Much more likely, the vast majority of them were not. And most likely very few of them were intimate with the details of European chattel slavery, which was very different from the slavery they practiced and were familiar with.
Ancestors are not homogeneous and one group. That kind of thinking is exactly the kind of thinking that produces bigotry.
You're a bullshit artist.
...
On the march, when, as happened frequently,
the crack of the whip or the sting of the lash proved a stimulant insufficient to enable some poor exhausted slave to keep up with the caravan, according to Park "the general cry of the
coffle [caravan] was '
kang-tegi' (cut her throat)"; and there ended the troubles of the poor over-driven creature.
Cruelly ill-used, insufficiently fed, marching during endless burning days under scorching sun on meagre supply of water,
is it to be wondered at that men and women in numbers sank exhausted, far beyond the power of whips to rouse, and so perished?
But if it were dreadful for adults, what of the children? Major Gray mentions that of one detachment of slaves which he met, "the women and children (all nearly naked and carrying heavy loads) were
tied together by the neck, and hurried along over a rough [190] stony path that cut their feet in a dreadful manner. There were a great number of children, who from their tender years were unable to walk, and were carried, some on the prisoners' backs, and others on horseback behind the captors, who, to prevent their falling off,
tied them to the back part of the saddle with a rope made from the bark of the baobull, which was so hard and rough that it
cut the back and sides of the poor little innocent babes, so as to draw the blood. This, however, was only a secondary state of the sufferings endured by those children, when compared to the dreadfully blistered and chafed state of their seats, from constant jolting on the bare back of a horse, seldom going slower than a trot, or smart amble, and not unfrequently driven at full speed for a few yards, and pulling up short."
Mr. Lyon, another explorer, tells us that "
Children are thrown with the baggage on the camels if unable to walk, but if five or six years of age, the poor little creatures are obliged to trot on all day, even should no stop be made for fourteen or fifteen hours, as I have sometimes witnessed." "The daily allowance of food," continues Mr. Lyon, "is a quart of dates in the morning, and half a pint of flour made into
bazeen, at night.
Some masters never allow their slaves to drink after a meal, except at a watering place . . . None of the owners ever moved without their whips, which were in constant use. Drinking too much water, bringing too little wood, or falling asleep before the cooking was finished, were considered nearly capital crimes; and it was in vain for these poor creatures to plead the excuse of being [191] tired,—nothing could avert the application of the whip . . . No slave dares to be ill or unable to walk; but when the poor sufferer dies, the master suspects there must have been something wrong inside, and regrets not having liberally applied the usual remedy of
burning the belly with a red hot iron."
For cold-blooded atrocity it must be hard to match this
King of Badagry. But another instance is given where the
King of Loango having no market for a large number of slaves taken by him in a raid, (and who had been forced by their captors to carry to the coast the store of ivory which till now had [193] been their own), "had them taken to the side of a hill a little beyond the town, and
coolly knocked on the head." In savage cruelty this can only be equalled by the methods of a
King of Ashantee as revealed by him to a Mr. Dupuis, who about the year 1820 was British Consul at Kumasi. "My fetishe made me strong, like my ancestors," said the King to Mr. Dupuis, "and I killed Dinkera, and took his gold, and brought more than twenty thousand slaves to Kumasi. Some of these people being bad men, I washed my stool in their blood for the fetishe. But then some were good people, and these I sold or gave to my captains; many, moreover, died, because this country does not grow too much corn, like Sarem, and what can I do?
Unless I kill or sell them, they will grow strong and kill my people. Now you must tell my master" (the King of England) "that these slaves can work for him, and if he wants ten thousand he can have them." The difference between "good people" and "bad people" one may conclude was with this monarch not so much a question of moral worth as of intrinsic value.