hell. They held the societies together got in rules and regulations but again these were based on hating others and protecting community, cities or co-followers. Unfortunately now These Fears of Unknown from different geographical locations are confronting each other stating my fear is bigger than your fear.. But eventually every one has some path i.e. Birth to Death ... During this lengthy thoughts i have understood that its not the fault of a Black to be black and there is no contribution of a White in being born a white... So being Brown is Great... Eternal life is fro the people who did things for generations to remember that's what heaven and hellz all about. - A Black can show supremacy by being Nelson Mandella - A White can help and heal people to Become Mother Teressa - A Brown can liberate and fight for Kids and become Kailash Satyarthi At this point you must also know that Thousands of Years have Gone.. and one thing that remains constant after "CHANGE" is "HATE" Can we change or let it be as was written on the WALL...

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION: More than twenty-five years ago while researching the fourth Saint-Germain book, Path of the Eclipse, I ran across references to the Year of the Yellow Snow, sometimes called the Year of the Dark Sun, in Western reckoning A.D. 535-36, which was characterized by catastrophic drops in temperature, crop failures, and famine throughout Asia and Europe, with disruption of trade and movements of populations resulting from these losses—just the sort of event to set the speculative juices, flowing, but not the object of my research, nor the period with which I was dealing, promising though it appeared. Then, about ten years ago, other researchers did some serious scholarship on those disastrous events and tried to determine the cause of what turned out to be a worldwide famine and, after considering a number of different scenarios from meteor collisions to a mini-ice age—which indeed occurred—at last identified the probable source of the trouble as an eruption of that all-time bad-boy volcano, Krakatoa; this eruption was more overwhelming than many of its others, for, according to records in Indonesia, this eruption broke Sumatra off from Java—Krakatoa is at the hinge position of those two islands—and opened the Sundra Strait to a deep-water sea passage instead of only the shallowest-draft boats, which it had been for centuries. The eruption occurred in late February or early March of A.D. 535, and its explosion was heard all the way to Beijing. It had been heralded by many months of regional instability, earthquakes, and drastic variations in ocean temperatures in and around what was becoming the Sundra Strait, making the shipping lanes more treacherous than they had been in the past. Many ships' captains reported dangerous sailing in and around Indonesia, and over time, merchant ships avoided the region. ¶ In April, following the eruption, the ash from the volcano had spread all around the world, and disaster followed after it, impacting global weather patterns and lowering the average temperatures sufficiently to keep crops from growing in most of Asia and Europe, as well as large portions of Africa and Americas. Although every part of the world was affected, there were regions that bore more of the brunt of the tragedy than others. Many of the nomadic people of the Central Asian Steppes were driven out of their traditional grazing lands when their herds began to die because of lack of food as the grasslands became arid plains, and their struggle to find new pastureland was made much more difficult by the impact of the colder weather; the significant westward migration from Central Asia began as an attempt to find grass for their herds. In China and Tibet, the snow that continued to fall all the way into June and July was yellow due to the high levels of sulfur in the upper atmosphere. Closer to the eruption site, actual flakes of sulfur fell from the sky, burning people, animals, and fields alike and contaminating wells, springs, and rivers; the devastation of the Indonesian Islands was calamitous, with tens of thousands of people killed in tsunamis spawned by the eruption, by gaseous emanations, and by sulfur contamination, records of which still exist in the royal archives of the Srivijava Empire, which comprised most of modern Indonesia. For months afterward, the remains of humans, animals, trees, sea-life, and buildings washed up on the shores of what are now Indonesia, the Malay Peninsula, the Philippines, China, and India.

Of my ancestry I know almost nothing. In the slave quarters, and even later, I heard whispered conversations among the coloured people of the tortures which the slaves, including, no doubt, my ancestors on my mother’s side, suffered in the middle passage of the slave ship while being conveyed from Africa to America.