LEST WE FORGET: There is this almost hashed narrative that has been sold to many African Americans, and other persons of African origin that were forcefully removed from the continent.

It goes something like this: You see those Africans? It’s them that sold our forefathers into a life of untellable pain, suffering and servitude. And while the slave buyers needed collaborators to ply their trade, the bigger half of the story is largely untold.

505 years ago today (August 28th, 1518 – using our present day Gregorian calendar) the King of Spain, Charles I, issued a charter authorizing the buying and selling, and direct transportation of slaves from Africa to the Americas which was economically more viable. Charles’s decision fundamentally changed the nature and scale of this terrible human trafficking industry and marked the start of the transatlantic slave trade, one of history’s most tragic and revolting events. In the 350 years that followed, at least 11 million black Africans were, by sheer force of gunpowder, uprooted from the continent by marauding bands of slave traders and despatched into untold suffering.

The trade was a catastrophe for Africa. The Arab slave trade had already devastated the continent – but European demand for slave labour in their embryonic New World substantially worsened the situation. The European slave traders massively expanded demand and consequently triggered a whole series of terrible intra-African tribal wars to satisfy demand. At the height of this heinous trade, in the mid 19th century, the entire economic model of global commerce and the development industry was anchored on slave trade. The profits gained from chattel slavery helped to finance the Industrial Revolution and establish vast and formidable financial powerhouses, chief of which was the Bank of England.

In the 350 years that followed, at least 11 million black Africans were, by sheer force of gunpowder, uprooted from the continent by marauding bands of slave traders and despatched into untold suffering.

Another 2 million died enroute; their bodies were tossed overboard into the sea. This grim demographic represents the combined current population of The Central African Republic, The kingdom of Lesotho, Western Sahara and The Gambia.

But that was only half of the story. Starting with the Herero Massacre (the first genocide of the 20th century), tens of thousands of men, women and children were shot, starved, and tortured to death by German troops as they put down “rebellious” tribes in what is now Namibia. And tens of thousands of defenseless women and children were forced into the Kalahari desert, their wells poisoned and food supplies cut. Pandemonium cannot start to describe the sheer bewilderment and mayhem that was visited on the continent as our brothers and sisters were enduring strange journeys on high tempest-toast seas, and being dispossessed of their very names and identity.

But of all these atrocities meted out on those Africans who were left behind non compares to what I will chronicle next..

(I was going to bed but noticed the major news networks did not carry this story today. So I sat up and wrote. But I will go to bed now.)

To be continued.