Submitted by piewacket1861 on Sun, 02/17/2008 - 19:15.
As elephant populations in East Africa dwindled and ivory had to be harvested from elephants in Central and West Central Africa, the journey itself to the coast got longer and harder for ivory's human porters. Some of the trade routes went all the way to the Belgian Congo halfway across the continent. Explorers like Stanley looked upon a devastated landscape of burned and empty villages. An entire frontier of ivory taking and human enslavement was moving west. Under the weight of the tusks that men were forced to carry, both men and women taken from their villages by force walked hundreds of miles to the coaast from inland trading centers on the Congo River and Lake Tanganyika, where Stanley had first met Livingstone. This was 700 miles from the coast, but the trek was often much longer.The ivory trade and it's horrors were not the temporary ravages of civil strife or war, but part of an ongoing system, one that lasted for at least 80 years and used black human beings as commercial currency.The most sustained and harrowing descriptions of the business come from a Connecticut man who was an ivory trader himself, and also a very successful one.Ernest D. Moore was 23 when his uncle brought him into the family ivory business. From 1907 to 1911Moore was based primarily in Zanzibar, buying elephant tusks in the market and traveling to the interior of Africa, where he bought directly from the great hunters for Arnold Cheney & Company, which supplied both Pratt, Read, and Comstock, Cheney.Bibliography:"Six men were singing...." Livingstone, Last Journals, 245."the bifurcated mind": Anne Farrow, Interview with Jennifer Baszile, assistant professor of history, YaleUniversity, June 2002.Smithsonian curator....today's currency: Shayt, "Elephants under Glass," p. 40
Slavery:Not just for the South
As elephant populations in East Africa dwindled and ivory had to be harvested from elephants in Central and West Central Africa, the journey itself to the coast got longer and harder for ivory's human porters. Some of the trade routes went all the way to the Belgian Congo halfway across the continent. Explorers like Stanley looked upon a devastated landscape of burned and empty villages. An entire frontier of ivory taking and human enslavement was moving west. Under the weight of the tusks that men were forced to carry, both men and women taken from their villages by force walked hundreds of miles to the coaast from inland trading centers on the Congo River and Lake Tanganyika, where Stanley had first met Livingstone. This was 700 miles from the coast, but the trek was often much longer.The ivory trade and it's horrors were not the temporary ravages of civil strife or war, but part of an ongoing system, one that lasted for at least 80 years and used black human beings as commercial currency.The most sustained and harrowing descriptions of the business come from a Connecticut man who was an ivory trader himself, and also a very successful one.Ernest D. Moore was 23 when his uncle brought him into the family ivory business. From 1907 to 1911Moore was based primarily in Zanzibar, buying elephant tusks in the market and traveling to the interior of Africa, where he bought directly from the great hunters for Arnold Cheney & Company, which supplied both Pratt, Read, and Comstock, Cheney.Bibliography:"Six men were singing...." Livingstone, Last Journals, 245."the bifurcated mind": Anne Farrow, Interview with Jennifer Baszile, assistant professor of history, YaleUniversity, June 2002.Smithsonian curator....today's currency: Shayt, "Elephants under Glass," p. 40
PIE