FW: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
Akurang-Parry, 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
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
“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.
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].
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Moses Ebe Ochonu
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!!!
Akurang-Parry, Kwabena
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!
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
Lavonda Staples
Akurang-Parry, Kwabena
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Lavonda Staples [lrst...@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, May 02, 2010 1:37 PM
Abdul Karim Bangura
Moses Ebe Ochonu
Kwabena,
This is the only aspect of your latest post that is worthy of a response. And yes, I am in the middle of grading. Otherwise, your inaugural post, which embodies your manisfesto on this subject, would have provoked a much more comprehensive rebuttal from me. I found it so watery and its contentions so simplistic that I could not believe that a trained historian was making such discredited and problematic propositions. I only had time to critique two propositions of yours just to give you a sample of how bad, vulnerable, and forced your arguments were. You're lucky this is the end of the semester, but rest assured that that post of yours, which is thankfully in the archive, will be dissected and redissected in the future, as I am sure that this subject will return on the listserv. But moving on.....
Your assertion above is laughable because, unlike you, I NEVER (contradict me!) advanced ANY example as a stand-in for the reality of slavery in Africa, all of Africa. Never!! In fact, quite the contrary, my examples were meant to reeducate you on the need for circumspection, on the dangers of the bad scholarly habit of generalizations extrapolation. I was responding to your wild historical distortions based on a narrow body of Akan local history. I was, for crying out loud, demonstrating the presence of countervailing realities of slavery and the slave trade in the same Africa of the Akans in order to alert you to the pitfalls of being seduced into an ideological fixation by one's intimacy with a small body of narratives. I had to use examples that contradict your (and Amutabi's) contentions to underscore the need for specificity and precision in these discussions. That is precisely why my posts on this discussion are riddled with caveats and qualifiers, semantic and empirical. If I had not provided examples, you would have accused me of critiquing your contentions from an abstract standpoint. I had to cover my base, as they say. I won't give you that pleasure, a cheap shot. No way!
You are the one who feels a need, methodological and epistemological, to homogenize Africa into one discernible ideological argument regarding slavery despite the bewildering presence of multiple and complex systems and ranges of slavery on the continent, despite the weighty evidence that contradicts your foundational premise and your empirical submissions. You are the one, along with your buddy Amutabi, who is eager to deny that slavery qua slavery or slave trading existed in precolonial Africa. You are the one who feels that isolating the African past into some some utopian conception of virtue, nobility, and victimhood is a cardinal obligation of African(ist) historians. I don't have all those hangups. I believe that Even villainy and vice especially historical ones, can and should be explained, as they were animated by certain logics of power, economics, or culture.
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? Of course, how these impulses are manifested vary from continent to continent, nation to nation, region to region, but humans are humans and share some constants--some of them morally good others not so much. How do you erase Africans and and their ancestors from this human historical verity without doing violence to their humanity?
Your mindset is so Manichean and compartmentalized that I am afraid that you and I will never reconcile our historical philosophies. I celebrate African history in all its messiness, complexity and plurality, in all its pleasurable and depressing flavors. You prefer an African history that is reduced and disciplined into a set of politically usable soundbites that can be used, like arrows in a quiver, to shoot down arguments that, regardless of their historical correctness, unsettle your frozen, childish vision of Pan-African vigilance.
Go and bury yourself in your incestuous study of Akan historical fantasies, which do not even always agree fully with established truths of Akan history. Asante was a slave exporting and importing state. I am more interested in the HOWS and WHYS of its slave institution and its participation in the slave trade, not in making pedantic excuses and formulating atomistic allibis to exonerate past villains and, worse, stand on that shaky ground to make nonsensical declarations about slavery and the slave trade in ALL of Africa.
Moses Ebe Ochonu
Edward Mensah
Akurang-Parry, Kwabena
Moses,
Haba now you seek to “re-educate” me! What do you have that I don’t have and what have you done that I have failed to do, or is it that you acclaimed Gates’ essay on the basis that you alone could understand him, while I queried Gates’ essay on the basis that some of his arguments and conclusions are flawed? Arrogance, condescension, and conceit are your problems, and that is why you claim that no one understands what Gates wrote except you. You need education in humility and that will be your stepping stone to re/educating yourself. They way you carry on here illustrates that you are prisoner of your self-conceited brilliant ideas because no one, not even your undergraduate students would take such intellectual assaults. You see different historical viewpoints as hierarchies of knowledge, and your self-conceit tells you that yours is better. One signifier of great scholars is that they express their criticisms in generous ways. In the past few days, armed with your non-sobering take on issues, you have stormed away from the precincts of academic socialization, and you are losing it before our very eyes.
I made two simple observations so put to rest your tired moribund postmodernist incantatory jargons. This would enable you to address the issues from an empiricist standpoint: please, please show us that you only use “general” histories as your evidence. This would be basis of re-educating me. Please, just prove that local histories are useless in constructing historical narratives, or better still in responding to Gates’ essay.
Let me restate the two observations. They are as follows: (1) you keep on saying that you don't have time, yet you have been rudely attacking people's commentaries by resorting to the same lame arguments that local histories and case studies are unwholesome. Let us assume that our methodologies border on historical naiveté, and as result, would like to you to find enough time to state your reasons for supporting Gates, framed around your new, refreshing historical methodologies and devoid of the applications of local histories. This is what all of us are eager to read from you, in reality something new and refreshing that would magnetize all of us to place our collective lightweight behind Gates’ essay.
And (2) you praise Gates to the high heavens, but Gates' essay in question is based on the same "reductionist" methodologies that have been the basis of your unscholarly redemptive assaults. You want to have it both ways: you condemn and insult us for using local histories to rethink Gates’ conclusions that are based on local histories, yet you carry Gates’ on your head for using local histories to make his jaded conclusions, as well, you use the similar localized history examples in your commentaries! How nice! This is what we want you to explain and no amount of theorizing would rescue you from this methodological quicksand.
Let me remind you that you are dealing with your peers so don’t belabor simple ideas as if they are some historical pearls that you have retrieved from some Gates-que archives! Where do you plan to go with statements like this one: "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.” Has anyone disputed such statements? Give us something brilliant. I am waiting to read your original take on Gates’ essay based on your “generalized” methodologies. And that would be re-educating some of us!
Kwabena
Maurice Amutabi
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
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
Moses Ebe Ochonu
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!
Moses Ebe Ochonu
If you must make accusations regarding abrasiveness, why don't you first go into the archive of this discussion and examine the confrontational, snide remarks of others? There is a method to my discursive "madness." I had a sustained discussion with Bode on this topic. Except for a brief moment of confrontation, which was quickly walked back, it was a gentlemanly yet vigorous discussion that ended with each man knowing what we disagreed on and accepting to let things stand that way. His tone was inviting and he displayed an ability to grasp the subtleties and nuances of my position. This provoked similar gestures on my part. The result was a discussion that was mutually rewarding. Contrast that with the attitude of Gloria Emeagwali and Kwabena, who take pleasure in making bizarre accusations and throwing out outlandish, unscholarly caricatures. Gloria even insinuated that I was somehow indirectly helping Gates to fulfill the sinister agenda of his sponsors! I responded to her brashly on purpose, and I am giving Kwabena the same treatment. But as usual, and your observation about appreciating my point speaks to this, I offered lucid outlines of my thoughts on the issue at hand even while serving up good comebacks in response to their irritations. So, I know what I am doing. With Kwabena, I also have had to be very punchy because my disagreements with him are more intense and more philosophical in nature. I don't consider a punchy style abusive. I don't consider honest, unsparing critique abuse either. Besides, this is a listserv (peopled by academics and non-academics) and not an academic conference or a similar forum governed by the pretentious protocols of intellectual disagreement.
Moses Ebe Ochonu
Take it easy. No be fight, as we say in Nigeria. I gave you a simple challenge, no, I dared you, and you are bobbing and weaving around. Her it is again:
Now, you don't know my view on the Gates piece. I have made more than ten postings on the Gates' piece and the issues it raises. Everyone is already familiar with my position, but Kwabena wants me to repeat myself. Either you need the validation and attention or you are a glutton for critique.
This is what I have to deal with when I dignify your outmoded propositions with a response. Everyone else can deal with nuance and complicated, non-linear, non-Manichean thinking except our two self-appointed gatekeepers of African morality and virtue (Kwabena and Amutabi). Sorry, I cannot succumb to your template. You're going to have to think in less simplistic terms like everyone else. Africa is complex; a scholar who studies it has no choice but to approach it in a way that is faithful to that complexity. Which is why, until you leave your current intellectual and epistemological station, our dialogue has to remain purely on the level of mutual critique.
Assensoh, Akwasi B.
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Edward Mensah [deha...@uic.edu]
Sent: Sunday, May 02, 2010 5:23 PM
Akurang-Parry, Kwabena
Maurice Amutabi
Dear Moses Ochonu,
You have this insidious habit of changing what other people are saying in order to criticize them. I have observed you making accusations against various people like Kwabena Akurang-Parry and Valentine Ojo, when it is clear that you have misunderstood their position. The concept slave is not African, linguistically and its etymological origins do not have the meaning for forms of servitude that existed in some African societies where I have conducted my research. I am disappointed by scholars like you who instead of pursuing research and making your own contributions to scholarship, you choose to spend time doing academic violence and throwing brickbats at fellow scholars. This is what Valentine Ojo says about academic hooligans: "What would the likes of Moses Ochonu or Ikhide or Qansy Salako know about any of these when they never did any original researches of their own, and are merely pausanning the West's anti-slavery rhetoric now being championed by Skip gates!"
Ochonu, you need a good lesson on how history is produced. History is about describing, analyzing and interpreting events and no society has the same word equivalent in meaning to words in other societies everywhere, even for simple, taken-for-granted issues like the meaning of father, child, marriage, food, etc. You are the wrong person to tell me that the concept 'slave' existed in my neck of the woods before arrival of foreigners, because it did not. Oral history reveals this. Well, look at the politics of the words you love to use before thinking that they are universal and inviolable. The Arabic word for slave is abd, which also means black. The Abaluyia people of Western Kenya and their Wanga Kingdom are all black and could not have referred to their neighbors are ‘black’ the way Arabs did. In the Arab world, abds were often castrated in order to work in homes, where they would not be a danger to the women (see Because of Honor by Maurice Amutabi). It is the reason there are not many black people in the Arab world. I interviewed a family at Mombasa of about a relative who was a former abd who had escaped from Muscat in 1830s and this was preserved through an poem, an important source of oral history.
The word slave was first used in Europe because many domestic workers some of whom were forced to work for other groups were Slavs (The Slavic people are found in Central and Eastern Europe). Slaves were later sourced from other parts of Europe and elsewhere but the name remained. Should the Abaluyia name for forms of servitude conform to European meaning, even when the forms of servitude in their milieu did not have the same meaning and implication as European slavery, especially in its cruelty and wickedness? The 15th Nabongo (king) of the Wanga Kingdom was a son of an omuhambe (captive), from a Tiriki clan, whose members had previously been captured in war. Surely you cannot present omuhambe or omurumwa (messenger) as slaves, because they were not. Moses Ochonu, such is the importance of oral history. The Abaluyia did not engage in slavery and slave trade, but Arabs and Europeans and Americans did. If the Abaluyia were to demand reparations for many men and women they lost to Arab and European raids, they will have no problem where to look. Whoever agrees with Henry Louis Gates on his claims to the contrary is fooling nobody. I would not put my eggs in Gates’ basket, and baskets of other arm chair scholars who come up with sloppy, speculative and pedestrian suppositions about issues and begin to imagine they are right, by repeating them over and over again, as talking points.
I rest my case with you, Moses Ochonu, for you are free to continue being a disciple of Gates.
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
Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
70% prisoners of war (a military-commercial complex?)
10% bystanders
?????????
I don't know what the latest figures are on this issue. This is a 'guesstimate' on my part.
Without the information from LOCAL HISTORIES we would never have an accurate account.
I made this point about a year ago, and I hope that it still has some merit. It is probably better to
speak about 'human trafficking' than a 'slave trade.' Some of the captives were civilians, so to speak,
in the wrong place at the wrong time-engaged in productive activities in small scale business as manufacturers,
snack food traders, fishermen/ fisherwomen or peasants. Some were non-combatants,
but perhaps a larger percentage were associated with military activities and became prisoners of war.
I concur with Assensoh that a large percentage consisted of felons, as defined by the local judicial
systems, as long as the point is not overstated.
This phenomenon of human trafficking would have remained a domestic episode, as was the case in
China, Japan and parts of Europe, without the external intervention of outsiders. In the case of South East Asia, human
trafficking was extended by the Dutch to Madagascar and South Africa, so this is not an appropriate example.
Needless to say that in Eastern Europe, a Mediterranean commercial network of human traffickers extended around the Black Sea
with the Germans and Turks playing a major role in the phenomenon, the captives being largely Slavic depending on the
century. Some of the trappings of trafficking and enslavement in the Atlantic were largely derived from this model.
Had the Europeans not stepped in to globalize trafficking in Africa, and profit from it on a gargantuan scale, local forces
of transformation would have adequately dealt with this issue. Class warfare, insurrection, revolts and riots are
central in the historical process. As pointed out by many contributors to this debate, the mothers, fathers, sons,
daughters, in laws, agemates and friends of captives wailed and weeped, dug trenches and armed themsleves,
and did their best to put up resistance. Of course, on the other side of the Atlantic resistance continued unabated,
some in the form of jihads (Brazil).The most successful revolt was that of Haiti. Escape from 'Babylon'' to
inaccessible hills and vales was also a response in the Caribbean.The so-called 'runaways' were actually
liberators and heroes, liberating themselves from the atrocities of the system.
Largely on the backs of the unfree, uncompensated, sustained labor of their captives in the Americas and the Caribbean, in
sugar, coffee, tobacco, and cotton plantations, EuroAmerican elites developed their financial institutions,
manufacturing sectors and capitalist industrialization processes. Numerous atrocities and human rights were
committed in the process, including generalized sexual abuse of women, child abuse, (pedophilia?), dismemberment
by plantation owners, some of whom passed on their accumulated wealth to later generations.
Braudel provides an illuminating discussion of the emergence of various mercantile groups within Europe,
their rivalries, colonies and networking systems. With the expulsion from Spain in 1492, and from Portugal
a few years later, Sephardic Jews headed in the direction of the Atlantic seaboard and elsewhere, benefiting
along with others, from the Brazilian and Caribbean sugar trade,according to Braudel. Williams successfully
identifies the prehistory of Barclays Bank, and the indirect links to profits from human trafficking
of David and Alexander Barclay. Braudel indirectly provides data on the primary source of capital of the Bank of France.
In London, as in Bordeaux, the proceeds of colonial trade, in wealth created largely by enslaved Africans,
became the basis of trading houses, banks and state bonds. This made the fortunes of certain powerful families,
whose most active representatives were to be found in the House of Lords in Britain.
The Jamaican plantation was a 'capitalist creation par excellence', a 'wealth creating machine,' 'remote
controlled' from Seville, Cadiz, Bordeaux, Nantes, Rouen, Amsterdam, Bristol and Liverpool, ' according to
Braudel. It was assailed by pillage and piracy and was similar to
other plantations in the regions such as those of Saint Domingue (Haiti) which actually became a greater source
of wealth than Jamaica, in the long run.. Middlemen thrived and siphoned
the money to the metropolis. Blood curdling episodes of violence, tyranny, despotism and treachery
are part of this history in the Americas and the Caribbean, largely at the expense of enslaved Africans.
Who owned the ships that facilitated transAtlantic human trafficking?
Have the descendants of the enslaved in the Americas and the Caribbean
received adequate compensation, for generations of enslavement?
Was the large scale wealth, generated in the Americas, transmitted back to Africa?
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
www.africahistory.net <http://www.africahistory.net/>
________________________________
kenneth harrow
a quick question. again about the jews. sorry if this annoys some, but as jews are singled out in the passage below (not to mention bludgeoned by clarke), i am asking you, as an historian (which i am not), this question.
you attribute to braudel the following: "With the expulsion from Spain in 1492, and from Portugal a few years later, Sephardic Jews headed in the direction of the Atlantic seaboard and elsewhere, benefiting
but then, i am not an historian, and there must be issues here i don't understand
ok, out of frustration, i went to my super-reliable source, wikipedia. here is what it said:
Allegations that Jews dominated the slave trade in Medieval Europe, Africa, and/or the Americas often appear in antisemitic discourse as a part of "Jewish domination" or "Jewish persecution" antisemitic canard. [ citation needed]It was alleged that Jews controlled trade and finance and hatched plots "to enslave, convert, or sell non-Jews". Such allegations are denied by David Brion Davis, who argues that Jews had no major or continuing impact on the history of New World slavery. [49]
These allegations were made in the Nation of Islam's 1991 book The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews . [50] These charges were widely refuted by scholars. [51] [52]
According to a review in The Journal of American History of Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight by Eli Faber and Jews and the American Slave Trade by Saul S. Friedman:
- Eli Faber takes a quantitative approach to Jews, Slaves, and the
Slave Trade in Britain's Atlantic empire, starting with the arrival of
Sephardic Jews in the London resettlement of the 1650s, calculating their
participation in the trading companies of the late seventeenth century,
and then using a solid range of standard quantitative sources (Naval
Office shipping lists, censuses, tax records, and so on) to assess the
prominence in slaving and slave owning of merchants and planters
identifiable as Jewish in Barbados, Jamaica, New York, Newport,
Philadelphia, Charleston, and all other smaller English colonial ports.
He follows this strategy in the Caribbean through the 1820s; his North
American coverage effectively terminates in 1775. Faber acknowledges the
few merchants of Jewish background locally prominent in slaving during
the second half of the eighteenth century but otherwise confirms the
small-to-minuscule size of colonial Jewish communities of any sort and
shows them engaged in slaving and slave holding only to degrees
indistinguishable from those of their English
competitors.
[53]
ken harrow
Kenneth W. Harrow
Distinguished Professor of English
Michigan State University
har...@msu.edu
517 803-8839
fax 517 353 3755
Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
Braudel does not claim that Jews dominated, unlike the
sources you quote.
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 kenneth harrow
Sent: Mon 5/3/2010 6:25 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: FW: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: Reply: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
a quick question. again about the jews. sorry if this annoys some, but as jews are singled out in the passage below (not to mention bludgeoned by clarke), i am asking you, as an historian (which i am not), this question.
you attribute to braudel the following: "With the expulsion from Spain in 1492, and from Portugal a few years later, Sephardic Jews headed in the direction of the Atlantic seaboard and elsewhere, benefiting
along with others, from the Brazilian and Caribbean sugar trade,according to Braudel."
i know that some jews converted to christianity, became "moranos," and thus survived. i am not sure how long one would consider a convert a jew, but never mind that. i don't get how the jews headed in the direction of the atlantic starting in portugal and spain. if that means across the ocean, they were headed to new spain, or to brazil which was portuguese, where the reach of the inquisition would not have spared them. how were they to manage their special role as slaveowners when their religion was banned? i remember when this debate over the jews' role in the slave trade began some years ago the research debunked the idea that jews had any special role in it. how could they have managed it under conditions of the inquisitions. i learned that when the jews fled spain, they first headed south to morocco, to egypt, and north to the netherlands. they didn't head across the ocean. i know of a distant relative of mine, my grandmother's grandfather, who wound up in turkey, an empire that in the days of the expulsion of the jews from spain welcomed the jews in. i never heard of jews fleeing across the atlantic and surviving as a jewish community. later, under the dutch, in the 17th c, there were small numbers of jews, but 15-16th? there were no dutch till the 1610s or so, right?
but then, i am not an historian, and there must be issues here i don't understand
ok, out of frustration, i went to my super-reliable source, wikipedia. here is what it said:
These allegations were made in the Nation of Islam <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_of_Islam> 's 1991 book The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews . [50] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism_and_slavery#cite_note-49> These charges were widely refuted by scholars. [51] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism_and_slavery#cite_note-Finkelman-50> [52] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism_and_slavery#cite_note-refutations-51>
According to a review in The Journal of American History <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Journal_of_American_History> of Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight by Eli Faber and Jews and the American Slave Trade by Saul S. Friedman:
Eli Faber takes a quantitative approach to Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade in Britain's Atlantic empire, starting with the arrival of Sephardic Jews in the London resettlement of the 1650s, calculating their participation in the trading companies of the late seventeenth century, and then using a solid range of standard quantitative sources (Naval Office shipping lists, censuses, tax records, and so on) to assess the prominence in slaving and slave owning of merchants and planters identifiable as Jewish in Barbados, Jamaica, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston, and all other smaller English colonial ports. He follows this strategy in the Caribbean through the 1820s; his North American coverage effectively terminates in 1775. Faber acknowledges the few merchants of Jewish background locally prominent in slaving during the second half of the eighteenth century but otherwise confirms the small-to-minuscule size of colonial Jewish communities of any sort and shows them engaged in slaving and slave holding only to degrees indistinguishable from those of their English competitors. [53] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism_and_slavery#cite_note-52>
While acknowledging Jewish participation in slavery, scholars reject allegations that Jews dominated the slave trade in Medieval Europe, Africa, and/or the Americas <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americas> . [51] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism_and_slavery#cite_note-Finkelman-50> [52] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism_and_slavery#cite_note-refutations-51>
Amatoritsero Ede
kenneth harrow
kenneth harrow
let me made this as short as i can.
no one on the list has disagreed that africans sold off africans as slaves, nor that slavery existed in africa. i don't think anyone would disagree that there were some, maybe most instances of "slavery" that bore no resemblance to slavery in the new world; whereas other forms of slavery were truly bad, shall we say.
gates was wrong, i believe, as the previous posting i sent by arthur abraham indicated, as eric foner indicated, as most on this list indicated, in casting the blame for the slave trade more on the role of the sellers than the buyers. more importantly, he was wrong in presenting this issue in such a way as to foment a split between african americans, represented as victims, and africans, represented as perpetrators. bode was 100% correct in stating that all of africa became victims, in one way or another, of the effects of the trade.
however, i don't think we will come to terms with this historical debacle by a simple one-off payment, not as long as we ignore that whatever ills slavery represented are still being perpetrated today, and just as dominant economic forces were responsible for the slave trade in the past, so too are they responsible for the economic patterns of today that generate massive conflict. i offered e congo as my example, and the guns for resources trade as the form the slave trade takes today. and when i heard randall robinson talk about banks that grew their capital from the slave trade to become world powerful instruments, i couldn't ignore his claim that that wealth was dirty money whose foundation was corrupt, and where some kind of restitution was owed.
you can say that i am defensive about jews. okay, i am. but i am defensive about black people as well, maybe more so. i am defensive about africans, more perhaps than about jews since i am in a minority jewish position when it comes to israel whose policies i oppose, whereas i am in the majority african position when it comes to defending africa from western slurs all the time.
i also apologize in using the first person singular so much: this ought not to be about me at all
ken harrow
Dr. Valentine Ojo
This is also the impression I have of Kenneth Harrow's contributions to this discussion so far - and I too can't help but wonder why...?
Kenneth Harrow wants to run with the hares, and hunt with the hounds...as the old adage goes.
I call that playing smart by half!
This is anything but helpful in a discussion like this, and definitely not designed to improve understanding between Africans and Jews!
Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD
On Tue 05/04/10 1:40 AM , Amatoritsero Ede esul...@gmail.com sent:
Amatoritsero Ede
Olabode Ibironke
Amato,
Like Ken, I too, am more receptive to arguments that acknowledge where necessary a little bit of this and a little bit of that than I am to propositions that claim all of this or all of that, all the time. What frustrates me in discussions on this and other lists is the complete absence of movement on either side of a debate in the end. When that happens, it frequently betrays more of ideological ping pong game than logical impasse. I wish that all the time we disagree, that it is as a result of a logical impasse, the discovery of a basic contradiction.
Bode