Sometimes the Diaspora Begins at Home

Sometimes the Diaspora Begins at Home

F. Ev'one yaY a.k.a. Felton Perry

This manuscript addresses the participation of some continental Africans, i.e., indigenous members of various linguistic, religious, and cultural communities who aided and abetted the European slave traders during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (TAST). They committed innumerable acts of kidnapping on their neighbors with whom they coinhabited the African continent's sub-Saharan regions: Western, Central, and to a lesser extent, Eastern.

There exist in some current societies the memory of ancestral involvement in past enslaving activities for which they have created ceremonies and graven images to atone for their forbearers' predatory practices. Many of the abducted unfortunates, besides being incorporated into the TATS, were sold into other slavery systems as well.

The Trans-Saharan, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, and the ubiquitous African internal networks for which there is very little verifiable documentation translated into English.

This lack of written records reflecting the number of humans absorbed into these systems means that there will never be an accurate total of all who were ensnared; however, the European slave-ship captains maintained fairly good ship logs of their slave purchases for the duration of the TAST era. While deficient in some aspects, they nevertheless provide a general accounting of the human trafficking business from the mid-fifteenth century of the dawning of the twentieth century.