Summary Of Death's Gwineter Lay His Cold Icy Hands On Me

The three items I read from "Death's Gwineter Lay His Cold Icy Hands on Me": Enslavement, focused on the experiences of Africans that were enslaved as well as the experience of a European slave trader. From the European slavers perspective, he see’s the slave trade as a favor to the Africans and that it is actually better for them than being in their own countries. Another item was about Ayuba Suleiman Dialloa a well-educated merchant from west Africa and his unfortunate experiences with the slave trade. He was kidnapped and put into slavery two times and from the reading its revealed that it didn’t matter what social class or station in society that you had, everyone in Africa could be sold as a slave. However, it is also stated that when Ayuba’s master and others discovered that he wasn’t a common slave they treated him differently and even helped him gain his freedom.
I never thought about how communities in Africa must have been changed by the slave trade itself because when discussing slavery, the parts focused on are usually the passage from Africa to wherever the slaves are going and the life that slaves had in those places. It didn’t surprise me that the European slave trader saw the slave trade as helping Africans and putting them into a better situation, however the idea that some slaves were sold into slavery by their own countrymen was surprising. When thinking about slavery I generally assume that slaves were stolen from their homes and forced into slavery by white European slavers, not by their own