The difference, of course, in the new Middle Passage from the old version is the voluntary nature in the movement of personnel, talent, capital, ideas, and culture. Other panellists included Gervase Warner, president and CEO of the Massey group from Trinidad Nardos Bekele-Thomas, CEO of the African Development Agency Donald Kaberuka chairman of the South Bridge Group and Ken Etete, CEO of the Century Group.Įach panellist, in his own way, reflected on the meaning of the Middle Passage and the role the African Union and the Afreximbank bank can play in the opening of a new chapter of the history of the Middle Passage. The panel discussion that focused on the Middle Passage theme was chaired by Godfrey Mutizwa, editor-in-chief for CNBC Africa. The recently concluded 30th annual meeting of the Afreximbank, hosted by the Government of Ghana, chose, for one of its themes, 'A New Middle Passage by Africans for Africans'. Notwithstanding the gory and demeaning details attached to the history of the Middle Passage, the term is being resurrected, dusted off, and rebranded by African and Caribbean political, thought, and business leaders. Not only did the African continent suffer the loss of millions of its best and brightest, but the Middle Passage set the stage for centuries of humiliation for the global black collective. Other enslaved Africans, out of sheer desperation to survive the journey, were forced to kill those nearest to them in an effort to gain what little comfort the extra space would afford them for the rest of the journey.īoth the Middle Passage and the system of chattel slavery constitute two of the most inglorious chapters in the history of people of African ancestry. Some enslaved Africans, like some of the besieged indigenous population of the Caribbean and the Americas, opted to take their own lives and the lives of those shackled to them by jumping into the ocean, maybe in the hope that their spirits would find their way back to the African continent. Bennett adds that the mortality rate was high enough to encourage sharks to follow slave ships across the Atlantic. Lack of ventilation, exercise, and sanitary facilities favoured the development of diseases and led to a high mortality rate among the enslaved Africans. Lerone Bennett, writing in Before the Mayflower, states that the human cargo was packed so tightly in the slave ships that each enslaved African had only coffin space for the journey, which could take up to 80 days. The journey, now known as the Middle Passage, was nothing less than an induction into the hell on Earth that ensued once the kidnapped and enslaved Africans were offloaded and sold. This ship, loaded with kidnapped Africans, was the first of many that would make the trip across the Atlantic from the shores of Africa. Historians generally believe that the first set of enslaved Africans to land in the world that was new to Europeans were transported by a Portuguese ship, the Sao Joao Bautista in 1619.
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