Life+in+Africa

=What was life like for African people before they were captured?=

It is important to remember that slavery had taken place for thousands of years. The vikings had slaves, the English port of Bristol had been used as a place to sell English children as labour in Ireland. The Egyptians had used slave labout to create the pyramids. //BUT - why were African people so heavily enslaved?//

[|//View a timeline of slavery from the 1400's.//]

**The Cultural Life of African People** **ACTIVITY: Click on the left hand image to enlarge it.** Look carefully at the picture - it shows the "First Day of the Yam custom" - a traditional cultural festival of many of the tribes on the Western coast of Africa. It was witnessed by European travellers during the early 1800's. African people had their own culture and civilisation long before the white Europeans settlers and raiders took it upon themselves to "educate" them and force Chritianity upon them.
 * Look out for the tribal King sitting under the umbrella marked with an elephant. Notice the flags in the background? What do they suggest to you?**

I//t is easy to see that the biggest export from the whole of the slave trade was in fact **__racism__** if we forget that African people had a wealth of culture, intelligence, art, customs, traditions and ways of life.//



As you can see there are a huge number of different groups of African tribal peoples - often with their own language, dialect, cultures and ways of life. Africa was a complex place! The white Europeans did their best to wipe out ideas that African's had any civilisation - they were racists - believing that African people were inferior to white people. They were happy to use African people as enslaved workers as they did not believe they had the same rights as other people. Some African tribes made war on other tribes and took the defeated as slaves. When the white race arrived in Africa, some tribes sold or gave their slaves to these newcomers to take back with them to their own countries - England, etc.
 * This picture shows Africa in the mid 1700's. The borders are not borders as we know them but areas where different ethno-tribal groups lived.**

[[image:http://www.northumberlandvtle.net/files/media/81/documents/5787/complex%20ethno%20group[s.jpg width="304" height="350"]]