Just as it may seem obtuse to pigeonhole Greeks, English, Spanish, and Germans into a homogeneous gob of indistinguishable “white people,” it does a disservice to lump the different societies, kingdoms, and people together from a continent three times as big as Europe and just simply refer to them as “slaves.”* The Mandinka people from the West African Mali kingdom were not the same as the Kongo people, although both had civilizations and empires that made Europe’s empires look like ghettos.
