Chapter three gives the reader background information to why the slaves involved in the slave trade came from where they did. This chapter was very interesting to me, because it explained the underlying causes of the trade and why it unfolded the way it did. However, the chapter is extremely disheartening as well. Redicker mentions that enslavement began in the interior of Africa, and most people who ended up on slave shops were enslaved by force, in capture or through judicial punishments as a sentence of crime committed. I find this very ironic due to the fact that slavery was later seen as crime. Redicker goes on to say that slavery was an ancient and widely accepted institution throughout larger societies of Africa. These slaves were traded in highly commercial markets because slave-ship captains wanted to deal with ruling groups and strong leaders, people who could command labor resources and deliver the “goods” and partly because wealth and powerful technologies accrued to these people during the course of trade. This explanation, in my opinion, is helpful in understanding the slave trade and why captains chose to trade with certain parts of Africa over others. The last bits of the chapter are focused on different regions of Africa and their culture and geography and how that affected the slaves within the trade. It also talks about the spread of culture, for example the spread of Islam, as a result of the trade. The very last thing Redicker talks about in chapter three is how Africans and African-Americans had come to express the “wrenching” departure of slaves through the symbol of the “door of no return”. Captives would have no choice but to live in struggle, a never-ending fight to survive.
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