The Kingdom of Dahomey, which captured everyone onboard the Clotilda, was focused almost solely on catching fellow Africans to sell, and the entire economy was based on the sale of people from its port city, Ouidah. And by the time of the Clotilda’s voyage, certain African kingdoms had turned the capture of fellow Africans into an industrialized enterprise, capturing tens of thousands of people per year. That happened in the earliest incarnation of African slavery, with people from Europe catching people from North Africa in the 1500s, but for most of the 400 years people were being sold, they were being captured by fellow Africans and sold to people from America and Europe. I went to elementary school in the south, and I remember being taught that white people went to Africa and caught people in nets and stole them. In part, that’s because it was readily available to people here, including the writers and historians who recorded what happened during enslavement and the aftermath of the Civil War. ![]() In America, our focus has understandably been what went on in this country. ![]() Even beyond the Clotilda, that part of the history of enslavement is little known to most folks.
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