The NegroDu Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt)
History
The Negro
Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt)
Africa -- History; Black race
After this time frequent notices show that Negroes were common in the new
world.[71] When Pizarro, for instance, had been slain in Peru, his body
was dragged to the cathedral by two Negroes. After the battle of Anaquito
the head of the viceroy was cut off by a Negro, and during the great
earthquake in Guatemala a most remarkable figure was a gigantic Negro seen
in various parts of the city. Nunez had thirty Negroes with him on the top
of the Sierras, and there was rumor of an aboriginal tribe of Negroes in
South America. One of the last acts of King Ferdinand was to urge that no
more Negroes be sent to the West Indies, but under Charles V, Bishop Las
Casas drew up a plan of assisted migration to America and asked in 1517
the right for immigrants to import twelve Negro slaves, in return for
which the Indians were to be freed.
Las Casas, writing in his old age, owns his error: "This advice that
license should be given to bring Negro slaves to these lands, the Clerigo
Casas first gave, not considering the injustice with which the Portuguese
take them and make them slaves; which advice, after he had apprehended the
nature of the thing, he would not have given for all he had in the world.
For he always held that they had been made slaves unjustly and
tyrannically; for the same reason holds good of them as of the
Indians[72]."
As soon as the plan was broached a Savoyard, Lorens de Gomenot, Governor
of Bresa, obtained a monopoly of this proposed trade and shrewdly sold it
to the Genoese for twenty-five thousand ducats. Other monopolies were
granted in 1523, 1527, and 1528[73]. Thus the American trade became
established and gradually grew, passing successively into the hands of the
Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, and the English.
At first the trade was of the same kind and volume as that already passing
northward over the desert routes. Soon, however, the American trade
developed. A strong, unchecked demand for brute labor in the West Indies
and on the continent of America grew until it culminated in the eighteenth
century, when Negro slaves were crossing the Atlantic at the rate of fifty
to one hundred thousand a year. This called for slave raiding on a scale
that drew upon every part of Africa--upon the west coast, the western and
Egyptian Sudan, the valley of the Congo, Abyssinia, the lake regions, the
east coast, and Madagascar. Not simply the degraded and weaker types of
Negroes were seized, but the strong Bantu, the Mandingo and Songhay, the
Nubian and Nile Negroes, the Fula, and even the Asiatic Malay, were
represented in the raids.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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