NOT MERE LABOR

NOT LIMITED TO MERE LABOR  To limit the African slave trade to mere labor is to diminish its true importance to that of dray animals, chattel. That limit tends to discount the value of Africans' intellectual and moral assiduities that were of as much importance to the taming of the new world as uncompensated labor. Africans contributed more than mere labor. As they still do, they also gave an entire panoply of other gifts, talents, proficiencies to their involuntary new world homes.