Africa and the West: A History and Reparations

By Odi Moghalu

The rise of Western powers to global dominance is understood without excluding the relationship of Western Europe and the Americas with Africa between the 1400s and late 1800s. The industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries Europe rests significantly on the labour, intellect and overall industry of Africans. The forced migration of about 12 million Africans to three different continents had come to shape the world as it presently is. Its legacy mostly remained a striving one of human acknowledgment, historical realities, equal rights and justice. The acknowledgment of governments of this epic history and its profits and losses to the parties involved can shape public policy of a remarkable reparation of the pernicious outcomes of the politics of race.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524506780

Odi Moghalu

Odi Arinze Robert Moghalu was born in the besieged breakaway republic of Biafra in 1967 in a post-pogrom, blockade-induced famine and devastating starvation in a vicious genocidal war that cost 2 million Biafran lives , the worst in Africa's multifarious twentieth century conflicts in both scale and severity. Mr. Moghalu worked in Nigeria as a journalist and human rights activist and in the United States as an educator.

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Copyright © 2016 by Odi Moghalu.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-5245-0679-7

                eBook           978-1-5245-0678-0

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Rev. date: 06/02/2016

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Modern Africa

The Issue Of Slavery

Scramble For Africa's Wealth: First Era

The Nature Of Transatlantic Slavery

Resistance

The Scramble For Africa's Wealth: Second Era

United States And Forced African Migration

American Diaspora

A Wedge To US Reparations

Reasons For US Reparations

Brazilian Diaspora

Environmental Racism

Miseducation

Media

The Politics Of Health

Scramble For Africa's Wealth: Third Era Globalization

Notion Of Poverty

The Debt Crisis

The Resource Wars

Bibliography 2

INTRODUCTION

ANCIENT HISTORY

It is widely believed that human life began in Africa in speculative times of between fifty thousand to eight million years ago. Though the exact times are arguable, the continent remains home to the oldest civilizations, some still leaving their traces being the ancient Ethiopian, Kushite (Nubian), and Egyptian empires, unified at some points more than five thousand years ago. Not much is known of the early pharaonic dynasties before and between 3050 and 2890 BC, but there were about thirty-one Egyptian dynasties, spanning from some pharaohs (Tiu, Thesh, Hsekiu---dates unknown) before known periods as Wazner in 3100 BC and Menes in 3050 BC to Ptolemaic Dynasty, when Egypt became a province of Rome under Augustus Caesar in 30 BC.

The significant Egyptian kings of what was to be known as the fourth dynasty built the great pyramids: one of Khufu in Giza, 4,600 years ago; the other by his son Khafre; and the smallest by Menkaure. For forty-three centuries, the 481-foot Great Pyramid was ranked as the tallest structure on earth, surpassed in height only by the skyscrapers of the last century.

Consisting of approximately two million blocks of stone, each weighing more than two tons and altogether about five to six million tons, moved from about five hundred miles away, some archeologists held the view that the three pyramids contain enough blocks to build a ten-foot high, one-foot thick wall around France. The parallel empire of Nubia, also known to the Egyptians at an earlier historical period as Kush (also spelt Cush), was a competing and later merged civilization with ancient Egypt's in political and military power, material, and cultural advancement.

With its capital at Kerma, then Jebel Barkal, where lies today the oldest, most extensively detailed surviving ancient Egyptian text of 159 lines of hieroglyphs, inscribed in a vertical granite monument. Later, it moved to Meroe (established around 300 BC).

The kingdom controlled vital trade routes that extended from Central Africa to Egypt. Conquered by Egypt at about 1500 BC and ruled for the succeeding four centuries, its resources and wealth, especially gold, were acquired by Egyptians; but around 730 BC, the tide of imperialism turned against the Egyptians as Kushite kingship for sixty years became the twenty-fifth dynasty of Egypt, from the Mediterranean to the confluence of the Blue and White Niles.

The Nubian Kingdom, as it was later known, existed for more than nine hundred years, famed for its iron technology, stately brick buildings, and a written language in indigenous alphabets that still remain today in Meroe (Sudan).

Forty generations of Nubian royalty are buried in Meroe under the pyramids, which differ in architecture and are smaller than the Egyptian. Today, in modern Sudan, which was part of ancient Nubia, much more ancient pyramids are found than in Egypt.

Ethiopia's history extends back to that of Egypt and Kush, but available historical records account for more than four thousand years. The Zagwe empire (AD 1100--1270), Abyssinian empire (1270--1750), and Axum empire (first millennium BC to tenth century AD), in which the written language named Geez was invented in100 BC.

Modern Ethiopia became a political entity as Abyssinian feudalism was dismantled in the middle of the nineteenth century after its existence for about a century. In the era of the scramble for Africa, an internally motivated expansion took place, forming the present boundaries. In Ethiopian's northern plateau lies one of ancient Africa's greatest architectural monument, a one-hundred-foot, five-hundred-ton obelisk. The world's largest single-stone obelisk, until the Washington Monument, was chiseled out some 1,700 years ago, stands like a thirteen-story building in Aksum, center of an ancient kingdom that ruled modern Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Yemen, and controlled trade route as far as Syria.

According to a remarkable portion of the Ethiopian chronicle called Kebre Nagast (Book of the Kings), Aksum's record was noted three thousand years ago, significantly inclusive of the era the Queen of Sheba ruled the land.

Makeda, as she is known to the Ethiopians, visited Solomon, king of Israel, within the tenth century BC and returned bearing Solomon's offspring whom she named Menelik. He became the originator of the Solomonic dynasty, a 225 chronological descent of kings and emperors ending with Emperor Haile Sellassie in 1974.

Menelik visited his father Solomon, staying in Israel for about three years. Prior to his return, Solomon ordered the firstborn sons of his noblemen to accompany him. He sent the Ark of the Covenant with them, which Menelik brought to Tana Kirkos.

Aksum, ranking with the empires of Persia, China, and Rome in the third and fourth centuries, conquered Meroe in AD 350, had the ark moved to itself under King Ezana who converted to Christianity and transformed his empire into the world's first Christian state in the fourth century AD.

Inscribed in stone are Ethiopia's Christian origins that states in Geez, Ethiopia's ancient letters, its advent. Chronicled by a fourth-century writer Rufinus, the message came through a young Christian from Tyre named Frumentius, who later became Ethiopia's first bishop.

The advent of Islam in the seventh century gradually confined Aksum's imperial extensions even from the strategic Red Sea. But Christianity's first state was saved from the encroaching advancement of hostile neighbors to this day with more than thirty million of its sixty-two million people constituting Christians of the world's oldest and largest monolithic church.

Other recorded history from the days of Egypt, Kush, and Ethiopia had witnessed empires, such as Ghana (1062), located about five hundred miles northwest of the modern nation of Ghana. Mali (1235) originally commenced as an organized political society from the seventh century AD and later emerged as a world learning center, particularly in the prominent city of Timbuktu, also Songhay in the eighth century AD among others.

Further to the south existed centuries-ago cities as that of Kilwa in today's Mozambique and one-thousand-year-old ruins of stone cities of Monamatapa and the Great Zimbabwe in its modern namesake.

Zimbabwe was to exist for four centuries and was a great gold exporter. There were hundreds of the stone relics scattered around the famous enclosures for which the state is named. Much more are yet to be known of these civilizations.

Mali's Timbuktu, a famous city that was, before and in the Middle Ages, one of the learning centers of the world, was inhabited by Christians, Muslims, and Jews for centuries and, from records, up to the nineteenth century.

Remarkable then for its Sankore University, whose fifty thousand Muslim scholars helped spread Islam across Northwest Africa, Timbuktu still holds the Jingerer mosque, built from red earth in AD 1325 and the Ahmed Baba center, with an archive containing more than twenty thousand ancient Arabic manuscripts that date back to the second century. These manuscripts retain records on disciplines ranging from astronomy to medicine to commerce and history.

The famous story of the city was the fourteenth-century, 1307 precisely, lavish expending of gold gifts in Cairo (city of modern Egypt) by Kankan Moussa, emperor of the ancient state, on his way to Mecca that the price of gold, then roughly equal to salt, crashed. Though its fortune was sought in trade and war by neighbors and foreigners, including Europeans explorers, being a strong Islamic center, it protected some of its important relics from intruders. Timbuktu waned as a great city in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as trade drifted to the Atlantic Ocean.

People of African descent sojourned in Western Europe from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries but ruled from AD 711 until the twelfth century. They first occupied today's Mauritania and Morocco in Northwest Africa.

In 46 BC, the Roman army that entered West Africa encountered these black Africans whom they gave the name Maures, from the Greek adjective mauros, meaning black.

The advent of Islam in the sixth and seventh centuries caught up with them and their neighboring Berber ethnic group, causing a social and cultural unification that existed for centuries.

The conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, Spain, and Portugal came in AD 711, orchestrated by Arab religious conquerors and executed by African adherents of Islam.

Tarik Ibn Zeyad and Moorish general Musa Ibn Nusair, with an army of about seven thousand men, conquered Spain, defeating the Visigothic Kingdom led by King Roderick, who was at the same time fighting the Basques of Northern Spain. Their victory stretched beyond the Pyrenees into France, where they retreated at Tours on the resistance led by Charles Martel (AD 732).

The Moorish era brought to Europe with it a civilization that cut across art, architecture, medicine, and other sciences and was remarkably tolerant of other races and cultures that made Southern Spanish cities as Cordoba, Seville, and Toledo famed centers of immigration and new learning with remarkable universities.

By AD 756, Abd ar-Rahman I established the Umayyad dynasty and a caliphate in Cordoba that later fell in 1031 to the Almoravids and supplanted in 1174 by the Almohads. The empire of the Moors fell in gradual succession of defeats: Toledo (1085) to Alfonso Henriques VI of Leon and Castille, aided by English and Flemish crusaders; Navas de Tolosa (1212) and Cordoba (1236) to Ferdinand III of Castile.

The last fort of Moorish presence, the rock called Gibraltar from the Spanish corruption of the words Gebel Tarik, meaning hill of Tarik, was captured in 1472. The rock later fell into the control of a merged Anglo-Dutch force in the early eighteenth century and ceded to Great Britain in the treaty of Utrecht. Lisbon became a word that transformed from the Moorish word Lashbuna.

Because of the influence of the Moorish presence in Europe, Napoleon was quoted as having once said that Africa begins at the Pyrenees.

Founded in the ninth century BC mainly by Phoenician migrants from Tyre, Carthage emerged as a flourishing trade region around the Mediterranean, having its base in today's Tunisia. The Phoenicians (geographically modern Lebanon) were conquered by the Assyrians and Persians, ushering in instability to their homeland. Their dispersal and migration to Africa influenced the beginning of an empire that was called Carthage that also meant the new city. Merging with the indigenous populations, it stretched its influence across North Africa, built ships and traded in African gold, ivory, pottery, jewelry, glassware, fruits, nut, and animals. The competition over the strategic trading region of the Mediterranean caused series of military conflicts with Greece and Rome. These wars produced a popular and valiant general called Hannibal. The wars with Rome were called the Punic Wars, and the last was fought with Carthage's defeat in 146 BC. The western half of the Mediterranean was dominated by Carthage from the eighth to the third century BC. Though it still rose after its defeat, it finally ended as an empire, following Arab invasion in 637 BC.

MODERN AFRICA

Modern Africa holds differences in its geopolitical and cultural shape: a teeming population of about one billion people; about 14 percent of the world's population; and like the rest of the world's continental regions, comprise multifarious tongues, ethnic groups, and faith. It also has the unique feature of being the only continent that still shows evidence of humans through the key stages of anthropological evolutions.

Among its fifty-three nations are the world's largest desert (Sahara); world's longest river (Nile) sourced from the Kagera River, a stream in Tanzania that flows into Lake Victoria and eventually becomes the White Nile which is joined by the Blue Nile (sourced from the Ethiopian Highlands) at Khartoum to become the Nile, finally emptying into the Mediterranean Sea in Egypt; myriad weather conditions from the desert north to equally desert south but additionally snowy south tip; rain forests, grasslands, plateaus, mountains (e.g., Tanzania's world's second largest named Kilimanjaro, next in height only to Everest); world's richest game reserves (the Serengeti and Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania, Savuti in Mozambique, Masai Mara in Kenya, among others); rivers, lakes, common villages, and more than five hundred major cities and towns. There are more than a thousand languages, many dialectic branches from major ethnicities. Special attribute of the continent remains the juxtaposed scenery of ancient cultures and modern societies.

THE ISSUE OF SLAVERY

Slavery simply means holding people to servitude, sometimes as property. It is an act that is as old as history can bear in its records. A social practice still prevalent in the modern world, though manifest in different forms makes it apt to divide it into the ancient and modern.

Modern slavery, no less dehumanizing, is far removed in severity from the horrid experiences of Africans' shipment and labor exploitation by Europeans between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, which is the central focus of this writing. It involves traditional or chattel slavery, the buying and selling of people, some abducted from homes or inherited as gifts. This is closer to the ancient patterns when human trade was viewed by many as another trade in commodities and relatively a rare occurrence in modern world. Others include bonded labor in which the subject is tricked to work for a debt, sometimes for a lifetime.

Forced labor---the illegal recruitment of people by an individual, government, or institution and forced to labor under threat of violence or penalty.

Early and forced marriage---a cultural norm in some parts of the world in which girls or women are forced into marriage and often live in servitude as a result.

Child labor---the consignment of children to exploitative or dangerous work in industries, fields, and other circumstances depriving them of safety, education, and conducive environment of growth and progress.

Trafficking---transport and trade of humans, usually women and children, for economic exploitation, using force or deception for domestic work or prostitution.

Drawing strength from Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), that is additionally claused that No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms, along with 1956 UN Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery, these types of modern slavery face a fitting battle from governments and organizations across the world, though it should be instructive that it is quite unlike the transatlantic slavery in scale and severity.

This gravely momentous period in human history has its permanent imprints in the world's economy and geography and broader demographics. The very significant contributions of its cultural, technical, and scientific transformations that determined the form of the emergence of modern Europe and the Americas still points to the need of recognition of Africa's cardinal inputs to world's cultures and civilization. Understanding significant portions of Africa's history will help the