No race, no people has ever been free from slavery, either as slave or as master. Every race and every people ever enslaved became at every opportunity enslavers themselves:
Greek enslaved by Greek in the time of Aristotle, black enslaved by black since time immemorial in Africa and in the 19'th century, the American south. Slavery was never predicated on race except as circumstances rendered it. Many of the vast number of slaves of ancient Rome were fair skinned, fair haired Germans and Anglo Saxons.
The universal truth of slavery, that it has been throughout history one of the defining manifestations of human nature, has been suppressed both by history and by that nature.
The enduring myth that slavery was imposed on Africa by outside forces, that it was introduced by the Portuguese in 1444, is belied by the fact that slavery and the slave trade were ancient and commonplace within Africa long before the arrival of any white slaver. (The trans-Sahara slave trade route between West and North Africa likely had it's beginnings as early as 1000 B.C., hundreds of years before the Ethiopians, long enslaved by Egypt, conquered and gave to Egypt its Twenty-Fifth Dynasty; hundreds of years before Homer wrote in the Iliad that half the soul of man was lost when "the day of slavery" came upon him.")
"Slavery was widespread in Africa," writes Professor John Thornton in Africa and the Africans in 'The Making of the Atlantic World, 1400 - 1800,' "because slaves were the only form of private, revenue producing property recognized in African law."
To the 'odehye' - the freeborn - elite of West Africa, the outside forces of Europe, England and the Americas imposed no evil, but merely presented a new market, increased demand, and lucrative new export opportunities that the indigenous powers welcomed and readily exploited.
We bewail our past as slaves - experienced or ancestral, real or fancied - but never commemorate our enslavement of others.
Only circumstance separates slave from master; and for much of history, freedom and the will to enslave have been one. The oppressed, in the blessing of their deliverance, become the oppressors.
"The ox," said Aristotle, "is the poor man's slave."