The photo above was taken in about 1907, and shows a British sailor sawing the shackle off the leg of an African slave.
Where was that slave bound before he was freed by the British?
In 1907 there was no longer any market for slaves among white people anywhere in the world. In fact, there was probably no market at all for slaves except in black Africa or among the Arabs. In all likelihood that slave was going to be sold on the Arabian Peninsula or perhaps to African Muslims.
Who captured the slave?
He was probably captured by another black African from a neighboring tribe, either in warfare or as a part of a deliberate slave-taking raid. The Arabs rarely captured black slaves themselves, and this slave might have been brokered several times by African traders before arriving at his final owner.
In any case, both the slave-taker and the customer were almost certainly Muslims.
Yet white Europeans are to blame for all this. As our multicultural indoctrination has drummed into us over and over, white people are the cause of all the world’s evils, including the enslavement of Africans.
Somehow, perhaps through diabolical mind-rays, we induced the Africans and the Arabs to enslave millions of blacks and then trade them among themselves.
It just goes to show how viciously omnipotent we white people are.
Here’s the full story about the photo:
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Rare ‘slave freeing’ photos on show
A set of rare photographs showing African slaves being freed by the Royal Navy have gone on show for the first time.
They are part of an exhibition marking the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade.
Samuel Chidwick, 74, has donated the photographs taken by his father Able Seaman Joseph Chidwick, born in 1881, on board HMS Sphinx off the East African coast in about 1907.
The photographs, on display at the Royal Naval Museum, Portsmouth, Hants, show a sailor removing the manacle from a newly-freed slave as well as the ship’s marines escorting captured slavers.
Mr Chidwick, of Dover, Kent, said: “The pictures were taken by my father who was serving aboard HMS Sphinx while on armed patrol off the Zanzibar and Mozambique coast.
“They caught quite a few slavers and those particular slaves that are in the pictures happened while he was on watch.
“That night a dhow sailed by and the slaves were all chained together. He raised the alarm and they got them on to the ship and got the chains knocked off them.
“They then questioned them and sent a party of marines ashore to try to track the slave traders down.
“They caught two of them and I believe they were of Arabic origin.
“My father thought the slave trade was a despicable thing that was going on, the slaves were treated very badly so when they got the slavers they didn’t give them a very nice time.”
Jacquie Shaw, spokeswoman for the Royal Naval Museum, said: “The museum and the Royal Navy are delighted to announce the donation of a nationally important collection of unique photographs taken by Able Seaman Joseph John Chidwick during his service on the Persian Gulf Station where the crew of HMS Sphinx were engaged in subduing the slave trade.
“The collection comprises a fascinating and important snapshot of life on anti-slavery duties off the coast of Africa.”
The exhibition, ‘Chasing Freedom -The Royal Navy and the suppression of the Transatlantic Slave Trade’, is being held until January next year to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade.
The House of Commons passed a bill in 1805 making it unlawful for any British subject to capture and transport slaves but the measure was blocked by the House of Lords and did not come into force until March 25, 1807.
Mrs Shaw said that since the exhibition opened, members of the public had brought forward several historically-important items.
She said: “As well as these amazing images, members of the public have brought many other unheard stories of the Royal Navy and the trade in enslaved Africans to the museum’s attention including the original ship’s log of the famed HMS Black Joke of the West Coast of Africa Station.”
Hat tip: VH.
For the tens of thousands of years of the Würm glaciation, Paleolithic hunting tribes lived at the southern edge of the ice fields in Europe and Asia. About 10,000 years ago, as the last of the glaciers receded, some groups chose to follow the retreating ice northwards. While their cousins in the warmer regions to the south were smelting metal, these hardy tribes were knapping flint. While the southerners were inventing agriculture, slavery, and the ziggurat, the northerners were hunting large game in the chilly grasslands and forests of Central Asia and Northern Europe.
When the monastery at Lindisfarne in northern England was sacked by the Vikings in 793, it was recorded by the Northumbrian chronicler Alcuin as an event of unspeakable brutality. Yet two and a half centuries earlier it was Alcuin’s ancestors, the heathen Saxons, who had slaughtered and raped their way through the Christian communities of Britain. The Vikings were scarcely different; they were just late to the game.
But, despite the conquest and slaughter, and unlike the Arabs (who were dedicated slave-traders), the Vikings did not generally take slaves during their raids. Perhaps the necessity of rapid movement by sea and the long passages through the cold northern waters discouraged the practice.
A yeoman’s rights were granted directly to him by God and could not be revoked by his sovereign. The Normans, in order to rule their new lands successfully, were required to recognize the “ancient liberties” of their Anglo-Saxon subjects. When his rebellious barons compelled the Norman King John to sign the Magna Carta in 1215, they were simply retaking their ancient liberties. The customs of the men of the North thus survived despite the Normans and became the English Common Law.
These, in turn, were soon supplemented by massive numbers of Celts, first the Scots-Irish, driven by poverty and political maginalization. They pushed beyond the English settlers into the Appalachian highlands. After the Revolution, they in their turn were supplemented by waves of surplus Irish. Near where I live in Virginia, there was a large Welsh community, drawn here by geography: the ample deposits of slate created a demand for their well-known quarrying expertise.
North America received further transfusions of northern European blood throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. The Dutch and the Germans were already well-represented in the original colonies. In the later 19th century Swedes and Norwegians spread across the northern plains of the United States and Canada, bringing with them an ability to withstand the harsh winters and an additional dose of the spirit of the North. The same folk who settled Greenland and Iceland came centuries later to homestead the frozen lake country of Minnesota and North Dakota.
The Pharaonic model was neither understood nor welcomed here. We are the descendents of those Paleolithic hunters, and when the Minutemen rose up in self-defense, they were, in effect, confronting another mastodon with their flint-tipped spears. They were a voluntary and self-organized group, taking collective action by common consent to serve a common purpose.
One of the fundamentals of the Islamic faith was the acceptability, even the duty, of Muslims to wage war against the infidel. Islam divided the world into two starkly opposing camps: that of Islam, the Dar al-Islam, and that of the unbelievers, which was known as the Dar al-Harb. But Dar al-Harb literally means “House of War”. Jihad or Holy War, as we have seen, was a fundamental duty of all Muslim rulers. Truces were allowed, but never a lasting peace. (See eg. Koran, 8: 40 and 9: 124). In the words of medieval historian Robert Irwin, “Since the jihad [was] … a state of permanent war, it [excluded] … the possibility of true peace, but it [did] … allow for provisional truces in accordance with the requirements of the political situation.” (Robert Irwin, “Islam and the Crusades: 1096-1699,” in Jonathan Riley-Smith (ed.) The Oxford History of the Crusades (Oxford, 1995) pp. 237). Also, “Muslim religious law could not countenance the formal conclusion of any sort of permanent peace with the infidel.” (Ibid.) In such circumstances, it is evident that, when the Islamic forces were in a position of strength, almost all contact between them and the outside world was warlike. And this was not war as is waged between two kingdoms, empires, or dynasties: This was total war, war that did not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, and war that did not end. In this spirit, Islamic generals launched attack after attack against the southern shores of Europe during the seventh and eighth centuries; and these “official” actions were supplemented by hundreds, even thousands, of lesser raids, carried out by minor Muslim commanders and even by private individuals: For it was considered legitimate that the Muslim faithful should live off the infidel world. Whatever spoils could be taken, were divinely sanctioned.
All the men had the cartilage of the nose bored, through which they wore a piece of wood or a porcupine’s quill. Whether they are considered as to their persons, their turn of mind, or way of life, the Bosjesmans are certainly a most extraordinary race of people. In their persons they are extremely diminutive. The tallest of the men measured only four feet nine inches, and the tallest woman four feet four inches…. [T]hey are known in the colony under the name of Cineeze, or Chinese Hottentots. Their bellies are uncommonly protuberant, and their backs hollow; but their limbs seem in general well turned and proportioned. Their activity is incredibly great. The klip-springing antelope can scarcely excel them in leaping from rock to rock; and they are said to be so swift, that, on rough ground, or up the sides of mountains, horsemen have no chance in keeping pace with them…. The Ethiopian soldiers, when called upon to defend themselves, or to face an enemy, stuck poisoned arrows with a fillet bound round the head, which, projecting like so many rays, formed a kind of crown. The Bosjesmans do exactly the same thing; and they place them in this manner for the double purpose of expeditious shooting, and of striking terror into the minds of their enemies…. Their bows are remarkably small; and, in the hands of any one but a Bosjesman, would be entirely useless. From the earliest infancy they accustom themselves to the use of the bow. All the little boys who came to us at the kraal carried their bows and small quivers of arrows. A complete quiver contains about seventy or eighty…. [Vol. 1, pp. 233-34, 239, 243]
German politicians, too, are inclined to define the history of worker immigration as one of Turkish victims and German guilt because of exploitation. But this version of history is a fairy tale.