Tiffany Ruby Patterson – Lecture 3 - The Human Cost of Slavery

This is just a little part of what I heard today:

“Capture. Capture. They (the slaves) didn’t walk to the slave ship. They were captured. They were captured by other African folks. […] Africans did participate in the capture of slaves.”

“Imagine (yourself as a woman) being captured from your village, in the middle of night, put in chains, collars made with the purpose of chaining people to each other […] taken to a fort, a military fort that then was transformed into a slave fort/post […] you have your clothes taken off […] imagine yourself as a woman, with your breast, your genitalia, exposed to all people, to your siblings, to your family members […] placed to sit on the floor for months, without any care about your period times […] you haven’t seen the ocean, you were scared of the ocean, and you were placed on a ship to cross the ocean, when ships weren’t design to carry human beings […] there were no latrines, and people used to defecate on another […] many of them were abused, and arrived in the New World pregnant, which doubled their price.”

Suggested reading: Orlando Patterson's work (Amazon.com Search). Here, his interview in the NYTimes. An audio interview extract here and his opinion about Obama's victory in Democracy Journal here.

Complete audio of the lecture here.