Oi Chums,

I stand corrected. Please disregard the following message. Or read it and find out for yourself that Slavery did indeed continue in Nigeria until 1936.

Oi Chums,

I was just perusing my digital copy of the 6th world Almanac. I have come to accept some minor typos here and there in all Shadowrun titles but this particular instance made me sit up and say "WHAT?" (IMG:style_emoticons/default/eek.gif)

[b]6th World Almanac pg. 110 Kingdoms of Nigeria

During the 1800's the area was taken over by the British. Becoming an official part of the British Empire in 1901. It was during this time that the slave trade flourished in Nigeria, until it was abolished in 1936.

Uh...what? Slavery was finally and completely abolished throughout the British Empire by 1840.

I don't mind typos, but historical inacuracies like that are too much. How bout a little bit of a reveiw by the editors? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/read.gif) [/b]

This one's not an inaccuracy, actually. EDIT: Here's a little clearer link, sorry. Sorry, had multiple browser windows open as I was frantically trying to remember the name of the book, and then when I did remember it, I didn't realize I was linking to a book review, not the book itself.

The sad fact is the slave trade was never really abolished in parts of Africa. T6W Almanac is pretty spot on with the generally agreed-upon 1936, for Nigeria, though. World History's a depressing subject, if you let it be.

What he said.

Oi Chums,

So in 1936 the Brits were still buying and selling slaves?

Oi Chums,

I followed your link. Who was selling and who was buying?

Oi Chums,

My mistake. How can I remove my post?

Like all broad questions of history, the answer is "it's complicated".

And to clarify, it's also hard to pin down in this case. Post US civil war, a lot of the trade shifted to smaller markets.

Uh... Hate to break it to you, but it's correct. Nigeria did not become a British colony until the late 19th/early 20th century and, although it wasn't anything like the slave trade before, it wasn't officially outlawed until 1936 in Northern Nigeria. From the BBC "Story of Africa" (about half-way down):

Meanwhile in Africa slavery of the old traditional variety continued in small pockets through the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th century; it was not, for example, finally outlawed in northern Nigeria until 1936. Slavery has still not disappeared. Slavery exists today behind closed doors in many parts of the world including Britain, Africa and the Middle East.

The Slave Trade Act of 1807 made slave taking theoretically illegal throughout the British Empire, yes, but that doesn't mean it magically stopped. Much like Prohibition in America over a hundred years later, enforcing that law was something else entirely. Making slaving illegal simply increased the demand (to some), increased the profits (to some), and increased the danger involved in the trade itself. Initially it was a $100 fine for every slave found aboard a trader vessel -- which, pretty horrifically, meant trader captains throwing shackled slaves into the sea to reduce their fine, like folks might throw a baggy of pot out a car window today, before getting pulled over -- but around 1825 (I think) they actually included slavery under piracy laws, making it punishable by death. The Royal Navy kept itself pretty busy off Africa's coasts for a pretty long time.

Part of the problem of enforcement was that slaves were still held under the Slave Trade Act, they just weren't supposed to be getting any new ones. It wasn't until the mid 1830's (I want to say '34?) that Great Britain actually passed an Abolition Act. Somewhat ironically (and very "British" of them, given how traditional the apprenticeship/servitude was), this emancipation was just a transition to indentured servitude, not outright liberation; some Confederate leaders (decades later) would hypothesize about a similar "staggered emancipation" possibility (though they were, uh, "shouted down" at best by their peers). I think the official plan was for a three or four year servitude, then total freedom...legally.

Even so, after the 1830's slavery still existed in Great Britain, the same way back-woods stills still existed in the Appalachians during Prohibition in the U.S. I don't want to step on toes or get too political (rather than historical), here, but traditionally speaking Islam has accepted the institution of slavery, and Northern Nigeria is, even today, strongly Muslim, culturally. Just like the stereotypical Hatfields and McCoys clung to their moonshine despite what some big-city sheriff tried to tell them, slavery stuck around for a good, long, time -- and, like I said earlier, is in many ways still around today -- in much of Nigeria, especially the north.

It really wasn't until 1936 that slavery was legally abolished throughout Nigeria. The buyers might not have been British the entire time, and those that were weren't legitimate businessmen...but it was still happening.

EDIT TO ADD: And in case I'm coming off as racist, please, I certainly don't mean to be. I-75, running north-south through much of the continental United States, is a major slave trade route today. Slavery as an institution is dead and buried, but that doesn't mean it's not a thriving, horrific, illegal business. I'm not trying to pick on Africa, Nigeria, Muslims, or anyone else; or, at least, I'm not trying to do so by pointing fingers and claiming my own culture is innocent of any wrongdoing.

Oi Critias,

Thank you for giving me the whole story. I edited my original post. Both you and The 6WA are indeed correct.

Erm, sorry, by the wway. I didn't mean to get that long-winded. My undergrad academic advisor is something of an expert on Africa in World History, so I ended up picking up a little more about the subject than I ever wanted to.

Life was a lot simpler when I could think of Africa as that blighted rock, the mysterious and savage "Dark Continent" of Tarzan books, and just go about my military historian day, worrying about Western Civ. like everyone else. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Interestingly I saw some information that actually claimed that all the slaves that America bought we bought from Islamic groups in Africa. Also, the slave trade is alive and well throught the world, albeit with a new name - human trafficking. An estimated 40% of the worlds' human trafficking passes through the D/FW metroplex in Texas.

That aside, it is also altogether possible that the seeming difference may stem from the fact that Shadowrun Earth is not neccessarily Real-World Earth, and the fact that these dates worked out is just coincidence.

For real =/ When I was in grad school, I saw a couple studies done that strongly correlated levels of cynicism and general dislike of humanity with the years of education in Political Science and History.

I think the point when I became a misanthrope was when I was doing my undergrad thesis on human trafficking in SE Asia. Further study has not improved my opinion ><

Of course, on the bright side (I guess?) it all makes for excellent backstory for Shadowrun... my runners love going pink mohawk against traffickers.

I wouldn't go so far as to say all, but I'd say a lot. I can't say for sure, off the top of my head, which ones went to America and which went elsewhere, but I'm sure we can't blame slavery entirely on African Muslims.

The whole...thing. The Atlantic Slave Trade? It's mind-blowing. Lots of us watched Roots in high school, or something, and have spent our lives being told how horrible it was to any given African getting shipped across, sure. We know it sucked. We're told how miserable it was, and how cruel it was, and how Honest Abe flew down and saved the day, and all that.

What we don't hear about -- most of us -- is what it did to Africa. You can actually track the population shifts, the migration patterns, as the people of the world's second largest continent, over time, were pulled and concentrated on the coasts. It was like a weird vacuum, all along the edges of the continent, where slave traders were sucking everyone, then deporting them, and others stayed there (on the trade routes) to profit from it.

Technological advancements came (by way of gunpowder, mostly) from European powers, and was given to appropriately sympathetic African rulers as a means of legitimizing their rulership...traded, inevitably, for slaves. The rulers then used the gunpowder to stamp out dissent in their country, often by shipping away malcontents and rival groups, who they could trade for...more gunpowder weapons.

So the kings who were willing to "play ball" (and some of them had to convert to Christianity, too, which is why it's not fair to say all of them were Muslim) got more and more powerful, built larger kingdoms with technology their rivals didn't have...and, once they were big enough, started to drain the population of the inland areas through force of arms. The ones who wouldn't play ball got pacified, either by those who would or by the Europeans themselves. It's not fair -- to any group -- to try and pin the whole thing on colonialists or on Africans (Muslim or otherwise) or on the folks buying the slaves here in America or the Caribbean or whatever, because the simple truth is the system wouldn't have been in place without all three groups. You needed the supply and the demand to keep it going for as long as it was.

Still, it's creepy stuff, imagining that sort of population shift due to something like greed and slavery.

Creepier still when you read up on the numbers involved about how many folks are still being bought and sold, today.

To get us (mildly) back on topic in Shadowrun, though? The same thing should be going on there, in spades. Folks without SINs don't exist on paper, remember, so anyone brutal enough to want to can do just about anything they wish. The balkanization, SURGE, etc, that runs rampant throughout T6W means even more grudges, even more dehumanization of "others" going on, and even more likelihood of folks being willing to engage in slave trafficking. Toss in the wars and other chaos-causing events they're so fond of -- nothing provokes monstrous crime like destabilization -- and you've got a world ripe for this sort of thing.

Some of my most popular shadowrun games for my old/regular group were dealing with unscrupulous Triad folks rounding up slaves from the SINless (for Bunraku parlors, or just old fashioned low-tech sex slavery), and a few more dealt heavily with Tir refugees pouring into Seattle thanks to the chaos back home. Not every game is going to want to focus on stuff that gritty, mind...but the source material's there, for anyone that wants to let their PC's have the certain moral high ground for a few jobs, that's for sure!

Most scholars believe that the slave trade is also a major part of why Africa is so Balkanized today (and in turn, in Shadowrun); it turned tribe on tribe, and slavery went from being a byproduct of war, to the cause of war =/

Anyway, I'm going to hush now, hopefully this is coming across as the "historical background for Shadowrun" it's meant as.

I think it's fairly on-topic, myself, as long as we look for ways to actively use it in a game, and we're not casting insults around while we talk about the real-world history. I'm not a mod, though, so if Grinder comes in here and yells at us with purple text, I apologize in advance. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

The truth is, I can see much of the same stuff happening in as "modern" a time as Shadowrun. There will always be haves and have-nots -- even moreso in T6W! -- and the have-nots will be, if they're desperate enough, willing to do whatever the haves tell them to do. There's still going to be oil and other natural resources for the haves to bicker and squabble over in Africa, there's still going to be superior technology on the side of corporate "colonists," and there's still going to be locals who are willing to work for them, no matter how gritty or brutal the task.

Look at Nigeria, in fact (the very country that sparked the thread), right there in T6W Almanac. Outside interests are there for oil, while "over thirty ethnic groups, speaking over 200 languages," are all scattered throughout that little corner of the continent. It mentions some forming "partnerships" with the corporations, just like, historically, some local kingdoms affiliated themselves with the European colonists for a mutually beneficial (though not fairly so) business arrangement.

You could run whole campaigns out of Lagos, and not have enough bullets for everyone the PC's might end up crossing...and that's WITHOUT really picking a side!

Thats the kind of campaing that makes you wish 4:th edition had the bulk discount belted ammo from older editions for sale (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

On the bright side, in some places you can trade a sack of grain or a couple chickens for an AK in real life, so in game it should be just as easy (and that's not even counting just the tried and true "picking up this blood-spattered one that my former opponent doesn't need any more and graciously gave me as a gift!") method...so everyone knows what specialization to take in Automatics. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cyber.gif)

We mods are watching this thread closely, of course, but so far everything's cool. Discussing a topic like this is a fine line to walk, so please continue to be careful what and how you post.

There's also another form of "Slavery" that's still legal today, and probably in the Sixth World as well: "Indentured Service".

OK, so a family from Craplakistan wants to go to America because of "The American Dream" (Sorry folks, dream's over, America woke up and found out that she got rolled). They can't get refugee status through the woefully underfunded UCAS and CAS Embassies, so they contact Uncle Vicktor who spent every dime he had going over, and now has a "Garment Factory" in Seattle.

He pays their ticket to come over to the UCAS, endorses them as new citizens, and gives them a good job at under minimum wage to pay off their ticket and learn English (And Spanish, or French, or Japanese, or Chinese, or Hindi, or whatever) and acclimate to a new society.

No way at all that can be abused, can it?

This is how the Chinese Triads do a big chunk of their Human Trafficking.
They help people "come across' to the use, with huge debts. Then they have to work to pay them off. And you do the work they want you to do, or you die. So if you're old, or ugly, you work in sweat shops. If you're young and relatively pretty, you work in 'massage' parlors.

I'm sure that Latin Americans using Coyotes to come to America end up with similar issues.
They end up working for gangs, or cartels, or whom ever.

Eastern European Criminals use a more direct route in Europe. They kidnap young girls, and get them hooked on smack.

As a further historical note, Western Europe raided Eastern Europe for slaves at least as far back as the Bronze Age (before Roman times). Ever notice the similarity between "slave" and "Slav"? There's a reason for that.

Yeah, some of the uses indentured service is put to is pretty sickening. In the US. it's technically illegal, though in the situation you described, while they won't enforce the agreement between you and Uncle Vicktor, the sudden loss of a job is still going to mean you get shipped home. Pretty much, this is true in just about any case where an immigrant is employed, sadly. There's just a huge power imbalance when a green card is involved.

But there are plenty of places in the world where it's still explicitly legal, and put to horrifying uses. Gah, I was going to talk about my thesis a bit, but I can already feel the rage coming back. Needless to say, when you read interviews with parents who sold their second daughter into what's effectively slavery so they could afford a new TV... &*^%(*&, it makes you wonder if humanity wouldn't be better off being subjugated by dragons. One thing that's true in both the real world and the 6th world; the second humans get any power, their first instinct is to abuse the hell out of it.

Yeah, this happens in Brazil too. Farmers and peasants from the Northeast region (one of the poorest) are "invited" to work on a farm in another state (usually the Midwest) and when they arrive there, they find out that they can't leave the farm until all debts for the travel and housing are paid over. Since they can't leave the farm, they must buy their food and stuff from the farmer who sells them for HUGE prices and keeps your salary at minimum wage, this means your debt is always increasing and you may never leave.
Federal Police has been trying to end this kind of thing but it is a tough job, specially because some of the farmers have a lot of political influence or are congressmen themselves... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/frown.gif)

Hwha? That's been outlawed under Article 4 of the UN's declaration of Human Rights. That should be all the Brazilian legislature needs.

Unless we're talking 6th World, in which case it's all Amazonia and everyone's happy down there. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)