The Blackworld Evolution to Revolution Prince Justice 3rd Edition Second Edition The Blackworld: Evolution to Revolution by Prince Justice ISBN 978-0-9551770-7-1 Copyright 2018 All rights reserved under International, U.S.A and U.K Copyright Conventions. An AU Media Book www.aumedia.info www.princejustice.com Copyright © 2018 PRINCE JUSTICE All rights reserved. Telephone 234(0)8063167994
Dedication To my late father, Prince Jaiyeola Faloye LL.B LL.M. Daddy, this is the new, fortified edition that we often spoke about. Thanks. The truth and nothing but the truth dedicated to all those who have lived and died for truth and justice. Prince Justice Faloye Omo Akure amuda sile afi ogun enu pa eni (Son of akure that lays down the sword and uses words to win)
CONTENTS Chapter1:TheTruhWillSetYouFree............................................................. 1 Chapter 2: Charity Begins on the Home Coast ...................................................... 30 African foundations of human civilization in the true Garden of Eden ................ 30 Chapter 3: Globalization of African Culture: Africans’ Frontier Empires ................ 62 The spread of
black African global prominence and their destruction by the First Horsemen from Eurasia 10,000 BC to 500 BC ...................................................... 62 Chapter 4: The Rise of the Second Horseman and Eurasian Dogmatization .......... 92 Jewish, Assyrian, Greek, and Roman campaigns in Saharan Africa; Christianity starts in Africa (500 BC to AD 500)....................................................................... 92 Chapter 5: Peaceful Islam from Afro-Asiatic Horsemen with the Scimitar ............. 99 Creation and rise of new Afro-Asian groups that challenge European and African sociopolitical structures (AD 500 to 1400) ........................................................... 99 Chapter 6: The Second Coming of the Europeans ................................................ 113 African slavery by Latino Catholics building empires on sugar and silver; Benin and Congo empires challenged (1400 to 1568).................................................. 113 Chapter 7: The Dutchmasters Gangster Paradise................................................ 129 The Dutch, British, and French rise against Latinos for African wealth and American land (1568 to 1650)............................................................................ 129 Chapter 8: Tale of Two Colonizers: French and English ....................................... 141 British and French vie for world domination through slavery and colonization: The creation of the United States, Haiti, and Brazil (1650 to 1808)................... 141 Chapter 9: From Land of Love to Land of Wickedness ......................................... 156 Yorubaland burns with Muslim jihads in the north and Christian attacks on the Slave Coast: Africa bleeds to America (1800s) ................................................... 156 Chapter 10: Cotton Is King .................................................................................. 167 Rise of US slavery, abolitionists, and the consolidation of Anglo domination; Brazil and Cuba renew slavery efforts (1800s) ................................................... 167 Chapter 11: Slavery 201: Colonisation and Sharecropping .................................. 180 Gentler form of slavery introduced: The beginning of industrialisation (1800s) 180 Chapter 12: Queen Victoria’s Boys Scramble for Africa....................................... 198 The entrenchment of European supremacy through small cliques (1800–1917)198 Chapter 13: The Ogun Military-Industrial Complex ............................................. 219 Iron and steel makers create military complexes and take over Western economies to rule the world (late 1800s to mid-1900s) ..................................... 219 Chapter 14: The Black Agitation ......................................................................... 233 Separatists and integrationist lead the blackworld with the likes of Du Bois, Garvey, Solanke, Plaatje and Nascimento (1900–1945)..................................... 233 Chapter 15: White Plutocracy ............................................................................. 247 European elitist sociopolitical theories and systems (1900–1945) ..................... 247 Chapter 16: The Winds of Change Ziks across Africa ........................................... 257 Africans win fragmented political but not economic freedom (1945–1965) ...... 257 Chapter 17: The Afro-Romantic Movements....................................................... 279 Liberation movements in Central and South American nations (Brazil, Haiti, Cuba, and Jamaica); Gain political but not economic freedom (1945–1965)..... 279 Chapter 18: Democracy: Demonstration of Craze? ............................................. 297 African American civil rights won but not economic: The redesigning of European neo-imperialism (1945– 1965)............................................................................. 297 Chapter 19: The Black VIPs: Vagabonds in Power? ............................................. 309 Africa falls on its face, tripped by invisible European shackles (1965–1980)...... 309 Chapter 20: Black Power Overpowered .............................................................. 345 African Americans restricted economically, culturally, and sometimes physically (1965–1980) ....................................................................................................... 345 Chapter 21: Slavery 301: Trickle-Down Nigganomics .......................................... 366 The creation of black plagues and ‘accounted’ slavery: HIV/AIDS, drug wars, and the IMF-inspired debt problem
(1980–2000)...................................................... 366 Chapter 22: Suffering and Smiling ...................................................................... 384 Small successes and big failures of the African giants of Ghana, Nigeria, the US and Brazil (1980– 1999)....................................................................................... 384 Chapter 23: Things Fall Apart…Together ............................................................ 434 The rest of the blackworld’s similar successes and failures (1980–1999)........... 434 Chapter 24: 2000AD: The Dawn of the New, Utopian African Millennium .......... 476 Chapter 25: The Evolution of the Revolution....................................................... 508 Concluding analysis of the blackworld—past, present, and future .................... 508 Selected Bibliography......................................................................................... 526
Tables 1.Twenty Most Populous Black Nations/Communities in 2013 Nation Nigeria Brazil Ethiopia Population in Millions 175 105* 94 Congo (Zaire) 76 Tanzania Kenya US South Africa 48 44 43 42** Uganda Ghana Mozambique 35 25 24 Ivory Coast Cameroon Angola 23 21
19 Burkina Faso Malawi 18 17 Mali Niger Zambia 16 16 14.3 Zimbabwe Location West Africa Official Language English South America Portuguese Northeast Africa West Central Africa East Africa East Africa English French English English Southern Africa East Africa West Africa Southern Africa West Africa West Africa Southern Africa West Africa Southern Africa West Africa West Africa Southern Africa
Southern Africa North America English 13 English English English Portuguese French French Portuguese French English French French English English * Excludes whites but includes mulattos. ** Excludes whites. 2.Five Largest Original African Languages in 2013 Language Numbers of Speakers Yoruba 52 million Igbo 47 million Kituba/Lingala 43 million Nguni 40 million Akan 25 million Country Nigeria/Benin/Togo Nigeria Congo South Africa/Zimbabwe Ghana/Ivory coast 3.Seven Largest Black Islander Populations Island Lagos (Nigeria) Haiti
Cuba Jamaica New York, US+ England, UK Trinidad Barbados Population 18 million(approx.) 9.9 million 6 million 3 million 2.9 million approx.) 2.3 million 1.3 million 300,000 Language English/Yoruba French Spanish English English English English English 4.Ten Largest Black Ethnic Groups/Languages + Excludes whites and other blacks in other parts of New York tristate area; New York islands only. Ethnic Group Afro-Brazilians* Hausa Yoruba(includin g Edo, Itshekiri, Aja) Igbo (including 50 million Ibibio, Efik) Population 105 million 60 million 55 million African Americans (including black Hispanics) Nguni(including Zulu, Xhosa, and Ndebele) Lingala/Kituba
Fulani/Fulbe Amharic Oromo Total Blackworld 48 million US languages slightly differentiated Ebonics (African Tonal English) 45 million Countries Language Type Brazil Afro-Portuguese Nigeria, Niger, Ghana Afro-Asian Arabic trade language in Sub-Saharan grasslands Nigeria,Rep. of Benin, Original African Togo, Brazil, Cuba, languages slightly UK differentiated Nigeria Original African South Africa Original African languages slightly differentiated 43 million Congo (Kinshasa), North and West Congo Congo(Brazzaville) trade languages evolving from original African languages 30 million Nigeria, Guinea, Afro-Asian Arabic Gambia, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Cameroon language of the ‘white man of the desert’ that spread across West Africa grasslands 30 million Ethiopia Afro-Asian language with ancient Greek input 30 million Ethiopia Afro-Asian with Arabian Peninsula influences 1.4 billion (approx.)
Sources: US Census Bureau; Central Intelligence Agency: The World Factbook; World Almanac; World Languages * * Excludes whites but includes mulattos.
Chapter1:TheTruhWilSetYouFree Nigeria is the scientifically proven origin of humanity and the centrepiece of the future Black global ascendancy, destined to usher in an unrivalled era of global peace, prosperity, and equality. Meaning Niger (Negro) Area, Nigeria is the world’s most populous and ethnically diverse Black nation. Its coast was formerly labelled ‘The Slave Coast’ by Europeans, and its known northern reaches labelled Negritia by the Romans. It is the heart of the African Giant whose legs, arms, and hair have been cut into numerous black nations and communities across the world. With 517 out of Africa’s 2146 languages, Nigeria houses the two largest Original African languages, Yoruba and Igbo, as well as one of the most populous Afro-Asian languages, Hausa. A DNA genomewide analysis of 2432 Africans from 121 geographically diverse populations across Africa (and 1379 DNA samples of other races across the world) proves that the ancestors of modern human beings originated and migrated from the Lower Niger River basin of Southern Nigeria.
In the beginning… Around 66 million years ago, a meteorite struck planet Earth and killed most dinosaurs and living things in what is known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction Event12. This led to the further breakup of the supercontinent and landmass, Pangea, into the present continents of this Cenozoic Era. The new formation of continents and the warming up of the planet made the Lower Niger basin the most conducive for evolution due to the wind system that brought rain from the Atlantic Ocean at an angle due to the tilt of the planet. 1 Renne, Paul R.; Deino, Alan L.; Hilgen, Frederik J.; Kuiper, Klaudia F.; Mark, Darren F.; Mitchell
III, William S.; Morgan, Leah E.; Mundil, Roland; Smit, Jan (7 February 2013). "Time Scales of Critical Events Around the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary". Science 339 (6120): 684–687 2 Fortey, R (1999). Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth. Vintage. pp. 238–260.ISBN 978-0-375-70261-7.
The heavy rains dumped on the West African sub-region, accumulates and drains back to the ocean, through the world’s largest continental mangrove rainforest swamp in southern Nigeria, where rivers rising from Guinean highlands (Niger), Cameroun highlands (Benue), Jos Plateau catchment area (Sokoto/Kaduna), and the Yoruba and Igbo highlands rivers meet. Regardless of the global Ice Age glacial cycles that made sea levels rise or
fall, coastlines advance or retreat and rainforest extend or retreat, this area remained the world’s most fertile lowland area. The Atlantic rains could not reach the eastern half of Africa, which depended on the Asian monsoon for rains whose unreliability could not sustain life for long, even in Asia where it originates. Therefore Lower Niger remained the springboard of humanity with its wild yams, palm trees and its high protein insects. Throughout prehistoric times, the rich ecosystem produced improved stages of hominids that left the area to colonize the world but faced evolutionary stagnation due to lower nutritional intakes. From genetic evidence, the modern man evolved around 150,000 to 200,000 years ago along the Nigerian coast. Pygmy hunter gatherers differentiated from modern Africans 60,000years ago3, while out-of-Africa migrations were dated between 50,000years ago and 70,000 years ago4 after the Toba supereruption in Indonesia and disturbance of the Asian-East African monsoon rain system that would have killed earlier migrants. In the Simmons Genome Study, it is stated that the Yoruba separated substantially from the KhoeSan 87 (58–120) kya; from the Mbuti 56 (32–84) kya; and from the Dinka 19 (9–25) kya5. Human beings evolved and dispersed with a culture based on Wild Yams. Wild Yam was the fuel of human civilization. Timing and festivals were based around lunar and yam cycles. A civilization based on natural Laws of Retributive Justice and an African Information Retrieval System, whose sixteen branches of knowledge (agriculture, metallurgy, psychology, history, etc.) evolved from keying natural language text to 256 ordered pairs of 4-bit arrays. This knowledge bank that became the first ‘religion’ in the world is called Ifa by the Yorubas, Iha by the Edos, Aha by Igbos and Ewe, and extends across Africa with similar names and concepts given to the 16 branches of knowledge called Odus in Yoruba. It also formed the foundation of Buddhism, I Ching and other Eurasian religions. 3 Patin E, Laval G, Barreiro LB, Salas A, Semino O, et al. (2009) Inferring the Demographic History of African Farmers and Pygmy Hunter–Gatherers Using a Multilocus Resequencing Data Set. PLoS Genet 5(4): e1000448. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1000448
4 Soares P, Alshamali F, Pereira JB , et al. 2011. The expansion of mtDNA Haplogroup L3 within and out of Africa. Mol. Biol. Evol. 29(3):915–927. 2012 doi:10.1093/molbev/msr245 5 Mallick S, Li H et al (2016) The Simons Genome Diversity Project: 300 genomes from 142 diverse populations, Nature 538, 201-6. (Supplementary Materials). PMCID: PMC5161557
In what is known as the Great Coastal Migration6, successive waves of humans migrated out of the Horn of Africa into Eurasia, initially settling on the coast, all the way to China, Australia and the Americas7. From around 10,000BC, the Original African culture bred civilisations from Lower Niger to Nile and Indus Valley until about 2000BC, when Eurasians (referred to in the Bible as the First Horsemen with composite bows and horse drawn chariots) came down from the Eurasia Mountains to begin a new era of violent civilization. This was the Age of Ogun, Iron Age. Two thousand years later, with the advent of the Era of the Second Horseman and the sword, the Age of Olokun, the slate was progressively wiped clean as Original African contributions and time were reset to zero. Oduduwa, an adherent of Olokun, also started a dynasty across Yorubaland which helped mystify ancient Black history and turn the science of Ifa into a religion. Now, from 2000AD with the advent of the Era of the Third Horseman, with scales of justice to bring economic prosperity and global peace, there is a need for the human race to identify these truths and unite along natural Original African principles of sustainable economic development and laws of retributive justice. This is the Age of Shango.
Rising from the ashes… Africans now need to revive and propagate a socio-political platform and belief system for their collective advancement or there will be no sustainable Black socioeconomic development and global peace! 6 Phillip Endicott, Mait Metspalu and Toomas Kivisild (2007),The Evolution and History of Human Populations in South Asia: Inter-disciplinary Studies in Archaeology, Biological Anthropology, Linguistics and Genetics, Springer Netherlands, ISBN 978-1-4020-5561-4, 7 Renee Hetherington, Edward Wiebe, Andrew J. Weaver, Shannon L. Carto, Michael Eby, Roger MacLeod (2007), Climate, African and Beringian subaerial continental shelves, and migration of early peoples, Quaternary International, International Union for Quaternary Research,
The vast majority of Black people worldwide will not only continue to be the most socioeconomically and politically deprived, but they will also continue to suffer from a racial inferiority complex and remain mentally enslaved to those who profit from their socioeconomic domination. What is the point of building factories and economic/political systems if nobody will patronise or be proud of its designers or products? How can one feel successful if one is not proud of oneself? Most important is how do we fight the scourge of terrorism and corruption? There will be no global peace or equality until the two prevailing belief systems, Christianity and Islam that breed inequalities and anomalies, are countered and defeated with an Original African belief system built on naturalistic principles that imbibe equality and naturally conducive behavioural patterns and economic systems. Unfortunately, those who greatly benefit from the unfairness of Eurasian belief systems are sabotaging all efforts to revive a naturally evolved and balanced truthful African belief system. This is done through culturally biased educational systems as well as religion, whereby they label progenitors of Original African thought in every African ethnic group as satanic. For the Yoruba, Esu, the Orisha of information, created the body of historic, scientific, and cultural knowledge known as Ifa. But, Esu is now unfairly equated with and translated as the devil, thus scaring the Yoruba from accessing important cultural and scientific information and leaving them open to cultural disorientation and a racial inferiority complex. It is the same with the Igbo Ekwensu and every other Original African group, despite the fact that the concept of the devil does NOT exist in Original African belief systems, which are based on the assumption of one Almighty God that is good and bad, and people personally choose and are repaid according to the rule of karma/Ofo and Ogu/Esan (laws of retributive justice). The cultural disorientation is exacerbated by the cultural bias and miseducation of Eurasian academia. At best, it misdirects and further confuses the origin and history of the Black race, and at worst, it distorts
clear facts that can free the world from mental slavery. European academia and religion are rather very linear, as opposed to the duality of Yoruba knowledge based on a binary system. Yoruba exhibits knowledge as a thesis and anti-thesis, theoretical and applied, physical and spiritual, making it easy to understand. European separation of applied mathematics from the theory makes it a difficult subject. Geometry was easily understood through hair-styling dividing the head as a cycle. Trigonometry would make more sense using planetary alignments and their astrological meanings. History and Economics will be more effective if trends are attached spiritual meanings. In what is known as the Precession of the Sun, it takes the Sun 26,000yrs to make a complete revolution. Ancient knowledge systems like Hinduism, derived from Ifa, also calculated this and showed that history is not a linear but cyclical function, based on the 26000 year precession cycle of the Equinox – the binary movement of the Sun. Yuga in Hindu, Ugba in Eastern Yoruba. This could be divided into 12 segments of 2000 years each. The 2,000yr eras of the Biblical Horsemen or of Orishas makes history clearer. Age of Orunmila (10,000-8,000BC) beginning of civilization. Age of Yemoja (8,000-6000BC) brought the lunar calendar tied to female menstrual cycles, matriarchy. Age of Esu (6000 to 4000BC) brought dispersal of knowledge, writing and Ifa; Age of Osun (4000 to 2000BC) brought the building of pyramids and trading empires of Sumner, Indus Valley Civilisations etc.; Age of Ogun (2000 to 1BC) brought the spread of warring Eurasian horsemen and their composite bows that overran Black empires from China to Egypt; Age of Olokun (1 to 2000AD) brought Christianity, Islam and other religious dogma, and propaganda from racist capitalism etc. used to dominate the world Age of Shango (2000 to 4000AD) will bring enlightenment and global economic justice. For even better understanding, the 2000yr era can be broken into eight 250yr eras of significant changes tied to Oya, the Orisha of change. The current change era started in 2007 with the global economic crash,
Obama, Arab Springs, fall of Mbeki, GEJ-Buhari, Mubarak etc and will last till 2023. 1763 to 1778 – American Revolution, beginning of the end of Oyo Empire, the French Revolution leading to the Haiti Revolution etc. 1516 to 1532 transit – Nupe invaded Oyo, forcing its resettling in Igboho; Christianity breakup, rise of Britain and France 1269-1287 introduction of Gun, defeat of Islam in Europe and the rise of Europe etc. These are rough but very useful guides to learning and remembering history. It is the aim of this book to clearly outline the history of the Black Race from the beginning to present day to challenge wrong beliefs and mental slavery, and to unite and empower us towards a global socioeconomic renaissance and global peace.
Clearing the fog of Western academia… From pillaging and damaging historic artefacts that unravel Black history to hiding scientific results, there is a concerted effort to keep Africans down culturally, economically, and politically. In a comparative DNA study of more than four hundred communities worldwide from 1990 to 2002 called The Human Genome Project (headed by born-again Christian Dr Francis Collins), it was discovered that the oldest DNA strand traced along the female lineage came from southern Nigeria, thus making it the true ‘Garden of Eden’. The fact was covered up in order to not discredit the major belief systems, Christianity and Islam, and their stories of human origin. Nonetheless, the result was passed onto a new project (also headed by Collins), called The International HapMap Project8, which was sponsored by the National Institute of Health (NIH), several world powers, and multinational firms. It used hundreds of DNA samples collected in Ibadan, Nigeria as a template to study the genome for a better understanding of human genetic makeup and its link to curing diseases. This would create a complete life map and launch a biogenetic revolution that, like the last Industrial Revolution, used black African resources without compensation.
8 http://hapmap.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
Later genome studies have also been unhelpful, though revealing. Another project called The Human Genome Diversity Project was started by Stanford University, in collaboration with France’s Centre for the Study of Human Polymorphism. They created a HGDP-CEPH Human Genome Diversity Cell Line – a resource of 1,063 cultured lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) from 1,050 individuals in 52 world populations, banked at the Foundation Jean Dausset-CEPH in Paris. But, whether out of racism or ignorance, there were questionable categorizations and conclusions that continued to obscure the truth. Various papers on human origins based on genetic deductions from the above genome banks have been written (Soares et al9; Tishkoff et al10). Tishkoff et al used a combined global data set containing a total of 1327 genotyped markers (848 microsatellites, 476 indels and 3 SNPs) to differentiate 3945 DNA samples collected worldwide. The only statistical data of value that provided the least biased insight, although not perfect, was the Global Unsupervised Structure Run (Table S8) that showed the proportion of genes of each ethnic group associated to 14 pre-determined ancestral homes. Even though the number of possible Associated Ancestral Clusters (AACs) was too high with K=14 (where K is number of possible ancestral clusters), it provides the true picture. From the study, it is obvious from the probability values tying linguistic groups to ancestral clusters that chances of being the origin of humanity fall as you move away from Yoruba with 0.932 (93.2%) – to the west Ashanti is 0.901, to the north Gwari 0.895, to the east, Igala is 0.931, Igbo 0.920, further east across the border into Cameroun Ewondo 0.912 Eton 0.895, eastward into Gabon Fang 0.895 and Kongo 0.907, Baluba 0.909. But, regardless of the telling values of major populations, a tiny group Lemande of less than 5,000 speakers with 0.935 skewed the perception of the obvious origin and migration route. 9 Soares P, Alshamali F, Pereira JB , et al. 2011. The expansion of mtDNA Haplogroup L3 within and out of Africa. Mol. Biol. Evol. 29(3):915–927. 2012 doi:10.1093/molbev/msr245 10 Tishkoff SA, Reed FA, Friedlaender FR, et al. (25 co-authors). 2009. The genetic structure and
history of Africans and African Americans. Science 324:1035
Computer generated probability values tying linguistic groups to ancestral clusters were wrongly skewed due to ill-defined linguistic groups and the inclusion of relatively too many tiny hunter-gatherer groups in comparison to larger Original African groups like Ijaw and Shona that were left out. First, contrary to even mainstream linguistic classifications, they added the Kodofanian languages to the Niger-Congo language family to create a NigerKodofanian language family, which prevented the figures not being closer to 100% in Table 8. The wrong classifications were even made worse in Table S9: Proportion of AACs from the Africa Structure Run at K=14, and rendered the result pointless when instead of separating Kodofanian to make it NigerCongo, they separated East Bantu into a cluster that had no group above 0.48. Second, contrary to basic logic and statistics, they concluded that Lemande of a mere population of 6,000 was the ancestral home of Original Africans in the Niger-Congo/Kodofanian phylum, despite the next five highest values in the global structure run for NigerKodofanian showed a pattern while Lemande was an exception. Third, they concluded that the Namibia/Angola San homeland was the origin of humanity because it had the highest AAC value among the huntergatherers, regardless of the established fact that they migrated south after their split with Western Pygmies and the high ancestral probability value is retained due to their relative isolation in the Namib grasslands and desert. The Genographic Project, by IBM and Geographic Society, also continued the mainstream fallacy of our origins. This cultural imperialism and bias is grossly unfair and racist. Not only will the Black race lag behind in the quest to cure diseases, but its right to know the true contents of God’s ‘logbook’ encoded in our blood is deprived. This is vital information required to counter those that use God through religion and tribalism to cause Islamic terrorism, ethnic strife and corruption across Africa. It is needed to foster unity by making clear the close ethnic relationships that are blurred by foreign dogma and ethnic politics.
Religious and cultural bias of mainstream academia…
It is obvious that regardless of the weight of logical conclusions that humanity originated in West Africa, mainstream academia will continue to support false assumptions at the foundations of their White supremacist belief systems and prevent the realization of a truthful global unifying Original African belief system. They remain intent on maintaining the whitewash of a West Africa evolution point that developed into the Original African civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia and India before white Eurasians came from the Andronovo Complex in Central Asian Caucasus/Ural Mountains to attack and take over. Following the initial 2000-year era of violent conquest, the second 2000 year era continued the imperialism with religion and dogma that gave birth to modern academia. The modern academic misconceptions have their roots in religious accounts in the Bible/Koran and their concepts of creation and history. Historic accounts were written by those who arrived on the global stage when black Egypt was already a dominant global power. As recounted in the Bible, the first notable Eurasian to come to the black superpower known as Kemet/Egypt was Abraham around 2000BC. He arrived after the pyramids were built and pharaohs had reigned for more than a thousand years. Abraham’s descendants later wrote themselves into history by starting at a beginning that no living man could have known with certainty without modern tools of genetics, linguistics and geography. The first Jewish accounts were written in Hebrew around 500BC in modern day Syria/Iraq where they had been enslaved, and were translated into Greek in Alexandria, Egypt around 250BC. Based on oral history and racial ego (wanting to be justified in the overwhelming development of black Egypt in comparison to their white, Caucasian wildernesses), those who wrote the Bible couldn’t completely disguise the truth even though they usurped black African power at the time. The Bible starts with the creation of earth and man in the Garden of Eden, which some Christians and Muslims vaguely tie to modernday Iraq, based on the Genesis story. In Genesis 2:10–14, it is claimed that the river watering the Garden of Eden split into four rivers: Pishon, which flowed through Havilah, the Land of Gold; Gihon, which flowed through the Land of Cush; and the
Tigris and Euphrates, located in modern Iraq. (Havilah is a son of Cush, a people whom religious theorists claim to be ancestors of black Africans.) Most important, West Africa has been known as the Land of Gold. Pishon and Gihon are Africa’s two major rivers: the Niger flowed through the West Africa Land of Gold, and the Nile flowed through the Land of Cush. However, Christian academicians prefer to refer to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which didn’t have biblical descriptions that could stand the test of time but had fairly recently formulated names. There are obvious inconsistencies such as Cain’s expulsion from his father’s lands and his life among other peoples, as told in Genesis 4. Skeletons of dinosaurs preceding human life have been found, but dinosaurs are not mentioned in the Bible. Egyptian writings and pyramids precede biblical records by at least two thousand years. The number of descendants between Adam and Abraham in Genesis 5 is suspect. Biased by religious and cultural sentiments, academicians have concentrated on East Africa where, due to the aridity of the valleys, prehistoric skeletons are well preserved.
Cultural and geographic bias of Archaeology… East Africa White settlers who filled the ranks of local archaeologists shied away from the West Africa rainforest and the inhospitable Sahara Desert (nearly the size of United States) above. Despite the fact that most East Africa hominid skeletons, paraded by Western academia, have dental structures and markings consistent with early rainforest development, the academicians choose to ignore the West Africa rainforests. Instead, they concentrated on the eastern and southern outskirts of the African rainforest! This line of study turned up prehistoric skeletons from the Ethiopian-Kenyan highlands: the Lake Turkana area. A 3.5-millionyear-old Australopithecus11 afarensis skeleton called ‘Lucy’ was found in 1974; the next year, a whole family was found. In 1993, a skeleton of a 4.4-million-year-old hominid, Australopithecus ramidus, was found in the same area. These and other findings were used to develop the theory of evolution, which conveniently
assumed that the evolution spot was nearby, because the oldest skeletons were found around the Lake Turkana-Omo River. 11 Austral means southern, pithecus means monkey.
However, the Ethiopian-Kenyan highlands, and even most of the eastern African plains, are too arid to be contemplated as evolution spots. This geographic inconsistency was explained by the hypothesis that the area was wet forestland millions of years ago and that the drying and transformation into a savannah made humans stand up and walk. The evolutionary theory based on skeletal discoveries was challenged in 2002, when a skeleton more than six million years old12 (‘Toumai’) was found in the Saharan Lake Chad, northeast of Nigeria! Lake Chad is served by rivers from Nigeria and Cameroon, and the rivers were also migration routes from the southern rainforests. Until 2002, only a few ancient skeletons and tools were found in the West Africa subregion, but they were not comparable in quantity to those found in South and East Africa. It was only with the 2002 discovery of a hominid skeleton labeled ‘Toumai’ in Chad, to the immediate northwest of Nigeria, that renowned archaeologists publicly admitted that the West Africa region had been vastly neglected compared to East Africa. Nevertheless, a few findings of tools, artefacts, and the occasional skeleton have shown that the Iwo Eleru caves in Isharun, Akure (located in Yorubaland, southwestern Nigeria) are the oldest proven settlement in black Africa, dating to more than ten thousand years before Christ, and the Akure Palace is the oldest surviving palace in black Africa. Most discoveries in Nigeria and the West Africa region had been by accident, not scientific adventure. The Nok statutes in middle Nigeria were stumbled upon by tin miners; the Iwo Eleru caves were brought to the attention of academia by a local chief. The neglect has been attributed to the hostile environment, the scorching sun, and disorienting flies of the northern Nigeria desert, not to mention the moving sand dunes that further bury evidence. There is stifling humidity and rich insect life in its southern rainforests, where small sample studies show that some civilizations flourished where some thick forests now stand.
12 Brunet, Michel, et al., ‘A New Hominid Finding in Chad,’ Nature 418 (2002).
In an archaeological study conducted in Okomu National Park13, between the Akure and Edo kingdoms, an extensive layer of charcoal and pottery was found below the forest, suggesting that the present forest block regenerated over the last seven hundred years! So, do we cut down all the southern Nigeria lowland rainforests to prove that the area between Okomu and Ife forests and Ewa Island was the origin of humanity, or do we drain the mangrove swamps in search of skeletons, knowing that regardless the proof, Western scholars will continue to try to authenticate biblical claims with cultural and geography-biased archaeological studies.
From the female lineage to the mother tongue… Recent scientific DNA studies of the female lineage like those mentioned above prove that there is a high correlation between language and genetic groups. Language has been the most authentic and lasting evidence. Before the advent of genetic anthropology, knowledge in social sciences, linguistics and other logical disciplines pointed to Nigeria as the origin of humanity, but archaeologists and historians claimed the contrary due to the lack of physical evidence since the acidic nature of rainforest soils prevents the survival of prehistoric skeletons. The single Original African language changed gradually into dialects, and later languages, as the population spread across Africa, but the greatest change in linguistics and genetics came through those that later migrated back into Africa for trade, territory and religion. In 1948, Greenberg classified African languages into major phyla/groups: Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, Nilo Saharan and Khoesian14. Some scholars have countered that Nilo-Saharan is part of the Afro-Asiatic group while others argue that Mande is not part of Niger-Congo phylum. Also, some scholars have wrongly included South Sudanese languages into the NigerCongo to create a new group called Niger-Kodofanian.
Nigeria, which boasts of the most languages in Africa (522), is the origin of Niger-Congo languages. From there, all Original African languages spread to Central, East, and South Africa through presentday Cameroon, which has the second highest number of languages (280). In A History of African Societies to 1870, Elizabeth Isichei, an acclaimed professor of African history, categorically stated that ‘since the closest relatives of Bantu are in Nigeria, it is virtually certain that the original proto-Bantu homeland and center of dispersal was in Eastern Nigeria, or Cameroon’15. All Original African languages are tonal languages. 13 White, L.J.T., and Oates J.F. New data on the history of the plateau forest of Okomu, southern Nigeria: an insight into how human disturbance has shaped the African rain forest. Global Ecology and Bioeography Letters 8:355-361(1999) 14 Greenberg JH. 1948. The classification of African languages. AmAnthropol. 50:24_30.
According to glottochronology (the study of language divergence based on Indo-European models), Yoruba and Igbo diverged from a single, tonal Original African language several thousand years ago around the present Niger basin. However, this is a gross age underestimation since glottochronology uses the faster rate of language dispersal in Eurasia, with frequent external and violent upheavals at the Middle East crossroads, to wrongly judge the date of the more natural peaceful secluded divergence of tonal Original African languages over a much longer period at a slower rate.
15 Elizabeth Isichei, A History of African Societies to 1870 (Cambridge University Press 1997) pg 53
The absurdity of using a single rate of change for all languages is highlighted when the date of origin of Cushitic and Nilo-Saharan languages, which are admixtures of Original African and Eurasian languages at the turbulent Northeast African crossroads, greatly precede the dates given for Original African languages. Various ethnic groups evolved from the main body of Original Africans in the lower Niger basin and moved in all directions, usually led by the smallerbodied Africans labeled Pygmies, Khoi-Khoi, or San Bushmen. The migration and divergence of Original Africans occurred in several stages over several thousand years.
From the single Original African linguistic group in present day Southwest Nigeria, Yoruba diverged into Igala, which diverged into Igbo and Idoma. The Igbos filled up the Southeast region, diverging into various groups, while the Idoma diverged into groups that filled the Benue basin into the central Nigeria plateau area. Various groups like Igbira, Nupe and Gwari evolved above the River Niger in Central and Northern Nigeria, Chad and modern Niger Republic, where some later became Afro-Asiatic to become Hausa.
Original African Languages in Nigeria
Other groups migrated up the River Niger through Upper Volta/Burkina Faso and Mali to its source in Guinea where the ancient Ghana Empire was formed. Later, Islamic raids and jihads were to push the Original Africans southwards towards the coast, especially along the Pra River Basin where Akan groups spread to fill southern modern day Ghana and Ivory Coast. Some like the Jukun migrated eastwards along the River Benue into Cameroun either through Mambilla plateau or through Lake Chad. In
Cameroun, Original Africans diverged as Beti-Pahoun-Fang, moving down along Sangha River into Gabon and the Congos. Around the confluence of the Ubangi and Sangha Rivers, and Ubangi and Chari Rivers watershed, Original African language groups labeled Bantu by Europeans (meaning people), were split into western and eastern Bantu language groups.
Original African Languages in Africa
The Western Bantus, relations of the Teke, migrated downstream towards the coast to form the Kongo, Loango, and Mbundu/Umbundu of Angola, while those who migrated onto the Kasai River became Mongo, Bobangi, and Kuba. The Eastern Bantu migrated farther north along the Ugbangi-Uele River to the Nile River and Great Lakes area, where they formed the Mashariki
Bantus. The Mashariki Bantus brought iron and yam agriculture around Lake Tangayinka, where they split into two groups. The first group evolved into Nyoro and Ganda in Uganda, Hutu in Rwanda, Kikuyu in Kenya etc. The second group of eastern Bantu migrated south to fill the southern half of Africa as the Sukuma, Haya, and Nyambo in Tanzania, the Bemba and Kaonde in Zambia, the Tonga in Zambia, and the Shona and Nguni (Zulu/Xhosa). Early humans that migrated to Ethiopia crossed over to Arabia in what is known as the Great Coastal Migration to initially populate India, Southern China and Oceania. Carrying the Mitochondrial DNA haplogroups M and N, as well as the Y-DNA Haplogroups C and D, they are called Negritos and are the Dravidian Indians, Papua New Guineans and various dark-skinned peoples of Asia and Oceania. Those who migrated to the north of the Niger River basin cultural melting point towards Egypt via Lake Chad or southern Sudan, or those who migrated to the East Africa coast, became Afro-Asian as they mixed with Eurasian traders and colonists that came back into Africa much later. Many Original African languages became known as Hausa/Fulani in the West African grasslands, Amhara in Ethiopia, and Swahili on the East Africa coast. The incessant attacks and colonisation from Eurasians and their Afro-Asian offspring bred new ethnic groups and dislocated the older groups, thus making it difficult to understand the ethnic spread across Africa. From genetics, it is now understood that languages like Fulani underwent at least two episodes of language changes along the Sahel grasslands – first in South Sudan where they underwent Cushitic changes and later in Futa Jallon where the encountered Afro-Arabic changes. From the above, it can be observed that African history is fairly straightforward, especially if we follow the river and language flows, but Western academia has been a stumbling block to a unified African history and perspective by concentrating on methodologies that are not viable across Africa. Archaeological evidence is, in most cases, not viable in West Africa. Skeletons don’t survive well in rainforests and mangrove swamps and, when viable, they are misinterpreted as they now do in genetics.
Basic geography, science and common sense… The Ethiopian area is naturally arid due to its location on the eastern half of Africa. Even during the wettest epochs when a larger proportion of the world was covered with forests, the West Africa equatorial areas would still have been the wettest and most fertile. The Rift Valley geological shifts resulted in the Ethiopian highlands, which enabled the area to attract enough rainfall to become open woodland but never enough to become a rainforest. African wind systems flow from northeast or southwest due to the fact that the earth rotates on a tilted axis. The West African rainforests derive rain through winds from the Atlantic Ocean, which is too far from the East Africa coast. The rain-bearing, Asian monsoon winds are too dry by the time they get to East Africa, having passed over China and India. Unless the earth drastically shifted on its axis, the closest points to the sun are along the equator, and the most fertile areas depend on the wind systems and oceans dictated by the position of the continents. It is a well-established fact that all the continents were once a single, continuous landmass called Pangaea/Gondwanaland. The question is whether hominids evolved before the breaks that created the present continents. It is believed that such a significant event would have killed all life at the time and was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. Most dinosaur skeletons have been found on what would have been edge of a single landmass, like the western coast of South America. If humans were created in Pangaea, the point of population density and dispersal would be at its land extremes of South America and Australia, but this is not the case. Moreover, it is improbable that such an experience would not be recorded in the ethnic histories across the globe. It was safe to assume that the evolution of man occurred after the split of the continents; the question is where—especially, where in Africa or Eurasia. Whether taking a scientific or religious point of view, humans must have been created or have evolved in the most fertile point with continuous water, food, and oxygen to withstand climate epochs (which are believed to shift from one extreme to another over twenty thousand years). The specific area
should not be impossible to pinpoint unless the planet drastically shifted on its axis and continents were re-arranged, completely changing wind and climatic patterns. Local geological shifts like the Great Rift Valley system can’t account for the vast regional climatic change, which would have made the biblical Garden of Eden at the Euphrates or Lake Turkana the most fertile place on earth. Starting from the basics, assuming that we want to create a man from a ‘natural’ laboratory, due to human qualities, evolutionary scientists believe that humanity started in the tropics. Some believe that this occurred only in Africa, while others believed that it started around the tropics in Africa and Asia. The theory starts with earth in an ice age, inching closer to the sun and gradually thawing. Because the equatorial region was closest to the sun, it was the first to thaw. As the planet moved closer, parts of the planet away from the equator began to thaw. The equator would have been the first place to reach a temperature conducive to life. For life to occur organically, it is generally believed that certain factors need to be present. The organic chemicals must have come from the earth’s surface, ocean beds, and belly through volcanic eruptions. Because the temperature of the human body is in the nineties, humans would need such constantly high temperatures. Because the body is largely water cavities (more than 70 percent), it was necessary for the site to have ample water. An ample supply of oxygen was needed. Because nothing happens in a vacuum, some form of energy was needed to begin the process. These factors could be found over a wide area in the world, but together and by making the model more complex, the choices should be narrowed. A Garden of Eden with abundant oxygen and water, with the humidity necessary for a 70 percent water balance and 90 degree body temperature, rules out biblical accounts that place it in the arid Middle East and Ethiopia. The water would have to be continuously present and preferably stagnant; otherwise, the long, delicate, evolutionary process would have been disrupted. The creation site would most likely be the stagnant water of a swamp or, at worst, slow-moving water at low altitude for abundant oxygen.
The Tigris and Euphrates of Iraq, the Congo, and the Nile (the longest river in Africa) all flow into arid regions that don’t have a mangrove coastal swamp or rainforest environments and therefore don’t fulfill the requirements. Lake Victoria and other great lakes in Central African are at high altitudes with lower oxygen levels and are not in rainforests. The only site in tropical Africa with these conditions is the huge, coastal swamp around the Niger-Benue delta.
Central Niger Delta Map
Nigeria Vegetation Map.
The constant thunder and lightning could act as a source of energy to set the process going. Ultimately, chemicals flowed out of the Guinean highlands, Jos plateau, and Cameroonian Mountains into the Niger, Benue, and other rivers systems, which took them downstream to the larger and swampier Niger delta coast. There they reacted with other chemicals to start the evolutionary process.
Eventually, by coming out of the swamps and onto dry land, man developed in the rich and suitable rainforest environment. Despite the prehuman apes that walked away from the creation site in Nigeria to Asia and Europe, there is genetic proof that modern man evolved from a single ‘Eve’ in Africa. Eve’s offspring continuously moved out of Africa to displace less developed predecessors who had earlier colonised Eurasia. A key question is why the proto-human beings that migrated to Eurasia did not develop into modern man. The answer is food and environment, because outside the garden of creation, the chances of starvation were high. Some scholars claim that migrating to the savannah was a blessing for hominid evolution, because the change in diet brought about walking and a higher intellect. This is wrong! When man left the rainforest, he left behind any hope of developing further due to the poorer diet that he faced outside the West Africa rainforest. More than a third of the population died before the age of sixteen. The West Africa chimpanzee, man’s closest genetic comparison, gives insight into how man evolved. The African chimpanzee uses stone tools to crack open palm nuts to extract the all-important palm protein. The nuts are still the major source of oil and protein for humans living in the region today. Protein and carbohydrates are the most important food for physiological and genetic development, and these were abundant in the Niger delta. Palm trees were one of the richest sources of protein, while yams were the richest carbohydrate. Another important source of protein was flying termites, which are 98 percent protein and are still eaten in the area. Less than 10 percent of the earth’s surface is fertile. It is an arid place, and its only major foods are fruits, grains, and tubers. Not many plants have edible fruits, and most are tropical and seasonal, while grains like wheat and sorghum are tiny seeds that need more effort and technology to process.
Africa Climate Map
Africa Vegetation Map
Roots and tubers were more available, were a source of water, and were more edible. The Yam Belt extends from the Igbo/Efik Cross River in eastern Nigeria to the Akan/Baoule Bandana River in central Ivory Coast. Grains couldn’t be processed until the invention of pottery, but yams are roasted without containers. It would take more effort to collect several sheaves of wheat or potatoes in the wild to make a meal, not to mention that
potatoes had a lower nutritional content. Archaeological findings dated to Homo erectus were stumbled upon in Okigwe (southeast Nigeria) in the form of heavy cleavers and picks that were used for digging yams and cutting trees. This high protein and carbohydrate intake made Homo erectus evolve further while the migrant Eurasian Homo erectus stagnated. Man evolved into his present form in the Niger rainforest before a few set out to colonise other parts of the world. The majority left behind continued eating yams and oil in the land so rich that even its plants secreted ‘blood’ in the form of palm oil. Rainforests can’t be excavated nor mangrove swamps emptied, therefore the only archaeological hope is the arid Lake Chad and northern Nigeria area, where older and better preserved skeletons could be found to prove that through the evolutionary stages, migrants from the delta moved and settled in the area, especially in its much wetter epochs. However, the Sahara Desert is now extremely dry, hot, fly infested, and unattractive to most archaeologists, while its moving sand dunes have probably buried evidence miles deep. Apart from archaeological findings, genetics now fully validates the above hypothesis. As mentioned, studies have been conducted on the genetic makeup of all peoples, and the genetic makeup of the Niger delta people is older and more diverse. In addition to mtDNA and Y-Chromosome phylogeny, studies in nuclear DNA show that West Africans have more blood groups than any other race. West Africans have various forms of sickle cell and other genetic mutations that others don’t. Before moving on from genetics, it would be good to address questions that might be raised about mass migrations across Africa. Some religious and academic accounts claim that the Yoruba migrated from the semi-arid Egyptian-Ethiopian region, and though a few returned due to Eurasian aggression, the vast majority of the Yoruba and Igbo never left Niger since creation except to the Americas. The largest indigenous African groups must have been in the swampy, rainforested, malaria-prone areas to have developed a genetic resistance against malaria over tens of thousands of years, which, unfortunately, resulted in the sickle cell trait. Those who migrated out of the forest never had the opportunity to develop
genetic resistance, and the sickle cell trait is not common in the Northeast Africa areas of Egypt, Ethiopia, and Kenya. If the Niger peoples migrated from Central Africa or the northeast, Southern Nigeria won’t be the epicenter of Sickle cell and they would have been decimated. The above, and many other pieces of evidence, point to human evolution in the Lower Niger, but cultural bias has led to the misinterpretation of genetics, linguistics and every other logical and scientific study that proves it. Yorubaland towards the coast is the ancestral home of humanity. To be more geographically specific, more DNA sampling and analysis needs to be conducted along the Nigerian coast, especially in towns around the Okomu and Ife forests and Ewa Island, notably Benin (Edo), Akure, Igbokoda and Ile-Ife. Hominids left the mangrove swamps of the Niger (Negro) delta on the West African coast to live on the dry ground of the world’s most fertile rainforest. They picked palm nuts and gathered yams and fruits from the true Garden of Eden, the Land of Love, the last place in the world that will ever experience drought. It was from the Niger Delta that the ancestors of modern man accumulated, differentiated and radiated to East Africa and across the world. It is generally agreed that migration bottlenecks and probably genetic differentiation were tied to climatic factors. It has also been argued that there was a megadrought in East Africa between 135,000 and 75,000 years ago18, and soon afterwards the Toba Supereruption in Indonesia, around 73,000 years ago, wiped out most life in the Asian monsoon area where East African rains also originate. Therefore it defies logic that humans could have accumulated in Eastern Africa, and radiated out to Western/Central Africa and Asia after the superdrought. 18 Scholz CA, Johnson TC, Cohen AS, et al. (19 co-authors). 2007. East African megadroughts between 135 and 75 thousands years ago and bearing on early-modern human origins. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 104:16416–16421.
Even though not publicly accepted, Haplogroup L is based on Yoruba DNA, the oldest matrilinear common ancestor. Haplogroup L0 represents the San. L1 represents the Mbuti and a mix of pygmies and normal stature humans, while L2 represents all full stature Black Africans. L3 was calculated to have differentiated from L0 around 60,000 years ago19 (Soares et al 2011) and its largest Africa populations are in Nigeria/Central Africa. L3 differentiated into haplogroups M and N 60,000 years ago enroute or in Eurasia20. All nonAfrican ethnic groups belong to mtDNA haplogroups, M and N, daughters of haplogroup L3 that are found only in Africa. Also, Africans differentiated into the Original African (Bantu) and Pygmy stock from the same ancestor around 60,000 years21. Therefore, since most of the differentiations and spread occurred around the same period, it is more likely that human beings accumulated and differentiated in the rich ecosystem of the Niger Delta during the Afro-Asian monsoon drought and Toba supereruption, after which part of L3 migrated to ‘recovering’ East Africa and onto Arabia peninsula and Eurasia, where they diverged into M and N, as
modern day Caucasians. There are questions on whether the single ancestor was a small stature Pygmy or full bodied African, and whether the categorization is genetic or merely based on social patterns of hunter-gatherers versus farmers. A better hypothesis is that Eve had two daughters – one full sized and the other, a Pygmy. There is still a large proportion of small-sized Yorubas and other Southern Nigerians that could pass for Pygmies and the traditional differentiation is along the lines of being a hunter-gatherer, an Egbere, or being part of the normal sedentary society. It appears that both groups lived together from Yoruba folklore. Yoruba history ties prosperity to ‘gba eni lowo egbere’ taking the mat from Pygmies, which could be translated to taking the land to settle down. Still held in high spiritual reverence, Egbere in Yoruba means to ‘go missing forever’ in the ancestral forests. Those in Nigeria have been widely assimilated and speak the same Niger-Congo languages, but the evidence of intermarrying can be seen from Original Africans that have inherited their protruding buttocks – which Europeans derogatively call a medical condition known as Steatogyia. 19 Soares P, Alshamali F, Pereira JB, et al (12 co-authors) 2011 The Expansion of mtDNA Haplogroup L3 within and out of Africa Molecular Biology and Evolution online (http://www.mbe.oxfordjournals.org/ doi:10.1093/molbev/msr245 20 Soares P, Ermini L, Thomson N, Mormina M, Rito T, Ro¨hl A, Salas A, Oppenheimer S, Macaulay V, Richards MB. 2009. Correcting for purifying selection: an improved human mitochondrial molecular clock. Am J Hum Genet. 84:740–759. 21 Patin E, Laval G, Barreiro LB, Salas A, Semino O, et al. (2009) Inferring the Demographic History of African Farmers and Pygmy Hunter–Gatherers Using a Multilocus Resequencing Data Set. PLoS Genet 5(4): e1000448. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1000448
Original Africans and Pygmy staple diets of Yams, flying termites, Palm kennels and oil remain the same. Contrary to widespread beliefs that Pygmy’s are continuously migrating, they set up camps of huts for several months during which they pick wild yams before moving on to fresh territory. Original Africans also have a similar practice called shifting cultivation whereby they rotate farms and crops but not homes. Yams are about the easiest plants to cultivate by sticking the end bit of the yam back into the ground. Therefore it is illogical to claim that yam agriculture did not start till 3,500 years ago, 50,000 years after the separation into hunter
gatherers and farming populations. There is archaeological evidence that blades used to ring-back and cut trees were in common use 80,000 to 90,000 years ago in present-day southern Nigeria Genetic evidence proves that Western and East Pygmies differentiated around 20,000 years ago, probably in Central Africa. From the unmixed Pygmies that led the migration across Africa, it appears that they spoke the same language since there are still linguistic and cultural similarities between Central African pygmies and those that migrated to South and East Africa. There is an hypothesis that there were two sets of migrations of full sized Africans from Nigeria – the older group that migrated out through Lake Chad and mainly became Nilo-Saharan over time and those known as the Bantu believed to have migrated out only 5,000 years ago. It is believed that genetic analysis was inferred from wrong grottochronology that underestimates the age of Niger-Congo languages, based on the faster rate of change of Indo-European languages. And also because, as stated that ‘the great age of L3BCD and its wide distribution across Africa makes phylogeographic inferences difficult… Furthermore L3C is extremely rare… L3B and L3D most likely began to diversify in Central/West Africa, representing the earliest major spread of L3 lineages within Africa that we were able to detect22’. Unlike archaeology permanently stuck with an East African origin due to West African acidic soils poor showing of skeletons, hopefully in the near future, with a fuller genomewide sequencing of West/Central African groups, paleoanthropologists and the Western academia will catch up with the logic of a West African origin. A recent archaeological survey turned up old skeletons around Morocco, which challenges the archaeological conclusion of an East African evolution spot. I am confident that more evidence could be found if required, although I am not confident that the Eurocentric mainstream would require it. The essence of the Land of Love (Ile-Ife) and the Niger River has been denied from antiquity. The essence of the Land of Love was stolen and discarded by those who wanted to change the course of history and claim white superiority.
Western ‘civilizations’ are aware of the ramifications if they agree to an exact spot of evolution. Physically and mentally enslaved Africans will realize their true place in human history from the Niger delta and departure from the Slave Coast, and the knowledge will provide a global spiritual and economic rallying point for Africans. As the erudite African American writer Amos Wilson pointed out in Blueprint for Black Power,* ‘economics is embedded in culture. A culture is in good part an economic system…’ 22 Soares P, Alshamali F, Pereira JB, et al (12 co-authors) 2011 The Expansion of mtDNA Haplogroup L3 within and out of Africa Pg920 Molecular Biology and Evolution online (http://www.mbe.oxfordjournals.org/ doi:10.1093/molbev/msr245 * Amos Wilson, Blueprint for Black Power (Afrikan World Infosystems, 1998), 339.
Chapter 2: Charity Begins on the Home Coast African foundations of human civilization in the true Garden of Eden Yam was at the root of human evolution and still central to the culture of Yoruba, Igbo and many others in Central/West Africa. One of the arguments advanced against a rainforest evolution and development was that it was not possible to survive mainly on yams in the rainforest, without having to rely on grassland cultivation during the dry season and early raining season. From my personal experience, I know that not only will you survive but live a very comfortably self-sufficient lifestyle. One person consumes 1.5kg of Yam a day. With a yam patch producing 100 yams (300kg of tubers), and a clan of fifty people with an average of 96 patches of over 15 species of Yam, survival was guaranteed. In a study of whether forest hunter-gatherers, Baka (Pygmies), in Southwest Cameroun could survive solely on yams (Yasuoka 2013)23, it was proven with the above figures that sufficient wild yams were available throughout the year. Hirokazu Yasuoka observed that merely discarding the inedible end of yam tubers propagate new yams more than planting the seeds of certain yam species. As Pygmies led in the migration along rivers, Yorubas, Igbos and other Bantus followed, ‘picking up their mats’ of yam for permanent settlement. Yams and palm oil were a staple diet with snails, flying termites (esunsun) and small animals. Abundant palm trees, an important fuel for evolution, became fuel for civilization and society as man adapted his most important resource. At an early stage, he used palm trees leaves to protect himself from the torrential rain and insects, and the practice evolved into breaking off branches to build huts. From the palm tree, they also made fire, soap, food, wine, brooms, clothing etc. Yoruba penchant for urban settings dictated the culture of women maintaining a small farm of yams, vegetables and plantain around the house, while the men cultivated various yam patches in the forest, where they
practiced shift cultivation. The Igbos preferred smaller decentralized settings, villages, but still engaged in the same gender related farming practices. This initially brought about matriarchy and later polygamy, with the emphasis of getting enough labor to harvest nature’s heavy bounty. 23 Hirokazu Yasuoka 2103 Dense Wild Yam Patches Established by Hunter-Gatherer Camps: Beyond the Wild Yam Question, Toward the Historical Ecology of Rainforests Hum Ecol (2013) 41:465–475 DOI 10.1007/s10745-013-9574-z
In Yoruba, Igbo, Igala and Nupe cultures, the society was organized around yams and the most important festivals were the New Yam festivals. Yam and palm oil are main characters in Igbo mythology of its evolution. In Yoruba and Igbo culture, the first sons inherited the land while others migrated for fresh lands for hunting, picking, and farming. This might partly account for the time and distance gained by the Pygmies constantly pushing the frontiers and disturbing the forests as they spread throughout Africa. In their quest for food, Pygmies/forest gatherer-hunters moved upstream along the banks of the outlets of the Negro delta to its sources and across the world. Although the majority of Bantus eventually migrate, the need to adapt to survive harder conditions kept their numbers small compared to those who stayed behind and gradually coalesced into hamlets and villages around the fertile Niger delta. Africans, Bantu and Pygmies, that migrated ended up filling the Earth, like the early hominids that migrated across the world according to archaeological findings. The series of megadroughts in the Asian-East African monsoon rain catchment area, the last of which was brought about by the Toba supereruption, had killed all the previous migrants – probably with the exception of a few Neanderthals in the Eurasian mountain caves who some scholars claim modern Africans impregnated to breed the White race. Apart from food, the L3 haplogroup might have had to migrate for health reasons or die if they did not have the sickle cell gene to protect them against the rich insect life that included malaria giving mosquitoes, sleeping sickness tsetse flies and river blindness. The Bible states that Adam and Eve were sent out of the Garden of Eden
because of sin, and God blocked their reentry from the east— and only the east—with a cherubim and burning swords.24 This is interesting because most of those leaving the Lower Niger to populate Europe-Asia went east along the Benue River or the Lake Chad basin to the Nile via some river systems in South Sudan and Central African Republic. Due to the lack of the sickle-cell gene, Eurasians were naturally blocked from returning to the Garden by the tsetse fly zone on its northern borders and dangerous insects. 24 Genesis 3:24.
Some religious theorists claim that Adam’s sin was tied to sex, which resulted in his and other whites’ ‘genetic nakedness’ or lack of color. This warranted migration from the hot African sun and malaria, until Eurasians were able to come from the west and south through the Atlantic Ocean. The east route was (and still is) plagued with insects detrimental to whites and their horses. Rather than migrating out of Africa as albinos or Caucasians due to the conditions (leaving unexplainable how they exited the tsetse fly zone in the first place), it is logical to assume that they migrated out of Africa to Europe as blacks and lost their color due to intermarriage with Neanderthals or because of having to adapt to the conditions faced in Eurasia, especially during its coldest epoch. Africans migrated out of North East African used the Horn into south Arabia, present day Yemen25and later Sinai out of Egypt into Arabia. They kept to the coast26 into Indus Valley and the earliest date of settlement in South East Asia is 50,00027 years ago while reaching Australia by 48,000 years ago28. The migrations to different environments across the world led to the creation of races. Those that remained behind in the delta became darker from the sun as they built their collective knowledge and genetic resistance to indigenous illnesses caused by the rich insect life. For tens of thousands of years, those who migrated out of the Yam Belt wandered across the planet for food in hot and freezing wildernesses, and because they weren’t settled in one place, the knowledge brought along from Niger Delta couldn’t be effectively built upon and passed down through generations. Western scholars used to claim that civilization started fewer
than ten thousand years ago in Mesopotamia and Egypt, where humans came together (after the invention of pottery and cooking) to form agricultural societies, to plant, and to process grains. This would have been a laborious process, because it required the invention of pottery and the forceful coercion of other people and animals around what initially would have been an outlandish idea. This was unlike the social and agricultural evolution of the people of the Yam Belt as outlined above. 25 Derricourt R. 2005. Getting ‘‘Out of Africa’’: sea crossings, landcrossings and culture in the hominin migrations. J World Prehist.19:119–132. 26 Forster P. 2004. Ice ages and the mitochondrial DNA chronology of human dispersals: a review. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci.359:255–264. 27 Barker G, Barton H, Bird M, et al. (27 co-authors). 2007. The ‘‘human revolution’’ in lowland tropical Southeast Asia: the antiquity and behavior of anatomically modern humans at Niah Cave (Sarawak, Borneo). J Hum Evol. 52:243–261. 28 Turney CSM, Kershaw AP, Moss P, Bird MI, Fifield LK, Cresswell RG, Santos GM, Tada MLD, Hausladen PA, Zhou Y. 2001. Redating the onset of burning at Lynch’s Crater (North Queensland): implications for human settlement in Australia. J Quat Sci. 16:767–771.
Contrary to some historical accounts, agriculture was not introduced from Egypt, or anywhere else, to the Niger delta but the other way round. The diet of most civilizations across the world centers around carbohydrate staples, mainly grains and tubers, and the Lower Niger was blessed with the best and biggest common tuber in the world. Yams grew in the wild in West Africa and did not require extensive clearings, which was mandatory for grains and potatoes in Eurasia (Homo erectus might have been the first to roast yams without using a container). The black African woman easily adopted yam as a staple food without external knowledge. There wasn’t much a latter-day grain or potato planter could tell a yam planter, who, with little effort, used one yam to feed three men, while three potatoes couldn’t feed one man. Having the best diet in the world, the black Africans in the Niger delta, who spoke the same language, began to fill the Niger-Benue areas that were served by dense and complicated river networks. The clans became villages and towns. The melting pot of the early human race lived in peace with their environment and developed a strong, naturalistic culture. With nature supplying their every need, the undifferentiated forest people created a complex societal system geared towards brotherhood and a solution
based system known as the African Information Retrieval System. They would rather share their yams with men than with ravenous insects; food couldn’t be stored for long. It was this natural and peaceful coexistence that brought about human civilization and not the forceful model portrayed by Western scholars (‘the gangster paradise’). With sources of food more stable than the rest of the world and a peaceful society, the population increased, and villages spread along the migration routes of the Niger and the Benue River into the Lake Chad region. Individuals and clan-groups migrated along the Benue towards the Nile. The grassland Africans on the fringes of the Yam Belt (the latterday Mande and Hausa), substituted cattle and milk for the small, protein-laden animals/insects and fruits diet of their forestland cousins. In addition to cattle rearing, the grassland Africans were the ones most likely to develop grains to supplement their supply of poorquality and low-quantity yams. The Sape/Mande people at the source of the Niger and the Senegal River, in present-day Guinea, were reported by George Murdock in his book Africa: Its People and Culture to have independently developed ‘grassland agriculture’ around 5000 BC. He went on to say, ‘This was, moreover, a genuine invention, not a borrowing from another people. Furthermore, the assemblage of cultivated plants ennobled from wild forms in Negro Africa ranks it as one of the four major agricultural complexes evolved in the entire course of human history’.30 Blades used to ring-back and cut trees of Yoruba and Igbo forestlands were in common use 80,000 to 90,000 years ago, long before Africans migrated with their tools to Eurasia. Not only were tools passed on to the outside world, but the savannah people developed sorghum, millet, and barley to supplement the carbohydrates that yams provided. Pastoralism, in which animal milk was used to supplement the high-protein content of rainforest insects and small animals, helped to diversify the nutritional content of their diet. The first evidence of milking in the world is seen on Saharan rock art, and it is believed to have preceded grassland agriculture. Excavations in the western Sudan and Sahara show agriculture and pastoralism as far back as 7000 BC, which precedes the cultural complexes of the Egyptians.
However, grains and animal milk were poor nutritional substitutes that the forest people never accepted. If all black Africans migrated into the forest from a Garden of Eden in a savannah-like environment, their first food would have been milk, and they wouldn’t be lactose intolerant today. Milk still makes black Africans in West Africa and the Americas sick. 30 Ivan Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus (Random, 1976), 188.
Africans spread pastoral and sedentary agricultural practices into Mesopotamia, India, and beyond, but the adopted palms and smaller tubers of cocoyam and potato resulted in lower nutrition. Nevertheless, the date palm became the most important plant in the arid North African and Asian plains. Egypt followed in agriculture but was not able to fulfill its potential until a black African called Menes, probably from the Niger delta, arrived in 4000 BC with the construction knowledge required to divert the Nile and the technological expertise to advance agricultural practices. The diversion of the Nile and the creation of a fertile delta were skills that could have been learnt only in the Niger delta, the land of a thousand rivers. Black Afro-Asians now called Negroids built the foundations of Asian civilizations including that of the Harrappan Indus Valley, Southern China and Oceania. In the lower Niger region, black Africans developed socially and productively, creating a system of loose organization through ‘religious’ sects that protected the secrets of agriculture, trade and politics in the African Information Retrieval System. Forced labor and tyrants were uncommon, because people could easily move out of an area to another riverbank and continue eating yams, palm products, and flying termites. Two significant forest mountain ranges in southern Nigeria affected the dispersal of people from the coast. The first was the mountain range from Ilesha to Akure, which was an effective migration barrier. On the mountain side of the thick forests facing the coast was Isharun, Akureland, the oldest settlement in black Africa, and a lot of history is mostly likely buried there. It was the defining line between Ekitiland, Ijesland, and Akureland, and people could have migrated through its occasional breaks to Ekiti, especially from
the Akure-Edo lands (not the other way around, towards the coast, as ascribed by academicians). The second natural barrier is the mountain range that runs from south to north on the eastern lower Niger area, Aba to Enugu, as well as the lower Niger forests on both sides of the Niger. These obviously affected the dispersal of the Igbo, as we see a greater concentration of settlements that appear to have spread from Aguleri to Owerri and environs. The clans coalesced into villages, and the first major conglomeration in the lower Niger to become a town and empire was present-day Edo (Benin City), whose sixteen-thousand-kilometer moat/wall was longer than the Great Wall of China. The Yoruba Ijebu to the west of the Benin kingdom built a rampart around Ijebuland. The Ndigbo to the immediate east of Edo congregated into 2,240 densely populated village groups, more than anything the One-River Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations could boast during their long histories. The Lower Niger peoples had advanced cultures also tied to iron production and farming. Carbon-dating of iron slags from ancient furnaces like those of Lejja, Nsukka date to over 2000BC, which attests to the fact that Southern Nigerians had moved into the Iron Age while the world was still coming out the Late Stone and Bronze Ages.
However, unlike the ancient Egyptians, who stored millennia of history in their desert pyramids, Yoruba Ife preeminence can only be archaeologically traced to the first millennium AD due to acidic soils, while the Efik/Igbo pictogram writing called Nsibidi was not used to store history. The most effective store of history and culture due to the soils was the African Information Retrieval System created around 10,000BC, Age of Orunmila. Obatala is undoubtedly the Yoruba’s earliest distinguishable deity, tied to the drying up of the marshes and Igbos. Yorubas earliest account of other people is Moremi’s sacrifice of her child to ward off opposition from the eastern forests, which signified the differentiation between the Yoruba and their eastern Igbo-like cousins. Care has to be taken not to confuse the history of kings and their dynasties with those of the initial settlers, who had inhabited the land thousands of years before the creation of political power structures. The advent of the Era of Olokun obscured Black history. It is believed that the Olokun era started in Benin from about 4AD and spread across Yoruba
land around 1000AD. Oduduwa is Olokun and the current dynasty across Yorubaland is an Olokun dynasty. The current mainstream Yoruba historians have only been able to trace their history to the 1141AD beginning of the present Ife Oduduwa dynasty, whose descendants are kings in various Yoruba city-states, including Benin/Bini. Some claim that the world was created by Oduduwa and thus negate any history before him, but recent scholars claim that there is a mix up between Oduduwa and Orunmila due to what they call Ife-centrism. Yoruba Ifecentrists rigidity inadvertently appears to be complicit in the conspiracy to keep the history of the largest Original African group a mystery, thus preventing a concise history of the black race. It is difficult to go against the different modern political dispositions of Nigerian ethnolinguistic groups, but if selfish ethnic considerations are not set aside, the black race will unable to decipher its collective history and identity and unite towards global socioeconomic ascendancy. Unfortunately, with the various power relations in present political and academic circles, the current ruling dynasties appear to be paranoid that revealing the power source they replaced will lead to being undermined politically. The ethnic pride and fight for supremacy across Yorubaland prevent a proper analysis of claims and counterclaims that question 1141 as the start of the largest and oldest Original African group. The Edo kingdom claimed that Oduduwa was a prince of Bini called Ekaladerhan and the only son of the last Ogiso called Owodo, contrary to Ife’s claim that Oduduwa dropped from heaven or was a prince from Mecca, the son of Lamurudu (the biblical Nimrod). The Edo vividly recount thirty kings/dynasties known as Ogisos that ruled their kingdom, formerly known as Idu (Igodomigodo), for more than a thousand years before Oranmiyan became king and the kingdom name was changed to Bini. The Edo say that Oduduwa fled Bini (Ile Binu, Land of Anger), escaping being put to death at the orders of his father. He was said to have arrived in Ife (Ile Ife, Land of Love), which at the time was ruled by a king from the coastal Ilaje kingdom of Ugbo. Being a spiritually powerful, knowledgeable
but humble medicine man and royalty who provided medical and spiritual help for free, Oduduwa was loved by the locals. The people were to revolt against their Ugbo rulers who they sent packing to the Ugbo, while enthroning Oduduwa. However, when his father, Ogiso Owodo, died, being the heir apparent, the Bini asked Prince Ekaladerhan (now known as Oduduwa), to take up the throne, but he was believed to have refused to return to Bini due to old age and poor health. Despite huge disagreements between Ife and Edo historians on whether Oduduwa came from Bini or Mecca, as some Ife historians claim, the Edo claim that he offered to send his scion, Oranmiyan, tallies with the famous Yoruba mythology that Oduduwa sent Oranmiyan to rule Benin. He first made sure that his son would be treated well by sending lice that the Bini fattened up as big as cows. Oranmiyan didn’t stay long in Bini, but his son, born in Benin, became the first oba called Eweka the First. The Edo logically point out that the enthronement of Oduduwa’s descendants in Bini was not out of pity but a fulfillment of an obligation. Oduduwa, being the only surviving royal blood, refused a recall and sent his son, Oranmiyan. They question why Bini, a major town at the time, would request a ruler from a smaller town if there were no blood ties. The new Oduduwa dynasty in Ife couldn’t have acquired a reputation throughout the land of being so special as to warrant such a request from an established entity like Bini, nor was there any conquest of Bini by Ife. Regardless of whether or not the Yoruba mainstream accepts that Oduduwa came from Bini, the fact remains that they can’t recount any history before 1140AD, which is several thousands of years after the creation of the Ifa divination system or the time in which science has proven that people and structures existed in Yorubaland. On the other hand, the Edo provide names of kings and towns stretching back a thousand years before the Oduduwa dynasty now ruling in Bini and across Yorubaland, which though better than what Ife historians can come up with, still falls short of what is expected regarding the origin of the black race. The names of the first two Ogisos, Igodo and Ere, are still borne by the Ijaw on the coast. This backs the belief that the Original people spread from the coast and the known dynasties, wherever the leaders came from, and they came to
dominate the indigenous people who inhabited the territory. Instead of digging deeper, Edo historians lazily fall for the fallacy of linking everything before the Ogisos to their fabled migration from ancient Egypt. This contradicts scientific evidence. Although a few rulers might have returned from the Middle East due to upheaval, the DNA from the average person in the area shows that the majority never left where they evolved in the lower Niger basin!
Yorubaland
It would appear, as in the Ijebu oral history that follows, that the current ruling class in Yorubaland would rather tie itself to faraway, Eurasian power
centers than with obvious, local blood ties. This is another symptom of the ‘racial inferiority complex’ that pervades the black race, both in Africa and the Americas! One can’t but demand a better attitude from the ruling class to divulge information about previous dynasties, confident that such information will strengthen them in the global community, especially in the black African race. The Original African Information Retrieval System shared by at least a dozen groups suggests that the diverging into their linguistic groups occurred after its creation. As shown earlier in this book that humanity evolved from each other in the Ijebu-Ife-Benin forest, it is likely that Yoruba diverged into Igala and Igbo closer to the Edo region. The Edo language appears to be a composite of Yoruba and Igbo languages. The word oduduwa (the name of the mythological creator of the Yoruba) has no direct translation in modern Yoruba, but in Igbo, it means ‘leader or guide of the world’ (odu, leader/guide; uwa, world). While Igbo means forest in Yoruba and the Igbo mythological leader, Eri is tied to Ori (head) which apparently is also the name of the first king of Ethiopia. Another good example is the oral history of the Deji (king) of Akure and Akureland, the oldest scientifically proven settlement and oldest surviving palace in black Africa. Located between Ilesaland, ruled by descendants of Oduduwa’s first son, Owa Obokun, and Edoland, ruled by his last son, legend has it that the Deji of Akure was the son of an Akure woman and Owa Obokun, the king of Ilesa, on a visit to Benin via Akure (akun re means ‘the (hand) chain broke or cut’). From the history, it is obvious that a woman lived there before the advent of Owa Obokun. What is most profound, but meaningless to today’s casual observer, is the long-held cultural funeral rites of the Deji of Akure. The king of Isharun, a suburb of Akureland, is the first person summoned to the palace when the Deji dies. The Isharun monarch sneaks through the back entrance to ridicule the Deji’s dead body before dressing it and taking his best possessions. After that, the public could be notified, and the women do a ceremonial tonguelashing of the king as he exits from the front of the Akure palace. Although many might disagree within my extended family, this
signifies that there were kings in the area before Oduduwa’s descendants unified and took over the land, as demonstrated by the ceremonial show of discontent by the lower king. Some scholars postulate that Oba-Ile is older than the present Akure dynasty! Unfortunately, with the advent of the Europeans, areas formerly subservient to the Bini and other local powers rebelled and denied the course of history. In some areas where the Muslims infiltrated, the elite tried to tie their history to the northeast African Islamic power centers, while the Eurocentric Igbos love to call themselves Jews! To the west of Benin, the Ijebu Muslim elite bastardised and discarded their history by neglecting the simple logic that Obanta, the king from outside the Ijebu Eredo ring, was probably from Whydah (on the nearby coast of Benin /Togo Republic) instead of a small, Sudanese town bearing a similar name, Wadai. The Ijebu were the cowrie (shell money) and salt merchants of Yorubaland, and, being effective bankers, they held sway over the area. They traded gold from their secret gold mines that extended to the Volta region of modern Ghana until the advent of the Europeans. The surrounding Eredo earthworks, visible from outer space, are indestructible. They comprised a wall and ditch measuring 14 meters high and 160 kilometers long. Though it can’t be dated, the existence of Eredo attests to the fact that the area had an early civilization and large population, because it required more labor than the largest pyramids in Egypt. An estimated 3.5 million cubic meters of soil were shifted to build the Eredo monument, a million cubic meters more than it took to build the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt. Thick forest now covers most of the earthworks. As time went on, the flourishing coastal trade compelled the western Yoruba (Ijebu, Ketu, and Awori) to build coastal cities outside the Eredo earthworks ring. They took advantage of the increase in coastal maritime business between Ivory Coast and Angola along the naturally shielded waterways and lagoons. It wouldn’t have been farfetched, during social unrest, to seek an arbitrator prince from the same Ijebu royalty bloodline, Omo Obanta (son of
the outside king) from their satellite town, Whydah, on the frontier of the Ijebu sphere of influence. The prince was to unite the Ijebu kingdom, especially with his famed exposure and ability to settle quarrels, and made Ijebu-Ode the capital city of the Ijebu. Unfortunately, this information is a generation away from being lost as Muslim elites have changed the official version of their history to suit new religious and political alliances. These were the same type of Islamic alliances that ultimately destroyed the Yoruba frontline city-states, Ilorin and the Oyo kingdom, to the northwest of the Ijebu, which was believed to have been created by Oranmiyan. The Oyo Muslim elite present since the 1500s Nupe/Borgu jihadist attack are mainly responsible for the misrepresentation that the Yoruba migrated from Mecca through Lamurudu; this is an unfounded assertion. The Oyo and the Egba were the middlemen between the Ijebu gold miners, the Hausa, and other Trans-Saharan gold merchants. Oyo-Ile, created by Oduduwa’s youngest son Oranmiyan, extended across the Niger. It was the Yoruba frontier grassland empire and best known, but it was razed with all its history in 1800s by Fulani jihadists. After the second jihadist destruction, the Alaafin (king) of Oyo relocated the Oyo court in the 1830s to the present Oyo. The town was rebuilt within the confines of the forest but devoid of true history apart from the stories of Islamized historians. Bordering Oyo-Ile to the southwest at Otun Ekiti was Ekitiland. It had numerous towns and villages that extended to the border of Akureland at Ikere, and it had mainly agriculturists with linguistic and historic traits similar to the Akure and Edo. Akure was regarded as part of Ekiti until my grandfather, Prince Adelola Faloye (the first Akure local government chairman, and other patriarchs, with the support of the ruling Deji) removed Akure from the Ekiti Parapo (Ekiti United Council). From personal observation, the Edo language appears to be a mix of Ijebu and Ekiti dialects, or the dialects were condensed from Edo. Some scholars claim that stronger age-group work relationships and linguistic evidence show that the more southern and eastern Yoruba, Ekiti/Akure, and Ijebu towards Benin, are older than the northern and eastern Yorubalands of Oyo, Egba, and Igbomina. This observation tallies with the oral history that
Oranmiyan left Benin to go and create Oyo to the northwest. Benin/Edo tradition shows that the previous Ogiso dynasty included more than thirty kings, who ruled for millennia before the present Oranmiyan dynasty. The pre-Ogiso dynasty relates to a time when the marshes hadn’t fully dried out and when the Yoruba, Edo, Igala, Igbo, and Ijaw were not fully differentiated. Due to the lack of early external distortions, some glottochronologists grossly underestimate the time of dispersal as just over five thousand years. If it takes five thousand years to forcefully diverge IndoEuropean languages, it might take fifteen thousand years in a peaceful forest Africa environment with no culture shocks or imperialism. The Ogboni secret cult in Yorubaland and the Igbos Nri cult relate to an earlier period of social development, while the Ijesha of Central Yorubaland link the Ogboni to the thicker, eastern forests on the way to Akure/Benin. Akure is not only the geographical midpoint between Ife and Benin, but it has the unique characteristic in Yorubaland of having ‘Yoruba’ and ‘Edo’ sections. As one moves along the coast eastward, there is the notable exception of the Ugbo kingdom, which claims that the Ife Odudwua dynasty replaced it in Ife. It appears that it has a closer and older relationship with the Benin-Edo sphere, but which came first is unclear. The Original African group initially spread inland from the coast, so it is possible that it was the first settlement before Bini, although another ruling class from Benin or those sacked from Ife went to take over rulership of the coastal kingdoms. It is recounted that when Oduduwa was blind and at the point of death, he sent his son, Owa of Ijeshaland, to the ocean near Ugbo for medicinal ocean water. This action ties to the fact that Oduduwa had knowledge of Ugbo and its environs. Oduduwa died before Owa’s return, which enabled his herbalist, who was not Oduduwa’s royal blood, to assume the throne. However, it is argued that Oduduwa becoming a king in Ife was not based on royal linage or conquest but because of his spiritual powers. It is a fact that all beaded crowned kings came after a long period of priest kings/spiritual leaders, so Ooni lineage is a continuation of the ancient priest king lineage which is why Ife king continued to be the spiritual leader of Yorubas.
This is a thorny issue to this day, especially due to the fight for supremacy between Oyo and Benin on one side and Ife on the other, as some royal purists claim that the Ooni lineage is not a true Oduduwa bloodline. The issue was vehemently raised during my visit to the Edo palace, especially during my lengthy discussion with the chief priest of Benin. However, I conclude that Ife is supreme, being the spiritual center that will always remain relevant, while Oyo and Benin polities have been overwhelmed, destroyed and absorbed. The Igbo are the second largest Original African group and have the third highest percentage proven by genetics of being the ancestral home. Before undisputable DNA evidence, due to the large number of Bantus that evolved from other groups to the east of the Niger and spread to Central and South Africa, there was the question of which side of the Niger delta did humans evolved from, if the Niger delta had fully developed before the split. The Obi of Onitsha categorically stated that Igbos migrated from Ife. Igbo historians point to Aguleri in northern Igboland as their ancestral home, which is far from a coastal evolution site, but this is supported by DNA evidence and cultural anthropology that they diverged from Igala at the northwestern fringes of Igboland. The Ijaw who lived on the coast and had links with the three inland ethnic groups claimed to have moved from the west to the central and later the eastern part of the delta. There is no continuous divergence from the Ijaw into the southern Igbo, who would have spread north to Aguleri. Moreover, the northern Igbo appear to be older than the southern Igbo near the Port Harcourt coast. Igbo divergence from or into other cultures across the Niger appears to have occurred around the northern, not the southern, crossing, because there is a continuous formation of settlements from Idah to Aguleria and Onitsha.
Igboland
The eastern spread from Benin takes a more inland route to Igboland along which there are numerous tales of Bini royalty who organized and led in Esan and western Igbo lands. The Igboland and culture spread from/into the western side of the Niger. We see how Edo culture diverges into Igbo through the Ika and Aniochi clans from the midpoint between Benin and Asaba on the Niger riverbank. Opposite Asaba, on the other bank of the Niger is Onitsha, a major Igbo town that some scholars have stated is derived from orisha, the name for Yoruba and Edo deities. The river is also called the Orunmili, a corruption of Orunmila, one of the highest Yoruba Orishas. Despite genetic and anthropological evidence shows the people diverged from Igala, some trace Onitsha’s royal lineage to the first king, Eze Chima, a rebel Edo Bini prince. Onitsha is slightly south of Aguleri, which the Ndigbo claim as their origin. To the southwest of Onitsha is Nnewi and the Anaedo kingdom, whose supreme deity is Edo. Next to Nnewi is Awka Etiti and Igbo-Ukwu. Considering the terrain and natural distribution of people, because the majority of Ndigbo towns are in the Onitsha-Owerri-Aba-Enugu triangle, it would appear that the Igbo migrated across the Niger to Onitsha or Aguleri and spread out. They were constrained in the west by the Niger (and the thick, lower Niger forests on both sides of the river) and in the east by the mountain range that ran from around Aba to Enugu. It is highly unlikely that they spread northward from a coastal evolution point or crossed over the Niger south of the lower Niger forests, via the Ughelli route, without leaving a continuous, significant Ndigbo community presence until they arrived at Aba/Owerri. Towards the central Niger delta, land settlements thin out, especially after Warri/Sapele, which used to be Bini/Edo territory. There are significant settlements of Ijaw and other riverine people living on the lagoons. The coastal peoples were the earliest conglomeration of people but also appeared to have mixed histories with the Yoruba, Igbo, and Edo. While they appeared to be the majority and rulers of Benin and Yoruba kingdoms before the Ogiso and Oduduwa dynasties, there is also evidence that the Yoruba/Edo dynasties ruled the coast. The Idoma, Jukun and many other ethnicities spread along the Benue valley,
where they created the Kwararafa Empire. Jukun meaning people were believed to have been the rulers of Kwararafa until it disintegrated and the peoples dispersed across the Middlebelt. Ethnic groups that migrated north of Yoruba and Igala became the Gwari, Birom, Kanuri, Nupe, and Igbira that formed the central and northern Nigeria Nok civilization. The Western academia has conservatively put the Nok civilization to around 1000BC. From the Nok terracotta and other factors, it was deduced that the people of the area had an advanced social system. It has been suggested that iron smelting was independently discovered in the region prior to 1000 BC31. The advanced civilization is believed to have disintegrated around 300AD. They were broken up into Hausa, Birom and other middlebelt peoples and made to move towards Cameroon or became Islamized by the Trans-Saharan traders and colonists in West Africa. 31 Duncan E. Miller and N.J. Van Der Merwe, 'Early Metal Working in Sub Saharan Africa'Journal of African History 35 (1994) 1-36
Two of Oduduwa’s sons are said to have migrated westward to lead Ketu, Sabe, and lands towards the Volta River, which includes the Yoruba’s close
cousins, the Aja, Ewe, Dangme, and Ga. Atlantic slavery greatly depleted the large population that filled the short savannah between Yorubaland and the Volta River basin, leaving substantial earthworks at Tado that attest to lost civilisations. The Upper Volta groups, like the Mossi in the grasslands, were Islamized and mostly lost their Original African history like the Hausa. The Original African Akan and Bia, whose languages still closely resemble Yoruba and Nigeria’s Middle Belt languages like Nupe and Gwari, relocated farther into the forest to establish new political structures. A few coastal groups migrated west along the West African coast to Senegambia, but the rest of West Africa was mostly filled by migration along the Niger to its Guinea highlands source onto the Senegambia delta. The Dogon, around the Niger bend in Mali, have an ancient but advanced knowledge base that proves the antiquity of the Upper Niger basin. The Trans-Saharan invasions led to the majority moving into the forest towards the coast in Guinea or becoming Islamized in Mali and Senegambia. The man-made monuments of the ancient kingdoms didn’t survive, except in places like Esie in northern Yorubaland that protrudes into drier, wooded grasslands, the 295 monoliths in Upper Cross River on the eastern outskirts of Igboland, and the substantial Tado earthworks in the narrow, western Aja savannah, next to the Ijebu earthworks. Esie has hundreds of stone carvings that have been dated to around the time when the Yoruba capital moved northwards to Oyo-Ile in the first millennium. The Igbo had the stepped Nsude pyramids that resembled earlier pyramids in the Sudan and Egypt but were much smaller. The Lower Niger ancient African societies, the Yoruba and Igbo, couldn’t build huge monuments that would stand the test of time and the moist rainforest climate and that did not, ultimately, fit into a naturalistic environment that prevented the excesses of human architectural accomplishment. Despite the lack of huge physical monuments, the advanced social systems attest to the age and development of the people. Between 8,000BC and 6000BC, the Age of Yemoja, Africans used their knowledge to develop the
stellar (lunar) calendar based on female principles. The African Information Retrieval system based on the four-day week shows that this system was in operation before the 4000BC evolution of the seven day solar calendar. The Igbos system called Aha still operates on the four by four strings, unlike many others that tie all the strings/Opele to make 16 cowries. Instead of a four-day week and a seven-week month, the new solar calendar was based on a seven-day week, a four-week month, and a twelve-month year, based on the twelve months (moons) required for a complete revolution of the sun. The Ifa calendar was based on a four-day week (Ose) and a ninety-one-week year. The days were named after deities. The first day of the week was Ojo (day) Obatala, the second was Ojo Orunmila, the third was Ojo Ogun, and the fourth was Ojo Shango. Converted to the solar year, the Yoruba year starts on June 3 and ends on June 2. The Yoruba year in 2016 was 10,058. The Igbo calendar was also based on a four-day week but had a seven-week month and a thirteen-month year, with an extra day added in the last month. The Ubochi (days) were known as Eke, Orie, Afo, and Nkwo. The year began in late February and ended in early February, as follows: Onwa Mbu—Third week of February Onwa Abuo—March Onwa Ife Eke—April Onwa Ano—May Onwa Agwu—June Onwa Ifejioku – July Onwa Alom Chi—August to early September Onwa Ilo Mnuo—Late September Onwa Ana—October Onwa Okike—Early November Onwa Ajana—Late November Onwa Ede Ajana—Late December to early January Onwa Uzo Alusi—Late January to early February Original Africans inhabiting the Niger-Kongo riverbasin developed complex social systems, especially the world’s first religion and a
complex divination system called Ifa by the Yoruba, Iha in Bini, Aha in Igbo and Ewe etc. The foundation of Ifa was laid more than ten thousand years ago, in the Age of Orunmila, and built on a binary code of 256 (16 x 16) outcomes. The divination system could be advanced to have 256 x 256 outcomes (Odu Ifa) or as many outcomes as it was possible to count. It became a gigantic memory bank of words on all sorts of events that one can ever contemplate which are tied to all outcomes possible since the bank was continuously replenished. This was the first systematic, knowledge-based system, but it had no written scripts and was recited orally to keep it secret. Its library of wisdom, called the Odu Ifa, consisted of 16 major chapters of 240 minor categories. These had to be memorized, and the outcomes identified as the Opele (divination chain, nuts) fell during divination on the opon Ifa (divination board). The names given to the Odus gradually changed with the divergence of languages, but the principles behind them largely remained the same. Similarities of 10 local variations westward from Fon in Benin Republic to Idoma in Eastern Nigeria FON NW NE Nupe Edo Urhobo GBE Yoruba Yoruba W Nri Igbo Igala Idoma Igbo Gbe Ogbe Osika Sikan Ogbi Ogbi Ogbi Obi Ebi Ebi Yeku Oyeku Oyeku Eyako Ako Ako Akwu Ahwu Akwu Akwu Woli Iwori Ogori Gori Oghoi Ogbori Ogoli Ogori Ogoli Ogoli Di Odi Oji Eji Odin Edi/Odi Odi Odi Odi Oji Abala Obara Obara Bara Ovba O(v)bara Obai Obala Obara Obla Akana Okanran Okona Kana Okan Okanran Okai Okala Okono Okla Loso Irosun Orosun Rusu Oruuh Urhur(h) u u Ulush Ururu Oloru Olou Wolin Oworin Oga Ega Oghae E/Aghare Ogali Agari Egali Egali Guda Ogunda Ogunta Guta Ighitan Ighite Ejite Ijite Ogwute Ejita Sa Osa Osa Esa Oha Orha Osha Ora Ora Ola Lete Irete Irete Etia Ete Ete/Eke Ete Eke Olete Ete Tula Otura Otura Turia Eture Erhure Etule Oture Otula Otle
Trukp OturupoOtaru Rakpa Erhoxu Erhokpo/ e n n a a Ka IkaOyinka Yikan Eka Ekan Atukp Aturukp Atunukp Etrukp a a a a Aka Aka Eka Eka Che Ose Okin Arikin Ose Ose Ose Ose Oche Oche Fu Ofun Ofun Efu Ohun Ophu Ofu Ohu Ofu Ofu Excerpted from people.bu.edu/manfredi/4bitArraySpreadsheet.pdf. As discussed elsewhere(Manfredi 2009a, §4.3)
A Yoruba interpretation of the sixteen Odus follows. The number before each odu represents the binary number corresponding to the pattern: 0 Ogbe: Light, birth of Orunmila (wisdom) 1 Osa: Overcome fear 2 Otura: Govern wisely 3 Owonrin: Weather storms 4 Irete: If you refuse to sacrifice something, you might lose it anyway 5 Ofun: Olodumare creates earth, the sixteen odus, orishas, and humans 6 Edi: Watch out for obstacles 7 Okanran: Follow plans 8 Ogunda: Ogun, use technology wisely 9 Iwori: Ask diviner for advice 10 Ose: Truth protects good, destroys evil 11 Oturopon: Raise children well 12 Irosun: Crouch, wait, and plan 13 Ika: You reap what you sow 14 Obara: Cooperate, each hand washes the other 15 Oyeku: Dark, Olodumare’s earthly creations Its intelligent outline of knowledge transferred across the world to aid in developing other divination systems and lines of study. Ifa was advanced enough to postulate abstract structures of the natural world, including elementary particle physics, cosmology, quantum consciousness and physics, voodoo physics, and maths. Its knowledge base was so advanced that technology inventors adopted its 256 dimensional structure for the 256-bit motherboard in computers. Ifa was transferred to Mesopotamia where it became the basis of Western
astrology. It is much more advanced than Western astrology, but the major Ifa Orishas are identified in the table below. Ifa transferred to the Indus Valley 5,300 years ago, and from it, latter day Indians established Buddhism. The African Information Retrieval System introduced to South China was also fundamental to the creation of I Ching with sixty-four dimensions or outcomes. It also helped the tarot system of seventy-eight outcomes. Hous Astrological e Sign Ruling Planet 1 Aries Mars Yoruba Ruling Orisha Ogun 2 Taurus Oshun Venus Effect War, iron technology, assertive and aggressive self Love, fertility, wealth, joy 3 Gemini Mercury 4 Cancer Moon Esu/Ibeji Information and duality, yin and yang Yemoja Ocean, moods, 5 Leo 6 Virgo 7 Libra 8 Scorpio Oya Oshun Love, fertility, Pluto balance, and harmony Storms and hurricanes, transformation, death, reincarnation/regenera tion 9 Sagittarius Jupiter Obatala Higher education, religion, philosophy, wisdom, good fortune and intelligence
10 Capricorn BabaluAiye Saturn Structure, career status, patience and discipline 11 Aquarius Uranus Shango Upheaval, rebellion 12 Pisces Sun Mercury Orunmila Esu maternal protective nurturing and instinct Destiny, creativity Information systems and prophets like Jesus Venus Neptune Olokun for justice/humanitarian ideals Seclusion, spirituality, secrecy of ocean floor Ancient Egyptians adopted the oracle through the worship of the Goddess Wadjet, the grand patron of Ancient Egypt. Wadjet like the Yoruba Osunmare was a rainbow snake goddess that brought fertility and prosperity. Wadjet later spread to Greece where she was called Buto and brought about divination skills to Europe. Ifa was brought to the Arabs by Prophet Idris and was called ilm al-raml (‘science of the sand’) or khatt al-raml (‘lines in the sand’). The divination involved calculating outcomes in the sand poured onto the divination board. To become a babalawo (a graduate practitioner in Ifa) was no easy feat. Training began between the age of seven and ten and lasted for twelve years. The progress between training grades was slow and laborious, as trainees were subjected to intensive memory and bodily tests. Every outcome of the divination system was tied to an event, name, place, and many other things or words ranging from the historic to the scientific, cosmic, and proverbial. An awo (obos in Edo) or practitioner had to memorize it all and be able to recognize the 16 major signs and the 240 minor ones as they fell during divination.
Contrary to the Christian or Islamic dogma of Esu’s knowledge base being satanic, Original Africans like the Yoruba and Ndigbo developed naturalist religions that reflected philosophies represented by common, important natural objects. They were based on natural laws of retributive justice and karma (known as Esan in Yoruba, Ofo and Ogu in Igbo), which ensured the personal responsibility necessary for peaceful coexistence. The Igbo religion, also known as Odinani or Odinala, was based on a central figure and almighty god called Chukwu. Odinani was the ancient Igbo traditional religion that connected Mmadu (humans) to Chukwu (God) through one’s chi (personal soul). As in the Yoruba culture, Chukwu was best approached through the Alusi/Arushi (Orishas) who represented specific aspects of nature. The top Alusis were as follows: Ala, the earth goddess, represented by the moon, the first and most important Alusi, was responsible for fertility and morality; Amadioha/Amadiora (‘free will of the people’) was the Alusi of thunder and lightning, the god of justice and represented by the sun; Anyanwu (‘the eye of the sun’) was also seen as a goddess of justice with an all-knowing eye that resides in the sun; Ikenga (‘place of strength’) was a horned Alusi represented by Mars and known as the god of human endeavor, assertiveness, success, and victory; Ekwensu was the god of bargains and trade like Esu but not the devil as misconceptualized by Christian dogma. One’s chi chose whether or not to desecrate ala (earth), while the goddess Ala, Mother Earth, the Alusi of morality, judged how one’s chi found its way back to the chi ukwu – soul collective – supreme god (Chukwu). The Igbo believed that Ofo and Ogu were rendered with thunder by Amadiora, the god of the sky and husband of the goddess Ala, who fed her with rains. The Original African culture, having evolved in tune with its bountiful environment, was holistic and reflected in all aspects of life. The African spirituality was wrongly regarded as a religion. His heartbeat (the engine of his soul) was connected with his environment through singing and dancing to drumbeats that reflected spiritual emotion and appreciation. The physical appreciation of the environment was expressed through art, expressive of all nature forms. Every torque of the drum was to convey messages to the orishas. His spirituality made the African appreciate the wide range of
nature’s gifts, from paintings on his body to paintings on the rocks and molding wood, metals, and fabric, which he wore as clothing in all the colors that nature provided. The fertile environment inspired a live-and-let-live atmosphere. Without food shortages or other restrictions, the Yam Belt was holy land, thus allowing a polytheistic environment. Everybody was allowed to participate and came out to celebrate the gods and beliefs of other people. This practice spread to the Nile region and across the world after the Ice Age, but it was eventually curtailed and bastardised in the quest to control scarce resources like water, food and gold. This need for control brought about the later and more restrictive forms of monotheism with jealous gods. In the Yam Belt, everyone initially had a voice in government and could voice their complaints in a daily, open court consisting of elders and priests and presided over by a king who did not possess absolute power. Knowledge was power, which was why the secrets of Ifa were never written down to try to prevent the abuse later witnessed in the Eurasian belief systems that evolved from excerpts of Ifa. In later civilizations, one man could amass a fortune of wheat or other grains that could be stored. The common Yoruba saying was that one man could never eat all of what the area had to offer. Whoever cleared the land of trees owned the land, resulting in communal ownership of land that extended to communal meals split among age and gender groups. This was the basis of the ancient African mentality of consensus as opposed to that of the majority or the strongest. While other races were migrating and trying to organize to survive in less favorable conditions, the Lower Niger people were busy formulating strong societal norms and mores. Their gods didn’t require taking someone else’s land as part of one’s manifest destiny, as was the case in Christianity, Islam, and other religions of the naturally deprived. Under no circumstances was taking another man’s property accepted, especially under the authority of personal religious visions with no corroborative witnesses. Otherwise, it was believed that Shango/Amadiora, the god of justice and thunder, the provider of the rains of the rainforest, would strike offenders down while Oya would blow and carry them away.
In Yoruba culture, the rhythmic language of Ifa and music encapsulated history and philosophy better than any other known means. The word ogun showed how one word could describe a whole philosophy. Ogun could be pronounced in five different tones, each with different meanings; Ogun meant war; Ogun was the god of iron, Ogun was biological and spiritual poisons, Ogun meant sweat/assertive self, and Ogun meant inheritance/wealth. This encompassed a natural philosophy of positive action that stated that one could attain wealth only through laborious sweat (working/farming) or war (plundering), both of which were accomplished with iron tools/weapons or through spiritual and biological means. The choice of plundering was administered with the warning of the nature of Ogun, the god of war and iron. Praises sung of Ogun reflected his fierce character:32 Ogun kills on the right and destroys on the right, Ogun kills on the left and destroys on the left, Ogun kills suddenly in the house and suddenly in the fields, Ogun kills the child with the iron with which it plays, Ogun kills in silence. 32 Joseph M Murphy, Santeria: An African Religion in America (Beacon Press, 1988), 11.
In a rich mythology that also depicted Ogun as preferring a bath of blood to one of water, this was a societal warning against unrelenting wars for material gain. The worship of Ogun was a fraction of the Yoruba pantheon, although Ogun became more important with the arrival of iron-wrought guns borne by Europeans whose Ogun rage the Africans could not pacify. A seven-day Ogun festival in 1791 prompted the revolution that gave birth to Haiti, the first modern black nation. Oya, another Orisha, encapsulated revolutionary trends and philosophy, while Osun encapsulated love. Respect for elders and societal responsibility was at the core of the Yoruba tradition, despite their love for urban settings and gatherings. Prior to fluoride toothpaste, the West African chewing stick was the best dental cleaner, and black palm oil soap still has its advantages. African naturalist tendencies resulted in a pattern of dressing that was suitable to the environment and physical health, similar to the black hip-hop baggy dressing. No color was,
and still is, too loud for African dress. In order not to interfere with nature, loose clothing was adopted, especially the trousers, which were loose in order to keep the male sex organs cool. Sperm is sensitive to high temperatures, and the body has a natural system of letting the scrotum fall away from the body; tight European clothing results in lower fertility. Modern-day black youth in loose, baggy trousers suffer abuse for dressing irresponsibly from a black middle class with a colonial mentality that thinks they should dress more like the repressed but ‘civilised’ Europeans. In Africa, training was a lifetime societal responsibility, because people were born into occupational groups and houses that undertook their training in the necessary life skills. Those named with the Ifa (Ifa is knowledge) or Fa prefix were trained to be Awos, like my name Faloye (knowledge is power/wisdom, a philosopher-king); those with an Ayan prefix were trained with drums and music; those with an Ade prefix were trained to be politicians/ruling houses. The Ogun prefix was for blacksmiths, Ode was for hunting, etc. Apart from biological and clan groups, a person belonged to an age group that was assigned a specific task in the existing social order. Young males kept the forest paths clear and charged tolls in Igboland, while older men often controlled politics and important rituals. African families were large, and distant relatives were welcome to contribute to the clan’s objectives. At a certain age, Igbo children were sent to successful relatives for indentured service, after which the role model set him or her up in a chosen career or business. This was a cultural trait that many have wrongly interpreted as being akin to slavery. The vast, thick vegetation that promoted easy habitation prevented harsh slavery regimes, because a slave could easily disappear into the rainforest. To increase production, families invited the teenage children of relatives with poorer lands to live and work with them. Even enslaved prisoners of war were not treated much differently than the clan’s legitimate children, and they could even become chiefs. Production was sometimes organized by age and gender. Men of a certain age
group came together to clear the forests and extend their yam farms, which were normally situated on the outskirts of their towns. They then returned for the socially enjoyable, communal meal. Women took care of the small vegetable farms within the compound, cooked, sewed, picked gold on riverbanks, and traded. An African woman often preempted her husband by choosing trusted junior wives to do certain tasks that she believed were beneath her in terms of age like cooking, collecting firewood, and sex. This was to prevent the arrival of an unknown rival who might seek to usurp her productive power within the family and clan. The economic system was embedded in the culture. As the importance of trade grew along with population, women became more visible outside the forest region as they traded their family wares over longer distances. This trait made outsiders conclude that women led African societies, but the point is that the African sense of wealth and belonging was different. Through trade, a woman could accumulate and allocate wealth, but it was not hers or anybody’s to will or pass to anyone outside the family. When she died, her role was taken over and nothing else. An African’s life was one of communal enterprise in different gender and age groups. As children, they respected elders with the hope of one day becoming an elder, after which they died, joined those who had come before, and become a god. Only in death they became revered, or so it appeared, but while they were on earth, they had to enjoy elaborate burial and reburial parties of the dead every day. There was a natural balance to everything as women and men worked with what nature provided. The African culture reflected the natural societal balance with both female and male gods. A complete lifecycle of life, death, and rebirth needed a female presence (unlike Christianity with a Father, a Son, and a Holy Ghost). Matriarchal worship of female ancestors came to an end, as seen in the Bible. The snake that was the symbol of the female and her curative powers, probably from the Egyptian snake Goddess Wadjet, was demonized when Adam ate from the Tree of Life (women) for knowledge and guidance. Medicine was equated with female curative powers as signified by the snakes on the emblem of the Hippocratic Oath/Rod of Asclepius. Archaeological findings show that Jews worshipped a female opposite of
Yahweh called Asherah when they left black Egypt and arrived in Israel, but the male dominance in their production function based on wars eventually erased the female god. Female gods of fertility appeared redundant in the arid deserts. Eurasians eventually called their mothers ‘bitches’ while the opposite of God became a dog, man’s best friend, who wandered with him in the wilderness. Homosexuality rose in the ranks of the Eurasian nomads, and their women were left behind as exemplified in Greece, their first empire. This natural societal and sexual balance was reflected by forestdwelling African unwavering taboo regarding homosexuality, which, at present, threatens to split African Anglican churches from Western Anglican churches. Homosexuality was believed to be a product of gender-unbalanced societies where migrant men lived in the arid environments, and the women couldn’t take significant roles in societal production because of warfare against other men and the environment. Homosexuality amounted to selfish enjoyment as opposed to positive African communal leisure and the productive capacity of the continent’s forests. African laws on sex were formulated with the realization that sex was the easiest way to destroy or build a society, and clearly defined roles were ascribed to remove any form of ambiguity. What was female was removed from a male child in his first week, while what was male was removed from a week-old female child. The male foreskin was believed to hold onto fluids and germs after sex, which could be easily passed to partners and result in sexually transmitted diseases. In modern times, some research has shown that uncircumcised men are more likely to spread HIV/AIDS. To protect against sexual laxity, sex was only for procreation, and therefore a woman’s clitoris was removed. The clitoris was viewed to be highly sensitive, like the male organ, but without any productive capacity. A corollary of the African belief was that sex for mere enjoyment led to sexual excess and homosexuality. Without a clitoris, oral sex and lesbianism were unattractive. In the interest of the community, to have more children, male promiscuity was encouraged, but female promiscuity was frowned upon. The reproduction rate was much higher than average because a man had to do more ‘rounds’ to satisfy a ‘clit-less’ woman, and the only way to arouse her
was through internal erogenous spots, which increased the chances of conception. Circumcision was done early in life to prevent enforcing the societal norms on a grown adult. The environment prevented forceful doctrines and promoted tolerance among adults no matter their private beliefs. With these societal norms in place, the Niger people lived in peace and prosperity in the Land of Love. As they spread, pressures upon the land brought about a culture whereby the first son inherited land while others migrated to the next plot. This was especially common among the Igbo and the Bantu who eventually inhabited the land to the far south of Africa. Without too much to bother about, black Africans concentrated on clothing, art, and music, and they produced the Nok and Ife terracotta, brass, and other artwork. They invented the talking drum, rhyming their words into music. There was also the Yoruba Ewi—it was like poetry with drums and a forum to recount history or make social criticism and praise, similar to modern-day rap. The philosophy and practice of forest African religion did not concentrate on social organization for production and ‘law and order’, because they weren’t constraining problems. Worship evolved as a means of meditation and healing. Dancing and music were means of cleansing, mediating, and rejuvenating the soul. They were also used to invoke the spirits of the dead whose specific influence was required. The people left in the Niger-Benue basin could have anything, but they couldn’t keep records or accumulate wealth unnecessarily due to the humid climate. Trade for essential food like salt, peppers, palm products, and fruits developed between the Yam Belt and the outlying savannas, whose inhabitants tried to exchange grains and animals for the richer forest products. Rice, millet, and other grains never appealed to the forest people of the Yam Belt, who regarded them as bird food, while the forest people had abundant and better-tasting animals instead of tasteless cow meat. Forest Africans had their own dwarf cows that they reared for its tastier meat but not for its milk.
Having so much time on their side, and fuller stomachs, the people of the Yam Belt made commercial artistic and decorative clothing and artworks. Starting with cloth made from palms, they tested and went onto other materials, like cotton, while experimenting with metals for artwork or to be sold unprocessed in the trade between the forest and savannah areas. This caused the savannah peoples to travel as far as Egypt and India in order to bring a better deal than grains and cows to the market. The forest people did not demand much for their goods, and in most cases, a rare item went a long way. International trade was unimportant to the common man, and subregional trade was based on items like salt for those living far from the sea. Rich forest dwellers often bought trade items, like grass, from an unknown land to thatch their roofs even though it was of an inferior quality. The entertainment capital of short-lived but exotic animals from other lands also appreciated. Horses were luxuries that normally lasted for a few months before falling prey to Africa’s rich insect life. On the other hand, many in the forest were enticed by the savannah traders with tall tales of exotic, faraway places. Black youth were the most impressionable. They felt overburdened by social responsibilities, were unable to accumulate wealth selfishly, and saw the fruits of their labors exchanged cheaply for exotic goods. From then on, forest people migrated to distant lands only to be disappointed by their inability to assimilate. They returned home to continue the circle of fabled lands and disappointment. Peoples of the savannah and desert were increasingly identified by their darker complexion—jet black, ‘burnt’ due to the lack of cloud cover in the hot, arid regions (compared to their original habitat in the cloudy rainforest). Their languages changed as they dealt with Eurasians and their Afro-Asian offspring. The cultural mores and Ifa-based knowledge in the Niger delta diffused throughout the world, although the real messages from the Land of Love and the Land of the Gods were later lost. From antiquity to modernity, it is clear that as people moved farther away from the Yam Belt, the crops became smaller and less nutritional, requiring more organization and land as well as stronger tools and animals for a lower quality of life. These typified, ironically, what were believed to be more technologically advanced
civilizations.
Chapter 3: Globalization of African Culture: Africans’ Frontier Empires The spread of black African global prominence and their destruction by the First Horsemen from Eurasia 10,000 BC to 500 BC Africans with the L3 haplogroup migrated from the Horn of Africa into Yemen/Arabia, settling on the coast along the way into present day Iran, Pakistan, India, until they got into Southern China and Taiwan, in what is called The Great Coastal Migration. Initially, due to ice caps covering most of Eurasia, they didn’t settle in the interior but migrated along the coast. The ice caps meant that sea levels were low so there were still land bridges between the Horn of Africa and Arabia, as well as Arabia and the Near Asia. Also, the low sea levels enabled crossing into Indonesia and Philippines onto Australia easier due to land bridges or low sea levels that made island hopping possible for ancient canoes. The Eurasian migrants took their African culture along; while some continued to be hunter-gatherers, others settled to farm African crops like millet and other grains, as well as Yams in India. Since they populated land all the way to Australia by 40,000 years ago, over time they began to form societies and cities. Detailed information of ancient African civilizations in Asia is scant due to the long time frame and the global racist agenda to wipe off all traces of ancient African civilizations across the world. Obvious African influences in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China are vehemently denied. Thanks to contemporary historians like the Senegalese historian Anta Diop, African-American scholar Runoko Rashidi, Nigerian Professor Catherine Acholonu and a few others, the new information trickling in on African frontier empires would not be accessed. Also, the new advances in genetics have countered mainstream claims that Africans only stepped out of Africa as slaves. New genetic evidence has confirmed that Africans were the first modern human settlers in Eurasia. Out of all continental ancestral clades, it
has been proven that the Oceania clade, composed of Asian Africans called Negroids, is the closest clade to the African clade, especially the East African subclade, their last stopover in Africa. They gradually settled in small settlements that became villages and towns by 8000BC, and then around 4000 BC became known as civilizations and major trade centers that traded afar. Ethiopia, Ancient Egypt, Sumer, Elam, Harappan Indus Valley and the Far East all had African civilizations, based on African culture and trade. The first king in Ethiopia around 4470BC was called Ori meaning head/leader in Yoruba, and Orisha called Erecha religion still survives there. Like in ancient Egypt, Eurasian academia claims that the ancient Eurasia civilizations wrote in what is now regarded as lost languages, but this is because the languages were African originated. Otherwise if they had been Eurasian languages, they would have been deciphered by one of the Indo-European or Asiatic languages. The dark-skinned African civilizations laid the foundations of global trade and human civilization, while Europeans were in the central Asia plains and mountains until they came south to overrun the African civilizations from around 2000BC in what is known as the Era of the First Horseman/Era of Ogun. With climate change in the central Asian freezing plains, where they domesticated horses and designed the war chariot, Eurasians migrated south to destroy the civilizations, brutally suppressed the survivors and tried to erase traces of Africa and blackness. On the coast migration route from Ethiopia into Arabia and around the peninsula, Sumer were various settlements that coalesced into citystates in Mesopotamian Euphrates-Tigris Delta, on the shores of the Persian Gulf, southern modern day Iraq. It was reputed to be one of the earliest civilizations that brought about writing, plough agriculture and astronomy. Its growth can mainly be attributed to being on the trade route of African goods to Asia that begins in Egypt and ended in the Indus Valley and China. Akkadian Afro-Asian Semitic kings were to overthrow the original kings and takeover the culture. Though the people called themselves ‘ug sag giga ga’ meaning the ‘Black headed people’33, they were named Sumer by the Akkadians that took up their culture and told the history from their own perspective.
Elam, also on the Persian Gulf, suffered the same fate being one of the Black empires in the region that was destroyed and erased by the Eurasians and their Afro-Asiatic offspring, the Akkadians. Sumer and Elam were midpoints between the two great population and trade centers, Ancient Egypt and the Harappan Indus Valley Black civilizations, and enjoyed the benefits of trade and synergies that arose from being in the center. However while it was possible to completely erase their physical legacies and dilute their African gene pool because of the nearby Eurasian homeland in the Caucasus mountains, the Harappan Indus Valley and ancient Egypt with much bigger populations were a bit more resistant. 33 W. Hallo, W. Simpson (1971). The Ancient Near East. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. p. 28.
WHITE-SKINNED PEOPLES SPREAD FROM ANDRONOVO
The Harappan Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) was based in the Indus basin in present-day Pakistan, northwest India and Afghanistan. From about 60,000yrs ago African Indians, Dravidians, filled up the Indian sub-region all the way to South China and as expected small settlements coalesced over time to form a civilization and trade center of cities by 3,350BC – Age of
Osun, physical wealth and love. The main Dravidian cities of the IVC were Harappa and Mohenjo Daro and were well laid out with street drainage. The 1900BC arrival of barbarian Indo-European groups from Andronovo Cultural complex of Western Siberia (Kazakhstan) that destroyed the IVC towns by 1800BC, compressed black Indians, Dravidian Indians, into South and Eastern India and Sri Lanka, where they currently number nearly two hundred million. The Indo-Europeans destroyed the northwest India civilization and built a new empire using the Black Indian culture and practices, which include ancestor worship, the African Information Retrieval System like Ifa that they transformed into Buddhism and Hinduism. Since the Indo-Europeans couldn’t completely kill off the African civilizers or dilute their gene pool beyond recognition, they subjected them to brutal racial caste systems as they engaged in cultural genocide that persists till date in India.
It wasn’t until the 1920s that the Eurasian falsehood, of Dravidians being primitive Black people, was exposed by archaeological excavations in British India Punjab district that brought to view over 1050 lost and forgotten cities. The white Eurasian mainstream was to deny that it was a black Indian civilization, but the evidence was overwhelmingly. The cultural and linguistic similarities of Dravidian and IVC has been cited by researchers like Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola. Sir Mortimer Wheeler, director of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1944 and Archaeological Adviser to Pakistan in 1949, who directed the digging of IVC, proposed that the decline of IVC was caused by the invasion of an IndoEuropean tribe called Aryans from Central Asia and cited evidence of a group of 37 skeletons found in Mohenjo Daro and passages in the Vedas referring to battles and forts. The Indus Valley Civilization, with no large monuments and palaces, was an egalitarian society with planned cities filled with traders and artisans and no single ruler. It mainly depended on trade with Sumer and especially Elam that was quite geographically close. Many scholars have proposed that there was an Elamo-Dravidian linguistic family34 and cultural linkage35, especially David McAlpin36 that found that they had over 30% similar cognates. The Mature Harappan Phase is contemporary to the Old Elamite Period, Early Dynastic to UR111 Mesopotamia and Old kingdom to Ist Intermediate Ancient Egypt, and they all began to witness decline with the 2000BC advent of Indo-European barbarians – the First Horsemen with the composite bow and horse-drawn chariots, the Age of Ogun. 34 Lockard, Craig (2010). Societies, Networks, and Transitions, Volume 1: To 1500 (2nd ed.). India: Cengage Learning. p. 40. ISBN 1439085358. 35 Ratnagar, Shereen (2006). Trading Encounters: From the Euphrates to the Indus in the Bronze Age. Oxford University Press, India. ISBN 0-19-568088-X. 36 David McAlpin, "Toward Proto-Elamo-Dravidian", Language vol. 50 no. 1 (1974); David McAlpin: "Elamite and Dravidian, Further Evidence of Relationships", Current Anthropology vol. 16 no. 1 (1975); David McAlpin: "Linguistic prehistory: the Dravidian situation", in Madhav M. Deshpande and Peter Edwin Hook: Aryan and Non-Aryan in India, Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1979); David McAlpin, "Proto-Elamo-Dravidian: The Evidence and its Implications", Transactions of the American Philosophical Society vol. 71 pt. 3, (1981)
It is noteworthy to mention some writers have propounded an African Indian, Dravidian, origin to some South China civilizations and dynasties like Yangshao (5000 to 3000BC) and Dawenkou (4100 to 2600BC) civilisations, as well as Xia (2100 to 1600BC) and early Shang(1700 to 1046BC) dynasties. It is logical that with the spread of Dravidian and Pygmy Africans across South Asia and Oceania there would have come a time, probably around the Yangshao and Dawenkou eras, when they would coalesce into civilizations in South China to the Yellow River. The red and black pottery from the Yangshao era are similar to those found in Harappan IVC and it is claimed that that the fish and bird totems belonged to Africans from Africa, Mesopotamia and especially the Dravidian religion, which formed the foundations of Hinduism and Buddhism later practiced in China. However, unless the attacks of the First Horseman came at a much later date than those of Egypt and Western Asia, the African claim of Shang and Xia dynasty needs more evidence. Mainstream Chinese history starts with Xia (2100BC to 1600BC) and Shang dynasties (1700BC to 1050BC), but provides no significant evidence of the existence or ethnic identity of the early dynastic era, and until recently were actually taken as mere myths. There are also cultural myths of ancient Black people in Korea, Japan and Taiwan that were tied to prosperity and revered in particular festivals. Some African scholars have claimed that the Zhou dynasty, representing modern Chinese known as Hua, defeated the black Shang dynasty and pushed them to the Pacific coast, where they were forced to move to the Philippines and Oceania. But, we need more evidence to ask more questions and form an historical construct of what happened to the Dravidian and Pygmy peoples that migrated to the area. With most Eurasians unwilling to divulge information on the African input into their latter Eurasian civilizations, it would be difficult if not impossible to get more information, knowing what Africans had to go through to lay claim to Ancient Egypt on African soil. An argument only put to rest recently with the advent of genetic anthropology. In prehistoric Africa, nomadic hunter-gatherers had spread to the Nile Valley and Northeast Africa by 120,000 years ago. The protosedentary farmers slowly accumulated in the Niger delta and as the forests along the complex
waterways were filled, new sites were settled along the riverbanks in the grasslands, which eventually included the Blue and White Nile. Western Africa was blessed with abundant water through heavy rains that culminated in river basins like the Niger, Benue, Volta, Pra, and Senegambia. Due to the rains from the Atlantic that approached West Africa at an angle, Nigeria was always the most fertile. The Jos Plateau was a great water catchment area that gave rise to rivers like the Sokoto and Kaduna that watered modern northwest and central Nigerian grasslands. The Yobe and others watered northeast Nigeria and Lake Chad area. The western boundary of the West Africa population was between the source of the Niger and the Atlantic mouth of the Senegal, while the center of the grassland population was between the middle Niger, the Chad river system, and the source of the Benue in Cameroon. The lands between the source of the Benue and the Nile (present-day Central Africa Republic and Sudan Republic) were wooded grasslands that were often threatened by the Sahara Desert and vulnerable to long, dry periods. They were intermittently inhabited by Africans who moved farther east to the White Nile and the Ethiopian highlands. Probably due to climatic changes between 18000 and 8000BC, the sea levels rose to submerge the land bridge connecting the Horn of Africa to Arabia (Mesopotamia), therefore making Ethiopia a dead end for land migrations. The populations around Ethiopia coalesced into communities, with Ori being the first king in 4470BC, but Ethiopia was surpassed by other areas due to its relative aridity and lack of land routes to Arabia for trade. The immediate Nile (in present-day southern Sudan) could not sustain large agricultural communities due to its narrow floodplains, but the foundations of Meroe and Kush were laid as blacks moved north to the wider, fertile floodplains called Upper Egypt. Due to climatic changes brought about by the end of the Ice Age, the pressures of pastoralism and grain cultivation on the grasslands, Western Sahara and Sudan became more arid, and the desert reached Kano in northcentral Nigeria. As water became the most important resource in western Sudan, the grasslands were unable to sustain the population from about 8000
BC, and famine made survivors relocate closer to riverbanks that hadn’t dried up. Africans from the surrounding dry grasslands were attracted to Upper Egypt, which attests to successive African settlements from about 8000 BC. Upper Egypt was a fertile area about 700 kilometers long and 10 to 20 kilometers wide that was fertilized by the rich, seasonal, equatorial silt deposited on the Nile banks. By about 5500BC, small African tribes living in the Nile Valley had developed an advanced culture with firm control of agriculture, animal husbandry and cottage industries. They produced distinctive pottery and personal items like combs and beads. The largest of the early Nile cultures was known as the Badari, which originated from the Western Sahara towards Nigeria, and were known for quality ceramics, stone tools and copper37. They traded with other Africans in the area and from afar – they imported obsidian from Ethiopia used to shape blades and other objects from flakes38. The Badari were followed by the Amratian and Gerzeh along the valley39. The Nile tribes slowly developed and traded with Mesopotamia as they coalesced into bigger settlements. They were believed to be culturally and economically united before the political union of ancient Egypt. It must be noted that most ancient Egyptian names were identified and spelt by Greek invaders that wrote the history thousands of years after the occurrence. Probably due to population pressures caused by the savannah’s aridity, and the need to control trade coming in from Mesopotamia, a significant change occurred under Menes (Narmer), the black pharaoh of Upper Egypt that united it with Lower Nile and the Nile Delta in what became known as Kemit/Kemi and later Egypt. However, the title pharaoh was not used until 1500BC, two thousand years later. Menes took over the Nile delta between 4000 BC and 3300 BC, and he made improvements to the Lower Nile River by diverting it at Inbu-Hedj (Memphis in Greek) with technology that could have originated only from the land of a thousand rivers, the Niger delta. 37 Hayes, W. C. (October 1964). "Most Ancient Egypt: Chapter III. The Neolithic and Chalcolithic Communities of Northern Egypt".JNES (No. 4 ed.) 23: pg220.
38 Barbara G. Aston, James A. Harrell, Ian Shaw (2000). Paul T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw editors. "Stone," in Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology, Cambridge, 5–77, pp. 46– 47. Also note: Barbara G. Aston (1994). "Ancient Egyptian Stone Vessels," Studien zur Archäologie und Geschichte Altägyptens 5, Heidelberg, pp. 23–26 39 Childe, V. Gordon (1953), "New light on the most ancient Near East" (Praeger Publications)
The Nile diversion resulted in rapid growth with more reclaimed land for agriculture, settlement, and foreign trade. By opening the delta, Egypt became the first frontier black African empire to the world that others were to emulate and build upon. A ship with planks sewn together, 75 feet long (23m), dated to 3000BC was among the 14 ships found in Abdju and is believed to belong to the second king, Pharaoh Aha40.
Menes
40 Schuster, Angela M.H. "This Old Boat", 11 December 2000. Archaeological Institute of America.
Kemet’s long civilization is divided into various stages: the predynastic period (7000 to 3100BC); Old Kingdom (3100-2181BC); dynastic period (7000 to 3100BC); Old Kingdom (3100-2181BC); 1650BC); Second Intermediate period (1650-1550BC); New Kingdom (1550-1069BC); Third Intermediate period (1069-664BC) and the Late period (664-30BC). It should be noted that the dates are not written in stone and have been challenged by African scholars that alleged that the times have been greatly reduced by Eurocentric scholars. The intermediate and late periods were times of internal strife, anarchy and structural changes, which by the New Kingdom Ancient Egypt had lost its true essence of Original African cultures. The first capital was Abdju (Abydos in Greek) but was moved to Memphis during the Old Kingdom, probably under King Djoser, the first king of the third dynasty (2691-2625). Djoser is reputed to have started the first step pyramids in Saqqara. The kings like Yoruba kings were living Gods (Igba keji Orisha – second in command to the gods), and were able to centralize power, collect taxes and push collective projects. During the 3rd dynasty of the Old Kingdom formerly independent ancient Egyptian states became Nomes and their rulers Nomarchs that were subservient to the king.
The Old Kingdom reached its zenith under the 4thth 2494BC) which began with King Sneferu that built three pyramids. He was succeeded by his son, Khufu (Cheops), who built the great Giza pyramid and in conjunction with his sons built the Sphinx. The 5th dynasty turned away from pyramid building to temple building for the Sun god Ra as its religious importance grew. The Old Kingdom began to wane as the nomes grew more independent, especially in the Nile Delta. The break occurred after 8th dynasty under the rule of King Ibi that is believed to have built a small pyramid in Saqqara41. With the increase in foreign trade into the delta area, the nomes interests became divergent to those of the king up the river, because of their economic and cultural association with nomads and traders they relied on for trade. Therefore with widespread famine, they broke away from the main body of Ancient Egypt to form a Lower Niger kingdom with a capital at Nen-nesu (Heracleopolis in Greek). 41 Kathryn A. Bard, An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 163
This made the original Egyptian rulers move down south to Waset, ‘city of specter’, renamed Thebes in Greek. Waste (Thebes) had been an original African town established before Memphis and the unification, and was the second largest city in the world with 40,000 people by 2000BC, second only to Memphis with 60,000 people. It was often viewed as the ancestral home of Egyptian rulers, the gateway to Sudan and Africa as a whole, as well as the key religious center being the seat of Amun, Mut and Khonsu. Throughout ancient Egypt, whenever the kings got overwhelmed in the Lower Nile, it was Thebes that they fell back on to give them black African power to regain their power. Therefore, Kings were to regroup in Thebes to recapture Abdju and later the whole Nile under Mentuhotep, who reunified Egypt in 2033BC to start the 11th dynasty under the middle kingdom. Mentuhotep and his 11th dynasty successors continued to rule from Thebes. Under the 12th dynasty, efforts were made to strengthen the political and economic security of Egypt with the construction of huge land reclamation to
boost agricultural produce, while the military secured the borders with walls. The reunified kingdom was to enjoy an increase in arts and quality of living, as democratization of spiritual rights increased and access to God was not restricted to the elites only. However, with the push to increase agricultural productivity, white Hyksos Canaanites were allowed into the Nile Delta, where they were to foment trouble that eventually led to the collapse of the Old Kingdom and the Second Intermediate Period. The Hyksos (shepherd foreign rulers), between 1730 BC and 1580 BC, were the First Horseman era tied to the global attack of Eurasians on African civilizations with the effective use of composite bows and horse drawn chariots. The influx of the Hyksos has been linked to the biblical immigration of Joseph and his brothers into Egypt. The rapidly growing population of migrant Eurasians in the eastern half of the delta, especially Avaris, was augmented by their cousins, who eventually invaded with the new, fast war technology of horses and chariots42. They seized control of Egypt and forced the central government to retreat to Thebes, where the Pharaoh was treated as a vassal and expected to pay tribute43. The First Horsemen, the Hyksos, retained Egyptian models of government and took the role of pharaohs as they integrated African Egyptian cultural traits into their own culture. Apart from the problem of the enemies within the territory, Africans were at a disadvantage; horses couldn’t survive the insect life of the African continent, and breeding them en mass was an expensive exercise. 42 Shaw, Ian (2003). The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-280458-8. Pg189
The African dynasties had to again take refuge in Thebes, Upper Nile in 1730 BC. The few centuries of Hyksos domination permanently affected the cultural makeup of Egypt and the Northeast region due to intermarrying that bred a large mulatto Afro-Asiatic race, proto-Arabs. The Jews were initially the largest group of AfroAsians. They adapted the social structure of Egypt and transformed it into a world religion that mimicked the African religion, making it acceptable to Eurasians, who were ascribed an elevated role in the evolution of human civilization.
Moses, their leader, grew up in a black Egyptian court and temple, and he realized that the best way to foster unity among his people was through monotheism. Just like with circumcision and Abraham, Moses copied the Egyptian social code, because Egypt was the model state of that time (similar to how many countries today copy the US constitution and form of democratic government). The biblical Ten Commandments summarized Egyptian mores as stated in the negative confessions of the Book of the Dead. Although refuted by many Christians, it is unrealistic to believe that a minority people could live in a host country for four hundred years and not reflect that country’s cultural norms. A relationship surely existed between the similar laws, especially when Moses and his people had no strong culture apart from that of the Egyptians. According to biblical accounts, they started as a clan of seventy members of Joseph’s family among more than a million African people. The denial of any beneficial relationship is believed to be due to the expulsion, which resulted in the negative portrayal of Egypt and blacks in Jewish writings. In Genesis 9:25, Noah is said to have cursed Ham and his son Canaan to slavery. According to Genesis 10:6, Ham was the father of blacks to include the people of Cush, Egypt, Punt, and Canaan. This was used as justification for the genocide and robbing of Africans in Canaan. 43 Ryholt, Kim (January 1997). The Political Situation in Egypt During the Second Intermediate Period. Copenhagen, Denmark: Museum Tusculanum. ISBN 87-7289-421-0. Pg310
After a long period of subservience, Egyptians were able to get the support of Nubia and challenged the Hyksos in a 30 year that ended in 1555BC. Ahmose 1 waged a series of campaigns against the Hyksos to rid them from the land and established the New Kingdom. The New Kingdom was strengthened by Tuthmosis 1, Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis 111 through military campaigns that extended the empire to its greatest extent. They established a period of unrivalled prosperity by securing borders and strengthening diplomatic ties with their neighbors. Hatshepsut was reputed to have made a trip far into Black Africa and cemented loyalties of Nubia to open access to critical imports.
The constant presence of foreign immigrants and the large mulatto class led to the extension of the administrative policy of centralization to an unAfrican policy of monotheism, introduced by Amenophis. Ramses II of the Nineteenth Dynasty succeeded in implementing it. This misdirection of the African religious system continued to undermine Egyptian culture, internally and externally. Africans in Egypt remained hostile to the Eurasian men, but they acquired a taste for white women, who were sold by their men for food and goods, as exemplified by the story of Abraham and Sarah. This ‘jungle fever’ pastime proved costly to the sociopolitical health of Africans for a long time to come. The mixed-race Egyptians exploited their middleman advantage in wrestling for power and, in so doing, undermined the African system. Mulatto AfroAsians abused the system of African extended families by enslaving their numerous African immigrant cousins. When the numbers of black immigrants dwindled, the Afro-Asians carried out raids down south. Administrative posts that were hereditary were filled with the corrupt and inefficient mixed-race sons of decadent officials. In the typical African setting of age-gender workgroups and the understanding, partnership role of the African woman, lineage might be a necessary condition of certain posts, but the post did go to the best person within the workgroup of inheritors who had been groomed from birth to take its responsibilities. A foreign mother, whose interests and background were at odds with the African mentality, could use the female power inherent in the African system to upset the system in favour of her unworthy, mixed-race inheritors. Ramses II and his father, Seti I, were not the rightful heirs to the throne, and they used the wrong orientation while trying to secure Egypt from attack from European migrants. An attempt to confront the incessant delta troubles resulted in the employment of foreign mercenaries in the delta and coastlands, which subsequently destroyed the black African national character of the army. Under Ramesses II Egypt had to withdraw from the Near East with the rise of the Hittites and the middle Assyrian Empire. The Libyan Berbers and Aegean sea peoples placed the delta under constant attack that was initially repelled
by the military, but Egypt was soon to lose the area to the Assyrians. Also beset by internal problems caused by corruption and misrule, Egypt fell into anarchy and the end of the New Kingdom gave way to another intermediate period. Various ethnicities were to usurp power in Lower Nile and the Delta ranging from Arabs, Jews, Greeks etc. It was not until 727BC that Nubia rose again to support the Africans in their quest to regain their frontiers. Based on millennia of trade and acculturation, the Kushite King Piye (Piankhi) left his Nubian capital of Napata to seize back from Thebes all the way to the Delta44. He laid the foundations of the 25th dynasty with pharaohs like Taharqa to usher in a period of renaissance in arts, architecture and religion45. They restored or built temples and monuments throughout the land and the Nile valley saw the first widespread pyramid building since the Middle Kingdom, even in Sudan46. Shabaka, Piankhi’s brother, succeeded him in 706 BC and moved the administrative capital closer to the delta for better control. In spite of this, Egypt was still belabored by incessant attacks from foreigners in the delta, which became overwhelmingly white with the arrival and settlement of Assyrians. 44 Bonnet, Charles (2006). The Nubian Pharaohs. New York: The American University in Cairo Press. pp. 142–154.ISBN 978-977-416-010-3. 45 Diop, Cheikh Anta (1974). The African Origin of Civilization. Chicago, Illinois: Lawrence Hill Books. pp. 219–221. ISBN 1-55652-072-7. 46 Emberling, Geoff (2011). Nubia: Ancient Kingdoms of Africa. New York: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. pp. 9–11.
The ironclad Assyrians became the new superpower of the Mediterranean. They took Judah, led the Jews away in chains, and came down heavily on the Phoenicians and Egyptians scouring for iron to compete, though to no avail. In collaboration with the Nile delta Eurasian enemies, the Assyrians, with their iron weapons, gave the black African pharaoh, Taharqa, the youngest son of Piankhi, a fatal and resounding defeat. Despite black Egyptians regrouping at Thebes and briefly recapturing Memphis in 669 BC, Assyrians relaunched an attack on Egypt, with the
backing of the delta feudal lords, and they pillaged all the way to Thebes in 661 BC. With Egypt becoming an Assyrian province under a white pharaoh, the black pharaoh had to escape south to Napata. Blacks lost control of Egypt forever and began the long process of retreating into the Sub-Sahara as each successive white invader ventured farther into Africa. In 525 BC, Egypt became a province of Persia. This lasted until 332 BC when the Greeks, under Alexander the Great, took over. The frontline African civilization was gradually withered down by various Eurasian and Afro-Asian groups. Unfortunately, this was why Eurasians could later deny any Black African input in one of Africa’s greatest civilizations.
Ancient Egypt’s Original African cultural complex… There has been controversy over the race of the ancient Egyptians, as many argue that Eurasians went out of their way to site an empire at the entrance of Africa. This is because over the last few millennia, people from the Eurasian wildernesses migrated back into black Africa. This resulted in the disfiguration and disorientation of a culture that Eurasians were never able to truly represent because of the harsh freezing wilderness background encoded in their cultural psyche that made them prone to war against Man and environment. At the beginning of this century, the world watched in horror as Muslim extremists destroyed historic texts and monuments in Mali and ancient Indian Buddha statues in Afghanistan. African history repeatedly faced such barbarism over the last twenty-five hundred years from Jews, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, French, Anglo-Saxons, and others. The fact that North African countries have been whitened and Arabized over three thousand years should not surprise anyone, considering the change in the more distant Americas over a mere five hundred years, where Native American Indians are now less than 2 percent of the population. Though the French were the first modern Europeans, in the early 1800s, to discover and try to erase black Egyptian history, the European cover-up was
perfected in Chicago universities in the early 1900s with dubious radioactive tests and other ‘scientific’ fallacies confusing the timing and nature of Egyptian history. There is much forensic evidence to prove the African-ness of the Egyptian civilization, which is well elaborated in Chiek Anta Diop’s The African Origin of Civilization. Diop explained the true nature of Egyptian history, but being a Senegalese from the grasslands, he failed to realize the significance of the rainforest, despite alluding to the fact that the Yoruba and other forest West Africans held the key to ancient Egypt. Apart from the remaining statues that clearly portray Africans, many other cultural and social similarities exist, ranging from mode of worship to social organization. African languages were not completely differentiated by 5000 BC, and older mainstream dates given for Afro-Asian languages were derived inaccurately from glottochronology. The basic estimation is that after a thousand years of divergence, 74 percent of the common vocabulary will be retained47. This is based on trends exhibited by Indo-European languages that don’t apply directly to African settings, where the attempts of Eurasian invaders to erase the presence of a superior African grassland culture makes the actual divergence appear older than rainforest Africans’ divergence amongst each other. When Menes united Lower and Upper Egypt, African languages and religion were still similar. The savannah grasslands spoke a slightly differentiated major lingua franca from the forest regions, especially because the spread of the Sahara caused black communities to move closer to the riverbanks of the Nile, Benue, and Niger. Though new linguistic and cultural traits began to appear with the opening of the Lower Nile, Africans retained the tenets of their Ifalike beliefs: communal feasts, naturalistic gods, circumcision of both sexes, prohibition of homosexuality, religious and social tolerance, and ‘democracy’. 47 Elizabeth Isichei, A History of African Societies to 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 47.
After improving the Nile delta, black African Pharaohs built Memphis where they worshipped in true African fashion. Although they acknowledged
Shango in some texts, they devised new gods in the African naturalistic style. In the stormy rainforest where thunder was the most prominent weather feature, Shango was one of the most prominent gods. There in the sunny desert, Amon-Ra, the sun god, took the center stage (in Yoruba, amon means a terrifying spirit; ara is ‘thunder’, and i-ra-wo is ‘a shining star’). The totemic symbols used in the rainforest and the Nile religions were similar, with snake and bird symbols used to represent the most supernaturally important beliefs, especially in Yoruba and Egyptian cultures with snake goddesses Osunmare and Wadjet. The allknowing eye of Anyanwu was replicated in Egyptian mythology, while its goddess Ma’at/Mother Earth was similar to the Igbo goddess Ala, both being central to the belief systems. Their divine kings were usually masters of tradition and knowledge, and they respected the gods of their ancestors. In both Egyptian and Yoruba cultures, when the king died (to become a god), essential parts had to be removed from his body before another king could take on his divine, earthly powers.
Khufu (Cheops) (built the Sphinx and Great pyramid of Giza)
The pictures of their statues show these pharaohs were undoubtedly black
until Eurasians arrived after Egypt passed its zenith with the building of the pyramids. The first pyramids were not built in Egypt but in western Sudan and Sahara by black Africans who later moved east to the Nile due to desertification. The Igbo Nsude stepped pyramids looked like the stepped pyramids in Sudan and Western Sahara, which were much older than those of Egypt. Nsudde Pyramids in Igboland
The Sphinx Osiris
Pharaoh Mentuhotep, 11th Dynasty, 2100 BC. The pharaohs ensured that they kept law and order and were not initially tyrannical, but to use the Nile and its seasonal floods in the most optimal fashion, a tendency towards centralization and overbearing government arose. Socioeconomic and natural laws were codified in religious rituals performed by black African priests who eventually departed from the oral secrecy of Ifa traditions by writing them down in the Book of the Dead. The concept of death was similar in Yorubaland and Igboland, where people endeavored to provide themselves a comfortable afterlife. The celebration of passing to another spiritual level was peculiar to Africans, which made the Eurasians who came into Egypt call Africans ‘death worshippers’ (Nekro Manteia in Greek, which became Nigro Mantia in Latin). The mantia was lost, and Africans were called Nigro, Negro, or Niger depending on the European tribe. The Yoruba word for burial is sin oku (‘worshipping the dead’), and even though the pyramids in the forest couldn’t stand the test of time, this social trait is still present among Yoruba, who remain the world’s merriest mourners. In present-day New York, Chicago, and most world-class cities, the Yoruba ‘spray money’ at funeral parties. Even poor Yorubas in Nigeria endeavor to spiritually ‘turn over’ their long-dead relatives once a while, whereby people practically shower friends and strangers with money in a party atmosphere. One-dollar notes are shunned, falling to the floor, while unaffordable hundred dollar bills are ‘sprayed’ away, as they celebrate relating the present to a time of past glory and plenty. Cultural beliefs apart from burial social traits were passed on from the forest and pervaded the entirety of Egyptian society. There was freedom of worship, freedom of association and freedom of trade extended to foreigners. There was also appreciable equality of the sexes in religious and political settings, as Yoruba women controlled the trade with the all-powerful Iyalode roles. Women held similar roles, with black Egyptian priestesses being a strong societal force behind the pharaoh, and both sexes were circumcised at birth.
Like other Yoruba cultural traits that spread to other parts of the world, the spread of circumcision to other peoples was documented in the Bible. In Genesis 12, Abraham, the forerunner of the Jews, took refuge in Egypt due to a famine in Mesopotamia. When he arrived, he came up with a feeble excuse to pimp his wife to the pharaoh by calling her his sister in return for food, gold, and animals. Unfortunately, Sarah gave the pharaoh and his family sexual diseases, and they were deported. It is said that God instructed Abraham to begin circumcision as a step towards building a great nation. Obviously, the only great nation in their arid world was Egypt, from whence they had just been deported. It is only logical that the circumcision lesson was well learnt, because they realized that a strong, healthy nation had to be protected from sexual diseases. The only problem was that because Abraham devised the solution, he was not aware of female circumcision and took only half of the lesson. This partial circumcision had huge ramifications, as the Jews disseminated the practice of male circumcision, which is still popular. Ironically, the West now condemns the practice of circumcising girls in the first few weeks of life. Although only a small minority still practices the tradition, the Yoruba and other Africans have seen socalled authorities from Western governments, in television talk shows, complaining about depriving women of the right to enjoy sex for its own sake. In the modern world, it is difficult to argue for ‘sex for procreation only’, despite the rise in HIV/AIDS and other Sexually transmitted diseases. Apart from the social traits observed by Egyptian society, tangible technologies and trade items were imported from the south. After the redirection of the Nile, West Africa plants were introduced including the bottle gourd, watermelon, and the tamarind fruit. Much later, cotton and tobacco were passed to Egypt or sometimes ‘jumped’ to Mesopotamia and India. Egyptian barley and wheat were a continuation of the sorghum/millet grain culture invented in the African savannah. Egypt did not give the Sub-Sahara new technology, either agricultural or metallurgical. No new plants were introduced from Egypt into the western Sudan or Niger forests, and black African metal technologies were developed independently. Iron working got to western Sudan and Nigeria before Egypt,
and the Yoruba lost-wax method of casting metals like bronze was one of the best in the world. There is ample proof that Southern Nigeria had got into the Iron Age centuries before anywhere else in the world. Igbo women were the iron and steel smelters, with a production mode encoded in their culture. The women smelt iron naked due to the extreme temperatures. Until the 1800s and the discovery of gold in South Africa, West Africa was also the world’s major Gold Belt. Initially, it was mainly mined by secret cults of Yoruba. They sold it to the savannah peoples who sold it to Asia through Egypt. Meanwhile, the troubles in Egypt had ramifications for the SubSaharan Africans who wanted to trade or migrate. New trade routes and empires were created to bypass the trouble spots on the Nile. To the northwest of Egypt, Phoenicians and Sub-Saharan Africans formed a trading post called Carthage in 813 BC on the coast of present-day Tunisia.
BLACK AFRICAN CARTHAGE
With the influx of Caucasians from Central Asia, Black African trade and influence westward. To the south of Egypt, Meroe (slightly south of the Blue and White Nile confluence in present-day Sudan and Ethiopia, around the Blue Nile headwaters and the Omo Valley) continued to absorb the population influx. Ethiopia, the Biblical land of Punt, existed as a vibrant community before political harmonization along the Nile and the Ancient Egyptian Old Kingdom. The first king of Ethiopia around 4470BC was an Original African named Ori, meaning head/leader in Yoruba. Due to the loss of a land route to Mesopotamia, Ethiopia was overshadowed by Egypt that became the frontier land empire in Africa. Trade was recorded between Egypt and Ethiopia, especially in myrrh, ‘and Egyptian ships sailed the Red Sea as far as the myrrhcountry48’. In addition to myrrh, it is believed that ivory, gold and
many other products were imported from Ethiopia, but there was a misconception by later Eurasian historians of what really was Ethiopia. Ethiopia , meaning Ethiop/Aithiop area, was initially used to refer to blacks from outside Egypt. It was derived from the Greek word aithiops from aithein, meaning ‘to burn’, while ops meant ‘face’. The Greeks around the Egyptian coast called their African civilizers ‘Nekro Mantias’ and the recent African migrants ‘Aithiops’. To the Greeks, Africa was like a straight line along the Nile, with Egypt in the front and all other Africans in a country to its south called Ethiopia. This wrong impression was fueled by the perception that most black traders who traveled to Egypt joined the Nile to the south of the delta region. From recent studies, it appears Ethiopia might have engaged in foreign trade earlier than previously thought, due to evidence of early iron-working and mining by the Mashariki Bantus and Zimbabweans, as well as Ethiopian shipping. The eastern half of Africa appears to have been a source of minerals and metals that would have been traded through Ethiopia to Asia, however they remained unknown until the trouble in Nile Delta that made traders seek alternative African ports. The first internationally recognized kingdom in Ethiopia was known as D’mt in Tigray with its capital at Yeha. D’mt rose to power around 10th century BC and was based on the socioeconomic linkage between the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia) and Yemen (Southern Arabia/Mesopotamia)49. This and other proto-Aksum empires50 had strong ties with Arabia and were the nearest ports to Asia. 48 Agatharchides, in Wilfred Harvey Schoff (Secretary of the Commercial Museum of Philadelphia) with a foreword by W. P. Wilson, Sc. Director, The Philadelphia Museums.Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century, Translated from the Greek and Annotated (1912). New York, New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., pages 50 (for attribution) and 57 (for quote
The accumulation of Eurasians in Mesopotamia led to the resident blacks moving farther into the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia and Yemen), where they were cornered into widely intermingling and exchanging cultural traits with Eurasians, which led to a number of new Afro-Asian groups. While many of the blacks in Canaan coexisted and intermingled with white refugees
and formed Semitic groups like the Jews, some Canaanites relocated farther down the Arabian Peninsula or the Egyptian delta and coast. Phoenicians went west to the African Mediterranean coast. This was in line with them being a seafaring people who eventually sailed to scantly populated Spain and Britain in search of the metals needed by the Egyptian super-state. Other North African ports were later created with the westward expansion of whites into Europe. This led to more direct routes across the desert in Roman times, when areas to the east of the Nile were identified as Ethiopia and those to the west as Negritia. Trans-Saharan trade routes were created across the desert from the Niger and Lake Chad area that supplied Carthage with gold, an increasingly popular item used for exchange in the Asian spice market. Without the guidance of rivers to help the traders, travel across the desert was a daunting task, slightly assisted by the few oases on the way and the later advent of the compass. On the whole, Africans were able to showcase their culture to the world in Egypt more than they could have in the forest, especially in building stone pyramids the likes of which could not stand the abrasive weather of the Yam Belt. However, the population of the one-river Egyptian state was never as high, or as prosperous, as the Lower Niger Yam Belt. Unfortunately but not unexpectedly, the ostentatious life and culture of Egyptian blacks living on the frontier attracted foreign thieves and usurpers, who would not relent until it was destroyed, from the Nile all the way back to its source in West Africa. 49 Phillipson. "The First Millennium BC in the Highlands of Northern Ethiopia and South– Central Eritrea: A Reassessment of Cultural and Political Development". African Archaeological Review(2009) 26:257–274 50 Uhlig, Siegbert (ed.), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica: D-Ha. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005. p. 185.
The fall of Egypt to Eurasian control adversely affected all black Africans. The turmoil in Egypt made Africans move west to Carthage and south farther up the Nile, but due to the narrow floodplains of Nubia, the excess people had to move farther up the Nile and into the Blue Nile, which led to the Ethiopian plateaus and Omo River Valley. The Assyrians and Persians (Iranians) also caused huge displacements in
Arabia that resulted in blacks retreating farther into the arid Arabian Peninsula and eventually crossing over the Red Sea into Ethiopia. The initial crossovers might have been made by unmixed Africans, but soon their mixed race brothers followed, as the Assyrians and Persians spared no one. The diverse waves of refugees streaming into Ethiopia had different ramifications for the locals. While some Africans fled immediately, most of them stayed to see whether they could coexist peacefully with the immigrants. Despite learning the languages of the invaders and intermarrying, many of the Africans eventually realized that the bellicose Afro-Asians were impossible to live with as they lost their land and capital under racist tyrannies. The Afro-Asian blacks who migrated south, like the Luo, realized that indigenous Africans, who viewed them as foreigners, did not particularly welcome them. Many of the native Africans in Ethiopia were engaged in sedentary pastoralism, whereby they planted grains and kept medium-size herds or fished, but the refugees were more than often full-time weaponized herdsmen. Eventually, the unmixed Africans had to move farther south, away from the constant influx of war-like refugee pastoralists like the Masai. At present, there are more than seventy distinct languages in Ethiopia, and most of them are Afro-Asian, reflecting the amount of turmoil experienced from about 700 BC to 1900 AD. Based on the Indo-European languages model, glottochronologists wrongly claim that the Ethiopian Afro-Asian languages formed before 5000 BC, and they fail to take into full consideration the constant sociopolitical upheaval caused by incessant and varied migration flow. One of the first waves of Afro-Asians, a mixture of those from Egypt and those from Yemen (Arabia), took over the northwestern Ethiopian plateaus, where they later formed the Axum empire. The unmixed Africans moved farther into Kenya and Tanzania or west to Chad and northern Nigeria. Many of the displaced native Africans returned to the NigerBenue area and even to the Yoruba and Igbo areas, but the large resident populations easily absorbed them without any Asiatic trace in the language, political structures, or dress. The return of the migrants led some ‘learned’ Yoruba, including Samuel Johnson (who propagated the name Yoruba in his 1897 first written
history of the Yoruba), to wrongly claim that the Yoruba migrated from the arid lands after the Middle East upheavals. The Oduduwa dynasty normally referred to by Johnson and others in their historical accounts, actually replaced earlier dynasties in Ife, while his descendants replaced the eastern Bini Ogiso dynasty before going to Oyo. Oduduwa was the enthronement of the Olokun, Second Horsemen era over previous Ogun dynasties with the use of Ifa that had been converted from a science to religion. Apart from the possibility that the Afro-Asian upheavals might have brought indirect benefits through the rise in the price of gold, Oduduwa or Oranmiyan showed no Afro-Asian influence in language, dress, political organization, or any other cultural trait. The Afro-Asian migrants must have been minorities who left no trace of Asiatic languages, and the mistaken perception is largely due to the tendency of Christian, Muslim, and Eurocentric black scholars trying to forcibly link African history to the current global sphere of influence. There is overwhelming evidence that the linguistic differentiation between the Yoruba, Edo, and Igbo occurred in situ with no sign of migrating from anywhere or of external influences on their languages. They remained original African forest people as their tonal language changed gradually throughout most of black Africa. The savannah peoples of central and northern Nigeria were served by the Kaduna and Sokoto River basins, which flowed into the Niger, and the Yobe basin that ended in Lake Chad. The original inhabitants, like the Gwari, Birom and Kanuri, migrated north along these river basins from the Niger delta to form the Nok civilization, until they were split by people from the troubled lands of the northeast. The unmixed, local Africans merged back into Nigeria’s Middle Belt, which was the African cultural hothouse. Hundreds of ancient, unknown states developed and disintegrated and then moved into Cameroon, spreading across Africa. The Middle Belt still has more than a hundred original ‘non-Asian’ African languages. The Akoko, Nupe, Igala, Igbira, Anaguta, and other Middle Belt people in Nigeria developed polities near the Niger-Benue confluence, which was a busy point between different ecological and economic zones. Based in the wooded grassland between the southern rainforest and northern Sahel
savannah, the Middle Belt produced yams as well as grains. It serviced the close cousins, the Yoruba and the Hausa, who passed through to trade gold, tobacco, kola, cotton, palm oil, and a host of other goods. The Igala were riverine people who plied the Niger, acting as middlemen between the regions of the Lower Niger. The Yoruba extended west into the slim savannah of present-day Republic of Benin and the adjacent forests of Togo and eastern Ghana, where they became the Aja people (Ewe, Fon, Ga, etc.). The expansion process was slower because of having to clear the forest as the Gold Belt shifted west, but the Aja communities mined and fished the Gold Coast up to the Volta River. Their Yoruba overlords, known as the Eso or Eyo, sold gold to the savannah peoples later known as the Hausa and Mande. To the immediate north of Yorubaland, along the River Niger into Burkina Faso and Mali, are the Gur subgroup of languages. The ancient Niger delta people, who migrated to the sources of the Niger, Gambia, and Senegal rivers in the Guinea highlands, were scattered by AfroAsian upheavals. This group of West Africans, who had been in the forefront of the grain agricultural revolution, also mined gold on the western outskirts of the Yam Belt and Gold Belt in present-day Guinea and Ivory Coast. The upheavals saw the southward shift of people from the Upper Niger grasslands in Mali, Guinea, and Upper Volta into the forests of Ivory Coast and Ghana. Due to the lack of an escape route like the Nigeria-Cameroon waterways, many communities became Mande as many of the overrun, original grassland people of Nigeria became Hausa. West African gold continued to attract foreign trade and made some goldtrading savannah polities known outside black Africa. Like Egypt and Ethiopia, the frontier polities called empires were not necessarily the richest, safest, or most populous. The Igbo enjoyed a relatively prosperous existence in their forest homeland, undisturbed by internal strife or the wars in the savannahs, and even if through a complex network of middlemen, they still enjoyed the luxuries of foreign trade. The Eze Nri was the priest-king who dictated social life through religious
rituals, which included the Ozo title system and Ikenga, the cult of the right hand, ‘with which a person works out a successful living in this difficult world’.* The Igbo planted yams, made iron tools and good clothes that they exchanged for salt and seafood with the riverine Ijaw people to the south, while they bought grains and meat from the varied peoples to the north. A few Igbo merchants traveled long distances to trade in Yorubaland or the savannas all the way to Egypt, even though the vast majority of the Igbo retained their yam diet and African beliefs that fostered peace and prosperity. The prosperity fostered a population increase in eastern Nigeria that couldn’t be siphoned off to the far north after the Egyptian upheavals. This resulted in an increase in the numbers of Africans, later named Bantus, migrating through the Cameroon river system into the northwest Congo River basin. The population overflow into Cameroon was not only from Igbos but also people from around the Benue River in present-day Nigeria. The Jukun, Tiv, Idoma, and who diverged from the main body of Yoruba, Edo, Igala and Igbo, and other original Africans went through Gboko into Cameroon and into the Kongos. Though the bulk of the Congo River basin was in the rainforest region, it was on a high plateau that prevented yams but allowed palm trees. The lack of suitable crops prevented a population build-up until a variant of yam—the cocoyam—was introduced. The migration through the complex waterways and the natural, clear ground on riverbanks led the populations to settle along the banks, fishing and planting grains and cocoyams for survival. The oldest of the western Bantu communities was the Teke people on the middle Ubangi and Congo rivers. They later migrated downstream to become the Kongos and Loango. The Bobangi, Mongo, Luba and Kuba were part of the communities settled to the south and east of the Upper Congo riverbasin. * Isichei, A History of African Societies to 1870, 247.
Black Africans known as eastern Bantus migrated east along the upper Ubangi and Congo rivers to the Nile and Lake Victoria, where they began forming the Bunyoro, Buganda, and Rwanda communities. Some slowly filtered south to fill southern Africa as the Sukuma, Bemba, Shona, and Nguni (Zulu and Xhosa). They were mixed agriculturists but concentrated on pastoralism because of the aridity of eastern and southern Africa. Eastern
Bantus also settled on the grass highlands of East Africa.
Chapter 4: The Rise of the Second Horseman and Eurasian Dogmatization Jewish, Assyrian, Greek, and Roman campaigns in Saharan Africa; Christianity starts in Africa (500 BC to AD 500) Alexander the Greek’s conquest of Egypt in 332 BC spelt more doom for Africans, not so much in the direct influence that they had in Africa but through the diffusion of civilization to other areas of southern and Western Europe in what is known as the Spatha (Sword) Migration that started the Second Horseman Era. The Greeks, whose barren homeland drove them to trade and colonization, built settlements in Italy, southern France, and Spain, whose inhabitants eventually made direct links to the North Africa coast. The Greeks initially settled in Libya and then moved into the Lower Nile delta as merchants and mercenaries under the Saite kings. They became more important in Egyptian life when it was conquered by Alexander the Great and given to Ptolemy, one of his generals. The city of Alexandria was built in his honor and made the intellectual center of Egypt, which was divided between the wealthy Greek-speaking oppressors and the poor, indigenous black Egyptians. This further encouraged intermarrying and watered down the black African stock in Egypt. There was also an influx of Jews into Alexandria and its surroundings, where they formed part of the cosmopolitan elite and intermarried with the ruling Europeans to shed any trace of blackness. The Jews had written the first five books of the Torah in Babylon where they had been enslaved. Being one of the first usurpers of Egypt in the Hyksos invasion more than a thousand years before the Greeks, the Jewish religion was comforting to the white usurpers of Africa, because it condoned the mistreatment of blacks by relegating them to slavery, a common practice from the time of the Jewish usurpation of Canaanites. Jews were at the center of the Eurasian intellectual world in Alexandria, where they legitimizing robbing Africans by converting the Old Testament from Hebrew to Greek. Although the Greek administration was credited with the evolution of new
farming and irrigation technologies, the benefits did not reach the indigenous Egyptians. The reopening of the Suez Canal, initially opened during Assyrian indirect rule, led to increased trade. The opening of northeast and eastern Africa led to foreign exploitation. This further complicated the Afro-Asian situation in Axum (Ethiopia) through its port in Adulis, as even the king of Axum spoke Greek. The Adulis port was controlled by foreigners, especially the Greeks and Jews. In the Mediterranean, the Phoenicians continued their seafaring trade from Carthage and their cities Sidon and Tyre in modern-day Syria, as well as in Spain. Carthage became a major terminal of the Trans-Saharan trade from West Africa, especially in gold. The North African Mediterranean coast, called the Maghreb, soon became a cultural center where Romans, Greeks, and other Europeans created settlements on the coast to take advantage of the western shift of the Trans-Saharan gold trade. Being more African oriented than Eurasian, the Phoenicians rejected the European migrants who were milling around the Maghreb. Among other nations, Phoenicia attacked Libya to its east, which was the largest European settlement on the coast, and the new Roman settlement on the nearby Italian Peninsula, which was attempting to divert its trade. This earned the Phoenicians a bad name in Western history as a wild, barbaric people. At the time, it was the only nation on the Mediterranean not ruled and dominated by whites. The Greeks enjoyed a commanding presence during their direct rule of Egypt, forming pharaoh dynasties known as Ptolemies. There were fourteen Ptolemais, and Cleopatra was the last and the only one to speak Egyptian. She committed suicide after being defeated by the Romans. The Romans started the 2000-year Era of the Second Horseman with their introduction of long Spatha swords for imperialistic motives disguised with religion and ideology.They stated their imperialistic ascendancy with the burning of Carthage in the Third Punic War of 147 BC. Carthage (presentday Tunis) was located nearly opposite the Roman Peninsula and engaged in two wars with the Romans before it was destroyed. From Carthage, the Romans colonized two small Numidian kingdoms based in Morocco and Algeria, which were cultural hotbeds of African and European descendants.
The Romans won Egypt in 30 BC, but its administration remained with the Greeks, who continued to dictate the intellectual discourse in Alexandria along with the influential Jewish population. The Romans moved up the Nile to Meroe, where they met stiff opposition from the black Queen Candace and her army. Unable to defeat the Black African army over the distance separating them, the Romans eventually signed a treaty with Meroe in 21 BC, and it remained independent. With narrower Upper Nile floodplains, Meroe was a small polity that couldn’t sustain a viable and independent African state at the edge of the savannah and desert. Its foreign trade was gradually overtaken by the AfroAsian Axum empire, which attacked and destroyed it around AD 350. The Maghreb North African coast was heavily exploited under Rome. It provided two-thirds of Rome’s corn while Egypt provided the rest. The Roman Empire in Africa was limited to the Mediterranean coast and did not extend to local Afro-Asian Berbers, who lived barely fifty miles off the coast on the Atlas Mountains grasslands and farther down in the Sahara Desert. The large European coastal Maghreb court and elite spoke Latin, while those in Egypt stuck to Greek. On the European side of the Mediterranean, the importation of African food, technology, and gold led to populating Western Europe. The Romans spread to France, Spain, and Portugal, attracting the Germanic peoples of Germany, Denmark, England, and Holland from the Russian and Central Asian plains. This was to spell trouble for the Romans and greater havoc in Africa. With Meroe’s decline and eventual demise following that of Egypt in northeast Africa, the original African socioeconomic frontier moved back a step from the Eurasians into the western Sudan on the southwest edge of the Sahara Desert. Many Sudanic kingdoms were ancient midpoints on the shortest routes between the West African forest and the increasingly mixed population on the northwest Saharan Maghreb. The European and Afro-Asian settlers on the northwest African coast did most of the trading for the Roman Empire across the Mediterranean. A black trade zone and empire called Ghana, in southwest Sahara, expanded west from the Niger bend around Gao in modern Mali to the Senegal in
modern Senegal and Mauritania. The Soninke, Sape, Akan, Bia and other peoples had flourished in the fertile grassland plains around the watershed of the Niger, Gambia, and Senegal rivers. Apart from the gold trade that initially put the area in the Muslim history books, there was an ancient, viable, interregional trade between the wooded grasslands, the Sahel savannah, and the Sahara Desert, which had large salt deposits. The Sape, Akan, and Bia migrated into the safety of the forests to the south, in Ghana and Ivory Coast, or were transformed into the Mande by Muslim invasions in present-day Mali, Guinea, and Senegal. The savannah-based empire called Ghana was the first West Africa empire to enjoy recognition from the outside world. Being on the western boundaries of the Gold Belt, the area’s economy and population increased by the trading across the desert with the Maghreb coast and those trading with Lower Niger. Middle Niger, the southern limit of the Sahara Desert in presentday Mali, saw growth in the settlements around the Niger bend. These settlements eventually came under the name of Jenne, and Gao eventually became a larger trading center than Meroe. Old Jenne was settled as a trade town from at least 250 BC, while others date from about 500 BC. In the west of Lower Niger, the main body of the Yoruba gradually split into two. While the oldest Yoruba ethnic groups, the Ifes Ekiti, Ijesa, Ijebu, and Edo, remained in the south and eastern Yoruba rainforests, the western Yoruba (Egun) pushed the receding gold mines west toward the Volta area in the center of modern Ghana. Yorubaland also extended north toward the regional grassland markets, ostensibly to prevent direct access to the mines by the savannah traders. The northern Yoruba created the Oyo empire, and its capital was called Oyo-Ile, although Ile-Ife remained the spiritual capital over the larger Yoruba sphere. Other Yoruba city-states developed, like the Ijesa kingdom, which had 134 towns and villages with 70 large quarters in Ilesa, its capital. The Ijesas, Ekitis, Akokos and Edos still used yams as their main staple and weren’t enticed by the ‘sneaky’ northwestern gold trade of Oyo. The Akoko in northeastern Yorubaland engaged in regional yam trade around the NigerBenue confluence.
The Benin/Edo city-states coalesced to become the coastal Edo empire that extended west through southern Yorubaland via Akure, all the way to Lagos and into the land of the Ajas and Fon in Dahomey. The Bini/Edo language was a mixture of the oldest Yoruba dialects, Ijebu and Ekiti, with Igbo. To the east, the Edo empire extended to the western Ibo on their side of the Niger River, but on the other side, the eastern Ibo remained out of their control. After the climax of the Igbo’s Nri kingdom, the Igbo opted for a decentralized village democracy that came together for defense, attempting to form an egalitarian society before most other societies conceived of the possibility. The Igbo entrusted religious and ‘law and order’ duties to outsiders for the sake of fairness and to prevent those given the power from abusing or extending their sphere of influence. The separation of state and religion was their downfall millennia later when the ‘foreigners’ sold man on the altar of God. Around the time that the Romans took Egypt, Jesus was born across the border in Israel and came to Egypt, the intellectual center, which was reflected by his summarization of all laws. Sweeping aside the legal, intellectual, and spiritual arguments, he said that the love of God and of one’s neighbor was paramount. He accused the intellectual scribes of being a false and misguided ‘brood of vipers’. Having visited Africa, Jesus summarized the basic philosophy of the remaining poor Egyptian people from Ile-Ife, the Land of Love, where the love of nature, God, and one’s neighbor was paramount. Jesus saw that despite the early warnings against symbolism in the second of the Ten Commandments, Judaism and other Middle East religions, with their strong monotheistic laws, had become tools for the upper classes that vied for power and profit. Jesus went to the temple to chase out the traders, and five days later, he was crucified. Departing from the African traditions whereby worshippers placed food at secluded shrines in a free-sharing communal spirit, in the arid nations, greedy foreign exchange and metal dealers conducted their trade on benches and tables in temples. The word bank came from banca, which is Latin for the ‘bench’ used by money-changers in temples before the Industrial Age (they
then transferred to the office buildings next door). Temples were also the major tax collection points for the ruling class across the Mediterranean and the Middle East. It was no surprise that five days after arriving in Jerusalem as a stranger, the upper classes had Jesus crucified for disrupting the temple’s business, despite feeding thousands free! The adulterated Egyptian cults of Osiris and Isis, and Judaism to a lesser extent, were the most prominent religions in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, and all had commercial temples. With the death of Jesus, a new religion, Christianity, was ushered in. Christianity won converts, because the common man couldn’t identify with the official religions that had been corrupted by colonial masters. The story of Jesus and his message of hope for the poor and oppressed appealed to many in the Mediterranean world, especially politically and economically disenfranchised blacks. Women and the poor were the first Christian converts. African gold meant more to the rich merchants trading in temples than the free giving-spirit of the Niger delta’s Garden of Eden. Contrary to modern vanities that depict him as a blonde, blueeyed European, Jesus must have been an Afro-Asian whose skin was light brown (like most Jews until their skin became whiter between 700 and 1400). Initially, North Africa had as many Christians as any region in the world, and in the third century AD, Egypt was one of three regions with a majority Christian population, as Alexandria competed with Antioch in Syria and Rome for prominence. Having witnessed how the Greeks used their language and the Jewish Bible to remotely control Ethiopia, the Romans saw an opportunity to use Christianity to unite their empire and raise taxes. But, they wanted to make it wholly European and shed the shadow of ancient Egypt and African civilization in their sociopolitical life. The use of religion and dogma with the long Spatha sword for conquests was the beginning of the era of The Second Horseman over the next two thousand years; Islam, racist capitalism, communism were to devise newer weapons to globally spread their cultural and economic imperialism. Powerful and whiter Jews in Mesopotamia supported the idea and provided
the intellectual and religious arguments. In the fourth and fifth centuries, the churches were faced with theological controversies that had roots in racism and nationalism under the guise of a debate over the nature of Christ. Some even claimed he was born in Egypt. Emperor Constantine counted this development inimical to the unity of the Roman Empire, and he called the Council of Nicea, which ruled against the Eastern/African churches. Again in 451, the Romans summoned the Council of Chalcedon that ruled against the African Eastern Church over the nature of Christ. The African Eastern Christians found this unacceptable and broke away to become the Monophysite church, which was known as the Orthodox Church. Three of the five Orthodox Churches were African: Ethiopian, Egyptian, and Nubian (Central Sudan). The Latin Maghreb coast had its divisions, although they were not as powerful as those dividing the Greekspeaking areas of Africa. Nevertheless, the Afro-Asian Berbers used the Donatist Church to promote their nationalistic and sociopolitical problems in the form of theological arguments. The church in Axum (Ethiopia) was the strongest and most successful in Africa, as even its king was baptized before Emperor Constantine. Ethiopia had been a Greek enclave for some time. Unlike Egypt and the Maghreb coast, where the poor and women were the initial converts, Christianity in Axum diffused hierarchically from the ruling to the lower classes. Churches were built and traditional African values were shunned as the Afro-Asian minority monarchy ruled as a Solomonic dynasty for six hundred years. Once converted by the Romans, Nubia became heavily Christianized and built churches throughout the land lined with beautiful palm trees. Notwithstanding these developments, Afro-Asians and Africans were alienated from the church after it was hijacked by the Roman Empire and the rich, who turned it into a European club. The religious money-making schemes and the oppressive taxation introduced into Christianity paved the way, in the seventh century, for a new religious and sociopolitical ideology called Islam.
Chapter 5: Peaceful Islam from Afro-Asiatic Horsemen with the Scimitar Creation and rise of new Afro-Asian groups that challenge European and African sociopolitical structures (AD 500 to 1400) Islam was supposed to bring a peaceful and fair way of life to the poor and oppressed, but, to date, brought a great deal of war and oppression to black Africans. Beginning in 622, when Muhammad appealed to the downtrodden against the corrupt rulers of Arabia and had to flee Medina for Mecca, Islam appealed to the large number of Afro-Asians who felt alienated by the European hijacking of Christianity. Islam was originally viewed as a Christian reformation sect, and its practitioners were known as Ishmaelites, the Arab ethnic group believed to have originated from Ishmael, the son of Abraham and Hagar, the black Egyptian woman. Like the Jews, the Arabs were a product of the continuous Eurasian migration and intermarrying in Egypt and the Middle East. Arabs were initially dark-skinned AfroAsians, but with time, they whitened considerably by intermarrying with the new Eurasian elites in an environment where African power had been overthrown and its essence continuously eroded. With the permanent overthrow of Africans, the sociopolitical settings in Egypt and Arabia were similar to that of present-day Brazil and the colonial Americas. Europeans were the ruling elite, mulattos were the middle class, and black Africans were firmly and permanently relegated to ‘the bottom of the pile’. The Arabs, who had at least a generation more African blood than the Jews, felt alienated when the Romans hijacked Christianity and the lighter-skinned AfroAsian Jews and white Greeks continued as local elites. Even in the backwaters of arid Arabia, which hardly warranted a direct Greek Byzantine rule, the lightest Afro-Asians ruled while Africans remained at the bottom of the social ladder. Most fullblooded Africans migrated back to the Sub-Sahara, and those who remained tried to marry Eurasian or ingratiate themselves to their light-skinned rulers.
There were a few who believed that the ‘good old days’ would return. Many of these peasant and enslaved Africans supported the middle-class, Arabic demand for a better system and a return to old values, when Muhammad and his believers overthrew the ruling elite. Like most middle-class revolutions, the system was changed to suit its protagonists, which was why they were initially viewed as reforming Christians. The new religion was a mere mutation of the 2nd Horseman with a sword to enforce his religious dogma. The Arabs were to tribalize God in their own image and use it as the foundation of their cultural imperialism and disguise to control other people and their resources. Religion was a guise to wrestle power over scare resources, instead of the brute force of the First Horseman, the era of Ogun. Religion was to be a captivating mystery aptly represented by the Yorubas concept of Olokun, the Orisha of the Oceans, whose depths and diversity of life captivated the human mind. Oduduwa was Olokun. By virtue of its population and economic clout in the Middle East, Egypt was the main target in the initial Islamic expansion years after Muhammad’s death. Egypt’s government was easily taken with the cooperation of the Coptic Church, which handed the Egyptian fleet to invading Muslims in return for recognition as a partner. With the promise of alms for the poor and protection of merchants and strong antitheft laws, the population in the Middle East fell in line against the European-centered Christianity that was so insensitive to their regional ethnic and cultural needs. The peasant-led Orthodox Coptic Church in Egypt had fallen out with the Western churches and was glad to get rid of the ‘king’s men’ in Egypt. This all amounted to empty promises over the next thousand years, but it was obvious from the beginning, when Arabs refused to acknowledge their African beginnings, like their Jewish cousins. The Arabs and other AfroAsians were ultimately Eurocentric, because they were of the same disposition that did not foment harmonious natural production, but forceful subjugation of nature that results in a constant state of war between man and environment. Apart from their lighter skin and philosophies that differed from those of the Africans, the Arabs could never have sided with Africans, because they were part of the ‘have nots’. They desperately needed the resources the Niger-Benue had in abundance, people and gold, which put
them in competition with Europeans. Prophet Muhammad died ten years after fleeing Mecca and becoming the head of a large Arab state, but he was succeeded by four caliphs who were close associates during his lifetime. It wasn’t till Umar’s reign (634 to 644) that the supposedly peaceful Muslims began building empires with the capture of Syria from the Greek Byzantines and the 642 takeover of Egypt. Like the Jews and Europeans, who used religious crusades to support their actions against other races and peoples, the Muslims used jihad (‘fight against spiritual corruption’) to take over the lands and resources of unbelievers. In some cases, they accused the Muslim rulers of moral corruption and deposed them violently. Major divisions within the religion along economic and ethnic lines appeared fewer than thirty years after the creation of Islam and the death of Muhammad. Despite the Koran’s obvious preference for the jihad of the heart, jakhanke, greedy usurpers disguised as learned, religious men instigated the masses to take up the jihad of the sword —the sword of truth. The new Second Horseman’s sword was wielded mercilessly against black Africans in the quest for resources, because it was right to enslave ‘unbelievers’, although European or Christians were not enslaved. The Coptic Church was in alliance with the Islamists during the takeover and survived as a majority in Egypt for three hundred more years by paying heavily. Similar arrangements were made with Christian Afro-Asian regimes in Nubia, which signed pacts to supply four hundred black African slaves each year. This proved that it was all about power, money and resources, and not about moral purity and godliness. The Maghreb northwest African coastal polities, aligned with the Catholic Church, were overrun by the Arabs. The Europeans in the urban centers around the North African coast didn’t resist as much as the Afro-Asian Berbers in the interior plains and mountains, where foreign control was traditionally weak. Berbers were a mix of the small number of Europeans and Africans on the North Africa coast, while Arabs were a mix of a larger number of Europeans and Africans in Mesopotamia and Egypt, so it was only a matter of time until
they realized that they had similar backgrounds and interests. When the Berbers were won over by the late 600s, they became one of the greatest vehicles of Islam on all sides of the Sahara Desert. They saw an opportunity to lead an AfroAsian empire of their own by playing the dubious middleman in the gold and slave trade. The Sanhaja Berbers were veil-wearing men who stuck terror into hearts and minds across the Sahara with their surprise attacks and stern rule over their subjects. They rapidly became ‘Arabized’. In 705, they took over the former Carthage region in the Tunisian plains opposite the Italian Peninsula. The Berbers created the Tunis and Ifriqiya province, which invaded and ruled modern Spain and Portugal, named Andalus. The Sanhaja Berbers chased out the Christian Visigoth kings, who had ended Roman rule in Spain, and secured the whole area as an outlet for Islamic trade around 711. They created and expanded the Almoravid empire by securing the Middle and Upper Niger trade terminals on the southern edge of the Sahara.
The Sanhaja Berbers, being mulattos, initially had the trust of full-blooded Africans who joined in the wars and supplied gold. Their strict laws and inherent racism saw most Original Africans migrate southward. Those who
remained behind, many of whom had been made redundant by famine and then converted to Islam, were indoctrinated with the belief that it wasn’t bad to help in the enslavement of their ‘pagan’ African brothers for money. AfroAsian groups like Fulani/Fulbe were created due to intermarrying, and together, they and the Sanhaja Berbers built the first and only empire to span both sides of the desert and import more gold into Western Europe than the Romans. Although most of the gold went to the Maghreb coast and Spain, the Berbers built their capital in Marrakech, Morocco, in 1070. Original black Africans realized that a creed that focused on the Middle East, with inherent negative connotations about black Africans, could never be concerned with their best interests. The western Sudan empire of Ghana was the next victim in the advance for the resources that Eurasians and their AfroAsian descendants badly needed. The naturalistic African philosophy of free markets and the right to practice any religion caused the downfall of the Ghanaian Empire, which allowed the desert usurpers to settle and multiply within its boundaries. With the obvious benefits of the Saharan trade flashed around by desert merchants doubling as clerics, Ghana’s citizens were gradually converted to Islam, and eventually the African traditional elite were overthrown with the usual cries of corruption and jihad. Like the latter-day European missionaries in West Africa who promised the freedom of a Christian society (without mentioning Freemasonry and racial barriers), the Islamists had core, exclusive groups called Sufis. The Sufis were ethnoreligious brotherhoods that extended into the sociopolitical area for the main purpose of securing power over resources. During the frequent famines suffered in the arid grasslands, a small Sufi clique usually operated a public front, where they gave out alms according to the Koran while indoctrinating the masses against the ruling class. After the Sufis sufficiently increased their membership, they incited new believers and turned them into the sword of jihad. As a Kunta cleric warned Al-Hajj Umar, a West Africa jihadist, ‘Jihad leads to kingship and kingship to oppression; our present situation is…safe from the error to which Jihad leads’. Unfortunately, many of the warnings were never heeded. After the overthrow
of the African system, at which point the peace had been murdered, the people realized that they would never be fully accepted into the new AfroAsian Eurocentric system. Even worse, the old way of doing things was gone forever. Though the changing locations of the grassland empires in the western Sudan were decided by the changing boundaries of the Sahara Desert —Mali, Songhai, Sokoto, and Bornu—African traditional interests were forever relegated to the fringe, and the light-skinned, Afro-Asian Muslims dictated power. Even if the black history of Egypt is disputed, Arab historians and visitors testify to the fact that traditional Ghana was rich, peaceful, and free, a country in which religions peacefully coexisted, and there was virtually no crime. The ancient Ghanaians never touched the belongings of a dead foreigner but kept them intact until someone of his ethnic origin came around to dispense the wealth as he saw fit. This was a cultural trait based on natural laws of retributive Justice/Karma common to the Lower Niger populations of Yorubaland and Igboland, where food for sale was put unmanned on paths, and prospective buyers were expected to leave the amount expected by their commonsense in cowries or barter. The more civilized Africans of the forest and wooded savannahs still vastly outnumbered the desert Afro-Asians and remained out of the reach of their cowardly fighting techniques. The people of the arid lands engaged in surprise attacks made possible by the hordes of animals ridden to the attack, but this was not feasible in the forest, where they would have had to dismount and fight man to man. Many of them were frail and didn’t relish the thought of pitting their grainsfilled stomachs and muscles against those of heavy yam eaters like the Igbo. Moreover, the attackers and their animals had to survive the insect life in the forests, which gave them sleeping sickness, river blindness, and malaria. The Muslim Afro-Asians kept to the outskirts of the forest, kidnapping black African children and women for slavery whenever they came to trade in gold and food. In the Yoruba language, Islam is called Imole, meaning ‘the draconian teachings’. With the imposition of the strict Islamic laws in the Upper and Middle Niger savannah regions, many Africans moved back into the wooded
savannah to the south. The average Yoruba, or other Lower Niger traders, stayed away from the Muslim trade points if the laws were applied to them, which made the Muslims realize that if they pushed too hard, the gold would disappear. Despite adopting bits of Ifa (which they called ‘science of the sand’ and attached to the prophet Idris), Afro-Asians found the rainforest jungle and people of Yorubaland too secretive and couldn’t break into the secrets of the gold trade carried out by the Eyo. The Eso taxed those who tried to trade directly with gold mines to the immediate southwest of Yorubaland. Eventually, Muslim Afro-Asians built a university at Timbuktu to study the enigma of the Niger forests. This goes a long way to show the importance attached to the Niger area, despite the wide area of Muslim influence that spread across the arid lands of Morocco all the way to the Indian region. The Timbuktu university was obviously of no great use, because they could not penetrate the rainforests until the second advent of the Europeans, but it promoted Islam across the Sahel grasslands. Some Afro-Asians were regular visitors to northwestern Yorubaland around the Niger River, but the Muslims found the Yoruba culture too strong to overcome despite its openness. Many took silent offence to the proud Yoruba and Igbo, who looked down on them as vagrant, socially backward people. The Afro-Asian’s only psychological defense was his holy book, which told him to look down on the Yoruba as unbelievers (kaffirs in Arabic, pronounced ‘keferi’ in Yoruba). To the northeast, in Egypt and Arabia, Central Eurasians from Persians to Mongols and Turks took turns controlling the Muslim population and religious centers. The third caliph after Muhammad, his son-in-law, was overthrown by a pre-Islamic leading family in Arabia that moved the Islamic capital to Damascus, but they were overthrown in 750 by a Central Asian group that moved the capital to Baghdad. Despite the migration of the Islamic dynasties to different locations, depending on the ruling desert clan, the basic foundation of these states was still the importation of slaves and gold from black Africa. Being a small people limited by nature, they needed labor to help in agriculture, mining, the military arts, and building and maintaining elaborate state structures. Their
restrictive social laws made most free blacks move farther south of Nubia and Axum. On the East Coast, Afro-Asians followed behind the Original Africans moving farther down from Axum onto the Somali coast and, eventually, all the way down to Tanzania and Mozambique. East Africa was arid, so people had to move around in order to use the fertile ground necessary for pastoralism, which was found only around a few lakes or highlands. An increasing number of AfroAsians traded with the sparsely settled East Africa regions, whose people had migrated there from the north and west and were migrating farther inland or south because of the fear of Arab slavery. Small cliques claiming to be from the Middle East, although the truth of their origins was sometimes questionable, repeated the practice of overthrowing the African authority as was done in Ghana. Despite intermarrying with Africans, the majority of Somalis linked their ancestry to Persian (Iranian) royalty. Claiming ancestral links with the Middle East became a pattern with Muslims all over Africa out of ignorance or wanting to appear well connected to the Islamic power center in order to prevent further jihads. Across the southern fringes of the Sahara desert, two groups evolved to advance Islamic interests: a class of light-skinned black Afro-Asians (along the desert fringes from East Africa, where they were known as Somalis, to West Africa, where they were called Fulani/Fulbe); and a lower class of darkskinned Afro-Asians whose original African languages were twisted with Arabic to form a lingua franca of Hausa in the West Africa grasslands and Swahili in the East Africa grasslands. The light-skinned Afro-Asians formed coastal polities in East Africa all the way down to Kilwa and Sofala, Mozambique. The East Africa trade to the Middle East and India resulted in increased African slavery, some of which resulted in revolts like the Iraqi Zanj revolt (Zanj was a port on the East African coast whose name was lent to the African slaves). The gold came from farther south and west of the East Africa coast. Some gold came from the Shona of the Zambezi River area, although it was not likely much, because of their small population. The majority of the gold still came from West Africa.
In the Lake Chad area, Berbers from the north took over the local African Zangawa and Sao cultures of the Kanem-Bornu area, while some black cultures like the Sara and Sango remained unchanged and moved south into the present-day southern Chad and northern Central African Republic wooded grasslands. The Kanemi Bornu area had developed and served as a trade post when Egypt was the outlet for African gold to Asia. However, it was Islamized as early as 1000, and it suffered several jihads as groups took over power and trading posts shifted around the edges of the Sahara. The Berbers and Arabs gradually overran the Nok peoples of Nigeria’s northern savannah from the northeast to the northwest, resulting in widespread use of the Afro-Asian trade language, Hausa. Farther west, the African peoples became the Mande. The Hausa had a mythology claiming that the founder of Hausaland was Bayajida or Abuyazid, a prince from Baghdad. He came to Daura, killed a snake that lived in a well, and married the princess of the land. According to the Daura version, Bayajida’s six sons founded Kano, Zazzau, Gobir, Katsina, and Rano. However, Baghdad was founded in 750, several millennia after the first settlements on the Hausa Rivers rising from the Jos Plateau and flowing to Lake Chad. It is inherent in the Hausa oral history that there was an African princess in a traditional African state and setting, part of whose religion was the totemic worship of snakes, as with the snake-bird motif at the center of Egyptian and Yoruba religions. Located in the grasslands, northern Nigerian environment provided little or no protection against being run over by intruders from the Sahara, so it suffered various conquests and jihads by 1000AD. Slightly to the south of the Hausa savannah, there are many relics of unknown empires in the wooded grassland Middle Belt, and the sophisticated iron mines of the Nok culture conservatively dated to the 1000 BC. The Nok civilization was broken up and its northernmost peoples were Islamized towards the end of the first millennium AD, when the first wave of Arabs and Berbers swept through the sparsely populated and scattered villages in the arid northern Nigerian grasslands (probably during one of the recurrent famines that made the elite vulnerable to revolts).
However, due to the proximity of the large population of unadulterated Africans in the south, the Hausa, like the Mande of the Upper Niger, never left their traditional worship and way of life entirely and relapsed into it between jihads. Hausaland was the buffer zone between the two groups of mulatto Afro-Asians on Lake Chad to the northeast and the Niger-Senegal River area to the northwest. The dark-skinned Hausa were the middlemen between desert Berbers and the forest Yoruba and Igbo. The Berbers occasionally ventured into the forest, while Hausa traders ventured past Lake Chad to cross the desert to northeast Africa and India. In Arabic, Ethiopia was called Habasha, which translated to the European word Abyssinia, while in the Katsina dialect, Habasha was pronounced hausa. Hausas and Ethiopians are the largest black AfroAsian ethnic groups. Although one is Islamized and the other Christianized, both possess the jetblack tan earned from their arid climate without cloud cover. (Probably due to the aggressive nature of the new, Islamic Afro-Asian-speaking converts, habasha means ‘rubbish’ in Yoruba.) The Islamic usurpers and slave raiders coming from the north heightened the migration out of the Niger-Benue savannas and wooded grasslands in all directions but more east into the forest via the Cameroon complex waterways. In Cameroon, the later migrants from Nigeria formed another layer of migrant trails (AdamawaUgbangi) in grasslands to the north of the original African group forest migration trail, which pushed the original African groups farther into the Congo River basin. The grassland migrants, like some Jukunoid groups that left Adamawa, moved through central Cameroon into Central African Republic and northern Congo Zaire. In Central African Republic, they diverged into Baya and Banda, as well as other sparsely populated groups. The rainforest Beti-Pahuin-Fang language group that spread through southern Cameroon into Equatorial Guinea and Gabon diverged into the Bateke that followed the Sangha River across Congo (Brazzaville) and spread to Gabon and Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire), part of which includes the present-day Kinshasa City on the Congo River. The Bateke coalesced into the Tio/Teke Confederacy, also known as the Anziku Kingdom, situated around the Malebo Pool/Lake Nkuda. They mined and processed copper as well as
cloth. Farther downstream the Congo towards the coast, the Bateke diverged into the Bakongo/Kongo people (Kongo means ‘hunter’). The Bakongo spread along the coast from present-day Pointe Notre in Congo (Brazzaville) to Luanda in Angola. They occupied less than 10 percent of land of the huge Congo (Zaire) country and the Congo River basin that bears their name. The Bakongo worshipped a creator god called Nzambia Mpungu in a religious setting similar to those left behind in their West Africa homelands. The Bakongo to the north on the coast of Congo (Brazzaville) formed the Loango empire, while those to the south built the coastal Kongo empire that extended from the Atlantic in the west to Kwango River in the east and from Kongo River in the north to Kwanza River in the south (present-day northern Angola, Cabinda, and western Zaire). The Bakongo diverged into the Mbundus in Angola, which included the Ovimbundu. The Kongo empire was initiated south of Matadi inland port on the bank of the Congo. The original kings built and ruled along the Kwilu Valley. The first known king was Lukeni Lua Nimi (1280– 1360), and he captured Kabunga and transferred the Kongo capital to its mountain to be known as Mongo dia Kongo.
African Kingdoms
His lineage ruled unopposed until 1567 when the Portuguese entered and ruined its sociopolitical existence. Like the Yoruba, Central Africans spent cowries mined off the Luanda Island by royal monopoly, and like the Ijebu, the Kongos became the financial controllers of the area. The Kongos also made great cloth as they became one of the most populous Original African groups outside Nigeria. The Congo River basin in Central Africa filled, and migrants sometimes bypassed the existing communities or joined them to the point that the
overflow had to move farther along the riverbanks for space. Those who migrated down the Congo and Ubangi River into the Kasai River, and other western Congo tributaries, and those who continued down the Congo to the coast were called the western Bantu. They included the Mongo in the Central Congo basin and Congo (Zaire). Like the eastern Bantu, the western Bantu came into the mineralrich Katanga plateau of south-central Congo. This was the source of rivers like the Kasai, which flowed into the Congo basin, as well as the watershed of the Zambezi River that flowed in the opposite direction towards the East Africa coast. The Luba were the major group in Katanga and were fairly prosperous traders, selling ivory and other products to the East Africa coast until the advent of the Nyamezi and Swahili Arabic traders who cut off their trade route to the sea. The eastern Bantu, also known as forest savanna Bantu, migrated along the northeastern limits of the Congo and Ubangi rivers before coming down south to the Great Lakes before 3000BC as Mashariki Bantu to form a sizable number of communities like the Haya, Busoga, Rwanda, Bunyoro, and Buganda. Most Great lakes communities in Uganda, North Tanzania, East Congo Zaire, Rwanda and Burundi tie their origin to Kitara Empire fabled to have been created by a mythical dynasty known as Bachwezi, or simply Chwezi. The Chwezi are believed to have arrived in western Uganda around 2,000 BC and built impressive earthwork sites in the western modern Uganda district of Mubende. Being close to the eastern border of Congo (Zaire), the Mongo and Luba, the two largest Bantu groups to the immediate west of the Great Lakes area, probably hold secrets of the mysterious Chwezi. The Bunyoro kingdom of the Nyoro, the first offshoot of Kitara Empire, was the most powerful Great Lakes kingdom between thirteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Bunyoro king, whose title is the Omukama, extended influence between Lake Victoria, Lake Edward and Lake Albert. As Bunyoro kingdom weakened, Buganda kingdom of the Ganda became the prominent kingdom in the area, with the Kabaka being the title of the king.
Because East Africa was very arid, those who didn’t settle around the lakes migrated to the wooded savannas of the Ethiopia/Kenya highland, like the Kikuyu and Kamba. The pressures and the East Africa aridity prevented long-lasting empires, as the people had to migrate due to famine or attacks from the north or the Arabs from the coast. The Kikuyu were mixed agriculturalists that faced constant pressure from the northern, dark-skinned, Afro-Asian pastoralists like the Masai and the Luo from Sudan and Ethiopia. The Nilotic pastoralists isolated the Kikuyu and Kamba in Kenya from the continuous chain of Bantus that extended from Ganda and Soga on the northern shores of the Great Lakes, and also from the Sukuma and Nyamwezi in northern Tanzania. Although the Luo and Masai spoke Afro-Asian languages, the majority of them were neither Christian nor Muslim. The Luo had a disruptive influence across the region as they came down the Nile, overwhelming kingdoms like Bunyoro along the Great Lakes and spreading towards the east coast, which was beset by Swahili Arabs. The Masai and other Nilotic groups also disrupted societies from the Ethiopian region into Kenya and Tanzania. Due to land pressures, the eastern Bantu continued south as the Sukuma, in present-day Tanzania, while a large group of mixed agriculturalists settled around the Zambezi River. The Bemba settled in the upper floodplains of modern Zambia, while slightly to the south of the midZambezi was the gold-bearing area of the Shona, who built the Zimbabwe. Early in 1000, the people of Zambezi area began trading with Arabs on the coast. This eventually culminated in the creation of the Swahili coastal polity of Kilwa where gold and Asian imports were traded. The reasons for the Shona’s Great Zimbabwe decline in the 1200s are not clear, but it might have been due to aggressive Swahili traders, the creation of a more competitive market to the north, or ecological factors. The Zimbabwe built impressive stone monuments but were never more than one hundred thousand people strong. This was due to the limited productivity of the African savannah for mixed agriculturalists and pastoralists that made people continue south into southern Africa. A few later returned to Zambezi as the Ndebele. In southern Africa, south of the Limpopo River, eastern Bantu separated into
two main groups: those of the Nguniland, on the eastern coastal strip between the Drakensberg Mountains and the Indian Ocean, and those of the high veld (mountain grasslands) known as the Sotho-Tswana. The Zulu were in northern Nguniland, and the Xhosa were in the south. The Sotho were in the southern velds in Central South Africa, while the Tswana in Botswana were up north. The difference in languages was not that distinct in the Nguniland or even across the language spectrum. Even words in Tswana relate to faraway Yoruba. The name Morounwa means the same in both languages and is a composite of three words meaning ‘I brought something’ or simply ‘a messenger’ of a blessing or a gift. Ngozi, a common female Igbo name, has variants all the way to South Africa. The Zulu Nguniland is phonetically similar to the Ijaw Ogoniland in the Niger delta. Ninety percent of those living in southern Africa inhabited its wooded grassland in its eastern half. The west had the Kalahari and the Namib Desert, inhabited by a few San and Khoi-Khoi. The San and Khoi-Khoi’s differences in height and stature were believed to be due to diet, because they didn’t take up agriculture in large numbers but remained naturalistic migrant hunters and gatherers. The Bantu mixed with the San and Khoi-Khoi, who were always ahead of other migrants across Africa, especially at that time, in the southern Africa land terminal. Though the Khoi-Khoi clans were mostly huntergatherers, they were also pastoralists like their eastern Bantu cousins, the Xhosa, who borrowed many Khoi-Khoi words.
Chapter 6: The Second Coming of the Europeans African slavery by Latino Catholics building empires on sugar and silver; Benin and Congo empires challenged (1400 to 1568) It is necessary to retrace the natural progression from the time blacks stepped out of the Niger-Benue Yam Belt to flaunt their wealth in Egypt and filled Southern Asia all the way down to China. After several thousand years of unabated and unrivaled Black African progress, Caucasians rose around 2000BC and spread from the Andronovo complex in Central Asia with their composite bow to destroy all the black empires from South China to Egypt in the era of the First horseman. They ran over the Blacks in South China, destroyed 100s of cities in the Indus Valley Civilization, as well as Elam and Sumner civilizations. The white, immigrant spillover to the immediate west of the Nile delta initially resulted in the founding of Libya and Greece, the nearest point in Europe to Egypt. After destroying Egypt, Black Africans created Carthage to its west which attracted Europeans to the Italian Peninsula to start the Roman Empire, resulting in the destruction of Carthage, at the start of the era of the Second Horseman with the long sword and religious dogma. As previously stated, the 2000yr eras could be divided into 8 two hundred and fifty year changes signified by the Yorubas Orisha of Change, Oya. The first three 250 year eras saw the introduction of Christianity, the rise of the Roman Catholic empire with the long sword, Spatha, that was used by Europeans from Central Asia to spread into Westen Europe, annihilating the indigenous people. The next two 250yr cycles, 750 and 1000AD, saw the Arabs use Islam and their curved long sword to conquer grassland Africa and Europe up to Paris. Oduduwa and the Olokun dynasty takeover Yorubaland and Yoruba history lost in the sea of Olokuns deceit.
The sixth 250yr cycle in the 2000 year Olokun era, era of the 2nd Horseman, around 1270AD, brought the introduction of the Gun used to change the global structure. Europeans began to regain lost territory from Afro-Asian Muslims during the Reconquista in Spain and Portugal and marched towards world domination with the introduction of a new war technology: firearms. By the seventh 250 year cycle in 1520, Christianity was split and a new financial caste system was born based on African slavery in American plantations. From 711, when Berbers and Arabs invaded Spain, Europeans were not able to reverse Muslim gains in the European Iberian Peninsula until 1276 when guns were introduced. Granada wasn’t free until 1492. Starting from the Greco-Roman rule, which supplied ample food as well as infrastructural innovations from Africa, Western Europe grew in population and organization. Western Europe greatly benefited from five hundred years of Islamic rule, because the Muslims provided enough African gold to offset the Mediterranean balance of payments with Asia. Food was more available from North Africa, but the most significant contribution was the transfer of technology that developed the European political economy, especially in agriculture, shipping, and science. Another important contribution was the improvement made to Arabic ships, which had developed further from those of the Egyptian era. Europeans made improvements to Arabic maritime technology by developing the caravel, which had better maneuverability and greater carrying capacity. Italian Genovese Jews were crucial in the revitalization of Europe, because they remained close to the center of international trade at the Mediterranean gateway to Africa and Asia. They were able to keep a positive trade balance with the gold coming from black Africa, some of which they got through the Sephardic (Iberian) Jews under Muslim rule in Spain and Portugal. The Romans paved pathways all the way to England in the first millennium AD, while in 1290, Italian Jews pumped funds into England to bolster the English contribution in the Crusades to free southern European lands. Portugal was the first to purge itself of Islamic Afro-Asian rule with the help
of Christian European allies. The introduction of firearms was a turning point in history as Portugal went on to claim territory in Africa. Portugal got its first foothold in Africa with the capture of Ceuta in 1415, and by 1500, it had taken over most Moroccan ports. Spain concentrated on the North Africa coast nations of modern-day Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia, while the Portuguese inched along the Moroccan northwest African coast until they reached the Niger delta area and reentered the ‘Garden of Eden’ in the 1470s. The Catholic pope Alexander VI gave the Portuguese a monopoly of exploration and missionary activity in West Africa. This was the first time since their ‘biblical Garden of Eden expulsion’ that Europeans entered the Niger delta area in large numbers. Maybe God put a barrier only in the east, according to Genesis 3:24, and not through the south underbelly that they eventually found (even though the West Africa coast was to be known as ‘the white man’s grave’). The northwest Afro-Asian Muslims had pushed the European Christians off the African coast and inadvertently caused problems for the whole continent when they went through the Iberian Peninsula all the way to Paris. The Europeans, growing in numbers and knowledge under their prosperous rule, eventually pushed the Afro-Asian Muslims back to Africa and traced their power source to West Africa with the help of Iberian Jews. On reaching the West Africa black heartland, the Negro area, the Iberians successfully moved European power from the southeast to Western Europe and began supplanting Muslim world power with Christian world power. The Portuguese had no valuable trade item to command respect in Africa apart from their guns. They started by taking over the middleman role in the Arabic Moroccan economy, transporting copper from the mines off the southern Moroccan coast to the refineries off the northern Moroccan coast. They also took advantage of the saltpeter, used to make gunpowder, and Moroccan sugar, which had been exported since the eleventh century. The Portuguese moved farther down the West Africa Atlantic coast, exchanging goods from the Moroccan coast, like Moroccan wool and copper, for gold and slaves. Unlike the Moroccan ports and other savannah areas, the Portuguese were to be restricted to the West African coast for centuries. They
were unable to attack and capture, because their war technology of surprise attacks couldn’t capture and colonies the vast peoples of the Niger forests. They traded and raided, relegated to the coasts. The first point they visited on the West Africa coast was the Senegal River in 1446, and they sailed up to its source where savannah Muslim kingdoms had taken over from the indigenous African kingdoms. After the ancient savannah kingdom of Ghana was overrun by Muslims, the ancient Mali empire evolved into a major Muslim trade post, slightly to the east of the Middle Niger bend. Gold and slaves were at the core of the Muslim economies in West Africa. The gold of the Upper Niger savannah was being exhausted while major reserves deep in the forest were still unknown to the world except to a few Akans and Aja/Yorubas. The Afro-Asian slave raids pushed traditional African societies deeper into the forest, including the Akan, which made the Muslims travel even farther for slaves and gold. The Portuguese mainly procured slaves, grains, and marginal gold dust from the Muslim traders of the SenegambiaGuinea area of the far West Africa coast. The Portuguese arrived in Sierra Leone in 1460, but the modernday Sierra Leone, Liberia, and western Ivory Coast to the Bandama River were sparsely populated by former savannah peoples. A few came down to the coast along the small rivers, but there was no major population center or activity when the Portuguese initially visited. Ivory Coast later became a major ivory port in West Africa. Original black African groups that relocated from the Guinea/Mali grasslands down into the Brong-Ahafo River basin around the present Ghana-Ivory Coast border split even further, becoming the Agni and Baoule in Ivory Coast and the Akan in Ghana. They spoke the Volta-Comoe languages and were within the Yam Belt, whose western boundary was the Bandama River in Ivory Coast. Neolithic tools were found in Kumasi, and archaeological dating revealed iron-working in the area since 200AD, even though the region had been sparsely settled by people migrating from the Niger into the Volta area since the beginning of humanity. The Akan dispersed from the savannah grasslands, where the first Akan polities developed by taking advantage of the gold trade in old Jenne on the
Middle Niger during the ancient Ghana empire and afterward. The Akans’ long stay in the savannah was reflected by their darker-than-normal hue for their present habitat in the forest lands. Muslim raids compressed the population towards the forest edges of Kumasi, which was fifty miles into the forest. The movement into the rainforest and later down the Pra River to the coast prevented Arabic ethnolinguistic changes like the Mande and Hausa. When the Portuguese arrived at the Gold Coast, the Akan forests were still virgin, uncleared rainforests and were sparsely inhabited by the Akan who came down the Pra-Ofin River basin to the coast before moving east to form the Akwamu kingdom. The Yoruba-Aja people still controlled the eastern Gold Belt from Accra west by virtue of their population and the powerful Oyo empire and Ijebu kingdoms. The Aja peoples were part of the wide Yoruba spectrum and were as close to the Yoruba center as the Bini and Itsekiris on its eastern extremes, if not closer, despite the slight effects Europeans had on their languages and classifications. Western Yoruba mined and traded gold and salt, loosely controlling the Aja people of present-day Benin, Togo, and eastern Ghana. The clandestine Eyo of the Ijebu kingdoms mined the gold discreetly while the Eso of the Oyo Empire collected the taxes. The Portuguese backed the Akan, who had recently resettled from Islamized grasslands to the Pra-Ofin basin, to build new kingdoms of Denkyira to the west of modern Ghana and Akwamu to the east. This cut out the Yoruba and Mande merchants on both outskirts of the Gold Coast. They cornered the gold trade and developed a minute slave trade with the Akan peoples on the Pra-Ofin basin, east of the gold basin, and the Aja peoples from Accra west. Before the advent of the Portuguese on the West Africa coast, the majority of the coastal population consisted of small, fishing-based Ilaje, Awori, and Egun communities that mainly provided salt and cowries to the inland Ijebu and Egbado Yoruba populations. Jakin and Whydah were the major ports where the Ijebu traded fish and salt, but they were the first to fall to new Akan empires, like Akwamu, from the east. Farther inland, into the Yoruba lowland rainforest, the Ijebu kingdom flourished with Ijebu-Ode as the capital city. To the north of the Ijebus were the Egba and Egbado of southern Oyo Empire, around Ibarapa area. To the
immediate west of Ijebu kingdom and Oyo Empire were Sabe, Ketu and Anago Yoruba territories followed by scattered Aja polities up to Tado and the Volta area. Jakin, Ajase Po, Eko and other Yoruba/Awori settlements were close to the coast, but the main population of Yoruba was to the north and east. The Oyo Empire had no use for coastal territories, apart from fisheries and cowries, until the advent of the Atlantic trade, which was conducted through Egbado land. However, the inland Aja territories were useful for the gold and trade tariffs exacted on traders passing through the Oyo Empire. The riverine Benin empire extended across coastal Yorubaland and Ajaland in present-day Republic of Benin and Togo. The Portuguese might not have been impressed by the fishing communities on the western Slave Coast, which were on the fringes of the Yoruba cultural sphere, but this was not the case to the east of the Yoruba center, Benin. In 1486, the Portuguese reached Benin City, the capital of Edo/Benin empire, where they were welcome enthusiastically by Oba Ozolua. Benin City was a cosmopolis with a large section of artisans, ivory and wood carvers, brass and blacksmiths, leather craftsmen, and other specialists like drummers, poets, and astrologers. It was a large, clean, and crime-free metropolis on the beautiful Benin River, which flowed into the Atlantic. Benin City was bigger and better than any European city in the 1500s. Present-day Benin City has shrunk several times from its ancient size, having been razed by Europeans a couple of times, but its ancient city wall was several times longer than the Great Wall of China. With a population in the millions in the rainforest, there was no way the Portuguese could think of conquering the Edo/Benin Empire. They ingratiated themselves to the ruling elite with trade while they undermined the empire with cultural and economic influences. The Edo/Bini exchanged gold, cotton, camwood, pepper, and prisoners of war for Moroccan leather, alcohol, and imported cotton. The Bini were eager to create fruitful business ties with the Portuguese and sent ambassadors to Portugal. The business relationship, including some trade in gold dust, was, at the start, beneficial to both sides. The traditional African
ruling elite were eager to please them. Because their most important Orisha was Olokun, the goddess of the seas, the white people from the seas were well received until their trade intentions changed with the discovery of the Americas. Land was given for churches in accordance with the African tradition that allowed foreigners to practice their religion free of fear of persecution, but rapid Westernization led to social upheaval and instability. The immediate eastern Niger delta (known at the time as the Oil Rivers) had no major kingdom, because the Igbo preferred to live in decentralized villages. Nevertheless, they traded their oil palm products and cotton for Moroccan wool, leather, and alcohol. The thick mangrove forest in the delta and Igboland left the Africans open to kidnappings, which was the main source of slavery in the area. Farther east, when the Portuguese arrived in the Kongos in 1483, they received the same reception as in the Benin Empire. The accumulation of people down the Kongo River near the coast resulted in the advanced society of the Kongo kingdom. Kongo was the largest state of the Lower Congo River, while the Loango kingdom was the largest of the three Kikongo empires on the Loango coast to the north of the Congo delta. All these empires are believed to have descended from the Tio/Teke Confederacy, located upstream to the north of Lake Malebo, because they all had similar matrilineal institutions and shared political symbols and vocabulary.
CENTRAL AFRICAN KINGDOMS
Kongo was a state of about five hundred thousand in the 1400s. Its capital
was Mbanza Kongo (renamed Sao Salvador by the Portuguese). Its king, called the Mane Kongo, was selected from the male members of aristocratic clans called the Mwisskongo. Like other West Africa kingdoms, Kongo used cowries as money, because metals were too readily available. The ruling elite of Kongo accepted the Portuguese, like the Bini. The Mane Kongo was baptized as Joao. In 1506, fewer than twenty years after the Portuguese arrival, civil war broke out when a proChristian aspirant for kingship from the wrong lineage took over illegally, with the help of Portuguese. He effectively derailed the ancient traditions of the land. The illegal king was known as Alfonso, and he made his lineage permanent despite the matrilineal Kongo culture, thus sending the Kongo area on a downward slope of anarchy and war. Alfonso Christianized the Kongo Empire and instituted the Atlantic slave trade for the Portuguese, who backed him into power. His son became a priest, and tax extractions from the Bakongo were used to sponsor the activities of the church. Alfonso changed meaningful traditional African titles into irrelevant European titles; his chiefs and governors were called dukes and duchesses. Despite trying to tightly control slave trade for revenue collection, he realized that the Europeans tried every gimmick to bypass him. The long-held Bakongo traditions were tossed out like rubbish. The Portuguese were involved in every aspect of decision making, including choosing traditional title holders. The slaves taken from the West Africa coast from 1480 to 1520 were small in number. They were mainly sent to the Sao Tome islands off the Nigerian coast, where the Portuguese set up sugar plantations to augment those of Morocco and the Canary Islands. However, West Africans and their original products of sugarcane, tobacco, and cotton soon spread farther afield. Christopher Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the Americas in 1492 changed everything. Although black Africans had been across the Atlantic, the landmasses were known as the Americas, which in Yoruba meant ‘we shall see wickedness’ (A ma ri ika—there is no letter c in Yoruba). Some claimed that ‘America’ meanst something else, perhaps the name of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, but even if so, the Yoruba meaning had an eerie feeling to it when realizing what the Yoruba and others faced in these lands.
The Portuguese heard rumors of lands across the Atlantic to the west from the locals on the West Africa coast. The Sahara trade winds had already blown blacks to Central America,* especially from the Senegambian rivers. The dusty West Africa trade winds changed, once on the Atlantic, into tropical storms and hurricanes whose force could carry any water-borne transport to the Americas. Columbus asked the European monarchs, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, to sponsor such a trip with the agreement that anything found would be shared with the king. This ensured for Columbus the backing of the king if anyone else tried to lay claim on new lands. The king of Portugal, Don Juan, was slow to take the offer, but Ferdinand and Isabella, who had united Spain with their marriage, took the offer and backed Columbus in January 1492. On Columbus’s return, he stopped in Lisbon, Portugal, where he struck an agreement with Don Juan. His dubious agreements with the Spanish and Portuguese leaders were legitimatized with the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed on June 7, 1494, by Pope Alexander VI, the infamously corrupt pope. The agreement sanctioned by the pope gave all lands to the west of a vertical line (longitude) to the Spanish and all lands to its east to the Portuguese. It was later discovered that the more powerful Spanish had been cheated out of a whole landmass that came to be known as Brazil. The Spanish took control of the islands of Cuba, Jamaica, and Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) as well as the South American continent with the exception of Brazil. Western South America was covered by the Andes highlands, whose altitude changed the vegetation expected of the latitude. The equatorial areas of Colombia and Ecuador (like the Congo highlands) were less productive, and the normal desert latitudes were wooded grasslands like those in Ethiopia. The Spanish focused on the discovery of metals, especially gold, but its colonies were rich in silver with the exception of the gold found in Havana, Cuba. Mining gold and silver didn’t require as much slave labor as did the later sugar plantations, so initially the Spanish were not overly bothered by West Africa being a Portuguese monopoly. Nevertheless, the Spanish used African slave labor for mining and in small agricultural settings.
* Ivan Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus (Random, 1976).
The silver had a greater indirect effect on Africans, because it led to economic disequilibria that brought other Europeans into the race for metals and colonies. This fueled an era of cheap money that financed shipbuilding and expeditions through Sephardic and Italian Jews and their banks (Banco di Santo Spirito in Rome and Bank Palermo in Sicily).* Brazil was named Brasa, Portuguese for ‘glowing coals’—the name given to a red dyewood that was initially the only commercial use of the territory larger than Western Europe. The Portuguese crown divided and allocated parcels of Brazil as captaincies to wealthy families, but until 1530, Portuguese settlers did not populate the captaincies due to their poor economy compared to West Africa. The Portuguese began taking their colony more seriously when the French and English, unhappy over the division of the Americas solely between the Iberians, decided to challenge the weaker of the two nations. The first most important Brazilian colonies were the southeastern Sao Paulo, where forays were made into the interior, and the northeastern Pernambuco, which had the first sugar plantations. The Iberian Jews’ transfer of sugar production from West Africa to Brazil led to a significant increase in Indian slavery from the 1530s to the 1560s, when the pope outlawed it due to rapid depopulation caused by mistreatment and diseases. From 1538, Africans were imported in small numbers, but their numbers increased sharply. By 1588, Africans were 25–30 percent of the slaves, while by 1620, they were 100 percent. Having used Africans in the slave plantations on Sao Tome and the Canary Islands, the Portuguese preferred Africans to Indians because of the natural West African aptitude for agriculture and wider genetic spectrum, which gave them a higher resistance to diseases than any other ethnic group. They, especially the Aja-Yoruba and Akan, were also famed for having a good ‘nose’ for finding gold deposits. * Anthony Sampson, The Money Lenders (Penguin, 1983), 35.
Bahia became the leading captaincy in sugar plantations and African slaves.
By 1580, Brazil prospered from sugar and brasa dyewood, with sixty sugar mills funded by Sephardic and Dutch Jews. It had a population of seventeen thousand to twenty-five thousand Portuguese, eighteen thousand enslaved Indians, and fourteen thousand African slaves.* By the end of the 1500s, Portugal and Spain were ascending to the status of world powers. In addition to the major changes across Africa discussed earlier, the ancient African gold trade was diverted to the coast with the arrival of Europeans and the disenfranchisement of the Yoruba and Mande. The savannah Muslim empires were deprived of the gold trade that came to Jenne and other savannah trade posts. To make matters worse, the European push on Morocco and the Maghreb had a ripple effect across the Sahara. Muslims pushed closer to the forest boundaries, making communities shift deeper into the safe confines of the forest. Because the income from gold was reduced, many more slaves were needed to balance the Muslims’ books, which resulted in an increased frequency of slave raids. The goods traded across the Sahara expanded to include products like gum Arabic, ivory, and other items that were never bothered with before the advent of the Portuguese and the subsequent diversion of the gold trade. The pressure put on the ethnic groups located on the fringes of the forest, like the Akan, had far-reaching implications. The presence of new trading points on the coast attracted peoples to the south. A combination of these factors resulted in the southeastern migration of the Akan heartland into space that historically belonged to the Dangme and Ewe of the Aja/Yoruba, with the creation of Denyika on the west and Akwamu on the eastern side of the Gold Coast. In breaking the secretive Eyo hold on the Gold Coast, the Portuguese established a fort they called El Mina (the mine), where they kept gold and promoted the destabilization of the area. It was a small fortress built to store gold and slaves. For various reasons, they made no attempt to conquer more land. Instead, they employed and armed coastal ethnic groups for protection and the management of possible competitive elements. * Ronald Segal, The Black Diaspora (Faber and Faber, 1994), 71–72.
The recently arrived Akan groups established new hegemonies in the Volta River basin and began charging tariffs on anyone trying to conduct business in the area. This was an affront to the Yoruba, who bluntly refused in the popular Eyo anthem: ‘Eyo oh! E eyo oh! Eyo were our fathers, who played with gold. We are not paying any border tariffs. We’re going home!’ This was a fatal stroke to the northern and western Yoruba kingdoms of Oyo and Ijebu that relied upon the gold, especially the Oyo, who had extended into the grasslands around the Niger River. The Oyo used the trade and taxes collected by the Eso to buy, among other things, horses from the north to build its cavalry. The loss of the income had an effect on the expensive cavalry, which had a high death rate for horses due to the environment, and the Oyo soon lost their power. Oyo-Ile, the capital of the Oyo empire, was sacked by the Nupe in the 1520s, and the Alaafin and the Oyo court moved to Ighoho in the west before moving back in the early 1600s. The Ijebu kingdom had no chance of recovering, as it coastal lands like Whydah, Jakin and Eko were overran by European sponsored groups. It would lose its trade, its peace, and its freedom! The Akan taking full control of the gold area led to another problem. Gold mining was labor intensive and needed a large population to enable full exploitation while other functions, like clearing the forest and agriculture, were not left unattended. To fill the labor shortage, the Akan bought slaves from the Portuguese, who engaged in slave raiding in Yorubaland and sold slaves for gold. Eventually, the coastal Akan conducted slave raids west into Aja and Yorubaland as well as into the northern Upper Volta Muslim Mossi communities. Prior to the advent of Europeans, the coastal lagoon people lacked large populations, viable economies, and an independent state infrastructure. The people of the coast, mainly fishermen, were often resentful of those in the rainforest hinterlands who, until the advent of Europeans, were the ‘mainstream’ culture. This resentment, coupled with the destruction of their fishing livelihood by Europeans, made it easier morally for the lagoon people to sell their former overlords from the hinterland. This was the case with the coastal Akan groups who raided the main body of the Akan to the north and
the AjaYoruba people who raided the Yoruba hinterland (similar to presentday, poor Mexicans making illegal forays into the United States). Unsettled by northern and southern raids, the Akan organized themselves into business houses and clans with military leaders whose main functions were to catch slaves, sell gold, and clear the forest. The militancy that pervaded the Akan society was reflected when it fell to slavery through reprisal raids and led slave revolts across the Americas, even when being the minority amongst slaves. The relocated Akan built culturally shallow but modern empires along the violent Eurasian model, and due to labor scarcity, it was an unending and vicious cycle. Freed slaves moved away with the sole purpose of creating their own clans with European guns bought with slaves and gold. This was the beginning of an era of ‘Ogun Complex’ that fueled mayhem and anarchy in the heart of the blackworld, starting with flooding the West Africa coast with hundreds of thousands of European guns every year. From the late 1500s, European nationals armed vagrant, coastal clans through their renegade military leaders to muscle in on the gold market. Akwamu was founded in 1600 in the east of the Gold Coast, and it was the first Akan polity to use guns successfully. To the east were the Dangme and Ga, close relations of Yoruba people. The war brought on in the 1600s by the Akan—Akwamu and Denkyira—led other people of the region, especially the Aja, to join the slave trade. The Aja joined the slave trade to buy European weapons for protection as well as to make money. The ancient, large Yoruba market for gold, salt, cowries, and other sea products had been compromised. With Whydah under Akan control, the Aja-Fon people formed the Allada kingdom in the space to its north, which was close to their ancestral home. Allada was to evolve into other kingdoms with the succession battles between three princes, which led to Ahomey farther north, and Porto Novo (Ajase) on the coast to the east, close to Ijebu Kingdom. Allada, meaning swordsmen, represented a new poignant chapter in the Era of the Second Horseman with the sword to spread religion and dogma for resources control. The Europeans not only used religion but fueled tribalism
to recruit African mercenaries and partners. It took over Whydah on the coast to gain direct access to the European slave traders. Allada was to be the most successful, earning the name the Slave Coast, since it was closest to the Yoruba population centers in the hinterland. East of Yorubaland, the Bini kingdom, which had forged a good relationship with the Portuguese, became involved in wars with its northern and eastern neighbors in Igala kingdom of Idah and Igboland. This was encouraged and fueled by the Portuguese, who wanted the prisoners of war. It became obvious that all their Portuguese friends wanted were slaves, and the Benin elite rejected the idea of war for slaves. They refused to sell any of their male subjects because of their contribution to the society, especially in agriculture and defense. The sale of female slaves was allowed, because the society gave brides in exchange for dowries, and the African idea of slavery was not as commercial and harsh as what the Europeans did on their American plantations. The Europeans rejected Benin’s strong trade policy, and Europeans were officially expelled from the kingdom in 1515. However, this did not stop or abate slave raids within the kingdom by other smaller polities like the Itsekiri and Ijaw, who the Europeans sponsored to engage in terrorist acts, especially when the Dutch and English arrived on the scene. In Kongo, King Alfonso didn’t have the prerogative to stop slavery, because he had claimed the throne illegally with the backing of the Portuguese in 1506. Alfonso encouraged importing guns that were used to raid for slaves in the interior, because most of the slaves were taken from outside the kingdom to the east, although some kidnappings occurred within the empire. The Portuguese prohibited the sale of guns to Africans, but other Europeans with no long-term plans sold arms freely. When the kidnappings got out of hand and no one was safe within Kongo, the ruling elite tried to prohibit the act, but it was too late. In 1568, the Jaga people of the interior got fed up and attacked Kongo towns and villages. They would have destroyed the empire entirely if not for the Portuguese from Sao Tome, who helped the Mane Kongo. The Jaga attack inadvertently pushed the region downhill by making the Kongos cede their southern territory as payment to the Portuguese in return for their help in
expelling the Jaga. The relinquished territory was later known as Angola, where the Portuguese were to launch their Central Africa operations. It was climatically conductive to the Europeans and for forming garrisons, although sustaining them in the aridity was a long-term problem. In 1571, the Portuguese established a trade route from Luanda, Angola, along the southern Congo basin grassland that nearly, and eventually, cut across Africa, although it was handled by different mulatto middlemen and newly militarized kingdoms. Three mediumsize states, Kasanje on the Kwango, Mwata Yamvo on the Kasai, and Mwata Kazembe on the Luapula, collected and distributed goods throughout the sparsely populated southern Congo basin. On the East Africa coast of the Indian Ocean, in 1505, the Portuguese attacked and destroyed Kilwa, the Arabic Swahili port, before establishing their own refueling station and trade post in Mozambique on their way to Asia. Arabs had been dealing on the coast with inland Shona kingdoms on the Zambezi and the Yao on Lake Malawi. Before the Portuguese arrived in the region, Zimbabwe had been destroyed, but another small, gold-mining Shona state, Mwene Mutapa, had developed closer to the Zambezi River, north of the relics of monument-building Zimbabwe. The Mutapa, like their folk across Africa after the Eurasian annihilation, shunned monumental stone building and built in clay and thatched roofs. This was why they were better equipped to fight off the Portuguese, who wanted to control their gold in 1569. The Mutapa had been initially receptive of them, in the misguided tradition of the Bini and the Kongos. The cultural proximity of the Shona to those slightly to their north and all the way to Igboland was reflected in the nearness of their titles: Mwene Mutapa, Mane Kongo, and Mwami of Rwanda all mean ‘lord conqueror’. The Kongos are the branch of eastern Nigerians who followed the Congo River downstream, while the Shona, Nguni, Rwanda, and Buganda formed the branch that followed it upstream through Ubangi to the Great Rift Valley and eastern Africa. The present coast of Kenya was under Islamic influences, which resulted in
the major African peoples, like the Kikuyu, remaining inland for fear of Arabic slavery. The administrative and trading center of the Arabic Singwaya Swahili connection was farther south on the coasts of Tanganyika and the Zanzibar islands.
Chapter 7: The Dutchmasters Gangster Paradise The Dutch, British, and French rise against Latinos for African wealth and American land (1568 to 1650) Natural justice appeared to occur when the Iberians, causing sociopolitical upheavals across Africa through divisions, faced rebellion at home. There was a rebellion in 1568 against the Spanish empire in the urban Dutch provinces of northern Netherlands when the large Sephardic Jewish community, merchants, and sundry dissidents involved in the AfricaAmericas trade made a declaration of independence. The fault lines in Europe caused by money ran deeper than little Netherlands and pervaded the European belief system. The Ogun war economics shrouded in Olokuns dogma was at the foundations of the Netherlands, the new Gangsters paradise. European elites hijacked Christianity to authenticate their existence in the civilized world, and over time, it was such a useful tool in uniting against the Muslims that they all waged crusades to expel them from their lands. Discontent began to show when Spain and Portugal divided the ‘new world’ between themselves, and it was signed by the pope, who saw no wrong done, because the complaining nations had initially rejected Columbus’s proposal. Francis I, the king of France and a Catholic, dismissed the authority of the pope in sustaining Spanish claims to the Americas. He commented, ‘I should very much like to see the clause in Adam’s will that excludes me from a share in the world’.* The wealth enjoyed by the Iberians from the 1470s brought about nationalistic jealousies among the Europeans, leading to a split in their religious beliefs similar to that of the Muslims and their many factions (Shiites, Sunnis, Kharjites, etc.). This questions the depth of Abrahamic religions and their link to money and war. The increased benefits of easy credit extended to all Europeans were not enough, and they wanted a bigger share as they split the Western church along nationalistic lines.
* Segal, The Black Diaspora, 37.
To compete in the global economic imperialism, it was necessary for each nation to be in control of its own tools of cultural imperialism – religion, racism, tribalism and other forms of differentiation. The age of the Second Horseman/Olokun was essentially about using religion and dogma to justify economic imperialism. By 1517, fewer than forty years of Europeans stepping on West Africa, Martin Luther launched a protest movement against the Roman Catholic Church, and by 1534, King Henry VIII of England had repudiated the spiritual authority of the pope and created his Protestant Church. The domino effect of these defections across Western Europe culminated in the Netherlands, which went on to create the perfect, exploitative, money-making machine. The marshy terrain that was reclaimed in northern Netherlands permitted shipbuilding, and its location allowed its Iberian Jews and European merchants to corner the Baltic grain market, which had grown due to improved plough agriculture in Europe. Following their declaration of independence from Spain, the Dutch founded limited liability companies worth seven million guilders: the East and West India Companies. The sole aim of the companies was to plunder, conquer, and foment commerce through maintaining their warships, which were supplemented by the government fleet when war was formally declared. This was an improvement over Queen Elizabeth I employing pirates like Hawkins and Drake, who used escaped African slaves to challenge the Spanish Catholic influence, an effort that led to war with Spain and didn’t achieve any long-term gains on its own. Most importantly, the Dutch companies were permanent money-making schemes without the uncertainty of political swings. This was the mother of joint-stock companies, whose numbers and profitability increased to a colossal amount that eventually culminated in the creation of the London Stock Exchange. When the Spanish king took advantage of the vacant Portuguese throne by taking over Portugal in 1580, the Dutch companies quickly took over Portuguese foreign possessions, especially El Mina on the Gold Coast, where
they armed the Ashantes to attack Portuguese interests with other Akans. The Dutch moved swiftly into foreign lands, challenging both local and European players in the field, because the companies didn’t need a monarchy to raise money for expeditions. The Dutch private enterprise, backed by a mercantile government, soon built the best fleet in the world. Without colonies of their own, the Dutch became the almighty middleman by selling cheaper West Africa slaves and European goods to Iberian colonies and gold in Europe. The British and French soon joined the Dutch ships in the precarious trade, which could have led to total loss and death if caught by the Spanish. This further exacerbated the tensions between the southern and the northwestern Europeans, who came together to fight wars to challenge and destroy the Catholic Spanish supremacy in the Americas. The overflow of West Africa slaves began to fill northwestern Europe, where they were used as housekeepers, musicians, and entertainers. In England, they became a fashion accessory among the rich. The sexual relationships between black men and English women heightened the push to find a colony of their own where they could put Africans to productive use and rid England of blacks. Queen Elizabeth I issued an edict to deport all Africans in 1601. With a change in their aggressive rulers at the turn of the 1600s, the new English and French monarchs decided, in separate treaties, to back off the occupied Iberian colonies but take North America, which hadn’t been claimed by the Iberians. The Spanish power was already stretched thin by trying to protect its Central and South American colonies, and the English and French faced no serious challenges when trying to take North American colonies. The French settled Acadia in 1604 and Quebec in 1608, while to the south, the English settled Virginia in 1607 and Cape Cod in 1620. Queen Elizabeth’s successor in 1603, King James, had ambitions of an imperialistic Britain. He commissioned the best English writers, like Shakespeare, to write the English Bible, called the King James Version. It was different from other versions but became standard issue for the soldiers of fortune sent to the Americas and Africa. By 1619, the English had begun planting tobacco in Jamestown using twenty African slaves. The Dutch, whose treaty with Spain included only its independence and a
twelve-year truce, attacked Brazil as soon as the truce was over in 1621. By 1624, the Dutch had seized the most prosperous of the Iberian colonies, Brazil, where they took over its main captaincies in the northeastern, sugargrowing region.
Map of the Americas.
With control of West Africa, the main source of labor in the sugar plantations, and northeast Brazil, where the delicate technology of sugar processing was already in place, money soon flowed into the United Provinces of the Netherlands, which became ‘a high-voltage urban economy’.* * J H Parry, P Sherlock, and A Maingot, A Short History of the West Indies (Macmillan, 1987), 45.
The Dutch were initially repelled from Brazil, which resulted in them ransacking the Spanish West Indian islands and practically driving the local Spanish fleet out to sea. In one such raid off Matanzas Bay, the Dutch captured a fleet of thirty-one sails that yielded booty of more than fifteen million guilders. This ruined Spanish credit in Europe and paralyzed their West Indian communications and defense. The Dutch then seized the little island of Curacao, which became the center of Dutch power in the West Indies. They returned to Brazil in 1630 and took Recife to the north of Bahia. Apart from the salt-rich Curacao, the Dutch weren’t interested in land colonies except to trade commodities and slaves between all ports, which was why they were the first to take New York port. The Dutch initially named present-day New York ‘New Amsterdam’. They set up an outpost on the Upper Hudson River in 1624 to buy fur at presentday Albany in upstate New York, which they called New Netherlands. Two years later, they took over Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River. The bay of New York (New Amsterdam) served as a port to export the produce and furs of the Americas and to import goods, credit, and slaves. The Dutch Jews set up present-day Wall Street as a trade zone in Manhattan from which they traded commodities and finance on benches. It was so named because trading was behind a wall that kept out unfriendly Manhattan Indians from the hilly north of New Amsterdam Island, as well as the African slaves who lived in the buffer zone between Bowery Street and Thirty-Fourth Street. The Dutch made no serious attempt to occupy the New Amsterdam colony until the English took over, renamed it New York, encouraged European immigration, and increased African slavery. Likewise, in Cape Town, South Africa, the Dutch created a refueling station in 1652 for ships on the way to
Asia, especially for vegetables to fight scurvy, and it remained so for a long while until the English arrived. ‘England undertook colonies of settlement rather than of trade or exploration’.* The crowded British islanders wanted to rid themselves of criminals and dissidents, but they wanted to do it economically, a policy that later reaped immense benefits. The English and French took over where the Dutch finished the Spanish by attacking and claiming the outward-lying Caribbean Islands of St Kitts, Barbados, Trinidad, and the Virgin Islands. * J H Parry, P Sherlock, and A Maingot, A Short History of the West Indies, 51.
In Brazil, the wealthy families and their captaincies became increasingly agitated by the state of affairs, especially the 1630 Dutch occupation of Brazil and the Spanish takeover of the Portuguese crown. These regional captaincies had local police and paramilitaries, because they were more or less centuryold confederates of plantations. They eventually came together in 1654 to expel the Dutch from Recife in northeast Brazil. On their own terms, the Portuguese in Brazil returned Brazil to Portugal, free of Spanish rule, and by so doing, they forever loosened Portugal’s grip on Brazil. To keep the Dutch trade cycle intact after their expulsion from Brazil, the Dutch merchants moved north to the Caribbean islands. They were ready to give any European national long-term credit for the sugar processing technology with free credits of African slaves, European goods and food, as well as guaranteeing the purchase of all their produce. In the Guianas, the territories to the north of Brazil and east of Venezuela, where the French and British had coastal strips, the Dutch invited the French and Jews to plant sugar with full packages of slave labor, technology, credit, and marketing. Every new colony in the Americas meant more cargo for Dutch shipping and a blow to the former Iberian masters. This policy helped to sustain the new British and French colonies, and in time, they overtook a weakened Brazil as the leading sugar producer. Barbados was Britain’s main sugar island until British Jamaica overtook it in the 1700s. The British and French also overtook the Dutch to become the world’s leading powers through their colonies.
The British and French monarchies vigorously pursued the settlement of North America by giving people incentives to migrate from Europe. They issued charters of whole regions in the Americas to joint-stock companies. Thirteen British royal-chartered colonies called states were formed on the North American Atlantic coast. The Mid-Atlantic and southern coast of the British-American colony, Virginia and its surroundings, was quickly converted to tobacco and rice plantations that were worked by black slaves with know-how from West Africa. The northeast coast of Massachusetts was labeled a ‘barren coast’ that produced no export crop of value to Europeans, because it had the same European, wintry climate. However, it produced wheat for the West Indies and became the trading point of southern agricultural produce and northwestern furs. Most importantly, the concentration of business and intellectual classes in the northeast resulted in cottage industries that partially processed or finished products for export and import substitution. The New England States, as the Northeast was known, bought and processed sugar from the West Indies into rum, which was taken to Africa. They also started making slave handcuffs and guns. This did not go down well with the British home government that lost income to nontaxpaying interlopers. Moreover, the North American colony wasn’t making any profit. The government, backed by powerful business concerns, proposed a series of laws to change the old system of colonies of settlement, based on a balanced subsistence economy, to a plantation system based on forced labor and huge profits. The British turned their envy against the Dutch and made laws like the Navigation Ordinance of 1651. This act was designed to strengthen British shipping and colonies by prohibiting foreign vessels from carrying goods to British colonies and from carrying British goods. Not forgetting its old enemy, Spain, Britain attacked and captured Jamaica to complete its West Indies island collection. The increasing power of the merchant class led to the effective challenge and 1649 beheading of the Catholic-friendly British monarch, Charles I. The huge
profits flowing into the previously deprived European lands caused serious sociopolitical upheaval in the resultant struggle for power. The British monarchy was restored in 1659 but was shaken by the 1688 Glorious Revolution before finally settling down with the merchant-friendly King William III. Over the next fifty years, Caribbean sugar plantations, and to a lesser extent North American tobacco and rice plantations, increased in number and size as prices of sugar and tobacco remained high. The English followed the Dutch example by creating the Royal African Company in 1672, which enabled them to build a larger fleet to transport cargo, with special emphasis on African slaves, needed to till the land. In West and Central Africa, the Portuguese monopoly was shattered by the Dutch, who weren’t able to maintain a monopoly. The British, Dutch, and French had better goods to offer Africans than the Portuguese, because Brazil, or even Portugal, didn’t have a growing industrial base. The British closely copied Indian and African cloth designs for the forest Africans, who had an advanced local cotton and glass industry long before the Europeans arrived and continued to export cloth and beads after they arrived. The Bini and Ijebu of the Slave Coast exported large quantities of cotton. The Europeans were stunned by the wider spectrum of cloth ranging from cotton, velvet, and damask to raffia, as well as the different colors that existed in Yorubaland and Igboland, where people were long accustomed to tasteful dressing. Before 1650, with the exception of guns, no goods were imported into West Africa that were not locally produced. The foreign goods only supplemented local production but, in time, destroyed the local African industry. The cotton industry in Manchester grew at the African industry’s expense, while a glass industry for African beads grew in Bristol. The Jamaican and Brazilian rum imported from New England and England were poor substitutes for the ancient African palm wine that had a better nutritional content than sugarbased liquor. The missionaries had a lot to do with the loss of belief in anything African, as they depicted blackness as pagan, backward, and negative. This was backed by their converted scriptures and the gun. The bad side of African religion
was highlighted, and the good side, which provided the necessary social skills to maintain a polite and civilized society, was shunned, leading to a loss of knowledge in metals, medicine, education, and social organization. African words of endearment were turned into ridicule. The Yoruba word for black is dudu, which turned into shit (excrement) in the English-speaking world. The most important items of trade that Europeans brought were guns produced in the new industries in Birmingham and later New England. Without the introduction of guns into the West Africa region, the majority of Africans wouldn’t have been aware of the presence of Europeans, but even those not buying into the Ogun Complex arms race had their lives affected by the kidnappings and the unnecessarily bloody wars caused by reckless ambition. The Dutch, French, and English, who had established a new order in the Americas, needed slave labor to promote their interests and promoted unrest in the region. Even with guns and psychological warfare masked as religion, the Europeans were not able to make an impressionable impact on the economy of West Africa. Initially, the terror attacks were less frequent in the interior central and eastern Yorubaland of Ekiti, Ijesha, and Akoko, but Europeans resorted to economic sabotage of the local currencies. Due to the abundance of metals in the region, cowries, which were less abundant and difficult to get, were used as the currency. Unable to sell better food than yams or clothing better than those locally produced, Europeans resorted to distorting and destroying the economy with excess cowries that they ‘mined’ heavily off the East Africa coast. The few who used metals for currency also had their metal currencies debased. People soon lost faith in the currency and fell back on their parallel system of trade by barter, which was a big shock to the economy but couldn’t stall it completely. The most successful approach was still the fueling of unrest in the western Yoruba frontier lands, where the coastal polity of Whydah declared its independence from Allada and, from 1671 onwards, ran at the whims of European slavers. Learning from the Akan experience of allowing the Portuguese to set up the El Mina fort, which was used to overwhelm the Gold Coast, the Allada monarch refused European forts on his coastal domains, but
Europeans sponsored coastal cliques of former fishing villages in their quest to break away and later the interior of Dahomey. Whydah earned the name ‘Slave Coast’ from the number of Yoruba slaves who were shipped from its coast. Constant wars and kidnappings were waged against and among the western Yoruba, especially the Egba, Egbado, Nago, and Ijebu. Unable to produce their own guns, some Yorubas responded by resorting to slave raiding in the European-inspired Ajalands to the west and Muslim north. This was a reaction that the Oyo empire, which extended into the northern savannas, bore as it came under attack from the north, west, and south, but the reaction was not supported by the main core of forest Yoruba to the east and south. The Oyo people earned a negative reputation among the Ijesha, Ekiti, and other central and eastern Yoruba, who opposed the Oyo antics in the grasslands. Though slavery was initially only an irritation at the western and south frontiers of Yorubaland, it increased dramatically towards the end of 1600s but never overwhelmed and derailed the Yoruba sphere in its entirety. The effects were felt more in the northwestern Yoruba Oyo court, which had been sacked from its ancient Oyo-Ile court and relocated to Igboho. With the loss of gold trade, it needed resources to buy weapons and revitalize its cavalry to push out the northern aggressors, the Nupe. To the east, on the Bight of Benin, the smaller Warri kingdom was used by Europeans to raid the large Benin Empire that had banned all European activities. Apart from those that raided Benin, some militarized coastal groups moved west along the coast and then inland, where oral history accounts suggest that they became the kings of the first row of forest kingdoms like Ondo and Iwoye. With the first row of forest kingdoms overran and militarized, their coastal fishing and salt trade killed, the people carried out slave raiding incursions into eastern Yorubaland. Ondo raided areas to its north, like Akure and Ekitis kingdoms, for slaves easily conveyed by short rivers to the coast. This practice was evident in the Niger delta proper, where Igbo coastal relatives, the Ijaw and Ibibio, carried out kidnapping raids on the inland Igbo. The Igbo rejection of unnatural authority, which resulted in their
decentralized villages, earned them a reputation of being the most uncooperative slaves with the highest suicide rate. Even a secondgeneration Igbo slave had a desire to escape or cause a revolt. In some areas in America, the Igbo were eventually marked with the compulsory removal of their two front teeth and identified and separated from the general slave populations to prevent uprisings. In Central Africa, the Portuguese savannah colony of Angola abandoned hopes of obtaining metals and concentrated on fueling unrest in the eastern hinterlands. It eventually fell out with the Kongo court and raised a black mercenary army to attack and defeat the Kongolese kings and empire in 1658. With the demise of Kongo, a few of its component states took over its former relationships with the Portuguese, although they couldn’t stop the slave trade from spreading to other areas in the region. The Loango coast, at the mouth of the Congo River basin, slowly took over the slave trade from the inland Kongo empire. The trade was serviced by the upstream Bobangi canoe merchants, who scoured the scattered villages in the sparsely populated rainforest highlands along the Kongo River and the Ubangi River, which is named after the Bobangi. The Portuguese established another trade fort farther south from Luanda in Benguela, which started exporting slaves from 1615. They found partners in the Ovimbundu, who spoke Umbundu and lived on the Benguela plateau, which was even more sparsely populated than Luanda. However, they encountered great opposition from the Ngola, and their Queen Nzinga waged war, unsuccessfully, to drive them out. Initially allying with the Dutch, Nzinga, who became Christianized, had to strike an uneasy compromise with the Europeans, despite harboring intentions to drive them out. She died at the ripe age of eighty years old. There was a large Afro-Portuguese mulatto population on the ground in Africa to push for slavery, but they had to travel far and wide in central and eastern Africa for slaves due to the low population concentrations. Many of the inhabitants were just migrating to the area, but when the raids became incessant, some of them moved back into the interior Congo highland rainforest, accessible only through complex waterways. Others moved into the vast South and East African savannahs.
The Zambezi basin region was the next vital area after the Congo basin and Rift Valley Lakes. From the 1630s, hungry Portuguese renegades, some from the Angola garrisons, formed Prazeiros—more or less terrorist cells with a small slave army—to launch raids around the Zambezi area. Their main revenue came from extortion and elephant hunting. The sparsely populated southeastern African savannah was good for cattle and ivory, which the Shona, especially those of the Rowzi empire, provided. The Shona cultural center moved from Zimbabwe to Mutapa to Torwa. Torwa was taken over by a Shona general, Dombo Changamire, in the late 1600s. They were known as the Rozwi (‘destroyers’). At the zenith of its power in the 1700s, the Rozwi kingdom confined the Portuguese influence to the Zambezi River. Farther north, along the East Africa coast, the sparse Swahili polities were mainly depended on trade from the Zambezi and Lake Victoria areas. In South Africa, the Dutch refueling station for vegetables, fruits, and grains for Asia-bound ships, established in 1652, became a reluctant Dutch ‘colony for settlement’ against the Dutch policy of ‘colonies for trade only’. The Dutch, some company ex-officials, and recruits came from the sea to settle the Table Mountains in the southwest corner of the region where they built Cape Town. They spread east, planting fruits and vegetables and establishing cattle ranches. As they claimed territory for the company, they met some of the largest San and Bushmen clans. Being on the African migration frontline, they were the first to experience loss of land, slavery, and extreme cruelties. They died in relatively large numbers from European diseases. The Nguni (Xhosa, Thembu, Pondo, and Zulu) were in the east of South Africa but were yet to establish centralized states and empires. The Nguni occupied the most fertile land in South Africa, which was in the east and was wooded grassland, while in the west and northwest, the Namib Desert was between the Drakensberg mountains and the grassland plateaus. With their strong, Calvinist religion, the Dutch settlers quoted chapters from their Bible that backed robbing and maltreatment of Africans. Many of the
Dutch believed that they were Jews returning to the Promised land, and it was their manifest destiny to rid the area of Canaanites. The worst was still to come across Africa, because the majority of Africans remained oblivious of the impending doom.
Chapter 8: Tale of Two Colonizers: French and English British and French vie for world domination through slavery and colonization: The creation of the United States, Haiti, and Brazil (1650 to 1808) The British and French took over the Dutch global ascendancy by reaping greater benefits from their colonies of settlement than the Dutch did from their colonies of trade. The Dutch couldn’t pursue a colony of settlement policy due to their much smaller population. To promote free trade and prosperity, the Dutch financed and transferred the sugar technology to French and English colonies, which resulted in Haiti and Jamaica catching up and surpassing Brazil’s sugar production. The Dutch were later disappointed and weakened by the closure of British and French ports to free trade, which deprived them of the benefits of their sugar ‘technology transfer’ and resultant increase in financial success. By the 1700s, British sugar colonies earned more income than the rest of the British Empire colonies combined due to the high sugar prices in Europe. The main business drive was the slave trade, which created the first millionaires in Nantes in France and Bristol and Liverpool in England. The slave trade led to the growth of Bristol and Liverpool for shipyards and the glass industry, Manchester for cotton, and Birmingham for guns. The port of Nantes became the most prosperous French town. French ships carried more than 1 million slaves, while British carried more than 2.5 million slaves in the 1700s. Each trip of two to three hundred slaves made more than 100 percent profit. The slave ship, Ann, left Liverpool in 1751 with an outfit and cargo costing ₤1,604 and returned to record a net profit of ₤3,287.* At the time, there was little difference between a merchant ship and a warship. Merchant ships were easily converted, which allowed the British to possess a navy that ruled the world’s seas. The Sugar Boom enabled the English to finance a far-flung British Empire, which built a fleet larger than the Dutch, because they had more colonies of settlements with monopolised
trade. In addition to giant sugar companies like Tate and Lyle, financiers and insurers like Lloyds of London built fortunes from the trade. Following William III’s crowning after the 1688 Glorious Revolution, a group of merchants agreed, in 1694, to lend the British monarch ₤1.2 million at 8 percent interest per year, in return for creating and running a Bank of England—a central bank that gave the merchants a monopoly of banknotes and the right to receive deposits.** With the English monarch signing over to merchants his sovereign right to issue currency and his control over the economy, London became a haven for merchant bankers and the world financial center for notables such as the Rothschilds and Barings. Throughout the 1700s, the British made ₤1 million yearly (a conservative estimate) directly from the African slave trade, while the merchants under the name of Bank of England continued to finance government war efforts with its bonds. Just before the Haiti Revolution, Saint Domingue (Haiti) accounted for no less than 40 percent of France’s foreign trade, probably more than the output of the British West Indies, and 60 percent of the world’s coffee supply. The French West Indies experienced a massive increase in slaves. In 1681, Haiti had two thousand slaves; this grew to four hundred and eighty thousand in 1791, even though 850,000 were imported. In 1664, Martinique had twentyseven hundred slaves, and that number grew to eighty-four thousand by 1790. From 1700 to 1793, an ‘official total’ of 3,321 French ships collected slaves in West Africa (one-third, 1143, were Nantes ships).* The only real value added to the economies was that of the slaves, who were brutally used over a ten-year period. The rationale was that it was cheaper to use a slave to death before he became a liability and needed healthcare and sustenance when old. The most torturous devices were introduced to punish and kill them, like tearing the slaves apart by tying them to horses that were whipped to run in opposite directions, hanging them with hooks in the rib cage, or using whips with nails—anything to dehumanize and kill the body and soul. Nevertheless, the slave revolts, often led by the Akan, Igbo, and Yoruba, were on the increase as the numbers of African slaves grew in relation to
whites. The vegetation and topography of the colonies dictated whether the Africans could escape or wage war, like in the Guianas, Brazil, and Jamaica, with the formation of escaped African communities called the Maroons. ** Sampson, The Money Lenders, 36.
The Jamaican Maroons, often led by Igbo and Akan religious juju Obeah men and women, were able to run up the Forest Mountains at the center of the island. To survive, the Maroons launched raids downhill on their former plantations for food and weapons. Many of them were hunted down by the Europeans. Jamaica was Britain’s most productive island and the most turbulent. Its increasing production brought more slaves and more revolts, which produced more Maroon communities, eventually leading to the First Maroon War in 1728 and the Second Maroon War in 1795. Brazil’s Maroon communities were called quilombos, and the most popular one was called Palmares, named after the large forest of palm trees. It probably came into existence around 1612. Exchange Qu for K, and quilombo means ‘what are you hiding/covering?’ in Yoruba.* With more than twenty thousand people, Palmares was the largest Maroon community in the Americas, and it withstood at least twenty attacks from the Portuguese and Dutch between 1630 and 1695 under the legendary Zumbi, their warrior leader. The large rainforest permitted the formation of many quilombos, although on a smaller scale. The Bush Negroes in Guyana were slaves who escaped into the forest in the 1660s during the exchange of colonies between the British and Dutch. Falling short of nearly ridding the country of whites in an early surprise attack, the Bush Negroes retreated into the forest and continued to strengthen their resistance with escaped slaves throughout the 1700s until their British colonizers abolished slavery in 1832. Although the numbers of Maroons increased in the 1700s, they were prominent from the beginning. A large Maroon community headed by an African slave called Bayano existed in Panama in the 1550s, while Hawkins, on a mission for Queen Elizabeth I, used Maroons from Spanish colonies to assail Catholic Spanish rule.
The huge population explosion in the Caribbean islands, consisting primarily of Africans, peaked by the end of 1700s. Europeans began to migrate to North America for fear of being overwhelmed by the imported African slaves and the ominous threat of the burgeoning Maroon communities. * It also means ‘what is coming?’ if each o is underlined and voiced with a deep tonation.
Unlike the Portuguese and Spanish, who were more familiar with black Africans because of their Islamic history, the northwest Europeans were more detached and harsh. Their belief was that to keep their system of slave plantation agriculture alive, they had to instill fear in the Africans while answering their societal and personal conscience that did, perhaps, inform them that what they were doing was clearly wrong. Religion was the answer —only God could have authorized such wickedness—if they and their relatives were to sleep at night. The religious and middle classes were apt to show that the Africans were cursed in the Bible and only they could save the soul of ‘black savages’. The harsher the regime, the harder the brand of Christianity from the Dutch Reformist Church in South Africa to the English Southern churches in the United States, where the Slave Belt was also the Bible Belt. Like the Muslim university in Timbuktu, of the Mali empire, that tried studying the roots of black African prosperity and produced agent provocateurs in the Niger area, the English created the University of Oxford and University of Cambridge at home, which were important in developing ways to approach the African issue. There were initially two main fields of study: human sciences (religion, economics, and philosophy) on one hand and alchemy and natural sciences on the other. Chem or khem was the name of black Egypt, and al-chem, the chemistry of black prosperity, had at its forefront the way to convert other metals to gold. With scarcely any agriculturists among them, the first group of religious philosophers and economists were let into the colonies, where they propagated the backwardness and hopelessness of the black race in order to expropriate the sins of their unfair plantation system. From 1666 in British North America, starting at Harvard, English graduates
built universities from New Hampshire to Philadelphia, where an ‘enlightened group’ was based and its philosophies developed, to move society moved away from the old religious belief system. New York, whose detachment from the mainland aided its atmosphere of free commerce, later became the focal point of the merchant class of Europeans as well as Dutch and Iberian Jews. The South attracted more of the uneducated lower classes who had been farmers in England and remained piously religious. The shift away from religion to explain social and natural phenomenon began in Europe and North America in the 1600s and 1700s, a time known as the Age of Enlightenment for the few Europeans who had grown fat on African slavery and gold. Theories of social contract and organization were propounded due to an increasingly powerful merchant class that didn’t want the overbearing influence of the Church, its European monarchies, or the ominous problem of a slave-based production system. This mercantile, ‘enlightened’ class eventually took the wheels of destiny from the churches and the aristocracy. A slight majority of African slaves imported into British North America were taken to the south of the colony, where the subtemperate climate allowed agriculture of tobacco, rice, and later cotton. In the north, slavery became a nuisance. The northeast coast was barren, as far as export crops were concerned and apart from the mid-latitudinal wheat exported to the West Indies. However, New York had a number of Africans relatively proportional to that of South Carolina. On the whole, 75 percent of African American slaves didn’t arrive until the end of the 1700s, when cotton became king. As in the West Indies and Brazil, African Americans did not exist in blissful ignorance, with many revolting or fleeing to join the Indians. There was a Yoruba/Akan slave revolt in 1712, and an even bigger revolt in 1741 resulted in the hanging of eighteen Africans. Slave ship revolts were on the rise. Africans tried to break the barriers peacefully, with the first black school in New York in 1704, while some formed towns like Chicago, founded in 1774 by a black trader, Jean Baptiste du Sable. New York had been a major slave port since 1662, when its merchants became involved in the ‘African trade triangle’. They transported slaves from
West Africa to the South and exported finished products to Africa and the South, where they also provided credit and technology to farmers. Shipyards were built in Baltimore, New York, and Boston. However, their prospective development became a challenge to the British colonial government, which lost revenue in tax and profit. The immediate challenge was the other European players in the region. The French took the interior of the North American continent from both ends of the waterways that cut across the United States. In the north, having gone through the Hudson Bay, the French conducted whale hunting and established contact with Indians who supplied them with furs. The area was not conductive to sugar or tobacco plantations that could attract a large population influx. In the South, the French had a large presence around the mouth of the Mississippi River from Louisiana west. Just as ancient African gold and labor attracted and sustained the flow of Europeans to the west of the Eurasian continent from the Caucasus Mountains and Russian plains, the fruits of African American slavery filled the Americas with Europeans. By the mideighteenth century, there were 1.5 million English colonists and ninety thousand French on the North American continent. The French and English clashed around Ohio and engaged in major warfare in 1760, which had huge ramifications on their empires. Despite the large number of English colonists, the British poured regular land soldiers into the land war while also fighting a tough naval battle. The war spread to Europe and became known as the Seven Years’ War, in which Prussia sided with Britain, and Austria sided with the French. Britain took the French Caribbean possessions of St Lucia, Grenada, and Tobago, as well as its possessions in Africa and India. The British won the war after spending more than $82 million, which it got from its sugar colonies and African gold (the North American colonies were yet to yield a profit). The British returned the captured French and Spanish islands in the Treaty of Paris, which heralded the beginning of the end of the French empire in North America. Spain gave up its underdeveloped Florida colony in return for Cuba and the Philippines colonies seized by the British, but Spain received Louisiana in another deal.
In the eighteenth century, the Iberians had lost their supreme position in the world, but Spain wasn’t a completely spent force. The Spanish held on to their silver-mining South American colonies and Cuba, where they slowly introduced sugar and discovered gold in Havana. In 1701, the Spanish gave the French a contract to supply them with four thousand slaves a year, but the French couldn’t fulfill this agreement because of their needs in Haiti and other colonies. The contract was re-awarded to the British. With the largest South American colony, the Portuguese were still the largest importers of slaves, but British merchants had taken over much of their importation volume. The Portuguese colonists were too weak to take advantage of their colonies due to their small merchant fleet and because of Brazil’s location, which made it attractive to foreign interlopers on the African trade route. The British took control of the Brazilian economy by providing credit and supplying manufactured goods and slaves from British ships that also transported Brazilian exports. The Dutch dissemination of Brazilian sugar technology to British and French islands in the mid-1600s hurt the Brazilian local production as the returns on capital shrunk due to the stiff competition. Gold was found in 1693 and diamonds in 1728 in the south, which directed London’s capital and profits away from the northeastern Sugar Coast of Bahia. It has been estimated that Brazil produced more than thirty million ounces of gold and three million carats of diamonds during the 1700s. Most were sold in the London markets. The administrative capital was moved from Bahia’s Sao Salvador to Rio de Janeiro, which had been the gateway into the interior for the earlier Indian slave trade and trade in metals. For a short while, Sao Paulo, General Mines, and other southern regions grew rapidly and drew financial and labor resources from Bahia, but the easy gold dried up, and further exploitation required more intensive mining. The Seven Years’ War that disrupted sugar production in the French and British Caribbean islands enabled Brazil to again grab a foothold in the sugar market. Tobacco also gained popularity as an export crop. Cotton was introduced around 1760, and Brazil was the world’s leading exporter until cheaper US production took over, supplying the large British cotton industry geared towards western African markets.
The Afro-Brazilian slaves behind these economic successes were subjected to harsh regimes. They were slightly less harsh than the English and French regimes, because slaves had a better chance of buying their freedom. Many Portuguese men had the habit of sleeping with their slaves, which resulted in a huge mulatto class that ‘wished itself white’ and tried unsuccessfully to bridge the gap. Many components of the Yoruba society remained intact among the slaves, despite attempts to whiten it. Yoruba food like akara and pepper-spiced foods and Yoruba music survived. Yoruba religions survived. This also occurred with the incursion of Islam in West Africa, and eventually the Catholic Church agreed to a form of mixing, whereby Yoruba gods were given the names of Catholic saints. The name of the Afro-Brazilian religion was Candomble, Macumba, or Santuario; Shango, Yemanja, and Ogun featured prominently. Apart from the South American jungles that helped Yorubas to hide in Quilombos and continue practicing their religion, one reason why Yoruba religions lasted was probably because the Iberian home governments frowned upon ‘enlightenment’ and universities. In the US, enlightenment eventually reduced the importance of religion, the very thing that the Catholics feared would happen. The British might have wished that they had kept a lid on the ‘enlightenment’ movement in their North American colonies, especially after the enlightened classes of merchants and intellectuals based in England wrested power from the monarchy. After the war with the French and the extension of British North American territories (that had an unfavorable balance of payments for fifty years before the war), British administrative costs multiplied fivefold. They also worsened by the overextension of the British Empire across the world. Like most previous empires at their peak, overextension was its downfall, because taxes and tariffs were increased to cover costs. The Sugar Act of 1764, the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Acts of 1767, and the Tea Act resulted in protests in America that grew to resistance and then ‘revolution’. The enlightened Americans claimed ‘no taxation without representation’ in the Parliament. George Washington, a Southern plantation owner with three hundred slaves
and one of the richest Americans, became one of the most prominent revolutionaries. The enlightened classes of lawyers, merchants, and academicians revolted against Britain, and because the taxes brought hardships on everyone, the lower classes rioted against both the British colonists and the American upper classes. Incorrectly gauging the mood in America, the British remained obstinate until they realized that their traditional enemies were taking advantage of the situation in the colonies. By the time they realized this in 1776, it was too late. The French, and to a lesser extent enfeebled Spain, backed the United States with arms and future trade treaties. Still bitter over the defeat of the 1760 Seven Years’ War, the French attacked Britain in other parts of the world to dissipate British military power in 1778, while the Spanish attacked in 1779. Both sides used Africans in the American Independence War, and Britain freed the slaves of occupied areas in the effort to destabilize the white Americans. Some of the freed African slaves joined and died in the fighting, while others left after the war, going to Canada, England, and the new country of Sierra Leone in British West Africa. George Washington fought hard to prevent many from leaving and reenslaved them. As Britain faced defeats across the world and its debt doubled, it was forced to come to the table in the 1782 Treaty of Paris, when it agreed to American independence. The newly independent American nation was a poor and weak confederacy of thirteen East Coast colonies. The Spanish still held land from Florida to the Mississippi, and the French held all land to the west of the Mississippi. The economic troubles of the colonies were blamed on the weak, central government and were corrected by the Congress of Philadelphia, with a constitution prompted by Alexander Hamilton (who had written the 1784 constitution of the first US bank, The Bank of New York). Divisions from the onset along ‘Federalist’ and ‘Democrat’ lines beset the resulting union of states, headed by President Washington in 1789. The Federalists, mostly from the Northeast, wanted an industrially oriented state, while the Southern Democrats wanted to keep the agricultural status quo. The
members of the Enlightenment, who had shouted about the virtues of freedom, failed to give freedom to African Americans by inserting a clause that made it illegal for Congress to outlaw slavery for twenty years, with a review slated for 1808. Thomas Jefferson obviously didn’t believe his famous words, enshrined in the 1776 Declaration of Independence, when he wrote, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’. A Southern plantation owner with more than two hundred slaves, Jefferson later ‘stated his suspicions’ that black Africans were ‘inferior to whites in the endowments of body and mind’.* Northerners wanted the slaves to be counted when determining each state’s share of direct federal taxes, but Southerners wanted them excluded from the count for taxes but not from the count for determining their state’s representation in the House of Representatives—even though they had no intention of allowing slaves to vote. In what was known as the Three-Fifths Compromise, it was agreed to regard the full-bodied Yoruba, Igbo, Kongos, and Akan as three-fifths of a person! Alexander Hamilton, a white, West Indian immigrant who married into a wealthy and influential New York family, was the father of big business and banking in the United States. The New York lawyer, who wrote the Bank of New York’s constitution in 1784, became the first secretary of the treasury, and he called the US Constitution Convention in 1786. He single-handedly brought New York into the Union. He set the financial tone of the new nation by creating the first central bank, the Bank of the United States, in 1791. There was serious opposition from Southern, Jeffersonian Republican Democrats, who accused him of paying off the financial interests of the rich Northeast and Britain. Hamilton, who also owned slaves, was a realist who stated flatly of blacks, ‘Their natural faculties are as good as ours’.* If he and his Federalist camp appeared to be pro-black with the freeing of slaves in Northeastern states after independence, it was because of a ‘higher vision’ of a worldwide industrial society, one where nearly everyone was
indirectly enslaved to big, moneyed interests. The international merchant class set up the London Stock Exchange in 1773, and US merchants desperately wanted to set up the necessary economic environment with a central but not necessarily democratic government that could enforce the interests of the business community. * John A Garraty, The American Nation: A History of the United States to 1877, vol. 1, 6th ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 173.
The United States became the first major European political system to claim the separation of church and state, and it couldn’t resort to religion to cover inconsistencies in the system (as was the custom with Rome, the European monarchies, and the Islamic caliphates). The United States resorted to boldfaced, English semantics as the merchants continued to dominate on the benches. The third arm of government, the judiciary, which was supposed to be the balance and conscience of the country, was taken over by merchant bankers (benchers) and became their most effective tool. Even the symbolic name, where the judges presided, was called ‘the bench’. The judiciary was ready to enforce contracts made by the public but dodged the societal responsibility of the business class as property became paramount while people and the environment came in a poor second. The judiciary was not geared towards truth and justice but towards an adversarial advocatory system that merely played a ‘game of law’, whereby defense and prosecution teams battled within a framework towards gaining a legal victory and not the victory of truth. Money and power employed the best legal teams, as the Enlighted got paid, beneath the blindfolded Lady Justice, while commoners remained deprived. Judges were to be chosen not by their peers like the bar association but by political parties through the executive branch. Therefore, judges were partisan and their party’s legal representatives on the most important bench of all. When the Federalists lost power, it was the judiciary, under Chief Justice John Marshall, that blessed the business community with the contract laws* and centralized power, which worked to their ultimate advantage.
On the other hand, Jeffersonian, Southern Republican Democrats proclaimed to stand for freedom from a tyrannical, overcentralized government and big business while they oppressed and exploited Africans. The judiciary made some devastatingly negative judgments that further entrenched slavery and racial prejudice. * Feb.1819 Sturges v. Crowinshield; Dartmouth College v. Woodward; McCulloch v. Maryland.
Hamilton’s Federalists of the Northeastern financial powerhouses, who claimed to stand for business, capitalism, and free trade, put up tariffs and blocked competition from abroad while using discriminatory credit practices at home to promote Anglo-Saxon monopolies. Although the Federalists’ Northeastern regions abolished slavery following the 1776 Declaration of Independence (Vermont in 1777, Pennsylvania in 1780, Massachusetts in 1783, and Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784), the laws didn’t extend to the slaves in the Southern plantations, nor did they assuage the plight of the Northeastern African, whose labor was used for next to nothing in the shipping docks of New York. To the Anglo-Saxon American, the new system was democracy, but to Africans, it was a demonstration of craze. Dem all crazy! Religion was not the ancient Eurasian problem behind politics, but the depraved craze for money and control was disguised by religion— from Jesus chasing merchants from the temple to the merchandised pope apportioning America to special interests, resulting in Protestantism. The veil of religion was discarded for the full effect of money. The US democratic system could not stop the unfair influence of big money special interests in politics and the judiciary, and the masses couldn’t appeal to God anymore when in need of healthcare, education, and access to the legal system that had been priced out of their reach. The British monetary establishment was able to recover lost ground in business through the Federalists, while Republican Democrats supported the dodgy French revolutionaries like themselves. The Seven Years’ war, indirectly leading to the loss of British North American colonies, had an even worse effect in France as the financial
weight of the loss became overburdening. The French masses could not understand the intricate dynamics of losing the French empire in America, which had provided them with undeserved prosperity but was drying up. The poor saw that the rich were still relatively rich and accused them of corruption. Their anger was encouraged by the middle-class members of the Enlightenment who no longer believed in the monarch’s divine authority to rule. In 1789, a revolution broke out in France that led to the 1793 beheading of King Louis XVI, who had sided with the Americans in their war of independence from Britain. Thomas Jefferson, the American political theorist and constitution writer, was constantly briefed on the evolving situation, and he advised the revolutionaries throughout the Revolution. In the division and confusion that ensued, Napoleon, a soldier, took over government and formed a republic in 1799. Fearful of the revolutionary Republican ideals spreading to England and Spain, their monarchies waged war against France. Napoleon intended to reestablish French ascendancy by using Haiti and Louisiana to conquer the North American continent, but the French colony of Haiti was not the springboard that Napoleon had hoped for. As the French revolted against their monarchy, their most important colony in the West Indies, Haiti, was consumed by an African revolt in 1791. The horrendous conditions in Haiti led to a bloody revolution, provoked by whites discussing their quest for freedom in the ongoing French Revolution in front of supposedly dumb Africans. Vociferous French abolitionists groups like Amis des Noirs helped to provoke thought on both sides. The Yoruba, called Nago, in Haiti retained their African culture due to the harshness of their French masters, which prevented any integration. Moreover, at least 70 percent of the slaves, at the time of the revolution, were first- or second-generation Africans who still spoke their language and related, on the cultural level, with each other behind the planters’ backs. Despite bans, they continued their dances and the religion that they called voodoo (a spelling variant of the Yoruba juju). Around 1750 an Ifa/voodoo priest, Francois Mackandral, was to inspire a revolt and the use of poisons to kill the slave owners. This spread fear among the Haitian plantation owners, who sought him out and eventually killed him.
However, his actions inspired a network of Ifa practitioners and the belief that Africans could gain freedom through positive action and revolt based on their African traditions. The knowledge of African traditional medicine enabled them and others across the Americas to use poisons as a weapon and for suicide. Poison and escapes became prevalent as the brutality of the French increased— mutilation by cutting off limbs, ears, and genitals as well as having hot wax or boiling sugar poured over their heads, or tying them around a cart wheel that was then turned until the slave’s spine was broken. These barbaric treatments were backed by a series of laws called Code Noir (the Black Code), which used examples from the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. The French pushed the island to the limit in the pursuit of sugar profits by cramming the island with Africans in one of the most murderous regimes in history. Three hundred and seventeen thousand slaves were killed between 1779 and 1788. On August 14, 1791, a seven-day Ogun ceremony led by voodoo priest Boukman Dutty triggered the Haitian Revolution. The spiritual ceremony took place at Bwa Kayiman (Alligator Woods) where 200 Ifa priests from the North came together to discuss plans for the only successful slave rebellion during the chattel slavery period. The 1791 slave revolt in Haiti, with one hundred thousand rebel Africans, resulted in the destruction of two hundred and twenty sugar plantations, six hundred coffee plantations, and two hundred cotton and indigo plantations. Francois Dominique Toussaint, allegedly with US backing, took over the revolt and organized it into a movement with a formidable force that defeated the British, French, and other Europeans, who were horrified by the prospect of an independent African state in the Americas. Fifty thousand French soldiers, and probably one hundred thousand African freedom fighters, died in the horrendous struggles, which were worsened by the mulattos switching sides. Toussaint did not push for complete independence but better treatment for Africans as a colony. Even after Toussaint made the mistake of seeking a compromise with the French, which led to his arrest and deportation, the strength of the African
movement secured independence in 1804 and left French North American ambitions in tatters. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, an African-born slave, became the king of Saint Domingue, renamed Haiti, which had its own constitution. Haiti (Ayiti) means ‘unbeatable/un-turn-able’ in Yoruba. Like the French duplicity that had led to the death of tens of thousands of Africans, the Haitians conned the whites into relaxing before massacring most of them in revenge. News of the Haitian Revolution sparked the 1795–1796 Second Maroon War in Jamaica, the 1798 Slave Revolts in conjunction with Bush Negro Maroons in Surinam (Dutch Guyana), the 1795–1797 Fedon rebellion in Grenada, the 1795–1796 Second Black Carib War in St Vincent, and others on practically every island in the West Indies. The law of natural justice, Shango and Ogun’s double-edged sword, brought about by Haitian independence, was carried across the Atlantic Ocean, where the ramifications of the Haitian defeat turned Europe into a bloodbath. Napoleon had to come up with something else to keep French dominance afloat. The aftermath of the Haitian Ogun Revolution led to the end of direct Spanish rule in South America and the eventual liberation of the small African populations in Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, and other South American colonies. Napoleon’s war in Europe eventually led to treaties that crystalized the global concept of the ‘nationstate’ and the scramble for Africa to put Africans in colonial straitjackets.
Chapter 9: From Land of Love to Land of Wickedness Yorubaland burns with Muslim jihads in the north and Christian attacks on the Slave Coast: Africa bleeds to America (1800s) The slave trade figures mentioned earlier are those that most academicians quote. They were derived from Cutin’s 1969 seminal study of the number of slaves who landed in the Americas, a number greatly underestimated at fewer than ten million. The lack of better statistics is partly due to the erasure of records, like Brazil’s Rui Barbosa’s 1891 Decree 29, which destroyed all slave records. Lovejoy updated the Cutin figures in his 1983 book to twelve million, but the figures still remain largely underestimated. The available records of ‘landed numbers’ are also incomplete because of tax evasion and smugglers in unfriendly foreign ports, such as Dutch smugglers in the small ports of British or French colonies. Some Afrocentric estimates have estimated the loss at fifty to hundred million people. I haven’t made a guess because it would be purely academic, but I believe the numbers lost in real time is the difference of the present populations of India or China to Nigeria and its immediate surrounding nations—several hundred million. Nigeria/West Africa should be the most populous region in the world. Nevertheless, the mainstream Cutin/Lovejoy figures are useful for the longterm economic dynamics of the trade, because they authenticate the socioeconomic history of the blackworld. According to Lovejoy, the years of the Atlantic slave trade from 1450 to 1600 involved only 367,000 slaves, and most went to Latin America. In the 1600s, the figure for the whole Atlantic slave trade rose to 1,868,000. The figure rose astronomically in 1700s to 6,133,000, more than 300 percent growth—a 4.3 million increase!* The 3,330,000 figure for the 1800s is lower due to the 1820s ban on the slave trade, which increased underreporting and smuggling before the trade died out in the late 1800s. * Isichei, A History of African Societies to 1870, 329.
AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE MAP
All figures exclude the extra millions killed at the point of capture, especially the slavery-induced wars in Yoruba and Kikongo lands and the millions who died aboard the slave ships. A good 25 percent of those who landed in the Americas died within a year. The supply of slaves gradually moved from the less populated savannahs of Senegambia and Angola into the population centers of forest West Africa. The western edge of the slaving zone in West Africa —around the Senegambia Muslim savannah—became sparse by 1700, because the nonMuslims moved farther into the forest. Next on the coast were Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast, which were lightly populated by Mande and Akan, who had recently moved south. The Gold Coast forests witnessed an influx of former savannadwelling Akan,
whose population couldn’t clear the forests and mine the gold and had to raid Yoruba and Aja land to the east for slaves. Their northern savannah neighbors, the Muslim Mossi states, were too small and militant for any sizable flow of slaves. The Denkyira, and especially the Akwamu polity that first usurped the original Aja/Yoruba speakers from the Volta area, were themselves attacked by the main body of Akans to the north, the Ashantes. The Akwamu resettled farther east, complicating the greatly militarized area since the advent of the European. The first head of the Ashanti was Osei Tutu, who reigned from 1695 to 1717, and the state was also modeled on the replaced Akwamu state institutions, copied from the original Aja/Yoruba around Accra. The Ashante state started not with war but with an alliance between a few small, Akan polities that took the king of Kumasi as their supreme head: Ashantehene. The Akan had had an ancient, small kingdom around Kumasi for more than a millennium, on the Volta River trade route to Jenne on the Niger, and they were displeased by the southern Denyira and Akwamu hegemony over the gold trade and their northern raids for slaves. The need for more slaves saw the rise of militant kingdoms springing up much farther inland where the ancient population centers accumulated around the Sahara trade routes. By 1750, the Ashanti expanded to cover much of modern Ghana and parts of Ivory Coast and Togo by selling war captives and gold to Europeans. The Ashantis were supported by the Dutch, while the British armed their southern cousins, the Fante. The Fante spoke the same language as the Akan (Twi) but were closer to the coast and more militarized. The Fante didn’t have a kingdom and were small polities without a king but with a military commander with the title, Braffo. The slave trade dynamics on the Gold Coast were more evident in the Slave Coast, the Aja peoples of western Yorubaland. Aja in Yoruba means ‘fighters’ or ‘we fought’ and is a collective name for the people on the stretch of a few hundred miles on the immediate western outskirts of Yorubaland from Benin to Togo.
The Dahomey empire of the Fon people, a subgroup of the Aja, was the most disruptive in the region. Fon means ‘disperse’ or ‘scatter’ in Yoruba, and the people of the region scattered because of the anarchy and upheaval they brought about. The Dahomey kingdom was founded in 1625 by one of the warring Allada princes, and it was initially a northern tributary of the Allada kingdom, which itself was a tributary of Oyo and Ketu. Allada means ‘sword-wielder/owner’ in Yoruba—those who wield the power of the sword. Like the second Horsemen of the Roman Catholics and Islamists, however their motivating philosophy was based not on religion, but on tribalism. Dahomey rose from the northern Allada territory and was more geared towards war with an early adoption of European guns. It took over Allada in 1724, and in 1727 took over the coastal polity, Whydah, which broke off from Allada in 1671. The Dahomey empire spread farther inland into Yorubaland in response to the demand, especially from the 1720s onward. Anarchy and war increased exponentially by the late 1700s, when nearly half a million guns were dumped in West Africa annually, even though many were faulty and exploded on use. The Portuguese on the ground were known as Aguda in Yoruba. The king of Dahomey coordinated the slave raiding and transport of captives, who were loaded onto British, French, and American ships filled with guns, fake cowries, and fake Indian cotton. The Dahomey king gave his soldiers one pound for every ‘prisoner of war’ brought back alive, while he sold them to the Portuguese for fifteen pounds, which made many small, European startups cut out the king’s middlemen. This could be done by making flash guerrilla incursions up the Ogun and Osun rivers, known as the Egbado corridor, which cut deep into western Yorubaland from the Atlantic lagoons. The Yoruba Ijebu coastal kingdoms became early casualties with the advent of Europeans. With the rise of inland Dahomey, a recently reinstated Oyo court around the same latitude to the east had to contend with increasing slave raids into its territory. There was constant war between Oyo and Dahomey, with Oyo having the upper hand until Dahomey eventually defeated an Oyo, weakened by jihadists, in 1823. The Oyo government had become increasingly militarized, following its expulsion by the Nupe to Igboho, to the west near the militarized Aja kingdoms. On returning to Oyo-
Ile, they extended into the vacuum left by the Ijebu to its south, with the help of Egbados that migrated towards the coast. The Egbados created a slave corridor through which Oyo conveyed Muslims and other prisoners of war that attacked from the north and west. Oyo also raided central and eastern Yoruba for slaves. The vast majority of Yoruba in the forests were against Oyo’s new dependence on the slave trade, as shown by their local ‘kings’, but the constitutional monarchy system failed in their savannah empire. As the ancient system was abused, regional upheavals resulted in leaders who were more repressive. Because laws were explained through religion, offenders were sacrificed to the gods who traditionally took only fruit and animal sacrifices. The majority of human sacrifices in Yorubaland were made to Ogun, where the accused were beheaded on Ogun’s shrine. This practice spread from dealing with traitors and usurpers to being used to settle personal and political scores. The Oyo Mesi (Oyo’s voice) was the upper legislative branch of the Oyo government, while the Ogboni was the lower branch. The Oyo Mesi had the power to overrule the king, the Alaafin, and even order his suicide. The leader of the Oyo Mesi, the bashorun (meaning ‘heaven assistant’) was the chief of the armed forces, because members of the Oyo Mesi, and not the king, raised the army from their constituents. The Bashorun had to commit suicide when the king died as a means of keeping the balance of power, but the tradition was disregarded when the Bashorun faced defeat from smaller clans that had been subservient for millennia. In the 1700s, when military considerations clashed with moral interests, the Bashorun increasingly wrestled for the upper hand. In addition to the European terrorism from the Atlantic coast, there were major problems from the north through the Nupe and Borgu kingdoms, which the Oyo constantly tried to keep at bay. Bashorun Gaa usurped power for twenty years and ushered in a freefor-all type of slavery as millions of Yoruba were killed and enslaved in Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, and the United States. Bashorun Gaa was overthrown by Alaafin Abiodun in 1774, with the help of the Oyo Mesi and other provincial leaders, but Oyo was fatally damaged. In
1783, Oyo was defeated by the northern savannah Muslim kingdoms of Borgu and Nupe, to Oyo’s immediate north, and it was defeated again in 1790. Alaafin Awole was overthrown by one of his provincial rulers, Bashorun Afonja, the ruler of Ilorin. Afonja hoped for the Alaafin throne but was refused by the Oyo Mesi and ceded the Ilorin province from the Oyo empire. Farther south, the Egba Yoruba revolted against the Oyo hegemony under the leadership of Lisabi, the Liberator, and moved further south to present day, Abeokuta in 1830s. Afonja of Ilorin revolted with the help of Muslims, who had increased in number in his northwestern Yoruba province bordering the northern Muslim states. The Fulani cleric, Alimi, who helped Afonja mobilize Muslim rebels against Oyo, led a jihad against Afonja a few years later. Afonja, a nonMuslim, could not control the Muslim residents and slaves from wars with Borgu and Nupe, and the jihad led to his death in 1823–1824. Ilorin became the first and only Muslim emirate in Yorubaland. The Muslims had been busy with piracy against ships bound for America and jihads across the arid western Sudan. Having the Europeans divert trade from them made the Muslims diversify into other products and intensify their slaving operations, but this was not enough to stop widespread discontentment when the frequent famines hit the arid areas. There was also an influx of light-skinned AfroAsians, Fulani, from Senegambia and the Maghreb, which had been overrun by Europeans. The Fulani, labeled ‘white men of the desert’ due to their imperialism over wide distances of the desert and their olive complexion and aquiline features, came as beggars and were known as torodbe (‘those who beg for alms’). Toronkawa in Hausa appears to be derived from the Yoruba phrases toro debe and toro nkan wa.* The nomadic Fulani from the far West Africa corner of Senegambia, who doubled as clerics, and other light-skinned Afro-Asians, incited the masses of the dark-skinned savannah Africans. The locals were forcibly converted centuries earlier but again revolted against their leaders when new jihadists, trying to control the European west coast trade, made a major push towards the sea.
The western Sudan empires in Senegambia and northern Nigeria were already Muslim, but the Fulani and their taliban (students/disciples) accused the elite of paganism and corruption to incite social upheaval that led to the overthrow of the dark-skinned Hausa rulers for the lighter-skinned Fulani. The notable exception was Bornu Empire near Lake Chad, where Al-Kanemi pled, ‘No age and country was free from its share of heresy and sin,51 and it was sin rather than unbelief’. The leader of the northern Nigerian Sokoto jihad, Usman Dan Fodio (1754– 1817), condemned ‘a group of talaba (students) who accuse ordinary Muslims of unbelief’ in his later writings, although he was guilty of the same crime. They used the Sufi as a tool of mass mobilization, making the darkskinned Hausa and Mande feel a sense of belonging, only to realize that the Fulani had an ethnically exclusive club at the top, like the Sanhaja Berbers of the Almoravid empire where they originated. * Isichei, A History of African Societies to 1870, 296. 51 Hodgkin, Nigerian Perspectives, 263. Isichei, A History of African Societies to 1870, 297.
The jihads started in Senegambia in the far west corner of West Africa, because the arid region depended on the lost trade more than anywhere else and was closer to Maghreb. African Muslim governments fell like a pack of cards eastward until the biggest jihad occurred in Hausaland, in northern Nigeria. It was the biggest by virtue of the population and closeness to the African population center of Lower Niger. The last, big African Muslim empire in the western Sudan was Bornu in northeast Nigeria, and the jihad there was stemmed by Shehu Al-Kanemi, even though Bornu eventually split up, losing Bauchi. The Hausaland Fulani jihad resulted in a vast conglomerate of states that extended over fourteen hundred kilometers of arid land from east to west and seven hundred kilometers from north to south, thus earning the Fulani the title of ‘the white man of the desert’. The jihad started in the desert edge Hausa kingdom of Gobir, which at the time was buoyant but affected by ecological and political factors in other parts of the western Sudan and Maghreb. This resulted in an influx of begging Fulani, who turned their jealousies and feelings of alienation into pious religious accusations of corruption and syncretism against their hosts.
Fodio, the leader of the Sokoto jihad, was backed by close relatives like his brother, Abdullahi, and his second son, Mohammed Bello. Fodio lived at Degel, a rural Fulani settlement on the borders of Gobir, and he overthrew the Hausa kingdoms of Gobir, Kano, Katsina, Zazzau, and Daura. Most of the Hausa kings fought bravely, exemplified by Katsina, where five successive kings died fighting the jihadists, but they all fell by 1810. In the Middle Belt of wooded grasslands, from whence many nations migrated into East, Central, and South Africa, new Muslim caliphates like Adamawa and Bauchi were formed. All the widely spread and sparsely populated grassland states were ruled by relations of Fodio. They became fairly autonomous client-states of the Sokoto caliphate, whose court was based in Sokoto City in the arid northwest corner of Nigeria. Despite the wide area of influence, their population and resources were still dwarfed by those of the Lower Niger rainforest lands. The Islamic expansion moved south by taking over Nupe and, through Afonja’s blunder, Ilorin, the Yoruba northern province. OyoIle, the Oyo empire capital, was razed in 1820 by Muslims living within the city while Oyo was at war with the Muslim north. The Alaafin of Oyo never bothered rebuilding Oyo-Ile and relocated the court to the safety of the forest at the new Oyo. Rebuilding was impractical, with Yorubaland straining under the weight of the aggressive Muslims from the north and Christian slavery in the south. Millions more were transported to the increasingly profitable cotton fields of the southern United States and the productive sugar fields of Cuba and Brazil. Eastern Yorubaland, from Ekiti through Akoko to the Edo kingdoms and Niger River, was not spared from the upheaval that swept the region. The Bini tried to maintain their ban on the export of slaves from the kingdom, but the geopolitical mechanisms were beyond what any single leader or nation could control, as seen from the political upheavals in Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere in Africa. It is commendable that the ban on slaves lasted from the early 1500s to the 1600s. Eventually, there was a foreign-inspired civil war, at the end of which Oba Akensua won and reintroduced slave trading. This did not increase the levels of slave raiding astronomically, because the Edo kingdom was not directly
located on the coast, and small, coastal polities like those of the Urhobo and Itsekiri allowed the shipping of slaves from their ports anyway. Many ports existed on the complex waterways of the Niger delta, which had on its west the Yoruba’s close cousins, the Urhobo and Itsekiri. The Ijaw, the close cousins to the Edo and Igbos, were on the central and eastern delta. Farther east were the Efik in Calabar and the Duala in the Cameroon estuary, who were also close cousins to the Igbo. Many of the ports had existed since antiquity for buying yams, camwood, and other foods of the interior while supplying salt, fish, and other sea products to the Igbo. Brass, Bonny, and Elim Kalabari became significant riverine states before the advent of the Atlantic slave trade. With the coming of the Europeans, trade was disrupted, and the riverine people increasingly kidnapped and sold Igbos. Canoe houses and states with philosophies like those of the Fante sprang up in the creeks of the Niger delta. To the east of the Niger delta, the Cross River flowed through the eastern Igbo heartland to the Atlantic Ocean. The Ibibio lived between the eastern Igbo and the ocean, and they shared the Arochukwu Oracle with the Igbo and Ijaw. The Oracle was supposed to be used by impartial judges to settle disputes, especially land disputes; therefore, riverine Ibibio and Aro without any land interests were chosen as judges. The Aro were the only Igbo that didn’t farm and were full-time merchants. The system was designed to fulfill the role of a centralized state by settling communal disputes and preventing civil war, because the Igbo village groups had remained autonomous due to the fear of a centralised authority’s tendency to tyranny and corruption. With the destruction of the river economy, the Arochukwu Oracle was corrupted and used according to the deceitful tenets of Olokun/Second Horsemen era that used religion and other dogma for economic exploitation. Its practitioners started issuing stern sentences like banishment or death, which were deceptively converted to slavery. Because the Oracle was mainly consulted in disputes between villages to avoid war, sometimes there were mass sentences that resulted in a large number of slaves on ships. The Aro formed nearly a hundred villages, many of which were founded by ex-Igbo slaves, who repeated the Olokun/Second Horsemen cycle exhibited by the Ijaw Canoe houses, or small states based on the kidnapping and slavery of the
interior Igbo. Many Igbos were to become Ijaws. In West Central Africa, despotic kings put in place by the Europeans turned on their peoples with draconian religious laws when it became difficult to find other villages and groups to enslave. With the destruction of the Kongo kingdom by the Portuguese and their African mercenaries in 1665, the Loango coast was the next important trade post on the West Central African coast from 1670 onward. Unlike those of the Slave Coast and Niger delta, the Bobangi slave traders were inland fishermen on the complex waterways of the Congo basin. The fluency and prevalence of their canoe trade brought about a major trade language called Lingala, which most people in modern-day Congo (Zaire) now speak. Farther south, the Portuguese colony in Angola was in an arid, sparsely populated area, unlike their foothold in Dahomey or Lagos, and although the Angola area withstood the initial assault of the 1500s, by the late 1600s, it was almost totally depopulated. Many people had been shipped to Brazil and Latin America, while the rest of the naturally migratory pastoralists fled into the interior. A few continued to be taken from the wooded grasslands in the southern Congo basin. Benguela was settled to the south of Luanda in 1615 by the Portuguese and Afro-Portuguese who were avoiding Portuguese taxation in Luanda. They succeeded in creating new ethnic groups as they married the Ovimbundus. The Portuguese dug deep into the center of Africa for slaves, but the population was not dense enough to fulfill the needs of the 1700s and early 1800s. The ecology of the area couldn’t permit a large western Bantu population, which had settled in the area in large numbers due to the introduction of the cassava food crop from the Americas. The majority of those people, who had previously migrated through the Congo basin into southwest Africa, were pastoralists belonging to the southern Bantu complex. With the upheavals on the western coast, they continued to move into the Zambezi River basin in East Central and South Africa. The Shona, in the Middle Zambezi, developed new kingdoms despite the debilitating presence of the Portuguese until
trouble erupted in the South Africa land terminal. In South Africa, the Dutch bought a few slaves from the West African Coast to augment the labor shortage as the San died or fled their oppression. It wasn’t feasible to enslave individual black Africans from Nguniland or the high velds, because they could easily escape like the American Indians. The Boers/Afrikaners drifted away from the main body of Dutch development as they copied and adapted to the African environment. There was no major advancement to the level of technology found in the region with the exception of guns. Because the Dutch didn’t develop colonies of settlement, they didn’t create universities or railroads that could use the surplus created to advance relevant technologies that would benefit everyone in the future, as was done in America.
Chapter 10: Cotton Is King Rise of US slavery, abolitionists, and the consolidation of Anglo domination; Brazil and Cuba renew slavery efforts (1800s) Unlike the Caribbean and South American colonies, the North American colonies were yet to bring a tangible surplus in the 1780s, excepting the tobacco plantations that weren’t overwhelmingly prosperous because of increasing competition. The Latinos used the sugar plantations and mining of metals to achieve supremacy from 1450 to the 1600s. The Dutch, British, and French used the Caribbean sugar plantations, slavery, and its attendant trades to launch vast empires and accumulate capital in the 1600s and 1700s. Towards the end of the 1700s, with the power of the Western European colonists waning, a unified European-American state was the developing European nation. In 1760, the machines used in British cotton textile manufacturing were as simple as those of Africa. The opportunity to leave Africa behind in its nightmare and realize the American dream came in the late 1700s with the improvements made to cotton production and the adaptation of engines to use steam. Eli Whitney was part of the Enlightenment based in New England and a graduate of Yale University. He visited the South in 1793 and became aware of the problem of ginning cotton (separating it from its seed). Setting his mind to it in an environment where everything else was taken care of by blacks, Whitney was able to solve the ancient problem in ten days. The new ginning device enabled a slave to clean fifty times as much cotton as by hand.* This revolutionized the cotton industry, and with the steam engine, Europeans were able to usher what they called the Industrial Revolution, which still relied on the output of Africans—loads of them! In 1790, only three thousand bales of cotton were produced, and in 1793, ten thousand bales were produced. In 1795, it was seventeen thousand, and by 1801, it was one hundred thousand. The US production of cotton was directly
related to the number of slaves imported as well as the flooding of West Africa with guns. * Garraty and McCaughey, The American Nation: A History of United States to 1877, 245.
Other slight improvements from Europe were introduced, which meant that by 1825, it took 135 hours of human effort instead of the usual 50,000 hours to spin one hundred pounds of cotton. Within fifty years, running parallel to the Slave Coast conflagration, African Americans increased from 1.5 million to more than 4.5 million. This meant that the number of people imported was not three million but probably five million, because many didn’t survive the harsh regimes encountered in the Southeastern quarter, the Bible Belt/Slave Belt. Those in the Bible Belt could only pray for the help of the Enlightenment and Establishment to provide for them in every way while they used the Bible to justify African slavery and genocide. Whitney, a member of the Enlightened northeast who blessed his fellow whites with the cotton bounty, couldn’t effectively patent his simple device as farmers and dodgy manufacturers flooded the market. He was awarded a contract for ten thousand guns by the government that knew the arms trade was a key factor in the Industrial Revolution. There was nothing new in this European revolution, because it relied on ultimate force that was produced through arms. Guns were only the beginning. While assembling the guns for the government, Whitney transferred the principle of interchangeable parts to the machine used to spin cotton thread. He and others in New England were awarded contracts to wage war while using the spin-off and surplus on consumer production. The same principle exists today. A major ingredient that allowed Whitney’s idea to become a reality in the South was the key question of investment. This was also important to funding the northeast Enlightenment arms makers and their accessories (many of the arms makers also made handcuffs and leg cuffs, like Weston and Smith). The money to fund the cotton industry, and its attendant industries, was ample in supply, especially if the terms suited the Enlightenment, their European circle of monarchs, and top merchant bankers like the Barings and Rothschilds.
As noted earlier, Alex Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, was influential in the formation of the US financial system. In 1793, Hamilton formed the US Central Bank to regulate the monetary and fiscal policies of the new nation, which had a credibility problem worsened by the popular sentiment against big business. The system he created financed the cotton industry, the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon, and whatever the Industrial Revolution had coming. The anti-banking Jeffersonian Republican Democrats complained that the Bank of New York’s lending was restrictive and discriminatory. In 1799, Aaron Burr, the Republican Democratic vice president, set up the Bank of Manhattan. The return on profit was astronomical as the number of slaves imported increased. In 1812, a third bank, the City Bank of New York, was created by New York merchants and Colonel Osgood, a friend of George Washington. With the New England and New York banks in place, the shipyards pushing out ships and gun makers churning out guns, America was ready to ascend in world domination, but the old European masters were still very much around, struggling for dominance. The British still owned the biggest navy throughout the 1800s, but their loss of the United States and the increasingly disruptive slave revolts in the West Indies fueled doubt over the slavery issue. They were alarmed by the numerous failed African revolutions and the bloody success in Haiti. In their main West Indian colony, Jamaica, they fought a series of long Maroon wars. Moreover, the British were at a disadvantage against a large nation that could use slaves indefinitely and produce at lower prices than they could compete against. Voices of concern were raised in London. The Gentleman’s Magazine claimed, in 1764, that there were twenty thousand blacks in London alone. This was before the large number of blacks who fought for the British Loyalist army in the United States followed it back to the English shores. One of the most important voices was that of Olaudah Equiano. He was brought to England in 1757 at age twelve as a slave from the Niger delta area, and he later bought his freedom from Montserrat Island in the West Indies to
return to England as a free man. He highlighted the fate of the 132 slaves thrown alive into the sea from the Liverpool slave ship, Zong, and he prompted a public will to enact a law regulating the slave trade in 1788. He wrote letters to the press, addressed meetings, and coordinated the work of black militants within other components of the abolition movement. His most influential contribution to the abolitionist cause was the 1789 publication of his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. It captivated audiences with its stark details of how he was kidnapped from his family compound as a boy and his suffering ever since. Ottobah Cugoano, a slave brought by his master to England and later freed, was another influential abolitionist voice. Working closely with Olaudah Equiano and Granville Sharp in 1787, Cugoano produced his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. It was a grave indictment not only of those directly involved in the slave trade but of the society that benefited from its profits. Most importantly, he gave Europeans a ‘get out of jail free’ clause by presenting them with an alternative economic system: colonization of Africans everywhere. Instead of shipping Africans to slavery on sugar islands in the West Indies, causing revolts close to whites, a safer and more productive system was to make Africans slave on their own land in Africa, where they can be made to produce a wider range of crops and raw materials for the British. He assured them that it ‘would soon bring more revenue in a righteous way to the British nation, than ten times its share in all the profits that slavery can produce’.* Europeans must have been impressed by the economic argument, judging from the reaction and subsequent growth of abolitionism in Britain. ‘Why supply slaves to build economies of countries that turn around to ban Britain’s manufactured goods, leaving Britain to buy more expensive sugar from its colonies of declining productivity in a system of closed markets?’ the Enlightened classes asked. They clamored for a belated, self-serving free trade and labor. To the Enlightenment, the cry was no longer lip service to God’s principles but the very principles of free trade and democracy. At the time, little was known of the African interior, because trade forts were
limited to the African coast, and direct European slave raids never passed a fifty-mile incursion. Land exploratory expeditions were soon launched. In 1795 and 1805, Mungo Park explored the Niger, and many other explorations were to come under the auspices of the British Royal Geographic Society. * Segal, The Black Diaspora, 267.
Meanwhile, the British embarked on a policy of arming the Latin colonies against a weakened Spain, like the Spanish and French colluded to ensure that they lost possession of the United States. In 1808, at the height of hypocritical traditions, Britain banned slave trade across its empire but not slavery, and it continued financing slavery in Brazil, the United States, and Cuba. As the largest slave exporter and major world power, Britain had the power to push others towards the abolition of slavery. But, there was to be no abolition of slavery before their conspirator in the African nightmare, France, provoked the law of natural justice to wreak havoc across Europe, where the bloodthirsty dogs of war turned on each other. Napoleon’s 1803 defeat in Haiti spelt the loss of 40 percent of France’s earnings and an end to a viable sugar-coated American dream. One of Napoleon’s greatest regrets was not taking the peace offer by Toussaint to colonize. The only option he saw fit to pursue was continued aggression against the other European powers for wealth and colonies. To concentrate on winning Europe, Napoleon sold Louisiana in 1803 to the United States for ₤15 million. He took the Netherlands, but the British preempted his move by taking over the Dutch colonies of South Africa and Indonesia while the rich, Dutch Jewish merchants moved to London. Napoleon marched into Portugal, but the Portuguese monarch escaped on British warships to Brazil. Napoleon could not win the British on the high seas and was defeated in the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, but his land armies defeated and ruled continental Europe. This affected the British by cutting away supplies from the temperate world, especially wood for British shipping.
The British and French attacked and seized hundreds of merchant ships from the Americas, despite the US claim of neutrality, which made the US War Hawks clamor for war. Despite seizures on the high seas earlier during the war, US businesses multiplied nearly ten times before the British Embargo Act. The increase was mainly in New York and Boston shipbuilding, because merchants from the West Indies were changing their ships to neutral US ships before crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Napoleon played close to the United States, having sold Louisiana, which showed that he no longer had territorial ambitions in America, especially with President Thomas Jefferson, who was viewed as a pro-French revolutionary. The War Hawks believed that they could use the opportunity to evict Britain from their backyard in Canada, which produced wood for ships and wheat for the British West Indian colonies. Britain was suffering a depression due to the war of tariffs and was ready to relax them in the face of riots and deep divisions at home. The different tariffs killed business and ultimately pushed the United States to an ill-advised war against Britain (the War of 1812), unaware that the British had repealed the tariffs a few days earlier. The merchants and bankers of New England and their Federalist party were against it, but the popular anti-British/big business South moved the United States to war. The war led to the British invasion of Washington, DC, including pillaging the White House and the Bank of the United States. Giant British ships were sunk by meager US ships. They eventually settled in The Treaty of Ghent, when a more understanding business relationship began. Britain realized that it couldn’t effectively recapture the United States, and it was good economic sense to invest in it as a partner. Napoleon was defeated by Britain and Prussia in 1813 after making the fatal mistake of attacking Russia and overstretching his military capabilities. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Europeans convened the Congress of Vienna in 1814–1815 to define national borders to the advantage of the bigger powers. During the war, Britain had invaded South Africa through its Cape and permanently settled the region by agreements secured through the Congress of Vienna. This was a further encroachment on the people of Nguniland, who
were caused immense pain, resettled, and crammed into the arid South Africa plains. The Xhosa in southern Nguniland faced the brunt of the European advance for land with the first war in 1779–1781 and the last war in 1877–1878. The average Dutch believed that it was his birthright to own a six thousand-acre ranch when he married. By 1819, this led to the expulsion of the Xhosa from the region between the Fish and Keiskamma rivers in the southeast of South Africa. In northern Nguniland, land pressures were caused by those moving north from Xhosaland, those moving inland from the Natal east coast, and the Portuguese influence in Mozambique’s Delagoa Bay to the northeast. This resulted in conflicts between three northern communities—Ndwandwe, Ngwane, and Mthethwa—which resulted in the unification and dispersal of the Nguni. In 1817, the Ngwane were driven from their homeland by the Ndwandwe, which made some of them flee to what later became Swaziland. The Ndwandwe defeated the Mthethwas and their leader Dingiswayo, whom Shaka replaced. Shaka’s army defeated the Ndwandwe, some of whom fled to Mozambique, while others were unified in the first major Zulu state. Shaka created his kingdom with military innovations, using stabbing instead of throwing spears and new battle formations, which were effective against other Zulus but suicidal against European horsemen with guns. Shaka was reputed to be a ferocious warrior and ruler, and there were many stories of his excesses, which were expected in a newly formed, militaristic state with no political experience. The attacks and counterattacks resulted in mass migrations of the warrior clans, who started out with no more than a few hundred followers but snowballed into tens of thousands. Some of the Ndwandwe warriors fled into Mozambique, while others continued into Malawi and Tanzania as far as Lake Victoria. Khumalo migrants from northern Nguniland moved into Zimbabwe, where they were known as Ndebele, and they disrupted the Shona Rowzi state to form Matabeleland.
The British later defeated and annexed the whole South Africa colony, but it wasn’t initially profitable because it produced vegetables and fruits, not sugar, cotton, or coffee. Its lower population density and new political structures made it the first African colony that the British would fight for, but it didn’t warrant British attention until gold was found much later. Meanwhile, the British concentrated on the West African Coast and South America, where it funded and armed revolutionaries against the Iberians. After being overrun by Napoleon in 1808, the Portuguese King John (Joao) VI was based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His presence brought a few changes to the sociopolitical life of the colony, bringing long-lasting effects, especially for blacks. The British secured a monopoly of the Rio de Janeiro port for their efforts in spiriting away the Portuguese royal family from Napoleon’s clutches and into their warships. Due to the presence of the Portuguese court in Rio, printing presses and other modernizations were introduced. These also brought about regional jealousies, especially from the northeast sugar-growing colonies that resented the mining-oriented southern region of Brazil. Calls rose for John VI to return to Portugal when Napoleon was pushed out of Portugal in 1811, but he enjoyed sunny Brazil, declined, and wanted to rule from there. The divisions over his Brazilian presence resulted in the secession of part of the northeast, which was regained with the help of Portugal’s army. Portugal witnessed a revolt at home, which led to the introduction of a constitutional monarchy whose first law ordered John VI to return home. John VI succumbed to pressure and returned home, but his son, Peter, refused and confronted Portugal. He declared Brazilian independence in 1821, and the following month, he declared himself the emperor of Brazil, Pedro I. This resulted in skirmishes in the northeast, but the Portuguese were forced out. This was inimical to the true revolutionary forces in the country, especially the millions of Africans slaves who were without a voice. Pedro instituted a constitutional monarchy that ignored the question of freedom and civil rights for blacks, as had occurred in the United States. Unfortunately, Africans couldn’t claim to be comrades in the fight for colonial freedom like those of
the United States. Pedro’s British trading partners pressured him on the abolition issue though not too hard, because they were profiting from the trade. The effort to move away from plantation slavery by developing their country through the domestic production of imports was sabotaged by the British, who pushed the fake lines of free trade backed by arms across South America. Brazil was the only newly freed South American nation that wasn’t hugely indebted to Britain in wars of independence, because Brazil didn’t go to war. For nearly twenty years, Britain enjoyed a near monopoly of the Rio de Janeiro port until other Europeans and the Americans challenged it in the mid-1820s. The slave trade reached new heights, as the Anglo-American dream, and the African nightmare, were to take off. The abolition movement waxed stronger and prompted superficial antislavery trade laws in 1808 in Britain and the United States, but the economics and sociopolitical environment heralded a different outcome. After the War of 1812, Britain and the United States started a special mother-child relationship of mutual respect and cooperation against all others. To secure the American continents for AngloSaxons, the US government announced the advent of the Monroe Doctrine, which frowned upon renewed colonization of the newly independent nations, especially in Latin America. Espousing the doctrine of free trade was especially beneficial to Britain, which had ensnared its Latin American ex-colonies with arms debt and wanted the Americas door firmly shut on Spain and France. The USA did not have the market power in Latin America and could not defend it; Washington, DC and the White House had just been overrun by a mere raiding party a decade earlier. With the ports and markets of Latin America and Africa secured, the British and Anglo-Americans moved into a period of economic expansion, mainly through guns, cotton, and transportation. With 394,000 guns dumped on the Slave Coast annually and the Muslim wars in the northern grasslands, the ports of Bristol, Liverpool, New York, Boston, and Baltimore, backed by financers like Lloyds of London, built ships full time to transport Africans en
mass from present-day Nigeria and Ghana. The Loango-Congo area had fifty thousand guns per year, which was indicative of the population density and the number of slaves. Considering the total conflagration in Yorubaland, more than half of the slaves at the peak and end of slavery (1780–1880) were from Nigeria. Despite the Enlightenment Federalist Party falling out of favor (over its seditious siding with money-making Britain during the War of 1812), New Englanders benefited the most from the stronger geopolitical role that the United States came to play with Britain. The income from agriculture, guns, canals, railroads, and shipbuilding was astronomical, and it promoted the development of iron and other metal industries. Immediately after the War of 1812, the Northeast United States was manufacturing less than $200 million worth of goods, which increased to $1,270 million by 1859 out of the total $2 billion.* The merchants’ only misgiving was the termination of the Central Bank by Southern farming interests, who felt that it was overwhelming power in the hands of a few private investors who wanted to dictate their lives. The merchant class claimed that the bank was essential in creating a uniform financial environment beneficial to creditors. The Northeast continued to control the finances and credit of the cotton farms that sprung up to the South and West as more states were added to the Union and more whites signed up for credit agreements. In addition, they increasingly processed produce from the South in New England, where they built cotton mills that were run by rivers and later by coal-fueled steam engines. What made the British great in the 1700s was the provision of a capable naval fleet to transport slaves, link their colonies, and provide the guns used to subject Africans into a peaceful whole or warring tribes. For the new American state to fully optimize its resources in the 1800s, the existing technologies had to be adapted, because the maritime improvements of the British islanders weren’t overly helpful to a continental empire like the United States. No point in the British Isles was more than 150 miles from the sea.
After a certain point, the US agricultural economy reached a plateau due to the problem of transporting produce from the hinterland fields of the Midwest and the South to the coastal markets of New England and England. The introduction of the steam engine freed cotton factories from river locations for their power needs, and it was also used in river transportation. Starting with New York’s Erie Canal, which linked the Northeast to the Midwest, canals were built in a frenzy fueled by the booming cotton economy. It was an ineffective mode of transport for those living far from rivers. The steamboat had better advantages in foreign trade, because the technology cut travel time across the Atlantic to England and continental Europe. * Garraty and McCaughey, The American Nation: A History of United States to 1877, 379.
England provided the land transport solution in 1820 with the introduction of railroads, which, in the beginning, were a little better than a few stagecoaches strung together on wooden rails. It was an expensive task to lay track across the vast North American continent in the 1830s and 1840s. It was a challenge for the merchant banks, especially those of Europe led by the Barings and the United States, with ‘robber barons’ like J. P. Morgan dealing in railroad bonds, and local businessmen who raised finance from the rich farmers and gun makers. The government’s major revenue came from the land sales and tariffs. By 1850, more than thirty thousand miles of track had been built, extending the frontier and bolstering the economic boom in the 1840s and 1850s. By the 1840s, Anglo-Americans began to feel it was their manifest destiny to rule the whole continent, if not the whole world. As farmers and prospectors pushed the boundaries towards the Pacific Ocean, the US government bullied the new Mexico republic, which became independent in 1823. The United States invaded Mexico, fighting all the way to the capital before signing a treaty that granted it Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California. The Spanish invaded and colonized the area in the 1520s, but failed to develop the local economy to attract a significant population. The 1849 discovery of gold in California led to an influx of people who later found employment making airplanes in the early 1900s. Initially part of the agricultural South with its cotton and cattle, Texas led the South in the 1900s when large oil reserves were found that greatly increased the political and
economic importance of the Southwest. The United States threatened the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico, but Spain refused to sell, and the prospect of bringing another slaveholding polity into the Union caused uproar from the Northerners. Westward expansion created another power base in the Northwest, Illinois and Iowa, which sided with the Northeast against the South. This was possible with the advent of railroads, because the Northwest previously transported its produce down the Mississippi River through Southern territory and wouldn’t have dared to oppose them. In addition to the hostile abolition arguments that preceded their entry into the Union, the cheaper and unfair price of Southern slave labor pitted the Northwest against the South. The majority of the produce went to Britain and Europe, which were still recovering from the ravages of the Napoleonic Wars. Britain dumped cloth, at bargain prices, in the United States. This caused friction between the North, which wanted to protect local industry from foreign competition with the 1828 tariff laws, and the South, which provided the highest amount of exports and wanted to keep all markets open and the prices of imports down. Following the 1828 tariffs, the South made serious threats to secede in its 1832 Ordinance of Nullification but was threatened with force by President Jackson’s Force Bill. An attempt to secure a balance of power between the North and the South resulted in an argument over the admission of the new Western states into the Union, especially because the rich Southern slave owners, mostly Virginians, had dominated the presidency from independence. The Missouri Compromise of 1820, made when Missouri was formally admitted to the Union, stated that an equal number of slave states and free states were to be admitted. To keep the numbers equal, the northernmost state, Maine, was admitted and slavery was barred above a certain latitude. This compromise did not address the moral issue of slavery and was about the balance of power and keeping the peace, but this was possible only for a while. Meanwhile, the Abolitionists pushed for the colonization of Africans on separate lands and created the American Colonization Society in 1817. The society ‘purchased’ African land and established the Republic of Liberia (‘liberated area’) next to the British abolitionists’ effort called the Republic of
Sierra Leone (‘lion mountains’). Liberia was colonized by a few returning slaves from the Americas and a few recaptured by the antislavery trade patrol off the West Africa coast. Nevertheless, as the cotton industry boomed, the price of slaves skyrocketed, which made the most generous slave owners rethink the idea of freeing their slaves. Many of those free in the North were even kidnapped and transported to the South, where prices rose to more than $1,500 per slave. Some states like Maryland forcibly made blacks breed more children who were then sold farther ‘down the river’. Contrary to some reports, stating that the growth of Africans in the United States was due to natural increase, the majority of the slaves were ‘saltwater Negroes’ (fresh imports), due to the harsh use and conditions Africans faced in the cotton fields. There was no way that there could be a significant natural increase of slaves anywhere in the Americas due to the ‘unnatural’ abuses they suffered. The imported slaves were smuggled through the vast American borders, which had been done occasionally but the money-hungry slave traders permanently resorted to. The British patrolled the seas off the West Africa coast halfheartedly, as more slaves went past them than at any time in history, and their plan of Cugoano’s colonization was deemed unworkable. The French and Spanish resumed prominent roles as the French, without any large sugar colony after losing Haiti, sold slaves to other nations, including the United States and Brazil. The Spanish, having lost South America, concentrated on Cuba as a sugar colony. Cuba was larger than the other fifty West Indian islands combined and ten times larger than Jamaica. Between 1820, when the Spanish joined other Europeans in making duplicitous statements about abolishing the slave trade, and 1865, they imported more than five hundred thousand slaves into Cuba. In 1835, the price of a slave was four pounds in Dahomey and eightyfour pounds in Havana. The British financed Havana merchants like Pedro Forcade, who built their ships in Liverpool and New York, and dealt with the supreme enslaver on the Slave Coast, the Cuban-born mulatto Felix da Souza. Souza gave King Gezo of Dahomey the military power over Yorubaland from the 1820s to the late
1840s. The Yoruba taken to Cuba were called Lucumi, from Oluku Mi (meaning ‘my friend’) in archaic Yoruba.
Chapter 11: Slavery 201: Colonization and Sharecropping Gentler form of slavery introduced: The beginning of industrialization (1800s) Despite winning the Second Maroon War in 1795, the British continued to face costly revolts in Jamaica. In 1815, an Igbo revolt to wipe out all whites on the island was foiled, and the Igbo king and his conspirators were hanged. The greatest African revolt in the history of British West Indies started on the night of December 27, 1831 and, despite the huge navy and army committed, it took until April 1832 to find peace. This revolt made the British rush the 1833 Emancipation Act throughout the British Empire before they faced the same fate as the French in Haiti, especially in Jamaica, with a population of more than three hundred thousand blacks to thirty thousand whites. In England, an economic downturn in the 1820s and 1830s (due to bad harvests and high military and administrative costs) resulted in social upheaval and calls for parliamentary reform. Moreover, Haiti had implemented a system that gave former slaves more rights than what the White working class enjoyed in England. The working-class movement, permeated by abolitionists, included the abolition of slavery in its demands, resulting in the 1832 Reform Act. The merchant class, which gained politically from the Reform Act, did not mind doing away with the costly protectionism given to the sugar colonies. The conditions were not right for the full implementation of Cugoano’s colonization model, but the Jamaican riot pushed the British to declare the Emancipation Acts in the West Indies. The Emancipation Act of 1833 freed children immediately but also imposed a period of compulsory apprenticeship of six to eight years on all slaves with their ex-masters. They had to work for threequarters of the week without pay and could use the remaining onequarter to buy their early release. The details were left to the local colonial apparatus controlled by the planter class, especially in Jamaica. The sugar field workers, who were the majority, were to work a forty-and-a-half-hour week until August 1840. They were made to work longer and harder, and were deprived of their traditional free days.
At the end of the compulsory apprenticeship, the planters devised ways to keep the slaves in servitude with harsh labor contracts. Most of the Africans rejected the contracts and faced threats of eviction from their shacks and small provision farms. However, the threats couldn’t carry the same potency that they had in Barbados, because even at the height of the sugar boom, the majority of the Jamaican island was not touched by plantation agriculture. Also, many slave plantations had been abandoned when their owners left after the Emancipation Act. Some of the disused plantations and previously uncultivated lands were ‘illegally’ converted to subsistence agricultural plots by black squatter farmers (who were liable to face eviction when noticed). The land was cheap initially, but prices slowly rose out of the reach of Africans when labor shortages became acute and European planters had to import Asian Indians, as was done in other British colonies. Christian missionaries bought land used to create ‘free villages’ and provided European-oriented education for the Africans, because the colonial powers initially refused to acknowledge the right of education and training for blacks. The competing Christian sects attracted converts with their social services, which were used to inculcate the colonial mentality into future black leaders. The Christian ethics of work and subservience were useful; one of their underlying principles was that all people should be content with their place in society, especially Africans, who were at the bottom of the social ladder. The missionaries and British colonists frowned on the African revivalist churches that spread from black America to Africa and the West Indies. Whites complained of the loud music, dancing, and overcelebration of Christmas. The Europeans shunned the warm, colorful African spirituality brought to Christianity, which became an empty parade of symbolic rites since the split of the African churches in AD 400. In case the blacks didn’t get the Western Christian message, the colonial apparatus had laws to force them to do so. The police and militia became the foremen of colonization and were heavy handed, sometimes sadistic, in their conduct. Property and many other impossible qualification requirements kept black Jamaicans out of the ‘representative assembly’ that included whites and a few mulattos.
Sugar’s importance to the economy rapidly declined and was replaced by US investment in banana production. Jamaican peasants did not require the intensive labor and expensive machinery of the sugar business, and they became a major source for the banana export market. The spread of banana estates soon took up the land but left many people unemployed and caused a drastic drop in the percent of people employed in agriculture. Many people moved into trading and domestic services, while many more started what became the Great Jamaican dispersal. From 1850 onwards, Jamaicans migrated for employment in the construction of the Panama Canal and Costa Rica railroads as well as to plantations in Cuba and the United States. Due to the overwhelming number of blacks to whites and mulattos, mulattos didn’t have the same kind of powerful, negative influence that they had in Haiti and Brazil. Nevertheless, the mulattos exhibited the same Arab complex, which whites were apt to use as capital in their economic model that relied on White supremacy and terrorism. Barbados was initially the most productive British sugar island, but due to revolts and overused soils, it was overtaken by Jamaica in the early 1700s and was a major slave port until 1833. The nearcomplete cultivation of the island, which left no forest cover for Maroons to hide in, left no virgin areas that the slaves could cultivate after emancipation. Barbados had more than five hundred apprenticeships per square mile, each person expected to serve for six years, and a Masters and Servants Act was introduced to keep the person in place when the apprenticeship ended. The act effectively made the slaves free labor with the right to look for alternative employment at the cost of losing their accommodations, food rations, and land. They were transported in large numbers to build the Panama Canal by the United States, and due to pro-British attitudes, they became civil servants, police, and soldiers across the British Caribbean Islands. All other British possessions in the Americas, like Trinidad and St Lucia, were covered by the Emancipation Act and experienced the same problems as Jamaica and Barbados: ignorance, no compensation, poverty, and epidemics resulting from deliberate cuts in public funds due to planter influences. Christianity was the only route for most people to get out of the quagmire of
‘accounted slavery’. They used it to gain access to education, which led to strong Eurocentric influences in the long run. Guyana (Britain’s only South American land colony with its ‘troublesome’ Bush Negroes) experienced severe labor shortages after the 1833 Emancipation Act. The freed Africans set off into the large rainforest to establish their own farms alongside Bush Negroes. This led to the mass importation of Asian Indians, by the British, to help production. The influx of Indians, who later became the majority, created awkward situations in the 1900s, which set Guyana and Trinidad apart from other colonies. Africans remained the majority in all other British colonies, and although the presence of a third race increased due to labor shortages, the Indians didn’t have the effect that mulattos had in other colonies, where they counted themselves as an intermediary class in opposition to blacks. The mulattos of Haiti became the greatest adversary of the blacks after the whites were pushed out in 1803. The mulatto elite believed that they had to hold onto the white supremacy doctrine, otherwise they might lose out. Even the poorest and lowest-level mulattos and whites were content in the belief that they were better than blacks and therefore part of the middle class. A corollary to the Keynesian Law of relative income and consumption alludes to the fact that relative income (both economic and sociopolitical) is paramount in consumption patterns. The Africans taken to Haiti over the span of a hundred years before the revolution in the 1790s retained their culture, because their population increased from two thousand in 1681 to four hundred and eighty thousand, out of the 850,000 imported. At least two-thirds of them were first-generation continental Africans who still spoke or understood the language and culture and would have found it difficult to accept mulatto dominance on the basis of color. Mulattos also fought for independence, but their idea of independence and freedom was like that of the Northeast US white abolitionists: black freedom but definitely not black equality with whites or mulattos. Dessalines, a black general, became king of Haiti after Toussaint’s capture, but he was challenged by mulatto armies controlling the south that wanted to keep the mulattos socially separate from the blacks.
The northern blacks wanted to keep their peaceful African way of life, possessing the full Yoruba pantheon of gods, culture, and beliefs as they did, but the mulattos wanted to identify with the militaristic and economically advantageous culture of their European fathers. This culminated in Dessalines’ ambush and death in October 1806, three years into a reign remembered forever as that of a genuine, noteworthy African leader. He was even made an orisha and added to the pantheon of voodoo (Ifa) Yoruba saints in Haiti. Henri Christophe, one of Toussaint’s revolutionary black generals, took over control after Dessalines’s death in 1806. He was crowned in 1811 but lost control of the south to a mulatto general called Alexander Petion. The rancorous division of Haiti continued for fourteen years. The blacks in the north introduced a good educational system, organized labor in free plantation villages, and encouraged subsistence farming for those tired of plantations. Plantations were paid a quarter of the revenue, and the treasury was paid a quarter in taxes. This led to an economic revival in the local market, and exports of sugar, coffee, and indigo increased. There was a prevalent sense of equality and freedom in the north. In the south, a mulatto oligarchy ruled, and although it did well for public services like education, agriculture suffered, and exports declined compared to that of the black territory. This contravened European propaganda that ‘blacks were like kids who had to be steered by whites, otherwise the savages would fall into decay’. France and other Europeans refused to accept the north’s independence and engaged in duplicitous sabotage. They made alignments and armed mulatto dissidents while bluntly refusing any alliance with the legitimate Christophe government. Eventually, after Petion the mulatto leader died in 1818, his successor, General Jean Pierre Boyer, led the army north while Christophe recovered from a stroke. Incapacitated, the old revolutionary general refused to be overrun by the advancing army revolt and committed suicide. Boyer, backed by the French, took over the north and united Haiti before attacking the west to capture Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He handed over the island’s future to France by agreeing to pay an indemnity of 150 million francs, and he gave France a 50 percent cut on import duties charged to other foreigners.
The indemnity, paid through overtaxation, and the tariff deal prevented diversification of the economy and trade. Boyer and his mulatto clique ruled for twenty-five years and ran the country down. Public services and education were neglected, and Haiti became extremely dirty. He tried to return blacks to neoslavery through the 1826 Rural Code. Blacks fled the rural areas, and the production of sugar fell from ₤2.5 million in 1820 to a petty ₤6,000 in 1842. The only public services promoted were the police and National Guard, which employed eighty thousand of the population of eight hundred thousand. Boyer funded an expensive law-and-order outfit to keep people in check with violent oppression, especially those who accused him of a ploy to keep Africans in ignorance and poverty. Boyer turned Catholicism into the state religion and persecuted African voodoo but couldn’t eradicate it. A serious revolt rose against Boyer, and he escaped to Jamaica on a British ship in 1843. The new mulatto president, Charles Herard, pledged to be better in his public administration and treatment of the African majority but in actuality was no good. Among the few prominent black families in the south, the Salomons raised objections to the mulatto dominance and called for a revolt. Their resolve was exacerbated when the government harassed their family members. While this happened, the east of the island declared independence as the Dominican Republic. The Haitian government was too burdened to challenge this because of revolts closer to the capital in the south. Herard was overthrown by the army and replaced with an old black general, Philippe Guerrier. The real power in the regime remained with the mulattos, a policy known as la politique de doublure (the politics of the double, stand in, or understudy). This was the beginning of a policy that is still present across the blackworld; an old, African sellout is placed at the head of a Westernstyled puppet government while Europeans loot the economy.The people are kept in check with heavy-handed policing, while the government is checked by the army. If the president dares to take away from the ‘profits’ to help the plight of his poor people through public services, the merchants and the army overthrow him. If he manages to convince the army to back him, Western merchants sponsor armed revolts that defeat the revenue-
gulping army, which soon runs out of bullets. Ultimately, the Western army invades them. When Guerrier died in 1845 and the mulatto army clique put in another old black general, Louis Perrot, they made the mistake of not realizing that he was an Afrocentric nationalist who would move the capital away from the southern mulatto enclave to the north. He denounced the excessive French intervention in Haitian politics, but he was cut down within a year and replaced by another old black general. The list of generals, faked elections, revolts, and counterrevolutions was as long as the Isle of Hispaniola. In 1865, a revolt was crushed with the aid of a British warship as diverse European interests threw weapons into the arena. Lysius Salomon, the scion of a distinguished black family, came back to Haiti from exile to become president and still had a cabinet full of mulattos. He and the alliances that brought him back opened the country for exploitation and even offered to give the United States some of Haiti’s land in an effort to keep the overbearing British away. The plight of the poor exslaves worsened with the constant ravages of war, and he was toppled by a revolt in the north. In the United States, calls for abolition increased with the realization that the abolition of the slave trade didn’t restrict the practice. More authentic calls than those of the colonization societies, especially those of William Garrison of Massachusetts, made a difference. Garrison, a white Bostonian, established his own newspaper, The Liberator, and the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1831. He was uncompromising in his approach to abolition, which didn’t include colonization or compensating slave owners. The colonizationists attacked Garrison as well as many others. A few accepted his message but not always publicly. Garrison provided the platform for an ex-slave, Frederick Douglass, who had a great impact on the slavery argument. This was reminiscent of what happened in London fifty years earlier, when a white, Granville Sharp, aided Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano in the colonization argument and slave trade ban. Born a slave in 1817 in Maryland, Douglass escaped to the North in 1838,
and in 1845, he published one of the most gripping autobiographies of a slave, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which attracted attention in America and Europe. He also edited a weekly publication called The North Star. Unlike Garrison, who burnt the US Constitution publicly and refused to deal with politicians, Douglass decided to fight within the political system and became a major black leader and the most effective speaker of the movement. The black movement didn’t initially have much success, due to white economics and war-based technology. A major development for the Northeast US abolitionists was the 1852 release of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which broke sales records and informed those outside the Slave Belt of its dreary conditions. This aroused sympathy from many apolitical, non-slaving whites who had never considered the moral question of slavery. It shone a spotlight on Southern slave owners, who reacted defensively. The heated public discourse was further provoked in 1854 when Kansas petitioned to be admitted into the Union. Violence engulfed the state as proslavery and anti-slavery groups brought people from outside the state to influence a referendum to decide whether it should be slave-free or not (this was known as the popular sovereignty doctrine). The violence spread outside the state, even to the Congress, where a new and vociferous white, antislavery Massachusetts senator, Charles Sumner, was violently attacked by an opponent in 1856. Sumner was later one of the strongest instruments in opening the chains of slavery. In 1857, the Supreme Court made an asinine ruling in the famous Dred Scott case, declaring that Africans were not citizens but property and that the equal entry of states in the Missouri Compromise, as so declared, was illegal. This ruling heightened tensions and resulted in political parties splitting over the smokescreen issue of state rights. Blacks were kept out of the discourse, but they voiced their grief through revolts, escapes, and all other available means, especially arson and poison. Harriet Tubman was a female slave from Maryland who escaped to Albany, New York, but she showed exemplary courage by returning to the south twenty times to lead groups of escaping Africans through her ‘underground railroad’. She organized railroad escapes for slaves from the South to Albany
and into British Canada, which became slave free in 1832. Her efforts and those of a few others contributed to the fuss over the Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed slave owners to retrieve their slaves from the North but which white Northerners openly flouted from the 1850s until the Civil War. Chicago, founded by an African American called Jean Baptiste du Sable in 1774, was also another important escape route to Canada, while Texas suffered a huge loss of slave labor to Mexico. Some believed that the white divisions finally hardened following the 1859 insurrection of a white abolitionist named John Brown, who had initially contributed to the Kansas melee. In an October 1859 plan to arm slaves for revolt with federal weaponry, John Brown staged an attack on a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, but he was overpowered and hanged. The Northeast and many abroad enshrined him as a martyr. Even school children in Nigeria sang of him until the 1980s. The 1860 elections were the final straw, as those in the Deep South believed that the Northeast was out to dominate them and override their state rights, including their self-perceived right of owning slaves as property. Abraham Lincoln did not commit to outlawing slavery, nor did he support the policy, which he agreed was immoral and eventually had to be replaced. Immediately after Lincoln won the presidential election, seven Southern states, led by South Carolina, seceded with the exception of those in the Middle Belt. The Southern States formed the Confederate States of America by February 1861 before Lincoln assumed office with the hope that he wouldn’t go to war. If he did, they were confident of economic and military backing from Britain, because they believed that ‘cotton was king’. Lincoln sued for peace, and as he stated in his reply to an editorial: ‘My paramount objective in the struggle is to save the Union and it is not to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, if I could save it by freeing all slaves I would’. The British, French, and other Europeans wanted to see the breakup of what they thought to be an oversized, unfair competitor. The British initially armed the South, but when the North protested over the building of ships for the South, Britain had to withdraw into the shadows, especially with its poor crop
season that was dependent on grain imports from the Northeast United States. Knowing the power of the abolition movement in Europe, Lincoln issued an Emancipation Declaration on September 22, 1862, freeing all slaves. Lincoln basically did this to win more backing from the Northeast and Europe as well as to undermine the Confederacy, but it did not have solid legal backing. For a long while, the war was balanced, even though the North was more populous, and the lack of an industrial base in the South was a disadvantage. To boost the ranks, the northern Union issued a Conscription Act, which the rich largely avoided with a $300 exemption fee clause. This led to riots, especially by Irish immigrants in New York, who lynched blacks unmercifully. Blacks from the North enlisted for the Union as well as Southern, escaped slaves, especially when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Again, Harriet Tubman showed her exceptional qualities by raiding the Confederacy and freeing enough slaves to warrant deep concern high in the Confederacy hierarchy. The Confederacy lost the war in 1865, and most importantly, Lincoln died just after winning his reelection and the war. With Lincoln assassinated by pro-Southerners, his vice-president, Southern Democrat Andrew Johnson, became president. If Lincoln had lived, the status quo would have continued with his policy of ‘constructive engagement’ with the South, giving them time to gradually stop slavery. Over the next decade, blacks made some progress due to Johnson’s inability to manage Charles Sumner’s Radical Republicans, who controlled the Congress in the absence of the South after the 1864 elections. Sumner, who had been physically attacked by a Southern antiabolitionist, got his vengeance on the South by backing the Emancipation Proclamation with the necessary constitutional amendments in the Congress. Frederick Douglass, the African American leader, acknowledged Sumner as ‘higher than the highest, better than the best of all our statesmen’. Thaddeus Stevens, also white, led the push in the House of Representatives. They opposed the readmission of the South under the status quo and passed the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution as conditions of reentry. The Thirteenth Amendment freed all slaves; the Fourteenth made all
those born in the United States automatically citizens and banned all those involved in the Civil War from public office. The Fifteenth Amendment gave all US citizens the right to vote. The Fourteenth Amendment kept all the political leaders of the South out of contention and rendered all opposition from the South ineffective. The South was treated as a captured territory and had to toe the line. This line appeared too radical for most whites, who wanted to see Africans freed but did not assume equality with them. Southern whites turned to intimidation and violence, openly and through clandestine terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which appealed to the sympathetic white North. The KKK killed 153 blacks in a single Florida county in 1871, regardless of the Force Acts enacted to curb the violence with the provision of federal supervisors during Southern elections. With the Southern political class silenced, blacks and white Northerners called Carpetbaggers began to fill Southern political posts. During the Radical Republican revolution known as the Reconstruction Period (1867 to 1877), Africans came to hold a majority of the state legislature seats in Louisiana and South Carolina. Oscar J Dunn, an ex-slave, was elected lieutenant governor in Louisiana in 1868, while P. B. S. Pinchback was acting governor in 1872. J. P. Long was the first African in the House of Representatives. Blanche Bruce was the first full-term black senator in 1875, and Edward Brooke was the next in 1961! Because most black politicians had historically been deprived of education, money, and experience, many were accused of being ineffective or mere fronts for their white, Northern sponsors. Black politicians tried to implement educational facilities to help African Americans assimilate into society. An effective political class would have flourished if blacks had been allowed to develop, but this was a far-fetched dream that Southern whites resisted in many ways, like the planters in the West Indies. Some Northern states even voted to keep the voting franchise white: Connecticut, Minnesota and Wisconsin voted in 1865, followed by New Jersey in 1867 and Michigan and Pennsylvania in 1868. With the 1868 death of Thaddeus Stevens in the House of Representatives,
and the 1874 death of Charles Sumner in the Senate, the Radical Republicans lost steam, and Africans lost recently gained ground. The 1872 Amnesty Act that restored the voting rights of one hundred and sixty thousand staunch former Confederates was the beginning of the end for black reconstruction. In the next election, in 1876, the South rigged the election by submitting two sets of electoral results from Florida (similar to the George W Bush debacle in 2000). The authentic Republican winner, Rutherford Hayes, was forced to promise to stop the reconstruction and withdraw military forces from the South before he was allowed to take office. This allowed the former Confederates to take back power in the South, but because the amendments to the Constitution restricted them from stopping black freedom, they resorted to new restrictions under state laws. The new state laws included voter registration requirements including property requirements, literacy tests, and even grandfather clauses, which stated that individuals could vote only if their grandfather voted in a previous election. Most important was the return to neoslavery, as the promise of ‘forty acres and a mule’ to compensate and help the slaves to adjust to a free society never materialized. Conforming ever to events in other parts of the blackworld, Christian groups and missionaries initially took over black education. Without money, land, or education, Africans were left to the caprices of their ex-slave masters who ‘reenslaved’ them under the auspices of tenant farming and predatory sharecropping schemes. They were forced to rent land and plant only the crops prescribed by the plantation master, who provided credit on stringent terms. This was ‘accounted slavery’ because the only difference was that the exslave made accounts of his production to the plantation master. The ex-slave rarely made any profit over the carefully calculated extractions that were made to keep him permanently in debt. This was by no means a new system; it was created and tested by the British in the West Indies through their 1833 Emancipation Proclamation. Slightly to the south of the United States, Cuban slaves, who didn’t win freedom in the early 1800s like their compatriots in much of South America, had to go through a revolt in 1868 called the Ten Years’ War, which cost two
hundred thousand lives and $700 million. Although Cuba was one of the first islands colonized by the Spanish, it was late in its adoption of plantation agriculture and the mass importation of slaves. The two main factors contributing to its growth were the ex-Haitian planters who fled to Cuba following the 1791– 1803 revolution and the loss of Spanish economic control of its South American colonies to the British by 1808. With not much income coming from elsewhere, the Spanish turned to sugar production in Cuba and Puerto Rico and imported more slaves between 1790 and 1868 than from 1508 to 1808. Bound by a treaty with Britain, enacted in 1817, the Spanish declared a ban on the slave trade in 1820, much like the other Europeans, but between 1790 and 1820, more than two hundred and twenty-five thousand slaves were officially shipped to Havana, Cuba, and 550,000 slaves between 1811 and 1870. The ships were built in Baltimore, New York, and Boston as well as in Liverpool. By 1855, sugar and sugar products accounted for almost 84 percent of Cuba’s export items. It became a single-crop economy, virtually dependent on the United States to buy its sugar. Although it was said that Spanish slavery practices were more benevolent, out of the seven hundred and seventy thousand slaves imported from 1790, there were no more than three hundred and ninety-four thousand alive in 1870. As in Haiti, the percentage of the slave population that consisted of first- and second-generations continental Africans, who still spoke and related to the Yoruba culture, was extremely high and helped to bring about the coalition needed to pursue a movement. The Yoruba Ifa, voodoo, was popular in its original form or the form mixed with Catholicism called Santeria (‘the way of the saints’). The 1868 Cuban rebellion was inspired by planters who wanted to dispose of the Spanish colonial hold in order to have a more assured future, including prolonged slavery, because Spain was succumbing to the British on the subject of abolition. The rebellion would have failed woefully if not for two exceptional military commanders, Maximo Gomez and the mulatto Antonio Maceo, who were committed to the struggle of freeing slaves and burnt plantation farms and buildings in the process.
The tide of the war turned against them in 1878, and the rebels came to the table with Spain’s negotiator Martinez Campos, who offered a revised form of continuing colonization, amnesty, and freedom for only the slaves who fought on the rebels’ side. Maceo refused and demanded complete independence and the total abolition of slavery. Maceo lost the war as his support dwindled to fifteen hundred fighters, but Martinez Campos, the negotiator, became Spain’s prime minister in 1879, and in 1880, he announced the future abolition of slavery.* Similar to the British West Indian colonies, slaves were expected to do an eight-year apprenticeship, called patronato, out of which they were expected to pay for their freedom at a rate of fifty to eighty dollars a year. Between 1880 and 1886, the number of slaves fell from two hundred thousand to barely twenty-six thousand, and the patronato had to be abolished two years early. The planters also issued labor contracts like those in the British colonies. Spain’s colonial reform was discounted as a farce, because the Spanish party dominated Cuba’s politics with a restricted voting franchise. This was not acceptable to the independence movement that found a leader in the inspiring journalist, Jose Marti. Some people in the United States believed that it was their manifest destiny to rule Cuba like Texas—the US president James Polk offered money to buy it from Spain in 1848, but they had refused to sell. Marti, jailed at sixteen for sedition, fled to New York where he wrote columns and agitated Cubans and their sympathizers in New York and Florida. He planned on overthrowing the Spanish government through popular revolt, and in 1892, he brought Gomez and Maceo into his plans. Gomez and Maceo led groups of revolutionaries from the United States, armed with Marti’s manifesto promising a free republic and new economic system that guaranteed full paid work for everyone. They urged blacks to join the revolt, because they were only six thousand to eight thousand strong and were up against fifty-two thousand Spanish troops and nineteen warships. The small revolt started on May 19, 1895, but it spread to the countryside, and by the end of the year, Africans constituted 80 percent of the fighting force rampaging the countryside and targeting significant economic infrastructure.
The war dragged on, costing Spain heavily in men and money, but eventually Spain gained the upper hand when Marti was killed in 1896. When it appeared that the tide of the war was turning against the rebels, they exaggerated Spain’s heavy handedness, which the United States seized upon and invaded when its warship, the USS Maine, exploded in Havana Harbor in February 1898. By April, the United States declared war on Spain and took over Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in southeast Asia. * Segal, The Black Diaspora, 225.
Eventually, US military administrations left the Philippines but held onto Puerto Rico and Cuba. Cuba pressed for independence in 1902, but the fate of the largest island in the Americas continued to rest on the manifest destiny of the largest country in the Americas. The largest country in South America, Brazil, had been taken over by Pedro I, the Portuguese monarch’s son, who created long-lasting obstacles to black progress. Coffee and cocoa rose in prominence in the 1800s and made the population again shift heavily to the plantations near the coast. In the 1860s, the United States, France, and other European nations split up the market, although Britain still retained the leading role. Despite the British pushing for abolition in Brazil, at least 1,145,000 slaves were imported between 1811 and 1870, with the help of British finance and shipbuilding. One shipload of slaves could provide a profit of a ₤100,000. The strong regional captaincies grew richer with the trade and more militarized. Brazil’s war with Uruguay and Paraguay in 1864, which it won, led it down the path of other South American nations, whose independence wars allowed the European-inspired armies to gain political power. There were increasing revolts by Yoruba and Hausa Muslims, who had been caught and sold in their war against Oyo. The Muslims were called male, derived from their Yoruba name imole (‘draconian teachings’). As a group, they were militaristic and revolutionary in temperament, able to read the Koran and write in Arabic. The Yoruba and Hausa came together to fight the common enemy admirably, but most of the revolts were foiled before execution or after a prolonged battle. Either case often resulted in mass slave hangings and executions from an increasingly oppressive Brazilian society.
The king tried to abolish the trade, but due to the military power concentrated in the hands of the slave plantation captaincies, he ended up gradually introducing measures in the effort to abolish it. King Peter II promoted the idea of a racial democracy. He had the backing of the abolitionists and those who wanted to see Brazil whitened in order to attract European immigrants and finance. The abolition of the trade commenced in 1851, and in 1871, the Free Womb Law that freed babies was promulgated, followed by the 1885 Sexagenarian Law that freed the old. In 1888, slavery was abolished and led to the overthrow of the monarchy by the army and planters. No social policy was developed for the freed Africans with the exception of trying to erase the African in them. The elite called for assimilation and increased European migration to erase the bloody footprints of history. The attacks on the quilombos continued, and Africans continued to be violently evicted from their lands. Rui Barbosa issued a decree ordering the destruction of all records of slavery, as the ex-slavemasters tried pointing to other parts of Africa while the people worshipped mainly Yoruba gods and spoke Yoruba. Many of the ex-slaves ended up in shantytowns, but a few remained in the interior and illegally farmed their quilombos or lands that their absentee, foreign landlords left fallow. Unlike in the British sugar colonies and the United States, where exploitation of Africans continued with colonization and sharecropping before becoming industrial exploitation, Afro-Brazilians were left in wasteful unemployment and illiteracy. This was not a deliberate policy but a failing that pervaded the whole of society and kept it underdeveloped and out of the new league of industrialized nations. The republic was distracted by regional rivalries in politics and in the army, as foreign suppliers took sides and promoted divisions to keep it an agricultural supplier and dumping market for foreign goods. With the old system of slavery finally discarded in Brazil in 1888, the last country to do so, Britain and the United States were to become the effective rulers of Brazil and the world. After the Muslim destruction of Oyo in 1833, the Oyo royal court moved to the new capital at the fringes of the rainforest in 1836. Most of the inhabitants of Old Oyo moved south towards the coast. The Oyo empire became a shell
of its former self as many provincial governments declared their independence, especially with the arms provided on the coast. A group of Oyo refugees under Kurunmi fled to a deserted Egba town called Ijaye, while others created new towns like Ibadan and Abeokuta. Ibadan (meaning ‘by the plains’) was a wide, flat plain that became the largest and most populous black city until Lagos surpassed it in the 1970s. Ibadan was filled with former Oyo, hustling cosmopolitan Yoruba who wreaked havoc in the area because they had no farms, and many had been hustling gold and other foreign trades. The Ibadan exhibited a fast-talking, shady cosmopolitan attitude with a sharp tongue, which set them apart from most Yoruba, similar to the comparison between present-day black New Yorkers and African Americans in general. (The unique Ibadan sharp tongue baffled me until I fell victim to New York ‘snapping’ and realized the effect of cosmopolitan living on the creative African tongue.) The Ibadan rulers led by Oluyole had no crown and royal backing, which was necessary in tradition-conscious Yorubaland. Especially with Oluyole coming from a female lineage and thus unable to become king, the new Alaafin of Oyo gave Oluyole the title of Bashorun, commander in chief of the armed forces. In 1838, the Ibadan halted the Ilorin Muslim advance at Offa in what turned out to be one of the most important battles in Nigerian history. The Ibadan militocracy fostered a dream of taking over Yorubaland with the demise of Oyo Empire, but was rejected by several citystates that wanted to retain their independence. The Ibadan attacked the more reserved agricultural Ekiti, who were the keepers of Yoruba metal technology through Ogun, the god of iron. Iron had not been heavily militarized within the community, because the Ekiti and Akoko had enjoyed a relatively peaceful existence under Edo Benin Empire. They were unprepared for the Ibadan onslaught from the northwest and the Ondo from the south. The Ekitis and Ijesas were to unify as Ekiti Parapo with their main garrison located in Ilara, Akureland. Under the leadership Ogedengbe Agbogungoro, the Ekitis were to defeat the Ibadans, who were hampered by infighting and also spread thin due to other battlefronts. Initially armed by Iyalode Efunsetan Aniwura, the largest slave trader that sold slaves for European
arms, her fallout with Aare Latosa and other military Ibadan leaders weakened Ibadan’s military poweress. In 1860, the two new settlements ruled by military leaders, Ibadan and Ijaye, clashed for supremacy, which led to the destruction of Ijaye. Ijaye was reputed to be one of the Yoruba’s finest cities and labeled a model of town planning.* * Isichei, A History of African Societies to 1870, 374.
Farther to the south, Owu, an Oyo province, went on a rampage and attacked the spiritual center of Ile-Ife for the first time. They attacked the Ijebu who defeated them with imported firearms and destroyed Owu in 1817. The war between Owu and the Ijebu arose out of kidnapping at the Apomu market but resulted in town after town engulfed in flames, as those who escaped often bonded together to become the scourges of other towns. In 1835, some Egba founded Abeokuta (meaning ‘under the rock’), where they hoped to seek refugee from the wars ravaging Yorubaland. Unfortunately, this was a dream because they had relocated closer to Dahomey, King Gezo, and his Latino backers. The British seized the repeated attacks on Abeokuta, despite being partially unsuccessful, as an excuse in 1861 to move farther inland from the Lagos forts.
Chapter 12: Queen Victoria’s Boys Scramble for Africa The entrenchment of European supremacy through small cliques (1800– 1917) Queen Victoria’s reign, from 1837 to 1901, represents one of the three most important reigns in British history. Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) challenged the Spanish economic sphere and, with African slavery and sugar plantations, put Britain on a path of economic ascendancy. The reign of Queen Elizabeth II witnessed the end of colonial Britain. Queen Victoria consolidated Britain into a world, colonial power with a landmass and population that exceeded any other in history. Cugoano’s economic plan of colonization had only been fulfilled in the Caribbean, while Africa remained on the shelf until Victoria’s reign and new technologies of war and social organization brought the world to the feet of the AngloSaxons. Her long reign, which saw her family members marry or rule as monarchs of major European nations, helped to make her great. In addition, she encouraged the formation of exclusive societies of young men dedicated to the cause of Anglo supremacy. It was not possible to conquer Southern Nigeria, the rest of Africa, and India without a new war technology, considering that four hundred thousand guns were dumped in West Africa yearly. This restricted the Europeans to the African shores, which they patrolled from the 1820s as ‘an antislavery’ force, with colonial bases in sparsely populated areas: the United States in Liberia and the British in Sierra Leone. With the American plantations booming and the clandestine slave trade profitable until the 1880s, European capitals, especially Victoria’s London, attracted ambitious young men who came together to form a new world order with new technology and old slave money from the merchant bankers. John Rockefeller, Alfred Nobel, J. P. Morgan, Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Vickers, and Hiram Maxim were part of a small clique that wielded enormous influence and power, especially with the creation of the British Conservative party in 1848 and the US Republican party in 1854. A new horizon of American prosperity and industrialization appeared with the 1820s upgrade of the horse-drawn stagecoach to railways. This had the
same effect that mass shipbuilding had on the British Empire, efficiently transporting the slave produce to England and New England markets. People like Vickers made fortunes exporting British iron to build American railroads. After the 1850s US railroad boom, railroad building extended south to Brazil and Argentina. Britain owed nearly 70 percent of all public debt in Latin America. George Peabody moved to London from Massachusetts in 1837 and started buying and selling during the cotton boom before turning to financing other people’s deals and becoming a banker. He became an informal US financial ambassador, and when he grew old, he found a young partner, Junius Spencer Morgan (J. S. Morgan) from his native New England. In 1854, Morgan, a young Hartford graduate, joined and ably took over from Peabody, who died and left money to the education of the Southern US in recognition of the contribution of the cotton kings and slaves. Morgan changed the company name to J. S. Morgan in 1864 and raised funds for the North during the war while everyone else in London was raising money for the South. After the Civil War, Morgan was well placed to expand his business as the new American merchant banker, while he also syndicated loans for France during the 1870 German-Franco war. Morgan focused on America where he made various alliances, especially with Anthony J. Drexel, who joined him to raise money from British investors and sponsor the Pennsylvania steel mills and coal mines with the likes of Andrew Carnegie from Scotland. Carnegie was one of the young Anglo-Saxons who came to dominate the business world after making his first fortune in Civil War supplies, like Rockefeller. After the war and relaunching the railroad fervor, Carnegie developed Pittsburgh Steel Mills with backing from the J. S. Morgan/Barings Bank. When the railroad business reached its peak, the iron and steel merchants like Vickers and Carnegie turned to arms making and began forming the modern military-industrial complex with their merchant bankers. Alfred Krupp, proprietor of the major German steelworks, turned to armaments and supplied the Prussian army under Otto von Bismarck, who from the 1860s united the
fragmented German peoples and defeated the French. Britain made no major improvements to its army’s gunnery between the 1815 Napoleonic Wars and their Rothschilds-sponsored 1854 Crimean War, so William Armstrong was commissioned to develop a gun that was perfected in 1858 and called ‘the Armstrong gun’. Armstrong supplied both sides during the American Civil War with the Armstrong gun, and he and Krupp became major arms dealers, the bulk of their profits coming through foreign orders. The British navy developed the Gatling machine gun, which it handed to Armstrong to manufacture and market in the 1870s. Carnegie turned to making armored plates for the US navy and made large profits, while Vickers built guns, engines, and armor plates for the British navy. The Civil War and other wars increased the need for inventions in war technology. Moreover, the British and French started their African colonization by taking over coastal forts, but the pace was slow due to the lack of a superior weapon. Vickers was able to profit from the work of a young inventor from Maine called Hiram Maxim, who changed the world with his invention of the Maxim submachine gun. Maxim considered his gun as especially useful ‘in stopping the mad rush of savages’,* and its advantages were soon realized in the colonial wars. Another young European in the mid-1800s, who developed war technology, was Alfred Nobel (whose foundation awarded Nobel Peace Prizes out of the fortune made from the invention of explosives). In 1862, Nobel made nitroglycerin explode, which he patented in 1863, and it was valuable for blasting in new mining colonies like California. In 1867, Nobel made dynamite from clay called Kieselguhr mixed with nitroglycerin, which made the latter more stable for use. Nobel made millions from inventions that transformed into the main ingredients of the new weapons industry. Rockefeller was one of the young Europeans in London who made a fortune from the Civil War and had inside knowledge of where the technology was heading. With the railroad boom in full swing, a new fuel to run the coalpowered steam engines was discovered: petroleum. He initially lit USA households and businesses with kerosene paraffin oil used in lamps. With the
backing of his rich friends, Rockefeller formed a world monopoly, beginning in Pennsylvania, that took over the Texan oilfields and others across the world. * Anthony Sampson, Arms Bazaar: From Lebanon to Lockheed (Viking, 1977), 47.
Morgan’s son, John Pierpont (J. P. Morgan), took over in 1879 and turned the J. P. Morgan Bank into one of the biggest banks through the financing of railroads. Eventually, he became the owner of more than half of all US railroads. He also sponsored the arms industry, which was not very different from the steel business, because the steel business covered large overhead costs with arms exportation. In 1901, J. P. Morgan took over Carnegie’s Pittsburgh Steel Mills to establish the monopoly of US Steel in rail and arms production. After being bought out by JP Morgan, Carnegie, like Nobel, left a large foundation to the promotion of peace to lighten his conscience over his deadly legacy to humanity. Another important contribution of JP Morgan, despite stiff competition and opposition from the likes of Rockefeller, was his investment in electricity that was to change the face of USA and ushered in the modern world. Rothschild, a main beneficiary of African slave money and respected financier of old Europe, sponsored the Nobel brothers in their bid to take over the Russian oilfields while also sponsoring the British war machine. Another young European of the mid-1800s, Cecil Rhodes, opened up southern Africa, where the world’s largest diamond and gold reserves were discovered in 1867 and 1886, respectively. Rothschilds sponsored the South African Boer War to keep control of the mines with the British, as Rhodes gained a world monopoly on diamonds by age thirty-eight. Rhodes talked of Africa from Cairo to the Cape as a single country ‘fit for white men, fit for Englishmen more populous and prosperous than the USA’, in his ‘idea’ of a Western Hemisphere united under the leadership of a secretive clique of Anglo-Saxons. The British had taken control of the Cape in South Africa in the first decade of the 1800s and established a new administration in their language and religion. Their ban of the slave trade in 1833 angered the local Afrikaner
Dutch and resulted in Boer migration from the Cape towards the war-stricken northeast Zulu Natal Bay. By 1839, the Boers defeated the Mfecane-weakened Zulu ruled by Dingane and set up a colony in Natal Bay. Not wanting another European presence on the Indian Ocean coastline, the British stopped the Dutch by annexing the Natal area in 1845. This caused the Dutch to again migrate north, where they founded republics, straddling the Orange and Vaal Rivers, called the Transvaal and Orange Free State. The British followed them but soon counted the inland plains unworthy of the cause and granted them independence between 1852 and 1854. On the West Africa coast, British colonists made their first move towards colonization from their Sierra Leone colony of freed slaves founded by the British abolitionists in 1787. A new class of African Christians and merchants slowly developed in Sierra Leone, and they spread the new European ‘script’ across Africa. From Sierra Leone, the British increased their presence on the Gold Coast by taking over the coastal forts formerly owned by an English company of merchants, while the Dutch and Danes gave up forts that had become unprofitable. The withdrawal of other Europeans caused problems, because the British favored the coastal Fante while the Ashante relied on the Dutch. The Ashante wanted to capture the coast but were repulsed by the Fante. Eventually, the fourth Ashante-Fante war of 1823–1824 became the first Anglo-Ashante War, as the British took control of the coast. The Ashante were defeated in Katamanso with new technology, which included the Congreve rockets, used by twelve thousand African soldiers and sixty Europeans officers. This was the beginning of the Ashante decline, disintegration, and defeat. With the abolition of slavery and dwindling gold supplies, the Gold Coast switched to raw materials like palm oil, kola, and later cocoa. The Ashante continued to invade the south, sometimes in pursuit of criminals, which led to another British attack in 1874. The new war technology, including the new Enfield rifle, led to the sacking of Kumasi and the dethronement of the king, Ashantehene Kofi Karikari. Initially, the British hoped to run an informal empire without high
administrative and military costs, but on the far West Africa coast, the French were the ones to first monopolize their coastal colonies. The British and French, the main European powers—and to a lesser extent the Portuguese, Dutch, and Danish—had small coastal trade forts on the African coast. After the Napoleonic Wars, the defeated French returned to their Senegal River coastal colony in 1817 and erected a tariff barrier to exclude competitors, because the war had greatly reduced the quality and competitiveness of French-manufactured goods. From the 1840s, the French extended this policy to Guinea, Ivory Coast, Dahomey, Gabon, and Madagascar. The British charged a uniform rate to avoid administration and enforcement costs, because, most importantly, the coast was too large to demarcate, and most of the trade took place in stretches where no European flag flew. Following the ravages of slavery and its attendant wars, Europeans approached African kings with an offer to make them a protectorate, which, as they explained to the Euro-illiterate kings, was a protection from slavery and a free-trade area. Africans soon realized that they had signed away their freedoms to trade and to tax trade. This was similar to what occurred in the 1980s drug wars, where the fear of drug crimes made middle-class AfroAmericans sign away many civil rights, leading to the extraordinary black incarceration rates of the 1990s and early 2000s. Many kings signed away territories that were in contention or not even theirs to sign away, causing huge misunderstandings when the Europeans wanted to claim their protectorates. This occurred in Opobo in the Niger delta area known as Oil Rivers and led to a bitter war between Jaja of Opobo and the British. In 1854, France stepped up its administration in Senegal with plans to link the Upper Senegal River to the Upper Niger. This was to secure a market for French exports only and corner the huge Hausa and Mande grassland trade of groundnuts, gum Arabic, leather, and other raw materials. The new technologies of railways and steamboats opened up the recently explored African interior and diverted the trade into French hands at the Senegal Coast.
The British were scared that this could adversely affect their coastal colonies, Sierra Leone and Gold Coast, whose northern trade would be diverted away. Moreover, the British already had their charter companies running their own steamboats on the Lower Niger and would eventually meet those of the French on the Upper Niger. To avoid conflict, it was proposed that the British give up their little colony of Gambia River in exchange for Dahomey and Ivory Coast. This would have meant that the British would own the land from Ivory Coast to the Cameroon Mountains and the French, from Morocco to Ivory Coast, but other Europeans challenged them, as they had done to the Iberians. The Germans and Belgians upset the Anglo-Franco balance, as the new European nations also wanted the promise of African wealth. The Belgians weren’t overly concerned with colonies, but their monarch, King Leopold II, felt the need to find power outside his tiny nation that was sandwiched between two major European powers. He employed the explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, who had discovered that the Congo and its tributaries were navigable for four thousand miles upstream after Malebo Pool but needed a railway to link the coast (due to the thirty-two cataracts in the 225 miles between Malebo Pool and the coast). The British and others rejected Stanley’s services, due to their experience that the Congo basin was not overly resource rich and profitable, but Leopold wanted to have his own colony and backed Stanley anyway. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the most important trade on the laborious Lower Congo route was ivory. More perishable goods were taken to the Portuguese in Angola through trade routes that ran across the savannah kingdoms on the southern edges of the Upper Congo basin. With the end of slavery and better accessibility in the area, the demand for palm products, coffee, and cotton increased. Leopold, like George Goldie on the Niger, aimed for a complete monopoly with his steamers and railways on the Congo but did not bother to obtain protectorate treaties. His success attracted French competition, Pierre Savorgnam de Brazza, who was quick to obtain to a treaty from Bakoko, the king of the Teke, inhabiting the northern edges of Malebo Pool. The French ratified the treaty in 1882 and pushed for more territory by turning towards the Niger delta coast. This alerted the British, who knew the value of the
Nigerian raw materials and huge market due to its population, and made them hurriedly secure treaties around the area. Bismarck, the German leader, was busy unifying and building the new German state during the 1850s and 1860s but was eventually urged on by north German merchants. To have a say in international European politics and distract France over the 1870 German seizure of the Rhineland, Bismarck decided to throw his hat in the ring with the surprise announcement of German claims to Togo, Cameroon, South West Africa, and East Africa. The claims were not substantiated by any commitment on the ground, but nevertheless, the pieces of paper upon which the treaties were written were acceptable. The only lands not partitioned were those of Egypt, which the French and British had earlier invaded on grounds of financial default. Although the French later withdrew, the British stubbornly lingered. The Berlin Conference popularly known as the ‘Scramble for Africa’ was held in 1884–1885 in Germany. Africa was partitioned on the basis of dubious treaties, setting a precedent for future lands to be claimed. It appeared to have taken a measure of modernity for the warlike Europeans to have peacefully agreed on dividing Africa, but it was possible only because Queen Victoria’s family members ruled or were married to the monarchs of the different nations. From the initial coastal claims, the Europeans scrambled for every inch left, the sole aim being to monopolize all trade. The British, having done their homework, appeared to have come out with a poor deal as they held onto Egypt, a few scattered West Africa territories, and South Africa. The French appeared to have won with their larger, West Africa colony, an equally large French Equatorial Africa that extended from the Congo coast to Lake Chad, and Algeria and Morocco. Leopold was grateful for the substantial portion of Congo basin that he secured, while Bismarck made the political gains he set out to achieve. The French later realized that with the exception of its coastal territories of Ivory Coast and Senegal, French West Africa encompassing the Sahara was largely an arid, sparsely populated subregion. Despite French Equatorial Africa starting from the rainforest of Gabon and extending to Lake Chad, it couldn’t compete economically with Nigeria or the Gold Coast. The combined population of the fourteen countries in French black Africa was
less than the population of Nigeria. Ivory was the main product of the East Africa grasslands, and trade was conducted by coastal Swahili Arabs, who bought from the Nyamwezi and Yao. The Arabian Muslim caliph of Oman initially ran the east coast, but the Europeans restricted his claims to fifteen miles inland, after which East Africa was divided into two spheres of influence: German in Tanganyika to the south and British in Kenya. The Germans bought the coast from the caliph, while Britain leased. King Leopold, the British, and the Germans scrambled for the land around the Great Lakes. Britain secured Uganda between its coastal colony of Kenya and Belgian Congo, and the Germans secured the land between Tanzania and Belgian Congo called Rwanda-Urundi. The Germans signed with the Tutsi minority rulers, who were happy to use the Europeans to gain total control over the remaining, independent Hutu kingdoms outside Tutsi control. The British faced more difficulties in Buganda and Bunyoro, the main Uganda kingdoms, which had experienced an influx of Arabs in the mid1800s. While the Nyoro accepted the Muslims, the Ganda invited the British Protestants and French Catholics to keep a balance of power, which ultimately led to a civil war that the British won. Afterwards, Britain used the Ganda to suppress all other peoples in the area, especially the Arab-supported Nyoro, and established the colony of Uganda. In Afro-Asian North Africa, the French took over Algeria and Tunisia. The Italians took Libya and wanted to include Ethiopia, but they were soundly defeated by an Ethiopian state led by Haile Selassie. Ethiopia was still ruled by light-skinned Afro-Asians who came during the Roman-Byzantine era, and they greatly increased Ethiopia’s historical borders in the scramble for Africa conducted by their European cousins. The rest of the horn of Africa was divided between the Italians in Eritrea, British Somaliland to the east, and Italian Somaliland. The British defended their stake in Egypt and moved into Sudan, where they faced down the French coming from French West and Equatorial Africa. The partitioning on paper was easy, and due to the size of the continent, the
small, European treaty-seeking groups hardly clashed. Problems occurred when the treaties were enforced. Waiting for the arrival of the machine gun and rocket bombs gave the Europeans an enormous advantage over the more numerous Africans who were equipped with obsolete weaponry, but the Europeans still faced pockets of fierce opposition. In 1857, the French made their initial thrust into West Africa through Senegal and met fierce opposition from the Fulani jihadists of Futa Toro and Futa Jallon, who were armed with European weapons from the coast. They broke Alhaji Umar’s military power and captured Bamako in 1883. Another important opponent was Samori, who led Muslim Mandingoes in the interior borderlines of Guinea, Mali, and Burkina Faso between Upper Niger and Upper Volta. They weren’t defeated until 1898 and delayed French penetration down the Niger, although the French took Timbuktu in 1894 and Say in 1896. The French could not go beyond Say in Middle Niger, because the British took all of the territory from the Niger delta. To enforce treaties in Nigeria was a nightmare. Even after centuries of slave raiding to the Americas, Nigeria still had more than five hundred language groups and spheres of influence, especially with the breakup of the major kingdoms. The first British foothold was on the sparsely populated Lagos Island, strategically located off the Yoruba coast. They initially came in support of Akitoye against his brother, Kosoko, for the Lagos throne in 1851 but declared it a colony in 1861. The British had become masters of divide and rule and didn’t have to fight wars in many areas. They often split polities into camps and then financed and armed the friendly camp against the others, no matter how small a minority it might be. Unfortunately, once the underdog had revenge dreams funded by the Europeans, the sudden reversal sometimes spelt annihilation for the historically stronger and more populous group or area, as occurred in Uganda, Rwanda, and a host of other African polities. After taking Lagos Island off the Slave Coast, the British moved farther east to the mouth of the Niger delta, where they faced opposition from the small trading states. When the British realized that they couldn’t easily beat King Jaja of Opobo in the complex waterways of the delta, they waited until the
dry season and hurled fireballs from their warships onto the farmland to starve the people into submission. Being a conscientious leader, Jaja called for a truce and was invited to a meeting on the warship. He made the same mistake as Haiti’s Toussaint. Jaja went for the peace talks and was then deported to cold Canada. The British reached the Niger-Benue confluence and moved into Sokoto caliphate territory to face resistance from the new southern Muslim provinces of Nupe and Ilorin. Reports from Upper Niger and Senegal of the European onslaught reached the caliph of Sokoto long before the British appeared. He wisely sued for peace with Goldie in 1885, although he couldn’t convince the Ilorin and Nupe to surrender until they were later attacked and conquered with Maxim guns and rockets. The operations were chartered to a number of companies that were combined, in 1886, into a monopoly called the Royal Niger Company under Goldie. The Sokoto caliph, being of the minority Fulani jihadist class, realized that instead of fighting the better-equipped British, he could use them to stabilize his grip on the Hausa majority. The British also realized that leaving the Sokoto caliphate and its Muslim administration in place would reduce colonial administrative costs. Having subdued the Muslim Sokoto caliphate in the northwest and stalemated the French at Say, the British moved across to the Muslim Bornu empire and Chad in northeast Nigeria. They stopped the French who were encroaching on their territory from three directions: around northwest Nigeria from Say, across the desert from Algeria, and from French Equatorial Africa. After taking the Lagos port, the next move in Yorubaland was against Dahomey, which still raided for slaves in the western Yorubaland until the late 1800s. After that time, the British placed a protectorate over the Egba and the Ijebu. The Ijebu and Egba resisted fiercely but were mowed down by the Maxim gun, wielded by a small band of African mercenaries directed by British officers. The defeat was so resounding that when the Egba surrendered to sign the treaty, they refused to partake in the official photographs taken of the ceremony. The camera, balanced on its tripod, looked like the Maxim gun on its stand, and they did not want to risk being cut down by the hundred-bullets-per-minute gun—not to mention the rocket
bombs! The Benin kingdom raised stiff opposition to the British treaty, as when it opposed male slavery by banning it in the territory. The British secured the treaty in 1892 from Oba Ovonramwen, but the Bini didn’t take it seriously and disregarded all British efforts to consolidate their gains. In January 1897, the British sent J. R. Philips, the acting consul-general of the Niger Coast protectorate, to give the Bini a last warning that an army was being assembled to invade if they continued their obstinate behavior. Despite pleas by Oba Ovonramwen on behalf of the consul-general and his entourage, the Bini chiefs insisted upon making them the first casualties of the war. The boldness of the British, in that instance, ended in the death of the entire party. The aggrieved British assembled an army and launched an attack but met stiff opposition on the way to Benin City. With their vastly superior firepower, the British eventually sacked the ancient and populous forest empire and burnt the palace that had been evacuated by the Oba of Benin before they arrived. The Oba and his people continued to resist, but because of the high casualty rate, he gave himself up by the end of the year and was deported to Calabar on the other side of the delta. The British swept through war-ravaged Yorubaland, killing thousands while losing only a few. Nevertheless, there were other lands to be taken as planned by the British merchants, Queen Victoria and the Conservatives, led by the British Prime Minister Marques of Salisbury (1885–1891). The southern half of Africa had a slightly different path to colonial rule, which diverged with the discovery of diamonds in Kimberly. Nineteen-year old Cecil Rhodes exemplified the British colonial spirit in Africa. He took a two-year break from Oxford University to take over the world’s diamond market before going back to complete his degree and preach Anglo-Saxon world domination. With diamonds changing the economic landscape, the British Cape colonists tried to change the political landscape by annexing the diamonds mines in the Boers Orange Free State and taking over the independent African states. Cape colonists took over Basutoland in the 1870s, and they broke the fighting power of the Xhosa and other Nguni peoples on the eastern front in 1878.
They were unable to suppress Basutoland in 1880 until the British government stepped in 1884, following the calls of people like Rhodes and his enlightened group in Oxford. The British initially tried to annex the Boer republics in the First Boer War (1800 to 1801) but failed. Calls for action by Rhodes and others led to a retrial through the Second Boer War (1899 to 1902), which they won and were able to successfully annex both republics. There were deep divisions between the Dutch settlers and the British, because the Boers saw the British taking over their economy and power over the Africans. Black Africans tended to favor the big business British, who appeared to be more lenient conquerors than the religious Boer settler ranchers (who, like the plantation farmers in the Southern United States, had used brute force backed by the Bible). Rhodes returned to South Africa to form the De Beers monopoly in 1880, and in 1889, he received a charter from the Conservative Prime Minister Salisbury to explore and take all lands possible. Rhodes was the prime minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896. As a British prime minister eager to push a pro-colonial policy, Salisbury’s first move in 1885 was to declare a protectorate over the grasslands between German Southwest Africa (Namibia) and Transvaal, the northern Boer republic, which he called Bechuanaland (now called Botswana). This opened the way to Central Africa, which Salisbury chartered to Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company in 1889. The initial charter, which entailed the acquisition of lands from the Limpopo River to the Zambezi River, was fulfilled and extended in 1891 to cover all of the land down to the Great Lakes and Katanga Plateau in southern Zaire. Salisbury gave Rhodes all the leeway required. ‘Take first, ask me later,’ Salisbury told him. Rhodes was once heard saying, ‘If I could annex the planets, I would!’
Rhodes declared that the only thing standing between him and Cairo was Matabeleland (Zimbabwe). He was quick to sign a treaty in 1890 with the Shona, who had been subjected by the Ndebele fleeing from the Nguni Mfecane troubles of South Africa, half a century earlier. The Rhodes-Shona treaty resulted in the creation of Fort Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia in Mashonaland, from where he provoked, attacked, and conquered the Ndebele. The territory to the immediate west, Malawi, was excluded from Rhodes’s charter, because it was already in British hands through the significant presence of British missionaries. Moving farther along the Zambezi River, the grasslands on the Congo side of the Congo/Zambezi watershed of
Katanga Plateau were left to King Leopold, according to the Berlin agreements. The grasslands on the Zambezi side became northern Rhodesia, later renamed Zambia. The greed of the European imperial powers made them grab land across Africa without a full cost and benefit analysis. They were burdened with how to keep administrative costs down and make the colonial undertakings at least self-sufficient before fulfilling their dream of obtaining a cheap source of raw materials and a closed, buoyant market for their expensive, poor-quality manufactured goods. To get white staff to run the colonial administration was expensive, and they had to resort to local people who they had to train in at least a European language. Similar to the Caribbean and black America, missionaries fulfilled this role with their initial, four-year schools. The first step towards profitability, especially in colonies without rich mineral deposits, was to introduce ‘cash crops’ as opposed to food crops (crops in demand in Europe and America, as was done in the American slave colonies). Africans were expected to plant the cash crops on their own land beside their food crops. From the 1830s on, abolitionists/colonists encouraged planting groundnuts, cotton, and gum Arabic in the West Africa grasslands while promoting palm produce, cocoa, and coffee in forest coastal colonies. Sierra Leone had diamonds and iron, while the Gold Coast had gold and tin. Even though the British had all the gold and diamonds they needed in South Africa, the West Africa productions were to defray local colonial costs, plus profit. The second step was to increase supply by ensuring the transportation of the goods from the deep African interior to the seaports, where they were transported to their home countries. Like America in 1830–1850, when the Barings and Morgan banks financed the canals, steamboats, and railroads that opened the agricultural Midwest, the European colonists raised the finances to build the necessary infrastructure from the Rothschilds and other colonial speculators, a group that later included the Rhodes moneymen. These measures weren’t effective on their own, because the Africans weren’t slaves on their own land, even though they had been hoodwinked, coerced, and killed to get them to accept the idea of being colonized. Despite the slavery, guns, and other trade brought by Europeans, they never directly
accounted for the lion’s share of the local economies of the larger, more established communities like the Edo, Igbo, Kongos, Nupe, and many others across Africa. The food, clothing, housing, and other necessities were mainly provided by the intra-African trade, and the majority had local credit cooperatives. The Yoruba, with their Esusu and ajo,* were organized by traders and managed at markets headed by the Iyalode (head of women). The Hausa and Dyula merchants had appropriate credit bodies that served their regular sphere of trading. The European important economic influences were mostly negative intangibles, like cowry trading, that sabotaged and devalued African economies. The gun culture caused insecurity, leading to a serious drain on labor and skills through slavery, dispersal, death, and the abandonment of traditional employment training. The colonists banned all forms of traditional and other foreign media of exchange and introduced their own currency in the colonies. However, even these measures weren’t enough to promote production, because Africans needed to plant only enough to buy the occasional Manchester cotton and not guns. To cover colonial costs, they began to charge a ‘head tax’, which resulted in revolts that were brutally put down by the new masters with their American plantation habits. In many forested African regions, especially in Yorubaland, women were the traders and wove clothing materials. They were the most affected and easily caught up in the vagaries of the market, where they were charged both head and produce taxes. The men could be out of public view on their farms, secret mines, or art crafts. The cost couldn’t be easily shifted onto them, because they initially passed the wares to their wives without monetary costs. An affected wife would probably be told to find another market with less hassle. In Ijebuland and Aba in Igboland, on two occasions women planned to shock the humanity of the European men by carrying out demonstrations naked to show that they were being stripped to the bone. To their surprise, they were ruthlessly gunned down, as was done to Africans in the Americas. The British had to fight crucial wars with the Ashante in 1896 and 1900 before finally subjecting them, after many years, of declaring a protectorate. In some savannah areas where the men protested, they were stripped of their land and
cattle, their main source of livelihood. In the Belgian Congo, their wives were held hostage, and failure to reach the prescribed quotas led to rape and mutilation. * Pronounced aj-au.
The colonial plans worked and production picked up, especially in the coastal colonies, with the help of Sierra Leone creoles, former slave warlords, longdistance coastal merchants, displaced peoples, and missionaries. Palm products and cocoa didn’t need much labor to plant and harvest, because they were trees that took years to grow. Palm trees were already growing in abundance, and with a little incentive and organization to pick the palm kernels, supply greatly shot up in southern Nigeria, especially with the improvement of transportation. Slavery had been mainly a chief or caliph business, but now their mercenaries and displaced peasants were able to make money. In the Muslim savannah states, cattle and slavery were the economic mainstays. Although slavery continued to be a major trade in the Middle East, many were quick to jump on the cash crop bandwagon, especially with groundnuts and improved hybridized cattle. The caliph facilitated the collection of taxes not only at markets or on cattle but also through mosques and other socioreligious avenues. The British consolidated colonies around the Lower Niger, adding the protectorate of Lagos to that of the Oil Rivers to become the protectorate of the southern Niger area, which was placed under direct colonial rule. The northern Niger area, placed under the Fulani Islamic caliphate of Sokoto, had Lord Lugard as its first governor from 1900 to 1906. Lugard realized that the vast northern colony couldn’t function on its own without linkage to the sea through the southern colony, especially because the French had taken over the longer western route to Senegal. The two most populous and prosperous British colonies of West Africa were amalgamated into one protectorate in 1914. It was named Nigeria by Lady Shaw, Lugard’s mistress, which officially meant ‘Niger Area’, but the Niger River’s greatest length was not in the area, nor was it as important in the daily lives of those in the area as it was to those in Mali. The tongue-in-cheek
meaning was ‘Nigger Area’, because it was the most populous and the acknowledged source of all blacks. The river itself had been named Niger River,* because it was the river that flowed through the Nigger/Negro heartland. The white Lady Shaw, a wordsmith, was fully aware of this. The northern area was even called Negritia by some medieval scholars who realized that the highest number of Negroes came from its south. Niger, nigger, negro, and nigga were all later variations in the new European languages, terms initially coined by the Greeks and Romans to refer to black Africans. * The Yoruba call the Niger the River Oya (‘the flood’), even though there are hundreds of other rivers.
Nigeria, the Gold Coast, and South Africa became the jewels of the British African colonies. Britain chartered the first colonial banks in the 1890s in Accra, Lagos, and Johannesburg: Standard Chartered and Barclays. The banks printed and regulated currency, on behalf of the British government, in relation to the productivity of the colonies. However, this was another way to siphon the productive capacity of Africans. The colony’s currency was exchangeable only with its colonists’ currency at a rate decided solely by the colonial master, and the creamed surplus was shared between the bankers and colonists. Monetary and fiscal policies were used to control production by reducing the money supply or charging high tariffs on ‘unfavorable’ production, like local food production and manufacturing, not geared towards exports or British interests. In addition, marketing boards, which gathered the produce and were supposed to work in favor of the farmers by helping to market their products, purposefully kept prices low with their Western orientation and failure to create viable African markets. With the destruction of traditional cooperatives and credit facilities, entry was barred to most sectors like marketing, transportation, and distribution or ‘unfavorable’ production. To cut costs, the French amalgamated their vast colonies into large blocks with the hope that the fast-growing coastal areas would carry the slower ones in the interior. Within a few years in French West Africa, its coastal colonies of Dahomey, Ivory Coast, and Senegal were making healthy profits from palm products, cocoa, coffee, and groundnuts. Funds from these colonies were used to fund developments across French West Africa towards
exporting more raw materials. In Central Africa, the French mostly followed the Belgian approach of concession companies that were like charter companies. European greed in the scramble for Africa was most evident in the Belgian takeover of Zaire. It was a momentous task for tiny Belgium (11,700 square miles), with its small population, to effectively manage Zaire, as their Dutch neighbors had realized in the Americas during slavery. Zaire (874,500 square miles) was bigger than the combined size of the ten Westernmost European nations, including the British Isles, France, Germany, Portugal, Italy, Spain, and Belgium. Costs were to be relatively higher than in West Africa due to the low population density and scattered local economies in the highland rainforest of Congo basin that formed the majority of the colony. Nevertheless, the Belgians promoted a coastal market for palm produce and a few other products, which the Bobangi canoe men were apt to supply from the many tributaries in the mountainous Congo basin. To raise credit to finance the roads, railroads, and steamboats, the Belgians offered companies huge parcels of land around the railway tracks. The first company, in 1886, built a railway from the coast to Malebo Pool at a cost of 14 square miles per mile of rail built, which amounted to the loss of 8,000 square miles* of African land (Belgium is 11,700 square miles). The concession companies concentrated on exploration for minerals, which they found in abundance in the savannah lands of Katanga, southern Zaire— copper, diamonds, coal, uranium, manganese, tin, zinc, and gold. Due to the sparse labor supply in the highland rainforest of the Congo basin, forced labor was adopted by a few concession companies, as well as by King Leopold himself, which led to an international outcry. From 1895, the advent of rubber tires brought a huge demand for rubber, which grew wild in the tropical forest, and resulted in the concession companies making huge profits from rubber tapping. When Leopold realized the massive profits being made, he conscripted both land and people into rubber production, nearly reminiscent of slavery. Leopold set quotas for the white administrators who ran slave camps and killed at random, burning down villages and raping and torturing Africans.
Leopold made $231 million from rubber while introducing mutilation into the sociopolitical fabric of the area, which later manifested in the local wars seen across the area in the 1990s. In addition to iron mining, the United States turned its only African colony, Liberia, into a massive rubber plantation in the name of Firestone. The French applied the same Leopold principles in French Equatorial Africa, where it had been running massive deficits. Eventually, as the wild rubber trees diminished in Africa and another source was found in Indonesia, there was an international outcry against Leopold and other Europeans murderous actions in 1910. * Roland Oliver and Anthony Atmore, Africa Since 1800 (Cambridge, 1994), 131.
In East Africa, ivory was the main trade item, and the number of elephants was in decline. Unlike in Central and West Africa, there wasn’t a dense network of river waterways, and therefore, transportation was largely over land. Kenya and Uganda were developed by grants from the Colonial Office, which slowly tried to promote the export economy of the grasslands. After their subjection of the Bunyoro, the British gave their main allies in the Buganda royalty huge parcels of land, which were used to promote cotton cultivation. Other European colonists, not having the advantage of allying with the moderately dense populations around the Great Lakes, brought in people from Europe. Without the malaria of West Africa, Europeans were able and encouraged to settle in the sparsely populated plains of East Central Africa, especially to administer and help develop infrastructure in return for land. It was like the Belgian concession company model, but instead of companies looking for fast profit, families migrated to take advantage of a feudalistic system based on racism. Germany needed territory to offload its citizens, who had been migrating to the Americas in the millions, so its government encouraged migration to the East African colony of Tanganyika and Southwest Africa (Namibia). This was achieved by giving the settlers land for farming and ranches along railway lines and increasingly marginalizing Africans. Seventy thousand Herero were killed by the turn of the century in proto-Nazism. Many Africans
were relocated to concentration camps, dispossessed of their land and cattle, and forced to labor. The pace of colonization reenergized the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, as European settlement was encouraged to boost the economy. The British were to unify their Black African and Boer colonies in South Africa but didn’t plan to pursue a ‘colonies of settlement’ policy in Africa like it had in the Americas, although Rhodes had dreams of repeating the American dream in Africa. Through his British South Africa Company, Rhodes encouraged European settlement in northern and southern Rhodesia. Indians were imported as in the Guyana and West Indies. Southern Africa ended up with the largest Eurasian settlement in Africa, reminiscent of Ancient Egypt and the rest of North Africa. The maneuvers across Africa strengthened the imperialistic European nations to spread across the world. The imperialistic club was increased with American Navy Commodore M C Perry’s visit to Japan in the 1850s. Perry led a trade delegation to market US iron products, especially guns and railways, and a treaty was signed in 1854 to allow American goods in Japan. At the time, Japan was an unstable country ruled by shoguns (military dictators) since 1192, but it was centralized in 1868 under Emperor Meiji with Anglo-Saxon military backing. The British saw in Japan an opportunity to launch from the island onto the populous China mainland, as well as to check Russian expansionism from Europe into eastern Asia. ‘British banks raised loans to build the Japanese railroads, to equip the Japanese forces, and to finance Japanese wars against China and Russia, while the British government provided political support’.* During the reign of its allies (the Meiji dynasty), Japan rapidly industrialized within thirty years, and by 1900, it joined the war syndicate, in which there were no permanent friends or allies. * Sampson, The Money Lenders, 51.
Chapter 13: The Ogun Military-Industrial Complex Iron and steel makers create military complexes and take over Western economies to rule the world (late 1800s to mid-1900s) In the United States, at the turn of the twentieth century, cotton was booming. Most importantly, British finance was flowing and ushering in the next stage of economic development, according to economists. Economic theory postulates that the lowest level of development is an agricultural economy. The second stage is a semiprocessing and processing economy that processes raw materials like cotton, clothing, and food. The next stage is the heavy industry economy of iron, steel, and chemicals, while the most advanced stage being the service industry economy. All these industries are usually present in most stages, but the industry providing the most income and employment dictates what stage of development an economy is in. (It is noteworthy to mention that at all times, blacks in the Americas and Africa were involved in most industries at most levels, even though their percentages might be insignificant.) Overall, at the turn of the century, more than 70 percent of Africans were employed in the rudimental agricultural/vocational sectors of the US economy. The economy moved into the heavy industrial stage by the end of the Civil War, when huge investments to rebuild and extend infrastructure poured in from Britain, which was recycling profits from slavery and new monies from the West and South African colonies. In the Northeast United States, bridges, roads, railroads, and ships were built to take advantage of the iron and steel boom, but there was a limit to which the racially selective credit and the steel produced could be used up by these peaceful endeavors. According to Anthony Simpson in his Arms Bazaar: From Lebanon to Lockheed, ‘It was not till the end of the century, as the railway boom receded and successive governments became more imperialistic, that American steel companies were more dependent on government contracts for arms, and on exporting arms abroad’. However, as shown in previous chapters, the relationship had been present since slavery when guns, sugar, cotton, and
alcohol promoted the white economy. The Enlightened classes of the Northeast and other areas concentrated on how to increase the uses of steel by adapting it to other processes and keep the boom going. They continued to design more lethal weapons and better defenses. The British financed the American Maxim gun and improvements that were used to gain territory across the world. They invested in the USbased Electric Boat (now called General Dynamics) that had acquired a patent for making submarines. The British Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) was a major partner of DuPont, the US explosives giant. The heavy British investment later dragged the United States into World War I to help the Allies. Carnegie continued to produce steel in the millions of tons as the company turned to army demands to help with its huge overhead and running costs. In 1881, launching the modern military-industrial complex, Carnegie received orders to supply the navy with four modern steel warships, in addition to supplying armor plates, orders that continued into World War I and beyond. With the adaptation of engines that ran on petroleum, it was easier to design smaller engines and carriers than those used by the rail system. With the introduction of bicycles and the use of rubber tires, the new engines didn’t need to run on rails and could act as army personnel carriers. However, the average cost to produce the cars was too expensive for the average consumer until Henry Ford’s assemblyline production provided mass production and lower prices. Nonetheless, it required a huge capital outlay to build a car factory, and private investors naturally took it as a risky, huge, longterm investment. The research and development of untested consumer goods and markets like those required government guarantees, in addition to the steady flow of British finances. The engines were also adapted to fly over small distances with lighter carriages. To take advantage of the long-awaited technology of petroleum engines, Rockefeller used insider information, and his powerful connections gained during the Civil War, to monopolise oil supplies under his Standard Oil (later divided into Mobil and Exxon). The huge profits of Standard Oil’s monopoly
were used to take over the cotton-boom banks of Chase Manhattan and Citibank, which were created in the early 1800s but soon became major players in the financial world. In the meantime, the steel companies joined the world arms race of the 1890s and 1900s as new car companies in the North drew on cheap labor from the South. The US economy began to show signs of stagnation by the mid-1890s, like the rest of the imperialist world. The Northeast manufacturers were initially able to keep their heads above water with relatively lower labor costs, especially with the help of J. P. Morgan, who came to the rescue in the financial crashes. Despite the mass European immigration into the US, encouraged to weaken black prominence, the establishment of labor unions demanding better treatment for workers increased labor costs across the white world. American industrialists weakened the wage pressures by employing African Americans to break strikes and dilute union power. The African Americans in the North were traditionally underpaid, if they could find employment, which was worsened by the African Americans from the South who hadn’t been paid for centuries and were now migrating north. The violence meted out to Africans in the South gradually seeped to the North, as angry ‘undercut’ immigrant Irish laborers and other poor whites carried out lynchings and race riots. In 1865, the Irish carried out the bloodiest race riot in US history, known as the New York Draft Riots, and in 1875, blacks were lynched in Confederate North Carolina. It wasn’t until the 1890s that the spate of race riots increased as the effect of industrialization was being felt. The 1900 New York race riot carried out by Irish policemen, who attacked African Americans, came within a generation of the 1865 New York Draft Riots and resulted in blacks moving from their homes and businesses of more than two hundred years, in midtown Manhattan, to its northern tip of Harlem. This was possible with the help of black churches that bought and distributed land among the black community. At the turn of the century, 90 percent of Africans in the United States lived in the South, out of which over 80 percent lived in rural areas. With the
abolition of slavery, a few blacks ventured north, but the majority stayed in the South—without land, uneducated, and in debt to former slave masters/landlords cum creditors. Their hopes of socioeconomic equality were stolen with the Florida presidential election fraud in 1877. The Southern state legislatures and governors passed laws that their farmers and white society needed to keep blacks down. This was in addition to widespread violent intimidation that resulted in at least four thousand lynchings in the South from 1890 to 1920. The police became the new foremen, tasked to uphold the racist economic system based on sharecropping. It was the new ‘accounted enslavement’ of Africans worldwide. Ellen and William Craft, escaped slaves who fled to Britain via Boston in 1851, returned to Georgia in 1868 to form the Southern Industrial School and Labor Enterprise. It educated and enlightened blacks with the skills needed to face the new agricultural system. Another ex-slave but more prominent educator, born in 1856, was Booker T Washington. He created in 1881 the Nominal and Industrial School for Negroes in Tuskegee, Alabama, for Africans to learn vocational skills and gradually climb the rungs of society. In the absence of a better alternative to help the large Southern African American populations, Washington proselytized a self-help strategy to develop the black community with its large pool of vocational skills, which were organized, sold, and used to build a black economy in the South. By 1900, he worked to advance his self-help principles by spearheading the creation of the National Negro Business League, ostensibly formed to bring together the mainly vocational African American businesses in the quest for socioeconomic progress. Higher education for blacks remained wholly in the hands of the white missionaries and black churches running private school systems. Between 1860 and 1900, Christian groups created about thirty colleges, but from 1901, industrialists, led by Rockefeller, created the General Education Board* to fund and regulate the education of African Americans through donations and foundations. Starting with J. P. Morgan’s founder, George Peabody (who dedicated part of
his fortune to the creation of the Peabody Educational Fund in 1867), Rockefeller, and other industrialists saw the need to control black education —or miseducation—and gear it towards keeping blacks in servitude in the new industrial order. The black elite were to be ‘enlightened’, or brainwashed, towards being workers and not entrepreneurs and leaders. Education reaffirmed culture, and if culture included economics and social systems, the black people’s miseducation was bound to confuse black cultural and economic progress that could challenge white domination. * Wilson, Blueprint for Black Power, 190.
Due to ordinances restricting the assembly of blacks for sociopolitical purposes, the church was the main body that brought blacks together. Even though it relegated black culture to a subservient position, it was still persecuted. Many whites complained of the ‘demonization of churches’ due to the introduction of music and dancing. However, blacks used the church, with its European connotations, as a vehicle to express their African soul and personal relationship with God, like in Jamaica, Brazil, and Cuba. The black church became the most financially viable institution in the black community and across the blackworld. An Afrocentric class of reverend activists from African Methodist and Baptist Revivalist Churches slowly grew, but they remained cautious over their utterances, which they knew could provoke severe reprisals from the white society. Outside the church, blacks continued to fight for their rights with Frederick Douglass in the front, although new, more educated leaders with the benefit of his hindsight took over after his death in 1895 at the ripe age of seventyeight. Although he could rest in peace that the old system of slavery was over, he was disheartened before his death that the benefits of freedom were being rolled back. In one of his major public addresses in the United States, at a mass meeting in 1883 protesting an adverse ‘civil rights’ decision, Douglass said, ‘We have been, as a class, grievously wounded, wounded in the house of our friends, and this wound is too deep and too painful for ordinary measured speech’. He became the first ambassador to Haiti in 1889 in an effort to get him out of the United States and reduce his political agitation.
W E B Du Bois, a Bostonian mulatto different from those in Haiti and Brazil, stepped up to the mantle of truth and social justice in the 1890s. Probably because Anglo-Saxons frowned on interracial marriage, mulattos in the United States didn’t have much chance to form a class of their own and joined with blacks to fight their common oppressor. Du Bois was born in 1868, the postslavery generation, to a wellto-do family that provided him with a good education. He received his BA in sociology from Fisk University and became the first African American to earn a postgraduate degree from Harvard University before teaching at Atlanta University. His initial public contributions were his dissemination of information to reeducate and unite the black race. He wrote The Suppression of the African Slave in 1896 and The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. As a social scientist, he believed more in social engineering and the value of passing the right information through the right channels towards creating a cohesive, positive black movement—the intangibles of sociology and psychology—rather than the sharp economic measures taken by Booker T Washington, Marcus Garvey, and the Nation of Islam. Du Bois derided the reverends for being weak and ineffective and failing in their efforts to highlight the plight of blacks or castigate white society, whose religion they preached. As a graduate, he saw no reason why blacks couldn’t make the same leap forward instead of maintaining the status quo by slowly crawling up the socioeconomic ladder. He called Washington an ‘Uncle Tom’, a sellout, for pushing the white propaganda that blacks weren’t ready for the higher levels of education and society. Booker’s Tuskegee Institute, teaching basic technical skills, attracted praise and finance from white industrialists and honor from poor Africans in the South (United States) and western Africa, because they marginally improved their welfare with his principle of self-help and building from the base upwards. However, he attracted abuse from the black middle class, which believed it was a working relationship with segregation to keep blacks oppressed. Booker later showed his concept of self-help to be more far reaching with his campaign to unite small black businesses towards socioeconomic progress in 1900, but his Atlanta Speech of 1895 was
interpreted as playing into the hands of disingenuous industrialists trying to stop black progress. To complete the rollback of African American freedoms and equality, in 1896, the Supreme Court passed a judgment upholding the ‘separate but equal doctrine’—an apartheid doctrine. This shut the door on those campaigning for the government to provide proper education instead of a piecemeal approach that found missionaries and industrialists funding a substandard educational system from the trickling crumbs of their international efforts. The forty black colleges had a combined fund of less than 1 percent of Harvard’s endowment. It was to this disparity that Du Bois addressed his The Souls of Black Folk, in which he condemned America’s gradualism policy. Two years later, he formed the Niagara Movement to challenge segregation through the courts. Around this time, due to worldwide, white labor unrest and the use of blacks in Northern cities to undercut wages, race riots and lynching increased astronomically—the 1900 New York police race riots and the Atlanta race riot in 1906. The 1909 lynching in Springfield, Illinois, led to Du Bois forming the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910. Despite Du Bois accusing reverends and others of a silent, collusive approach with the white establishment, he worked and was backed by white liberals and Jews, who funded and staffed his organization in New York, in addition to black contributors like Madame C. J. Walker. Ironically, Walker, the black laundress who became a millionaire by inventing and marketing a hairstraightening process, was part of the process that saw an increase in black businesses from twenty thousand in 1900 to forty thousand in 1917.* These were mainly vocational businesses designed to cater to black people. They were attributed, by some historians, to Booker T Washington, whose National Negro Business League reported, in the same period, an increase of black banks from four to fifty-one and retailers from ten thousand to twenty-five thousand. This proved that a self-help approach was more effective in uplifting Africans than the integration approach or begging whites to assimilate blacks as their underclass. Notwithstanding, the vast majority of blacks remained illiterate sharecroppers
and underemployed menial workers, while those who ventured into business were financially redlined by creditors, sabotaged, violently attacked, and destroyed. To educate and agitate the majority, Du Bois created and edited a monthly publication called The Crisis. He employed a Pan-Africanist approach to solving black problems by attending and arranging conferences for all Africans under European imperialism. * Wilson, Blueprint for Black Power, 420.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Sylvester Williams, a Trinidadian law student in London and the secretary of the newly created African Association, called for a world conference of black people in 1898. Williams continued the work of the Equiano and Cugoano Pan-African movement in Britain, which took a subservient approach to the British. The world conference met in London in 1900, where an ‘Address to the Nations of the World’ warned that the ‘problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line’. The conference established the Pan-African Association to advance the course of Africans towards equality. Williams traveled to the Americas, especially the United States, Jamaica, and Trinidad, to spread the word. The movement never attracted wide support in Britain, and the association was short-lived as he went on to become the first black British lawyer. Although Williams’ publication, Pan-African, didn’t last more than an issue, Duse Mohammed Ali, an Egypto-Sudanese, financed by a Sierra Leone businessman, created a longer-lasting black publication called African Times and Orient Review. Duse Mohammed Ali’s business premise at 158 Fleet Street London was a crucial meeting point of the growing rank of black students and professionals that would come to promote black internationalism and Pan-Africanism over the next three decades. Majority were male African students and professionals from British West African colonies of Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Gambia until later joined by more female African and West Indian students. John Dube, a Zulu student taken to the USA by missionaries in the early 1890s to study at Oberlin College, was influenced by Booker T Washington and returned to create the first black-owned school in 1901 called Zulu
Christian Industrial School and a newspaper. The 1910 creation of the Union of South Africa by an Act of the British Parliament (the 1909 South African Act), which unified the British colonies of the Cape of Good Hope and Natal with the annexed Boer republics renamed Orange River and Transvaal colonies, threatened the disenfranchisement of Black Africans, even in the Cape Colony that had a color blind voting franchise based on being literate and earning at least £50 a year. On January 8 1912, the South African Native National Congress (ANNC) was created by John Dube, who became the first president, Sol Plaatje, also a missionary educated journalist and author that became the General Secretary, and a few other South Africans came together to challenge the imminent disenfranchisement, on realization that the British would not be upholding their rights in the new Union of South Africa. Eventually, they had to take their fight to London, the seat of the monarchy and Pan-Africanism. The next London conference held in 1913 raised issues pertaining to the disenfranchisement of South Africans, as well as called on the Colonial Office to build an African student hostel in London to alleviate the problem of racist poor cramped substandard housing, but the calls were ignored52. John Robert Archer, a black Barbadian from Liverpool who moved to London, entered politics in Battersea, London’s most radical borough at the time, and he won a council seat in 1906, to the surprise of many people. He became the mayor in 1913, which, although was a flash in the pan, had a momentous impact on blacks throughout the diaspora. Archer was also an advocate of PanAfricanism, but European imperialism interrupted the African quest for freedom throughout the world. The world economy slowly ground to a halt with astronomical arms stockpiles. The industrialized powers built dozens of warships, and armies doubled between 1900 and 1914. The business community refused to divert investment into black or other new industries and continued to push out armaments. The United States kept its economy going longer than others because of the huge British investment, low black wages, continental expansion towards the Pacific, its 1898 takeover of the Spanish sugar colonies of Cuba and Puerto
Rico, and its increasing South America investments that were second only to Britain’s. Barings bank ran into trouble by August 1890 with its bad debts in Argentina but was saved by the Bank of England and several other banks. 52Marc Matera, Black Internationalism and African and Caribbean Intellectuals in London, 1919-1950, (Proquest 2011) ISBN-9781243527479
Britain maintained its economic growth with the acquisition of African colonies like Nigeria and Ghana. Although the British conceded to white South African political independence, they held the control of the gold and diamonds mines as well as most other aspects of the economy. This was in addition to their Asian, Caribbean, and South American colonies. The bankers’ confidence in lending was based on the knowledge that in case of default, the Imperial navy and army would back them. They often trapped countries with debt that led to taking over the country militarily, as occurred with Chase and J. P. Morgan in Cuba, Citibank in Haiti, and British and French banks in Egypt. France was buoyed by its vast African colonies and invested the surplus in Eastern Europe and the Russians, who were taking over the northern half of Asia into the Far East. Its lending to Russia, even in the face of political instability, cost the French bankers heavily but only after World War I. The new industrial powers, like Germany, challenged the status quo when their economies stagnated without substantial colonies to help continue growth like the Franco-Anglophiles. The only way to achieve growth on their investment was by putting their arms stockpile to ‘productive’ use by going to war for new territory. Japan began a massive industrialization programme in the 1860s, financed by the British, but experienced an economic plateau in the mid-1890s with a need for more labor and resources. With its iron and steel industry not having enough new railroad and other steel construction orders, it produced weapons to pursue an expansionist policy. Japan took over the Korean Peninsula and went to war for territory with Russia, pursuing an expansionist policy eastward. Germany, led by William II (1888–1918), realized its mistake of not pressing
for more colonies during the scramble for Africa. Germany landed troops in Haiti under the pretext of protecting its citizens but later turned to Europe like Napoleon. The Germans overran Belgium and moved into France, while their ally, the AustroHungarian Empire, invaded Serbia and other areas, which brought Britain and Russia into the war. The Muslim Ottoman Empire, whose North Africa and Asian lands were divided between the British and French, entered the war, siding with the Germans and AustroHungarians. The United States supplied weapons and drastically increased weapons production but remained out of the war due to widespread public disapproval. Moreover, the United States was engaged in Cuba and Haiti, the two largest African populations in the Caribbean. The United States didn’t relinquish control in Cuba after the 1898 takeover from Spain, as J. P. Morgan and other New York banks took over the ownership of sugar estates, national infrastructure, and finances. This made the United States invade whenever unfavorable populist governments entered or Africans revolted, as in 1906. The United States invaded Haiti in 1915 to protect Citibank’s investment and quell a black rebellion from the north. The incumbent Western puppet president was torn to pieces in the sanctuary of the French embassy where he and his family fled. In 1917, Haitian resistance movements engaged the US army for three years until the United States killed the last guerrilla leader and thousands of blacks. It militarily occupied Haiti for twenty years and exercised fiscal control for another thirteen years. On the home and European front, J. P. Morgan raised ₤100 million for the Anglo-Franco war effort and remained the allies’ purchasing agent until the United States entered the war. Morgan bought Carnegie Steel in 1900 and renamed it US Steel; it made an annual profit of $240 million during the three years of the war. The US government commandeered production like a Socialist state to develop tank-making assembly lines and long-distance radio communication. The national economy was planned and geared towards the first industrial war in Europe, and eventually, the United States entered on the side of Britain. Because the war was basically about colonies, the war extended to Africa and
was fought by a huge African contingent, normally used to break deadlocks. The war was fought in the arid plains of Muslim Ottoman North Africa and in the southwest African plains, where Germany had its Namibian colony, beside British South Africa. Most important was the number of Africans used by the United States, Britain, Germany, and France in a war that was of no benefit to Africans. As the US army was killing thousands of Africans in Haiti, more than 367,000* African Americans from the United States fought in World War I. More than one hundred thousand fought in the battlefront in France, liberating the French and protecting the British, who had enslaved and continued to exploit Africans. The British and French committed over a million black Africans from their African and American colonies to war. In the end, the Europeans with most African bodies, wealth, and sweat, won World War I and reinforced their own world order. The Anglo-Francophiles reigned supreme in Africa, while the EuroAmericans continued the exploitation of their African American communities. This was in addition to the largely black islands to their south – Cuba, the largest American island, and Haiti, the most populous black island. Farther south in Brazil, Afro-Brazilians continued to be subjugated by the US/UK-inspired and military-backed plutocracy, which came after abolition in 1888 and lasted until 1934. In the meantime, the world’s second-largest African population was wished away in Brazil, and their contributions smoked away in the assimilation pipe dream. The Germans lost all their African colonies after losing the War of Colonies (called World War I). The British took over half of Togo and Cameroon in West Africa. The French took over the other halves of Togo and Cameroon, in addition to the rich coal and iron mines in the Rhineland (East France) that they had lost to Bismarck in 1870. The British also took over the German East Africa colony of Tanganyika, which became Tanzania when added to the Zanzibar islands previously colonized by the British. The Belgians received the remaining lands of German East Africa, next to their border near the Great Lakes, Burundi, and Rwanda. German Southwest Africa, Namibia, was given to white South Africa, which gained independence from British rule in 1910.
Economically and in terms of world dominance, the end of World War I brought America closer to Britain and France. With the destruction of their productive capacities, the British used its huge US investments to balance its war debts, while the French faced additional heavy losses with the Communist takeover of Russia. Before the war, America had been a debtor country, but by the end of the war, America became a creditor nation that was owed $14 billion. * World Almanac and Book of Facts, 2002.
America was able to reorganize its economy with Socialist market controls due to its wartime state of emergency. The War Industries Board regulated more than thirty thousand commodities, while the War Finance Corporation and Emergency Fleet Corporation took care of the rest. With the full establishment of a military-industrial (Ogun) complex, the government dashed away the hard labor and taxes of the masses to a few white industrialists in the name of competitive freemarket economics. Although unfair, it produced the longest boom in history before the 1990s computer cold war peace dividend. The industrialists were able to mass-produce cars in Michigan and Illinois, profiteering from the government-initiated factory lines of General Motors (GM) and others. The mass production of radios, from government investment in military communications, was passed to the likes of General Electric (GE) and other giant, governmentaided conglomerates. There was an immediate economic boom after the war, followed by a slump in 1919, before picking up in what was known as the Roaring Twenties. The 1920s brought an ample supply of capital that led to the mushrooming of factories and radio stations. This investment capital was restricted to a small circle of white industrialists, which led to unsound investments and the 1929 crash and Great Depression, after which there were unavoidable recriminations. There was a prevalent sense of injustice and backlash against the arms makers for profiteering, excessive overcharging, and causing World War I by deviously playing nations against each other, while making the United States
go to war because of its financial entanglements in Europe. This led to the 1934 Nye Committee in the United States and the British Royal Commission. US Senator Gerald Nye commented, ‘It makes one wonder whether the army or the navy are just organizations of salesmen for private industry, paid for by the American government’.* The lamentations came to nothing, because the merchants of death kept the spoils of war that they got in form of factories and received large orders to replenish war stocks when World War II came knocking. There had been ample investment into research and development of new products between 1919 and 1929, especially military hardware like fighter jets, but the Depression staved off funds and profits until the 1934 war preparations. * Sampson, The Arms Bazaar, 77.
Rhodes’s plan ‘to create a secret society…placed at our universities and schools… in every colonial legislature, which would crush all disloyalty and every movement for the severance of the British Empire’,* took form as English-speaking elites took firm control through the Rhodes Scholars, Rockefeller bankers, and Republican foot soldiers. Immense power was concentrated in the hands of a few merchants and the alumni of universities like Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge. Although a small, Freemason-like clique existed at the pinnacle, which included the Morgans and Rockefellers, the most visible clique within the United States was the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR). It controlled political and economic power, and its membership was selected by an even more select few. According to Pat Robertson, chairman and founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, ‘The visible home of the Establishment is Pratt House, on the corner of Park Avenue and Sixty-Eighth Street in New York City…This is the headquarters of the Council of Foreign Relations’.** Every secretary of war and defense from the 1940s, as well as every secretary of state except one, was to have come from the CFR, a private clique, while many passed through the Rockefeller businesses and foundations. After more than a century of obstruction by Southerners fearful of total domination by Northern industrialists, a central bank called the Federal
Reserve was created. It was run by a tiny circle of bankers and industrialists that included J. P. Morgan and Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank and Citibank. * Autobiography of Cecil Rhodes. ** Pat Robertson, The New World Order, 96.
Chapter 14: The Black Agitation Separatists and integrationist lead the blackworld with the likes of Du Bois, Garvey, Solanke, Plaatje and Nascimento (1900–1945) The merchant-industrialists who had called for the abolition of slavery enjoyed the benefits, as they exploited cheap black labor that couldn’t organize itself against further exploitation, especially with the continued miseducation of Rockefeller’s General Education Board. The underfunding of black education and black poverty and unemployment (due to the increased machination of Southern agriculture and financial redlining in the oppressive South) led to a mass migration to the North. Between 1910 and 1930, the population of African Americans in Northern cities more than quadrupled due to the flood migrating up Route 66 along the River Mississippi to industrial Chicago and ‘motor town’ Detroit. Chicago became the largest Midwest metropolis, being the main US commodity market and second-largest industrial city. Although white immigrants recently surpassed the black population, African Americans caught up and eventually comprised the largest ethnic population in Chicago. The black population went from 44,000 in 1910 to 109,000 in 1920 and 234,000 in 1930.* Detroit became majority African American. The white lower classes, frustrated by the influx of blacks and the downward effect on their wages, reacted violently by regenerating the KKK (formed in the South during the 1870s reconstruction but disbanded after whites reassumed control of the South). The KKK was relaunched in 1915 in Atlanta, Georgia, and it soon spread north. Lynching became a pastime enjoyed by the whole white family; postcards were made and memorabilia taken from the African’s dead body. This was a social phenomenon peculiar to the white race dating back to Roman times, when people threw men into a pit of lions and displayed a chilling, bloodthirsty, wild dog mentality, exemplified by the Latino custom of taunting bulls with red.
In an incident replicated across the United States—reminiscent of raging Muslims emerging from desert mosques to wage jihad and kill black kaffirs —immediately after church on a Sunday after sharing the body and blood of Christ, almost a whole town in Texas set out to lynch an African, whom they slowly beat to death as the townspeople jeered. After hours of torture and the black man’s inevitable death, his body was cleaned, dressed, and hanged. Pictures were taken with the man dangling from a branch in the background. With the dead man’s body parts as memorabilia in their pockets, they sat down with their families to picnic on sandwiches and discuss the necessity of ‘putting the savage Africans in their place!’ There is a book of five thousand postcards and photographs of social lynchings, many with chilling, funny remarks, more prominent in the South until the 1950s when it became a police function.53 * Segal, The Black Diaspora, 249 / Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land, 16.
The growth of the Northern cities and the influx of blacks brought about an increase in income and greater freedoms exhibited by the black Harlem renaissance of the 1920s. The booming postwar business, especially in New York and Chicago, brought about the boom in radios and radios stations, which Africans living in the cities took advantage of to promote their culture. Black music was waxed on records. It spread to a wider audience than that of the church and other ‘chittlin’ circuits where blacks showcased their talents to their communities. In the segregated cities, where the repressive white society ensured that an African had no voice, the first music to gain prominence was a voiceless music called jazz, which couldn’t offend the white clientele, record companies, and the targeted audiences. Mainstream musical acceptance progressed to ‘the blues’, where Africans rhymed in metaphors and ironies that told of their pain and suffering. The antagonist in the African call-andresponse music system was a lover, instead of whites, so it was agreeable to the white populations that bought and copied it. Apart from singing about their plights indirectly, the black political class rose to the challenge of educating and agitating their people about the problems that they faced. The likes of Du Bois continued and increased their opposition against the status quo of black servitude through publications and media like
the NAACP Crisis. After Booker T Washington’s death in 1915, the black political forum was divided between integrationists, like Du Bois, and separatists, like Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant who came to the United States in 1916, intent upon furthering Booker’s concept of collective self-help. Garvey wasn’t entirely a separatist, but he believed in the development of blacks independently of whites. Born in 1887, Garvey left school at fourteen to become a printer’s apprentice, but he was blacklisted when he led a printers’ strike in Jamaica. He traveled to the UK and United States and realized that Africans everywhere suffered from European exploitation. He formed the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the African Communities League in accordance to Washington’s selfhelp doctrine. 5353 1918. Arno Press and the New York Times, New York. 1969. He dreamt of ‘uniting all the Negro peoples of the world into one great body to establish a country and government absolutely their own’. He created within the UNIA the Black Cross Nurses to take care of disabled Africans, the Negro Factories Co-op, which included a chain of groceries, restaurants, smallscale industries, the Black Star Shipping Line and publishing houses with weekly publications like Negro World. This increased and encouraged blacks’ self-belief and entrepreneurship. Garvey’s call to Africa was for partial repatriation of skilled workers to build an Afro-centric economic system, but he was widely misinterpreted as calling on all blacks to return to Africa. People like Du Bois attacked him for being impractical and feared that whites, who were interested in ‘whitening’ America, might take up his call and twist it into colonization of African Americans on another territory in Africa. Garvey realized this in Liberia, where white powers pushed him aside and exploited the African territory for its rubber and labor through the white-owned firm, Firestone. Likewise, when Du Bois told blacks to enlist in World War I with the hope that the moral indebtedness would help change things at home, Garvey attacked Du Bois with his light skin and white backers as being ‘more of a white man than a Negro’. Du Bois was disproved when, in 1919 after the war, antiblack riots occurred in twenty-six cities (mostly in the Northern United States, Chicago being the worst), just as in Liverpool and Cardiff in Britain. The differences between approaches deepened with their successive movements, but the actions of Du Bois and Garvey were not entirely hardened into camps. Despite his ‘separatist’ Back to Africa movement, in 1924 Garvey formed the Negro Political Union (NPU), which endorsed candidates sympathetic to the black cause. Du Bois waged the war through courts but not through political machinery. By the 1936 election, the vote mobilization of several hundred thousand Africans migrating to the North became an important political tool for integrationists. Democrats courted the black vote, and Roosevelt won more than 75 percent of black votes. To some observers, it was ironic that the separatist Garvey could be responsible for organizing the first African American political party, but in a very real sense, it was compatible with the concept of black self-help, the foundation of which was black ethnic identity and nationalism as opposed to integration
and assimilation into another identity. The simpler, social-engineering, integrationist approach took the upper hand, especially after Garvey’s deportation and death. The trend of lesser-educated blacks leading the separatist/nationalist movement, and its goal of attacking the root problem of economics and culture, led to losing ground to middle-class integrationists. This adversely affected the outlook of the blackworld and its movement. Due to the seeming futility of integration, the chief integrationist, Du Bois, turned to separatism towards the end of his long career in 1960, even though he lost the backing of many in his organization. Nevertheless, from 1890 to 1950, he promoted education and agitation towards integration while planning the Pan-African Congresses in Europe. The black movement was initially restricted to a small group of middle-class African Americans students and professionals in New York, Chicago, and Detroit. Apart from a small group of black businessmen, increasing numbers of blacks got teaching jobs and industrial supervisory roles, which led to a mushrooming black working class and middle class. African American entrepreneurships in most industries were stifled through monetary and fiscal measures, just like in Africa, especially in long-haul transportation, marketing, advertising and media, and heavy industry. Unfortunately, the black church, the most financial viable institution, directed its resources towards producing civil servants in the universities they sponsored, not entrepreneurs. The urban environment of America’s two most industrial cities, New York and Chicago, bred a small but visible class of entertainers, hustlers, and low-level criminals. They showed off their wealth from adult entertainment including prostitution, gambling, and drugs. With the barring of investment in black communities, generation of income outside the bottom rungs of the white society was possible mainly through vocational trades and the provision of entertainment, which occasioned increased frustration. Blacks began to show their frustration with boycotts and demonstrations, as seen in the 1935 Harlem riots. The majority of African Americans remained in the rural South, and their economic plight was scarcely better than what it had been during slavery. Even when Southern blacks struggled to break the yoke of oppression by using their large population and market to create business communities in Tulsa, Durham, and Memphis, they were attacked and destroyed financially, legally, and, most important, through terror and violence. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the large black business community known as ‘Black Wall Street’, after trying everything else, the police held back blacks under false pretenses while whites burnt and destroyed the black business district in May 1921. Many blacks were saddened by the fact that hundreds of thousands of African Americans fought abroad for the freedom of the European cousins of their oppressors, while African Americans remained oppressed at home. In Britain, immediately after the war, there was widespread resentment against blacks. It was clear that the people whom they had oppressed came to provide their slight margin of victory. Before the war, blacks found it difficult to get jobs, because whites and their labor unions refused to work beside them, but during the war, jobs came begging from the arms and chemical industries as well as the merchant navy and the army. Immediately after World War I, whites wanted to ‘put blacks in their place’ as thousands were dismissed. Not satisfied with the resulting black unemployment, they made physical attacks, and race riots spread in the Midlands and Northern England, especially in the ports of Liverpool and Cardiff that had blossomed with the slave trade. During the Paris Peace Conference (January to June 1919) and in
Liverpool (May to June), violence against blacks grew in intensity and incidence, culminating in race riots that saw mobs burning homes and boarding houses. By June 10, close to a thousand Africans were forced to take refuge in fire stations. The following day, the Liverpool Courier reported, ‘One of the chief reasons of popular anger behind the present disturbances lies in the fact that the average Negro is nearer animal than is the average white man, and that there are (white) women in Liverpool who have no self-respect’. The reference to white women sleeping with black men was a pathological fear and deep-rooted inferiority complex dating to black Egypt but which first manifested officially with Queen Elizabeth I’s 1601 edict ordering the deportation of all Africans. In the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, it led to entire black towns in the United States being slaughtered on the mere accusations of a black man having sexual intercourse with a white woman. The excuse was given for the thousands of lynchings up until the 1950s and resulted in murders in 1999 at the hands of the local police, who disguised it as suicide in detention cells in Mississippi. The 1919 victory riots spread to Cardiff, where three thousand blacks were under siege by white mobs. By June 13, the blacks were escorted out of the city, although quite a few residents remained to fight for their rights. By the July 19 victory parade in London, blacks who had fought in hundreds of thousands were officially excluded from the march. The immediate response to the insults and injuries, for the African seamen and ex-military men returning to their colonies in the West Indies and Africa, was to set upon their resident white populations. There was deep resentment across the blackworld, especially in Trinidad and Jamaica, where blacks attacked whites in race riots. In Britain, black intellectuals returned to Pan-Africanism with a vengeance. Claude McKay, a Jamaican poet who had been in the United States during the 1919 riots, hoped that he could get a better treatment in England, but he was disappointed. He tried to enlighten white labor unionists who appeared libertarian, but he realized that their self-interest made them the most ardent racists of the day. In South Africa, the African Native National Congress created to challenge the imminent loss of their voting franchise in 1912 by John Dube, the newspaper proprietor that became its first president, Sol Plaatje, the author and journalist that became its General Secretary, and many others were to face new racist laws like the 1913 Native Land Laws that laid the foundations of apartheid. The Native Land Laws that banned land ownership by blacks in most arable areas and forced them into cities as laborers agitated the likes of Plaatje and Dube, who wrote articles to protest the injustice. They took their case to London in 1914 but were ignored by the British government that hypocritically claimed they did not want to interfere in the internal affairs of the Union they created. In 1919, the ANNC led a campaign against issue of passes but the situation worsened as the Boers enacted various Pass Laws to further restrict Africans and lay the foundations of apartheid. In 1923, the ANNC was changed to the African National Congress but its significance began to waned in the mid-1920s as the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union and the Communist Party represented blacks. The refusal to unite with the communists and labor unions saw the ANC pale into insignificance during the 1930s and 1940s, especially with the 1932 death of Plaatije. However, they were able to network with London Pan-Africanists, as well as WEB DuBois and Marcus Garvey, to seek a solution to the global black problem. In Nigeria, Herbert Macaulay decried European corruption and the rape of Africa in 1908, and most
important, fought for the Lagos chiefs whose lands were seized by the British. He took their case to court in London and secured compensation in 1919. He was jailed twice as his popularity rose and in 1923 he formed Nigeria’s first political party, Nigerian National Democratic Party, centered in Lagos. However, the fight for freedom needed a London base that was close to the door of the imperialists, in the comfort of other panAfricanists, and a more militant approach of another generation. The Africans in London pushed on with Pan-Africanism, and London became the acknowledged center of Pan-Africanists. In 1916, initially named the African Students Union it was changed, with the inclusion of West Indian students, to Union of Students of African Descent. It was created to bring all African students in London to together, ‘with the purpose of dealing with African history and sociology’ by keeping students in a condition of active intellectuality and inciting investigations through debates by members and others54’. 54 Marc Matera, Black Internationalism and African and Caribbean Intellectuals in London, 19191950, Pg16 (Proquest 2011) ISBN-9781243527479 By the end of the war in 1918, John R Archer, who had become the mayor of the radical London borough of Battersea, established the African Progress Union that he led as president until 1921. The African Progress Union served as a rallying point for the growing black student population in London and delegates of the newly formed National Congress of British West Africa, like BankoleBright, as well as those of the South African Native National Congress, like Sol Plaatje. Ladipo Solanke, a Yoruba Law student, wrote to protest the negative wrong media representations of African culture. This was especially highlighted with the British Empire Exhibition held in Wembley in 1924. He wrote a series of letters and articles criticizing the false and eroticized representations and the attempt to paint Igbo culture as cannibalism. This brought him to forefront of Black activism in London, as Amy Ashwood Garvey, Garvey’s first wife, wrote to express her support and shared visions of reforms in British West Africa. Ladipo Solanke, Ashwood Garvey and 13 other Nigerians launched the Nigeria Progress Union in July 1924, the first Nigerian organization outside Nigeria, with the vision to build the long demanded African Student hostel required to improve their living conditions. Ladipo became the first person to broadcast Yoruba in radio and sought to teach Yoruba and the culture. On August 7, 1925, Solanke, Bankole-Bright and a group of West African law students established the West African Student Union in London to organize a major section of the blackworld to become the primary catalysts behind black internationalism and Pan-Africanism. London was the site of sessions of the second Pan-African Congress in 1921 and all of the third Congress in 1923. Under Solanke’s leadership, WASU served as a port of call for blacks in London and was the most important pressure group devoted to African issues. Two of WASU aims and objectives were to act as a center for research on all subjects pertaining to Africa and its developments, and also ‘to present to the world a true picture of African life and philosophy’. The Union used its position in London to decry abuses of colonial rule and publicize those struggling against them in the colonies at the time when government repression made it increasingly difficult to do so outside London. They fought for full citizenship rights of the British Empire for West Africans, and not independence. In 1929, Solanke travelled to West Africa for three years to set up branches across West Africa and to raise funds to build the African House. He returned with enough funds and built the Africa House and became its first warden55. It was co-managed by Opeolu Obisanya, who met on his trip and married.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Solanke was able to use his friendships with Garvey, Paul Robeson, Reginald Sorensen to advance the cause of West African unity and anti-racism and increase the profile of WASU. When cocoa farmers wanted to break the stranglehold of the British cartel, he was approached and was able to raise questions in the parliament over the issue. African students were a much easier group to mobilize than the vast populations of Africa, many of whom had nothing to do with the Europeans except for taxes. Those who were directly affected by European imperialism in Africa, and could effectively do something about it, were the middle and upper classes. They were composed of traditional chiefs, a few wealthy farmers who planted export crops, middlemen merchants, and pockets of coastal Christian elites and northern Muslim leaders. This was a mixed bunch that didn’t mind the existing status quo and had conflicting interests. The students, most of who were children of the above-mentioned classes, were the real ambassadors of their parents and people of Africa. Their mixing with black European, West Indian, and American intellectuals in London, Philadelphia, and Paris provided the key to freedom across the blackworld. A Trinidadian, C L R James, came to London in 1932 and provided a wealth of knowledge to the blackworld by publishing analytical books on the situation in Trinidad, the first African revolution in Haiti, and the contemporary Communist revolutions and their African relevance. With several major books to his credit, he left London in 1938 to go on a lecture circuit in the United States, where he lived for fifteen years as an illegal immigrant. George T N Griffith, a Londoner from British Guyana (who changed his name to Ras Tefari Makonnen), was a major financier of the Pan-African movement. Blacks in diaspora looked at Ethiopia with pride, being the only independent ‘African’ monarchy with an ancient Christian background, which authenticated African ascendancy before the slavery that brought them to the Western world. The light-skinned, Afro-Asian Ethiopian monarchy disguised its oppression of the dark-skinned, AfroAsian-speaking majority. It attracted widespread support during and after the 1936 Italian invasion, especially from African West Indians. 55 Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain, 1900-1960: Nationalism, Pan-. Africanism and Communism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998). Ras Tefari Makonnen began business in Manchester with the Ethiopian Teashop; this grew into a chain of restaurants that proved profitable during World War II. This enabled him to organize lodging and partly finance the most important fifth Pan-African Congress in 1945, which included activists from around the world. The West Africa student and political activist base was indirectly strengthened along the prescribed lines of Lord Lugard, the creator of the Nigger Area, who became the world authority on colonial administration after the war. Lugard devised his style of indirect rule and local administration in northern Nigeria through the Fulani Sokoto caliphate and its local Hausa emirs before later adapting it to southern Nigeria through the Yoruba obas and Igbo obis. The Yoruba council of Obas was headed by the spiritual head of the Yoruba, the Ooni of Ife, flanked by the leading Oba of the twin Yoruba kingdoms (the Alaafin of Oyo and Oba of Benin). After subjecting the people with machine guns, but without the resident white population for direct colonial administration, the colonists pressured the kings to motivate their people to grow cocoa, palm trees, rubber, and other raw materials sold through the Royal African Company monopoly. The uncooperative kings were replaced by a lineage established by Europeans. In parts of Igboland, kings were created where no feudal system existed due to the preexistence of ancient, village democracies.
The salaried kings, through their established local governments, organized the collection of head and income tax payments, which were forwarded to the colonial government while retaining a little for local government administration. Lugard proposed that the kings would grow into the roles provided for them and could eventually be expected to run the whole system, semi-independently, at a national level. At the business end, the European colonialists ‘milked the Garden of Eden’ through the trading monopoly of the Royal African Company and the banking monopolies of Standard Chartered and Barclays. To staff the local governments and companies, one of Lugard’s greatest followers, Lord Harlech (who had become the undersecretary of state for the colonies) made it clear to the colonial governors in a 1925 meeting that the educational and employment training policy was to subsidize, regulate, and promote mission schools except in Muslim areas, where local authority schools had to be freshly built. The Christian mission schools, created with the advent of colonial missionaries in the early 1800s, spread throughout coastal and forest West Africa with the creation of teacher training colleges. Harlech set a new standard of at least four years in primary education. This policy extended and resulted in more secondary schools, especially in the coastal southern areas. Nigeria was the only country to have more than a dozen secondary schools by 1939. In British East Africa, which now included German East Africa, as well as in Central Africa, where Rhodes’s British South Africa Company gave up control in 1923, the white settlers wrestled the power prescribed by Lugard for local chiefs. This led to chronic labor shortages, malfunctioning, unprofitable colonial administrations, and even revolts, which was unlike the West Africa experience. In 1925, a British parliamentary commission, headed by OrmsbyGore, drew up a colonial policy like that of Lugard and tried to eliminate friction between European settlers and the indigenous Africans. This was done by colonial powers limiting the numbers of settlers and the settlers’ intended absolute control of political power. The colonial government knew that settlers’ absolute control would build resentment among the Africans and stifle the production of much-needed raw materials, income generation, and tax collection. The British employment training in West Africa of subsidizing mission schools was adopted. In French West and Equatorial Africa, Lugard’s equivalent was Albert Sarraut, the minister of colonies in 1920–1924 and 1932–1933. After the experiences of Haiti and the Napoleonic Wars, the French plan was to never leave the African colonies. This led to a policy of assimilation and cultural subjugation, the aim being to turn the colonies into permanent raw materials depots. Sarraut wrote that their ‘colonies must be centers of production and no longer museums for specimens’.* This was disguised as a mutual working relationship with promises of the gradual development of the colonies. The French colonies became economically and politically centralized, and the local chiefs were not allowed to assume larger roles. The French permeated every facet of African life as they tried to milk the territories, because they were hungrier than the British, who didn’t mind chiefs and middlemen profiting as long as they remained loyal. The French West African chiefs were no more than regional clerks and mainly chosen from among the more efficient clerks and interpreters in government service rather than from any hereditary principle that may have operated in the British colonies. Probably due to the fact that the large Muslim areas of French West Africa didn’t experience the precolonial business and education influences of the Sierra Leone Creole/Saro and missionaries, 90 percent of European education was directly from the French colonial government through regional schools. This was opposite to the stated British policy of subsidizing mission schools but was more like
the exception used in northern Muslim Nigeria, under similar circumstances. Only a handful of exceptional mission schools were subsidized by the French. The result was fewer primary schools and even fewer secondary schools than in the British colonies, because the provision of education was rigidly tied to the amount of low-level African administrators needed in the centralized French system. The Belgians in Congo and the ex-German colonies pursued the same direct-rule policy as the French, leading to more than six thousand chiefdoms in Congo and even a larger cumulative white administrative staff than the French. Like the British, the Belgians didn’t bother creating their own educational systems and instead funded mission schools. Unlike the British, the Belgians funded only Catholic mission schools. * Oliver, Africa Since 1800, 158. From this first set of expanded secondary school attendants, the first student and political activists developed as they traveled to the United States, Britain, and France for degree courses, because the first real universities weren’t created until after World War II. Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone began awarding degrees in 1876 from the University of Durham, but they were essentially teaching and clergy degrees. One of the most exceptional of the new class of student-political activists was Nnamidi Azikwe, fondly known as ‘Zik of Africa’. Azikwe was a Christian Igbo born in Muslim northern Nigeria, but he attended the mission schools of Igboland before he went to Lagos and to the United States for a university education. Azikwe attended Pennsylvanian universities that provided more enrollment spaces for blacks than most other Northern Ivy League colleges. Its melting pot provided the opportunity for West African students to get involved with the northeast civil rights movement and music. Azikwe obtained a master’s degree in political science from Lincoln University and another master’s degree in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. Most importantly, he learnt and followed the Pan-Africanist visions of Garvey, Du Bois, and other black intellectuals making the lecture circuit. On his return to Africa, Azikwe stopped in Ghana to edit a newspaper. This was in accordance with the Pan-African Congresses principle of educating and agitating the masses to form a movement large enough to defeat European imperialism. Following a riot in Accra, caused by the paper that he edited, he left Ghana for Lagos, where he established his influential newspaper, the African Pilot, as well as accosted the British through sociopolitical and economic means. Before leaving for Lagos, Azikwe helped to send eight Nigerians and four Gold Coasters (Ghanaians) to study in the United States. All of them were from the younger generation of the extended mission schools and grew into key figures in the black movement after World War II. Most notable among them was an Akan, Kwame Nkrumah, who attended his mentor’s University of Pennsylvania and Lincoln University. Following the ideology of Azikwe and Garvey, Nkrumah continued his education in England, where he co-chaired the fifth Pan-African Congress with Du Bois (which was partly financed by Ras Tefari Makonnen). Throughout the blackworld, with the exception of the Romantic* colonies, the student-political activists were ready to advance the black movement from education and agitation to economic boycotts, demonstrations, and civil disobedience. This was exhibited by the first sit-in protestors, Tucker and five others, who walked into a library in Virginia on August 21, 1939, and demanded to read—blacks
weren’t allowed in Southern public libraries. The incident was kept from the newspapers due to Hitler’s September 3 invasion of Poland, which caused the postponement of the black movement’s first major thrust. * Latino and French.
Chapter 15: White Plutocracy European elitist sociopolitical theories and systems (1900–1945) As the engineers of the Enlightenment ushered in the Industrial Age in the mid-1800s, its intellectuals heralded the notion of an advanced industrial society based upon free-market principles and democracy. Like the Christian enslavers calling slavery a ‘saving mission of savages’, with Latinos baptizing captives, the intellectuals describing the new industrial system perpetuated outlandish new theories to explain its failures: survival of the fittest and ‘the Tarzan mentality’. This was the continuation of the era of the Second Horseman, the Age of Olokun, a time when religion and other dogma was deceptively used to control Man and his environment. The lack of truth and clarity at the foundations of their theories caused the divisions seen in Christianity, Islam, and every other creed they professed. After the rush for African wealth split Christianity, and the conceptualization and formation of nation-states required new laws and guidelines, the white Enlightenment moved away from the ‘heaven and hell syndrome’ and hypothesized the ideal of freemarket democratic principles and individualism. Being the 8th and last two hundred and fifty Oya cycle in the 2000yr era, it also showed the theme of the next 2000yr era of the 3rd Horseman, the era of Shango, an age of global economic justice, humanitarism and enlightenment. Therefore the Shango enlightenment and quest for justice was shrouded in the mystery and deceptions of Olokun. Adam Smith, the father of economics, postulated in his The Wealth of Nations that labor was the most important economic factor, but he refused to identify the economic significance of African labor, conveniently accounted as the wealth of white nations. He and later economists claimed that free trade and competition would bring prosperity as nations and individuals exploited their comparative advantages. Britain and the United States proclaimed the ‘Free Trade’ crusade to the four corners of the world, but in reality, it came down to using comparative military advantages to freely exploit Africans through slavery and colonization, with the gun and transportation industries being essential. The spirit of individualism was nowhere to be found in the Anglo-Saxon world, as Peabody passed the baton to his New England tribesmen, the Morgans, who financed the businesses of a few select whites, including the Rockefellers, who also built an Anglo dynasty. Under the auspices of a philosophy called democracy, the new system was hijacked from birth by Hamilton-led merchant bankers and other special interests. The framers of the constitution disregarded African rights essential to the system. The judiciary, the societal conscience, was sold on the benches. Following Napoleon’s discovery of the glorious black history of Egypt, French intellectuals like Gobineau led a virulent and racist attack on Africans in the early 1800s. The racist conceptualization/dogma was advanced by Darwin’s survival of the fittest hypothesis (The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man) and by Rhodes and his Oxbridge (University of Oxford) clique. The rich intellectuals went on a racial ego trip until the 1930s, disregarding Africans and their essential human and labor rights, like those of the previous century’s era of slavery, as explained by Adam Smith and his dreamland free-trade theories.
The mid-1800s, Enlightenment social scientists professed that everyone could fulfill their ‘American dream’ if the correct economic principles were followed, unless the person was an African (thought to be pathologically challenged). They advanced outlandish theories to explain the continued mistreatment of Africans after slavery. These included Gradualism and economic theories like the Native Supply Curve Function, but these so-called theories never addressed the real issue of free black labor and were merely Olokun’s dogma/propaganda. Human beings are the most important component in any economic system, and they are either labor (workers) or entrepreneurs (business owners). In many modern businesses, labor costs are about twothirds of the whole production costs. The actual labor costs of the sugar and cotton economy in the Americas would have exceeded the benefits and prevented European development if not for forced African labor, especially Africans genetically blessed with special agricultural skills and disease resistance. The Europeans would have died trying to cultivate America by themselves. At the beginning of the ‘modern’ world economy, labor was differentiated by the demands of nature, which only Africans could withstand with the sickle cell trait that naturally developed against fever, headache, and disease. Only Africans with this trait, mostly among Yoruba and Igbo, were genetically strong enough to withstand the demanding plantation conditions. Abolitionists/colonists and industrialists fought to inherit this labor pool from the South, in order to move the economy into the industrial stage. After the Civil War and slavery, industrialists were able to undercut labor costs due to their price discrimination of labor. Although many economists directly avoided the issue of price discrimination of labor, the price discrimination of goods was described as the way to take consumers’ surplus income by charging different prices for the same good, if the consumers could be differentiated and the goods couldn’t be exchanged between consumers. With the price discrimination of labor, since labor could be differentiated by skin color, which couldn’t be exchanged, it allowed a major cut in labor cost. In addition, economic theories of specialization were advanced to basically place blacks at a disadvantage. The labor specialization theories explained away the restriction of individual Africans to lowpaying menial jobs, while national specialization of production theories, in terms of ‘national comparative advantages in a free world trade’, rooted Africans in the lowest role of raw materials providers. There was, eventually, the Native Supply Curve Function, which theorized along the traditional lines that Africans were lazy, stipulating that after a certain income level, Africans couldn’t be motivated to work. With a lower wage structure given to blacks and barriers against black entrepreneurs, Anglo-Franco industrialists did better than their competitors in Germany and Russia. The industrialists in Germany and Russia had to use their own race. It soon became obvious that industrial development couldn’t provide the utopia of free trade and democracy, because it needed an underpaid working class and constant war. Russia was able to extend into Asia, but Germany wasn’t. German intellectuals like Karl Marx criticized the unfair, unsustainable growth derived by rich capitalist nations, even though he never recognized the full significance of Africans. In addition, Marxists argued against ownership of private property, which they believed was detrimental to overall societal development. Lenin stated in 1916 that, ‘a handful of monopolists subordinate to their will all the operations, both commercial and industrial, of the whole capitalist society’. The problem of gathering private property towards societal and industrial development was encountered, because free market principles couldn’t efficiently direct funds into large, long-term
investments. At the turn of the century, there were many inventions and investment opportunities like cars, radios, telephones, and airplanes, but the investment capital was not available unless it was war oriented. Pondering on the German economy, Lenin said, ‘the question is: what means other than war could there be under capitalism to overcome the disparity between the development of productive forces and the accumulation of capital on the one side, and the division of colonies and spheres of influence for finance and capital on the other?’56 Socialists and Communists entered the European political forum on the platform to make more equitable changes to the existing capitalist system and won a few seats. The world industrial stagnation of the early 1900s affected the Russians, whose imperial dreams had grown drastically since the 1850s. The Russian military and territorial expansion was halted by their loss to the British-sponsored Japanese in the 1904–1905 war. The defeat ultimately led to the 1906 revolution that saw the weakening of the tsar, the creation of a legislature called Dumas, with inclusion of Socialists and Marxists, as well as agricultural reforms. The Russian social reforms of 1906 were like those of the Western world, which was also facing economic slowdown. The British Labor Party in 1906, US antitrust suits against Rockefeller and employer liability acts, and the 1904 French ten-hour work day all provided a brief respite without attacking the root economic problem. The reforms showed promise for major labor groups, but the entrepreneurial aspect was neglected. It wasn’t until World War I that factors of production were reorganized to push the world economy to its next stage with the mass production of war-related goods. The US government took the lead by taking over production factories and won the war with the resultant increased production, which extended into the 1920s consumer and investor boom. The Russians didn’t organize their war production efforts in a Socialist manner like the United States and suffered economically, leading to Bolshevik Socialists taking over the political and economic realm in November 1917. 56 Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1917, Chapter V11 Lenin, leading the Socialists, wrongly believed that by taking over the production factories, they could stop the failures of a corrupt, inefficient, capitalist system, not realizing that money was just a veil. They only accomplished the transfer of power from a few industrialists to the hands of a few politicians, which still resulted in a huge underpaid underclass whose price discrimination of labor couldn’t be explained in religion or race, only ideology. Gradually, the stepped divisibility, transferability, and unaccountability of economic power clogged the economic wheel and killed competition. Capitalism and Communism failed because they were never practiced in totality. Ultimately if both systems were practiced perfectly they would tend towards the same results. The problem of huge long term investments is better resolved with government directing productive resources to the intended production, then privatizing it for natural growth. However, despite the evolution of national communism/socialism as seen in Russia and China, international Communism was to be the way to bring about a fairer level ground between slaving and nonslaving White nations. China and Russia realized that without politically and economically freeing African colonies from Western Capitalists, there would not be a level playing field in the global marketplace and they would be disadvantaged. America was able to continue enjoying lower labor costs from its suppression of the black populace, but human beings naturally fulfill two production function roles: labor and entrepreneurship. The ample
financing available after the war was restricted from blacks and resulted in investments being pumped into less efficient sectors while profitable black sectors were starved. With peace prevalent in the world, the expected income was not enough to attract investments into the new range of goods, and because white society would rather ‘cut its nose to spite its face’ than sponsor black economic growth, its subsequent weak investments led to the Great Depression. The small, black businesses strictly catering to the segregated black populace survived the Depression because there was always space for growth. In the mainstream US heavyindustrial economy, without its natural black quota, economic growth could be derived only through refitting an army during war or due to new weapons that made the existing stock obsolete. The inability of the Western nations to get out of the Depression led to an increasingly restive public. By 1932, 12 million were unemployed in the United States, 5.6 million in Germany, and 2.7 million in the UK. Socialist revolutions were prevented only by the introduction of economic planning and welfarism. France was the first to go along the route of welfarism, but by 1935, US President Roosevelt had introduced a Social Security programme, called the New Deal, that covered low-income white families. Housing, agriculture, and other sectors were subsidized to pacify the hungry and angry lower classes, but the economy still couldn’t escape the Depression. Instead of investing in the black community, the United States started investing in its old enemy of World War I, Germany. Ultraconservative Hitler was elected in 1933, and Germany soon rebuilt its industrial base. It began rebuilding its army with the help of Krupps and finances from US banks, including those of the Rockefellers, and Senator Prescott Bush (President George Bush’s father). For its industrial development, Germany needed to retake the Rhineland and its African colonies lost in World War I to France and Britain. Hitler had no other means of getting them except through war on others, which was initially allowed by Britain and France, until he turned against them. Even during war with the European Allies, US banks continued to finance Hitler until Senator Bush was sanctioned by the US Congress for acting as a go-between for Hitler’s regime and his American bankers. The Catholic Church, Rockefeller, and the Swiss banks were also deeply involved with Hitler’s finances. However, Hitler wasn’t the only beneficiary. By 1934–1935, most of the Western economies that had been stagnant for several years were reawakened, as steel/arms companies received huge orders for the arms race. Most important were military jets, a technology that had been underused for two decades until it was needed on the battlefield. Aviation enthusiasts had been able to secure investment in the mid1920s, but with the Depression and antiwar feelings running high, they withered until right-wing Hitler gave them a breather. Using the defunct New England factories of Colt gun makers from the slavery era, the founder of United Technologies and Pratt Whitney Aircrafts secured loans from New York banks to develop aircraft engines for navy aircraft. Before World War II, the Airforce was not a distinct armed force and operated under the navy to transport ground troops from ships to land. The Electric Boat, which made huge profits making submarines during World War I, was reduced to repairing hair curlers from hair salons. Bill Boeing saw opportunities for aviation and sold planes to the navy but had to convert his plant into making furniture during the reign of peace. Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, in California, collapsed during the Depression until it was given a kiss of life in 1938 from the British, who ordered more than three hundred bombers within a year after Hitler invaded Austria. Their orders went to seventeen hundred by 1941.
The heavy-industry sector of the Northeast United States experienced a major shift when the center of the arms industry operations in New England made a major relocation to the more spacious territories of the Southwest, which was required for flying and huge aircraft plants. California, with clear skies and wide, arid plains, was the first to benefit from the influx, especially with its largely redundant population after the gold rush. The industry spread to Texas, Georgia, Missouri, and a few other states. By May 1940, Roosevelt announced a target of fifty thousand planes a year to be produced primarily by Boeing, Lockheed, and McDonnell Douglas. In 1939, defense spending accounted for 1.5 percent of the gross national product (GNP), and unemployment was running at 17 percent, but by 1944, defense was 44 percent of the GNP and unemployment was 1.2 percent.* This was repeated in France and Britain but not on the scale of the Americans, who had the land, labor, and capital. California became the most populous US state, as companies like Lockheed employed fifty thousand people. California’s wealth spread to the Hollywood film industry, which was used to propagate and inspire people towards the war. The US government, as in World War I, commanded the diversion of national resources into the creation of the necessary infrastructure to produce war materials. After the war, the materials were committed into the hands of a few industrialists who purchased industries for prices far cheaper than their real value. The few military industrialists turned around to take unfair advantage of the consumer peace dividend of World War II in the form of air travel. * Sampson, The Arms Bazaar, 93. The United States committed more than a million African Americans to war, while the various European colonists committed millions of Africans to a war that killed forty-five million people worldwide, at the end of which nothing was accomplished. Hitler was never caught, nor were his racist ideas repudiated. His officers and engineers were tapped for their skills, and it was business as usual for his sponsors. More odiously, a more dangerous weapon was created at the end of the war: the atomic bomb. As the machine gun had been hailed as a colonizing machine to ‘cut down African savages’, the atomic bomb was to destroy large, advancing Asian armies. It was dropped on Japan, which had had every right to compete with Europeans in the scramble for Asian colonies in contested east and southeast Asia. At the end of World War I, the airplane was unveiled as the weapon of the future that the whites seemed to be racing towards, culminating in World War II. Now, it was the atomic bomb! The atomic bomb marked US military supremacy, which had already surpassed that of Europe due to World War II, the destruction of Europe, and the mass development of its military-industrial complex in the United States. Following Germany’s surrender on May 7, 1945, the United Nations charter, that authenticated US world supremacy, was signed by fifty nations in San Francisco (the center of the aircraft-building West Coast). Nelson Rockefeller, John Dulles, and John McCloy led the US delegation. The UN offices were to be on Rockefeller’s land in New York, the new world financial center, where sponsors of the military-industrial complex congregated. The body was largely controlled by the Security Council comprised of the United States, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and China. The first four countries had caused the most insecurity in the world for three hundred years and still held the world hostage. The United States, Britain, and France were under the rule of the ‘merchant bankers of death’. They had progressed from slavery to guns, ships, and airplanes, and they were now in charge of world security.
China was admitted to the Security Council due to its large population, which came together to take a nationalist stand. Lenin, in the spirit of international communism, backed Chairman Mao in China in his fight to free China from yoke of Western imperialist, especially the British and the Japanese they used. After gaining control, Mao received Soviet help towards industrialization through the building of its steel mills. The Soviet Union felt threatened by the US bomb, because it was one of only two natural enemies with a large army. Russia had been attacked unsuccessfully by Western capitalists after its 1917 Socialist revolution, so it developed its own atomic bomb within four years. Germany was no longer the enemy, but the Soviets were, as whites ushered in a new arms race called the Cold War. While Germany had resorted to fighting for colonies in the two world wars and failed, Russia resorted to making the world marketplace a level playing ground by freeing peoples used by the Western world to gain their global hegemony. With the division of Germany among the French, United States, British, and Russians, a line was drawn in the white world between the Socialists/Communists in the east and the capitalist nations in the West. The Communists helped African liberation movements to achieve their civil rights/political independence objectives, and promised to help in their industrialization efforts. The division was beneficial to the merchants of death in control, who used the fear of invasion to promote the arms race that brought jobs, profit, and power to a few, especially in the West. Due to the widespread destruction of postwar Europe and the looting of treasuries by the Germans, most European finances were suspect and the value of their currencies uncertain. With US home production and the value of its economy unharmed by the war, the US dollar was the only credible Western currency that could be used to make international payments. Secure in its newly found financial and military might after the war, the United States became the sole world superpower. It left Britain and France behind. However, the US Europeans couldn’t leave their European cousins to suffer, so they formulated a club whereby they could all share the blood money derived from Africans and other nations. The US establishment believed that its survival depended on its European cousins, who controlled the raw materials sources in Africa and Asia. Without Europeans, the Euro-Americans could be overwhelmed in numbers by Africans and Asians. Starting with the Marshall Plan (which was to rebuild Europe and buy its allegiance), the United States, backed by weakened Britain and France, set in place infrastructure that perpetuated European supremacy over Africans. Because Britain and France still had their colonies to fleece, the Marshall loans were more effective in South and East Europe, where they were supposed to keep the Russians at bay. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank were set up to put effective control of the world’s economy in the hands of bankers in New York, London, and Paris, who had grown by shortchanging Africans. The new financial system was geared towards Europe’s reconstruction, but it turned to furthering the neoimperialist aims of Western capitalists.
Chapter 16: The Winds of Change Ziks across Africa Africans win fragmented political but not economic freedom (1945– 1965) Africans’ contribution to the war worldwide earned them a moral authority that they used to challenge white establishments over their mistreatment. The postwar generation was more militant and decisive, from Azikwe’s energizing the Nigerian Youth wing to Mandela’s ANC Young Wing in South Africa. Help also came from the Soviets and Chinese that realized that they will forever remain in the shadow of Western Imperialistic nations as long as the West had their colonies that gave them an unfair advantage. In Britain, the West African Students Union leadership was taken over by more militant students like Nkrumah, in the absence of Solanke that had travelled in 1944 to Africa to raise funds for a second African hostel and did not return till 1949. Unlike Solanke and others of his generation that fought to be treated as full British citizens within the British Empire, the new postwar generation agitated for immediate independence from the European imperialists. In addition to the moral capital earned by blacks during the war, a few reaped financial benefits that were used to fund the Pan-African movement. Ras Tefari Makonnen’s chain of restaurants proved to be profitable by attracting a large number of black servicemen stationed in northern England. He contributed his profits to the postwar fifth Pan-African Congress held in Manchester and cohosted by Nkrumah and Du Bois. The financial benefits extended beyond a few restaurant chains, because the war in Asia cut off Western raw materials sources located in Malaysia and Indonesia. This made the prices of rubber and palm oil skyrocket. The rise in agricultural prices benefited a lot of African farmers, whose increased earnings helped the black movement. On his return to Nigeria, Nnamidi Azikwe prompted the creation of the first indigenous bank. He raised awareness of how European banks were enforcing other European monopolies by redlining African participation, especially in marketing, transporting, and manufacturing. The first indigenous Nigerian bank was created shortly before World War II, and by the end of the war, the black heartland had created more than 150 banks with the excess income derived from the war scarcities. The growth in indigenous banks was frowned upon by the British colonial masters, because it reduced the amount that could be siphoned. Moreover, the Nigerian indigenous banks could create credit with the money deposited with them, which opened the gates to many restricted industries. In a callous display of unfair, dualistic financial rules, the collapse of one of the indigenous banks led to a colonial panel that prescribed measures that led to the closure of 148 of the 152 banks. The surviving four banks were saved by regional governments. This financial witch hunt, in the 1950s, was an opposite reaction to that exhibited during financial scares and crashes in Britain and the United States. A socially conscious panel would have prescribed measures to regulate and, most importantly, keep the indigenous banks alive. This prompted local calls for a central bank to ensure economic independence and transparency, which went along with the call for political independence. The call for political independence by the new generation of militant students-professionals like Azikwe led to the growth of political parties, especially in Lagos and other major towns. Nnamidi, born under Oya’s influence, brought a revolutionary spirit to bear across Africa, and found a kindred spirit in
Herbert Macauley, who was also born under Oya’s influences. Herbert Macaulay, a scion of Bishop Ajayi Crowther, the first Nigerian bishop, formed the first important political party, known as Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), on June 24, 1923. Its membership was limited to the Lagos elite, and it won all seats in 1923, 1928, and 1938. Nnamidi Azikwe, a key figure in the Pan-African movement, began mass mobilization and militancy with the Lagos Youth Movement, which was renamed the National Youth Movement. It challenged and defeated Macauley’s NNDP in 1938. In 1944, Azikwe united with Macaulay and forty other parties to form the National Convention of Nigeria and Cameroon. Azikwe was a political leader free of petty ethnic politics and with a vision of a single prosperous black African nation. ‘The decisive event in the history of nationalism in British West Africa was undoubtedly the return in 1935 of Nnamidi Azikwe from his studies in America and his launching, first in the Gold Coast and then in his native Nigeria, of a popular press’.* Following the philosophy of Du Bois and Garvey, he inspired the following generation of Nkrumah, who he had directed to America. Azikwe moved to Lagos from Accra. He and Nkrumah pushed the agenda for British West Africa, which was to unify with the French West African bloc in the move towards forming a viable African nation. Unfortunately, some questionable characters upset the whole plan. With Azikwe following the Pan-African approach of writing through his African Pilot newspaper to educate and agitate the black community, the British government became agitated and reacted, in July 1945, by banning the paper and making an assassination attempt on his life. Nevertheless, the push for freedom on all fronts, especially through the West African Students Union, forced Britain and France to rethink their colonial plans. The failed repression of the Indian selfrule movement was clear for all to see, even if the Haitian experience was fading. The creation of secondary schools created a large number of students hungry for higher levels of education. They flocked to British, American, and French universities, where they formed organized groups. The European colonists were slow to create universities in the colonies, but during the four years following 1945, the British established the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, the University of Achimota in Ghana, a university in Makerere in Uganda, and another in Khartoum, Sudan. The French took nearly a decade afterwards to create their first university in Africa, and the Belgians were even slower. This had a negative effect on the labor pool when the French-speaking African nations eventually obtained their political independence. Instead of a complete refusal by the European colonial powers, they devised ways to keep indirect rule in place, allowing political but not economic freedom. In British West Africa, their cause was helped by the Islamist Sokoto Caliphate and some Yoruba elites, in French West Africa, it was HouphouetBoigny of Ivory Coast; in French Equatorial Africa, it was Leon Mba in Gabon. * Oliver, Africa Since 1800, 160. Initially a schoolteacher, Obafemi Awolowo, a Yoruba, became a businessman and politician in Ibadan when he joined Azikwe’s militant Nigeria Youth Movement. However, Awolowo was born under the Olokun’s influences. He went to London in 1944 to complete a correspondence course in law. In the mist of the PanAfrican student movements in London, unlike Ladipo Solanke that sought West African unity, Awolowo decided in 1945 to launch a Yorubacentric body called Egbe Omo Oduduwa (Association of the Children of Oduduwa). This was an association only for the descendants of the mythical Adam of the Yoruba race, who was essentially Olokun. It was the poignant beginning of tribal politics and the beginning of the end of Pan-African ideals, especially the unification of black Africa.
On Awolowo’s return to Nigeria, he relaunched Egbe Omo Oduduwa in Lagos in 1948 and its political party, Action Group, in 1951. With the death of the revolutionary Oya inspiration, Herbert Macauley, the erudite Yoruba Lagos politician (who with Azikwe unified all political parties), Awolowo, an Olokun inspiration, with the backing of Ooni of Ife, Yorubas Spiritual leader, wrestled power from the Oba of Benin and Oyo, the de facto Yoruba political leaders, to become the Yoruba political leader. However, unable to wrestle the party from Azikwe, he went on to form Action Group party. Awolowo and other Yorubas insisted that it would be fair if he relocated and contested in his Igbo homeland, instead of controlling both Yoruba and Igbo lands. Some Igbos argue that this was the beginning of tribal politics. Awolowo was accused of selfish ambition since he knew fully well that he couldn’t win the Nigerian presidency without the support of the eastern Igbo or Muslim north. However, Awolowo struck alliances with the Middlebelt minorities. The black movement, without the combination of Yoruba and Igbo groups, was a largely weakened movement that could never achieve Pan-African ideals, especially with the pro-British Northern Muslim political elite. Azikwe and his followers were increasingly persecuted by the British: they were arrested for sedition in November 1948, a trial of ‘Zikist leaders’ was held in February 1949, and his ban in April 1950 was a fait accompli, which Awolowo left free to organize and consolidate his power. Some claim Awolowo grabbing of power from the traditional power brokers effectively destroyed the Yoruba traditional structures, in comparison to the North where the Caliph remained in control. He attacked the Alaafin of Oyo, the ancient head of western and northern Yoruba, the Oba of Benin, the head of the eastern Yoruba and many other powerful, traditional Yoruba leaders. A contrary opinion is that since Oyo and Benin empires had become defunct and absorbed into the British colony, it was only right that the Yoruba spiritual leader Ooni of Ife, Oba Adesoji Aderemi, choose and back a Yoruba king of modern colonial politics. However, som insist that Awolowo further maladjusted Yoruba traditional institutions by placing the nonterritorial Ooni of Ife, the spiritual head, above the territorial kings, the Alaafin of Oyo and the Oba of Benin, making Yoruba lose their territorial aggressive posture. In Benin, he weakened the Oba of Benin by dividing up his territory and sphere of influence by making his subordinate, the Olu of Warri, its paramount ruler and equal of the Oba of Benin. His disregard for Yoruba traditional settings led to the infamous curse to lifelong failure and underachievement by the Deji of Akure, the paramount ruler of the oldest scientifically proven land and surviving palace, who felt insulted by him in a Westernized court setting. Being a Eurocentric Christian, Awolowo’s political maneuvers debased Yoruba traditions and relegated its traditional beliefs below his Christian religion and education, whereby traditional systems were discarded for confused foreign values. Unlike the northern peoples who held onto their precolonial political structures, the Yoruba Oba and institutions lost respect and relevance, because they could be sacked and dethroned like ordinary clerks. Pictures of Jesus Christ replaced those of the Orishas in the palace of the Ooni, who was supposed to be the spiritual leader of the largest original African group and religion. Henceforth, all Yoruba Obas, who wanted to align with the new political setting, became born-again Christians who cast aspersions on the very traditions that they were meant to propagate. Awolowo was later charged and found guilty of corruption and embezzlement, but until his death, he remained the political head of the traditionally confused and mentally enslaved Yoruba. Due to a lack of sense of their true history, they saw nothing good about themselves and their culture while they were hungry for foreign cultures.
Awolowo established a personality cult that led the Yoruba to believe that they would amount to nothing without his free, Western education and massive infrastructure development. Unfortunately, the people were not taught that they were the oldest and largest Original African group who had imparted knowledge to humanity even before the whites who they now glorified came out of their Caucasian caves of Central Asia. Instead of the enslaving, colonizing white being the enemy, the Yoruba were misguided to see the enemy in all other African groups that had worked with them, at home and abroad, to get political independence. The makeup of the most populous black area, Nigeria, was such that the Yoruba and their minorities were roughly one-third of the population. The Igbo and their minorities were one-third, and the remaining third belonged to the Hausa and other northern Muslim minorities. With the conservative Muslim north realizing the split among the progressives in the south, they led a conservative front to continue the status quo of British indirect rule through the Muslim caliphate. When the southerners clamored for independence, the Muslim northerners complained of not being ready for self-rule. The Northerners rioted and tried to sabotage the independence movement until they were assured that the British would rig the process in their favor to continue the indirect rule with Caliphate on all Nigerians.
Over in the Gold Coast, a few hundred miles to the west of Nigeria, Nkrumah had returned to take over
the mass mobilization of his people after completing his studies and chairing the fifth PanAfrican Congress in England. The chiefs, lawyers, rich farmers, and merchants of the older generation organized a political party called the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), which didn’t expect independence until Nkrumah fostered a sense of urgency in 1947. Violent demonstrations by exservicemen resulted in the detention of Nkrumah and five other members of the UGCC. The UGCC split with Nkrumah, whom they reckoned was too revolutionary with his backing of force and victory by any means possible. Nkrumah founded his own party, the Convention People’s Party, in 1949 and waged a campaign of ‘positive action’, a movement of strikes and boycotts that destabilized the whole country and led to his arrest and imprisonment in 1950. He came out of prison to take over power when his Convention People’s Party won the election in 1951. He became the prime minister of the first independent African nation in 1957, and the Gold Coast was renamed Ghana. He and his Convention People’s Party looked to join Macauley/Azikwe’s National Convention of Nigeria and Cameroon (NCNC), but the plan was going awry everywhere else. With the stalemate Awolowo created by pulling the Yoruba, the largest indigenous African group, out of the black movement’s NCNC, Nigeria, the largest Negro area, was at a crossroads. Nkrumah pled with Azikwe to try everything to keep the most populous and historically important piece of Africa together. Unable to reconcile his differences with Awolowo, Azikwe joined with the northern Muslims in a marriage between progressive Pan-Africanists and conservative Muslims. It was a shaky marriage that tested, and still tests, the delicate federal unity of Nigeria. Awolowo became the premier of the Yoruba western region, Azikwe was the premier of the eastern Igbo region, and the caliph of Sokoto ruled the north. In 1960, Nigeria became independent. Azikwe was the ceremonial president, while the northern Muslim candidate, Tafawa Balewa, became the premier. It was initially believed to be a continuation of British Indirect Rule through the Northern Sokoto Caliphate. The selfish, ethnic politics of ambitious politicians were also the experience of French Africa, where unification was already in place because the French had centralized the management of their colonies in the area. Brazzaville, Congo was the administrative capital of French Equatorial Africa. Dakar, Senegal, was the administrative capital of the Federation of French West Africa, while Ivory Coast was the richest of the French colonies in West Africa. The Ivory Coast provided 40 percent of the French West African colonial revenue through cocoa, palm produce, and other raw materials, which were used to support other less profitable colonies. Gabon supported other territories in French Equatorial Africa. One of the most exemplary black leaders in French West Africa was Leopold Sedar Senghor, who was born in Dakar. His well-to-do family gave him a good education in Dakar and Paris. In Paris, he fomented the black cultural revolution, which determined the essence of the postwar, Francophone African liberation movement. He and others created the concept of Negritude: the affirmation of the values of African culture. French-speaking West Africans concentrated on the cultural front, because the French refused to accept the existence of racism. The French employed the disguise that Arabs and Latinos used to hide their racist exploitation, ‘cultural assimilation’, whereby the African stood for everything negative that was assimilated and done away with. They were the ‘black sheep of the family’—the kaffir/pagan/criminal syndrome! The Francophone West Africa cultural movement produced the likes of Chiek Anta Diop, who challenged European whitewashing lies about black African Egyptian history.
Despite not being like the English-speaking West Africans, who agitated over constitutions and economics, Senghor and Guinea’s Sekou Toure believed firmly in the Pan-African ideals, and he vouched for the independence of French West Africa as a whole, not as units. Toure formed his own party with popular backing after refusing, in 1946, to join the first French West African party, the Rassemblement Democratique Africaine (RDA), which had been taken over by colonial sympathizers. In French Equatorial Africa, Leon Mba formed the Comite Mixte Gabonais (CMG) with close ties to RDA and colonial sympathizers. Felix Houphouet-Boigny, a medical assistant turned rich cocoa farmer, entered politics and became the first president of the RDA. Being a farmers’ representative, he promoted the selfish view of dissecting the federation and ending Ivory Coast’s subsidization of its poor neighbors, as was done under the French. Houphouet-Boigny and his pro-French clique took over the party, and with the approaching independence of Ghana and Nigeria, he was influential as a government minister in preparing the Loi Cadre (Outline Law) in 1956. The Loi Cadre created a new French super-state in French Africa, stipulating that France kept control of foreign policy and defense, while all other aspects of government belonged to the twelve independent colonies formerly organized under the federations of French West and Equatorial Africa. HouphouetBoigny’s work with the French ensured that the resultant states were so small in population that they would remain under French control forever. There were intense negotiations, but when Charles de Gaulle came into power in France in 1958, he insisted on offering the colonies self-government under the new French community or immediate independence and severance of all ties with France. Because the Francophone Africans hadn’t been well agitated, they voted to stay in the French community, with the exception of Guinea, where Toure had enlightened his people. However, France resorted to economic blackmail and sabotage that threatened the collapse of Guinea if Toure didn’t rescind the decision to become independent. Fortunately, Nkrumah offered financial assistance and declared a union between the two countries, although it was mere political statement because Guinea and Ghana were geographically separated by Houphouet-Boigny’s ‘separatist’ Ivory Coast. Nevertheless, the unification statement and Nkrumah’s dynamism were enough to send French plans tumbling by prompting the other colonies to change their minds and vote for independence. Senegal and French Sudan came together to form the Mali Federation, and it demanded independence in 1959 while opting to remain a member of the French community. The French realized that they were bound to lose against the tide of nationalism and were forced to ease their hardline approach of breaking all ties and economic sabotage. All other French colonies formed small, looser groupings while negotiating their independence separately with the French. The former German colonies that were split between the British and the French also petitioned for independence. In French Cameroon, France outlawed on 13 July 1955 the most radical and popular political party, Union Des Populations Du Cameroon (UPC), which prompted a long guerrilla war and the assassination of the party leader. Regardless of the ongoing hostilities, France gave French Cameroon independence with Ahmadou Ahidjo as the President, who went on to consolidate himself in power through a one party system under the guise of national security against the guerrilla warfare. The British divided their share of German Kamerun into Northern and Southern Cameroon provinces administered from Nigeria. At independence, Northern Cameroon voted to join Nigeria, while Southern Cameroon joined French Cameroun to become the Federal Republic of Cameroon. British Togoland
voted to join Ghana, while French Togo became independent without joining Dahomey (which was renamed Benin). Although the Pan-African dream had been derailed by the likes of Houphouet-Boigny and Mba, Nkrumah continued his push to make Africa free of European colonists. Nkrumah was effectively the African leader, because his mentor, Azikwe, had been greatly weakened by his compromise to keep Nigeria together. Despite the breakup of the French Federation, if Azikwe had had the backing of Yorubas, with his strong Igbo support in his quest to become the authentic leader of Nigeria, he and Nkrumah would surely have united black Africans into one nation and led them towards the PanAfrican ideals of economic and political ascendancy that we dream of today. In December 1958, Nkrumah called the first All-African People’s Conference in Accra, where he invited representatives of nationalist movements in the twenty-eight territories still under colonial rule. East Africans belatedly joined the African revolution with the formation of the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa by Tom Mboya of Kenya and Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika. Nkrumah gave the leaders backing and exposure, especially those in East Africa and Belgian Africa like Patrice Lumumba. The Belgian colonists later admitted the importance of the Accra conference, which ‘brought decisive results for the Congo. There Lumumba got the support which he needed to implement his demand for independence’.* The Belgians weren’t prepared to grant independence for at least another fifty years. There were no plans for the future by creating and strengthening local governments and the adequate provision of education to staff the new country. The independence came not as a result of effective Congolese nationalism but due to the inability of a small country like Belgium to control the situation. With the first signs of dissent and rioting that followed the independence of the neighboring French colonies, being a small country, Belgium couldn’t send troops to restore peace and pulled out abruptly. The abruptness of independence didn’t allow a political culture to evolve, and politics were still largely at the local level, with only Lumumba having a national focus. The national elections that Lumumba and Kasavubu won in May 1960 were soon overshadowed by anarchy throughout the land. Western powers, Belgium and the United States in particular, didn’t like the voters’ choice of Lumumba, especially in Belgian Congo, with its history of concessionaries companies, so they instigated sabotage. The concessionary companies feared losing the outrageous concessions made under Leopold, especially Union Miniere, in the copper-rich Zambezi-Congo watershed area of Katanga in the south, and the Compagnie du Congo pour le Commerce et l’Industrie CCCI in Lower Congo in the west. * Oliver, Africa Since 1800, 225. Lumumba called upon the UN to stop the anarchy and balkanization of Zaire, but he was ignored and had to call on the Russians for help. This incident was the first clear sign that the UN was not set up to respond to African needs. The nonchalance of the UN was clear for all to see in 1960 and again in the 1990s when millions died in Zaire and Rwanda. Without any real military backing, Lumumba was overthrown by US-backed soldiers and killed in a way that sent shock and sorrow throughout the blackworld. The country was united under Colonel Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled and pillaged for three decades. The shaky national foundation the Belgian Congo inherited was also experienced in the former German
colonies, Rwanda and Burundi, now run by Belgium. The two tiny territories refused to amalgamate into one territory, although they both had ethnic problems between the Tutsi and the 90 percent, subjected Hutu majority. The Tutsi were pastoralists from the grasslands who came at a later date to subject and intermarry with the Hutu, who were agriculturists and retained a few independent kingdoms. The European colonial structures made Tutsi hegemony complete. In 1959, the subservient Hutu majority in Rwanda violently overthrew their Tutsi (minority) rulers in the Rwandan civil war before independence, at which time many Tutsi were driven out of the land to become refugees in Belgian Congo (Zaire). Belgium gave them independence without resolving the conflict, and the Tutsi minority monarchy survived as a constitutional monarchy in Burundi, while the Hutu held power in Rwanda. In 1963, the Rwandan Tutsi exiles launched an unsuccessful coup to overthrow the Rwanda Hutumajority government, resulting in large-scale massacre of the Tutsi. The ethnic warfare dictated the lives of millions for years to come. The violent exit of the colonial powers was not only limited to Belgian Africa, but it was also experienced in the eastern and southern parts of Africa, where there were white settlers. The British never expected East Africa to follow West African nationalism as soon as it did; the East Africans were viewed as being poorer, less educated, and with less sociopolitical cohesion. Moreover, white settlers in the territories prevented them from taking the same approach used in West Africa, because whites vouched for a ‘multiracial’ system that would give them preference. It was meant to be different political systems for each race, whereby the black system was subservient to the white system. In 1951, a Kikuyu rebellion started in Kenya that put to rest all doubt about their readiness for independence. The Mau Mau began with killing a few white farmers, mutilating their cattle, and other acts of violence, which grew to a reign of terror for white settlers and their sympathisers. Frustrated by their inability to identify the rebels, the British arrested top Kikuyu politicians like Jomo Kenyatta, and Kikuyu peasants were rounded up from their scattered villages into ‘protected villages’. The rebellion wasn’t crushed until 1955. It cost the British ₤20 million, hundreds of British lives, and thousands of African lives. The Mau Mau insurrection put the colonial administration and independence movement on the wrong footing, because nothing could be discussed during the rebellion. However, it made the British realize that the white settler communities were vulnerable and that it would be impossibly expensive to protect the planned multiracial systems. Due to the measures the British took to prevent the insurrection from spreading nationwide, national politics were restricted to regions, which fostered divisive regional politics. The two major parties were the Kenya African National Union (KANU) and the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), but their divisiveness delayed Kenya’s independence until December 1963. The Tanganyika nationalists, led by Nyerere under the Tanganyika African National Union, electorally defeated the concept of multiracialism. In 1954, Nyerere organized the most efficient political party, because he agitated the nation to its grassroots and made it clear that multiracialism was not a viable alternative. His task was made easier due to the absence of major powerful ethnic groups and the fact that Arab penetration, followed by the colonial educational system, had made Afro-Asian Swahili a national language, which he used to communicate with everyone. His effectiveness was realized when his party won all the seats, even under the existing multiracial constitution. This victory spelled an end to plans of multiracialism in East Africa as Tanganyika attained independence in December 1961 (two years before Kenya, which started its independence movement earlier).
The divisiveness in the Ugandan territory was of a different kind, because there was no major, white settler community. The problem was caused by three groups: the Buganda monarch, who wanted to keep his ethnic privileges won by conniving with the British colonists; other kingdoms to the west and south, who wanted to challenge British/Buganda hegemony; and the new radicals of the black movement. Milton Obote, the founder of Uganda People’s Party and leader of the Uganda black movement, had to strike an alliance with the royalist Buganda party, which led to the Kabaka of Uganda becoming the head of state at independence in 1962. Around the same time that the British were trying to implement the multiracial system in East Africa, they were also trying to implement it in their southern African River Zambezi territories. They created the Central African Federation, comprised of the protectorates of northern and southern Rhodesia, as well as Nyasaland (Malawi). Nyasaland was fully African occupied, while northern Rhodesia had only a small, white settler community. Southern Rhodesia had a large, dominant, white settler community. The Federation was based on a multiracial constitution, although the different regions reserved the right to pull out. Southern Rhodesia had the most European settlers, especially after World War II, when many exservicemen settled in the main towns of Salisbury and Bulawayo. The white population rose from eighty thousand in 1954 to two hundred and twenty thousand in 1960, among four million Africans. Like South Africa, blacks were forced to live in separate satellite towns on arid patches outside the major white towns that they serviced. White manufacturing industries were located in southern Rhodesia alongside the agricultural production of tobacco, cattle, and corn. The Federation was economically beneficial to the British, because the Rhodesians were dependent on Nyasaland for cheap black labor, while Nyasaland and northern Rhodesia were dependent on southern Rhodesia for manufactured and agricultural goods. This led to the rapid economic growth enjoyed only by white settlers. Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo, and Ndabaningi Sithole led parties during the 1950s struggle against white rule, especially in South Rhodesia. The 1959 return of Dr. Hastings Banda to Nyasaland heightened demonstrations, strikes, and riots, which culminated in a state of emergency in Nyasaland and South Rhodesia and the detention without trial of many of the African nationalist leaders. The 1959 riots marked the turning point for the Federation, especially with the British discarding the multiracialism system in East Africa and the Belgians leaving the Congo next door. The British gave the colonies in the Federation the choice to secede if they set up a black majority government. The northern territories with far fewer white settlers, Nyasaland and North Rhodesia, took the choice and got independence. Nyasaland became independent (as Malawi) in July 1964, while North Rhodesia got its independence (as Zambia) in October 1964. The white settlers in southern Rhodesia proved far more obstinate. Following their unsuccessful attempt to force through a constitution that was to greatly compromise African rights, they increasingly used murderous and repressive tactics to destroy the African movements. The African movements were forced to relocate to Lusaka Zambia, where they made additional efforts to keep in touch with their support down south. The British made superficial attempts to increase pressure on white southern Rhodesia, but in 1965, Ian Smith, the white leader, made a unilateral declaration of independence. Although no nations apart from South Africa and Portugal recognized it, no nation challenged it. The African liberation fighters had to
continue for over a decade before there was any significant breakthrough. Farther south, in the Union of South Africa, which had the largest white settler community in SubSahara Africa, black South African political rights suffered a major reversal as West African cousins became independent. Missionary schools had been introduced in the mid-1800s, like in West Africa, and the Union of South Africa didn’t lack its share of African academicians/activists who could agitate the masses. John Dube, inspired by Booker T Washington, had created the first Zulu Christian Industrial School in 1901 and, in 1912, the first movement, the African Native National Congress that became ANC in 1923. Cecil Rhodes dream of turning South Africa into another America by flooding it with European settlers was pursued under a new racial caste system called Apartheid. Following the Boer War that the British successfully annexed the Boer Republics, there was an agreement to leave the running of the new Union to the settlers. The 1910 ‘independence’ of white South Africa left power in the hands of the English concentrated in the Cape colony. However, the larger number of Dutch settlers, in a ‘democratic’ system that disenfranchised blacks, soon saw the Dutch National party take over political control from the English and the further disenfranchisement of Africans. Starting with the Native Land Use that deprived Africans of their land, the ANC realized that the British plan was to claim noninterference in the pseudo independent union while profiting at a distance from the new Apartheid system. The Europeans sought ways to cause divisions among the Africans with the likes of John Tengo Jabavu. ANC’s power also waned as the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union and Communist Party also fought indirectly on behalf of Africans. It would take another generation to revive and change the course of South African liberation, especially the Youth and those ‘born in the struggle’ of the 1940s. Anton Lembede led Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and a new set of leaders to create the Youth Wing of the ANC. The ANC-YG gained control of ANC through mass mobilization and called for civil disobedience and strikes to challenge the news laws associated with the apartheid system. Black South Africans attended the fifth Pan-African Congress, and in December 1945, they demanded one-man-one-vote and all other sociopolitical freedoms. The war brought a slight increase in their standard of living, as blacks had been able to step into the lowly jobs left by whites who enlisted to fight. The war brought prosperity, as mining and arms manufacturing drastically increased employment and income. Cheap black labor fueled high economic growth from 1945 to 1975, comparable to that of Japan and Singapore. Whites went to every length to keep the racial advantage enshrined by the price discrimination of labor, notably enjoyed in America. In the first of many white military onslaughts, the army was called in to quell a peaceful strike in 1946 by seventy-four thousand African mineworkers, resulting in the death of nine Africans and twelve hundred wounded. Boer nationalism and the English merchants’ fear of losing political, and hence economic power, led to the 1948 switch to the Boer conservative National Party, which set out to wipe out any hope of black political equality. The National Party Prime Minister Strijdom said, ‘Call it paramountcy, baaskap or what you will, it is still domination. I am being as blunt as I can. I am making no excuses. Either the white man dominates or the black man takes over’.*
White South Africans initiated a policy of apartheid based on the separation of races by relocating and cramming the 80 percent majority African population on reservations with poor soil that constituted only 13 percent of the South African land. Slightly larger than US Indian reservations but with many more times the population, these reservations were called bantustans. However, a huge percentage of Africans seeking employment were crammed into shantytowns outside the cities. The shantytowns were on dusty, arid lands. The white authorities allowed little or no business activity except beer parlors, similar to the situation in many black ghettos in the United States. Following the 1948 election, the right-wing National Party introduced the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949, the Immorality Act of 1950, the Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents Act of 1952, the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950, and the Unlawful Organizations Act of 1950. All these were law-and-order, conservative, right-wing laws used to hound the Africans. ‘The policy of apartheid has grown out of the experience of the established white population of the country, and is based on the Christian principle of right and justice’.* * Oliver, Africa Since 1800, 252. Africans rose in protest and, in 1952, the African National Congress (ANC) organized a campaign of passive resistance, which included refusing to carry passes and other social insults. (Peaceful resistance was tested when Gandhi refused, as an Indian migrant, to register as an Indian.) Albert Luthuli, Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela, and Walter Sisulu led the ANC, which joined with the leaders of the coloreds, Indians, and liberals to form the Congress of the People that issued a freedom charter in 1953. This resulted in a government clamp down that led to more than 150 of the leaders being charged and tried, although they were all acquitted four years later. The ANC split in two over the inclusion of other races in the struggle, like in the US black movement. In 1959, Robert Sobukwe founded the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), which concentrated solely on African aims. The PAC continued passive resistance and mass demonstrations, which included the largely successful Alexandria bus boycott in Transvaal. On March 21, 1960, the South African police fired on kids and women peacefully protesting the pass laws in Transvaal, resulting in seventy-two people killed and hundreds injured. A few days later, the police fired on a thirty thousand-strong demonstration in Sharpsville, Cape Town. The likes of Thabo Mbeki, ‘born into the struggle’, joined the ANC-YG as school children in 1956 and organized student protests, which earned him explusion from high school in 1956. The publicity received by the Sharpsville incident embarrassed the government, which responded by declaring a state of emergency, arresting the African political leaders, and proscribing the ANC and PAC. The government’s full-scale war against the Pondo ethnic group signified a turning point in the history of South Africa that was marked with violent resistance. The freedom movement moved away from the nonviolent approach when people realized that they had to use all means possible. The ANC started the Umkonto we Sizwe (‘the spear of the nation’), which sabotaged government installations. The PAC formed Poqo, which aimed to terrorize the white populace. The outlawed African leaders had to operate covertly, which made it difficult to keep in touch with their grassroots support and left them open to great dangers. Most important, the leaders wisely sent the teenagers ‘born into struggle’ abroad and out of reach of the new draconian approach to be employed by the European authorities. Nelson Mandela was captured in 1962, and the Umkonto leadership was arrested in July 1963—they all received life sentences. The sentences set back the South African
movement, and the apartheid system survived for a few more decades, as the new youth ran abroad to fight another day. The Portuguese were also in the southern half of Africa and equally determined to keep their unfair privileges in Angola and Mozambique. Following its loss of power to other European imperialists, Portugal had become a poor nation that was desperate to hold onto the sparse African territories in its possession: Angola, Mozambique, a tiny enclave on the West Africa coast called Portuguese Guinea/Guinea-Bissau, and the tiny islands called Sao Tome and Principe. While Britain and France prepared to exit their colonies, the Portuguese tried to dig in by encouraging further European settlements and viciously repressing opposition. The Kongo people were divided between Portuguese Angola and Belgian Congo, and Congo’s Lumumba influenced Holden Roberto, who, in 1958, formed the Uniao das Populacoes de Angola (United Peoples of Angola or UPA). Soon after Belgian Congo’s independence, a large Congolese revolt occurred in northern Angola in 1961, which resulted in the death of more than two thousand Europeans and six thousand ‘loyal’ Africans fighting for the colonists. The Portuguese were unprepared for the scale of the revolt and had to send a fifty thousand-strong military reinforcement from Portugal. They crushed the rebellion by the end of the year, leaving more than fifty thousand Africans dead. Similar revolts broke out in Portuguese Guinea in 1962, in Mozambique in 1964, and in Sao Tome. In Angola, an alternative party called the Movimento Popular de Libertacao de Angola (MPLA) was created. To give Roberto’s UPA a wider audience and include Angola’s central and southern Ovimbundu peoples, he joined with another party in 1962 to form the Frente Nacional de Libertacao de Angola (FNLA). The FNLA formed a black Angolan government in exile in Kinshasa, Zaire, with Roberto as the prime minister and Jonas Savimbi, an Ovimbundu, as the foreign secretary. In 1964, Savimbi broke away to form his own party on Angola’s southern border with South Africa-held Namibia. He was funded by white South Africa to act as a counterweight to the authentic freedom fighters. In 1962, the MPLA formed a government in Congo (Brazzaville), the former French colony, and Augustus Neto, their black president in exile, was supported by Russia. The MPLA became the legitimate Angolan leaders, because Lumumba’s downfall led to the split of the FNLA. Mobutu was a sellout who was bound to contaminate any movement based in Zaire. However, the three movements operated in rural Angola, dividing it into regions of influence, while the Portuguese held tightly to the towns. There was a hushed international condemnation of the brutality used by Portugal to repress the freedom movements. Portugal made cosmetic changes to appeal to the Africans by making all inhabitants of the colonies Portuguese citizens; this was possible due to the small populations in the areas that could be absorbed into Portugal if they decided to take the offer. However, the Africans weren’t impressed and wanted equal political rights in their own land, not in faraway Portugal. Unfortunately, that freedom did not arrive for another decade. In northern Africa, black Africans had been an insignificant minority for centuries, and their independence movement was more tied to a Pan-Islamic movement that sprang from Egyptian universities. To Egypt, the main North Africa country, the present colonization was just another wave of Europeans, the type that the land had experienced since the Assyrian invasion of 661 BC, which had weathered the black population in the region to a bare minimum. In Sudan, Arab resurgence had grave consequences for those in the southern wooded grasslands. Although most spoke Afro-Asian languages, the Dinka, Nuer, and other black Africans in southern
Sudan had never been subjected. They converted to Islam, but thanks to the British, they were now under the northern Arabs who had raided them for centuries and were still raiding them for slavery! There was immediate strife when the British pulled out and their posts were refilled, because out of the eight hundred posts, only six were filled by the southerners. Even before independence, the first open hostilities happened in 1955, when the northern government brutally repressed a mutiny by southern members of the army, who were to form a rebel group that made sporadic attacks on government infrastructure. Despite the ethnic upheavals in the British creation called Sudan, the British shoved the new nation into independence in 1956. By 1958, the unworkable system was overthrown by British-backed Muslims soldiers who worsened the situation as the country slid into anarchy and civil war. The Muslim soldiers imposed a centralized Muslim government, which led to a prolonged strike in southern Christian schools that refused to be Islamized as the foreign staff of the mission schools were expelled. By 1963, a well-organised resistance movement evolved in the south called the Anya Nya. It organized guerrilla attacks against their Muslim overlords as one of Africa’s longest civil wars began to claim lives on both sides. The divide between the Muslim north and the unconquered indigenous Africans ran from Senegal on the far West Africa coast to Kenya on the East Africa coast. It was worsened by Western governments who were apt to supply weapons and sabotage an ‘unfriendly’ incorruptible government. In the Horn of Africa, after Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia were freed from Italian rule (1936 to 1941), Ethiopia was returned to the rule of the Afro-Asian monarchy of Haile Selassie, who had fled to England during the Italian invasion. He returned with British aid to expel the Italians. He was the only African king ever accorded the protection of Buckingham Palace, which goes a long way to show how Eurocentric he was, knowing the world’s racial relations in the 1930s. Italians greatly improved the infrastructure during their brief rule with the provision of a network of engineered roads and telecommunications, which later helped Ethiopia in its local administration and international trade. After the war, the other coastal territories were placed under Ethiopian rule, which caused immense problems in the future. Although Eritrea was loosely mandated to Ethiopia by the UN, it was later fully absorbed with an Ethiopian imperial decree, to the displeasure of the surrounding Arabs. From 1953, Ethiopia received US military support in its bid to hold onto its Somali-populated eastern provinces. To counterbalance the real African leaders like Nkrumah, the West sponsored the Ethiopian monarchy’s attempt to assume the leadership position in the blackworld. This was to have an immense miseducational effect, especially on the Africans in diaspora. Jamaican Rastas, for instance, turned to Ethiopia for spiritual guidance instead of West Africa. The Organization of African Unity, which served as the Pan-African headquarters of the newly independent African nations, was based in Ethiopia as the PanAfrican movement lost its direction. The Original Africans of Ethiopia were not heard or represented by the corrupt Afro-Asian, Eurocentric monarchy of Selassie, and they eventually overthrew him in hopes of enjoying the freedoms that blacks sought throughout Africa. In neighboring Somalia, the movement was aided by the uniformity of the Afro-Asian Somalis, who were split across colonial territories. The Somalis were not delayed in their quest for independence, and the Italian and British Somalilands were united at independence in July 1960. After independence, the
Somali government concentrated on unifying with other Somalis, especially those in the eastern Ethiopian district of Ogaden, the northern frontier district of Kenya and Djibouti. The British, who gave the Somali Ogaden province to Ethiopia in 1954, ignored the Somali claims in Kenya as they tried to sort out the freedom movement in Kenya. This resulted in Somalia breaking diplomatic ties with Britain and sponsoring insurgents in Kenya, resulting in a four-year war. Border skirmishes with Ethiopia resulted in a full-scale but inconclusive war, as the merchants of death built the Somali army that wreaked immense havoc in the region. Across Africa, even the countries that had received independence peacefully realized that true freedom from the European militaryindustrial complex would remain a dream, as those in the Americas had realized earlier.
Chapter 17: The Afro-Romantic Movements Liberation movements in Central and South American nations (Brazil, Haiti, Cuba, and Jamaica); Gain political but not economic freedom (1945– 1965) Afro-Brazilians were the largest African population directly ruled by Europeans, and despite being 50 percent of Brazil’s population, they still found the fruits of freedom elusive after their 1888 emancipation. The military takeover and constitutional rule, introduced in 1893, tried to negate Africans and their influences with its concept of assimilation and white immigration. A prominent white Brazilian politician of the first republic declared, in 1923, that ‘the Negro would disappear in seventy years, while in the United States he constitutes a permanent danger’.* In the 1930 election, a losing candidate, Getulio Vargas, backed by the Anglo-inspired army, marched on Rio de Janeiro to take over the government and bring an end to the first republic. The second republic’s constitution of 1934, for the first time, recognized the race problem and prescribed racial equality, but this mandate took a poor third to nationalism and business during the Vargas era (1930– 1944). Afro-Brazilians were concentrated in the agricultural northeast region of the Bahia and Maranhao states, where sugar, and later, cocoa plantations were concentrated. They formed more than 70 percent of the population as they moved to Salvador, the capital of Bahia. The move away from rural agricultural areas also saw the numbers of Africans soar to nearly half of the population in the southeast cities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, but Liberville, Salvador City, on the Bahia coast was the modern black heartland. The Brazilian race problem, which was being denied, had interesting qualities that were reminiscent of other imperialistic cultures. The pretentious racial interrelationship and social organization that originated with the Jews and Arabs was passed to the Latinos, who passed it to the French in a modified form. In the quest to whiten Brazil and isolate Afro-Brazilians, laws were enacted banning African immigration, but like French West Africa students in Paris, Afro-Brazilians focused on cultural revolution to fight their oppressors. * Segal, The Black Diaspora, 346. The movement was led by home-based intellectuals like Gilberto Feyre. On his return from US universities to Recife in 1923, he led a handful of authors called the Regionalista Movement to help raise the historical consciousness of all Brazilians. He went on self-exile with the rise of Vargas but returned in 1933. In 1934, he published CasaGrande e Senzala, examining the positive contributions of Africans to the Brazilian society. He encouraged Afro-Brazilians to celebrate their African heritage but as a contribution to a distinct Brazilian identity based on interracial marriage and social intermingling. He failed to address the victimization of black people and their restricted social mobility while he joined the mainstream intellectuals with their insincere talk of racial democracy. Gilberto Feyre was regarded as the father of the term LusoTropicalism, which described and attempted to dignify the distinctive paternalistic character of Portuguese imperialism, as opposed to the harsher slavery regimes of North Europeans. Luso-tropicalism essentially propagated that any prejudice or discrimination in Portuguese colonies can be traced to class but never racism. It celebrated both actual and myths of racial democracy.
Feyre encountered huge positive and negative criticisms for the views expressed in his books, and made to qualify and sometimes retreat his position on Luso-Tropicalism. Despite criticisms of propagating assimilation and racial intermarriage, the reality was that Afro-Brazilians had more access to the political arena than AfricanAmericans at the time since Latino racism was usual hidden. Feyre’s main contribution to the black movement was educational. He was a major figure in the organization of the first Afro-Brazilian Congress in 1934 and the following congress in Bahia. The congresses dealt mainly with cultural issues, whereby a wide range of Afro-Brazilian cultural expressions and influences were studied and published. The first Afro-Brazilian political organization, Frente Negra Brasileira (FNB), emerged in 1932 to make an important step in the national black consciousness within the Afro-Brazilian community. It was a mainly inward-looking movement, attempting to foment action within the black community, and it was not a direct protest against white oppression. This awareness drive was a necessary step, because the vast majority of blacks continued to be economically and sociopolitically deprived, especially in terms of income and education. The regional politics that divided white Brazil also prevented a nationwide cohesion and identity among Afro-Brazilians who, despite been the world’s second-largest black population, were largely compartmentalized into captaincies/states. The vast majority of Africans, still living in the rural areas doing menial farm work, gradually emptied into Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, and Sao Paulo, where they lived in shantytowns or favelas. Most were unemployed and underemployed. Just like their US African cousins, police constantly persecuted AfroBrazilians, while the financial and business community redlined them. The lighter you were, the more assimilated you became, and you got lighter only through marriage or skin bleaching. A few Afro-Brazilians were able to slip through the poverty trap, but the government did nothing to compensate the majority of the exslaves or alleviate their suffering, especially when the sugar business crashed. The adaptation of the sugarcane plant to grow in the temperate zone brought about beet sugar, which crashed the market for the tropical American territories. The Brazilian government and rich Portuguese Brazilians tried to industrialize by substituting imports with home manufactures, but Brazil essentially remained an agricultural economy. Britain and the United States remained the highest investors and were not keen on developing Brazil to compete against them, especially with its lower labor costs. Often subsidized by the profits of the increasingly deprived agricultural sector, the few foreign heavy industrialists did harm to the economy with their capital flight, which constantly drained the economy of foreign exchange. The agricultural base shifted to cocoa, rubber, and coffee, which placed Brazil in direct competition with African colonies, but AfroBrazilians were systematically excluded from farm ownership, despite the large land holdings left vacant by their foreign landlords. The rich landowners with huge parcels of land exercised immense, divisive, political power through their captaincies, which were augmented by military power. Since the Paraguay war, the army had grown in importance, as was true everywhere on the South American continent. The army brought its 1893 constitution to an end by giving power to a losing opponent in 1930. Vargas initially appeared to be liberal and in favor of AfroBrazilians, with his 1934 constitution that ensured all citizens equality regardless of race, and he made voting compulsory. However, there was no legislation to alleviate the suffering of blacks, and the nationalism that the constitution bred made it difficult to question fundamental issues without being label subversive (the Muslims and Christians labeled people blasphemers and sinners, and the US labeled black civil activists Communists in the 1950s). There was a continued fixation on whitening Brazil during his term especially for economic reasons. This attempt was based upon the belief that it would attract investors and industrialists. To allay the
fears of would-be migrants, the Portuguese ruling class wanted to portray an image of a social paradise where races peacefully coexisted with no threat of a Haiti-like revolution. The phrase ‘racial democracy’ was coined for the assimilation of the ‘primitive’ Africans into the European system, normally through interracial marriage and cultural whitewashing. During the Vargas years, the FNB registered as a party and had more than two hundred thousand members at its height. Unfortunately, though it tried not to be militant, Vargas eventually banned it, along with all other parties. Vargas came down on those he regarded as political dissenters, who were subversively impeding national unity in World War II, not only those in the political arena but those who organized around their African religion. Towards the end of the war in 1944, he was overthrown and a new constitution was written in September 1946, which had the same racial equality guarantees but was contextually more potent, coming as it did during the new era of democracy due to the Jewish holocaust. Gilberto Feyre was elected to federal congress. Vargas was to return to power in 1950 through elections but committed suicide in 1954 over a political scandal. Feyre changed his political leanings, from first being labeled a communist in the 1930s, he became being regarded a member of the political right with his support of Portuguese colonists in the 1950s and the military government in 1964. However, his writings left an indelible mark on Brazil’s sociopolitical existence, with Casa Grand and Senzala being the first of a trilogy that would act as a turning point in the analysis of African heritage in Brazil. Abdias do Nascimento, a full Afro-Brazilian had a more consistent pro-African approach. Born in the state of Sao Paulo, he first participated in the local Brazilian Black Front in 1929, before leading the organization of Afro-Campineiro Congress challenging racial discrimination in the city of Campinas in 1938. Abdias started Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN) in 1944 as a black arts movement. It was formed to provide a forum to promote black civil rights through theatre arts and address issues like cultural and economic discrimination. Like Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal, the initial poet, Nascimento created the black experimental theatre to register dissent through art. The clearly defined objectives were to educate Afro-Brazilians that there was no superior race, to propose policies to enhance black education, and to combat racism following the code of conduct put forth in the constitution. It also highlighted the persecution of African Candomble practitioners. Nascimento attended the 1945 fifth Pan-African Congress in England and between 1945 and 1946, he sponsored the National Black Convention in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, where they formulated antidiscrimination and affirmative policies that were presented to the 1946 Constituent Assembly. In 1949, he led a coalition of TEN and other groups to organize the First National Negro Congress. In an address to the congress, Nascimento pointed out that channels for the dissemination of information open to blacks were inadequate and that those organized around African religions were being attacked by the state. Nascimento led the Afro-Brazilian movement with an aggressive pursuit of the goal of consciousness raising like his contemporaries. Like Du Bois’ NAACP using its Crisis newsletter to disseminate information in the United States, and Azikwe using the African Pilot in Africa, TEN created a newsletter called Quilombo. In Brazil, it organized literacy campaigns and put out cultural information. It demanded equal and proper treatment, even if the TEN voices were not as forceful as those of the protesters and agitators in the United States and Africa. TEN also gave resources and attention to the role of AfroBrazilian women. They formed a sister organization called the National Congress of Black Women (NCBW), which included professional women, domestic workers, female artists, and others who called for the integration of black women into sociopolitical life. The fruits of the movement were reaped slowly as AfroBrazilians expressed their political will through the ballot box. Although they made up a greater percentage of the population than their African compatriots in the United States, their power was diluted through regional politics, the splintering of
civil rights groups, and the political parties they allied themselves with. If the effects of their political advancement were difficult to notice, their socioeconomic progress was even more inconsequential, because the majority still remained in poverty. Nevertheless, they progressed slowly with the hope of eventually getting to the promised land, if not waylaid by external forces. In other South American nations like Colombia and Venezuela, both with much smaller African populations, black Latinos were gradually made to disappear from public view. In Haiti, the Caribbean island with the largest Afro-descended community, despite being the first independent black nation in 1803, it found itself under US neocolonisation inspired by Citibank after a century of mulatto dominance and mismanagement in the early 1900s. From recent evidence that corruption propaganda is a tool of regime change resorted to by neoimperialists, it is difficult to know who genuinely served the people. It is now obvious that this neoimperialist tool was devised in Haiti and Cuba before spread to African nations. Following the 1915 revolt in the northern black heartland, when the Haitian president was lynched in the French Embassy and the US marines landed to safeguard Citibank’s interests, three mulatto presidents ruled under US guidance before a substantial guerrilla movement emerged. Apart from Haitian nationalism and Anglo-American racism, the anger that fueled the resistance movement included the US extractions that saw 40 percent of Haitian income servicing their alleged American debt and an additional 20 percent to upkeep the army in Haiti, which left the Haitian population hungry. This was in addition to the unfair labor practices employed to bring about infrastructural and agricultural developments, which were geared towards US needs and special interests. The largely peasant guerrilla war in Haiti, the Cacos War, started in 1917 and lasted until May 1920. In November 1919, the leader of the guerrilla movement, Charlemagne Perault, was ambushed, killed, and tied to a door for public exhibition, similar to how blacks were lynched and portrayed in the United States at the time. The continued US occupation led to the 1920s African renaissance. This occurred as resurgent nationalism increased black intellectual interest in African heritage as a form of identity and protest, as was occurring in Brazil and the United States. It was difficult sharing the same God with a wicked oppressor! By the end of the 1920s, US occupation became morally indefensible and increasingly repressive. With all systems in place economically, it was cheaper to run the island indirectly. A student demonstration in 1929 led to nationwide strikes and demonstrations that culminated in the 1930 elections. All candidates demanded US withdrawal, and Stenio Vincent won. The United States did not leave Haiti until 1934, when preparations for World War II required all hands on board at home. It left a fiscal agent behind to take care of finances. This was in line with the partial withdrawal of other European forces from the African colonies to prepare for and fight World War II, giving Africans a brief respite to move ahead. Unfortunately, President Vincent’s ability to attract support across the board, especially from blacks, was lost as the old mulatto dominance resurfaced amid poor economic conditions. Many Haitians rushed to the sugarcane farms for work in the neighboring Dominican Republic under the murderous President Rafael Trujillo. He ordered them killed under the pretext of an antivoodoo campaign, while the Haitian mulatto elites showed no concern. Another mulatto president, Elie Lescot, succeeded Vincent in 1941, despite mulattos being less than 5
percent of the population, out of which power rested with three hundred mulatto families of the total two thousand mulatto families. Under Lescot, Africans continued to be politically and economically disenfranchised, while the state supported the campaigns of the Catholic Church against African religions. By 1945, Lescot had earned formidable opponents, including mulatto liberals, who lobbied against his increasingly repressive government and its debilitating pro-US economic policies, as well as a black elite disenfranchised in all facets of society. He was forced into exile in 1946 by student demonstrations that sparked strikes and rioting. Haiti was not left out of the worldwide black movement. The Trinidadian, C L R James, who went to London in 1932, further highlighted the Haitian war of independence. Being part of the Romantic culture, the ex-French colony had problems that deeply affected its stability through the development and dominance of a mulatto class, which arose from the culture of assimilation and its underlying principle of ‘light being right’. To attack the problem, like those in French Africa and Brazil, Haitian intellectuals chose cultural revolution. They aptly named themselves ‘The Griots’ from the West African griots who were poets, storytellers, healers, and guardians of customs and myths. The Griots had their own periodical and had Francois Duvalier in their camp—a qualified physician who had worked with the US army medical corps. Black intellectuals and activists rallied around their Yoruba/Original African beliefs against US occupation and continued white imperialism. In August 1946, following Lescot’s exile, a new government took over after a contest between seven candidates who raised the race issue to heights never before witnessed in Haitian politics. Dumarsais Estime became the president, and he initiated a number of public works and social programmes: minimum wage, maternity and child welfare programmes in rural areas, and projects to strengthen the economic and agricultural infrastructure. To show the new government’s commitment to the black movement, Duvalier was offered and took a cabinet post as secretary of state for labor and public health. However, the lofty plans couldn’t be backed by finance, and the industrialization plans were a pipe dream. Haiti couldn’t be allowed to erect an iron and steel complex to economically and militarily challenge the West and its dominion in the region. The governmental support for the revival of African religion throughout the country upset the Catholic Church, while the mulatto elite complained of black dominance. The business community was unhappy over the establishment of an income tax. The formidable enemies of the Estime regime backed him to the wall, where he had to use increasingly repressive methods to stay in power such as banning political parties, student associations, and publications. In May 1950, Estime was overthrown by an army coup that entrusted the transitional government to a junta of three. Paul Magloire, one of the three, presided. The junta outlawed voodoo and other African ceremonies in public, while Magloire looted the treasury before fleeing into self-exile in 1956. After a brief period of instability, the first full adult suffrage election was held in September 1957, and people elected the black movement leader, Duvalier (colloquially known as ‘Papa Doc’). He promised to continue the policies of Estime while giving reassurances to those who had been alienated. Papa Doc’s power base was in the 90 percent black populace, 80 percent of whom lived in the rural areas, where they formed a militia to act against the counterweight of the urban militias of the mulatto and church powerbase. Knowing the army and its long history of Western-inspired coups, Papa Doc
reorganized the army by placing trusted blacks at the top and sacking the entire mulatto officer class. Duvalier’s elevation of his African heritage and religion led to serious confrontation with the powerful Catholic Church, which he overcame with marked success. He clamped down on their subversive influences by banning their publications and sent a few bishops and other clergy packing to the Vatican. In 1962, he expelled the Bishop of Gonaives for his campaigns against voodoo. There were more than six invasions inspired by the United States, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, in an effort to win Haiti over in the Cold War. They all failed due to the huge black peasant support of Papa Doc. Rural platoons under local chiefs wore Ogun’s traditional red sashes and the big, straw hats of the old Cacos, who had fought the US marines, as they faced down any threat to the long-awaited government of the people. Papa Doc challenged the United States in a speech blaming the United States for preventing Haiti’s development. There was little or nothing to spring open the gate that was effectively closed against the blackworld. However, his threat to look to the Russians for help prompted the easing of restrictions on US finance. During his reign, he increased the size of the Black middle class but wasn’t able to significantly improve the economic lot of his people for the long term. His long lasting legacy was successfully winning the cultural revolution that made Haitians show pride in their African culture. They became more known for juju than the Yoruba and Brazilians. Duvalier redirected some of the political spoils normally enjoyed by the mulattos to the black elites and the rural platoons, which infuriated and further alienated mulattos. Blacks did not frown upon his repressive methods, disproportionately applied to mulattos, because they viewed it as payback for the atrocities the mulattos committed intermittently over the previous century. Cuba was another major Afro-Caribbean population center that had to fight US neocolonialism and mulatto dominance. From the US takeover in 1898, Cuba experienced military and political intrusions from the United States, which had negative effects on black freedom and political development. AfroCubans would probably have fared better under continued Spanish colonization, because they would have been able to successfully revolt against a weak, faded power like Spain. White Americans had tried keeping the Yoruba-Congo culture to a bare minimum in the United States, but they were confronted with a far more resistant strain of the culture in Cuba. In the attempt to suppress it in Cuba, it inadvertently spread to the United States. The Yoruba culture was expressed in Cuba through the practice of Santeria (‘way of the saints’ and Orishas/Ocha), which resulted in the Catholic Church’s unsuccessful attempt to suppress it. Yoruba gods were given Catholic saint names57 in the hope that eventually Yoruba culture would disappear. Instead, as with Yoruba Muslims, the older and more natural philosophy persevered, and the Yoruba philosophy remained nearly intact. The AfroCubans’ culture survived and intermittently challenged the mainstream for a long time to come. Blacks revolted again in 1912. All the gains of the ten-year independence war against the Spanish had been stolen and were being monopolized by whites and mulattos. US marines quelled the black revolt and protected US investments by defeating nearly five thousand black rebels commanded by Evaristo Estenoz. Over the next decade, the United States imported more than 150,000 Africans from Jamaica and Haiti into Cuba, because the immigrants were easier to control and could be paid much less. The US backed General Mario Menocal, a conservative, in his bid to become the president and preside over the raping of the country that soon left the treasury dry. Menocal was supplied arms by the United States to crush subsequent revolts. He was succeeded in 1920 by Alfredo Zayas, who was declared the winner of a fraudulent presidential election that was marred by widespread violence, but the United
States and J. P. Morgan bank provided ample financing. 57 Sango became St Barbara, Ogun became St Peter, Yemoja became St Regla, Osanyin became St Joseph, Obatala became St Mercedes, etc. Gerardo Machado won the 1924 presidential election on the threat of a black and liberal revolt, but he was soon labelled corrupt. Unwilling to leave power, Machado extended his term from four to six years by calling a constitutional conference in 1928 for a further extension. J. P. Morgan Bank publicly expressed their hope that he could remain in power indefinitely in order to continue the corruption, while Chase Bank supplied a succession of questionable loans. Politically, Machado safeguarded himself with a repressive army and police force that he personally selected for loyalty. To buy black loyalty or indifference, he didn’t persecute their Afro-Cuban religion and was even known to fund them in their practices. In the end, he was forced to step down by a mass strike that effectively crippled Cuba in 1933. The United States tried to replace him with another favored candidate, but the unrest that ensued with Machado’s exile led a mulatto army sergeant, Fulgencio Batista, to mount a successful military coup with the help of noncommissioned officers and students. Batista made himself a colonel and made Colonel Carlos Mendieta the president. He was largely supported by the black community, which saw someone from a background of poverty and farm labor. Despite the fact that a few others were to become presidents, Batista was the real power in Cuba, from his 1933 coup to his presiding over the rewriting of the constitution in 1940. New social measures attributed to Batista include the outlawing of racial segregation, education for all from age eight, and the introduction of a minimum wage. Some trade agreements he signed with the United States were detrimental to Cuba (like one giving the United States a protected market for manufactured goods and effectively killing plans for local industry). He polled 60 percent of the vote in 1940 but didn’t bother to stand for reelection in 1944, passing the role to Dr Grau San Martin as he left for Florida. Following two presidents, Batista again contested for the presidency in 1952, and when it appeared that he might lose the election, he overthrew the legit Cuban government as Vargas did in Brazil. The United States recognized and accepted the government of its long-time friend. A revolt planned in 1953 by Fidel Castro against Batista failed woefully, and Castro was sentenced to fifteen years of imprisonment. However, Batista made a magnanimous but overconfident gesture by releasing Castro and others in April 1955. This gave Castro the chance to relaunch his revolt. It was planned in Mexico and started in the eastern region of the island, and it rapidly spread across the island with the support of hungry peasants. On January 1, 1959, Batista accepted defeat and fled to the Dominican Republic. Castro and his Revolutionary Council, which had a few Africans in notable positions, were initially silent on the race issue until black leaders publicly challenged him. In a televised speech on March 22, 1959, Castro proclaimed that the revolution would confront racism in education, employment, and recreation. His seemingly genuine racial revolution delighted the Black population, while agitating whites and mulattos to move to the United States to wage a vicious anti-Castro campaign. The mass white immigration allowed the black population to increase from half to around 66 percent of the population. Although there was a dramatic improvement in the welfare of Afro-Cubans, Castro was still inherently
racist in the Latino way, making one realize the point of Romantic black nationalists who choose cultural revolution to tackle racism. Castro’s statements and actions exhibited the Hispanic, paternalistic racism of a nice slave owner who fed, educated, and housed blacks better than any other slave owner and expected gratitude in return. Despite Castro’s good intentions towards blacks, his miseducation couldn’t allow him debunk the white supremacy theory. Although he claimed ‘nobody can consider himself as being of pure, much less superior, race’ in Cuba, it showed that he believed whites were the superior race if proven to be pure, not mixed with African blood. He didn’t think much of African culture and religion, because he banned and repressed African cults, whose adherents fled by the thousands to places like New York and Miami, where they spread Santeria’s Orishas. Blacks were conspicuously absent from the government, because they were made to stand back while ‘kindhearted and knowledgeable’ whites took good care of them. Castro must have been impressed traveling to and relating with Africa, but this didn’t translate into much change at home, proving that he was probably unable to explain the phenomenon and, like many others, pushed the problem to the back of his mind. Moreover, American neo-imperialism prevented a full discourse of the race issue, because Castro was forced to employ a strict, centralized style of government, while an African cultural revolution wasn’t forthcoming. Cultural revolutions never took prominence among Anglophone Africans in the Americas and Africa, but their political and economic revolutions had an effect on promoting their culture, especially for Jamaicans. The Jamaican mass migration for jobs across the Americas and Britain had an impact on their music as it became internationalized. At home, Garvey, who had also traveled the Anglo world, setup up the political revolution. After forming the Negro Political Union (NPU) in 1924 to mobilize African American votes in the northeastern United States, Garvey was deported in 1927 (on false fraud charges) to Jamaica, where he founded the People’s Political Party. In the 1930s, after Garvey’s death, Jamaican revolutions were distorted by mulattos at home and in Africa. Unlike Haiti and Brazil, which rightly looked toward West Africa for spiritual guidance, Jamaicans fell for the Europeans’ disingenuous promotion of the Afro-Asian mulatto Christian Ethiopian monarchy. The cultural revolution was misled by the Ethiopian monarchy of Haile Selassie. Jamaicans saw him as a source of pride and culture, being a king of the only African nation not under European imperialism. Not realizing that the Ethiopian monarchy was a Eurocentric minority government that had oppressed original Africans for centuries, Jamaicans developed Rastafarianism based on the worship of Selassie and the concept of black Jews. This era saw nonconformist religions develop in the United States, with the Nation of Islam and revivalist Christianity, as well as in Nigeria, with the Aladura revivalist Christianity, although these movements were not as political as their counterparts in Jamaica and the United States. The cultural counterrevolution pervaded other revolutions, and the black movement had been taken over by the mulatto elite at home. Garvey had sufficiently agitated his people, but he didn’t hand over power to a chosen successor before going to London in 1935 to spend his last days. Unlike in other black communities, where African intellectuals were behind the Pan-African movement, the numbers of black Jamaican middle-class elite were small and never challenged the less educated Garvey as the undisputed black leader. The mulattos that tookover didn’t do so out of a commitment to black development but out of Socialist ideals copied from the British Labor Party.
Alexander Bustamante, a mulatto moneylender, organized the labor movement by starting the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union in 1936. A single sugar-estate strike culminated in the 1938 nationwide general strike that brought Jamaica to a standstill and the colonial authorities rushing to the negotiation table. Bustamante’s charisma and the appalling labor conditions developed a mass movement that demanded better labor treatment and eventually culminated in independence. Meanwhile, the general strike won a minimum wage for sugar workers and the recognition that labor unions were a force to respect in Jamaica. Bustamante’s cousin, Norman Manley, a mulatto lawyer, negotiated the general strike settlement with the colonial masters and was influential in the formation of the People’s National Party (PNP) in September 1938.The PNP campaigned for full adult voting and increased participation in the colonial legislature before Bustamante formed a rival party in 1942, the Jamaica Labor Party (JLP). Manley’s PNP formed its own labor union ally, which put it at par with Bustamante’s JLP. In 1944, the first election based on full adult suffrage was held, and the two parties contested. The PNP campaigned for independence, but the JLP countered by saying ‘self-government’ meant slavery. Bustamamte warned that it would ‘replace a white man with a brown man on the backs of black men’. This line of campaigning and Bustamante’s charisma won the JLP a sweeping victory at the polls. Jamaica, St Lucia, and other British Caribbean Islands were made to join the Federation of the West Indies, an unlikely union that was short lived due to the impracticalities of a federation of different islands separated by more than space and water. The islands received independence soon after the Federation was dissolved. Jamaica won its independence in 1962 from the British, who had left their other colonies in Africa and thought it would be cheaper to let Jamaica and the other sugar islands run as ‘independent’ nations (especially because sugar had lost its importance with the introduction of beet sugar). Although the Jamaican economy was weak, due to its reliance on sugar, bananas, and bauxite, its surplus black labor was important as the British encouraged Jamaicans to rebuild postwar Britain. Jamaicans immigrated in large numbers to Britain to rebuild the infrastructure that had been damaged during the war, and they helped in the major urban renewal. There was a mass migration in the 1950s, throughout the West Indies, to the major cities of the United States and Europe, which invited the Afro-Caribbean communities to take up employment. Many of them, especially those from Barbados, were surprised by the racist sentiments they met in their new lands but stayed for the lack of better opportunities. At home, the Caribbean islands related along colonial lines as the Anglophones formed the Caribbean Free Trade Area and later the Caribbean Common Market. This was unfulfilling, because their focus was directed at Europeans instead of their immediate geographic or ethnic cousins, especially with their broken sugar economies and the unlikely chance that they would be welcomed into the industrial community. In Guyana, Britain’s only South American colony, the mass importation of cheap, East Indian labor after abolition turned the Africans into a minority, which produced a striking comparison to the mulatto divisiveness in other parts of the Americas. Like other parts of the blackworld directly tied to England, Guyana’s prominent black activists grew agitated in London. George T N Griffith (aka Ras Tefari Makonnen) partly financed the Pan-African Congress. However, as in Jamaica, the local challenge to colonization came from a lighter-skinned activist, an East Indian student called Cheddi Jagan. Jagan returned from his studies in the United States in 1943, radicalized by the US black movement, and he set out to form political apparatus to challenge the British. He and his white Canadian wife, Janet, who was more of a ‘Marxist’, joined with other intellectuals in 1946 to form the Political Affairs
Committee, which they hoped would unify Africans and Indians with its planned ‘scientific Socialism’. In the ‘liberalized’ colony legislature, they fielded three candidates, but only Jagan won a seat. Jagan used his political platform to attack the sugar and bauxite companies, and he attracted a popular support that he mobilized during the 1948 strikes. In their drive towards forming a real political party, even though they had their own racial prejudices to overcome, Jagan and others realized that they needed a black man with the spirit of the worldwide black movement. They approached the head of the black movement, Linden Burnham, who was studying in London, and the 1947 president of the West Indian student union, which had fought for independence as a group. Like Azikwe and Nkrumah, Burnham returned to Guyana in 1949 and became the chairman of the proposed People’s Progressive Party (PPP), while Jagan became the leader and his wife was the general secretary. The repressive reaction of the British government only served to increase the popularity of the PPP, which demanded full adult suffrage and independence. The British eventually conceded on universal suffrage and a new constitution, while elections for the Legislative Assembly were slated for 1953. Contrary to colonial expectations, the PPP won 51 percent of the votes in the election, which showed a popular interracial movement as candidates won across racial lines. Below the surface, they were fault lines between Jagan and Burnham, who wanted to form a black party but couldn’t attract black intellectuals away from Jagan and the PPP. Like in other colonial settings, the PPP was expected to mellow its firebrand election promises, which it didn’t, as Jagan tried to correct the many wrongs that had been perpetuated by the British. This didn’t go down well with the West, especially the United States, which didn’t want pro-Soviet governments in ‘its backyard’. The British colonial government vetoed Jagan populist measures. The veto resulted in strikes and violent demonstrations in August and September 1953 and led to the British threat of naval and military deployments as the colonial masters also suspended the new constitution. The harassment and banning of PPP politicians made Jagan and Burnham decide to present their case in London, but in a display of European imperialist unity, French, British and US airlines refused to sell them tickets. Undeterred, they charted a flight to England, where the government accused the PPP of inciting racial hatred and spreading Communist aspirations. They couldn’t be charged in London on such baseless accusations, having brought the Indians and blacks together like no other time in their history, but on their return to Guyana, Jagan and his wife were imprisoned for six months for infringing on the emergency orders in place. A Royal Commission appointed to investigate the upheavals made a distinction between Jagan, who was labeled a Communist, and Burnham, who was labeled a moderate Socialist. This appeared to be an indication of how the West was to play its divide-and-rule game, causing the racial hatred that it had accused the PPP of fomenting. The unity of the East Indians and Africans had unsettled the Europeans, who found nowhere to breed their disruptive influences. By 1955, the conflict between Jagan and Burnham over the leadership of the PPP led the authorities to allow only those meetings that served to widen the rift, as the party split into rival factions bearing the same name.* Initially, black intellectuals remained in Jagan’s PPP, but they eventually moved over to Burnham’s faction as the politics differentiated along racial lines. With the inspired divisions in place, the British allowed a gradual return to colonial democracy in the August 1957 elections, which Jagan still won. Burnham won the capital despite losing the elections and renamed his faction the People’s National Congress (PNC). In his four years in office, Jagan made huge improvements with the social programmes he pursued, although the colonial governor often overruled measures that were viewed unacceptable to British
interests. Both parties called for independence with a constitution based on proportional representation, which was rejected by the British government that had also rejected such an arrangement in Britain. In 1961, PPP won the election with 43 percent. The PNC won 41 percent, and the United Front (UF), the party of the Portuguese and conservative middle class, took the rest. Jagan’s October 1961 visit to the United States only provoked fears that he was a Soviet admirer amidst the furor of US paranoia, which had to prevent the rise of another Fidel Castro in the Americas. Beginning in February 1962, serious rioting broke out against the increase in taxes needed to fund economic development, because it didn’t appear that foreign development funds were forthcoming. Instead, the United States sent destructive funds to Burnham and Peter d’Aguair to finance the strikes and demonstrations, which Jagan could quell only by calling on British troops and modifying his tax reforms. Within a year, another social explosion aided by the United States disrupted Guyana, when Jagan wanted to resurrect a formerly acceptable Labor Relations Bill. Riots, demonstrations, and food and oil shortages, from March to July 1963, made Jagan request that the governor declare a state of emergency enforced by British troops. * Segal, The Black Diaspora, 193. The colonial secretary announced plans for independence for the following year on December 7, 1964, despite the ongoing sociopolitical upheavals. In the elections, the PPP won 46 percent, the PNC 40.5 percent, and the UF the remaining 13 percent. Because Jagan won the popular vote and not a clear majority, he called the UF to join him in forming a government but was rejected. Burnham’s PNC formed the government with Peter d’Aguiar’s UF and promised racial harmony, and they received approval from the West with promises of development finance. Jagan boycotted the independence talks in 1965, which led to independence on May 26, 1966. In the new government, the two coalition parties promoted their special interests zealously. D’Aguair of the UF became the finance minister to promote the conservative business class interests that he represented, and Burnham vigorously advanced Africans into strategic positions. The need to redistribute capital towards blacks gradually led to the split of the coalition with the big business party, the UF. In August 1967, d’Aguair resigned from the cabinet but didn’t break up the coalition, because it would have led the more antibusiness PPP ‘Marxists’ into power. Burnham, knowing that he couldn’t secure a domestic majority vote, started devising loopholes like overseas voting, because a significant number of black Guyanese had migrated to the United States and UK. In the December 1968 elections, the overseas voters gave the PNC a massive majority of 56 percent of the popular votes, but the government was accused of electoral fraud and corruption, a familiar refrain across the blackworld. Guyana was an exception in the Americas that showed the mulatto usurpations witnessed elsewhere were not merely pigment problems but the results of the divide-and-rule policies of the Western governments, bankers, and military-industrial complexes.
Chapter 18: Democracy: Demonstration of Craze? African American civil rights won but not economic: The redesigning of European neo-imperialism (1945–1965) Back home in the world’s second-largest black ethnic group at the time, African Americans became increasingly impatient with racism after fighting for white freedom in World War II. The lynching and segregation continued despite the obvious moral debt owed. This made blacks more vociferous and was reflected by popular music and a sizzling rhythm and blues—white’s rock and roll music. However, the postwar black elite were ready to rock but not roll over the white boat, according to Du Bois’s integration script, because Garvey was dead. Du Bois was now the grandfather of the PanAfrican movement, having influenced Azikwe and Nkrumah, with whom he co-chaired the important fifth Pan-African Congress, where his belief in educating and agitating the masses was restated, in addition to taking all means necessary towards black freedom. Du Bois and other members of the civil rights community continued to write in the Crisis while intensifying the fight against racism and segregation in the courts. The NAACP, which Du Bois formed in 1909, began maturing into a formidable organization by attracting to its ranks a new generation of brilliant black activists. Two of the most public and important brains of the era were Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King, Jr, who represented and openly challenged the two major systems of white society: the court and the church. President Roosevelt’s packing of the Supreme Court with liberal judges to help the passage of his New Deal welfare package made the traditionally conservative Supreme Court sensitive to the shift in world public opinion (exemplified by UN human rights declarations following the Jewish Holocaust). To greatly embarrass the government, the NAACP filed formal charges, in October 1947, at the newly created UN, accusing the United States of racial discrimination. This forced the United States to use diplomatic capital to defeat the Soviet proposal to investigate the charges. There was a mobilization of black votes in the North, where the black population continued to be amplified by immigrants from the South and black West Indians attracted by the wartime boom. Blacks, never compensated or aided in their flight from the poverty trap, were attracted to the Democrats with their New Deal welfare programmes. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., a black reverend/civil rights activist, was elected in Harlem to the House of Representatives, serving from 1945–1969. He played a vociferous role in the legislative branch, which tried to reduce his effectiveness and disbar him from Congress. President Truman’s election campaign of 1948 brought the race issue to the forefront of political discourse, and Truman desegregated the army that more than a million blacks had joined to win the war. In a judicial system where the caliber of the players was more important than the game, Marshall was a legal luminary and a blessing to the black movement. As a brilliant, youthful lawyer, working under the auspices of NAACP, he relentlessly challenged segregation by filing numerous suits against state governments. He had a breakthrough against racial segregation with the May 1954 ruling in the Supreme Court case of Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka. The case reversed the ‘separate but equal’ ruling of the 1898 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which legalized segregation and had agitated the likes of Du Bois sixty years earlier. The Supreme Court
ruling that segregation in the provision of education was unconstitutional had ramifications in other aspects of governance, where Marshall was apt to turn his attentions, which the Courts could not refuse to deliberate in a legal context. The progress of the civil rights movement in the United States, and across the blackworld, continued to be disseminated through the Crisis, university students, and other middle-class circuits. The Southern white reaction to the desegregation rulings inadvertently motivated the black masses and white liberals in the civil rights struggle. The improvements in military communications, which had been customized to radio and television, were major weapons in the struggle. Evil acts that would have gone unnoticed, especially in the Deep South, were now beamed across the world, even to Africa, during the television boom of the 1950s. The white racists enraged even the disinterested with the August 1955 brutal murder of a fifteen-yearold boy, Emmett Till. He was holidaying in Mississippi from Illinois and killed for whistling at a white lady while merely trying to overcome his stammering. Till was killed and his body tossed into the river, with the assumption that he was just one of the Southern blacks, but the state of Illinois requested his body, and it was placed in public view to show the barbarism of the Southern white society. It was a pungent reminder to the large number of blacks who had migrated north to Illinois and New York of what was still happening to their cousins left behind. The nonviolent pursuit of racism through the courts was joined by a nonviolent civil disobedience movement, which was more than justified, because whites openly disobeyed the new desegregation court rulings. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat and move to the back of the bus for a white person in Montgomery, Alabama, led to her arrest and triggered a massive, nonviolent movement and a year-long Montgomery bus boycott. The black middle class, especially the reverends, were not keen on the potentially disruptive confrontation. They eventually succumbed, under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr, who led the black movement with the greatest oratory skills ever witnessed in a black leader. The boycott was initially called for a day, but its success encouraged an indefinite extension. Although most of the fifty thousand people had to walk, the boycott was a huge success, and the determination in the face of intimidation attracted worldwide attention and support funds from the North. Meanwhile, the arrest and treatment of Rosa Parks was contested in the courts, and on November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that segregated transportation was unconstitutional and ordered it desegregated. Southern Congressmen, 101 of them, called for a massive resistance to the spate of Supreme Court desegregation rulings. In January 1957, black ministers came together in the South to organize a body called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). It drew up plans on how to tackle segregation; Dr. King was the leader, and Ella Baker of the NAACP was its coordinator. The increased mobilization saw the largest black demonstration in May 1957 and, three months later, saw the passage of the first civil rights bill since reconstruction, even though it was watered down considerably. Nevertheless, the nonviolent attack on segregation continued and resulted in a court victory with an order for desegregation in Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The state governor strongly resisted, first by calling in the National Guard, which was ruled illegal, then calling local vigilantes to resist the black ‘intrusion’. The mob violently assaulted blacks trying to enter the school, which was televised and aroused feelings of dismay across the world. On September 24, 1957, Republican President Eisenhower was forced to dispatch federal troops to Little Rock to end the embarrassing situation, declaring that ‘mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts’. In continued resistance, the governor sold the schools to a private company but was overruled
by the courts. On the other side of the black political spectrum, with Garvey out of the picture, black separatism advanced with the emergence of the Nation of Islam. Forwarding Garvey’s proposal of a viable black state in Africa and black self-sufficiency throughout the existing European structures in the Americas, the Nation of Islam called for a separate black nation on US territory and represented a form of black separatism that arose out of frustration with the present system. It developed in the 1930s black heartland of the industrial city of Detroit, becoming a melting pot of Garvey’s old, black selfempowerment network and new black Muslims inspired by the large, local Arab community. The need to have a black religion and belief system behind a black movement fostered the idea behind the ‘Five percenters’ and the Nation of Islam with its outlandish theories of creation and the curse on whites. This was a striking, but not surprising, parallel of how the Jews reacted when they carved Israel out of northeastern Egypt and wrote the biblical book of Genesis of how blacks were the erring race that needed to be deprived. In the new black religions, the white man was an experiment by one mad doctor or nutty professor, an experiment that went wrong and was banished from one arid area to another! Despite the limited formal education and historical knowledge of the founder, Robert Poole (later called Elijah Mohammed), the Nation of Islam fulfilled the need for a black religion. It promoted selfsufficiency and served as a strong social support system for the large number of poor blacks deprived of freedoms. The Nation of Islam’s programmes promoting charity and discipline attracted many young black men. They felt so alienated and insecure in the new, faceless, industrial society that they migrated to in the North (which, coupled with poor, segregated education and underemployment, also jailed them unfairly). Malcolm Little was one of those jailed and disillusioned by the system and its religion. After finding the Nation of Islam’s comfort and education in jail, he came out to take them to the forefront of the black movement. In a display of alienation from white American society, Nation of Islam converts dropped their Anglo-Saxon surname for the letter X, representing the unknown. Malcolm X later took a more cherished and appropriate Yoruba name, Omowale, and identification card in Ibadan, Nigeria. Reflecting the impatience of the lower classes from the mosques that mushroomed under his leadership, Malcolm X verbally attacked the exploitative white system and the black middle class for hypocrisy and being miseducated to be servile instead of entrepreneurial. Malcolm X vouched for a black-inspired development movement and saw no end to the gradualism employed by white liberals and the black middle class seeking integration through the courts. The Nation of Islam exemplified its concept of black self-development by building an economic base that boasted of its own farms and aircraft for transportation (like Garvey, who owned ships). However, the Nation of Islam remained a small group, while nonviolent integrationists gained more prominence. On February 1, 1960, a new chapter in the nonviolent, directaction demonstrations started when four black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at the white-only lunch counter in the local store of a national chain. Within a week, sit-ins spread across fifteen cities in five Southern states, and by the end of the month, four national chains had desegregated their services. The sitins spread to many other aspects of society and business, and black students were increasingly joined by their fellow white students. Ella Baker, the NAACP coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was quick to coordinate and organize the students into a formidable force with the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had representatives from fifty-six Southern
campuses and nineteen from the North. The SNCC took part in freedom rides to challenge segregation on interstate buses and related services, as well as to set up voter registration ‘schools’ called freedom schools. The freedom schools went into rural, Southern areas to encourage blacks to register and supported them when attacked and hounded by white thugs. All these nonviolent actions towards desegregation attracted a ferocious attack from racist whites, but the protestors of both races withstood all that was thrown at them, mostly with singing and praying. When Dr. King’s SCLC decided to confront racism in Birmingham, Alabama, it faced the stiffest test of the nonviolent movement. Police resorted to dogs, whips, fire hoses, and mass arrests to break the protest. The staunch racists even resorted to bombing, which provoked blacks to riot on May 11–12, 1963. The rioting, which included attacks on white business areas, was an unexpected reaction. Detractors of the nonviolent movement proclaimed that it was proof that the policy of nonviolence was indecisive and couldn’t withstand the test of extreme provocation. This was especially relevant with the increasing militancy of the black movement as people became disillusioned. Even Du Bois, the leader of black integrationist politics, became disillusioned and left the country in 1961 to spend his last years in Ghana with Nkrumah. (His relocation preempted a move by the United States to arrest him on false charges of Communism and subversion.) Malcolm X epitomized the feeling of blacks in the ghetto, whose open anger was a warning to white society that they had to diffuse the situation, preferably through the middle class of reverends and intellectuals in the nonviolent movements of the NAACP and the SCLC. Noting the frequency with which African American leaders courted the new African diplomats in the UN in New York, not to mention Nkrumah openly sponsoring dissent across Africa, eventually one of the new African nations would have supplied weapons, probably from the Chinese and Russians. This would arm the African Americans who were clamoring for freedom through revolution. The urgency of African American freedom couldn’t be overstated in the Pan-African movement, because there were only three African nations, (Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Zaire) with more black people, and they were already ‘free’. As tempers rose in black America, President John F Kennedy rightly identified the propensity for anarchy, and he introduced a civil rights bill to Congress in June 1963. To keep the pressure on, the civil rights movement called for a protest march. It took place in August in Washington, where King made his moving ‘I have a dream’ speech to more than 250,000 people at the rally and tens of millions more across the world on television and radio. He and other speakers decried government and society over their commitment to civil rights. The answer to the reverends was a bomb in a black church in Birmingham, killing four children. The progenitor of the civil rights bill, President Kennedy, who appeared to blacks to be the most approachable president to date, was assassinated. The fears that arose due to the setbacks were put to rest when President Johnson fought through and signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was probably more than Kennedy would have done. It caused a major split in the Democratic Party, which led to the Republicans gaining a sizable defection of ‘Dixie Democrats’. They were rich, racist whites who had supported the Democratic Party since the Jeffersonian period of slavery, when the South supplied the most presidents. Although the Civil Rights Act might have been a party-splitting event, it wasn’t a groundbreaking event for African Americans. They were not economically better off by being able to use desegregate facilities, and the civil rights law did not address the issue of Southern whites preventing blacks from exercising their constitutional right to vote given a century earlier. The riots sparked across six cities
brought the message home, as militant black leaders like Malcolm X threatened to step up to the oppressors. Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam won a major publicity campaign with the conversion of Muhammad Ali, the world heavyweight boxing champion, whose vociferous attack on the racist establishment spread the message far and wide. Ali later became a force in his own right, making the Black Power movement visible all the way to Africa, where he symbolized the new, free African in the white lands of America. Malcolm X talked about his African heritage even though the religion he represented, Islam, misrepresented the African past. After his break from the Nation of Islam, which tried to curtail his astronomical rise on the political forum, he traveled to Africa and the Middle East to increase his understanding of the world. On a pilgrimage to Mecca through Egypt, he realized that Islam was not entirely a black religion, as portrayed in the United States. On his visit to Nigeria, the most populous black nation, and Ibadan, the largest black city at the time, Malcolm X was fascinated by what he saw and by his reception. He was dutifully renamed Omowale (‘our child has come home’) as opposed to Akata (fox or wildcat), the Yoruba nickname for African Americans. In the African totemic fashion, akata represented Yoruba people born outside the land, without the culture—a wildcat that grew up with the wild, white race instead of a domesticated cat that was taught the respectful, naturalistic African culture. At Malcolm X’s delightful homecoming he became Omowale. He went from Nigeria to Ghana and other parts of West Africa before returning to the United States with the belief that the only way forward was a united African front throughout the world. He envisioned a United States of African Peoples that could provide political, financial, and military support to black ideals, a black power based on self-sufficiency, not forced integration. He formed a black liberation army composed of Africans from around the blackworld, especially Cubans and Congolese. Unfortunately, he didn’t live long enough to lay the foundation. He was assassinated on February 21, 1965, while delivering a speech in Harlem, allegedly by those who were bitter about his ‘defection’ from the Nation of Islam and his continued rise. The lovable militant leader was replaced, in November of the same year, by a militant group called the Black Panthers, who were formed by a faction of university student members of the SNCC. The Black Panthers, being more educated and determined than previous activists, scared whites with their military drills, mass education, and agitation on the streets. Although formed in Alabama, their main power stemmed from the ghettoes and schools of Northern and Western cities. Even before the group’s formation, black militancy was on the rise and on exhibit in the Northern city riots, which were partly fueled by the televised white violence against those trying to register to vote despite the Civil Rights Act. The establishment further courted Dr. King, in absence of softer alternatives. He was awarded the Nobel Peace prize (named for the creator of dynamite, a paragon at the apex of the military-industrial complex), which conferred more recognition and respect upon him from white society. Notwithstanding this achievement, when he led a peaceful protest from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital, he was violently handled by the police and treated like a common criminal. This prompted President Johnson, in March 1965, to submit the Voting Rights Act, a bill to empower federal officers to register voters if they were restricted from exercising their constitutional rights. The Watts Riot in the same month that the voting bill was passed, which killed thirty-four blacks,
showed that something more than voting rights were required to diffuse the frustration, especially by taking care of economic and political disenfranchisement. The attention span of the nation was cut short by the Vietnam War, which took whites from the civil rights movement to the antiwar movement, believing the Africans had gotten enough civil rights. This was as far as the European machinery wished to go, having made plans to counter the postwar political revolutions, which meant little economically. Political independence and civil rights with no economic independence was a black, middle-class, integrationist dream that blacks were soon to awaken from. The initial euphoria among the black middle class across the world could be likened to that of a hundred years earlier – when the Civil War was won and Reconstruction started in the United States while slavery was abolished in Africa, and there were signs that the present euphoria of freedom was a mirage. Across the Atlantic, the European powers rebuilt their warravaged economies by importing Africans from their colonies, despite the maltreatment of returning black soldiers in postwar, anti-black race riots in Liverpool (a repeat of the post-World War I race riots). The 1948 Nationality Act paved the way for mass migration with the offer of British citizenship, which led to about 150,000 AfroCaribbean migrants and an unknown number of continental Africans being imported between 1948 and 1958. Apart from direct employment in the reconstruction sector, London Transport, British Hotels, and the National Health Service were some of the first pioneers to offer to pay travel expenses in advance to willing blacks in the West Indies and Africa. The population of blacks and Indians greatly increased in the cities of Britain and other European colonial powers. This reignited racial resentments that had waned with the postwar departure of white American Southern soldiers, who had had a negative effect on race relations in wartime Britain. From 1956, as the rebuilding drew to an end, blacks faced increasing discrimination in housing and employment. By 1958, the black unemployment rate was 14.5 percent compared to the 1 percent national rate. In addition, the black community began to experience more heavy handedness from police and attacks from poor whites in deprived areas. Both factors culminated in the August 1958 black rioting in Nottingham and London’s Notting Hill. The following month, neo-Nazi groups attacked blacks and their properties. The government response, led by parliamentary members from Birmingham, submitted new laws to restrict immigration. Before the laws could be enacted, the news prompted a huge rush to beat the deadline for citizenship. By 1962, West Indian numbers swelled to 300,000 across Britain, with 135,000 in London and 67,000 in Birmingham. In 1962 and 1964, the Conservatives pushed the first Commonwealth Immigrants Bill through Parliament, which restricted working migrants to eight thousand persons per annum and didn’t include African whites. Due to the large number of students and workers from British colonies, most of them hoping to return home soon, the black community’s political efforts were split between securing political independence at home in Africa and the West Indies and in securing civil rights in Britain. With the US black struggles televised, blacks in Britain were inspired, and liberal whites became more vocal. The Labor government of Harold Wilson introduced the 1966 Race Relations Act to show that Labor was opposed to racism, although the law was first used against a black man for racial hatred. The weakened economy allowed Conservatives to raise the fears of the lower classes being culturally overwhelmed by immigrants, who were also blamed for causing the economic malaise.
Following World War II, the old European powers had to accept the supremacy of the United States with its new fighter jet economy, which small, Western European nations could not afford on their own except through US investment and the embryonic European Union (EU). Instead of using the postwarera opportunity to launch the world on a path of peace and prosperity, they strengthened the militaryindustrial complex amongst themselves. The French, led by Marcel Dassault, used German scientists like Herman Oestrich and US finances to start Snecma, which became one of the world’s largest aircraft makers. US airplane contracts were meted out to other European nations as the Americans took over Hitler’s missile technology and former Nazi scientists. The West implemented laws to convert fighter jet technology to consumer purposes like airmail and air travel. European dominance was ensured in sinister plans that unfolded as divisions between Communist Russians and the West deepened into the Cold War. The West was paranoid that communism would extend into their territories to agitate and free their underclasses, especially their African colonies that International Communism was to free from the slaving nations in order to bring about a level playing field in the global marketplace. In 1950, the Western world, under the auspices of the UN, went to war in Korea against the Communists. The Korean War launched new weapons and the ‘deterrence ideology’ that bolstered faltering Western economies and restored confidence. This resulted in the defeat of the notion that the atomic bomb had made conventional warfare, and its profitable production facilities, obsolete. This allowed the United States and its allies to base their economies on the fear of Communism; more than 33 percent of the economy was directly related to defense industries. It also provided an unwritten rule never to use the atomic bomb, wherever and whenever their merchant bankers and arms dealers decided to play their game of death in the ex-colonies. Though they were Communists, Russians based their economy on the ideology of war against internal and external enemies and conscripted a significant percentage of their population and resources to its pursuit. With their historical background of African exploitation, the crusade of the Western nations ultimately returned blacks to exploitation mode, disguised as containment of Russians and Communism by neutralizing the Black movement, which they conveniently labeled communist. This was the third phase of European exploitation: the first was slavery, the second was colonization and sharecropping, and the third was neo-imperialism. This phase evolved from the world order that emerged after World War II, with the United States hijacking the world economic and financial systems. These were controlled through the IMF, the World Bank, and other UN bodies, located in the United States—the continuation of a monetary caste system. The Communist bloc formed its own systems that included the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) as its world bank. To fight the Cold War, the former Office of Strategic Studies was upgraded with Nazi scientists to a new outfit called the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Some of the Nazi scientists were employed to work on biological and chemical programmes, because Germany had been in the forefront of biological and chemical technologies from the turn of the century. During the 1952–1960 presidency of Ike Eisenhower, an ex-army general, and his vice president Richard Nixon, there was a major defense reorganization. Scientists under the CIA, headed by Allen Dulles, embarked on some questionable projects. The CIA project MK Delta was initiated in 1952 to research the use of biochemicals to alter human behavior and the use of covert biowarfare agents. It was continued as MK Ultra from 1953 to 1966 and as MK Search from 1965 to 1975. This was revealed in the first session of hearings before the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources of the
Ninety-Fifth Congress. To keep the West ahead in the Cold War, which required spying, gathering, and processing voluminous amounts of information, the US government made a huge military investment in the research and development of machines to process and store information. Research funds were directed to traditional military designers in the New England universities of Harvard, MIT, and others. They worked in conjunction with a government-backed company called International Business Machines (IBM) to create computer technology. Before the West could initiate the next world-domination master plan through the UN bodies and the CIA, which would disorientate blacks for another century, the Europeans had to regain control of the free African people through covert methods. The United States helped bolster Western European economies financially, while both realms built large public debt through their urban renewal programmes and the arms race. By 1965, they were ready to use their militaryindustrial complexes to clear the field on which the new system was deployed.
Chapter 19: The Black VIPs: Vagabonds in Power? Africa falls on its face, tripped by invisible European shackles (1965– 1980) Nkrumah said ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and all these other things shall be added unto you’, but it became clear that his dreams, so eloquently portrayed during his 1957 independence speech, were nothing without economic independence. The utopia desired in Ghana attracted African American intellectuals and artists like Du Bois and Maya Angelou, but it rapidly became apparent that talk of ‘free trade and democracy’ was Anglo-jargon! The new pseudopolitical system accorded blacks a little more respect, but the economic system based on European racial and military superiority and restrictions remained intact. The Europeans had taken over the colonies to keep the ‘potential slaves’ on their own land for the provision of primary goods and to be a privileged-butclosed market for the European manufacturing sector. Nkrumah expected to drastically improve the welfare of his citizens and the black race with rapid industrialization, improved agriculture, and exports by investing heavily in infrastructure like education, health, water, roads, and electricity dams. However, the restrictive Western tariffs placed on processed goods from the former black colonies were still in place, working to prevent competition with the colonial masters’ manufacturing concerns, while the colonies lost their coveted market of raw materials. The new black nations could increase income only by increasing agriculture and mining, which led to the crash in commodity prices in the sixties. The Blackworld’s commodity supply market was fragmented into ex-colonies against a unified buyers’ market in the West that dictated the price, while Western industrial products the blackworld bought in exchange had no unified pricing control structure. To get a better control of the economy, Nkrumah had to nationalize some strategic industries, which only confirmed his negative Socialist label in the West. His plan was to build a major electricity dam on the Volta River to supply power to the aluminum plant to feed planned African motor and airplane manufacturing plants. The fact that the US national income in the 1900s had increased dramatically through the arms dealers’ motor and aircraft industry (the largest industrial employers and sources of income) affected the prevailing thinking on industrialization and economic prosperity. However, the European powers were not inclined to let Nkrumah or any full African nation develop an industrial complex like 1800s Japan. They believed that industrialized Africans would turn to arms production to ensure continuous profit and progress like them. This would not only challenge whites economically, but blacks would have the military ability to revenge or redress past evils committed by European imperialism. In case the African leaders persisted, the manufacturing lobby pushed their Western governments to take all steps necessary to stop Africans from competing on an equal basis. Pressure was placed on Western companies providing technical and financial assistance, whereby they either wasted time and money, knowing full well that they were constrained, or they pulled out straightaway. If a company refused to pull out, it was bought out or blacklisted. Eventually, Nkrumah realized the insurmountable barrier erected by the West, and he turned to Russia for technical assistance, which turned him into a pariah who had to be replaced by the West. Because overambitious, greedy bastards were abundant in every nation, the Europeans found sellouts to
undermine the black government, especially the young African vagabonds recruited in the UN Congo Mission against Lumumba. In addition, a powerful but negative media was apt to exaggerate the common weaknesses of anti-Western governments—rumors of corruption were always good for character assassination. This relentless onslaught to undermine black nations, dating back to the slavery era and the first Western black nation, Haiti, inadvertently drove black leaders to become more repressive to stay in power. It was a dicey situation for leaders trying to do their best and gain popular support while being undermined by foreign agent provocateurs and having to clamp down on the human rights that they initially fought for. The workability of democracy in the blackworld became questionable, because foreign usurpers could finance and influence the political parties. The parties ended up being mere foreign or tribal representatives, and in some countries, they discarded a divisive, multiparty system for a single-party system, which had its own faults. With the notable exception of Senegal, most Francophone nations had one-party systems. Their sociopolitical life was still glued to France, which dictated the political discourse and left little or no space for freedom of expression in the political scene. Some Anglophone African nations changed to one-party Socialist states, which were different from those of the French that were capitalistic, but they often had to give up some autonomy to the Russians. Many of the African leaders who became Socialists were driven to it by having to go to Russia for technical help, which was given at the price of joining the restrictive Socialist club. Some form of ‘Socialism’ was needed in many of the nations to redistribute and reorganize resources towards nation building and economic development, because most were mere colonial outposts for raw materials that couldn’t support a viable economy. For effective control, strategic industries had to be nationalized, because there was no fully developed, local capitalist class to takeover. Some industries were nationalized because the most profitable sectors remained in European hands. By and large, the economies of the colonies were still very much in European hands, and the black political leaders were merely reporting clerks. With Gold and other commodity prices purposely depressed, the way to industrialization blocked, and Western financers playing God, Ghana’s economy faltered, unemployment increased, and the masses became restless. The realization that he was powerless in the colonial straitjacket called Ghana, and that his dreams of Pan-African unification had vanished, made Nkrumah frustrated and ‘repressive’. Claims of corruption were mounted to discredit him in a political system that had been fashioned after the inherently corrupt British system that allowed special interest funding and party patronage. With his image torn to tatters by the world’s conservative media, the Western Powers backed their colonial soldiers recruited in Congo, Col. Kotoka and Major Afrifa of the Ghanaian army, to overthrow him without a whimper from his people. Joseph Ankrah, the Chief of Ghanaian Army staff, one of the most senior UN Congo colonial soldiers, became the the head of state. A former CIA employee, John Stockwell, confessed that the CIA had an effective hand in forcing the coup.* This became a pattern across Africa. An Afrocentric, ‘uncooperative’ black president is disparaged, the economy ruined by international forces, and the Western-trained military takes over. Coups and countercoups racked the Ghanaian political scene after Nkrumah’s exit, while export earnings of gold, cocoa, and other agricultural exports declined. Afrifa, one of the key coup plotters against Nkrumah was to replace Ankrah in 1969. The cost of petrol imports worsened the balance of trade and foreign exchange payments. Two consecutive governments could do nothing to reverse this, but they worsened
the situation as they grabbed whatever they could from the sinking ship. In 1979, Jerry Rawlings came with the loudest cry of corruption, and despite an international outcry, he lined up all military ex-head of states – Generals Afrifa, Acheampong, Akuffo and other members of the Congo Cabal – before a firing squad and shot them for corruption. The question of whether Ghana, like most other African nations, was too small to sustain a viable economy, especially with the IMF knocking, remained. If Ghana (with a population under twenty million in 1999) was too small to justify the investment required to build an industrial complex and break out of the European mold, one would expect Nigeria (with the largest black population of 130 million) to kick start black development worldwide. Apart from being the largest black consumer market and labor supply, it was blessed with oil, gas, and iron. Some said that Nigeria was lucky to have struck oil a year before independence; otherwise, the British might have rethought leaving the country. Although the oil in the Niger delta area became the mainstay of Nigeria’s economy, the commercial and administrative center was Lagos Island on the Yoruba shores. The little manufacturing sector was still controlled by Europeans, especially the United African Company (UAC), an offspring of the Royal African Company that traded in slaves and African products for the British. * Adam Curtis (22 June 1992). "Interview with John Stockwell on 'Black Power'". BBC Two series, Pandora's Box:. The financial power remained with the predatory foreign banks, whose numbers greatly increased after independence to include other European and American banks. Most production facilities were based within the Lagos-Ibadan-Benin triangle of Yorubaland, southwest Nigeria, which produced more than half of the country’s industrial output. The Yoruba Southwest and Igbo Southeast produced the two main export crops, cocoa and palm products. The Muslim north produced groundnuts. Apart from being naturally richer, the Yoruba southwest and Igbo southeast regions pushed more vigorously for economic independence from the likes of UAC. The push for industrial and overall economic development was pursued, especially through their banks: the National Bank, and other related financial institutions like Odua Investments for the Western region, and the African Continental Bank for the Igbo eastern region. It was hoped that export earnings from agriculture could be used to build a balanced economy that wouldn’t be merely a raw materials source to Europeans. Nigerians developed light food-processing and cloth-processing industries to service its huge market, but they soon came against the same brick wall as Ghana when they set out to build a heavy-industry complex. As noticed in the industrial development of the Europeans, a heavy-industry economy wasn’t overly complicated. It mainly required a full iron and steel complex and chemical and electrical plants. If in place with other infrastructure, like transportation and communication, these would turn a nation around in ten years (like in Japan, Sweden, and latter-day South Korea). Nigeria had a local supply of iron and abundant petrol for petrochemical plants, which Japan didn’t even have, but the Nigerians were the wrong color. All Western nations refused and tried to discourage Nigerians and those that might help them achieve their aim of competing with the West. The American oil and pharmaceutical lobbies did not allow such development and blackmailed the US government, because it would have meant a substantial loss in US jobs. Eventually, Sweden agreed to build the iron and steel complex in the mid-1960s but withdrew in 1974 in what appeared to be a deliberate, time-wasting sabotage. The Europeans were directly
sabotaging the largest Nigger area. The political fabric of the new Nigerian state was greatly strained by ethnic problems carried over from colonial times due to the fusion of three regions, of different histories, that had to team up to make Nigeria work. The unlikely team included the Conservative Muslim Fulani caliphate over the northern Hausa, the republican Igbo, historically accustomed to participative village democracy, and the middleof-the road Yoruba, whose populist leader usurped Yoruba’s traditional power structures and derailed Azikwe’s Pan-African movement. Without a clear electoral majority, the alliance struck between the winner, Tafawa Balewa, representing the Muslim north, and the third, Azikwe, representing the southeast Igbo, made Balewa the prime minister and the effective head of government. Azikwe was the ceremonial president without much power. Because the Yoruba were second in population to the Afro-Asian Hausa-Fulani group, Awolowo, the Yoruba leader, came second in the election and became the leader of the opposition. However, divisions began to appear among the Yoruba before independence and widened immediately afterwards. Yoruba leaders like Chief S L Akintola pointed out that the Yoruba couldn’t continue to survive in the political wilderness, and the present non-alliance policy was beneficial only to Awolowo, who ruled over the Yoruba Action Group (AG) in opposition. The suggestion to strike an alliance with the Hausa, because Awolowo made grave enemies of Azikwe and the Igbo, was rejected by Awolowo, whose autocratic style frowned on independent political suggestions and quests for power. The failure of the progressive southeast and southwest to unite led to another victory by the Muslim north, with Balewa continuing as the prime minister at the federal level. The 1964 elections were marred by violence and electoral fraud, which moved the nation to the edge of disintegration, largely caused by political realignments in the southwest and the north’s religious violence. The switch was mainly among Yoruba politicians rejecting the autocratic structure in the AG, in which their political careers depended solely on Awolowo’s acceptance, as well as the prospect of spending their careers in opposition without the benefit of federal largesse. The result was political mayhem and violence, especially when Awolowo wanted to impose his will on his party’s western region governor, Akintola, and the North backed Akintola to cause more divisiveness in Yorubaland. Awolowo was charged for treason and jailed, which prompted his party to strike an alliance with Azikwe and Igbos to boycott the 1964 election. However, the agreement fell through as Azikwe’s party contested for Yoruba seats boycotted by AG, resulting in cries of betrayal ny the Yorubas. In a situation whereby the southern progressives were in disarray, the northern Muslims had a free hand to run a corrupt, disinterested government, because the north’s leadership was accountable not to its people but to the Caliphate and Allah. Like most Islamic rulers, they were not overly interested in mass education and industrialization, which they believed would create an enlightened middle class that would challenge them for power. This was not unnecessary paranoia. An educated elite, like in the United States, would present a more logical alternative to the rule of religion and the false belief that the rulers were godsent from Mecca (where the majority were wrongly taught that they originated). Under the guise of Islam, the Sokoto caliphate was based on the ascendancy of the smaller, Fulani group of light-skinned Afro-Asians over the majority of very dark-skinned Hausa. Nevertheless, the British colonists believed that the Nigerian government was challenging its authority within the Commonwealth and across Africa, so they sought regime change by discrediting the entire political class. The CIA inspired global corruption propaganda was also set up against Nigeria. Between 1958 and 1963, the British trained young Nigerian vagabonds to win back the African Giant
to their tentacles. The neocolonial soldiers were trained in UK, USA and India and tested in the Congo battlefields. One of the young officers, Olusegun Obasanjo, gained their attention and backing. With the media still within the control of the imperialists, they placed CIA agents in Nigeria, like in Ghana, to disseminate false or exaggerated information to the media to smear the characters of the political leaders. An agent known as John Thorne was located in Kaduna where he spread damaging news to the likes of Charles Sharp, the Briton managing director of a new publication for Northern Nigeria called The New Nigerian. Stories of corruption by the ruling elite were fed to him and others across the media. In addition to being agitated by foreign agent provocateurs, Olusegun Obasanjo is believed to have played an important role in instigating a clique of young Igbo army officers led by Major Kaduna Nzeogwu, who claimed to be tired of the corrupt system and set out on January 15th 1966 to assassinate the northern leadership without a concrete plan to take over and do better. Olusegun Obasanjo flew in on January 12th 1966 from London and was picked up Nzeogwu, his close friend. What exactly transpired is unknown, but it is known that Nzeogwu met with Obasanjo at 8.00am the morning after the coup at a roundabout to brief him of the previous night events. The clique that operated in Lagos was directly handled by British and American agents, who were at a party that paired the coupists with the targeted officers and leaders. The coupists were to tail their targets home from the party to kill them. The coup plotters tookover three cities and blocked Niger and Benue bridges until they were overwhelmed two days later by the army led by Aguiyi Ironsi, an Igbo that had also served the Western Powers in Congo. The Igbo dominated the ranks of the colonial army that had been converted at independence to the Nigerian army. The overthrow of the political leadership required the army to take over the government. This complicated matters, because the Igbo who controlled the army’s leadership corps headed the new government, and the northerners weren’t going to allow what appeared as an ethnicinspired coup to stand. They believed that the British were breaking the Indirect Rule arrangement with the Caliphate. On the northern streets, waves of reprisal mob attacks were made on the Yoruba and Igbo, whom the Northerners blamed for killing their leaders. This was also inspired with false news propagated by the CIA that Northerners were being lynched on southern streets. A few months after the first coup, on July 29th 1966, the Nigerian military head of state, General Aguyi Ironsi, was assassinated. Murtala Muhammed led a clique of Northern soldiers that included Sani Abacha, Muhammadu Buhari, Theophilus Danjuma, Ibrahim Babaginda et al to overturn what they deemed as a tribally motivated coup. They became head of States and vagabonds in power that were to later hold the nation to ransom over the next fifty years. The Nigerian and Ghanaian soldiers involved in the corruption propaganda used for regime change had been recruited by the Western Powers in Kongo where most of them served on the UN mission to get rid of Patrice Lumumba. To head the new government in July 1966, a delicate balance was struck as a twenty-nine year old, Christian northerner had to be promoted from lieutenant colonel to general to act as the face of the Northern inspired government. General Yakubu Gowon wasn’t part of the coup nor a full member of the northern elite, as southerners believed, but from the minority region known as the Middle Belt, the underbelly of the Muslim north around the Niger-Benue confluence. The Middle Belt became a political center and force of its own by playing both sides, being a composite of all sides, like the
mulattos in the Americas. The British made it clear that the North could not rule Nigeria, especially the Southern Protectorate that included Yoruba and Igbolands, which the British had conquered and directly ruled, therefore they set out to cause divisions through false media reports. False news reports were carried that southerners were killing northerners, which provoked reprisal attacks across the North. The governor of the south Eastern Region, Emeka Ojukwu, complained about the ethnic cleansing and threatened secession, emboldened by foreign arms backers like France, Portugal and Apartheid South Africa. The British allowed the French to arm Ojukwu while they placed an arms embargo on Nigeria to frustrate the Northerners in power in their bid to stop the breakaway Biafra. They made it clear that the Northerners were not to cross the River Niger in their attempt to win back the Eastern Region. The war was stalemated for awhile and when the leader of the July 1996 coupists, Murtala Muhammed tried to cross the River Niger, he was summoned to London and went on leave. Eventually, the Northern coupists realized that they won’t be allowed to rule a united Nigeria and since the North couldn’t survive as a landlocked nation they had to succumb to British demands. Once they succumbed the British armed Olusegun Obasanjo of the Southern Protectorate to get the surrender of Biafra. The arrangement was that Obasanjo will be the voice and foreman of the British who will lead the Northern officers. This was to be the arrangement over the next fifty years as Nigeria lost its true sovereignty. With the war over in 1970, the African giant faced nation building with the surplus income that the oil boom provided. A lot of socioeconomic infrastructure was put into place; roads, universities, and hospitals were built in addition to useless parts of an incomplete industrial complex, as was seen in Haiti. Crude oil was mined and exported to the Western world for processing before the finished petroleum products were reimported into Nigeria. There were eventual concessions by the chemical industry but only in the form of refineries that could process only crude oil into petrol and not the hundreds of other chemicals that the rich oil could provide. Moreover, the Western world erected tariffs and barriers against exporting any processed product. The iron and steel complex was made an even more distant dream when the Swedes succumbed to Western pressure and deserted the steel complex. Eventually, the Gowon government decided to go against the Imperialist economic status quo by implementing an indigenization decree in banking and other major sectors. The government turned to the Russians to build the Ajaokuta steel complex, which the Russians claimed would involve restructuring the system from its foundation and cost another fortune. With no other choice, Nigeria went ahead with the Russian steel complex and continued to prod the Western chemical industry for the few concessions it was willing to give. The racist trade barriers were not limited to industrial production but also applied to agriculture. The US farmers lobby pressured the Nigerian government, like others in the vast African grasslands, to not grow wheat to feed its people and to rely on US imports. This was similar to the killing of pastoralism in Mali and other ancient West Africa pastoral regions by white, Western milk producers who were protected by tariffs and heavily subsidized. The African cotton industry was also decimated by the $4 billion in annual subsidies to the US cotton industry. It was made clear that if Nigeria tried to cultivate its vast Middle Belt grassland, it would be taken as an unfair trading practice, and sanctions would be made against its oil exports. The vast population, especially the middle-class cornflake eaters, had to rely on the West for breakfast, while 300 percent tariffs were placed on African agricultural exports to the West.
This was not immediately apparent in Nigeria with the skyrocketing oil prices in 1973 caused by Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan colonel who took power in 1969. The Nigerian economy was revamped from the three-year civil war, with $50 billion surpluses by 1975, but the reactionary government put forth no socioeconomic vision and did not know how to move ahead. The young, inexperienced head of state, Gowon, said ‘money was not the problem but how to spend it’, while increasing wages more than 100 percent, fueling inflation and poor consumer habits. In increasing government wages across the board while agricultural export prices fell, Gowon caused the destruction of the agricultural sector and the bloating of the civil service. Rural dwellers and farmers left agriculture and migrated to the cities in search of nonexistent white-collar jobs in a Europeanconstrained manufacturing sector, forcing the government to provide employment in a vast and inefficient civil service. When it became apparent that Gowon was bent on breaking the colonial economic status quo, a coup was carried out against him based on corruption allegations. Muritala Muhammed that led the 1996 counter coup and Olusegun Obasanjo took over from General Gowon in a July 1975 coup. With the Western markets effectively protected against competition, as was true in Haiti since 1803, the unfavorable balance of payments and excessive capital flight resulted. To worsen the picture, the Western bankers started a ‘hustle’ similar to the slavery era, when the Dutch Jews offered any willing European the full package of sugar technology, slaves, and capital. Now, they offered corrupt officials loans for projects that were clearly unprofitable, especially with the knowledge that they were nonfunctional parts of a complete industrial system that would never be fully transferred. Many of the projects were nonexistent, and the loans were split between the European arranger and the African official, who shortsightedly thought, ‘It’s the white man’s money’—like his poor cousin in the US ghetto who got an unsolicited credit card in the post. The US cousin would be blacklisted, while in Africa, millions were hounded for the mutually irresponsible debt. Apart from the traditional methods of using the army to collect national debt, the United States and its allies built a watertight, financial ‘caste system’ through the IMF, the world’s financial police force controlled by Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan banks. The IMF rated national creditworthiness. Therefore, all countries except the Communist bloc relied on the IMF credit report to do international business, especially in shipping and air travel, which the West still monopolized. An IMF blacklisting might lead to having to use foreign exchange cash reserves or gold for every international transaction, and the national economy would collapse. Nigeria, the African giant without a focus, couldn’t challenge white economic supremacy. The military rulers made a few sluggish steps towards leading blacks throughout the world by generously providing oil and other aids to a few other black nations battling the oil crisis of the mid-1970s. Nigerians, who had been silenced in their call for a return to democracy during the war, became vociferous in their calls for a democratic government when Gowon postponed the promised 1975 election date. General Murtala Mohammed claimed he intended to stand up to the West and was getting rid of a corrupt regime. Muritala surrounded himself with known intellectuals in their fields and carried out a massive purge of the civil service, especially those found to be corrupt or to belong to secret societies. To increase national control of business and open the economy up to local people, the government improved upon the weak indigenization laws that Gowon decreed to protect Nigerians, as well as further increasing infrastructure investment from the oil surplus. Foreign investment, mainly European and Asian, was limited to varying degrees in sectors like
banking, public utilities, and lower businesses. Retailing earned a complete ban. Established companies were nationalized and compensated, but some foreigners escaped by organizing fake sales to local friends who represented them in public while they kept control and ownership. The redistribution of racial ownership and management gave a substantial number of people the opportunity to move up the economic ladder, even if the business base was too small to affect a larger percentage of the population. More states were created out of the existing ones to bring the government closer to the people and provide employment through rural development and local government infrastructure. In addition, the progressive government introduced a land reform decree that, although didn’t go far enough, helped to alleviate land problems faced in rural areas by farmers and reduce citybound migration. Being an Afrocentric, progressive government that placed the right intellectuals in specialist departments, the likes of Professor Bolaji Akinyemi (Director, Nigerian Institute of International Affairs), made an impact on the international scene, especially in the continuing independence movement in southern Africa. The new government upset the Western powers over its opposite stance on the Angola independence movement. The diplomatically inept government of President Gerald Ford, with Henry Kissinger as secretary of state and George H W Bush coming into the CIA directorship, inadvertently agitated the African giant with a form letter addressed to all African heads of state. Like a 2000 US presidential aspirant that called Africa a country, Ford addressed a letter ‘To All African Heads of State’ as if addressing mere department heads, which is probably how he regarded them. In the letter, he sternly instructed them not to vote in support of the MPLA at the upcoming Organization of African Unity meeting, because the Angola freedom movement was labeled Communist. The Nigerian government took this as an insult and unnecessary meddling in African matters. Murtala Muhammed replied in a publicized letter in which he told the United States that Africa was not a department or a state of the Americas. The External Affairs ministry led by General Joseph Garba went on a diplomatic offensive among African nations. Some were bribed with free oil and finances, which led to the Nigerian win over the United States, European, and South African lobby. Not known to take such defeats lightly from an African nation, the Europeans, through South Africa, backed an invasion of Angola, but the Cubans were apt to come to Angola’s defense with Soviet weapons in addition to those supplied by Nigeria. The West punished Nigeria by tightening US immigration controls and other diplomatic measures while tightening financial controls. Most importantly, Murtala was soon assassinated in an unsuccessful coup, which its plotters allegedly confessed to have been briefed by the CIA in a London hotel. Olusegun Obasanjo, the British neo-imperialist agent, Murtala’s deputy was to take over as head of state, despite suggestions to pass power to Muhammadu Buhari, the highest ranking Fulani and second in line to Murtala in the 1966 counter coup. More sinister plans were to be launched, but Jimmy Carter’s presidential win disrupted the global rightwing agenda. On the cultural front, Nigeria organized the African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, which attracted black musicians and intellectuals from around the world. In one symposium, delegates could not agree on choosing a common African language, because the Yoruba vehemently disagreed to the choice of Hausa or Swahili on the basis that they were Afro-Asian and not Original African languages. In the end, no important decisions were made, but all types of music were showcased. On the domestic scene, various types of traditional music were being put on wax, although most were regionalized. Yoruba juju music gained slightly more prominence due to the larger urban population
around the Lagos-Ibadan-Benin triangle. The music with the widest coverage was sung in African English, mainly from the southeast Igbo or Midwesterners like Victor Uwaifo. Afro-American music was popular among the Nigerian middle class, who enjoyed jazz, rhythm and blues, disco, and rap, as well as Caribbean reggae and calypso called ‘hi-life’. Though it was agreed that Afro-American music owed its origins to West Africa, a continuous cultural exchange resulted in modernday rap. Ewi was an ancient Yoruba art of social commentary and documentary, which involved poetic rhyming over a background of musical instruments, especially the talking drum, in a call-andresponse musical arrangement. This Yoruba art form was modernized and hybridized by a young musician, Fela Ransome-Kuti, the son of Nigeria’s foremost female suffragist. He was sent to English universities, where he was introduced to Pan-Africanism in the late 1960s. Fela returned to Nigeria, singing African folklore songs before turning to social enlightenment and criticism over a mixture of Yoruba drums and Hausa horns. This clearly distinguished him from the numerous other musical types in the world. Fela’s sociopolitical criticism in the 1970s was refreshing, because the old Pan-Africanists were either dead or had become bedfellows of the imperialists that they had fought and replaced. Fela called his new music ‘Afro-beats’, although he essentially ‘rapped’ on his albums with an anti-establishment posture, wearing no shirt and smoking marijuana, with a band of half-naked women ‘gyrating’. He was accused of promoting the weed-smoking thug culture among Nigerians of the early 1970s, and his ‘shrine’ in Lagos attracted youth from near and far to listen to ‘jams’ or ‘yapping’ nights. His records sold at home and abroad with black power songs like ‘International Thief Thief (ITT)’, ‘Vagabonds in Power (VIP)’, ‘Army Arrangement’, ‘Sorrow, Tears, and Blood (STB)’, and ‘Follow Follow’. Fela enlightened the new generation of Africans born during and after the civil rights era and independence, many of whom were ignorant of the new crimes waged against the common African by European and American ‘ITTs’ and their local ‘zombie’ armies and ‘follow follow’ elite. The generation born in the 1950s and 1960s reacted to Fela’s music coupled with the American crime stories, particularly the James Hadley Chase crime series and espionage stories like Day of the Jackal, which broke down Western administrative systems, and cult films like The Godfather and Scarface, with the advent of video players. Fela not only attacked the neo-imperialist corrupt Nigerian government and global European imperialism, but social ills like skin bleaching (‘yellow fever’) and the colonial mentality (racial inferiority complex). The posture cost him financially and physically, because the military government came down heavily on him, leading to imprisonment and familial loss, but the message was delivered. The decimation of Fela and his form of meaningful music led to the switch of local tastes to reggae and rap from the diaspora by the late 1970s. The expansion of the middle class and income levels augured well for Africans in diaspora. Nigeria was the largest black market and didn’t need much of a hard sale, especially for new artists. It was an era that saw Zaire, through Mobutu, sponsor the Ali-Foreman heavyweight boxing fight, which effectively stabilized the business of boxing in the hands of an African American, Don King. The seventies saw African American music tours with the likes of the Brothers Johnson, Skyy, and Whispers. Reggae artists like Jimmy Cliff, Aswad, Black Uhuru, and Third World made financial and spiritual profit from their tours. From my experience of living on both sides of the Atlantic, the hip-hop culture took strong roots in Yorubaland from its inception in the mid-1970s, as many middleclass Yoruba families never missed the TV show Soul Train. As coastal Yorubas and Igbos became more ‘Afro-Westernized’ by identifying with their cousins in the
Americas in their attitudes and religion, the rise of worldwide Islamic fundamentalism spread to Islamic northern Nigeria, funded by Libyan and Saudi Arabian oil money. In the south, this resulted in the worsening of the mental slavery that pervaded the southern Nigeria sociopolitical scene. More took to the wave of American Pentecostalism to the detriment of original African religions and values. In the north, the advent of fundamental Islam resulted in the Matasine, the religious killing of southerners in the north, where Afro-Asian religious leaders incited the largely uneducated masses against Original African groups from the south. The majority in the north still relied on pastoralism and regional trading dating back to antiquity, but with the death of the Trans-Saharan route and the European war of tariffs and subsidies on pastoralism, a larger percentage than the national average were unemployed and in poverty. Instead of their political and religious elite educating them away from the outdated, Muslim economic system, they incited jihads to help them gain political power and resources that only God could hold them accountable for embezzling. Although African traditional religion was still popular across the country, it took a second place to Christianity in the south or Islam in the north. Many people still believed in the efficacy of traditional African spiritual powers but preferred to avoid its negative connotations in the Westernized public, while seeking its positive effects in private when all else failed. In the south, the Anglican Church of England and the Catholic Church, which appeared elitist with their solemn English and Latin services, were challenged by the gradual rise of African revivalist spiritual churches, which spread upwards from the poorer classes. Ayo Babalola and others introduced the Aladura, ‘the prayerful’ church, that swept Yorubaland in the 1930s (even though the British tried to stop him by refusing him land grants and jailing him for six months for practicing a witch-eradication scheme). New sects continued to grow, and in the 1970s, the Celestial Church grew to include the Yoruba at home and those who had migrated to the United States during the 1967 civil war. The Igbo largely remained Catholic, but many crossed over to Anglicism and the US ‘born-again’ Scripture Union of the late seventies, which preceded Pentecostalism. After the Nigerian civil war and its recriminations, which were limited by the oil boom that satisfied most immediate needs, the Igbo again launched the dynamic business drive that earned them the label ‘Jews of Africa’. This aptitude for trade appeared to have generated from a number of factors: the merchant status of the historical Aro clan, the strong Igbo communal mentality that promoted self-help and strong business bonds amongst each other, and their presence on both sides of the Niger River, which allowed them to trade with both the Yoruba and the Hausa. However, unlike the Yoruba women, who still held the pivotal role in the trade scheme, the riverine terrain that historically required strong canoeing skills probably prevented Igbo women from developing a larger presence in trade. During the war, a large number of Igbos migrated to the United States, where they had a business presence from New York to Florida, but they developed a stronger trade link with Asian manufacturing economies. Igbo merchants led in importing cheap manufactured goods from Hong Kong, Japan, and the rest of the Far East. They tried local import substitution strategies that turned Nnewi into the largest Black-owned manufacturing center in Africa, but their products were generally frowned upon as inferior by the miseducated Nigerian elite. Due to the Igbo aptitude for trade, they had the most widespread presence across Nigeria, cornering the electronics and imported goods markets buoyed by the oil boom and inflationary tendencies of the government. Sadly, this was an Indian summer in the short and unforgettable warming up of African freedoms, which were to be chilled by the right-winged political victories in the United States, United Kingdom
and United Nations. The French indirectly held on to most of their colonies and, in many cases, organized coups against governments with Afrocentric populism, like in Togo, Upper Volta, and Central African Republic. Though some nations didn’t provide essential raw materials, they remained protected markets for French goods, especially the French arms industry. Although the population of French Africa was lower than that of Nigeria, its balkanization profited the French arms industry, because it had more national armies to supply. France’s arms industry became the second-largest arms supplier after the United States. In Houphouet-Boigny’s Ivory Coast, the French maintained a visible stranglehold on the economy. French businessmen continued to trade directly at the source, cutting out African retailers and middlemen and preventing the development of a significant black middle class. Ivory Coast, with a population of sixteen million in 1999, was portrayed as a model West African nation that was able to achieve a steady rise in its GNP, but the increase was accounted for by an increase in French business that never trickled down to the Africans, except for Houphouet-Boigny’s tiny clique. Houphouet-Boigny and the French restricted all opposition in Ivory Coast before independence, and the army was effectively constrained. Unlike its Afrocentric neighbor, Ghana, many years after ‘independence’, Ivory Coast shamelessly permitted the continued existence of white-only areas, bars, and entertainment in the capital, Abidjan. While all African nations put up a united front against apartheid, Ivory Coast opened its ports to become the gateway to racist South Africa. Houphouet-Boigny was reputed to have built an escape corridor leading from the Ivory Coast presidential palace to the French Embassy—leaving one to wonder what state of mind would let him think of running from his own people into the hands of oppressors of four centuries. This trait was also exhibited in sparsely populated but oil-rich Gabon, where President Leon Mba had proposed the breakup of French Equatorial Africa and the colonists financed his 1960 election campaign in appreciation of the favor. In 1964 French paratroopers landed in the country within 24 hours to restore him to power after being ousted in a 1964 coup that arose due to his dissolution of the national assembly, suppression of the press and imposition of a one party rule. After Mba died in 1967, his vice-president Omar Bongo took over, dissolved all parties and created a new party under a one party political system. Bongo remained in power, backed by the French, despite several unsuccessful coups, until he died of cardiac arrest in 2009 in Spain. His son, Ali Bongo, took over in a rigged election and remains in power, regardless of Gabonese outcries. With a low population density and high oil revenue, Gabonese have the third highest per capital income in black Africa on paper, but in reality the people are economically deprived by the French and their imposed puppets. Guinea, with a population under ten million, was one of the outstanding Francophone countries due to the Pan-Africanist Toure, who was frozen out of French politics for pushing for the independence of French Africa and turning to Nkrumah. Toure formed a one-party state and turned to Russia and China for technical expertise, Guinea being a nation endowed with iron, bauxite, gold, and diamonds. However, Guinea was unable to develop an industrial base with its small, largely Muslim population and low literacy rates. Portugal invaded but was repelled by Toure, who ruled until his death in 1984. His reign was marred by his repression of various foreign-inspired insurgents at home, as he was forced to cross the ‘unacceptable line’ by Western powers and their arms. Chad, another French West Africa colony, faced both internal and external insurgents. Its population
was under ten million. Like Nigeria and Sudan, the colonial amalgamation of Afro-Asian Muslims and indigenous Africans proved again a recipe for trouble between the southern Chad agriculturalists and the northern, Arab desert pastoralists. The southern agriculturists, mainly Sara people, had been more easily subjected by the French than the northern cattle nomads, the Toubou, who held out from the 1930s and were on the wrong side of the French. The French handed over power to the southerners, who had embraced Christianity and embarked upon a cultural Africanization that irritated the Muslim north into war from 1966. French troops aided the southern indigenous African government in its fight against the northern Arabic rebels. President Francois Toumbalaye was assassinated in 1975 by northern Muslims who had formed a government but couldn’t keep the peace, and the nation slipped into civil war in 1979. When the Muslim government realized that it was on the verge of losing to the French-backed southerners, it called upon Gaddafi of Libya next door for help. Libya, like in other parts of Africa, used its oil wealth to help the Muslim Chad government against its Christian, southern rivals backed by the West. Gaddafi had more than enough oil money to spend in his sparsely populated Libyan desert, with under five million people, and used it to sponsor the Muslim agenda in black Africa, causing upheavals like his Roman Baribari ancestors in ancient Egypt. The Muslim conflicts remained one of the highest African killers of the last thousand years, as slavery continued in western and central Sudan. Niger Republic, the French ex-colony to the north of Nigeria, was especially notorious for its slavery of original black Africans by northern Tuareg/Arabic populations that came down from the desert to kidnap. During the 1970s, it enjoyed prosperity from the sale of uranium deposits, but the fall in prices returned Niger to being one of the world’s poorest nations. The arid country suffered severe drought from 1968 to 1975 and was saved only by humanitarian aid from the international community. In 1974, President Hamani Diori, who held office since the 1960 independence, was overthrown by his Chief of Army Staff Lieutenant Colonel Seyni Kountche. Senegal was one of the few countries in black Africa that was able to strike a delicate balance, especially as Christian President Leopold Senghor governed an 85 percent Muslim majority in a population of fewer than ten million. Despite the fallout with France during independence, it kept close links with France and the Western world with its own brand of Socialism, which was more like French Socialism than Russian Socialism. The French and the West could not afford to lose the gateway into the vast western savannah and made sure to keep their trade links intact, while the industrial barriers ensured that Senegal remained a French raw materials depot. The intertwining geography of Senegal and Gambia reflected the stupidity of keeping the colonial straitjackets left behind by Europeans. In the 1600s, the British had established a trade post on the Gambia River, which they retained as the French took all the surrounding land. The narrow strips of land on both sides of the Gambia River became the English-speaking nation of Gambia, right in the middle of French-speaking Senegal. Senghor couldn’t promote his Pan-African ideals due to lack of support and logistics, but they showed in Senegal’s dealings with other African nations. He and Gambia’s President Dawda Jawara briefly unified Senegal and Gambia in 1981, although this later failed like the earlier unification with Mali. Mali briefly united its population of five million with Senegal in 1963. It experienced its first coup in 1968. This was the end of its Socialist regime and the beginning of a long, corrupt regime. President Moussa Traore’s regime swept out the Pan-Africanists in the mid-1960s and resold their nations to the West.
The Central African Republic was one of the French colonies that turned to the East to overcome French neocolonisation. Although it exhibited the one-party syndrome common across French Africa, it became the center of Chinese influence in Africa from 1960 under President David Dacko. In 1965, the French inspired a coup through Chief of Army Staff Jean Bokassa and chased the Chinese out of the country. Like the Uganda Chief of Army Staff Idi Amin, who turned out to be a Western embarrassment after being aided to power, Bokassa was a madman who thought that he was Napoleon. He called himself Emperor Bokassa while killing his people en mass and squandering their money. Nevertheless, he was courted by French presidents and their elite. Despite the dirty money the French received, they eventually had to dispose him in 1979, partly because of the international embarrassment that he caused, parading around and calling himself an emperor. Coups and countercoups racked Nigeria’s western Francophone neighbor, Dahomey, the former slavetrading capital that was renamed Benin in 1975. The governments kept switching between corrupt proFrench governments and confused Marxists regimes even though the country less than two hundred kilometers wide was too small to develop a fully industrialized economy (its population was under five million in the 1970s). Colonel Usman Kerekou took power in 1972 and two years later declared a Marxist Socialist state, which didn’t change its dependence on France. It was better suited to be a service economy to its giant neighbor, Nigeria, as its free ports of trade were used to import and smuggle goods into and out of Nigeria. Kerekou’s Benin was like French Congo, also with a population of fewer than three million, situated beside the major population center of Belgian Congo-Kinshasa. In 1963, labor strikes led to the overthrow of the pro-French government, and the West labeled the new government under Denis Sassou-Nguesso Marxist. Although the Russians and Chinese vied for political influence, the French still dominated the economy, because French Congo, like Benin, continued spending the CFA franc, and its public utilities remained under French control. The Congo-Brazzaville economy wasn’t geared towards servicing the large population center of Belgian CongoKinshasa. Cameroon, the German-turned-French colony located on the ancient migration route from Nigeria, was given independence while there was an ongoing guerrilla war waged by UPC, a popular radical banned by the French in 1955. The guerrilla war did not end till 1971. It claimed the life of the leader of UPC and the sociopolitical life of Cameroon, as President Ahmadi Ahidjo suppressed all political freedoms and turned his party into the sole legal party in 1966. Ahidjo’s suppression continued after the defeat of UPC and the 1971 end of the guerrilla war. In 1982 he was wrongly diagnosed with a terminal disease and had to stand down for Paul Biya, with the hope of continuing to control from behind the scenes. Within a year they fell out, as Biya consolidated power, and Ahidjo was exiled to France, where he plotted unsuccessful coups in Cameroon against Biya. Biya sentenced Ahidjo to death in absentia, but he died of a heart attack in Senegal in 1989. Biya removed Ahidjo’s loyalists from power but continued Ahidjo’s economic liberalization policies and high level of corruption. One of the more populous French colonies, with a population of 15.8 million in 1999, Cameroon remained close to France, and the stability allowed it moderate economic development but not economic independence from France. Togo, another former German-turned-French colony located between Benin and Ghana, saw its legitimate government swept from power by a pro-French corrupt government in 1967, led by President Gnassingbe Eyadema, who retained power through unsavory means until his death, similar to Benin’s Kerekou.
If most French-speaking African nations appeared to be in a mess because of the vagabonds in power, they were not as bad as metal-rich Belgian Congo, the second-most populous indigenous African nation. Zaire, with a population of fifty-three million in 1999, was one of three black African nations with more Africans than the United States. However, apart from corruption and neocolonisation, Belgian Congo lacked competent manpower on all levels of government. Belgium had never contemplated indirect rule, not to mention independence, which was reflected by its educational policy that provided only for a few primary schools. While newly independent countries like Nigeria and Ghana had thousands of university graduates, and Kenya and Uganda had a few hundred, other parts of Africa had been deprived by colonists, leaving Tanzania with only twelve and Zaire with none.* This had an immense negative effect. There was no large, educated middle class to challenge the United States/Belgian military imposition in the person of Mobutu, who renamed Belgian Congo as Zaire. * Oliver, Africa Since 1800, 281. Apart from the low skills level of the population, and the way Zaire had been bastardised by King Leopold for his concession companies, it was unlikely that even a large middle class could have done anything other than bring the 1998 bloodbath closer. Irrespective of a capable Lumumba being aided by Nkrumah and other Africans, the United States and Belgium came in with military force as the Union Miniere Concessionaire Company engineered the secession of the copper-rich Katanga province. Mobutu, the ignorant soldier who was put in charge, had no chance of successfully wrestling power from the West, even if he were so inclined. He joined in the continued fleecing of the Congo basin and openly boasted of being one of the richest men in the world. Unlike many other African nations, Mobutu never had a concerted, massive programme of building schools, hospitals, roads, and other social infrastructure despite the riches of the Congo basin. He tried to attain the industrial stage, unreachable even by more skilled African nations, by paying and borrowing for the construction of a hydroelectric plant, a copper-smelting plant, and an iron and steel complex. After two decades of delays, like those plaguing the entire continent, the copper-smelting plant remained incomplete, as its raw copper continued to be exported. The steel complex never produced the full array of iron products, especially the types useful for industrialization. Even if the copper plant had been completed, there was a barrier in the West against African-processed products, which showed that the West was siphoning Zaire’s wealth knowing full well that the expensive projects were duds. To compound Congo-Kinshasa’s woes, raw copper prices fell, and the economy faltered from the mid1970s. The deficient social services that the Belgians had provided ran down with no money or local personnel to run the facilities, while the foreign staff in place before independence left the country as everything ground to a halt. Nevertheless, the US conglomerate Citibank, British Morgan Grenfell, and French Societe Generale bankers kept awarding Mobutu loans that they split amongst each other and saved in European banks, while digging future Zairians into a debt trap. It got to a stage that Mobutu had to lend his country some of the money that he had stolen and kept in Citibank and the others! In 1977, when Angola-backed Kongolese insurgents tried to take the copper-rich Katanga province from Mobutu without the support of the concessionaire companies, the West threw military support behind Mobutu’s undisciplined army, even though it was being overrun. Because the Kongos extended into Angola, they were apt to pick up the spirit of the African liberation wars in Angola, where they received training from the Cubans. However, the West ensured that Mobutu remained firmly in power
with all the financial and military support he required. A similar situation arose on Zaire’s eastern borders in the former British colony of Uganda. The sycophantic relationship between the British colonists and the Buganda kingdom created immense problems in the dysfunctional political system that evolved. With a 1999 population of twenty-four million, Uganda was made up of indigenous Africans in the more densely populated south and AfroAsian Muslims in the north. At independence in 1963, Obote, who had been in the forefront of the independence movement, became the prime minister, while the Buganda royalty was made the constitutional monarch in a land of many kingdoms where Bugandas accounted for only 16% of the national population. This system was beneficial only to the Buganda monarchy, which was placed there by the British to undermine the new Afrocentric government. In 1967, Obote used the army to retire the monarchy from government, and he set about implementing a more realistic central government, which didn’t go down well with the British. By 1971, the British had had enough. They inspired his semiliterate Muslim army commander, Idi Amin Dada, to overthrow Obote’s ‘wayward’ government. Amin played along, but problems developed that made a joke of the British selection of a mere armed thug over Uganda’s intellectuals. A problematic, incomplete economy coupled with the oil crisis demanded tough economic measures, which Amin felt were unfair and blamed on the British and Indian business class. Unfortunately for the British, Gaddafi was spreading his oil dollars around and had found a friend in his fellow Muslim, Amin. Uganda had a relatively influential Indian population, like in other British colonies of South Africa, Trinidad, and Guyana (where the British had imported a large number of Indians to augment labor shortages). The Indians were given more freedom and were more cohesive as an immigrant group than black Africans and therefore stepped into the intermediate business class. This fact built resentment against the British and their ‘imported’ friends, who became first- and second-class citizens while the ‘sons of the soil’ remained at the bottom of colonial society. When the Ugandans fell out with the British and wanted to send them packing, being that there were only a few British on the ground in Uganda, the semiliterate Amin picked on their closest allies. In many newly independent African nations, Indians were excluded from business sectors that they controlled from colonial times, which might have also influenced Amin’s decision. Elsewhere it was done in a legal and civilized manner through nationalization/localization laws with appropriate compensation. In addition to throwing out the British Indians, Amin, being a Muslim, picked on the church, which he believed was subversive. He imprisoned and killed a few church clergy, which aroused international condemnation as the Western media exaggerated and overplayed the ‘tape’. To avoid a military coup, Amin negated all those who could be instigated against him, both in the military and political arenas, and he could have stayed in power forever. Like the African saying, ‘those who the Gods want to kill, they first make mad’, Amin, in his contorted thinking, attacked neighboring Tanzania, a more populous nation. The ex-Ugandan president, Obote, had fled to Nyerere’s Tanzania when Amin overthrew him and Amin had accused the Tanzanians of aiding Obote factions across the border, which he now decided to stop. Nyerere gave Amin a heavy routing all the way to the capital in Kampala in April 1979. This was not only due to a better equipped and disciplined Tanzanian army but also because the Tanzanians came through the traditional south, which was against Amin’s northern Muslims. Power remained in the north as Obote, a Christian, was reinstalled through elections conducted by the conquering Tanzanians.
The West resorted to arming the south against Obote, their old enemy who they had previously backed Amin to overthrow. The north-south strife witnessed in Uganda could not compare in magnitude or duration to that of Sudan, the ex-British colony sharing its northern borders. Sudan was the largest land territory in black Africa, although most of its population (thirty-six million in 1999) lived on the Nile, like Egypt to its north. The war in Sudan was a continuation of the Afro-Asian aggression that saw indigenous Africans pushed south from their ancient Egypt homeland. Unfortunately for present-day Africans, the British cut them out from the main body of Africans to the south and joined them with the Arabs extending south from Egypt. By 1967, the Anya Nya under Colonel John Garang demanded a complete secession of the southern section from the majority Islamic north, but their numbers were too small to effectively challenge the Arabs. The Arabic Sudanese government held tightly onto the southern towns, while the Anya Nya carried out its resistance from the countryside. The Muslim, Afro-Asian slave traders continued to kidnap Original Africans from the south while the Islamic government conveniently looked away. It should be noted that the slave trade was also continuing in Mauritania, which was on the same latitude in the desert to the far west. The south’s ability to fight wars had been limited by the British. During colonization, they built most of the socioeconomic infrastructure in the north, because the Muslims provided a unified front and culture that they easily understood. The northern Arab rulers shared the imperialistic objective of dispossessing the Original Africans of their land and labor. Like in other parts of the Arab world, and also the Nigerian Sokoto caliphate, it was much easier for the British to deal with oppressive regimes that owed nothing to the land and people. Northern soldiers committed genocide in Juba and massacred a church congregation in Wau, which led to a heightening of hostilities with hundreds of thousands displaced. In 1969, General Gaafar Nimeiri led a coup and opened negotiations with the help of Haile Selassie, which led to the end of the first phase of the civil war in 1972. The peace agreement ensured a federation that gave the south its autonomy, allowing the free practice of African and Christian religions and recognizing English instead of Arabic as its official language. It was a short respite from the millennia-long Islamic fundamentalism and aggression that rose in the next decade. Selassie was able to broker the peace in Sudan on his western borders, but he was not able to extend the peace to his eastern and northern borders, where Muslim Somalis clamored for the unification of all Somalis into one Muslim nation. Most important to the AfroAsian Muslim Somalis was the land claimed by the Christian Selassie during the Christian European land grab, which he undertook to greatly extend the borders of ancient Ethiopia. Even after the Italians were chased out, the British handed over the Ogaden province to their Ethiopian allies instead of keeping it as part of British Somaliland and avoiding the gruesome war that ensued after independence. The Somalis wanted back the historically important Ogaden province in eastern Ethiopia, which served as grazing ground for Somali herdsmen. Somalis, seven million in number in 1999, took on a more populated Ethiopia, which had nine times their population. This was done with the help of the Russians until Selassie was overthrown and the West switched sides. Student demonstrations, strikes, and an army mutiny brought about the end of the Solomonic dynasty. Some quarters claimed that Selassie’s overthrow was inspired by the Russians, but it had popular support as the masses were seen rejoicing in the streets after the fall of the detached emperor. In a callous display of cold-blooded economics regardless of ideologies, Western arms dealers switched supply of weapons from Ethiopia to Somali.
The new government in the second-most populous black African nation faced serious embattlement from both Eritrea and Somali. Addis Ababa, the capital of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), fell to a reign of terror. Hundreds of thousands fell as the death merchants fed on the blood let out from Africa’s horn. Africa was drained through the false promises of industrialization or war, supported by dubious loans from New York and London bankers or the Kremlin. In 1977, with Brigadier Mengistu Haile Mariam in power, the Russians pumped $12 billion in arms and military aid into Ethiopia, which served as a training ground for South African freedom fighters. This Soviet military infusion was to defeat and rid the Somalis of Ogaden but at a terrible cost to be suffered in the near future. The defeat of the Somali under Siad Barre led to an increase infusion of American arms, which only served to drag down both countries. Dumping arms into the Horn of Africa for jobs and profit in the United States and Russia led to the disintegration of the African nations. The warlords who were created challenged the central authority for power, reminiscent of the slavery wars waged across Yorubaland. To the south of the Horn of Africa was Kenya. After the initial Somali claims and attacks in northern Kenya were crushed, Kenyans enjoyed a relatively sedate political life. Jomo Kenyatta, the Kikuyu nationalist leader who became the first president, weakened the army and opposition party as he held onto power for life. Kenya was the closest British ex-colony to the French Ivory Coast example of the perfect ex-colony. The colonial educational system adopted by the British in East Africa had an indelible effect on the African sociopolitical culture, whereby the education of the majority indigenous Africans was left in the hands of the minority, coastal Afro-Asian Swahili merchant class. Despite East Africa being poorer than West Africa, Swahili indoctrination appeared to have taken the fire out of the African nationalism evident in other black nations. This was especially evident in Kenya, with a population of thirty million in 1999. In Uganda, the kingdoms of Buganda and Bunyoro, and the Muslim north, made political life more challenging, and Nyerere and his African Socialism pervaded the Tanzanian national identity. Failing to get the key to heavy industrialization from the West, unlike other African nations that turned to the East for technical aid, the Kenyan government turned its safari game reserves into moneymakers through tourism. It settled for being the world’s animal kingdom, happy to portray the ‘Tarzan backwardness’ of Africa wherein the animals were the most important players. Despite the fact that Kenya made up a small fraction of Africa and its people, the international media reinforced the racist view of all Africa as a continent of lions and elephants where Africans, wearing only animal skins, chased animals around the plains. Enlightened Africans became infuriated by the stereotype bred across the world, especially from Africans in diaspora. Kenya remained close to the British colonial masters and Asians by leaving them in control of most local businesses and industry. This made it one of the few nations in Africa that was given a free immigration access to Europe and America, even though its processed goods were not. Kenya experienced a moderate growth of its light industry and a stable political life until 1975, when Kenyatta was accused of corruption and oppression by the opposition, which caused political turmoil. The declining prices of its agricultural products like coffee, and the rising prices of its oil imports, shook the economy in the late 1970s. Kenyatta died in office in 1978, and power was handed over to his vice president, Arap Moi, who also intended to rule for life. Tanzania’s Nyerere implemented a one-party system but showed a genuine commitment to the economic development of the former German-turned-British colony, despite its natural aridity. Nyerere turned to what he called African Socialism, which was required to mobilize and redistribute income and
production factories, without the confrontational multiparty system whose divisiveness was viewed as too expensive for the poor, new nation. He implemented a massive education system along the colonial Swahili lines but didn’t leave the concentration of business in the hands of Europeans and Asians. Tanzania, with thirty-five million people in 1999, could not get a foot on the ladder of industrialization, which, apart from European barriers, was due to the control that it insisted on having on the economy and flight of foreign capital. Tanzania’s main agricultural exports were sisal, coffee, and cotton, while its mineral exports were tin and phosphates, whose fall in export prices in the mid-1970s and rise in oil imports led to increased debt. The other former German colonies to the northwest of Tanzania, landlocked Rwanda and Burundi, were not fortunate to enjoy a stable political life like Tanzania. Instead of Britain, Belgium took over from the Germans and mishandled them, as they had in neighboring Zaire, by not leaving and thus promoting and arming dissent. Rwanda was the most troubled. The Hutu overthrow of the Tutsi minority resulted in sporadic ethnic clashes launched from Zaire. The West was more in favor of the Tutsi minorities but couldn’t unseat the Rwandan Hutu throughout the sixties and seventies. Like in Uganda, the Burundi Tutsi monarchy retained power by becoming a constitutional monarchy. It was overthrown in 1966 by its Tutsi Prime Minister Michel Micombero, who declared himself president and retained the Tutsi minority rule. An unsuccessful Hutu rebellion left 10,000 Tutsi and 150,000 Hutu dead, with another 100,000 Hutu fleeing east to Tanzania as ethnic clashes continued. South of the Rift Valley, northern Rhodesia was renamed Zambia after independence in 1964 under Kenneth Kaunda. It appeared to be the most impressive nation with a peaceful political atmosphere and growing economy. The one-party state of Kaunda had strained relations with its twin sister, southern Rhodesia, after its white regime made a unilateral declaration of independence and its black independence movement relocated to the Zambian capital, Lusaka. Zambia, being landlocked, was reliant on the surrounding whiteminority governments, which it fraternized with and was corrupted by. In a balanced approach to economic development and independence, with copper being the mainstay of the Zambian economy, the government took 51 percent of the shares of the foreign mining companies in the mineral-rich Zambezi-Congo watershed area. Despite the fact that its population was under ten million in 1999, Zambia tried unsuccessfully to launch an industrialization drive to strengthen an economy that, apart from small processing industries, remained reliant on copper exports. Like elsewhere, the crash in commodity prices, increase in oil prices, and exploitative foreign loans for dodgy industrialization projects and oil caused economic decline. Nyasaland, renamed Malawi, was one of the three nations in the colonial, multiracial Central African Federation whose independence with Zambia led to the breakup of the federation. Dr. Hastings Banda kept a one-party state in the poorer neighbor of the Federation. Reliance on tea and tobacco for export income wasn’t enough to sustain the population of under ten million during the best of times. Botswana, to the south of Zambia, received its independence from the British in 1966. It was in a more arid region, with a population of under a million, that largely left the economy and the mining of its valuable resources to the Europeans. Despite the economic problems of Zambia and Malawi, they were better off than the Africans in the surrounding coastal nations of Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia, and South Africa. After the Portuguese brutally crushed the 1960s rebellions in their African colonies, the resistance movements waned before Mozambique provided ‘the straw that broke the back’ of the Portuguese colonists.
The Frente de Libertacao de Mozambique (Mozambique Liberation Front or FRELIMO), led by Eduardo Mondlane, relaunched from Tanzania where most of the dissidents had fled. It laboriously worked its way south without much effect until it got to the Tete region, where the Portuguese government and South Africa were building the world’s fifth-largest hydroelectric dam to supply the region. Mondlane planned to sabotage the plant but was killed by a letter bomb. His successor, FRELIMO army commander Samora Machel, carried on and sabotaged the railroads linking Mozambique and Rhodesia. The sabotage became so disruptive that the Portuguese, in March 1974, sent an additional ten thousand soldiers to join the sixty thousand soldiers they sent to quell the rebellions in their three continental African colonies. This put a tremendous military cost burden on poor Portugal, which provoked a military coup by those who believed that Portugal should discard its colonial pipe dreams of some faraway, arid, African land and concentrate on growth within the new European Union. The Portuguese monarch was overthrown in April 1974 and the new rulers announced that they would grant the African colonies some form of self-rule. True to their word, Portugal’s only West Africa colony, GuineaBissau, became independent a few months afterwards, but Angola and Mozambique were more complicated. In Mozambique, although the Portuguese tried to delay with a promise of referendum, the social unrest made them give up the territory in June 1975. Samora Machel became the first president of Mozambique. He governed along Socialist lines, although he maintained all the foreign agreements with the country’s neighbors. Mozambique became the launching pad for Rhodesian freedom fighters. This earned it attacks and raids from the white governments of Rhodesia and later South Africa. The white minority governments trained a counterrevolutionary movement called the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO), which launched disruptive attacks within Mozambique but fizzled out without much local support. Angola proved the most difficult with the presence of three movements that split the country into areas of influence with no hope of unifying when the pre-independence provincial government collapsed a few months before the November 1975 independence date. The MPLA was the only authentic movement, and it was backed by Nigeria and Cuba, while Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and FNLA were backed by South Africa and the West. The backing of the OAU led by Nigeria and the arrival of Cuban troops swung the conflict in favor of the MPLA, which became the recognized Angolan government, with the northern FNLA and southern UNITA defeated. South Africa and the West continued supporting UNITA, leading to a thirty-year war in southern Angola. The African-recognized MPLA, despite being Marxist, honored its foreign agreements, even with the US Gulf Oil company prospecting for oil on its shores. Following white Rhodesia’s 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence, the UN, inspired by free African nations, issued sanctions that were openly flouted. The United States bought its chrome for military use and supplied South Africa with oil and everything else. The UN sanctions made Rhodesia more industrialized through its import substitution programme that was aided by the Western world. The negotiations between 1966 and 1969 achieved nothing, and in 1969, the white electorate accepted a new constitution with more severe segregation practices. From 1967 to 1970, guerrilla attacks from Zambia were launched by the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) and the ANC into the Zambezi valley. From 1972, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) started an offensive from FRELIMO’s enclaves in the Tete region of Mozambique, which intensified with Mozambique’s independence. The white minority government’s
reprisals became more brutal as the guerrilla attacks intensified. By 1974, the black movement parties had regular armies with some members trained by Cubans and Ethiopia—the Zimbabwe Independence People’s Army (ZIPA) and Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA). In 1975, Mugabe moved to Mozambique to organize the army with Michel’s help, and by 1976, the guerrilla activities had escalated into war. By 1979, the black armies had nearly progressed to the Rhodesian capital of Salisbury. The menacing progress of the black freedom fighters made the whites realize that they needed another approach, which was to forget about fighting black majority rule and find a way of diluting the freedom by ‘placing a friendly Negro in power’. The ‘friendly Negro’ decided upon was Bishop Abel Muzorewa. In 1978, a fraudulent election was arranged from which he emerged victorious but unrecognized by the freedom fighters and African nations. Nigeria clashed with the British and threatened to nationalize British Petroleum in Nigeria and give its assets to the black movement. The British, who had politically but not economically disengaged from the white regime’s atrocities, took over Rhodesia to have a future say in the black government of Rhodesia. It was a ‘good cop, bad cop’ scenario. Another election was called for an organized handover before the African ‘rebels’ forcefully took over. To their surprise, Mugabe’s Marxist party won the election even though he was forced to drop some of his hardline measures, especially the nationalization of assets and the redistribution of land. Knowing that the system was patently unfair and unsustainable (whites were 1 percent of the population but held 70 percent of the land), the British agreed to pay compensation to the white farmers. They failed to keep their promise, and the unjust land distribution continued for another two decades. The South African freedom movement was violently crushed by the Apartheid government that resorted to killing and jailing its leaders at the turn of the Sixties decade. Luckily, the teenagers smuggled out of the country were to provide the lifeline to the liberation movement. From the beginning of Black Internationalism and PanAfricanism in the early 1900s, London had presented the opportunity to present a global front at the doorstep of the British imperialists, which couldn’t be ignored or wished away being the hub of international media. Nineteen year old Xhosa, Thabo Mbeki, was to identify the significance of London and use it to fight a fight a media war intended to highlight the injustices of apartheid and bring international pressure on the racist South African government. After the banning of ANC, Mbeki and a group of comrades were smuggled out in a minibus disguise as a football team through Botswana, from where to Tanzania. Mbeki was accompanied by Kenneth Kaunda to London where he was to stay with Oliver Tambo, ANC’s new leader, and study in University of Sussex. Mbeki, the born rebel, was elected in February 1963 into the Student Union Government within three months of admission into University of Sussex. Barely five months later, on July 11th 1963, the ANC High Command was caught at Rivonia and his father was one of those charged for treason, with retroactive laws quickly enacted to sentence them to death. Mbeki mobilized support by leading a successful motion in the Student Union, which resulted in hundreds of signatures from students and lecturers, and a protest march to Downing Street. From Downing Street they moved to the South African embassy, where they attracted the attention of the international media. In April 1964, Mbeki appeared with a delegation to the United Nations Special Committee against
Apartheid to plead for his father’s life. The international attention and pressure led the apartheid government to spare their lives, making Mbeki realizing the immense power of London as a center of Black internationalism and international media. Mbeki sponsored a 24hr vigil at Brighton’s clock tower against Ian Smith’s 1966 Unilateral Declaration of Independence in Zimbabwe. In London, working for ANC Mbeki fully developed into his role ascribed by destiny to be a born rebel, as he carried various protests ranging from school fees to antiVietnam, nuclear disarmament, solidarity struggles with peoples of Spain, Zimbabwe, Iraq, Iran, Cyprus, Portuguese Africa etc. After his Masters degree in Economics, ANC sent Mbeki to attend military training and leadership in Moscow, where he also excelled. In 1970, at age 28, he became the youngest member and first African in the South African Communist Party hierarchy. At home, the movement experienced a lull after the jailing of Mandela and other ANC leaders. A new movement developed in 1969 among black students led by Steve Biko. He formed the South African Students Organization (SASO), which was followed by a new black party, the Black People’s Convention (BPC). In April 1971, Mbeki started on the long life-defining journey to directly confront and defeat apartheid beast that still kept his father in jail and his people in slavery. He left for Lusaka with Oliver Tambo, initially as the assistant secretary of ANC’s Revolutionary Council, setting up bases, recruiting and arming fighters in Lusaka, Botswana and Swaziland. He was arrested with Jacob Zuma in Swaziland, but they were lucky to escaped deportation to South Africa. He also struck an agreement with Robert Mugabe to allow arms pass through Zimbabwe. Whites enjoyed immense economic development, the second fastest growth in world from 1945 to 1970, and one of the world’s highest standards of living gleaned from the country’s rich resources and cheap black labor. Apart from organizing militant liberation struggles, Thabo Mbeki made use of his ability to court support of the international media and fellow African with Pan-African aspirations. Thabo Mbeki moved to Nigeria in the mid-Seventies and was lucky to court the new leaders in Nigeria, who provided diplomatic, financial and military support. This made ANC overshadow PAC as the leading liberation movement in South Africa. Nigeria led African nations to focus international pressure on the South African government to dismantle apartheid and alleviate the squalid conditions in which Africans lived. Many blacks were relocated to one of the ten bantustans, black homelands, that the white government created in its separate development policy of apartheid. This crammed 80 percent of the population into 10 percent of the land. The economy experienced a downturn in the mid-1970s due to oil prices and international sanctions and pressures to improve the wages and conditions of black workers. The bantustans were given autonomy, which was to lead to independence on the small parcel of arid lands ascribed to each subethnic group. This was an absurd policy, because there were more blacks than whites in the designated white areas outside the bantustans, and, at any time, there were more supposed natives of the bantustans living permanently outside its borders. Chief Buthelezi of Kwazulu was the first to reject autonomy before being followed by seven other heads of bantustans. The puppet leaders of Transkei and Bophuthatswana bantustans who accepted autonomy were granted independence in 1976 and 1978, respectively, but were refused recognition by the African nations, the OAU, and the UN.
The separate development extended to education as an average of R 664 was spent on white children, while R42 was spent on black children. To isolate and worsen the education of black Africans, a law was introduced to make Afrikaans (Africanized Dutch) the teaching language in secondary schools, which led to an outbreak of violent resistance that lasted two years. The white minority regime of B. J. Vorster brutally came down on blacks, leaving hundreds dead and arresting its leaders, including the SASO leader, Biko, who was killed in government custody. As it became apparent that blacks were destined to rule in their own land, the white regime became even more brutal, like the 1950s in the American South. They developed a brutal, secret police that was armed to the teeth. They also developed military capabilities, including nuclear, in response to the fear of attack from African nations. Nigeria had threatened to back the Africans if war was the only means left. By the end of the seventies, the apartheid government realized that it had to find a way to diffuse the situation by finding a ‘friendly Negro’ to take over, one who wouldn’t nationalize the gold and diamond mines as insisted upon by the ANC leadership. A solution couldn’t be found, and the situation deteriorated. South Africa continued to hold onto the former German colony to its northwest, South West Africa. It had been mandated to South Africa by the League of Nations for its role in World War I, but the UN reversed the mandate in 1966 and was upheld by the international court in 1971. South Africa disregarded the rulings and international pressure. Covertly supported by the United States, it brutally crushed a rebellion, set up bantustans, and continued the repression through the 1980s.
Chapter 20: Black Power Overpowered African Americans restricted economically, culturally, and sometimes physically (1965–1980) Afro-Brazilians were also affected by the mid-1960s wave of political armed robberies designed to negate the recently achieved political rights of Afrocentric nations; this goes a long way to show that it was a concerted, worldwide effort. Through the 1940s and 1950s, Nascimento, the leader of the black movement, including TEN and other civil rights bodies, inspired Africans to use the ballot box as a weapon in their struggle. With the crash in coffee and other commodity prices, Brazilians under President Joao Goulart tried to introduce popular socioeconomic reforms that the Rockefeller Citibank bankers detested. AfroBrazilians’ slow but apparent socioeconomic progress was blocked by a right-wing military coup in 1964, led by Castelo Branco. He was succeeded in 1968 by President Costa Silva before General Emilio Medici took over and began a long reign of corruption supported by irresponsible foreign lenders and domestic repression. Under the new regime, no rights were guaranteed, and black and civil rights advocates were branded subversive. The Catholic Church and police used various means to suppress artistic and cultural expressions that went against the national image of whiteness. In 1969, the repressive regime, in denial of the apparent racism in Brazil, told its military-police agency to target ‘the campaign conducted through the press and television… of international studies on racial discrimination, with the vision of creating new areas of friction and dissatisfaction with the regime and the constituted authorities’.* The military regime promoted nationalism along technocratic, scientific, and other professional lines, which entailed the establishment of national research institutions.* The legendary Afro-Brazilian civil rights leader, Abdias do Nascimento, was forced into exile where he remained from 1968 to 1980, lecturing in major universities like the University of Ife, Nigeria and playing an active role in Pan-Africanism across the globe. * Thales de Azevedo, Democracia Racial: Ideologia e Realidade (Petropolis:Editoria, 1975) pg53. * Minority Rights Group International Report Afro-Brazilians: Time for Recognition, 11. Florestan Fernandes was the most prominent voice of the independent advocates from the academia. In a study sponsored to authenticate Gilberto Feyre’s diagnosis of Afro-Brazilian socioeconomic existence in his 1933 Masters and Slaves (CasaGrande and Senzala), Professor Fernandes was chosen as a research partner, who in turn included his student Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who later became president. In his research about ‘The Integration of Blacks into the Class Society’(1966), Fernandes denounced Feyre’s analysis and the ideology of racial democracy for concealing a conflict between races and classes. He exposed in a dramatic manner the way racial discrimination and exclusion worked throughout Brazil. He published the classic work on race relations in Brazil that used social science research methods to depict historic and continuing discrimination against Afro-Brazilians. Fernandes pointed out that black Brazilians were handicapped because of the debasement of history, pauperism, and isolation. He argued that Brazil’s primary prejudice was the belief that there was no
prejudice. Fernandes’s study had widespread resonance because the industrialization efforts concentrated in Brazil’s largest city left out the vast numbers of Africans in the Sao Paulo favelas, as it did in favelas across urbanized Brazil. Fernandes, Cardoso and other academicians were sacked and stopped from lecturing by the army. Fernandes went on a brief selfexile to Canada before returning in 1973 to earn a living. He refused to join other academicians like Cardoso that had formed CEBRAP, a think tank being funded by the Ford Foundation, on the grounds that he had no wish to work with military-industrialists that overthrew Brazil’s democracy. Regardless, the repression continued as the economy experienced a boom and rapid industrialization in pockets of European areas. This was sponsored by US banks, led by Citibank, which had surpassed the British banks after World War 1. Following the US-inspired 1964 coup and the ‘liberalization’/corruption of the economy, US banks rapidly notched up Brazils’ foreign debt through puppet governments. The corrupt regimes entered into dubious loan agreements with foreign banks, especially Citibank. Some financed friendly, whiteowned industries, while the rest went into the pockets of the military rulers and their sponsors. Brazil’s vast iron reserves were put into use in steel mills, car assembly plants, and other parts of the industrial complex, which also took advantage of the huge, cheap labor market. It looked good as national income figures rose, but the vast majority of blacks, 47 percent of Brazilians, didn’t feel the industrialization and economic growth. A huge chunk of Brazil’s domestic market was marginalized, while tariff restrictions to the West negated any hope of balancing the books with export sales. By the mid-seventies, the masses who had hardly enjoyed any benefit from the military-industrialist relationship had to pay when the boom collapsed due to the fall in the commodity prices of cocoa, rubber, and coffee, coupled with rising oil prices and capital flight. In addition to the extremely high debt repayment-to-income ratio, which deprived Brazil of scarce foreign exchange, European multinationals drained the foreign reserves with repatriation of profits, legally and illegally. Despite the stringent foreign exchange controls, the capital flight was effected through false accounting practices like overbilling foreign services and materials through sister companies in the United States and Europe. This and other practices deprived the nation of taxes and cumulative investment. In spite of the downturn in the pace of industrialization and job creation in the cities in the midseventies, the oppressive situation in the rural areas led to more than thirty million people migrating to the cities between 1970 and 1990. Many rural plantations closed due to poor export prices. AfroBrazilians and American Indians were prevented from peasant farming the huge tracts of uncultivated land, leaving the rural people no choice but to move to the urban, hillside slums. Many of the rural dwellers who refused to relocate to urban slums damned the consequences and became squatter farmers, tilling the uncultivated land illegally. The police were apt to forcefully evict and kill the squatter farmers and those living in the historical quilombos and Indian villages that remained outside the realm of Portuguese Brazil. The repressive nature of the military regime became even more sickening with the murder of ‘street kids’—the mostly homeless, hungry, black children who roamed the streets in search of food and ended up stealing. In their so-called ‘street cleaning exercises’, children were given ‘instant justice’ by being shot on the spot where they were caught or were taken to youth detention centers, where they were viciously tortured and sometimes killed.
The torture culture was hard to break, because the corporal punishment mentality inherited from the slave era persisted in the national psyche, which made it right to ‘flog senses into the dumb, obstinate Negro’. A century after the abolition of slavery, there were still a few cases of forced labor in the deep rainforest interior, where people were trapped into forced labor through dubious contracts and false debts. The Catholic Church initially encouraged mixing Yoruba religion with Catholicism in the hope that the Yoruba religion would fade away (like Afro-Brazilians were expected to fade). To the Church’s dismay, the naturalistic African cultures comfortably assimilated Catholicism. This called for a more repressive stance from the Church. It banned events celebrating African culture, and the police were made to disperse crowds and arrest anyone engaged in celebrations outside of the influence of the Church. The Police Museum came to possess a rich collection of African figurines and symbols seized during the raids. The Candomble and Santuario African religions, and other aspects of African culture, were watered down in public, especially in the Carnival that was supposed to be a display of cultures. The commercialization of Carnival and samba schools financially barred the authentic African contributors in the era of expensive, gigantic floats. The spontaneous cultural celebrations were replaced by European corporate planning, which recouped its investment through cordoning off the space and selling overpriced seats and media rights. This commercialization, especially since the mid-sixties, relegated the importance of Afro-Brazilians, who were deprived of seeing the display while the rest of the world enjoyed it for a price. By the late 1970s, Brazilians were clamoring for a return to democracy, like in Nigeria. The generals realized that their time was up as the economy worsened, the national debt was near $100 billion, and the people were increasingly restless. This restlessness was aggravated by occurrences in other parts of their ‘secluded’ Portuguese world, especially with Afro-Brazilians empathizing with the freedom movements of the Portuguese African colonies of Angola, Mozambique, and Portuguese Guinea. Despite the ban on black immigration, news of developments in other parts of the blackworld, outside of the Portuguese realm, seeped through to Afro-Brazilians. The US Black Power movement influenced Afro-Brazilians, although not much could be done with the repressive government at home. In music, the influence was a twoway street, as Afro-Brazilians warmed up to the beats coming out of the black United States. They also developed new music types that influenced the world, all with African, rhythmic beats and call-andresponse techniques. African cultures were more suppressed in Fidel Castro’s Cuba during the mid-sixties and seventies. More than five hundred societies of color (African sociocultural organizations) were banned under the guise of suppressing American-inspired insurgents. Absolute control was exercised to stand up to the American giant that went all out to sabotage the economy and unity of the island. The Florida-Cuban mafia, through the US Republican Party, continued driving a wedge between the United States and Cuba. It remained angry for being deprived of huge plantations and the planned income from turning the island into a holiday and gambling resort, which it had expected to develop in the sixties. Despite the debilitating US-led trade embargo, Afro-Cubans made huge strides in education; the literacy rate increased to more than 85 percent. In absolute terms, living standards increased fourfold, which was attributed to infusions of Soviet military and technical aid. With the highest black literacy rate in the world, Afro-Cubans were allowed to progress only in a European-idealized Cuba, where African culture was still viewed as subversive and inferior despite the revolutionary rhetoric. Cuba and Communism claimed to frown on religion in general, but the Catholic Church was given a freer hand. Dissenting blacks, no matter how minute, were regarded as ingrates for all the benefits ‘given’ to them
and punished more severely. Even with Communism, apart from being the major chunk of the labor force, Afro-Cubans were the crucial part of the Soviet-backed revolution. Although blacks were insignificant in the government at home, they were more than compensated in Cuba’s diplomatic corps in Africa. Cuba’s strategic importance to the Soviets was its historic link with African Americans and even more importantly in Africa, where Cuba more than compensated the Soviets for the economic and political backing it received. Suspicious of European imperialistic interests, African freedom fighters were more receptive of black Cuban diplomats, fighters, and technical support than they were of having white Russians running around Africa—not that the Russians were eager to get involved in the dirty work that they had passed to the Cubans. Africans wanted the Soviet technical and military support but were wary that Communist ideology would bar their cultural and artistic expressions. They found Cuba to be a lesser evil. In October 1964, Cuba declared its support and backing of the all black liberation movements in Africa. Plans were made to form a black diaspora army, which was in line with Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). The first test was supposed to be in 1964–1965 in Congo, where the Cubans had sent two advance battalions, but Malcolm X was assassinated in February 1965 before the plans came to fruition. Cubans remained committed to the plan, but it was further weakened as the Algerian government, a main supporter, was overthrown in June 1965. With other African leaders running scared as coups swept across Africa, Cubans were left to contend with the United States and Belgium, which overthrew Lumumba. This made Cuba withdraw to the French Congo across Belgian Congo’s borders, where it hoped to continue the war but had to leave when no support was forthcoming. Cuba’s growing relationship with Africa led to many African nations sending their students to Cuba for training, which amounted to about six hundred by 1966. The regime took to isolating the foreign students on Youth Island to hide its dirty, racist secrets. The students were dismayed to find racism in Cuba, and some were deported for being racially divisive. Ninety Congolese students demanded to be returned home after a fight with Cuban officials who had made racially offensive remarks. Some African Americans were disappointed by the true, racist face of the revolution, especially after leaders like Stokely Carmichael, the Black Power leader, expressed his doubts about the racial democracy after his August 1967 visit to Cuba. Cuba’s interest shifted to the US Black Panthers, but a visit by their leader, Eldridge Cleaver, on Christmas Day of 1968, led to disillusionment and complaints of racism in Cuba. The suppression of Afro-Cuban values was not limited to the historic Yoruba ‘Lucumi’ culture. From 1967, US Afrocentric hairstyles and dress were prohibited and often led to rounding up recalcitrant offenders. In 1969, Afro-Cuban intellectuals formed the Movimiento Black Power, which adopted the Afro hairstyle and discussed foreign black writers, but by 1971, many had been imprisoned, ‘reformed’, or exiled. Castro was visibly impressed during his first visit to Africa in May 1972, and he voiced his ignorance of African culture. When he returned to Cuba, he continued his patronizing attitude of AfroCubans and their culture as he clamped down on the 1974 emergence of Afro-Cuban study groups. Castro sent troops to Angola in 1975 to help the authentic freedom fighters against the United States and South Africa, but its involvement in the Ethiopian-Somali-Eritrea wars only served the Cold War agenda of
Russian and US military industrialists. In 1980, some twenty-five thousand Afro-Cubans fled to the US for economic and spiritual freedom. Their influence was soon felt with the spread of the Yoruba, Ifa-based Santeria religions in Miami and New York, especially in the Bronx, where more than a hundred shops catered to the needs of Santeria practitioners. In Haiti, Francois Duvalier (‘Papa Doc’) believed in and promoted African religions to the annoyance of Catholic, mulatto elites. After his death in 1971, his nineteen-year-old son, Jean Claude Duvalier (known as ‘Baby Doc’), became the president of Haiti. Baby Doc was nothing like the visionary leader that his father had been in his earlier years. He received support from the Church and the United States —they felt safer with a smooth transition from father to son rather than having to support, or depose, a real ‘Duvalierist’ who would have been difficult to control. Needing more than his father’s prestige, which he lacked, to stay in power, Baby Doc greatly increased his patronage of the African traditionalists in rural platoons. They acted as an internal secret police known as the Macoutes. The employment of 10 percent of the population in the secret police was a great drain on the economy, but Western bankers increased their loan output irresponsibly against doubtful future income receipts. As long as the Soviets had no influence in Haiti, the West was ready to finance and keep Baby Doc in power with all the arms he deemed necessary in suppressing the Haitian population. The stable, pro-US environment led to investment in assemblyline, low-level production of baseball caps, bras, and imported radio components. In return, Baby Doc ran a corrupt government, which was exemplified by his $7 million state wedding in 1980, in which everything was imported from Paris. This largesse ended in the early 1980s, as the economy contracted 15 percent yearly. The corruption in Jamaica was more institutionalized through the party patronage system that was modeled on British and American political systems. The Jamaican system was based on a two-party system that included Norman Manley’s PNP to the center left and Bustamante’s JLP to the center right. The parties alternated power by winning two terms at a time. There wasn’t much difference between them until 1972, when the advent of the Black Power movement in the United States and the economic realities of the seventies made the PNP become more ‘radical’—pro-Jamaica poor. The mulattos still held the upper hand in the sociopolitical scene, and Jamaica did not get a black president until 1992 despite blacks being the majority population. Corrupt party patronage led to the parties succumbing to foreign big business, particularly special interests that were contrary to public interests. The ‘financed’ parties were expected to provide large economic advantages in return. Michael Manley, the PNP founder’s son, led a 1972–1980 PNP government that drastically changed the status quo when it faced rising oil prices, inflationary pressures, and relatively poor export prices. Like everywhere across the blackworld, Manley was mislabeled a Marxist because of his economic assertiveness and less submissive foreign policy, which included normalization of ties with its much larger neighbor Cuba, despite US sanctions. To rectify the economic problems, the government turned to devaluation, which brought no improvement other than an inflation rate of 27 percent. The PNP turned to fiscal policies to increase the living standards of Jamaicans: raising the minimum wage, progressive job creation, land-use laws that made uncultivated land available to peasant farmers, and indirect taxes and tariffs on big business. These measures resulted in a huge capital flight by foreign, multinational companies and bankers, who
exported money legally and illegally through false accounting schemes. Despite tightening foreign exchange controls, like in other new nations, the foreign exchange reserves dried up rapidly. This caused a balance-of-payment problem that made Jamaica vulnerable to the dictates of foreign bankers, and probably a military attack, to secure debt. The right-wing JLP put up a fierce opposition in the 1976 elections, which saw an increase in the accustomed political violence, but the PNP won a second term that lasted until December 1980. The PNP win, due to the gratitude of the lower classes for more populist policies, ensured that the economy would continue in a downward trend. The PNP policies were labeled Communist as Manley gave state and idle private land to hungry peasants so that they could eke out a living. One Jamaican export that didn’t dwindle was its reggae music, which rapidly became internationalized with the arrival of artists like Bob Marley. Reggae music brought a few financial gains and international recognition to the country, and it spread the cultural miseducation of Rastafarianism, which bore no apparent fruit in the sociopolitical existence of Africans in Jamaica. Guyana, the former British colony with a difference, continued to have a black minority government supported by the United States and the UK. Burnham did much for black pride, being one of the few African leaders in the Americas, but colonially inspired racial divisions and geopolitics took prominence. The strange US-UK alliance with Burnham’s Socialist government went awry, and the coalition with the pro-business party UF collapsed, but the only alternative was Jagan’s ‘Communist’ faction. Like Manley’s Jamaica, to gain more control of the economy and income redistribution, Burnham was forced to nationalize the nation’s major earners—the major sugar and bauxite firms—but he faced racially inspired strikes and revolts by Jagan’s East Indians. His nationalization, like other countries in the blackworld, led to serious capital flight coupled with high oil prices and predatory international bankers. Unlike the colonial period, when Jagan called in British troops to quell riots, Burnham had to use increasingly repressive laws, and as the economy worsened, his popularity declined, even among black activists. Burnham resorted to unsavory means to hold on to power, like Nkrumah and Papa Doc, but he didn’t have to contend with the army. It was as ineffectual as the Jamaica army, with fewer than two thousand personnel. With constant black migration to United States and Britain, Burnham introduced overseas voting to stay in power, especially in the July 1973 election, in which he needed a two-thirds majority to change the constitution. He ended up winning 70 percent, which solidified his regime. Sydney King (who later changed his name to Eusi Kwayane to reflect his African origin), provided an alternative among blacks and challenged Burnham. Kwayane had been influential since the beginning of the PPP in 1949 when he was the assistant secretary. His austere life and constant fight for the poor endeared him to the masses, who regarded him as an authentic leader. In November 1974, he joined with other black and East Indian intellectuals to create the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), which became a front of all working peoples, African and Indian, against Burnham. Walter Rodney, a worldrenowned Afro-Guyanese historian and activist, was among the intellectuals who promised democratic Socialism. To deprive them of the joy of winning the 1978 election, Burnham called a referendum to have the elections postponed for eighteen months. The response was a huge display of opposition across Guyana, even from the Church, but to no avail. In July 1979, the opposition joined together under the Council of National Safety to challenge the government with protests, which led to the arrest of Rodney but with no significant effect. Being the prime minister, Burnham abolished the ceremonial post of
president and declared himself president. The poor economy and political insecurity led to huge inflation and immigration to the United States and Britain. Following Harold Wilson’s Labour government’s 1966 Race Relations Act, and the racist scaremongering of Conservatives in opposition, like Enoch Powell, coupled with the poor state of the economy, the Conservatives won the election in 1970. Powell claimed that the British mainland was being swamped by Africans and Asians, who were turning it into a ‘mongrel nation’ that would disintegrate in strife. Although the Conservatives publicly disassociated themselves from the statement and from Powell, once they returned to government in 1970, they pursued racist immigration and lawandorder policies. This was around the same time that Republican US President Nixon was in power and was setting the ball rolling. Britain’s immigration policies became more stringent and racially limited. Most importantly, under the guise of enforcing the new laws, blacks were routinely harassed, arrested, and imprisoned. Police and immigration officials were empowered to randomly stop and search, make house searches without warrants, and take other racist measures, as long as the blacks were suspected ‘illegal immigrants’. Bernie Grant, a member of Parliament for Tottenham, was an outspoken black leader in the Labor Party who pushed black issues to the forefront during Conservative rule. There was a brief interlude, with the return of the labor government in 1974–1979, when the 1976 Race Relations Act was enacted to outlaw direct and indirect racial discrimination. The indirect discrimination was to curb racism in employment and housing, which was extremely high and continued to be high even after the enactment of the law. Racism in housing and employment led to the concentration of blacks in urban areas like London, Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool. In London, where the vast majority (more than 70 percent) resided, they formed an immediate ring around the city center: Hackney and Tottenham in the north and northeast, Notting Hill and Brent in the north and northwest, Brixton Lambeth in the southwest, and Peckham Southwark in the southeast. Most black people lived in run-down, privately rented houses, while a few bought properties or were able to rent from Jews in Hackney (like in Brooklyn, New York). With high unemployment and poverty, overcrowding in poor living conditions was a prevalent problem. However, blacks slowly integrated and progressed within the system to attain education, housing, and employment during the 1970s. The economic freedom of the new West Indian and African nations (especially the oil-rich Nigerians, who formed a significant percentage of black Britons), had a significant if not wholly positive effect. The large, Nigerian middle class that arose from the huge wage increases at home, and a few with embezzled public funds, bought properties, sent their children to high tuition fees colleges, and demanded first-class service from the best hotels and service providers that their petro-dollars could buy. Unfortunately, they weren’t inspired to establish their own economy apart from exporting British goods to Nigeria. Huge clothing and consumer goods markets blossomed to cater to the insatiable Nigerian demand, which led to large markets off Liverpool Street at the heart of the City of London, where the white merchants even spoke Yoruba. Nigerian cash buyers joined the early 1970s property boom in Britain, caused by excessive property loans to the white populace made by British banks filled with Nigerian and Arab petro-dollars. Ghanaians, East Africans, and West Indians also made impacts corresponding to their population and national wealth. These foreign financial (and morale) infusions were concentrated in the urban areas,
where blacks were traditionally concentrated, and although they might have helped the self-perception of a few blacks, the majority of black Britons were still poor. Luckily, the property boom allowed more space in public housing and friendlier private landlords from excolonies: Africans, West Indians, and Asians, especially African Indians. This was a brief Indian summer as economic turmoil in Britain and the world economy, from 1974– 1979, due to inflationary pressures of oil and housing booms, spelt the end of the black-friendly Labor government for eighteen years. While the labor unions agitated for better conditions, the Conservative opposition, under a new leader named Margaret Thatcher, warned them in 1978 of the danger of being swamped by foreigners, which could worsen their economic condition. Thatcher resorted to more alarmist statements shortly before the 1979 election, which she won and which spelt doom for blacks in and outside Britain. British blacks were better off, financially and socio-politically, than others on the European continent. French Africans were made to disappear from public view by relocating them to ghettos on the outskirts of major cities. To prevent cohesion and identity, the French government outlawed statistics from being collated on racial backgrounds for the national census or other governmental sources. The concept of a black identity outside French parameters was frowned upon, and the weak cultural revolution carried out by black intellectuals couldn’t allay the poverty and isolation that resulted from the racism that pervaded French society. Germans, Italians, and other European tribes were in even worse situations. In the United States, the black movement began to falter after political rights were constitutionally guaranteed by President Johnson’s Voting Rights Act of 1965. It forced Southerners to respect black political rights, which were enforced by federal authorities. The Watts Riots in Los Angeles occurred the following week, showing that poor African Americans needed more than political rights. They needed economic rights. But the white society turned its concentration to Vietnam War protests, gay rights, feminism, and animal rights. If blacks could have rights, why not animals? As Ronald Segal pointed out, ‘Many of these (white liberals) distinguished between the struggle of blacks for civil rights, which involved Southern acquiescence in the rule of law as well as decencies of democracy, and the struggle against racism, which threaten the right of individual citizens in the United States to be as racist as they pleased’.* To weaken the movement, black activists under the age of twenty-five were drafted into the Vietnam War. Even Muhammad Ali was stripped of his title and threatened with jail time when he refused his enlistment. Facing a brake in African American progress, and possibly a rollback, it was up to the black leadership to find an alternative solution. Malcolm X’s plan of forming a unified black front across the blackworld was scuttled with the wave of assassinations that swept African leaders away in the 1960s. The February 1965 assassination of Malcolm X passed the leadership of the Black Power movement to the university students of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who formed the Black Panther Party in November 1965. The Black Panthers, first and foremost, preached selfdetermination and black pride by any means necessary. The selfdetermination principle towards black socioeconomic advancement, which had been preached since Garvey’s era, was now more politically pertinent as white liberals turned to antiVietnam protests. The corollary of ‘by all means possible’ was confronting violence with equal violence, which was doomed from the start without any component of the Ogun industrial complex. The black leadership was jailed, assassinated, and bombed by law enforcement agents who wrecked black neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Chicago, and many other cities.
* Segal, The Black Diaspora, 259. The chairman of the SNCC declared in 1967, ‘America won’t come around, so we’re gonna burn America down’. Apart from the relatively few personal guns, having forgotten the Ogun (biological poisons) weapons of the slavery era, fire was the main weapon the black community had left (fire was, coincidentally, the Yoruba sign of the god of justice, Shango). The troops restrained the rioters to black neighborhoods where they resorted to burning their own houses. Many people questioned this practice, but some said it was frustration expressed in the hope of destruction and renewal. Truly, the living conditions were appalling, and it was unlikely that they would have burnt reasonably well-cared-for housing accommodations. The riot fires lit a sense of justice under the liberals, bringing about affirmative action and equal opportunity laws, while Southerners obeyed the letter of the law on voting practices—just barely. The United States became even more segregated—in reality, two separate nations—because nearly half of all Africans lived in areas that were more than 75 percent black. No significant funds were released into the black communities for improvement or to compensate for the historical cost of slavery and continuing exploitation. However, the Rockefeller/Morgan banking oligopoly released funds to build a sprawling white suburbia, away from the rapidly desegregating cities. This left blacks to occupy the decaying city centers, which had been left with poor city tax receipts and budgets. In these areas, only tax-skimming banks and big businesses were building and then only for business, not residential or community-oriented use. Like the new African nations that continued to do most of their business with their ex-colonial masters instead of other black nations, African American integrationist leaders failed to galvanize the sparse resources within the community and synergize it with the rest of the blackworld. Moreover, African Americans no longer patronized their own businesses but flocked to non-Black businesses to spend their increasing income. In the mid-sixties, the Ooni of Ife, Oba Aderemi, the Yoruba spiritual leader, came to Harlem in the attempt to culturally unite the people from the Land of Love. Impressed by the number of Afrocentric African Americans, he gave royal authority to some Ifa and Santeria leaders in the hope that they would gather others towards a worldwide Yoruba nation. He didn’t take into consideration the prevalent integrationists, who continued to push for more servile cultural and socioeconomic integration with the Europeans, while ethnically conscious Asians moved in and took over food, retailing, and wholesaling industries in the black and urban communities. Like the Western industrialization of Japan from the 1860s, there was a free flow of Western capital into South Korea (due to the extension of military industrialists in the Far East against Communist North Korea and China), as well as a relaxation of immigration rules, tariffs, and barriers against South Koreans. This resulted in an influx of South Koreans into the United States, where they used their available resources and sense of ethnic unity to take over retailing and distribution outlets in black neighborhoods, as Indians did across British Africa. In the name of integration, poor blacks relying on half promises of affirmative action and equal employment laws acquired a long, expensive education to seek employment for jobs slightly lower than the level of education achieved. Some tried to achieve a higher level, but most couldn’t get out of the poverty trap that was shifting focus. The Rockefeller-controlled General Education Board was dissolved in the 1950s, and forty-one black universities were placed under the United Negro Fund, which was kept on a shoestring budget by the industrial foundations that wanted a servile educational system for African Americans. The military industrialist-sponsored politicians made the army the only feasible avenue to college education for the poor. If you didn’t have the money up front or a sport
talent, you could deposit your life chances with the army! Dr. King and others questioned the ideology of spending huge amounts of tax dollars to sponsor the military-industrial complex agenda in Vietnam, while blacks were economically deprived and made to sacrifice their lives for a country that had sacrificed little for them. In Memphis on April 4, 1968, King was assassinated at his first series of economic demonstrations while attending a demonstration of lowpaid workers who made up the majority of African Americans. Like other parts of the blackworld, the European Ogun Complex was not willing to give way on the US economic front and was preparing to roll back Black political gains, as seen elsewhere. The Conservative agenda was based on White supremacy tied to its Ogun foundations and propagated through the current Olokun dogma. This mood was personified by the victory of conservative President Nixon in 1968. As an incumbent vice president, he lost to Kennedy, who disrupted the 1950s Ogun conservative agenda. Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York from 1959–1973, was Nixon’s employer, landlord, and neighbor while Nixon waited after leaving his vice presidency. His huge defense reorganization benefited Rockefeller interests. The Rockefeller clique placed in the forefront of Nixon’s administration Germanborn Henry Kissinger and George W Bush (whose father had been Hitler’s banker and had been instrumental in the formation of the CIA). While vice president from 1952–1960, Nixon oversaw the recruitment of Nazi scientists in the CIA and their biochemical programmes MK Ultra and MK Delta. With Nixon as president, everything seemed to be falling in place, as Rockefeller made a suspicious move that appeared to support a hidden agenda. In New York, where drugs weren’t yet an epidemic, Rockefeller declared a War on Drugs in 1970 and draconian sentences (RICOH Laws) that targeted the black community. This ushered in a phase of the criminalization of black community members that deprived them of their voting rights, employment prospects, housing, and many sociopolitical benefits. Its nationwide implementation was interrupted by the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s impeachment. Meanwhile, black sociopolitical leaders who preached economic self-help were negated through imprisonment or assassination, and with the Democrats out of power, the assimilationist leadership of the Black Power movement ran out of steam without the power to counteract the new right-wing agenda. The systematic underfunding and tightening of the Rockefeller industrialists’ grip on black education prevented the developed of a true black middle class rather than one assimilated in service to the whites. The Indians, South Koreans, and other Asians who fought to retain their ethnic identity and remained segregated used their culture to further their economic goals. Like Fela in Nigeria, the loudest cries for black justice shifted to the cultural forum through sports, music, and other expressions, not through politicians and intellectuals. Black fashion and music sold Black Power and pride through the efforts of popular personalities such as Muhammad Ali and James Brown, but with ‘Blaxploitation’ and a dearth of leadership, the music floated to the shallow ends of disco—from ‘say it loud, I am black and proud!’ it went to ‘ain’t no stopping us now…we on the move’ to nowhere. Like the Black Power movement, the middle classes promoted black music, but when it transformed into the overassimilated disco of the late seventies, the black ghettos dug deep into their Yoruba-Igbo origins to produce rap—Ewi that substituted modern instruments for the talking drum. Being closer to the black majority, rappers were able to say what they felt and weren’t restricted by assimilationist concerns. They proved that economics based upon culture was the best way forward. On television and cinema, the likes of Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby opened the doors to a new generation of actors who supposedly reflected the black community. However, the actors were not as
culturally successful as rappers, because it was more difficult to own or access the production and distribution facilities of their art form. Their art was compromised by what was deemed right and, more importantly, inoffensive to whites. Blacks were told that the African in their products had to be assimilated in a European context in order to be successful, while it was right for whites to sell the concept of a lily-white European product. A single, Yoruba village in Sheldon, South Carolina, and the ‘Ibo Landing’ on the southeast coast were distinct reminders of the Niger people brought to the coast, apart from the scattered Yoruba religion believers. Black churches remained the major sociopolitical focal point, augmented by the larger churches and radio shows that disseminated African spirituality in European technological and social embodiments. This was reflected by popular music as many R&B musicians graduated from the church choir to the world stage. The churches had the largest share of black resources, but their integrationist background prevented them from gathering and directing those resources toward black progress. The churches integrated their financial resources into the white system, which they had no control over, while they indoctrinated and mentally enslaved their followers to hand over their earnings to the white economy. The dissipation of black resources occurred in the economic and political realms. African Baptist and Methodist reverends were often the local Democratic Party’s avenues into the black community. Reverend Jesse Jackson stepped into the shoes of Dr. King and became even more integrated into the system. Although Jackson’s integration policy was initially effective in housing and employment, it later raised suspicions of corruption and sycophancy that pervaded most other parts of the blackworld. This was due to his policies that were effective for the 35 percent middle class that won employment concessions but not an African American economic base that could be used to uplift the majority from poverty. Notwithstanding these realities, Jackson continued to highlight social injustice as he climbed within the structure of the Democratic Party and formed nongovernmental sociopolitical organizations to further African American aims, especially during Carter’s presidency. Separatist/self-help sociopolitical groups like the Nation of Islam saw their economic base and significance grow, though they remained relatively and politically insignificant to the integrationist Christians. The Nation of Islam, which had only low-key political backing due to its separatist views, continued to be an important social and religious organization on the poor, black streets and in the jails within which a large number of African Americans were being incarcerated. Led by Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam provided a support system to inner-city adolescents caught up in the whirlwind of unemployment, drugs, imprisonment, homelessness, and the other maladies afflicting the black community. Ironically, the self-help nation was especially useful since the increasingly successful integrationist policies caused social pressures, which led to an alarming disintegration of black families and an increase in single-parent families (three times greater than that of whites). Black women became the most assimilated—culturally, with their straight, European hair and potato instead of yam hips, and economically, because it was easier for a male employer to employ and assimilate a female of another race. Unfortunately, the level of personal and familial success was tied to the level of assimilation, and black men increasingly fared the worst from the grade-school level to the workplace. The percent of households headed by women in 1950 was 17.3 percent for blacks and 5.3 percent for whites. In 1960, the ratio was 24.4 percent for blacks and 7.3 percent for whites, while in 1970, it was 34.5 percent and 9.6 percent, respectively. In 1980, it was 45.9 percent and 13.2 percent.* Black men earned $613 (black women, $369) for every $1,000 earned by whites in 1950. The gap widened by 1980 to $751 for black men and $917 for black women. There are other factors to consider, but the
figures show that the lower the relative income of the black man to the black woman, the higher the percentage of broken homes headed by women. Black women were more welcome in the office economy that replaced the factory floor, and their numbers and average incomes overtook those of black men. Many people claimed that the racist employment system effeminated the black male, whereby black women formed 65.1 percent of black professionals, 52.2 percent of black managers, and 57.3 percent of black technicians. What was truly effeminizing was the black man’s leadership that continued to entrust his own and his woman’s employment to men of other races. Overall black unemployment was double that of whites throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and blacks continued to face racist financial and other social barriers from entrepreneurial roles in most industries. The white manufacturing sector, which had traditionally provided employment and attracted blacks to the North, shrunk as the manufacturing economic stage advanced into the service economy stage. A few, with their undeniable African natural abilities, excelled in sports and music, but for many black youth, petty crime was the only way out of abject poverty. Drugs and prostitution became increasingly common, but use of hard drugs was not prevalent. Marijuana remained the predominant drug in the black community. Most importantly, hard drugs were too expensive for most people in the black community and were sold to whites and black entertainers by a few drug dealers who doubled as pimps, hanging around the edges of white and black segregated areas. Eateries, social clubs, and groceries were the main forms of available self-employment, while alcohol had an insidious effect on the youth. The only sure way out of the ghetto was getting an expensive college education. * Andrew Hacker, Two Nations—Black and White (Ballantine, 1995), 74. Although 60 percent of poor African Americans lived in cities, the rural areas weren’t much better. Without a large population, rural dwellers couldn’t make a comfortable living from entertainment and vocational industries, so the vast majority engaged in agriculture or teaching. In the agricultural sector, the few who acquired their own land faced increasingly underhanded racist practices designed to chase them off. Despite over 50 percent of African Americans living in the South and the voting acts, blacks were still not able to gain political power, even in states where they were nearly a majority. The Northern blacks still remained the most politically active, especially since whites refused to desegregate in most major inner cities like Newark, Detroit, and Philadelphia, and their flight to suburbia, which left the black majority to start voting black mayors into office. The political advancements of the era brought a few more congressmen into national power, but their increase was stunted because of the racist redrawing of electoral districts by white men in a practice called gerrymandering, which cut up the districts to reduce black political power. The Manhattan borough didn’t cover the whole of Manhattan Island. It stopped where African Americans and Latinos lived, around 100th Street upwards, in the area called Harlem, which was a part of Bronx county and had no say in the doings of the world’s greatest financial center. Black communities were lumped into a single district while the white, suburban fringes were cut into several districts, or blacks were split across districts where they formed a tiny minority of voters. In 2003, there was another dubious redistricting in Texas and had also occurred across the South and as far north as northern New Jersey. Single towns were divided in two and named north and south, or west and east, which disguised the black and white electoral boundaries. With this rampant gerrymandering, more than 80 percent of incumbent legislators kept their seats in Congress for decades and kept blacks out by passing seats to other whites upon retirement.
Like Africa and the Caribbean, black political advances in US city councils didn’t bring corresponding economic benefits to black neighborhoods. Without black financial power, black politicians had to rely on white sponsors who often dictated the sharing of the spoils of the office in contracts awarded to white contractors and jobs for suburban whites. The new class of black politicians was under pressure to show that it wasn’t racist or Afrocentric. It became too fair for the community’s own good, because white politicians never reciprocated when it came to racial fairness. Suburban whites retained city hall jobs like the fire brigade, police, teaching, and other services, which accounted for the lion’s share of recurring city expenditures. They spent the income and paid taxes in suburbia, thus becoming a constant drain on the black taxpayers in the city.
Chapter 21: Slavery 301: Trickle-Down Nigganomics The creation of black plagues and ‘accounted’ slavery: HIV/AIDS, drug wars, and the IMF-inspired debt problem (1980–2000) The liberalism era, which brought about societal changes from the 1940s onward, came to an end in the late 1960s with Nixon. Like across Africa, African-American leaders were hounded with character and physical assassinations. During Nixon’s presidency, the black movement ground to a halt but not a reversal, even though the counter-revolutionary mechanisms devised during his vice presidency in the early 1950s were coming to fruition. The plans were put on hold following the Nixon’s 1974 impeachment and the 1976 defeat of his replacement, Ford, by Carter. The White supremacist agenda given birth in the Ogun era, now disguised in the ocean beds of Olokuns religious and political dogma, was to advance one step further in global domination. No specific major leader or party could be held directly responsible for what transpired against the blackworld, because the political players were merely left or right wings of the Rockefeller military-industrial bird. Rockefeller, Morgan, Rhodes, and the rest of the clique firmly established Anglo-Saxon ascendancy by forming a strong, militaryindustrial Ogun Complex with a self-sustaining and regenerating structure, disguised with Olokun’s democratic dogma. Even after their deaths, apart from the fact that they passed their monies to foundations that were tasked to carry on their agenda forever, there was always someone to step into their shoes and pursue their specialized racist agendas. The replacement might come from within the clan, like the Rockefellers and Bushes, or someone who had been groomed for years or decades with the promise of establishing a family tree connected to those who wielded global power. Despite the fact that the Ogun-based merchants of death sponsored most US presidents of both parties over the last century, a Republican government was inadvertently bound to give its extreme right-wing members access and opportunities to covertly carry out a minority extremist agenda. With the creation of the Esu intelligence services, the Ogun military industrialists institutionalized their power base, and used it to usurp popular sovereignty, especially from Eisenhower’s rule in the fifties. The same clique of politicians in the Republican Party promoted fear only to the benefit of the defense industries. This was a deadly mix of Olokun propaganda and Ogun weaponry. The antiCommunist, witch-hunt protagonists of the 1950s covertly pursued trade with Communist China, and in the 1970s under Nixon, they promoted public hysteria over Communist Russia, whom they practically fed. The Nixon/Ford Conservative era ushered in the oil crisis. The CIA-inspired geopolitics continued in the Reagan/Bush rule of the 1980s, ostensibly to ‘defeat’ Russia, while the Islamic oil allies against Russia became the enemy in Bush’s War against Terrorism in 2001. This was similar to the aftermath of the war against Germany and Japan, which produced the much-vaunted Soviet threat. During the Democratic Carter years, there were slightly more opportunities for African Americans in the public sector, where attitudes were easier to change with laws than in the private sector. Dr. King’s close colleague and townsman, Andrew Young, was a widely celebrated example of the inclusion of African faces in the government of the new South, with Carter being the first Southern president since the Civil War. The government was the largest employer of the growing African American middle class, enabling it to slowly reduce the racial income gap.
However, conservative politicians painted a picture of the white middle class male being marginalized and oppressed through new laws that bred ‘inefficient’ black university students and civil servants. As their Olokun propaganda went into overdrive, their calls for rationalization, downsizing, and privatization gained prominence, ironically in an economy ruined by the Republican mismanagement of the early seventies oil and housing boom. Carter’s interruption of the North Atlantic right-wing agenda was brought to a halt by the likes of the Rockefeller power circle, especially with the creation of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research,* Heritage, and other foundations, all funded by the Rockefellers to influence public opinion through Olokun devices and promote right-wing politicians and their ideas. In 1954, the Rockefeller clique created the Bilderberg Conference—a secret, worldwide summit of favored bankers, politicians, and businessmen, along the lines of Cecil Rhodes’s dream. This was in addition to the strong Rockefeller influences in creating the UN and the US central bank, the Federal Reserve. * Rockefeller Chase Manhattan Foundation. In 1979, the British left-wing Labor government was pushed out of power by inflationary pressures inherited from the Conservatives. It was further assailed by Rockefeller’s IMF conditions, which provoked social upheaval. Margaret Thatcher led a Conservative Party government into power in 1979, which signaled the ascendancy of right-wing politics, trickle-down supply-side economics, privatization, and all of the other neoclassical economic privations, backed by Irving Friedman, professor at the Chicago School of Economics. The supply-side economics neglected the consumer side, because the consumption of goods and services produced was on battlefields (from the obvious ones like the Falklands and Grenada to the much less defined theatres of war described in this chapter). Regardless of the fact that the 1970s economic problems were caused by the oil price shocks and an outrageous property boom spurred by irresponsible bankers, Thatcher turned on the public sector for employing too many blacks, leftwingers, and other ‘undesirable’ minorities. Public utilities were sold cheaply to the militaryindustrialist bankers. The car and airplane plants were sold to a few in the selected clique who were expected to lay off poor workers in the name of commercialization. In addition to having the same poor economics as Great Britain, key US right-wing politicians used the Iran hostage crisis to embarrass Carter out of office by making sure that the US citizens held hostage weren’t released until after the presidential elections. The new US president was Ronald Reagan, a Republican who was the Olokun propaganda chief in Hollywood during World War II and known for his racist tenure as governor of California. The actual power behind the throne was his vice president, George H W Bush, the former CIA director, whose father, Senator Prescott Bush, allegedly inspired the creation of the CIA from behind the scenes. With conservatives in power across the Atlantic Ocean, Africans throughout the world experienced a multifaceted attack that included a drug war, HIV/AIDS, and economic slavery. The right-wing conservatives who controlled US television and British newspapers, with the master propagandist and actor Reagan in the forefront, sold an extreme, neoclassical economic model that entailed practically destroying major sources of black employment, making blacks unemployable and ‘reenslaveable’. Many governmental social functions and utility companies, which were seen as open to the new, pro-black employment laws, were sold, privatized, and commercialized. The implication was that if the companies were rationalized, they would not employ blacks except in times of acute labor shortages.
In addition, what was termed as improved credit facilities in the eighties ended up being an efficient drawing up of black districts to be redlined, deprived of finance and other social benefits. A key mechanism that military industrialists in the 1950s researched was a machine to process and store information necessary to fight the Cold War. This system was based on the binary code of the African Information Retrieval System, Ifa. Fruits of the New England/California-based research were being made available for use as mainframe computers owned by government and militaryindustrial centers, especially California’s Silicon Valley of arms/aircraft makers and New York bankers. The computer’s most important use was a proper segregation of financial resources. However, African Americans were the ‘lucky’ ones, because bankers couldn’t draw an effective barrier to completely bar them from employment. The banker-driven policies were more devastating in every other land where blacks lived as the IMF grew into its role as the world banker and police force. The IMF’s initial function was to ascertain the true value of postwar Europe and reconstruct war-ravaged economies with the Marshall Plan and other loans, but it was extended to cover the world outside the Iron Curtain, especially the newly independent black nations. The IMF loaned money raised from floating bonds that were bought by banks dominated by Rockefeller’s Citibank and Chase Manhattan banks, J. P. Morgan, and the club of bankers in Paris and London. Because the bondholders paid the piper, they dictated the tune of IMF policies, which were reflected in its all-important credit report function (assigning values to national economies). The IMF greatly undervalued the gold reserves and other values of the black nations, making them uncreditworthy. Being the lender of last resort and the monetary policeman, the IMF was known for its destructive and unwavering financial ‘discipline’, especially towards black nations. Its loans were usually small but symbolically important to other lenders, who were happy to give more loans to the nation with an IMF sign of approval. The sign of approval had to be earned by following stringent, neoclassical economic conditions that were codified and marketed as the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). These conditions included massive currency devaluations, import liberalization, deflation through reduction of governmental investment and subsidies, high interest rates, privatization of social services, and every other policy that sold the nation wholesale to the foreign banking clique of Rockefeller/J. P. Morgan-led US banks, France’s Societe Generale and Credit Suisse, and the big four British banks: National Westminster (NatWest), HSBC (Midland), Barclays, and Lloyds. White commercial banks overtook the IMF and World Bank as the chief lenders when they became awash with petro-dollars in the early seventies. The oil shock saw the share of commercial banks in external public debt increase from 12 percent in 1967 to 50 percent by the end of 1975. Unlike the IMF and the World Bank, the private banks increasingly lent to governments without attachment to any specific project or any economic conditions. The oil shock spelt trouble for everyone except for the bankers who had batted themselves into a corner. The increase in oil prices and revenues brought about the greatest surge of money ever witnessed in the Western world, as the oil-producing nations like Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab nations saved the money in interest-bearing North Atlantic banks. Nigerian oil was mainly mined by Mobil, Shell Oil, and BP. When Rockefeller’s Mobil had to pay Nigeria, all that needed to be done was to debit Mobil’s account at Rockefeller’s Chase or Citibank and credit Nigeria’s account. Whatever may have been the case, Rockefeller’s balance sheet remained the
same! The Rockefellerinspired IMF could easily keep record of national earnings and expenditures. According to a 1994 World Bank report, from 1979 to 1994, 66 percent of Nigeria’s oil earnings were paid into dubious private accounts held in these big banks while the Nigerian masses continued to be entrenched in the debt trap. These vast sums, kept in big banks, were expected to earn interest, which the Western nations’ economies could not provide without causing inflation. The petro-dollars caused massive inflation in the saturated Western economies. With no more viable business investments to be made, rash loans were made to property companies and any other willing non-black local industry. This led to the 1974 property boom and economic crashes in the United States and Europe. The bankers were saved from domestic ruin by timely intervention as the property bubble burst and banks became overexposed to bad debts. Despite fears and warnings of a similar fate because of their foreign loans, bankers increasingly turned their attention to the newly independent nations, which they entrapped as they passed on the financial burden of securing interest on petro-dollars. Their aim was to trap the nations with loans that they knew could never be repaid. As long as the nations were made to pay the exorbitant interest rates, the bankers were assured a healthy profit over the petro-dollars in their care. Unlike at home, where an insolvent person or business could seek protection under bankruptcy laws, the leaders of borrowing black nations were unaware that their future generations were doomed to pay unending interest or the Western military would invade to seize assets worth more than the debt. With the control of the national military-industrial complexes, the IMF, and the UN, Western bankers confidently went about entrapping the world with easy money, especially African and Asian nations that faced huge oil bills. The greater the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) petro-dollar surplus kept in the Western banks, the higher the oil bill deficit of nations in Africa and Asia that did not produce oil. Hundreds of shady lending officers were sent across Africa to persuade government officials to take cheap loans instead of raising taxes to cover their oil bill deficits and development programmes. The lending officials lived off their commissions and sign-up fees like insurance salesmen, and they were not concerned by the long-term implications of the loans. This brought about rampant corruption, wherein African government officials were bribed or convinced to sign for the loans, which were directed into the personal accounts of the government officials and the lending bank officials involved. On the basis of charging a slightly higher interest rate, determined by the local cartel of foreign bankers, loans were made to African countries that obviously didn’t deserve it due to bad leadership or inability to repay due to poor economic outlooks. In Mobutu’s corrupt Congo (Zaire), Citibank, Morgan Grenfell, and the French Societe Generale raised syndicated loans for extravagances like the construction of the world’s largest supermarket and buying five hundred British double-decker buses in a nation with few roads. The loans were tied to the increased production of African commodities like cocoa and metals, which led to oversupply, a crash in commodity prices, and decreased earnings in African nations and their ability to pay. In 1972, when Ghana needed financial help, due to the fall in cocoa prices, the IMF enforced its stringent conditions, which led to social upheaval and the overthrow of the democratic government. Soon afterwards, with the effects of the oil shock and excessive petrodollars in full swing, the same group of banks showered Ghana with funds, despite the underlying weakness of the economy that had relied heavily on the insolvent cocoa market. It was a blatant case of this condition: ‘Yes, we know you can’t repay, but instead of having the funds sitting idly in our vaults, you can have it for free now, with a disclaimer in small print that we will squeeze every drop of blood from future governments and
control the sociopolitical life of your country’. Government officials were more irresponsible due to the false assurance that their deficit financing would cover their gross mismanagement and corruption during their political tenure and much later. Even in oil-producing Nigeria, with surplus petro-dollars and no foreign oil bill, the moneylenders convinced corrupt officials to accept easy money against future oil receipts as the debt spiraled to $28 billion in no time. Most of the loan monies were shared between the ‘players’ and never reached the shores of Nigeria, where future generations were sold for reenslavement to Western interests with the simple signature of government officials and lenders—slave catchers and slave traders. These were leaders who had been forced upon the people by foreign military-industrial complexes after their struggles for independence. By 1974, Citibank was earning 40 percent of its total profits from developing nations, where it had only 7 percent of its assets, fewer than 5 percent of its loans, and where it paid the salaries of nearly twenty thousand Europeans. By 1976, Citibank earned 13 percent of its worldwide income from loans made to Brazil alone.* The huge difference between the percent of loans given to Africans and the percentage of the banks’ profits from Africa reflected the unfair and fraudulent actions of the big banks. Chase Bank’s percentage of profits from international earnings increased from 34 percent in 1972 to 78 percent in 1976, while that of J. P. Morgan went from 35 percent in 1972 to 53 percent. Other members of the military-industrial complex joined the fleecing by offering credit-financed military weaponry like used-car salesmen—even better, because arms dealers banked with the Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan clique. The Pentagon’s foreign sales of weapons doubled as early as 1974, and the effect was felt outside of Washington, DC, with more jobs in the California military complex and happier New York bankers. Other big players from the militaryindustrialist circle made significant intrusions, like ITT Corporation (ITT), which promised modern telecommunications in the developing nations at a high cost financed by American bankers. With the aid of the CIA and the US government, ITT was notorious for overthrowing governments that were labeled leftist for refusing to follow the Western agenda. The conservative agenda, which included a financial war, was reinstated with the inception of Nixon but was impeded due to Nixon’s political troubles and the subsequent return of the Democrats. In 1972, the IMF launched debilitating attacks on African nations like Ghana—needing to stabilize its economy due to poor commodity prices that were designed to derail and reverse development made by the new black nations. Normally, this wasn’t asking for too much, because the bankers subsidized and stabilized agriculture in their own countries, but in Ghana, the world bankers demanded that all progress be reversed. Ghana was told to devalue its currency and economy in order to enable the Western military industrialists to buy them out and take over. Education, health, and other subsidies for people, who had suffered through slavery and colonization over the last few centuries, were halted. This was in addition to ending public utilities development projects, like electricity and water, and socioeconomic infrastructure that could change and relieve the dependence of these countries upon mono-product economies. * Sampson, The Money Lenders, 180–181. The oil shock made the bankers rethink their strategy by temporarily calling off the financial policeman, the IMF, while they dug the African nations into a greater and wider debt trap. Before the oil shock, the monies owed to the IMF and the big banks weren’t outrageous and within the Africans’
ability to repay. The European neocolonisation objectives could only have been attained by their closing ranks on the Africans, which would have demanded a more cohesive plan. The oil shock and the resultant free credit led to the new nations sinking into a massive hole of debt that they could never escape. The IMF and its Western masters ensured the permanent debt trap by purposely undervaluing the debtors’ gold stock kept in its vaults. Although an ounce of gold was valued by the markets at more than $400 between 1970 and 2000, the IMF valued the gold deposits kept with it below $50. Nigeria’s debt was billed as $28 billion in 1980, and despite the oil wealth and the IMF ‘curative’ conditions, it still owed $30 billion in 2000. It struggled to pay interest on interest accrued for twenty years, while millions suffered from the austerity measures. With Thatcher and Reagan singing the IMF rhetoric and the classical economic principles of Friedman, the new African nations were coerced into implementing IMF SAP that would sap out any economic life left. Alternately, they faced being ostracized by the North Atlantic bankers/Paris Club of creditors, whose monopoly of shipping and air freighting could shut them down if their imports and exports were left to rot in ports. If economic sanctions failed to work, the military industrialists were confident that their military power would swing things to their favor. Nation after nation in the blackworld was forced to take the bitter pill that the IMF offered, which often resulted in sociopolitical upheaval widely known as IMF riots and coups. In Nigeria, Ghana, Brazil, and a host of other countries, the IMF conditions led to coups and government changes as each new set of leaders tried, usually unsuccessfully, to secure more accommodating conditions. Nigeria was told that its currency was overvalued by the same clique of Europeans who built their fortunes on the slave economy taken from its shores and who prospered during the colonial fleecing of the underdeveloped countries. Apart from the compulsory reduction of all government spending, the most telling condition on the economy was the destabilization of their foreign exchange markets resulting in extreme devaluation, whereby a nation was forced to freely auction its currency every week before it could get back stability. No responsible government allowed its currency to be traded freely due to the negative effect of currency speculators. In no time, black currencies were devalued 1,000 percent, which meant that real wages were cut 1,000 percent as the prices of finished, imported goods and raw materials rose more than 1,000 percent. This was all in the name of British and American free market economics, which these countries had never practiced. Their markets were still closed to African finished products while they forced Africans to completely open their markets to European goods. To stop local competition in the African nations, African governments were prevented from developing local businesses in the name of stopping subsidies. Meanwhile, the United States and Europeans established the most elaborate protectionism at home with agricultural and industrial subsidies, tax breaks, and tariffs. The United States gave its mainly white farmers more than $20 billion worth of subsidies every year, while the EU gave more than $80 billion. To compound the African agriculture nightmare, the West placed 300 percent tariffs on African agricultural exports. The most obvious unfairness was the currency sabotage that had its roots in the slavery era when Europeans flooded West Africa with cowries. Now, they sabotaged and cornered Africans into reckless devaluation and de facto auctioning of the economic life of future black generations. The unfairness was ironically highlighted when Britain joined the European monetary exchange system. This allowed currencies to fluctuate within a slightly wider percentage band to determine their true value in the move towards implementing a single European currency. In 1990, sensing a temporary
weakness in the market from the volatility of the Italian lira and high German interest rates, currency speculators jumped on the British pound and wreaked havoc within a few hours. The British pound lost fifty pence against the German deutschmark, and the British Conservative Party government hurriedly supported its currency with billions of pounds of bailout money. Currency dealers like George Soros made billions in the saga. Britain withdrew its currency from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and fixed its currency, like the United States and other nations that pegged their currencies within an acceptable, smaller percentage band. If the economically advanced countries like the United States and the UK protected their currency using a fixed mechanism due to the fear of an onslaught from currency speculators, it was disingenuous to argue that African nations should leave their currencies completely open to market forces to decide a fair value (which resulted in ridiculous devaluations of several thousand percent). The SAP was implemented in all black countries by 1990 (a total of sixty-six nations), and it was the beginning of a new era of reenslavement, disease, and war for blacks. The IMF SAP sapped all life out of the Africans, making them immunologically susceptible to other aspects of the sinister Olokun conservative agenda. The 1972 Ghana/IMF episode allowed for a preview of the economic war that later sapped African economic life. The Carter government also allowed a delay and a peep into the other sinister plans brewing since Nixon came to power in 1968. There were congressional hearings into the drug and biological programmes, which had been initiated by the CIA Director Allen Dulles during the 1953– 1961 Eisenhower/Nixon presidency. Unwilling to divulge information when required by congressional committees in 1977, the CIA and Department of Defense claimed to have destroyed all records pertaining to the projects. By the late sixties, Western scientists, especially in Europe, had studied and identified an incurable virus that caused Green Monkey Disease, and their findings were disseminated to interested parties who took it further. On June 9, 1969, Dr D M Macarthur, deputy director of research and technology for the Department of Defense, appeared before the House Committee on Appropriations and requested $10 million from the Congress for the research and development of a new, infective micro-organism that would have no known immunological defense and be resistant to all known treatments. He attested to the fact that studies were already being made outside of the Department of Defense and guaranteed the development of the virus in five to ten years. The request was granted, and work started under the name of project MK Naomi, a continuation of MK Delta. It was conducted in Fort Detrick, Maryland, a top-secret biological warfare facility that was later taken over by the National Cancer Institute. Under an agreement reached with the army in 1952, the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick assisted the CIA in developing, testing, and maintaining biological agents and delivery systems. In addition, work was contracted to biotechnological companies in New Jersey and elsewhere. These private subcontractors were normally less obligated in their ethical practices, as some were known to perform experimental tests on unsuspecting US citizens, especially Africans. In 1952, in a wellpublicized scandal, the Tuskegee Institute knowingly infected hundreds of African American men with syphilis and other diseases. The CIA and Department of Defense studies into biological warfare identified a T-cell attacking Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV), which caused nonfatal immune deficiency in some African monkeys. When incubated through genetic-engineering into humans, it became an insidious pathogenic retrovirus that didn’t show symptoms until long after infection. This was an ultimate weapon that, like the
discovery of the atomic bomb and its devastating effect upon Japan, was banned internationally to keep the advantage. Although Nixon and the leaders of other Western nations agreed to ban biological and chemical weapons in a 1972 convention, the biological weapons programmes, especially the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS)/Green Monkey Disease programme, was completed and in the process of being disseminated by some extremists. Moreover, work continued under the guise of national security and medicine, especially cancer research, as work on recombinant DNA and other genetic engineering continued. By the time the projects were ready, especially projects like MK Ultra and MK Search that sought an unlimited supply of drugs for mind control, the Republicans were out of power. It all had to wait until the early eighties. In the early 1980s, HIV/AIDS began to appear in black and homosexual communities. This was suspicious because blacks had relatively fewer homosexuals compared to whites, and the only correlation between blacks and gay groups was that they were both hated by the newly elected conservatives. The concentration and dispersal of the disease was suspicious, because it was sometimes possible to determine the source of a disease by noting the direction and intensity of the infection. In a 2005 survey, nearly half of all African Americans believed that HIV/AIDS was a US governmentdesigned biological weapon, and an even greater percent believed likewise across the blackworld. In the United States, the initial epidemic occurred in towns with large populations and black majorities like Newark and not among those of Manchester, New Hampshire, or Utah. In Africa, the initial epidemic occurred in the eastern half of Africa, which had a much lower black population than West Africa but large white settler communities that controlled business and medical supplies. By the mid1980s, millions had been infected in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The racist diversionary excuse was that it must have originated with the Africans, but African Americans were most likely to have sexual relationships with West Africans, who had a much greater presence in the United States than East Africans. However, West Africans initially showed low or no infection rates. Truly, Green Monkey Disease was an inhabitant of Africa, but it had been for millions of years without any trouble. According to long-held African traditions, monkeys were rarely eaten or domesticated. It was even an abomination for a pregnant woman to see monkeys in many areas. I personally witnessed the anger felt in a suburb of Ibadan, Nigeria, one afternoon in 1977 after a monkey escaped from a European’s compound. Many adults voiced their perplexity about why Europeans were friendlier to animals than people—kissing and hugging dogs and cats and domesticating the taboo animals. A popular European saying that ‘a dog is a man’s best friend’ is opposite to the Yoruba saying A re eni pe, la fin pe aja la awe (‘Only loneliness makes you refer to your dog as mate/buddy’). If HIV/AIDS was from the African monkey, it was nearly certain that Europeans brought it to humans who had lived there for thousands of years. A study released by Rand Corporation and University of Oregon, reported in the January 26, 2005 edition of The Guardian. Another doubtful claim about the HIV/AIDS virus was that the initial epidemic was spread through sex. Though it is transmitted sexually, the majority of initial cases defied logic. If HIV/AIDS had not been introduced into a large, sample population through artificial means, it was mathematically impossible to have one or two originally diseased people spread the infection to 30 percent of the population in such a short time. Although Europeans have traditionally painted blacks as promiscuous, HIV/AIDS was unlikely to spread from one or two people to several millions in fewer than ten years unless it was
airborne! The only feasible method of spreading the infection so rapidly was through tainted medical supplies during mass vaccinations given throughout Africa or the experimental tests for new drugs carried out on unwitting Africans. The Chinese admitted that the 2003 outbreak of HIV/AIDS in rural China was due to tainted medical supplies. Some CIA operatives attested to the fact that they conducted other tests on unwitting American citizens, probably in prisons, where African Americans were the majority. From the top ranks of the Conservative groups, someone, or a group, covertly infected sample populations of blacks and gays, who spread the disease through sex and drug use across and beyond the blackworld. The government most likely didn’t have a direct link, but the US government was a slave to the special interests that created it, and the special interests used it to carry out the plan with the help of extremists in bodies like the CIA and other right-wing camps. Examining the motives, being that the initial infected areas were conducive to European inhabitation, a few extremists among the white settlers in East and South Africa were major suspects. The only West Africa country with an infection rate remotely comparable to those of East and South Africa was tiny Gambia, whose economy was in European hands and was their only holiday spot in West Africa. The Gambian outbreak occurred in the early 1990s, much later than the early 1980s initial outbreak. Europeans had a history of clearing out original inhabitants by all means possible, as seen in North Africa, Australia, North America, and South America. In the 1760s, the British commander, Lord Jeffrey Amherst, suggested infecting the American Indians with smallpox to rid the land of their presence, and whether it was a concerted plan or not, American Indians were mainly decimated by diseases and guns. The same mentality was passed through southern Africa by Rhodes, similar to the latter-day Tuskegee Institute experiments and the CIA extremists’ sinister geopolitical games. Another suspect, when considering motives, was the petrochemical/pharmaceutical group, which stood to profit from the disease that resulted in a form of medical slavery. Through international copyrights, US pharmaceutical companies were to derive a huge slice of the income from HIV/AIDS victims, as long as they tried to stay alive with expensive, daily medications. Even when the countries were too poor to buy the drugs, they were prevented from making a copy or buying cheaper generic drugs. Instead, loans were organized with the Rockefeller clique, which came with the small print that all drugs had to be bought from the clique’s pharmaceutical companies. The pharmaceutical companies had not only a motive but the means in the foreign-dominated East Africa business and medical circles. Foreigners operated unchecked, unlike in Nigeria and Ghana, where black middlemen furnished local medical needs with supplies originating in the Far East, and any other sources cheaper than those of the West. Moreover, Nigeria and Ghana had a large, educated class of medical professionals that preempted European medics from running the scene. In the United States, still largely segregated, the large black towns and their hospitals, which primarily served black patients as well as prisons, were easy targets for the extremists. Blacks in Haiti and Brazil were not spared from high infection rates, but predictably, Cuba had low infection rates, which can be attributed to the fact that Western conservatives and the big pharmaceutical companies were barred. Despite the high infection rates in East Africa, the absolute numbers were still relatively small, because the plague didn’t catch on in West Africa until the nineties. Other plagues were designed to cover those who escaped HIV/AIDS. The CIA MK Ultra and MK Search programmes identified two drugs, cocaine and heroin, that could be
used to destroy the fabric of the blackworld, but they were not produced in any locality within the blackworld. This plague was used not only to destroy the community but also to sponsor other sinister plans of the intelligence and business communities and their right-wing extremists. As publicized in 1996 by the San Jose Mercury and by Democrat Congresswoman Maxine Walters, a semiliterate African American called Ricky, in a California prison, was taught by people in the intelligence community how to convert expensive cocaine into a cheaper but more addictive base called crack cocaine. CIA renegades were involved in a conspiracy to import drugs from Colombia (via the trouble spots of Nicaragua, Panama, and Haiti) into the United States, where Ricky and other black pawns distributed it for a profit. ‘Crack’ swept through black America faster than a Harvard graduate marketer could have achieved, considering the level of logistic support required to spread through mostly black neighborhoods with the right price and packaging. The result was ‘crack babies’ and a skyrocketing black murder rate. European and Asian gunrunners flooded the market, and the players quarreled over the pittance left to them in the drug pricing structure. The CIA may never have received any direct benefits, but it could bypass an uncooperative Congress with the huge drug profits made by intelligence officers. Like bad cops who break laws to secure convictions and promotion, rogue agents used the drug profits to pursue pro-US business and political interests. Examples included maneuvering against the populist Nicaraguan Sandinistas government, Cuba’s Castro, and other parts of the blackworld. US marines occupied Nicaragua from 1926–1933 like in Cuba, Panama, and Haiti, but the 1980s Democratic-led Congress was more cautious in the postsixties world and restricted the CIA and its operations. Manuel Noriega, the president of Panama and friend of American conservatives, was deeply involved in the drugs trade before he became an embarrassment and was removed. The United States broke off Panama from Colombia in the early 1900s to lay a major strategic claim to the subregion. Heroin was at least five times more expensive than cocaine and was used to finance a much bigger war to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan, where 70 percent of the world’s heroin was produced. Rogue CIA officers used the drug proceeds to finance Osama Bin Laden and other mujahedeen against the Russians, because the Congress was not overly sympathetic to their needs. Nigeria and Turkey were chosen as transit points, because they were friendly nations with no terrorist or major drug production, and their nationals were able to easily blend and move into the Western world. Nigeria was a transit point on an inland route stretching from Afghanistan to Pakistan. The flights were either from Karachi straight to Lagos or with a stopover in Ethiopia before Lagos. The vital link was found within the top Nigerian army clique (some of whom were alumni of West Point and Sandhurst military academies, with strong US military and business links that ensured rapid promotion and control of the country). The ‘army boys’ picked hundreds of poor Yoruba and Igbo, many of whom were students indoctrinated by the movie Scarface, to become ‘drug mules’ from Lagos and Ibadan. It was a convenient scheme that exploited the closeness between Yoruba, Igbo, and African Americans, as drugs were distributed through African American gangs, many also Scarface-inspired, especially in Chicago. Despite a Nigerian military coup, whose leaders made drug possession punishable by firing squad, as the first few drug carriers were being executed in 1994, some top Nigerian military officers close to the CIA wrongly assured would-be mules of smooth sailing through customs on both sides of the Atlantic. To make matters worse, the law from the new Islamist Nigerian government was too severe and only
served in popularizing the street knowledge of heroin. People inquired what could be so bad to deserve the death penalty, especially in a land where politicians and the army embezzled millions with no remorse. Although they were given a pittance, the lower classes saw the drug trade as a way to leave the poverty trap and wrongly discounted the death penalty as only a barrier that the corrupt elite had erected to prevent the poor from success. The drug trade was made more lucrative by IMF conditions that devalued the local currency and made the dollar highly desirable, while all legitimate exports were barred by racist tariff structures. The drug circle rapidly expanded as those who knew anyone with army links went into the drug business, which was concentrated around Yaba army barracks in Lagos. It got so bad that on some scheduled flights of 300 people, nearly 150 were drug mules. The top army officers and ‘big men’ played with numbers. If seven out of twenty were caught out, they would hold up the available custom officers on duty, and the rest could slip through to make a handsome profit for their drug barons. Some FBI reports attributed the practice of swallowing heroinfilled condoms to a Nigerian origin; South Americans soon copied it. Dangerous body cavities were surgically created for heroin, making some African Americans jokingly label their African cousins ‘crash test dummies’. Many died on arrival or had to be saved in prison hospitals across the country. By the early nineties, the US government and President Clinton banned all direct flights from Nigeria, citing drugs and the lack of security at Nigerian airports. The United States set up the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which paid the top military brass in dollars to come down heavily on ‘crash test dummies’. The travel ban didn’t do much to help as the oversupply in Nigeria destroyed thousands of lives in a country with scarce drug rehabilitation and detoxification units. To feed their habit, drug addicts, some from middle-class families, resorted to carrying out daring armed robberies and reigned terror over huge areas. Their gun power was far superior to the ill-equipped Nigerian police force, which the army had systematically weakened. At the peak of the madness, Nigerian robber gangs were known to write, two weeks in advance, to entire neighborhoods of their intention to raid. Arriving in gangs of twenty or more with assault machine guns, they swept houses number one to one hundred over several hours! The common man was not allowed to own or produce his own guns, but the Western Ogun Complex and the local representatives armed the drug addicts, who rendered havoc as during the slavery era. There was immense misery across the blackworld following the implementation of the three plagues, whose effects began in the early 1980s and extended to 2000. This was the last Oya cycle in the 2000yr Olokun era, and since Olokun covers propaganda, dogma and drugs, the Blackworld was to be awashed with its suffocating mystery!
Chapter 22: Suffering and Smiling Small successes and big failures of the African giants of Ghana, Nigeria, the US and Brazil (1980– 1999) Ghana was the first ‘independent’ African nation, but from its inception, Nkrumah realized that no African nation, on its own, could be truly independent from the white military-industrialist bankers. The West had a special hatred for Nkrumah, who was blamed for the near loss of Africa. After sabotaging delays to the Aksombo dam construction and outright industrial barriers against the bauxite smelting plants, the exploitative debt repayments of loans to finance the industrial projects and other social services bankrupted the Ghanaian economy, which relied upon the poor cocoa market. A foreigninspired insurgency and a disinformation campaign of corruption brought down the first democratic government in Africa. This process was repeated in 1972, when bankers precipitated social upheaval that ended the democratic rule of Prime Minister Kofi Busia. The downturn of the economy, especially with the ruinous IMF 1,000 percent devaluation, sent millions of migrants to Nigeria and other surrounding nations and a lesser amount to Europe and the United States due to visa restrictions. Jerry Rawlings, a young air force officer, took over power in 1979 as the bankers turned the screws on Ghana and another military government fell. Rawlings represented the rage of ordinary Africans against their allegedly corrupt rulers and executed all surviving past leaders from the ‘Congo Cabal’ that had seized power on false grounds of corruption. He later realized, like many others before and after him, that regardless of the corruption, most African nations were merely incomplete economic units of the imperialist nations that created them. He handed over power to a civilian regime but overthrew it in 1981, when the government appeared incapable of dealing with the debilitated economy held ransom by the IMF. On Rawlings’s return to power, he accepted all IMF conditions and tried various social engineering techniques to evolve a genuine political culture from the grassroots. Rawlings was an Akan, and he enjoyed the Akan dominance (58 percent of the population) over the other minorities in Ghana’s sociopolitical life. He had an easier task of keeping the country together than Nigeria, Zaire, and many other African nations. However, he was accused of being repressive, and the economy improved only marginally with the inward-looking, government by example he portrayed. The industrial barriers remained as tight as ever, despite following the IMF model. Ghana did not have a substantial domestic market with its population of under twenty million. Even if Rawlings tried to overcome the industrialization barriers, there were greater barriers ahead that included the tariffs against African processed goods and the heavily subsidized Western competitors. For a larger free market, he signed the pact with the Nigerian head of state, General Olusegun Obasanjo, and other West Africa leaders to form the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). With the little additional income generated by Ghana’s acceptance of IMF confinement to being a primary producer and the subsequent reorganization of agriculture, mining, and semiprocessing, Rawlings tried to improve socioeconomic infrastructure like roads, water, electricity, and telecommunications. However, these improvements were largely confined to a few urban and mining areas due to the lack of funds and an IMF limitation on government subsidies and social programmes.
The IMF made the government price common drinking water out of the reach of the average man. It calculated academic local prices in US dollars after currency speculators trashed the local currency to 2 percent of its original value, while local wages paid in local currency remained practically unadjusted. Water was priced out of reach in the IMF-prescribed, ‘free-market’, high-unemployment economy as were education and health. By the 1980s, people across Africa were fed up with their leaders and the IMF, and they clamored for democratic rule. The Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda, the black movement leader, bowed to democratic rule after his term of twenty-five years in office was ended by two defeats against the IMF. Kaunda turned down the IMF in 1985 due to widespread riots caused by corn subsidy withdrawal and the overpricing of the vital food supply, but he was forced to return, cap in hand, in 1990 to implement the IMF conditions, which again led to anarchy. Unable to contain the socioeconomic upheavals, Kaunda abolished the one-party system and submitted himself to democratic, multiparty elections, which he lost. He gracefully stepped down, knowing that there was no winning against the IMF. This was a strong message by one of Africa’s favorite older leaders, and many others followed, like Republic of Benin. In 1992, after ten years of military power and due to political pressure, Rawlings promulgated a constitution towards democratic government. He won the presidential election to the dismay of people who didn’t agree with his autocratic policies and suspected the election results. In 1993, ethnic clashes occurred in the Muslim north, killing more than a thousand people and disrupting the ethnic peace that the Akan-dominated Ghana had known since independence. However, Rawlings survived the coup attempts as he tried to find a solution to the economic problems. Ghana’s trade balance began to show improvement while most other countries in Africa were just hitting the IMF pit, although its cocoa income again took a dip soon afterwards. The initial rise was due to the corresponding fall in cocoa production in Nigeria, Brazil, and other nations facing the IMF economic collapse, but their competitors’ IMF restructuring saw an increase in world cocoa supply and fall in prices and income for Ghana. This was a common problem across the mainly one-product African nations that were cut out to supply the ex-colonial master and friends. President Rawlings won reelection in 1996, but it became apparent that the promised economic progress was a mirage. Despite implementing IMF conditions, there was not much left that he could do to change the predominantly agricultural and mining economy or to open closed Western markets. ECOWAS didn’t fulfill its promise due to the divisive nature of the French neocolonies, especially Ivory Coast, and the fear of Nigerian domination by Eurocentric, selfish leaders. Rawlings attested to the fact that Nigeria was the giant that could bring about a change in the African economy. Rawlings kept Ghana in the forefront of black geopolitics by constantly and positively contributing to peace and prosperity efforts across Africa and appealing to African Americans. Due to the fact that southern indigenous groups like the Akan dominated national politics, Ghanaians maintained a more Afrocentric foreign policy than Nigeria and its powerful northern Muslim interests. The Akandominated government gave African Americans the right of dual citizenship and even built Garvey city, which continues to attract African Americans, even though Ghana was the gold and not the nearby Slave Coast. At the turn of the century, Rawlings lost his reelection bid to an opponent, John Kufuor, and handed over power in the first such transfer from one civilian government to another in Ghana, heralding a new era. Although he left a much better socioeconomic infrastructure and an excellent political culture, Rawlings and many people wished for an economy that could stand up against the West.
Nigeria, the African giant with potentially more cocoa, large oil and gas reserves, and a huge domestic market, couldn’t stand up to the 1980s onslaught of the Western imperialists. Until the IMF attack, the seventies oil boom allowed an explosion of the middle class through mass education and an increase in private and public investment to challenge European control. The oil boom of the seventies enabled Nigeria to play its black leadership role. This included its support of African liberation movements, events like FESTAC, and benevolence to other African nations, especially in oil and financial aid. There was a large migration to the cities, especially Lagos, because the rural agricultural sector suffered from a lack of investment and subsidies relative to what was spent in urban cities. Basically, the structure of the Nigerian economy required the development of a steel complex and manufacturing in the Southwest, development of petrochemical and pharmaceutical sector in the oil rich Niger Delta and Southeast, and an agricultural revolution and solar energy in the vast grasslands in the North and Middle Belt. The Western Powers were to sabotage the economic development blueprint by refusing to help in building the Steel and petrochemical infrastructure. The US and European farmers’ lobby used US politicians and bankers to threaten an embargo against Nigerian oil if the government continued with plans to turn the massive grasslands of the Middle Belt into one of the world’s largest Wheat Belts. In the name of free trade, Nigeria was to no longer feed its people as it imported US rice and wheat to compensate a ‘fair balance of trade’ and subsidy-free market. The increased reliance on food imports into the Garden of Eden was paid with the oil revenue. However, the West broke the back of the oil market by the late seventies, and things began to turn for the worse for the military government, especially amidst allegations of corruption. Despite the lack of unity, people were unified in calling for a return to democratic rule, which General Obasanjo heeded and handed over to a democratic civilian government in October 1979. The political landscape was still divided along the huge ethnic groupings of Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo. Obafemi Awolowo again led the Yoruba-dominated party, and Nnamidi Azikwe led the Igbo. With the previous northern leader killed in the January 1966 coup, one of the old guards of the conservative Muslim north, Shehu Shagari, was favored and won the election. Yet again, the Muslim north formed a national coalition with the Igbo leader Azikwe, because Awolowo remained essentially a Yoruba leader with alliances in the Middlebelt. Nigeria’s oil wealth still attracted dubious moneylenders, especially after the 1980 oil market crash caused a budget deficit, which gave rise to even more reasons to make fraudulent loans. A 1994 World Bank Report claimed that from the 1979 inception of democratic government, less than a third of Nigeria’s income was repatriated back to Nigeria. The rest was stolen from the oil accounts held by the Rockefeller New York and European banks. It is now clear that the loud allegations of corruption, initiated by Obasanjo and amplified by his Western Powers handlers, was part of the global conspiracy to bring down Nigeria, its government and Black leadership role. With the Western economic sabotage of its oil and economy, the IMF began to pressure Nigeria to implement its structural adjustment programmes, but President Shehu Shagari refused, knowing that he couldn’t sell it to the public. Shagari tightened import controls to ration scare foreign reserves, but the licensing bred corruption, profiteering, and inflation. He continued to delicately balance the economy, but because a lack of agreement with the IMF creditors led to extremely high repayment rates taken from the leftovers of the
fallen oil revenue, there was little left for economic sustenance and development. Living standards fell slightly, due to the inflation caused by import controls and the reduction of subsidies that led to high unemployment. Despite the corruption propaganda and effects of the crashed oil market, President Shagari won reelection in 1983. He was overthrown three months later by Buhari, the highest ranking Fulani in the July 1966 coup, on claims of the riots caused by the elections, the worsening economy, and the excessive corruption of the civilian government. Some newspaper reports claimed that it was a preemptive palace coup to prevent a real revolution brewed by the socioeconomic conditions. In reality, it was choreographed by the Western Powers that wanted to stop economic development, especially the Steel Complex being built by Russia. The caustic Islamic government of General Muhammadu Buhari came like a foreman sent to put the ‘Negros in their place’ on the plantation. Buhari alienated everyone with its domestic war against indiscipline, a plan to disguise the gradual introduction of Muslim sharia penal codes while allowing corrupt northern Muslim political leaders to escape to the West. Among the politicians who fled to the West were people with alleged billions of Nigerian petro-dollars, which Nigeria requested back from its uncooperative bankers and host governments. One such leader was Umaru Dikko, who Britain chose to protect, along with his billions, with twenty-four-hour police protection. With hindsight, it was all media play designed to distract people from the fact that the Obasanjo-Buhari cabal were agents of Western imperialism sent to stop Nigeria’s growth and to chase the Russians building Nigeria’s steel mills. With the inspired destabilization of its foreign exchange markets, the Naira and the economy was sent spiraling out of control. The Western bankers pressed Nigerians to accept IMF conditions or face the impossible terms demanded for the repayment of loans. Margaret Thatcher heightened the corruption propaganda by insisting on no leeway for Nigerian economic problems, claiming that she knew four individuals out of tens who could pay the $28 billion debt out of their back pockets, but she refused to instruct the bankers to release the alleged stolen funds neither did Buhari prove any of the allegations in court. The Buhari government refused the IMF conditions and stubbornly paid 44 percent of the national income in annual debt repayments. Buhari further tightened foreign exchange and import controls in his neo-imperialist agenda to destabilize Nigeria’s economy, causing economic distress to the citizens who were contained only by repression. As in the past whereby Abrahamists work together to sabotage Original African aspirations, from Ancient Egypt to the Sokoto Caliphate colonial arrangement with the British, Buhari’s conservative Muslim government put an end to dreams of industrialization by expelling the Russians building the Ajaokuta iron and steel complex, the linchpin of Nigerian industrialization. Signed in 1979 and nearing 86% completion, the Russians were the only people in the world willing to give the Steel technology to the African giant. Buhari brought in the death penalty for the drugs trade, which had slowly grown during the civilian regime through soldiers deprived of the largesse of defense contracts that were the mainstay of military rule. This move only served to publicize the drug trade and recruit more drug mules. After completing his sinister agenda as an economic hitman to derail Nigeria’s growth, Buhari was overthrown in a palace coup by another of the 1966 cabal, Ibrahim Babangida, on grounds of human rights abuses. General Ibrahim Babangida, a seemingly more apt political player who was the number three in the
Buhari government, took over in 1985 and promised ‘Western values’ like the respect of human rights and liberalization of the economy. With increasing international financial pressure, Babangida threw open the IMF conditionality to national debate, which caused lively debate throughout the country. The anti-IMF proponents appeared to win but had no influence on the final decision. Earning the nickname of the ‘Political Maradona’ (after Diego Maradona, the Argentine footballer with fascinating skills), Babangida claimed that he was rejecting the IMF loans but implemented their draconian conditions for the betterment of Nigeria. Like in Ghana, the local currency, the naira, was ‘tied to the dollar’ and reduced in value by more than 1,000 percent, resulting in 66 percent of the population made to survive on less than a dollar a day. This was coupled with devastating subsidy withdrawals in education and the public services and the unilateral opening of unsubsidized, domestic markets to subsidized foreign competition. The classical economists of the IMF ignored the huge subsidies used to build and sustain Western economies extracted by their governments and bankers from the blackworld, which sponsored the 1812 canal boom, the 1830 railroad boom, the 1914 World War I car production boom, the 1940 World War II airplane production boom and the Cold War computer/internet boom. Every subsidy and effort to build the economy was stopped, except the oil subsidy. Though the subsidy was academic in nature, its price regulation prevented the development of a private petrochemical sector, so the IMF did not press for its removal like with all other subsidies on agriculture, education and health. Across Africa, public services rapidly collapsed due to lack of funding. Sick, poor people were refused or detained in once-free hospitals for lack of payment. The debilitating effects of IMF conditions were quick to manifest, especially with the rapid decimation of the middle class, as real wages fell 1,000 percent, and cuts in education and workers benefits led to constant student riots and labor strikes. With less than a dollar a day, people were able to afford only bare essentials, like traditional food and clothing, whose prices were not based on foreign inputs. Young, local industries and sources of employment went bankrupt due to the imported raw materials that quickly became unaffordable in the decimated local currency. The only growing social institutions were religious organizations, as numbers in the south took to the American Pentecostal Revivalist churches to assuage the disintegration of the social services and growing economic and political insecurities. However, the churches were reactionary and couldn’t channel the huge amount of resources received through charity into self-regenerating economic ventures to alleviate the unemployment. Because the youth needed more than prayers, there was a massive ‘brain drain’ of the large Yoruba-Igbo middle class. They were colonially miseducated and mentally enslaved to be workers, much like their Rockefeller-educated, African American cousins. A large number of doctors, engineers, and other professionals were absorbed into the late eighties and early nineties Western economy, especially in the United States and Britain, where more than 45 percent of ‘immigrant Africans’ were college graduates. They surpassed the stereotypical (overeducated) Asian graduate ratio of 44 percent. Graduates from Nigerian colleges took up substantial roles in internationally important constructions from the construction of the world’s most complicated airport in British Hong Kong to the tallest skyscrapers in Europe, like the NatWest Towers. They contributed to the development of the computer and Internet technology. The unfulfilled high demand for science, technical, and computer skills in the West overrode many racist employment practices. This gave science-oriented graduates a chance to prove themselves at the highest technical levels, even if at lower pay.
This leeway was not extended to arts, administration, law, and social science graduates, because administrative and communication skills were a matter of personal, subjective opinion. By the early 1990s, there was a massive enrollment and conversion to professional accounting studies, but the attention soon turned to computing skills. The computing boom and shortage of necessary skills resulted in the highest pay structure, which largely benefited African and Asian immigrant graduates, enabling them to reach the highest levels ever attained by non-whites in the Western economy. By 2000, there was a backlash from the white community as the computing boom came to an end. The supply of whites with computer skills caught up with the excess demand that had opened the door for blacks. In 2001, a website operated by computer technologists accused Nigerians of embellishing their CVs, demonstrating petty, racist jealousy and the wish to ‘return blacks to their place’. A significant percentage that couldn’t take computer conversion courses or find gainful employment, in addition to many college dropouts and secondary-school graduates, became taxi drivers and other menial laborers. A small number went into self-employment and other minor trading opportunities. Southern Nigerians became popular taxi drivers, especially in London, England, Brooklyn, New York, and Washington, DC—even around the White House. By 1999, many small and medium-size businesses had developed in scope, although the Nigerian business community still remained tiny and unable to effect a significant change among the disenfranchised majority. Many of these disenfranchised people in the Western world, and a much larger number who were ‘stranded’ in Nigeria without visas, began a new phase of reciprocal criminality. A generation had grown up listening to Fela, Nigeria’s foremost Afrobeats ‘rapper’, and understood the international financial maneuverings and attendant white-collar crime from his songs like ITT (International Thief Thief), Authority Stealing, Zombie, Army Arrangement etc. With the destruction of the economy by foreign bankers known to have benefited from slavery to the billions of stolen Nigerian petro-dollars, instead of getting violent, the Yoruba and Igbo youth decided to get even and beat the foreign crooks at their own game. Even in Nigeria, the government complained of the 1980s pervasive ‘Nigerialization’ mentality where for every administrative and legal loophole blocked, a dozen loopholes were created. People realized that during the Babangida IMF-friendly regime, 80 percent of the nation’s wealth was stashed in Western banks, and they wanted some of it, either through the foreign governments or the foreign banks. Although the criminal youth were less than 10 percent of the population, 10 percent of 130 million was 13 million—more than most African national populations or European nations like Holland, Belgium, or Ireland. Having to survive on less than a dollar a day, Nigerian youth went about reclaiming their fair share of their ‘national cake’ from European and American financial and administrative systems that spent twodollar subsidies on cows. Credit card, banking, and many other types of fraud were perpetuated with an intensity and complexity never experienced by Western bankers, who were used to milking blacks without a backlash. White bankers and media were perplexed due to their racist perception of blacks as mentally inferior and subservient, which led them to allege that there was a mafia school in Lagos churning out brainy criminals. In reality, there was no rigid organization, but the language and the Yoruba’s extraordinary social skills were the keys to unraveling the Western system. There were no secrets, no violence, or bitter feelings, which made the ‘fraud game’ appeal to youth who normally abhorred violence or dangerous secret societies. The bankers realized that they were incapable of stemming the tide and losing millions daily, especially in cities with the largest immigrant Yoruba and Igbo communities (London and New York). The Western welfare and tax systems were not spared as Nigerians went to reclaim monies owed since slavery.
In the City of London financial center, brainstorming meetings among top bankers were held every Friday in the early nineties to discuss the latest Nigerian fraudulent scheme. They sent alerts on major US and UK news programmes to watch out for ‘sharp-suited’ Nigerians. The historic Yoruba fetish for tasteful dressing was extended to the top. The youth sported expensive designer labels, which were the perceived fruit of their ‘reclaimed wealth’ and fraudulent credit cards. In lessons taken from their home experience (dodgy white men and their black conspirators, as well as Italian mafia films), they realized that Europeans used suits and formal dressing as cloaks to hide dishonesty. The British banking and law enforcement authorities worked closely with their American counterparts without significant success. They couldn’t promulgate a new law to directly attack blacks, as they could with different sentencing structures for cocaine and crack cocaine. The fraud type constantly changed, and a tough law would affect more whites, especially in the corporate world and places like Florida, with a high number of insurance scams. As the authorities looked out for ‘sharp-suited’ Nigerians, Nigerians moved into the background. They easily taught and confronted other races with their ‘U chop, I chop’ live-and-let-live attitude, especially white women, who held the majority of counter and processing clerk positions, and poor Jews. An FBI deputy director of fraud claimed that he investigated Nigerian fraudsters for fifteen years, but he discovered mind-boggling frauds every day. The Nigerian fraudster named ‘the King of New York’ was much publicized due to the vastness and profits of his schemes. In a BBC documentary, the Office of Serious Fraud discussed thousands of unsolved Nigerian frauds, which it complained were weighing down its administrative system. The American establishment greatly feared the influence of Yoruba and Igbo on their long-lost African American cousins who it believed, if corrupted, would crash the racial caste financial system built on the trust and subservience of blacks. The FBI had long held the belief that Nigerians would worsen their ‘black problem’, because Nigeria’s educational system was out of its reach and couldn’t be used to inculcate fear into the huge Yoruba and Igbo populations. The IMF conservative agenda to destroy the African education system came ten years too late. Fortunately for the US authorities, African Americans educated to fear the almighty white system were reluctant to join in the bold attempt to take on the system. Most criminally inclined African Americans kept to the street drug trade, scared to dress in suits and go into the large, white banking and government halls. The ‘street’ forest Africans born after independence had no such inhibition, and their attitude was that the white man was socially inept. They boasted that the Yoruba taught the Europeans how to bathe and dress and other social skills before the Europeans came back with their guns to rob, raid, and rule. Unlike the blacks in diaspora who had been brainwashed to feel inferior, even though a large part of the Yoruba and Igbo also suffered from ‘colonial mentality’, they largely believed that their social power and brain power were superior to those of the Europeans, who relied on gun power for ascendancy. A further proof of this cultural confidence, apart from the direct administrative raids on the Western system, was a new class of scam artists known as 419, named after the Nigerian penal code 419, ‘Obtaining by deception’. Playing on the assumed greediness of the racist Europeans, Nigerians sent millions of letters inviting wannabe African raiders to partake in the fleecing of Nigeria. Some of the fake letters from Nigerian institutions offered billions of stolen petrodollars to those interested for a small administration fee of 5–10 percent. Ten percent of $1 billion was $100 million, and it had to be paid to the fake arranger before the nonexistent billions were paid. The exact words and plan changed, but the basic ingredient was playing on European greed and assumed black subservience. One of the popular scams was the black paper/washy-washy scam. Europeans were shown modern
black gold, which was supposedly millions of dollar bills covered in black ink for security purposes and stolen from the Nigerian Central Bank during transportation. The scam artist performs the washing of a few sample notes with an unknown chemical, which turns out crisp hundred dollar bills. Unknown to the greedy European, the money bales were composed of carefully cut blank sheets of paper and included only a few hundred genuine banknotes covered in ink. The ink easily washed off with common solvents like turpentine or nail polish remover. The European was offered the lion share of the black paper money for a large investment to buy the supposedly scarce chemical, whose source was only known to the scam artist (because it was supposedly a banned substance). Even after falling for this scam, some people became desperate to recoup their losses and fell to more advanced scams like arrangement fees for stolen funds. A large number of whites and company executives, used to getting something for nothing in Africa, fell prey to the scams as they parted with millions of dollars in arrangement fees. The scams highlighted the racist legal thinking of Europeans. The scammed whites had the audacity to cry foul to the legal authorities, who tried to arrest the 419 artists while leaving the ‘intended’ conspirators alone. It was impossible for any African to walk into a police station in the United States or UK to report that a European had defrauded him of an arrangement fee paid to transfer stolen US or UK government funds. Not only would he be detained for conspiracy to defraud Her Majesty The Queen, but no attempt to arrest the white conspirator would be made. From the mid-nineties, the lower classes that had been employed as drug mules moved into fraud, while some drug trade barons spread from the major cities into smaller towns for mules and into other countries all the way to South Africa. Other black nationals like Zairians and Haitians, also victims of European, banker-inspired, white-collar crimes in their respective nations, joined Nigerians in Paris, London, and the United States, where a slightly increasing number of African Americans and Jamaicans mixed with them in the ghettos and clubs. Unlike the civil rights era norm of mixing in universities, which still happens, the most important mixing of black youth in the present economic rights era was on the street level. The Nigerian ‘invasion’ was not limited to the UK, United States, and France; Nigerians were traditionally barred from these countries with visa and other restrictions. A significant number had to go through other countries and citizenship changes to reach their final destination in the UK and United States. Proof of the desperation caused by the imperialist IMF conditions was in thousands of poor people who walked across the Sahara Desert. These desert trekkers were not the normal Trans-Saharan nomadic groups, the Hausa, and other Arab-related groups, but the Yoruba and Igbo who had kept under the shade of the rainforest since evolution. They migrated across a desert nearly as big as the United States without camels, and they hitchhiked all the way to Europe and America, stopping occasionally for hard labor earnings in order to move to the next city. Many died in the blistering heat and the freezing Alps, if they were not shot in Italy or Spain or killed in German custody. More than forty Nigerians were killed in German police custody in 1993–1994, leading to a top German minister’s resignation in 1994 after a complaint by the normally nonchalant Nigerian embassy. Austria and other countries also saw Nigerian human rights abuse scandals. Prostitute trafficking was on the rise, especially from the Benin southern Nigeria area to continental Europe. This phenomenon spread to Nigeria and other poor nations, including Eastern Europe and Russia, and flowed from South American nations to the United States. Although the percentage of foreign Nigerian prostitutes remained small, it was a major embarrassment. Women that fell prey to prostitution went back to southern Nigeria to lure young girls from their parents under the pretense of offering Western education and employment.
On arrival in the European capitals, the girls were held for ransom and forced to prostitute themselves for grueling hours every day, in rough living conditions, until they paid their captors $30,000 to $50,000 for alleged travel expenses. By the time most of the young women were free, they could only join the prostitution ‘game’ and continue the cycle, and yet HIV/AIDS in Nigeria was relatively lower than in East and South Africa.* Another example of racist European legal and social structures was exhibited when the Italian government deported seventy prostitutes to Nigeria after they were infected with HIV/AIDS working in Italy, even though the European governments received income taxes from the prostitutes for the immoral services. This was hardly surprising, coming from the same Italian establishment that dumped barrels of radioactive waste in the coastal rural areas on the Bight of Benin. Under the pretext of a special business project, Italians leased land from an ignorant local landlord on the huge swathe of an unpatrollable mangrove lagoon and deposited the ‘raw materials’ that they never returned to collect. Several years later, these were discovered to be radioactive materials. Local kids were playing in the emptied barrels, whose radioactive contents had leaked into the surrounding soil of the Niger delta ecosystem, while mothers had converted some of the barrels to domestic use. Despite the small percentage of Nigerians who were hitting back to get what they believed was rightly theirs, legally and illegally, the majority still received a raw deal from the European military industrialists and their imposed leaders. Around the same Niger coastal area where Italians dumped radioactive waste into the womb of humanity, Western companies mined their oil and polluted without adequate compensation to the people or environment. The huge oil revenue shared among the Rockefeller clique and its African military boys trickled down only to the people of the Negro area. It was ironic that US blacks in Alabama experienced a fraction of the oil industry pollutants that those in the Niger delta suffered from. * AIDS increased in Nigeria in the mid-1990s due to increased migration. On the Niger delta, the Ogoni people rose against the unfair exploitation through demonstrations and sit-ins, but their leaders were killed by Mobil and Shell-paid soldiers. The repressive Abacha government hanged twelve internationally recognized Ogoni members, led by the poet Ken Saro Wiwa, for treason in the midnineties, while oil companies practically planned, funded, and ‘rented’ the army to launch attacks against the delta communities. Divisions festered among the local communities as some community leaders were specially favored to act as mercenaries. The resilient ecosystem continued to be blackened with oil spills and continuously burning gas into the atmosphere. Nigeria was more of a gas-rich nation, with a mere hundred years of petrol reserves sitting on a thousand years of gas, so the Western interests wastefully burnt off the Nigerian gas to keep the price of gas up, regardless of the environmental hazard. Although the south Nigerian peoples agitated for a more representative, democratic government and fairer sharing of oil income, Western economic interests and their military boys did not take the socioeconomic interests of the delta people into account. To their dismay, even with the advent of a pseudo-democratic government in 1999, the people’s plight was not prominently and adequately addressed, which led to small revolts and killings in the communities. What had started as a basic rural revolt in the delta area rapidly grew into a modern revolt with the use of foreign speedboats and modern weapons supplied by unknown European players. The trouble precipitated by the oil companies attracted the arms dealers and others interested in the oil reserves.
Africans always had to get strange bedfellows to achieve what should have been rightly theirs— bedfellows like apartheid white South Africa and Rhodesia, the Portuguese, and the French, who armed and backed Ojukwu’s unsuccessful breakaway Republic of Biafra. With their small showing in the Blackworld’s oil reserves limited to Gabon, the French, engaging in the traditional European infighting, tried to challenge the Anglo-Saxon/Dutch oil monopoly by causing a fracas through its excolony Cameroon (in the Bakassi Peninsula on the southeastern Nigerian borders). The Nigerian public became fed up with the northern Babanginda pro-West military government, which had introduced the IMF SAP that destroyed their livelihood from 1986 and saw the rise of corruption, armed robbery, and drugs. The people clamored for civilian rule to give other ethnic groups a chance. In the thirty-three years since independence from Britain, a southerner had ruled for only four years. This break occurred only due to the 1976 Westerninspired coup that killed the Afrocentric northern president and allowed Obasanjo to come into power. Obasanjo became the first Nigerian head of state to hand over power to a democratically elected government. Although he was a Yoruba, Obasanjo rightly handed over to the Muslim north electoral winner in 1979. In 1993, the Yoruba hoped that the Northern General Babaginda would reciprocate by handing over to a southerner. Babangida para-ambulated insincerely towards handing over to a civilian, canceling political startups between 1987 and 1992 and agreeing to conduct elections in 1993. With the natural death of the Yoruba’s leader, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Babangida allowed a politically tainted billionaire friend from the military-industrial clique, Chief M K O Abiola, to represent the vociferous Yoruba and run against one of his northern Muslim minions. The Nigerian military establishment failed to realize the depth of Abiola’s convictions and ambition, and how resolutely their Western masters would react against them. Abiola was from a poor, Yoruba Muslim background, but he fought his way up the ladder after graduating as an accountant in Britain. On his return to Nigeria, he struck gold in the late sixties when he won a national telecommunications contract, which he sold to the US telecom giant (and CIA front company) ITT in exchange for becoming its vice president in Africa and the Middle East. Being a Muslim, Abiola easily found favor with the northern Muslim power base and the Western interests he represented. Before the 1993 elections, he was rumored to be corrupt due to the halfbilliondollar telecommunications contract, still incomplete after fifteen years. He was alleged to be a cohort of the CIA and involved in coups in Nigeria and across Africa, especially in Uganda where the US-backed General Yoweri Museveni took power. Regardless of his questionable history, people across the country warmed up to Abiola when he promised social welfare programmes to bring about economic justice. To the surprise of Western interests, their ‘friendly Negro’ did not stop with local economic justice, but went all the way to the UN to push for reparations and global economic justice, as his wealth opened doors in the United States and across the world. Black US congressmen warmed up to ‘Moneybags’ Abiola and his message of global economic justice. By the elections, it was clear that Abiola had played the Western military industrialists for what they were worth and was firmly standing up for his people and political ambitions. The people across the nation responded in the first non-ethnic election. Even without his populist policies, Yorubas and other southerners voted for the Yoruba candidate, and being a Muslim, the northern Muslims trusted and voted for a man known for his overflowing philanthropy across the north, despite being a southerner. The northern elite could not use the normal scare tactics of a pagan outsider coming to defile their religion, because Abiola was the vice president of the national Supreme Islamic council.
Abiola won the election in a huge landslide, but Babangida immediately nullified the elections and made the unprecedented step as a president of the most populous black nation by confessing that ‘the powers’ prevented him from handing over rulership to Abiola. This led to sociopolitical mayhem in the south, especially among the Yoruba. Unaware of the global importance, they were bitter that a Yoruba man was still kept out of power even after succumbing to a less-than-perfect candidate, who was known as a Western military industrialist to appease the Europeans and a Muslim to appease the Muslim north. The European establishment Rothschild publication, The Economist, wrote that the Western powers turned against Abiola for his Afrocentric populism and could not allow a reparationspushing president at the wheels of the Slave Coast and the most populous black nation. To show that it wasn’t a personal decision and to save his neck, General Babangida resigned and handed over power to the head of the colonial Royal African Company, renamed the United African Company (UAC). It was the largest manufacturing concern in Nigeria, and its imperialist links were still prominent. It was a momentous insult to Africans that the UAC chairman should rule Nigeria in 1994. Babangida claimed that because the economy crashed, due to the sociopolitical upheaval and IMF conditions, he was handing over political power to the business leaders led by UAC chairman Ernest Shonekan. Despite being a Yoruba technocrat who came up the ranks of the company, Shonekan shared the views of his militaryindustrialist bosses in London. Powerless against the local military stranglehold, which allegedly supported him until the West threatened their position, Abiola left the country to appease the powers in London and the United States but to no avail. To agitate and galvanize the support of the black diaspora, especially African Americans, Abiola made a fatal political mistake of relying on the congressional black caucus of politicians instead of going directly to the people through the reverends, whom the black politicians relied on. Babaginda’s former deputy, General Sani Abacha, ebbed out the business administrator after a few months to provide military muscle against whatever Abiola and his southern supporters planned. Without any progress in the Western world and the increasing allegations that he ran scared and was unable to stand up for his mandate, Abiola returned to Nigeria to declare himself the president. He made a second fatal political miscalculation by declaring his mandate in Lagos Yorubaland instead of the Kaduna Hausaland, the volatile cultural boundary between Original African and Afro-Asian cultures, which would have made it an original African agitation instead of the Yoruba tribal agitation that it was made to look like. He was arrested and imprisoned by the repressive Abacha regime, which rolled tanks into Yoruba cities and killed protestors. The military government tried to pacify the riotous southwest, being the economic powerhouse, and organized new elections excluding Abiola, which the Yoruba and other southerners shunned. They stuck to the June 13, 1993 results and demanded that the reins of government be handed to the jailed winner of the elections. Abacha used repressive techniques never believed possible in Nigeria, as he imprisoned anyone who dared to voice their opposition including the former and only Yoruba ex-head of state, Obasanjo. He sentenced twelve Ogoni delta activists to death by hanging while killing minority military leaders, capable of overthrowing him, by firing squad. Those he didn’t kill or imprison, like the Nobel laureate poet Wole Soyinka and other pro-democracy activists, fled for their lives. Abacha’s rash behavior made him a public embarrassment to the Western powers that levied trifling sanctions against him but still did business with him in private, like they did with the mad Emperor Bokassa of the Central Africa
Republic. Abacha’s repression was matched only by his corruption, as revealed in the Financial Times and a US Senate report. Investigators were able to trace only $4 billion out of probably double that amount that Abacha took in four years. He kept the loot in US Citibank and Chase and Britain’s NatWest, Barclays, and HSBC banks, which were all reluctant to return the monies to Nigeria. The Abacha family was reported to have employed the services of Johnnie Cochran in 2001. In 1998, the Western powers stepped in after five years of impasse. Abacha kept himself in power with brute force. The economy deteriorated due to the sociopolitical upheaval across the nation and Abacha’s massive corruption. The West, in what appeared like a Hollywood script, decided to knock out the two protagonists and start afresh. Abacha was declared dead of a heart attack rumored to have been caused during sex with a prostitute and a concoction of hard drugs and Viagra. Southerners were hopeful that the imprisoned presidentelect, Abiola, would be freed to take up his mandate, but they were rudely shocked a few days afterwards when Abiola was declared dead of an heart attack after a meeting with US State Department officials (including Dr. Susan Rice)—it was rumored that they gave him a poisoned cup of tea. There was an outcry of foul play, but the new military government denied any wrongdoing and called on US health officials to do an autopsy to back the claim of heart attack. The choice of autopsy experts didn’t allay suspicions, because the people knew that a heart attack could be used to describe a wide range of conditions but not what actually caused it, especially with drugs that left no trace. Calls for independent Cuban doctors were ignored. MKO Abiola’s death was to usher in the era of the Third horseman, an era of global economic justice that he had campaigned for seven years before its start. For the sake of peace, elections were declared soon afterwards, with an arrangement that northerners shouldn’t contest to give others a chance. Obasanjo was the only southerner that the Western powers and Muslim north trusted. Although as a Yoruba he didn’t win the Yoruba vote, Obasanjo again became the only Yoruba to rule Nigeria, now as a civilian president, twenty years after ruling as the only Yoruba military head of state. In 1999, the Black horseman was given his scales of balance, in form of democracy, to begin a laborious 2000 year journey towards global economic justice, prosperity and peace. Unlike the reparations-demanding Abiola, Obasanjo was a ‘moderate’ politician who tried to delicately balance implementing the necessary socioeconomic infrastructure while dancing to the tune of the West and appeasing the north Nigeria remained desperately in need of infrastructure to exploit the huge market and productive capabilities. There was the obvious need for unfailing water and electricity, roads and other forms of transportation infrastructure, the completion of the steel and petrochemical complexes as well as an urgent need for reinvestment in health and educational facilities. Thanks to mobile phone technology, Nigerians were able to enjoy the benefits of modern technology after many failed promises to improve its phone system. At the inception of democratic rule in 1999, Nigeria still suffered from a sporadic electricity supply from the north, so southern politicians commissioned the building of a thermal power station off the shores of Lagos Island to supply the industrial southwest. In a rare and frank interview in Tell,* Governor Abdulkadir Kure of the northern Muslim Niger State
(which held the majority of the hydroelectric plants that supplied the bulk of electricity) admitted that the north had been sabotaging the energy needs of the industrial south for fear of being left behind. The ignorant, miseducated politician prayed that Allah would prevent the successful completion of the new plant meant to supply the largest black market. Kure didn’t have to pray too hard. The now-infamous, insolvent US electricity giant ENRON was in charge and collapsed soon afterwards! As was the case with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), Nigeria suffered from ENRON’s corrupt practices. The government remained the largest employer. Local manufacturing accounted for less than 10 percent of the national income, while more than 50 percent foreign raw materials input further reduced manufacturing’s socioeconomic significance. Even the ancient local glass industry that produced Yoruba beads relied on more than 80 percent foreign input. * April 16, 2001 issue. With the government still under the IMF spell, there were no massive subsidies to improve the industrial and agricultural sectors, especially towards local production and away from the cash crop/colonial economics. The underinvestment in agricultural rural areas continued to produce huge migrations to the large cities, especially to Lagos, which surpassed Ibadan as the most populous black city in the world. The socioeconomic infrastructure remained poor, even in Lagos, as it grew into the world’s secondmost densely populated island. (With a present population of fifteen million and a high growth rate, Lagos is expected to become the world’s third-most populous city, rising from its present position as sixth, after New York, which holds fifth place.) The huge population rise made all town-planning dreams obsolete and created a desperate need for employment and socioeconomic investment in housing, electricity, transport, and communications. The constant, IMF-related riots turned the university system into a joke, whereby a four-year course extended to seven years or more due to closures after riots. Apart from the obvious benefits of using education to build a strong industrial economy, it was only through proper education that Nigerians, especially in the north, could discount the divisive religious and ethnic politics and hold their political leaders accountable towards unified, Afrocentric growth and prosperity. The SAP had the advantage of stimulating the populace through hunger to become businessmen, but without the necessary infrastructure and investment, many became importers, preachers, and hustlers. In the 1990s, Nigeria became infamous as the world’s most corrupt nation. Because the government remained the largest employer, the devaluation of real wages led to a significant number of families subsisting on the corruption of governmental services at all levels of the political class, civil service, police, and army. Outside the government, the corrupting influences of trying to survive extended to the spiritual sphere and led to the mushrooming of churches that amassed wealth but couldn’t use it to promote socioeconomic progress through economic and cultural cooperation. Ironically, the government monopoly on the television industry led to the 1990s growth of the private video industry, and Nigeria became the world’s largest producer of films and the major disseminator of Yoruba-Igbo culture. Regardless of the negative northern Islamic leaders and the passive southern churches, the growth of the film industry was indicative of how the Blackworld’s economy could grow astronomically; economics were embedded in culture. It was the only way the Negro area could provide for its people and the less fortunate black nations. Nigeria was to the black race what the United States was, economically and politically, to whites.
In the US during the eighties, African Americans continued to face impediments from the white establishment as well as from themselves, as was the situation across the blackworld. Despite continued white segregation, the prevalent black integrationist leaders continued to prevent the realization that African Americans were a nation within a nation and a viable and integral part of the blackworld. Its forty million people and huge consumer expenditure made it one of the three most important African communities. Like most other black nations, its economy relied on the ‘export’ of just one commodity, labor, while it hemorrhaged money to myriad non-black goods and services. With the continued shift from white agriculture to manufacturing, African Americans continued to migrate in the eighties, searching for employment away from Southern rural areas and immigrating to industrial areas in the North and West (and later to Atlanta, the Southern black capital). Although the majority of Africans still lived in the South, New York had the largest black metropolitan population (50 percent). Chicago was a distant second, and Los Angeles was a close third. Detroit had a 75.7 percent black population by 1990, Atlanta had 67 percent, Washington, DC had 66 percent, Philadelphia and Chicago had 40 percent each, and New York had 29 percent. With the passing of the ‘white economy’ from the industrial stage to the service economy stage, manufacturing jobs dried up in most major cities that increasingly became African and poor. Black wages were pushed down with immigration policies that encouraged the influx of Asians and Hispanics —reminiscent of how the British used Indians in the postslavery blackworld and how blacks were used to break white strikes in the early 1900s. However, like other parts of the blackworld, there was a relatively large increase in the size of the educated, black middle class that mostly relied on government jobs and lived in prosperous African suburbs. Prince George’s County in Maryland was the largest black suburb, and it was based on the outskirts of Washington, DC, the seat of the federal government and the largest black employer. Despite its significant increase, the middle class remained relatively insignificant to the black majority. It couldn’t improve its lot by developing black agriculture and industry or by winning further significant concessions from whites. Republican President Reagan relegated progressive African American issues to the background. The black movement, led by Jesse Jackson and the Congressional Black Caucus, pushed through affirmative programmes for a fairer employment system and a few distributorships from white-owned businesses instead of concentrating on creating an Afrocentric economic system. To avoid the public embarrassment of being labeled an oldfashioned racist (old-fashioned being the key word), white businesses and government organizations began adopting a policy of tokenism, whereby one or two blacks were employed in a business to pacify activists. The greatest form of tokenism occurred in the media, where a few entertainers, actors, musicians, and athletes came to represent the face of African America, while its common people and sociopolitical leaders were conveniently ignored. These groups of naturally talented black people enjoyed huge incomes sometimes comparable to or exceeding those of whites, which the media were quick to use as examples of racial equality and progress. These were the Michael Jacksons, Michael Jordans, and Michael Tysons of their professions. The vast majority of blacks in more mundane professions were relatively underpaid, but there was vast improvement. Jackie Robinson became the first black baseball player in the major leagues. Things were slowly moving forward. The rise in income of working-class African Americans was slower as it inched forward to catch up with the income of whites. Black women made the most astronomical rise in employment and income.
This was not surprising because the white man naturally felt less threatened by a female than by any other man (especially a black man). From slavery to sharecropping and the era up to the 1940s, a significant percentage of black women were employed in white homes where they took over the white wife’s duties. From the civil rights era to the 1970s, black women took over the low-level, routine jobs like typing and other clerical jobs that white women had taken over when freed from household duties. Once on the white corporate ladder, black women spread up and through the organizations in the 1980s. Men didn’t find such a welcome but pushed the ceiling nevertheless. The majority of the changes in employment policies were in government and large companies, which couldn’t turn a blind eye to the new antiracism laws. The small and medium-size companies that formed the majority of business organizations were obstinate in their racist employment practices. However, many whites couldn’t be openly racist and used indirect methods of turning down blacks, because most administrative job evaluations were based on subjective, qualitative analysis. More than 50 percent of black college graduates in the 1980s and 1990s were from the social sciences, arts, and business administration courses. They were easier to discriminate against than the 11 percent of graduates with science and engineering skills that were measured more quantitatively. The common excuse given to black graduates was that they were underqualified, overqualified, or did not have suitable interpersonal and communication skills. When a black man squeezed through, he was easily gotten rid of by allegations of not fitting in, being a troublemaker, or harassing white women. In the political arena, racist conservatives modernized their approach. The national attacks on blacks were codified in political catchphrases like ‘government downsizing’ black employment, ‘law and order’ with anticrime bills to jail blacks, good ‘family values’ against the African ‘welfare queens’ who used white taxes to fund a higher black birth rate, and selective ‘anti-immigration bills’ to make America whiter, even if Spanish speaking. HIV/AIDS was epidemic through the eighties, but the rates began falling with proper public education, even though blacks still had the highest infection rates. In 2004, African Americans accounted for over 50 percent of new cases in the United States, and more than 70 percent of female HIV/AIDS victims were black women. The HIV/AIDS and drugs epidemics of the mid-eighties hit the African American community at an inopportune time when there were major cutbacks in jobs and social services with the advent of neoclassical downsizing and privatization. Black unemployment rose to more than 15 percent, 2.5 times that of whites. Without wealth accumulated over time, and the continuous financial redlining of black communities, there were no avenues to the American Dream of successful entrepreneurship that the Reagan government pushed, popularized by the 1980s syndrome of independent and socially irresponsible young professionals (yuppies). Education not made more attainable for black populations; only 11 percent graduated from college in the eighties. The only ways for poor black kids to succeed were through sports scholarships or by enrolling in the army, and after graduation, many still faced employment barriers. With nearly 50 percent of African Americans in poverty in the 1980s, colleges remained out of reach for many families. Nearly 60 percent of black families were headed by women, and 50 percent of the one-parent families were in poverty. The need for additional income to survive often led to the older children going to work once they were sixteen. Even when their parents survived on a moderate income, most teenagers wanted to leave their poor, congested, high-rise buildings (known as projects). In the consumerist society, they believed that they had many immediate needs. While the majority found legitimate part-time jobs that soon became full-
time, at the expense of further education, a few desperate girls became pregnant in order to form their own family homes. A few fell prey to vices like prostitution and lap dancing. The young African American male wanting to survive or raise business capital sometimes had only the drug market or robbery to raise the necessary funds. This was why the drug trade attracted a sizable number of young black men like the CIA-inspired Ricky in California and the army-inspired African heroin trade. Crack cocaine’s low price and addictive potential made it popular in the black community in the 1980s, leading to an increase in junkie robberies and addicted babies. However, the effects and spread of the drug trade weren’t half as debilitating as the cure. In 1986, the white media caused pandemonium over the drug overdose death of a young NBA player. This enabled conservatives to railroad the United States into committing to the most draconian and racist drug laws imaginable as they launched a ‘War against Drugs’ that was practically a war against blacks. Without going through the necessary checks and balances of congressional committees, and facing a summer holiday just before the 1986 elections, politicians heaped heavy jail times on drug dealers to appear tough on crime in the elections. Having been put on the defensive with Olokun’s biased media reporting, blacks got ten times harsher sentences when caught with drugs of the same chemical composition but known by different names (cocaine and crack cocaine). In addition, new conspiracy laws admitting hearsay and convictions without evidence were a throwback to the 1692 Salem witch hunts in a nation that prided itself as a bastion of law and order. While blacks should have charged the government with conspiracy, an increasing percentage of young black men were locked up for conspiracy on mere accusations. Apart from the HIV/AIDS medical slavery, the War on Drugs was a form of reenslavement, as blacks had their rights trampled upon while they paid for the trampling. Large numbers of white law enforcement officers were employed from white suburbs to patrol and harass blacks at random under the pretext of drug searches. The drug war was fully honed from Governor Rockefeller’s New York drug law to Governor Reagan’s policies in California, where it was packaged as ‘zero-tolerance policing’ and sold across the Western world, especially in New York and London. A memo was circulated in 1990 to the New Jersey state police ordering them to be on the lookout on Route 95 and other state roads for African Americans, Nigerians, Jamaicans, and Haitians, who all had to be brought in for a full investigation. By 1992, there was an explosion in California, the birthplace of zero-tolerance policing. The acquittal of four police officers, videotaped semi-lynching a black motorist named Rodney King, led to rioting and destruction that claimed fifty-three lives, with more than two thousand injured. Despite being the worst race riot in the 1900s, the drug war was not called off, and African Americans continued to experience homicide and arrest rates ten times those of whites. In 2000, in Passaic County, New Jersey, the local police gleefully announced that they made more than three hundred drug dealer arrests during a single summer. How many drug addicts were in the small community to warrant such a clear-out? Entire age groups within black communities were sometimes taken off the streets in an overthe-top War on Drugs. On a major US television network, an investigation in the South showed nearly a hundred black people being arrested and their properties confiscated because of a single drug dealer in the small town. (He was freed to continue dealing once he falsely snitched on others to strike a deal.) According to the 2000 Human Rights Watch Report on Drugs in the USA, blacks comprised 62.7 percent of all drug offenders in state prisons. Although there were five times more white drug users than black users, blacks were 13.4 times more likely to be imprisoned than whites. Seventy-three
percent of those imprisoned had committed nonviolent, economic related crimes. Maryland, with a 25 percent black population, had the highest black prison admission rate at 79 percent in 1996. Illinois, with a 15 percent black population, followed with 74 percent black prisoners. New Jersey, with 13 percent blacks, had 72 percent black prisoners (these numbers do not include the large numbers of immigrant blacks like Nigerians, Haitians, and Jamaicans). Young African American men got smeared at an early age. By the time they were in their early twenties, when they should be graduating from the third level of education into adulthood, they got a third offence and were sent off to jail for eternity under the three strike rule. The banker-inspired judicial system was not geared towards justice and fairness but towards deals and plea bargains. Bargains extended even to killers, who were told to snitch on someone else for a reduction in time, and the more innocent people they snitched, the earlier they left to start another cycle. At arrest, an accused black was economically strangulated. The resources that could be used for his legal defense were seized, and friends and family were too intimidated to come to his support. With legal costs priced out of the reach of the common man, the accused African’s only hope was a free but overworked, unmotivated government lawyer, located next door to the prosecutor’s office. The government lawyer, normally called a public defender, was renamed the ‘public pretender’ by many in the black community. The FBI secured a conviction rate averaging 92 percent, the highest in the world, due to underhanded practices rather than efficiency. The public defender, on average, managed to secure 8.2 times more punishment and sentences for black clients. To accommodate the rising numbers of ‘captured’ black males, more prisons were built in white neighborhoods that enjoyed a boom in the local economy through construction contracts, catering, and jobs for thousands of white youth. The political struggles between white communities for the location of prisons could only be explained by stating that the government paid an average of $40,000 per annum per prisoner. This was more beneficial to the white communities than building a college, because students wouldn’t pay $30,000 per annum in community colleges, and rowdy students were never kept off the streets. In addition to monopolizing prison commissary services by wellconnected conservatives, national telephone companies cashed in heavily on the black community by charging them 500 percent the normal rate to speak to their relatives in jail. A telephone company gave New York State $5 million as part of periodic payments within a year, which was not based on a predetermined rate but left entirely to the telephone company. Knowing they were in business and not a charity, we could be left guessing how hefty a profit they kept. Black families, broken up by jailed fathers and struggling to survive on one or no income, were financially drained by expensive reverse-charge calls and long-distance transportation to white suburbs to visit the jailed family member. The arms dealers made huge profits, because their sponsored Christian conservative politicians blocked legislation to ban guns in America. To the conservatives, guns gave the family law and order. Even when individual northern states restricted and banned some machine guns, the southern Bible Belt states relaxed the gun laws and indirectly allowed the northern urban centers to be flooded with guns. The large-scale domestic supply of guns, augmented by those from Asia and Eastern Europe, left in the hands of excitable black youth, spelt doom for the black community. Street gangs caused hell in some communities, like the military cliques in other parts of the blackworld took over and rampaged communities. In the United States, those not killed in the streets were arrested for gun possession and jailed for long periods. On a higher scale, the larger arms companies used prison labor to produce weapons and other components required while paying a pittance: 1 percent of the normal wage rate. This practice arose
from the cunning argument that prisoners shouldn’t be given a free ride and be made to work, but the large companies that provide the ‘job experience’ still billed the final customer the market price of the weapons. The loss to the black community was exponential, because most of these monies were never redirected back into black communities, especially the confiscated ‘criminal’ property and the fact that the prisoner’s family lost income on lawyers, phone calls, and visits. With one in every three black men between the ages of twenty and twentynine, the childbearing age, under correctional supervision, the loss of father figures in the community did not augur well for the growing generation. Because 73 percent of blacks were imprisoned for nonviolent economic crimes that presented no physical danger to society, the mass arrests of black youth did nothing but force generations deprived of fathers and income to prematurely step into the field to earn money, at times leading to the drug market. The community reacted by creating mentoring groups like 100 Black Men of America and other charities. Serious economic questions arose from the drug market and the criminalization of nonviolent black men. The drug market was made profitable and enticing by government policies, which made the price of drugs high by restricting supply without being able to affect demand. This was a simple economic reaction of supply and demand. The government could crush the drug market by taking over supply and heavily undercutting the price, but it appeared that the freemarket right wingers never let the market play in the blacks’ favor. With this approach, not only would the government be able to affect demand, there would be no incentive to sell, because a dealer couldn’t beat the government’s low price. The right wing engaged in scare tactics, fostering the belief that drugs would pervade society, which was untrue because it took the anti-establishment, hip feeling out of drug usage. With proper public education, the percentage of users would fall. Aggressive street drug dealers, hanging out in schools, clubs, and public alleyways, set out to entrap unsuspecting and impressionable youngsters into becoming new addicts by offering them free or subsidized supply with glitzy temptations and peer pressure. Gun dealers and other merchants of death came into play, leaving large numbers dead and the community under a siege mentality. The second economic argument, as seen from earlier chapters, is that it is usually the minority criminal class that raises the living standards of the majority, which turns a blind eye to the source of the investment into its community. Examples are the small percentage of criminal slave traders and plantation owners who funded the European Industrial Revolution, the Italian mafia that transferred its criminal proceeds to industrialize agricultural Italy in the mid-1940s, and the overseas Chinese who used proceeds from gunrunning and copyright piracy to develop southeast China. It is a racist injustice of historical proportions if African American criminals are dispossessed of their proceeds and their communities squeezed dry while whites, whose historic crimes drained and put blacks in the situation, are allowed to keep their funds and the benefits. If blacks have to be punished and deprived, whites have to pay reparations to the blackworld, as Germans, and their US banker Chase, are still paying Jews. However, in the name of solving black inner-city crime, millions of suburban whites are employed and overpaid to unfairly disenfranchise blacks socially, economically, and politically. Most exfelons are barred from public housing benefits and prevented from voting in many US states, which goes back to the post-reconstruction period when laws were promulgated to keep the blacks disenfranchised despite constitutional amendments.
In addition to other electoral tricks, with nearly 20 percent of black adult males criminally blemished and with no right to vote, blacks might see their politically effective numbers dwindle to 60 percent. This is reminiscent of the Three-Fifths Compromise made during the 1789 constitution assembly, when white southerners wanted Africans to be regarded as three-fifths (60 percent) of a person. The police receive outrageous salaries and overtime payments in comparison to the average income of the blacks they are ‘serving’. They are more than satisfied to be the domestic front of the rightwing, law-and-order drug conspiracy of the military-industrial complex. The police and other agencies vote overwhelmingly for the conservative Republican Party, and a number of them can’t demarcate the line between professional and political interests, especially policemen largely chosen from the suburbs, where their parents fled from blacks in the city. Cops descend onto the streets of black America the summer before every election. While blacks vote overwhelming for Democrats, Republican police ‘wipe clean the streets’ by arresting potential black voters. On election day, even though majority of the cops don’t live or vote in black electoral districts, the cops parade the streets menacingly and pick up people on warrants, found later to be computer errors. From New York to Florida, in the 2000 presidential election, black radio reported instances of police malpractice including bearing arms at electoral booths, which was against the constitution. In the nineties, Al Sharpton found himself deprived of a certain win in a New York mayoral contest. Other electoral tricks used in bringing the value of the black vote down include the use of different electoral machines with widely different error margins. Newer, more efficient electoral machines, with a 33 percent improvement in accuracy, are brought in to replace the older ones but not in black neighborhoods, especially those in the South (as seen in the 2000 election, when huge numbers were omitted in Florida). In 2004, a computerized voting machine with no audit trail was designed by a Republican and introduced in Ohio and other key swing states to win the election. Another trick is the ancient and widely accepted redistricting and election gerrymandering, where elections are won by the dubious demarcation of electoral districts, sometimes based on faulty population data. The impact of undercounting blacks is difficult to ascertain because there’s a subculture, especially comprised of poor blacks and others, of suspecting government agents. Based on the fear of forced family separations by social services, being charged with one of many economic crimes, or even being exposed as illegal immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa, some blacks ‘float around outside’ when government officials are coming or refuse to open the door for an unidentified white person. Unfortunately, the African American middle classes are unable to stop the cancers eating into the black community. Many of the black yuppies even alienated themselves from the black neighborhoods. A few become neoconservatives, acting as mouthpieces of the military industrialists—political foremen. From the selfish Reagan yuppie revolution, with the notable exception of a few intellectuals like Cornel West, African American intellectuals stall on developing new ideas for black progress. Like everywhere else in the blackworld, they are stuck in civil rights mode instead of moving to authenticate cultural and economic rights. Some black activists with genuine concerns for the blackworld are themselves miseducated and end up culturally misdirecting the masses. They introduce the descendants of the West Africa coast to an unrelated Afro-Asian Swahili culture originated by Arab merchants and spread by 1900s European colonists across eastern Africa. Children are given meaningless Afro-Asian-sounding names or Muslim names. Ironically, a few whites who have discovered the real deal, and worship and disseminate Santeria Ifa wisdom and the practices of the Yoruba from New York to Miami, fund ifacollege.com and related sites.
Nevertheless, African Americans, especially through Santeria, are slowly rediscovering the Yoruba tradition. Since starting in 1975 in Philadelphia, the Odunde Festival (Yoruba New Year) opens every second Sunday in June and continues to grow. Following the Ooni of Ife Oba Aderemi’s visit and empowerment of Yoruba believers in the mid-sixties, his successor, Oba Sijuwade, crowned the African American head of the traditional Yoruba kingdom in 1981 in Sheldon, South Carolina, as Oba Efuntola Adefunmi the First. However, the expected Afrocentric results have not been achieved, because most elite Yoruba still suffer from a colonial mentality and are not fully aware of their relationship to African Americans. Although, the mainly Christianized Yoruba have switched from the boring colonial, Christian Anglican sect to African American-inspired Christian Pentecostal sects with colorful bands and soul. Ebonics is widely spoken black English, or Yoruba-English, and it shows strong linguistic patterns similar to Yoruba and other West African languages. Blacks transferred the rhythmic tonalities that give Yoruba words meaning into English. Words like ‘mufucka’ or ‘ass’ have several negative and positive meanings of the original word(s), depending on the tone. Ebonics was suggested as a nationally recognized language, but it was opposed by many who believed it would be counterproductive to their integration and that its mistaken stereotypes would affect employment prospects. A proper approach would be teaching Yoruba, Lingala, and Igbo and encouraging bi- and multilingualism among African Americans, like most educated forest Africans are presently. This policy would help African American youth to reestablish proper cultural ties for the socioeconomic benefits that would arise from a better understanding of Africa, its people, and its resources. Hebrew and European languages are taught and sponsored in the United States to establish and cement white historic and socioeconomic ties, reinforcing their cultural survival and dominance. With Asian languages being added to the education curriculum, one can’t but wonder why African languages have not been. It is imperative that black youth reconnect with Africa, because black culture has been distorted by impressions fostered by television and the rest of the mainstream media. The media are apt to depict African American men as ignorant, violent, and unstable and those in Africa as backward, violent people in animal skins or nude, chasing animals around the plains. Thankfully, magazines like Ebony, Essence, and the Source, despite having a fraction of mainstream media resources, counter the mainstream, negative aspersions by portraying positive black middle classes, fashions, and views across America and the world. Black women have made more significant progress in mainstream media, exemplified by the exceptional Oprah Winfrey, a talk show hostess and opinion leader in nearly seventy countries. Having the greatest audience and influence ever held by a black woman, Winfrey is the de facto Iyalode, the women’s leader, of the blackworld even though her friend, the renowned Yoruba spiritualist/social psychologist, is called Iyanla Vanzant (Iyanla means ‘topmost/big woman’ in Yoruba). A few Afrocentric film producers like Spike Lee, John Singleton, and Van Peebles produced a host of impressive black films and a crop of black actors in the 1990s. The dearth of black ownership of media platforms and distribution facilities, like black cinemas and competitive black television stations, greatly reduces the audience and impact of African art and thought. The paucity of black-owned media companies is not only a function of black poverty but part of the white racist agenda. Media companies derive most of their income from advertising. A case filed in 2000 by the Latino media against the US government showed that non-white media have been starved by the US government and the white advertising industry concentrated in New York’s Madison Avenue. The poor
are the target audience of most government advertising, especially for welfare and army recruitment programmes, but black media receive less than 0.02 percent of government advertising expenditure raised from taxes. Similarly, despite the theoretical $600 billion African American consumer expenditure, white companies that receive the majority of this expenditure refuse to direct the advertising funds to black media, especially black radio, which is the most common medium among blacks. It is unsurprising when the largest advertising spenders are military industrialists, like General Motors (GM), Daimler Chrysler, and Ford, that make consumer and military vehicles and hardware. Independent black radio attracts the majority of blacks, because it is more Afrocentric and less influenced by military industrialists, but the federal government delivered an insidious, fatal blow to black radio. This was done through the 1994 Federal Communications Commission Act, which saw a rapid decline in the number of blackowned and operated radio stations. They were taken over by big, white companies with more than their fair share of advertising funds. African Americans also face racist barriers in the television industry, which employs fewer black actors, technicians, writers, and other professionals. Blacks continued to be a rarity on television until the NAACP, led by Kweisi Mfume, threatened the major television networks with a black boycott in 2000. The improvement in the number of black programmes was slight. Black-owned television was rare, and the world-renowned Black Entertainment Television (BET) was swallowed up in the computer media boom of the late 1990s. The most widely recognized African American cultural form is rap music and the hip-hop lifestyle, which many wrongly criticize for singing about the drug and gun culture that permeates the society. Grown out of the lower middle-class neighborhoods of New York, a cultural hothouse of the blackworld in the 1970s, they were initially funded by traditional, white, Jewish money but soon became a viable investment for the ‘ghetto blacks’ they depicted. Niggaz With Attitude and Nas are politically philosophical rappers whose Afrocentric lyrics appeal to youth facing poverty and the heavyhandedness of racist military industrialists throughout the blackworld. In the mid-1990s, with the expansion and acknowledgement of the African American middle class, African American R&B/rap largely moved to more consumerist, fast-life lyrics. This fostered black pride, especially across the blackworld outside the United States, attracting billions of dollars in record sales and a hip-hop fashion sense that cut across races, as popularized by the likes of Sean Combs (aka P Diddy). Heart-searching, sickle-cell crisis tempering, soulful R&B tunes became worldwide anthems from the likes of Mary J Blige, Anita Baker, and Lauryn Hill. The hip-hop culture is a powerful vehicle towards political and economic progression, which authentic political leaders like Reverend Al Sharpton have identified and are trying to employ through the likes of Russell Simmons, the rap mogul. The black hip-hop dress and fashion is a multibillion-dollar business that the likes of Russell Simmons, Jayzee, FUBU, Master P, and Sean Combs wisely exploited. However, the huge fortunes made by sports personalities and entertainers are often stored with the military-industrialist bankers who pass it on to the white community, which continues to starve the black community of investment funds. The astronomical revenue and influence hip hop came to command in the 1990s needed to be directed and solidified so that African Americans didn’t continue the mistakes of their African forefathers—whose only alleged contributions to humanity were the talking drum and worshipping the dead with lavish parties, exotic burial goods, and large edifices.
Black culture has continued and strengthened in some cases, but the break and ‘theft’ of its economics by outsiders has yet to be properly addressed. In the eighties and nineties, more than 90 percent of the $600 billion black consumer expenditure, mainly derived from wages, was saved in white banks and spent in white-owned businesses while whites don’t reciprocate by spending in black businesses. The civil rights political assimilation came at the price of depriving black businesses investment capital and a consumer base, because blacks were ‘allowed to save and shop in Massa’s institutions’. This was the same colonial mentality across the Atlantic in Africa, where people jumped at European wares at the expense of items made locally, derogatively called ‘Igbo-made’ in Nigeria. Apart from franchising, light processing, and clothing industries also present across Africa, due to the inability to garner black resources worldwide, African Americans failed to significantly move into heavy industry and the technological sectors of the world’s most technologically advanced economy. Although it is known that whites achieved their heavy industries mostly through government giveaways, African American leaders and their African counterparts failed to gather their resources towards heavy industry by building viable Afrocentric financial structures and attitudes. No African American owned an iron and steel complex or a car/weapons assembly plant. Black farmers nearly disappeared in the nineties, as they continue to be financially and administratively redlined by the white institutions that their black, integrationist leaders favor. The level of financial redlining can only be imagined when the New York tristate area, the richest black community in the world and with a population of 3.6 million blacks, had its first blackowned, large supermarket in 2000. However, the mid-nineties saw a few people, especially in the Midwest, make huge fortunes in franchises and car retailing. Atlanta became a budding black economic center in the South, which attracted entrepreneurial blacks from the North. By the 2000 census, the migration flow reversed, as blacks migrated south while keeping in touch with the northern industrial bases through the Internet. Similar to World War I peace dividend of car and radio production that provided jobs in the Midwest and Northeast, the 1990s Cold War peace dividend of the computing and Internet boom provided African Americans with information technology (IT) jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities. The formation of IT companies and dot coms required low capital outlays. The success rate wasn’t great, mainly because African Americans were not well placed to make an early start. Many were kept out of the information loop in their respective professions or were financially restricted. The US government invested billions of taxpayer dollars in the research and development of computing through IBM and the New England universities, which enabled a few selected, non-black staff and students in the information loop to capitalize on future developments, including Microsoft and eBay. Many African Americans who enjoyed the late 1990s economic boom wrongly speculated in the stocks and property boom. They were big losers in the stock market, where a bit of goodwill and privy information and the powerful institutional players made a huge difference. Some hoped that blacks would escape the imminent property crash and be able to redirect their surplus equity value to a viable black economic base, but this was not to be. Political and economic leadership has not been able to properly harness the largest black income in the world to make significant multiplier effects throughout the blackworld. Instead, the historically black penchant of excessive enjoyment, arising from the ancient yam mentality, has seen the rise of a ‘blingbling’ materialistic culture exemplified by excessive metallic ornaments and expensive cars and drinks. The Yoruba have an irresponsible saying, Ariya olo pin, ojo iku ni ojo isimi (‘entertainment has no end, the day of death is the day of rest’). This has taken a literal meaning as the entertainment world
glamorizes fast living instead of a savings-oriented lifestyle. Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH, Operation Cash the Check, and others against white corporate giants (like Coca-Cola, Texaco, and Wall Street companies) have succeeded in securing a few distributorships for rich blacks while continuing to drain black income regardless of their charity-masked marketing programmes. The intensity of Jackson’s moral and political leadership began to wane in the 1990s, especially after his presidential candidacy. He became a mainstream politician renown throughout the world and was forced to deal with more abstract issues than those of his poor, black constituents. After twenty years at the pinnacle of black politics, he was expected to leave the frontline to become an elder statesman, advising the upcoming generation. The Nation of Islam and its leader, Minister Louis Farrakhan, grew but still paled to the point of insignificance when compared to integrationist black churches in terms of economic and political power. The 1930s noble quest to create an Afrocentric religion by its founders inadvertently confined its spread to the African diaspora, especially in the United States and the UK. They could attract a tiny fraction from the black churches but not in Africa, except for those countries with repressive Muslim regimes like Nigeria’s Abacha (1994–1999). The enigmatic Al Sharpton came out of the next generation of African American leaders. He came to prominence when fighting to bring to light the alleged sexual assault of an African American woman by powerful white officials in New York State. He vigorously supported employment and business issues concerning the black community, especially in his native Harlem. He was particularly vociferous against non-black businesses coming to drain black neighborhoods while correctly educating his people of their West African roots. Equally important, he shed light on police brutality and racial profiling in America, showing that the large numbers of black arrests were due to racial profiling and the adage that ‘you only find what you look for’. Having lived in America, Africa, and Europe, I found Sharpton to be one of the most authentic leaders in the blackworld. He was the leader who inspired confidence while I lived in Rudy Giuliani’s police state of New York in the 1990s. His handling of the Amodu Diallo case (whereby a young street trader from Guinea, West Africa, was shot dead by white policemen on his doorstep with forty-one bullets), confirmed Sharpton as the true de facto leader of black America. Normally, the government, especially Mayor Giuliani, was quick to castigate black men killed by police as deserving and provide criminal records to show that the dead was an unsavory character. On this occasion, Diallo had a spotless record, being a recent immigrant worker, and Sharpton strenuously highlighted the case, comparing it to that of some college undergraduates shot on the New Jersey Turnpike, also for flimsy reasons. An independent and progressive thinker, Sharpton’s authenticity was further highlighted during the 2000 elections, when he held the Democratic Party for ransom by refusing to toe the line by spouting the same talking points as the other candidates, because the Democrats refused to offer blacks any tangible promise of progress. In early 2000, he questioned the purpose of demonstration marches on Washington politicians and proposed a peaceful demonstration targeting their New York banker sponsors, who would bring about more tangible changes to avert more losses to the business classes. His call for peaceful demonstrations (to bring about a slowdown in business by overcrowding the seven entrances into Manhattan Island, the US financial center) brought a knee-jerk reaction from the establishment. Not that Sharpton is one to run from tough decisions. He had a near-fatal attack on his life during a demonstration. He was jailed in 2001 for protesting against using an airfield in Puerto Rico as a navy shooting range, which had caused an increase in the rate of cancer and other radiation-related
sicknesses in the black population. After being released from detention, Sharpton signified his intention to run for the US presidency in 2004, but he lost in the primaries. It appears to be a long shot for a black man, not a mulatto, to win the presidency of white America, but like Jesse Jackson, Sharpton might use clout and experience to further African American aims. It was hoped that he won’t become too endeared to the establishment. His greatest legacy would be if he could use his position to garner the church and hip-hop resources towards building a solid black economy in the Americas and Africa, strengthening the links between African Americans and the largest groups of Nigerians, Afro-Brazilians, and Afro-Caribbeans. Although most black legislators become overwhelmed and ineffective when they get to Washington, DC, Congressman John Conyers of Michigan was an exceptional representative of the blackworld. In addition to championing major domestic black issues, he introduced legislation to study the long-term effects of slavery and the question of reparations. The reparations issue heated up in the United States in the 1990s, being one of the ways to bring investment into the black community. Democratic President Bill Clinton officially apologized for the US role in African slavery, even though he was pilloried by Republicans like Tom Delay and there was no effort to pay reparations. It is only reasonable for the government and bankers to pay up their historical costs, which Africans could use to build their own financial base. Another exemplary African American is Randall Robinson, a writer, Washington lobbyist, and activist, who has pushed the reparations objective through writing books (The Debt) and other political measures. He was at the forefront of the US-South African anti-apartheid movement in 1986, antiHaitian racist deportations in 1994, and reparations for the race riots that destroyed Tulsa, Oklahoma’s ‘Black Wall Street’ in 1921 and Rosewood, Florida in 1923. However, Robinson is an unassuming man who has shown no intention of leading politically but who continues to contribute by agitating and lobbying in Washington, DC. There have been legal challenges for reparations against companies like the Tate and Lyle Sugar Company, while hip-hop media has contributed to the dissemination of information through hip-hop summits. The Olokun agenda shifted gears, with the September 11 terrorist attacks, as the conservative Ogun Complex successfully shifted public attention from the wars against Communists and drugs to the War against Terrorists. In a bizarre twist, which if it had happened in any black neighborhood would have landed all the players in jail for conspiracy, the friends of the CIA and the establishment who indirectly helped in the drug war to defeat the Cold War turned against them. The CIA ‘Massas’ son became president and needed help with his ratings and power. Richard Clarke, the head of counterterrorism in the United States, stated that President Bush knowingly dropped the ball by not having a plan until September 4, a week before the attacks. Bush refused to make a truly independent public inquiry into the incident by putting his father’s contemporary, Henry Kissinger, in charge, and he later refused a full exposure of the financial and oil maneuverings of the Arabic Muslim wing of the Ogun Complex. The day after the terrorist attacks, after spiriting away bin Laden’s relatives to safety in military jets, Bush instructed his counterterrorism chief to find a way to pin the attacks on Iraq, despite the clear fact that bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda wouldn’t have dealt with Saddam Hussein, who was regarded as a sellout. As stated in the 2003 Labor Party conference in England, the 2001 principle of preemptive strikes was an ultra-right-wing 1990s conspiracy designed in the Bible Belt to dictate this century’s quest for oil under the guise of a religious war called the War against Terrorism. This was a refined use of Olokun to further the White Ogun industrialist agenda.
The right-wing conservatives stifled public opinion by using their normal Olokun ‘fear factor’ that bred paranoiac patriotism, as they advanced the law-and-order agenda in the Patriot Act for a police state mentality. This gave them a free hand to pursue preemptive wars that further enriched the arms, oil, and biological/pharmaceutical companies of the Ogun Complex. The only solution to the sluggish world economy implemented by the Bush presidency was the War against Terrorism, $200 billion for new fighter jets, and $100 billion post-Iraq War contracts given to cronies. These were monies that, if invested in the blackworld (held hostage by $200 billion in debt to Western bankers) would exponentially promote worldwide prosperity and probably the loss of a bit of paranoiac control, which the Ogun war merchants were not willing to relinquish. According to the legal system, used to excessively imprison blacks, the Bush right-wingers have the motive and the means to create the terrorist dilemma themselves through direct instigation or, most likely, by purposely letting down their guard—criminal negligence, indeed! Whatever the case might be, African American issues like reparations have been put on the mainstream back burner, a tactic reminiscent of the 1909 civil rights movement delayed for two world wars, after which white nations rebuilt and then neglected the African input again. A few blacks have been caught up in the patriotic frenzy, failing to realize that the historic battle is between the sons of white Abraham/Ibrahim brought by the dogmatic Olokun era. The Taliban had a hand in the Muslim upheaval in West Africa that ultimately led to the destruction of the Oyo empire, while Christian Europeans carted blacks away to American plantations. Until the mid-1990s, bin Laden and his Arabic friends in Sudan carried out genocide and continued to enslave indigenous Africans, while the United States supported them for Arabic oil. Though labeled a battle of two arid and warlike civilizations, Islam and Christianity, the African American, with his older African civilization from the Land of Love, has a duty to the world and, most importantly, to himself, to make a unique contribution towards resolving the crisis. This duty can’t be military like as it was during the world wars but must be accomplished in peace, truth, and justice. Realizing that this thousand-year war that can’t be won with blood, care must be taken that it doesn’t ultimately destroy centuries of African blood, sweat, and tears used to build the Western economy, which is still expected to pay them. The next few decades of religious war could destroy not only the Western world but the heart of blackworld. Peace can be achieved only from the truthful and wise judgment of the older civilization. The lack of black leaders across the blackworld is attributed to the phenomenon of wrongly identifying black progress in personal terms instead of a worldwide, generational phenomenon. Tying movements to charismatic leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr and Malcolm X usually causes a problem of succession. Charisma can’t be inherited, but ideas do pass on smoothly. In addition to the old War on Drugs and the new War on Terrorism, African American leaders need to address serious economic issues like the black poverty rate, which was more than double that of whites in 2000. This was clear in the New Orleans Katrina disaster, where poor blacks were left to die by the white authorities. Other pressing issues include excessive criminalization, the urgent need for urban renewal in black neighborhoods, the provision of medical coverage, especially for sicklers, the financial redlining that kills black industry, and the excessive fragmentation and hemorrhaging of black financial resources and institutions. As long as the list might be, it is all about getting the right unifying Afrocentric perception. African Americans have lost their place as the second-largest ethnic group in the United States, through the mass immigration of whites from Latin America called Hispanics. Without a more racially balanced
immigration policy, the black community may find that other races eat the fruits of black labor while blacks fade away, like the white Brazilians prayed that their blacks would eventually fade away. Some in the African American community confuse linguistics with race and are lured into a false perception that Hispanic immigrants are minorities like them, but they have come to realize that the only difference between American whites and the mainly white Hispanics is the language. As later witnessed from the killing of an innocent teenager, Trayvon Martin by an Hispanic white man, George Zimmerman, who was freed by an all-white jury in Florida. The problem is not in the language, as African Americans know well, but in the lighter skin color of European supremacists. Afro-Brazilians, the largest black ethnolinguistic group, were still socio-politically disjointed into regions and captaincies. Salvador in Bahia was still the black heartland, where pockets of Yoruba speakers remained, and Akara (fried, ground black-eyed beans) and other pepper-laced Yoruba foods were commonplace. In the eighties and nineties, Northeast and Southeast Brazil were the most populous Black regions, with the northeast state of Bahia having a 79 percent black population. Another northeastern state, Maranhao, had a 78 percent black population. Southeast Rio de Janeiro had 44 percent, and Sao Paulo, the most populous Brazilian state, had 25 percent. Afro-Brazilians were not spared from the HIV/AIDS and drugs plagues that disproportionately beset the blackworld in the eighties. They required some form of cohesion to move forward in a country where, according to the Data Focha Institute, 87 percent of whites were racist. The white military rulers continued to deny the existence of racism in Brazil, but it was not their racism that spelt the end of their reign, because both whites and blacks suffered from their misadministration. Like Nigeria and Ghana in the late seventies, Brazilian militaryindustrial regimes caused economic decline and worsened the IMF debt burden. Brazil owed the highest foreign debt in the world at $100 billion and did not have much to show for it in terms of infrastructure. This led to a huge, multiracial, pro-democracy rally against the army, which came to power in the 1964 right-wing coup to prevent further socioeconomic reforms. These were frowned upon by Rockefeller interests, to whom the military regimes were paying 75 percent of Brazil’s export earnings as debt repayment. In 1976, Citibank made 20 percent of its global profits from Brazil’s interest payments. The foreign loans for fostering rapid industrialization and socioeconomic infrastructure were concentrated in the cities, especially Sao Paulo. On paper and in GNP figures, Brazil grew into one of the world’s largest and newest industrial and agricultural economies, but income growth was concentrated in the hands of a few Citibank-friendly Europeans, while Afro-Brazilians remained in abject poverty in the slums. Most Afro-Brazilians had migrated and continued to be joined by millions from the rural areas, where they had been oppressed and pushed out of agriculture due to unfair land distribution that saw 1 percent of Brazilians owning 40 percent of the land. This was in addition to more than a million uncompensated rural dwellers being displaced by the construction of hydroelectric dams that provided more than 93 percent of Brazil’s electricity. A large percent of Afro-Brazilians lived in poverty, high in the favelas, away from sight and with little or no socioeconomic infrastructure. Only 1 percent of blacks passed through universities, and widespread racist stereotypes prevented them from getting fair employment and remuneration. A significant number of the uneducated blacks in the favelas were used as house servants and cheap labor in the new factories, while many were left with no option but the illegal economy. With 1 percent of Brazilians, mainly whites, owning 40 percent of land and more than half of blacks
surviving on less than one dollar a day, a few young men resorted to supplying drugs or kidnapping the rich. This led to a conservative backlash in the 1980s that brought about police brutality that outweighed the social malaise, especially when considering that police accounted for more than twenty deaths each day. Favelas became a breeding ground for drugs and HIV/AIDS, and due to the lack of positive governmental concern, this festered for a long time. However, the general economic downturn led directly to change. The exorbitant petrol price increases and withdrawal of subsidies in the 1970s led the largely white middle class and black leaders to push for a democratic government and better rationalization of resources. The military government, put on the defensive by the shattered economy amid claims of mismanagement and corruption, allowed pro-democracy movements to foster a political opening known as Abertura from 1979 to 1985. In addition to the domestic conditions, Afro-Brazilians were agitated by the mid-1970s liberation wars of their fellow Portuguese-speaking Africans in Angola and Mozambique. Abdias do Nascimento was a co-founder of Democratic Labor Party (PDT). He spearheaded The Movimento Negro Unificado (MNU) formed in 1978 in Sao Paulo, and it became an important black movement that brought blacks together across the vast nation to voice their complaints over racial inequalities. The most national of all movements, the MNU focused on old issues like discrimination and lack of employment and new issues like healthcare in the HIV/AIDS era and police brutality in the War against Drugs in the law-and-order era. Florestan Fernandes, the prominent academician that had assailed Feyre’s Luso-Tropicalism, initially turned down invitations by Lula Da Silva in 1980 to join the newly created Workers Party, but eventually joined in 1986 and was elected as a deputy in Sao Paulo. He helped elaborate the 1988 constitution but soon retired from active politics due to health reasons. His student Cardoso joined the political right. The spearhead of the Afro-Brazilian movement was again Abdias do Nascimento, the resilient leader of TEN who unified blacks in the first National Negro Congress , which won the Afro-Brazilians voting rights between 1940 and 1964. In 1983, he contested and was elected as the first Afro-Brazilian to fight his people’s cause. By 1985, civil rights movements towards the political, cultural, and spiritual development of Afro-Brazilians blossomed into more than four hundred groups, mostly regional in scope. In a nation with 47 percent Afro-Brazilians, Nascimento was the only Afro-Brazilian in the 1985 constituent assembly working towards the 1988 constitution. Nevertheless, he fully represented his people by demanding that the new constitution defined racism as a crime against humanity and the institution of mandatory literacy campaigns. Unsurprisingly, most of his demands were not met. Serving on the Foreign Relations Committee, Nascimento led Congress in articulating anti-apartheid measures, supporting African liberation movements like South Africa’s ANC and Namibia’s SWAPO, as well as other measures on the Pan-African world stage. The new democratic government, in continuance of the Brazilian racial democracy myth, approached the black issue as a poverty issue. However, with the creation of the Palmares Cultural Foundation (FCP), it followed the constitutional requirement towards AfroBrazilian civil rights and cultural promotion. In the tradition of civil rights leaders of the Romantic nations, cultural revolution was necessary. The system had made it economically and socially detrimental to be regarded as black, which was
associated with lower wages and social odium. Out of the 47 percent blacks in Brazil, only 6 percent admitted to being black, while the rest claimed to be mulatto. Due to their international isolation by linguistic barriers and racist immigration laws, many Afro-Brazilians were systematically indoctrinated to see themselves as an inferior race. Some wouldn’t even vote for a fellow African, while most black politicians didn’t campaign on black issues. Despite the apparent racial inequalities that pervaded Brazilian society, with blacks having double the poverty, illiteracy, and police brutality rates of whites, open discussion of racism, even in the democratic era, was still taboo. This prevented the MNU from becoming a national political party as it became fractionalized by the 1990s. Nascimento was instrumental in the creation of the Democratic Labor Party, but it was not limited or identified as a wholly Afro-Brazilian party. Prominent MNU and other Afro-Brazilian civil rights activists were courted by parties for their public profile in their regions, and the activists often chose to run on party platforms that had similar objectives. Once elected, Afro-Brazilian objectives were usually relegated down the party’s list of priorities, and the political arena became a weak avenue for pursuing black objectives. The Brazilian parties often fielded high percentages of blacks, but many weren’t voted for by their own people. In Salvador, with the highest black population at 74 percent, Afro-Brazilians formed 50.6 percent of candidates fielded by Democratic Labor Party (PDT); 57.5 percent were fielded by the Liberal Party (PL), 52.6 percent by the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT), and 42.8 percent by the Christian Democratic Party (PDC). Only 34.4 percent were elected as local officials in 1992, which was more than double the 11.4 percent elected in 1988. Although there were improvements in the numbers of blacks in public offices, their political significance and numbers were still below what their demographic importance deserved. There were a few governors and no senators. Despite having a much higher national population ratio, AfroBrazilian’s political power was as weak as that of blacks with much lower population ratios in Western two-party systems (blacks in the US Democratic Party and the British Labor Party). The AfroBrazilian movement was dissipated by the suspect multiparty system that was also implemented in Nigeria. Further improvements in the Afro-Brazilian community were pushed through forums outside the multiparty political system. In accordance with the demands of the Romantic cultural revolutionaries, as stated in the new constitution, the federal government created and funded the Palmares Cultural Foundation (FCP) under the Ministry of Culture. The foundation was named Palmares, being the name of the largest quilombo under Zumbi in the 1600s, and the new foundation was to promote AfroBrazilian culture through research, with the aims of deterring racial discrimination and harassment and promoting racial harmony. The FCP’s most important task was the accreditation of quilombos and assisting their residents in attaining titles to their land. The task was done by researching and mapping the quilombos to establish the legitimacy of seven hundred claims out of more than three thousand quilombos, which, initially, overburdened the FCP despite its constitutional access to federal funds. The FCP was exceptional, because few organizations could cut across state lines to have the national effect of a black movement, especially after the fracturing of the MNU. One of the few nongovernmental organizations to aid blacks was the Conselho Nacional de Entidades Negras (CONEN or National Council for Black Entities), which brought together differently oriented groups from all over the federation under one umbrella to pursue strategies of mutual support and advance the black movement’s agenda on a national level. On the international level, the Ooni of Ife, Oba Okunade Sijuwade, often acknowledged by AfroBrazilians traditionalists as the supreme African leader, was well received during a visit to Brazil.
Most movements remained regional, like Ile Aye, created in 1974 from Liberdade, the poor suburb of Salvador and center of black consciousness. Ile Aye started as a Bahian Afro-carnival group but developed well-known social programmes that focused on raising black consciousness and education. Ile Aiye, in Yoruba, strictly translates to ‘land of the living’ but means ‘planet earth’. Ile Aiye signified the blackworld in the Brazilian context, and its membership was restricted to Afro-Brazilians. Ile Aye celebrated African beauty, hair, and music by developing rhythms that combined the Candomble Yoruba drums. A controversy arose over accusations that Ile Aye was racist because it catered to blacks and rejected white finances and cooperation, which Ile Aye believed commercialized and watered down the Afrocentrism of the carnivals in Rio de Janeiro and other areas. Olodum (shortened from the Yoruba word Olodumare meaning almighty god) was a Bahian carnival samba-reggae group that focused on raising black consciousness and pride. Its international reputation allowed it to sponsor computer classes for poor black youth. Olodum extended its membership to all races, enabling it to spread the AfroBahian culture across the world through the likes of the legendary white musician Paul Simon. The Iyalode, meaning head/chief of women in Yoruba promoted female education and self-esteem in Bahia, especially going against the popular Brazilian saying that ‘white women are for marriage, mulattos are for sex, and black women are for work’. Other Bahian groups like Ara Ketu (meaning ‘natives of Ketu’, the historical Yoruba city-state) and Male Debale became household names. The Steve Biko Cooperative specialized in preparing poor black youth for the university entrance exam (the vestibular) but broadened its goals to include consciousness raising. The first week of the course included classes on human rights, legal rights, and competences in the market place. A recent and innovative development was a scheme in Rio de Janeiro whereby children were organized to be tourist guides in the favelas. It was promoted outside mainstream Brazil to raise money for education and awareness of the black communities, while effectively countering excessive negative media coverage. Even without the fantastic sights of New York and Paris, it had the propensity to attract a huge number of visitors and income from across the blackworld, especially those who want to feel the environment and realize, as said in Nigeria, ‘Na poor I poor, I no craze!’ – ‘I am poor but I am not crazy!’ Glossy Afro-Brazilian magazines like Raca Brasil and Black People started in the eighties and contributed to cultural awareness and black pride across the world, like the African American magazines Ebony and Essence. Despite their limited resources, the various nongovernmental groups achieved tremendous success since the 1980s. Fernando Cardoso, who described himself as slightly mulatto and participated in the research by Florestan Fernandes on ‘The Integration of Blacks into the Class Society’, which debunked earlier theories of racial democracy, was to take an active role in the new democratic era. The sociologist from wealthy parents moved a bit to the political right and was elected for senate in 1986 under the banner of Party for Democratic Movement. He took part in the 1988 Constituent Assembly and was his party’s Senate leader until 1992. In 1994 as Finance Minister, he pushed the Plano Real advocated by academicians and stabilized the Brazilian economy by curtailing its hyper-inflation. Based on his success as finance minister, he resigned and stood for elections against Lula Da Silva, who he beat with a landslide victory in 1994 and 1998. President Fernando Cardoso engaged in liberalization of the economy and massive privatization. He was heavily criticized by his former leftist colleagues over his right wing IMF inspired policies and the increase of the public debt to GDP ratio from 30% to 50%. However, the economy improved and most
important was the implementation of his findings in the earlier research conducted on Afro-Brazilian socioeconomic exclusion. He reserved 20 percent of all federal posts for Afro-Brazilians. There have been significant increases in the number of AfroBrazilian graduates, as well as the numbers employed in academia and government organizations. There is still a long way to go before AfroBrazilians are fully represented in accordance with their population ratios. There is still a ceiling that halts black progress in many sectors, as only the lower rungs of the sociopolitical ladder are relinquished to blacks. Cardoso and his successor fought against the army in the eighties but found it more difficult fighting the Western IMF military industrialists for economic concessions. Cardoso was only slightly more successful with human rights issues. Analysis presented by the Global Justice Center in 2000 showed that of those killed by police in Sao Paulo, 51 percent were shot in the back, 49.5 percent were between eighteen and twenty-five years old, 60 percent had no prior criminal record, and 23 percent were shot more than five times. The excessive police brutality showed that for every AfroBrazilian injured, five were killed—zero tolerance for life. The infamous ‘street cleaning’ and killing of street kids did not completely stop in the new democracy, especially in youth detention centers, where many were still tortured and beaten to death. Despite Cardoso’s clamor for human rights, police brutality did not decrease, especially with the increased industrialization based on military hardware. Without access to Western markets or an aggressive foreign policy sponsoring state terrorism and war, Brazil’s arms industry could only profit locally with conservative law-and-order campaigns for more armed police against the black criminal element, public enemy number one. For Afro-Brazilians to take their rightful position as the majority group in Brazil and a major force across the blackworld, there must be a more significant cultural revolution that enables them to proudly identify as African. Most importantly, there must be a more equitable distribution of income, which entails an economic revolution that discards the Ogun ideology of war at the heart of Brazil’s economy. An ideology that wages war on the environment and people can benefit only a few people and needs to be changed. The use of Brazil’s vast solar energy, instead of oil and building dams that kill rivers and destroy ecosystems, is a starting point. AfroBrazilians must be intellectually and economically empowered to exploit their historical relationships throughout the blackworld, especially in Africa and with African Americans, but not by causing wars with its restless military-industrial complex. They could act as a counterweight to the blocked US markets to Cuba, Haiti, and other smaller black nations in the Western Hemisphere.
Chapter 23: Things Fall Apart…Together The rest of the Blackworld’s similar successes and failures (1980– 1999) Haiti, the first Western-styled black nation (and one of the most important, though poorest, in the Americas), was not spared the ignominious plagues of the eighties. Unsubstantiated propaganda claimed that HIV/AIDS started in Haiti, because it was one of the first places to experience an epidemic in 1982. However, Haitians contacted HIV/AIDS the same way as other parts of the blackworld. The United States and the Catholic Church continued to support nineteen year-old ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier after his father’s death. Baby Doc was easier to manipulate than an adult Duvalierist with a strong set of Afrocentric beliefs. ‘Papa Doc’ had weaned the Haitian army away from the Catholic mulatto elites by replacing them with African traditionalists who remained in control of the army. In addition, the rural militia created by Papa Doc served as a counterweight against an urban, mulatto-inspired revolt. Baby Doc was able to pacify opposing groups due to his lack of strong beliefs and by buying their allegiance. His lack of experience made it impossible for him to turn around an economy that was based on coffee and sugar against a mountain of Western tariffs and subsidies. Although Haiti had been France’s most profitable colony for a century, it was now the poorest nation of the Americas, and like most other islands, it was like an exhausted sugar mine. The people were prevented from moving their economy to the industrial stage, and in hope of a pittance, they were made to scrape the bottom of the foreignowned sugar/coffee ‘mines’ in the Citibank, Western-controlled economy. By the early 1980s, with the renewed conservative/IMF attack, the rug was pulled from under Haiti’s economy and Baby Doc. Like nearly every other country across the blackworld, the foreign exchange markets were sabotaged and destabilized, leaving them at the mercy of IMF and its destructive SAP conditions that were rejected by resorting to import controls. This led to nepotism and corruption and the distortion of the real economy, which contracted 15 percent each year. There was a massive ‘brain drain’ as people migrated to the United States, Canada, France, and other Caribbean nations. A large number of doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, and other professionals found work in US cities, where they interacted with the African American community. A small percent became involved in drugs, especially as Haiti was initially used as a transit point for South American cocaine. Due to the public experience of high-level corruption, some younger immigrants were apt to turn to white-collar crime, even though there was a linguistic barrier. When it came to black fraud, Haitians came second only to Nigerians in the United States (like Zairians were the second-likeliest group in Europe after Nigerians to directly reclaim their monies from the European financial system). Legal and illegal money remittances to the families and businesses of Haitian migrants rose to more than one-third of Haiti’s total earning from exports. With over 40 percent of the population below the poverty line due to the stringent IMF conditions, demonstrations and riots were aggravated by the deaths of demonstrators in November 1985. Baby Doc could have used the Macoutes to brutally suppress the riots, but realizing the futility of the imposed IMF conditions, he asked the US government to provide him with a military jet on February 7, 1986 and fled into exile in France with his family. The army took over, and military-industrialists playing both sides (one through the IMF), ushered in an
era of the type of sociopolitical upheaval witnessed in other parts of the blackworld. General Henri Namphy, the head of the new military regime, promised a just and good transition to democracy. In the meantime, the Catholic Church and mulatto elites saw the IMF upheavals as an opportunity to reclaim their hegemony, and they incited mobs to the streets to revenge the wrongs done by the former Duvalierist supporters. Many of the prominent Duvalierists fled the country with the help of the new government, though more than two thousand were lynched and the properties of those who escaped were destroyed. Many Catholic priests were at the forefront of the lynching of Duvalierists who were traditional African believers. Although Baby Doc wasn’t a genuine Africanist, he had protected the diehards from his father’s regime and other traditional believers. Soon the cry of Dechoukay (revenge) from the mulatto urban elite and the Church power base was directed at the top army officers, including Namphy. The army resisted mulatto and Church calls for it to step down by brutally suppressing riots and allowing the former Macoutes and Duvalierists back on the streets. Under pressure to return to democracy, a constituent assembly was nominated from supposedly safe nominees, who turned around to produce an anti-Duvalierist constitution. The new constitution prescribed the creation of an independent Electoral Council to conduct and supervise elections, and it banned all Duvalierists from partaking in the new system for ten years. With the current military leadership affected by the constitution, they supported protests with slogans like Aba Konstitisyon Kominis! (‘Down with the Communist constitution’). Haitians voted in favor of the constitution on March 29, 1987, and demonstrations erupted in June when Namphy insisted that only the army could supervise elections. He retreated after a few deaths, but the militant Church demonstrators called for a coup, which was unsuccessful and led to more deaths. A few weeks before the November elections, the independent Electoral Council released the names of twenty-three acceptable candidates after disqualifying twelve other candidates for being former associates of the Duvalier government. A few hours later, the Macoutes launched an attack on the Electoral Council’s building and burnt it down. On election day, November 29, 1987, the Church and mulatto radio stations, which had been instigating against the traditionalist Duvalierists, were sabotaged, and their transmitters were destroyed by armed Macoute men. The ensuing violence led to the cancellation of the elections. Namphy created another Electoral Council to supervise new elections, but the first four leading candidates in the previous election refused to partake in new elections and called for a strike. New elections were held on January 17, 1988, and Leslie Magnat was declared the winner with 50 percent of the vote. Magnat was the World Bank official who became Baby Doc’s finance minister and who claimed that 36 percent of Haiti’s national income was being stolen, in what was likely Western inspired corruption propaganda. Magnat lasted only a few months as he foolishly set out to rid the Haitian government of its overwhelmingly Africanist military influence by removing Namphy as the head of the army and Colonel Prosper Avril (also a former Duvalierist) as the commander of the Presidential Guard. Two days later, on June 19, 1988, the Presidential Guard mounted a coup that brought Namphy back as president and Avril as his assistant and sent Magnat into exile in the Dominican Republic. Although Baby Doc thawed government relations with the Catholic Church and its mulatto elite by stopping their repression and giving them back the economic concessions lost under Papa Doc, in 1988, after their cries for vengeance and lynching former Duvalierists were defeated, the Church still resented many Duvalierists and voiced their incitements from the pulpits.
On Sunday, September 11, 1988, several hundred rural Africanist militias marched on Father JeanBetrand Aristide’s Catholic church, where he campaigned against the Duvalierist military government of Namphy and Avril. Thirteen people were killed and dozens wounded before the church was set on fire. Six days later, there was a palace coup, and Avril announced that he was ‘forced to accept the presidency of the military government’. The September 17 ‘window dressing’ impressed the public, especially as the United States gave Avril a public endorsement and $30 million in aid. A US spokesman declared, ‘We are encouraged by what the Avril government is doing’.* The positive public approval was short lived, as Avril’s government was made to follow IMF conditions. The West wasn’t overly interested in local politics as long as Avril signed up with the conservative agenda. After fewer than eighteen months in power, Avril realized that Haiti was ungovernable with the IMF conditions. On March 12, 1990, he left on a US military jet, like Baby Doc, to self-exile in the United States. After several months of protracted political wrangling, Aristide won the June 1991 elections. Although Aristide belonged to the Church and mulatto elite powerhouse, he was a black radical whose populist intent was clear and rejected by both the Catholic mulatto elite and the Africanist army. He was overthrown and exiled by the head of the army, General Raoul Cedras, as the army came back to power. In June 1992, Marc Bazin, who had been resoundingly defeated by Aristide in the elections, was made prime minister. Trade embargoes by the Organization of American States couldn’t have any sufficient impact, because IMF conditions had sapped the life out of the economy. Dodgy officials and businessmen used the embargo to make more money through sanction busting and overpricing goods to the consumer. The army had to struggle to keep control against the IMF upheaval, which was worsened by ancient mulatto and Church influences. * Segal, The Black Diaspora, 222. Without immigrant dollar remittances to survive, the lower classes emigrated in large numbers (primarily by unsavory means, which included unseaworthy vessels that killed thousands), while many others became drug mules. The cocaine trade flourished through the availability of a large pool of people willing to risk being caught in the United States as mules rather than risk drowning in unsafe vessels in the Gulf of Mexico. Despite being drained by Citibank IMF military industrialists, Haitian refugees received inhumane treatment at the hands of the US establishment, which arrested them and returned them to Haiti. The US navy formed a blockade that flouted international law to stop Haitians from immigrating to the United States, while the mostly white Cubans were given free entry. The international embarrassment caused by the conservative US Republican racist policy was continued by the new Democratic president, Clinton, who piled unfair pressure on the Haitian government to allow the return of Aristide. Despite United States and UN diplomatic pressures leading to worldwide oil and arms sanctions and freezing Haiti’s foreign accounts on June 23, 1993, the army, led by Cedras, refused to let Aristide return to power. Eventually, under the real threat of a US/UN invasion in September 1994, the army stepped down, and Aristide returned to power on October 15, 1994, after three years in exile. The restoration of ‘democracy’ and Aristide didn’t pacify tempers agitated by the IMF conditions, which had dogged every leader since Baby Doc. A US-inspired UN ‘peacekeeping’ force had to militarily exercise authority in Haiti from March 31, 1995 to November 30, 1997. Aristide disbanded the Afrocentric Duvalierist army but lost the elections on February 7, 1996. President Rene Preval also
found Haiti impossible to rule, especially with a hostile parliament. Like other black nations that stagnated since the early 1980s, the Haitian economy stagnated and worsened over the intervening twenty-year period. Western markets remained closed, and Haitians were deprived of investment funds, subsidies, and tariffs in the name of IMF free-trade conditions. The large numbers of emigrants still contributed a significant amount of foreign earnings, because with Western barriers and tariffs, labor was the only exportable commodity in the export-oriented economy. Those emigrating still faced numerous barriers including emigration restrictions, linguistic differences, lack of job training, and racist employment practices. The Catholic Church, locally controlled by the mulatto middle class, restricted access to education to those who kept their YorubaCongo traditions. With the Haiti educational system in their hands, children of black voodoo practitioners were prevented from attending school, which led to the continued, relatively high illiteracy rate of black Haitians. The Church’s negative influences were not only directed at black children but also at their naturalist African religion, based on the environment. Trees and their mighty roots were important aspects in shrines of the Orishas in the rainforest religions, so the Church and the establishment set out to clear Haiti of trees, leaving less than 1 percent of tree cover before the ‘green era’ of the nineties. However, the sins against the environment were ruthlessly punished in 2004 by rains that flooded the treeless nation and swept many innocent thousands away. Coffee and sugar were still the main exports, but on their own, they couldn’t provide full employment to the majority of the population, especially with the unfair sugar subsidies in the Western world. Haitians, like other Africans, retained their artistic qualities, which were more fully represented by their paintings and artworks, because their Creole Haiti French language (Yoruba-French) was a barrier to success in international hip-hop music. Nevertheless, the vibrant, Haitian musical scene included juju music and hip-hop with the same rhythmic call-and-response melodies. Haiti, the first modern black nation, was the poorest in the Western Hemisphere and had a long way to go to fulfill the dreams of its 1804 revolution, but the rest of the blackworld had to be free before meaningful house reordering could commence. South Africa was the last black African nation to gain political independence—not because its people were docile, but because Nguniland had the largest European settler community in Africa. The black movement encountered an increasingly repressive reactionary government as the leader of the South African Students Organization, Steve Biko, and many others, were killed. Many fled into exile or were tortured and imprisoned. Thabo Mbeki returned to Southern Africa in 1971 but due to the jailing and killing of activists, ANC set up their headquarters and army of freedom fighters in Lusaka and neighboring countries. In 1978, the white South African presidency passed from Vorster to P W Botha, both of the National Party (NP) that had ruled since 1948. Botha’s government launched attacks in 1981 against supposed guerrilla ‘terrorists’ in Mozambique and Angola. The white regime made it clear that it was ready to attack independent African nations in its desperate attempt to hold onto power in South Africa and South West Africa (Namibia), an ex-German colony. South Africa developed a nuclear bomb to scare other African nations away from helping the freedom fighters. In response, Nigeria made it clear that it wasn’t scared of the white regime’s devices, and some generals boasted of being confident of taking on the white regime and fighting with Ogun (biological and spiritual) warfare. Although Nigeria’s threat appeared to be an empty boast, the white
regime continued to develop weapons to help it stay in power, including biological weapons to be used against the black populations and supporters. With the independence of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), the apartheid regime felt the increased pressure from its freedom fighters and their supporters within and outside South Africa. With Mbeki’s agreement with Robert Mugabe, there were signs that the liberation struggle was getting more militarized, while Nigerians and other nations pushed for sanctions at the UN. The rapid industrialization achieved by whites since the 1940s, with cheap black labor and abundant mines, was targeted with sanctions and increasing black strikes. In 1982, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) was created by the Council of Unions of South Africa (CUSA) through Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa. Ramaphosa was born in 1952 in Soweto Johannesburg and was a former member of the South African Students Union (SASO) and Black Peoples Convention (BPC) in the 1970s, when he was jailed twice. He returned to university for further studies and after graduation went to work for the unionists. Raised in the Johannesburg mining region, Ramaphosa, as NUM General Secretary, was able to rapidly increase the membership of NUM from 6,000 in 1982 to 300,000 in 1992. In 1985, he broke NUM away from CUSA to form Congress of South African Trade Unions, which formed an alliance with a coalition of 400 non-racial non-violent groups of students, workers, churches and others called the United Democratic Front (UDF). NUM, UDF and ANC launched a Mass Democratic Movement in which Cyril Rampahosa took a leading role. Countering Africans were conservative calls for restraint by the Thatcher and Reagan governments, who vouched for ‘constructive engagement’ with the racist regime. The calls were reminiscent of calls made after the US Civil War, when President Johnson unsuccessfully fought for ‘constructive engagement’ with the Southern slavers against the Radical Republicans’ immediate reconstruction programmes. The Western conservatives blocked every move to place embargoes on South African gold and labeled the liberation fighters as terrorists and Communists, not to be dealt with. Archconservative Congressman Dick Cheney (later US vice president) earned the ignoble title of the most pro-apartheid congressman by voting more than seventy times against anti-apartheid laws in the United States. The apartheid government employed delaying tactics to ease pressure by passing a constitution that extended the voting franchise to mulattos and Asians but not the black African majority, which was left to hope for future progress. They set out to divide the black freedom movement by sponsoring Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi Inkatha’s Freedom Party to breed clashes between Xhosas and Zulus in Natal and around Johannesburg. With Mbeki, Mandela, Tambo and Sisulu all being Xhosa, who revived the ANC through its Youth Wing, the apartheid government instigated tribal divisions by promoting ANC as an Xhosa attempt to dominate their slightly more populous Zulu cousins within the Nguni sphere, despite ANC being formed by John Dube, a Zulu. Xhosas, whose homeland was in East Cape colony, were the first to lose their lands to the Dutch and English colonists. Being situated in the English controlled Cape Colony that a nonracial franchise, a larger proportion of the population were made politically conscious with the loss of their voting franchise at the 1910 beginning of the Union. This coupled with the fact that there were slightly more political freedoms in the area led to the initial overwhelming influence of the Xhosa, which the apartheid government exploited for their traditional divide and rule tactics.
The main bone of contention the white military industrialists had was the black movement’s rightful stance, which was to take back the gold and diamond mines for the benefit of the African people instead of the merchants in London, Amsterdam, and New York who controlled the wealth. The nationalization of the productive resources of the country, the mines and good agricultural land stolen from Africans, was labeled Communism by the white apartheid government, the US Republicans, and the UK Conservative party. They continued the delay tactics to give them more time to find a way out, and another piece of the apartheid system was brought down in 1985 as anti-interracial sex and marriage laws were repealed. The appeasements did little to stop an increase in the diplomatic and military offensives against the apartheid government, especially with the ANC becoming more equipped and organized and international calls for sanctions strengthening. The international white establishment gave Bishop Desmond Tutu the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize to signify that he was working according to their favored route, like Martin Luther King Jr was awarded the prize in the sixties due to his nonviolent approach. Despite the encouragement of peace talks and the promise to scrap racist pass laws, on May 19, 1986, Botha launched preemptive attacks against ANC ‘terrorist training camps’ in the three neighboring nations: Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Zambia. Still unable to control the rising black resistance, the Botha government declared a nationwide state of emergency on June 12, which in effect was a state of war waged against blacks by the security services. Blacks were shot, arrested, tortured, and killed by the desperate apartheid government. Over the next two years, with the pressure building to the June 6– 8, 1988 strike of two million black workers, it was apparent that the apartheid government had to find a way of convincing the ANC to accept a political solution without economic independence. Otherwise, the downward slide of the economy would continue. Many whites were just workers in the system and not fearful of change, but the few ranch owners and businessmen were the nucleus of the conservative Nationalist Party. With the end of Cold War, the overwhelming pressure forced out the conservative Botha government in 1989 to allow the more liberal Frederik Willem de Klerk to preside over the dismantling of the apartheid system. Winnie Mandela and her two daughters, the international faces of black South Africa, aroused immense international support against the apartheid system that had jailed her husband for more than twenty years. Mandela cut a figure of a strong African woman fighting the white oppressor that had negated her African male and resorted to anything to keep power. She held onto the ANC demand of a meaningful political and economic independence. Thabo Mbeki remained the face of the liberation movement. The unions, white businessmen and liberals travelled to hold talks with him in Lusaka to find a way forward, and he undertook the first secret talks with apartheid government. When the serious talks began, he was replaced by Cyril Ramaphosa, who had grown in statue with his union power. Ramaphosa was to become ANC General Secretary in 1991 as he ironed out the resolution details with Roelf Meyer of the National Party. Many people have cruised the resultant deal for black freedom that Ramaphosa made as selling out cheap and the whites found their ‘friendly Negro’, who was willing to drop immediate nationalization and income redistribution demands. Without deep convictions like Mbeki and true freedom fighters, it was a typical unionist compromise with management, which never really frees the slave but fattens both sides of the negotiating table. This perception was not helped by the fact Ramaphosa ended up in the boardrooms of most of the military-industrialists and became one of the richest men in South Africa, whose companies continued
racist practices. Others argue that the whole black political elite realized that ‘half bread was better than none’—especially when considering that all other African nations that had received political independence were still in economic shackles. Nationalization of mines and immediate land redistribution wasn’t possible without war. Winnie Mandela and others who refused the compromise were labeled hardliners and hounded. The end of the Cold War made it easier for the West to deal without the fear of losing the monopoly of gold and diamonds to the Russians. President de Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC in 1990 and released Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners on February 11. He announced plans to abolished apartheid laws in February 1991, as plans for a constituent assembly were set into motion and completed in 1993. Thabo Mbeki and others liberation fighters were able to return home. With his first son, Kwanda, and his brother, Jamal, killed during the struggle Mbeki, the ‘man born in the struggle’ reunited with his father who was also released. The first time since early 1960s both will walk as free men in South Africa. With Oliver Tambo dead, Mandela was the natural head of the free black South Africa, while Mbeki was the operational head. To weaken the ANC, the apartheid government continued to sponsor divisions, especially through Chief Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party, leading to fifteen thousand deaths. South African security forces used, aided, and abetted the Inkatha to commit atrocities, as Buthelezi used ethnic differences for his own selfish ambitions. The last major African peoples took political control in the April 1994 elections. The ANC won 62.7 percent of the vote, making Nelson Mandela the president. The NP, which had ruled since 1948, won 20.4 percent, while the troublesome Inkatha won 10.5 percent and control of the local legislature of Kwazulu. The first black majority government led by Mandela faced the enormous task of delivering the socioeconomic benefits expected of political independence but not with the full economic tools of the political unit. Less than 1 percent of the population (forty-five thousand whites) owned more than 75 percent of the arable land, and the De Beers mines were still owned by the Rhodes and Rothschild military industrialists. Mbeki, with a Masters degree in Economics, proposed an ambitious reconstruction and development programme to help the vast majority of Africans in poverty, living in shantytowns and dispossessed of fertile lands. Blacks expected to receive an increase in income to bring them on a par with whites, which increased costs to businesses built on the assumption of cheap labor. The new black government realized a huge percent of its people were infected with the HIV virus and South Africa had the world’s largest number of AIDS victims. As noted, the virus mysteriously affected a much higher percentage of blacks wherever there was a large white settlement or white control of medical services. How and when 40 percent of the adult population could suddenly be infected was a mystery that has not fully been explored, but the motives and means of white, military-industrialist extremists are clear. The apartheid government conducted a biological weapons research programme (one of its scientists has been brought to court for his evil practices). Mbeki came under media attack for discounting the importance of AIDS by tying it to the issue of poverty and diet. However, faced with a high level of poverty, homelessness and illiteracy that exacerbated the AIDS problem, it was rational to approach it from a socioeconomic perspective. The South African government challenged the copyrights that were meant to medically enslave them to
Western interests. US pharmaceutical companies were brought to court, being known to conduct all types of lethal tests across Africa and profiteering on their copyrights to alleviate the problems caused by their industrial complex. They won the right to produce much cheaper generic drugs to alleviate but not cure the disease that was rapidly debilitating the Nguni. In addition to the huge HIV/AIDS bill, improvements in housing, education, and other social services were expected, especially to cover historical underinvestment, but this could be achieved only by an increase in taxation on the white-owned military-industrial complex. New black industries and markets took more time and investment before they could provide the required increase in personal and national income. An advantage was that South African businesses could grow faster. The African markets, formerly closed to apartheid South Africa, were opened, especially the Nigerian market that the South African telecommunications industry later found profitable. Transferring ownership and the management of the economy to black South Africans were major problems. Mbeki devised the Black Economic Employment (BEE) and created employment in middle sector. With the racist educational and social policies, black South Africans lacked the managerial and professional skills to fully take control of the economy, even before taking into account the huge number of HIV/AIDS victims. This led to imported foreign labor, especially black professionals from the United States, Nigeria, Ghana, and England, to fill the posts of many racist white professionals who left due to the black majority rule. It provoked anger among Ngunis who felt ‘jumped over’ by ‘foreign blacks’, and many unsavory politicians employed it as a political platform in South Africa. Moreover, not only Black professionals flocked to the new South Africa but a whole array of Blacks, due to the poor IMF economic conditions across the blackworld. A large number of unskilled workers flooded South Africa from its neighboring nations of Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique, as well as a large number of Nigerians. Unlike the colonial South African seasonal immigrants, who were more interested in mining jobs and were in direct competition with black South Africans, the West Africans evolved their form of street trading and black economy. Imported goods were hawked by Nigerians and other West Africans, but they were joined by black South Africans who rightly wanted to control at least the lowest rungs of the new economy. Most other African nations had restricted retailing to their citizens, and the poorer classes enforced their dominance brutally. Ghanaians and other African nations had exhibited xenophobic tendencies towards immigrant Nigerians during the Nigerian civil war, while Nigerians had also mistreated Ghanaians during the IMF deprivations of the mid-seventies. This was due to misguided politicians who sacrificed the spirit of the Afrocentric politics that won their political independence for the economic exigencies of local politics. Despite Nigeria’s help during South Africa’s liberation struggle, Nigerians were especially targeted due to their large numbers and exposure, which even more developed and populous nations found overbearing. Nigerians were made to pay a huge immigration bond before being allowed into South Africa, where they could easily overwhelm the thirty million black Africans with potentially one hundred million from the nigger area. They were accused of taking jobs at all levels as well as promoting the drug trade. A tiny percent, but a significant absolute number, of Nigerians in the drug trade, who had been shut down in Nigeria, found South Africa to be a virgin transit land. Fraud schemes against the rich, white South Africans were also perpetrated. Due to their exposure and education, the majority of the immigrants achieved a relatively higher standard of living through legitimate avenues in labor and retail markets. Poor South Africans were
misdirected by their politicians, who in an effort to cover their inadequacies, stereotyped the tiny percent of criminal immigrants as the majority and the source of all social problems. South Africans became the world’s most xenophobic nation as politicians pointed to the immigrants as the ones who were taking housing and employment and were the source of all crime. In a speech to parliament, the Home Affairs Minister Chief Buthelezi warned that South Africa could forget its reconstruction and development plans if it didn’t stop the flow of immigrants. The Inkatha Freedom Party threatened to organize marches and take ‘physical action’ if the government failed to respond to the alleged crisis, while the white National Party spokesman alleged that ‘eighty percent of all suspects appearing in court in Johannesburg in connection with drugs were Nigerians’. The negative attitude towards foreigners encouraged and condoned abuses against those suspected of being illegal immigrants and non-South Africans in the country legally. Research showed that the level of xenophobia hovered around 75 percent of the population, and it was higher among whites—93 percent were hostile to immigrants while only 53 percent of blacks* were similarly inclined. A year after black majority rule, the South African Bishops Conference released a report on the high levels of xenophobia, expressing concern that the unrealizable expectations of the populations, bolstered by the promises of the ANC’s reconstruction and development plan, were translating into xenophobia. The masses became impatient, because they expected the government to perform miracles in their socioeconomic lives. There were limits to the creation of new capital, and the overtaxation of the existing industries was bound to terminate the economy. However, there was a mass improvement, reminiscent of the sixties, in Nigeria, Ghana, and other newly independent countries, but it was not fast enough to stop the growing division and alienation in the sociopolitical structures. The Western media labeled South Africa as the murder capital of the world. Young, black South Africans became desperate and more involved in crime, especially drugs, lowlevel and violent personal robbery, and extortion-based crimes. Without a proper education, there was little hope of bringing the majority to the skill level required to earn well-enumerated, modern jobs. * Human Rights Watch 1998 Report, ‘South Africa—Xenophobia and Attacks against Migrants’, http://www.hrw.org/reports98/sareports. There should have been free and universal education up to the university level for everyone, but this would cause an enormous strain on the resources of the government, which would be forced into raising income by increasing taxes on the mines and industry. South Africa provided the hope of widespread industrialization across Africa with its mineral resources and established industrial complex. Despite the infant political economy, black South Africans began to play a role corresponding to their wealth as they joined Nigeria in the front row of Africa’s geopolitics. South Africa was the last member of the ‘free’ blackworld, but apart from the Nguni being the thirdlargest original African group, its huge gold and diamonds reserves, modern army, and industrial complex from the apartheid regime allowed it to stake its claim in the Blackworld’s leadership. A concrete political tradition was built with the 1999 transfer of power from Nelson Mandela, who served one term, to Mbeki to take South Africa into the new era. Congo-Zaire was one of the most important African nations for having the second-largest indigenous African population, its history, and its abundant mineral resources, but its sociopolitical system was derailed from its inception. The US-installed President Mobutu wreaked havoc in Zaire and its
surroundings after taking power in 1965. With a poor educational system and ragtag army left behind by the Belgians, there wasn’t a sufficient pool of intellectuals and military officers to challenge Mobutu. The few who did found themselves victims of a repressive government and an ‘uninterested’ international community that was happy with Mobutu’s reign. In the bankers’ rush (which started with Mobutu’s 1970 visit to Washington, DC where Bankers Trust raised the first $25 million general loan), US Citibank, British Morgan Grenfell, and French Societe Generale made Zaire flush with loans to the tune of $400 million. Despite the obvious economic mismanagement and the crash in copper prices that led to a default on interest payments on the $400 million debt by 1976, Citibank and the Paris Club raised even more petro-dollars to keep Mobutu in power. The debt multiplied nearly ten times in three years, and the foreign debt reached $3 billion by 1979. In March 1977, members of the Kongo extended family tree in Angola attempted to secede the copperrich Katanga province from Mobutu’s Zaire. They successfully pushed Mobutu’s army back before Western powers arrived to reverse their gains and defeat their cause. The French transported Moroccan soldiers to fend off the cessation reattempts, but the Europeans became more directly involved, and French and Belgian troops were inserted when the rebels pushed up to the copper city of Kolwezi and killed forty-four whites. To repay the Westerners and keep a good credit rating with Citibank IMF bankers, Mobutu agreed to sign the control of the Zairian Central Bank, the Audit Office, and the finance ministry to them. German banker Erwin Blumenthal of the IMF took over the Central Bank and finances in August 1978. With the Central Bank in their control, the Western bankers continued to pile on Zaire’s national debt; devaluation and inflation ran up a thousand percent. Mobutu continued to parcel out concessions to companies, including giving a German missile company land for weapons testing. Throughout the eighties and early nineties, the corruption and IMF conditions debilitated Zaire’s socioeconomic infrastructure. Luckily, probably due to the low number of white settlers, Zaire initially had a lower HIV/AIDS infection rate than the East African nations on the Indian Ocean Coast. A huge domestic and regional trade continued across the Kongo River basin. The Kongos retained a close cultural similarity with eastern Nigerians, who traded clothing and music across the vast country. Zaire experienced migrations to Belgium and Europe, but due to the low literacy levels and being French speakers, the people didn’t have a significant influence on the international black labor market until the 1999 war sent millions fleeing across the world. Mobutu’s negative influence extended outside Zaire’s borders, especially into Uganda, Burundi, and Rwanda, where he sponsored Western-favored rebels in Belgian-mandated ex-colonies. Mobutu contributed to the Western efforts to again get rid of Uganda’s President Obote in the eighties and the ascendancy of Museveni, who still held the fort for Western interests in Uganda. Idi Amin was a Western replacement for Obote, but with the fall of Amin and the return of Obote, Museveni became the Western favorite in Uganda. Mobutu and Museveni were a dangerous mix of Western puppet leaders. They caused the worst carnage in Africa, leading to more than five million deaths in the mineral-rich Great Lakes area, especially in Burundi and Rwanda. They filtered Western support to Tutsi rebels trying to overthrow the legitimate, Hutu-majority, Rwandan government, which had not been in Western favor since overthrowing the European-friendly Tutsi minority government in 1959. Following the 1972–1973 Hutu uprising in Burundi that left 150,000 Hutus dead and an equal number
displaced in Tanzania and Zaire, the Tutsi minority government agreed to the first democratic elections in Burundi. The Tutsi minority lost power to a Hutu majority government in June 1993, but the first Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, was killed in an attempted coup in October 1993. Cyprien Ntaryamira, another Hutu Burundi president, was elected in January 1994 but was killed in a suspicious plane crash with the Rwandan president—who was also of Hutu origin and faced Tutsi insurgents at home. The deaths of both Hutu presidents sparked ethnic clashes, in which the UN and French were quick to interfere. They tricked the majority Hutu into disarming before allowing the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front to run over and slaughter millions of Hutu as the Tutsi took over power in Rwanda and were strengthened by the West. The Hutu fled into eastern Zaire, where they clashed with previous Tutsi refugees, and Mobutu intervened on the side of the Tutsi. This was his downfall; the Hutu and Congolese rebels, led by General Laurent Kabila, a long-time opponent of Mobutu and labeled a Marxist, marched west towards the Zairian capital, Kinshasa. The success of the rebels was attributed to the fact that Mobutu was receiving treatment for prostate cancer in Western Europe during the last four months of 1996, when the civil war started and rapidly accelerated towards the capital. His army showed little or no resistance. The Western military industrialists were unsure of what to do in Mobutu’s absence, and his weak army structure had been left in command, so they played both sides through Rwanda and Uganda, who were inspired to grab territory. When Mobutu returned in March 1997, all efforts to negotiate with Kabila were ineffectual, because Kabila had already won half of the country. On May 17, 1997, Kabila marched into Kinshasa, and Mobutu fled into exile after thirty-two years of the worst rule in Africa. The Western powers would not allow the ‘Marxist’ Kabila to retain power, so they sponsored Ugandan and Rwandan puppet governments to start Africa’s first ‘world war’, in which nine countries mauled the Kongo nation. Rebels assisted by the West through Uganda and Rwanda threatened Kinshasa in August 1998, but Angola, Zimbabwe, and Namibia came to Kabila’s aid. South Africa, Tanzania, Central African Republic, and Malawi had contributory influences in a war that took three million lives in four years. The shady UN missions sometimes indirectly aided mass killings like Rwanda by disarming the disfavored communities in a peace effort but then allowing the pro-Western groups to aggress with impunity. On January 16, 2001, Kabila was assassinated, and his son stepped into his shoes and attempted to find a workable solution. Many truces had been called before 2003, but it appeared that peace would not be attained until the West called back its dogs of war in Uganda and Rwanda—not likely if an Afrocentric government remained in power in Zaire. This was the case in Burundi as Western-inspired coups and countercoups resulted in ethnic clashes between the Tutsi puppet leaders and the Hutu majorities. Nelson Mandela and President Clinton tried to broker an uneasy peace between the warring factions, but the nations around the Great Lakes were still unstable, especially the French-inspired government of Rwanda and the British/USinspired government of Uganda. France made it a point to remain strong in Africa and was ready to send troops into any Francophone ex-colony that tried to break the ‘apron strings’. Its ex-colonies were like a variety of companies in its business portfolio valued in the CFA, whose value was tied to and decided by the French franc. The French indirectly developed plantations and kept tight controls on the economic life of Senegal, Ivory Coast, Gabon, and Cameroon, its four most prosperous excolonies, all with populations of under twenty million. Gabon had large oil reserves and a population of under two million but with a standard of living only slightly better than the remaining sixteen Francophone nations.
Senegal and Gabon had pro-French governments for long periods (especially President Bongo of Gabon, who had been in office since 1967), despite serious IMF riots. The French military industrialists, through the Paris Club, ensured that the IMF conditions didn’t upset the political and economic control of their African neocolonies. They prevented widespread riots and social upheavals by softening the effects of subsidy withdrawals and the mass devaluations witnessed in other black nations, since Francophone countries used the CFA whose value was set by France. If all else failed, they sent in troops in dubious ‘peace efforts’ to keep the status quo. In Ivory Coast, the model Francophone ex-colony, the French kept Houphouet-Boigny in power after he had helped split French West Africa into manageable, neocolonised units in the sixties. The economic power remained with the French, who largely did away with African middlemen, and prevented a more equitable distribution of income. There were large coffee and cocoa plantations in Ivory Coast owned by the French, usually run by an African caretaker. Due to Ivory Coast’s small population, the plantations relied on migrant labor from Burkina Faso and other neighboring nations for 20 percent of their labor supply. The persistent, European, slave-labor mentality and the IMF cut in workers’ real wages led to increased child labor and alleged reports of child slavery. The ex-French colonies didn’t suffer from the HIV/AIDS epidemic suffered by the East and South African ex-British colonies with significant white settlers. Due to the large presence and control of the French in the Ivorian economy, the Paris Club and the IMF didn’t press too hard on French businesses. However, the tiny, black middle class working for the government was debilitated because of the cuts in subsidies and services. The French were directly involved in all Francophone African nations, where dissent and Pan-African thought was frowned upon and excluded and local politicians were capitalist or Socialist pro-French. The first to voice opposition to French dominance in Ivory Coast was Laurent Gbagbo, a history professor who bravely questioned Houphouet-Boigny’s dominant presidency for life and brought about dissent. The 1990 demonstrations demanded that Houphouet-Boigny be ousted, and the first multiparty elections were called, but he fraudulently won and retained power. In 1993, Houphouet-Boigny died in office, and the National Assembly named a successor, Henri Bedie, who belonged to the HouphouetBoigny camp. Bedie won reelection in 1995 and continued the same masterservant relationship with the French. A mutiny by underpaid soldiers and workers led to the coup that brought an end to the HouphouetBoigny era on December 24, 1999—the last revolution of a millennium of revolutions across Africa. Cameroon enjoyed a relatively docile sociopolitical existence, and President Paul Biya retained power for more than twenty years in a farcical, multiparty democracy. After a brief period of instability in the early 1980s, the French secured Biya and their interests in Cameroon and surroundings. It was alleged that after the loss of Iraqi oilfields to Anglo-American interests, the French inspired Cameroon’s diplomatic struggle for oil along the Nigerian border, especially along the oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula, and that the French used their power in the UN to secure a favorable diplomatic outcome. It was hoped that this would not cause war with Nigeria, which vowed to disregard the UN resolution based upon the 1920 colonial agreement between the British and French to split the ex-German colony. The UN resolution awarded the Bakassi Peninsula, under Nigerian rule since 1960 independence, to Cameroon in 2002. The French had already sponsored the Biafra War, and it was hoped it would be the last war in the Niger delta area between French and Anglo-American interests. In Mauritania, France’s westernmost African desert colony, the French sent bombers to aid the
Mauritanian government, which grabbed territory from Spanish Sahara and was fighting against the Polisario Front. Reminiscent of Zaire’s Mobutu, using French and Moroccans against his insurgents in 1977, Mauritania used eight thousand Moroccan fighters and French bombers, but the Mauritanian government eventually signed a peace treaty with the Polisario Front. With a population of under three million in 2002, Mauritania had a reputation of being one of the last few nations where Islamic slavery of original Africans was reported in recent times. In Mali, Mauritania’s eastern neighbor also on the desert fringes, a pro-French coup in 1968 overthrew the Afrocentric government, and President Traore ruled until 1991, when the IMF conditions finally turned the masses against him. Backed by the French, Traore used repressive means to stay in power until March 26, 1991, when he was overthrown by a military coup led by Alpha Oumar Konare. In April 1992, Konare held presidential elections, which he won and retained power over the population of ten million. He won public and French support due to the indefensible long reign of Traore, who was charged with human rights crimes and sentenced to death, which was commuted to a life sentence. Mali continued to implement the IMF conditions, which made one of the poorest nations even poorer. In an area that gave humanity pastoralism and milk, the ancient, local pastoralism industry was destroyed, and the West flooded Mali with cheap, subsidized milk. Malians couldn’t compete when an average Malian lived on a dollar a day and the West subsidized every cow with two dollars. The poor economic situation provoked sociopolitical upheaval that saw the Tuareg and other Arabic clans take over government and destroy many of its rich historical monuments, as the ultra-Islamic groups sought to ‘purify’ the Islamic nation with their own extremist brand of Islam. To the east of Mali, in Upper Volta, a young army officer, Thomas Sankara, took over power when the Francophone nation stagnated due to the global currency manipulations and pressure from the IMF and the Paris Club. The existing government refused to implement the conditions and chose to enforce import and foreignexchange controls, but the ensuing inflation and corruption attached to its fiscal policies led to its overthrow. Sankara turned out to be one of the great Pan-Africanists and revolutionaries of post-colonial Africa, launching one of the most ambitious programmes for socio-political and economic change in Africa. His direct approach saw the nationalization of foreign owned assets and redistribution of land that brought about a doubling of agricultural output. He was termed a Marxist by the Western as he sought to wean Upper Volta from French domination. Though he ruled for only four years, he left an indelible mark on the national consciousness, and across Africa. His Afrocentric stance against Western neo-colonization led to his assassination by his close aide, Compaore, backed by Western powers through their West African puppets. Compaore was to sellout the nation as he held onto power for the next two decades. He rescinded all Sankara’s policies, reversed the nationalizations and returned control to France. Burkina Faso, with a population of thirteen million, was to remain a poor nation, heavily reliant on aid and the income earned by its migrant workers from Ivory Coast plantations. Along the same grassland latitude to the east was Chad, where the French, like in Mauritania, committed troops to fight the northern Muslim Arabs. Following an armed struggle since 1966, Toumbalaye, leading the southern pro-French African naturalist/Christian government, was killed in 1975. He was succeeded by General Felix Malloum, who continued to face Libyan-inspired rebels in the civil war. In March 1979, nine rival groups conducted peace talks in Lagos, Nigeria, where they agreed to form a provisional government headed by Goukouni Queddei, a former rebel leader. In June 1982,
Frenchbacked southern rebels, led by Hissene Habre, took the capital and power, forcing Queddei to flee. In 1983, the French sent three thousand troops to Chad to help President Habre against the Libyanbacked northern rebels. The French struggled to keep Habre in power for eight years before a proLibyan insurgent group, called Patriotic Salvation Movement and led by Idriss Deby, overthrew him in December 1990. This led to the withdrawal of the French and Americans and later the Libyan forces. The struggle between the two factions continued, but following the approval of a new constitution in March 1996, multiparty presidential elections were held in June/July 1996, and Deby won. Despite allegations of repression and corruption, he won reelection on May 20, 2001 for another five-year term. Although the divisions continued to simmer, the foreign usurpers appeared to be tiring in their fight for the arid desert nation with crude oil deposits. In November 2004, Chad received its first oil payment and was expected to earn $80 million annually over the next two decades, which would increase its revenue by at least 50 percent and, it was hoped, bring the much-needed relief to its poor inhabitants. In 2004, Chad experienced a huge influx of Sudan refugees who fled from Arabs. To its south, in Central African Republic, after the overthrow of Bokassa by the French government in September 1979, the former president David Dacko was reinstalled but was soon overthrown by General Andre Kolingba, who ruled from 1981 to 1993. Due to ethnic tensions, exacerbated by IMF hardships, calls rose for multiparty elections in the population of four million. Legislative and presidential elections were held in October 1992, but Kolingba cancelled the results when he found himself losing the presidential race. He lost elections held in August/September 1993 and was forced to hand over power to President Ange-Felix Patasse. Despite Central African Republic’s small deposits of gold, diamonds, and uranium, Patasse couldn’t bring about the muchneeded improvements in socioeconomic infrastructure, as more than 50 percent remained on subsistence agriculture. The IMF squeeze led to riots and strikes in schools and the civil service, in addition to ethnic clashes fueled by the French-backed Kolingba. To compound Patasse’s economic problems, Central Africa Republic’s main trade routes to the sea were the Ubangi and Kongo River waterways, which were blocked by the 1990s war in Congo (Zaire) to its south. In 2001, Kolingba and his French-equipped rebels launched an unsuccessful attack to overthrow the Patasse government in Bangui, the capital. In addition to the French weapons recovered, the Central African Republic government claimed that the rebels were supported by Ugandan and Rwandan military personnel, notorious for causing mayhem across the Kongo basin. Hundreds were reported killed, and hundreds of thousands were displaced, especially when government supporters carried out reprisals against the Yakoma people, Kolingba’s ethnic group based in the south, favored by the French and formerly in control of the nation’s political economy. Patasse, from the northern Sara people, was backed by Libya’s Gaddafi, who sent planes and equipment. The French support for the southern Yakoma people against the Sara people in Central African Republic was a stark opposite to what transpired in Chad, to the north, where the French supported the northern portion of Central African Republic’s Sara people based in southern Chad, while Libya supported northern Chadians. It went a long way to show that the French and other Europeans, as well as Gaddafi, had no consideration for black African lives or principles and were interested only in geopolitical games for African resources. In 2003, Patasse was overthrown and replaced by General Francois Bozize, who established a
transitional government but did not fully control the countryside, where pockets of lawlessness persisted. In 2005, Bozize conducted presidential elections that he won, and he has since remained in power. Sudan, Chad’s eastern neighbor, was a site of the Islamic AfroAsian wars between the twenty-five million Muslim Arabs in the north and the ten million black Africans, with African and Christian beliefs, in the south. The British supported the majority northern Arab-Muslims to the detriment of the non-Muslim southerners, and the first open conflicts broke out in 1955, two years after independence. The first phase of the war ended in 1972 when Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie brokered the peace between Anya Nya rebels from the south and General Gaafar Nimeiri’s regime. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism during the mid-seventies threatened Nimeiri’s Sudanese government, which had engendered peace through a more secular rule over the indigenous African believers in southern Sudan. The ten-year peace brought no major improvement to the economy, and the demands of the IMF, which worsened the delicate socioeconomic situation, inadvertently pushed the northern Muslim government into the hands of Saudi and Libyan Islamic fundamentalists with promises of interest-free petro-dollars. Following the urgings of the Saudis and Libyans, Nimeiri proclaimed Islamic law throughout the Republic of Sudan, and Colonel Garang and his southern Sudanese People’s Liberation Army reacted by renewing hostilities. Unfortunately for the southerners, due to the oil-rich friends of the northern Muslim-Arabs and the rule of northern Muslims in Nigeria at the time, they had no significant backer, as the West labeled them terrorists and rebels. Moreover, the West was using the Muslim Arab-Sudanese government to destabilize its Christian, proSoviet neighbor, Ethiopia, by instigating and arming separatists within Ethiopia. The West was also using associates of the ArabSudanese government, like Osama bin Laden and other Afghan mujadeens, to fight the Russians. After the brief interlude of a democratically elected government in Sudan, following a bloodless coup against Nimeiri, the debilitating war continued into the nineties. The war caused more than two million deaths, and millions were displaced. It wasn’t until the late nineties, when bin Laden became a Western enemy, that the world began to address the carnage in Sudan. It listened to the Church, which decried the ethnic cleansing carried out by the Muslim northern leaders, and African Americans decried the continued slavery of southern blacks. President Clinton signed the Sudan Peace Act in November 1999, while the UN took greater interest in how the Muslim Arabs were prosecuting their war against the southern minorities. Despite the promise of a long-lasting solution, when the Arab north agreed to talks in 2003, especially with the discovery of oil in the south, by 2004, Arab militia waged ethnic-cleansing wars against the black Africans in the western Darfur province. Apart from the hundreds of thousands of deaths and more than a million persons displaced, the Arab-Sudanese government’s ties with bin Laden allowed the West to take action, summon international condemnation, and demand that all ethnic-cleansing to cease, despite Arabic denial. The legendary southern leader, Garang, successfully conducted peace talks and was offered a seat in the supposedly new federal structure. Sadly, this appeared to be a trick taken from the Haitian revolution. Within months, the unsuspecting Garang was killed in 2005 in a mysterious helicopter crash. It was hoped that an able replacement would be found to continue the fight for African liberation. It appeared that the international pressure would bring peace to the black Africans in West, South, and East Sudan, but a final solution couldn’t be assumed, given the structure that included the murderous
northern Arabs. A new republic named South Sudan was to be created. East of Sudan, war waged because of the unworkable colonial structures left by the colonists and Ethiopia’s grab for land during the 1890s European colonial scramble for Africa. The Somalis continued to fight for the right to have all Somalis under one Islamic nation instead of the three ‘Christian/African’ nations that they were split between, while the Ogun industrialists happily and profitably supplied the firepower. Following Selassie’s overthrow and the United States switching support to Somalia, the Somali army and the Somalis living in eastern Ethiopia waged war against the Ethiopians, who were backed by twelve thousand Cuban soldiers and $12 billion dollars’ worth of Soviet arms. The United States and its allies, through Sudan’s Muslim Arab northern government, sponsored internal strife on the northwestern borders of Ethiopia, in addition to the conflicts occupying Eritrean separatists on the northeastern border. The Ethiopians defeated the US-backed Somalis in 1978, but both nations knew no peace as hostilities continued. The Ethiopians cleared the Somali fighters from the Ogaden province but continued fighting the Eritrean separatist and the new separatist movements of the Oromo and Tigre. There was only so much that the marginally fertile grasslands of Ethiopia could take before famine struck, especially when the 1984 drought swept the war-debilitated agricultural areas. The Ethiopian famine killed more than a million people and attracted the attention of the world, especially the media and entertainers, and millions of dollars in aid were raised. Although it brought immense pride to many in the Western world, many Afrocentrics felt that it was an outright insult for musicians from the arms capital of the world to come around singing ‘we are the world’—they were implicitly involved in the warfare and might as well have said, ‘Here is a small percent of the arms dollars that were used to bring you to this situation’. Somalia disintegrated under President Siad Barre after the Ethiopian defeat. A peace treaty was signed between Ethiopia and Somalia in 1988. From 1991 onward, the warlords that Barre armed for support during the Ethiopian war turned their guns on one another in a scramble for local power. Despite American aid, the Somali nation disintegrated, as large numbers of starving Somali refugees returned from Ethiopia and ambitious, uncontrollable warlords turned on their own people. The warring factions prevented any solution to the famine, and even Barre fled from the country that was known as the most dangerous country in Africa by 1992. Despite UN and US intervention, Somalia sank into a sociopolitical quagmire. Their US allies, who came to secure peace in 1992, fled the land after suffering a few casualties from the monsters they had created, leaving the poor, innocent people to grapple with the unsavory situation. In 1995, the UN pulled out of Somalia with no central government in control, and it wasn’t until 1999 that a central police force was introduced. The land was still wracked by widespread violence and hunger from famine, even in 2004, when there was still no tangible solution to put Somalia back on its feet. In Ethiopia, following the 1988 peace treaty with Somalia, its six rebel armies came together under an umbrella group called the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which launched a major push against the government in February 1991. With the demise of Ethiopia’s Soviet backing after the Cold War, the West wanted to get rid of President Mengistu Mariam, who had defeated the West in Somalia in 1978 and trained South African rebels. Mengistu, facing a formidable opposition without his Soviet backing, resigned and left the country in May 1991. The EPRDF took over and set up a transitional government that called for the 1995 multiparty presidential elections in the new pro-West Ethiopia. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who led the armies, retained power in the 2000 and 2005 elections, despite widespread allegations of election fraud and government intimidation.
Nevertheless, the flames of war flickered in the north with the Eritrean separatists declaring independence in 1993, and fresh fighting erupted in 1998. The fighting intensified in May 2000, but a peace treaty was signed in June 2000. However, a lasting solution wasn’t found to the Oromo’s legitimate claims of subjection by the Amharic peoples, who continued to dictate their political economy since the Ethiopian monarchy extended Ethiopia’s borders, during the colonial scramble, to include the Oromo and their land. Ethiopia, the second-most populous African nation, with a population of sixty-six million, squandered the money meant for socioeconomic development on war and still couldn’t boast of a lasting, peaceful solution. I