USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
Toyin Falola
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:07:06 -0500
From: "John Stafford Anderson" <jsand...@wisc.edu>
Subject: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
Date: Wed, April 28, 2010 2:03 pm
Gado Alzouma wrote: "I am always amazed how some people would like to
excuse the atrocities perpetrated by European and American powers by
stating that Africans were involved in the slave trade. As if this was a
discovery.... For those people [slaves] and their descendants it does not
matter whether some Africans back home were involved or not."
Gado, to the contrary, for those people and their descendants, it matters
a great deal whether "some Africans" were involved. Neither Gates' nor
anyone else's goal here is to absolve white slave trading countries for
some of history's most heinous, race-precipitated atrocities, it is to
share the complicity for those atrocities across all the parties
involved.
While you dismiss it as elementary knowledge among twelve-year African
students (and therefore, interestingly, not worthy of supporting this
argument) that Africans prohibited penetration of the interior until,
among other prophylactics, the invention of quinine, it is important to
understand that this is not universal knowledge. It is perceived (in the
Texas-sanctioned schoolbooks) in the US, for instance, that slavery and
colonization were one and the same. African 12-levels, you say, know that
slaves were shipped out before colonization. In the face of this, it is
somehow insulting to have African complicities excused because of
contemporary generalizations about race and profit.
Obviously it was not a you are my brother because you are my color era.
And what, exactly, did gain mean to the benefactors of the day? As a
descendant, it is of immense importance to understand that not only did
"some Africans" sell my predecessors, they sold them for such pittance and
amusements -- bullets, beads, and trinkets -- that they could not even
sustain themselves with the profit. Why must we shift economic models
solely to present conceptions? What was the local economic measure of one
group of the neighboring nation being removed from a valuable part of a
fertile valley? What was the local economic measure of not having to
repeatedly wage war with people in your way? And imagine, as you said,
all without slave markets. Were neighbors sold then by the pound? Were
the captors paid according to how full the ship's hold was? By how high
the fingernails and blood reached on the side of the walls of human
storage holes that Africans constructed to store their catch at Goree?
Any African American who "returned home to the motherland" seeking
one-ness and communion with their long lost families, only to be
derisively called slave baby, or akata, or spat at while trying to overpay
for a market craft, or reads praises about a Yoruba hunter as a slave
catcher, needs to understand that the attitudes that permitted bondage,
are being allowed to persist in an environment fostered by a culture of
absolution. To render African complicity a blank slate serves to only
support the diminutive notions of Africa that supported colonization. It
excuses violence against Africans perpetrated by other Africans as
negligible, while conveniently re-focusing the brunt of atrocities to what
happened after slaves were loaded onto the ships to the Americas. How do
you know whether it was more devastating to be whipped on the block than
to be ripped away from homes and loves?
I believe that Gates' goal is to iterate how Obama's Presidency can foment
a more intense discussion of the slave trade, and ultimately invigorate
what reparations should look like and who should pay them. After all,
what happened to the land from which my parents were taken?
John Stafford Anderson
Dept. of African Languages & Literature
University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
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Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
intensively in
http://www.westafricareview.com/vol1.2/1.2war.htm
I believe the level of our discussion will be substantially elevated
after a read or re-read of the earlier debate. We can take the
discussion forward after that, and even add to it, since 'The Blame
Game'
was an integral part of the forum.
May I add that Esi Bani's piece, 'Prof. Gates' 11 year itch'
hit the nail on the head and put the debate in full perspective.
Well done.
Gloria Emeagwali
www.africahistory.net
..........................................................
Some of the relevant articles from the earlier
Slavery Blame-Game Debate.
The "Wonders of Africa" and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
Joseph Inikori, University of Rochester, New York, USA
Deconstructing Gates' Wonders of the African World
Gwendolyn Mikell, Georgetown University, Washington D. C., USA
A Millennium Letter to Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Concluding a Dialogue?
Ali A. Mazrui, Binghamton University, New York, USA
My Preliminary Response to "A Preliminary Response to Ali Mazrui's
'Preliminary Critique
of Wonders of the African World'"; [A Personal Letter to Gates]
Amechi A. Okolo, Long Island University, and Nassau Community College,
New York, USA
Conversations with Colleagues: Africanist and Afrocentric Reactions to
Wonders of the African World
Michael Burks, Karen Cudjoe, Jonathan T. Reynolds, and Michael
Washington, Northern Kentucky University, Kentucky, USA
The Travelogue: Wonders of the African World
Omofolabo Ajayi, University of Kansas, Kansas, USA
Greatness and Cruelty: Wonders of the African World and the
Reconfiguration of Senghorian Negritude
Biodun Jeyifo, Harvard University, Massachusetts, USA
The Gates-Mazrui Clash: Why Mazrui May Have a Case
Eddie D'Sa, Goan Overseas Digest, London, UK
On the Slavery Issue in Wonders of the African World
Gloria Emeagwali, Central Connecticut State University, Connecticut, USA
Critique of Wonders of the African World by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Vivian Windley, City College of the City University of New York, New
York, USA
Wonders of the African Crisis
Biko Agozino, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, USA
Wondergates
George Nelson Preston, City College of New York/City University of New
York, New York, USA
Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
ISSN: 1525-4488
Thoughts on the Atlantic Slave Trade: the Roles of Africans and the Issue of Apology for Slavery
Abdul-Rasheed Na'Allah
Who deserves an apology for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade? Skip Gates, in his Wonders of the African World video series makes some Africans apologize to him, thus demonstrating his belief that continental Africans need to apologize to descendants of slaves in the Diaspora. President Mathieu Kérékou of the Republic of Benin echoed a similar belief by asking for a conference where continental Africans would apologize to Diaspora Africans for slavery.1 I'm not sure whom the president was speaking for, and whether he was offering to convene such a meeting. In my view, continental and Diaspora Africans have never been enemies and have always worked together for the glory of Africa, and history is rich in examples, Nkrumah to DuBois, Randall Robinson to Moshood Abiola. However, we need conferences, in Africa and abroad, to reconcile our understanding of past events and to ensure that no one sells the African agenda to the highest bidder. Yet, apology will not end the debate and misunderstanding about Atlantic Slave Trade. We need to know whether Africans advertised to Europe that they were slavers, and invited Europeans to buy slaves, or Europeans had their own plan, and enticed uninformed, militarily weaker Africans, to choose between Cane and Carrot, to sell their own brothers and sisters. We need to know whether no African resisted the idea of his own people sold across the ocean. We must know what happened to King Jaja of Opobo and his contemporaries, and whether there was truly no African resistance to slave trade.
Now, who would apologize to continental Africans who lost their brothers and sisters to slavery, to the wife whose husband was sold away and forcefully removed to European and American plantations? To those whose cousins, aunts and nephews were massacred and dumped in oceans for ocean animals to eat. Who would apologize to people whose aso ara "cloths covering their bodies" were forcefully removed and left naked, and their homes, nations and continent, in perpetual hunger for development. If all Africans brought to the New Worlds remained and tilled lands and farmed rivers back home in their ancestral origins, Africa might be better than it is today.
In many spots in "Wonders," Skip Gates presents many slippery arguments to support his view that Africans practiced, and still practices, their own "terrible slavery". He interviews some Africans to support his views. In several instances during the interviews, Gates fails to realize that communication practically breaks down between him and his interviewees. For example, he asks one Oumar, "It [slavery] is not illegal?" Oumar responds that it is "traditional". Gates does not caution himself on whether he has gone too far in defining this specific relationship between the worker and the employer as between slave and the white slave owner in America before abolition. Some songs I have heard in Nigeria which were recently recounted for me perhaps shows how a Yoruba person would have interpreted what Gates calls "slave" and "slave master" episode:
Maso'ga di lebira Olohun,
Gbogbo ohun ti n bami lookanje
Ko bami so d'erin
Koja s'ope.
Gbogbo eni tin wa'se
jeki won ri'se.
Gbogbo eni ti o ri'se saanu funwon.
Gbogbo nto mbami lokan je
Ninu odun tawa yi
je o ni'yanju.2
Oh God) don't make a master becomes a laborer
All what makes me sad
Let it make me laugh
Let me be grateful (to you). All those searching for jobs,
let them have jobs.
All those who don't get jobs, help them.
All what makes be sad
This year that we are
solve them for me (Oh God!).
Even when Oumar uses such words as "friend," "permission," "payment" in the process of explaining the nature of this servitude, it does not occur to Gates to check his own preconceived view. Would anyone ever described a slave master as, or compared him to, a slave's "friend"? Did the European slave master ever allow his slave to earn money for him-/herself by taking on other employment? When was a slave ever paid for his/her labor by a slave master? No, Gates is on the offensive, and seems to be saying, "these people [Africans] are by nature slave hawkers, what morality have they to ask for reparations from the Europeans and the Americans?!" Well, let us examine a portion of Gates conversation with Oumar:
(Gates starts this portion by introducing some natives as dark-skinned slaves, and others as light-skinned masters. This was at Mopti, a market town between Bamako and Timbuktu).
Gates: (Pointing at a native) So, he's from Timbuktu?
Oumar: (After inquiring from the person concerned) Timbuktu.
Gates: But, how come, Oumar, how come he looks different from
him?
Oumar: No, he's Bella, things like that
Gates: Is he a slave?
Oumar: Yeah
Gates: Yeah, I see. So, this man owns him?
Oumar: Like that
Gates: So, he's born into slavery?
Oumar: Exactly. From father to son, to big father.
Gates: It's not illegal?
Oumar: It is traditional.
Gates: Tradition.
Oumar: Yeah, it's tradition.
Gates: Hun. My great grand father was a slave.
Oumar: Now, you, in America, is finish for that. But for this people, it is
traditional. Every thing he have to do [that] he have to go to ask a friend, he
have to
ask him. He have to say do that, things like that.
Gates: Does he pay him?
Oumar: He pays him too.
Gates: He pays him too. But this man if he wanted to quit and work on the
river, he couldn't do that unless he says "yes"?
Oumar: Sometimes he can say "yes", sometime he can so
"no'.
Gates: And the Bella people, no rebellion? They never want to fight the
Tuareg?
Oumar: They like it.
Gates: (smiles) Yeah, they used to say that about Black American slaves
too.3
No right thinking person will condone any practice anywhere that subjects anyone to socioeconomic domination, and I personally condemn any situation in Africa that makes some people lords and some serfs. However, Gates does not seem to want to examine the true situation here. He forces words into Oumar's mouth, and coats the native's responses in his own biased colors. In all instances cited above, it is Gates, and not Oumar, who suggests that someone is a slave, and the other is a master. Oumar's level of understanding of the English language can be judged from the grammatical and phonological correctness of his responses. Yet, Oumar most likely knows the English word "slave" but chooses to use the indigenous language word for lineage or language group to describe every person he identifies for Gates in the video. Yet, in the book that accompanies the video, Gates interprets a dialogue similar (perhaps the same as above) with Oumar about the Tuareg and the Mella as follows:
The man was a Tuareg, dressed in their traditional white gown with a bold indigo turban. With him was another man, very dark, dressed in an indigo gown, who performed all the menial tasks for the Tuareg tradesman. When we had passed them, Oumar told me that the Bella man was a slave. The word "slave" is not used but is the only one that accurately describes the traditional relationship between these two peoples. (p. 119)
Gates sounds really determined to give biased meanings to anything Oumar says. Oumar's frequent addition of "things like that", to his responses to Gates shows that he is not about to accept many of Gates's translations of his speeches. I am particularly impressed that on the contrary, Oumar answers Gates' questions only after first confirming from those natives actually concerned.
I grew up constantly hearing a powerful Yoruba adage in my multicultural, multiethnic Ilorin: eniyan l'aso, humans are cloths unto one another. This saying, from the repertoire of Yoruba cultural expressions, can be very extensive, and the core meaning would be that people are there to defend each other, to be their brothers' and sisters' keepers, and that humans are more important to themselves than money is to them. Basically eniyan l'aso is a Yoruba philosophy which clearly denotes that Yoruba people would rather have people around themselves than accept money from a highest bidder. My thesis is not to negate the theory of a willing horse in Africans, or specifically among the Yorubas during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Rather it is to establish that there is nothing inherent in Yoruba culture that people should sell their own people for money and materials. I like to further Joseph E. Inikori's opinion4 that "conditions" were created by Europeans for the crudest act of trading in human beings and for transporting "captured and bought people" across the Atlantic in the most inhuman conditions possible.
Again, I am not about to deny that Africans practiced a kind of servitude before the European intrusion. However, as Ali Mazrui said in his documentary, The Africans: A Triple Heritage, the degree of callousness of the European enslavement of Africans was unknown to Africans. Let me go once again to Yoruba rhetoric. Eni to l'eru lo l'eru, eni leru lo l'eru. "To whomever belongs the 'slave,' belongs the slave's properties, and whomever has slave's properties has the 'slave.'". T'aa ba ran ni ni'se eru afi t'omo jee. "When a person is sent on an errand that portrays him/her as a 'slave', he or she should deliver it as a freeborn." It is not yet time or place to analyze every phonemic, morphological and syntactic structures of these Yoruba adages, neither do I need now explain what socio-cultural meanings they give. What is crucial for the purpose of this discussion is that Yoruba has a word, eru, often wrongly translated as equivalent to the English word "slave," by many contemproary Yoruba scholars. As Toyin Falola once said, eru is not always the same as "slave",5 neither is a person called eru mi "my eru" the same as way an American white slave owner would call "my slave". O s'eru sinmi, means, "he/she served me", or, O s'eru sinle baba re, he/she served his/her country, as in the case of the one year national youth service program in Nigeria. Eru Anabi, follower of Anabi (Falola). The question we must ask is whether the Yoruba culture at any time saw eru as less human as Black slaves were treated in Europe. Since historians have repeatedly reminded us that Europeans practiced slavery of their own before they enslaved Africans, we may also want to ask, did Europeans treat European slaves as less human as they treated Black slaves? Did any non-Europeans create any "condition" for Europeans to be shipped abroad? How many of them were massacred as Blacks were? How many got thrown into the Atlantic Ocean, beheaded like chickens! Where on earth were European slaves taken and maltreated in such devastating degrees as Blacks were?
The philosophy of eniyan (enia) l'aso would prove that Africans (or Yoruba people) who captured opponents during inter- ethnic wars, used them to boost their own population. Some powerful warriors married female captors, and other captors served their masters in various economic and cultural capacities. Without doubt, this attitude is terrible and degrading of their fellow human beings, but it is far less callous than the European slavers' subjugation of Africans. African practice of servitude is not reason enough to initiate or justify the Atlantic Slave Trade. The farms worked, and the economies developed by the indigenous African labor were Africa's. Descendants of hitherto laborers have become political leaders in many parts of Africa. If our searchlights are sharp enough we will find among contemporary African presidents some whose foreparents were domestic farm workers.
When Africans practiced indigenous servitude, I'm not sure the African master had manufactured chains and padlocks to further dehumanize fellow Africans. Part of the "conditions" Europeans created for the Atlantic Slave Trade was the importation of chains, padlocks, guns, and various crude gadgets to Africa, and the obvious demonstration of their uses to the Africans. If the account we heard about how Europeans dehumanized King Jaja of Opobo were true, if the story about how they subjugated the proud Kingdom of the Benin people was anything to learn from, Africans had to cooperate when Europeans came to them with carrots asking to ship away fellow Africans. For after carrots would have come heavy canes.
Let us take a brief time to peruse this Yoruba anecdote: O nwa owo lo, o waa pade iyi l'ona. Bi o ba ri owo ohun kini iwo yo fira? "You set off on a journey in search of money, and right on your way, you met prestige/honor. If you had eventually got the money what would you have bought with it?" I am not so sure that the Yoruba people, and indeed Africans, had particular yearnings for materials such that they would be all out to sell their own people for devastation. Of course, the Sese Sekos, the Abachas and the Babangidas of this "neocolonial" generation proved particularly carnivorous. Oral traditions show that good name, prestige and honor were more a preoccupation to them than money, and honor came when they were generous to their own people, when they spent for their people's welfare, and served them selflessly, not when they sold their brothers and sisters to the highest bidder.
Slavery and the African Kings
Yes, let's turn one of the Yoruba adages I cited in this paper upside down (isn't the issue at stake itself 'upside down'?): Won ran Oba n'ise eru, Oba je'se bi eru, the King was sent a message as a slave, he delivered it as a slave. Yes, African Kings and Chiefs were slaves in the hands of the White slavery mongers. As Wole Soyinka suggested in his recent "Intervention",6 we should not sympathize with the African King- collaborators. We should not speculate either about what could have happened to them had they refused to collaborate with the Slavers. Yes, the Kings should have resisted, and history would have judged them brave warriors? How has history judged King Jaja of Opobo who said "to hell" to the slavers and the colonialists? How did it judge the Benin King, the Chiefs and the masses who insisted that the British must respect their culture and protocol? Yes, the same history and historians today say they deserve no reparations! Did the Europeans enslave King Jaja and the King of Benin, or did they leave them in their kingly robes? How can we understand what informed those Kings' choices for resistance? How sincere are we when we hail or condemn African Kings and Chiefs either way? Has whatever decision they made nullify the genocide of the Atlantic Slave Trade? Can we discuss Atlantic Slave Trade outside racial reasons? Will it be wrong to say that racism (the belief that Blacks are sub- humans) was at the root of how Europeans prosecuted the trade?
In Ali Mazrui's recent posting,7 he made references to a respected Nigerian historian's assertion that African Chiefs were forced into the Atlantic Slave Trade. Mazrui's lines were interesting:
The formulation is mine, but the logic is what professor Ajayi has brought into the debate. African Chiefs were BLACKMAILED (or WHITEMAILED) into becoming slavers for the white man. Since the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was DEMAND- DRIVEN, and the demand was in the West, Africans were forced into collaboration. Often literally at the point of a gun.
The "carrot or cane" policy of White slavers cannot be dismissed with a wave of the hand whenever Africans' participation in Atlantic Slave Trade is discussed. Yet, I might be among the first to agree that African Chiefs should have chosen to receive the White man's cane and resisted him to the last. But, would it be the Kings alone that would have been maimed and or put into slavery? Perhaps the entire continent and the black race would have been forced into captivity. No, no speculation.
I think history has proved that a choice to resist European domination may be practicable in African-European's dealings today--despite neo-colonialism. It could have been suicidal for Africans to dare the white man even before mid twentieth century. I need not repeat the many examples that we already know, and really, I don't want to speculate!
It seems to me that Africans compete well, sometimes even imitate the White man in many areas, but have refused to degenerate to the level of callousness of the white executors of the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Eru is not Slave: A Misuse of Terminology
"No scientific discussion can take place if scientific terms mean different things in different regions."
- Joseph E. Inikori
I am often amused to hear this Yoruba adage, B'Oyinbo mu tii maa m'ekoogbona. Omi gbona kan naa lajo n mu. "If the White man drinks tea, I'll drink Ekoogbona--hot corn-drink. We both drink hot water/liquid." It is with this popular saying that I like to return to my previous discussion on the terminology used for the English word "slave" in some African languages, especially the Yoruba language. The eru (there's another word: iwofa) tradition among the Yoruba is basically a tradition of servitude. Eru is simply a servant. Serf is far better a translation of eru than "Slave". Eru Oba, King's servant. The Yoruba persons compete so well with the Europeans and easily locate equivalent cultural element from their locality as shown in the Ilorin Yoruba humorous adage. However, never do the Yoruba people, and indeed no African culture to my knowledge, ever even thought of, let alone actually competed with the brutish British and American slavery traditions. Although there was, and still is, Ekoogbona for the tea the English presented to them, never did Africans practiced a debasement of humanity as slavery was. There is no word, apology to the Whorfians, in the thoughts of the Yoruba people (Africans) for slavery!
Among the Hausa people, Yoruba neighbors spread in many areas of West Africa, modern writers often use for "slave" bawa, or baiwa. Like eru, bawa simply means servant, not slave. Many contemporary Hausa scholars have used bauta for slavery. However, bauta in Hausa gangariya, deep-rooted Hausa, is worship or service, and many will say, na bautawa Allah, "I worshiped God." Na bauta wa sarki, "I served the king!" Na bauta maka can even be extended to mean "I served/respected you". Perhaps Eru Oba will be the same as Dogarin Sarkin in Hausa, or bawan sarki. Because of the importance of the "service" meaning of the word bawa, many Hausa people today answer to the name Bawa. I don't think any person will like to be called "slave", in terms of the Atlantic Slave. Uncle Toms won't use the word "Slave" as a first name. Cato, Dr. Gaines's house slave in The Escape; or A Leap for Freedom (1858) by William Wells Brown, proved at the end of the day, that he would rather answer to a name of freedom.
My American students would forever ask me why Elesin Oba, the King's Horseman in Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman (1975), was treated with reverence and cultural dignity, when, in fact, he was only a servant, an eru, to the king and was meant to "die" because the King "died". I would always reply that Elesin Oba was not a slave, that as a servant of the King and the community, he did not, at any time, lose his status as a human being, and that an Elesin actually won greater glory by the share importance of the service of saving human lives and ensuring community harmony through his committing death to accompany the Kabiyesi, King. As Olori Elesin, leader of all King's Horsemen, his position attracted more honor to him. Certainly no Elesin Oba would ever cease to be regarded as a human being, even if he is terribly disadvantaged in any matter.
Conclusion: Slavery and the Race Question
Anyone who still hasn't got it that race made the big difference in the execution of the Atlantic Slave Trade should read (or cause to be read to him/her) Soyinka's poem, "Telephone Conversation", as evidence of a not too distant past. And I'll be aback if he or she continues to limit his/her polemics on demeaning the African Chiefs, instead of understanding their predicament. The European slavers did not see Africans as human beings. The darkness of Africans' skins was what, to them, defined Africans, not the lightness of Africans' palms. I think if argument for reparation is based on racism alone, it'll still be genuine. The French on overpowering the English dined with the English, encouraged their own princes and princesses to marry British princes and princesses, and the Romans did not chain the Greeks to trees, or pack them like sardines across oceans and seas. The European Slavers considered that subdued Africans weren't human beings, thus they justified perpetuating anything and everything evil on them.
Yes, we need more studies into the kinds of eru traditions in Africa. We need Metalanguage scholars (the Awobuluyis, the Bamgboses, and the Dalhatu Muhammads in Nigeria) to get equivalents for some foreign words.
References
Brown, William Wells. The Escape; or A Leap for Freedom. Black Theatre USA. New York: The Free Press, 1974.
Gates, Henry Louis. "Wonders of the African World." PBS Home Video. Wall to Wall Television, 1999.
---. Wonders of the African World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.
Mazrui, Ali. The Africans: A Triple Heritage. Boston: Little, Brown, 1986. (Also in Video).
Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King's Horseman. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
Soyinka, Wole. "Telephone Conversation." A Selection of African Poetry. Introduced an annotated by K.E. Senanu and T. Vincent. Longman, 1976, 116-9.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
© Copyright 2000 Africa Resource Center
Citation Format
Na'Allah, Abdul- Rasheed. (2000). Thoughts on the Atlantic Slave Trade: the Roles of Africans and the Issue of Apology for Slavery. West Africa Review: 1 , 2. [iuicode: http://www.icaap.org/iuicode?101.1.2.24].
xok...@yahoo.com
!!! This kind of scholarship is quite honestly unhelpful. I actually am amazed at how the howling of those opposed to Professor Gates' perspective have helped me appreciate and respect his position. How on earth can someone say that what happened to slaves in the Old Benin kingdom was "servitude." Talking about callousness, I wonder if the descendants of slaves who were used as human sacrifice would consider that humane. The problem with this kind of scholarship is that its purveyors have boxed themselves into tight corners built on fantasies and lies. As a result they find themselves defending the indefensible. The unintended tragedy here as Abdul-Rasheed Na'Allah so eloquently demonstrates is that the research is distorted and twisted and ultimately worthless. The lasting ramifications of compromising these works are infinitely long-lasting. It is a tragedy of immense proportions.
I am afraid in this debate, Professor Gates is looking really good. I admire his stance on this issue. I think the world would be a better place if we tried to engage him on an equal level and with respect. What I have been reading for the most part is patronizing and condescending. I won't even dignify the abusive rants with as much as a nod. Some things are just beneath me. Those pushing reparations need to understand one thing. It is complicated.
- Ikhide
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
-----Original Message-----
From: "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@mail.ccsu.edu>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 19:27:18
To: <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery
Blame-Game
Dr. Valentine Ojo
Ikhide, Gloria, and other Colleagues:
Is this kind of discussion we are conducting her not really part of the PROBLEM - and I do not mean being pro or anti Skip Gates here. I suppose both sides have merits, but that's for another time. But the manner in which it is being conducted - at loggerheads with each other!
But guys, lets' get REAL!
Can any of us imagine Jewish intellectuals - whether Israeli Jews or Jews residing outside Israel like American or European Jews - on Jewish forums, arguing among themselves as to whether the Germans were culpable in, and to be held responsible for the so-called Jewish Holocaust where some 6 million Jews were said to have perished, regardless of what the Jews may have done to "provoke" the Germans (and some of you should take the time off to read the German side of the story, and I don't mean Mein Kampf alone), and of Jews that may actually have colluded with Germans to betray or help exterminate fellow Jews?
We are here talking of Africa losing some estimated 100 million Africans over a period of some 200 years to the peculiar institution of European Chattel Slavery in Africans!
This kind of rigid wall and academic sophistry between the PROS and CONS is not not helping our case on either side of the Atlantic - and we do have a case! It is merely hardening the DIFFERENCES between us as peoples of African origin who suffered from the EFFECTS of European chattel slavery on Africa and Africans, regardless of the degree of involvement or participation of some - but not all - of our own African peoples!!
Why for example should it be unhelpful to state that "Africans practiced a kind of servitude before the European intrusion...but the degree of callousness of the European enslavement of Africans was unknown to Africans?"
TRUE or FALSE - YES or NO?
This should be the concern of our academic researches! We have a need to know the TRUTH as much as possible, and not merely swayed by a pro or anti Skip Gates flood of emotion!
That is UNSCHOLARLY!
That is QUACKERY disguised as SCHOLARSHIP!!!
Today, we are again living witnesses of a repeat performance in our African "rulers" again selling African resources to Americans, Europeans, Asians for NAUGHT!
Those who fail to learn from their history...
Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD
On Wed 04/28/10 8:54 PM , xok...@yahoo.com sent:
Moses Ebe Ochonu
What I find tragic in this debate is that it appears that some people are doing a deliberate misreading of Gates' OP-ED. Unfortunately, that misreading, a gross distortion if you ask me, is now framing this discussion. Did those who are accusing Gates of blaming Africans for the slave trade actually read the OP-ED or are they simply transferring their ill-feelings from previous encounters with Gates' other "controversial" works? This is what I suspect is happening here.
I read the piece thoroughly and nowhere in it did I see the meanings and motives being read into it. What the man is saying is fairly simple, straightforward, and in accord with known facts. Reparations is a more complex issue than the narratives of advocates advance it to be. This complexity is further intensified by the ACTIVE and PROACTIVE participation of African kingdoms, states, merchants, warrior-raiders, and kings because it makes moral, if not legal, culpability a trans-Atlantic reality. Why is this such a controversial point to bring up, especially when reparations campaigners only focus on Western culpability? Let's not forget that some Africans, including the late MKO Abiola and Ali MAzrui once had the audacity to demand slavery reparations for Africa, all of Africa, with no mechanism for distinguishing the descendants and provinces of slavers from those of the enslaved. By what moral, commercial, or legal logic do you pay reparations to a whole continent, when some of its current privatized wealth is traceable to the slave trade and is still benefiting those who did one of the dirty works of the enslavement process: capture and sale? And without paying attention to how the holders of such wealth deserve no part in any putative reparations or how only verified African victim (raided and conquered) communities and families deserve compensation.
Are we saying that the Africans who raided villages in the interior and marched captured Africans to the coast bear no responsibility for chattel slavery in the so-called new world? There is no acceptable excuse for this brazen attempt at revisionism, the quest to manufacture and peddle a sanitized version of recent history. We know of individual families from Lagos to Ouidah to Goree to Congo and Angola and other places who built fortunes from the anguish of ethnic Others that they enslaved and sold to European merchants.The descendants of this families are alive and do not even deny this history. On a recent trip to Nigeria I was given a church-commissioned historical text that refreshingly provides a window into how the slave trade constituted the foundations of the fortunes of many of today's renown Lagos families and their wealth. The descendants of these 18th and 19th century slave traders, who were interviewed for the project and are custodians of the written and oral histories of their families, are willing to do what some of our historians hesitate to do: retell the past in all its flavors of ugliness and beauty. Local oral traditions in many coastal regions of West and Central Africa identify whole families and clans that continue to dominate commerce and politics in their respective locales, having parlayed their ancestors' slave trade commercial wealth into more licit ventures. Do we not do violence to our history when we minimize or erase this historical verity?
This nonsense about African "servitude vs. Euro-American slavery should be beneath the professional integrity of historians and scholars who have access to the dirty FACTS of precolonial African slavery in several forms, as well as to the more significant historical fact of slavery's universality in antiquity and even in the modern period of so-called post-enlightenment humanism. Africans were not alone in enslaving outsiders who in today's taxonomy would qualify as their racial kin. Treating slavery in Africa differently or denying its presence is a dangerous act of erasing Africa from some of the socio-economic constants of world history, or worse, carving a space of exotic insularity for Africans and Africa.
That it took a non-Historian, Ikhide, to put down this ultra-defensive and callous denialism is indicative of how dangerous the mixing of ideology and scholarship can be in imposing blind spots on historians.
There is nothing wrong with Gates pointing out that African complicity in the slave trade, of which there was much, and the evidence for which is embedded in many oral traditions and remembrances, complicates current narratives on reparations. The only mitigating logic that would not be defensive or escapist is to argue that without European demand for slaves in the "New World" there might not have been an Atlantic slave trade, at least not on the scale that it occurred. Since demand is a bigger factor of causality than supply, this may release the descendants of African regions, states, families, and clans that participated in the trade from the material compensation being sought from European corporations. I am not even sure that this is a winning argument, since it only mitigates moral culpability, not actual culpability. At the very least it would still make symbolic, non-material reparations from individual African countries, clans, and ethnic descendants of slaving kingdoms necessary.
Then there is Kwabena's egregious extrapolation of Akan oral traditions and their narratives on slavery and the slave trade to the rest of the continent----something that would demand a whole new post to refute. I have multiple, serious quibble with Kwabena's submission, but I am starting with this general commentary. But let me say this: he talks about well known gun-slave cycle. This is merely an explanation of the "driver" of the trade. Every trade needs a driver, a tool and mode of production. The gun was the tool during the slave trade. But guns needed raiders and warriors-for-booty before they could produce slaves. The agency of the raiders and warriors in the slave trade chain should not be written off. The gun was also a currency in the transaction between European slave traders and African slavers and kings. It was a thing of immense value in Africa--even before the slave trade took off. So, to the extent that guns were desired items of value in African kingdoms and states, the trade was indeed a trade: reciprocal exchange of value. Europeans responded to the demand for guns in Africa. Without the demand for guns, Europeans would have battered other items for slaves and in fact they did in some areas where gin, mirrors, and other in-demand, exotic items of value were treasured above guns.
African history, especially precolonial African history is not a consistently pretty history. Like other histories, it is full of the good, bad, and the atrocious. There is no need to assume that Africans, as a subset of the human family, would follow a radically different historical trajectory. Wars were fought; the vanquished were captured and enslaved to different degrees depending on the society; some of the enslaving societies, like some societies in other parts of the world, practiced an integrative slavery; others, again like some other societies elsewhere, did not. It's no big deal to be faithful to these facts of African history. It does not and should not, exonerate European slavers and what they , in collaboration with their African agents and profiteer, did to many African communities, villages, and families during the slave trade. Unless these facts fall into misuse in the hands of racist mischief makers, but there is nothing we can do about racists and their agenda, and their antics should not prevent us from reconstructing histories faithfully and accurately or make us into paranoid, defensive, visceral hagiographers of romantic African virtue.
And Gloria, please do not assume condescendingly that folks on this list have not read that debate or did not follow the "Wonders" controversy. There is nothing anyone said then or is saying now that impeaches the essential truth of Gates's current intervention, which makes the simple point that the reality of Akan, Dahomey, Yoruba, Nupe, Igbo, Kongo, Angola, etc, complicity in the slave trade and of specific known families and groups adds a new layer of complexity to what is already a legal and political minefield.
What worries me is that some historians may actually be teaching this fumigated, romantic version of African history to students--Western and African. History is by its very nature messy. African history is no exception. That is why an excursion into the past can be alternately depressing and pleasurable. But that precisely is the point of studying it. It is a sobering reminder of the countervailing human capacities for evil and good.
There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.
---Mohandas Ghandi
Qansy Salako
and quacked like a duck....it was a duck.
A million facts may not deem the light from one TRUTH.
One sacrosanct and unassailable TRUTH is that there were Africans who
collaborated with the white man in enslaving other Africans.
The activities of African slavers contributed immensely to prolonging the
era of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (TAST). Period.
All the dribbles about Africans' traditional culture of slave/slavery not
being in the same vein as the white man's slavery, many Africans who
collaborated with white man in TAST did so to enable them have guns they'd
use for protection and security of their territories, that many African
collaborators were forced into the TAST business under duress, etc, might be
historical facts, they were nothing more than fancy footwork in sophistry
against the issue under discussion.
They make us, continental Africans, look both arrogant and ridiculous.
It is like this.
The wife who killed her husband because of spousal abuse is not in the same
class as the one who killed he husband for insurance money.
Common people...both wives killed, dammit.
The wife committed homicide, not counter abuse.
The abuse she suffered in her relationship with her husband is only an
extenuating fact, it does not diminish the fact/truth of her killing her
husband.
Even if she is sentenced to probation by the judge or she manages to get a
hung jury, she would still be liable for, at the least, an apology to the
family of the killed.
Indeed, there were kings who suffered dethronement, banishment, mutiny and
death at the behest of the white colonialists because they refused to take
part in TAST or support the white man in his evil business. These were noble
forefathers.
Similarly, there were kings and nobles who collaborated, supported and
traded with the white man in TAST. Some of these might be under
pressure/force of the time.
But oral history from my own neck of the wood reported that some among them
actually enjoyed the spoils from the heinous trade. Lagos history is replete
with so many characters and personalities who lived and prospered as local
slavers.
These forefathers knew the kind of hell slaves were put through right from
the coastal slave depots/ports (e.g. Badagry, Port Novo, etc) with cast iron
chains yoked to their legs and necks and in groups.
They saw the conditions in which the slaves they sold lived at the ports for
days/weeks before finally boarding the ships for the journey of no-return.
Months after months, years after years, these middle class of the time
supplied more and more slaves to the white brokers and they realized that
they never saw again the last slaves they sold, ever again.
These African slavers had the opportunity to stop their odious participation
in a damnable business and die honorably in banishment (or whatever), but
they chose to live enriched in the cold blood of their brethren.
They didn't enjoy their spoils in sorrow.
They were the lords of the society in their day.
They had a blast, they lived outlandish lives and died like the nobles which
they were not.
These ignoble forefathers were culpable with all the horrors and blames of
the TAST and they were the ones Gates was pointing to accusingly.
By the way, has any of us continental Africans ever tried to imagine what it
feels like to grow up as an African American or a Brazilian Black, let alone
imagine how we would think?
Why should Gates stop thinking the way he thinks when he has failed to
obtain satisfactory answers to what nags his being?
Our patronizing treatment of his queries would hardly satisfy anyone in his
skin, anyway.
The existence of African slave marauders pretty much mooted all other
extenuating pontifications on why black might be enslaving other blacks.
As far as the trans-atlantic slave trade is concerned, the white man alone
should not bear the burden of paying reparation.
That's all Gates is saying.
Any attempt to castigate Gates for this much truth would only incense his
detractors to talk a lot without really saying anything.
They will be left with saliva all over their face.
People like Na'Allah thought being a member of the national ruiner's elite
club of Nigeria qualifies them to pontificate like scholars.
He says "eru" in Yoruba means servant, not slave.
Arrant nonsense.
His submission is so shameful in logic and reminiscent of the caliber of
characters in charge of Nigeria.
He is probably being celebrated as we speak by his vacuous colleagues as a
professor emeritus in history.
America and some European countries already started to apologize for the
trans-atlantic slavery on behalf of their forefathers.
It didn't mean much, but we all acknowledged it as a good gesture.
There is nothing wrong in Africa apologizing too for the culpability of some
of its forefathers in the slave trade. It costs us nothing to apologize, but
it sure buys us a lot of goodwill from descendants of African slaves all
over the world.
Kerekou and Rawlings did the right thing by apologizing to African
Americans.
More sensible leaders from Africa should follow suit.
Over-arched arguments against Africa culpability in the trans-atlantic slave
trade is arrogant, fraudulent, and sterile.
Thanks for reading.
QS
-----Original Message-----
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
[mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Emeagwali, Gloria
(History)
Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 6:27 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery
Blame-Game
Femi Kolapo
From the point of view of Africans, who are equally victims, though victims of a different order, such arguments, especially when it uses the word complicity implies equal responsibility between two criminals, one the White European buyers and users of slaves and the other African catcher and sellers of slaves. For Africans, it rankles that any person would equalize African culpability to White Euro-American liability. It beats the tenor of available evidence and all logic of argument, they would argue.
Being the sellers of slaves to Euro-American buyers and users of slaves, Africans are implicated as culprits, even when their victimhood is beyond question. (Ancestors of) African Americans on the other hand are double victims – first from the hands of those who in Africa sold the slaves and in the hands of those who bought, transported and used them.
Since the two sides do not seem to have been able to harmonize or essentialize the basic elements of their victimhood, each side seems to easily slip into a false position that the success or effectiveness of its ability to demonstrate justiceable victimhood and to demand for satisfaction can only be met by their oversimplification of the situation and by one type or the other of denial of the claim of the other side. On the African side, the tendency to want to smoothen over Africa’s role and its answerability to African-Americans demand for satisfaction of that portion of Africa’s culpability as it sees it and a possible implicit psychological tendency, I guess, to see Africa's victimization claim by Euro-American slave trade as automatically neutralizing Africa-American's victimization claim by African catchers and sellers of their peoples. On the African-American side, there is the tendency, despite denials and caveats, to downplay Africa’s victimhood and equal right as victims to demand for justice and satisfaction. (The latter point, I believe, parallels calls, including by African intellectuals, that Africans and their leaders answer for their own current poverty and backwardness.)
I believe that the only way to establish a necessary middle ground for both sides and especially to harmonize their victimhood experiences is for them to establish magnitudes of the culpability for aspects of the slave trade that roped Africa and Euro-America together. Once we suppress our emotions and are able to do this, Africans should be able to very openly and in a way that is respectful of African-Americans claims, accept their culpability as both sides would have jointly established it. On the other side of the coin, African-Americans also will have to be able to demonstrate respect for Africa’s equal right to lay claim against culprit Euro-America as its victimzers.
The use by professor Gates or any other person of J. Thornton and L. Heywood’s African agency theory or analyses, by default, minimizes Euro-American culpability and liability in the Atlantic slave trade and the horrors it brought on Africa and on those who were shipped out of Africa as slaves. In fact, the logic of Thornton’s argument tends toward exculpating Euro-Americans, and used by diasporan Africans, though clear victims themselves, it tends to erase Africa’s rightful claim to victimization by the EuroAmerican slave trade.
The very useful source evidence that professor Gates motioned as providing a better understanding of the scope of African involvement in the slave trade, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, also supplies unbeatable evidence for which of the two sides, Africa or Euro-America, had and used its technological, financial, industrial, legal and other capacities to initiate, control, and to define the character of the Atlantic slave trade.
It paints clearly for us to see who initiated the slave trading voyages, who controlled them, who owned the ships, who funded the voyages, who produced the manufactures that created [or met] demands in Africa. Names are named, dates are mentioned, and prices, goods, shipping data and so on are made available for all this.
The database is the best tool available so far to enable us establish magnitude of culprit-hood between Africa and Europe and to at the same time help define the shape of the victimhood or victimization that Africa can rightfully claim in this case. Even more than this, it is one of the best tools anywhere around that clearly defines the nuts and bolts of the European construction and control of a new global world with Africa as one of the components that was sucked into it. It supplies details of an overarching global economic structuration whose power extended beyond any individual African trader or multitudes of local chiefs and kings. For me it elaborates the trans-Atlantic slave trade as the coupling of an intercontinental market, a vast capitalistic demand for labour for European colonies, to Africa’s previously limited socio-economic and military-political configurations.
Using its data, it is clear that what was determinant in the new trading relationship was Euro-American demand, a ferociously huge demand backed up by large corporate, private and official capital of European and American societies. That the African supply side was only reactive and responding to the demand side promptings is clearly defined by who controlled the means of transportation and communication that effectively allowed for the linkage of the two worlds and who initiated the contact. It is further defined by the reality of who supplied the capital, most of the manufactures that accompanied the slave trade and who had the farms that required and demanded unending slave labor supply. That Africans have been selling slaves to each other before then is not an argument that can ever stand against this fact.
When Europeans crossed over the Atlantic to sub-Sahara Africa from Europe, and eventually from America in ships they designed for slave transportation, they created a new market dynamics that affected the frequency and character of wars and a different valuation and or appreciation of the war captive than hitherto. What was previously local was now intercontinentalized (in an earlier process of the globalization of a capitalistic world order).
When we shift our focus to this macro level analysis, it becomes clear that L. Gates and whoever makes similar arguments to his, in effect, are blaming Africans and their kings for not resisting or refusing participation in this new globalizing, capitalistic black slave based European dominated commerce. The validity of the blame depends on an impartial delineation of where vital agency lay in the determination of the character of the mega structure of this commerce. It seem to be beyond argument that Africa was vastly the underdog in this relationship. Just as it is unrealistic today to ask poor, if mal-governed African countries, to refuse to sell their oil or cotton or cocoa in a Western dominated unjust global market, likewise, it is unrealistic to expect that African kings or traders would have been able to withdraw from the Atlantic slave trade as a general policy. In both cases, it is simply politically, not to talk of economically, unviable a decision for any governmen to make given the nature of the economic and political web they were entangled in and given their sheer dependency on this emergent global structure.
Given the obvious inequality of power between the two sides, a clear cut line of culprit vs. victim is traceable at the trans-continental level (Africa vs. Europe) with the Atlantic as the divide. This analysis can of course apply to the situation within Africa too at the continental level of North Africa vs. sub-Saharan Africa with the Sahara desert being the divide. The Indian Ocean is another divide that allows for a clear cut line of victim vs. culprit, again between East Africa that was drained of its population and the Middle East and the European Indian Ocean islands and their South West Asia settlements.
Europeans and Arabs of North Africa and the Middle East never sent their people as slaves into sub-Sahara Africa, rather they took slaves from Africa. This is so one way and so unchanging for so many centuries that no amount of theorization of African agency can diminish the gross inequality of the economic relationship involved in this trade and in the structural external imposition that it was on sub-Saharan African peoples, their states and their rulers. African governments and traders’ ability to deploy the power of their states to protect themselves from European traders or to give them an upper bargaining hand are largely micro level down stream issues that do not detract from this patent reality.
The agency that Africans had was not with regard to determining the principal structures of the trade. It is a travesty to confuse micro-level reactions on the part of African traders and kings with macro level (re)structuration of the entire production and commerce of an entire continent by European slave trade and their forceful grooving along tracks that self-perpetuated in production of slaves. The Darwinian imperatives that began to operate in consequence of turning Africa into a labor pool for European farms in the New World were such that survival, political enlargement or growth (rather than development) became predicated on militarism, war and slavery. You were either on top or you ended up beneath – with your people in the hold of the whiteman’s ship, in the caravan of an Arab, or on the way to the farm of some far off African potentate.
But then the claim of Africa’s dependent and weak position in this European constructed and dominated global economy and the claim that it changed the dynamics of internal African political, economic and military processes do not in any way invalidate the argument by anybody, even when they are not African Americans, that Africans it was who did all the dirty work that got slaves down to the coast to be sold to white slave traders. It will be an equal absurdity to deny African culpability in that regard. But though this culpability is defined by Africa’s agency in capturing the slaves within Africa and selling them to Europeans on the coast, it is no less an absurdity to equate this African agency, as delimited and as defined by the larger European dominated structure as it is, with the more vital agency and vastly powerful economic and technological dominance exercised by the Europeans in the entire process.
Continental Africans and diaspora Africans are victims and should be able to unite in their moral rightness to demand justice for wrongs done to them. This justice also demands that African culpability be called out and some satisfaction be given to those who suffered as a result of this culpability, at least in terms of statements from Africa that accept or that do not implicitly deny the charge of the wrongness of Africans deporting Africans, a charge which in its essence is based on a pan-Africanist outlook. The same justice, however, demands that the limited extent of Africa’s culpability in relation to Euro-American liability be clearly defined so that the victimization that Africa bore and continues to bear is not unjustly waved aside by their fellow brothers and sisters in the diaspora in their search for closure to the haunting memories and realities they have gone through. Let there be peace: built on justice.
------------------------
F. J. Kolapo, Ph.D.
History Department * University of Guelph * Guelph * Ontario * Canada* N1G 2W1
Phone:519/824.4120 ex.53212 Fax: 519.766.9516
kol...@uoguelph.ca
----- Original Message -----
From: xok...@yahoo.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 8:54:48 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
"Again, I am not about to deny that Africans practiced a kind of servitude before the European intrusion. However, as Ali Mazrui said in his documentary, The Africans: A Triple Heritage, the degree of callousness of the European enslavement of Africans was unknown to Africans."
!!! This kind of scholarship is quite honestly unhelpful. I actually am amazed at how the howling of those opposed to Professor Gates' perspective have helped me appreciate and respect his position. How on earth can someone say that what happened to slaves in the Old Benin kingdom was "servitude." Talking about callousness, I wonder if the descendants of slaves who were used as human sacrifice would consider that humane. The problem with this kind of scholarship is that its purveyors have boxed themselves into tight corners built on fantasies and lies. As a result they find themselves defending the indefensible. The unintended tragedy here as Abdul-Rasheed Na'Allah so eloquently demonstrates is that the research is distorted and twisted and ultimately worthless. The lasting ramifications of compromising these works are infinitely long-lasting. It is a tragedy of immense proportions.
I am afraid in this debate, Professor Gates is looking really good. I admire his stance on this issue. I think the world would be a better place if we tried to engage him on an equal level and with respect. What I have been reading for the most part is patronizing and condescending. I won't even dignify the abusive rants with as much as a nod. Some things are just beneath me. Those pushing reparations need to understand one thing. It is complicated.
- Ikhide
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
-----Original Message-----
From: "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@mail.ccsu.edu>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 19:27:18
Akurang-Parry, Kwabena
Ghanaweb, Feature Article of Thursday, 29 April 2010
Nkatia-Kumi James
Slave Trade Blame Game: Give Asante Empire Credit
It is just sad and academic falasy to read from a renowned fellow academician of no small measure than Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr.
I sympathize with the Prof. who was demeaned by the community where he lives because of the color of his skin. His anger of this maltreatment by the neighbors who did not recognize his academic credentials may have been a contributing factor for his anger to
blame his ancestors and slave trade.
Blame game is not solution to Black African problem in USA or any part of the world. Let us enjoy the success of Black American climaxed by the victory through President Obama, the first Black President of USA.
To get facts straight, when the Portuguese built Elimina Castle in 1482 to promote Atlantic Trade, there were other products besides slaves. It is a fact that by early 18th century Ashanti Kingdom had expanded to wide area over the present Ghana and beyond
the eastern and western neighboring countries.
It is true Asante Empire wanted to participate in the coastal trade. Their primary objective was not slavery. The Asante Empire has control within its empire vast element of gold, ivory, diamond etc. The Empire skillful workers had produced beads, textiles
(kente) guns, machetes and other metal products that they needed to trade in the south with the European who heather to had been fighting among themselves to get control of the coastal Trans Atlantic Trade.
Later Asante wars with the Europeans and their coastal allies was to get access to the southern trade and also to prevent the British (the final European victor) to colonize the Asante and later Gold Coast at large.
The strategy of Asante Empire after defeat of neighbors was annexation and expansion of the Empire. The chief of the defeated tribe paid allegiance to Asantehene for protection and the Empire provided equal treatment. If Asante Empire was sorely interested
in selling the tribes they captured as slaves before the trade ended the then Gold Coast would have been a barren land.
Yes, Asante Empire participated in the slave trade but only on selected basis, the ransom of war and the people who disobeyed the culture and tradition.
Asante Empire did not wage war just to acquire slaves. They did not sell slaves to import gold as Prof. Gates claims but rather the Empire wanted access to export gold and other industrial products from the ingenuity of the Empire people.
Yes, there were wars against British but only to prevent British territorial acquisition. Asante at its central location of present Ghana was needed to be defeated by the British wars to penetrate to the northern Ghana where French were penetrating for colonizing.
In a few Asante British wars where Asante were defeated eg The battle of Dodowa in 1826 the Asante warriors that were captured and exported as slaves gave the slave traders a hell of resistant from the ship and even to the new American lands.
The learned Prof. Gates Jr. is right to be frustrated and angry on how his people of African ancestry were violently taken by Europeans for the greedy financial exploitation during the industrial revolution and discovery of America.
Definatly the slaves captured were through wars the Europeans initiated through the tribes they divided and incited to fight each other and it was Asante Empire that resisted that exploration and domination. Asante Empire resistance was as current as 1900 through
Yaa Asantwaa War. It was the Asante Empire’s resistance that was disincentive for the colonizers to permanently usurper Ghana’s land.
Asante Empire resistance was the savior of Ghana from being a Rhodesia or apartheid South Africa. The Empire also provided alternative lucrative trade to slave trade. Asante gold, diamond, beads, textiles (Kente and Adinkra) and iron product were collection
items for colonizers.
I will support Prof. Gates Jr. if his anger is vented on the fact that the Black Africans did not resist the Europeans hard enough to prevent slave trade. If this is his anger then he may have to give credit to Asante Empire, which continuously resisted the
European colonizers with comparatively inferior military equipment.
James Nkatia-Kumi Management Consultant,Ghana
nkati...@hotmail.com
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Moses Ebe Ochonu [meoc...@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 11:46 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
Pius Adesanmi
Hey, Ogbuefi Moses:
Take your time o. I think you are a tad uncharitable to Gate's critics. It's a question of nuance and you are stretching nuance a bit here in other to ascribe this neo-Negritudinist romanticization of African history to Gate's critics. I agree that Kwabena Akurang Parry's uncritical "give me back my black dolls" approach to everything about Africa, which has accorded him the Manifest Destiny to even love Nigeria more than Nigerians, is of the pity-inspiring variety (apologies to Farooq) but I don't think that he has gone to that extent here. Gates's critics have no illusions about African participation and complicity in slavery as you and Ikhide are claiming. It's a question of slant.
The slant you give things is very important Moses. If you have been reading and studying Gates consistently over the years, I don't see how you could possibly fail to notice his irritating exculpatory politics. Gates is megaphoning African participation while always mumbling inaudibly about Western participation. Where you have two sides that participated in this thing, whose guilt you elect to play up consistently and whose guilt you elect to consitently minimise is a function of choice, politics, ideology, the interests of your funders, etc. It is not a function of the rotten underbelly and uncomfortable truths of history as you claim here.
That is the point Moses. Anyway, on the lighter side, if you and Ikhide have decided to offer apologies to Gates for selling his ancestors - he is always happy to accept apologies from another African he has successfully intimidated - make sure I see a draft of your letter of apology o. Just to ensure that it is exclusively about you and not on behalf of the rest of us!
Pius ====================================================================== " Oraga rogo, arogo raga, eni ti o r'ago, ko ni s'ago m'owo." - O'odua Abass Obesere --- On Thu, 29/4/10, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com> wrote: |
Moses Ebe Ochonu
Two points for Femi:
1. Millions of African families were torn apart by the slave raiding and capture that went on in the interior. The victims of these crimes in the interior associate their enslavement with powerful neighboring kingdoms, maverick slave raiders, and domineering warrior groups--the visible agents of their suffering and the villains of their victimhood. MOST of them never set eyes on the white man. They saw what in today's crude lexicon could be called black on black violence (of course, the category of blackness didn't exist then). Your argument that African victims blame more powerful Europeans than they do African slavers is therefore neither logical nor factual. As far as the victims were concerned, they were being victimized by more powerful ethnic Others. On arrival at the coast, captives would, of course, have seen the financial masterminds of their brutalization. But for the communities, families, and villages they left behind, their villains till this day remain the powerful polities that made traffic in slaves their economic and social mainstays. Don't forget that slavery and the political traffic in slaves were an essential aspect of the rituals of power and allegiance in states like the Sokoto Caliphate, and that this outlived the Atlantic slave trade. And, sorry, complicity does not automatically imply equal responsibility. Not in the dictionary or legal sense of the word. Complicity means complicity--willful, unforced, self-interested participation. It implies culpability. You can weigh this against the depth of participation and extent of hos central the trade was to a kingdom's economy or to a slaver's personal economy. It is inaccurate to simply do a raw, crude comparison between African and European profiteering without adjusting for the two factors above. The culpable should not escape sanction altogether, if we can identify persons and institutions that continue to be privileged by their profits. Even if we cannot, a symbolic apology from descendants of raiders and slavers would go a long way. The notion that Africans who participated and profited from the trade bear no (or less) responsibility for the crimes that characterized the trade is as ahistorical and fallacious as the empty claim that all of Africa or all Africans are complicity in the Atlantic slave trade. Thanks to good research, we now know, with a small margin of error, states, regions, clans, and even families that enslaved "foreign" Africans for profit. We also know regions and ethnicities that were largely victims, although there were overlaps across time and space that are also documented.
2. The "unequal power" argument is an unhelpful cop out. Every trade (local, regional, or international) is fundamentally unequal. It has always been the case that those who control the political levers that determine the terms of trade and/or those who control credit and other financial instruments of a trading system can profit more from it than those who do not. But unequal profiteering, which is a hallmark of every trade, is not an accurate guide to the moral responsibilities of trades that victimize people or make a commercial virtue of human suffering. The idea of passive and powerless Africans being goaded or forced by powerful Europeans into capturing and selling "African" Others flies in the face of what we know about slavery, slave capture, and slave sacrifice in many ancient and medieval societies in Africa and other continents. Where was the all-powerful European trader when, prior to the 15th century, brutal rituals of enslavement and even slave sacrifice were occurring in many African kingdoms? Where were they when over 20 million African captives were sold across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean? Do we assign exclusive responsibility to the "powerful Arabs" for this pre-Atlantic slave trade or locate the trade in the polyvalent dynamics of precolonial Africa-Arab relations and in the state-building, state-consolidation struggles of precolonial West and East Africa? In Many ancient societies from Africa to China to South America to Europe, the sacrifice of slaves and their burial alongside powerful king were widely practiced. Slaves were transferred and battered across multiple territorial configurations. These were internal acts of enslavement, fueled by local rituals of power, religion and economics, not the overbearing hegemony of a powerful, intrusive outsider.
Again, let's separate history from ideology. As an African who is cognizant of the many injuries inflicted on Africa by Arab and European outsiders, I would prefer that it was all the fault of the evil white man, or the domineering Arab, but that is not what history tells me. At any rate, Africans as subjects of history and as history makers would be boring and uninspiring if all they did in was respond to European (or Arab) economic and political stimuli, if they didn't build states at the expense of others, if they didn't exhibit the timeless human act of survival and Hobbesian self-preservation. People inevitably get hurt, killed, displaced, wiped out, and enslaved in these processes. That's how states formed and fell throughout history, and that's how the realm of power and privilege were demarcated. Trying to exclude Africa from this reality is like trying to deny Africans (or their ancestors) their humanity and their political and economic rationality. The warts of African history are what makes African historical subjects and events as interesting as any others. And the unpalatable realities and present dangers of the past are what vivifies the subject for some of us.
This excessive defensiveness is getting sickening. African history ( with its records of virtues and vices) does not need to be defended; it needs to be explained. How can history perform its didactic and pedagogical role if we insist on this ahistorical formula of African exceptionalism in slavery and slave trade matters?
There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.
---Mohandas Ghandi
kenneth harrow
Can any of us imagine Jewish intellectuals - whether Israeli Jews or Jews residing outside Israel like American or European Jews - on Jewish forums, arguing among themselves as to whether the Germans were culpable in, and to be held responsible for the so-called Jewish Holocaust where some 6 million Jews were said to have perished, regardless of what the Jews may have done to "provoke" the Germans (and some of you should take the time off to read the German side of the story, and I don't mean Mein Kampf alone), and of Jews that may actually have colluded with Germans to betray or help exterminate fellow Jews?
well, yes, i can imagine a nazi side to the story; i can imagine jews asking questions about the holocaust; i can imagine a bible which is not described as jewish tales, including another one with jesus in it; i can imagine the slave trade not dominated by jews, jews who were actually victims of the inquisition when the centuries of the trade got started. i can imagine citing the figure of jews killed in the holocaust without stating "said to have perished." i can also imagine having to hear variants of holocaust denial for the rest of my life.
i can also imagine having to read again and again antisemitic tracts blaming the jews for everything, all over again, because i am a jew and have seen this all my life.
maybe this discussion could be carried out without having to slur jews en route.
ken harrow
Kenneth W. Harrow
Distinguished Professor of English
Michigan State University
har...@msu.edu
517 803-8839
fax 517 353 3755
Olabode Ibironke
“I read the piece thoroughly and nowhere in it did I see the meanings and motives being read into it…. There is nothing anyone said then or is saying now that impeaches the essential truth of Gates's current intervention” Moses Ebe Ochonu
“there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played…. [Obama] is uniquely placed to publicly attribute responsibility and culpability where they TRULY belong, to white people and black people, on both sides of the Atlantic, complicit ALIKE in one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization.” (Emphasis added, Henry Louis Gates Jr)
Dear Moses and Ikhide:
I agree with almost everything you are saying but unfortunately you and Professor Gates are not saying the same things, and obviously have different goals. Imagine that when Obama went to Ghana he said the following: “my fellow Africans, the day of reckoning has come, you who sold your children, brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers into slavery, you must now….” How would you and Ikhide react? This is what Skip Gates seems to be demanding that President Obama does now as a matter of urgency. Do you, in the first place, agree with his basic premise that we don’t know much at all about the role of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade and that it would require an Obama intervention to correct that imbalance/injustice? We know that African Americans were victims of the transatlantic slave trade, Africans were culpable victims, Europeans and Americans (the list goes on) criminal beneficiaries. Gates deliberately and effectively moves Africans into the same criminal beneficiaries category with Europeans and Americans. He can claim that Africans were culpable, complicit if he wants, in the transatlantic slave trade but he cannot logically and historically claim that Africans and Americans/Europeans were “complicit ALIKE.” This is a fundamentally indefensible ideological drift! There are real consequences for how we go down on this debate. My African students increasingly tell me how difficult it is for them to get along with their African American peers for similar reasons. This type of discussion has repercussions far beyond anything we can normally imagine. We must strive to be honest about us history, but we must also be circumspect enough to see the dangers associated with obsessions and strategic statements such as Gates’s.
Bode
Olabode Ibironke, PhD.
Johns Hopkins University
Department of English
1102A Dell House, 3400 N. Charles St.
Baltimore, MD 21218
Office: (410) 516-4313
Email: ibir...@jhu.edu.
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Moses Ebe Ochonu
Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 11:46 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Olabode Ibironke
“I read the piece thoroughly and nowhere in it did I see the meanings and motives being read into it…. There is nothing anyone said then or is saying now that impeaches the essential truth of Gates's current intervention” Moses Ebe Ochonu
“there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played…. [Obama] is uniquely placed to publicly attribute responsibility and culpability where they TRULY belong, to white people and black people, on both sides of the Atlantic, complicit ALIKE in one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization.” (Emphasis added, Henry Louis Gates Jr)
Dear Moses and Ikhide:
I agree with almost everything you are saying but unfortunately you and Professor Gates are not saying the same things, and obviously have different goals. Imagine that when Obama went to Ghana he said the following: “my fellow Africans, the day of reckoning has come, you who sold your children, brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers into slavery, you must now….” How would you and Ikhide react? This is what Skip Gates seems to be demanding that President Obama does now as a matter of urgency. Do you, in the first place, agree with his basic premise that we don’t know much at all about the role of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade and that it would require an Obama intervention to correct that imbalance/injustice? We know that African Americans were victims of the transatlantic slave trade, Africans were culpable victims, Europeans and Americans (the list goes on) criminal beneficiaries. Gates deliberately and effectively moves Africans into the same criminal beneficiaries category with Europeans and Americans. He can claim that Africans were culpable, complicit if he wants, in the transatlantic slave trade but he cannot logically and historically claim that Africans and Americans/Europeans were “complicit ALIKE.” This is a fundamentally indefensible ideological drift! There are real consequences for how we go down on this debate. My African students increasingly tell me how difficult it is for them to get along with their African American peers for similar reasons. This type of discussion has repercussions far beyond anything we can normally imagine. We must strive to be honest about our history, but we must also be circumspect enough to see the dangers associated with obsessions and strategic statements such as Gates’s.
Bode
Olabode Ibironke, PhD.
Johns Hopkins University
Department of English
1102A Dell House, 3400 N. Charles St.
Baltimore, MD 21218
Office: (410) 516-4313
Email: ibir...@jhu.edu.
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Moses Ebe Ochonu
Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 11:46 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
afrs...@aol.com
REPARATIONS OR NO REPARATIONS!!
Accordingly, intellectuals and or scholars who present ideas that run contrary to the ultimate realization of such an aim must not be permitted to orchestrate the debate....(Read more)
Dr. Valentine Ojo
Kenneth Harrow:
If you see my comments as "slur jews en route", you just confirmed my point!
You are a Jew, immediately rising to the defense of Jews - even when Jews are not being attacked or slurred here.
So, what exactly is YOUR POINT?
Here you are stating unabashed: "i can also imagine having to read again and again antisemitic tracts blaming the jews for everything, all over again, because i am a jew and have seen this all my life."
Kenneth Harrow - because he is a Jew - is already circling the wagons even when Jews are not being attacked!
Persecution complex?
And how do you think Africans feel...?
Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD
On Thu 04/29/10 9:19 AM , kenneth harrow har...@msu.edu sent:
Can any of us imagine Jewish intellectuals - whether Israeli Jews or Jews residing outside Israel like American or European Jews - on Jewish forums, arguing among themselves as to whether the Germans were culpable in, and to be held responsible for the so-called Jewish Holocaust where some 6 million Jews were said to have perished, regardless of what the Jews may have done to "provoke" the Germans (and some of you should take the time off to read the German side of the story, and I don't mean Mein Kampf alone), and of Jews that may actually have colluded with Germans to betray or help exterminate fellow Jews?
well, yes, i can imagine a nazi side to the story; i can imagine jews asking questions about the holocaust; i can imagine a bible which is not described as jewish tales, including another one with jesus in it; i can imagine the slave trade not dominated by jews, jews who were actually victims of the inquisition when the centuries of the trade got started. i can imagine citing the figure of jews killed in the holocaust without stating "said to have perished." i can also imagine having to hear variants of holocaust denial for the rest of my life.
i can also imagine having to read again and again antisemitic tracts blaming the jews for everything, all over again, because i am a jew and have seen this all my life.
maybe this discussion could be carried out without having to slur jews en route.
ken harrow
Kenneth W. Harrow
Distinguished Professor of English
Michigan State University
har...@msu.edu
517 803-8839
fax 517 353 3755
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Akurang-Parry, Kwabena
Moses Ebe Ochonu
----Pius
Oga Pius,
Yes, slant is an important variable; yes, we should scrutinize agendas, subtexts and hidden scripts. But we shouldn't allow these to take us into an escapist territory where we feel a need to deny or mitigate the rotten subtleties of African history--a revictimization of the victims of past "black on black" atrocities on the continent.
I am, of course, deeply familiar with Gates' history of controversy and provocation. Which is precisely why I suspect that the critics of his Op-Ed here are merely trying to divine his motive in light of their ill-feelings from previous engagements with his work while neglecting to really evaluate his current offering on its merit. And let me also state for the record that, while I found some methodological problems with "Wonders," I was not one of those who got worked up over its ideological underpinning. It was a documentary designed for emotional catharsis. It was a fastfoodish production and never pretended to be a scholarly, definitive intervention on the politics of the slave trade. It was a personal journey, for crying out loud. Taking it outside that context authorized a set of critiques that the work never deserved to begin with.
That's that on that point.
Kwabena's ahistorical pronouncements on the subject of slavery in Africa comes almost exclusively from his rich but provincial mastery of Akan sources on the subject. This has led him, in my opinion, to consistently commit two errors of logic:
1. That African languages have no word for "slave," which is an outright falsehood requiring no elaborate sociolinguistic explanation. A mild variant of this nonsense is the specious distinction between "servitude" and chattel "slavery." Without getting into the dangerous terrain of comparative victimhood, could we in good conscience say that the slaves who were buried with African monarchs, sacrificed to gods, or worked to death on plantations in Africa (yes, plantations in some African kingdoms!) were any less chattel than the Africans who slaved on plantations on the coast of South Carolina? Or that their families were any less victimized by their enslavement?
2. That Akan oral traditions on slavery and the slave trade offers a comprehensive window into slavery in other African domains.
Again, my loyalty is not to Gates; it is to the facts of history, uncomfortable as some of them may be. That's why I don't get worked up trying to read the mind of Gates or to obsess over his agenda. Gates' agenda does not authorize us to falsify our history or to do discursive violence to the victims of some of its violent events.
I am not going to carry Gates' water but I also do a bit of what you are accusing Gates of doing when I teach on the subject: excavating and explaining African complicity. As a pedagogical philosophy I never want my students to leave my classroom with an incomplete or politically correct version of a historical event or process. Everyone knows about Western culpability, including American undergraduates, so naturally I don't spend as much time beating them over the head with it as I do illuminating the misunderstood, politically misused reality of African participation. I focus on the logic (yes, logic!) and dynamic of African participation. I'd rather they knew HOW and WHY some Africans participated in the trade, and WHICH specific Africans participated and benefited from it than go over the familiar territory of Euro-American involvement while leaving them with a distorted picture of African complicity that they may have acquired from unwholesome, agenda-laden sources.
So, perhaps I am also guilty of the Gates syndrome.
Ikhide
- Ikhide
From: kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu>
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thu, April 29, 2010 9:19:45 AM
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
Akurang-Parry, Kwabena
Chief Ochonu:
There are discussions of Professor Gates' essay all over the place: H-Africa, H-Afro America; H-Slavery; H-West Africa; Ghanaweb; Ghanaian media, etc. In fact, a number of professional historians, etc. and “non-professionals” are deploying their different views based on their personal exegetical readings of the essay. Thus, to insist that you are the only person who can interpret Gate's essay and that others got it all wrong is absurd.
Second, I set out to use oral history to interrogate some of Gate’s conclusion and I made that clear. Gates’ account is obviously based on knowledge defined by either secondary or primary sources, besides he did not only write about Asante or Kongo. He used both as his referent points to write about Africa as a whole. Similarly, you use the example of specific precolonial African states and societies to speak to broader African issues informed by Gates’ essay. I used the same approach of “from-particular-to-general”! So what then is the problem – that I had engaged in "egregious extrapolation of Akan oral traditions and their narratives on slavery"? So what sources define you extrapolation - "Western" ones?
Kwabena.
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Moses Ebe Ochonu [meoc...@gmail.com]
Moses Ebe Ochonu
I understand the pragmatic need to go after those who profiteered more from the slave trade in raw monetary terms and whose slave trade holdings have since been parlayed into mountains of economic privilege and fungible assets in today's global finance. It makes practical sense from the narrow perspective of reparations activism. However, in terms of assigning culpability for the trade, Gates' is faithful to the historical facts.
That said, I can't claim to know why he would need an Obama presidential declaration to underscore the documented complicities on both sides of the Atlantic. I prefer not to question his motives or make imputations. But as I also know that there is a lot of reluctance and defensiveness among Africans in broaching, let alone discussing, African complicity and moral responsibility. My consistent contention has been that defensiveness will never illuminate the subject. It is better to explain African complicity than to deny or minimize it against the obvious notoriety of white slavers.
And by the way, why is the proposition that Africans who participated actively in the trade and Euro-Americans who did the same are complicit ALIKE so problematic? Why do we have trouble grasping this factual but troubling fact of history? Is it because we can see the material, financial, and social consequences of the plantation slave system more starkly in America than we can in Africa? As I argued in one of my earlier posts, we seem to be getting seduced by the weight of visible legacies, by the overwhelming presence of the slave trade's legacies in the West and the more subdued manifestations of its legacies in African regions that were enslaved or enslaved others. Degrees of complicity should follow from the depth of participation, the centrality of slave profits and exchange to personal and group economies in Africa, etc, rather than from an exercise that measures culpability through the visible weight of legacy. By the way, has anyone stopped to think about what traumas those enslaved Africans must have felt at the realization that they were being sold by their "kind" (in the most physiognomic sense of the word)? Does this kind of psychosocial indictment on African slavers make it into our assessment of culpability? In the minds of the captives, these questions about the relativity of culpability would have been academic.
Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
This is in response to Ochonu:
So what if I remind my colleagues of the debate? What is the sin here? There are many who were not around to follow it.
Ikhide was apparently not aware of it. Gates has a hidden agenda and so too his sponsors.
Gloria Emeagwali
gmur...@gmail.com
Godwin
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone from Zain Kenya
Olabode Ibironke
“DEGREES OF COMPLICITY SHOULD FOLLOW FROM THE DEPTH OF PARTICIPATION, the centrality of slave profits and exchange to personal and group economies in Africa, etc, rather than from an exercise that measures culpability through the visible weight of legacy.” (Empahsis added, Moses Ebe Ochonu)
Absolutely correct and well said! But this distinction is precisely what Gates sets out to erase. His rule is the biblical rule of if you break one of these commandments you have broken all! This is why I say you, Moses, and Skip Gates belong to different camps. It is that fundamental! Get off his defense team.
Bode
Dr. Valentine Ojo
"an escapist territory where we feel a need to deny or mitigate the rotten subtleties of African history"?
Lord have mercy!
You "over-enlightened" African intellectuals will never cease to amaze me!
Is there any people's history - and especially that of our white American and British mentors - that has no "rotten subtleties", and even not so subtle ROTTENNESS?
Should we now hold Africans solely responsible for everything that happened (and is happening) to Africans because of "a revictimization (whatever that means) of the victims of past [and present] "black on black" atrocities on the continent."?
Okay, let's BLAME Continental Africans only for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, because the Black American descendants of African slaves were not related to any African families when they were captured as slaves - be it by other African tribes/ethnicities, or European slave catchers. The ancestors of today's Black Americans were a special species, not related to any Africans at all, so Africans have to compensate them for the sufferings their ancestors went through during the Middle Passage, and on European slave plantations in the Americas!
Why can't we SPEAK PLAIN ENGLISH - rather than this convoluted attempts to hide our real thoughts and feelings behind pseudo-intellectual verbosity?
Skip Gates is right in his demands that Africans should be made to compensate African Americans, and the European slavers should be exonerated.
After all, it was Africans who sold their fellow Africans - including even their own brothers, and sisters, and wives and mothers and neighbors, etc - into European slavery?
Is that not what some European and African American revisionists like Skip Gates are telling us?
Is that not what Ikhide and Moses Ochonu are attempting to say in such convoluted manners?
Why not come out straight and say so?
African societies are inherently slave societies, so don't blame Europeans for coming to piggy-back on it and exploit the situation.
Africans are the real culprits! Make them pay!
That way, you will be unequivocal as to where you stand, and not this business of attempting to serve the ball from both sides of the tennis court in order to sound intellectual - which it does not!
It sounds merely confused and sold out on Skip Gates and European anti-slavery propaganda!
It is the woman who runs around dressed skimpily, or stands naked in front of her uncurtained window who attracted her rapist! Blame her, and not the rapist!
I hear you! That makes sense!
Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD
On Thu 04/29/10 1:15 PM , Moses Ebe Ochonu meoc...@gmail.com sent:
The slant you give things is very important Moses. If you have been reading and studying Gates consistently over the years, I don't see how you could possibly fail to notice his irritating exculpatory politics. Gates is megaphoning African participation while always mumbling inaudibly about Western participation. Where you have two sides that participated in this thing, whose guilt you elect to play up consistently and whose guilt you elect to consitently minimise is a function of choice, politics, ideology, the interests of your funders, etc. It is not a function of the rotten underbelly and uncomfortable truths of history as you claim here.
----Pius
Oga Pius,
Yes, slant is an important variable; yes, we should scrutinize agendas, subtexts and hidden scripts. But we shouldn't allow these to take us into an escapist territory where we feel a need to deny or mitigate the rotten subtleties of African history--a revictimization of the victims of past "black on black" atrocities on the continent.
I am, of course, deeply familiar with Gates' history of controversy and provocation. Which is precisely why I suspect that the critics of his Op-Ed here are merely trying to divine his motive in light of their ill-feelings from previous engagements with his work while neglecting to really evaluate his current offering on its merit. And let me also state for the record that, while I found some methodological problems with "Wonders," I was not one of those who got worked up over its ideological underpinning. It was a documentary designed for emotional catharsis. It was a fastfoodish production and never pretended to be a scholarly, definitive intervention on the politics of the slave trade. It was a personal journey, for crying out loud. Taking it outside that context authorized a set of critiques that the work never deserved to begin with.
That's that on that point.
Kwabena's ahistorical pronouncements on the subject of slavery in Africa comes almost exclusively from his rich but provincial mastery of Akan sources on the subject. This has led him, in my opinion, to consistently commit two errors of logic:
1. That African languages have no word for "slave," which is an outright falsehood requiring no elaborate sociolinguistic explanation. A mild variant of this nonsense is the specious distinction between "servitude" and chattel "slavery." Without getting into the dangerous terrain of comparative victimhood, could we in good conscience say that the slaves who were buried with African monarchs, sacrificed to gods, or worked to death on plantations in Africa (yes, plantations in some African kingdoms!) were any less chattel than the Africans who slaved on plantations on the coast of South Carolina? Or that their families were any less victimized by their enslavement?
2. That Akan oral traditions on slavery and the slave trade offers a comprehensive window into slavery in other African domains.
Again, my loyalty is not to Gates; it is to the facts of history, uncomfortable as some of them may be. That's why I don't get worked up trying to read the mind of Gates or to obsess over his agenda. Gates' agenda does not authorize us to falsify our history or to do discursive violence to the victims of some of its violent events.
I am not going to carry Gates' water but I also do a bit of what you are accusing Gates of doing when I teach on the subject: excavating and explaining African complicity. As a pedagogical philosophy I never want my students to leave my classroom with an incomplete or politically correct version of a historical event or process. Everyone knows about Western culpability, including American undergraduates, so naturally I don't spend as much time beating them over the head with it as I do illuminating the misunderstood, politically misused reality of African participation. I focus on the logic (yes, logic!) and dynamic of African participation. I'd rather they knew HOW and WHY some Africans participated in the trade, and WHICH specific Africans participated and benefited from it than go over the familiar territory of Euro-American involvement while leaving them with a distorted picture of African complicity that they may have acquired from unwholesome, agenda-laden sources.
So, perhaps I am also guilty of the Gates syndrome.
On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 8:09 AM, Pius Adesanmi <piusad...@yahoo.com> wrote:
======================================================================
" Oraga rogo, arogo raga, eni ti o r'ago, ko ni s'ago m'owo." - O'odua Abass Obesere
--- On Thu, 29/4/10, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>
Date: Thursday, 29 April, 2010, 4:46
Moses Ebe Ochonu
Do not misrepresent me. I am critiquing your reading of Gates' latest piece, and Gloria's. I belong to other forums where the issue is being discussed, but I was clear that my critique is of readings of Gates posted on this forum. This is, by the way, the only discussion on the piece I have participated in. So, to conclude that I am damning everyone's interpretation and advancing mine as the only correct reading is mischievous...and dishonest.
Second, you are the one who got this discussion started by repeating your familiar pattern of generalizing your Akan traditions to the entire continent. I merely gave you other examples to show you that the road of extrapolation and generalization does not do justice to the inherent complexity of the issue.
And, by the way, what makes oral tradition inherently superior to the "African" written sources or even written European accounts that, together, can shed invaluable light on the subject? Don't they all invite the historian's interpretive and interrogative skills? At any rate, what makes Akan oral traditions superior to the oral traditions of other African peoples, who not only have a word for "slave" in their lexicon but remember their slavery practices quite well?
Where is your analytical circumspection as a historian? Where is your sense of the complexity and messiness of history, especially with rational, self-interested human subjects? Why do you have to slice and dice every historical phenomenon into facile binaries and frozen moral dualities? Why do you let your impulsive defensive sensibilities get in the way of your sharp historical mind? We are all Pan-Africanists, but how we express our pan-Africanism differ. I don't think that arguing that Africans never had a word for "slave" or that slaves in Africa were servants furthers anyone's pan-Africanist agenda.
I have a right to critique your submissions and arguments, which I have not even had time to do fully, as I have many epistemological and philosophical quarrels with your initial post. You have a right to critique my critique. But misrepresentation hurts a debate. If I have misread you, please point it out and I'll take a second look. But without doing that, you should stay faithful to my critique.
Moses Ebe Ochonu
If you agree with the logic of the depth of participation, the centrality of slave profits and exchange to an economy (rather the mere visible legacy of the crime) you'll be assigning as much culpability to several African kingdoms, states, clans, ethnicities, and families as you would to Euro-American actors. But if you, as they say, follow the money--the raw money--you'll be seduced into assigning asymmetrical responsibilities to Euro-American and African actors. That seems to be the problem. We want to do history backwards, starting from the visible legacies rather than actually looking at evidence of the past.
So, without realizing it, you may actually not disagree with Gates on the facts. You may simply be suspicious of his agenda and motive, which you are entitled to. I prefer not to get worked up over motives, especially when in the process one runs the risk of distorting aspects of Africa's history.
toyin adepoju
Amatoritsero Ede
Olabode Ibironke
Moses writes: “We want to do history backwards, starting from the visible legacies rather than actually looking at evidence of the past.”
The problem continues to be that you and Gates seem to ignore another all too important distinction: the fact that Africa was the ground zero for the devastation of the slave trade regardless of which nations participated and to what extent, all were severely damaged, perhaps, permanently! Africans participated _actively_ in their own destruction. This was not the case with European and American slavers. The refusal to recognize that the dynamics was completely different in Africa and for Africans; that this distinction is also an integral and a most serious part of the evidence, as important as OUR demand for Africa, too, to pay reparations in acknowledgement and restitution of the damnable role of self betrayal played in the trade, is the very point of supreme distortion for me. We will agree on the facts if they are indeed all the facts!
Qansy Salako
I have never completely agreed with Moses Ochonu on any issue on this forum more than this Gates’ thread.
On this thread, my concurrence with Moses is total.
Nuance……this is one mercilessly abused and violated word in the hands of academics.
Slant……is its closest relative.
Either word is a slovenly tool that intellectuals use to create a hatch door of escape out of debates.
Ironically, it works for both con and pro sides, but it is the side that first deploys it that goes home with the illusion of victory.
Nuance works in debates by rendering both proposition and counter-proposition true.
It works by inverse interrelationship.
For instance, if Skip Gates is notorious for “megaphoning African participation while always mumbling inaudibly about Western participation,” then Gates’ virulent critics are scandalously guilty of de-emphasizing the culpability of Africans in the heinous slave trade.
Both sides claim they acknowledge each other’s facts, yet each goes to encamp on a set of historical facts.
It seems to me therefore that choosing which history to glorify or victimize is perfectly normal in academic discourses.
Academic……that is what it all boils down to.
For if not, we wouldn’t have lost sight of the incomplete conclusion that partial encapsulation of facts engenders.
Follow me on a simple journey in Logic:
1. Europeans initiated and perpetrated the trans-atlantic slave trade of Africans.
2. Local Africans collaborated with European slavers, raided fellow Africans and supplied them to European slavers.
3. Local African slavers contributed to perpetuating the ignoble slavery of their kind for hundreds of years until the Europeans themselves stopped the trade.
4. Reparations should be made to descendants of slaves by all who took part in slavery of their ancestors.
5. Conclusion 1: The descendants of European slavers should pay reparations.
6. Conclusion 2: The descendants of African slavers should pay reparations.
Everyone agrees on Conclusion 1, but Gates critics shift uncomfortably on Conclusion 2.
Hence the circular debates over Gates.
Moses, your job is done.
You cannot accomplish the feeding of a kwashiorkor child in one day.
Retire….move on to another issue.
Go and complete your semester chores.
QS
Layi Abegurin, Ph.D
Guys,
You all have your points to make and you are making your points but there is one very important point I want everybody to understand. Professor Henry Gates has done what his sponsors want him to do and say about the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. "The Wonders of the African World" Program by Prof. Gates was sponsored by an American Foundation that wants to continue to divide and sow the seeds of discord between the Africans and African Americans. Any cooperation between the Africans and African Americans is seen by the europeans as threat to the western economic interests and domination of Africa. The european powers will use a black person to distabilize the unity between the black peoples, be it in Africa or in America period.
You are all having very good and useful debates on this very important issue to all of us Africans and African Americans but at the same time do not overlook the economics and political events that had taken place in the past centuries in this country and Europe in relations to Africa, and also pay attention to the events taking place around you and around the world. I hope everyone of us is watching what is going on since the election of Barack Obama as the president of this country-USA.
I rest my case Layi Abegunrin |
|
Akurang-Parry, Kwabena
Akurang-Parry, Kwabena
1. That African languages have no word for "slave," which is an outright falsehood requiring no elaborate sociolinguistic explanation. A mild variant of this nonsense is the specious distinction between "servitude" and chattel "slavery." Without getting into the dangerous terrain of comparative victimhood, could we in good conscience say that the slaves who were buried with African monarchs, sacrificed to gods, or worked to death on plantations in Africa (yes, plantations in some African kingdoms!) were any less chattel than the Africans who slaved on plantations on the coast of South Carolina? Or that their families were any less victimized by their enslavement?
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Abidogun, Jamaine
Thank you for bringing forward this connection. In fact Dr. Gates’s field is English Literature with a focus on African-American literature that has included the Diaspora. His earlier works involved literary critique and he rightly earned a stellar reputation in his field. More recently he has worked/explored the realms of history perhaps initially as context to the times of particular writers and the periods they wrote from or about. Unfortunately, this exploration has led to the development of works like the Wonder of the African World documentary. I have used this series, but to me, as a social scientist in African & African-American studies, it is little more than a tourist interpretation of African historical and contemporary contexts. The films are more about his experience, rather than a full historical review and critique that one finds in other works, for example Basil Davidson’s and Ali Mazrui’s earlier series. I actually appreciate the struggles he seems to experience as he wanders across Africa – this is after all his roots. In the film series he seems to be as much on a personal journey as he is working on an academic project. I tend to believe that this latest piece is just a stage in this exploration. He is a brilliant scholar, but we all have our limits. Out of respect to social scientists and historians, I think he should qualify his statements based on the limits of his particular academic field. After all I am an avid fan and have some training regarding Harlem Renaissance literature, but I would never claim to be an expert in that particular field nor would I attempt to publish in an internationally read press an interpretation of this literature. He must be cognizant that the average reader will take everything he says as truth, because they are not scholars in African and African-American Studies. This is a dangerous game for a man of such stature to play. It sets us all back in terms of understanding the historical roles of power and privilege during the period of Trans-Atlantic slavery.
Thank you,
Dr. Jamaine Abidogun
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Amatoritsero Ede
Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2010 4:37 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Moses Ebe Ochonu
Once again you've confirmed my sneaky suspicion that, instead of assessing Gates' fundamental point in the current Op-Ed on its merit, some folks are settling scores with him for previous transgressions, namely his "Wonders" adventure.
I have read your post and, with all due respect, much of it will not stand up to elementary evidentiary historical scrutiny especially in light of what we know today from written and oral sources on the period of the slave trade. For those who question Gates' motive and agenda ( and you are entitled to it) such an ideological response may work, as a tool for learning about ourselves through past events, this falls flat.
Take this paragraph of yours for instance:
"This is the spin that Dr. Gates is giving an otherwise legitimate query about the involvement of a negligible section of African elite chiefs in an 'African slave trade.' Dr. Gates summations is revisionary to say the least. He conveniently ignores the nature of that so called 'African slavery' which was benign compared to what transpired on the other side; the ignorance of the African chiefs involved as to what is meted out to the people sold out into 'European Trans-Atlantic slavery.
You used the word "negligible" to describe African participation in the slave trade. African participation was NOT negligible at all. This is settled historical fact. Africans who participated did so actively and vigorously. How could their involvement have been eligible when, for at least 250 years, the slave trade shaped and constituted the mainstay of the economies of several African States--Kongo, Dahomey, Oyo, the states of the Benguela Estuary, etc? I have left out Asante because Kwabena informs us that the Akan did not even have a word for "slave" (although, as we speak, Kwasi Konadu has published a book on the Akan slave diaspora in the New World; perhaps the Akan exported "servants" and not slaves). How was the role of African agents and actors negligible when, as a result of the trade, West central Africa became awash with guns and the pace of state building and state consolidation through warfare and slave production accelerated in the period of the trade? How was it negligible when we know that the dynamics of the slave trade produced far-reaching political and social changes within many African societies and shaped their transition to the so-called Legitimate Trade?
No, it was not just a "negligible section" of African elites that participated in the trade. This was the dominant mode of production for 250 years across West central Africa. Some ethnic groups in the interior managed to escape being sucked into it as victims or enslavers but its dominance as economic system is unquestionable. In kingdoms that enslaved, slave capture and sale involved entire armies, warrior clans, and even considerable number of maverick raiders. Most of these people were not chiefs or kings. While some of them were performing the wishes of kings, others were profiteering from a gruesome but acceptable economic opportunity. If you say most of the benefits and profits accrued to states and their leaders, that would make sense. But to say only the leaders participated would be factually wrong since the leaders didn't do the dirty work of raiding, capture, imprisonment, and coast-bound march.
And the notion of precolonial African slavery being "benign" is so atrocious I don't even know how to respond. You mean, benign like the treatment of slaves that were buried alive with dead monarchs or benign like those who were worked to death on plantations in several parts of Africa (East African coast, Northern Nigeria, etc)? Please, for goodness sake, could we show a little sensitivity and not insult the suffering of millions of Africans who were enslaved on the continent or exported? Could we at least respect their memory by not minimizing the magnitude of their servility? These were for the most part young people who were never given the chance of an independent, aspirational existence. This casual dismissal of precolonial African slavery does nothing but promote the kind of agenda-laden blame-Africa narratives that we rail against.
And what ignorance are you talking about. Even Kwabena has informed us about folks from his own region of Africa who not only saw what was happening to their racial kind in Euro-America but actually wrote in defense of it. Are you talking about the African chiefs who had European scribes? Are you talking about the African chiefs and merchants who could read and did read foreign newspapers and records on how slaves were "used" in the New World? Are you talking about African actors who offered some of the most chillingly detached narratives on the trade?
It's my simple contention that it is better to admit the settled fact of African complicity and explain it, instead of explaining it away. Are we so insecure that we cannot embrace the warts of our history?
I am an African and I know that I am supposed to instinctively deny or minimize the role of Africans in the trade to keep the coalition intact. But I am also a historian and I know of evidence from African sources pointing to the deep, far-reaching involvement of Africans in the trade, and to the atrocities that Africans committed to secure their interests in the system. I cannot play this defensive game while distorting the African past and investing in an ideological falsehood. Knowing what I know about the trade, I will never buy the nonsense that the role of Africans in it was "negligible." Yes, European demand and a European-invented economic system (new world plantation complex) fueled it, but African kings and chiefs and raiders were willing, rational, economically ambitious participants. However, their participation is explainable within a rational economic and political framework. It helps no one to explain it away or to casually sidestep it.
Let's not confuse our strong opposition to Gates and his politics with the need to write accurately about our past.
For me, minimizing the African side of the slave trade ledger is as unacceptable as the attempts of some Western interests to mitigate the agency of Euro-Americans in the trade.
Anunoby, Ogugua
“The most damning argument for Africa’s complicity, from the point of view of professor Gates, is that it was Africans who captured Africans as slaves, marched them down the coast and sold them to white Europeans and that white Europeans were merely buyers, far away and for a very long time on the coast. It is clear that Gates reference to J. Thorntorn and L. Heywood underlines this view. For some African-Americans as represented by professor Gates, the complicity of Africans has not been exposed and condemned enough….”
FK
A basic law of Economics in an immoral or unethical world is that demand drives supply. The FK quote above ignores this law. The said law of Economics does not however neither absolves from blame nor redeems Africa from its complicity and participation in the evil Trans Atlantic Slave Trade.
If the purveyors of the argument truly believe in it, they should challenge the US Government to stop its war against local coca farmers in South America. They should urge the US Government to concentrate her efforts on eliminating the demand for cocaine (produced from coca leaves) in the United States. The cultivation of coca plants is driven by the demand for cocaine in the United States and other countries.
Africa complicity and participation in the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade was derived.
Slavery anywhere and anytime is terrible and a great evil. It must be roundly condemned at all times. It cannot and should not be justified. It is shamefully opportunistic and one of mankind’s worst inventions.
The Trans Atlantic Slave Trade arguably represents the worst practice of slavery in human history. It was mindless, ruthless, and wide-scale. It was enshrined in and protected by law for scores of years. Its abolition was stoutly and vehemently resisted by the economic and social beneficiaries of slavery. Its abolition spurned a bitterly fought civil war that resonates to this day.
For many years, there was practically no redemption for African slaves in the United States. Having bought their freedom, a former slave could still be re-enslaved. Slavery supported and transformed the economies of the United States and several European countries. Slaves were denied the economic and other benefits of their enslavement. It is an unfathomable debt that deserves to be paid.
There should be no doubt however about who was more culpable for the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade. It is without question Europeans. They created the demand that gullible Africans as suppliers responded to. In the same light, the users of cocaine have the greater responsibility for increased coca plant cultivation, and the production and shipment of cocaine to the United States and other countries. Anyone who argues otherwise takes a disingenuous position of convenience and entitlement. They are giving a dog a bad name in order to hang it.
oa
From:
usaafric...@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On
Behalf Of Femi Kolapo
Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2010 5:41 AM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery
Blame-Game
The most damning argument for
Africa’s complicity, from the point of view of professor Gates, is
that it was Africans who captured Africans as slaves, marched them down the
coast and sold them to white Europeans and that white Europeans were merely
buyers, far away and for a very long time on the coast. It is clear that
Gates reference to J. Thorntorn and L. Heywood underlines this view. For some
African-Americans as represented by professor Gates, the complicity of Africans
has not been exposed and condemned enough. This complicity demands that they
pay reparation rather than demand one; the logic of his argument seems to go.
From the point of view of Africans, who are equally victims, though victims of
a different order, such arguments, especially when it uses the word complicity
implies equal responsibility between two criminals, one the White European
buyers and users of slaves and the other African catcher and sellers of slaves.
For Africans, it rankles that any person would equalize African culpability to
White Euro-American liability. It beats the tenor of available evidence and all
logic of argument, they would argue.
Being the sellers of slaves to Euro-American buyers and users of slaves,
Africans are implicated as culprits, even when their victimhood is beyond
question. (Ancestors of) African Americans on the other hand are double victims
– first from the hands of those who in Africa sold the slaves and in the
hands of those who bought, transported and used them.
Since the two sides do not seem to have been able to harmonize or essentialize
the basic elements of their victimhood, each side seems to easily slip into a
false position that the success or effectiveness of its ability to demonstrate
justiceable victimhood and to demand for satisfaction can only be met by their
oversimplification of the situation and by one type or the other of denial of
the claim of the other side. On the African side, the tendency to want to
smoothen over Africa’s role and its answerability to African-Americans
demand for satisfaction of that portion of Africa’s culpability as it
sees it and a possible implicit psychological tendency, I guess, to see
Africa's victimization claim by Euro-American slave trade as automatically
neutralizing Africa-American's victimization claim by African catchers and
sellers of their peoples. On the African-American side, there is the
tendency, despite denials and caveats, to downplay Africa’s victimhood
and equal right as victims to demand for justice and satisfaction. (The latter
point, I believe, parallels calls, including by African intellectuals, that
Africans and their leaders answer for their own current poverty and
backwardness.)
I believe that the only way to establish a necessary middle ground for both
sides and especially to harmonize their victimhood experiences is for them to
establish magnitudes of the culpability for aspects of the slave trade that
roped Africa and Euro-America together. Once we suppress our emotions and are
able to do this, Africans should be able to very openly and in a way that is
respectful of African-Americans claims, accept their culpability as both sides
would have jointly established it. On the other side of the coin,
African-Americans also will have to be able to demonstrate respect for Africa’s
equal right to lay claim against culprit Euro-America as its victimzers.
The use by professor Gates or any other person of J. Thornton and L.
Heywood’s African agency theory or analyses, by default, minimizes
Euro-American culpability and liability in the Atlantic slave trade and the
horrors it brought on Africa and on those who were shipped out of Africa as
slaves. In fact, the logic of Thornton’s argument tends toward
exculpating Euro-Americans, and used by diasporan Africans, though clear victims
themselves, it tends to erase Africa’s rightful claim to victimization by
the EuroAmerican slave trade.
The very useful source evidence that professor Gates motioned as providing a
better understanding of the scope of African involvement in the slave trade,
the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, also supplies unbeatable evidence for
which of the two sides, Africa or Euro-America, had and used its technological,
financial, industrial, legal and other capacities to initiate, control,
and to define the character of the Atlantic slave trade.
It paints clearly for us to see who initiated the slave trading voyages, who
controlled them, who owned the ships, who funded the voyages, who produced the
manufactures that created [or met] demands in Africa. Names are named,
dates are mentioned, and prices, goods, shipping data and so on are made
available for all this.
The database is the best tool available so far to enable us establish magnitude
of culprit-hood between Africa and Europe and to at the same time help define
the shape of the victimhood or victimization that Africa can rightfully claim
in this case. Even more than this, it is one of the best tools anywhere around
that clearly defines the nuts and bolts of the European construction and
control of a new global world with Africa as one of the components that was
sucked into it. It supplies details of an overarching global economic
structuration whose power extended beyond any individual African trader or
multitudes of local chiefs and kings. For me it elaborates the trans-Atlantic
slave trade as the coupling of an intercontinental market, a vast capitalistic
demand for labour for European colonies, to Africa’s previously limited
socio-economic and military-political configurations.
Using its data, it is clear that what was determinant in the new trading
relationship was Euro-American demand, a ferociously huge demand backed up by
large corporate, private and official capital of European and American
societies. That the African supply side was only reactive and responding to the
demand side promptings is clearly defined by who controlled the means of
transportation and communication that effectively allowed for the linkage of
the two worlds and who initiated the contact. It is further defined by the
reality of who supplied the capital, most of the manufactures that accompanied
the slave trade and who had the farms that required and demanded unending slave
labor supply. That Africans have been selling slaves to each other before then
is not an argument that can ever stand against this fact.
When Europeans crossed over the Atlantic to sub-Sahara Africa from Europe, and
eventually from America in ships they designed for slave transportation, they
created a new market dynamics that affected the frequency and character of wars
and a different valuation and or appreciation of the war captive than hitherto.
What was previously local was now intercontinentalized (in an earlier process
of the globalization of a capitalistic world order).
When we shift our focus to this macro level analysis, it becomes clear that L.
Gates and whoever makes similar arguments to his, in effect, are blaming
Africans and their kings for not resisting or refusing participation in this
new globalizing, capitalistic black slave based European dominated commerce.
The validity of the blame depends on an impartial delineation of where vital
agency lay in the determination of the character of the mega structure of this
commerce. It seem to be beyond argument that Africa was vastly the
underdog in this relationship. Just as it is unrealistic today to ask poor, if mal-governed
African countries, to refuse to sell their oil or cotton or cocoa in a
Western dominated unjust global market, likewise, it is unrealistic to expect
that African kings or traders would have been able to withdraw from the
Atlantic slave trade as a general policy. In both cases, it is simply
politically, not to talk of economically, unviable a decision for any governmen
to make given the nature of the economic and political web they were
entangled in and given their sheer dependency on this emergent global
structure.
Given the obvious inequality of power between the two sides, a clear cut line
of culprit vs. victim is traceable at the trans-continental level (Africa vs.
Europe) with the Atlantic as the divide. This analysis can of course apply to
the situation within Africa too at the continental level of North Africa
vs. sub-Saharan Africa with the Sahara desert being the divide. The Indian
Ocean is another divide that allows for a clear cut line of victim vs. culprit,
again between East Africa that was drained of its population and the Middle
East and the European Indian Ocean islands and their South West Asia
settlements.
Europeans and Arabs of North Africa and the Middle East never sent their people
as slaves into sub-Sahara Africa, rather they took slaves from Africa. This is
so one way and so unchanging for so many centuries that no amount of
theorization of African agency can diminish the gross inequality of the
economic relationship involved in this trade and in the structural external
imposition that it was on sub-Saharan African peoples, their states and their
rulers. African governments and traders’ ability to deploy the
power of their states to protect themselves from European traders or to give
them an upper bargaining hand are largely micro level down stream issues that
do not detract from this patent reality.
The agency that Africans had was not with regard to determining the principal
structures of the trade. It is a travesty to confuse micro-level reactions on
the part of African traders and kings with macro level (re)structuration of the
entire production and commerce of an entire continent by European slave
trade and their forceful grooving along tracks that self-perpetuated in
production of slaves. The Darwinian imperatives that began to operate in
consequence of turning Africa into a labor pool for European farms in the New
World were such that survival, political enlargement or growth (rather than
development) became predicated on militarism, war and slavery. You were either
on top or you ended up beneath – with your people in the hold of the
whiteman’s ship, in the caravan of an Arab, or on the way to the farm of
some far off African potentate.
But then the claim of Africa’s dependent and weak position in this
European constructed and dominated global economy and the claim that it changed
the dynamics of internal African political, economic and military processes do
not in any way invalidate the argument by anybody, even when they are not
African Americans, that Africans it was who did all the dirty work that got
slaves down to the coast to be sold to white slave traders. It will be an equal
absurdity to deny African culpability in that regard. But though this
culpability is defined by Africa’s agency in capturing the slaves within
Africa and selling them to Europeans on the coast, it is no less an absurdity
to equate this African agency, as delimited and as defined by the larger
European dominated structure as it is, with the more vital agency and vastly
powerful economic and technological dominance exercised by the Europeans in the
entire process.
Continental Africans and diaspora Africans are victims and should be able to
unite in their moral rightness to demand justice for wrongs done to them. This
justice also demands that African culpability be called out and some
satisfaction be given to those who suffered as a result of this culpability, at
least in terms of statements from Africa that accept or that do not implicitly
deny the charge of the wrongness of Africans deporting Africans, a
charge which in its essence is based on a pan-Africanist outlook. The same
justice, however, demands that the limited extent of Africa’s culpability
in relation to Euro-American liability be clearly defined so that the
victimization that Africa bore and continues to bear is not unjustly waved
aside by their fellow brothers and sisters in the diaspora in their search for
closure to the haunting memories and realities they have gone through. Let
there be peace: built on justice.
------------------------
F. J. Kolapo, Ph.D.
History Department * University of Guelph * Guelph * Ontario * Canada* N1G 2W1
Phone:519/824.4120 ex.53212 Fax: 519.766.9516
kol...@uoguelph.ca
Femi Kolapo
Moses, did you notice that though I made two parallel statements one after the other regarding the complexity of Africa’s and African-American victim hood and culpability , you chose to isolate only the one that concerns Africa’s rightful claim to satisfaction as a victim and that disputes Gates subtle misrepresentation? You did not consider being relevant or persuasive my assertions that African-American’s victimhood was in double fold, nor my point that we should respect African Americans’ claim to some satisfaction from Africa for Africa’s culpability in the causes of their experience. You are more inclined to swiftly conclude that my mention of the legitimacy of Africa’s claim to satisfaction from Europeans for their victimization of Africa and the demand that this be equally respected automatically implies that I am denying that Africans bear no blame in selling Africans to the Americas and that they did not practice slavery before Europeans came. Such major misrepresentation of evidence is exactly the major issue that I have against Louis Gates’ article.
At any rate, I disagree with your reading of both Gate’s article and my position on it. Your first point about millions of Africans torn apart by slave raiding and Africans selling slaves across the desert is really not central to Gate’s argument. It is therefore a point that I needn’t stress in my argument, though, if you had read through all of my analysis, there is nothing therein that denies all you have said in your point #1 about war, violence, slavery and slave trade in Africa before Henry the navigator.
The full logic of Gate’s argument is that Africans should have had the moral rectitude to say no to the Atlantic slave trade, in particular because it involved Africans selling their own sons and daughter overseas. That is what his argument boils down to. He could not have been concerned with pre-European slavery in Africa that you are concerned with as such because such a concern actually waters down his charge against Africans. If he were to have been arguing your point #1 as the fulcrum of his position, nothing would have been novel about his charges, since it is common knowledge that people everywhere had been enslaving their neighbours and selling them off to strangers in Europe, Asia, Central and South America and in the Caribbean long before the 15th century. Such a line of argument would make African culpability that professor Gates is concerned has not been widely exposed and acknowledged no different and no worse than the culpability of any other people in history. But when it comes to the charge of Africans selling Africans as professor Gates is laying, emotions come into sharp display both ways. For Gates and (here I will say for you too, based on your comment below) any African attempt to simultaneously establish their parallel victimhood and European culpability becomes automatically construed to mean that Africans are in denial that their ancestors sold off their sons and daughters into American slavery.
With respect to your point #2, your claim that there are no magnitudes to criminality or culpability (simply because we are talking about the Atlantic slave trade?) is not logically and empirically tenable. While it is true that wrong is wrong, there are levels of wrongness and levels of punishment for them and nothing stops scholar from examining facts about levels of culpability. You miss my argument entirely when you stress the point about unequal profiting being a universal characteristic of all trades. My concern was to identify which of the two sides, Africa or Euro-America, created the intercontinental economic system that is otherwise called the Atlantic slave trade and who initiated and controlled the vital most structures that defined it. That does not in any way say that it was therefore the white men that fought the wars in Africa or that raided for the slaves that were exported overseas and not Africans. What it does is to establish comparative or contrastive orders of agency, effect, impact, and yes, profit and loss among all those who were involved in the trade. It helps to contextualize the evil of the widening spiral of Africans enslaving Africans and selling them to Europeans.
Even the development of the trans-Saharan slave trade that you explained to have developed out of the “dynamics of polyvalent Africa-Arab relations and state building” cannot validly exclude an examination of relative structural inequality between the participants and its impact on the dynamics of the relationship you were talking about. All of this does not in any way deny that Africans were the sellers of slaves to the Arabs, but it does establish some scale of magnitude in apportioning blame, and I do not accept that it is wrong to do that. Here too, my position is not that Africans did not enslave each other long ago and that it was the Arabs that came and stole African women and children. Nor did I say that Africans were not the sellers of Africans overseas. My argument is that in trying to establish African-American victimhood, Gates uses Africa agency arguments like Thorntons that apply only to micro level supply side economy of Africa, to not only stress African’s culpability in the slave trade but also to very clearly mitigate European culpability, a GREATER culpability in many, if not in all, respects I insist, as well as downplay Africa’s parallel victimization by Europe.
Being sensitive to one another is good, but being overly sensitive to mostly trumped up charges that Africans scholars are wilfully denying that there was grievous violence before the Atlantic Slave trade in Africa will in no way substitute for honestly rigorous and even uncomfortable analyses on both parts. Descendants of enslaved Africans have a right to raise a question about African culpability, and while Africans must respect this right and not be in denial, they don’t have to close their eyes to facts and evidence nor do they have to be blind to the differences, perspectives and scales of the legal and moral culpability that charges against them entail and that evidence allow for or to the deadly impact of the trade on the continent.
For some time now I have come to consider the maxim jaded that historians should only explain and not judge. Isn’t every explanation that involves assessment of facts or evidence in reality some form or other of defending or challenging historical narratives? Much of useful history is not confined to the classroom, but is done on newspaper pages, in court and in the political arena, and there is nothing wrong with that as long as we engage the evidence with the right tools and with proper logic, as best we could. It does not help to get too carried away with our positions and give each other labels for trying to fully xplore all the tangles that make up the sticky web, else, we shut down useful discussions that we need to engage in without necessarily convincing anybody to change their position. No, your ability to identify “excessive defensiveness” that is “becoming sickening” in my position, I will opine, is due to the straw man that you had set up in the first place. \f. kolapo
------------------------
F. J. Kolapo, Ph.D.
History Department * University of Guelph * Guelph * Ontario * Canada* N1G 2W1
Phone:519/824.4120 ex.53212 Fax: 519.766.9516
kol...@uoguelph.ca
----- Original Message -----
From: "Moses Ebe Ochonu" <meoc...@gmail.com>
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2010 9:27:28 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
"From the point of view of Africans, who are equally victims, though victims of a different order, such arguments, especially when it uses the word complicity implies equal responsibility between two criminals, one the White European buyers and users of slaves and the other African catcher and sellers of slaves. For Africans, it rankles that any person would equalize African culpability to White Euro-American liability. It beats the tenor of available evidence and all logic of argument, they would argue."
Two points for Femi:
1. Millions of African families were torn apart by the slave raiding and capture that went on in the interior. The victims of these crimes in the interior associate their enslavement with powerful neighboring kingdoms, maverick slave raiders, and domineering warrior groups--the visible agents of their suffering and the villains of their victimhood. MOST of them never set eyes on the white man. They saw what in today's crude lexicon could be called black on black violence (of course, the category of blackness didn't exist then). Your argument that African victims blame more powerful Europeans than they do African slavers is therefore neither logical nor factual. As far as the victims were concerned, they were being victimized by more powerful ethnic Others. On arrival at the coast, captives would, of course, have seen the financial masterminds of their brutalization. But for the communities, families, and villages they left behind, their villains till this day remain the powerful polities that made traffic in slaves their economic and social mainstays. Don't forget that slavery and the political traffic in slaves were an essential aspect of the rituals of power and allegiance in states like the Sokoto Caliphate, and that this outlived the Atlantic slave trade. And, sorry, complicity does not automatically imply equal responsibility. Not in the dictionary or legal sense of the word. Complicity means complicity--willful, unforced, self-interested participation. It implies culpability. You can weigh this against the depth of participation and extent of hos central the trade was to a kingdom's economy or to a slaver's personal economy. It is inaccurate to simply do a raw, crude comparison between African and European profiteering without adjusting for the two factors above. The culpable should not escape sanction altogether, if we can identify persons and institutions that continue to be privileged by their profits. Even if we cannot, a symbolic apology from descendants of raiders and slavers would go a long way. The notion that Africans who participated and profited from the trade bear no (or less) responsibility for the crimes that characterized the trade is as ahistorical and fallacious as the empty claim that all of Africa or all Africans are complicity in the Atlantic slave trade. Thanks to good research, we now know, with a small margin of error, states, regions, clans, and even families that enslaved "foreign" Africans for profit. We also know regions and ethnicities that were largely victims, although there were overlaps across time and space that are also documented.
2. The "unequal power" argument is an unhelpful cop out. Every trade (local, regional, or international) is fundamentally unequal. It has always been the case that those who control the political levers that determine the terms of trade and/or those who control credit and other financial instruments of a trading system can profit more from it than those who do not. But unequal profiteering, which is a hallmark of every trade, is not an accurate guide to the moral responsibilities of trades that victimize people or make a commercial virtue of human suffering. The idea of passive and powerless Africans being goaded or forced by powerful Europeans into capturing and selling "African" Others flies in the face of what we know about slavery, slave capture, and slave sacrifice in many ancient and medieval societies in Africa and other continents. Where was the all-powerful European trader when, prior to the 15th century, brutal rituals of enslavement and even slave sacrifice were occurring in many African kingdoms? Where were they when over 20 million African captives were sold across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean? Do we assign exclusive responsibility to the "powerful Arabs" for this pre-Atlantic slave trade or locate the trade in the polyvalent dynamics of precolonial Africa-Arab relations and in the state-building, state-consolidation struggles of precolonial West and East Africa? In Many ancient societies from Africa to China to South America to Europe, the sacrifice of slaves and their burial alongside powerful king were widely practiced. Slaves were transferred and battered across multiple territorial configurations. These were internal acts of enslavement, fueled by local rituals of power, religion and economics, not the overbearing hegemony of a powerful, intrusive outsider.
Again, let's separate history from ideology. As an African who is cognizant of the many injuries inflicted on Africa by Arab and European outsiders, I would prefer that it was all the fault of the evil white man, or the domineering Arab, but that is not what history tells me. At any rate, Africans as subjects of history and as history makers would be boring and uninspiring if all they did in was respond to European (or Arab) economic and political stimuli, if they didn't build states at the expense of others, if they didn't exhibit the timeless human act of survival and Hobbesian self-preservation. People inevitably get hurt, killed, displaced, wiped out, and enslaved in these processes. That's how states formed and fell throughout history, and that's how the realm of power and privilege were demarcated. Trying to exclude Africa from this reality is like trying to deny Africans (or their ancestors) their humanity and their political and economic rationality. The warts of African history are what makes African historical subjects and events as interesting as any others. And the unpalatable realities and present dangers of the past are what vivifies the subject for some of us.
This excessive defensiveness is getting sickening. African history ( with its records of virtues and vices) does not need to be defended; it needs to be explained. How can history perform its didactic and pedagogical role if we insist on this ahistorical formula of African exceptionalism in slavery and slave trade matters?
---Mohandas Ghandi
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Lavonda Staples
Ikhide, Gloria, and other Colleagues:
Is this kind of discussion we are conducting her not really part of the PROBLEM - and I do not mean being pro or anti Skip Gates here. I suppose both sides have merits, but that's for another time. But the manner in which it is being conducted - at loggerheads with each other!
But guys, lets' get REAL!
Can any of us imagine Jewish intellectuals - whether Israeli Jews or Jews residing outside Israel like American or European Jews - on Jewish forums, arguing among themselves as to whether the Germans were culpable in, and to be held responsible for the so-called Jewish Holocaust where some 6 million Jews were said to have perished, regardless of what the Jews may have done to "provoke" the Germans (and some of you should take the time off to read the German side of the story, and I don't mean Mein Kampf alone), and of Jews that may actually have colluded with Germans to betray or help exterminate fellow Jews?
We are here talking of Africa losing some estimated 100 million Africans over a period of some 200 years to the peculiar institution of European Chattel Slavery in Africans!
This kind of rigid wall and academic sophistry between the PROS and CONS is not not helping our case on either side of the Atlantic - and we do have a case! It is merely hardening the DIFFERENCES between us as peoples of African origin who suffered from the EFFECTS of European chattel slavery on Africa and Africans, regardless of the degree of involvement or participation of some - but not all - of our own African peoples!!
Why for example should it be unhelpful to state that "Africans practiced a kind of servitude before the European intrusion...but the degree of callousness of the European enslavement of Africans was unknown to Africans?"
TRUE or FALSE - YES or NO?
This should be the concern of our academic researches! We have a need to know the TRUTH as much as possible, and not merely swayed by a pro or anti Skip Gates flood of emotion!
That is UNSCHOLARLY!
That is QUACKERY disguised as SCHOLARSHIP!!!
Today, we are again living witnesses of a repeat performance in our African "rulers" again selling African resources to Americans, Europeans, Asians for NAUGHT!
Those who fail to learn from their history...
Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD
On Wed 04/28/10 8:54 PM , xok...@yahoo.com sent:
Moses Ebe Ochonu
EXACTLY!!!!!!!!!!! This is precisely what I have been saying. But we need to be more nuanced because the declaration above and its deployment of "Africans" lumps the African victims together with the slavers and profiteers. This is wrong. All Africans did not "actively participate in their own destruction"; some Africans did." We need to separate the raiders from the raided to the extent that the available date allows us to do that. Thanks to new data and new research on both sides of the Atlantic, we can now determine these facts with a small margin of error. I want nuance on both sides. If there anything one could invoke against Gates' Op-Ed it is its failure to name the specific African groups that participated and benefited and to clear a space for African states, groups, and regions that were victimized by the trade. The same nuance should accompany any effort to delineate culpability on the African side.
Moses Ebe Ochonu
A quick response, since this is the end of the semester and there's work to be done. Our readings of Gates are so different that we may never reconcile our positions. I prefer to evaluate what Gates wrote; you're more concerned with discerning his motive for writing and with peering into the inner recesses of his mind. For instance you argued that Gates wanted to use this to exculpate Europeans. Please show me one sentence in his OP-Ed that remotely does that. Again, I am fine with folks being suspicious of his motive on an ideological level, but why should suspicion become a straw man for framing this important debate?
You asked the question of who controlled the vital structures of the slave trade. My answer: Europeans and Africans. That is what my history books and sources told me; Africans controlled the logistics (raiding, capture, march, war, etc) on the African side and this these were all very "vital structures" in the trade. Europeans controlled the finance, credit, and the supply of the instruments that lubricated and prolonged the trade: guns and exotic European goods. They, of course, also controlled the plantation side, although don't forget that there were mini African-controlled plantations that the trade spawned in a few parts of the continents where excess slave supplies were dumped and worked.
You wrote this:
"My argument is that in trying to establish African-American victimhood, Gates uses Africa agency arguments like Thorntons that apply only to micro level supply side economy of Africa, to not only stress African’s culpability in the slave trade but also to very clearly mitigate European culpability, a GREATER culpability in many, if not in all, respects I insist, as well as downplay Africa’s parallel victimization by Europe."
Here is another sample of our radically different readings of Gates. You wrote thus:
"The full logic of Gate’s argument is that Africans should have had the moral rectitude to say no to the Atlantic slave trade, in particular because it involved Africans selling their own sons and daughter overseas."
Olabode Ibironke
Moses, the point that I lump all Africans together as slave traders is hairsplitting, the modifier is implied, because I already made the point you are making on this forum about African nations needing to make reparations to African nations etc. I will not repeat myself. What I presume you have now acknowledged is that we agree on almost everything including the need to insist on making important distinctions where necessary: yes, indeed, all Africans did not participate in the slave trade, so also, slave traders were not all equal, there was an hierarchy in the trade, which you and Gates conveniently ignores that makes the attribution of the UNDIFFERENTIATED CULPABILITY of “ALIKE” so problematic. Human laws simply do not work that way. More so, regardless of who was culpable or victimized on the African side of things, ALL were damaged. This is what Gates does not factor into his relentless charge. Regardless of who was Nazi, all of Germany was devastated by the war, and then rebuilt by the very same enemies it sought to destroy. At some point, human beings admirably make the decision about when to recompense a victim, when to both punish and rehabilitate a culpable victim, and when to administer justice to the criminal beneficiary.
Moses Ebe Ochonu
Olabode Ibironke
If there is no foolproof formula for determining degrees of culpability in a crime, how then has the modern legal system survived for centuries on that very practice of attributing precisely the degrees of culpability in a case where you have multiple culprits? I use your own logic of degrees of participation informing degrees of culpability. “DEGREES OF COMPLICITY SHOULD FOLLOW FROM THE DEPTH OF PARTICIPATION.” (Moses) What is the difference between complicity and culpability, except that the latter implies legal liability? If you already affirmed degrees of complicity based on the definitiveness of degrees of participation, how could you hesitate to make the next logical step of accepting that the degrees of culpability should also automatically flow from the degrees of participation? Please let us responsibly not foreclose that possibility since we don’t know what the exercise would produce. Let us, including Gates, yield that territory to legal experts and philosophers of the law. There may be a way where you think there is no way! Also, when I say “all were damaged,” I mean all of Africa as a geopolitical zone, institutionally, socially, psychologically, and indeed, metaphysically etc. That does not necessarily contradict the fact that there are families whose wealth go back to slavery. The German analogy is an example of a transgressor, who does not fit the sometimes ambiguous position of collaborator, that was both punished and rehabilitated which I think is Kolapo’s claim as well. In the end, WE CANNOT SAY JUSTICE IS IMPOSSIBLE BECAUSE IT IS IMPRACTICABLE OR COMPLICATED. THE IDEA OF JUSTICE IS UNCONDITIONAL AND TRANSCENDENT. We cannot also let a part of humanity sink into abysmal misery because it was their own fault. If we agree that Africa is culpable and should redeem itself, we are not explaining away that culpability. And if we insist that conceptual distinctions are the only way by which sound judgment is possible, we are not just being academic. I am amused you call me an academic. See who is talking! Kettle calling frying pan black.
Dompere, Kofi Kissi
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Olabode Ibironke
Sent: Friday, April 30, 2010 9:03 AM
Moses Ebe Ochonu
Olabode Ibironke
Everything else we seem to agree on including culpable Africans paying reparations to African and African American victims, that is consistent with my initial position. I said as much in my very first posting on the issue. Check your email.
These we don’t agree on:
1. You and Gates want to end the blame-game by ending the call for reparations on the basis that it is a “dead-end debate” because “Africans and Europeans participated actively and vigorously and that both are culpable ALIKE”
I say we end the blame-game by all paying reparations. “Africa is culpable, and Africa must and can pay reparations, too… All must pay!” (Ibironke: USA Africa Dialogue Series, Sun 4/25/2010 9:19 AM)
2. You and Gates argue the futility of a formula by which reparations can be assessed and administered.
I say do not prejudge the process.
3. You and Gates are of the opinion that no distinction is to be made between African middlemen/sellers and European and American slave masters and buyers of men.
I believe there are important distinctions to be made. I need not repeat some of the distinctions people like Kolapo, Kwabena, etc have made here and which Ade Ajayi among others have also made, but which apparently you reject. We can leave it here: that I was seriously mistaken about how much of Gates’s party you really are!
Adeniran Adeboye
Thanks to new data and new research on both sides of the Atlantic, we can now determine these facts with a small margin of error.
Tony Agbali
"This is why I keep saying that you and others are evaluating his current offering in the shadow of "Wonders," not on its merit. At any rate, if you believe that his 'Wonders" framework of "Africans selling their sons and daughters or Africans selling Africans" is at the heart of his current piece, what stops you as a learned historian from simply correcting that fallacy, which is very easy to do ( I do it all the time in my classroom)? Why must you manufacture motives and subtexts that are undeclared just to shoot down what is fundamentally a historically accurate proposition?" -Moses Ebe Ochonu
These diatribes have been interesting. Reading from the sideline is also very intriguing too. However, I briefly want to ask: does past antecedents not matter in the ways we map patterns from which we can discern current and at times predictable reasons and trends, socially and individually?
Gates seemingly have problems with Africans. The "wonders" reflect that. His other one was not too long ago, when he and others decried the fact that it is children of recent (contemporary) African immigrants who are taking the places of "African-Americans" in the ivy league colleges/universities.
However, in spite of those antecedents, Gates may also have some good points regarding the role of Africans in the slave trade. There are historic evidence that Gelede, the King of Dahomey was so disheartened following the decline of the slave trade, due to new anti-slave laws and norms, that seriously affected Dahomey's economic fortunes.
Many African polities made gains from the slave trade, and some had enormous losses, with even whole communities entirely wiped out or depopulated with massive effect for ethnic, cultural, linguistic survivals of certain groups. The European mindset too was not always wholesomely ethically neutral; even when slavery was considered as evil through many papal bulls, many including monarchs, princes, and merchants from Catholic Portugal chose to ignore these.
The most fundamental issue as I see it is the lumping of this phenomenon under the tag "African" as we do so now. The societies that benefited from the slave trade, many still exist in Africa, but they did not label themselves as such. It was not different from the Anglo-Saxons and the Goths not then seeing themselves in the modern sense of Europeans. So, using the currently engendered constructs and terminologies of nationhood, often hinged upon colonial referents, such as Nigeria, we would now say that all Nigerians are guilty of the slave trade, even when some groupings benefited and others suffered immensely?
The fact of the matter is, they were discrete groups within Nigeria, and within same regions in Nigeria, that either gained enormously or suffered immensely. That means that if the Nupe suffered enormously with their people chartered to Kano or Bornu for onward transmission to the coastal slave markets, while, let say the Fulani (Fulfude, Fulbe) benefitted, which groups should we be focusing upon to take responsibility? Or, would it be certain class within the cleavages of given societies?
The issue of slave trade was and remain very complex. The best way, as bad and as ugly as the issue remains, is that using present ethical constructs, historical and economic barometers to measure culpability for past actions and societies that create more problems. As historians know very much, the slave trade and its routing changed the features and social relations of many societies.
Take for instance the case of the Bassa Komo, an ethnic group of the Gwari extraction, and the Bassa Nge of the Nupe extraction in Kogi State. These left their aboriginal settlements and diffused across a number of states such as Plateau, Kogi, Nassarawa, Benue, Kaduna, to find new secured niches thus transforming their identities and social relations. In their new forage, they formed new interactions that forged new coalitions with novel ethnic formations such as the Igala, that equally altered and reshaped their identity.
Having undergone all of these, which Bassa group would now claim to deserve the apologies? Would the ones that remain around Toto, and the Nassarawa ambience claim more valor and therefore heir to the aboriginal group, while denying any entitlement to those who left their home areas around Nassarrawa fleeing to various parts of Nigeria as a result of the Fulani slave raids and conquests?
When we carry these logics of blame apportioning and responsibility that far, we would provoke another layer of social problematic. Here, it can easily be assumed that the questions of identity would arise as to who is Bassa? And that frontal question would evitably transmogrify in all directions as to the polemics as to who is entitled to an apology, recompensation, and all those attritions.
In spite of the fact that all groups can equally lay claims of being subjected to acrimonous and inhuman conditions through the agency of the Fulani slave raids and brutal conquests, the currency of new identities and formative consciousness can leave these issues more sore and tenuous than it is currently actually imagined.
Also, which Fulani group spread across Nigeria and beyond are we to apportion blame for these past attrocious situation against folks like the Bassa?
Should we now hold Nigeria and Nigerians all and equally responsible, even when some within her current limits can lay claims to have suffered enormously, while others benefited? Moreso, there was no Nigeria and Nigerians then. There were no Africa and Africans then. They were Fulani and Nupe, Masai, Luo, and Gikuyu, and Akan and Asante, rather than Nigerians, Kenyans, and Ghanaians.
I think it would amount to a double jeopardy for a Nupe who is a Nigerian now to be smeared with the guilt for which he and his ancestry also suffered simply because he happens to be Nigerian, and the there are ethnic groups or persons, wo derive from the currently mapped limits of Nigeria that immensely benefited from the trans-Atlantic slave exploitation.
In our example, I would assert that the Nupe equally suffered enormous trauma, in what is now today's Nigeria, and probably equally need to be recompensed. Even within the current limits of what is Nupeland, who should be apologizing and responding to whom? Is it the descendants of Masaba to the descendants of Tsoede?
I see that the unit of analysis here remain so porous and flawed. Yes, these things did occur, however, the historic shifts, the reconfigured spatial and interactive imaginations can be problematic in trying to rechart the dimensions of these past events. It is here that I think that we cannot totally dissociate what happened in the "Wonders" from the current tenor and contour of Gates' galeful entrance into the gateway of blame apportioning. The same kind of thing we said of the Bassa or Nupe can also be said of the African-Americans?
Can President Obama, whose father was an immigrant-America and emigrant-African (supposedly non-immigrant African-in-America, I cannot tell if his assumed marriages to two American women made him pursue citizenship) now also be expecting African apologies, though his wife and children have the slave legacy? As we continue, where are we going to begin, and where will this end? I think this is one of the problems that has plagued the slave reparation movement in the United States- the problem of measurement and the defining the fine limits of the unit of analysis.
Finally, I wonder whether they are any stripes of history that we can so quickly and easily describe as historically accurate- events and facts are as accurate as we impute into them, we may share common perceptive experiences of happenings but the filtering lenses and interpretations, I am afraid are not always as clear cut and accurate as the cult of historical accuracy might be robustly articulating. Actually, a historical accurate proposition is ahistorical, because its accurate inheres in presumptive and prepositionally discernible imputative aspiration as a proposition- it has yet to be ascertained beyond its propositional values. |
Moses Ebe Ochonu
Let's agree to disagree on the points you outlined. Except for this one:
"You and Gates argue the futility of a formula by which reparations can be assessed and administered."
And this "that I was seriously mistaken about how much of Gates’s party you really are!" was completely unnecessary. Because my view happens to accord more with Gates' than with yours on this issue, I am in Gates' party!!!! I didn't even know that Gates had a party!!! So Moses Ochonu is not smart or learned enough to make his own argument or take his own positions on issues? He has to be in someone's party eh? And whose party is Bode a part of? Can we at least concede to our interlocutors the right to have their own positions even if we disagree with them without stripping them of the ownership of those ideas and casting them as intellectually dependent appendages? Na wa ! And I thought you were one of the reasonable, open-minded, nuanced, and charitable ones on the other side of this debate.
Moses Ebe Ochonu
With all due respect, we need to be careful how we throw out analogies. We run the risk of insulting the sanctity of some of these atrocities. Let me answer your false analogy this way: I didn't realize that the Australian aborigines and American Indians actually captured, violated and profitably delivered their kind to the Europeans to be slaughtered. I probably have not studied history to that extent. Give me some time to cover that subject and I may see the similarity you're invoking. Be patient with me.
Pius Adesanmi
Lavonda Staples:
Indeed, you are the daughter of your father as we would tell you in Africa! Brilliant, this intervention of yours. This brings us again to the question of slant. A dimension Moses at least accepts with some reservation as opposed to my broda, Qansy Salako's, curious and irritating take on the matter. The only thing I will want Moses to consider is this: how is it possible to sever Gate's latest sortie from its filiation to a consistent politics of European exculpation that he has articulated over the years?
Gates didn't start this yesterday and you know it Moses. He's been at this thing for a very long time and Moses will suddenly have us believe that the NYT piece is an orphaned text that has no intertextual relationship with the exculpatory porridge that Gates has been serving us all these years? I think it is time for Gates to leave African History to Toyin Falola, Paul Zeleza, Mamadou Diouf, Gloria Emeagwali, Moses Ochonu, Kolapo Ishola, Uyilawa Usuanlele and return to his natural habitat in literary-critical-cultural theorizing. Moses, hear ye: you cannot, under any circumstances, divorce anything Gates has written in the last decade from this statement by Lavonda: |
Dr. Gates is attempting a terrible piece of "black" magic. He is trying to take the issue of reparations away from "blaming" whites and onto the backs of Africans. What reason? As in all things in my country: money, sex, religion, politics. I think if you chose the last answer you would be correct.
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Moses, this is the koko (crux) of the matter. This your argument for the epistemic orphaning of that NYT text ain't cutting it at all. That piece has a very large extended family in Gates's previous writings and politics. No one is denying the reality of African participation. Moses, if I jump up today and begin to write the history of the Jewish holocaust consistently from the perspective of Jewish collaborators - especially in Vichy France - in order to "end the blame game" on Nazi Germany, your instinct should be to look into what my motivations may be. It could be that a Saudi-Iranian foundation is pumping a lot of money into my scholarly work. If, rather than do that, you start theorizing the rotten underbelly of Jewish collaboration, Moses, AIPAC will descend on you like a ton of bricks!
Pius
====================================================================== " You need patience and ability to celebrate small wins or you will get frustrated. Every small win is another step towards to the ultimate goal.We need to apply the same learnings to Nigeria. 50 year rot is not going to disappear at a go. We just have to keep pushing. Celebrate little victories like getting rid of Iwu; when we lose, dust up ourselves and get on with it; keep our eyes on the ball.." - Pastor Joe Attueyi --- On Fri, 30/4/10, Lavonda Staples <lrst...@gmail.com> wrote: |
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xok...@yahoo.com
I did not understand most of your sentences. Some of the words are longer than sentences. Too brainy for me. Let us however not patronize Ms. Lavonda Staples; there is nothing brilliant in her outburst. It is basically the same garden variety e gba mi wailing of my people: short on substance but long on the cringe-worthy wailing that white liberals love to dance to.
I am not a historian; however I have followed Professor Gates' work quite a bit. It is irresponsible for anyone to suggest that Professor Gates seeks to shift blame for the transatlantic slave trade from white folks to Africans. Just plain irresponsible. My brothers and sisters on this list are perpetuating a romanticized hagiography of Africa. I join Gates et al in soundly rejecting this nonsense.
The problem, to be honest, if I was to critique the postings here, is a near universal inability of most anti-Gates scholars to articulate themselves clearly and coherently. That is something, alas, that cannot be taught overnight. Contrast that with the clear headed logic and beauty of Citizen Ochonu's presentations. Gbam! No contest. How did he pull it off? Ochonu first divorced himself from raw emotions and argued his case based on the facts. It is impossible to push him off his pedestal, the man really went to anti reparations school ;-))))))
I once watched a couple of pro reparations leaders on TV try to explain their position. They were so inarticulate, by the end of the show, I was in tears for our people. What is wrong with our people? They could not understand that they were dealing with a very complex issue. It was embarassing.
The problem I have here is that some of these our scholars lack credibility. They were quiet when Professor Maurice Amutabi swore there was no word for slave in Africa. I was practically by myself begging people to come out and teach this man our history. Whossai, people were talking meke meke from both sides of their multiple mouths. Now, they are saying, ah, so we sold slaves to the white man, we hung slaves, we used them as human sacrifice, but don't you understand, the white man came and took our brothers and sisters away! They must pay! Anyone of us that thinks differently from such orthodoxy is plastered with epithets, ridicule and opprobrium (Ikhide stop it, you are sounding like Pius!).
I ask again:
Were Africans culpable in the slave trade?
What is wrong with Professor Gates saying so? And who cares if he made a Nollywood video about the wonders of some fantasy Africa?
As Ochonu has so expertly put it, all our friends needed to do was to warn everybody to put Gates' new thesis in the context of his priors. And even then I would not change my views. The man is speaking truth to power. More power to him.
Yes, we should talk about reparations, who gets to pay, who gets to receive. And yes, let's talk about the trillions that America has spent on a lot of programs to ameliorate the horrible effects of slavery, racism, colonialism, blah, blah, blah! And let's talk about Haiti, the billions and billions of dollars funneled into it and now look where it is... In any case, if you all succeed in getting the reparations, I want mine. In dollars!
And Citizen Ochonu, owner of pretty words, you sting like a bee, you float like a butterfly, there are historians and there are historians, you, you are a double historian! I salute you ojare, ajanaku!
- Ikhide
ps
I don't really understand why I should bite my tongue because the oyinbo man is listening and may rejoice... Who cares? I hear Soyinka is mad at BBC for exposing the open sore of Lagos in that excellent documentary Welcome to Lagos. Na wa O! A snake is dead, you say a woman killed it! Who cares, shebi the snake is dead? Kudos to BBC bo... I don't understand Kongi anymore!
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Cornelius Hamelberg
bigger issue of the matter than is called for, I must press the point
home and not only on behalf of our Jewish community at large.
It’s a question of simple courtesies and simple rudeness that can be
avoided - and voided since no one here has what can be called
linguistic immunity when guilty of having displayed bad manners or
insensitivity – in this forum which has previously been served with
some good advice called netiquette.
There is intentionality to language - words have and do convey
meanings and words can be used with some degree of sensitivity and
consideration, so as not to inflict unintentional harm or to foster
unnecessary social discord and we don’t have to be members of the
diplomatic corps or to have undergone such training to be aware of
this, so let me say my piece:
If Farooq A. Kperogi can take Vice President Dr. Goodluck Jonathan
to task for some really petty language trivia then lets assume that
even Dr. Valentine Ojo is to be held to certain standards when
wielding or attempting to wield the English Language with some
intended/ unintended effects – though perhaps not to be held to the
same standard of accountability as Distinguished Professor of
English, Kenneth Harrow who first complained about the matter , and
not without just and sufficient cause.
It’s not that any of us can go around trampling like a mad or
inebriated elephant and crushing other people’s feelings and then
casually say, not even by way of apology, “Jews are not being attacked
or slurred here.” - just as Dr Ojo cannot and I don’t suppose that in
a normal state of mind he would, refer to the Rwandan Genocide “as
“the so-called Rwanda Genocide” – as if it wasn’t a genocide at all -
so too he should not – in my opinion and in the opinion of common
decency, should not refer to THE HOLOCAUST as “the so-called Jewish
Holocaust where some 6 million Jews were said to have perished”.
http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A03uoSoSd9tLei8AwwubvZx4?p=The+Holocaust
I also have some unprintable reactions to Ojo’s chosen words which
would not be acceptable here and I prefer to take the matter up here
where the offence occurred, than to take it up elsewhere. Nor can we
refer to the starvation-to-surrender of Biafra as “the so called
Starvation” - as a weapon of war and callously call it” collateral
damage”
On 29 Apr, 18:32, "Dr. Valentine Ojo" <val...@md.metrocast.net> wrote:
> Kenneth Harrow:
>
> If you see my comments as "slur jews en route", you just confirmed
> my point!
>
> You are a Jew, immediately rising to the defense of Jews - even when
> Jews are not being attacked or slurred here.
>
> So, what exactly is YOUR POINT?
>
> Here you are stating unabashed: "i can also imagine having to read
> again and again antisemitic tracts blaming the jews for everything,
> all over again, because i am a jew and have seen this all my life."
>
> Kenneth Harrow - because he is a Jew - is already circling the
> wagons even when Jews are not being attacked!
>
> Persecution complex?
>
> And how do you think Africans feel...?
>
>
> Tall Timbers, MD
> Jews residing outside Israel like American or European Jews - on
> Jewish forums, arguing among themselves as to whether the Germans were
> culpable in, and to be held responsible for the so-called Jewish
> Holocaust where some 6 million Jews were said to have perished,
> regardless of what the Jews may have done to "provoke" the Germans
> (and some of you should take the time off to read the German side of
> the story, and I don't mean Mein Kampf alone), and of Jews that may
> actually have colluded with Germans to betray or help exterminate
> fellow Jews?
> jews asking questions about the holocaust; i can imagine a bible which
> is not described as jewish tales, including another one with jesus in
> it; i can imagine the slave trade not dominated by jews, jews who were
> actually victims of the inquisition when the centuries of the trade
> got started. i can imagine citing the figure of jews killed in the
> holocaust without stating "said to have perished." i can also imagine
> having to hear variants of holocaust denial for the rest of my life.
> i can also imagine having to read again and again antisemitic tracts
> blaming the jews for everything, all over again, because i am a jew
> and have seen this all my life.
> maybe this discussion could be carried out without having to slur
> jews en route.
> ken harrow
> Kenneth W. Harrow
> Distinguished Professor of English
> Michigan State University
> har...@msu.edu
> 517 803-8839
> fax 517 353 3755
>
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> Texas at Austin.
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Farooq A. Kperogi
even Dr. Valentine Ojo is to be held to certain standards when wielding or attempting to wield the English Language with some
intended/ unintended effects – though perhaps not to be held to the same standard of accountability as Distinguished Professor of
1 Park Place South
Suite 817C
Atlanta, GA, USA.
30303
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Blog: www.farooqkperogi.blogspot.com
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
Pius Adesanmi
Oga Ojo:
You must understand and sympathize with my broda, Ikhide. He has this jejune conception of oppositional discourse that is completely underwritten by his knee-jerk scoffs at scholars, scholarly practice, and scholarship. He pretends to have found an Archimedean point to diss, dissmiss, disrespect, scoff at the language, protocols, and manners of knowledge production and those who do it.
No be today I know Ikhide and his strategies. Once Ikhide is able to lump every scholar from Gloria Emeagwali to Abdul Rasheed Na'Allah into that basket of condescension to prove that he is not predisposed to go with what he regularly misconstrues as "the bandwagon" (rather than free minds having a consensus), he manufactures the exception for the occasion - today, it is Moses; in the past, it has been Ken Harrow, Obi Nwakanma, Tony Agbali, even yours truly. He has an one size fits all agbada that he decks on his manufactured exception for the occasion. This explains why Moses is writing greater prose than Chinua Achebe in Ikhide estimation today. Tomorrow, he will manufacture Moses's replacement in another thread and declare him or her master of the verb while dissing the person's constituency.
This is not something that Moses is unaware of, so he can't possibly get carried away by Ikhide's trademark. Latching on to Moses's carefully-articulated opposition (which I disagree with) while delegitimising the scholarly constiuency of the same Moses is one trademark strategy that Ikhide imagines sexy! The funny point, Oga Ojo, is that way too many of those scoffing and dismissing people probably first ever heard about Gates within the last two years - especially after the arrest imborglio leading to the beer summit. Yet, here they are, dissing those who belong in Gates's field and have been reading him and his politics for years.
Ikhide is treating Ama like he doesn't know what he is saying. Ama who has been reading and following Gates over beer since our Ibadan years in the SUB with the likes of my foolish brother, Ogbuefi Nwakanma. And just imagine the infuriating dismissal of Abdul Rasheed Na'Allah - who was writing years ago in reaction to Wonders of the African World. Professor Emeagwali merely posted Na'Allah's old intervention to show filiation - I believe to let Moses know that he is not making strong enough a point to disavow that continuum. Ikhide rushes in abusing Na'Allah's scholarship! Let the point be made again: Lavonda's submission is brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant.
Let Ikhide go and write his letter of apology to Gates and stop trying too hard to play notice me compulsive-obsessive opposition - the sort that seems to scream: make una come see me o. I can diss these so-called scholars and their yeye vocation. If you must do it, have valid reasons for it.
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Pius ====================================================================== " You need patience and ability to celebrate small wins or you will get frustrated. Every small win is another step towards to the ultimate goal.We need to apply the same learnings to Nigeria. 50 year rot is not going to disappear at a go. We just have to keep pushing. Celebrate little victories like getting rid of Iwu; when we lose, dust up ourselves and get on with it; keep our eyes on the ball.." - Pastor Joe Attueyi |
--- On Sat, 1/5/10, Dr. Valentine Ojo <val...@md.metrocast.net> wrote: |
|
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game |
Cc: xok...@yahoo.com, emea...@mail.ccsu.edu, "Adeniran Adeboye" <aade...@mac.com>, "Abraham Madu" <abraha...@yahoo.com>, "Bimbola Adelakun" <adunn...@yahoo.com>, "Emmanuel Babatunde" <babemm...@gmail.com>, "Rufus Orindare" <bato...@att.net>, "Ibukunolu Babajide" <i...@usa.net>, "Lavonda Staples" <lrst...@gmail.com>, "Nnanna Agomoh" <mnag...@yahoo.com>, "Pius Adesanmi" <piusad...@yahoo.com> |
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Olabode Ibironke
Greetings Moses,
My last line about “Gates’s party” was channeling William Blake’s critique of John Milton that Milton belonged to the devil’s party without knowing it. It was intended to be an allusion, a pun, a compliment and a light humor. A compliment because for Blake the devil is the hero who challenged the status quo. So, I simply replaced devil with Gates. Now Gates is indeed a mischief maker because as you and I have explored all week, the ramifications of his piece are far-reaching. In my humble opinion, reparations is impossible and the entire history of the slave trade changes radically and is distorted if we are not able to make any form of distinction between raiders and the major European and American users of slaves. Yet, some form of reparations is necessary. To make this happen, we must make the distinction between the African slave raiders and their senior partners. Whatever ephemerals and payments African players got for their role, it cannot be compared to the end use of slaves on plantations and for capital accumulation etc. The essential orientation of human laws to which I appeal is toward forms of equity and relief that take into consideration such distinctions as exactly where the devastation of the wars of slavery took place, the GROUND ZERO, and what collaborators got and made of their illicit gain. It derives from the principle of Jesus Christ that TO WHOM MUCH IS GIVEN MUCH WOULD BE REQUIRED. I also think, now that you introduced the subject, that we have to consider the long view of historical duration in the evaluation of these different players, which you seem to consider as writing history backwards. I guess this is a closing argument and I must say that I appreciate your bold contribution, only that I think the stakes are too high to leave things ALIKE where Gates wants them to be.
kenneth harrow
i frequently read the postings on this topic not as addressing the political and ethical question posed by reparations, but not the history. at times the views strike me as ill-informed; other times, as more informed than i.
for instance, the question of gold being traded on the gold coast is addressed by vague comments about the locations of gold, etc. i have read enough of the history, and histories, of the region and slave trade to know that i do not know as much as historians who've studied the issue, but more than the man-on-the-street who has vague notions. i was surprised to read histories than informed me that initially the portuguese acquired slaves in the senegal-gambia region and then traded them for gold in the guinea coast region since gold was one of the objects of their voyages, and plantation slavery hadn't moved outside the mediterranean and there was no significant market for slaves. after 50-100 years, as the plantations were implanted in the islands off the african coast, a market was created, the value of slaves went up, and the acquisition of slaves over gold began.
anyway, the processes by which slaves were generated also changed over time, i gather. initially it was largely wars that led to prisoners, whose value went up as the slave trade grew. eventually wars, initially undertaken to control regions and peoples, turned into instruments that generated prisoners whose value as slaves created an incentive for war. very much like the changes in e congo where the initial war to remove a president, and then to remove his replacement, turned into conflict over control of the resources in the region.
how can any meaningful designation of accountability take place in the absence of clear historical understandings of the mechanics of the slave trade?
similarly, the issue of benefit, as recently and eloquently stated in the nytimes letters by experts like foner, seem to me necessary for an informed discussion.
for instance, the percentage of slaves traded to the united states was comparatively small: maybe 90% went to the caribbean islands and brazil. but there are complicating factors, like the later reshipments of slaves north, the survival rates in various regions, and ultimately the increase in slaveholdings for economic reasons late in the period....
i am not a specialist in african history; i teach it to provide my students with a context, and so, as i said earlier, what i know i get from history books, second hand information for which i rely on the expertise of scholars in the field. i don't mean to suggest that we not offer opinions and debate, but it would be a more informed debate, it would feel like a more informed debate, if it were grounded more completely in historical claims.
i do not know the competency of the debaters here as historians; do not know who are the historians, or how they would present their arguments based on their own expertise as such. i would value a claim more, such as the trade of gold, say, if i knew it were based on some historian's claim than in the claim of non-historians like myself
finally, lest i be misunderstood. i am not suggesting non-historians shut up--i won't shut up either; but that historians speak up.
ken
Kenneth W. Harrow
Distinguished Professor of English
Michigan State University
har...@msu.edu
517 803-8839
fax 517 353 3755
xok...@yahoo.com
I won't lie, this your biography of Ikhide had me rolling on the floor, writhing with abi na in laughter. You sir, you are a genius. You are one funny dude, I won't lie.
I do wish I was as intellectually powerful as Citizen Ochonu; look at how he has tied every one of you in your own knots. I mean, everywhere I look for miles, there are all these anti-Gates scholars, felled by mere words, na wa O! Man, when I grow up, I want to be like Mazi Ochonu ;-))))))) I mean, nothing that is thrown at his ideas sticks, nothing! Our forefathers did some really bad things; we must acknowledge this, as part of our history. Just as their offspring are doing some really bad things today. Obasanjo... El-Rufai... Ribadu... IBB... Go and watch the BBC's new documentary Welcome to Lagos and you will find enough rage in you to focus on the right things. As long as liberal thinkers continue to patronize us as if we are cute lovable beings, lacking the complexity to be responsible for our own failings, we will continue to be stuck where we are today. In the cesspool of irrelevance.
Reparations for me is an expensive distraction. I am not impressed. The truth of the matter is that today, we are witnessing modern day slavery in our African "countries" to use that term loosely. Nigeria is the most visible example of black-on-black crime unleashed on a beautiful people. In the past 11 years, Obasanjo and his elite thugs, El-Rufai and Nuhu Ribadu have converted all of Nigeria into a big Otta Farm, with Nigerians as serfs if not slaves. The looting under their ruthless leadership has been so massive, it will take decades to repatriate all the stolen money. Pius, your very good friend El-Rufai is back in Nigeria today. You have written tomes in praise of that man and dismissed critics of his heinous activities as yeye people. If you can support that jerk, you might as well go be IBB's chief of staff. Go look at what EL Rufai has done to Abuja. He and his goons basically divided up the land among the rich and shoved the poor into the marshes of Abuja's edge. Our leaders should be shot. When young energetic intellectuals like you ignore noble ideals then perhaps there is no hope. That, my friend, is the real problem. We must dream big, and then worry about the constraints later. El-Rufai is back. I pray that Ribadu comes back. Things must get worse before they get better.
Be well. And keep it coming. We are listening!
- Ikhide
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
Moses Ebe Ochonu
Thanks. I think we understand each other's position better now. We disagree but we know what we disagree on. Our disagreements no withstanding, I actually--and this may surprise you--sympathize with your closing statement that the political stakes may be too high in letting an argument of equal culpability stand or get operationalized in the policy domain. I find this refreshingly honest, and I can live with it. Ideological instrumentalization of academic debates is something I am familiar with. I even study it, so I have no major quibble with it as long as folks declare this to be their discursive platform rather than pretend that what they are advancing is borne out by the historical facts. My entire argumentation here has not been informed by the political imperative of fighting actual or perceived agendas; it has been a battle for reclaiming African history as History--messy, complex, and at times depressing, just like all histories are. History, for me, should not in the first instance, be an ideological practice. It can be in the second and third instances but it should be made clear that we are invoking historical claims to stake out intellectual territories in a high stakes game. Such prefatory transparency would be fine with me.
Finally, nothing I've written here actually provides a road map to my views on reparations, which I have stated in scattered forms elsewhere. I believe you're making an unfair extrapolation from my stated views on culpability to make definitive statements on what you believe to be my position on reparations. So, for the record, here are the rough outlines of my view on reparations. I don't have time to refine them, so forgive the tardiness.
1. I agree with your position that some African nations (polities implicated in the slave trade story) should apologize or render or even material reparations to victimized African peoples. Thanks to research, we have these distinction down almost to a science.
2. American corporations whose wealth are traceable to the profits of the slave trade should be made to pay reparations to African Americans identified as descendants of slaves who worked on plantations in the America. Symbolic investments and other gestures of remorse would also work here.
3. Unless a fairly precise formula that identifies the descendants of victims and victimized regions is hammered out, it would be wrong to demand reparations for Africa, all of Africa. If this is worked out, reparations should be paid to the descendants of victims or victimized regions by BOTH Euro-American corporations/governments and African nations/kingdoms that participated and profited from the trade. Since both are EQUALLY culpable in my view, reparations should be assessed accordingly. The key difference is that African culprits would not actually pay, since they either can't afford it or in some cases would be paying to themselves.
4. Making these delineations is difficult and will take a lot of time and research. But we should not short-circuit the process by advocating for wholesale reparations from Euro-America to all of Africa, or by making parts of Euro-America with no clear lineage of slave profits and slave capital transfers pay reparations. If we don't take our time to sort out these complexities and make these distinctions, we risk compensating the descendants of African slave profiteers, raiders, and other participants who are already enjoying the material and symbolic capital brought forward from the slave trade. We also risk punishing Euro-Americans with no clear line of inheritance in the system of slave-produced capital.
It's been a pleasure, Bode. I rest my case.
Dr. Valentine Ojo
And many MISGUIDED AFRICANS - like Moses Ebe Ochonu, Ikhide, Ozdiobi Osuji, Qansy Salako - even go as far as to want to hold Africans responsible for their own ENSLAVEMENT by Europeans!
Can you top that in SELF-DENIGRATION?"
On Sat 05/01/10 3:45 AM , Omo Oba olad...@ix.netcom.com sent:
THE DEBT HAS NOT BEEN PAID, THE ACCOUNTS HAVE NOT BEEN SETTLED. ©
Dudley Thompson
First of all, I want to thank the students and those who are responsible for giving me the chance to participate in these "streets of intellect." Listening to George Lamming alone is worth the trip. I hope you will agree with me on that.
I will begin with a quotation that could have come from Walter Rodney himself. Actually it is a quotation from George Lamming. It goes like this:
There is a perennial debt to be paid to black people for continuing of enslavement and degradation. There are those who believe that the matter is over. They are completely wrong. Actually, there are those among us who believe that the demand and struggle for justice and restoration to full dignity would take a generation to win a crusade for reparations. In unison under concerted strategy....
There are other words of inspiration along the same lines, for instance Kwame Nkrumah has said: "We can no longer afford the luxury of delay"; and as I have stated elsewhere, "The debt has not been paid; the accounts have not been settled."
The purpose of this address is first of all to sensitize all progressive thinkers on the issue of reparations. Secondly, it is to bring you up to date on what the Organization of African Unity has done and to assist you in working out strategies for carrying out the mandate of the Group of Eminent Persons, that I would refer to later.
Once you accept that the mass kidnap and enslavement of Africans was the most wicked criminal enterprise in recorded human history; and that no compensation has been paid to any of the sufferers by the perpetrators, and that the consequences continue to be massive both in terms of the enrichment of the descendants of the perpetrators and in terms of the impoverishment of the Africans, then the justice for claim for reparation is established beyond any reasonable doubt. Our claim, which is still outstanding, is supported in law and exemplified by several precedents. The law of unjust enrichment provides the basis on international law for claim against those who have gained by the unlawful oppression of another.
First, the best known case which can stand as a precedent arose out of the well known, hideous and despicable persecution of the Jews by the Nazis in the last great war. Hitler exterminated approximately 6 million Jews in the dreaded Holocaust, marking one of the grimmest pages of human history. The Jews have not hidden their suffering by putting it under the carpet in shame, like many of our people do when we speak about slavery. They say, "this is a long-time story; why talk about it again? Why are you opening again those wounds which are healed?"
Those wounds have never been healed. And there is no time expiry nor Statute of Limitations to prevent challenging such a crime of genocide and murder. The Jews have done a great service to the world by exposing genocide simply as a crime against humanity, so that never again should it be repeated. They did even more. They organized themselves and challenged their oppressors and brought them before the tribunals of the world and received not only acknowledgment of their guilt, but also approximately $60 billion so far and running, in reparation for resettlement of the descendants of those who suffered. There are other cases, which I shall bring to your attention later.
As I mentioned earlier, the allies also claimed some $33 billion from Germany after World War II. Japanese Americans received an apology from the United States for unjust racial discriminatory treatment during World War II when most of them were interned in concentration camps in the West coast. They also received $1.2 million from the US government as reparation for the 120,000 Japanese Americans who had been interned. Native American Indians as a result of their claim reparations received $1.3 billion and large areas of reserve from the US government.
Poland demanded $284 million plus lands and concessions from Germany for using Poles as slave labor. The Eskimos received from the Canadian government $1.5 billion and very large areas of land. The Aborigines received large areas of bauxite land from the Australian government and a large sum of money. Last year, the Maoris received $160 million and a large expanse of territory.
There are many cases outstanding. For instance there is the claim of sexual slavery by Korean women against the Japanese, and the case against Iraq during the recent Gulf war. Some of these are still to be ruled upon. So far, we descendants of Africans, the black people, have made no such claim. The accounts have not been settled; the books have not been closed .
A charge of the Nuremberg tribunal in addressing the Nazi genocide, and I quote: "It is crime against humanity, it is murder, extermination, deportation and other inhuman acts committed against any civilian population. The tribunal found them guilty of acts so reprehensible as to offend the conscious of mankind, as amounts to crime against humanity and against International law."
In 1948, the US congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, granting reparations to individuals or groups within the US whose rights have been violated. Thus the Japanese Americans and Native American Indians received large entitlements, that I referred hitherto. The blacks, as a group have not yet made their claim. The books have not been closed; the accounts have not been settled.
I shall illustrate by five examples, cases to show how construction of white developed countries have tried to distort the history taught to us as black people; having robbed us of our own history. In the surgical operation which we call the Atlantic Slave Trade, they cut-off not only a person's language, religion, family support and everything else that used to mean anything to him, and put him away in a foreign land--the land of Babylon. They blotted out his past.
Forged in a foreign setting over several centuries, they made him forget his own history in an entirely complete sense. And what did they put in its place? They put a myth: I will try to prove that there is nothing of the past which has already been settled.
The first is what has been brought forward by the previous speaker. Statements such as that of a Cambridge Professor (Hugh Trevor-Ropper) who said that the blackman has no history, before the whiteman came; Africa was total confusion and confusion, he says, is not history. Now, that is not just a simple statement from the heart of ignorance!
But the average child in the West Indies, anyway, is taught in history (in fact it begins that way) that history begins with the abolition of slavery, the abolition of slavery by the whiteman. This is quite wrong! It is a very different approach to a child's mind, teaching him that he had no past until whites gave him something. That you are just an unwanted descendant of the slave; you do not carry your birth certificate in the further past. It is very different for the teacher to say, ".. .oh no, slavery didn't begin your history, it interrupted your history, a history which started long before that. It interrupted your history, you did not descend from slavery, you ascended over a system of slavery, which interrupted your history!" It is entirely a different approach to a child because he begins to look and find out what happened to him and to learn the truths. Such is the myth they have tried to teach you that they have settled the whole affair by giving you a civilization and something to hold on to.
The second example is, and I will quote two cases, established cases that they have paid their dues.
The first is known as the Sommerset case of 1772. It is that of an Englishman who took his servant, his slave to England. Nancy was her name. Nancy went before the great Lord Mansfield who having listened to the advocacy of the abolitionist lawyer said, "The black must be set free. Let the black be set free."
What he has been trying to show there is the validity of British justice settling the scores of slavery. It didn't settle anything. It didn't set slaves free. Slavery went on for many, many, many years after that. What he meant was set her free, because the free white atmosphere of Britain could not stand this act of slavery. That is what he said.
The second case is that of the well known Le Amistad, the case in which the black slaves fought and took over the slave ship, and told the navigator who was saved from death to take them back to Africa. He steered by night and landed in the US. That epic shows the great trial in the courts of Connecticut where the great white lawyer John Quincy Adams set them free. As if it settled the whole affair. The debt has not been paid; the accounts have not been settled.
Another draconian example of the distortion of history is the Emancipation Act of 1838. The Emancipation Act is not a human relation's idea; it has nothing to do with morality or human rights. The Emancipation Act was a commercial transaction, a commercial transaction in which reparation was paid; I think sterling pounds 200 million to the slave master as reparation for losing his property --your ancestors. It had nothing to do with closing the books; nothing to do with settling the accounts. In all those cases, what happened to those who had gone before? What happened to those people who worked in the tobacco fields and made cotton "king" of the powerful US? And the cane field plantations? What about those lynched? No, the accounts have not been settled.
Then from Emancipation came colonialism in Africa and the Caribbean. You are free according to them. You don't tell a person he is free any more than you tell a dog he is a cat and this makes him a cat. But there you are, emancipated; you are free, or, in fact, nearly so. You move from there to colonialism, the stepson of slavery. Now, what happened under colonialism isn't well known, at least in this part of the world. I know that in the colonies you had the statement, "lower the horizon and the hopes of the black people". Children were taught you are now free, you can move just so far, but you can't get any further because the colonial officers are your new masters and they call the shots!
It is strange that men like C.L.R. James, Manley, Rodney and others lived most of their lives as colonials, under those limitations. They did not stop there because they pursued the heritage. The heritage of our own history, which is a heritage of struggles. And so, after the battles of war and colonialism, came independence in the 1960's. New status and independence of the 1960's is the fifth opportunity for them to say that they have settled the deal.
The new status as colonials after emancipation was evidenced everywhere with the continual struggle. Voices were raised all round. The Pan-Africanist movement drew a new resurgence of nationalist agitation. Black leaders began to merge under its banner. People like Nasser, Mclair, L. Hughes and W. Rodney worked to raise the consciousness of black people. Marcus Garvey's prophecies of thousands of black nurses, black engineers, black newspapers like the Negro World, the Crisis, and various publications. Garvey began telling black people about their own history, and therefore the only thing left for them to do under independence was now to ask for its consequence. These days we are hearing the Pope and others asking black people to forgive these atrocities. Forgive them for they know exactly what they were doing! We say, yes of course we forgive you, but we will not forget. After confession comes atonement. We, therefore, say our claim is still outstanding, supported by the law.
Let me point out that the work has been going on. The OAU during its 1993 Dakar summit named a group of Eminent Persons to pursue the effects of slavery and its consequences; to pursue the modalities by which it can be addressed; to examine it and approve the Abuja Declaration. The Eminent Persons Group included among others the late M.K. Abiola, Ali Mazrui, Professor Ajayi, and I was the rapporteur; I do the work.
The Abuja Declaration, which was passed after the first Pan-African Conference on Reparations stated as follows:
This First Pan-African Conference on Reparations held in Abuja, Nigeria, April 27-29, 1993, sponsored by the OA U Group of Eminent Persons (GEP) for Reparations, and the Federal Government of Nigeria.
Recalling the establishment by the Organization of African Unity of a machinery for appraising the issue of reparations in relation to the damage done to Africa and its Diaspora by enslavement, colonization, and neo-colonialism;
Convinced that the issue of reparations is an important question requiring the united action of Africa and its Diaspora and worthy of the active support of the rest of the international community;
Fully persuaded that the damage sustained by the African peoples is not a "thing of the past" but is painfully manifest in the damaged lives of contemporary Africans from Harlem to Harare and in the damaged economies of Africa and the Black World from Guinea to Guyana, from Somalia to Surinam;
Aware of historic precedents in reparations, ranging from German payment Of restitution to the Jews, to the question of compensating Japanese-Americans for the injustice of internment by the Roosevelt Administration in the United States during the World War II;
Cognizant of the fact that compensation for injustice need not necessarily be paid only in capital transfer but could include service to the victims or other forms of restitution and readjustment of the relationship agreeable to both parties;
Emphasizing that the admission of guilt is a necessary step to reverse this situation;
Emphatically convinced that what matters is not the guilt but the responsibility of those states and nations whose economic evolution once depended on slave labor and colonialism, and whose forebears participated either in selling and buying Africans, or in owning them, or in colonizing them;
Convinced that the pursuit of reparations by the African peoples in the continent and in the Diaspora will itself be a learning experience in self discovery and in uniting political and psychological experiences;
Calls upon the international community to recognize that there is a unique and unprecedented moral debt owed to the African peoples which has yet to be paid - the debt of compensation to the Africans as the most humiliated and exploited people of the last four centuries of modern history:
Calls upon Heads of States and Governments in Africa and the Diaspora itself (to set up National Committees for the purpose of studying the damaged African experience disseminating information and encouraging educational courses on the impact Of enslavement, colonization and neo-colonialism on present-day Africa and its Diaspora;
Urges the Organization of African Unity to grant observer status to select organizations from the African Diaspora in order to facilitate consultations between Africa and its Diaspora on reparations and related issues;
Further urges the OA U to call for full monetary payment through capital transfer and debt cancellation.
Convinced that numerous looting, theft and larceny have been committed on the African people, calls upon those in possession of their stolen goods, artifacts and other traditional treasures, to restore them to their rightful owners - the African people.
Convinced that the claim for Reparations is well grounded in International Law, urges the OA U to establish a legal Committee on the issue of Reparations.
Also calls upon African and Diaspora groups already working on reparations to communicate with the Organization of African Unity and establish continuing liaison.
Encourages such groups to send this declaration to various countries to obtain their official support for the movement;
Serves notice on all states in Europe and the Americas which had participated in the enslavement and colonization of the African peoples, and which may still be engaged in racism and neo-colonialism, to desist from any further damage and start building bridges of reconciliation and co-operation, through reparation;
Exhorts all African states to grant entrance, as of right, to all persons of African descent, and the right to obtain residence in those African states, if there is no disqualifying element on the African claiming the "right to return" to his or her ancestral home, Africa.
Urges those countries which were enriched by slavery, the slave trade, colonialism and neo-colonialism to give total relief from Foreign Debt, and allow the debtor countries of the Diaspora to become free for self develcpment and from immediate and direct economic domination.
Calls upon the countries largely characterized as profiteers from the slave trade and colonialism to support proper and reasonable representation of African Peoples in the political and economic areas of the highest decision-making bodies;
Requests the OA U to intensify its efforts in restructuring the international system in pursuit of justice with special reference to permanent African seat on the Security Council of the United Nations.
Let me backup a little. People only think of restitution in terms of how much money, what is going to happen, who is going to get what and what have you. But this is not about money. We are not thinking about black people who have suffered as a result of slavery and its consequences. We are demanding an opportunity, room at the table, to make full contribution to the world, the present day and the coming millennium. It means adjusting to people asking such questions as: why are there so many black people in jail and prisons? Give them education--that is part of it. Why is there in the supposed repository of peace called the United Nations not one black nation represented as a permanent member of the Security Council? Put them there. That is reparation. There is not one black executive officer making final decisions at the IMF or any of the other bodies; put them there; that is reparation. There are many ways in which restitution can be done. Why not study why many more black women die after childbirth than whites? Give them more hospitals and better medical care.
There are many ways reparations can be made. You are not punishing people from guilt, although the thought might have crossed your mind. What you are saying to them is, "This is a claim for your responsibilities. You, who have the profits in the white world, have inherited the responsibility of what your forefathers did to us. For it is the responsibility you have and not the guilt, by which we approach you. We emphasize that the admission of guilt is the necessary step to reverse the situation. First of all, admit the guilt; it is the necessary step, for this is not just another debt."
We call upon the international community to recognize that there is a unique and unprecedented moral debt to the African people which has not yet been paid. The debt of compensation to Africans as the most humiliated and exploited people of the last four centuries of modem history. We urge the OAU to ask for full monetary compensation through capital transfer to Africa or debt cancellation. Something like the Marshal plan; an African Marshal plan would be necessary. Without debt cancellation, we will never be able to repay the amount of money they have lent to us so easily. They don't want to do this; they are prepared to live off the interest which strangles us in the debt trap which they have left us in a state called Independence!
Convinced that numerous looting, theft and larceny have been committed on the African people, we call upon those in possession of stolen goods, artifacts, and other traditional treasures to restore them to their rightful owners, the African people. Convinced that the claim for restoration was established in the international court of law, we urge the OAU to establish a legal committee to address the issue of reparations.
It exalts all African states to grant as its right to all peoples of African descent a right to obtain residency in those African states, the right to return to the ancestral home, Africa. It calls upon the OAU to intensify its efforts to restructure the international system in pursuit of justice.
I therefore suggest to you that we take this matter seriously. I suggest to you that you owe it to your parents who paid for you. In the words of Churchill, "... you made us rich, you made us great. It is the colonies in our possession that enabled us to win the Napoleonic wars. It was your wealth that made us the greatest nation in the world."
It is our duty to remind them, through your committees, your schools, your governments, your politician's that we the people are saying: THE DEBT HAS NOT BEEN PAID; THE ACCOUNTS HAVE NOT BEEN SETTLED!
Thank you.
Olugbemiga 'Toyin' OladokunPresidentOladokun Multimedia Productions(A Thoroughbred Multimedia Prod. Company)==================================Ile Aye Yi Ki i Se Tiwa,A Kan n K'oja Lo Ni Be NiAye n Yi, A n ToEni Aye Kan Ko Se Aye e Re
This World Is Not OursWe Are Just Passing ByThe World Rotates on its AxisWe Are Just Following its RotationBe It Your Turn To Be In The SpotlightBe Humble.
On Apr 30, 2010, at 10:22 PM, Dr. Valentine Ojo wrote:Cornelius Hamelberg:
Oh, the mask has now come off - you are speaking "on behalf of your Jewish community at large"?
And where is the connection between your "Jewish community at large " and "Ending the Slavery Blame-Game" - a matter of grave concern to the African Community?
Why must your "Jewish community" now try to take center stage in a matter that is of real concern to the African Community - the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Africans?
And what is all this pandering with Biafra, Rwanda, and this desperate attempt on your part to stir people's emotions in your obsession with your defense of anything Jewish - even when, I repeat "Jews are neither being attacked nor slurred here"!
And if you think they are, then prove it!
Must it always be about Jews?
Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD
On Fri 04/30/10 8:43 PM , Cornelius Hamelberg cornelius...@gmail.com sent:
> Dr. Valentine Ojo
>
> Tall Timbers, MD
> On Thu 04/29/10 9:19 AM , kenneth harrow har...@msu.edu sent:
> Can any of us imagine Jewish intellectuals - whether Israeli Jews or
> Jews residing outside Israel like American or European Jews - on
> Jewish forums, arguing among themselves as to whether the Germans were
> culpable in, and to be held responsible for the so-called Jewish
> Holocaust where some 6 million Jews were said to have perished,
> regardless of what the Jews may have done to "provoke" the Germans
> (and some of you should take the time off to read the German side of
> the story, and I don't mean Mein Kampf alone), and of Jews that may
> actually have colluded with Germans to betray or help exterminate
> fellow Jews?
> well, yes, i can imagine a nazi side to the story; i can imagine
> jews asking questions about the holocaust; i can imagine a bible which
> is not described as jewish tales, including another one with jesus in
> it; i can imagine the slave trade not dominated by jews, jews who were
> actually victims of the inquisition when the centuries of the trade
> got started. i can imagine citing the figure of jews killed in the
> holocaust without stating "said to have perished." i can also imagine
> having to hear variants of holocaust denial for the rest of my life.
> i can also imagine having to read again and again antisemitic tracts
> blaming the jews for everything, all over again, because i am a jew
> and have seen this all my life.
> maybe this discussion could be carried out without having to slur
> jews en route.
> ken harrow
> Kenneth W. Harrow
> Distinguished Professor of English
> Michigan State University
> har...@msu.edu
> 517 803-8839
> fax 517 353 3755
>
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Maurice Amutabi
Why I would not care about what Henry Louis Gates Jr thinks or writes
Each time I see people debating on things about Africa using Henry Louis ‘Skipper’ Gates Jr as the point of reference I become sick to my stomach, for such discussions take away my intellectual appetite. My mother taught me that it is bad manners to call people names, and I will keep to that training in my short post.
First, what Gates is saying in the article is not new. He has been against reparations like some Black people who have made it. I listened to debates on reparations and the group of eminent persons such as Ali Mazrui has been clear. These have been his talking points for quite some time. Those of familiar with talking points know what I mean. They are used by political who want to score cheap political points, and are often prepared by handlers or managers, who are often in the background away from public glare. Such people do not get off the script no matter what you tell them. They never respond to yes or no questions, instead they rush back to their talking points at any opportunity, to repeat their mantra.
Second, Gates has no knowledge about African history and it is therefore annoying to see people respond to his shallow and pedestrian write ups, for this simply legitimizes his outbursts as intellectual. Clearly, his ideas violate scholarly decorum where you pick on hapless victims (Africans and African Americans) and violate them because their ancestors were powerless enough not to have the Gatling and Maxim gun, and their sane descendants do not have access to the big media and dollars. No one should cite the work of Gates on Africa in an intellectual forum such as this, and I am happy to see that only Ikhide thinks Gates makes sence and is relevant. Gates does not espouse scholarship but propaganda. Like someone has said, he embarrassed Africans in his documentary which was about his tour in Africa more than a study of Africa.
Third, Gates has followers who often come to his defense, because he pays them. That is why his propaganda assemblage in the name of a film series on Africa is seen on somne syllabi of a few who although do not believe in some of things he claims in the documentary, they still show them to their students. To me, Gates should be seen as a hireling and an agent of the rightwing in the North. He says stuff that only makes sense to the academically depraved. His film series is unadulterated conspiracy, for which a black person was used to propagate. I watched all the episodes and was shocked that the series was even allowed to be circulated. CWU has the collection in the library and it makes my teaching of African history very hard, because some students want to cite it as authority. Gates is not an authority on African history, may be in literary studies. I have never used his books in my teaching and do not intend to, because they are not balanced, much titled towards the right.
Fourth, Gates is trying to push the debate back. The issue is no longer whether reparations should be paid or not. What has remained is who will actually be paid and by whom?
I don’t want to be negative about previous debates on the work of Gates, but I am shocked when I see scholars begin to throw around stale facts about older debates, as if they will add anything new to the fact that Gates is a hireling of the worst kind. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza has done a good job, in his book Rethinking Africa’s Globalization in which he analyses the debate on The Wonders of the African World sparked by exchanges between Ali Mazrui and Wole Soyinka sometimes back. My teacher and mentor Zeleza gave the last word. I am taken aback to see people like Gloria Emeagwali peddle the old scholarship, saying that one needs to read the old debates and such past claptrap that includes praises for Gates’ scholarship, in order to understand the present debate. I disagree. Past or present, Gates has nothing new to add to our understanding of African history. It will serve no useful purpose to revive the old debates between progressive scholars and Gates’ court jesters and boot lickers. I hate it when scholars hide behind the views of others instead of articulating their own views about urgency of today, of Gates perpetuating the blame game. It serves no purpose for someone to post here a long list of stale exchanges of academic archives on Africa. Scholars should provide new interpretations than sticking to shallow and antiquated ideas, which Gates, and those remembering the debates that the launching of the erroneous and dishonored Wonders of the African World provoked.
Gates has given ammunition to the lies about slavery and genocide that was generated by the Middle Passage, which should be the first holocaust. He has carelessly glossed over the work of Eric Williams on Capitalism and Slavery and Patrick Manning on the carnage of Africans in the New World. Africans were not responsible for the Industrial Revolution and the demand for slaves in the Atlantic and the New World. Instead of focusing on the trauma on the descendants of African Americans as a result of suffering experienced over the Trans-Atlantic in the Middle Passage and the New World, he wants us to look at helpless Africans who were given guns and told to fight each other. These were victims. You cannot blame a woman for being raped because she did not fight or fend off the rapist. Gates is equivalent to a holocaust denier and should be condemned for blaming the victims – Africans and African Americans.
On performance and focus, Henry Louis Gates has been determined like a night runner, stubbornly sticking to his talking points. I admire the intellectual arrogance of Henry Louis Gates and his swagger, even when he is talking about things that he does not know. You hate his silly courage and guts, and I think that is what makes him controversial. It is what makes him raise be debated. I have listened to him and met him many times at conferences but after going to three of his sessions, I realized that I need not attend any or listen to him anymore. He says the same stuff – blaming Africans for slavery and the slave trade. I would rather that if African scholars want to cite an African American on African scholarship, they should cite Molefi Kente Asante, who has has a better grasp on African history and walks in the tracks of Cheikh Anta Diop, Dike, Obenga, Ogot, Ajayi, Ayandele, Boehen, etc. I would also cite Cornell West, for he has incredible insights and grasp on the state of the black history, where it has come from and where it is going.
Well, I had said that I would sit out of this debate until Ikhide roped me in by misrepresenting my views and dismissing everyone on this list serve except himself and his new friend Henry Louis Gates Jr. He provoked me and I have to end on him. Read what this charlatan wrote, “My brothers and sisters on this list are perpetuating a romanticized hagiography of Africa. I join Gates et al in soundly rejecting this nonsense.” You would think that everyone on this list serve is a dimwit and only clever Ikhide is the only sane mind. Ikhide you are not the first person to join Gates and his pseudo historical pronouncements on Africa. Your elder brother Wole Soyinka already did so many years ago, on his own admission for dinners and other favors. I am sure you might get some crumbs, if any are left for hirelings and hatchet men like you. Ikhide wrote, “They [members of the list serve] were quiet when Professor Maurice Amutabi swore there was no word for slave in Africa. I was practically by myself begging people to come out and teach this man our history. Whossai, people were talking meke meke from both sides of their multiple mouths.” That is Ikhide’s strategy, seeking to attract attention from himself, to himself. Ikhide is always adversarial, attacking everyone from Ken Harrow, Valentine Ojo, Obi Nwakanma, Tony Agbali, Gloria Emeagwali to Abdul Rasheed Na'Allah, Kwabena Akurang-Parry, etc and now his sights are on La Vonda Staples. I agree with Pius that Gates should leave African history to historians like Toyin Falola, Paul Zeleza, Kwabena Akurang-Parry, Hannington Ochwada, Mamadou Diouf, Gloria Emeagwali, Emmanuel Mbah, Bridget Teboh, Abdullai Iddrisu, among others. I would repeat for the sake of Ikhide that Europeans did not understand the notions of pawns or clients and servitude in African societies and were quick to baptize them as slaves. The Abaluyia notion of servitude –omurumwa (messenger) - was not the equivalent of slave. Omurumwa was also different from omuhambe (captive), none of which approximates the notion of slave as understood by Europeans and Gates. Gates and his masters should accept the fact that European guns and the significantly expanded demands of the Industrial Revolution and huge appetites of the European middle class were major factors in the evil trade. They should be honest and tell their readers that the events in Europe and the New World transformed the existing systems of dependent connections such that more people were channeled into the slave market, through the Atlantic system. Other races and groups have been paid, in Germany, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. If they are not ready to pay reparations, they should say so and stop demonizing Africans.
Maurice Amutabi
Prof. Maurice Amutabi, Ph.D
Department of History,
Central Washington University,
400 University Way,
Ellensburg WA 98926
http://www.cwu.edu/~history/amutabi-bio_cv-1059.html
http://www.kessa.org/about_us
http://www.amazon.com/NGO-Factor-Africa-Arrested-Development/dp/B0014DF6WE/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1
http://www.amazon.com/Manuel-Falla-Iberian-American-Studies/dp/1889431109
http://www.amazon.com/NGO-Factor-Africa-Arrested-Development/dp/0415979951
http://www.cwu.edu/~history/amutabi-bio_cv-1059.html
http://www.cwu.edu/~cah/amutabi.html
http://www.amazon.com/Studies-Lifelong-Learning-Africa-Technological/dp/0773447571
http://www.amazon.com/Studies-Economic-History-Kenya-Entrepreneurship/dp/0773439072/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265479492&sr=8-1
Olabode Ibironke
Letters
Eric Foner
Africa’s
Role in the U.S. Slave Trade
To the Editor:
In “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game” (Op-Ed, April 23), Henry Louis Gates Jr. notes that African rulers and merchants were deeply complicit in the Atlantic slave trade. Despite Mr. Gates’s contention that “there is very little discussion” of this fact, it hardly qualifies as news; today, virtually every history of slavery and every American history textbook includes this information.
Mr. Gates’s point is that the African role complicates the process of assigning blame for slavery and thus discussion of apologies and reparations by the United States. I believe that apologies serve little purpose and that reparations are unworkable. But the great growth of slavery in this country occurred after the closing of the Atlantic slave trade in 1808.
It was Americans, not Africans, who created in the South the largest, most powerful slave system the modern world has known, a system whose profits accrued not only to slaveholders but also to factory owners and merchants in the North. Africans had nothing to do with the slave trade within the United States, in which an estimated two million men, women and children were sold between 1820 and 1860.
Identifying Africa’s part in the history of slavery does not negate Americans’ responsibility to confront the institution’s central role in our own history.
Eric
Foner
New York, April 23, 2010
The writer is a professor of history at Columbia University.
Cornelius Hamelberg
A little learning is a dangerous thing – but not necessarily so. You
were shrill in your denunciations when you took your vice-president to
task, making big bones about his language use. I mentioned that and
you think that I insulted you, thereby? Well, I didn’t. Perhaps you
insulted your president. I am sufficiently sure of myself to not feel
insulted by you, no matter what you would say. It would reflect on you
and not on me.
Do you forget that you have previously communicated with me quite
amicably? Were you only flattering me then? I have those
communications.
Here, I’ve replied to your lecture without any ill-feeling
whatsoever:
http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/articles/farooq-a-kperogi/semantic-change-and-the-politics-of-english-pronunciation.html
All that you say to me is cool with me, and heaven forbid that I
should feel belittled by whatever you will ever come up with here or
in my grave.
It’s not my prestige that’s at stake. I am already so lowly that I
don’t have any.
You don’t have to be honest with me.
Wouldn’t it be better if you were first honest with your self?
“To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day,
thou canst not then be false to any man.”
You surely don’t think that I read all the gratuitous gibberish that
you pander or that I am in need of your language rehabilitation or
that that you are for me some new Fanon or Derrida? Or that Nigeria is
the highest form of government that I will ever experience?
It's a public forum so please free to react here- Nitwit would be an
intensification of what you are, as petty is to trivia and so is your
ungraded Nigerian spoken and written English which is certainly not
mine or something I would aspire to look up to – or to look down
upon.
Oh yes I do have good academic credentials in your favourite language
( my native tongue) and philosophy and some other things that go
beyond Joyce or your self appointment as an English Language buff. –
My aunt Nelly was personal secretary to your. Sir Abubakar Tafawa
Balewa She taught me good manners.
I can talk with my guitar and can sing and compose.……not for fortune
or fame - if you want to say something to me- give me a call and
I’ll talk to you, In the meantime, for Nigeria, let us pray, even in
Swedish or perfect Quranic Arabic if need be.
I have nothing to apologise about.
I hope that what we have in common – our humanity is greater than
whatever differences may exist between us.
Sincerely,
Cornelius
- Show quoted text -
Pius Adesanmi
Ken (Moses, part of this is for you):
You are a foundation member of this forum. What is this talk that you don't know who the historians are around here? Helloooooooo, Ken! We have all been here from the beginning. Profs Toyin Falola, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Mamadou Diouf, Gloria Emeagwali etc etc etc; and the younger ones - Moses Ochonu, Kwabena Akurang Parry, Kolapo Ishola, Uyilawa Usuanlele, etc etc etc. You know that they are all here. So, what is this talk that you don't know who the professional historians are and what their competence is?
Anyway, I have already made this point to Moses and it bears repeating. What is going on here is about politics, ideology, and those personal and ethical choices that inform where the knowledge producer elects to go with avalaible facts. This is about the subterranean factors that overdetermine intellectual choices and not about the competence or lack thereof of the historian.
If I decide to dismiss Ngugi and approach Kenyan history from the perspective of British victimhood in kenya - oh my poor Brits! How those Mau Mau rascals shot and killed those poor Brits randomly! -, I can of course go into the archives to find enough stories of white 'victims' of the situation to develop a thesis of joint/mutual victimhood of colonized and colonizer that the Ngugis of this world have silenced, abi? I can proceed to write a piece to end the Kenyan blame game and ideologically shift guilt for the brutalities of the emergency to kenyans - especially Kenyans who collaborated with the Brits. When I start doing that, I don't expect Moses to rush out celebrating my brilliant unearthing of the rotten underbellies of Kenyan history or attributing the choice of Kenyan intellectuals who have not travelled that route to unscholarly emotional display. I expect Moses to problematize my politics, ideology, and choices. I expect him to leave
the trivializing scoffs to Ikhide.
Moses is paying very little attention to the effects and affects of discourse here and that makes me uncomfortable. Gradually, over the years, Gates has been inching closer and closer - one essay at a time - to that day when we shall all be asked to sympathise with those poor European victims of African avarice who really didnt want slaves and slavery but were actually invited and cajoled by those barbaric Africans to come and buy the slaves.
Ah, those poor Europeans and the slaves they bought were, in fact, joint victims of those barbaric continental Africans. We already have one prurient and foolish lightweight internet "intellectual", Ozodi Osuji, who traffics regularly in such irresponsible propositions. Fortunately, he is not known beyond Nigerian internet listservs and has no presence whatsoever in circuitries of serious Africanist intellection.
It is too much for Moses to ask us to attribute a game Gates has been playing for a very long time to some altruistic interest in historical truth and scholarly objectivity. It is too much to ask us to treat each new essay in Gates's continuum of rubbish as an independent island - a separate universe of meaning unrelated to its older siblings from the pen of the same man.
|
Pius ====================================================================== " You need patience and ability to celebrate small wins or you will get frustrated. Every small win is another step towards to the ultimate goal.We need to apply the same learnings to Nigeria. 50 year rot is not going to disappear at a go. We just have to keep pushing. Celebrate little victories like getting rid of Iwu; when we lose, dust up ourselves and get on with it; keep our eyes on the ball.." - Pastor Joe Attueyi |
--- On Sat, 1/5/10, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote: |
Ikhide
Some good questions are arising from Professor Gates' brave stand? Let us compile them. When is enough, enough? White folks have been paying for slavery for ever, we are talking trillions of dollars in set asides, to close the achievement gap in virtually every sphere of competitive life. Ask the children of Washington DC Public Schools. Ask Haiti. Ask Africa. Our shameless African leaders with the collusion of our black intellectuals have been stealing the money and sending it right back to the white man. Why, we need to pay for our ice cream. Serves white folks right! They should never have taken us as slaves. What is wrong with our people? Why are things the way they are? These "papers" and "treatises" should do more than just give us tenure in the universities. They should make a difference in the lives of those we left behind in Africa. For now, all I hear is mostly self-serving noise.
"The African environment created by external slave trades (the transatlantic sector was only one of several) became increasingly unstable from the 15th to the 19th centuries. Captives from wars (fought over religion, land, the control of trade routes and in some cases for the express purpose of creating captives), who would have been killed or absorbed into the conquering society in prior times, now found themselves funneled toward the coast, where they would eventually be taken to the Americas and elsewhere. Along the way, they were joined by others who were similarly bound, but for other reasons. (They were accused of crimes or were victims of kidnapping, etc.)"
"As the tentacles of the trade reached deeper into the hinterland, more communities became susceptible and responded by defending themselves. Ironically, captives taken by those acting in self-defense were also often fed into domestic commercial relays that ultimately led to the sea. Relations between communities became increasingly complex, but the point here is that individuals and populations "involved" with the slave trade were drawn in for many different reasons. It is difficult to imagine assigning equal culpability to a community fending off the slave trade with the European nations bankrolling and in ultimate control of the entire affair, especially when those European nations were providing the weaponry."
"So African involvement has to be qualified, as it varied and secondary to that of European and American powers. Further, such involvement is clearly central to related matters such as reparations. For even if African elites were as guilty, does that excuse European and American participation? And even if African states were equally culpable, from which African governments could we expect reparations?"
"These are critical questions, because the logic of reparations is that compensation is to be derived from corporate bodies -- states, businesses, universities, etc. -- that both participated in and benefited from slavery and the slave trade. The United States, France, England, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, etc., were all present (in one form or another) during the slave trade, and they all continue to exist. They all benefited from the trade and arguably owe a great deal to those whose labor was exploited but whose persons were abused for centuries. In contrast, European colonialism did away with African sovereignty; the Dahomey and Asante of the 18th and 19th centuries are no more."
"To be sure, there are a seemingly endless number of questions and variables that would make the implementation of reparations unlikely, or at least unwieldy, but the practicality or viability of reparations is a separate issue from its moral validity. It is beyond debate that Africans and their descendants suffered egregiously. Those responsible for that suffering may no longer be with us, but, in many cases, the institutions and forms of government to which they contributed remain."
kenneth harrow
well, i knew about falola, zeleza, diouf, of course--famous names, if i may say, and people whose works i have read and taught. the others on the last do not "sign" their departments or specializations, so i didn't know precisely. and i still don't know, of the people you named, what their work bears upon, if it has anything to do with the subject under discussion. when i read some of the comments (and i confess, much of the discussion is now escaping my attention), they seem quite loose about the history as i know it, as a non-specialist. i gave a few examples in previous posts, not worth repeating.
i don't know how people are supposed to frame this debate. i could say it should be framed around the history, and use as an example the portuguese trading slaves for gold in the early years; or discuss falola's description of those palm oil plantations in nigeria that he compared to american plantations, late in the period. but that would be disingenuous, pretending that history as such stands apart from ideology. i have interjected a few examples of where i felt the ideological slant against jews was deployed, as it had been some years ago when jews were being blamed for the holocaust and for the slave trade, by so-called scholars. the unpleasant hammering that resulted alienated me enormously.
now the point i find most relevant is your claim that the issues at stake are political and ideological. i agree completely, and would feel most instructed by the discussion if that were ultimately recognized and debated. that said, the ideologies and politics at stake can't be called eurocentric or afrocentric, black or white, african or american, much less jewish, as if there were a single position that could represent such an ideological stance. i suggested earlier a left, central, rightwing approach. the posting that gave us the 10 reasons horowitz opposes reparations are an accurate representation of the rightwing point of view--they are instructive not for the history they present, but the ideology they exhibit; the response represents a vaguely left response. or if you like, a conservative versus a progressive response.
ultimately ideology is about representing a set of interests. horowitz's represent those of the wealthier classes and entities in societies, be they european or anywhere else in the global corporate economy. his respondant represents those who contest the dominant globalized neoliberal entitites who control the resources around the world.
where do we stand? it is impossible to stand above this fray; we find reasons to justify a greater flow of capital to those now living in the bottom half of the world, or reasons that the poor are to blame for being poor and belong there forever.
lastly, pius, we can't find real reasons that will hold based on misinformation or inadequate knowledge of the history. we can't argue why the portuguese carted slaves down to the guinea cost and then sold them and simultaneously concoct a vision of the slave trade that doesn't correspond to anything that actually happened. and, poor reader that i may be, it seems to me that a fair amount of the "historical flow" of the debate has not been well-grounded. for instance, there is a commonly held belief that slavery was essentially innocuous in africa. well, has anyone read about where it was not innocuous? i learned the former when i was an outright beginner in africa history; i learned the latter when i started to read the details of specific instances, some of which i have already cited. the truth has become messier than i had known, and i felt i couldn't make broad generalizations in class without being a liar. neither could i detail all the exceptions to the broad generalizations.
to finesse the two and come up with a statement one could stand by was not very easy. perhaps in the heat of the debate on this hot issue that is where we are faltering. it is some of this and some of that; bode tries to recognize this with his attempt to discriminate in the blame game. gates doesn't finesse it, and in his broad strokes eventually creates a picture that serves the very interests we are mostly challenging. and at that point the analysis of the ideology, not the history comes into play, as it should. but when the ideology is recast as history, as if history were ever not "history," then comes the substitution of accusation and really the thrusts of hatred that betray the underlying ideological frame that always already presents itself as something else called "truth" or "true history."
(let me see...how many of us jews collaborated with the nazis to destroy our people)
ken
Amatoritsero Ede
Adeniran Adeboye
Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
on the carnage of Africans in the New World.' Amutabi
I wonder why you would quote Eric Williams, whose work was written in the 1940s and get upset about links to the debate in 2000.
As a matter of fact I would also add another retrospective source, namely, the highly controversial work on the slave trade by Professor Tony Martin of
Wellesley College, a work which probably provoked the Wonders Saga in the mid 1990s.
Dr. Gloria T. Emeagwali
Prof. of History and African Studies
History Department
Central Connecticut State University
1615 Stanley Street
New Britain
CT 06050.
www.africahistory.net <http://www.africahistory.net/>
www.ccsu.edu/afstudy/archive.html <http://www.ccsu.edu/afstudy/archive.html>
________________________________
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com on behalf of Maurice Amutabi
Sent: Sat 5/1/2010 12:14 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Cc: olad...@ix.netcom.com; cornelius...@gmail.com; Adeniran Adeboye; Abraham Madu; Bimbola Adelakun; Emmanuel Babatunde; Rufus Orindare; Joe Igietseme; Lavonda Staples; Pius Adesanmi; Toyin Adepoju
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
Each time I see people debating on things about Africa using Henry Louis 'Skipper' Gates Jr as the point of reference I become sick to my stomach, for such discussions take away my intellectual appetite. My mother taught me that it is bad manners to call people names, and I will keep to that training in my short post.
First, what Gates is saying in the article is not new. He has been against reparations like some Black people who have made it. I listened to debates on reparations and the group of eminent persons such as Ali Mazrui has been clear. These have been his talking points for quite some time. Those of familiar with talking points know what I mean. They are used by political who want to score cheap political points, and are often prepared by handlers or managers, who are often in the background away from public glare. Such people do not get off the script no matter what you tell them. They never respond to yes or no questions, instead they rush back to their talking points at any opportunity, to repeat their mantra.
Second, Gates has no knowledge about African history and it is therefore annoying to see people respond to his shallow and pedestrian write ups, for this simply legitimizes his outbursts as intellectual. Clearly, his ideas violate scholarly decorum where you pick on hapless victims (Africans and African Americans) and violate them because their ancestors were powerless enough not to have the Gatling and Maxim gun, and their sane descendants do not have access to the big media and dollars. No one should cite the work of Gates on Africa in an intellectual forum such as this, and I am happy to see that only Ikhide thinks Gates makes sence and is relevant. Gates does not espouse scholarship but propaganda. Like someone has said, he embarrassed Africans in his documentary which was about his tour in Africa more than a study of Africa.
Third, Gates has followers who often come to his defense, because he pays them. That is why his propaganda assemblage in the name of a film series on Africa is seen on somne syllabi of a few who although do not believe in some of things he claims in the documentary, they still show them to their students. To me, Gates should be seen as a hireling and an agent of the rightwing in the North. He says stuff that only makes sense to the academically depraved. His film series is unadulterated conspiracy, for which a black person was used to propagate. I watched all the episodes and was shocked that the series was even allowed to be circulated. CWU has the collection in the library and it makes my teaching of African history very hard, because some students want to cite it as authority. Gates is not an authority on African history, may be in literary studies. I have never used his books in my teaching and do not intend to, because they are not balanced, much titled towards the right.
Fourth, Gates is trying to push the debate back. The issue is no longer whether reparations should be paid or not. What has remained is who will actually be paid and by whom?
I don't want to be negative about previous debates on the work of Gates, but I am shocked when I see scholars begin to throw around stale facts about older debates, as if they will add anything new to the fact that Gates is a hireling of the worst kind. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza has done a good job, in his book Rethinking Africa's Globalization in which he analyses the debate on The Wonders of the African World sparked by exchanges between Ali Mazrui and Wole Soyinka sometimes back. My teacher and mentor Zeleza gave the last word. I am taken aback to see people like Gloria Emeagwali peddle the old scholarship, saying that one needs to read the old debates and such past claptrap that includes praises for Gates' scholarship, in order to understand the present debate. I disagree. Past or present, Gates has nothing new to add to our understanding of African history. It will serve no useful purpose to revive the old debates between progressive scholars and Gates' court jesters and boot lickers. I hate it when scholars hide behind the views of others instead of articulating their own views about urgency of today, of Gates perpetuating the blame game. It serves no purpose for someone to post here a long list of stale exchanges of academic archives on Africa. Scholars should provide new interpretations than sticking to shallow and antiquated ideas, which Gates, and those remembering the debates that the launching of the erroneous and dishonored Wonders of the African World provoked.
On performance and focus, Henry Louis Gates has been determined like a night runner, stubbornly sticking to his talking points. I admire the intellectual arrogance of Henry Louis Gates and his swagger, even when he is talking about things that he does not know. You hate his silly courage and guts, and I think that is what makes him controversial. It is what makes him raise be debated. I have listened to him and met him many times at conferences but after going to three of his sessions, I realized that I need not attend any or listen to him anymore. He says the same stuff - blaming Africans for slavery and the slave trade. I would rather that if African scholars want to cite an African American on African scholarship, they should cite Molefi Kente Asante, who has has a better grasp on African history and walks in the tracks of Cheikh Anta Diop, Dike, Obenga, Ogot, Ajayi, Ayandele, Boehen, etc. I would also cite Cornell West, for he has incredible insights and grasp on the state of the black history, where it has come from and where it is going.
Well, I had said that I would sit out of this debate until Ikhide roped me in by misrepresenting my views and dismissing everyone on this list serve except himself and his new friend Henry Louis Gates Jr. He provoked me and I have to end on him. Read what this charlatan wrote, "My brothers and sisters on this list are perpetuating a romanticized hagiography of Africa. I join Gates et al in soundly rejecting this nonsense." You would think that everyone on this list serve is a dimwit and only clever Ikhide is the only sane mind. Ikhide you are not the first person to join Gates and his pseudo historical pronouncements on Africa. Your elder brother Wole Soyinka already did so many years ago, on his own admission for dinners and other favors. I am sure you might get some crumbs, if any are left for hirelings and hatchet men like you. Ikhide wrote, "They [members of the list serve] were quiet when Professor Maurice Amutabi swore there was no word for slave in Africa. I was practically by myself begging people to come out and teach this man our history. Whossai, people were talking meke meke from both sides of their multiple mouths." That is Ikhide's strategy, seeking to attract attention from himself, to himself. Ikhide is always adversarial, attacking everyone from Ken Harrow, Valentine Ojo, Obi Nwakanma, Tony Agbali, Gloria Emeagwali to Abdul Rasheed Na'Allah, Kwabena Akurang-Parry, etc and now his sights are on La Vonda Staples. I agree with Pius that Gates should leave African history to historians like Toyin Falola, Paul Zeleza, Kwabena Akurang-Parry, Hannington Ochwada, Mamadou Diouf, Gloria Emeagwali, Emmanuel Mbah, Bridget Teboh, Abdullai Iddrisu, among others. I would repeat for the sake of Ikhide that Europeans did not understand the notions of pawns or clients and servitude in African societies and were quick to baptize them as slaves. The Abaluyia notion of servitude -omurumwa (messenger) - was not the equivalent of slave. Omurumwa was also different from omuhambe (captive), none of which approximates the notion of slave as understood by Europeans and Gates. Gates and his masters should accept the fact that European guns and the significantly expanded demands of the Industrial Revolution and huge appetites of the European middle class were major factors in the evil trade. They should be honest and tell their readers that the events in Europe and the New World transformed the existing systems of dependent connections such that more people were channeled into the slave market, through the Atlantic system. Other races and groups have been paid, in Germany, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. If they are not ready to pay reparations, they should say so and stop demonizing Africans.
Maurice Amutabi
On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 7:42 AM, Dr. Valentine Ojo <val...@md.metrocast.net> wrote:
"...the best known case which can stand as a precedent arose out of the well known, hideous and despicable persecution of the Jews by the Nazis in the last great war. Hitler exterminated approximately 6 million Jews in the dreaded Holocaust, marking one of the grimmest pages of human history. The Jews have not hidden their suffering by putting it under the carpet in shame, like many of our people do when we speak about slavery. They say, "this is a long-time story; why talk about it again? Why are you opening again those wounds which are healed?""
And many MISGUIDED AFRICANS - like Moses Ebe Ochonu, Ikhide, Ozdiobi Osuji, Qansy Salako - even go as far as to want to hold Africans responsible for their own ENSLAVEMENT by Europeans!
Can you top that in SELF-DENIGRATION?"
On Sat 05/01/10 3:45 AM , Omo Oba olad...@ix.netcom.com sent:
<http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/index.htm> <http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/current.htm> <http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/prev.htm> <http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/subs.htm> <http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/books.htm>
THE DEBT HAS NOT BEEN PAID, THE ACCOUNTS HAVE NOT BEEN SETTLED. © <http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/legal.htm>
Dudley Thompson <http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v2/thompson.htm>
Olugbemiga 'Toyin' Oladokun
President
Oladokun Multimedia Productions
There is intentionality to language - words have and do convey
meanings and words can be used with some degree of sensitivity and
consideration, so as not to inflict unintentional harm or to foster
unnecessary social discord and we don't have to be members of the
diplomatic corps or to have undergone such training to be aware of
this, so let me say my piece:
If Farooq A. Kperogi can take Vice President Dr. Goodluck Jonathan
to task for some really petty language trivia then lets assume that
even Dr. Valentine Ojo is to be held to certain standards when
wielding or attempting to wield the English Language with some
English, Kenneth Harrow who first complained about the matter , and
not without just and sufficient cause.
It's not that any of us can go around trampling like a mad or
inebriated elephant and crushing other people's feelings and then
casually say, not even by way of apology, "Jews are not being attacked
or slurred here." - just as Dr Ojo cannot and I don't suppose that in
a normal state of mind he would, refer to the Rwandan Genocide "as
so too he should not - in my opinion and in the opinion of common
Holocaust where some 6 million Jews were said to have perished".
I also have some unprintable reactions to Ojo's chosen words which
would not be acceptable here and I prefer to take the matter up here
where the offence occurred, than to take it up elsewhere. Nor can we
refer to the starvation-to-surrender of Biafra as "the so called
Starvation" - as a weapon of war and callously call it" collateral
damage"
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Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
1. I didn't realize that we were in some kind of bizarre competition and boxing match.
A real tournament at the gym would have been a better idea. I do a leg press of 900lbs.
I can certainly handle myself there, gender aside.
2. Prof. Falola withheld some of my submissions, especially those which included reference to
Tony Martin. To mention his work does not necessarily suggest an endorsement of his
views. I guess Toyin feared some kind of prolonged discussion about Martin's thesis
and the ripple effects from such a discussion. I respect his decision.
3. Well known historians such as Foner, Gomez etc are actually against Achonu's position.
4. It is one thing to vent one's anger against contemporary neocolonialism and corruption
but to understand the complexities of the 17th and 18th centuries you have to look at the big picture
and be sophisticated enough not to fall in some kind of trap.
5. Tony Martin of Wellesley College had on his reading list a text which talked about Jewish
involvement in the Slave Trade. He almost lost his tenured position for that, but went ahead to
write a controversial text on the Slave Trade entitled The Jewish Onslaught (Majority Press, 1994?)
This is the original context of the ongoing discussion on accountability
As a historian I am expected to interrogate sources and place them in a context, without exception.
That means that the debate of 2000 should also be included.
Dr. Gloria T. Emeagwali
Prof. of History and African Studies
History Department
Central Connecticut State University
1615 Stanley Street
New Britain
CT 06050.
www.africahistory.net <http://www.africahistory.net/>
www.ccsu.edu/afstudy/archive.html <http://www.ccsu.edu/afstudy/archive.html>
________________________________
http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/SlaveTrade/collection/large/LCP-13.JPG
Ikhide, Gloria, and other Colleagues:
Is this kind of discussion we are conducting her not really part of the PROBLEM - and I do not mean being pro or anti Skip Gates here. I suppose both sides have merits, but that's for another time. But the manner in which it is being conducted - at loggerheads with each other!
But guys, lets' get REAL!
Can any of us imagine Jewish intellectuals - whether Israeli Jews or Jews residing outside Israel like American or European Jews - on Jewish forums, arguing among themselves as to whether the Germans were culpable in, and to be held responsible for the so-called Jewish Holocaust where some 6 million Jews were said to have perished, regardless of what the Jews may have done to "provoke" the Germans (and some of you should take the time off to read the German side of the story, and I don't mean Mein Kampf alone), and of Jews that may actually have colluded with Germans to betray or help exterminate fellow Jews?
We are here talking of Africa losing some estimated 100 million Africans over a period of some 200 years to the peculiar institution of European Chattel Slavery in Africans!
This kind of rigid wall and academic sophistry between the PROS and CONS is not not helping our case on either side of the Atlantic - and we do have a case! It is merely hardening the DIFFERENCES between us as peoples of African origin who suffered from the EFFECTS of European chattel slavery on Africa and Africans, regardless of the degree of involvement or participation of some - but not all - of our own African peoples!!
Why for example should it be unhelpful to state that " Africans practiced a kind of servitude before the European intrusion...but the degree of callousness of the European enslavement of Africans was unknown to Africans?"
TRUE or FALSE - YES or NO?
This should be the concern of our academic researches! We have a need to know the TRUTH as much as possible, and not merely swayed by a pro or anti Skip Gates flood of emotion!
That is UNSCHOLARLY!
That is QUACKERY disguised as SCHOLARSHIP!!!
Today, we are again living witnesses of a repeat performance in our African "rulers" again selling African resources to Americans, Europeans, Asians for NAUGHT!
Those who fail to learn from their history...
Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD
"Again, I am not about to deny that Africans practiced a kind of servitude before the European intrusion. However, as Ali Mazrui said in his documentary, The Africans: A Triple Heritage, the degree of callousness of the European enslavement of Africans was unknown to Africans."
- Abdul-Rasheed Na'Allah
!!! This kind of scholarship is quite honestly unhelpful. I actually am amazed at how the howling of those opposed to Professor Gates' perspective have helped me appreciate and respect his position. How on earth can someone say that what happened to slaves in the Old Benin kingdom was "servitude." Talking about callousness, I wonder if the descendants of slaves who were used as human sacrifice would consider that humane. The problem with this kind of scholarship is that its purveyors have boxed themselves into tight corners built on fantasies and lies. As a result they find themselves defending the indefensible. The unintended tragedy here as Abdul-Rasheed Na'Allah so eloquently demonstrates is that the research is distorted and twisted and ultimately worthless. The lasting ramifications of compromising these works are infinitely long-lasting. It is a tragedy of immense proportions.
I am afraid in this debate, Professor Gates is looking really good. I admire his stance on this issue. I think the world would be a better place if we tried to engage him on an equal level and with respect. What I have been reading for the most part is patronizing and condescending. I won't even dignify the abusive rants with as much as a nod. Some things are just beneath me. Those pushing reparations need to understand one thing. It is complicated.
- Ikhide
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
-----Original Message-----
From: "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@mail.ccsu.edu <http://uk.mc1103.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=emea...@mail.ccsu.edu> >
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 19:27:18
To: <usaafric...@googlegroups.com <http://uk.mc1103.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=usaafric...@googlegroups.com> >
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery
Blame-Game
West Africa Review (2000)
ISSN: 1525-4488
Thoughts on the Atlantic Slave Trade: the Roles of Africans and the Issue of Apology for Slavery
Abdul-Rasheed Na'Allah
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Lavonda Staples
kenneth harrow
so what is our response to be to the information that a book was
written by a scholar titled The Jewish Onslaught that detailed jewish
involvement in the slave trade? that it validates the claim? the
controversy wasn't due to the fact that jews were thus definitively
implicated, but that the scholarship was flawed, as many subsequent
critiques attempted to validate. a huge uproar followed. do we want
to rehearse that again?
on point 4: who is to provide the lessons in sophisticated, and judge
the traps one has fallen into? who is educating the educators here?
how do we establish claims that are convincing? one reason i called
for the historians to speak was the hope that bogus historical claims
would be sidelined; but i think that was a fruitless hope, as pius
indicated. ideology trumps
ken
Distinguished Professor of English
Michigan State University
har...@msu.edu
517 803-8839
fax 517 353 3755
xok...@yahoo.com
Many thanks for yours. It is of course an extremely rude and intemperate piece, but I realize that you and Pius Adesanmi are angry because I refuse to follow orthodox, and appealing paths to what bothers all of us. You have both asked the world to ignore me because I am unschooled in these things. You are right. I have no regrets about being illiterate, to use the black-white man's term for those of us who are not similarly schooled in the white man's ways.
But then some things should not require a doctoral thesis. It is simply common sense. There is also this thing called oral history. It is a crying shame that some of our best records, some of our best poetry have gone with their owners. I don't need a PhD thesis to tell me what I know, which is that where I come from, there were slaves. And our people actively traded in slaves. I am saying I will only respect our differences of opinion if they are based on facts.
Esulaasu, it should sadden you immensely that virtually ALL the historians that have been quoted on this ilo are White and or Western. Someone mumbled about Professor Falola's work and promptly sat down. Draw your own conclusions. I realize you are upset with me, but this diatribe of yours against my person is innocent of basic facts even as they relate to me. My works that you have referred to, that come out of my after-hours passion are freely available on the Internet. Please post my views on poetry and let folks judge your characterizations of my views. It gets better. You, it was that solicited my views on poetry (with a phone call) and you it was that published it. I am extremely proud of that piece, by the way.
I am not going to ask for your apologies because it is unnecessary. But years after you solicited my views that you now ridicule, you evidently respected my views enough to ask me to review your book of poetry, which I did and you again published it in your Canadian literary journal. It was not a puff piece; I tell it as I see it. I say all this in case there is someone here who actually is taken by what you have to say. You are angry and so I will not use this against you.
I am happy for you and Professor Pius Adesanmi. You came to the West and did what you were asked to do. You have excelled and your names are hung on shingles everywhere intellect is called for in the world. And I will continue to pray for your success. And for mine also. Maybe one day, I will become famous and revered like both of you! Hear me: I will continue to pray for both of your successes. Ise
What I will not do is to retreat from honest conversations about what true scholarship should be about, how we should tell our stories, etc, etc. I also bring to the table the perspective of a reader and consumer of OUR works. This consumer has a lot to say about a lot and you will need to get used to it, because, like your fabled tortoise, I am not going away. I was the first person to question the patronizing and condescending stuff being directed at Gates et al. Ochonu took time from his busy schedule to do a masterful engagement of the issues using researched facts and his views. I regret that my intervention cost him a lot of his personal time, for which I apologise. But, it is a good thing, even as my people retreat into what is familiar to them when they are stressed - abuse - they are learning a thing or two and also teaching us a thing or two. I am good for something, even though I did not go to school ;-))) Look, thanks to Ikhide, no one will ever come here and announce that there is no word for slave in Africa (!!!). And certainly, no one will come here saying homosexuality does not exist in Africa. I am good for something ;-)))
The reason I frustrate some folks is that I am issues-oriented. It is not about you. If I don't like your ideas today, I will let you know. Tomorrow, if you have something new that I like I will buy it. No wahala. I don't form gangs, too old for that!
The world is changing. Things are no longer as black and white as they are in our old textbooks. It is great to have core beliefs; however we should be prepared to engage others who think differently from us. As Professor Gates has so eloquently demonstrated, we may learn a thing or two. Besides, as I keep saying, listen carefully to what your friends are telling you. For instance, some of the most patronizing and racist stuff actually exists in those books on "multiculturalism" and "diversity." I realize that it is a multibillion industry but man, I was reading one the other day and I almost went crazy... Be on the alert, the new ways that enslave us will not be found on the pages of graduate papers. That's all I am sayin'.
Amatoritsero, we should also ask ourselves: Why are things the way they are? Why are we always having to defend our humanity, all the time? Why are our leaders now our new slave masters? As we speak, El Rufai is back in the Abuja he parceled out to all his friends, and Obasanjo and Ribadu are in America giving long lectures to the white man on the evils of corruption. If Obasanjo were white where do you think he would be? I could care less about reparations; we have a more immediate problem. It is black and mean and it is staring at us in the face. This is a long rambling way of saying we should respect Gates and engage him respectfully. The first order of business is for folks to re-read what Gates wrote - carefully!
Be well! And whether you like it or not, despite your rudeness, you are still my friend, because, you are a good man. Don't take these things too personally.
- Ikhide
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Mario Fenyo
Whether Professor Gates deserves the attacks heaped upon him or not-- it is not for me to decide; I lay claim to a general understanding of history, but not to expertise on any culture or country, let alone the slave trade in particular.
I will, however, mount the barricades when it comes to the work of Eric Williams (just in case my argument is dismissed as biased, i might as well fess up to having family from Trinidad and Tobago). Dr. Williams and his work have been under attack for decades, notably by Samuel Dreschler, who is a competent historian in his own right.
Indeed, Dr. Williams' magnum opus, Capitalism and Slavery, has some flaws. It is not the definitive history of slavery or of the British involvement in the slave trade (there are no definitive histories of anything, I should add) . Yet it would only be fair to admit that Williams deserves credit, a) for having broached the topic, b) for having presented several convincing arguments establishing a connection between the industrial revolution and profits from the slave trade, c) that all authors working on identifying the parties guilty of trading human beings refer to his work, will-nilly.
Two things are absolutely clear to me: 1) that a scholarly work cannot be disqualified on the basis of its age, and 2) that a scientific work cannot be dismissed on the basis of the author's ethnic backgound.
respectfully, mario
ps; The time has come to submit our proposals for the upcoming ATWS meeting in Savannah
Dr. Mario D. Fenyo
President
Association of Third World Studies
c/o Department of History and Government
Bowie State University
Bowie, MD 20715
USA
________________________________
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com on behalf of Ikhide
Sent: Sat 5/1/2010 2:39 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com; val...@md.metrocast.net
Cc: emea...@mail.ccsu.edu; Adeniran Adeboye; Abraham Madu; Bimbola Adelakun; Emmanuel Babatunde; Rufus Orindare; Ibukunolu Babajide; Lavonda Staples; Nnanna Agomoh; naijap...@yahoogroups.com; alu...@gmail.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
Amatoritsero Ede
Master of the Intellectual Dodge
A Reply to Henry Louis Gates
By Martin Kilson
Frank G. Thomson Research Professor Harvard University
(These Comments Are In Response To Henry Gates' Rebuttal of Professor Ali Mazuri's Critique Of Gates' Film Series "Wonders of The African World") Gates' Reply Was Put On Internet Nov. 12th, 1999.
As far as I am able to determine, none of the African-American Intellectuals here at Harvard University has contributed thus far to the very important discussion indeed firestorm around my colleague Henry Louis Gates' film series, "Wonders of the African World." I am now on the elderly side of the African-American faculty around Harvard these days (I formally retired as of Spring Term 1999 at 68 years of age) and I was expecting someone among the younger age-cohort of progressive Black intellectuals here at Harvard to join the ranks of Black intellectuals who have rightly challenged the
intellectually atrocious film series that Henry Gates has served up for American viewers for White viewers mainly I think. Among the younger age cohort of progressive Black intellectuals at Harvard whom I thought would join this discussion were the following: Christopher Edley and Lani Guinier in the Law School; Cornel West in Theology/Afro-American Studies; Loran Matory in Anthropology/Afro-American Studies; Larry Bobo in Sociology; and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham in History/Afro-American Studies. So the absence so far of any participant from my Black colleagues here at Harvard in critiquing Gates' intellectually shameful film series, has partly sparked my decision to join this criticism.
But it was especially Henry Gates' response to his critics especially to Professor Ali Mazuri-that really pushed me over the edge, so to speak; that fired me up enough to join the discussion. I've known Henry Gates as an academic colleague quite well during the past decade of his tenure here at Harvard. I was part of the Afro-American Studies Appointments Committee that selected him in fact. I had a good collegial academic
relationship with Henry Gates up to about 1995/1996 academic year, at which point I decided to probe Gates' particular style and modus operandi as a Black academic entrepreneur intellectual , in context of forerunner Black academic entrepreneur intellectuals like the Sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson and the Historian Carter G. Woodson both of whom I worship. My probe of Gates was for a chapter in an ongoing three volume study of the 20th century African-American Intelligentsia.
My study is titled THE MAKING OF BLACK INTELLECTUALS: STUDIES ON THE AFRICAN AMERICAN INTELLIGENTSIA, Volume I of which might get published by late 2000.The chapters in the three volume manuscript (now nearly all written after 25 years or so in the making) comprise mainly case study probes of the intellectual careers of specific individuals (Horace Mann Bond, John Aubrey Davis, Ralph J. Bunche. Martin Kilson--myself that is); case study Probes of Black political class professionals (Adam Clayton Powell, Gen. Colin Powell); and case study probes of intellectual discourse produced by a Given Black intellectual which make up the majority of the chapters in the Three volumes (e.g., Harold Cruse, E. Franklin Frazier, Carter G. Woodson , Ira Reid, Ida Wells Barnett, St. Clair Drake, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Orlando Patterson et. al. - the latter two are part of an extended dissection and probe of contemporary Black establishmentarian and conservative intellectuals in Volume II and Volume III).
My chapter on Henry Gates deals with his intellectual discourse over the past decade or so. As I searched the numerous articles he has published (including his memoir COLORED PEOPLE) dealing with the character of African-American social, cultural and political patterns, I discovered two things that I disliked about Gates' intellectual discourse. One was an almost neurotic need to couch discourse on African-American socio-cultural and political patterns in what I call "Black put-down terms," a mode of intellectual discourse on Black realities that Gates' intellectual confrere Kwame Anthony Appiah is also addicted to, I should add. Second, much of Henry Gates' discourse on African-American socio-cultural and political patterns exhibits a thoroughly chameleon trait an almost manic need to produce a discourse on Black realities that migrates between a "Black put down" or "Black averse" mode, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a seemingly redeeming "Black friendly" mode, though in ultimate essence the redeeming posture is phony.
This chameleon trait so fundamental I think to Henry Gates as an Intellectual stood out as I read his reply to Professor Ali Mazuri's fully valid critique of Gates' film series "Wonders of the African World." The overall character of Gates' reply is one of "an intellectual dodge." By which I mean, a clever bid to translate the overwhelming negatives of his film series into intellectual positives. By "overwhelming negatives",
I refer to 1) the numerous intellectually convoluted or twisted put downs of African realities in the film series, and 2) the Eurocentric derived irreverent posturings toward African realities by Henry Gates, even while simultaneously characterizing a given African reality as positive, as "an African Wonder." As Ali Mazuri rightly put it: "Gates seemed incapable of glorifying Africa without demonizing it in the second breath."
Henry Gates' reply to Professor Ali Mazuri's valid critique of "Wonders Of the African World" is, then, a premier example of discourse as an intellectual dodge, something Gates is quite adept at, I suggest. Henry Gates paints several self-serving images of himself seemingly objectively rendered and weaves betwixt and-between them, straining, for what might be called a self-portraiture crescendo to hook his readers on. But don't be caught by any of it, snared in Gates' self-portraiture trap so to speak.
For starters, Henry Gates would have his readers believe that an academic year spent in the village society of one of the few genuinely progressive African states in the early 1970s Tanzania translated automatically into a socialist friendly demeanor on his part. Gates would have us believe, furthermore, that courses taken at the University of Cambridge by him in the 1970s under a genuinely progressive African intellectual like Wole Soyinka also automatically translated into a progressive friendly demeanor on Gates' part. But don't you believe it. Henry Gates' intellectual arrogance is such that he thinks he can get people to believe just about anything. With this verbal trickery, then, Gates is pretending a kind of "progressivism by association syndrome," so to speak. But what has been unique about Wole Soyinka whom Gates parades around in his speaking and writing as his African intellectual mentor is precisely Soyinka's lack of verbal trickery.
For Gates, however, verbal trickery is his stock in trade. During the past 30 years of predatory and kleptocratic governing classes in most African states including especially Soyinka's own country of Nigeria, Wole Soyinka has exhibited a courageous and rare commitment to a Progressive African intellectual identity. The kind I wish I could live up to if required. The kind that the great Frantz Fanon and the great Camara Laye (in Sekou Toure's Guinea) represented in their intellectual careers. The kind, that is, that dares to critique and challenge what's vicious, venal, and predatory among one's own natal cultural and political milieu one's own ethnic/tribal and nation state milieu that is and thereby run the clear risk of autocratic and cruel retaliation that has been a built in component most independent African states over the past 30 years. It takes a special
kind of intellectual gall and chutzpah-as well as an incredible capacity for intellectual fantasy for a Henry Gates to portray himself at intellectual parity with Wole Soyinka . Such self-portrayal by Gates is not just an historical travesty, but just plain laughable, I submit. I hope Wole Soyinka is aware of how his name is being manipulated by Henry Gates.
What is more, note that Gates does this with the use of what he thinks is a hip term -"tough love." I seriously doubt that in articulating the proposition that "Criticism, like charity, starts at home," Soyinka was trying to teach what Gates characterizes as a "tough love" lesson to his Nigerian intellectual colleagues who were more reluctant to challenge
authoritarian regimes in their country. Put another way, Soyinka was not beating his chest in public around attributes of his own genuinely progressive intellectual makeup, he was not showing off with his political discourse that is-something Henry Gates is manicly addicted to, I think. Though Henry Gates is not aware of it, "tough love" is a lightweight pop journalistic term that tells us nothing about a genuinely courageous and independent progressive African intellectual like Wole Soyinka.
On the other hand, however, "tough love" has much utility for Henry Gates' perpetual bid to cloak his penchant for what I call Black put down discourse in seemingly high minded language like "tough love." In doing so, Gates aims to deflect attention from the true goal that his Black put down discourse serves-namely, the establishmentarian and
conservative patterns in contemporary American society, and globally too. In putting "tough love" into Soyinka's mouth, Henry Gates is, above all, trying to play back his way to a special public self-portraiture-one he consider politically serviceable.
At bottom, Henry Gates' myopia regarding his own self-importance can be viewed as the main source of both the filmic failure of "'Wonders of the African World" and the intellectually tacky Black put down aura that pervades it-an aura that bespeaks the film series' politics, actually.
What else can explain the absence of a serious didactic format for the narration of the series a formalized instructional design or format for conveying to American viewers a serious quantum of substantive information about African History and Culture? What else can explain the unbelievably arrogant irreverence that Henry Gates exhibited at so many levels in the series? The irreverence associated with wearing the lounge attire Found in bourgeois quarters of our American suburbs when visiting traditional sanctuaries of the Ethiopian Coptic Church, for example.
The irreverence associated with snide comments about the historical authenticity of the Coptic Church's claim of possessing the Ark, and the related irreverence associated with Gates' posturing about climbing the gate to the hallowed site where the Ark is located. Henry Gates wouldn't dare behave with such flippant and infantile irreverence in a comparable visit to a traditional sanctuary of Judaism in Israel, of the Church of England, of the Holy See In Rome, or anywhere else in the West. He wouldn't dare, I assure you....This kind of behavior by Henry Gates is reserved only for Black world realities! And that Gates can quote to his readers a fawning comment on "Wonders of the African World" by the current governing class in Ethiopia as a serious rebuttal of the charge by Mazuri and others that his demeanor as interviewer was irreverent toward traditional sanctuaries of African civilization is another dimension of Gates' myopic self importance.
His chutzpah too.
Above all, the irreverence associated with Henry Gates' characterization of the historical dynamics of the Atlantic Slave Trade-the man's lack of simple decency of spirit toward that devastating historical trauma visited upon Black people in the tens of millions by capitalist Christendom at its crudest-struck me as the foulest of all. If American viewers-White Americans especially-were relying upon Henry Gates' "Wonders of the African World" for a chance to finally come-to grips with the raw cultural barbarity of the Atlantic Slave Trade that our own component of the capitalist Christian state system helped to perpetrate against African peoples, their disappointment must have been gigantic.
Or perhaps not., for what Henry Gates dished up in his film series was a characterization that enabled many of our White American compatriots to persist in their longstanding, arrogant, and stubborn condition of moral denial-denial of systemic collaboration in and much responsibility for what can only be called the "Black Holocaust." Like Ali Mazuri and other critics of "Wonders of the African World," I was aghast at Henry Gates' Indecent verbal maneuvers in his interviews relating to the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Verbal maneuvers that emphasized almost solely the role of African errand boys for European dominance (African slave raiders, predatory African traditional chiefs and kings and religious authorities, etc.) in fostering the Atlantic Slave Trade. As Blackworld scholars for a century now-from the great W.E.B.Du Bois (the research institute Gates directs at Harvard bears his name) to the late Trinidad scholar Eric Williams and the late
Nigerian scholar and dear friend of mine Kenneth 0. Dike - have uncovered along with the White scholars, the Atlantic Slave Trade stemmed overwhelmingly from the military, naval technological prowess, and political economic prowess of Europe vis a vis African peoples and other world peoples too, Regardless of what African errand boys (or. as the case may be, Chinese errand boys in the East Asia context, Arab errand boys in the Middle East context, so forth and so on) did or did not do.
As Ali Mazuri rightly characterized this part of Henry Gates' series: "Gates manages to make an African to say that without the participation of Africans there would have been no slave trade! How naive about power can we get?" Indeed. Just the slightest glance at instances in ancient and medieval history of imperial and feudalistic predatory state societies (or just a visit to the movie "Brave Hearts") would inform Henry Gates about the comparative history of slaving dynamics. Those dynamics were overwhelmingly power class dynamics, with vicious and predatory power classes among vanquished societies typically preferring power benefits from participation in imperially imposed slaving dynamics over loyalty to their natal cultural/political unit (the tribe, province, region, etc.).
But this historical ignorance on Henry Gates' part in regard to the comparative history of slaving systems is only part of Gates' problem-his "Black problem", if you will. At the core of Henry Gates' insensitivity toward the massive historical trauma for the everyday oppressed and violated African persons (children, women, and men) in the long night of
The Atlantic Slave Trade is Gates' deep personality need to participate in contemporary establishmentarian and conservative put down discourse toward Black world realities.
And, as already noted, for Henry Gates this is always a chameleon choreographed Black put down modality, which can find him at one time both putting down Blackness and pretending to affirm Blackness too. But Henry Gates knows well that the American establishment, in its several formations, gets the message of his intellectual maneuvers. And I'm sure it does. One last theme relating to Henry Gates' intellectual persona requires mentioning. Gates makes a major effort to rebut Ali Mazuri's charge that "Wonders of the African World" series does not make rigorous use of authoritative scholars that one expects from a serious documentary film.
Gates gets around this criticism from Mazuri partly by claiming that his film was not quite a documentary but rather "was framed as a travelogue which allowed me to show both the diversity of the vast African continent and the African peoples themselves." This is bunkum, I submit. The best travelogues are anchored by a keen and careful documentary type infrastructure, which means they seek to have a serious didactic thrust, and such a thrust implies leaning on serious authoritative advice.
Of course, Henry Gates lined up a show list of official authoritative advisers for his series as he eagerly points out in last section of his reply to Professor Mazuri. Gates is too shrewd an academic entrepreneur intellectual not to protect himself on this flank, need I add. But lining up authoritative advisers is one thing; honestly and effectively employing their advice and knowledge is quite another matter altogether. A matter I think that was of very little interest to Henry Gates when making "Wonders of the African World."
As I started off these comments, I've known Henry Gates for a decade and I can say that I watched and probed his "MO" as much as any of his Harvard colleagues have. At the center of Gates' "MO" is a convoluted autocratic component, and at the level of his academic/administrative functioning that autocratic component of Gates' persona is never far from the surface. I speak from institutional experience in this matter of Henry Gates' autocratic trait, for throughout his decade presence at Harvard I (along with Professor Preston Williams-Divinity School-Professor Charles Willie-School of Education-Professor Peter Gomes-Divinity School-Professor Werner Sollors Comparative Literature -and Several others) have been on the Advisory Board of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. Like the advisory boards of other research institutes or centers at Harvard, the presumption is that the chair or director of such centers will confer with such boards through maybe two meetings a semester-depending upon relevant situations and sometimes more frequently.
If I recall correctly, the Du Bois Institute Advisory board was convened twice a year during Gates' first year, once a year during the following two years (at which meetings Gates presented a self-serving balance sheet of his achievements), and since then the Advisory Board of the DuBois Institute has not been convened-a period of about six years!!
All decisions from the character of the Institute's funding, choice of lecturers for lecture series like the Du Bois Lecture and the Nathan Huggins Lecture, etc. demanate from the very wise head of Henry Louis Gates. A couple of Advisory Board members have discussed Gates' tacky autocratic "MO" within the affairs of the Du Bois Institute among ourselves, but none of us has ever moved in any substantive way to redress this Gatesian autocracy, and I don't even think any of us knows what the formal Harvard rules are (if there are any) for redressing this Gatesian autocracy. I have personally queried Henry Gates regarding the state of the Dubois Institute's Advisory Board (I queried Gates quite candidly on many other issues too) a state of affairs that is an insult to the members of the Advisory Board. I can report that Henry Gates could care less.
There is also another dimension to my skepticism that Henry Gates made any serious use of his show list of authoritative advisors for his film series. My Du Bois Institute experience with Gatesian autocracy led me, a couple of years ago, to decline several persistent requests from Henry Gates to join the Advisory Board of the proprietary structure that he formed to produce the Microsoft ENCARTA CDROM on Black History and the hard copy ENCYCLOPEDIA AFRICANA version, recently out from Basic Books. Henry Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah transformed the original plans that the late Professor Nathan Huggins created to produce the ENCYCLOPEDIA AFRICANA from the academic realm of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute to a privatistic structure-a private firm, 20 if you will, headed by Gates and Appiah as sole proprietors .
I queried around about whether this was officially kosher, this transforming a Professor Huggins' designed research project within the academic realm of the Harvard DuBois Institute into a proprietary structure. I did so in an informal way I might add, dropping notes on the matter to my longstanding friend Archie Epps (who was Dean of Students-the first African-American Administrator in Harvard College) and to one of my progressive Harvard academic colleagues who happened to be a part of the Afro-American Studies faculty, Professor Cornel West. Epps said that he didn't know what the formal Harvard rules were, so I told Epps that I wasn't that concerned about the matter, so he need not inquire any further.
My progressive academic colleague Cornel West never got back to me about the matter at all, as I recall. As I told both Epps and West in my notes to them, it was my simple minded understanding that a project conceived as Professor Huggins conceived the ENCYCLOPEDIA AFRICANA project to be a research production of the Du Bois Institute, ought to remain an Institute affair in substance whatever privatistic choreographing might be done to it. So whatever financial benefits that resulted from the end product of Professor Huggins' ENCYCLOPEDIA AFRICANA project (such as the Microsoft ENCARTA CD-ROM on Black History and the hard copy version) ought to become part of the research funds or endowment of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute which God knows deserves serious financial endowment after nearly 30 years existence.
For me anyway, this is the only academically honorable thing to do in this kind of situation. One should not cynically pursue one's own self serving and money enhancing agenda as a scholar, which is what the privatistic arrangement set up in regard to Professor Huggins' original plans for the ENCYCLOPEDIA AFRICANA project By Henry Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah looks like to me. But maybe I'm just a naive old fashioned academic in these matters, I suspect. Thus, I want to conclude these critical reflections on Henry Gates' film series - "Wonders of the African World"- and on the intellectually convoluted character of Henry Gates himself with some thoughts on the future interaction between progressive African-American intellectuals, on the one hand, and the establishmentarian and politically cagey Henry Gates on the other hand.
First of all, there should be no doubt among progressive African-American intellectuals that Henry Gates as the leading African-American academic entrepreneur intellectual in the country these days has an intellectual persona and modus operandi vis a vis Black
world realities that is riddled through with establishmentarian and sometimes anti-Black purposes. Henry Gates, therefore, warrants much more scrutiny by progressive African-American intellectuals than he has received to date. Happily for us in this regard, Henry Gates has unwittingly helped us with the intellectually tacky and arrogant Black put down aura that pervades his BBC/PBS film series.
However, to be effective in the important task of scrutinizing an Incredibly cagey academic entrepreneur intellectual like Henry Gates requires, I think, any progressive Black intellectual to keep a kind of respectful distance from the chap. Why? Because Henry Gates is not only a master of the intellectual dodge as I have tried to delineate in these comments. Henry Gates is also a masterful manipulator of strategic goodies at his disposal as a Black academic entrepreneur. I suppose that's how Gates maneuvered my old friend Professor Ali Mazuri to pen a friendly blurb for the coffee table book version of "Wonders of the African World." I say this because when the secretary at the DuBois Institute mailed notices to Advisory Board members regarding the lecturers for the Nathan Huggins Lecture Series always selected solely from the wise head of Henry Gates by the wav, since the Advisory Board is operationally superfluous-I discovered that on the List of future lecturers was Professor Ali Mazuri (November 2000 1 think).
To perform the much needed task of intellectually scrutinizing a cagey and politically opportunistic academic entrepreneur American intellectual like Henry Gates (or, say, like Professor Samuel Huntington who's in International Studies here at Harvard and others like this at Harvard and other universities around the country) , it is best for anyone who is a progressive intellectual and scholar to keep a respectful distance visa versa resources (goodies) at Gates' disposal. Even rather simple ones like invitations to strategic dinners at his house. For Henry Gates anyway they're his fish hooks, so to speak. And he has snared a lot of strategically useful fish I might add, some who could otherwise contribute to the important task of intellectually scrutinizing the latter day Booker T. Washington accommodationism dimension of Henry Gates' intellectual persona.
Remember that it is not easy to "drink the King's wine and challenge the King too...."
For me anyway, this is not an easy issue even though I Know that there are times when "the King" must be challenged, whether one sups his table or not. So for myself here at Harvard University during the past decade of Henry Gates' tenure here, I've kept a respectful distance from Henry Gates' goodies in order to reserve my independence of action. Luckily for me of course, my academic appointment needs and resources, here at Harvard have not overlapped with "King Gates", unlike the situation for other African-American faculty here whose appointment Henry Gates had a hand in-such as Professor William Wilson--and thus who are inclined to be rather discreet in their interactions with "King Gates."
I have no such dependence ties to "King Gates." So when there was one instance in the past decade when my resource needs relating to a Fiftieth Anniversary Conference on Gunnar Myrdal's "An American Dilemma" that I conceived and mainly organized (with marvelous assistance from Dr. Randall Burkett then associate administrator at the DuBois Institute but who was later unceremoniously dismissed by Henry Gates) became
something of an issue between me and Henry Gates, I let Gates know that I was willing to do battle if necessary. One should never act weak in the midst of Gatesian autocracy, or any autocracy for that matter. Wole Soyinka has taught us that nobly.
Not, of course, in the pop journalistic way that Henry Gates characterizes Soyinka's intellectual courage so as the advance Gates' own phony public self portraiture.
So I try to advise my progressive Black intellectual peers especially to be wary of "King Gates" strategic offerings his fish hooks, if at all possible. And I'd like to address this especially to the up coming younger generation of African-American intellectuals and scholars, particularly those who seek to fashion a progressive outlook for themselves. Finally, we progressive Black intellectuals especially do indeed have to perform the scrutinizing task in regard to establishmentarian and/or conservative Black intellectuals like Henry Gates, because no one else will. Above all, we progressive Black intellectuals still have a serious Black people agenda to attend to. Namely: Protecting, advancing, and redeeming Black folks' honor, both here in the United States and elsewhere in the globe.
* * * * * (From ChickenBones)
kenneth harrow
>"As the tentacles of the trade reached deeper into the hinterland,
>more communities became susceptible and responded by defending
>themselves. Ironically, captives taken by those acting in
>self-defense were also often fed into domestic commercial relays
>that ultimately led to the sea. Relations between communities became
>increasingly complex, but the point here is that individuals and
>populations "involved" with the slave trade were drawn in for many
>different reasons. It is difficult to imagine assigning equal
>culpability to a community fending off the slave trade with the
>European nations bankrolling and in ultimate control of the entire
>affair, especially when those European nations were providing the weaponry."
>
>i welcome the attempt to give some kind of meaningful summation of
>the slave trade's workings. there was another local phenomenon i
>learned about, reading in mamadou diouf's brilliant history of
>senegal, which relates to some of the earlier references to
>sembene's ceddo. sembene liked to affect the identity of a ceddo,
>calling his house keur ceddo, i.e., the house of ceddo (hard to
>imagine the ceddo he saw himself as being ensconced in that very
>traditional muslim funeral they gave him, where women were excluded
>from the levee du corps....another matter)
>in his film Ceddo he represents the ceddo as resisting the forced
>conversion to islam effected by the evil Moor who stands out as
>different from the "native black senegalese" in the film.
> in any event, as diouf tells us, the collaboration of the coastal
> kingdoms with the slave trading ultimately set them at odds with
> the middle kingdoms or states, ultimately termed the marabout
> states, who attempted to resist french domination. that resistance
> entailed interdiction of the slave trade which ultimately fed
> wealth to the coastal states--states sustained by the ceddo. yes,
> the very ceddo sembene misrepresented as heroic nationalist figures
> who resisted outside domination. i know it gets mixed up and more
> complicated than that, but the maraboutic wars of late 18th century
> were aligned along broad lines i sketched out here. the resistance
> to slavery was joined, as in the kingdom of benin as well, right?,
> to local political configurations.
>ken
Kenneth W. Harrow
Distinguished Professor of English
Michigan State University
har...@msu.edu
517 803-8839
fax 517 353 3755
Dr. Valentine Ojo
kenneth harrow
but there were two points i would focus on.
kilson alludes to "African errand boys" in describing african states that participated in the slave trade. to be sure, the powerful build-up of coastal states was at the expense of trading states to the interior that had funneled slaves north, and the fight to control the middle kingdoms was determined by the arming of the coastal states that continued to favor trade along the coast. but "errand boys'? the kingdom of oyo, of benin, sokoto, wolof, and serrer kingdoms errand boys? that's ridiculous.
secondly, well, i too admire soyinka. but not nearly as completely as kilson. come on, soyinka's attack on the u.k. for being too soft on communists??? that's called progressive? his attack on the u.k. for being too liberal-indulgent of muslims extremists?
admire soyinka like rushdie, if you like, but recognize that his attacks on islam, on the left, hardly qualifies him for the epithet "progressive," unless progressive=anti-muslim, unless progressive=liberal huamnism. that's the rub
ken
Kenneth W. Harrow
Distinguished Professor of English
Michigan State University
har...@msu.edu
517 803-8839
fax 517 353 3755
Lavonda Staples
- The languages are in danger of being supplanted completely by Francophonisme and English.
- Upon entry to America (or any other "western" country) the traditional roles are sacrificed. I should say, the working, productive traditional roles.
- The religions of West Africa have been bastardized, syncretized, and re-created into a space to receive tourist coins.
- Personal confusion which flies against logic. Example: African women frying their hair with relaxers or other customs which have never "fit" within the African concept of beauty. Western concepts have been added which are either completely ridiculous (in the least) or proof-positive affirmation of self-hatred.
- The diaspora itself! Isn't this payment enough?
Amatoritsero Ede
Dr. Valentine Ojo
You tell them Ms Lavonda Stables - even when they are out to merely try to diss what you write from their intellectual cockroach horses!
Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD
On Sun 05/02/10 1:37 PM , Lavonda Staples lrst...@gmail.com sent:
I have to interject. I would like to discuss the actual "on the ground" realities of American slavery. My opening arguments are:The slavery system in America was accurately assessed as a peculiar institution. Why? Under this de facto and de jure system of wealth creation there were instances, daily practices which had never occurred in any system of its ilk. What were these instances?Miscegenation for profit. Masters producing children with slave women and then selling off their progeny.The practice of buying slaves without cash. This is the main reason why slavery in America was a transient system. If the crops did not come in the slaves went out and out and out.Slavery as a system of wealth creation instead of proof of wealth. In Old World slave systems, the presence or the ability to buy a person to work, for life, was the right of the wealthy, aristocratic and even the right of kings and queens. In the New World, slavery was a gamble which paid off for very few.Further, in the New World, slavery was a political tool. This is evidenced in the Second Continental Congress of 1787 where the delegates of New York left the proceedings. They rejected the use of slaves as political control (3/5 person - slave-ocracy) and were enticed back by our Founding Fathers. This can be found in a text called, "Arguing About Slavery." It is also helpful to mention that Thomas Jefferson was the delegate from VA. At this time he was the largest slaveholder in the state and had a personal stake to the ratification of the Constitution with the 3/5 vote/person clause intact. This measure would ensure, for generations to come that slave-holding states would hold power in the Congress. It would also ensure the economic downfall of the American south.Finally, these "slave relationships" uttered in the same sentence with the word "love" is an extreme misapplcation. These households were isolated. The relationships were ostracized by "civilized" persons. The myth of the Black women as constantly sexually stimulated was born in order to assuage the public conscience. The anger between Black women and White women had its inception - we became things. Black women and White women. They were dolls on a shelf without feeling. We were beasts on the floor without feeling. This is a single facet of the American slave system which can be called (accurately) "close-quarter" slavery.La Vonda R. Staples
On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 11:53 AM, Akurang-Parry, Kwabena <KAP...@ship.edu> wrote:
Moses,
In the past several days you have mounted a very high horse that has given you an authoritative optical range over the arguments and conclusions of Gates which have been subjected to debunking perspectives worldwide. Atop the high horse, you have lectured down to those of us who have sought to question aspects of Gates’ blame-game essay. Interestingly, you have prefaced all your commentaries with a caveat that you are bearing precipitously toward the end of the semester, hence the tyranny of time has the momentum in what you have had to say. In spite of this, you are still churning recycled responses from two standpoints: we are all wrong and Gates is right; and that our historical methodologies are anemic and need resuscitation. I wish you had enough time to compose an original essay that articulates your reasons for supporting Gates instead of flexing condescending muscles over what others have said. Hopefully once the semester sets you free, you would be able to do that. In sum, I doubt if elementary school pupils would deny some of the fundamental points that inform your insistence that Gates is right and that all others are wrong. In other words don’t we all know that slavery existed in precolonial Africa as much as it had existed in some parts of the world; that several African societies practiced different forms of slavery defined by local ideologies and practice and that the latter was not always in league with the former; that some African societies enslaved others and sold them to Europeans and Americans in the era of the Atlantic slave trade; that slavery in some parts of Africa was not a composite static institution, etc. These effortless viewpoints shouldn’t come from someone agog with resplendent ideas on a stunning high horse!
What is of more interest to me is your tired-bound condemnation of “extrapolation” as a tool of the historian’s craft. You suggest that one must not do case studies in order to use it to mirror cleavages of broader historical patterns and lines of continuities and discontinuities, or use local studies as the basis of theorizing from the particular to the general in an effort to frame wide-ranging questions. You claim that we don’t understand Gates’ essay and that you alone do. If that is the case you may well know that Gates’ essay is not about African history as a whole and neither is Gates a professional historian of Africa. Gates used the examples on the Kongo and Asante, but generalized for the whole of Africa. In sum Gates lopsidedly quarried secondary sources on a few specific African societies, and sadly enough misread the secondary sources. For example, he claimed that Asantes sold slaves to buy gold and overlooked the staple historiographical fact that it was the Portuguese presence in the Kongo that intensified the incidence slavery and the slave trade. For these reasons, I am surprised that you have a set-goal to defend Gates’ methodology and his conclusions, while condemning and even insulting some of us who have sought to use primary sources on the very examples that Gates had deployed to pose our critical questions. Your own arguments are defined by localized examples yanked from the Hausa States, states of the Benguela Estuary, Abomey, Ouidah, Dahomey, etc), Yoruba Iwofa, etc. Do these represent all of Africa? You attack and insult people simply because they apply local studies in broader context, yet the paradox is that you have mastered the same methodology, and worse of all, you are happy that Gates’ essay is feebly planted in the same methodological terrain!
Kwabena
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Moses Ebe Ochonu [meoc...@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, May 01, 2010 2:46 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: FW: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
Kissi,
Your post raises a number of significant issues, which I cannot respond to in detail because it's the end of the semester. But at least you started with a very firm acceptance of the ACTIVE participation of some African groups in the slave trade. I don't disagree with your assertion that there has been some excessively emotive sensationalization of the African precolonial slavery terrain. But the Rodneys on the opposite side of the Fages make it harder to capture the nuance and complexity that an understanding of precolonial African slavery demands.They commit the same error they accuse others of committing: confer continental verity on their narrow local histories and denying the reality of precolonial slavery on the basis of a small body of material, which they fit into prepackaged ideological templates like their opposites. If there is anything that the Fage-Rodney debate makes clear it is that one should never make a categorical statement that purports to stand in for the variety of slave arrangements across Africa. The two scholars worked on different regions--the Upper and the Lower Guinea Coast. Both may be correct in the fundamental conclusions they draw from their sources. But both are also guilty of exaggerating and extrapolating their local histories to the rest of the continent. This is precisely what Kwabena does with his Akan material. This is what Amutabi also does from his narrow East African example, claiming that there is no word for slavery in Africa. Obviously, the Europeans did not merely plug themselves into preexisting slave trade systems or merely expand a preexisting trade. That is an oversimplification. But the notion that the Europeans invented slave trading in Africa is just as simplistic. It's even worse; its a fabrication. There were pre-European contact transactions in slaves on the continent in specific areas (Kongo, the Hausa States, states of the Benguela Estuary, the successive states of the "slave Coast"--Abomey, Ouidah, Dahomey, etc). More circumspect historians have pointed to many kinds of slave transactions in specific areas (again speaking to the value of local histories but also pointing to their limits in explaining Africa as a whole). The scope and breath was obviously not as big as Fage (and perhaps Thornton, although Thornton is a lesser offender), working from a small set of regional sources, would want us to believe. Also, let's understand that at the experimental stage of the trade, especially when the destination was Europe and the main commodity was spices and gold, there were in certain areas of West Central Africa with " reservoirs" of expendable Africans that could be sold. They didn't have to be captured. In these specific areas, the sale of slaves was already familiar practice, especially examined in the context of the at least six centuries of the Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trade that came before the Atlantic trade in West-central and parts of East Africa.No was slave raiding new. Many slaves who made their agonizing march across the Sahara and made the painful voyage across the Indian Ocean were captured in RAIDS. This was before the evil white slave trader came ashore.
We know that there was slavery in MANY parts of precolonial Africa, and there were areas with no documented systems of slavery, especially the the so-called acephalous societies. But we also know that the severity of servility varied from place to place, which is also true of slavery on other continents. No two slave systems are exactly the same. But complexity and the enslavement of racial kin is a universal feature of all slave systems. Africa is not unique in this sense, so there should be no stigma or defensiveness on the part of our historians. There was also localized arrangements of semi-servitude, debt pawnship (Iwofa, in the Yoruba system), indentured labor, etc. We also know that there was even some plantation slavery in some places, although, to add to the complexity, some African states that had plantation slavery also provided pathways for SOME slaves to make remarkable social mobility (Northern Nigeria and parts of the East African Coast). We know that in some places, integration was a cardinal aspect of slavery but in others integration was less possible and the status of the slave bordered on property and came dangerously close to the chattel status of New world slaves. Slaves were transferable in many African slaveholding polities; they could be bought and sold. That for me is commodification. In many other slaveholding polities, slaves were not commodified and there were strict barriers to their transferability (sellability, if there is such a word).
The point of this is to underscore the importance of precision and delineation--the importance of staying faithful to the complexity of slave systems on the continent and not manufacturing some presentist, ideologically inspired categories that conflate and flatten many continental realities. We cannot simply invoke one localized arrangement to impeach an argument about African complicity or about the presence of slaves in precolonial Africa. Conversely we cannot also extract one localized reality and use it to argue about the prevalence of a certain kind of slavery or its absence across Africa.
I won't question the validity of Kwabena's Akan oral histories of the slave trade and slavery generally. But I question its ability to explain all of Africa in the precolonial period, just as I do the capacity of other local histories to supplant the bewildering complexity of the slavery arrangements on the continent. I also have many disagreements with his frame of analysis, which, as far as I can tell is designed for the ideological purpose of shooting down what he suspects are Gates' motives of inculpating Africans and exonerating Europeans. Because of time, I also took him on on two points (unequal trade and the gun-slave cycle). My point in questioning the African slave exceptionalism framework (which is really Akan exceptionalism applied by Kwabena to the rest of Africa) was to show that there is and should be no shame in admitting that slavery and servility in Africa ran the entire gamut of the slavery spectrum, including commodified and even plantation slavery on one extreme and debt pawnage and indentured servitude on the other. Let's not forget that even in the plantation complex of the New World, there were also indentured arrangements, and the plantation system did not mean that every Africal slave picked cotton--there were "house slaves." The world is a complex place. Human beings are complex beings. History is about our world and about human beings, so it always bothers me when I see historians struggling to disciplines the complex and contradictory reality of history into discernible continental and national patterns, especially when the "disciplining" is forced and uses "local histories" as its primary tool.
It is even more egregious when localized histories are advanced as a continental counterpoint to perceived distortions of African history.
It is from this mindset of using a part to represent the whole that nonsensical statements like "there is no word for slave in Africa" emerge.
Cheers!!!
On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 10:26 AM, Akurang-Parry, Kwabena <KAP...@ship.edu> wrote:
Oga,Please, post this on behalf of Edward Kissi whose system would not allow him to post it on USA Africa Dialogue.Kwabena.
From: eki...@usf.edu [eki...@usf.edu]
Sent: Saturday, May 01, 2010 8:15 AM
To: Akurang-Parry, Kwabena
Subject: Fw: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
Hello Kwabena!
I sent this posting to the Dialogue this morning. Please let me know if it pops up on the net. It bounced back to me. I have taken a long holiday from Dialoguing to work on some projects. I am not sure if I need to reregister to get a posting through.
Kissi.Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
From: "Kissi, Edward" <eki...@usf.edu>Date: Sat, 1 May 2010 04:28:27 -0400Cc: Kissi, Edward<eki...@usf.edu>Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
“The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves. "The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia," he warned. "We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it."
“…But the sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time. Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold. Queen Njinga, the brilliant 17th-century monarch of the Mbundu, waged wars of resistance against the Portuguese but also conquered polities as far as 500 miles inland and sold her captives to the Portuguese. When Njinga converted to Christianity, she sold African traditional religious leaders into slavery, claiming they had violated her new Christian precepts .”
Henry Louis gates Jr.
“THERE are a number of subtle suggestions which undergird Gates’ essay of blame-game that are plucked from the works of Linda Heywood and John Thornton whose conclusions are shaped by the extant Eurocentric records. One is the notion that wars in precolonial Africa were mostly geared toward the acquisition of slaves for the Atlantic market. Oral history/traditions amply illustrate that some wars in precolonial Africa, even during the period of the Atlantic slave trade, also served as conduits of freeing slaves .”
Kwabena Opare-Akurang.
“This nonsense about African "servitude vs. Euro-American slavery should be beneath the professional integrity of historians and scholars who have access to the dirty FACTS of precolonial African slavery in several forms, as well as to the more significant historical fact of slavery's universality in antiquity and even in the modern period of so-called post-enlightenment humanism. Africans were not alone in enslaving outsiders who in today's taxonomy would qualify as their racial kin. Treating slavery in Africa differently or denying its presence is a dangerous act of erasing Africa from some of the socio-economic constants of world history, or worse, carving a space of exotic insularity for Africans and Africa.”
Moses Ochonu.
If there is any redeeming value in the embers that Skip Gates has stirred up in his “controversial” op-ed piece, it is the debate over African history that it has rekindled. The period of African history that the piece indicts is the period of Western and Central African history before the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade began, and from that period of time to any point after 1807. This is also the period of African history that is seen and understood differently by Henry Louis Gates Jr; Frederick Douglass; John Thornton and Linda Heywood, on one hand, and anybody in Africa or any African outside of Africa incensed by their perspectives, on the other. Gates’ piece has reinforced the often-dismissed importance of studying history at school. The history of the African continent and how historians have reached their understanding of that past matters today. Whatever the good professor’s motives may have been (and I am less concerned about motives and more interested in history), he has caused people on the African continent and those who were born and initially educated there and now make their living in America to confront and clarify the African past that his article impeaches.
I am persuaded by the overwhelming historical evidence that some groups of people in particular kingdoms and societies on the African continent actively took part in and profited from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade when that trade began in the late fifteenth century or the beginning of the sixteenth century. That is not new knowledge. It is a fact well-established. But that fact also requires the kinds of clarifications that Kwabena Opare-Akurang has provided about the nature of that participation; its scope and ultimate purpose in particular localities in two huge regions of Africa---Western and Central Africa. Kwabena is correct in pointing out that there is a subtle notion in Thornton’s and Heywood’s works that Gates invoked that prior to the Atlantic Slave trade, there was a well established use of human beings as commodities in these two regions. That wars waged there produced a large supply of slaves which the warring kingdoms “sold” to Europeans. One should not lose sight of how basic economic theories of demand and supply may be influencing the interpretations here. That these “war captives” and/or “slaves” were the main “export” of the kingdoms of Asante and Kongo long before the Middle Passage began. An even more startling statement appears in Gates’ reference to Frederick Douglass, one of the doyens of African American history. Douglass and Gates believe that the buying and selling of human beings for “cash”, or as a source of “foreign exchange”, was a commercial activity to which “the savage kings of Western Africa” were accustomed for ages. Here is where some scholars such as Douglass; Thornton; Heywood and others have derived their “antiquity” of slavery and slave trading in Africa arguments.
At this stage of the uproar over Gates’ article, some important lessons of African history have been learned. One of them is that it is inaccurate to argue that “the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold” The fraudulence of this particular argument has been exposed in some of the discussions. Some have aptly inquired: how could producers of gold as the Asante were seek and export slaves to buy gold, and from whom? What should be added is that no persuasive evidence has so far been produced in Gates’ article that the Asante or the Kongo kingdom obtained its gold from processes of production that required the use of a large pool of “slave” labor. I am yet to see any persuasive evidence in any history book, or the memoirs of travelers to these two kingdoms, that before the nineteenth century era of open shaft or dredging mining procedures, gold was obtained in Western or Central Africa through mining procedures that would have required the acquisition and use of professional slave miners purchased from slave markets within the continent. Thus whoever informed Frederick Douglass that the kings of West Africa used slave labor obtained through purchased war captives to produce gold may have misinformed him. It is this myth of how people in West Africa obtained gold before the Trans-Atlantic slave trade that also underpins the works of Thornton and Heywood from which Gates draws part of his perspectives on West African history.
It seems to me that people deliberately or unwittingly read history backwards. They know enough of African history after the trans-Atlantic slave trade, or of 19th century gold mining in Kimberley and California. They compensate for their limited knowledge of production methods in pre-Atlantic Slave Trade Western and Central Africa by resorting to theory or by assuming that the present of which they are a part is the exact mirror image of the past they did not witness. Any idea that history is nothing more than a continuous, unbroken, linear progression from the beginning of time to the present is mythical and speculative. Equally speculative and even more propagandist is the claim that “ the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time.” I am not certain where “a very long time” actually begins: before 1500 or after 1500? I doubt that historians of Western and Central Africa know enough about the military history of the pre-Atlantic Slave Trade period to be able to argue, definitively, as Douglass, Thornton, Heywood and Gates do that wars were fought in these regions “ for a very long time” to obtain captives. Where the evidence is fragmentary and circumstantial, historians and other writers should simply confess a lack of adequate knowledge. Suppositions do not make a sound history.
Equally unsound is the assumption or theory that slavery and/or trade in slaves has been a “universal” fact of human history. That it is ancient in its origins. That the “antiquity” of slavery in human history suggests that people in Africa may have had slaves too; bought, and sold them as every human society from ancient times to the modern period did. This reasoning may be theoretically seductive, but candidly ahistorical. That African history must have conformed consistently to a universal trend of slave ownership and slave mode of production throughout human history. And that any local histories of Africa, as Kwabena provides about the Akans whose history he has mastered, that appear to deviate from this assumed “universal” trend makes African history different and thus “exotic” and “insular.” I am one of Moses’ admirers on this forum for his many admirable skills, but on this thought I am not persuaded. Are we being asked to conclude that everywhere in Africa people bought, sold and owned slaves because Hebrew scripture tells us that Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery in Egypt; because the Greeks used slaves in their silver mines; because the Romans did too; and the Assyrians. If all these European and Asian societies had slaves then so must have the Yoruba; Ibo; Shona; Matabele; Asante; Sonike; Amhara; Nuba; Dagarti and the Sotho-Tswana of Africa. Is Moses arguing that any findings elsewhere in Africa that contradict this supposed “universal” trend put African history outside of the necessary framework and mould of world history and, thus, make the history of Africa “different” and therefore “exotic” and “insular”? This troubling thesis about the conformity of African history to some assumed common and universal trend in human history reminds me of the arguments that some of the Euro-American pioneers of African history made in the 1960s that in the pre-Industrial world without machines civilizations must have been built on the backs of human beings. Therefore, there could not have been Egyptian pyramids; walls of Great Zimbabwe and kingdoms in West Africa without the possession and use of slaves to build them. Is one to gather from this correlation that the presence of slaves in African history make that history real history because Rome and Greece had slaves.
There is a reason why we study particular regions and localities and why some historians build their reputations on case studies and comparative histories. The more local and comparative history we study, the more we realize that particular environments and specific aspirations of people led some groups to chart a course of history that was “different” from what other environments rendered possible to their inhabitants. That is the point I read from Kwabena’s posting and I am persuaded by his argument. What Skip Gates’ article should cause us (Africans) to do is to conduct more local studies on what was going on at various parts of Africa before the Atlantic Slave Trade began. Were people selling and buying human beings in well-established commercial relationships in Western and Central Africa before the Europeans arrived? Is the evidence convincing or circumstantial or derived from a mistranslation of the original non-English document? Did the Europeans merely tap into these existing trade systems in which human beings were articles of trade in Africa as John D. Fage assumed in his 1969 article in response to Walter Rodney’s. A theory of the “universality” or “antiquity” of slavery and slave trading to which Asante, Kongo, Yoruba, Ibo, Chokwe, Imbangala, Ovimbundu and Nyamwezi history conform, so prevalent in the historiography on slavery in Africa, is not a sound beginning of an instructive inquiry into Professor Gates’ quest. Neither is the argument that alternative findings from local histories that do not reinforce the universality of slavery theory is exotic history.
We will be able to educate ourselves and those we teach in America’s schools and have beneficial conversation on apology and reparations with our African American brothers and sisters, including Professor Gates, if we seriously explored what was going on in various places in Africa before the slave trade began. In my view, it is perfectly within the professional integrity of historians to look for similarities as well as differences in the African experience as an integral part of the human story. It is the organization of knowledge about Africa in accordance with some assumed “universality” of world history, or that history’s socio-economic “constants” that has misled us to this confusing crossroad. We have allowed theory to distort what should be our search for complexities, contradictions, confluences and divergences in African history. If those of us to whom many in the United States look for answers to the issues Gates has raised (and some of them are legitimate) cannot offer concrete and convincing answers, but yield to the seductions of theory, then we have become the tasteless salt in a soup.
Edward Kissi
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Moses Ebe Ochonu
Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 11:46 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
Normally, I don't get into a discussion that I may not have time to conclude. With the end of the semester, things are crazy with me and I should not be getting into intellectual fights that may distort my schedule. But I'll make an exception here and post my general preliminary thoughts on the issue.
What I find tragic in this debate is that it appears that some people are doing a deliberate misreading of Gates' OP-ED. Unfortunately, that misreading, a gross distortion if you ask me, is now framing this discussion. Did those who are accusing Gates of blaming Africans for the slave trade actually read the OP-ED or are they simply transferring their ill-feelings from previous encounters with Gates' other "controversial" works? This is what I suspect is happening here.
I read the piece thoroughly and nowhere in it did I see the meanings and motives being read into it. What the man is saying is fairly simple, straightforward, and in accord with known facts. Reparations is a more complex issue than the narratives of advocates advance it to be. This complexity is further intensified by the ACTIVE and PROACTIVE participation of African kingdoms, states, merchants, warrior-raiders, and kings because it makes moral, if not legal, culpability a trans-Atlantic reality. Why is this such a controversial point to bring up, especially when reparations campaigners only focus on Western culpability? Let's not forget that some Africans, including the late MKO Abiola and Ali MAzrui once had the audacity to demand slavery reparations for Africa, all of Africa, with no mechanism for distinguishing the descendants and provinces of slavers from those of the enslaved. By what moral, commercial, or legal logic do you pay reparations to a whole continent, when some of its current privatized wealth is traceable to the slave trade and is still benefiting those who did one of the dirty works of the enslavement process: capture and sale? And without paying attention to how the holders of such wealth deserve no part in any putative reparations or how only verified African victim (raided and conquered) communities and families deserve compensation.
Are we saying that the Africans who raided villages in the interior and marched captured Africans to the coast bear no responsibility for chattel slavery in the so-called new world? There is no acceptable excuse for this brazen attempt at revisionism, the quest to manufacture and peddle a sanitized version of recent history. We know of individual families from Lagos to Ouidah to Goree to Congo and Angola and other places who built fortunes from the anguish of ethnic Others that they enslaved and sold to European merchants.The descendants of this families are alive and do not even deny this history. On a recent trip to Nigeria I was given a church-commissioned historical text that refreshingly provides a window into how the slave trade constituted the foundations of the fortunes of many of today's renown Lagos families and their wealth. The descendants of these 18th and 19th century slave traders, who were interviewed for the project and are custodians of the written and oral histories of their families, are willing to do what some of our historians hesitate to do: retell the past in all its flavors of ugliness and beauty. Local oral traditions in many coastal regions of West and Central Africa identify whole families and clans that continue to dominate commerce and politics in their respective locales, having parlayed their ancestors' slave trade commercial wealth into more licit ventures. Do we not do violence to our history when we minimize or erase this historical verity?
This nonsense about African "servitude vs. Euro-American slavery should be beneath the professional integrity of historians and scholars who have access to the dirty FACTS of precolonial African slavery in several forms, as well as to the more significant historical fact of slavery's universality in antiquity and even in the modern period of so-called post-enlightenment humanism. Africans were not alone in enslaving outsiders who in today's taxonomy would qualify as their racial kin. Treating slavery in Africa differently or denying its presence is a dangerous act of erasing Africa from some of the socio-economic constants of world history, or worse, carving a space of exotic insularity for Africans and Africa.
That it took a non-Historian, Ikhide, to put down this ultra-defensive and callous denialism is indicative of how dangerous the mixing of ideology and scholarship can be in imposing blind spots on historians.
There is nothing wrong with Gates pointing out that African complicity in the slave trade, of which there was much, and the evidence for which is embedded in many oral traditions and remembrances, complicates current narratives on reparations. The only mitigating logic that would not be defensive or escapist is to argue that without European demand for slaves in the "New World" there might not have been an Atlantic slave trade, at least not on the scale that it occurred. Since demand is a bigger factor of causality than supply, this may release the descendants of African regions, states, families, and clans that participated in the trade from the material compensation being sought from European corporations. I am not even sure that this is a winning argument, since it only mitigates moral culpability, not actual culpability. At the very least it would still make symbolic, non-material reparations from individual African countries, clans, and ethnic descendants of slaving kingdoms necessary.
Then there is Kwabena's egregious extrapolation of Akan oral traditions and their narratives on slavery and the slave trade to the rest of the continent----something that would demand a whole new post to refute. I have multiple, serious quibble with Kwabena's submission, but I am starting with this general commentary. But let me say this: he talks about well known gun-slave cycle. This is merely an explanation of the "driver" of the trade. Every trade needs a driver, a tool and mode of production. The gun was the tool during the slave trade. But guns needed raiders and warriors-for-booty before they could produce slaves. The agency of the raiders and warriors in the slave trade chain should not be written off. The gun was also a currency in the transaction between European slave traders and African slavers and kings. It was a thing of immense value in Africa--even before the slave trade took off. So, to the extent that guns were desired items of value in African kingdoms and states, the trade was indeed a trade: reciprocal exchange of value. Europeans responded to the demand for guns in Africa. Without the demand for guns, Europeans would have battered other items for slaves and in fact they did in some areas where gin, mirrors, and other in-demand, exotic items of value were treasured above guns.
African history, especially precolonial African history is not a consistently pretty history. Like other histories, it is full of the good, bad, and the atrocious. There is no need to assume that Africans, as a subset of the human family, would follow a radically different historical trajectory. Wars were fought; the vanquished were captured and enslaved to different degrees depending on the society; some of the enslaving societies, like some societies in other parts of the world, practiced an integrative slavery; others, again like some other societies elsewhere, did not. It's no big deal to be faithful to these facts of African history. It does not and should not, exonerate European slavers and what they , in collaboration with their African agents and profiteer, did to many African communities, villages, and families during the slave trade. Unless these facts fall into misuse in the hands of racist mischief makers, but there is nothing we can do about racists and their agenda, and their antics should not prevent us from reconstructing histories faithfully and accurately or make us into paranoid, defensive, visceral hagiographers of romantic African virtue.
And Gloria, please do not assume condescendingly that folks on this list have not read that debate or did not follow the "Wonders" controversy. There is nothing anyone said then or is saying now that impeaches the essential truth of Gates's current intervention, which makes the simple point that the reality of Akan, Dahomey, Yoruba, Nupe, Igbo, Kongo, Angola, etc, complicity in the slave trade and of specific known families and groups adds a new layer of complexity to what is already a legal and political minefield.
What worries me is that some historians may actually be teaching this fumigated, romantic version of African history to students--Western and African. History is by its very nature messy. African history is no exception. That is why an excursion into the past can be alternately depressing and pleasurable. But that precisely is the point of studying it. It is a sobering reminder of the countervailing human capacities for evil and good.
On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 7:54 PM, <xok...@yahoo.com> wrote:
"Again, I am not about to deny that Africans practiced a kind of servitude before the European intrusion. However, as Ali Mazrui said in his documentary, The Africans: A Triple Heritage, the degree of callousness of the European enslavement of Africans was unknown to Africans."
- Abdul-Rasheed Na'Allah
!!! This kind of scholarship is quite honestly unhelpful. I actually am amazed at how the howling of those opposed to Professor Gates' perspective have helped me appreciate and respect his position. How on earth can someone say that what happened to slaves in the Old Benin kingdom was "servitude." Talking about callousness, I wonder if the descendants of slaves who were used as human sacrifice would consider that humane. The problem with this kind of scholarship is that its purveyors have boxed themselves into tight corners built on fantasies and lies. As a result they find themselves defending the indefensible. The unintended tragedy here as Abdul-Rasheed Na'Allah so eloquently demonstrates is that the research is distorted and twisted and ultimately worthless. The lasting ramifications of compromising these works are infinitely long-lasting. It is a tragedy of immense proportions.
I am afraid in this debate, Professor Gates is looking really good. I admire his stance on this issue. I think the world would be a better place if we tried to engage him on an equal level and with respect. What I have been reading for the most part is patronizing and condescending. I won't even dignify the abusive rants with as much as a nod. Some things are just beneath me. Those pushing reparations need to understand one thing. It is complicated.
- Ikhide
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
-----Original Message-----
From: "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@mail.ccsu.edu>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 19:27:18
To: <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery
Blame-Game
West Africa Review (2000)
ISSN: 1525-4488
Thoughts on the Atlantic Slave Trade: the Roles of Africans and the Issue of Apology for Slavery
Abdul-Rasheed Na'Allah
Who deserves an apology for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade? Skip Gates, in his Wonders of the African World video series makes some Africans apologize to him, thus demonstrating his belief that continental Africans need to apologize to descendants of slaves in the Diaspora. President Mathieu Kérékou of the Republic of Benin echoed a similar belief by asking for a conference where continental Africans would apologize to Diaspora Africans for slavery.1 I'm not sure whom the president was speaking for, and whether he was offering to convene such a meeting. In my view, continental and Diaspora Africans have never been enemies and have always worked together for the glory of Africa, and history is rich in examples, Nkrumah to DuBois, Randall Robinson to Moshood Abiola. However, we need conferences, in Africa and abroad, to reconcile our understanding of past events and to ensure that no one sells the African agenda to the highest bidder. Yet, apology will not end the debate and misunderstanding about Atlantic Slave Trade. We need to know whether Africans advertised to Europe that they were slavers, and invited Europeans to buy slaves, or Europeans had their own plan, and enticed uninformed, militarily weaker Africans, to choose between Cane and Carrot, to sell their own brothers and sisters. We need to know whether no African resisted the idea of his own people sold across the ocean. We must know what happened to King Jaja of Opobo and his contemporaries, and whether there was truly no African resistance to slave trade.
Na'Allah, Abdul- Rasheed. (2000). Thoughts on the Atlantic Slave Trade: the Roles of Africans and the Issue of Apology for Slavery. West Africa Review: 1 , 2. [iuicode: http://www.icaap.org/iuicode?101.1.2.24].
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Biko Agozino
|
Let me start by saying that this opinion by Gates represents an advancement on his PBS series in the sense that he did not say a single word about reparations in his six hours of documentary and he was called out on that. Now that he has commented on the issue, he has taken another step forward by limiting his conspiracy theory of slavery to the elites and not to all Africans as appeared to be the case in the Wonders when he asked ordinary Africans what it felt like to see a descendant of one of those that they supposedly sold long ago. These baby steps forward appear to be too little too late especially because he also took massive leaps backward by blaming Africans while calling for an end to the blame-game. What Gates left out and what the discussion is ignoring is that Africans fought against slavery as much as they could, a fact that historians narrate with indications that women fought as bravely as the men to prevent our people from being captured during the raids. Once we give credit to African masses as the warriors against slavery that they were, then we realize that the demand for reparations is neither a game nor a blame-game as Gates and his critics seem to imply. I disagree with Henry Louis Gates Jr. because his title implies that the demand for reparations is a ‘blame-game’: it is not a game at all, it is a struggle for justice which every other racial group that suffered historic wrongs has waged with relative success except people of African descent, due mainly to racism. Secondly, it is not about apportioning blame because Africans are not interested in punishing those who enslaved our people, we are more interested in healing the festering wounds of slavery that people of African descent continue to suffer worldwide.
I also disagree with Gates when he
suggests that
Africans sold their own people into slavery. On the contrary, the Trans
Atlantic Slavery was not a trade but a plunder in which a few members of
the
elite joined their European allies to terrorize fellow Africans. The
majority
of Africans fought against slavery in wars that were documented by even
European historians, according to Walter Rodney. Many of us were raised in Africa by parents who were never enslaved because their parents fought fiercely to prevent them from being captured and enslaved. So just like African-Americans, those of us whom Ali Mazrui calls African-Africans are also survivors of the African holocaust. Today, a few elite Africans still rob fellow Africans blind and stash the loot in Europe and North America and just as in the past, the vast majority of Africans are activists against the modern slavery that our people still suffer while those of us fortunate to be abroad try to cushion the pain with the remittances that outpace foreign aid by miles. As an African, I share the shame of brother Henry Louis Gates Jr. as he addresses this issue that some of my Diaspora Africana students (in the US and in the Caribbean) sometimes pose with passion; ‘were you not the people who sold us?’ Of course not, when we see you, we see fellow survivors for while you survived the war-crime raids, the genocidal middle passage, the rapacious plantations and Jim Crow lynch mobs, we survived the Holocaustal slave raids, murderous colonization, genocidal civil wars and slavish kleptocracy. As a person of African descent, Gates is entitled to wail with Peter Tosh and Bob Marley, ‘Look how long, 400 years, and my people still can’t see….’
But as a highly privileged scholar, Gates should help the
Arab, European, and American regions that benefitted from the African holocaust
to see that they owe reparations to people of African descent. Obama must not
leave office without initiating the Fund for Africana Reparations (FAR) with emphasis on
what I theorized elsewhere as ‘Reparative Justice’ with the acronym, DREAM:
democracy (unity government for Africans at home and abroad and the abolition of racist laws that
cause the disproportionate incarceration of Africans), reparations (obligated
funding, not just optional aid), education (admission and funding set-asides,
not just affirmative action that women and other minorities also enjoy),
apology (more like the one from Congress will not hurt, but a global commemoration of Slavery Emancipation Day as a public holiday will be in order), and (visa-free)
movement for Africans (other groups appear to enjoy this without earning the right the way Africans did). No individual American, European or Arab will have to
lose anything or pay any extra tax to make slavery reparations happen and the
healing of Africans would benefit the whole world. No government on earth is returning money to taxpayers in these responsible regions and announcing that it is money saved from refusing to pay reparations to Africans. Gates is not the first to admit that African states also owe reparations to Africans (but not just for slavery) and they could start making such reparations by abolishing the colonial boundaries and constituting the People's Republic of Africa to help us start healing the wounds of slavery, racist colonialism, neo-colonialism and patriarchal imperialism.
Biko Agozino |
|
--- On Sun, 5/2/10, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote: |
Rex Marinus
"As an African, I share the shame of brother Henry Louis Gates Jr. as he addresses this issue that some of my Diaspora Africana students (in the US and in the Caribbean) sometimes pose with passion; ‘were you not the people who sold us?’ Of course not, when we see you, we see fellow survivors for while you survived the war-crime raids, the genocidal middle passage, the rapacious plantations and Jim Crow lynch mobs, we survived the Holocaustal slave raids, murderous colonization, genocidal civil wars and slavish kleptocracy. As a person of African descent, Gates is entitled to wail with Peter Tosh and Bob Marley, ‘Look how long, 400 years, and my people still can’t see….’ "
Biko, I preface my own statement on this question for my own students by saying that Africa's history of the past 500 years is markeed by the twin conditions of abduction and subjection. The end of the slave trade led to the beginnings of colonialism. Africans have always fought these conditions, and the reality of a segment of the African elite complicit in this rapine moments cannot translate into a general African complicity. African resistance even against a contemporary decimation of Africa's resources and pillage of her environment by rapacious western and increasingly Asian the (Chinese) multinationals , clearly demonstrates the situation that Africans have faced especially in the face of overwhelming technologies of terror deployed against them. We need to look at the situation in the Congo and Niger delta today as an example. We need to examine closely how these external powers/forces help to sustain conditions of African instability as a means of creating both incoherence and mastery using figures that I call their authentic "black legs," those that Chinweizu has described well in his seminal The West and the Rest of Us. The pattern of destabilization and subversion of the conscious African political leadership committed to rehabilitation of the African world even in the so-called post-imperial era also reflects the profound challenges that Africans have faced. This challenge only further highlights the ways that an indigenous segment of the African elite - the slavish kleptocrats - those funded and armed to fight these genocidal civil wars, maintain corrupt edifices of governments are only an extention of western political and commercial interests. They maintain their allied interests as a surrogate or rogue elite. Professor H. Louis Gates jnr therefore has failed to establish these simple connections. He has also failed to highlight indigenous African peoples resistance to both human and resource slavery whether four hundred years ago or today. He has not given voice to how communities in Africa dealt with slavers and created defence systems and pacts against slavery. He also fails to see how scholars like him help to perpetuate, by their own contemporary forms of complicity, the African tragedy.
Obi Nwakanma
_____________________ "If I don't learn to shut my mouth I'll soon go to hell, I, Okigbo, town-crier, together with my iron bell." --Christopher Okigbo
Date: Sun, 2 May 2010 11:40:51 -0700
From: biko...@yahoo.com
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Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
"How do we understand today's betrayals in Africa and the black world generally if we are too sensitive to peer comprehensively into our past and to
endure the momentary emotional discomfort of learning about the genealogy of "black on black" crime? .......... "(Ochonu)
"African groups kept slaves and enslaved Others for roughly the same broad reasons that other civilizations did: to have unrestrained access to their labor
product and/or to enhance their status or expand their harems. Why should there be a shame or embarrassment in writing Africa into this broad human
history?" (Ochonu)
'.......... for Henry Gates this is always a chameleon choreographed Black put down modality, which can find him at one time both putting down
Dr. Gloria T. Emeagwali
Prof. of History and African Studies
History Department
Central Connecticut State University
1615 Stanley Street
New Britain
CT 06050.
www.africahistory.net <http://www.africahistory.net/>
www.ccsu.edu/afstudy/archive.html <http://www.ccsu.edu/afstudy/archive.html>
________________________________
Sent: Sun 5/2/2010 5:57 PM
To: Naijapolitics; Lavonda Staples; Adeniran Adeboye; Rex Marinus Obi Nwakanma; Nowamagbe Omoigui; Osamede Wilberforce Uwensuyi-Edosomwan; Toyin Adepoju; Bimbola Adelakun; Naiwu Osahon
Cc: Emeagwali, Gloria (History); xok...@yahoo.com; usaafric...@googlegroups.com; Dr. Valentine Ojo; Abraham Madu; Emmanuel Babatunde; Rufus Orindare; IBK; Nnanna Agomoh; Mobolaji Aluko; Sandra Frempong
Subject: Re: [NaijaPolitics] Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the SlaveryBlame-Game; Louis Gates Sophistry
Ovbie Ada,
I feel Lavonda Staples as speaking from the heart. Her intervention is also not without intellectual verve. There were castes and social classes in pre colonial African societies but there were no ready supermarkets for human flesh in which we sold our own. The Arabs were involved in direct raids for captives whom they treated and sold as slaves across Asia while the European catalysed the ugly phenomenon by the supply and demand needs they brought to the continent in their bid to effect dominion over their new acquisitions in the new world that was the Americas. No doubt in both of these cases, you had African conscripts or collaborators, so? Treachery is a common human characteristic universal to all mankind and it should not in this instance, without more define the rest of us!
Again, one may ascribe many reasons to the impoverishment of our continent and its comparative prostrate position today to which the pre colonial trans Atlantic slave trade may be one of such. However, civilisations and their locales do rise and fall and Africa is no exception. Ever since Hegel propounded his theory of Dialectics, it had become easy to see and explain why changes and new situations occur from the eternal struggles between status quo and actions against status quo that thereby usher in new orders as a matter of necessity. However, not all changes from status quo result in higher orders. Decline may also result from alteration of status quo. Africa was great once, I have no doubt about this. In 2700 BCE over two millennia before Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (circa 427 BC) Ptah Hotep, Ipuwer and a host of other Egyptian philosophers and philosophisers were already propounding rarefied theories and interrogating issues in metaphysics, ethics mathematics and cosmology in their very own Egypt. The fact that emerging research revelations now ascribe many positions and ideas of many Greek icons like Plato and Aristotle to original Egyptian thought (in whose academies and temples many of them studied) has now raised the egyptological question in Philosophy. These are aside from the tech, architectural and engineering wonders that are the pyramids, temples, sphinxes, etc that evidence Egypt's and Africa's primal place in greatness past.
Now, I am personally not enthusiastic about celebrating the past TOO MUCH because there a is a tendency for us to over celebrate our past rather than focus and work on things that would bring us up to speed in the present tense (sense - if you choose). I said this much when Ras Menelik's victory over the foraging Italians at Adwa (Adowa) was being celebrated in these forums last year that the real tragedy for Abyssinia (Ethiopia) is one that she shares with the defunct Benin Empire. They have both tattered and declined almost into insignificance only now to be known for being the only African country that was never colonised (Ethiopia) and the nation of a rich anthropological past with its superior artwork dotting public and private museums the world over (Benin) - both in the past.
However, decline is not only peculiar to Africa or its groups for it is indeed a global characteristic of civilisations and peoples. The Sumerians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Mongolians, the Incas, the Mayans, the English (over whose empire at some time past the sun never set) - all declined after attaining their apogee. When one power goes down, another sprouts. Discerning historians are most probably at this time keenly observing the downward happenings in America as corresponding with the rise of the Chinese dragon with significant implications for emerging repose of global power. It is always the call for historians to explain the rise and fall of peoples, but that peoples do rise, peak and fall is a trite aspect of mankind, its civilisations and its peoples.
Reasonably therefore, rather than Gates', I believe its more like Philip Curtin stated - that African slaves offered comparatively, the cheapest source of the most pliable labour required for the New-World purposes of the caucasian entrepreneur. Given this entrepreneurial need, anything would have been done by European slavers to obtain slaves from Africa. Anyone who doubts this doesn't know about Portuguese cruelty in South-western and Eastern Africa. The European strategy in getting this "commodity" was a singular one of by-any-means-necessary i.e trade where convenient and war, pillaging and plunder where necessary. Tunde Obadina's take on Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cuguano must be seen in the perspective of this by-every-means-necessary strategy for the face of the real slaver to be revealed to the inquirer. They may have obtained Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cuguano by trade, but Tristiao d'Acunha and his Portuguese comrades and lieutenants in South-western and Eastern Africa didn't rely too much on liassez faire principles to obtain their "goods".
Gates is most probably troubled and confused on this matter of culpability for the evils and the un edifying nature of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and social psychologists may be better placed to explain his trauma. Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe may not be guiltless of some animus (giving his account of past brushes with Louis Gates) in ascribing Gates' recent ascertainment of his mixed race genome constitution through the acquisition of the Human Genome acquisition Technology (HGT) to his sophistry. Regardless of this, my take on the significance of this on Gates is that in spite of the fact that US law (unlike apartheid South Africa, Brazil and some other multi racial countries) declares him a negro, this definite tech confirmation of his part caucasoid ancestry impels him in deference to his assumed sense of fairness to "fairly" distribute the blame between both sets of his ancestors (Africoid and Caucasoid) for slavery. Those who may want to disagree with this take should be well served to be mindful of the fact that highly acclaimed intelligent (even brilliant) people are not beyond primordial foibles.
Ovbie Ada, that's it from me on this Gates fella and his slavery blame game faux pas.
Domo o,
CUE
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN
________________________________
From: Adeniran Adeboye <aade...@mac.com>
Date: Sun, 02 May 2010 01:01:52 -0400
To: Lavonda Staples<lrst...@gmail.com>
Cc: Emeagwali, Gloria (History)<emea...@mail.ccsu.edu>; <xok...@yahoo.com>; <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>; <val...@md.metrocast.net>; Abraham Madu<abraha...@yahoo.com>; Bimbola Adelakun<adunn...@yahoo.com>; Emmanuel Babatunde<babemm...@gmail.com>; Rufus Orindare<bato...@att.net>; Ibukunolu Babajide<i...@usa.net>; Nnanna Agomoh<mnag...@yahoo.com>; <naijap...@yahoogroups.com>; <alu...@gmail.com>
Subject: [NaijaPolitics] Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
I believe that Prof Gates got his high school diploma before he was 31, BUT you might not know so.
Adeniran Adeboye
On May 2, 2010, at 12:44 AM, Lavonda Staples wrote:
First and foremost, honours to Dr. Gloria, she fights the good fight on behalf of all of us MA's, minorities, women, and other folks who don't matter.
Short note: If I am not complaining about slavery then why is Henry Gates making such a fuss? I can tell you this much, I am directly related to Staples in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a well as Gospel and Blues. My surname has been taken all over the world. Even though I didn't get a high school diploma until 31, my words have been published in Lagos, Nigeria. My friends come from the entire continent. I take it as a personal offense, fighting words, if someone says that my brothers and sisters across the water are to blame for the troubles that befell us since 1440. We are not to blame. Who would dare blame those bend in the force of the maelstrom??? Dr. Gates. That's who.
What do I teach my students? I say this, "the tribes go up and the tribes go down." I let them know that NO civilization is incapable of falling. Dr. Gates has fallen to his knees in worship of a colorless god. That's all. Nothing more and nothing less.
What's got us and me and we so angry? He has taken the time to place blame on someone, an entity, a group which is without defense and needs no defense. He is a bully.
In the hood, when I was growing up, there was a remedy for bullies. A bigger ass kicking from a bigger bully.
Let's pray to all the loa and our God that he finds his remedy.
Professor La Vonda R. Staples (until May 11, 2010)
www.ccsu.edu/afstudy/archive.html <http://www.ccsu.edu/afstudy/archive.html> <http://www.ccsu.edu/afstudy/archive.html <http://www.ccsu.edu/afstudy/archive.html> >
________________________________
From: xok...@yahoo.com <mailto:xok...@yahoo.com> [mailto:xok...@yahoo.com <mailto:xok...@yahoo.com> ]
Sent: Sat 5/1/2010 10:34 AM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com> ; val...@md.metrocast.net <mailto:val...@md.metrocast.net>
Cc: Emeagwali, Gloria (History); Adeniran Adeboye; Abraham Madu; Bimbola Adelakun; Emmanuel Babatunde; Rufus Orindare; Ibukunolu Babajide; Lavonda Staples; Nnanna Agomoh; naijap...@yahoogroups.com <mailto:naijap...@yahoogroups.com> ; alu...@gmail.com <mailto:alu...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
Oga Pius!
I won't lie, this your biography of Ikhide had me rolling on the floor, writhing with abi na in laughter. You sir, you are a genius. You are one funny dude, I won't lie.
I do wish I was as intellectually powerful as Citizen Ochonu; look at how he has tied every one of you in your own knots. I mean, everywhere I look for miles, there are all these anti-Gates scholars, felled by mere words, na wa O! Man, when I grow up, I want to be like Mazi Ochonu ;-))))))) I mean, nothing that is thrown at his ideas sticks, nothing! Our forefathers did some really bad things; we must acknowledge this, as part of our history. Just as their offspring are doing some really bad things today. Obasanjo... El-Rufai... Ribadu... IBB... Go and watch the BBC's new documentary Welcome to Lagos and you will find enough rage in you to focus on the right things. As long as liberal thinkers continue to patronize us as if we are cute lovable beings, lacking the complexity to be responsible for our own failings, we will continue to be stuck where we are today. In the cesspool of irrelevance.
Reparations for me is an expensive distraction. I am not impressed. The truth of the matter is that today, we are witnessing modern day slavery in our African "countries" to use that term loosely. Nigeria is the most visible example of black-on-black crime unleashed on a beautiful people. In the past 11 years, Obasanjo and his elite thugs, El-Rufai and Nuhu Ribadu have converted all of Nigeria into a big Otta Farm, with Nigerians as serfs if not slaves. The looting under their ruthless leadership has been so massive, it will take decades to repatriate all the stolen money. Pius, your very good friend El-Rufai is back in Nigeria today. You have written tomes in praise of that man and dismissed critics of his heinous activities as yeye people. If you can support that jerk, you might as well go be IBB's chief of staff. Go look at what EL Rufai has done to Abuja. He and his goons basically divided up the land among the rich and shoved the poor into the marshes of Abuja's edge. Our leaders should be shot. When young energetic intellectuals like you ignore noble ideals then perhaps there is no hope. That, my friend, is the real problem. We must dream big, and then worry about the constraints later. El-Rufai is back. I pray that Ribadu comes back. Things must get worse before they get better.
Be well. And keep it coming. We are listening!
- Ikhide
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
________________________________
Date: Sat, 1 May 2010 06:34:43 -0700 (PDT)
To: <usaafric...@googlegroups.com <mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com> >; <val...@md.metrocast.net <mailto:val...@md.metrocast.net> >
Cc: <xok...@yahoo.com <mailto:xok...@yahoo.com> >; <emea...@mail.ccsu.edu <mailto:emea...@mail.ccsu.edu> >; Adeniran Adeboye<aade...@mac.com <mailto:aade...@mac.com> >; Abraham Madu<abraha...@yahoo.com <mailto:abraha...@yahoo.com> >; Bimbola Adelakun<adunn...@yahoo.com <mailto:adunn...@yahoo.com> >; Emmanuel Babatunde<babemm...@gmail.com <mailto:babemm...@gmail.com> >; Rufus Orindare<bato...@att.net <mailto:bato...@att.net> >; Ibukunolu Babajide<i...@usa.net>; Lavonda Staples<lrst...@gmail.com <mailto:lrst...@gmail.com> >; Nnanna Agomoh<mnag...@yahoo.com <mailto:mnag...@yahoo.com> >; <naijap...@yahoogroups.com <mailto:naijap...@yahoogroups.com> >; <alu...@gmail.com <mailto:alu...@gmail.com> >
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
Oga Ojo:
You must understand and sympathize with my broda, Ikhide. He has this jejune conception of oppositional discourse that is completely underwritten by his knee-jerk scoffs at scholars, scholarly practice, and scholarship. He pretends to have found an Archimedean point to diss, dissmiss, disrespect, scoff at the language, protocols, and manners of knowledge production and those who do it.
No be today I know Ikhide and his strategies. Once Ikhide is able to lump every scholar from Gloria Emeagwali to Abdul Rasheed Na'Allah into that basket of condescension to prove that he is not predisposed to go with what he regularly misconstrues as "the bandwagon" (rather than free minds having a consensus), he manufactures the exception for the occasion - today, it is Moses; in the past, it has been Ken Harrow, Obi Nwakanma, Tony Agbali, even yours truly. He has an one size fits all agbada that he decks on his manufactured exception for the occasion. This explains why Moses is writing greater prose than Chinua Achebe in Ikhide estimation today. Tomorrow, he will manufacture Moses's replacement in another thread and declare him or her master of the verb while dissing the person's constituency.
This is not something that Moses is unaware of, so he can't possibly get carried away by Ikhide's trademark. Latching on to Moses's carefully-articulated opposition (which I disagree with) while delegitimising the scholarly constiuency of the same Moses is one trademark strategy that Ikhide imagines sexy! The funny point, Oga Ojo, is that way too many of those scoffing and dismissing people probably first ever heard about Gates within the last two years - especially after the arrest imborglio leading to the beer summit. Yet, here they are, dissing those who belong in Gates's field and have been reading him and his politics for years.
Ikhide is treating Ama like he doesn't know what he is saying. Ama who has been reading and following Gates over beer since our Ibadan years in the SUB with the likes of my foolish brother, Ogbuefi Nwakanma. And just imagine the infuriating dismissal of Abdul Rasheed Na'Allah - who was writing years ago in reaction to Wonders of the African World. Professor Emeagwali merely posted Na'Allah's old intervention to show filiation - I believe to let Moses know that he is not making strong enough a point to disavow that continuum. Ikhide rushes in abusing Na'Allah's scholarship! Let the point be made again: Lavonda's submission is brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant.
Let Ikhide go and write his letter of apology to Gates and stop trying too hard to play notice me compulsive-obsessive opposition - the sort that seems to scream: make una come see me o. I can diss these so-called scholars and their yeye vocation. If you must do it, have valid reasons for it.
Pius
======================================================================
" You need patience and ability to celebrate small wins or you will get frustrated. Every small win is another step towards to the ultimate goal.We need to apply the same learnings to Nigeria. 50 year rot is not going to disappear at a go. We just have to keep pushing. Celebrate little victories like getting rid of Iwu; when we lose, dust up ourselves and get on with it; keep our eyes on the ball.." - Pastor Joe Attueyi
From: Dr. Valentine Ojo <val...@md.metrocast.net <mailto:val...@md.metrocast.net> >
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Cc: xok...@yahoo.com <mailto:xok...@yahoo.com> , emea...@mail.ccsu.edu <mailto:emea...@mail.ccsu.edu> , "Adeniran Adeboye" <aade...@mac.com <mailto:aade...@mac.com> >, "Abraham Madu" <abraha...@yahoo.com <mailto:abraha...@yahoo.com> >, "Bimbola Adelakun" <adunn...@yahoo.com <mailto:adunn...@yahoo.com> >, "Emmanuel Babatunde" <babemm...@gmail.com <mailto:babemm...@gmail.com> >, "Rufus Orindare" <bato...@att.net <mailto:bato...@att.net> >, "Ibukunolu Babajide" <i...@usa.net>, "Lavonda Staples" <lrst...@gmail.com <mailto:lrst...@gmail.com> >, "Nnanna Agomoh" <mnag...@yahoo.com <mailto:mnag...@yahoo.com> >, "Pius Adesanmi" <piusad...@yahoo.com <mailto:piusad...@yahoo.com> >
Date: Saturday, 1 May, 2010, 6:05
Ikhide:
Then what are you responding to, if you do not understand most of his sentences?,
Really?
And what is this:
Deep and brilliant scholarship on your part?
And this:
Is this scholarship - or mere empty verbosity?
And I suppose this bier-parlor yabice is the conclusion of a genius and an intellectual giant?
What is the difference between your deposition herr, and what you are arrogantly dismissing as "there is nothing brilliant in her outburst. It is basically the same garden variety e gba mi wailing of my people: short on substance but long on the cringe-worthy wailing?"
On your own stipulated parameter, I would rate your own OUTBURST here by far lower - or by any intellectual parameter for that meter - "short on substance but long on the cringe-worthy wailing" of an utterly confused African.
Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD
http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/SlaveTrade/collection/large/LCP-13.JPG <http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/SlaveTrade/collection/large/LCP-13.JPG>
Ikhide, Gloria, and other Colleagues:
Is this kind of discussion we are conducting her not really part of the PROBLEM - and I do not mean being pro or anti Skip Gates here. I suppose both sides have merits, but that's for another time. But the manner in which it is being conducted - at loggerheads with each other!
But guys, lets' get REAL!
Can any of us imagine Jewish intellectuals - whether Israeli Jews or Jews residing outside Israel like American or European Jews - on Jewish forums, arguing among themselves as to whether the Germans were culpable in, and to be held responsible for the so-called Jewish Holocaust where some 6 million Jews were said to have perished, regardless of what the Jews may have done to "provoke" the Germans (and some of you should take the time off to read the German side of the story, and I don't mean Mein Kampf alone), and of Jews that may actually have colluded with Germans to betray or help exterminate fellow Jews?
We are here talking of Africa losing some estimated 100 million Africans over a period of some 200 years to the peculiar institution of European Chattel Slavery in Africans!
This kind of rigid wall and academic sophistry between the PROS and CONS is not not helping our case on either side of the Atlantic - and we do have a case! It is merely hardening the DIFFERENCES between us as peoples of African origin who suffered from the EFFECTS of European chattel slavery on Africa and Africans, regardless of the degree of involvement or participation of some - but not all - of our own African peoples!!
Why for example should it be unhelpful to state that " Africans practiced a kind of servitude before the European intrusion...but the degree of callousness of the European enslavement of Africans was unknown to Africans?"
TRUE or FALSE - YES or NO?
This should be the concern of our academic researches! We have a need to know the TRUTH as much as possible, and not merely swayed by a pro or anti Skip Gates flood of emotion!
That is UNSCHOLARLY!
That is QUACKERY disguised as SCHOLARSHIP!!!
Today, we are again living witnesses of a repeat performance in our African "rulers" again selling African resources to Americans, Europeans, Asians for NAUGHT!
Those who fail to learn from their history...
Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD
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Biko Agozino
| Brother Obi, ezi okwu ka I kwuku (true talk is what you said). Ezi okwu bu ndu (Good talk is life). The emphasis that you place on exogenous factors is really important. But note that it was challenged by Museveni in his presentation to the 7th Pan African Congress in Kampala, 1994, just before the outbreak of the Rwanda genocide. He said that we should ask questions about African internal weaknesses that made all those past and present wrongs possible. Babu had responded almost immediately by making a distinction between primary and secondary contradictions and underscored that imperialism remained the primary contradiction to be prioritized in our search for solutions, as many people will insist. The danger of over emphasizing the foreign causes is that it encourages dependency in the search for solutions while emphasizing internal options of Africans
makes for greater optimism. As the motto of the 7th Pan African Congress has it, Do Not Agonize, Organize! What I am suggesting is that we must make clear that our constitution of the Peoples Republic of African would not threaten the interests of any group of people or nation as we will most likely continue to live all over Africa and all the world in harmony with our neighbors. There is a bogeyman notion of reparations implicit in Gates opinion as if it represents a threat to white interests. The fact remains that white people have nothing to lose just because black people are finally paid the reparations due. On the contrary, the increased peace, health, wealth and happiness of Africans would benefit the whole world as Africans are able to share more with the whole world. Reparations are not punitive justice but reparative justice, the emphasis is on doing something for the victimized and not doing something against the victimizers. Biko --- On Sun, 5/2/10, Rex Marinus <rexma...@hotmail.com> wrote: |
Adeniran Adeboye
Ovbie Ada,
I feel Lavonda Staples as speaking from the heart. Her intervention is also not without intellectual verve. There were castes and social classes in pre colonial African societies but there were no ready supermarkets for human flesh in which we sold our own. The Arabs were involved in direct raids for captives whom they treated and sold as slaves across Asia while the European catalysed the ugly phenomenon by the supply and demand needs they brought to the continent in their bid to effect dominion over their new acquisitions in the new world that was the Americas. No doubt in both of these cases, you had African conscripts or collaborators, so? Treachery is a common human characteristic universal to all mankind and it should not in this instance, without more define the rest of us!
Again, one may ascribe many reasons to the impoverishment of our continent and its comparative prostrate position today to which the pre colonial trans Atlantic slave trade may be one of such. However, civilisations and their locales do rise and fall and Africa is no exception. Ever since Hegel propounded his theory of Dialectics, it had become easy to see and explain why changes and new situations occur from the eternal struggles between status quo and actions against status quo that thereby usher in new orders as a matter of necessity. However, not all changes from status quo result in higher orders. Decline may also result from alteration of status quo. Africa was great once, I have no doubt about this. In 2700 BCE over two millennia before Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (circa 427 BC) Ptah Hotep, Ipuwer and a host of other Egyptian philosophers and philosophisers were already propounding rarefied theories and interrogating issues in metaphysics, ethics mathematics and cosmology in their very own Egypt. The fact that emerging research revelations now ascribe many positions and ideas of many Greek icons like Plato and Aristotle to original Egyptian thought (in whose academies and temples many of them studied) has now raised the egyptological question in Philosophy. These are aside from the tech, architectural and engineering wonders that are the pyramids, temples, sphinxes, etc that evidence Egypt's and Africa's primal place in greatness past.
Now, I am personally not enthusiastic about celebrating the past TOO MUCH because there a is a tendency for us to over celebrate our past rather than focus and work on things that would bring us up to speed in the present tense (sense - if you choose). I said this much when Ras Menelik's victory over the foraging Italians at Adwa (Adowa) was being celebrated in these forums last year that the real tragedy for Abyssinia (Ethiopia) is one that she shares with the defunct Benin Empire. They have both tattered and declined almost into insignificance only now to be known for being the only African country that was never colonised (Ethiopia) and the nation of a rich anthropological past with its superior artwork dotting public and private museums the world over (Benin) - both in the past.
However, decline is not only peculiar to Africa or its groups for it is indeed a global characteristic of civilisations and peoples. The Sumerians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Mongolians, the Incas, the Mayans, the English (over whose empire at some time past the sun never set) - all declined after attaining their apogee. When one power goes down, another sprouts. Discerning historians are most probably at this time keenly observing the downward happenings in America as corresponding with the rise of the Chinese dragon with significant implications for emerging repose of global power. It is always the call for historians to explain the rise and fall of peoples, but that peoples do rise, peak and fall is a trite aspect of mankind, its civilisations and its peoples.
Reasonably therefore, rather than Gates', I believe its more like Philip Curtin stated - that African slaves offered comparatively, the cheapest source of the most pliable labour required for the New-World purposes of the caucasian entrepreneur. Given this entrepreneurial need, anything would have been done by European slavers to obtain slaves from Africa. Anyone who doubts this doesn't know about Portuguese cruelty in South-western and Eastern Africa. The European strategy in getting this "commodity" was a singular one of by-any-means-necessary i.e trade where convenient and war, pillaging and plunder where necessary. Tunde Obadina's take on Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cuguano must be seen in the perspective of this by-every-means-necessary strategy for the face of the real slaver to be revealed to the inquirer. They may have obtained Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cuguano by trade, but Tristiao d'Acunha and his Portuguese comrades and lieutenants in South-western and Eastern Africa didn't rely too much on liassez faire principles to obtain their "goods".
Gates is most probably troubled and confused on this matter of culpability for the evils and the un edifying nature of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and social psychologists may be better placed to explain his trauma. Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe may not be guiltless of some animus (giving his account of past brushes with Louis Gates) in ascribing Gates' recent ascertainment of his mixed race genome constitution through the acquisition of the Human Genome acquisition Technology (HGT) to his sophistry. Regardless of this, my take on the significance of this on Gates is that in spite of the fact that US law (unlike apartheid South Africa, Brazil and some other multi racial countries) declares him a negro, this definite tech confirmation of his part caucasoid ancestry impels him in deference to his assumed sense of fairness to "fairly" distribute the blame between both sets of his ancestors (Africoid and Caucasoid) for slavery. Those who may want to disagree with this take should be well served to be mindful of the fact that highly acclaimed intelligent (even brilliant) people are not beyond primordial foibles.
Ovbie Ada, that's it from me on this Gates fella and his slavery blame game faux pas.
Domo o,
CUESent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN
From: Adeniran Adeboye <aade...@mac.com>Date: Sun, 02 May 2010 01:01:52 -0400To: Lavonda Staples<lrst...@gmail.com>
Cc: Emeagwali, Gloria (History)<emea...@mail.ccsu.edu>; <xok...@yahoo.com>; <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>; <val...@md.metrocast.net>; Abraham Madu<abraha...@yahoo.com>; Bimbola Adelakun<adunn...@yahoo.com>; Emmanuel Babatunde<babemm...@gmail.com>; Rufus Orindare<bato...@att.net>; Ibukunolu Babajide<i...@usa.net>; Nnanna Agomoh<mnag...@yahoo.com>; <naijap...@yahoogroups.com>; <alu...@gmail.com>Subject: [NaijaPolitics] Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
I believe that Prof Gates got his high school diploma before he was 31, BUT you might not know so.
Adeniran Adeboye
On May 2, 2010, at 12:44 AM, Lavonda Staples wrote:
From: xokigbo@yahoo.com [mailto:xokigbo@yahoo.com]
Sent: Sat 5/1/2010 10:34 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com; val...@md.metrocast.net
Cc: Emeagwali, Gloria (History); Adeniran Adeboye; Abraham Madu; Bimbola Adelakun; Emmanuel Babatunde; Rufus Orindare; Ibukunolu Babajide; Lavonda Staples; Nnanna Agomoh; naijapolitics@yahoogroups.com; alukome@gmail.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
Oga Pius!
I won't lie, this your biography of Ikhide had me rolling on the floor, writhing with abi na in laughter. You sir, you are a genius. You are one funny dude, I won't lie.
I do wish I was as intellectually powerful as Citizen Ochonu; look at how he has tied every one of you in your own knots. I mean, everywhere I look for miles, there are all these anti-Gates scholars, felled by mere words, na wa O! Man, when I grow up, I want to be like Mazi Ochonu ;-))))))) I mean, nothing that is thrown at his ideas sticks, nothing! Our forefathers did some really bad things; we must acknowledge this, as part of our history. Just as their offspring are doing some really bad things today. Obasanjo... El-Rufai... Ribadu... IBB... Go and watch the BBC's new documentary Welcome to Lagos and you will find enough rage in you to focus on the right things. As long as liberal thinkers continue to patronize us as if we are cute lovable beings, lacking the complexity to be responsible for our own failings, we will continue to be stuck where we are today. In the cesspool of irrelevance.
Reparations for me is an expensive distraction. I am not impressed. The truth of the matter is that today, we are witnessing modern day slavery in our African "countries" to use that term loosely. Nigeria is the most visible example of black-on-black crime unleashed on a beautiful people. In the past 11 years, Obasanjo and his elite thugs, El-Rufai and Nuhu Ribadu have converted all of Nigeria into a big Otta Farm, with Nigerians as serfs if not slaves. The looting under their ruthless leadership has been so massive, it will take decades to repatriate all the stolen money. Pius, your very good friend El-Rufai is back in Nigeria today. You have written tomes in praise of that man and dismissed critics of his heinous activities as yeye people. If you can support that jerk, you might as well go be IBB's chief of staff. Go look at what EL Rufai has done to Abuja. He and his goons basically divided up the land among the rich and shoved the poor into the marshes of Abuja's edge. Our leaders should be shot. When young energetic intellectuals like you ignore noble ideals then perhaps there is no hope. That, my friend, is the real problem. We must dream big, and then worry about the constraints later. El-Rufai is back. I pray that Ribadu comes back. Things must get worse before they get better.
Be well. And keep it coming. We are listening!
- Ikhide
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
________________________________
From: Pius Adesanmi <piusadesanmi@yahoo.com>
Date: Sat, 1 May 2010 06:34:43 -0700 (PDT)
To: <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>; <val...@md.metrocast.net>
Cc: <xokigbo@yahoo.com>; <emeagwali@mail.ccsu.edu>; Adeniran Adeboye<aadeboye@mac.com>; Abraham Madu<abraham.madu@yahoo.com>; Bimbola Adelakun<adunnibabe@yahoo.com>; Emmanuel Babatunde<babemman2000@gmail.com>; Rufus Orindare<batokkinc@att.net>; Ibukunolu Babajide<i...@usa.net>; Lavonda Staples<lrstaples@gmail.com>; Nnanna Agomoh<mnagomoh@yahoo.com>; <naijapolitics@yahoogroups.com>; <alukome@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
Oga Ojo:
You must understand and sympathize with my broda, Ikhide. He has this jejune conception of oppositional discourse that is completely underwritten by his knee-jerk scoffs at scholars, scholarly practice, and scholarship. He pretends to have found an Archimedean point to diss, dissmiss, disrespect, scoff at the language, protocols, and manners of knowledge production and those who do it.
No be today I know Ikhide and his strategies. Once Ikhide is able to lump every scholar from Gloria Emeagwali to Abdul Rasheed Na'Allah into that basket of condescension to prove that he is not predisposed to go with what he regularly misconstrues as "the bandwagon" (rather than free minds having a consensus), he manufactures the exception for the occasion - today, it is Moses; in the past, it has been Ken Harrow, Obi Nwakanma, Tony Agbali, even yours truly. He has an one size fits all agbada that he decks on his manufactured exception for the occasion. This explains why Moses is writing greater prose than Chinua Achebe in Ikhide estimation today. Tomorrow, he will manufacture Moses's replacement in another thread and declare him or her master of the verb while dissing the person's constituency.
This is not something that Moses is unaware of, so he can't possibly get carried away by Ikhide's trademark. Latching on to Moses's carefully-articulated opposition (which I disagree with) while delegitimising the scholarly constiuency of the same Moses is one trademark strategy that Ikhide imagines sexy! The funny point, Oga Ojo, is that way too many of those scoffing and dismissing people probably first ever heard about Gates within the last two years - especially after the arrest imborglio leading to the beer summit. Yet, here they are, dissing those who belong in Gates's field and have been reading him and his politics for years.
Ikhide is treating Ama like he doesn't know what he is saying. Ama who has been reading and following Gates over beer since our Ibadan years in the SUB with the likes of my foolish brother, Ogbuefi Nwakanma. And just imagine the infuriating dismissal of Abdul Rasheed Na'Allah - who was writing years ago in reaction to Wonders of the African World. Professor Emeagwali merely posted Na'Allah's old intervention to show filiation - I believe to let Moses know that he is not making strong enough a point to disavow that continuum. Ikhide rushes in abusing Na'Allah's scholarship! Let the point be made again: Lavonda's submission is brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant.
Let Ikhide go and write his letter of apology to Gates and stop trying too hard to play notice me compulsive-obsessive opposition - the sort that seems to scream: make una come see me o. I can diss these so-called scholars and their yeye vocation. If you must do it, have valid reasons for it.
Pius
======================================================================
" You need patience and ability to celebrate small wins or you will get frustrated. Every small win is another step towards to the ultimate goal.We need to apply the same learnings to Nigeria. 50 year rot is not going to disappear at a go. We just have to keep pushing. Celebrate little victories like getting rid of Iwu; when we lose, dust up ourselves and get on with it; keep our eyes on the ball.." - Pastor Joe Attueyi
--- On Sat, 1/5/10, Dr. Valentine Ojo <val...@md.metrocast.net> wrote:
From: Dr. Valentine Ojo <val...@md.metrocast.net>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Cc: xokigbo@yahoo.com, emeagwali@mail.ccsu.edu, "Adeniran Adeboye" <aadeboye@mac.com>, "Abraham Madu" <abraham.madu@yahoo.com>, "Bimbola Adelakun" <adunnibabe@yahoo.com>, "Emmanuel Babatunde" <babemman2000@gmail.com>, "Rufus Orindare" <batokkinc@att.net>, "Ibukunolu Babajide" <i...@usa.net>, "Lavonda Staples" <lrstaples@gmail.com>, "Nnanna Agomoh" <mnagomoh@yahoo.com>, "Pius Adesanmi" <piusadesanmi@yahoo.com>
Date: Saturday, 1 May, 2010, 6:05
"I did not understand most of your sentences. Some of the words are longer than sentences. Too brainy for me" - xokigbo@yahoo.com
Ikhide:
Then what are you responding to, if you do not understand most of his sentences?,
"Let us however not patronize Ms. Lavonda Staples; there is nothing brilliant in her outburst. It is basically the same garden variety e gba mi wailing of my people: short on substance but long on the cringe-worthy wailing that white liberals love to dance to" - xokigbo@yahoo.com
Really?
And what is this:
"Now, they are saying, ah, so we sold slaves to the white man, we hung slaves, we used them as human sacrifice, but don't you understand, the white man came and took our brothers and sisters away!" -xokigbo@yahoo.com
Deep and brilliant scholarship on your part?
And this:
"As Ochonu has so expertly put it, all our friends needed to do was to warn everybody to put Gates' new thesis in the context of his priors. And even then I would not change my views. The man is speaking truth to power. More power to him." - xokigbo@yahoo.com
Is this scholarship - or mere empty verbosity?
"And Citizen Ochonu, owner of pretty words, you sting like a bee, you float like a butterfly, there are historians and there are historians, you, you are a double historian! I salute you ojare, ajanaku!" -xokigbo@yahoo.com
And I suppose this bier-parlor yabice is the conclusion of a genius and an intellectual giant?
What is the difference between your deposition herr, and what you are arrogantly dismissing as "there is nothing brilliant in her outburst. It is basically the same garden variety e gba mi wailing of my people: short on substance but long on the cringe-worthy wailing?"
On your own stipulated parameter, I would rate your own OUTBURST here by far lower - or by any intellectual parameter for that meter - "short on substance but long on the cringe-worthy wailing" of an utterly confused African.
Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD
On Fri 04/30/10 8:25 PM , xokigbo@yahoo.com sent:
On Wed 04/28/10 8:54 PM , xokigbo@yahoo.com <http://uk.mc1103.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=xokigbo@yahoo.com> sent:
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kenneth harrow
i am not trying to nail soyinka to the cross. i've taught his works for longer than any other african author, since 1975 anyway, and admired his work greatly. but not everything he has said. his attacks on affirmative action, on what he called political correctness at a time when such attacks were aligned against those seeking to enhance black admissions to the univeristy or jobs, well, that was not progressive for me. that was the substance of one of his keynotes at asa some years ago. should we forget about his adherence to a liberal agenda that placed him at odds with a radical agenda? please feel free to attack my positions, and we can discuss them. i view soyinka as another human being, not a god to be admired. though i can admire most of his writings, and much of his actions, he is not above criticism--especially with his recent anti-muslim tirades and his anti-communist attacks.
i wonder what there is subtextual about my remarks concerning slavery. i don't think of responsibility for things like the holocaust or slavery in terms of the actors' identities, but of the systems that created them. i think of slavery as ensconced in world trade systems, and the people who encouraged and profited from that trade were brutal; many saw the suffering that was caused, and persisted--on both sides of the atlantic, on both sides of the sahara, on both sides of the east coast. why was that?
something about what people will tolerate, especially if they see a profit in it for themselves.
the holocaust developed as well from a fascist system that used propaganda to enable a radical nationalist project to seize hold of a population. i am sure people were demonized in both cases--the jewish holocaust, the black holocaust-- so as to enable the actors to live with themselves. the effects of that demonization against black people has not ended. nor has it really ended for the jews.
when i was little, i learned to hate the germans. now i prefer to fight against the conditions that make fascism possible. the same is true for the slave trade, for slavery--past and present.
were there people and institutions that dominated that trade and made it possible? yes. they might well be blamed for perpetuating misery and oppression; what good is learning about it if we can't put that learning to practice today. that's my hidden agenda.
ken harrow
Dr. Valentine Ojo
I have been one of your major critics on this forum, and on the present topic.
Now, you are beginning to write like a true professor of English - you are stating your points plainly and not in the obtuse "riddle me this" manner of yon.
I appreciate that. I now understand better where you are coming from though I may not necessarily agree with your slant on some. But that's beside the point.
I just wanted to state that you are expressing yourself more clearly, though I still have a serious issue with your penchant to write everything in lower case. Too stressful to try to speed-read...
Guess you can't win them all!
I find your comments about Wole Soyinka - who I knew personally and with whom I worked - very interesting.
Wole Soyinka is a good person, but Wole Soyinka is about Wole Soyinka - and not about "his adherence to a liberal agenda that placed him at odds with a radical agenda" nor about "i view soyinka as another human being, not a god to be admired. though i can admire most of his writings, and much of his actions, he is not above criticism--especially with his recent anti-muslim tirades and his anti-communist attacks."
Wole Soyinka is not "a man of the people", despite his seeming liberal and progressive agendas and writings.
However, this is TRAIT shared by virtually all of Africa's "intellectual gems", including Ali Mazrui and even Skip Gates and Chinua Achebe (Ngugi wa Ntiogo I am not so sure...), but virtually all of Africa's intellectual and literary idols, including even those who are merely of African origin like Skip Gates and Cornell West.
And that's what they are, IDOLS that have a small circle of devout disciples to whom they can never be wrong, and they dare never be criticized!
And everyone else is expected to simply join the queue in adoration, and subscribe to the credo of faith!
These CLAY IDOLS are in the meantime busy carrying out their own agenda, in the arrogant assumption that their agenda is also the agenda of the people.
That's the same mentality that African rulers have displayed. They alone know what's best for the people, even when they are merely carrying out personal agendas like Abacha, Babangida, Mobutu, Mugabe, Museveni, you name them!
The same mentality many of our intellectual peers and participants in the current discussion have also displayed - "I alone understand what's at stake here; the rest of you except for maybe a handful just don't get it!'
Could there possibly be something genetic or cultural about all this?
Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD
On Sun 05/02/10 8:47 PM , kenneth harrow har...@msu.edu sent:
xok...@yahoo.com
It is beyond ridiculous, it is racist. This is the problem that some of us have. In the rush for dollars, some of our intellectuals are buying into this nonsense about our sub-humanity. To refer to *several* highly organized nations as errand boys and attempt to excuse them from their crimes, is to me the height of racism and I don't care the color of the author. "Hey look, those cute Africans, they were simply doing the bidding of The Man!" Do these people even listen to themselves? If those "errand boys" were white, they would be referred to as awesome fire spitting nations who came to abduct and steal "poor, cute Africans." With friends like these, who needs slavemasters? Some of us actually read these things, you know.
I am quite frankly appalled, but not surprised by the dismal quality of the bulk of what I have read so far from the pro-reparations scholars. One senses a culture of entitlement - just give me the money, I don't have time to argue the facts! The reparations movement is an incoherent minstrel show populated mostly by hustlers and weak scholars hobbled by their ancient ideas. And folks wonder why they have not gotten a penny from their intended victims.
Some of our African colleagues braying reparations have built an academic tenure out of this and so it is understandable, their rage at being questioned. I am saying, take a deep breath, in the face of formidable competition, go back to the drawing board and try something new. Leave your dusty cob-web ridden PhD thesis behind. You can do it.
And listen to them read to me the ancient scrolls of mostly dead and dying Western scholars. Not one African scholar is quoted sensibly, not one. That is embarrassing, appalling, actually. They keep shoving poorly written nonsense after poorly thought out nonsense in my face, "oya, here, read this, Gates is wrong!" Na wa O!
For me, regardless of the debate, reparations is an expensive distraction. As we speak, our black leaders, egged on by some of our black hustler-intellectuals are busy raping and pillaging our continent. Let us turn our rage on them. We are human beings; we should accept responsibility for our destiny. Why, O, why, are Obasanjo and Ribadu giving the white man lectures on the evils of corruption? Those two thugs should be in jail. Why is El Rufai not in jail for crimes against our state? Because some of our intellectuals on this forum insist that anyone who does not see that thug as a messiah is smoking something. That, my friend, is the problem. Our intellectuals need to earn our respect by going to buy themselves some credibility.
- Ikhide
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
Dr. Valentine Ojo
And by what criteria - by what dint of academic abracadabra - would you adjudge "the bulk of what we have read so far from the anti-reparations scholars" as of any better quality?
Are you then the "quality administrator" for this forum - or what?
The most qualified scholars participating here - are those you and those who share your retrogressive views and those of Moses Ochonu, and anyone who supports Skip Gates' anti-Africa rant?
You ignore readily, "the dismal quality of the bulk" of what Skip Gates supporters - and of course Skip Gates himself - have so far presented in support of Skip Gates, which is virtually NOTHING but empty a-historical cacophony and PBS African Fantasies!
"For me, regardless of the debate, reparations is an expensive distraction. As we speak, our black leaders, egged on by some of our black hustler-intellectuals are busy raping and pillaging our continent. Let us turn our rage on them. We are human beings; we should accept responsibility for our destiny."-
Why don't you then lead the way?
Are you not African enough?
Are you not Nigerian?
Are you not educated enough considering all the Turenchi you have been blowing here?
Are you then also man enough to follow your challenge to others with action?
What is your point, Ikhide?
The usual Nigerian posturing and game of one-upmanship it seems - I alone know all the right answers, while you all who disagree with me are all dead wrong!
O ya! Prove otherwise please...that we are not here just dealing with another Nigerian empty barrel!
Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD"
On Mon 05/03/10 7:27 AM , xok...@yahoo.com sent:
Pius Adesanmi
Brodas Ed and Assenssoh:
You are directing your calls for civility at the wrong person. Such calls should not go to Moses or Kwabena or Maurice or Gloria Emeagwali. I agree with Moses that what is going on is robust dissent with a generous dosage of punch among colleagues. The real and insufferable culprits here are Ikhide and his irredeemable condescension. Have the two of you been reading him at all? Just look at his latest verbiage below. The arrogance! The arrogance! Suddenly Ikhide is the only one brilliant enough to recognize race and racism and teach it to people in a forum like this? Nothing wey man no go see for this usaafricadialogue sef. And this condescending rubbish below comes from someone who, only yesterday, was barking and heehawing about Amato being rude to to him? How does Ikhide define rudeness? What does he call his pathetic knee-jerk response to anything anybody within academe has had to say in this forum - except, of course,
the exception he manufactures and worships for the occasion? That is why I have warned Moses against being carried away by Ikhid's hypocritical attempt to butter him up while pouring dung on his constituency, his environment, and the very idea of scholarship. Deploying insipid and flat humour, Ikhide plays this silly ringside invidious game of trying to cheerlead one scholar against his peers and transform legitimate disagreement between peers into whatever his condescending imagination cooks up.
Whatever oedipal animus he holds against academe and people with recent or dusty Ph.D dissertations can be better exorcised if he goes home to wash himself in any shrine in his village, kill a white cock, and pour its blood on his head, instead of one and the repeated juvenile tantrum he throws here all the time. Ikhide has done very well in whatever capacity his oyinbo bosses have thrown him in America. His rush for the dollar since the early 1980s has rewarded him handsomely over the years as far as I know. He can't exactly complain about his station in life. So what exactly is the problem that makes him behave like a man whose boxers have been invaded by soldier ants in the middle of Times Square at the first hint of Universities, academics, scholars, etc.? Did he perhaps register for a Ph.D and failed out? I'm just trying to understand this juvenile animus that swims so pathetically in a cocktail of inferiority complex. Or is
it a problem that Ikhide left literature, discourse, and active intellection for decades and returned to the fold as an unaffiliated critic some 8 or so odd years ago, hurriedly reading up everything and trying to play catch up? How is that the fault of those he returned to and must now abuse robotically at every turn to demonstrate that he is back?
At the drop of a heart, Ikhide insults every African scholar and what they do. They have not shown him any convincing argument for reparations.To that I say go to hell. And with his funny mindset, cast in granite, and so contemptuous of African scholars, what could he possibly read from any of them with an open mind? Here is a man who has not found that African scholar he cannot insult and pour condescension on - the minimum qualification for his bilious invectives being a Ph.D dissertation and scholarly work in a University environment.
Ikhide is appalled by the quality of people's interventions here. Halleluyah! And who the heck has been impressed thus far by his notice me porridge that needs Moses to sail? Deopka Ikhide, go and listen very carefully to Baba Fryo's nice song, "Notice Me". It describes you. What the heck are you even doing in Usaafricadialogue? What impulse keeps you among people you despise so much? Self-hatred? My advice: go and start a Facebook and twitter beer parlour forum where you could produce knowledge in the form of the silly court-jesting ribaldry that you believe is the future of knowledge production - the world is changing and we are all too obtuse here for your liking! You should attract enough disciples to help you eliminate all African scholars, burn down all universities and allied institutions, use their books as toilet paper, before proceeding to singlhandedly take on African dictators since you appear to be the only one with
sufficient intelligence to understand what is going on in Africa. It is tragic when an apprentice jester does not know when ribaldry is appropriate or inappropriate.
|
Pius ====================================================================== " You need patience and ability to celebrate small wins or you will get frustrated. Every small win is another step towards to the ultimate goal.We need to apply the same learnings to Nigeria. 50 year rot is not going to disappear at a go. We just have to keep pushing. Celebrate little victories like getting rid of Iwu; when we lose, dust up ourselves and get on with it; keep our eyes on the ball.." - Pastor Joe Attueyi |
|
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com, val...@md.metrocast.net |
Dr. Valentine Ojo
Not so fast, Moses!
I have no clue how much language studies you did Moses, but those who claim there is not a word in African languages for "slave" - 'eru' in Yoruba being the closest - have a very strong case - stronger than you can imagine.
Translation is NEVER a linear affair. You cannot simply take a word from one language, and automatically expect to have a correspondence in another language - no matter how similar those concepts may be.
Let me give you a couple of examples:
1. The word "ebi", a Yoruba word for anyone that can be remotely traced to be related to you by blood, is frequently translated as "family", which it is not in English, where family is usually a husband, a wife, and their children, and maybe the immediate parents of the couple.
This is why we have to come with circumlocutions like "nuclear family", and "extended family" which do not exist in Yoruba!
Thus, one can say that Yoruba has no word for English /family/, and English has no word for Yoruba /ebi/!
'Aso ebi' is a uniform won by all those celebrating an event with your "family", and who may not themselves be related to you at all!
2. Yoruba has a word, /ale/ which is frequently rendered as English /concubine/ or 'outside mistress'.
But even within the Yoruba people, the usage of /ale/ differs! For most Yoruba communities, it simply means an 'outside mistress', a perfectly legitimate type of relationship among the Yoruba, and not necessarily something to be ashamed of.
But it goes further! Among the Ondo, /ale/ is the wife of your uncle, and you are also her /ale/!
So Yoruba has no word for English /concubine/ really!
3. Then from this, we have the expression, /omo ale/, the child of an 'outside mistress' (again not necessarily negative), but translated to negative English /bastard/, it becomes a fighting word in English!
4. Rev. Samuel Ajayi Crowther did Yoruba a major disservice, when he translated Yoruba /esu/, one of the important deities in the Yoruba Cosmology, to mean English /devil/ - which it is not!
To really know what a person with the position of a /slave/ does in any given society, the true meaning of that expression or similar one, you have to know about that culture.
Thus, it is perfectly legitimate to claim that "there was no word for slavery in African languages until white men came and introduced us to the PECULIAR evil of servility" of the type of SLAVERY imposed by Europeans on Africans, including rapes of African women, miscegenation, breeding African slaves for sale, treating Africans as sub-humans, destroying the languages and cultures of the slaves, etc.
These aspects are not present in 'slavery' as practiced by African cultures that I know off! Slaves not infrequently rose to hold positions of responsibility in the community, and to even marry the daughter or son of the family that enslaved them!
That was never the case when whites enslaved blacks!
Again in Ondo, it was not uncommon to use your child as collateral for a debt you owe someone else. The child would go to serve that person like a 'slave' - 'lo si oko eru' was the usual expression - for an agreed period of time until the debt is paid off. The person who the child is serving is deemed responsible for the child's health and welfare until that child is returned to the parents. Sometimes, the person the child is serving may request to formally keep the child, if the child shows talent in the master's trade!
This practice is into exactly like the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Africans as practiced by Europeans!
NMoses Ochonu, you have lost touch with African cultural practices, and you are in no position to pontificate about them, or to refer to anyone as "incorrigible" when you are precisely the one refusing to take any corrections!
Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD
On Sun 05/02/10 9:47 PM , Moses Ebe Ochonu meoc...@gmail.com sent:
"I am disappointed to read Moses Ochonu’s claim that local histories and case studies are useless."
Amutabi,
If after my response to Edward Kissi on this issue, you can make this claim then I question your capacity to comprehend. Then again, I am dealing with a guy who argues that there was no word for slavery in African languages until white men came and introduced us to the evil of servility. Any historian, African or not, who would make such a claim is unworthy of membership in the fraternity....not to mention undeserving of any discursive courtesies.
You're incorrigible!
On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 7:11 PM, Maurice Amutabi <amu...@gmail.com> wrote:
Ed,Dear Ed,
I am totally in agreement with you Edward Mensah. You are spot on, for I detest academic bullies and I know there are many on this list serve who will agree with you. These bullies have been kept in check in the recent past, but I can see them appearing again. Just when we are enjoying a good debate, they happen on the scene, ruing it for everyone. When I responded yesterday, I mistook Moses Ochonu for Ikhide, for he sounded very much like Ikhide at his worst. It is wrong for scholars to resort to using abusive language whenever they cannot agree with others. Moses Ochonu should not be allowed to denigrate this list serve by his trivial tirades. I find it strange that scholars who cannot raise sensible arguments often resort to name-calling and empty verbiage in order to be noticed.
I am disappointed to read Moses Ochonu’s claim that local histories and case studies are useless. I did not want to give his idea legitimacy by responding to it, but since he is getting bolder in his posts, and no one has told him he is wrong, he might think that he is right. Like many trained and professional historians, I use case studies, and case studies are the pillars on which the discipline of history is built. They provide the building blocks for historians. Case studies are called micro histories and together, they form meta-narratives or grand-narratives. It is a methodology that has worked for hundreds of years and historians love case studies.
Finally, I am waiting to hear a good reason from you, Moses Ochonu on why you support Henry Louis Gates. I am hoping that it will be better answer than Wole Soyinka’s. I am sure others are waiting to hear your response to this. If you respond in a more educated manner than your previous posts, which have been inane and too polemical, no one will fault your response. A good answer, without vitriol, might just give you a lifeline in the community of scholars, on this important debate, and the list serve.
Maurice Amutabi
On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 2:23 PM, Edward Mensah <deha...@uic.edu> wrote:
This is a wonderful forum. But I must admit that I am getting a bit tired of the abusive words. Can Moses rebut without being abusive? I find some of Moses's points quite enlightening , like the capability of our ancestors and by extension today's African leaders to be good and evil. I love complexity. But can't Moses state his points without being abusive? haba!!Ed----- Original Message -----From: Moses Ebe OchonuSent: Sunday, May 02, 2010 2:42 PMSubject: Re: FW: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-GameI can see that the mutual exchange of platitudes is in full swing. We tell ourselves what we want to hear and assure ourselves that the battle of self-awareness is won. Then, when we encounter another act of self-sabotage from our elites, it demoralizes us and catches flatfooted. How do we understand today's betrayals in Africa and the black world generally if we are too sensitive to peer comprehensively into our past and to endure the momentary emotional discomfort of learning about the genealogy of "black on black" crime? For me, knowing that our ancestors were capable of good and bad in equal measure is not only affirming but is also infinitely more empowering and inspiring than the illusion that they were saints and angels corrupted and morally enfeebled by evil white men ( I forgot the Arabs who came before).
On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 2:03 PM, Abdul Karim Bangura <th...@earthlink.net> wrote:
Teach 'em, Sister Lavonda. Yours have been the best takes on thid forum on the debate on Gates' pseudo intellectual fraud.
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Moses Ebe Ochonu
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
Normally, I don't get into a discussion that I may not have time to conclude. With the end of the semester, things are crazy with me and I should not be getting into intellectual fights that may distort my schedule. But I'll make an exception here and post my general preliminary thoughts on the issue.
What I find tragic in this debate is that it appears that some people are doing a deliberate misreading of Gates' OP-ED. Unfortunately, that misreading, a gross distortion if you ask me, is now framing this discussion. Did those who are accusing Gates of blaming Africans for the slave trade actually read the OP-ED or are they simply transferring their ill-feelings from previous encounters with Gates' other "controversial" works? This is what I suspect is happening here.
I read the piece thoroughly and nowhere in it did I see the meanings and motives being read into it. What the man is saying is fairly simple, straightforward, and in accord with known facts. Reparations is a more complex issue than the narratives of advocates advance it to be. This complexity is further intensified by the ACTIVE and PROACTIVE participation of African kingdoms, states, merchants, warrior-raiders, and kings because it makes moral, if not legal, culpability a trans-Atlantic reality. Why is this such a controversial point to bring up, especially when reparations campaigners only focus on Western culpability? Let's not forget that some Africans, including the late MKO Abiola and Ali MAzrui once had the audacity to demand slavery reparations for Africa, all of Africa, with no mechanism for distinguishing the descendants and provinces of slavers from those of the enslaved. By what moral, commercial, or legal logic do you pay reparations to a whole continent, when some of its current privatized wealth is traceable to the slave trade and is still benefiting those who did one of the dirty works of the enslavement process: capture and sale? And without paying attention to how the holders of such wealth deserve no part in any putative reparations or how only verified African victim (raided and conquered) communities and families deserve compensation.
Are we saying that the Africans who raided villages in the interior and marched captured Africans to the coast bear no responsibility for chattel slavery in the so-called new world? There is no acceptable excuse for this brazen attempt at revisionism, the quest to manufacture and peddle a sanitized version of recent history. We know of individual families from Lagos to Ouidah to Goree to Congo and Angola and other places who built fortunes from the anguish of ethnic Others that they enslaved and sold to European merchants.The descendants of this families are alive and do not even deny this history. On a recent trip to Nigeria I was given a church-commissioned historical text that refreshingly provides a window into how the slave trade constituted the foundations of the fortunes of many of today's renown Lagos families and their wealth. The descendants of these 18th and 19th century slave traders, who were interviewed for the project and are custodians of the written and oral histories of their families, are willing to do what some of our historians hesitate to do: retell the past in all its flavors of ugliness and beauty. Local oral traditions in many coastal regions of West and Central Africa identify whole families and clans that continue to dominate commerce and politics in their respective locales, having parlayed their ancestors' slave trade commercial wealth into more licit ventures. Do we not do violence to our history when we minimize or erase this historical verity?
This nonsense about African "servitude vs. Euro-American slavery should be beneath the professional integrity of historians and scholars who have access to the dirty FACTS of precolonial African slavery in several forms, as well as to the more significant historical fact of slavery's universality in antiquity and even in the modern period of so-called post-enlightenment humanism. Africans were not alone in enslaving outsiders who in today's taxonomy would qualify as their racial kin. Treating slavery in Africa differently or denying its presence is a dangerous act of erasing Africa from some of the socio-economic constants of world history, or worse, carving a space of exotic insularity for Africans and Africa.
That it took a non-Historian, Ikhide, to put down this ultra-defensive and callous denialism is indicative of how dangerous the mixing of ideology and scholarship can be in imposing blind spots on historians.
There is nothing wrong with Gates pointing out that African complicity in the slave trade, of which there was much, and the evidence for which is embedded in many oral traditions and remembrances, complicates current narratives on reparations. The only mitigating logic that would not be defensive or escapist is to argue that without European demand for slaves in the "New World" there might not have been an Atlantic slave trade, at least not on the scale that it occurred. Since demand is a bigger factor of causality than supply, this may release the descendants of African regions, states, families, and clans that participated in the trade from the material compensation being sought from European corporations. I am not even sure that this is a winning argument, since it only mitigates moral culpability, not actual culpability. At the very least it would still make symbolic, non-material reparations from individual African countries, clans, and ethnic descendants of slaving kingdoms necessary.
Then there is Kwabena's egregious extrapolation of Akan oral traditions and their narratives on slavery and the slave trade to the rest of the continent----something that would demand a whole new post to refute. I have multiple, serious quibble with Kwabena's submission, but I am starting with this general commentary. But let me say this: he talks about well known gun-slave cycle. This is merely an explanation of the "driver" of the trade. Every trade needs a driver, a tool and mode of production. The gun was the tool during the slave trade. But guns needed raiders and warriors-for-booty before they could produce slaves. The agency of the raiders and warriors in the slave trade chain should not be written off. The gun was also a currency in the transaction between European slave traders and African slavers and kings. It was a thing of immense value in Africa--even before the slave trade took off. So, to the extent that guns were desired items of value in African kingdoms and states, the trade was indeed a trade: reciprocal exchange of value. Europeans responded to the demand for guns in Africa. Without the demand for guns, Europeans would have battered other items for slaves and in fact they did in some areas where gin, mirrors, and other in-demand, exotic items of value were treasured above guns.
African history, especially precolonial African history is not a consistently pretty history. Like other histories, it is full of the good, bad, and the atrocious. There is no need to assume that Africans, as a subset of the human family, would follow a radically different historical trajectory. Wars were fought; the vanquished were captured and enslaved to different degrees depending on the society; some of the enslaving societies, like some societies in other parts of the world, practiced an integrative slavery; others, again like some other societies elsewhere, did not. It's no big deal to be faithful to these facts of African history. It does not and should not, exonerate European slavers and what they , in collaboration with their African agents and profiteer, did to many African communities, villages, and families during the slave trade. Unless these facts fall into misuse in the hands of racist mischief makers, but there is nothing we can do about racists and their agenda, and their antics should not prevent us from reconstructing histories faithfully and accurately or make us into paranoid, defensive, visceral hagiographers of romantic African virtue.
And Gloria, please do not assume condescendingly that folks on this list have not read that debate or did not follow the "Wonders" controversy. There is nothing anyone said then or is saying now that impeaches the essential truth of Gates's current intervention, which makes the simple point that the reality of Akan, Dahomey, Yoruba, Nupe, Igbo, Kongo, Angola, etc, complicity in the slave trade and of specific known families and groups adds a new layer of complexity to what is already a legal and political minefield.
What worries me is that some historians may actually be teaching this fumigated, romantic version of African history to students--Western and African. History is by its very nature messy. African history is no exception. That is why an excursion into the past can be alternately depressing and pleasurable. But that precisely is the point of studying it. It is a sobering reminder of the countervailing human capacities for evil and good.
On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 7:54 PM, <xok...@yahoo.com> wrote:
"Again, I am not about to deny that Africans practiced a kind of servitude before the European intrusion. However, as Ali Mazrui said in his documentary, The Africans: A Triple Heritage, the degree of callousness of the European enslavement of Africans was unknown to Africans."
- Abdul-Rasheed Na'Allah
!!! This kind of scholarship is quite honestly unhelpful. I actually am amazed at how the howling of those opposed to Professor Gates' perspective have helped me appreciate and respect his position. How on earth can someone say that what happened to slaves in the Old Benin kingdom was "servitude." Talking about callousness, I wonder if the descendants of slaves who were used as human sacrifice would consider that humane. The problem with this kind of scholarship is that its purveyors have boxed themselves into tight corners built on fantasies and lies. As a result they find themselves defending the indefensible. The unintended tragedy here as Abdul-Rasheed Na'Allah so eloquently demonstrates is that the research is distorted and twisted and ultimately worthless. The lasting ramifications of compromising these works are infinitely long-lasting. It is a tragedy of immense proportions.
I am afraid in this debate, Professor Gates is looking really good. I admire his stance on this issue. I think the world would be a better place if we tried to engage him on an equal level and with respect. What I have been reading for the most part is patronizing and condescending. I won't even dignify the abusive rants with as much as a nod. Some things are just beneath me. Those pushing reparations need to understand one thing. It is complicated.
- Ikhide
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
-----Original Message-----
From: "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@mail.ccsu.edu>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 19:27:18
To: <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery
Blame-Game
West Africa Review (2000)
ISSN: 1525-4488
Thoughts on the Atlantic Slave Trade: the Roles of Africans and the Issue of Apology for Slavery
Abdul-Rasheed Na'Allah
Who deserves an apology for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade? Skip Gates, in his Wonders of the African World video series makes some Africans apologize to him, thus demonstrating his belief that continental Africans need to apologize to descendants of slaves in the Diaspora. President Mathieu Kérékou of the Republic of Benin echoed a similar belief by asking for a conference where continental Africans would apologize to Diaspora Africans for slavery.1 I'm not sure whom the president was speaking for, and whether he was offering to convene such a meeting. In my view, continental and Diaspora Africans have never been enemies and have always worked together for the glory of Africa, and history is rich in examples, Nkrumah to DuBois, Randall Robinson to Moshood Abiola. However, we need conferences, in Africa and abroad, to reconcile our understanding of past events and to ensure that no one sells the African agenda to the highest bidder. Yet, apology will not end the debate and misunderstanding about Atlantic Slave Trade. We need to know whether Africans advertised to Europe that they were slavers, and invited Europeans to buy slaves, or Europeans had their own plan, and enticed uninformed, militarily weaker Africans, to choose between Cane and Carrot, to sell their own brothers and sisters. We need to know whether no African resisted the idea of his own people sold across the ocean. We must know what happened to King Jaja of Opobo and his contemporaries, and whether there was truly no African resistance to slave trade.
Na'Allah, Abdul- Rasheed. (2000). Thoughts on the Atlantic Slave Trade: the Roles of Africans and the Issue of Apology for Slavery. West Africa Review: 1 , 2. [iuicode: http://www.icaap.org/iuicode?101.1.2.24].
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Department of History,
Central Washington University,
400 University Way,
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http://www.cwu.edu/~history/amutabi-bio_cv-1059.html
http://www.cwu.edu/~cah/amutabi.html
http://www.amazon.com/Studies-Lifelong-Learning-Africa-Technological/dp/0773447571
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kenneth harrow
the same is true in the new world as well; conditions changed as new crops became profitable, as things like tobacco and cotton came to supplant sugar cane, as beet sugar came into existence, etc.
i am not an historian, but i would ask what the labor was used for, what were the conditions of labor, how was the system of production organized--not whether there is a signifier in one language that corresponds to a single word significer in another. most of all, i would not assume that conditions, relations between people of different groups, castes, classes, could be generalized throughout the continent or across time.
ken
Kenneth W. Harrow
Distinguished Professor of English
Michigan State University
har...@msu.edu
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kenneth harrow
>Date: Mon, 3 May 2010 17:52:59 -0500
>xposted from H-NET List for African History and Culture
> <H-AF...@H-NET.MSU.EDU>
>
>From: "Arthur Abraham" <AAbr...@vsu.edu>
>Subject: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
>Date: Mon, May 3, 2010 2:49 pm
>
>
>I have been resisting the temptation to make a lengthy response to "Skip"
>Gates, but thankfully, that has been done. Any additions will only add new
>examples to the points already made. Gates has no answers but an
>ideological hidden agenda using his influence in "the academy" to cross
>disciplinary frontiers into areas in which his competence is questionable.
>He calls his "documentary" "Wonders of the African World", a deceptive
>title when judged against the content. He has been attempting to influence
>the historiography of the slave trade for some time now in a direction
>that, as has already been observed on this list, is meant to push a wedge
>between Africans and African Americans, as he actually does in the present
>article. As an economic phenomenon, was not the slave trade DEMAND-DRIVEN,
>rather than supply-driven? That should say a lot to Gates.
>
>Arthur Abraham, Ph.D.
>Professor of History & Eminent Scholar,
>Chairman, Department of History and Philosophy,
>Virginia State University
Dr. Valentine Ojo
"Looking for a linguistic marker"" is in no way in opposition to factoring in "what the labor was used for, what were the conditions of labor, how was the system of production organized."
After all, even within the same system, individual slave owners would use their slaves for different purposes, and treat them differently, depending on their own personality. Some owners would be wicked, others would be benign, etc.
So, why would you want to weigh how the slaves were used higher than what the word for describing "slaves" or similar status in vastly different cultures?
As a language professor, you cannot dismiss "whether there is a signifier in one language that corresponds to a single word significer in another" - which is not even the issue at stake here.
Language is very powerful. It forms people's thoughts and perceptions of reality. And you ought to know that.
And who is assuming that "that conditions, relations between people of different groups, castes, classes, could be generalized throughout the continent or across time?"
I have merely written about the concept of "eru" among the Yoruba. On the contrary, it is people like Skip Gates, Moses Ochonu, Ikhide. Qansy Salako - and maybe yourself - who are making that assumption without stating it.
You are are all talking about "slavery existing in Africa" as if all African societies had slaves and treated them exactly the same way - including callously selling their fellow Africans into Arab and European chattel slavery.
Is that not what the entire discussion here is based on? Is that not why Skip Gates is demanding reparations from African societies and peoples whom he claims became wealthy from selling their fellow Africans into European slavery...?
And why this your constant refrain - "i am not an historian"?
And?
What's that got to do with anything? At least you lived a history - like we all did! And you have told about your history - your initial hatred for Germans as a young Jew growing up. That's also history.
Why then are you getting involved in a historical discussion, if you have to be a historian in order to do so?
Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD
On Mon 05/03/10 5:06 PM , kenneth harrow har...@msu.edu sent:
- Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery
- Blame-Game
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- Prof. Maurice Amutabi, Ph.D
- Department of History,
- Central Washington University,
- 400 University Way,
- Ellensburg WA 98926
- http://www.cwu.edu/~history/amutabi-bio_cv-1059.html
- http://www.kessa.org/about_us
- http://www.amazon.com/NGO-Factor-Africa-Arrested-Development/dp/B0014DF6WE/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1
- http://www.amazon.com/Manuel-Falla-Iberian-American-Studies/dp/1889431109
- http://www.amazon.com/NGO-Factor-Africa-Arrested-Development/dp/0415979951
- http://www.cwu.edu/~history/amutabi-bio_cv-1059.html
- http://www.cwu.edu/~cah/amutabi.html
- http://www.amazon.com/Studies-Lifelong-Learning-Africa-Technological/dp/0773447571
- http://www.amazon.com/Studies-Economic-History-Kenya-Entrepreneurship/dp/0773439072/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265479492&sr=8-1
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Amatoritsero Ede
Amatoritsero Ede
kenneth harrow
i was president of the ala at the time, and supported a motion in support of soyinka. other's on our board opposed that, saying it was to controversial. i threatened to resign if we did not take up the measure and put it to the membership. it passed.
his latest statements about muslims have crossed the line; they are important; he is famous, his words are reported, and have weight. ditto for his position re marxism. one can oppose even those one admires on various issues. these are not small matters, cannot be dismissed as aberrations.
let's put it this way: i think gates has done much that is also very admirable. his op-ed was terrible, and we don't hesitate to attack it.
ken
Samuel Quainoo
African Americans. Remember his mocking of African Americans who
denounced their American citizenship for African ones in the 60's
because of their rejection of discrimination towards them in
America...forgetting that the very chair he occupies at Harvard is named
after an eminent African American who became a Ghanaian citizen in his
later years?
S. Ebow Quainoo Ph.D.
Professor of Political Science
Founding Member & Executive Board
State Wide Frederick Douglass Collaborative
East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania
East Stroudsburg, PA 18301