Suffering of the Black and Brown Body: “Human trafficking,” or was the slave trade never abolished?
News is trending regarding human trafficking of Sub-Saharan Africans, in which I argue is modern-day slavery, being smuggled and traded in Libya by human-traffickers. This is not 7th Century AD, the 1500s, or the 1800s before the supposed abolishment of slave trading. Smuggling and trading of captured bodies are occurring in 2017.
There is actual video footage of African slaves forced onto auction blocks for the purpose of commerce, and to be sold to the highest bidder. Why is the mainstream media slow in reporting this occurrence?
Historically, the combined Arab, Indian Ocean, and Trans-Atlantic Slave Trades, lasted for roughly over 1500 years (from 640s-1900s). It is impossible to know the total amount of enslaved Africans that were taken from the Motherland and disbursed throughout the world. More importantly, the death-rate of those prisoners of war —Who included captured Africans that were marched from the interior that died along the way before imprisonment at the slave castles, death at the prisons before boarding the slave ship(s), and the African victims who died along the voyage. Since these prisoners of war were not viewed as humans, they were simply treated as perishable goods/cargo that had to be discarded along the middle-passage.
Known throughout the woke and conscious community as the “Afrikan or Black Holocaust,” or the MAAFA, coined by anthropologist Dr. Marimba Ani, is a Kiswahili term for “terrible occurrence,” or “great disaster.” However, some include European-colonialism in Africa which involved the King Leopold II of Belgium-led genocide of the Congo who claimed the lives of over 10 million victims; the German-led Herero and Namaqua genocide, argued as the first concentration-camp centered on race ideology in the 20th Century; along with Caribbean-colonialism; slavery (both historical and current); legalized-racial-segregation (Jim Crow U.S., apartheid South Africa); forced- sterilizations of Black and Latina women for population control, historically-rooted by eugenicist Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood birth-control facilities; and the continuous suppression of the Black and Brown body in the 21st Century, as continuous occurrences of the MAAFA. In other worlds, the African or Black Holocaust has not ceased.
Since the Nation’s “founding,” the human value has always been determined by the colonial- and governmental-entity, which was (and is) composed by the global European-elite. The humanness of the individual must be a reflection or representation of the person in power. Due to these gaps within history, the Eurocentric perspective of narrative; mainly, who is and who is not viewed as worth valuing or remembering, is why there is a need for continuous 20th Century Africana Studies discourse pertaining to investigating the “Negro/African Problem.” As I stated in my dissertation “Blurred Consciousness,” This critical-race theoretical and academic need is, “due to uninterrupted suppression in the 21st Century of the Black and Brown body.”
Representation of “the Other,” within the mainstream media, and society at large, is why there is a continuous global social-movement asserting and projecting to the public that #BlackLivesMatter.
It’s how the global-society decides whose body is worth seeing as 100% flesh, blood, and human. This lead to question, “Was the slave-trade ever abolished?”
