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I'm sorry. You said they didn't know what was going to happen to the slaves they sold.
What did you mean by that?
I'm sure you haven't. It would be quite the claim, but it's not one I made.
I said that they sent their kids to be educated abroad.
Education may have been sought in Europe, but it was often the slave routes that were traveled to get there and the slave ships that were used.
To be honest, it seems that one has to have a pretty low opinion of Africans in order to make the case that "oh, they just didn't know."
I didn't say you said benign. I said "benign by comparison"
The differences you described would make the African practice of slavery benign by comparison to the barbarity that went on in the States. But you describe differences in the way that some African cultures treated their slaves.
You said that their kids weren't born into slavery, or that there were legitimate paths out of slavery or that people were only enslaved because they lost a battle or to pay off a debt, and while that's all true to a certain extent, it seems its being discussed as though some umbrella set of conditions could be said to be true of slavery in Africa as a whole, which is obvious nonsense.
For this to gel with the idea that "slavery was practised differently in the States and so African leaders didn't know how slaves were treated" you'd almost have to make the assumption that the African states who treated their slaves the most humanely were also the African states who most readily sold them to foreign powers.
Yes, sometimes slaves were soldiers of the enemy that were taken in battle, but sometimes the battles were fought for the express purpose of taking slaves.
Sure, not all slaves in Africa were born into slavery, but in some African cultures, slavery was indeed hereditary.
The descendants of the Ashanti have used this talking point ("but kids their children were born free") in their defense of their historical practice of slavery, but they rarely mention that slaves were often sacrificed as a part of their masters' funeral ceremonies because, of course, slaves were expected to follow their masters into the afterlife.
Hard to work your way out of slavery, when you're expected to die as a part of the position.
The Kingdom of Dahomey is another example of a culture that saw the sacrifice of slaves as acceptable - to the tune of hundreds of slaves sacrificed as a part of an annual ceremony.
Benin too, was pretty grim in their steadfast attachment to the practices of slavery and human sacrifice that it was destroyed by the British in its misguided attempt to preserve the traditions.
Slavery in Africa could be just as brutal (if not more so) as the institution in America. No doubt, it could also be a lot less so and there was resistance to it - the Mossi Empire, for example (well, for a while at least - they did eventually join the Atlantic slave trade)
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