AFRICANS MUST NOT ALLOW  THEMSELVES TO BE BOUGHT AND SOLD AS SLAVES

We have been writing on enslavement of dark-skinned Africans by the Arabs. Check out our Feature  Article of December 16, 2013, entitled “Aren’t Racist Muslims Enslaving Uneducated Africans?” Read more at  jamesagazies.blogspot.com.

The CNN reports this month that slave trade is alive and well in Libya. No one knows how long the  selling of Nigerian and other African slaves  has been going on. I told a friend in Abuja and he says: “is not only Nigeria but also Ghana.” The world knows of the nefarious trade in human beings but keeps silent because “it is a problem of black folks, and not whites.”

We say to Africans to please remain. One, remain at home and pressure your government to change  bad policy, and create conditions that enable employment to take roots, including roads, electricity, and infrastructural  renovation. Two, remain in your country to make things happen. Three, remain in schools and acquire needed training in the science, engineering, mathematics, and technology fields where jobs are being advertised.

 If bad comes to worse, go to other friendly ECOWAS  African countries rather than journeying to the unfamiliar terrain in Europe. Remain where you are. Be  law-abiding and respectful of other people. Resist the get-rich-quick-so-soon stupidity that makes Africans (particularly Nigerians ) the pests they are. Nigerians are not the only group going through hard time. 

 This writer is suspecting that darker-skinned Africans had been forced into slavery for centuries, starting with the Arab slavery where Africans served as indentured servants, gaining momentum during the Atlantic Slave trade where Africans were sold as chattel, and continuing till this day.

Sale of black slaves didn’t just exist during the reign of Gadhafi and his oil fields. Sale of black African slaves has been ongoing, and persists beyond the fall of Gadhafi. It is reported that black Africans have been bought and sold in Timbuktu, Saudi Arabia and in many corners of the Arab world .

It is such a shame that African nations are so poor that their citizens have the urge to become slaves in Europe in order to make a living under the most inhumane conditions. Many Africans die of hydration while trekking across the inhospitable Sahara desert. Some die of drowning at sea when their rickety, overloaded boats capsize or run aground. Those who make it through the perilous journey end up being auctioned off at slave markets.

The purpose of this essay is first to call attention to the plight of black Africans who suffer rape, brutality and painful death while seeking to escape poverty in their countries. All right thinking people the world over should decry exploitation of Africans.

We deplore the conditions responsible for the deaths of our people. As the Civil Rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere.”  Additionally, we should demand that  African nations and human right organizations take steps to end the exploitation of Africans.  

African leaders are urged to resign their positions or be forced to go as President Mugabe was if they cannot boost their economy in such a way as to guarantee their citizens some form of minimum wage employment that would prevent loss of lives of citizens who leave their homes in search of greener pastures

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We encourage young Africans to mount pressure of their governments until  more Mugabes resign or be put under house arrest. Young people shall use persuasion to demand that their leaders create enabling conditions for employment to take roots. Enabling conditions include building roads, providing electricity, renovating infrastructures. It is advisable to remain in the country to make things happen; to remain in schools and acquire needed training in the science, engineering, mathematics, and technology fields where jobs are being advertised. 

A combination of greed and poverty has led Africans to seek passage to Europe usually at great risks that include shipwrecks and drowning at sea; rapes and brutality at the hands of cruel traffickers and pirates who pluck Africans out of dangerous waters only to sell them. It is reported that over 3, 000 Africans drown each month in the Mediterranean Sea . The situation leaves them particularly vulnerable to human trafficking, sexual violence, predatory cold-heartedness, torture, slavery,  and in some instances, death.

Africans who arrive in Libya, numbering over 1,000,000, are stranded, unable to pay the cost of their passage, and having  no money to get back home. An African caught in the Libyan slave market has the option to pay up or be sold into slavery. Men sell for $400 usually to farmers or miners, while women go to men seeking sex slaves or prostitutes to work the streets.

Slavery of Africans begins as poverty drives masses of Nigerians and Ghanaians  to leave home in search of the proverbial golden fleece. These Young men and women leave home with the blessing of families who believe children should take care of ageing parents. The parents are usually the poor, illiterate, and uneducated who occupy the squalid tenements of Lagos and many African cities.

When one is unlettered, one is easily persuaded to believe pie-in-the-sky sermonizing about how money can be gotten in Europe. 

Since the Naira and most African currencies have fallen miserably to the point the ordinary citizens cannot buy their staple food items, so what can they do? When the Africans see the Dollars, Pounds, Franks, and Yuans waxing strong, the enticement  by trafficking agents and entrapment  by exploiters  become real. Exploiters  promise to take them  to the sources of ego oyibo (the white man’s money).

The agents are usually human traffickers who charge exorbitant fees upfront and give no guarantee they would deliver. After collecting the fees, the traffickers disappear or find someone to lead the young people to lead the victims to untimely death, trek the Sahara Desert where they perish from dehydration  under the blazing, sizzling, suffocating Equatorial sun.

 Those who survive dehydration pay extra money to ride the boat in the Mediterranean Sea where they go down in watery graves. It is murder with no clear motives and no one to fight for the dead. It is needless to say that the boats are not maintained and usually parked with more human beings that the vessel can safely hold.

When these young people arrive in what they think is the Promised Land, they are disoriented, ready to give up, hungry, penniless, and unable to get back home. The rest is history. They are shipped to Spain as slaves or prostitutes.

Dr. James C. Agazie; jamesagazie@gmail.com; jamesagazies.blogspot.com

Wed, 6 December, 2017 
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