Theme:  The Labour movement, Strikes and, Poverty.

Lesson 10: Christianity and slavery.
    A third source of the antislavery impulse was the evangelical faith in instantaneous conversion and demonstrative sanctification.   One must hasten to add that many ,Methodists, Anglican Evangelicals, and American revivalists subscribed to the traditional Christian justifications for human bondage.  Leading Anglican Evangelicals, like Bishop Beily Porteus, came to see the African  slave trade as an unmitigated sin but recoiled from condemning any form of servitude so clearly sanctioned by Scripture.   Yet the evangelical movement, traditional in overall theology and world view, emphasized man’s burden of personal responsibility, dramatized the dangers of moral complacency, and magnified the rewards for an authentic change of heart.   And by 1774 John Wesley had not only made it clear that the sins of the world would soon be judged, but every slaveholder, slave merchant, and investor in slave property was deeply stained with blood and guilt.  John Newton, who was a sailor had seen the full horrors of slave ships and West I Indian plantations, could testify that “inattention and interest” had so blinded him to sin that he had never doubted the legitimacy of Negro slavery even after his religious conversion.  Newton’s decision to denounce slavery as a crime and to confess his former depravity became a model, for his pious admirers, of authentic sanctification.
 

 

Lesson 9: Racism and Thomas Carlyle

 

Lesson 8: Racism 

Buenos Aires, neighborhoods like Monserrat and San Telmo housed many black slaves, some of whom
 were engaged in craft-making for their masters. Indeed, blacks accounted for an estimated one-third of the
 city’s population, according to surveys taken in the early  1800s.
Slavery was officially abolished in 1813, but the practice remained in place until about 1853. Ironically, at 
about this time, the black population of Argentina began to plunge.
Historians generally attribute two major factors to this sudden “mass disappearance” of black Africans from
 the country – the deadly war against Paraguay from 1865-1870 (in which thousands of blacks fought on the
 frontlines for the Argentine military) as well as various other wars; and the onset of yellow fever in Buenos
 Aires in 1871.

 

Lesson 7: Analyze this extract from Eric Williams Capitalism and slavery.
It was not the climate which was against the experiment.  Slavery had created the pernicious tradition that manual labor was the badge of the slave and the sphere of influence of the Negro.   The first thought of the Negro slave after emancipation was to desert the plantation, where he could, and set up for himself where land was available.  White plantation workers could hardly have existed in a society side by side with Negro peasants.  The whites would have prospered if small farms had been encouraged.  But the abolition of slavery did not mean the destruction of the sugar plantation.  The emancipation of the Negro and the inadequacy of the white worker put the sugar planter back to where he had been in the seventeenth century.   He still needed labor.  Then he had moved from Indian to white Negro..   Now, deprived of his Negro, he turned back  to white and then to Indian, this time the Indian from the East.   India replaced Africa;  between 1833 and 1917, Trinidad imported 145,000 East Indians* and British Guiana 238,000.   The pattern was the same for the other Caribbean  colonies.  Between 1854 and 1883 39,0000 Indians were introduced into Guadeloupe; between 1853 and 1924, over 22,000 laborers from the Dutch East Indies and 34,0000 from British India were carried to Dutch Guiana.   Cuba, faced with a shortage of Negro slaves, adopted the interesting experiment of using Negro slaves side with indentured Chinese coolies, and after emancipation turned to the teeming thousands of Haiti and the British West Indies.  Between 1913 and 1924 Cuba imported 217, 000 laborers from Haiti, Jamaica and Puerto Rico.   

 

Lesson 6:  Analyze the cartoons on Amerindian and African slaves

 

Lesson 5, Timbuktu

Tom Dalgetty
Civilisations were born from the belly of the African continent.  In East Africa, near the source of the River Nile, the first supper and first prayer took place.  Religious leaders of all faiths and famous natural scientists of the world point to East Africa as the place where human civilisations and cultures emerged. Historians have written of the following ancient African civilisations: the Nile valley civilisations, Ancient Carthage, the pyramids of Giza, Meroe and the Nubians, Great Zimbabwe and the Zambezi River that ‘smokes’, Benin bronzes of the Edo Empire, Ifa worship of the Yoruba, Sahara trade routes, Timbuktu manuscripts, Zulu warrior Shaka and Zululand and Ethiopia or Abyssinia - the land of our fathers.  
 

Lesson 4, Arab enslavement of Africans

The Number of People Enslaved
The number of people enslaved by Muslims has been a hotly debated topic, especially when the millions of Africans forced from their homelands are considered.
Some historians estimate that between A.D. 650 and 1900, 10 to 20 million people were enslaved by Arab slave traders. Others believe over 20 million enslaved Africans alone had been delivered through the trans-Sahara route alone to the Islamic world.
Dr. John Alembellah Azumah in his 2001 book, The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa estimates that over 80 million Black people more died en route.
 

 

 

Lesson 3, Africa and the slave trade

 From the 15th to the 19th centuries, 30,000,000 Africans were displaced.  They were forced  to migrate to the Western hemisphere.  This form of human trafficking caused untold suffering and misery particularly to the Africans of West and Central African.  The belief that it was a blessing to take the slaves to the New World was unfounded.  The slaves had shown resistance to their conquerors from the very beginning.  Consistent opposition to the slave trade was rare because of its profitability.

 

Lesson 2.  Diploma in African studies: Lesson 2, Voyages of Christopher Columbus.1.    Christopher Columbus arrived in the West Indies  on 12 November, 1492.  He landed at San Salvador.  This was the first of 4 voyages to the West Indies.1492- The Last day of Indian Independence?By Mary Noel Menezes, RSM

 

 

Lesson 1.   Methodology
1.    Historical methodology.   In writing historical essays it is necessary to be impersonal.   Hence use, the third person.  Instead of the personal pronouns, I, and we, write such words and phrases as, ‘one’, ‘it is stated’, ‘the sources concur that’ etc.
2.    Cite your sources.   These can be foot notes, end notes and, the bibliography.
3.    Foot notes are written at the bottom of each page of the historical essay.   Examples of foot notes are: 

4.    End notes are place at the end of the essay.
5.    The Bibliography is the list of sources consulted or used in the compilation of the essay.  It is written in alphabetical order at the end of the essay.  Example of a bibliography is::