Article: "Science's Debt to the Slave Trade"

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Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

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Apr 7, 2019, 11:39:37 AM4/7/19
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Why not science's debt to Africa and Africans as a title?
Is it too much to acknowledge this straight on?
Are we  now indirectly  honoring the  despicable slave trade?
The author has good intentions, somehow.


GE

 

Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM

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Apr 7, 2019, 2:07:00 PM4/7/19
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Gloria,
Was "the despicable slave trade" illegal at the time of its practice?

CAO.

Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

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Apr 7, 2019, 2:32:32 PM4/7/19
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No. It was considered legal. So, too, torture- which is even sanctioned in the Bible.
Does that make it any less despicable? And by the way it was not a trade.
It was  international human  trafficking.





Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department, Central Connecticut State University
www.africahistory.net
Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries
2014 Distinguished Research Excellence Award in African Studies
 University of Texas at Austin
2019   Distinguished Africanist Award                   
New York African Studies Association
 


From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM <chidi...@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 7, 2019 2:04 PM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Article: "Science's Debt to the Slave Trade"
 
Gloria,
Was "the despicable slave trade" illegal at the time of its practice?

CAO.

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Biko Agozino

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Apr 7, 2019, 3:39:50 PM4/7/19
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Slave trade was actually outlawed by many states in the US from the 17th Century onwards out of fear that the trafficking of more Africans would lead to more insurrections long before the abolition by Britain. W.E.B. Du Bois argued in his doctoral dissertation that the African Slave Trade was suppressed by law in America from the start and so it could not have been as legal as historians want us to believe. Gloria is right that it was not a trade. Walter Rodney called it kidnapping, warfare, deceit and he demonstrated how science and technology developed in Europe based on the huge profits from trafficking Africans. Eric Williams argued the same thesis in his doctoral dissertation, Capitalism and Slavery. In ignorance, Max Weber argued that it was The Protestant Ethic that produced the Spirit of Capitalism. No be so.

Biko


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Harrow, Kenneth

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Apr 7, 2019, 4:22:16 PM4/7/19
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to refine a bit.the slave trade ended before slavery was declared illegal. the major europeans outlawed the trade in 1807, 1808, and 1815. the practice of slavery was abolished in 1833-34, by most europeans. the americans also abolished the slave trade 20 yrs after the constitution was adopted in 1787, i.e in 1807, but slavery wasn't abolished until the american civil war. after than only some spanish places, like cuba, kept slavery till late 1880s, and one province in brazil did the same.

as for the actual practice, we all know it gets complicated. mauretania has declared it illegal more times than i can remember, and other parts of the world as well--but even that's not enough of an answer since plantation slavery was different from personal slavery, like in homes or being concubines, or things like people sold for their labor (say on fishing boats in asia, where it still goes on.... and on....)

ken


kenneth harrow

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dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Sent: Sunday, April 7, 2019 2:12:38 PM
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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Article: "Science's Debt to the Slave Trade"
 
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Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

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Apr 7, 2019, 4:22:17 PM4/7/19
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The Brits outlawed it in 1807. I guess that was 400 years late, if we date the first documented
 evidence of human trafficking in its Euro-African context,   to 1441 with  the Portuguese
Antao Goncalves. 

 Agreed. Max Weber got it wrong -  and Marx got it right, in his Communist Manifesto.
I suspect that  many started to hate Marx from the moment he talked about "primitive accumulation" 
and the "turning of Africa into a commercial warren for the hunting of black skins."
Some never forgave him for that statement.

Williams, Rodney and also  Inikori   (and Braudel) helped us to put  names, places and data to it all.
We are now on to the  European and American   universities and museums  that benefitted
 and the  scientific disciplines and institutions that thrived  from it.

GE



Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department, Central Connecticut State University
www.africahistory.net
Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries
2014 Distinguished Research Excellence Award in African Studies
 University of Texas at Austin
2019   Distinguished Africanist Award                   
New York African Studies Association
 


From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
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Harrow, Kenneth

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Apr 7, 2019, 6:16:45 PM4/7/19
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the brits outlawed slavery itself in 1833 or 1834. but if you broaden the concept of slavery for a moment, and consider the lives of peasants displaced by the enclosure acts, forced to migrate to the cities where they lived in worse conditions than in the middle ages, and went to work at institutions like factories, lived in misery and disease and died young, their lives without choice were a replacement for slavery, or were, in reality, enslavement. the reforms of the 1830s might have saved capitalism, but really it saved the ownership of enterprises for the rich and powerful.

the story of capitalism since its beginnings in the 19th century is a variant of this, with conditions going up and down, but the top 1% or 10% living radically better than the working class not to mention the lumpenproletariat.

slavery was always relative in history, and my favorite example of this is the word for slave in ancient biblical terxts, "abd", which is the same as that for servant. ditto in arabic.

and indentured servants in the u.s. or africa in the 17th century were just slaves for fixed terms.


i supposed fixed term faculty feel like that nowadays, and with good reason.

ken


kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Sent: Sunday, April 7, 2019 4:07:59 PM

Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM

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Apr 7, 2019, 6:16:45 PM4/7/19
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Glory,
If it was considered legal then, it couldn't have also been considered as "human trafficking" in the illegal sense now.

It could however, be considered "despicable" by moralists like you and l.

Its legal status then, methinks, makes it almost impossible now for any claims of reparations and/or apology to pull through.

CAO.

Harrow, Kenneth

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Apr 7, 2019, 7:35:32 PM4/7/19
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chidi, most people in a position to make reparations would still consider it Crimes against Humanities.

laws of the past are irrelevant nowadays. we aren't considering if it was illegal. it was presumably legal to put the japanese in camps during wwII, but reparations have been made for it.

similarly, maybe it was legal under german law to commit genocide, including what was done to the herero, but new days and new thinking now consider it criminal.

ken


kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM <chidi...@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 7, 2019 4:59:39 PM

To: USA Africa Dialogue Series
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Article: "Science's Debt to the Slave Trade"
 
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Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM

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Apr 8, 2019, 8:12:01 AM4/8/19
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Ken,
Can we now, for example, consider the fund used to establish a certain Present world class bank, whose promoters were said to be former slave dealers as "proceed from crime"?

CAO.

Harrow, Kenneth

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Apr 8, 2019, 11:15:57 AM4/8/19
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hi chidi, i don't know, but i think it is an interesting question.

the notion of direct responsibility, indirect responsibility, that we today can't be held accountable for the crimes of our ancestors, has now become relevant. i don't think these are the real issues, to tellthe truth, but rather present/current unjust economic orders, and which should be corrected. using these arguments about past crimes simply to work to correct the current order is something i can support, even if i don't believe in the arguments about responsibility.

for instance, what if a class of wealthy people were judged to be victims of past crimes that a given bank had permitted. would you want to pressure the bank to pay them too? after 100years? after 200 years? i wouldn't.

on the other hand, when the nazis stole jewish property, the current day germans make restitution.

the same argument applies to the displacement of palestinians. the right to return can include compensation,and it was an issue worked out at oslo


ken


kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM <chidi...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, April 8, 2019 1:21:47 AM

To: USA Africa Dialogue Series
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Article: "Science's Debt to the Slave Trade"
Ken,
Can we now, for example, consider the fund used to establish a certain Present world class bank, whose promoters were said to be former slave dealers as "proceed from crime"?

CAO.

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Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

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Apr 8, 2019, 11:15:57 AM4/8/19
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Ken,
The problem with this argument is that it may be used to trivialize the enormous crime that took place in the case of  enslavement in the Americas.This may lead to a kind of denialism.

Chido, to the Nazi regime the holocaust was  very legal but we know that it was a criminal violation of human rights, and mass murder.


Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department, Central Connecticut State University
www.africahistory.net
web.ccsu.edu/afstudy/archive.html
Chief Editor- "Africa Update"
www.vimeo.com/gloriaemeagwali
Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries
2014 Distinguished Research Excellence Award in African Studies
University of Texas at Austin
2019   Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association


From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu>
Sent: Sunday, April 7, 2019 6:04:05 PM

OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Apr 8, 2019, 2:15:29 PM4/8/19
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When it comes to teams Atlantic slave trade it was specificallyvdesigbed for western institutions to benefit from it. It was legalised for this purpose western institutions  lije Science and western philosophers like Locke directly benefited.

It was designed in its massive scale and locus in the Americas to frogleap the West into the industrial revolution.  That was why when non circumspect western commentators asked Africa to state there contributions to modern science and invention  the Marxists got it right that Africa's contribution is locked in the industrial machinery. 

 Every modernisation of any scientific machinery ipso facto contained the return on investment of African Labour in geometric multipke proportions since nothing can come out of nothing as the legal phrase goes.  The African human capital is the undefined quantum mathematically that fuels the astronomical returns on capital that fuels capitalist growth down the ages since the trans Atlantic Slave trade wimchich no reification in the Marxian sense ( obliteration of origins) can elude.

This why ALL global sciences and scientific advances in a real economic sense (and not mere metaphoric sense belongs to Africa the irreducible ( human) economic factor that made them possible in that calculated gambit called the trans Atlantic Slave trade.  Products of science for this reason should be made available to African countries ( unlike say India & China which were not specifically targeted as locus of that economic leap that frog- leaped the United Kingdom its European competitors and the rest of the world into the Industrial Age.) free of charge or else they would be paying twice for the same products or updated models.

The European Union got this basic fact wrong in fashioning an economic union that excludes Africa from its activities and that is why it is destined to fail as the UK quickly realized even though it is India championing the position Africa should provide leadership for because of its ((India's )numerical advantage over Africa; numerical advantage provided by non other than the demographic depletion of Africa by the trans Atlantic Slave trade which makes Africa's case doubly urgent..

OAA


Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Date: 08/04/2019 16:21 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Article: "Science's Debt to theSlave  Trade"

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Ken,
The problem with this argument is that it may be used to trivialize the enormous crime that took place in the case of  enslavement in the Americas.This may lead to a kind of denialism.

Chido, to the Nazi regime the holocaust was  very legal but we know that it was a criminal violation of human rights, and mass murder.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department, Central Connecticut State University
www.africahistory.net
web.ccsu.edu/afstudy/archive.html
Chief Editor- "Africa Update"
www.vimeo.com/gloriaemeagwali
Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries
2014 Distinguished Research Excellence Award in African Studies
University of Texas at Austin
2019   Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association


From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu>
Sent: Sunday, April 7, 2019 6:04:05 PM

Harrow, Kenneth

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Apr 8, 2019, 2:15:29 PM4/8/19
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gloria, i agree with you. but there is always a flip side, which is how to align support for one's position. if we were to take the issue of enslavement only, we'd have to ignore much that complicates any claims. moral righteousness is one part; historical parsing of claims is quite another thing. we could go on to claim the victimhood status of anyone, right down to jews who were capos in the camps, or who facilitated administration of the warsaw ghetto; not to mention african slavery itself, or that which existed everywhere in the 15th c, etc

why do we work for affirmative action? a similar question that arises all the time.and which gets different answers in europe or even in africa. the answer for me is how much we can use social engineering to correct inequalities in society today, not to correct past injustices.

how this can be used against us politically, your point, is an important question, for which i have no easy answer.

ken


kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Sent: Monday, April 8, 2019 10:09:35 AM

Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM

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Apr 8, 2019, 2:15:29 PM4/8/19
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Gloria,
This argument would not "trivialize" any "enormous crime", neither would it lead to "denialism".

The situation, if properly interrogated, would rather fortify the reparations/apology argument.

Arguments need to be built on solid(less emotional) grounds.

CAO.

OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Apr 8, 2019, 2:15:29 PM4/8/19
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Biko:

I'm totally with Du Bois on the goal of the " Slave Trade"  If you look at my other posting in this thread it could not legitimately be called a trade because of the defective  economic theory of value involved in which human value was bastardized and delegitimated.  Yes legal cover was given for the new mathe-magical theory of human value to facilitate the intended goal.

All the work of the abolitionists was part of the whole gambit of using the mass uprooting of population to develop a certain part of the world then delegitimate the trade afterwards without sharing the continuing proceeds with the dispossessed  in an equitable manner.

This was why the first anti- capitalist in western discourse  (my friend  the Nazarene and allegorist) called on the rich man to first give up ALL his riches before following him declaring that it is easier for the camel to enter the eye of the needle than for the rich man to enter the kingdom of God.  Dubious western capitalist Christians pretend not to understand the import of this call.


OAA


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-------- Original message --------
From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: 07/04/2019 20:46 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Article: "Science's Debt to theSlave  Trade"

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Slave trade was actually outlawed by many states in the US from the 17th Century onwards out of fear that the trafficking of more Africans would lead to more insurrections long before the abolition by Britain. W.E.B. Du Bois argued in his doctoral dissertation that the African Slave Trade was suppressed by law in America from the start and so it could not have been as legal as historians want us to believe. Gloria is right that it was not a trade. Walter Rodney called it kidnapping, warfare, deceit and he demonstrated how science and technology developed in Europe based on the huge profits from trafficking Africans. Eric Williams argued the same thesis in his doctoral dissertation, Capitalism and Slavery. In ignorance, Max Weber argued that it was The Protestant Ethic that produced the Spirit of Capitalism. No be so.

Biko

On Sunday, 7 April 2019, 14:07:04 GMT-4, Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM <chidi...@gmail.com> wrote:



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OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Apr 8, 2019, 5:45:48 PM4/8/19
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EDITED (for more clarity)



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------
From: OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Date: 08/04/2019 19:24 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Article: "Science's Debt to theSlave   Trade"

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When it comes to trans Atlantic slave trade it was specificallyvdesigbed for western institutions to benefit from it. It was legalised for this purpose western institutions  like Science and western philosophers like Locke directly benefited.

It was designed in its massive scale and locus in the Americas to frogleap the West into the industrial revolution.  That was why when non circumspect western commentators asked Africans to state their
 contributions to modern science and invention  the Marxists got it right that Africa's contribution is locked in the industrial machinery. 

 Every modernisation of any scientific machinery ipso facto contained the return on investment of African Labour in exponental multipke proportions since nothing can come out of nothing as the legal phrase goes.  The African human capital is the undefined quantum mathematically that fuels the astronomical returns on capital that fuels capitalist growth down the ages since the trans Atlantic Slave trade which no reification in the Marxian sense ( obliteration of origins) can elide.

This is why ALL global sciences and scientific advances in a real economic sense (and not mere metaphoric sense belong  to Africa the irreducible ( human) economic factor that made them possible in that calculated gambit called the trans Atlantic Slave trade.  Products of science for this reason should be made available to African countries ( unlike say India & China which were not specifically targeted as locus of that economic leap that frog- leaped the United Kingdom its European competitors and the rest of the world into the Industrial Age.) free of charge or else Africans would be paying twice for the same products or updated models.

The European Union got this basic fact wrong in fashioning an economic union that excludes Africa from its activities and that is why it is destined to fail as the UK quickly realized even though it is India championing the position Africa should provide leadership for because of its ((India's ))numerical advantage over Africa; numerical advantage provided by non other than the demographic depletion of Africa by the trans Atlantic Slave trade which makes Africa's case doubly urgent..

OAA


Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Date: 08/04/2019 16:21 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Article: "Science's Debt to theSlave  Trade"

Boxbe This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (emea...@ccsu.edu) Add cleanup rule | More info
Ken,
The problem with this argument is that it may be used to trivialize the enormous crime that took place in the case of  enslavement in the Americas.This may lead to a kind of denialism.

Chido, to the Nazi regime the holocaust was  very legal but we know that it was a criminal violation of human rights, and mass murder.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department, Central Connecticut State University
www.africahistory.net
web.ccsu.edu/afstudy/archive.html
Chief Editor- "Africa Update"
www.vimeo.com/gloriaemeagwali
Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries
2014 Distinguished Research Excellence Award in African Studies
University of Texas at Austin
2019   Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association


From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu>
Sent: Sunday, April 7, 2019 6:04:05 PM

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Article: "Science's Debt to the Slave Trade"

the brits outlawed slavery itself in 1833 or 1834. but if you broaden the concept of slavery for a moment, and consider the lives of peasants displaced by the enclosure acts, forced to migrate to the cities where they lived in worse conditions than in the middle ages, and went to work at institutions like factories, lived in misery and disease and died young, their lives without choice were a replacement for slavery, or were, in reality, enslavement. the reforms of the 1830s might have saved capitalism, but really it saved the ownership of enterprises for the rich and powerful.

the story of capitalism since its beginnings in the 19th century is a variant of this, with conditions going up and down, but the top 1% or 10% living radically better than the working class not to mention the lumpenproletariat.

slavery was always relative in history, and my favorite example of this is the word for slave in ancient biblical terxts, "abd", which is the same as that for servant. ditto in arabic.

and indentured servants in the u.s. or africa in the 17th century were just slaves for fixed terms.


i supposed fixed term faculty feel like that nowadays, and with good reason.

ken


kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Sent: Sunday, April 7, 2019 4:07:59 PM

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Article: "Science's Debt to the Slave Trade"
The Brits outlawed it in 1807. I guess that was 400 years late, if we date the first documented
 evidence of human trafficking in its Euro-African context,   to 1441 with  the Portuguese
Antao Goncalves. 

 Agreed. Max Weber got it wrong -  and Marx got it right, in his Communist Manifesto.
I suspect that  many started to hate Marx from the moment he talked about "primitive accumulation" 
and the "turning of Africa into a commercial warren for the hunting of black skins."
Some never forgave him for that statement.

Williams, Rodney and also  Inikori   (and Braudel) helped us to put  names, places and data to it all.
We are now on to the  European and American   universities and museums  that benefitted
 and the  scientific disciplines and institutions that thrived  from it.

GE



Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department, Central Connecticut State University
www.africahistory.net
Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries
2014 Distinguished Research Excellence Award in African Studies
 University of Texas at Austin
2019   Distinguished Africanist Award                   
New York African Studies Association
 

From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 7, 2019 3:31 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Article: "Science's Debt to the Slave Trade"

Biko Agozino

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Apr 10, 2019, 8:46:17 PM4/10/19
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
OAA

This first documentary of mine may help to answer some of the questions that CAO raised about reparations for the crimes of slavery.


Biko

Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

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Apr 11, 2019, 6:05:09 AM4/11/19
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Georgetown University students are voting on adding a fee to their tuition to fund reparations for descendants of the 272 slaves by the institution.


Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department, Central Connecticut State University
www.africahistory.net
Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries
2014 Distinguished Research Excellence Award in African Studies
 University of Texas at Austin
2019   Distinguished Africanist Award                   
New York African Studies Association
 

From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2019 8:22 PM

Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

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Apr 11, 2019, 6:05:09 AM4/11/19
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Thank you for your consistency over the years.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
 


From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2019 8:22 PM

Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

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Apr 11, 2019, 11:31:32 AM4/11/19
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
I use "pinnacle 21." I couldn't download the you tube video.
You have to facilitate the download.


GE
 


From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2019 8:22 PM

Biko Agozino

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Apr 11, 2019, 3:40:36 PM4/11/19
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
How do I enable downloads from my YouTube Channel?

Biko

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