Everyone is quite familiar with the Atlantic slave trade that helped develop and prosper various European colonies through exploitation and injustice, but few know the diverse and complex history of African civilization that underscore that exploitation and injustice. African civilizations, similar to the indigenous civilizations of Latin America so far examined - Inca and Mexica, promoted ideas, values, and systems contrary to European colonial rule, such as communal land ownership and kinship ties emphasized throughout various spheres in society (including labor).

However, in each empire, conquest through violence was integral to the maintenance of the empire; therefore, to overcome the demands of collective ownership and kinship bonds, African civilizations determined wealth and power through one’s control of human labor, which could then take into account kinship and communal land rights. With this conception of power and wealth, conquest through violence manifested itself through prisoners of war and slaves.

Only after the decimation of the indigenous population did the importation of slave labor begin for labor-intensive crops and activities, such as mining. However, as noted in the Amistad film clip and the readings, the Spaniards stripped the Africans of their previous culture and civilization upon arrival to the New World, as Spaniards had done to the indigenous people when they arrived and confronted the existing populations. The diverse indigenous populations of Latin America became simply and narrowly known collectively as “Indians”’ by the Europeans, while the diverse African population arriving in Latin America was simply and narrowly known collectively as “Black.” Both of these terms fail to recognize previously complex societies from which the designated person came and also diversity within those societies. This phenomena is blatantly demonstrated with the Africans’ renaming upon their arrival before being purchased, being named Christian names or descriptive names in the Spanish language and thereby disregarding the significance of the existing African civilization.

In each case - Inca, Mexica, African, the Spaniards (and by extension, other Europeans) imposed their economic, religious, and political belief systems and further extended these systems’ ideological implications upon the conquered persons in terms of their gender and their labor. For the Africans, this meant similar consequences, though clearly more severely displaced from their traditional way of life, to those for the Incas and the Mexica. In each circumstance, the Spaniards perceived (directly or indirectly) the conquered men as more threatening to Spanish male power than the conquered women; men were also deemed more capable at performing labor-intensive work, as strength is associated with masculinity. For both of these reasons, male African slaves were generally selected for the most labor-intensive or dangerous jobs in agriculture and mining. This same pattern applies to the indigenous men enslaved under Spanish colonization.

Similar patterns also apply to female African slaves and indigenous women, with certain domestic roles designated to them, allowing for greater proximity between enslaved women and the European colonizer. This proximity arguably had several social and economic advantages, but it also carried many clear disadvantages, such as sexual exploitation. (See previous post about the inequality of sexual and marital relations.)

These clear and repeated similarities between these diverse groups make sense in the context of their contact with and treatment by European colonizers, in which the Europeans react in the same way to the perceived same “good,” over and over again for their own purposes.