World of Slavery

This week discussion was rather interesting. We discussed the different slave trades and how they were different. In today’s society, the views on slave is manly focus on the new settlers of the new world in America who came to African to get slaves to help maintain the Settlers farms in which helped the Settlers flourish financial. Also we discussed how the process of getting slaves from Africa to America was violent and deemed immoral. To explain this process, we were seen a clip of the movie Amistad. In this clip, the slaves were forced to leave there homeland and were treated horrific matters. They were beat and some died due to the harsh conditions that they had to endure on the boat. They were beat to put fear into them so that they would not think about going against their master or the people that had capture them. They were also made to travel in cramp and damp quarters and were literally on top of one another. Due to these harsh conditions, disease ran rapidly and killed off many Africa slaves during the trip to America. Also in the clip, the slaves were given new American names so to speak in which this process was to strip away their identity from being from Africa.

Another thing that was discuss was the fact that Africans were selling their own people to the American people to earn money and for own selfish reasons and also had slaves as well. However, Africans treated their slaves slightly better because to in their eyes, the slaves were precious cargo but the Americas just felt that if they lost a slave that they could just buy another one. In addition, in Latin American slaves had rights and could sued their masters for mistreatment. These different elements show that there were different structures , rules, and regulations depending on who was doing the selling of slaves and who were being the owner of slaves as well .

Also within the slave system, different slaves had different roles depending on your gender. African male slaves usually did the hard labor while the African females slaves did field work as well but could also be use to do house work .