AFRICA'S UNDER REPORTED TRAGEDIESBy
Although Africa lost its position as the leader of human civilization long time ago, its adversaries who are committed to exploiting its human and material resources succeeded in one thing: imbuing the culture of self hate. This has made it impossible for Africans to focus world attention to their plight unlike the Jews who used to the holocaust to ensure permanent Western guilt and the perpetuation of political Zionists’ genocide against the Palestinians. No people in human history have been cheated and are still being cheated by others like the Africans yet the world does not care and even Africans feel inferior to speak or write about this plight.
Europeans are determined to perpetually undermine the African psyche. One of the most glaring evidences of this atrocity was the rejection of the doctorate dissertation of Chiekh Anta Diop by the French academic authorities because it proved that ancient Egyptian civilization “was purely African”. But after its publication in 1955 under the title Negro Nations and Culture it earned him worldwide acclaim and the French authorities at Sorbonne shamelessly awarded him the doctorate but he was denied any opportunity at the University of Dakar, which was for a long time “the only university in French speaking Africa”. He was later honored at the First World Festival of Black Arts “for being the African author who had the most profound influence in modern African and international history” (Uwechue 1991: 195-197). The French attempt on Diop and other subsequent attempts on others were! designed to destroy African intellect and to perpetuate the culture of self hate that makes Africans think that all their problems are internal and even genetic without the manipulations of others.
One of the earliest African tragedies was the Moroccan invasion of Songhay led by Sultan Ahmed al-Mansur based on Islamic pretensions. The sultan was more concerned with boosting his legitimacy as the authentic Caliph and rival of the Osmanlis whom he regarded as usurpers (Willis 1976: 512-514). He was able to convince some Moroccan scholars that his adventure was Islamic and that he was going to turn his attention to Spain after the conquest of the Sudan. But Sudanese scholars were not convinced and the famous Shaykh Ahmad Baba refuted the Islamic pretensions of the invasion because the Sudanese were Muslims and they accepted Islam peacefully without conquest (Yahya 1981: 156-157 and 169). Al-Mansur dissipated his energy in this pursuit of fame rather than building a solid Moroccan society. Later Morocco fell to the colonialists, because “al-Mansur’s f! ocus upon imagery from the past was not conducive to making the necessary changes to compete with emerging European world system”(Corry 2002: 172). The Moroccan invasion was one of the greatest tragedies in African history. At that time there were 100000 inhabitants in Timbuktu of which 25000 were scholars. The Moroccans destroyed that tradition and the Songhay Empire collapsed. Timbuktu now has about 25000 inhabitants. Since that invasion the area never recovered and it remained far behind in human development. Mali now has a lower literacy rate than the Songhay Empire. Al-Mansur did not achieve his aims, the Sa’adi state also collapsed after him.
The highest human cost to Africa was the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade in which tens of millions of Africans were exported to the Americas by Europeans and many perished before reaching the destinations. Trans Atlantic slavery began after European settlement in North America and the Caribbean and they decided to be shipping Africans to those areas as plantation slaves. Africans were induced to sell their kin as slaves to Europeans (recently many studies on slavery financed by the Europeans have made attempts to shift or share the blame of slavery with others especially, the Arabs). The Portuguese, one of the most brutal people in human history built the Elmina castle, the first European trading port ! in Africa in 1482; African slaves were shipped from that location and many others in Africa to the Caribbean and Americas.
After accumulating wealth through the use of slave labor in agriculture, the Europeans devised another strategy for the exploitation of Africans. The new strategy left Africans to produce raw materials in their territories for European industries, which, sprang up as a result of the industrial revolution, one of the gains of slavery. Britain, which was the emerging maritime and industrial power, spearheaded and prosecuted the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade. Regina Jere-Malanda (New African 2000) rightly observed: Now I know that the British Industrial Revolution was anchored on the slave trade and that there is more to the story of eulogized British slave abolitionists - most of whom only changed heart after they had participated and enriched themselves from the slave trade. Their descendants are still enjoying the riches.
According to New African, Pope John II apologized "for 2000 years of crimes and blunders committed by the Catholic Church against Jews, heretics, women, Gypsies and native peoples, yet said nothing - not even a word - about slavery". No reasons have been given for the omission of slavery, the worst crime committed by Europeans against Africans. The transatlantic slave trade involved "210 million Africans (UNESCO estimate)" (New African, April, 2000 p.14) some lost their lives while others were shipped to foreign parts in what is the vilest holocaust the world has ever seen". It is instructive that the earliest European slavers of Africa, the Portuguese and Spa! nish sought and got the blessing of the Pope in 1455. The magazine further added that: Pope Martin IV and Bishop Bartholomew de la Casa got twenty-five cents per head for each African slave, to save their souls so that if they died across the Atlantic, they would go to heaven. The Church benefited as much from slavery as the monarchs, merchants and governments of Europe. Various papal bulls, from 1447 onwards, approved and encouraged slavery. When the Portuguese king, Henry the Navigator, sought the approval for his "trade" in Africans in the early 1440s, Pope Engenius IV declared that "whoever should participate in it would completely get his sins forgiven" (New African, 2000). New African concludes its write up titled "The Pope loves you" thus: For the current Pope to look at these facts in the face and say nothing about them in his sweeping apology of 2,000 years of crimes and blunders by the Church, is a proof of how much he and the Church, of which hundreds of millions of Africans and blacks across the world are members, think about Africans and black people (New African, April, 2000).
The Europeans did not abolish slavery without adequate preparation for the continued subjugation of Africans. They changed their style and became friends of the Africans to pave the way for another form of European domination. The missionaries took up the challenge and began campaigning for abolition of the slave trade because it was "unchristian". Since as stated above the Church supported slavery and gained from it and when it became uneconomical the Africans had to be deceived over the need to abolish it because it became “unchristian”. Christianity was to be compensation for the y! ears of slavery. The African tropical environment was not conducive for permanent European settlement. Thus freed African slaves who became Christians were the ideal persons for most of the missionary work. Through their effort European Christianity was consolidated in Africa. Some of the ex-slave missionaries and African Christians even dreamt of establishing a Christian state in Africa (Ajayi 1980: 21).
Europeans who for a while pretended to be Christian friends of Africans turned out to be vicious exploiters and by the beginning of the 20th century most of Africa had come under European colonial rule. Joseph Chamberlain, a colonialist suggested that the aim of colonialism was to: "carry, British Justice, British Law, religion and Christianity to millions and millions of people who until our advent had lived in ignorance, in bitter conflict and whose territories had fallen to us to develop"(Sulaiman 1986: 72).
Africans tried to develop their own version of Christianity but they were not very successful. It has also been observed that European Christian missionaries resisted all attempts by Africans to evolve African version of Christianity that would promote African independence: this was especially true in Zaire (then Congo) where the movement of Simon Kimbangu in the 1920’s: Quickly attracted a large following to the detriment of both the Roman Catholic missions and work on the railway and the plantations. Within months he was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death, which was commuted to life imprisonment; he died in 1951. Missionary hostility notwithstanding, the movement continued to grow through out the Belgian rule. It was legalized in 1959 and it took the title Eglise de Jesus-Christ sur la terre par le prophet! e Simon Kimbangu (EJCSK). Since independence, with its impeccably anti-colonial origins it has grown in numbers and standing under the leadership of Kimbangu's sons" (Goldthorpe 1996: 192).
Apart from a few Christian groups like the followers of Kimbangu most other African Christians believed that their total spiritual salvation and material advancement depended on their subservience and aping of Europeans (Sulaiman 1986 63). Professor Bedford Umez has demonstrated that this inferiority complex is one of the major root causes of Africa’s endless problems (Umez 2002). The first post-colonial African leaders sidelined the fanatical Christian missionaries hence it was observed that in East Africa: At the time of independence, the secular sixties, the mainline churches with a rather limited African leadership and a reputation for collusion with the colonial order were, for the most part, excluded from the power game and glad to be so (Hastings 1997: 343).
Even the newly established fundamentalist Churches believe in aping Europeans because they want access to US funds and they make no contribution to African development and freedom from American domination. After the so-called political independence the Europeans and their American off-springs did not allow Africans to develop on their own instead they use every available opportunity to undermine African development. Hence it was observed that: When the people of Zaire tried their hand at democracy in 1961, the CIA called for its death when it supported Patrice Lumumba’s assassination and then supported the dictator Mobutu’s reign of terror for the next three and half decades. Yet, Mobutu’s tens of thousands of victims are virtually unknown in the US nor are the many Zairians who dead at the hands of US-hired mercenaries during the 1960s, some of whom lynched their victims because they were opposing dictatorship (White 2003).
Zaire has never been in peace since then so also Angola where the US insisted that Sivimbi its stooge must be the president until he died. Angola is indeed a great African tragedy without the efforts of Murtala administration in Nigeria the country would not have been independent and after that the Americans made sure it remained in perpetual civil war for the next twenty five years and it became a field day for their companies and other multi-nationals who looted the treasures of that country. The Murtala administration that spearheaded the liberation of Angola was not spared the intimidation of the US. When Murtala took over power “policy planners in the west were on high alert about a second theoretically ‘crippling’ OPEC strike”. The Congressional Research! Service prepared a master plan for the possible invasion of some countries including Nigeria one month after he took office. Nigeria was thus on top of Washington’s top policy agenda. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger proposed a state visit to Nigeria “the overture was bluntly refused” by Murtala. The U.S. Congress had begun investigations into abuses by Central Intelligence Agency particularly the assassination of foreign leaders. U.S. President Ford “then made it clear that an executive order would be written barring such actions. But the promised order languished until February 18, 1976---exactly five days after Nigeria’s popular leader was assassinated...” (Laigin)
The foreign policy of Murtala’s administration was very dynamic and purposeful. This made the U.S. suspicious of Nigeria. U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria Mr. Easum cautioned his home government some weeks before Murtala was assassinated that: “Nigeria’s academic and political leaders were planning to use oil as a political weapon against the United States and advised that Nigerian government may be considering ways it might assert greater control over which consuming countries get Nigerian oil”. In another memorandum dated 2nd February 1976 Ambassador Easum “hinted that U.S. officials were prepared to sabotage Nigeria’s economy” (Liagin). This was how desperate they could be. Since then they never took any chance and they playe! d active roles in Nigeria’s subsequent elections.
The United States has remained very interested in Nigeria, which is off course the giant of Africa and the hope of any future African renaissance. But the country has remained unfortunate because of lack visionary leadership. The US is so intolerant of progressive views from Nigeria. Although Nigerian writers are yet to face the music of the Guantanamo style injustice as the US did to Al-Jazeera journalists (Tahboub 2003) most Nigerian newspapers and websites have embarked on self-censorship for fear of US reprisals. As for the Nigerian writers who write about US atrocities they are denied US and other European visas.
Because of American and European complicity Africans have been unable to utilize their resources to fight poverty and disease in the continent. The worst tragedy since the Second World War is the war in Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire). Even a conservative journal The Atlantic Monthly July/August 2003 reported in its: Excerpt from Primary Sources: The Deadliest War What conflict has taken more lives than any other since the World War II? Don’t look to Asia, the Balkans, the Middle East, or even Rwanda for the answer. According to a recent mortality study released by the International Rescue Committee, the record breaker—by far—is the ongoing and under-reported war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire). The IRC estimates that since the conflict began, in 1998, some 3.3 million ‘excess deaths have occurred—that is, deaths from combat and from easily treatable diseases and malnutrition.
All attempts to bring the attention of the international community to that conflict failed because it will expose the involvement of the US government and multinational companies as documented in the book titled Genocide and Covert Operation 1993-1999 by the American journalist Wayne Madsen who presented his findings to the US Congress that turned deaf ears because it is an African tragedy. The involvement of the US in this Deadliest War are documented in the detailed study titled: ‘How America ran and still runs, the Congo war’ New African published in London September 2001 edition pages 18-22. The U.S. has committed more atrocities to the Africans than others if one considers Angola and the crisis in DRC (Steele 2002) but they receive less media attention compared to the Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians because Africa is less ! important in world affairs. The Sudanese conflict is now receiving the attention of U.S. government largely because of the oil (Steele 2002) in that country whose production is dominated by the Chinese who built the pipelines and the US wants to get in.
Indolent African leaders have shown no commitment to the plight of the continent and are more interested in vain programs like AGOA, which is going to bring nothing to Africa as analyzed by Sardar and Davies in their best selling book Why Do People Hate America (2002). Some of them think following the World Bank and the IMF will take them to the promised land but thank God people are now better educated by the teachings of Joseph Stiglizt (Noble Laureate Economics Prize) who has shown beyond reasonable doubt that Economics is political and not technical as these institutions want Africans and others to believe. He has also shown that the developed countries of the West always pursue opposite policies to those they prescribe to others when they are in similar crisis (Stiglitz 2003). African leaders should concentrate in finding peaceful resolution! of Congo crisis. This is one of the richest countries on Earth that has 7% of the world’s hydro resources and has the potential of making the Sahara desert green if the Congo River project is executed. Greening the Sahara, which is possible will wipe out hunger from the face of the earth. But African leaders are more interested in jamborees such as COJA and CHOGM instead of ideas that would liberate their hungry peoples.
References:Ajayi, J. F. A. 1980 Milestones in Nigerian History London Corry, S. C. 2002 ‘Chosen by God To Rule: The Caliphate and Political Legitimacy in Early Modern Morocco (West Africa and Ahmad al-Mansur)’ PhD. Dissertation University of California Santa Barbara. Abstract in American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 20: 1: 172-173 Goldthorpe, J. E. 1996 Sociology of Post-Colonial Societies: Economic Disparity, Cultural Diversity and Development Cambridge Hastings, A 1997 ‘Religious History’ Review of Hansen, H. B. and Twaddle, M. (eds) 1995 Religion and Politics in East Africa: The Period Since Independence London Journal of African History 38: 343 Jere-Malanda, R., 2000 'The hidden history Africa needs to know' New African Liagin, E. ‘Washington’s gift to Nigeria’ Sardar, Z. and Davies, M. W. 2002 Why Do People Hate America Icon Books Cambridge Steele, J. 2002 ‘Oil is the key to peace in Sudan: So Bush is helping to end one of Africa’s most brutal civil wars’ The Guardian August 6 Stiglitz, J. 2003 ‘Do What We Did, Not What We Say’ available at www.projectsyndicate.org/commentaries Sulaiman, I. K. R. 1986 ' Shari'ah in the 1979 Constitution' in Rashid, S. K. (ed) Islamic Law in Nigeria: Application and Teaching Lagos where it was quoted from Altaf Gauhar 'Islam and Imperialism' New Horizon London 26th March - 1st April 1977 Tahboub, D. T. 2003 ‘The US is determined to suppress the independent Arab media’ The Guardian London October 4 Umez, B. N. 2002 ‘Educated to Feel Inferior: Will Africa ever Catch Up?’ Presented at the 8th Annual Convention of the World Igbo Congress, Houston USA August 29-September 31, 2002 Uwechue, R. (ed) 1991 Makers of Modern Africa: Profiles in History London White, C. 2003 ‘9/11 in Context: A Marine Veteran’s Perspective’ Chris White is a former Marine Sergeant who is currently working on his PhD in History at the University of Kansas. Willis, J. R. 1976 ‘The Western Sudan from the Moroccan Invasion (1591) to the Death of Mukhtar al-Kunti (1811)’ Ajayi, J. F. A and Crowder M. (eds) History of West Africa Harlow Essex United Kingdom Yahya, D. 1981 Morocco in the Sixteenth Century: Problems and Patterns in African Foreign Policy Harlow Essex United Kingdom
Dec 2003
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