Any talk of womanhood, especially in grammatically gendered (neo)European languages, puts us into a colosseum of “Western” notions of gender and fe/male, where we lose because the fight is on their terrain, using their terms as faux weapons. Oyèrónké Oyèwùmí has successfully argued the categories of “gender” and “woman” are not cross-culturally inherent in social relations, and remarking how these social construct entering the English language in the late 19th and early 20th century have been used uncritically.[1] In the context of Oyèwùmí’s Yorùbá culture, the category of “woman,” as biologically determined, did not exist until British colonial rule. The Yorùbá language, like the Akan language of Ghana which I speak, are gender-neutral. They do not grammatically declare gender. Cultural context does.
On Reparations (Again!)
EssaysCommentrep·a·ra·tion / repəˈrāSH(ə)n / noun: 1. the making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged. 2 the compensation for war damage paid by a defeated state.
ARCHAIC. the action of repairing something.
In a previous essay, ‘Political Organization v. Reparations,” I had made the case not for nor against reparations, but for a grasp of reparations—as historicized concept and practice, as individual compensation, and as an organizing strategy. Here, I want to reaffirm my position, which remains unchanged, and suggest there’s no way to have sensible discussion about reparations unless we put all its meanings on the table and then decide which ones support broader-than-the-individual strategies in the African world.
In a time when every human effort constitutes a “movement,” with self-appointed leaders and spokespersons, with or without organizational structures, reparations because of its iterations lacks cohesion and thus cannot be a movement. There is no shared aim or strategy. For the pay-check expectants, what happens then the day after getting the (unlikely) compensation? What individual desires should be tempered to feed collectivist needs, and how will those needs receive remedy? This monetary approach to reparations, if we can call it an approach, justifies itself as a solution, but the layered predicaments of “black” life in white societies is no mathematical equation solved with a number-crunching solution. For those who want an apology, and are satisfied with that alone, then the ends justify the means, for this, too, is a dead-end approach. For the justice-seekers, what does the justice they seek looks like and justice (whatever this means) for whom and from whom? They cannot bring a collectivist suit, representing their angst and aims, against the U.S. government—or any government—and expect to win in their courts. For the law-making sponsors of reparations, there have been decades of bills introduced in Congress to study reparations, not to grant it, and this approach continues elected officials asking for or creating reparations task forces and commissions to study “the effects of slavery and create recommendations for reparations.” And, finally, for the this-will-save-democracy and bring-racial-reckoning-to-a-close proponents, nothing in nor through reparations will accomplish either, except reconfigure U.S. empire as it marches on with less-than-disgruntled “descendants of slaves” (pun intended!).
Democracy and its discontents
EssaysCommentMy argument is that the United States, or its forerunner colonies, was never a democracy nor can it become one for this reason: if democracy is a “government by the people,” where sovereign power is vested in “the people” who exercise power directly or by elected official,” that system of governance requires rational people and most of the 330 million people in the United States are irrational, including their elected officials. By rational, I mean a person or people able to think clearly, sensibly, and logically. The implication is that it doesn’t matter who becomes the president, nor which party is in power, for there’s a feedback loop where incoming regimes usually do their best to eviscerate the body of work belonging to the previous administration, regardless if that some of that work benefits “the people.”
Political Organization v. Reparations
CommentThe question of political organization versus calls for reparations assume these are at odds. I see them differently. If both are approaches to the consequences of colonial slavery for peoples of the African world, then they should be engaged in tandem, not as odd couples. Political organization or mobilization for said peoples seek to redress collectivist and current socio-political violence in the Americas, Africa, and elsewhere, but so does reparations. While reparations might suggest near-term goals—monetary compensation, apology, etc.—political organizations of various stripes have lofty goals as well—socialist democracy, plain socialism, unification of Africa under scientific socialism, and too many to name. I’m suggesting we think about political organization through reparations, that is, the root mistrust and intra-cannibalism wrought by colonial slavery and which reparations to seeks to address inhabits any sustainable political organizing or organizations which require workable levels of trust and disciplined starvation—to fight the pivot against or toward each other. Mass movements don’t work, and neither do political organizations of any stripe. Their resumes, their fragmentation—the problem of too many organizations in intramural squabbles over finite resources and equally fragmented members—borne this out. Pointless are cadre classes, ideological seminars, dogma (read: political education), or quoting of this or that revolutionary (whose resumes, when you cut away the praise poetry, looks anti-revolutionary). Mass movements and political organizations can’t work unless we address the adhesive that holds organizations together, that make them workable, and that answer the crucial question of whether organizations are means to somewhere, to something, or whether they are permanent fixtures regardless of the state of the African world?
Voting as a Tool for What in 2020?
EssaysCommentAs the U.S. presidential election day approaches on Tuesday, November 3, there is the idea the (f)act of voting is a tool, but we need to ask for what? Voting presents us—or is presented to us—as a quintessential right, safeguarded by the blood of fallen troops and shrouded in mythos of liberty and justice for all… whom matter. Whether we accept or reject this presentation, we must admit voting as a performative act or a tool through which to direct action needs to be framed in history. “The great force of history,” James Baldwin reminds us, “comes from the fact that we carry it within us,” and that “history is literally present in all that we do.” But what has been carried into the present under the guise of voting and, through voting, what do we keep ever-present? We start where history nudges us to look—ancient Rome. The socio-political and economic structures regulating U.S. society, and around a globe molested by western European violence, are plagiarized forms of Roman law and institutions. Their story is a mirror to us.
Blackness, Pan-Africanism, and Chadwick Boseman
EssaysCommentI moved from Brooklyn to the District of Columbia (DC) in June 2000 for graduate studies at Howard University. Chadwick Boseman graduated from Howard a month before I arrived, and we would never meet. But I encountered him through his movies, which is to say the way he worked the silver screen to place notions of blackness and pan-Africanism, or pan-African blackness, for us to seriously engage their implications: is blackness and pan-Africanism relevant in the age of Chadwick Boseman? By “age,” I mean the chronological life of Boseman and the afterlife of he and the characters he reimagined for global Africa. Chadwick’s life work, echoing W. E. B. Du Bois, seized upon the idea that “all art is propaganda”—a tool Du Bois considered part of the arsenal for “racial uplift” across the pan-African world.
Gendered | Intimate | Household | Violence
EssaysCommentBorn into a family, we recreate it so others can cycle in and out. With each entry and exit, we accrue unresolved-ness that plays out in our being and in our family, at times violently. My view is simple: the source of and success against gendered intimate household violence is our families. If Covid-19 exposes, laying bare more than some imagined, the (ill-)health of family discloses intergenerational violence while granting us the tools to expunge it. I’ve digested Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyèwùmí’s The Invention of Women, as well as Tommy Curry’s The Man-Not and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. And yet, I’m unconvinced the central problem is nor can be resolved by focusing on women/girls or men/boys as if contestants in the oppression game—jostling for who is the most oppressed. These approaches seem too schizophrenic and divisive. They fall short because they embody rather than challenge assumptions about the common denominator—gender.
Monuments and flags
EssaysCommentSymbols as representational images matter. Whether casted as monuments, flags, currencies, or other icons of the nation-state, they shape perceptions of who we were and who we now claim to be. They always speak to us, because they are co-defendants in the myths upon which our lives (r)evolve, rotating like that caged hamster on the wheel. Symbols keep us on that wheel, as if we have a real stake in “our democracy,” the democracy that dispossesses those who cry out its name. Symbols matter because even if the hamster in us wants to get off the wheel, realizing its energies are spent to remain in place, there’s the cage.
A Note on “This moment is different”: Is it?
EssaysCommentA chant, “this moment is different,” has been heard, seen and printed from these weeks of protest. Protesters have embraced this chant, echoed in the mouths of Obama and official spokespersons for Black Lives Matter. Attached it to another, that declared, “unlike our ancestors, we will not sit down.” The two slogans are related. Their message has one target: the efforts of ancestors. But this is what they suggest: that somehow those in the present moment are more strong-willed, more prepared, more tactical to seize a moment their ancestors might have accepted, or to which they would’ve acquiesced. Organizing a protest of 150 deep in a small Texas town known for Klu Klux Klan activity, they felt embolden, especially after a planned counter-rally by the Klan never materialized. They have also had enough, “unlike our ancestors.” That’s why “this moment is different.”
“The March had already been co-opted”
EssaysCommentOn their website, the Movement for Black Lives coalition claims to be anti-capitalist. Google lists their “type of business” under “social movement.” In the past month, they have raised over $100 million from a billionaire, foundations, and the same Democratic Party for which they disavowed any affiliation in 2015. The ante of pledged financial support is now close to two billion dollars.
European Expansionism in Africa and the Indian Ocean
African History 360CommentPrior to the mid-nineteenth century, the Asian markets for enslaved and scorned African laborers were connected more closely with and even propelled city-states such as Zanzibar and Pemba into the slaving world of East Africa and Asia. Certainly, the Swahili city-states were well integrated in the trade network and politics of the Indian Ocean world and their markets. These markets drew slavers from Brazil, French merchants from Mauritius, Arab merchants from Oman and Hadramawt, Indian merchants from the Kathiawar peninsula and the Konkan coastal region, and Swahili merchants into a consortium that exploited gold, ivory, and human captives.
African Diaspora Culture in the Americas
African History 360CommentCharles Ball (1781? – 1840s?) was born on a tobacco plantation in Maryland, eventually purchasing his legal freedom and serving as a naval officer in the war of 1812. Ball spent much of his live laboring and being sold and resold—and captured and re-enslaved—on plantations in South Carolina and Georgia, before resigning himself to Pennsylvania to escape recapture. While in South Carolina, Charles witnessed and participated in a funerary ritual brought from Africa. Since almost all enslaved Africans took death and funerary rites seriously, dedicating funds toward and undertaking such rites as community affairs, the funerary ritual Charles observed has therefore wider significance for understanding the continuity and transformation of African cultures in the Americas.
Atlantic Crossing, Slavery, and Religion in Brazil
African History 360CommentMahommah Gardo Baquaqua (1830? – 1860s?), originally from the village of Djougou in present-day Benin, was captured and exported to the Brazilian state of Pernambuco in the first half of the nineteenth century. “Slave narratives” about bonded life in colonial Brazil are indeed rare, and thus Mahommah’s account takes on added significance. Ultimately, he was able to travel from Brazil to New York, Haiti, and finally Canada, where he related his account less than a decade after he was exported from his homeland.
Oral History and Tradition
African History 360CommentCarl Christian Reindorf produced the first general history of the Gold Coast peoples written by an African and using a judicious selection of published and oral sources from “more than two hundred persons of both sexes.” Carl Christian Reindorf (ca. 1834 – 1917) was a Basel Mission pastor and historian. His use of oral history to write African history in the late nineteenth century was unprecedented, as well as his methodology for combining oral sources with available documentary sources.
Religious Effects of Atlantic Slaving on African Regions
African History 360CommentToward the end of the seventeenth century, marabout Nasir al-Din launched a religious movement against transatlantic slaving but for the Islamization of the Senegal valley. French colonial official Louis Chambonneau, stationed at the French outpost of St. Louis at the mouth of the Senegal river, was an eyewitness whose reporting of the events to his superiors remains one of the best first-hand accounts Nasir al-Din’s movement. Nasir al-Din was born in the southern Sahara to an elite family of the Traza Moors (so-called “Berbers”). Chambonneau referred to the movement as Toubenan (from the Wolof tuub, “conversion”). Chambonneau and many after him agreed the success of the Toubenan religious movement, though Nasir al-Din was killed, was due to the negative effects wrought by transatlantic slaving.
African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean
African History 3601 CommentKnown as Siddis or Habshis in India, Africans have lived in South Asia for some two millennia. Over time, they played crucial roles in the politics, economies, religions, cultures, and arts of the region, especially in western parts of India. Though a large number came to the region as captive persons through Arab slavers across the Indian Ocean, numerous Siddis ascended to positions of power and authority in the military and government of various India rulers, and some even became rulers themselves between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. Two such persons were famed Siddi ruler Malik Ambar, who ruled Ahmednagar until his death in 1626, and his son Fateh Khan, who became governor of Janjira and its fort in 1655. Janjira was important for trade and Muslim pilgrims traveling to Mecca. Its importance is also supported by the failure of European naval powers to capture it and conquer the Siddis of Janjira, who continued to rule the fort.
Islam and non-Islamic Communities in 19th Century Transatlantic Africa
African History 360CommentAn African Muslim from Bornu who would later convert to orthodox Christianity in Czarist Russia, and renamed Nicholas Said, Mohammed Ali ben Said spent much of his captivity in Africa, not the Americas. In a significant proportion of his account, Mohammed focused on the encounters between Islam and indigenous spiritualities in Bornu as well as the wider Sudanic region of Africa. In the selection below, Mohammed provides his own view of the Sudan before Islam and the destruction left in the wake of its encounter with indigenous cultures.
Arts, Technology, and Society during the Transatlantic Slaving Era
African History 360CommentOlaudah Equiano (1745 – 1797) was born around 1745 in what is now southeastern Nigeria. About age eleven, Equiano was kidnapped and exchanged to slavers trafficking human cargo for the Caribbean market. In 1766, Equiano purchased his freedom and settled in England the next year. In 1789, Equiano published his two-volume autobiography. In this selection, Equiano, from his “slender observation” as a child, centered his recollections on his natal village, the arts and technologies of society, and the general structure and working of that village. From this perspective, he offers some insights into the local meaning of “slaves” and “slavery” and does so in comparative perspectives.
Resistance to Portuguese Colonial Rule in West Africa
African History 360CommentAmilcar Cabral (1924 – 1973) was an anti-colonial thinker and freedom fighter, and leader of the PAIGC that fought for the liberation of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. After studying agronomy in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, Amilcar Cabral founded the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde or PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) in 1956. As Secretary-General of the PAIGC, Cabral and his comrades liberated much of the Guinean countryside and distinguished himself among the bevy of African freedom fighters as both theorist and tactician.
Effects of Transatlantic Slaving on Dahomey
African History 360CommentThe rise and expansion of Dahomey since the mid-seventeenth century coheres with the rise of transatlantic slaving and the extensive availability of firearms. On several occasions, however, the Yoruba-controlled Oyo state would reinforce its hegemony over Dahomey’s foreign affairs throughout the eighteenth century.