How and when did Europeans find African Americans (Blacks) and started using them as slaves?
Well gee how far is Africa from Europe? Seriously whip out a map and you will find that Africa is due South of Europe. Europeans have known there were Africans since the dawn of time! Heck, William Shakespear even wrote a play called Othello about a ‘dusky hued’ Moor. But to set the record straight the first to traffic in black African Slaves in a big way were the Arabs who set aside their differences with Catholic Spain and gladly sold the Spaniards slaves in a variety of hues. Gonna toss link and snippets at you… http://www.faithfreedom.org/Articles/SSt… “””Slavery in the Arab World Murray Gordon New Amsterdam Books, New York, NY 1989 In his fact-filled work on the history of the Muslim Arab slave trade in Africa, Murray Gordon notes that this trade pre-dated the European Christian African slave trade by a thousand years and continued for more than a century after the Europeans had abolis
It started, really, with the Portuguese explorers. Every hear of Prince Henry the Navigator? They were the first to explore most of the West African coast and round the southern tip of Africa. On the morning of 8 August 1444, six Portuguese ships landed in Lagos, on the Algarve, in Portugal, and unloaded their cargo: 235 slaves from Africa. That was the beginning of Europe’s entry into the African slave trade. …Prince Henry watched from atop his horse, and he personally received 46 of those slaves. The discovery of the Americas, of course, only came later. And it just helped the slave trade even more. Pretty soon, all of Europe was in the business, and they dominated the slave trade from then on… EDIT: Of course I’m talking about the slave trade in early modern Europe (roughly 1500 – 1800) and not in antiquity, but that’s what your question is about — not slavery in the classical Greek and Roman world, but in the Americas. The early modern African slave trade differed from slavery
Slave trade was in full swing before 1AD, so that would eliminate America as the source of the trade. As far as Africans to the America’s I believe the first area was in the Caribbeans that had the African slaves in use. These were the captives that ‘brother Africans’ sold to the Europeans (or traded for goods). So if you’re trying to ‘pin’ the situation on a specific race or people for this ‘problem’…kind of hard to do since almost everyone was a party to it, North-Central-South Americans, Europeans, Asians and Africans. As far as WHEN it happened in the Americas, well it could not have occurred before 1492….Even though black slavery had been a fact of life for thousands of years Before this date.
Europeans were familiar with African countries and slaves from Africa from the earliest known times, thanks to tarde between these areas for goods including salt, gold, cloth, skins and hides, education (their were great schools in Egypt and Alexandria in the early days of civilisation), and yes ~ slaves. As an example, armies from ancient Greece captured and destroyed the city of Troy in northern Africa, enslaved the women and children and took them back to Greece. One common misconception modern people have is that slaves have always been from africa, but in the early days of European civilisation, slaves were from whichever population was unlucky enough to lose a war, or have more aggressive neighbours. By the time of the Roman Empire, slaves were transported from countries around the known world (including England, France and Africa) to work in Rome. At the time of the late middle ages, African faces were not uncommon in northern Europe, where the ancestors of the first Europeans t
