Black History

According to this article at Africana.com, the bankruptcy of Vanguarde means that Savoy Magazine, along with Body & Soul and Honey, are now black history.

Yes, I'm late noticing this, and if I read hiphopmusic.com more frequently I would have known last month, and I suck, and let's move on, shall we?

Or back. The subject/title is Black History, and there's lots to know:

Past Imperfect: Black Iraq

Thirty years of black and Diaspora studies have shed light on the scale, intensity and impact of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade — the 400-year traffic of Africans between the continent, Europe and the colonies of the alleged new world. Less attention has been paid, though, to the millennium-long slave trade that scattered African slaves throughout present-day Iraq, Turkey, Kuwait, Iran, Pakistan and India. Emerging European capitalism and the labor requirements of cash crops like sugar, cotton and tobacco drove the Trans-Atlantic trade; the Trans-Saharan trade, which flourished from the eighth century AD through the 1840s, brought African labor to the hazardous enterprises of pearl diving, date farming and the raw, brutal work of clearing Iraqi salt marshes. African boys were commonly castrated to serve as eunuch guards of royal harems. Unlike those who were enslaved in the west, however, blacks enslaved in the Arabic-speaking world also served as guards, sailors and high-ranking soldiers. In the 19th century, Basra was one of the most profitable slave ports in the region, commonly offering slave traders as much as 50% returns upon their "investments."

There has been a black presence in Basra — present-day Southern Iraq — as early as the 7th century, when Abu Bakra, an Ethiopian soldier who had been manumitted by the prophet Muhammad himself, settled in the city. His descendants became prominent members of Basran society. A century later, the writer Jahiz of Basra wrote an impassioned defense of black Africans — referred to in Arabic as the Zanj — against accusations of inferiority which had begun to take root even then.

Maybe I should try to dig up a translation of that. There still seem to be quite a few people convinced of our inferiority.

Or maybe just my individual inferiority to them. Don't know, don't care.

Also noted/linked at hiphopmusic:

The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record

The hundreds of images in this collection have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery. This collection is envisioned as a tool and a resource that can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and the general public -- in brief, anyone interested in the experiences of Africans who were enslaved and transported to the Americas and the lives of their descendants in the slave societies of the New World.

I haven't looked through that yet.

I will one day. It's something I feel that I should look through.

Just. . . not today.