The Spook Still By The Door

Ye: Crazy or Creative?

"To make myself clear. Of course I know that slaves did not get shackled and put on a boat by free will. My point is for us to have stayed in that position even though the numbers were on our side means that we were mentally enslaved. The reason why I brought up the 400 years point is because we can't be mentally imprisoned for another 400 years. We need free thought now. Even the statement was an example of free thought. It was just an idea. Once again I am being attacked for presenting new ideas."

- Ye

According to PBS.org Section Regarding "The Slave Trade":

"Forty years after that first human cargo traveled to Portugal, Portuguese sailors gained permission from a local African leader to build a trading outpost and storehouse on Africa's Guinea coast. It was near a region that had been mined for gold for many years and was called Elmina, which means "the mine" in Portuguese. Although originally built for trade in gold and ivory and other resources, Elmina was the first of many trading posts built by Europeans along Africa's western coast that would also come to export slaves. The well-armed fort provided a secure harbor for Portuguese (and later Dutch and English) ships. Africans were either captured in warring raids or kidnapped and taken to the port by African slave traders. There they were exchanged for iron, guns, gunpowder, mirrors, knives, cloth, and beads brought by boat from Europe."

According to History.com:

"The insurrection began in 869 A.D. when Zanj slaves-an Arabic term used to describe East Africans-joined with an Arab revolutionary named Ali bin Muhammad and rose up against the Abbasid Caliphate. What began as a humble revolt slowly grew into a full-scale revolution that lasted 15 years." (The Zanj Rebellion, 869 AD)

"Gaspar Yanga was an African slave who spent four decades establishing a free settlement in Mexico. Yanga's odyssey began in 1570 when he staged a revolt at a sugarcane plantation near Veracruz. After fleeing into the forest, Yanga and a small group of former slaves established their own colony, or palanque, which they called San Lorenzo de los Negros. They would spend the next 40 years hiding in this outlaw community, surviving mostly through farming and occasional raids on Spanish supply convoys. Colonial authorities succeeded in destroying San Lorenzo de los Negros in 1609, but they were unable to capture Yanga's followers and eventually settled for a peace treaty with the former slaves. Now in his old age, Yanga negotiated the right to build his own free colony as long as it paid taxes to the Spanish crown. This municipality-the first official settlement of freed Africans in the Americas-was finally established in 1630 and still exists today under the name "Yanga."(Gaspar Yanga's Rebellion, 1570)

"One of the earliest slave revolts in North America saw a group of African slaves effectively conquer the Danish-owned island of St. John. At the time, most of St. John's slaves were part of the Akan, an African people from modern-day Ghana. Plagued by widespread illness, droughts and harsh slave codes, in November 1733 a group of high-ranking Akans began to plot against their Danish masters. The rebellion began when a group of slaves used smuggled weapons to kill several Danish soldiers inside a fort at a plantation called Coral Bay."(St. John Insurrection, 1733)

"The most successful slave rebellion in history, the Haitian Revolution began as a slave revolt and ended with the founding of an independent state. The main insurrection started in 1791 in the valuable French colony of Saint-Domingue. Inspired in part by the egalitarian philosophy of the French Revolution, black slaves launched an organized rebellion, killing thousands of whites and burning sugar plantations en route to gaining control of the northern regions of Saint-Domingue." (The Haitian Revolution, 1791)