Slavery
Slavery is any system in which principles of property law are applied to people, allowing individuals to own and sell other individuals, as a de jure form of property. A slave works without remuneration. Many scholars now use the term chattel slavery to refer to this specific sense of legalised, de jure slavery. In a broader sense, the word slavery may refer to any situation in which an individual is de facto forced to work against their own will. Scholars use the more generic terms such as unfree labour or forced labour to refer to such situations. However, under slavery in broader senses of the word, slaves may have some rights and protections according to laws or customs. Slavery existed in many cultures since the time before written history. A person could capture, or purchase. Slavery was legal in most societies at some time in the past, but is now outlawed in all recognized countries; the last country to abolish slavery was Mauritania in 2007. There are an estimated 40.3 million people worldwide subject to some form of modern slavery.
The most common form of modern slave trade is referred to as human trafficking. In other areas, slavery continues through practices such as debt bondage, the most widespread form of slavery today, domestic servants kept in captivity, certain adoptions in which children are forced to work as slaves, child soldiers, forced marriage; the English word slave comes from Old French sclave, from the Medieval Latin sclavus, from the Byzantine Greek σκλάβος, which, in turn, comes from the ethnonym Slav, because in some early Medieval wars many Slavs were captured and enslaved. An older interpretation connected it to the Greek verb skyleúo'to strip a slain enemy'. There is a dispute among historians about whether terms such as unfree labourer or enslaved person, rather than "slave", should be used when describing the victims of slavery. According to those proposing a change in terminology, including Andi Cumbo-Floyd, slave perpetuates the crime of slavery in language. Other historians prefer slave because the term is familiar and shorter, or because it reflects the inhumanity of slavery, with "person" implying a degree of autonomy that slavery does not allow for.
Indenture, otherwise known as bonded labour or debt bondage, is a form of unfree labour under which a person pledges himself or herself against a loan. The services required to repay the debt, their duration, may be undefined. Debt bondage can be passed on from generation to generation, with children required to pay off their progenitors' debt, it is the most widespread form of slavery today. Debt bondage is most prevalent in South Asia. Chattel slavery called traditional slavery, is so named because people are treated as the chattel of the owner and are bought and sold as commodities. Under the chattel slave system, slave status was imposed on children of the enslaved at birth. Although it dominated many different societies throughout human history, this form of slavery has been formally abolished and is rare today; when it can be said to survive, it is not upheld by the legal system of any internationally recognized government. "Slavery" has been used to refer to a legal state of dependency to somebody else.
For example, in Persia, the situations and lives of such slaves could be better than those of common citizens. Forced labour, or unfree labour, is sometimes used to refer to when an individual is forced to work against their own will, under threat of violence or other punishment, but the generic term unfree labour is used to describe chattel slavery, as well as any other situation in which a person is obliged to work against their own will and a person's ability to work productively is under the complete control of another person; this may include institutions not classified as slavery, such as serfdom and penal labour. While some unfree labourers, such as serfs, have substantive, de jure legal or traditional rights, they have no ability to terminate the arrangements under which they work, are subject to forms of coercion and restrictions on their activities and movement outside their place of work. Human trafficking involves women and children forced into prostitution and is the fastest growing form of forced labour, with Thailand, India and Mexico having been identified as leading hotspots of commercial sexual exploitation of children.
Examples of sexual slavery in military contexts, include detention in "rape camps" or "comfort stations," "comfort women", forced "marriages" to soldiers and other practices involving the treatment of women or men as chattel and, as such, violations of the peremptory norm prohibiting slavery. In 2007, Human Rights Watch estimated that 200,000 to 300,000 children served as soldiers in current conflicts. More girls under 16 work as domestic workers than any other category of child labor sent to cities by parents living in rural poverty such as in restaveks in Haiti. Forced marriages or early marriages are considered types of slavery. Forced marriage continues to be practiced in parts of the world including some parts of Asia and Africa and in immigrant communities in the West. Sacred prostitution is where girls and women are pledged to priests or those of higher castes, such as the practice of Devadasi in South Asia or fetish slaves in West Africa. Marriage by abduction occurs in many places in the world today, with a national average of 69% of marriages in
John Brunner (novelist)
John Kilian Houston Brunner was a British author of science fiction novels and stories. His 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar, about an overpopulated world, won the 1969 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel, the BSFA award the same year; the Jagged Orbit won the BSFA award in 1970. Brunner was born in 1934 in Preston Crowmarsh, near Wallingford in Oxfordshire, went to school at St Andrew's Prep School, Pangbourne, he did his upper studies at Cheltenham College. He wrote his first novel, Galactic Storm, at 17, published it under the pen-name Gill Hunt, he did not start writing full-time until some years after his military service. He served as an officer in the Royal Air Force from 1953 to 1955, he married Marjorie Rosamond Sauer on 12 July 1958. Brunner had an uneasy relationship with British new wave writers, who considered him too American in his settings and themes, he attempted to shift without success. Before his death, most of his books had fallen out of print. Brunner accused publishers of a conspiracy against him.
But he was known to be difficult to deal with. Brunner's health began to decline in the 1980s and worsened with the death of his wife in 1986, he remarried, to Li Yi Tan, on 27 September 1991. He died of a heart attack in Glasgow on 25 August 1995, while attending the World Science Fiction Convention there. At first writing conventional space opera, Brunner began to experiment with the novel form, his 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar exploits the fragmented organizational style that American writer John Dos Passos created for his USA trilogy, but updates it in terms of the theory of media popularised by Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan, a major cultural figure of the period. The Jagged Orbit is set in a United States dominated by weapons proliferation and interracial violence, its 100 numbered chapters vary in length from a single syllable to several pages in length. The Sheep Look Up depicts ecological catastrophe in America. Brunner is credited with coining the term "worm" and predicting the emergence of computer viruses in his 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider, in which he used the term to describe software which reproduces itself across a computer network.
Together with Stand on Zanzibar, these novels have been called the "Club of Rome Quartet", named after the Club of Rome, whose 1972 report The Limits to Growth warned of the dire effects of overpopulation. Brunner's pen names include K. H. Brunner, Gill Hunt, John Loxmith, Trevor Staines, Ellis Quick, Henry Crosstrees Jr. and Keith Woodcott. In addition to his fiction, Brunner wrote poetry and published many unpaid articles in a variety of venues fanzines, he published 13 letters to the New Scientist and an article about the educational relevance of science fiction in Physics Education. Brunner was an active member of the organisation Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and wrote the words to "The H-Bomb's Thunder", sung on the Aldermaston Marches, he was a linguist and Guest of Honour at the first European Science Fiction Convention Eurocon-1 in Trieste in 1972. John Brunner wrote the screenplay for the science fiction film The Terrornauts by Amicus Productions. Two of his short stories, "Some Lapse of Time" and "The Last Lonely Man", were adapted as TV plays in the BBC science fiction series Out of the Unknown, in series 1 and series 3, respectively.
Galactic Storm Threshold of Eternity, Ace D-335 The 100th Millennium, Ace D-362. Book 1 of the "Zarathustra Refugee Planets" series; the Super Barbarians, Ace D-547 The Ladder in the Sky, Ace F-141 The Dreaming Earth, Pyramid F-829. The Stars!, Ace F-215. Book 2 of the "Zarathustra Refugee Planets" series; the Rites of Ohe, Ace F-242 To Conquer Chaos, Ace F-277, DAW 422 Endless Shadow, Ace F-299. Book 3 of the "Zarathustra Refugee Planets" series; the Altar on Asconel, Ace M-123 The Day of the Star Cities, Ace F-361.
Protectorate
A protectorate, in its inception adopted by modern international law, is a dependent territory, granted local autonomy and some independence while still retaining the suzerainty of a greater sovereign state. In exchange for this, the protectorate accepts specified obligations, which may vary depending on the real nature of their relationship. Therefore, a protectorate remains an autonomous part of a sovereign state, they are different from colonies as they have local rulers and people ruling over the territory and experience rare cases of immigration of settlers from the country it has suzerainty of. However, a state which remains under the protection of another state but still retains independence is known as a protected state and is different from protectorates. In amical protection, the terms are very favorable for the protectorate; the political interest of the protector is moral or countering a rival or enemy power. This may involve a weak protectorate surrendering control of its external relations.
Amical protection was extended by the great powers to other Christian states and to smaller states that had no significant importance. In the post-1815 period, non-Christian states provided amical protection towards other much weaker states. In modern times, a form of amical protection can be seen as an important or defining feature of microstates. According to the definition proposed by Dumienski: "microstates are modern protected states, i.e. sovereign states that have been able to unilaterally depute certain attributes of sovereignty to larger powers in exchange for benign protection of their political and economic viability against their geographic or demographic constraints". Examples of microstates understood as modern protected states include Andorra, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Niue, the Cook Islands, Palau. Conditions regarding protection are much less generous for areas of colonial protection; the protectorate was reduced to a de facto condition similar to a colony, but using the pre-existing native state as an agent of indirect rule.
A protectorate was established by or exercised by the other form of indirect rule: a chartered company, which becomes a de facto state in its European home state, allowed to be an independent country which has its own foreign policy and its own armed forces. In fact, protectorates were declared despite not being duly entered into by the traditional states being protected, or only by a party of dubious authority in those states. Colonial protectors decided to reshuffle several protectorates into a new, artificial unit without consulting the protectorates, a logic disrespectful of the theoretical duty of a protector to help maintain its protectorates' status and integrity; the Berlin agreement of February 26, 1885 allowed European colonial powers to establish protectorates in Black Africa by diplomatic notification without actual possession on the ground. This aspect of history is referred to as the Scramble for Africa. A similar case is the formal use of such terms as colony and protectorate for an amalgamation, convenient only for the colonizer or protector, of adjacent territories over which it held sway by protective or "raw" colonial logic.
In practice, a protectorate has direct foreign relations only with the protecting power, so other states must deal with it by approaching the protector. The protectorate takes military action on its own, but relies on the protector for its defence; this is distinct from annexation, in that the protector has no formal power to control the internal affairs of the protectorate. Protectorates differ from League of Nations mandates and their successors, United Nations Trust Territories, whose administration is supervised, in varying degrees, by the international community. A protectorate formally enters into the protection through a bilateral agreement with the protector, while international mandates are stewarded by the world community-representing body, with or without a de facto administering power. Han dynasty: Protectorate of the Western RegionsTang dynasty: Protectorate General to Pacify the West Protectorate General to Pacify the North Protectorate General to Pacify the EastYuan dynasty: Goryeo Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Maarten Various sultanates in the Dutch East Indies Trumon Sultanate, Langkat Sultanate, Deli Sultanate, Asahan Sultanate, Siak Sultanate and Indragiri Sultanate in Sumatra Jogjakarta Sultanate, Mataram Empire and Surakarta Sunanate, Duchy of Mangkunegara and Duchy of Paku Alaman in Java.
Sumbawa Sultanate and Bima Sultanate in Lesser Sunda Islands. Pontianak Sultanate, Sambas Sultanate, Kubu Sultanate, Landak Sultanate, Mempawah Sultanate, Matan Sultanate, Sanggau Sultanate, Sekadau Sultanate, Simpang Sultanate, Sintang Sultanate, Sukadana Sultanate, Kota Waringin Sultanate, Kutai Kertanegara Sultanate
Niger River
The Niger River is the principal river of West Africa, extending about 4,180 km. Its drainage basin is 2,117,700 km2 in area, its source is in the Guinea Highlands in southeastern Guinea. It runs in a crescent through Mali, Niger, on the border with Benin and through Nigeria, discharging through a massive delta, known as the Niger Delta or the Oil Rivers, into the Gulf of Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean; the Niger is the third-longest river in Africa, exceeded only by the Congo River. Its main tributary is the Benue River; the Niger has different names in the different languages of the region: Manding: Jeliba or Joliba "great river" Igbo: Orimiri or Orimili "great water" Tuareg: Egerew n-Igerewen "river of rivers" Songhay: Isa "the river" Ijaw: Toru Beni "the river water" Zarma: Isa Beeri "great river" Hausa: Kwara Yoruba: Oya Fula: Maayo JaalibaThe earliest use of the name "Niger" for the river is by Leo Africanus in his Della descrittione dell’Africa et delle cose notabili che iui sono published in Italian in 1550.
The name may come from Berber phrase ger-n-ger meaning "river of rivers". As Timbuktu was the southern end of the principal Trans-Saharan trade route to the western Mediterranean, it was the source of most European knowledge of the region. Medieval European maps applied the name Niger to the middle reaches of the river, in modern Mali, but Quorra to the lower reaches in modern Nigeria, as these were not recognized at the time as being the same river; when European colonial powers began to send ships along the west coast of Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Senegal River was postulated to be the seaward end of the Niger. The Niger Delta, pouring into the Atlantic through mangrove swamps and thousands of distributaries along more than 160 kilometres, was thought to be no more than coastal wetlands, it was only with the 18th-century visits of Mungo Park, who travelled down the Niger River and visited the great Sahelian empires of his day, that Europeans identified the course of the Niger and extended the name to its entire course.
The modern nations of Nigeria and Niger take their names from the river, marking contesting national claims by colonial powers of the "Upper", "Lower" and "Middle" Niger river basin during the Scramble for Africa at the end of the 19th century. The Niger River is a "clear" river, carrying only a tenth as much sediment as the Nile because the Niger's headwaters lie in ancient rocks that provide little silt. Like the Nile, the Niger floods yearly. An unusual feature of the river is the Inner Niger Delta, which forms where its gradient decreases; the result is a region of braided streams and lakes the size of Belgium. The river loses nearly two-thirds of its potential flow in the Inner Delta between Ségou and Timbuktu to seepage and evaporation. All the water from the Bani River, which flows into the Delta at Mopti, does not compensate for the'losses'; the average'loss' is estimated at 31 km3/year, but varies between years. The river is joined by various tributaries, but loses more water to evaporation.
The quantity of water entering Nigeria measured in Yola was estimated at 25 km3/year before the 1980s and at 13.5 km3/year during the 1980s. The most important tributary of the Niger in Nigeria is the Benue River which merges with the river at Lokoja in Nigeria; the total volume of tributaries in Nigeria is six times higher than the inflow into Nigeria, with a flow near the mouth of the river standing at 177.0 km3/year before the 1980s and 147.3 km3/year during the 1980s. The Niger takes one of the most unusual routes of any major river, a boomerang shape that baffled geographers for two centuries, its source is just 240 km inland from the Atlantic Ocean, but the river runs directly away from the sea into the Sahara Desert takes a sharp right turn near the ancient city of Timbuktu and heads southeast to the Gulf of Guinea. This strange geography came about because the Niger River is two ancient rivers joined together; the upper Niger, from the source west of Timbuktu to the bend in the current river near Timbuktu, once emptied into a now dry lake to the east northeast of Timbuktu, while the lower Niger started to the south of Timbuktu and flowed south into the Gulf of Guinea.
Over time upstream erosion by the lower Niger resulted in stream capture of the upper Niger by the lower Niger. The northern part of the river, known as the Niger bend, is an important area because it is the major river and source of water in that part of the Sahara desert; this made it the focal point of trade across the western Sahara, the centre of the Sahelian kingdoms of Mali and Gao. The surrounding Niger River Basin is one of the distinct physiographic sections of the Sudan province, which in turn is part of the larger African massive physiographic division; the origin of the river's name remains unclear. What is clear is that "Niger" was an appellation applied in the Mediterranean world from at least the Classical era, when knowledge of the area by Europeans was better than fable. A careful study of Classical writings on the interior of the Sahara begins with Ptolemy, who mentions two rivers in the desert: the "Gir" and farther south, the "Nigir"; the first has been since identified as the Wadi Ghir on the north western edge of the Tuat, along the borders of modern Morocco and Algeria.
This would have been as far as Ptolemy would have had consistent records. The Ni-Ger was speculation, although the name stu
Bight (geography)
In geography, a bight is a bend or curve in a coastline, river, or other geographical feature. It indicates a large, open bay only receding, it is distinguished from a sound by being shallower. Traditionally, explorers defined a bight as a bay that could be sailed out of on a single tack in a square-rigged sailing vessel, regardless of the direction of the wind; the term is derived from Old English byht and is not etymologically related to "bite". Bay of Campeche Bay of Plenty Bight of Benin Bight of Biafra or Bight of Bonny Canterbury Bight Flemish Bight German Bight or Heligoland Bight Great Australian Bight McKenzie Bight Mecklenburg Bight Mid-Atlantic Bight New York Bight Cameron Sound North Taranaki Bight Robson Bight Santa Monica Bay South Taranaki Bight Southern Bight Southern California Bight Trinity Bight and Labrador
Atlantic Ocean
The Atlantic Ocean is the second largest of the world's oceans, with an area of about 106,460,000 square kilometers. It covers 20 percent of the Earth's surface and about 29 percent of its water surface area, it separates the "Old World" from the "New World". The Atlantic Ocean occupies an elongated, S-shaped basin extending longitudinally between Europe and Africa to the east, the Americas to the west; as one component of the interconnected global ocean, it is connected in the north to the Arctic Ocean, to the Pacific Ocean in the southwest, the Indian Ocean in the southeast, the Southern Ocean in the south. The Equatorial Counter Current subdivides it into the North Atlantic Ocean and the South Atlantic Ocean at about 8°N. Scientific explorations of the Atlantic include the Challenger expedition, the German Meteor expedition, Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the United States Navy Hydrographic Office; the oldest known mentions of an "Atlantic" sea come from Stesichorus around mid-sixth century BC: Atlantikoi pelágei and in The Histories of Herodotus around 450 BC: Atlantis thalassa where the name refers to "the sea beyond the pillars of Heracles", said to be part of the sea that surrounds all land.
Thus, on one hand, the name refers to Atlas, the Titan in Greek mythology, who supported the heavens and who appeared as a frontispiece in Medieval maps and lent his name to modern atlases. On the other hand, to early Greek sailors and in Ancient Greek mythological literature such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, this all-encompassing ocean was instead known as Oceanus, the gigantic river that encircled the world. In contrast, the term "Atlantic" referred to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and the sea off the Strait of Gibraltar and the North African coast; the Greek word thalassa has been reused by scientists for the huge Panthalassa ocean that surrounded the supercontinent Pangaea hundreds of millions of years ago. The term "Aethiopian Ocean", derived from Ancient Ethiopia, was applied to the Southern Atlantic as late as the mid-19th century. During the Age of Discovery, the Atlantic was known to English cartographers as the Great Western Ocean; the term The Pond is used by British and American speakers in context to the Atlantic Ocean, as a form of meiosis, or sarcastic understatement.
The term dates to as early as 1640, first appearing in print in pamphlet released during the reign of Charles I, reproduced in 1869 in Nehemiah Wallington's Historical Notices of Events Occurring Chiefly in The Reign of Charles I, where "great Pond" is used in reference to the Atlantic Ocean by Francis Windebank, Charles I's Secretary of State. The International Hydrographic Organization defined the limits of the oceans and seas in 1953, but some of these definitions have been revised since and some are not used by various authorities and countries, see for example the CIA World Factbook. Correspondingly, the extent and number of oceans and seas varies; the Atlantic Ocean is bounded on the west by South America. It connects to the Arctic Ocean through the Denmark Strait, Greenland Sea, Norwegian Sea and Barents Sea. To the east, the boundaries of the ocean proper are Europe: the Strait of Africa. In the southeast, the Atlantic merges into the Indian Ocean; the 20° East meridian, running south from Cape Agulhas to Antarctica defines its border.
In the 1953 definition it extends south to Antarctica, while in maps it is bounded at the 60° parallel by the Southern Ocean. The Atlantic has irregular coasts indented by numerous bays and seas; these include the Baltic Sea, Black Sea, Caribbean Sea, Davis Strait, Denmark Strait, part of the Drake Passage, Gulf of Mexico, Labrador Sea, Mediterranean Sea, North Sea, Norwegian Sea all of the Scotia Sea, other tributary water bodies. Including these marginal seas the coast line of the Atlantic measures 111,866 km compared to 135,663 km for the Pacific. Including its marginal seas, the Atlantic covers an area of 106,460,000 km2 or 23.5% of the global ocean and has a volume of 310,410,900 km3 or 23.3% of the total volume of the earth's oceans. Excluding its marginal seas, the Atlantic covers 81,760,000 km2 and has a volume of 305,811,900 km3; the North Atlantic covers 41,490,000 km2 and the South Atlantic 40,270,000 km2. The average depth is 3,646 m and the maximum depth, the Milwaukee Deep in the Puerto Rico Trench, is 8,486 m.
The bathymetry of the Atlantic is dominated by a submarine mountain range called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It runs from 87°N or 300 km south of the North Pole to the subantarctic Bouvet Island at 42°S; the MAR divides the Atlantic longitudinally into two halves, in each of which a series of basins are delimited by secondary, transverse ridges. The MAR reaches above 2,000 m along most of its length, but is interrupted by larger transform faults at two places: the Romanche Trench near the Equator and the Gibbs Fracture Zone at 53°N; the MAR is a barrier for bottom water, but at these two transform faults deep water currents can pass from one side to the othe
Atlantic slave trade
The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people to the Americas. The slave trade used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage, existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries; the vast majority of those who were enslaved and transported in the transatlantic slave trade were people from central and western Africa, sold by other West Africans to Western European slave traders, who brought them to the Americas. The South Atlantic and Caribbean economies were dependent on the supply of secure labour for the production of commodity crops, making goods and clothing to sell in Europe; this was crucial to those western European countries which, in the late 17th and 18th centuries, were vying with each other to create overseas empires. The Portuguese were the first to engage in the Atlantic slave trade in the 16th century. In 1526, they completed the first transatlantic slave voyage to Brazil, other European countries soon followed.
Shipowners regarded the slaves as cargo to be transported to the Americas as and cheaply as possible, there to be sold to work on coffee, cocoa and cotton plantations and silver mines, rice fields, construction industry, cutting timber for ships, in skilled labour, as domestic servants. The first Africans imported to the English colonies were classified as "indentured servants", like workers coming from England, as "apprentices for life". By the middle of the 17th century, slavery had hardened as a racial caste, with the slaves and their offspring being the property of their owners, children born to slave mothers were slaves; as property, the people were considered merchandise or units of labour, were sold at markets with other goods and services. The major Atlantic slave trading nations, ordered by trade volume, were: the Portuguese, the British, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch Empires. Several had established outposts on the African coast where they purchased slaves from local African leaders.
These slaves were managed by a factor, established on or near the coast to expedite the shipping of slaves to the New World. Slaves were kept in a factory while awaiting shipment. Current estimates are that about 12 to 12.8 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic over a span of 400 years, although the number purchased by the traders was higher, as the passage had a high death rate. Near the beginning of the 19th century, various governments acted to ban the trade, although illegal smuggling still occurred. In the early 21st century, several governments issued apologies for the transatlantic slave trade; the Atlantic slave trade developed after trade contacts were established between the "Old World" and the "New World". For centuries, tidal currents had made ocean travel difficult and risky for the ships that were available, as such there had been little, if any, maritime contact between the peoples living in these continents. In the 15th century, new European developments in seafaring technologies resulted in ships being better equipped to deal with the tidal currents, could begin traversing the Atlantic Ocean.
Between 1600 and 1800 300,000 sailors engaged in the slave trade visited West Africa. In doing so, they came into contact with societies living along the west African coast and in the Americas which they had never encountered. Historian Pierre Chaunu termed the consequences of European navigation "disenclavement", with it marking an end of isolation for some societies and an increase in inter-societal contact for most others. Historian John Thornton noted, "A number of technical and geographical factors combined to make Europeans the most people to explore the Atlantic and develop its commerce", he identified these as being the drive to find new and profitable commercial opportunities outside Europe as well as the desire to create an alternative trade network to that controlled by the Muslim Empire of the Middle East, viewed as a commercial and religious threat to European Christendom. In particular, European traders wanted to trade for gold, which could be found in western Africa, to find a maritime route to "the Indies", where they could trade for luxury goods such as spices without having to obtain these items from Middle Eastern Islamic traders.
Although many of the initial Atlantic naval explorations were led by Iberians, members of many European nationalities were involved, including sailors from Portugal, the Italian kingdoms, England and the Netherlands. This diversity led Thornton to describe the initial "exploration of the Atlantic" as "a international exercise if many of the dramatic discoveries were made under the sponsorship of the Iberian monarchs"; that leadership gave rise to the myth that "the Iberians were the sole leaders of the exploration". Slavery was prevalent in many parts of Africa for many centuries before the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade. There is evidence that enslaved people from some parts of Africa were exported to states in Africa and Asia prior to the European colonization of the Americas; the Atlantic slave trade was not the only slave trade from Africa, although it was the largest in volume and intensity. As Elikia M'bokolo wrote in Le Monde diplomatique: The African continent was bled of its human resources via all possible routes.
Across the Sahara, through the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean ports and across the Atlantic. At least ten centuries of slavery for the benefit of the Muslim countries... Fou
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