Black Holocaust
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“Black Holocaust for Beginners ÐDeath Ships” By Anderson S.
Black Holocaust for Beginners “Death Ships”, is a realistic, and trapping article about the slave trade. Instead of the former stories on slavery and giving it a general description telling reader how slavery is bad and slavery is immoral, this article goes in and describes what it was like in a slave ship. It made the reader feel the pain of the middle passage in every page.
There are three things in the article that is very compelling to me as a reader, the living conditions of the slaves in the ships, the rape the women faced, and the punishment styles the rebellious slaves had to endure. What they endured was almost like hell on earth, it was almost genocide, but without the intention of genocide.
The living conditions were horrible, according to the article Black Holocaust for Beginngers “Death Ships”, “You see the vomit above you and alongside you and you come close to passing out. You can barely breathe. You are trapped. You cant move a leg or arm without increasing someone elses misery. The chains rattle as we try to shift out bodies to get away from the running yellow brown stream and odor from next to us, from above us. The flies and mosquitoes begin to swarm around you. But you cant swipe at them without yanking your chained brethren or sisteren.” Such condition sound like how a pig lives, only the slaves did not want to live like that. The writer wrote it as if the reader was in it, I thought I was a slave.
The rape of the female slaves, was described by the writer as an almost normal occurrence in the ship as the article Black Holocaust For Beginners “Death Ships” states “Ðwe hear African screams and white mens laughter. To the women, to the girl, we KNOW. Many of us have been in the Enemys presence now for four to six months and we know that rape is always a grab awayД Later in the article it put the reader in as the rape victim who, get raped by the first mate. The rape described in the article was more violent than the rape we now know.
What is even worse is two incidents of punishment that was given two slaves. One woman one man, both were “agitators”, and were punished to the extent, which was death. But their death was different from a regular death punishment