Culpability of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade by Bangura Abdul Karim;

Author:Bangura, Abdul Karim;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Hamilton Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

As already noted severally, Phillis Wheatley is one of the few Africans whose voices were actually heard during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade period.

Another way literature was utilized during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade era was to articulate the dynamics of the master-enslaved African relationship. The region of the United States to which an enslaved African was brought dictated how s/he would be treated. For example, Phillis Wheatley was transported to Boston. She was one of the very few whose masters believed that she would be talented and taught her how to read and write. They inspired her to write poetry and other literary pieces. The overwhelming majority of enslaved Africans, however, were not as fortunate. Some of the enslaved Africans from the 1800s described the horrendous abuse, sexual assault and other horrible living conditions they experienced. In its Making of African American Identity, the National Humanities Center Toolbox Library describes this quandary as follows:

The first group presents statements from eleven formerly enslaved black men and women whose narratives were published between 1825 and 1868. Harriet Jacobs came to realize that her status as property defined her role in the master-slave relationship: no matter how humane a master might be, he or she could sell a slave with little or no discomfort. Frederick Douglass recalls becoming aware as a child of his status as a slave—”Why am I a slave? Why are some people slaves, and others masters?”—and struggling to reconcile slavery with the belief in a benevolent God. And James Curry asserts in his narrative that, no matter how ignorant masters kept their slaves, it was “impossible to beat into them they were made to be slaves” (National Humanities Center Toolbox Library, 2007).

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