Suffering is when an individual or a group is subjected to unwanted conditions, which may produce negative emotions related
to pain and sadness. Some people are born to conditions that cause them to suffer? In some instances children are born in a country hit by civil wars, hunger, drought, epidemic and mass killings.
Slavery is where people are owned by others, and live to serve their owners without pay. In the past we have seen how some human beings where treated as slaves Their rights were taken, forced to work against their will, taken from their place of birth to foreign countries, pull out from their families for good. The slave masters ignore the cries of their slaves. In their mind they wanted a cheap labour that will do a hard work without complaining, paid next to nothing and in the process enriching themselves. They did not see them as people with rights. They rape, torture and kill them at times without mercy. How cruel can a human being be!
We have seen and noticed the torturing of human beings in a dispeakable way. The apartheid system in South African subjected black people to much
suffering. Apartheid which means "apartness" or "separateness" in Afrikaans, was a system of racial segregation that operated in South Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s. Under apartheid, the races were separated and black people were denied voting rights within so-called 'white' South Africa. It favours white people and degraded black people; that is why black people were treated like animals if not lesser. Why should a human being inflict suffering on his fellow human being? This is a
question that puzzled many people. It is sad to see that suffering is mainly perpetrated by human beings on other human beings. In one instance in South Africa we have witness a horrible accident, where policemen trained their dogs with living human beings. They set their dogs loose so that they can bite those poor African men.
We have noticed a number of sufferings that occur in this world and the question is; Why so much suffering? We have all in some way experienced suffering, whether rich/poor, white/black, young/old, religious/non religious. You can meantion it again, suffering knows no boundaries.
Do we have a choice when it comes to suffering? This question comes when you look at a young child born in a country like Ethopia where there is no enough food and where people die of hunger. What choice does a baby have when he is born in a disrupted family with no values and with parents who are irresponsible, drunkards and fighting at all the times? All these sufferings of the innocent, I think; how much did we contribute to this unwanted situations? Did we take a wrong route or did we take matters into our own hands?