Between January 1899 & April 1900, French colonial troops in Niger, under the command of Captain Paul Voulet & Lieutenant Julien Chanoine, committed some of the most brutal acts of violence & mass murders of the colonial period in West Africa Paul Voulet was described by his fellow French officers as “a man with a true love of blood & cruelty, coupled with a sometimes foolish sensitivity”. While Julien Chanoine, the son of the French minister of war, was said to be “cruel out of cold-bloodedness, as well as for pleasure”

In 1840, Madison Washington, an enslaved man, attempted to start an insurrection on a plantation in Richmond, Virginia, where he & his wife Susan were enslaved. After the planned slave revolt was discovered by authorities, Washington fled the plantation He successfully escaped to Canada, where he found work as a field hand for a Canadian farmer, hoping to earn enough money to return to Virginia & purchased his wife’s freedom

In June of 1730, enslaved African captives aboard the Slave ship Little George, freed themselves from their shackles, overpowered their captors & successfully sailed the ship back to Africa. Thread.. On June 1st 1730, Captain George Scott of Rhode Island & his crew embarked from Banana Island off the coast of present-day Lagos, Nigeria, with a cargo of 96 enslaved Africans shackled in the hull of the ship, 61 women & 35 men

Quick thread on how the CIA orchestrated the 1980 Liberia coup on behalf of rubber giant Firestone.
In the mid-20th century, Firestone Liberia supplied 40% of all American rubber & and latex and 10% globally.

https://twitter.com/earth_tracker/status/1852362188176134234

When William Tolbert came to power in Liberia in 1971, the profits of Firestone in Liberia were 3 times higher than the total revenue of the Liberian state. Tolbert renegotiated the deal, which had given Firestone a 99-year lease on 1 million acres of land at 6 cents per acre

In 1661, Maryland passed the 1st anti miscegenation law in an attempt to discourage marriage between African men & European women. The penalty for such marriages was the enslavement of their offspring for 30 years. The law had the opposite effect... White men began importing White women from Ireland & England, forcing them to marry Black men & bear children so that the children could be enslaved. It became such a common practice that a new law was passed in 1681 to prevent White men from prostituting White women for slavery

The natives of North Sentinel Island used to be welcoming to outsiders until a British degenerate by the name of Maurice Vidal Portman, along with 6 British convicts went to the island, abused & abducted several adults & children "in the interest of science".

https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1822729252997087545

The adults quickly died from disease while the children severly became ill. Portman returned the children back to the island with whatever disease they had been infected with. The natives have no immunity to outside diseases, so something as small as a common cold can kill them.

After Britain's failed invasion of Haiti in 1793, the British army was at a deficit of 50,000 troops. Most English would rather desert than serve in the Caribbean. To make up for the shortage, the British military turned to African slave soldiers.

https://twitter.com/xspotsdamark/status/1821205786967633993

Between 1795 & 1807, the British military was the biggest importer of enslaved Africans and was spending 5 times more to buy, train & equip Africans than it was spending on regular English troops.

We've all heard the popular stereotype that Black people can't swim. Is there any truth to it? Let's investigate. The Dutch explorer Pieter De Marees, who visited the West Africa in 1602 noted "Negroes are excellent swimmers, they swim very fast, easily outdoing people of our nation. Girls as well as boys swim daily. The women also swim very well in the same manner as the men"

When people think of medieval knights & chivalry, they think of European culture. What if I told you chivalry was introduced to Europeans by Arabs? "The spirit of chivalry arose among the Spanish Arabs, which has since been adopted by the warriors of the north, as though it were a special quality belonging to Christian people..." - Vicente Blasco Ibanez, The Shadow of Cathedral

How the U.S. robbed , looted, impoverished & reinstituted slavery in Haiti.

In the early 1900s, Haiti was heavily indebted to the National Bank of the Republic of Haiti, a central bank founded by French, Germans & Americans, headquartered in New York. By 1910, payments to the bank amounted to 80% of Haiti's yearly revenue. U.S. officials noted that despite the high debt, Haiti was stable & still able to meet financial obligations, unlike other South American nations like Ecuador, Mexico & Honduras, with similar debt

In reality, Castration was mainly a European practice that was later adopted by the Ottomans. The majority of Eunuchs were European. The Muslim Empires, of course, would later make great use of Eunuchs, which is how the practice came to be associated with Arabs.

https://twitter.com/AfricanHub_/status/1759286388539723933

Even then, the Eunuchs in the Arab world were castrated by Europeans & then sold to Arabs. The Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine) was not only the biggest employer of eunuchs but also the biggest exporter, along with the city-state of Venice & later the Egyptian Coptic Church.

Reminder that it's actually White people who got their own national anthem, not Black people. Lift every voice has been the Black national anthem since 1901. The Star Spangled Banner became the national anthem in 1931. Before that, it was the anthem of the former Confederacy

https://twitter.com/jakeshieldsajj/status/1757184443524276274

Northern States used America the Beautiful as their national anthem. Blacks used Lift every voice and sing. The South used the Star Spangled Banner. In the 1920s, the Daughters of the Confederacy successfully campaigned to make the Star Spangled Banner the only national anthem.

The Haitian Revolution caused slavery caused to be unprofitable. The Haitian massacred all the French slaveholders & burned down all their property. Causing France to lose two-thirds of its global trade revenue.

https://twitter.com/DaleCloudyman/status/1755622151657316829

After the revolution, Britain attempted to claim Haiti for themselves, but the expedition ended up disaster, with over 50,000 British soldiers dying, primarily from yellow fever. Many British soldiers deserted rather than serve in the Caribbean

In 2014, a Congolese man in the tiny village of Kasulo, near the town of Kolwezi in Southern Congo was digging a hole in his backyard for the construction of an outdoor toilet. About 8 feet deep, his shovel struck a slab of a strange grey rock. Curious about the rock, the villager broke off a little piece & took the sample to a Lebanese mineral trader in Kolwezi. The trader informed the villager that the rock sample was Heterogenite, the unrefined ore from which Cobalt is extracted.

All the revisionism of the Haitian Revolution stems from the fact that many people simply can't deal with the reality that a white army was defeated in war by non-white people. Centuries of propaganda has convinced white people of their own invincibility & righteousness This goes back to what I said earlier about Europeans erasing the last thousand years of the Roman Empire because they were unceremoniously defeated by Ottoman Muslims. They want to preserve the image of the glorious Roman Empire felled by equally valiant Germanic whites.

In the 15th century, Britain's most lucrative industry was wool (and polishing French dick). The problem with wool is that it shrunk every time it was washed, so people wouldn't wash wool clothing, causing it to stink. Only poor Europeans wore wool. The Wealthy wore cotton & silk The Cotton & Silk trade was dominated by Muslims. Europeans were locked out of the most lucrative industry of the period. Spaniards "discovering" cotton in the Americas was a major economic breakthrough for Europe. Spain swiftly enslaved Native Americans to grow more cotton

The Haitian Revolution is by far the most consequential event in the history of Black people on both sides of the Atlantic. Haiti singlehandedly struck a fatal blow to the Transatlantic slave trade. If not for Haiti, slavery would've lasted another 200 years

https://twitter.com/negrosubversive/status/1699212878921011398

The Haiti knocked France out of the slave trade. In the decade before the Haitian Revolution, France was importing an average of 21,000 enslaved Africans per year. After the Haitian Revolution, that number dropped to 6000 per year. A 71% drop.

There's an ancient Egyptian papyrus from 2276 BC in which the Pharaoh Pepi II sends an expedition up the Nile into Central Africa. The Egyptians are believed to have reached the source of the white Nile in what is now Uganda. The Egyptian expedition encountered dwarves whom they believed to be the Egyptian Dwarf God Bes. They also believed this was the land of spirits from Egyptian mythology

A thread on my all-time favorite books on Black/African history

Precolonial Black Africa - Cheikh Anta Diop

A History Of Upper Guinea Coast - Walter Rodney

The Destruction of Black Civilization - Chancellor Williams

The Black Jacobins - CLR James Africa and Africans in the Makings of the Atlantic World, 1400 -1800 - John Thornton

The Kongo Kingdom: The Origins, Dynamics, and Cosmopolitan Culture of an African Polity - Koen Bosteon & Inge Brinkman

Capitalism and Slavery - Eric Williams

Part 1 of my thread on the abolition of slavery by Britain. Part 1 covers the history of Abolitionism from 1791 to the slave trade abolition act of 1807.
Part 2 will cover 1807 to the abolition of slavery in 1833.
Part 3 will cover 1833 to the Berlin conference. The Haitian Revolution (1791 - 1804) was the largest & most successful attempt by enslaved Africans to overthrow their captors, free themselves from enslavement & establish self-rule in the era of Transatlantic Slavery, & sounded the death-knell for the institution.

Between January 1899 and April 1900, french colonial troops in Africa, under the command of Captain Paul Voulet & Lieutenant Julien Chanoine, committed some of the most brutal acts of violence & mass murder of colonial period in Africa. Voulet, was described by his fellow French officers as "a man with a true love of blood and cruelty coupled with a sometimes foolish sensitivity," while Chanoine, the son of the French minister of war was said to be "cruel out of cold-bloodedness as well as for pleasure"