West Africa Review (2000)
ISSN: 1525-4488
MY PRELIMINARY RESPONSE TO, "A PRELIMINARY RESPONSE TO ALI MAZRUI'S PRELIMINARY CRITIQUE"
|
West Africa Review (2000) ISSN: 1525-4488 MY PRELIMINARY RESPONSE TO, "A PRELIMINARY RESPONSE TO ALI MAZRUI'S PRELIMINARY CRITIQUE" |
|
Amechi A. Okolo
This is to acknowledge receipt of your preliminary response to Ali Mazrui's preliminary critique of your series - Wonders of the African World – which you faxed me earlier today. I watched the series on PBS and was quite impressed with the details, the historical reach, clarity, and above all, the simplicity of the presentation. Furthermore, it was quite amazing that you were able to present such a delicate mass of data in a serious and yet entertaining format to attract and keep the attention of both the professionals and the general public. The format is correct and commendable because authentic African historiography needs to be disseminated as widely as possible especially given the violence that Euro-centric scholarship and mass culture have done to Africa.
I need to say that this is certainly one of the most important aspects of the series. The topic is always controversial whenever it is raised so I can understand why it has attracted so much attention. I first heard that question as a graduate student at Purdue in the early 1970s. I was quite embarrassed because I had not earlier given much thought to the possible complicity of Africans in slave trade. I have since found out that it is the favorite of many white scholars to raise the question because such approach serves some useful purposes for them, such as:
Embarrass Africans: First, they hope to use it to embarrass Africans so as to shut them up from raving against slave trade.
Divide and Rule Principle: Here, the age-old principle of divide and conquer is at work. They hope to set African-Americans and other Africans in Diaspora against continental Africans.
Spreading Guilt: They also hope to dilute the western guilt of that notorious period by spreading and sharing the guilt with others.
It was in the light of the above that I particularly enjoyed watching the episode on slave trade in Ghana and Dahomey. It was not only brilliantly presented but courageous to broach the issue at all. Like I stated earlier, the vexed, confused and embarrassing nature of the question makes many African and African-American scholars to shy away from it. They hope that the question could be swept under the rug by not addressing it. It was therefore to your utter credit that you did not try to avoid the question even while you were in the belly of the beast. Your interviews in Asante and Benin were direct, informative and scholarly. It is therefore not correct that you were trying to make anyone feel guilty.
In fact, you were able to bring out some authentic facts about the question. First people were able to see the kings' descendants publicly acknowledge their shameful complicity in the horrible trade. Some of the surviving infrastructure used to subdue, chain and sell off the slaves were shown on camera in your various interviews with the Prince in Ghana and the Princess in Dahomey. To the best of my knowledge that was the first time such facts were shown publicly on camera to a worldwide audience so that there is no way for any further credible denial of the action. I think your action is very commendable even though I can understand why even some African scholars could be upset with you. I completely agree with the episode and the questions because they are cogent and timely. The important thing is that it is time African scholars stop playing ostrich with the question of our ancestral complicity and collaboration in slave trade.
The problem with some African scholars is that they think that continuous avoidance might make the question go away. Unfortunately, it will not disappear but will continue to evoke rancorous responses whenever anyone has the courage to initiate a frontal attack on it like you did. I must confess that I have always considered the issues raised by the questions as inherently valid ever since I heard them in my graduate class; and I suspect that it is the apparent credibility of the questions that makes many uncomfortable with the discussion. My problem was that the professors who raised the questions then did not provide students with the necessary tools to correctly answer the questions in any meaningful way without serving their dishonorable intentions.
To fully understand the historiography of the question, we must go back to the boisterous sixties, the rancorous civil rights era with its black power movement - all of which engendered assertive black scholarship and the rise of African Studies Departments in various universities. The questions were therefore part of the establishment's responses to stunt and blunt the budding proud and assertive black scholarship. Unfortunately some of us have therefore grown into "mature" practicing scholars in the 90s still uncomfortable whenever the questions of our ancestral duplicity and collaboration in slave trade are mentioned. The question, however, is not too difficult to understand and need not be embarrassing to anyone. Like you said, guilt should not be heritable. I have over the years devoted a good part of my scholarly efforts to answering those questions in a way that makes common sense to me and involves minimal embarrassment. I have been sharing my studies on this with my students over the years; and their reactions and critiques have continued to improve the research. Incidentally, we just finished the segment on slavery and slave trade in class just before "Wonders of the African World" aired. You can therefore imagine my fascination. In fact I hope that I can get the video so that I can show it to the students in class next semester.
To deal with that question, I usually get students to understand that Slavery did not start in Africa or with blacks. The normal conception is that we have been culturally conditioned to associate the word "slave" with blacks and Africa. Yet, linguistically, the word slave did not originally refer to blacks or Africa. It was derived from slavs who were historically subjected to unmitigated servitude after their migration to Europe from Asia from the 5th Century BC. Furthermore, apart from the historical use of slavs as slaves in Europe, slaves had been part of the historical realities of most societies as they progressed from the "Hunting and Gathering" phase which was the most primitive type of society known to man. There was therefore no question that African societies had slaves before their Western encounter just as the west. Hence, there was nothing unusual in finding out that African had enslaved Africans long before Europeans arrived on the scene. In fact, the reverse would have been empirically significant because slaves existed in most societies as part of historical dialectics of mankind of which Africa could not have been different.
Historically, slaves had mainly been the result of warfare. It had been part of the conqueror's bounties to carry off some of the captured enemies back home as slaves or to demand slaves as part of war reparations. Or the women of the vanquished communities would be taken as slaves by the conquering soldiers for their pleasures. In fact, often a general's worth was measured by the number of slaves he or she brought home. Also some societies would condemn their own kinds as punishments for some heinous offenses against the society. Now that we are all agreed that slaves had existed in most historical societies, singling out the African slavery for special critique would, therefore either show ignorance of historical dynamics or confirm a form of academic dishonesty that western academic orthodoxy has been charged with either of which would make the African slavery charge to lose both its punch and poignancy.
The uniqueness of the Atlantic slave trade and American slavery was that it was part and parcel of the industrial revolution. Slavery which had been an integral part of the internal development process of most societies, and which most societies were able to transcend as internal development progressed, got distorted in Africa by an onslaught of exogenous dynamics unleashed by the forces of industrial revolution. The Atlantic slave trade was therefore a movement that was entirely driven by external forces – the forces of industrial revolution, the need to work the plantation system in the Americas so as to feed the industries of the west and to make profit. In one word, it was capitalism and the forces of capitalism that caused the Atlantic slave trade and American slavery. Notably, it was only in Africa that slavery acquired the special status of being capitalism, i.e. money driven. Then Europeans got African leaders as allies, gave them guns, machetes, matches, rum, etc; and set them on rampage against fellow Africans for the sole purpose of capturing those to be sold into slavery. That was the essential uniqueness of the Atlantic slave trade.
The role of the African leaders was quite clear and deplorable; and nobody should ever defend them for such horrendous collusion. Furthermore, their ignominious actions must always be condemned in the strongest possible terms; and on this I agree completely with Wole Soyinka that "criticism, like charity, must start at home." I therefore see no reason why Ali Mazrui or any African should feel embarrassed or uncomfortable with the issue. I do not feel any obligation to defend African leaders for their collaborative roles in slave trade nor should any African. In a way, the average African whether in Africa or in Diaspora was a victim of the western capitalist aggression in cohort with African leadership who benefited and built personal wealth due to their trade in human cargo and the spread of suffering and chaos in the society. The prevalent excruciating poverty in the current continental Africa and the harrowing slave experience of Africans in Diaspora started from our ancestral collusion with the forces of evil and oppression against their people they were supposed to cherish and protect.
Our ancestral leaders abandoned their sacred contract with their people to cherish and protect them and accepted unholy copulation with the enemy for their own selfish aggrandizement. The result has been stunted growth for the continent, poverty and misery for the masses. If we do not condemn them as strongly as we could today, our current leaders today who collude with foreigners to siphon away billions of our money might think that they would be free from African criticism. Again, as Wole said, "criticism, like charity, must start at home."
Furthermore, let me just briefly react to the statement by Dr. Akosua Perbi, "that there would have been no slave trade in the countries without the complicity and collaboration of the kings and their representatives." I find it difficult to ignore the statement because I am not sure if it is true. In fact, historical evidence show that is not correct. You see, I have very strongly condemned our ancestral leaders and blamed them for their collusion, but I am not sure that I can go as far as saying that there would have been no slave trade if they had not cooperated as Dr. Perbi said. After all, many of our leaders objected strongly to colonialism when the west decided on that, yet they were not able to stop the colonial onslaught. In fact, Ethiopia was the only African country that was not colonized by western powers in spite of the rigorous objections of many African leaders then.
The point I am making is that once the historical dialectics had dictated the need for slaves from Africa, I am not sure that non-cooperation alone would have stopped them. The question is whether Africa possessed the relevant military might to stop determined western incursion then? And my answer is no. So chances were that the west would still have prevailed. After all, western expansion has been historically based on violence and not on peaceful cooperation. This meant that if they did not get peaceful collusion they would have forced violent compliance just like they did later during colonial period when many African leaders resisted them. My anger against our ancestral leaders was that they would have at least fought them and let it be on record that they died fighting for their people instead of the cozy picture of the happy bedfellows that we have today.
The piece on Ethiopia was also excellent and very informative. The mummies, the underground stone city and the mystery of the Ark were indisputable evidence of authentic indigenous civilization that predated any western incursion. Ironically, while there has been Western fascination with Egyptian civilization, there appear to have been a complete conspiracy of silence on Ethiopian civilization. The standard orthodoxy of Egyptologists is that the civilization was not African hence their fascination with it. Unfortunately, they are wrong, ancient Egyptian civilization resulted from the hybrid of cultural integration between the Egyptians and the Nubians which started some 20th Century BC ago and during which power had shifted and alternated between them. The west wants to disjoint Egypt from Africa so that they would continue to deny their intellectual and scientific debts to Africa.
In the case of Ethiopia, the West has determined that the best approach is to ignore it since they have no way of showing that the civilization was not indigenous and/or not African. This is why your series is very important because the ancient Ethiopian achievements parallel those of Egypt in many ways. If people are able to view two of them together- one in the tip of Africa and the other in heartland Africa - one might begin to see them as part of the continuous and authentic as well as indigenous African civilizations. The huge western lies reinforced by Hegel that Africa has no history would have been blown asunder. As for the Ethiopian claim about the Ark, you said it all yourself – since no other nation is making such a claim why should I not believe them. And I do not believe that the claim is an empty one or that it is baseless – after all, it is solidly supported by all the material evidence that you showed on camera. And like the Patriarch brilliantly told you that if you do not believe with all that you have seen, chances are that seeing the Ark itself might not suddenly turn you into a believer.
Finally, I am also elated about the fate of books at Timbuktu. I hope the collection will include books from the great University of Sankore which was a world center of learning. The legendary town of Timbuktu was also the world center of commerce long before Venice ever rose to fame.
Sincerely yours,
© Copyright 2000 Africa Resource Center
Citation Format
Okolo, Amechi A.. (2000). MY PRELIMINARY RESPONSE TO, "A PRELIMINARY RESPONSE TO ALI MAZRUI'S PRELIMINARY CRITIQUE". West Africa Review: 1 , 2. [iuicode: http://www.icaap.org/iuicode?101.1.2.15].