Sep 9, 2006 1:25:00 PM cite

Audrey Kitagawa: The Africans who came over to the Americas were very instrumental in helping to build the Americas. And it is the contribution of their labor that actually helped to move the country and develop the country in ways that would not otherwise have been possible. So the growth, the development, that we have seen, in the Americas would certainly have been slow but for the tremendous contribution of the African people. The Americas would also have been deprived of the rich cultural, spiritual heritage that the Africans brought with them and have been an enduring testament to the power of the African people to preserve their culture in many environments, even though they were taken out of Africa under the most degrading, heinous conditions. So we have much to be grateful to the African people for, for the, their tremendous contributions from which we've all benefited.

by Audrey Kitagawa

Sep 9, 2006 1:25:00 PM cite

Avi Primor: In my opinion there will be hardly differences barring that the Americans probably now have a better conscience, that a lot of black Americans have bad memories and a historical hatred. There will be african based Americans because there are migrations in America. There is a constant migration - people change their homes, travel around, marry each other. They do not all stay in the area of nation, state or continent. So in this respect I think there will be a lot of Africans in America who are Americans today even without slavery, but of course without this sad background. But there will be black Americans and therewith there will be racial problems in the course of time that have to be overcome. Man would overcome this problem as man did in the 60s in America. Perhaps it was not ideal, but we have reached great improvements and it has not much to do with slavery. The point is that man always has problems to accept others, those who are different and he has to learn to deal with this, with or without slavery.

by Avi Primor

Sep 9, 2006 1:25:00 PM cite

Benjamin Fahrer: How would the world be today if Africans were brought over to the America as people, with a culture and a heritage? If we brought the Africans over to America with their song, with their culture, with that sense of village, and connectivity, and connection with the man, with the mother -- Africa. If we brought that over to America in that context, what would that world be like today? Oh man, I make a lot of compost in the world and I saw this film with Africans making compost, so taking waste products and turning into a soil. And they had this song and the dance and it was beautiful, so beautiful. And even put in to slavery, the song and dance continued and turned into a resistance, into a movement that then rose up out of the suppression and suppression. America would be different today if they were brought over in a positive way as opposed to being stolen. But, we have what we have in America. It is unfortunate that they were enslaved, but it is fortunate that they have risen up and overcome. And have, still, a connection with their roots. We see it in the hip-hop culture so much in America. The roots of dance and song, movement and music, being enlivened in their appropriate context of today. America would be very different if we brought these people over in celebration instead of slavery. What would the world be like if we didn’t bring many cultures into slavery? Not just Africans to America. And how can we help those cultures overcome their suppression?

by Benjamin Fahrer

Sep 9, 2006 1:25:00 PM cite

Benson Venegas: This is a very interesting question. Rivers never turn back. So bad or good is decision in history, we can never turn back to change those decisions. What you can do is to look forward, try to understand the positive influence where changes built our history. And I think there's a legacy, positive legacy if Africans and some of these countries where they were pushed out of the continent and they went over other continents as slaves. Then a lot of these Africans become to be free in new continents, and they also were very important in constructing or building the societies and economies of their new countries. And I have to say this in the case of my country, where black people really give a lot of efforts and support to the building, the development of the country, in terms of the railroad, in terms of fishery, in terms of other aspects that's a very important [inaudible] that really give the country a legacy that, with the music, with the art, with the creations, and this is also part of a new synthesis in which our society are really bring in all this multicultural approach to continue as a unity to the future.

by Benson Venegas

Sep 9, 2006 1:25:00 PM cite

Bianca Jagger: Answertext will be available soon.

by Bianca Jagger

Sep 9, 2006 1:25:00 PM cite

Bill Joy: Well, slavery’s clearly a great abomination and unfortunately for most of history there was slavery in different parts of the world. I think in this particular case when you had slaves being made of a certain race it created a problem that we’ve had trouble getting past in America for a very long time. I think the economic system in the south of the United States was dependent on inexpensive labor. Crops like cotton and tobacco were very labor intensive. Perhaps those economic things would have changed, it wouldn’t have been economically possible perhaps to have the kind of tobacco farms. Maybe we wouldn’t have gone that way. And that probably would have been a good thing. A lot of people’s health have been clearly ruined by the consequences of tobacco. So I think the negative impact of slavery has had a long, for the slaves and for the people whose lives are poisoned by the racist attitudes they still hold is really saddening to me. I have real trouble with all of those attitudes. And I wish we could clearly imagine what it would have been like if this had never happened, if the people had come freely and find a way to reinvent and get ourselves to the point where we could live in the world that was like it would have been if the slaver had never been part of the equation. Maybe someone will write a great novel that will inspire us to a new attitude.

by Bill Joy

Sep 9, 2006 1:25:00 PM cite

Bora Cosic: Finally a question from a philosopher was asked. Beside all painful episodes thru which black population went on the way to the relative equality in American society, beside all victims of this innocent people, by the force of events there was a brake thru to the mixed society, a step towards a united word and colored world not only in sense of the skin colors. If Africans weren’t brought to America maybe something else would have happened, there world probably tends toward some kind of unity in the worlds metaphysical means. However it can not always achieve it without agony. If we look back at Napoleons wars which were very aggressive, where those good dressed soldiers occupied so many territories and poured so much blood, however along the way by the force of the events big areas were united, similarly to the peaceful unification of Europe which is slowly happening nowadays. There are strange events in history that even philosophers can’t explain.

by Bora Cosic

Sep 9, 2006 1:25:00 PM cite

Brian J. Weller: I guess the world would be very different. I find it really difficult to speculate on this question. I just don’t know. I really don’t know. My God, I don’t know. I mean if there hadn’t been slavery, and there still is slavery around the world, we’d certainly have a world which is probably more equitable. That would be an amazing thing. Because if you think of the incredible – out of this pain resulting from slavery and so on – I mean just think of the extraordinary beauty that our African brothers and sisters have brought certainly to the West and to America. I mean we wouldn’t have [taboos]. We wouldn’t have maybe rock and roll; all that incredible culture. Maybe that would have happened anyway without us having to enslave that beautiful people. I really don’t know.

by Brian J. Weller

Sep 9, 2006 1:25:00 PM cite

Catherine David: We cannot change history but we could probably be a little bit more attentive concerning the consequences and the today’s question – once again – is not to reshuffle the cards and to take the Africans back to Africa. The Africans, the diaspo-africans are a little bit everywhere and I think what is much more current today, is to be aware of the injustice that has been done to these people and not in a way of flagellation because I do not think that this is very useful, neither for the diaspo-africans nor for others but it can lead to attitudes, to ways of behaviour, to treat the Africans, regarding history, a little bit fairer and honourable.

by Catherine David

Sep 9, 2006 1:25:00 PM cite

China Keitetsi: I think that we as a world would have missed a lot of knowledge, because today the world - the entire world - have learned so much from African American and also I personally learned that African are very strong people. Because these people, the way they were brought chained, humiliated, put down, spit at, made to believe that they were nothing, they were worth nothing, and yet they brought this music to the world. Yet they didn't give up. Some became professors; some became powerful men of our time. I'm very impressed to have learned that you can learn a lot from being oppressed, from humiliation, from unwanted eyes. And yet some of these people who faced violence because have read a few books how they were treated, and yet, for example, Martin Luther King, he left the world with a legacy, not only African American, but the entire world, his words. I’m sure some have used them to do good. But also I feel sad that that had to happen; to be broken away from where their souls, where everything lies. Men who left their relatives. Men who are separated forever from everything they knew as little boys, as little girls; and yet survived and taught us to do good.

by China Keitetsi

Sep 9, 2006 1:25:00 PM cite

Constantin von Barloewen: Unfortunately slave trade has not only been - let's call it a privilege - of North America and Latin America that came form Africa, slave trade did also exist in other, earlier traditions, in the Arabic cultures, in the Asian confrontations with China back then during the expansion. On the other hand we have to say that the American political economy in the nineteenth century, especially the cotton trade, would have never had its upswing without the slave trade. It may be morally condemnable, but it is historically correct. The same applies to Latin America. The great French ethnologist and photographer Pierre Verger observed the black Brazilian cultures in Salvador da Bahia like noone else, he took photos of them, he described them, he traced the slave trade back from Benin to the Caribbean, to Haiti. We would have a completely different situation of the world, we would not have an acculturation as in Brazil between black, white and red, between different ethnic groups as it is the case today, we would not have what Gilberto Freyre called an ethnic democracy. But there is a moral category that we add to a historical fact which does not always do justice to the historical fact. In the end it is an otiose question to ask in how far historical developments would have been different if this or that had or had not been the case. America has developed as an ethnic democracy, if nothing else, then because of the civil war in the nineteenth century, because of Martin Luther King, because of the entire civil rights movement, because of Thoreau's civil disobedience which has been developed further by Emerson in the nineteenth century. America would look different, Latin America would look different. Argentina has always excluded the black population by laws of immigration, but we would not have a cultural diversity in the Caribbean or in Brazil, or as far as music, films, classical pop music and so on are concerned, without a black population.

by Constantin von Barloewen

Sep 9, 2006 1:25:00 PM cite

Cornel West: Well, first I think we have to recognize that there would be no modern world without Africans being brought over to America because it was precisely the wealth produced by those slaves who were never compensated, wealth that produced in the Lancashire mills in Britain the cotton picked in the New World going back to Britain, the wealth produced that constituted the pillar for democratic experiments in the United States and other places, so that slavery itself set at the very center of modern democratic experiments in the last 350 years, and thank God we had abolitionist movements to undermine slavery, but that wealth had already been produced and the legacy of that wealth goes on in terms of the ways in which the exploitation of the labor of those Africans both after slavery and up to this very moment is still in place. And so, we have to recognize the paradox here, the ways in which so much of the freedoms were dependent on slavery and the ways in which slavery itself contributed to the freedom of others. If it were not for fellow citizens of all colors who had the courage to break the back of that slavery, to expand democratic possibility, we would not be sitting here in this grand platz reflecting on this question. I think part of the challenge these days is trying to overcome the white supremacy’s legacy, the white supremacy that justified that kind of exploitation of African labor is going back to the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. So, the question raised actually is the question that is quite relevant today and one of the reasons why reparation movements and so many other concerns about trying to understand the truth of the past and the way in which the truth of the past has everything to do with the struggle for justice today.

by Cornel West

Sep 9, 2006 1:25:00 PM cite

Dedi Baron: Answertext will be available soon.

by Dedi Baron

Sep 9, 2006 1:25:00 PM cite

Donato Bayu Bay Bumacas: Well, honestly, no one knows what it looked like. But, definitely, if African people were not brought to America, definitely maybe America is a Third World country now because in one way or another the Africans who were enslaved in America had been used as a development tool for the development of America, and this is the [subtle] part of it. Other people were being sacrificed, being sold by [inaudible] for their own interest and development. And, we hope we will not be experiencing a modern type of enslavement where a scenario will come that a modern type of enslaving people will happen. But for this question I would see America might have been a Third World country at the moment and not a superpower if Africans were not brought to the area.

by Donato Bayu Bay Bumacas

Sep 9, 2006 1:25:00 PM cite

Dritëro Kasapi:

by Dritëro Kasapi

Sep 9, 2006 1:25:00 PM cite

Eliane Potiguara: Well, for example, in the Americas, indigenous people were slaved. And even though these people didn’t accept it and ran away in the forests, they were catched and their lands were taken, their culture was broken, their women were raped and lots of their lives were slaughtered. We had millions and millions of indigenous people in the Americas and this number has been violently reduced. The slaves came from Africa, the same happened, lives were slaughtered and then started this miscegenation in the countries. And I’m telling you that even if the blacks didn’t come, the Indians, Pakistanis or any people of color would have come. Because the white world has always thought that people of color would be good for being slaves. So, if the world didn’t slave the Africans, other people would have certainly been discriminated, as they still are until nowadays. It was just a bad luck of the Africans.

by Eliane Potiguara

Sep 9, 2006 1:25:00 PM cite

Eliot Weinberger: I think that African-American culture -- American in the larger sense in that it includes not only United States, but the Caribbean and Brazil, African-American culture is this magnificent edifice that’s built on a foundation of bones. And even though it’s basis is in the, shall we say, the great shame of slavery and the slave trade, what has been created is something of such tremendous vitality and importance to Brazil, to the Caribbean, to the United States, that these countries are unimaginable without it. To speak only of the United States, I think that what the Africans brought were the wisdom and creativity of [oral] cultures, which then becomes specifically expressed in language, and of course in music, and of course in dance. Music, 20th century music, is entirely the product of, or I would say, almost entirely the product of African-American creativity. The American language, the language of the United States, most of the enrichment of the language in the 20th century has come from African-American speech, most of the new expressions, new ways of talking has come from that. Certainly, African-American writers are among the great writers in American literature. I mean, there are great African-American writers within American literature, writers for whom one needs no special pleading, writers as great as any. So, I think United States would be an extremely dreary country, if the Africans had never been brought over to the Americas. So, even though you have the shame of the past, you have a kind of glory of the present.

by Eliot Weinberger

Sep 9, 2006 1:25:00 PM cite

Elisabet Sahtouris: Here’s a big question. The first thing that comes to my mind, if I’m asked what would the world be like today if the Africans had never been brought as slaves to America, is that well, the Americans would have had to do their own work a lot more than they did. It also implies a very different kind of world, a world in which there is no slavery and a world in which we don’t exploit people in that way. So as I say I would answer the question on the one hand by saying I think more Europeans would have been brought over. Now, whether the people who had already settled in the Americas would have used them as slaves—there was of course indentured servitude, indentured servants, white Europeans were sent to Australia. They had to pay off their passage and often that put them into the equivalent of slavery for their whole lives. So is the question should we have a world without slavery? Of course. And yet, in our world today there’s more slavery going on than there ever was in the world. We have enslaved children, we have sexual slavery, we have work slavery, all these things are as serious as they ever have been in the world except they are less known about. They are not legalized and so it’s all done under cover. And we have to become aware of that and we have to end slavery of all kinds in all places so that we can have the kind of a world that wouldn’t have done what we did with Africans.

by Elisabet Sahtouris

Sep 9, 2006 1:25:00 PM cite

Ervin Laszlo: I can ask the same question in regard to any minorities that are forcefully deported or forced to migrate. Obviously, there will be less frustration; there would be less resentment in the world. [They are best in equality remnants] of the enslavement. So, all together forcing people to move from one place to another is always interfering with their liberty and to enslave people is the greatest harm and injustice that we can do to any person to any group of people.

by Ervin Laszlo