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Education for a New Reality in the African World
#8 - 0--clubafrika--Education for a New Reality in the African World--2005-07-04 02:28:18
#Paper by Dr. John Henrik Clarke
Professor Clarke was a faculty member and former chairman of the department of Black and Puerto Rican Studies
at Hunter College. He was a former Distinguished Visiting Professor of African History at the African Studies and Research Center at Cornell University...Part 1 of 10
A Single Focus With Many Dimensions
Education for a new reality in the African world must have a single focus with many dimensions that take into consideration the fact that African people are universal and the most dispersed of all ethnic groups. African people can be found in more parts of the world than any other ethnic group. Africa, of course, is their homeland, but through curiosity, need, forced migration and serving as mercenaries in the armies of other nations, Africans have migrated throughout the world and in many ways they relate to all the ethnic nations of the world. To this end I invite you to read three different special issues of the Journal of African Civilizations, edited by Professor Ivan Van Sertima, "African Presence In Early Asia," "African Presence In Early Europe," and "African Presence In Early America," because there is a need to locate African people on the map of human geography and to restore African people to the respectful commentary of history.
If Africans are to be judged by the current headlines in the newspapers the judgement will not be in their favor—with the murder of Africans by Africans in Rwanda, with a nation like Nigeria, which could have been Africa's finest example of a functioning African nation, turning inward on itself, and a nation like Ghana, where Nkrumah took Africa for her political walk in the sun, now a nation of Jesus freaks selling the land, including the gold mines, to foreigners. Without some understanding of how Africa was programmed into this disaster, the picture of Africa, of course, would not be favorable. If one took the time to look beyond the headlines and discover why and how the African dream was turned into an African nightmare one might have some understanding of the African crisis and some human sympathy. - In the years after the emergence of Kwame Nkrumah, l957-present, Africa was programmed to fall apart. The two generations educated after the independence explosion were educated to imitate Europeans in the handling of power. Figuratively speaking, the European political coat will never fit the African body. Africans were not educated to take over Africa by Africans using African methodology. Nearly every African head of state today has an African body and a European mind. Those trained in the United States have only a variation of the European mind. Because African people the world over are a ceremonial people, they often engage in ceremony and miss the substance. This is why in substance, the civil rights movement was basically a failure, the Caribbean concept of federation and unity was also a failure, and the Organization of African Unity was the saddest failure of them all. Until we are adult and face the reality of why these failures occurred we will not be prepared to establish an educational program that would enable us to face the reality of the immediate tomorrow of African people.
The main focus of an education for a new reality in the African world must have as its mission the restoration of what slavery and colonialism took away. Slavery and colonialism took from African people their basic culture, their language, their concept of nationhood, their manhood and their womanhood. They mutilated and tried to destroy their traditional culture and reduced Africans to beggars at the cultural and political door of other people while neglecting the job of restoring their own culture, the main thing that could have sustained them.
The Africans needed a value system of their own design. Most important in the education to assume the responsibility of nationhood, Africans needed to be educated to be the managers of the wealth producing resources of their own country. All over the African world we need fewer parades, fewer demonstrations, fewer pronouncements, less hero worship and more closed door meetings to plan the strategy of African survival throughout the world. We need to study how other nations rose from a low to a high position in the world and did what we still have to do.
Both my colleagues and my students have grown weary of my using the case of the rise of modern Japan. They say the Japanese are racists. They are, but they did for themselves what we still need to do—they retained their culture. They did not let the conqueror interfere with their way of life or tamper with the concept and image of god as they conceived god to be. Throughout the whole of the African world most Africans who call themselves civilized, and here I have to question their definition of the term, worship a concept and image of a god assigned to them by a foreigner. Because the Japanese refused to allow their conquerors to do this to them they recovered from defeat and rose to a position in a world where their former conquerors are asking them for space in their commercial world.
The Japanese did this without demonstrations, shooting a gun or asking the permission of their conqueror. They did this because they could talk strategy among themselves and not have anyone run to their conqueror and betray the strategist. They realized something that the people of the African world have not yet realized. There is no way to move any people from a lower to a higher position unless they are willing to accept some form of collective discipline. You can not move an unruly mob into anything but chaos. Sometime we are democratic among ourselves and not able to get anything done because we are not able to decide what needs to be done.
Europeans and white people in general have become masters of image control and mind control, which is sometimes one and the same. The most devastating of all European image control is their control over the definition and the image of God. Very few black ministers or laypersons dispute the white picture of Christ painted in Europe 1500 years after Christ was dead. Most people in the civilizations of the world generally look at a spiritual deity that resembles themselves, mainly the father in their home, be this right or wrong. Why are we an exception?
Let's look briefly at what this image does to our mind and the mind of our youth. The image of Christ, the son of God is one color, policemen are the same, judges in the courts, in most cases, are the same. What are these images saying to our youth—that the color they wear is incapable of holding power. When one goes to the black church and looks at the Sunday school lesson, all the angels shown there are white. These pictures tell your child that he or she is not capable of being an angel.
If you are now asking the question, what has this to do with education for a new reality in the African world, then you need to ask the question until you find the answer. Why not answer the question with a question to yourself: Am I not as worthy of exercising power over myself, within my family, within my community, within my nation, as anyone else? If I am not prepared for it, do I have the mental capacity to prepare myself for it? Do people holding power have a mental capacity in excess of mine? If so, why? We live in a society that programs us into doubting our capacity to be the masters of ourselves and the circumstances under which we live. The rulers of this society and other societies have made a mystery of the ruling of nations. They say outright, or imply, that this is an achievement beyond our capacity.
If we had a thorough knowledge of our history for just one thousand years before the slave trade, we could put this matter to rest. There were great independent states along the coast of East Africa before they were destroyed by the Arab slave trade. There were great independent states in the Congo before they were destroyed in 1884. There were great independent states in inner West Africa that lasted one hundred fifty years into the slave trade period. One independent state, Songhay, ruled exceptionally well by Africans, conducted trade in the Mediterranean and in southern Europe, had a great university, Sankore, at Timbuctoo and a university city devoted mainly to education. While the ruling family was of the Islamic faith, this was not an Arab achievement; there were no Arab teachers at the University of Sankore or Jenne.
This is why throughout this paper I will be consistently referring to the fact that we have to look back in order to look forward. The past illuminates the present and the present will give us some indication of what the future can be. Education for a new reality in the African world has to be three dimensional in its approach.
Part 2 of 10
The Significance of the African World
A distinguished African American poet, Countee Cullen, began his poem "Heritage" with the question: "What is Africa to me?" In order to understand Africa, we must extend the question by asking, "What is Africa to the Africans?" and "What is Africa to the world?" With these questions we will be calling attention to the need for a total reexamination of African history. Considering the old approaches to African history and the distortions and confusion that resulted from these approaches, a new approach to African history must begin with a new frame of reference which will help us better analyze the issues of slavery, colonialism, imperialism and nation-building among black people.
We must be bold enough to reject such terms as "Black Africa" which presupposes that there is a legitimate, "White Africa." We must reject the term "Negro Africa" and the word "Negro" and all that it implies. This word, like the concept of race and racism, grew out of the European slave trade and the colonial system that followed. It is not an African word and it has no legitimate application to African people. For more details on this matter, I recommend that you read the book, The Word Negro—Its Origin and Evil Use, by Richard B. Moore. In a speech on "The Significance of African History," the Caribbean writer, Richard B. Moore observed:
The significance of African history is shown, though not overtly, in the very effort to deny anything worthy of the name of history to Africa and the African peoples. This wide-spread, and well nigh successful endeavor, maintained through some five centuries, to erase African history from the general record, is a fact which of itself should he quite conclusive to thinking and open minds. For it is logical and apparent that no such undertaking would ever have been carried on, and at such length, in order to obscure and bury what is actually of little or no significance.
The prime significance of African history becomes still more manifest when it is realized that this deliberate denial of African history arose out of the European expansion and invasion of Africa which began in the middle of the fifteenth century. The compulsion was thereby felt to attempt to justify such colonialist conquest, domination, enslavement, and plunder. Hence, this brash denial of history and culture to Africa, and indeed even of human qualities and capacity for 'civilization' to the indigenous people of Africa.
Mr. Moore is saying, in essence, that African history must be looked at anew and seen in its relationship to world history. First, the distortions must be admitted. The hard fact is that most of what we now call world history is only the history of the first and second rise of Europe. The Europeans are not yet willing to acknowledge that the world did not wait in darkness for them to bring the light, and that the history of Africa was already old when Europe was born.
Until quite recently, it was rather generally assumed, even among well educated persons in the West, that the continent of Africa was a great expanse of land, mostly jungle, inhabited by savages and fierce beasts. It was not thought of as an area where great civilizations could have existed or where the great kings of these civilizations could have ruled in might and wisdom over vast empires. It is true that there are some current notions about the cultural achievements of Egypt, but Egypt was perceived of as European land rather than a country of Africa. Even if a look at an atlas or globe showed Egypt to be in Africa, the popular thought immediately saw in the Sahara Desert a formidable barrier and convenient division of Africa into two parts: one (north of the Sahara) was inhabited by European-like people of high culture and noble history; the other (south of the Sahara) was inhabited by dark-skinned people who had no culture, and were incapable of having done anything in their dark and distant past that could be dignified by the designation of "history." Such ideas, of course, are far from the truth, but it is not difficult to understand why they persisted, and unfortunately still persist, in one form or another in the popular mind.
To understand how these ideas came about we must examine African history and its relationship to world history before and after the slave trade and the colonial period. Then we must deal with a recurring theme in the African peoples struggle to regain a definition of themselves and their role in world history—Pan-African Nationalism. African people are both jealous and envious of other people who possess a culture container called, nation. They want the same thing for themselves and all African people on the face of the earth. African political activists are asking, and trying to answer the question: "How did we become so scattered and fragmented and how can we unite to save ourselves?" The formula that a large number of African people agree on most is Pan-African Nationalism. This formula bridges all political lines, religious and cultural lines, and geographical boundaries, or should do so.
The following definition of Pan-Africanism and its meaning is extracted from one of my books in preparation, Pan-Africanism: A Brief History of An Idea in the African World. "Pan" movements are not new in the world. These movements existed long before the use of the preface "Pan" was a part of a group's organizational name. Any movement by an ethnic group to recover and reclaim their history, culture and national identity, after slavery, war or migration, forced or otherwise, can be called a "Pan" movement.
The largest number of these movements existed in the United States, a nation of immigrants. In this country these movements were mainly historical and cultural societies whose objectives were to preserve the history of the United States and the respective history of each immigrant group.
Pan-Africanism, often thought of as a movement conceived and developed by Africans living outside Africa, was in fact, a world-wide movement, affecting Africans in every part of the world. Generally, we think of it as a twentieth century phenomenon. In fact, this world-wide movement used different approaches, depending on the political climate in the countries where African people lived in large numbers. In Africa itself, Pan-Africanism was often expressed through armed resistance to slavery and colonialism.
There is need for an operational definition that witl explain PanAfricanism's many manifestations in different places, under different circumstances. All over the world, Africans have been fighting to restore what slavery and colonialism took away from them. No matter what their circumstances, their objectives have been the same. Slavery and colonialism strained, but did not completely break, the cultural umbilical cord between the Africans in Africa and those who, by forced migration, now live in what is called the Western World. A small group of African American and Caribbean writers, teachers and preachers, collectively developed the basis of what would be an African-consciousness movement over one hundred years ago. Their concern was with Africa in general and Egypt and Ethiopia, and what we now called the Nile Valley, in particular.
In the years before emancipation of the slaves in the United States and in the Caribbean Islands, these "free" blacks had barely mastered their conqueror's language. However, in spite of their lack of formal training, their first writings reflected a concern for Africa as their homeland. W.E.B. DuBois, the great African American scholar, and elder statesman among African Americans, describes the situation in this manner:
From the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, the Africans imported to America regarded themselves as temporary settlers destined to return eventually to Africa. Their increasing revolts against the slave system, which culminated in the eighteenth century, showed a feeling of close kinship to the motherland and even well in the nineteenth century they called their organizations "African" as witness the "African Unions" of New York and Newport, and the African Churches of Philadelphia and New York. In the West Indies and South America there was even closer indication of feelings of kinship with Africa and the East.
In referring to the importance of African people in world history, he tells us that:
Always Africa is giving us something new.. On its black bosom arose one of the earliest, if not the earliest, of self-protecting civilizations, and grew so mightily that it still furnishes superlatives to thinking and speaking men. Out of its dark and more remote forest vastnesses came, if we may credit many recent scientists, the first welding of iron, and we know that agriculture and trade flourished there when Europe was a wilderness.
He notes fiuther that:
Nearly every human empire that has arisen in the world, material and spiritual, has found some of its greatest crises on the continent of Africa. It was through Africa that Christianity became the religion of the world. In Africa, the last flood of Germanic invasions spent itself within hearing distance of the last gasp of Byzantium, and it was again through Africa that Islam came to play its great role of conqueror and civilizer.
Egypt and the nations of the Nile Valley were, figuratively, the beating heart of Africa and the incubator for its greatness for more than a thousand years. The human traffic from the South renewed the creative energy of Egypt and helped it meet one of the greatest challenges in history. She gave birth to what later became known as Western Civilization, long before the greatness of Greece and Rome.
In essence, Pan-Africanism is about the restoration of African people to their proper place in world history. The Arab slave trade in East Africa (that started before the trans-Atlantic slave trade in West Africa) shattered the foundations of African nations and cultures. These catastrophes would scatter African people to the four corners of the earth. Further, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans began to colonize most of the world: they not only colonized the world but they colonized information about the world. And in order to create a rationale for the Atlantic slave trade, Africans were left out of the respectfull commentary of history.
The objective of Pan-Africanism is not only the restoration of land and nationhood: it has as one of its aims the restoration of respect. The major PanAfricanist theoreticians—W.E.B. DuBois, H. Sylvester Williams, C.L.R. James and George Padmore—gave the concept form and substance. This concept was old before they were born. The main roots of Pan-Africanism (both action and social thought) were nourished by the events of the fifteenth century—the second rise of Europe, the beginning of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and Western colonialism. During the period referred to here, Africans lost their nation-structure, war was declared on their culture, both by the European and the Arab and the African was removed from the commentary of world history.
The three major religions of that day, Judaism, Christianity and Islam found a rationale for slavery that they could live with. Slavery was practiced and the Africans were scattered throughout the world as though they were a people outside of the grace of God. Because Africans lost more than any other people in human history have lost, they have more to restore than any other people. Although some things will never be restored. In the Arab slave trade, that started before the rise of Islam, and the European slave trade, that started in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the colonialism that followed, Africa has suffered through more than five hundred years of foreign domination.
These Europeans and Arabs impressed upon the African mind the fact that Africans could not manage nations. Most Africans in Africa and throughout the world do not know enough about their history to know that they managed nations, exceptionally well, for thousands of years, before the first European wore a shoe or lived in a house that had a window.
Education for a new reality in the African world will have to begin with a total view of the role of Africans in world history and their interaction with societies, nations and cultures down through the ages. It is generally conceded in most scholarly circles that mankind originated in Africa; this makes the African man the father and the African woman the mother of mankind. This is where we begin our assessment of the role of Africa and its people in world history.
Early men in Africa became geniuses at surviving under harsh circumstances. Present-day archaeologists have dug up and preserved the evidence of their achievements. They found that they made hooks to catch fish, spears to hunt with, stone knives to cut with, the bola with which to catch birds and animals, the blow-gun, the hammer and the stone axe. In his pamphlet, "The African Contribution," the writer John W. Weatherwax gives us this additional evidence: today's cannon, long-range missiles, ship propellers, automatic hammers, gas engines, and even meat cleavers and upholstery tack hammers have the roots of their development in the early African use of power. Africans gave mankind the first machine; it was the fire stick. It is the making of tools that sets man apart from, and in a sense, above all living creatures. Africans started mankind along the tool-making path. Canoes made it possible for man to travel farther and farther away from his original home. They began to explore the many rivers in Africa like the Nile, the Congo and the Niger. It was in this way that the early peopling of Africa started and that organized societies began. At some time years later, Africans, driven by curiosity or some force of nature, began to leave Africa in large numbers. They became the most widely dispersed of all people. Evidence of their presence, at some time in history, has been found in nearly every part of the world. Africa was already old when what we now call Europe was born. The Ghanaian historian, Joseph B. Danquah, called attention to this fact in his Introduction to the book, United West Africa or Africa at the Bar of the Family of Nations, when he said:
By the time Alexander the Great was sweeping the civilized world with conquest after conquest from Chaeronia to Gaza, from Babylon to Cabul, by the time this first of the Aryan conquerors was learning the rudiments of war and government at the feet of philosophic Aristotle; and by the time Athens was laying down the foundations of modern European civilization, the earliest and greatest Ethiopian culture had already flourished and dominated the civilized world for over four and a half centuries. Imperial Ethiopia had conquered Egypt and founded the XXVth Dynasty, and for a century and a half the central seat of civilization in the known world was held by the ancestors of the modern Negro, maintaining and defending it against the Assyrian and Persian Empires of the East. Thus, at the time when Ethiopia was leading the civilized world in culture and conquest, East was East but West was as yet to be held. Rome was nowhere to be seen on the map, and sixteen centuries were to pass before Charlemagne would rule in Europe and Egbert becomes first king of England. Even then, history was to drag on for another seven hundred years before Roman Catholic Europe could see fit to end the Great Schism, soon to be followed by the disturbing news of the discovery of America and by the fateful rebirth of the youngest of world civilizations.
The French writer, Count C.F. Volney in his book, Ruins of Empires, made a similar statement after observing the evidence of what was once a great Ethiopian Empire. This was his observation:
A people now forgotten discovered, while others were yet barbarians, the elements of the arts and sciences. A race of men now rejected for their sable skin and frizzled hair founded, on the study of the laws of nature, those civil and religious systems which still govern the universe.
The present search for the place of African people in world history and the Black Power Revolution that produced the Black and Beautiful concept out of which the Black Studies Revolution emerged, is part of a chain reaction to the absence of African people from the accepted commentaries of world history. This also means that we, as an African people, rejected the rejection referred to in Count Volney's observations, and we are now demanding that other people acknowledge our contribution to world history, and their indebtedness to us.
It can be said with a strong degree of certainty that Africa has had three Golden Ages. The first two reached their climax and were in decline before Europe as a functioning entity in human society was born. Africa's first Golden Age began at the beginning—with the birth of man and the development of organized societies.
In his book, The Progress and Evolution of Man in Africa Dr. L.S. B. Leaky states, "In every country that one visits and where one is drawn into a conversation about Africa, the question is regularly asked, by people who should know better: 'But what has Africa contributed to world progress?' The critics of Africa forget that men of science today, with few exceptions, are satisfied that Africa was the birthplace of man himself, and that for many hundreds of centuries thereafter, Africa was in the forefront of all human progress."
In the early development of man, the family was the most important unit in existence. Through the years the importance of this unit has not changed. The first human societies were developed for reasons relating to the needs and survival of the family. The early African had to make implements with which to catch fish and animals for the family table. He searched for new ways of building shelter, gathering and raising food, and domesticating animals. Our use of fire today simply continues the process started by the early Africans—the control of fire.
With the discovery of metals and how to use them, all Africa took a great leap forward. Man had learned how to take iron from the ground and turn it into spears and tools. Iron cultures spread rapidly across Africa and there were very few parts of Africa that were not influenced by these iron age cultures. Iron cultures had their greatest development in the area of Africa that is now the Eastern Sudan, in the great city-state of Meroe. The use of iron accelerated every aspect of African development and introduced a new danger—the eventual use of iron weapons in warfare.
The Nile River became a great cultural highway, bringing peoples and culture out of inner Africa. These migrations by river led to the establishment of one of the greatest nations in world history, Egypt. In his book, The Destruction of African Civilization, Great Issues of A Race From 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D., the African American historian, Chancellor Williams, refers to Egypt as "Ethiopia's Oldest Daughter" and calls attention to evidence to prove the southem African origin of early Egyptian people and their civilization.
Egypt first became an organized nation about 6000 B.C. Medical interest centers upon a period in the Third Dynasty (5345–6307 B.C.) when Egypt had an ambitious pharaoh named Zoser, and Zoser, in turn, had for his chief counselor and minister a brilliant commoner named Imhotep whose name means "He who cometh in peace." Imhotep constructed the famous step pyramid of Sakkarah, near Memphis. The building methods used in the construction of this pyramid revolutionized the architecture of the ancient world. Egypt gave the world some of the greatest personalities in the history of mankind. In this regard, Imhotep is singularly outstanding. In the ancient history of Egypt, no individual left a deeper impression than the commoner Imhotep. He was the world's first multi-genius. He was also the real father of medicine. In his book, Evolution Of Modern Medicine Sir William Osler refers to Imhotep as "the first figure of a physician, to stand out clearly from the mists of antiquity."
The period in Egyptian history from the Third Dynasty to the first invasion of Egypt by the Hyksos, or Shepherd Kings, in 1700 B.C. is, in my opinion, the apex of the first Golden Age. The western Asian domination over Egypt lasted about one hundred and twenty years and was ended by the rise of Egyptian nationalism during the Seventeenth Dynasty. During this period the pharaohs at Thebes consolidated their powers and began a united campaign to rid lower Egypt of the Hyksos invaders. When the invaders from western Asia were finally driven out by the Pharaoh Ahmose I, the splendid Eighteenth Dynasty was established and Egypt's second Golden Age began. Egypt's Golden Age did not belong to Egypt alone but included other nations in Africa, mainly Kush and Ethiopia (which at certain periods in history were one and the same). These nations farther to the south were the originators of the early culture of Egypt. Egypt at this juncture in history was no longer dependent on her cultural parent and was once more the most developed nation in the world.
Again rulers of monumental status were coming to power. Two of the best known rulers of this period were the female pharaoh Hatshepsut and her bruther Thothmose III. Great temples were built throughout the country, and the consequent employment of hundreds of artists and craftsmen prepared the way for the artistic glories which were still to come.
During the reign of Thothmose II, the influence of Egypt was once more extended to western Asia, now referred to as the Middle East. The age of grandeur continued. This age underwent a dramatic and lasting change in 1386 B.C. Around that time, Queen Tiy of Egypt gave birth to a boy who was first named Amenhates after this father. Very little is known of his childhood except that he was sickly from birth and developed an interest in art, poetry, and religion. His closest companion was said to be Nefertiti, who later became his wife.
Akhenaton, often referred to as the "Heretic King," is one of history's most extraordinary monarchs. Thirteen hundred years before Christ he preached and lived a gospel of love, brotherhood, and truth. He has been called the world's first idealist; the first temporal ruler ever to lead his people toward the worship of a single God.
When Akhenaton came to the throne more than 3000 years ago, Egypt dominated the world.
Egypt's Golden Age gradually waned and the pride and splendor that had marked the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties gave way to internal strife and confusion. Wars of conquest and colonization had drained much of her military and economic strength. In the meantime, as the nations to the south grew more powerful, they became predatory toward Egypt, which had once been their master.
The nation that is now called Ethiopia came back upon the center stage of history around 960 B.C. It was then represented by a queen who in some books is referred to as Makeda, and in others as Belkis. She is better known to the world as the Queen of Sheb~ In his book, World's Great Men Of Color J. A. Rogers gives this description: "Out of the mists of three thousand years emerge this beautiful love story of a black queen, who, attracted by the face of a Judean monarch, made a long journey to see him..." In Ethiopia, A Cultural History, Sylvia Pankhurst tells the story of this journey: "The history of the queen of the South, who undertook a long and arduous journey to Jerusalem, in order to learn of the wisdom of King Solomon, is deeply cherished in Ethiopia as part of the national heritage, for she is claimed as an Ethiopian Queen, Makeda, 'a woman of splendid beauty,' who introduced the religion and culture of Israel to her own land."
By the tenth and the ninth centuries B.C., Egypt had been weakened by outside attacks and by bitter disputes between its priests and the royal families. This had allowed the Kushites to the south to gain a measure of independence. They now had the confidence to move northward and conquer their former masters. In spite of the war of conquest, these Kushite (or Ethiopian) kings brought Egypt her last age of grandeur and social reform. There is a need to make a serious study of this act of internal African colonization and what it achieved at the end of the Golden Age for the two great nations of Egypt and Kush.
These Kushite kings restored the declining culture and economy of Egypt and took it to unprecedented heights of leadership in the way it cared for its people. Though a colony, Egypt was once more a world power.
The Assyrian invasion of 671 B.C. drove the Kushite forces to the south and began the harshness and misrule that destroyed the grandeur that once was Egypt. Egypt continued to decline while a young nation on the other side of the Mediterranean—Greece—began to gather its power, around 500 B.C. In the year 332 B.C., Alexander the Great, a student of Aristotle, invaded Egypt. This was the first purely European invasion of Africa. The aftermath of this invasion, and the new European interest in dominating the trade of the Mediterranean world, led to the Punic Wars and the invasion by the Romans.
In Egypt a strong and shrewd young girl tried to deal with the plight of her country under the threat of Roman domination. Her name was Cleopatra.
In the sixth and seventh centuries A.D., Roman rule began to lose its hold on North Africa and the Middle East. African genius for state building and for bringing new societies into being was reborn in the Western Sudan (inner West Africa), where the third and last African Golden Age began.
The first of the great empires of the Western Sudan to become known to the outside world was Ghana. It began as a small settlement during the second century of the Christian era. It would later develop into a state with a known history of more than a thousand years. In Europe and in the Arab countries, Ghana was known as the country rich in gold. This was a natural attraction for the Arabs and later the Europeans. The country reached the height of its greatness during the reign of Tenkamenin, one of its greatest kings, who came to power in 1062 A.D. The king lived in a palace of stone and wood which was built to be defended in time of war. The empire was well organized. The political progress and social well-being of its people could be favorably compared to the best kingdoms and empires that prevailed in Europe at this time. The country had a military force of 200,000 men.
In one of a number of holy wars, or Jihads, Ghana was invaded by the Almaravids under the leadership of Abu Beku of the Sosso Empire in 1076 A.D. This conquest brought an end to Ghana's age of prosperity and cultural development. The character of the country was slow to change. Nearly one hundred years later the Arab writer El Idrisi wrote of it as being "the greatest kingdom of the Blacks." In a later account, El Idrisi said: "Ghana...is the most commercial of the Black countries. It is visited by rich merchants from all the surrounding countries and from the extremities of the West."
In 1087 the country regained its independence, without regaining its old strength, state organization and grandeur. The ruins of the Empire of Ghana became the Kingdoms of Diara and Sosso. The provinces of Ghana became a part of the Mali Empire and were later absorbed into the Songhay Empire.
The great drama of state-building, trade and commerce, and power brokerage unfolded at Timbuctoo, queen city of the Western Sudan. Two hundred miles down the Niger from Timbuctoo the competing city of Gao stood. It was founded about the seventh century and was the capital of the large black empire of Songhay.
The famous emperor of Mali, Mansa Musa, stopped at Timbuctoo on his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324. He went in regal splendor with an entourage of 60,000 persons, including 12,000 servants. Five hundred bondsmen, each of whom carried a staff of pure gold and marched in front of the entourage. Two hundred eighty camels bore 2,400 pounds of gold which this African monarch distributed as alms and gifts. Musa returned from Mecca with an architect who designed imposing buildings in Timbuctoo and in other parts of his realm. To the outside world of the late medieval period, the Emperor Mansa Musa was more than an individual. He was Africa. He conquered the Songhay Empire and rebuilt the University of Sankore. He figured, by name, on every map. In his lifetime he hecame, in person, the symbol of the mystery and of the fabulous wealth of the unknown African continent. He was the most colorful of the black kings of the fourteenth century. He still held this position nearly two centuries after his death.
After the death of Mansa Musa, the empire of Mali declined in importance. Its place was taken by Songhay, whose greatest king was Askia the Great (Mohammed Toure). Askia came to power in 1493, one year after Columbus discovered America. He consolidated the territory conquered by the previous ruler, Sonni All, and built Songhay into the most powerful state in the Western Sudan. His realm, it is said, was larger than all Europe.
The German writer Henry Barth, in his famous work, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, calls Askia the Great, "One of the most brilliant and enlightened administrators of all times." He organized the army of Songhay, improved the system of banking and credit, and made the city-states of Gao, Walata, Timbuctoo, and Jenne into intellectual centers. Timbuctoo, during his reign, was a city of 100,000 people—"People filled to the top," said a chronicler of that time, "with gold and dazzling women."
Askia encouraged scholarship and literature. Students from all over the Moslem world came to Timbuctoo to study grammar, law and surgery at the University of Sankore; scholars came from North Africa and Europe to confer with learned historians and writers of this black empire. A Sudanese literature developed and many books were written. Leo Africanus, who wrote one of the best known works on the Western Sudan, says: "In Timbuctoo there were numerous judges, doctors and clerics, all receiving good salaries from the king. He pays great respect to men of learning. There is a big demand for books in manuscript, imported from Barbary (North Africa). More profit is made from the book trade than from any other line of business."
Askia has been hailed as one of the wisest monarchs of the Middle Ages. Alexander Chamberlain, in his book, The Contribution of the Negro to Human Civilization, says of him: " In personal character, in administrative ability, in devotion to the welfare of his subjects. in open-mindedness toward foreign influences, and in wisdom in the adoption of enlightened ideas and institutions from abroad, King Askia was certainly the equal of the average European monarch of the time and superior to many of them."
After the death of Askia the Great in 1538, the Songhay Empire began to lose it strength and control over its vast territory. When the Songhay Empire collapsed after the capture of Timbuctoo and Gao by the Moroccans in 1591, the whole of the Western Sudan was devastated by the invading troops. The Sultan of Morocco, EI-Mansur, had sent a large army with European firearms across the Sahara to attack the once powerful empire of Songhay. The prosperous city of Timbuctoo was plundered by the army of freebooters. A state of anarchy prevailed. The University of Sankore which had stood for over five hundred years was destroyed and the faculty exiled to Morocco. The great Sudanese scholar of that day, Ahmed Baba, was among those exiled. Baba was a scholar of great depth and inspiration. He was the author of more than forty books on such diverse themes as theology, astronomy, ethnography and biography. His rich library of sixteen hundred books was lost during his expatriation from Timbuctoo.
Timbuctoo provides the most terrible example of the struggles of the West African states and towns as they strove to preserve what was once their Golden Age. The Arabs, Berbers and Tuaregs from the north showed them no mercy. Timbuctoo had previously been sacked by the Tuaregs as early a 1433, and they had occupied it for thirty years. Between 1591 and 1593, the Tuaregs had already taken advantage of the situation to plunder Timbuctoo once more. Between 1723 and 1728, the Tuaregs once more occupied and looted Timbuctoo. Thus Timbuctoo, once the queen city of the Western Sudan, with more than 200,000 inhabitants, and the center of a powerful state, degenerated into a shadow of its former stature.
Now, West Africa entered a sad period of decline. During the Moorish occupation, wreck and ruin became the order of the day. When the Europeans arrived in this part of Africa and saw these conditions they assumed that nothing of order and value had existed in these countries. This mistaken impression, too often repeated, has influenced the interpretation of African and African American life and history for over four hundred years.
Africa's time of tragedy and decline started both in Europe and in Africa itself. For more than one thousand years Africans had been bringing into being empire after empire. The opening of Europe's era of exploration, Africa's own internal strife, and the slave trade, turned what had been Africa's Third Golden Age into a time of troubles. The "independence explosion" that started with Ghana in 1957 was a signal to the world that Africans were breaking away from the effects of slavery and colonialism, and were determined to reenter the mainstream of history.
The splendor and the genius in state building that I have been referring to in this short paper is as much a part of African history as slavery, if not more so. In the re-education of African people to take their place in the world of the future, Africans must be clear about the role that they have already played in the world of the past. This is essential if African people are to shape their world of the future.
Part 3 of 10
The African Holocaust—The Slave Trade
There is a need to look holistically at African history, good and bad. If African people are to be educated to face a new reality on the eve of tne twenty first century, we must know about the good times as well as the bad times. We must also know that history has not made Africa and Africans an exceptional case. In the great unfolding of history, Africans have played every role from saint to buffoon and we need to learn how to live with the good as well as the bad. We need to understand the triumphs as well as the tragedies in our history. At the end of what I have been alluding to as the last of the three golden ages in Africa, we entered a period of internal and external tragedy, partly of our making, but mainly imposed on us by foreigners in search of new land, new energy and new resources. We made the terrible mistake of thinking some foreigners could settle our internal "family" disputes. Instead of settling our family disputes, the foreigner turned us, one against the other, and conquered both. This is the great mistake we made in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries at the end of Africa's third golden age. It is the greatest mistake we are making right now. This mistake grows out of our misinterpretation of our greatest strength which is our universal humanity.
As a people we have always been hospitable to strangers. The weakness in this noble gesture is that we have not been alert enough and suspicious enough to examine the intentions of the stranger that we have invited into our homes. All too often in our history strangers come in as guests and stay as conquerors. This is, at least in part, how and why the slave trade started. You cannot explain the slave trade and vindicate or rationalize the European participation in the slave trade by saying some Africans were in the slave trade and sold slaves to the Europeans. In some instances and in some regions, this was basically true. You cannot excuse the European slave trade by saying that slavery was practiced among the Africans before the Europeans came. In some instances and in some regions, this is also basically true. But the system of internal servitude in Africa that existed in some parts of Africa before the coming of he Europeans and the chattel slavery imposed upon Africa by the Europeans had no direct relationship, one to the other. In the African system of servitude which deserves critical analysis, families were broken up but not a single African was shipped out of Africa. In no way am I trying to say or imply that this system was good. My main point is that it was not the same as the European system. The European slave trade was a three continent industry that brought about a revolution in maritime science, international trade and a system of mercantilism that had not previously existed in world history. No Africans had this kind of international contact or were in a position to establish it at this juncture in history.
For more enlightenment on this subject, I invite you to read the following books, Black Mother, The Years of Our African Slave Trade: Precolonial History, 1450–1850, by Basil Davidson, Forced Migration, by Joseph E. Inikore, Christopher Columbus and The African Holocaust, by John Henrik Clarke and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, by Walter Rodney.
Like most world tragedies the Aflantic slave trade, or the European slave trade, started slowly, almost accidentally. At first the Europeans did not visit the coast of West Africa looking for slaves; they were searching for a route to Asia for the spices and the sweets they had heard about because they needed something to supplement the dull European food of that day. In general they needed new energy, new land and new resources. Plagues, famines and internal wars had left Europe partly exhausted and partly under-populated. In the years between the first European entry into West Africa from about 1438 to the year of Christopher Columbus' alleged discovery of America in 1492, there were no slaves of consequence taken out of Africa because there was no special work outside of Africa for slaves to do. The creation of the plantation system in the Americas and the Caribbean Islands set in motion a way of life for Europeans that they had not previously enjoyed. This way of life and the exploitation of the resources of the Americas and the Caribbean Islands, after the destruction of the nations and civilizations of the people referred to as "Indians," renewed the economic energy of Europe and gave Europeans the ability to move to the center stage of what they refer to as world progress. This was done mainly at the expense of African people who are still not thoroughly aware of their impact on every aspect of world history. Education for a new reality in the African world, must train African people to understand the nature of their contribution to the different aspects of world history, past and present, and the possibilities of their future contribution.
If slavery was the African people's holocaust, we should not be ashamed of saying so. We should have no hesitation in using the word "holocaust" because no one people has a monopoly on the word and I know of no law that gives a people the right to copyright a word as though it is their exclusive ownership. In relationship to this subject I have previously said that slavery was already an old institution before the European slave trade. However, the European slave trade in Africa is the best known and best recorded in the history of the world and also, in my opinion, the most tragic. The neglected tragedy of this system is that it did not have to occur at all. Had the European entered into a genuine partnership with the Africans instead of reducing them to slaves there would have been more goods and services to be had, both for the Europeans and the Africans, through contract labor.
The European slave trade in Africa was started and reached its crescendo between 1400 to 1600. This was also a turning point in the history of the world. Europe was emerging from the lethargy of the Middle Ages. Europeans were regaining their confidence, manifesting a new form of nationalism and extending that nationalism into racism. The African had goods and services that the European needed, and the European had the basic technology that the African needed. Had the African needs and the European needs been considered on an equal basis, there could have been an honest exchange between African and European and the European could still have had labor in large numbers without the slave trade and the massive murder that occurred in the slave trade. This idea, only a dream in the minds of a few men, could have changed the world for the better had it been seriously considered.
Slavery is taught as though it is something that victimized only African people. Slavery is an old institution. It is as old as human need and greed. It grew out of a weakness in the human character and the need to cover-up that weakness by dominating other people. In teaching about slavery, the one thing African people seem not to know is that for most of their existence on this earth they have been a sovereign people, free of slavery. The period of their enslavement is the best known and the best documented in history in comparison to other slave periods in history. When other people were the victims it was comparatively short. Feudalism in Europe, a form of European enslavement of Europeans, no matter what you call it, lasted much longer. This is why a holistic view of history is needed in order to understand this particular part of history that relates to a single people. This is where so-called Black Studies Programs missed both the objective and the subject in the study of slavery.
In evaluating the African slave trade, there was another "Middle Passage" often neglected by most scholars—the Arab slave trade. It is often forgotten that the Arab slave trade in East Africa and the slave trade from North Africa into Inner West Africa was protracted and ruthless. Sometimes the Arabs from the north who were Moslem enslaved Africans in the south who were also Moslems, thereby violating one of the most basic customs of their faith—that no Moslem should enslave another Moslem. There is a small library of books on this subject that most scholars have chosen not to read, thereby making the Arab slave trade the best kept secret in history—although it is not a secret at all. Of the many books and documents that I have read on the subject, Slavery in the Arab World by Murray Gordon, 1987, and The African Slave Trade From the 15th to the 19th Century, in The General History of Africa: Studies and Documents 2, UNESCO,1979. I find the most informative the UNESCO book, especially the chapter, "The Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean."
Like most strangers to Africa the Arabs entered Africa, allegedly. as friends. The Africans who are curious and uncritical about new people, new religions and cultures treated the Arabs as well as they treated other strangers. The Arabs were not always kind in their spread of Islam in Africa. In fact, they were usually ruthless and often disrespectful of societies and cultures that existed in Africa before they arrived. In North Africa the two wars of Arab conquest that came in the seventh and tenth centuries, the first being religious and military, broke the back of Roman influence in the area and replaced the corrupt Roman regimes. At first the Arabs were welcomed in North Africa as a replacement for the ruthless Romans. When the North Africans and Berbers discovered that the Arabs were also ruthless, although in a different way, it was too late because the Arabs now had the military upper hand.
Another aspect of Arab conquest, generally neglected, is the spread of Arab influence in East Africa through accommodation and sexual conquest. Many times the Arabs moved down the coast of East Africa rendering the service of the much needed East African coastal trade. Soon after this, Arabs began to marry or cohabit with African women. This in turn resulted in a generation of African-looking Arabs. These Arab half-breeds facilitated the spread of the trade inland at a time when the Arab face was held in suspicion in this part of Africa. In the fierce competition in the West African slave trade, the Portuguese were driven from West Africa around to East Africa. The Arab slave trade, moving from north to east met the Portuguese slave trade moving up from the south. These two slave trades complemented each other and culminated with the establishment of one of the largest slave trading forts, in the history of the world, on the Island of Zanzibar. This event is well documented in any good history of East Africa, including the Cambridge History of East Africa, and The Cambridge History of Africa. Basil Davidson's A History of East and Central Africa to the late 19th Century, and certain chapters on East Africa in his Lost Cities of Africa is a popularization of the subject. There are two old but valuable books on the subject, East Africa and Its Invaders by Reginald Coupland, and the chapters on East Africa in the book, The Colonization of Africa by Alien Races, by Sir Harry Johnston.
While the East African drama of slavery was unfolding with the Arabs and later with the Portuguese as the protagonists, the larger drama in West Africa was changing the course of history. The Africans, all along the coast of West Africa were being subjected to a form of humiliation never before known, in quite the same way, in their history or human history. The collecting of Africans, sometimes prisoners of war from other Africans, the movement of Africans from the hinterlands to the coast, where very often seven out of ten lost their lives, were forms of unrecorded genocide. This is one of the numerous missing statistics in the attempt to estimate the number of Africans who died in the slave trade within Africa, the number of those who died in the slave dungeons waiting for shipment to the Americas, and the number of those who died on the journey to the Americas. The precise figures will never be known. Good estimations in this case are the best that we have.
There are a number of books describing the tragic living conditions in the slave forts and dungeons along the coast of West Africa. Books written by Europeans tend to tone down the tragedy. Books written by African scholars tend to be academic and objective to the point of being noncommittal to the tragedy of slavery. The following is a brief description of some of the conditions in these slave dungeons. In the early slave trade the forts sometimes contained between three hundred to five hundred captives. During the eighteenth century most forts had been adaped to the larger scale slave trade and they held many hundreds more. There were sections for the female captives and sections for the male captives. There were smaller and more tortuous dungeons for the rebellious and unruly captives. The conditions within and around these slave holding castles were great tragic horror stories. Within the castles there were no beds, no drinking water, no installed toilet facilities, and no means of day by day sanitary maintenance. The apartments of the slave traders and captains were directly above the main holding dungeons. And they lived there in luxury and were unmindful of the misery and degradation one or two floors below.
These conditions were forced upon a people who had never done European people any harm or had ever allied themselves with the enemies of the Europeans in any way. The Europeans who forced this condition upon African people professed to believe in a loving God who was no respecter of kith, kin and geographical boundaries in the dispensing of his mercy and understanding to all human beings. In their action toward the Africans that would last for more than three hundred years, the Europeans were saying that Africans had no soul or humanity, no culture or civilization worthy of respect, and that they were outside of the grace of God.
The long journey across the sea was another tragic story of misery. Figuratively, the slave ship was a floating city of prisoners presided over by a crew of ruffians gathered from the human scum of Europe. The period of the European slave trade in Africa is best known to us because it is the best-documented. However, the documentation is often confusing because it was created by people who were trying to justify the slave trade. Most people, especially Europeans who created most of the documents on the slave trade, write about the subject with the intent to make the victim of slavery feel guilty and to vindicate the perpetrators of this inhuman trade.
There is probably more dishonesty related to the interpretation of this subject than any other subject known to mankind. The African slave trade, like African history, is often written about, but rarely if ever understood. This misunderstanding probably grows out of the fact that we nearly always start the study of the African slave trade in the wrong place. The germ, the motive, the rationale for the European aspect of the African slave trade started in the minds of the Europeans in the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. And this slave trade could not have started at all had there been no market for it. The slave trade started when the Europeans began to expand into the broader world. And the market for slaves was created by Europeans for European reasons. The story of the European slave trade in Africa is essentially the story of the consequences of the second rise of Europe.
The peopling of the so-called new world by African people in the Americas and the Caribbean Islands was an enterprise of monumental proportions. This act would change the status of Europe and the world forever, and the Africans brought to the new world would be transformed into a new kind of people, neither wholly African nor wholly American. They would not easily adapt to their new condition though they gave their slave master, in some cases, the impression that they were doing so. They did not easily give up their African way of life, in spite of the attempt to destroy and outlaw it. This was the basis of massive slave revolts throughout the Caribbean Islands, South America, especially Brazil, and the more than two hundred and fifty slave revolts recorded in the United States.
Every attempt was made through the church and through oppression to deny that Africans hid a revolutionary heritage. There is documentary proof that Africans fought on the shores of Aftica to keep from getting on the slave ships. After being forced on the slave ships they continued the fight. Some fought to keep from being taken off the slave ships. Many, many more continued the fight once they got here. In parts of South America, and on some lslands in the Caribbean where the slaves outnumbered the Europeans, some Africans bypassed the auction block, fled into the hills and the forests and never became slaves at all. Some of these Africans who escaped slavery were called Maroons. The best books on the subject are, The Maroons, by Mavis Campbell, Maroon Societies, by Richard Price, and The Haitian Maroons, and Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James.
The drama of African survival in what is called the new world went beyond drama itself. In conditions that defied human imagination, for a protracted period lasting over three hundred years, Africans, using various techniques, pretenses, and acts of both submission and rebellion, went beyond survival and prevailed in order to live and still be a people in spite of the massive effort to destroy every aspect of their humanity. Part of what kept them alive, away from home, is that they would not give up their African culture in spite of being consistently pressured to do so. Many Africans, away from home, depending on the prevailing conditions that could change any day or any moment, had to become two persons in a single body. Some went beyond schizophrenia and changed their personality to suit the prevailing situation in order to survive so that the next generation could prevail.
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Source: The John Henrik Clarke Virtual Museum
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