Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Marvin X in upcoming anthology
African American Experience in California
African American Experience in California, edited by Aparajita Nanda, will include the Marvin X essay, "Welcome to Mexi-Cali" from Chicken Bones: A Journal for Literary & Artistic African-American Themes, posted online 14 April 2006. Copyright (c) 2006 by Marvin X.
African American Experience in California, to be published in June 2011,
collects literature past and present that explores the African American experience in California.
Public Hears Unpublished work from Malcolm X
Public hears unpublished work from Malcolm X
By JENNIFER PELTZ, Associated Press Writer
The introduction, read publicly for the first time last week, underscores the ambition, personal-as-political power and foreboding of ``The Autobiography of Malcolm X,'' published shortly after the civil rights leader was assassinated in 1965.
``I'm writing this book for the best interests of the Negro and the white man in America,'' begins the introduction, read by a Detroit lawyer who bought it from the estate of the autobiography's collaborator, Alex Haley.
``Most sincerely I want my life story to do as much good for America and for both races as it possibly can. ... I give my life to be used to benefit America and humanity, that America will learn that the Negro's problem is a challenge to America's consciousness and that the Negro is America's problem.''
The existence of the introduction, and three other unpublished chapters apparently intended for the 19-chapter political classic, has been known since entertainment attorney Gregory J. Reed bought them at a 1992 auction of Haley's estate. Some pages have been exhibited in a Detroit museum.
But Reed on Wednesday read it publicly for the first time, to an audience of hundreds at the Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center. The organization was founded by the civil rights leader's late widow and housed in the building where he was killed.
It's unclear why the introduction or the other chapters weren't in the book, said Morgan Entrekin, who heads the autobiography's original publisher, Grove Press. Now called Grove/Atlantic Inc., the publisher is talking with Reed about possibly releasing the unpublished sections.
The introduction echoes the themes of the book, which traces Malcolm X's evolution from a child who lost his parents to violence and mental illness, to a teenager lured into ghetto vice and crime, to a burglary convict drawn to a burgeoning black Muslim movement and finally to a fiery voice for black empowerment.
Portraying his experience as a reflection of racial oppression, Malcolm X says he aims ``to end the white man's enslavement of the black man's mind.'' Apparently written in 1964, it describes the state of American race relations as ``just this side of war.''
It also reflects Malcolm X's sense that his life was at risk.
Reed said he bought the unseen autobiography chapters, as well as the manuscript of the published book, to ensure their conservation. He spent more than $120,000, ``a lot of money for me, but at the same time, it was really a steal for mankind,'' he said in an interview.
He has occasionally given talks about some of the material, including an unpublished chapter setting out a 13-point plan for blacks to achieve economic, social and cultural independence as a prelude to ``true integration.''
The missing chapters delve into Malcolm X's philosophy and ideas for improving the country, rather than focusing on events in his life, Reed says.
One of the civil rights era's most controversial and compelling figures, Malcolm X rose to fame as the Nation of Islam's chief spokesman, proclaiming the black Muslim organization's message at the time: racial separatism as a road to self-actualization. He famously urged blacks to claim civil rights ``by any means necessary'' and referred to whites as ``devils.''
But after breaking with the Nation of Islam in 1964 and making an Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, he espoused a more internationalist approach to human rights and began emphasizing that he didn't view all whites as racists. He also took the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.
He was shot to death on Feb. 21, 1965, as he began a speech at Harlem's Audubon Ballroom, now the Shabazz center. He was 39.
The only man ever to admit involvement in the assassination, Thomas Hagan, 69, was paroled last month from a prison work-release program. Two men convicted with him - who he said were not among his four accomplices - were paroled in the 1980s. No one else has ever been charged.
Hagan has said the assassins acted out of rage at Malcolm X's criticism of the Nation of Islam's then-leader, Elijah Muhammad.
Often branded a demagogue and extremist during his lifetime, Malcolm X was celebrated with a postage stamp a quarter-century after his death. The autobiography and Spike Lee's 1992 film, ``Malcolm X,'' helped build his stature as an agent of social change.
Ilyasah Shabazz, one of Malcolm X's daughters, and William Alex Haley, the author's son, said at Wednesday's reading they appreciated Reed's efforts to preserve the civil rights leader's legacy.
As for the missing chapters, ``it doesn't matter what happened to them,'' Haley said. ``It matters that we can read them today.''
Setting the Record Straight: A Response to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Setting the Record Straight: A Response to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
We, the undersigned, take strong exception to the Op-Ed, “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game,” published in the New York Times, April 23, 2010 by Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. There are gross errors, inaccuracies and misrepresentations in Gates’ presentation of the transatlantic European enslavement system. Moreover, we are duly concerned about his political motivations and find offensive his use of the term “blame game.” For it trivializes one of the most heinous crimes against humanity—the European enslavement of African people. Gates contradicts his stated purpose of “ending” what he refers to as a “blame-game,” by erroneously making African rulers and elites equally responsible with European and American enslavers. And he shifts the “blame” in a clear attempt to undermine the demand for reparations.
The African Holocaust or Maafa, as it is referred to by many, is a crime against humanity and is recognized as such by the United Nations, scholars, and historians who have documented the primary and overwhelming culpability of European nations for enslavement in Europe, in the Americas and elsewhere. In spite of this overwhelming documentation, Gates inexplicably shifts the burden of culpability to Africans who were and are its victims. The abundance of scholarly work also affirms that Europeans initiated the process, established the global infrastructure for enslavement, and imposed, financed and defended it, and were the primary beneficiaries of it in various ways through human trafficking itself, banking, insurance, manufacturing, farming, shipping and allied enterprises.
No serious scholar of African history or reparations activist denies the collaboration of some African rulers, elites, merchants and middlemen. Indeed, collaboration accompanies oppression as a continuing fact of history. Historians have described collaborators in two other major Holocausts: the Jewish Holocaust and the Native American Holocaust. Yet Gates, ignoring the historical record, makes the morally unacceptable error of conflating three distinct groups involved in the Holocaust of enslavement: perpetrators, collaborators and victims. The Jewish Holocaust had its Judenrรคte, Jewish councils which chose Jews for enslaved labor and for the death camps and facilitated their transport to them, as well as its kapos, Jewish camp overseers, who brutalized their fellow prisoners along with the SS guards. Also, in the Native American Holocaust, there were also Native American collaborators who fought with the Whites to defeat, dispossess and dominate other Native Americans. Thus, such collaboration in oppression is not unique to Africa and Africans.
Gates makes it clear that the article is written in the context of “post-racial posturing,” eagerly set forth by a nation citing its first Black president as false evidence of the declining significance of race and racism. Indeed, this is a period of resurgent racism reflected in the rise of the Tea Party movement, increasing hostility toward immigrants, open public recommitments to embracing and celebrating the history of racial oppression, joined with the fostering of fear to facilitate the continued denial of civil and human rights.
The purpose for Gates’ misrepresentation of the historical record is to undermine the African and African descendant reparations movement, and to make it appear to be based on unfounded demands. Yet, an accurate reporting of the history of the Holocaust of enslavement and the period of segregation and other forms of oppression which followed it, attests to the importance, in fact, the essentiality of reparations. And the widespread opposing responses to Gates and the anti-reparations interests and sentiments he represents in his article, provides us with an excellent opportunity to renew the just demand for reparations for centuries of enslavement and continued economic disadvantage and exploitation Black people endured in the Jim Crow era and subsequent years of wage slavery.
Gates’ flawed and misconstrued presentation of the global reparations movement to redress the injuries of the Holocaust of enslavement and subsequent labor exploitation attempts to leave the reader with the impression that the movement is only a product of misguided African Americans. However, legal battles regarding reparations for the European enslavement of Africans are being waged throughout the United States, Jamaica, Brazil, South Africa, The Virgin Islands, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Martinique, Canada, Namibia and Barbados. The United Nations declaration that 2011 is the International Year of People of African Descent will afford yet another opportunity to expand the reparations movement for the longest unpunished crime against humanity --- the European enslavment of African people. In this country, reparations scholars, activists and others will continue their efforts in support of the House Judiciary Committee, HR-40, which calls for a study of the economic, cultural and psychological impact of enslavement on United States citizens.
Also the record of the United Nations World Conference Against Racism (WCAR), held in South Africa in 2001, offers additional evidence of the global reach and relevance of the reparations movement and the work of Africans and African descendants in Africa and throughout the African Diaspora. Gates’ omission of these efforts and WCAR seem to suggest either a deliberate misrepresentation or a reflection of his intellectual limitations and distance from contemporary political movements in the international African community.
We, the undersigned, intellectuals, activists, artists, professionals, men and women from various fields of focus, assemble here from a call by the Institute of the Black World 21st Century united in our profound commitment to African people and with a long history of involvement in national and international issues involving Africa and people of African descent. And we sign this letter, not simply to respond to Gates’ clear inaccuracies, misrepresentations and questionable timing, but rather to honor and defend the memory and interests of the victims of the Holocaust of enslavement. We have come together at this historical moment to bear continuing witness to this gross human injury and the continuing consequences of this catastrophic and horrific event and process, and reaffirm our renewed commitment to continue and intensify the struggle for reparative and social justice in this society and the world.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Parable of a Dying White Man
Parable of a Dying White Man
He was the agent for the sale of my archives. My daughter said he was an arrogant bastard, dad, just like you! Only difference, he was a rich arrogant bastard. He was highly intelligent, like you dad, my daughter Nefertiti said.
He had a book store with an excellent collection of black literature, one of the best on the West coast or East coast, thousands of volumes. But Peter was steeped in world literature, but well read in black literature. He sold my archives to the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Among other black authors, he'd also sold the archives of Eldridge Cleaver and Ishmael Reed. He was in the process of selling the archives of Joyce Carol Thomas, another black author.
Peter became a friend, even though he was a white supremest. Yes, he helped me more than anyone in obtaining several thousand dollars at a time when I needed several thousand dollars.
But when I came to him for help publishing my book How To Recover From the Addiction to White Supremacy, he told me he would not help me because he and his friends were not trying to recover, actually, they loved white supremacy and would bomb the world to keep white supremacy.
On another occasion he said he would help me if there was a way to make me part of "the family." He tried to find a way, sincerely he did, but it didn't work out, so I never made it into his family to get the help needed.
When he read my monograph Mythology of Pussy, he said it was not for black people, but for him (meaning white people). In other words, the nature or the subject matter was beyond black people since it dealt with patriarchal mythology, the essence of white supremacy oppression and domination.
During his perusal of Mythology, he told me to shut up and let him finish. I found this ironic since a friend in Philly allowed a white woman to read the monograph and she also told him to shut up and let her finish, even told him to leave her house if he wasn't going to be quiet. He left her house but peeked through the window to see her still absorbing the Mythology and emailing her friends to read it.
But pancreatic cancer is taking my friend out. He knows the show is over. He seems very bitter that God has cursed him, yet he knows God is the one with the power here, no matter how much money he has or had.
He used to brag about how much money he had. "I just went to New York and purchased the archives of a friend for $200,000. I didn't need the stuff, but I wanted to help my friend.
You know a check came to my book store the other day for $45,000.00. I don't know where it is, but it'll show up. I'm not worried about it."
And so my friend is going down slow. And I confess I love him because he helped me like no other person on this earth. And, yes, as my daughter Nefertiti said, he was an arrogant/intelligent bastard, very much like myself.
--Marvin X
5/21/10
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Memorial for Betty Shabazz
Stirred by Her Life, Thousands Attend Service for Shabazz
By FRANK BRUNI
Published: June 30, 1997
In a tribute that reiterated the degree to which the noble melodrama of Dr. Betty Shabazz's life and death touched so many people, thousands of mourners filled Riverside Church in Manhattan yesterday, with hundreds more spilling onto the sidewalks, to remember her as a brave widow, a loving mother and a tireless advocate for the oppressed.
The memorial, which followed Dr. Shabazz's private Muslim funeral on Friday, drew an eclectic assemblage of legislators, writers, ministers and entertainers.
There were brief testimonials about Dr. Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, not only from the current Mayor of New York City, Rudolph W. Giuliani, but from three of his predecessors: David N. Dinkins, Edward I. Koch and Abraham D. Beame. Gov. George E. Pataki spoke, as did Representative Maxine Waters, chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus.
The Secretary of Labor, Alexis Herman, came on behalf of the Clinton Administration, reading a letter from the President that called Dr. Shabazz ''a true heroine, a fine role model and a valued friend.''
And Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of Medgar Evers, sobbed and leaned into Coretta Scott King, the widow of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as she described Dr. Shabazz as the third member of their sisterhood of sorrow, all of them having lost husbands whose blunt attacks on racial injustice courted grave personal danger.
Mrs. King, in turn, said, ''We married their mission, and that became our mission when they were no longer there.''
But perhaps the most emotional moment came when the oldest of Dr. Shabazz's daughters spoke of the family's heartache. The six women had maintained an almost uninterrupted public silence since Dr. Shabazz was critically injured on June 1, in a fire that the police say was set by her 12-year-old grandson, Malcolm Shabazz.
Her daughter Attallah Shabazz stood tall in a lofty pulpit carved from gray stone and recalled the slow, tense passing of the 23 days that Dr. Shabazz spent in the burn unit of Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, with her daughters close by.
''We tried to breathe life and hope into our mother,'' Ms. Shabazz said. ''We'd whisper in her ear, 'You don't have to fight so hard, Mama. We're doing it.' ''
Then, referring to the jeers that greeted Mayor Giuliani when he ascended the pulpit, Attallah Shabazz said her mother was always surrounded by peacemakers and tolerant of diversity, ''as opposed to those who boo when someone stands here to give a tribute to her. Can't happen.''
The turnout yesterday, in its size and wealth of dignitaries, demonstrated anew how Dr. Shabazz's struggle and violent end became, for many African-Americans, a universal allegory of aspirations, perseverance, bitter disappointments and uncontrollable twists of fate.
It also showed how Dr. Shabazz, as the widow of Malcolm X and the stubborn guardian of his legacy, had attained a place among modern African-American trailblazers.
The poet Haki Madhubuti said, in one of more than two dozen speeches from the pulpit, that the Shabazz, Evers and King families were ''First Families'' for African-Americans, with narratives that have become both public and symbolic.
Those narratives spanned decades of enormous change, several speakers said, noting that one of New York City's grandest cathedrals opened its doors yesterday for Dr. Shabazz.
''It is a far cry from 32 years ago, when no religious institution except one was willing to open its doors to the man called Malcolm X,'' said Percy Sutton, a lawyer and close friend of the Shabazz family who presided over the ceremony.
A dense line of people, most of whom had never known Dr. Shabazz, began to form outside Riverside Church four hours before the 3 P.M. service. By 2:30 P.M., the line was several blocks long, and only a fraction of the people in it could be accommodated with seats among the thousands in the main sanctuary.
An additional 600 mourners watched the service on closed-circuit television from a room in the church building. But that still left an overflow crowd on the sidewalk, listening to the speeches on a loudspeaker.
Inside, the music and the speakers reflected the diversity that Dr. Shabazz was said to treasure, the confluence of cultures she worked to achieve. The ceremony opened with African drumming and chants, and later paused for a rendition, by the Boys Choir of Harlem, of the pop song ''Wind Beneath My Wings.''
And there were prayers both Christian and Islamic: at one point, the Rev. James Alexander Forbes Jr. of the Riverside Church stood in a pulpit on the left, while Imam Al-Hajj Talib Abdur-Rashid of the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood stood in a pulpit on the right.
Many of the faces in the pews were instantly recognizable, from Marion Barry, the Mayor of Washington, to the actor Edward James Olmos. Maxine Waters was accompanied by at least three other Congressional representatives: Eleanor Holmes Norton, Charles B. Rangel and Carolyn B. Maloney.
Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee delivered the formal eulogy, and their words, like those of many speakers, seemed as much about the history of black Americans as the history of Dr. Shabazz.
''We've been to hell and back again,'' said Mr. Davis, who also spoke at Malcolm X's funeral. ''And death cannot have the final word. We've been black too long to grant him that.''
Others focused more specifically on Dr. Shabazz, praising her as a survivor who raised six daughters by herself and still found the time to study for a doctorate in education.
She was selfless, they said, in satisfying countless requests to speak at public events, about her visions for the country as well as her dead husband's.
They recalled that she cared deeply about other people's children, spending the last two decades as an administrator at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. And they recalled that she cared deeply about her own daughters.
Looking out at the front middle pew, where those daughters sat, the poet Maya Angelou said, ''You must know, there are tens of thousands of black women in this country who reach their arms out to you.''
Ms. Angelou said that Dr. Shabazz was not only strong but kind, and a beloved friend. ''There is a major seam that has come undone in the quilt of my life,'' she said, fighting to control her sobs.
Then, turning to a subject that many speakers ignored, Ms. Angelou called on those present to nurture and protect Dr. Shabazz's grandson, Malcolm. ''God created him,'' Ms. Angelou said, to loud and sustained applause.
When Mr. Giuliani stepped to the pulpit, several dozen people in back pews began booing. But just as their chorus grew louder, former Mayor Dinkins, sitting in a front pew, stood, turned around and motioned with his hands for quiet. His gesture was greeted by applause, and the boos stopped.
Attallah Shabazz, with her five sisters standing in a huddle behind her on the pulpit, recalled the love her parents shared and said she wanted mourners to leave the church with an image of her dead father stretching out his ''amber arm'' to her dead mother, beckoning her to join him with the playful invitation: ''Come on, brown sugar.''
A Remembrance
Attallah Shabazz, in her address at the memorial service for Betty Shabazz, recalled her struggle for life after she was burned in a fire in her Yonkers apartment, and thanked the thousands who turned out to remember her.
''We kept asking ourselves, 'What gives her the strength to fight so hard?' We whispered in her ear, 'We're here, you're not by yourself, the prayers are big.'
''You don't have to fight so hard, Mama. We're doing it.'
''I want to thank you all for regarding the Shabazz family as that important, that significant. I'd like to ask you to look to the person to the left and to the right of you and genuinely say, 'I wish you the best.' By the power invested in us all, consider us brothers and sisters.''
Photos: Attallah Shabazz, the eldest daughter of Betty Shabazz and the slain civil rights leader Malcolm X, speaking at a memorial service for her mother. With her at Riverside Church are her five sisters, from left, Ilyasah, Gamilah, Qubilah (hands to face) and the twins, Malikah and Malaak. (Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times)(pg. B6)
Marvin X Replies to Abdul Khalimat
so than now with their addiction to white supremacy values, including materialism. A general strike would move things to another level. This has worked and is working around the world. Didn't it work in Ukraine? What about now in Thailand? Bolivia, Philippines. Again, unity is the great weapon. Further, as Castro says, the weapons of today are not guns but consciousness. We could flood the hood with black conscious literature and turn some of the reactionary tide. People love the truth, especially as it affects their everyday lives, such as male/female relations, brother to brother, father to son, mother to daughter. Parents are losing their children and don't know what to do, but they know church is not working, school is not working, college is not working, there must be something that works, that can turn their children around, get them on the right path, save their lives, literally. WE know it was conscious literature plus the times that turned us
radical, and so it must be again, the times are here but much of the conscious word is in books not accessible to the people--yes there is conscious literature on the streets of New York, Newark and a few other places, but not in a big way, as in the way Khomaini sent his tapes into Iran from exile in Paris. I told this to Ancestor Asa Hilliard, rip, but he was concerned about nigguhs bootlegging his lectures when he should have been happy they were/are doing so, and least they are getting to a generation in need. Get my drift? peace and revolution, brother. marvin
----- Original Message ----
From: Abdul Alkalimat <mcworter@illinois.edu>
To: Marvin X Jackmon <jmarvinx@yahoo.com>
Sent: Fri, May 7, 2010 10:39:21 AM
Subject: we got needs
Ok, I feel that, but how can that wisdom lead to either a pay day or maybe even a stride toward freedom.
We currently lack a frame of reference to shape a movement for change. Even if baby steps we need to start talking about a basic game plan.
Every body can ya-ta-ya-ta, but strategic thinking and a plan take another kind of brother and sister.
Hit me back
aa
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
Cambridge, Mass.
THANKS to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics — the fact that he is African-American and president — Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage.
There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime. Perhaps the most vexing is how to parcel out blame to those directly involved in the capture and sale of human beings for immense economic gain.
While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.
For centuries, Europeans in Africa kept close to their military and trading posts on the coast. Exploration of the interior, home to the bulk of Africans sold into bondage at the height of the slave trade, came only during the colonial conquests, which is why Henry Morton Stanley’s pursuit of Dr. David Livingstone in 1871 made for such compelling press: he was going where no (white) man had gone before.
How did slaves make it to these coastal forts? The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.
Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in “Roots.” The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.
The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves. “The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia,” he warned. “We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it.”
To be sure, the African role in the slave trade was greatly reduced after 1807, when abolitionists, first in Britain and then, a year later, in the United States, succeeded in banning the importation of slaves. Meanwhile, slaves continued to be bought and sold within the United States, and slavery as an institution would not be abolished until 1865. But the culpability of American plantation owners neither erases nor supplants that of the African slavers. In recent years, some African leaders have become more comfortable discussing this complicated past than African-Americans tend to be.
In 1999, for instance, President Mathieu Kerekou of Benin astonished an all-black congregation in Baltimore by falling to his knees and begging African-Americans’ forgiveness for the “shameful” and “abominable” role Africans played in the trade. Other African leaders, including Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, followed Mr. Kerekou’s bold example.
Our new understanding of the scope of African involvement in the slave trade is not historical guesswork. Thanks to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, directed by the historian David Eltis of Emory University, we now know the ports from which more than 450,000 of our African ancestors were shipped out to what is now the United States (the database has records of 12.5 million people shipped to all parts of the New World from 1514 to 1866). About 16 percent of United States slaves came from eastern Nigeria, while 24 percent came from the Congo andAngola.
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Through the work of Professors Thornton and Heywood, we also know that the victims of the slave trade were predominantly members of as few as 50 ethnic groups. This data, along with the tracing of blacks’ ancestry through DNA tests, is giving us a fuller understanding of the identities of both the victims and the facilitators of the African slave trade.
For many African-Americans, these facts can be difficult to accept. Excuses run the gamut, from “Africans didn’t know how harsh slavery in America was” and “Slavery in Africa was, by comparison, humane” or, in a bizarre version of “The devil made me do it,” “Africans were driven to this only by the unprecedented profits offered by greedy European countries.”
But the sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time. Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold. Queen Njinga, the brilliant 17th-century monarch of the Mbundu, waged wars of resistance against the Portuguese but also conquered polities as far as 500 miles inland and sold her captives to the Portuguese. When Njinga converted to Christianity, she sold African traditional religious leaders into slavery, claiming they had violated her new Christian precepts.
Did these Africans know how harsh slavery was in the New World? Actually, many elite Africans visited Europe in that era, and they did so on slave ships following the prevailing winds through the New World. For example, when Antonio Manuel, Kongo’s ambassador to the Vatican, went to Europe in 1604, he first stopped in Bahia, Brazil, where he arranged to free a countryman who had been wrongfully enslaved.
African monarchs also sent their children along these same slave routes to be educated in Europe. And there were thousands of former slaves who returned to settle Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Middle Passage, in other words, was sometimes a two-way street. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to claim that Africans were ignorant or innocent.
Given this remarkably messy history, the problem with reparations may not be so much whether they are a good idea or deciding who would get them; the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted.
So how could President Obama untangle the knot? In David Remnick’s new book “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” one of the president’s former students at the University of Chicago comments on Mr. Obama’s mixed feelings about the reparations movement: “He told us what he thought about reparations. He agreed entirely with the theory of reparations. But in practice he didn’t think it was really workable.”
About the practicalities, Professor Obama may have been more right than he knew. Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide. He is uniquely placed to publicly attribute responsibility and culpability where they truly belong, to white people and black people, on both sides of the Atlantic, complicit alike in one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization. And reaching that understanding is a vital precursor to any just and lasting agreement on the divisive issue of slavery reparations.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor at Harvard, is the author of the forthcoming “Faces of America” and “Tradition and the Black Atlantic."
Reply to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Essay by Barbara Ransby
In a recent /New York Times/ editorial, entitled, “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game <http://www.nytimes. com/2010/ 04/23/opinion/ 23gates.html? scp=1&sq= henry%20gates& st=cse>,” Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates calls on the United States’ first Black president to end the nation’s sense of responsibility for the legacy of slavery. It is a pernicious argument, well suited to the so-called “post-racial” moment we are in. Like the erroneous claims of “post-racialism,” in general, Gates’ editorial compromises rather than advances the prospects for racial justice; and clouds rather than clarifies the history, and persistent realities, of racism in America.
Gates essentially absolves Americans of the guilt, shame and most importantly, financial responsibility for the horrific legacy of slavery in the Americas. How does he do this—through a contrived narrative that indicts African elites. And they did collaborate in the trade. But this is no news flash. Every history graduate student covering the Atlantic World knows that people of African descent (like the elites from every other corner of the globe) waged war against one another, captured enemies in battle, and enslaved their weaker and more vulnerable neighbors. This is nothing unique to Africa. What is problematic about Gates’ essay is how he frames and skews this fact.
The frame is this. Black and white people in the United States should now “get over” slavery because as we all know, this was not a racial thing but an economic thing. Since both Blacks and whites were culpable, the call for reparations is indeed meaningless and bereft of any moral weight. If we take Gates’ argument to its full conclusion, we might claim that it is not America or Europe, but the long suffering, impoverished, and debt-ridden nations of Africa, that should really pay reparations to Black Americans. “The problem with reparations,” Gates proclaims, is “from whom they would be extracted.” This is a dilemma since Africans were neither “ignorant or innocent,” when it came to the slave trade.
At its worse, Gates’ argument resembles that of some Holocaust deniers who don’t deny that “bad things” happened to the Jews, but add that maybe the Nazi’s weren’t the only ones to blame. Maybe the Jews, in part, did it to themselves. Stories that over-emphasize the role of the Judenrats (Jewish Councils), for example, who were coerced into providing slave labor to the Nazis and organized Jews to be sent to the concentration camps, distorts the real culprits and criminals of the Holocaust, and in the final analysis, serves to blame the victims.
Even though African monarchs did collaborate in the selling of Blacks bodies into slavery, what happened after that was the establishment of a heinous and brutal system that rested squarely on the dual pillars of White supremacy and ruthless capitalist greed. There was nothing African-inspired about it.
It is with the construction of a racialized slave regime in the Americas that a new form of the ancient institution of slavery was honed and refashioned. African slaves in the Americas, unlike most other places, were deemed slaves for life, and their offspring were enslaved. Moreover, Black servants were distinguished from white servants (who were also badly treated) and stripped of all rights and recourse. As slavery evolved even “free” Blacks were denied basic rights by virtue of sharing ancestry and phenotype with the enslaved population.
Racism, as so many scholars have documented was the critical and ideological justification for the exploitation, or more accurately, theft, of black labor for some 300 years. Blacks were deemed inferior, childlike, savage, and better suited to toiling in the hot sun than whites, and innately incapable of governing themselves. These are the racist myths and narratives that justified slavery in the Americas. It was indeed different in this way from other slave systems where the fabricated mythologies of race did not rule the day.
Another problem with Gates' narrative about slavery is that he neglects to examine the plantation experience itself as the main ground on which African and African-American labor was exploited. As distinguished historian, Eric Foner, points out in his letter to the /Times/ on April 26, in critical response to Gates, the internal U.S. slave trade, which had nothing to do with Africa or African elites, involved the buying and selling of over two million Black men, women and children between 1820 and 1860. Slavery existed for over a half century after the abolition of the trans-Atlantic trade in 1807.
/Even if African monarchs were complicit in and benefited individually from the trade, none of them received dividends from the profits generated by the production of millions of tons of tobacco, sugar and cotton by the stolen labor of imprisoned African and African-American plantation workers (i.e. slaves). It is this appropriation of millions of hours of uncompensated labor that is the core of the reparations demand. /
Professor Gates’ selective storytelling and slanted use of history paints a very different picture than does the collective scholarship of hundreds of historians over the last fifty years or so. A learned man who commands enormous resources and unparalleled media attention, why would Gates put this argument forward so vehemently now? It is untimely at best. At a time when ill-informed and self-congratulatory commentaries about how far America has come on the race question, abound, Gates weighs in to say, we can also stop “blaming” ourselves (‘ourselves’ meaning white Americas or their surrogates) for slavery.
The burden of race is made a little bit lighter by Gates’ revisionist history. It is curious that the essay appears at the same time that we not only see efforts to minimize the importance of race or racism, but at a moment when there is a rather sinister attempt to rewrite the antebellum era as the good old days of southern history. Virginia Governor Bob McConnell went so far as to designate a month in honor of the pro-slavery Confederacy.
Gates’ essay fits conveniently into the new discourse on post-racialism. Slavery was long ago, the story goes, and Black Americans have come such a long way. So, we need to stop embracing ‘victimhood,’ get over it and move on. We need to stop complaining and ‘end the blame game,’ with regards to racism. After all, doesn’t the election of Barack Obama relegate racism to the dustbins of history? Gates goes even further to suggest that even the worst marker of American racism, slavery, wasn’t so exclusively racial after all.
Clearly, there has been racial progress in the United States since the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. That progress was born of decades of struggle and protest. But we have not come as far as some would have us believe. And we don’t escape history by either tracing common ancestry or blaming others for comparable crimes. Reconciliation with the past is a long, arduous and complex process and there are no shortcuts.
Moreover, ‘the past’ is not so long ago. In other words, chattel slavery ended in the United States in the 1860s but, as Herb Boyd, in yet another letter to the /New York Times/ in response to Gates, rightly points out, “the economic disadvantage of Black workers extended beyond the long night of slavery into the iniquitous era of Jim Crow” (marked by segregation, legal disenfranchisement, and rampant violence). Moreover, we don’t have to go back to Jim Crow to see the ravages of American racism, a racism that took hold under slavery.
Today, millions of young Black men and women are caged, shackled and dehumanized by a prison system that is growing rapidly, privatizing and increasingly exploiting the labor of its inmates. That scenario is far from Harvard Square, where police harassment lands you in the White House and on television. But the reality of the 21st century carceral state suggests that various forms of coercion and containment are palpably present today. It is not slavery but a powerful reminder of it. And once again people of color are disproportionately impacted.
Finally, despite its flawed and reckless uses of history, and powerfully disturbing political messages, there are some useful lessons embedded in Professor Gates’ essay. The lessons are about the self-serving role of certain Black elites, who in slavery times and now, will sell (or sell out) other Black bodies for their own gain and advancement. African royalty did it in the 1600s and 1700s.
Comprador elites did it in colonial and postcolonial settings through the Global South. And certain public figures, in political, cultural and academic circles, do so today, with a kind of moral blindness and impunity that rivals the slave sellers of old. As we know, ideas have consequences. And misleading narratives that fuel and validate new forms of denial and given cover to resurgent forms of racism should not be taken lightly.
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*Barbara Ransby* is a historian, writer, and longtime political activist. Ransby has published dozens of articles and essays in popular and scholarly venues. She is most notably the author of an award-winning biography of civil rights activist Ella Baker, entitled /Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision/, (University of North Carolina, 2003). Barbara is currently working on two major research projects: a study of African American feminist organizations in the 1970s, and a political biography of Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson. She serves on the editorial board of the London-based journal, _Race and Class_, and a number of non-profit civic and media organizations. Dr Ransby is a University of Illinois (Chicago) Associate Professor, Gender and Women's Studies, African American Studies, and History Director, Gender and Women's Studies Program
PhD in History, University of Michigan.
“Ending the Slavery Blame-Game” by Henry L. Gates Jr.: Some Perspectives
By Kwabena Akurang-Parry
LET me state some caveats that my effort at interrogating the conclusions of Professor Henry Louis Gates does not mitigate the marginality and chattel nature that reconfigured the lived-experiences of enslaved Africans worldwide, nor does it exonerate slave-holding societies in Africa as well as some African states’ participation in the Atlantic slave trade. Second, I do understand Gates to mean that the blame for the Atlantic slave trade should be debited to both Africans and Europeans/Americans, consequently, reparations should also be the responsibility of Africans. Third, this is not about reparations, but more so about querying and rethinking some of Gates’ historical arguments and conclusions from the standpoints of “Akan” oral history wedded to “Western” sources, indeed, a bold departure from most of the commentaries framed around “Western” sources.
CAREFUL readings of Gates’ efforts at illuminating the Atlantic slave trade and the quest for reparations, pivoted on Obama’s presidency, illustrate Gates’ subtle preoccupation with blaming Africans for the slave trade. Gates’ present essay, full of inaccuracies and spiced with dizzying barber-shop narratives, revisits his perspectives on Africa and the Atlantic slave trade couched during his Conradian scholarly-tour of Africa, packaged as
THE viewpoint that “Africans” enslaved “Africans” is obfuscating if not troubling. The deployment of “African” in African history tends to coalesce into obscurantist constructions of identities that allow scholars, for instance, to subtly call into question the humanity of “all” Africans. Whenever Asante rulers sold non-Asantes into slavery, they did not construct it in terms of Africans selling fellow Africans. They saw the victims for what they were, for instance, as Akuapems, without categorizing them as fellow Africans. Equally, when Christian Scandinavians and Russians sold war captives to the Islamic people of the Abbasid Empire, they didn’t think that they were placing fellow Europeans into slavery. This lazy categorizing homogenizes Africans and has become a part of the methodology of African history; not surprisingly, the Western media’s cottage industry on Africa has tapped into it to frame Africans in inchoate generalities allowing the media to describe local crisis in one African state as “African” problem.
GATES writes that “Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold.” Asante dominated the Akan gold trade and exported gold overseas; thus, they didn’t have to sell slaves to import gold. In sum, Asante had access to gold in the area described by Kwame Arhin as Greater Asante. Absolutely, the slave trade contributed to the expansion of Asante, but Asante’s political economy was not wholly dependent on the export of slaves. What is also clear is that the profit from the sale of slaves was used in purchasing guns, the most important commodity that facilitated both the military defense of individual African states as well as the supply of slaves to the Europeans. For its part, the Kongo state was already prosperous before the advent of the Portuguese in 1483. Although, slavery and slave trade were a part of the political economy of the Kongo, it was by no means the dominant one. The people of the Kongo dealt in iron, copperware, pottery, and textile goods, and had extensive markets as well. It was the Portuguese presence that intensified the incidence of slavery and eclipsed other forms of economic ventures just as much as the Portuguese, British, Dutch, etc. presence increased and reconfigured the institutional mechanisms of enslavement in West Africa.
ADDITIONALLY, Gates notes that:
“some African monarchs also sent their children along these same slave routes to be educated in Europe. And there were thousands of former slaves who returned to settle Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Middle Passage, in other words, was sometimes a two-way street. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to claim that Africans were ignorant or innocent.” Even if Africans knew about the conditions of slaves in the Americas, there was very little that the so-called 90 percent of “Africans” enslaved by fellow “Africans” could do to thwart their enslavement. In other words, they did not choose enslavement over freedom. Besides, Africans educated in Europe were pedagogically conditioned to accept the demonization of people of African descent in currency, and when they returned home imputed similar inferiorization to other Africans. For example, Gates should know that Jacobus Eliza Johannes Capitein, an African intellectual giant educated overseas had even defended the slave trade. Capitein was born in 1717 in the Gold Coast and sold into slavery to Jacob van Goch, an official of the Dutch West Indian Company then operating in the Gold Coast. Capitein accompanied his master to the Netherlands, studied and attained advanced degrees, and in 1742 chronicled
THERE are a number of subtle suggestions which undergird Gates’ essay of blame-game that are plucked from the works of Linda Heywood and John Thornton whose conclusions are shaped by the extant Eurocentric records. One is the notion that wars in precolonial Africa were mostly geared toward the acquisition of slaves for the Atlantic market. Oral history/traditions amply illustrate that some wars in precolonial Africa, even during the period of the Atlantic slave trade, also served as conduits of freeing slaves. Historians of slavery in Africa, mostly non-Africans, have overemphasized the colonial conquest and its consequent wars as auspicious moments that enabled slaves in Africa to take to the pathways of freedom. Conversely, warfare among precolonial African states and African wars of resistance to incipient European domination in the precolonial 19th-century, both of which contributed to slave flights and reunited deserting slaves with their families, have not garnered the attention they deserve. For example, in 1730-31, when Akyem Abuakwa assisted the region of Akuapem to wean the inhabitants off Akwamu domination, a large number of Akuapems, who had been enslaved by the Akwamus, returned to their families in Akuapem and public celebrations were used to welcome them home. Also in the aftermath of the Asante resistance to the budding British imperialism in 1873-74, “slaves,” according to colonial and Christian missionary reports as well as newspaper accounts, left their slave-holders in Greater Asante and its coterminous regions, including Bono, Adansi, Asante-Akyem, Denkyira, etc. and returned to their families and communities. Of course, not all fleeing slaves were able to return to their respective homes in a timely fashion, and about this, the reports describe massive “refugee” movements in the area between the Pra, Ofin, Birim, and Densu Rivers, notably encompassing parts of Akyem Abuakwa, Denkyira, Gomoa, Agona and Fante territories. Even war-scares, such as the ones which occurred between the Akuapems and Krobos in the l8th and 19th centuries, also triggered slave flights and some of the fleeing slaves found their way home, or built slave villages that would form the nucleus of some Krobo and Akuapem satellite communities.
ECONOMIC motives, according to Gates, are what compositely explain the “role Africans themselves played” in the Atlantic slave trade as suppliers of the European slave traders’ appetite for slaves. Although, direct economic reasons may be used to explain the European involvement in the age of capitalism and slavery, it does not fully explain African states’ participation in the Atlantic slave trade. More than economic gain was the pernicious gun-slave-cycle that compelled African states to arm themselves with European-made guns, the most important commodity of the Triangular Trade to West and West-Central Africa, both for protection and as a means of acquiring war captives to sell to European slave traders in order to paradoxically procure more guns for protection. In my view the participation of African states was conditioned more by political motives for protection than short-term economic gains.
GATES argues that since European slave traders lived in the coastal trading posts, the blame for the Atlantic slave trade wholly lies with Africans who captured fellow “Africans” in the interior and sold them to Europeans. His argument is an attractive proposition obviously quarried from the historiography. Unlike “Western” sources that inform much of the historiography, the use of oral history allows us to interrogate Gates’ conclusions at several levels. First, 1871, Gates’ date for the so-called European exploration of the interior of Africa, is wrong: long before 1871, Europeans had visited the interior parts of the continent. Oral history collected by scholars at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon, shows that during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, “aborofo/oburoni”[whites] visited the interior of what is today Ghana, broadly defined as the region between Greater Asante and the littoral stretching from Edina [Elmina] in the west to Keta in the east. Even granted that Europeans never set foot in the interior of West Africa and West-Central Africa, there is no doubt that their presence in the trading posts along the coast enabled them to influence politics that led to wars of enslavement, and the example of Portuguese predatory activities in the Kongo may be summoned to elucidate this conclusion. Second, oral history shows that some indigenous rulers in the Gold Coast and European agents held regular meetings regarding the on-going slave trade in the precincts of the castles and forts. During such durbars or “palavers” Asafo Mma [so-called Companies] or lineage-based warrior groups exhibited their weaponry and demonstrated their military skills defined by warrior “traditions” to the delight of all. Third, the extant literature illustrates that the forts and castles served as permanent hegemonic sites that enabled some European states to influence economic, social, and political developments in both the coastal and immediate interior regions. Finally, the bolts of supply and demand were not tied to space and physical presence: some European/American states’ demand for slaves existed and African states like Asante and Dahomey supplied it; more importantly, the Asante and Dahomian supply curves met the European/American slave traders’ demand along the lines of proliferation of European-made guns which fueled the political economy of destructive gun-slave-cycles in much of West and West-Central Africa.
FURTHERMORE, Gates, like most Western interpreters of slavery, slave trade, and abolition, attributes abolition solely to non-African agency. The Atlantic slave trade was as much a trade in “commodities” as it was in diffusing prevailing osmotic abolition ideologies in the Atlantic world. Even if we assumed that abolition began in the West as a staple pearl of the historiography would have us believe, the movement of osmotic ideas was also assimilated by Africans, unless Gates and others want to argue that Africans did not know the meaning of freedom, or were incapable of constructing and applying freedoms during the global abolition epoch. In fact, recent research amply suggests that the seeds of abolition in the Gold Coast had been nursed by the Gold Coast educated elite long before the British colonial agents implemented abolition in 1874-75, and the Gold Coast educated elite led by Timothy Hutton Brew, for example, argued that the British colonial government’s abolition policy was woefully inadequate.
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