Week 3: Culture & Colonization

Block One

Session Theme: our personal value systems, how they were established, and reflection on whether they are up-to-date or outdated

Learning Goals:

·       Participants will be able to identify and explain why specific core values are important to them

·       Participants will identify what values they uphold are outdated, and in need of an upgrade, which ones they benefit from keeping and which they would like to adopt

Meditative Questions:

·       What do you value?

·       Where did you establish these values? ( i.e. At home, at school, through etc.) 

·       Does any of your values need to be re-evaluated? If so, which ones?

·       Do you feel valuable? Why or why not?

·       How do you treat things that are valuable to you?

·       How do you expect to be treated?

Block Two

Theme: a general overview of how culture was impacted by slavery and colonization

Learning Goals:

·       Participants will be able to identify why slavery started and who the key players were

·       Participants will learn the role slavery and colonization played in the erosion of the seven elements of culture for the African diaspora

·       Participants will understand the role Europe, Africa and the Ottoman Empire played in the creation of slavery/ human trafficking

Major Takeaways

·       Slavery was used as a form of labour

·       The transatlantic slave trade formally began in the 15th century

·       Countries that had significant involvement in the transatlantic slave trade

o   Portugal

o   Spain

o   England

o   France

o   Dutch/ The Netherlands

o   Germany

·       15th century A.D Portugal (Prince Henry the navigator) was the first European nation to take significant interest in the African continent because the Ottoman empire had taken over previously established trade routes between Europe and Asia

·       Enslaved African people were brought to Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean as forced labour to build the European/ world economy by working on sugar, tobacco, rice, cotton and coffee plantation, along with mining for gold in Brazil

Key Words

Colonization: the action or process of settling among and establishing control over the indigenous people of an area (Google Definition)

Chattel Slavery: the enslaving and owning of human beings and their offspring as property, able to be bought, sold, and forced to work without wages, as distinguished from other systems of forced, unpaid, or low-wage labour also considered to be slavery (Google Definition)

Transatlantic Slave Trade: The trans-Atlantic slave trade was the largest long-distance forced movement of people in recorded history. From the sixteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, over twelve million (some estimates run as high as fifteen million) African men, women, and children were enslaved, transported to the Americas and bought and sold primarily by European and Euro-American slaveholders as chattel property used for their labour and skills (https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu)

Middle Passage: the sea journey of slave ships from West Africa to the West Indies. (Google Definition)