QUOTE (Neraph @ Sep 3 2010, 12:43 AM)

Interestingly I saw some information that actually claimed that all the slaves that America bought we bought from Islamic groups in Africa.
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!