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The Blood on the Keyboard
The history of ivory-topped piano keys and the invisible human suffering caused by our cultural commodities.
During an ivory hunting expedition in 1909 in the AEF or French Equatorial Africa, led by Russian Price Demidov in the Haut-Oubangui region, 13 indigenous porters died due to brutal conditions. As journalists Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank wrote in their 2005 book Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, “nascent environmentalism was less a cause than were the extraordinary difficulties of getting a reliable supply of ivory from Africa” after the early 1950s as African nations began to assert their independence, cutting off Western control of the resource. The current supply chain perpetuates a cycle of maximum extraction and profits in exchange for minimal payments and continues to reward violence, and the materials that humans use — natural and unnatural resources alike — are not objects plucked out of the vacuum of Eden.
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