WHO started black slavery?

Answer 1

Black slavery is essentially prehistoric, since it has been going on for as long as we have had information about Africa. There seems to have been a tradition of thousands of years of inter-tribal warfare with the winners enslaving the losers.Then new winners enslaved the old winners and freed the old enslaved losers. This culture seems to have been an endless cycle for as far back as African history is available. Only recently has African tribal warfare changed to brutally killing rather than enslaving tribal enemies.

We know that the Egyptians captured black Nubian slaves in their ongoing series of wars and reconciliations with Nubia to their south, going back to 5000 years ago.

Modern black slavery, the Atlantic Slave Trade, was started roughly 300 years ago by Portuguese ship owners who made contact with west coastal African tribes and discovered that the tribes were willing to sell their slaves. There was a serious shortage of agricultural labor in the Americas, especially in South America and the West Indies, so the Portuguese traders made a fortune transporting tribal slaves from Africa to the plantations of the Americas. A relatively small number of black slaves were sold in the North American colonies which became the U.S.A.

The Atlantic Slave Trade grew as (1) most other European nations began running slave ships, and (2) inland tribes started bringing their slaves to the coast where they could sell them to the traders, which was followed by even more tribal warfare and outright kidnapping to bring more and more slaves to the west coast to be sold, creating an epic Holocaust.

I have never seen any evidence of anyone but blacks selling blacks to the Europeans.