Page 161 - LD215 History of the Church in Africa A4 final

Nineteenth-Century Challenges and Progress

dungeon and auction block that still stand in Zanzibar as a memorial to
the millions who were stolen from the soil of Africa. I must say that this
is a sobering experience. Shaw details some of the incredible aspects
of the cruelty and inhuman conditions to which slaves were subjected:

The Atlantic slave trade was notoriously cruel.… As many as five
hundred [slaves] were crammed into the hold of a slave ship.
They were placed on shelves with no more than two and half feet
of headroom and without proper sanitation. Beatings were
frequent. Captains routinely lost 10 percent of their human cargo
to disease and death. But these were the fortunes of trade, and
most were willing to overlook the cruelties of so profitable an
institution. (1996, 128)

Although slavery became an important element of world trade,
many people knew it was very wrong and began to campaign against
the practice. We have noted that
England and Europe experienced
a great evangelical revival in the
eighteenth century, and this revival A group of politicians,
spread to North America, where it business people, and
changed the way people viewed
the world. Christian believers religious leaders
now submitted themselves to the developed a plan by
lordship of Christ, and they could
not remain silent about the evil which freed slaves
of slavery. A group of politicians, could return to Africa.
business people, and religious
leaders was determined that not
only England but also the whole
world needed to end the institution of slavery. So this group developed
a plan by which freed slaves could return to Africa.

Under the leadership of a godly man named William Wilberforce,
the British Parliament passed a law to abolish the slave trade in 1807.
After this monumental decision, other European nations also abolished
slavery. Although slavery was illegal in the United States in 1808, the law
was not enforced until the end of the Civil War in the 1860s.

::: 151 :::