April is Confederate History Month

[Herman]

[Herman]

 

[Herman]

This is a good video about White slavery in the US.

[Herman]

[DKG]

On the eve of the Juneteenth observance, it was reported that several Confederate statues, which were removed almost a decade ago, have made a quiet return to Baltimore, Maryland.

The Baltimore Sun reported Thursday that four Confederate statues have made their return to the city, but many details remain unknown.

[DKG]

On the eve of the Juneteenth observance, it was reported that several Confederate statues, which were removed almost a decade ago, have made a quiet return to Baltimore, Maryland.

The statues, which were taken down before dawn on August 16, 2017, just days after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, were most recently stored in California. They were on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Just after the statues were pulled from their pedestals, they were stored for years in a Baltimore impound lot, during which time vandals cost tens of thousands of dollars' worth of damage to the collection.

The statues are: the statue of Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall jackassson that originally stood outside Wyman Park Dell, the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument that stood on Mount Royal Avenue, the Confederate Women's Monument, and the Roger B. Taney Monument.

The Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument sustained the most damage during the storage period after vandals "chopped off an arm and a Confederate flag and doused the whole thing with bright red paint," according to the Sun.

[formosan]

Blazor hasn't been around for a while.....I hope he's okay.

[Herman]

[Herman]

A map showing when slavery was legally abolished across Africa.

At first glance, this looks like a simple timeline. But the history behind these dates is far more complicated. Slavery in Africa did not end in one single wave, and it was not abolished the same way everywhere. In some places, it ended through local decrees. In others, it was abolished by European colonial governments. And in many regions, legal abolition came long before slavery-like systems actually disappeared in practice.

Some of the earliest abolition dates were in the north and south of the continent. Tunisia abolished slavery in 1846, making it one of the first places in the region to do so. In the Cape Colony, now part of South Africa, slavery was abolished under the British Empire in 1834, though formerly enslaved people were forced through an apprenticeship period until full freedom came in 1838.

Across much of West and Central Africa, many dates are tied directly to colonial rule. The sweep of 1905 labels reflects a major French colonial decree, while similar laws were issued by British, Portuguese, and Belgian authorities at different times. But enforcement was often weak, and forced labor, debt bondage, and hereditary servitude frequently continued long after slavery was officially banned.
East Africa had its own timeline, shaped heavily by the Indian Ocean trade rather than the Atlantic. Zanzibar, the Swahili Coast, Madagascar, and the Horn of Africa all had distinct systems connected to plantation labor, domestic servitude, and regional empires. Madagascar's abolition followed the French colonial takeover in 1896, while Ethiopia, one of the few African states never fully colonized, formally abolished slavery around the period of Italian occupation and reaffirmed abolition under Haile Selassie in the 1940s.

The most striking case of all sits in the far west. Mauritania, shown as 1981, was the last country in the world to formally abolish slavery. Even then, the practice was not criminalized until 2007, and human rights groups have continued to report cases of hereditary servitude.

So this map is not really just about dates. It is a map of how difficult and uneven abolition truly was.

Slavery could be ended on paper, but freedom often took far longer to become real. Behind each year lies a deeper story of colonialism, resistance, local power structures, forced labor, and the long struggle of enslaved people and their descendants for genuine freedom.