THE OPINIONATOR: So was any other group responsible for facilitating as well as using Africans as slaves?  Who rounded-up the slaves and delivered them to the slave ships? Could Africans care so little for their own that they greedily sold them? Was slavery itself accepted and rampant in Africa? READ ON (emphasis mine):

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies, 1927

On June 21, 2007, the Freedom Schooner Amistad began an 18-month “Atlantic Freedom Tour” to retrace the route of the Atlantic slave trade. Owned and operated by AMISTAD America, Inc., the recreated Amistad will visit ports in Canada, England, the United States and West Africa to commemorate the story of the 1839 Amistad revolt and to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the international slave trade in England (1807) and the U.S. (1808). AMISTAD America is an educational organization committed to:

improved relationships between races and cultures by acknowledging our common experiences and encouraging dialogue that is based upon respect. … the re-created Amistad…serves as a floating classroom, icon and as a monument to the millions of souls that were broken or lost as a result of the insidious Transatlantic Slave Trade. The vessel offers an important message for all Americans about our collective history and future.1

The AMISTAD America website stresses the need to educate the public about the history of slavery “through common experiences and dialogue.” By “confronting the past” and promoting “reconciliation and social healing” the Amistad’s Atlantic Freedom Tour aims to help all people work toward “transforming the future.”

However, confronting the history of the Atlantic slave trade requires more than a sentence acknowledging that the Amistad prisoners “had been captured in Africa by Africans who sold them to European slave traders.” Website readers must understand that this terrible traffic in millions of human beings had been, as affirmed by the PBS Africans in America series, a joint venture: “During this era, Africans and Europeans stood together as equals, companions in commerce and profit. Kings exchanged respectful letters across color lines and addressed each other as colleagues. Natives of the two continents were tied into a common economy.”2

Incomplete depictions of the Atlantic slave trade are, in fact, quite common. My 2003 study of 49 state U.S. history standards revealed that not one of these guides to classroom content even mentioned the key role of Africans in supplying the Atlantic slave trade.3 In Africa itself, however, the slave trade is remembered quite differently. Nigerians, for example, explicitly teach about their own role in the trade:

Where did the supply of slaves come from? First, the Portuguese themselves kidnapped some Africans. But the bulk of the supply came from the Nigerians. These Nigerian middlemen moved to the interior where they captured other Nigerians who belonged to other communities. The middlemen also purchased many of the slaves from the people in the interior . . . . Many Nigerian middlemen began to depend totally on the slave trade and neglected every other business and occupation. The result was that when the trade was abolished [by England in 1807] these Nigerians began to protest. As years went by and the trade collapsed such Nigerians lost their sources of income and became impoverished. 4

In Ghana, politician and educator Samuel Sulemana Fuseini has acknowledged that his Asante ancestors accumulated their great wealth by abducting, capturing, and kidnapping Africans and selling them as slaves. Likewise, Ghanaian diplomat Kofi Awoonor has written: “I believe there is a great psychic shadow over Africa, and it has much to do with our guilt and denial of our role in the slave trade. We too are blameworthy in what was essentially one of the most heinous crimes in human history.”5

In 2000, at an observance attended by delegates from several European countries and the United States, officials from Benin publicized President Mathieu Kerekou’s apology for his country’s role in “selling fellow Africans by the millions to white slave traders.” “We cry for forgiveness and reconciliation,” said Luc Gnacadja, Benin’s minister of environment and housing. Cyrille Oguin, Benin’s ambassador to the United States, acknowledged, “We share in the responsibility for this terrible human tragedy.” 6

A year later, Senegal’s president Abdoulaye Wade, “himself the descendant of generations of slave-owning [and slave-trading] African kings,” urged Europeans, Americans, and Africans to acknowledge publicly and teach openly about their shared responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade. 7 Wade’s remarks came months after the release of Adanggaman, by Ivory Coast director Roger Gnoan M’bala, “the first African film to look at African involvement in the slave trade with the West.” “It’s up to us,” M’Bala insisted, “to talk about slavery, open the wounds of what we’ve always hidden and stop being puerile when we put responsibility on others . . . . In our own oral tradition, slavery is left out purposefully because Africans are ashamed when we confront slavery. Let’s wake up and look at ourselves through our own image.”8 “It is simply true,” declared Da Bourdia Leon of Burkina Faso’s Ministry of Culture and Art, “We need this kind of film to show our children this part of our history, that it happened among us. Although I feel sad, I think it is good that this kind of thing is being told today.”9

Several television productions of the last decade have acknowledged these facts: Africans in America (PBS, 1998), Wonders of the African World (PBS, 1999), and The African Trade (History Channel International, 2000). The latter begins with the visit by a group of African-Americans to the infamous slave castle and Door of No Return on Goree Island off the coast of Senegal. “Appalled by the cruelties of the Europeans,” the narrator relates, “the visitors become curious as to how Africans fell into their hands.” Their African guide admits that “this history is difficult to tell and hard to believe” but pulls no punches about African complicity in kidnapping and selling millions of African people: “All the tribes were involved in the slave trade—no exemptions.” The African-Americans were staggered: “So we really can’t blame the Europeans,” one declares, “We sold our own. It takes two.” Another visitor declares, “That’s right—money and greed.” The program concludes that “white guilt can never be erased”—but cautions that it is also important to remember that “black participation lets no one off the hook.”

The historical record is incontrovertible—as documented in the PBS Africans in America series companion book:

The white man did not introduce slavery to Africa . . . . And by the fifteenth century, men with dark skin had become quite comfortable with the concept of man as property . . . . Long before the arrival of Europeans on West Africa’s coast, the two continents shared a common acceptance of slavery as an unavoidable and necessary—perhaps even desirable—fact of existence. The commerce between the two continents, as tragic as it would become, developed upon familiar territory. Slavery was not a twisted European manipulation, although Europe capitalized on a mutual understanding and greedily expanded the slave trade into what would become a horrific enterprise . . . . It was a thunder that had no sound. Tribe stalked tribe, and eventually more than 20 million Africans would be kidnapped in their own homeland. 10

Historians estimate that ten million of these abducted Africans “never even made it to the slave ships. Most died on the march to the sea”—still chained, yoked, and shackled by their African captors—before they ever laid eyes on a white slave trader. 11 The survivors were either purchased by European slave dealers or “instantly beheaded” by the African traders “in sight of the [slave ship] captain” if they could not be sold.12 Of course, the even more horrific and inhuman middle passage—the voyage of a European (and later American) slave ship from Africa to the Western Hemisphere—still lay before those who had survived the forced trek to the coast.

Failure to educate young Americans about the whole story of Atlantic slave trade threatens to divide our nation and undermine our civic unity and belief in the historical legitimacy of our democratic institutions. Education in a democracy cannot promote half-truths about history without undermining the ideal of e pluribus unum—one from many—and substituting a divisive emphasis on many from one. The history of the slave trade proves that virtually everyone participated and profited—whites and blacks; Christians, Muslims, and Jews; Europeans, Africans, Americans, and Latin Americans. Once we recognize the shared historical responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade, we can turn our attention to “transforming the future” by eradicating its corrosive legacy.

No one is well served when “old myths of African barbarism” are replaced by “new myths of African innocence.”13  Article continues:
http://hnn.us/articles/41431.html

THEOPINIONATOR: -----Clearly the WHITE MAN is not the only nor even the first culprit in the African slave trade.  But as the hate of the white man seems to go hand in hand with multiculturalism and political correctness the cries for apologies and monetary restitution are directed at ONLY white man countries.  Hmmm isn't that racist???? 

Where are the loud protests and demands that moslems, Jews, Latin Americans AND especially Africans apologize for something that ended over 150 years ago in the US and even earlier in Europe?  The British, after all, were the first to call for the abolition of slavery and were instrumental in removing it from the Western/civilised world.

Fact is that the slave trade is STILL going on in AFRICA & elsewhere - note these are NOT "white" countries!!!

"Recently, we have seen the revival of the once thriving slave trade routes across West Africa, after a lapse of 25 years.  Slavers have reappeared following the old slave trade routes, except that trucks, jeeps and modern four-wheel drive vehicles and, on occasions, aircraft, have replaced the camels. The slavers often carry mobile telephones.

Some things, however, have not changed.  Cunning, deceit, the use of drugs to subdue the children and the whip still remain part of the essential equipment of the professional slaver.

The trade involves most states in sub-Saharan West Africa.

The children are kidnapped or purchased for $20 - $70 each by slavers in poorer states, such as Benin and Togo, and sold into slavery in sex dens or as unpaid domestic servants for $350.00 each in wealthier oil-rich states, such as Nigeria and Gabon.

These children are bought and sold as slaves. They are denied an education, the chance to play or to use toys like other children, and the right to a future.  Their lives are at the mercy of their masters, and suicide is often the only escape."
http://www.anti-slaverysociety.addr.com/slavetrade.htm 

OR

"Modern-day slaves can be found laboring as servants or concubines in Sudan, as child "carpet slaves" in India, or as cane-cutters in Haiti and southern Pakistan, to name but a few instances. According to Anti-Slavery International, the world's oldest human rights organization, there are currently over 20 million people in bondage."
for more info on this go to:
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/slavery1.html

THEOPINIONATOR:
So before we collapse from so much self flaggelating punishment, before our children need therapists to get over the passed along guilt, before our "national day of shame" becomes an annual day of penance- perhaps we need to "set the record straight" and call for Africa and other nations that were AND STILL ARE INVOLVED IN SLAVERY (and let's not forget the child soldiers) to put their own DIRTY houses in order before they start to criticize our CLEAN house.

Sorry for the ultra-long post but I really feel this is important...TheOpinionator