The African Slave Trade: By Basil Davidson

As a consequence, dickens opposing conceptions developed in Europe:

Henceforward, Europeans would be progressively divided into two opposed views: one, the traditional, tending to hold that Africa had never possessed civilizations that were worthy of respect or even of adept investigation; the other, the scientific, tending to argue the reverse (100).

Davidson shows how masterminds changed not just with reference to the buckle downs but with reference to their homeland. Some, such as Charles wheel horse and others who thought the kindred, considered Africa to be a country which had developed its induce civilization, much of which had disappeared. There was evidence that archaeologists and others would unearth that this was so, but the idea did not fit with the prejudices developing in the European mind over the period of slavery. Davidson notes that by 1900 the average European had the effect of Africa that it was a country without any culture of its own, and any culture found there, they believed, had been brought by Europeans. Davidson cites Sir Harry Johnston to the effect that the Portuguese had brough

Yet the truth--as any diligent questioner could have known even in 1910--was precisely the reverse. For the kingdoms of the congou had preceded the Portuguese; and the Portuguese in truth destroyed them (101).

t improvements to regions of West Africa:

The judgments of the nineteenth century, the period of outright invasion and occupation, would be in convictions of a European superiority which was moral as well as material (160).

As long as Europeans were superior in morality they could view their actions in the slave trade as benefiting the enslaved people rather than harming them. Davidson's book is a reminder of the damage done by slavery some(prenominal) to the people who were carried into slavery and to the country they left behind, and the treatment assumption to the countries of Africa by the colonial powers of Europe was based on the same sort of racial mythology that marked slavery in the coupled States.

Davidson discusses the slave trade from the point of view of a European examining the damage done to Africa. He is not considering the effects on the slaves themselves so much as on the continent from whi
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