ancestor ahmed baba-- courtesy of -- "who did they really sell into slavery?"

WHO DID THEY REALLY SELL INTO SLAVERY II?

"Ahmed Baba headed the world-famous Sankore University, in Timbuktu for thirty years. Timbuktu was considered by Europeans, as the city "arched in gold and clothed in education." Ahmed Baba is considered by historians as the greatest scholar, the most extraordinary intellect, and the most prolific writer of the sixteenth century. Under his administration, Sankore became the center of the world's scientific knowledge. Its structure consisted of faculties of law, medicine and surgery, letters, grammar, manufacturing, building, and other allied craft. High standards were required in the elementary and secondary schools in Songhai in order to meet the exacting admission requirements of the university. In 1591, Islamic and Christian forces attacked the Songhai Empire, which was larger than the continent of Europe, in order to capture Songhai's gold mines. They concentrated on the great cities of Gao, Jenne, and Timbuktu to neutralize the intellectual leadership of Songhai. Ahmed Baba and other leading intellectuals were carried north in chains by the Islamic Caliph al-Mansur to the Moroccan capital of Marrakesh and thrown into prison. In the Moslem and Christian destruction of Songhai, libraries were destroyed or stolen, including the one thousand-six-hundred-book library of Sankore. Of the forty books authored by Ahmed Baba, two are known to still be in existence. One is an autobiography and the other is entitled Al-Kabir. They are located in the Ahmed Baba Documentation Center in Timbuktu, established in 1971. During the invasion, the infrastructure and the social fabric of Songhai were destroyed. Basil Davidson says, "The invasion cost Songhai and its descendants its place in history . . . robbing that great empire of its vitality. . . ." Europeans now descended on this wealthy, huge empire with unmatched cruelty. Songhai's sad end is described in Tarikh es Sudan by eyewitness Muhammad es Sadi. While the Europeans did not find the yellow gold, they found Black gold, the enslavement of the Songhai prisoners-of-war. They took the Songhai doctors and dentists, lawyers and lecturers, professors and princes, students and surveyors, musicians and mayors and marched them to the seas to the waiting ships to be brought to America in chains. Even greater an injustice than that, they ripped the Black pages out of the books of history so that the Songhai descendants in America would not know about their great ancestors such as Ahmed Baba."

* note that religion did not prevent either europeans or arabs from attacking and enslaving black africans and destroying our civilizations--when it comes to us neither of them fully practice the religion they preach, both the arabs and the europeans have been a plague on africa and her children--A HARD LESSON of OUR HISTORY