It truly sickens me at what the human race is capable of. That over thousands of years human beings, supposedly the most advanced species on this planet, has deliberately murdered, enslaved and even attempted to destroy entire peoples based on a fear of another race, religion, or even way of life, some times even just because they don't wish to pay another to do their work.

In the excerpt from Roots by Alex Haley it gives a detailed account of one of these horrors, or at least a part of it. In chapters 33 through 40 it gives details of the capture of a slave and his journey from Africa to America, or the islands to the south. If there is anything on earth that could possibly stop the slave trade it should be one of those chapters. The details given in them, made me sick.

Perhaps we don't have to despair for the human race anymore since it had sense enough to abolish slavery but humanity isn't improving much. We have war, poverty, greed, bad politic (though not as bad as they have been in the past) and dozens more problems. The human species is the only species that will deliberately kill off another of it's kind even when the other submits to the individual. No animal will do this, at least no normal animal (rabies are excluded in this argument) and logically speak people are animals. This much has been proven by what the whites did to the African.

People are intelligent animals, much like dolphins, but in my personal opinion the dolphins are smarter. People tend to wish to dominate one another and the very weakest has used the excuse that blacks were nothing more than inferior animals to whites, and everyone knows people have the power of life and death over animals. That was one simple view taken, the other was religious and using the bible and a specific passage in it that says generally that one of the sons of a prominent figure and all his decendents would forever be in servitude to others.

No matter how people justified slaver to them selves, which in some way they had to because no average human mind could accept owning some one else with out some incredible reasoning, it was still very, very wrong. The abuses suffered on most of these poor people were horrible, they ranged from psychological torture to physical abuse bordering on insanely psychotic pleasure for the inflictor. The conditions of most slave ships are enough to make most people sick at the mention which does not even begin to describe how horrible they really were.

From the time they were taken from the village, or some other place that they had the misfortune to be, the slaves knew suffering to the extreme. Little food, no sympathy except from a whip or a stick for the men and some women. Out right rape for most women, regardless of condition of age or pregnancy. This continued on for most of the journey to the coast where slave ships waited and on through out the voyage. That was the least of it all, if any of it could be called 'least'.

Kunta was no exception to these horrors, he spoke a language no one else did, if anyone aside from the other slaves cared at all, he was starved through the voyage, beaten, made sick from the intolerable living conditions, and numerous other things. He watched many others die and suffer worse than he did, he was spared for the most part because he had good behavior. Try to imagine how it would have been for one who constantly rebelled or tried to throw them selves over board and were caught and brought back. If they weren't beaten to death they were lucky, or perhaps unlucky. The conditions down in the hold were intolerable at best and deadly at worst, stacked side by side on shelves, more likely than not chained to one another. Illness was rampant and deadly, spread by such close conditions, rats, fleas, and the intense amount of filth and human waste present.

The constant motion of the ship caused people to rub against the boards of the shelves they were on and on some wore away skin and muscle down to bare bone. Intense pain as well as infections and most likely ganegreen were common place. Occasionally the slaves were lucky enough to be taken on deck and 'hosed off' which involved a bath in salt water hauled up in buckets from the sea and stiff wire brushes. If the slaves weren't cut up, bruised and in bad enough health as it was the wire brushes help them along to that. Then back into the hold and gods help them if there was a storm. The ships tended to be very water proof and when a storm came up and the possibilities of water running into the hold and killing 'cargo' came up the hatch was closed and air was sealed in as well as water out. I'm willing to bet many people suffocated at times like those and those that didn't die most likely wished they had by the end of the voyage.

Slavery was one of the worst things in the history of the United States and possibly the world. It is my sincerest hope that none of the horrors from that time are forgotten because who knows what possibilities lie in the future for a world that forgets something like that.

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