“Christian” Renaming and Slavery

For this post, I feel like relying mostly on Thorton’s article because I learned so much while reading it. I know we’ve all heard that slavery has been around in all cultures, not just America, but this article really developed upon this and explained that yes, it’s true, slavery was in Africa and has always been around, but it was expressed differently when the Europeans arrived–this was the kicker.

In our group discussions in class this past week, my group talked mostly about how slaves in Africa were used primarily as a source of investment or wealth. Before the slave trade by the Portuguese began, private ownership was  basically nonexistent to African society, just as it was among the Incas. I believe the kings sort of owned the land, and people lived and worked among it, so owning a slave was more of an investment, and these slaves were treated as such.

It’s almost becoming thematic in this class that private ownership of land has been the cause for so much shift in society, and more specifically, gender relations. This has been the same when discussing African societies. Clearly, slavery has been around, but when the Portuguese instituted a different definition of ownership (private land), we begin to see the slavery that took the dominant form here in America, one of severe punishment and coercion of African Americans. Our group also really talked about how this slave trade significantly affected the gender roles and culture at large among the Africans, as it did to the Indigenous, as well. Thornton really expresses how as many African males entered the slave trade, the “sexual division of labor” was extremely affected. What really struck me, though, was not only including those women who were left behind but those that did enter the slave trade, and how their identities seemed even more unimportant to the Europeans than the male slaves. I know that not much status was at stake just by mere fact of being a slave in general, but as our group mentioned, many written records of slaves by the Portuguese left women unnamed, or simply just referred to them as slave women or girls. I really believe that this just speaks to the larger context of how Europeans at this time did not acknowledge women in political and economical realms even among their own. I’m anxious to learn this next week about European gender relations, so I’ll have a better grasp of this.

I also find it really interesting how, as even seen in the Amistad clip, the Europeans were renaming the slaves as they got off ship. These names really reflected the Christian values of the Europeans and basically stripped the slaves of their previous heritage and identity. I just find it really odd that this could possibly have been done in a “Christain” sense. These Europeans were renaming the slaves that were brutally treated, and somehow miraculously survived the Middle Passage, with Christian names! Did they really believe that this was “Christian”?!? I guess people have used the Bible to justify some rather horrible events throughout all of history. Sort of makes me wonder what they’ll say about our generation one day….