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It is not racial difference that has been a problem in discovering the ideological basis of the enslavement of Africans, but rather the idea of racial hierarchy, developed, refined and disseminated by Europeans who prosecuted and profited from the slave trade for three centuries. All of us are aware that the magnitude of the European forced migration of enslaved Africans has no peer in history (Haywood, 1985). In its extraordinary reach into another continent and by overcoming horrendous obstacles on land and the high seas, the European enterprise dwarfed all other examples of similar social and economic constructions. The sea, more daunting in ways than the desert, made the journey far more perilous than any other forced migration of peoples. Yet it is also true that the magnitude of the "trade" must be measured in terms of the multiplicity of legacies, historical and contemporary, that it created. In the wake of the most mammoth forced movement of people over a period of centuries we see the very beginnings of the modern world. Indeed, the postmodern world is, in effect, a creation of the same legacies (Tracy, 1990). Without European slave traders, slave buyers, slave insurers, slave sailors, slave auctioneers, and slave owners, there would have been no transport of Africans across the sea for enslavement.
In one instance the spread of Africans and Europeans to continents other than Europe and Africa helped to produce a world order that has reigned supreme in technology, science, economics, law, and sociology for five hundred years. It was, however, a racist construction created out of stolen land, broken treaties, stolen labor and broken backs. Any interpretation of the postmodern views of the present world must take into consideration that the entire discourse on the fluidity of cultures, the notion of subjective identities, the instability of social and cultural space, and the interaction and interpenetration of peoples is a direct result of the most massive forced movement of people the world has ever known (Cohen, 1982). It becomes impossible to speak of the Americas or Caribbean without Africans or indeed Europe without Africa. One cannot speak intelligently about Portugal and its history without Brazil, Angola and Mozambique or Britain without its ties to the Fante coast of Ghana and the...