http://www.newsnet14.com/2009/03/black-slaveowners/
Please go to link, because it takes you to the whole story and other links where I got this information.
Many historians have argued that the majority of black masters purchased their relatives and friends who were held in bondage. Being unable to manumit their loved ones, the black masters were forced to hold their kinsfolk and friends as nominal slaves. So they treated their relatives and friends as free persons, and whenever possible, they attempted to manumit their loved ones.
However, there is ample evidence which demonstrates that free blacks purchased slaves as capital investments. To many black masters, slaves represented valued property being used to produce more wealth. These slaveowners, therefore, bought slaves as commercial assets and used them to make a profit. In fact, the commercial side of free black slaveholding was more prevalent than previously maintained by historians.
CHATTEL SLAVERY is closest to the slavery that prevailed in early American history. Chattel slaves are considered their masters’ property — exchanged for things like trucks or money and expected to perform labor and sexual favors. Once of age, their children are expected to do the same. Chattel slavery is typically racially-based; in the North African country of Mauritania, for example, black Africans serve the lighter-skinned Arab-Berber communities.
Though slavery was legally abolished there in 1980, today 90,000 slaves continue to serve the Muslim Berber ruling class. Similarly, in the African country of Sudan, Arab northerners are known to raid the villages in the South — killing all the men and taking the women and children to be auctioned off and sold into slavery.
The first to be enslaved usually were members of the nearest tribe or clan. For centuries, Europeans enslaved fellow Europeans, until economic circumstances altered, creating a whole new set of social needs. As the European looked elsewhere for a market in slaves, Africa became the continent of choice because of the sophisticated slaving network already in place.
Slavery had a sustained history in places like Ghana and Mali long before Europeans began trading in African slaves. Slave societies were common throughout the continent. Sometimes slavers got caught in their own nets, as in the case of Abd Rahman Ibrahima. Ibrahima was the son of a Timbo king and, along with his father, was an industrious slave trader. While on a mission to attack and capture other clansmen, he himself was captured by tribal enemies. Ibrahima was sold to a Spanish slaver, and wound up on a Mississippi plantation, where he remained for the next 40 years.
Marcus Garvey, black nationalist and leader of the largest mass movement of blacks, was certainly no apologist for slavery. Nevertheless, he had a keen understanding of the origins and indispensable role of the institution of human bondage. Without moralizing over the right and wrong of slavery, in the 1920s, he pragmatically wrote:
“Slavery is a condition imposed upon individuals of races not sufficiently able to protect or defend themselves, and so long as a race or people expose themselves to the danger of being weak, no one can tell when they will be reduced to slavery.
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