Chelsea Dawson
“It has been said that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the laws of gravity.” – Kofi Annan. There is great debate between if globalization is helping humanity or hurting it. There are many different opinions but ultimately the opinion that matters most id your opinion, because you have the power to be able to change the world where as elders have already had that option and chosen to continue with globalization. Harper Lee wrote a book, The Book of Negroes, stating his opinion about what globalization has done to the world and has it has affected its many peoples.
The Book of Negroes begins in the village of Bayo, which is in Africa, where Aminata Diallo (Meena) is an eleven year old girl, while she is travelling home from another village with her mother the worst thing possible happens to Aminata, she is taken captive by the slave traders and tossed into the new and upcoming world of a globalized society. Meena is forced to travel for three moons on foot, yoked to the other captives, to Bance Island, one of the many “slave pens” along the coast of Africa. During the journey Meena has to deal with the loss of many of her loved ones including her mother and father who were killed while she was taken away from Bayo. The horror that Meena was going through only got worse as her journey to America continued. The slave ships were nowhere anyone sane would want to be, the floor of the slave compartments were filled with feces and the bodies of those who had died over night and were yet to be discovered so they could be tossed overboard with the rest of the deceased. The diet of the slaves while they were onboard consisted of “horse-beans, boiled to the consistency of pulp; of boiled yams and rice, and sometimes, a small quantity of beef or pork…” (pg. 408) Later in her life Meena said this about her life aboard the ship, “…I had eaten such foods to stay alive, on a ship that smelled like death itself. Captives had squatted around buckets of slop, desperate for the biscuits and peanuts I smuggled for the medicine man’s cabin.” (pg. 408) By the time Meena got off of the ship at Sullivan’s Island she was so weak she could barely stand and had lost the ability to control her bowels.
Sullivan’s Island was where the slaves were taken into Charles Town to be sold. At the sale the healthy, fit slaves are the first to go and the weak and sick were grouped together so that buyers could come around and sang a slave for only a few pounds. The second, weaker, group was where Meena was sold to a man by the name of Appleby where she was forced to work on an indigo plantation working endless hours through the heat and cold at only the age of eleven. While Meena was in South Carolina she was taught to read, which was against the wishes of fellow slaves and extremely against the wishes of the whites.
When most people think about the slave trade they know that it was wrong and they shouldn’t have done it, they know that they worked the blacks until they were dying, that they made them do everything that was “unfit” for a white person to do. While all of this is true it doesn’t capture the true essence of what the African s had to live through just on their journey to America or the Caribbean or Europe. And most of all most people wouldn’t think of the slave trade as globalization, but it was. It may not have been the first type of globalization but it wasn’t what we think of globalization today. The slave trade didn’t involve you always being connected to the people on the other side of the earth and it didn’t let you eat the grapefruit that was grown in the tropics in Canada, but it did bring people from somewhere else in the world to be used for a deed. As the world begins to expand man is able to find even more ways to take away the human rights of those living in other parts of the world. The slave trade and the removal of the Africans human rights began in the late 1400’s, when the Dutch landed in Africa and it lasted in America until the end of the civil war in 1865. Though the trade may have been stopped in places such as England and Spain the use of slaves was still being practiced.
Human rights is defined as the basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled, often held to include the right to life and liberty, freedom of thought and expression, and equality before the law. During the slave trade all of these rights were taken from the Africans, the right to life was held in their owner’s hands would they beat them to death or let them live to continue their work? The right to liberty, how can you have liberty if you are under someone else control? The freedom to thought and expression, the Africans were beaten if they tried to pray or express their thoughts. The right to equality before the law, there was no question that Africans didn’t have that right. Ultimately globalization has hurt many of the peoples around the world and will continue to do so as long as we continue with it but with a growing and greedy society globalization will be in the foreseeable future for a very long time.
–Jack Welch
Reflection
I really enjoyed the freedom that there was in this project and the chance to be able to choose what book you wanted to read. The book I choose, The Book of Negroes, was really really good and it was easy for me to see the realation of the book to globalization. The book was easy to read and the assignments that went with it were fairly easy to complete and if given the chance to choose between doing all book studies as a class or a bit of class and individual book studies I would choose a bit of class and individual because it gives you a chance to explore the world of books.
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