RE: Why are there no good African 100m sprinters?

and the yanks have gotten a lot fatter in just the last 20 years or so - that's fast evolution man.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Chattel slavery was very much a European invention. Slavery in Africa was much different than slavery in the New World. It was not inheritable. Slaves were not kept in a dehumanizing system, but were in more of a status, like being in prison. Slaves could buy their way out of slavery.

And the scale was much, much smaller. There were not large-scale numbers of slaves waiting to be sold in Africa. Europeans arrived, armed one side or another in a tribal conflict, and bought the prisoners of war. Africa is still struggling with the political consequences of the tribalism unleased by the slave trade and colonialism. Demographically, Africa was forever changed.

So, your lousy justification that enlaved Africans would have been condemned to live a miserable life in African anyway is demonstrably false.

So true. I heard that they dressd them up in ruffles and served them tea and crumpets before they sent them out to the fields to pick the cotton. Then when they came in from the fields, they had their feet washed and were given back rubs before retiring to their palatial chambers.

Thanks bcal 92: Finally, a post on this topic that contains logic, some basic history, and knowledge.

Slavery in Africa was very different from the European's interpretation of slavery. Slavery was not dehumanizing, not chronically traummatizing, and did not result in the castration of body parts, mutilation, lynchings, and the raping of innocent women and girls. Europeans completely changed this. Their culture was very different from the Africans'. The Africans' were based on tribal rites of passages where the village raised a child. There were moral rules to abide by and if you break these rules you could be exiled, removed from power, or at worst placed into captivity with other boys (which was a huge insult to men of tribal power). The Europeans' were based on competition, chivalry, individualism. The culture of competition was so strong it suggested that by any means necessary to do what it takes to obtain more, even if it means beheading a man and his entire family. This is present day capitalism at its best.

Let us not forget that what we see today in Iraq is not very different from what Europe saw in its history. Religous, civil, wars and ethnic cleansing. This way of life was brought to Africa and is what fueled the change of how slavery was practiced. Read your history, all of it. Africans did sell other Africans; that statement was true. However, Africans sold other Africans with the misunderstanding that they were simply doing business with "civil" men from the north who understood their practice of taxes, etc. This was a terrible assumption. They were tricked and would not sell their brothers and sisters into the hands of the devil if they knew its consequences. Would you?

However, just as we have house-negros today and Uncle Toms claiming to be real, tribal men in places of power, Africa had/has those too. So, I would not rule out the ability to bribe some lost brothers into helping them trick some men/women onto the ship to the new world. But before you dismiss the truth for your own personal opinions of history, please do some research and present the facts.