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The Scientific Evidence Against Lord Jamar’s Spook And Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Denial

The Scientific Evidence Against Lord Jamar’s Spook And Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Denial

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Lord Jamar (Photo: TV One)

Lord Jamar is one of the founding members of the legendary hip-hop group the Brand Nubians. The New Rochelle, NY-based group was known for their politically charged and socially conscious rhymes in the 1990s. Today, Jamar is shocking people not with his lyrics but with his beliefs about the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In short, he doesn’t believe it happened.

Jamar also doesn’t believe that Black folks were brought to the Americas on ships at all.

During a 2018 episode of his “Yanahadeen Godcast” with fellow rapper Rah Digga, Jamar shot down the history that Africans being shipped across the Atlantic and forced into slavery in the New World. He claimed Europeans did not have the resources to achieve this and questioned why the slave shops had not been found en masse.

A clip of the episode has resurfaced and is making the rounds on social media.

“Did the trans-Atlantic slave trade exist to the level they’re mothaf—-s are claiming? No, it didn’t,” Jamar said. “They didn’t have the resources to do what the f–k they said they did. Where’s the slave ships?”

Jamar wondered why the historic ships were preserved from the Boston Tea party but ships said transport Africans to the Americas weren’t as well. 

So how did Africans get to the Americas? Jamar said they traveled for their own will before colonizers like Christopher Columbus arrived.

“You’ve (white people) showed me diagrams and you told me story — but my people were already here,” he stressed. “Ya’ll aren’t that organized to do that. It’s a way to make yourself (white people) seem supreme. Like ‘oh, I was so industrious. I was able to subjugate and move that many people.’ No mothaf—-.”

Lord Jamar added, “You put a spell on a generation of people and you tried to kill off that generation. And on the next generation, you just told them they were from somewhere else.”

It is true many slave ships have not been recovered. Yet there has been an effort by a group of Black scuba divers to recover the ships that brought enslaved Africans to the Americas, National Geographic reported in 2019.

And, they have found a few, such as a Portuguese slave ship named São José Paquete de Africa. It set sail from Mozambique in 1794 headed for Brazil. When the ship became wedged between two coral reefs off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, it broke in half. The wreck killed 212 of the 512 African captives on board, National Geographic reported.

“Before I even got to it, I began to sort of get goosebumps getting a sense of the tragedy.” says Kamau Sadiki, a lead instructor for Diving With a Purpose, the maritime archaeology program whose divers search for slave wreck. 

“I could feel the vibration, the energy, and the pain, and the suffering and the horror,” says Sadiki, who was part of the São José research dive team.

“There were over 12,000 ships making over 40,000 voyages over 250 years of slave trade,” Sadiki says. “To date, there are only five [slave] ships in maritime history in the database. Why is that?”

Why? Because there has been a lack of interest on sponsoring research into the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade–until recently, said Tara Roberts, a DWP-trained diver, journalist and National Geographic explorer writing about DWP’s dives.

“We’re now in a moment in time where there is an interest in understanding all the many perspectives that make up a story,” explained Roberts. “It’s no longer okay for just the people who came in and conquered to tell stories.”

In 2019, the Clotilda, the last known ship to bring enslaved Africans to America, was discovered in a remote arm of Alabama’s Mobile River following an intensive yearlong search by marine archaeologists.

And, while American slave masters were notorious for not keeping records of slaves, there is an extensive database put together by researchers at Emory University. The school’s “Slave Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database” is recognized as a preeminent resource for the study of slavery across the Atlantic.

Lord Jamar has not addressed the issue of the slave ships that have been found, nor why so few of the ships that carried Europeans to the Americans have also failed to be discovered.

Lord Jamar (Photo: TV One)