More on the curse of Ham

More on the curse of Ham: The Christian church's main justification of slavery was based on the Old Testament book of Genesis. God sent a worldwide flood to destroy the world’s sinful inhabitants, except for a man called Noah and his family. God told Noah to build an Ark for his family and to take two of each species of animal on the earth so that the earth could be repopulated after the flood. When the flood subsided after forty days and forty nights of rain, Noah, his wife and their six sons and daughters in law were saved and the animals were released.

Later, Noah's son Ham saw his father naked and drunk in his tent, so Noah laid a curse on Ham, which passed to Ham’s son Canaan (Noah’s grandson) and all his descendants. It is not clear why the curse was transferred from a guilty to an innocent person but similar situations do occur elsewhere in other parts of the Bible narrative. Whatever the reason, the incident is usually referred to as ‘The curse of Ham’, rather than ‘the curse of Canaan’ and was certainly used as a significant means of justifying both the trade in African slaves and African-American slavery in the south.