REFLECTING ON AMERICA'S FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT - An African Perspective of Global Events Critical to the Overall Black History
By Ooko John
Available online at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Xlibris
Introduction
During my first trip to Europe in the early 1990s, principally on that very occasion when I was taking a photo next to an Egyptian mummy at the Ulster museum in Belfast Northern Ireland, I began not only to question the European perspective of African history, but also the African perspective of European history. Over the next few years on my other trips away from the two continents, either as an engineer or as a sports consultant, I came to realize just how those two perspectives were out of phase with each other. From then on, even though my main profession was miles away from that of an historian, I decided to engage in the possibility of at least attempting to help in fine-tuning the two.
It was in this drive therefore that when I unveiled my personal website in the year 2000, I had used the opening page to challenge the African professional in the developed world to maintain one steady foot in Africa. My philosophy then, which still happens to be very much alive today, is the simple logic that the continent of Africa needs them more than the developed world does.
If my book has dealt majorly with the story of African Americans in the United States, it’s because of the political and economic advancement they have attained in respect to the other black populations that in all respects share their history as descendants of the African continent. Even though numerous factors may be cited in the case of African Americans, no black nation the world over has ever attained the economic growth that they currently possess as consumer market. Calculated at a total income of $98.6 billion in 1978, this figure had risen to $125.8 billion in 1980.
If the ascendancy of Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency of the United States in 2008 set up a pinnacle reference point for the black history covered in this book, it’s because of the grand achievement that it reflects for a community of which such an achievement had been deliberately delayed upon, merely on the grounds of its race. Ever since the initiation of Alexander Twilight in 1836 as the first African American elected to public office when he won a seat on the Vermont legislature, many African Americans have walked that often risky path into politics. It was in that charged atmosphere of the US political system that Congressman James A Garfield, later to be a President of the United States, could contest the congressional victory of John Willis Menard in the1868 election by claiming that it was too early to admit a Negro to the United States Congress. In completing the full process of ascending to the highest political office of the United States, Obama had shattered the status quo that lived on in the country’s political circle to define the average black as simply ‘that’ African American, one whose political ambitions were predestined on the grounds of race.
Had Obama been born in the era of Robert S Abbot, the founder of the Chicago Defender and a law graduate from Kent, he would never have succeeded to be a president of the United States. The color of his skin was to serve as a ceiling for all his professional dreams in the manner that Abbot himself was told that he was too dark to practice law in the United States. Initially entitled “The Race to Emulate Obama”, this book is intended to highlight the current president’s achievement as a model that blacks everywhere need to rise up to, and try to emulate in all the relative challenges of their lives. Supporting this view is the significant piece of history confirming that the current plight of the average African American, has its direct relation to what have been political maneuvers at the country’s higher offices.
If this book portrays a massive reference to past and current events on the continent of Africa, it’s because of the validity of those events in relation to the various socio-political and economic histories of blacks living away from the continent. After all, the struggle for development that is still in place in most African countries today, most of it stemming from what was the confused state of affairs under European colonialism, is also related to that distant history of the slave trade. Itself an event of acrimony, the slave trade in blacks from Africa that began as early as 1501 by the Spaniards, to its official abolition in early 19th century, had resulted in over 10 million Africans being trans-located to the Atlantic World. Forced to work as free labor in a capitalistic system that was essentially gainful to western European nations as Britain and its then principal colony of America. It was again these political establishments which, after providing the political will that supported the complex legal framework that assuaged racism against blacks under slavery and colonization, have to this day influenced the lack of development on the continent.
For the continent of Africa therefore, the desired intention from this book is that blacks currently living on the continent would learn from the political and economic struggles of their brethren away from the continent toward achieving their own share of those rewards at home. This feat is very true given that while the number of the world population and the proportion of the world’s poor people in extreme poverty fell after 1980, the proportion of people in sub-Saharan Africa living in abject poverty increased to almost 50%. Still, a forecast from the 2007 UN Human Development Report indicated that sub-Saharan Africa will account for almost one third of world poverty in 2015. While such a forecast almost looks certain, it will be a statistical tragedy, not only for the inhabitants of the continent, but the world at large, given that the figure from 1990 was (just) one fifth. The major reason for this increase in relative poverty on the continent against the rest of the world is because whereas there exist dramatic developmental strides being made elsewhere around the emerging world of economics as Asia and Latin America, all seems to be in reverse in most of African countries.
The Obama victory and its backlash of culture war
After almost three hundred years of some very well scripted European propaganda of pseudo-scientific dogma, biased literature and a very well intentioned political and economic will, of which its base deliberation was to depict blacks as inferior culturally, it came as no surprise that Obama’s victory drew some backlash from the die-hard section of white community.
One such explosive reaction came from a certain Klaus Emmerich who is an Austrian journalist. In an interview just after the Obama victory, Klaus Emmerich had remarked that he does not want the Western world being directed by a black man because blacks are not as far advanced in their civilization process or in their politics. All this is in spite of the fact that the history of the Black Madonnas in various societies in Europe points to what was the pressure from the influence of the black civilizations that had extended as far as certain German tribes who adored Isis the Negro goddess. Still, there is the knowledge that even though Charlemagne’s empire, the precursor of modern Western world, which only became a reality following his crowning in 800 AD, was thousands of years late in comparison to the African empires of Egypt and Nubia. Moreover, even the latter-day African empire of Ghana was probably founded around the 3rd century AD before running its course well ahead of Charlemagne’s empire until the year 1240.
If Klaus Emmerich’s comments could be taken as coming from a section of Europe still stuck in the past, similar sentiments were encountered at home following the Obama victory. In the United States, the victory had ruffled some feathers by dismantling a status-quo that had somehow designed the limits of political roles for its black population. So vitriolic were some of the reactions from some white separatist movements that the Aryan Nations’ official website presented the graphic tomb for the United States of America with the words, “Born: July 4, 1776, Died: Nov 4, 2008”!
The fact that reactions from proponents of the Aryan Model would today reflect unease with the new and more advanced scientific techniques that have been applied to Aegean archeology is because their model was conscribed with a hint of racism and anti-Semitism. For the proponents of the Aryan Model, the Ancients’ view of Greece as having been civilized by Egyptians and Phoenicians had to be removed because it offended against their laws of “racial” science. In effect, their reaction to the results now emanating from the new techniques has generally been to squeeze them into their out-of-fashion model, rather than making adjustments to the latter.
Taken a step further by the Tea Party Movement, the fight-back by the white separatist groups of America hijacked some of the agenda set by the movement with intones as “I want my country back”. Stroked by yet another agenda that rode the waves within the Tea Party Movement under the tutelage of the “birthers”, the empty controversy of Obama’s citizenship was easily expanded to the hot issue of illegal immigrants. As a justification, those within the Tea Party Movement who had an inclination to the militia, strove to centralize their ideologies around the Second Amendment and the 1980s-era Posse Comitatus. What the Posse Comitatus offered for them was a doctrine of citizenship which was for matter of purpose, a reservation for white Christians only.
With rights and responsibilities for the same white Christians, the Posse Comitatus had also offered its subscribers within the Tea Party Movement a sense of being, a cadre that was superior to the other groups whose citizenship were merely sanctioned by the Fourteenth Amendment of 1865. With the erasing of the status quo by his victory, Obama had presented a challenge to the white supremacist members of the Tea Party Movement who felt being pushed to the back of the benefits queue in respect to the history of being white in America. Left to fight for the maintenance of the status quo and against immigration, the Tea Party Movement came to form a kind of refuge for the white supremacists, just like the black church became one for blacks throughout their history of slavery and discrimination in this land.
The African slavery and the effects
Caught squarely in a war that was not of their own creation, mainland Africans who were unlucky to be enslaved in the New World became the consequential victims of earlier events that had gripped the continent of Europe through the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages. These Africans were subjected to traditions which had been created largely for fellow Europeans of a different class and the residents of Mediterranean region. One significant factor of those traditions which had taken shape under feudalism in Europe, before paving the way for the policy of enslavement of second class citizens, was the system of vassalage. It had been instituted to create and regulate the obligations of obedience and service on the part of the vassal to the lord. It was therefore on the grounds of conquest and crusades, themselves by-products of feudalism and Christendom, that Europeans came to impose their form of political and economic policies on Africans through the slave trade, colonization, genocide, exploitation and all forms of pseudo-scientific dogmas for a good part of the last four hundred years or so.
Treated as pawns in an emerging capitalist system having been dispersed throughout Western Europe and the Atlantic World, Africans were deprived of a multitude of dignities before being robbed of their identity. At the onset of the slave trade, the mentality of the earlier European expeditions was largely influenced by the events that had led to the Castilian and Portuguese conquest of Jews and Moors in old Europe, only to be followed by the conquest of the American Indians in the New World. What had become the Iberian context of racism was an expression of the conflict between Christians, Jews and Moors. This form of racism had itself led to a discriminatory policy of blood purity (limpieza de sangre). Later to be taken as a royal legislation which had the full support of the Catholic Church, the policy of blood purity had carefully distinguished between the so-called Old Christians (those Christians of the Middle Ages), and the so-called New Christians (those who had recently converted from Judaism or Islam).
These events were sanctified by two particular infamous bulls from Pope Nicholas V. In the Dum diversas Bull of 1452, he had authorized King Afonso V of Portugal to reduce any Muslims, pagans and other unbelievers to perpetual slavery. In the other Bull, Romanus Pontifex of 1455, he had gone a step further to authorize the seizure of non-Christian lands discovered during the Age of Discovery while encouraging the enslavement of natives therein. It therefore followed that those individuals who were marked out as new Christians came to be denied the right to practice certain occupations, to be admitted to many civil and ecclesiastical offices, and in many respects, were treated as second-class citizens. It was to be as second-class citizens that the initial Africans found themselves in the new world before slavery took its more tragic form as promises of economic wealth from the institution of slavery became the definite avenue toward attaining a political class.
Most of the Africans who found themselves living under slavery in the Atlantic World were from the western coast of the continent. Victims of tribal wars that were instigated by Europeans who had supplied arms and mercenaries, they had to endure tortuous voyages across the Atlantic Ocean en route to European farmlands and factories in the New World. Lasting between six to nine weeks for destinations as the new colonies of Virginia, the other trips to such offshore locations as Peru in South America could take up to eighteen weeks as the slaves had to transported over land to the western coast of South America. Many slaves never made them through. They died en route because of the manner in which they were packed in the ships, chained in pairs and made to lie close to each other with no space to turn leave alone stretch. Others died simply because they were not used to the rations of food served on the slave ships.
For the continent of Africa, the slave trade was the initiation of its current stuttered passage through development. With the increased enslavement the continent’s population to the Atlantic world and to Europe, African communities were laid bare in labor deficiency. At a crucial point in history of human development, before the industrial revolution, when labor was the most important resource as was to be evidenced in Europe and the American colonies of the period, the continent missed a fundamental step in the take-off toward overall development. The fact that the same Europeans appeared on the continent’s shores at the onset of the “Scramble for Africa” just as Africa was starting to recover from the slave trade only helped to delay further, that otherwise deeply-yearned-for take-off to this very day.
If the institution of slavery in places as Argentina in Latin America was mostly based on culture, the opposite was true in North America where law was the factor. It was therefore not surprising that with the booming tobacco and other farm harvests, slavery on Christian grounds gave way to slavery on skin color in North America toward the mid 17th century. Whereas slaves could virtually earn their liberty after accepting Christianity before this period, the rules very much changed after the economics of scale around the institution changed dramatically. Part of this new economic rule as was pasted on the face of slavery, was to tame the potential revolt under the slave working conditions, a factor that would have pitted poor indentured Europeans and their African co-workers against the land owners.
In North America, Maryland became the first colony to pass a declaration in 1639 nullifying the freedom of an African slave on the grounds of baptism to Christianity. From then on, the punishment for rebellion or escape on the part of white and black laborers became very different. While white servants could get a pass of days or months of labor for escape, a black servant’s punishment was either slavery for life, amputation or death. To follow Maryland with new laws to manage the enslavement of Africans was the colony of Virginia. It had passed a law in 1663 that set the passage of enslavement of a child of a slave. At the prospect of better economic yields from a tightened form of slavery and the diminishing prospect of an inflow of indentured European because of economic progresses in their homelands, the colony of Virginia went on to pass yet another law that declared it legal to kill an unruly slave during punishment!
From then on, the conditions and the fate of an African slave in North America came to reminisce a view of life expressed by Clemence, that character from Albert Camus’ book La Chute. From a passage in that book, the French writer had remarked thus – “Le plus haut des tourments humain est d’être jugé sans loi (one’s greatest torment is to be judged without a law)”.
Because they constituted a group of which its economic returns under slave labor were always higher than non-slave laborers, the African slaves, more than anybody else, contributed to what is today the union of states that forms the United States of America. It was the human muscle, apart from that of other animals that had accounted for 94% of the energy used in US industry around 1850. Such a figure is gigantic in comparison to today’s world where those two sources of industrial energy only account to a figure well below 1%.
Without their sweat, blood and the politics that played about the institution of their livelihood, the union would probably never have expanded westwards as it did, and the US would probably have never become a continental nation. It was the far-reaching politics of African slaves that led to the Louisiana Purchase after the French fall-out following the Haiti revolution of 1791. This purchase had helped the union gain the territories that became the Southwest and the West Coast States, which themselves were vital for the union’s growth in 20th century. Without them, the US could well have ended territorially at the Mississippi River and never emerged as a world power.
By the time it came to the Civil War, the institution of slavery in the United States had its own worthy might in politics and economics as part of the union. That is how the institution led to the Civil War, before hatching the divided opinions from historians whether the war was over states’ rights or over slavery, and if the politics and economics around the institution had ended slavery in the US, or there was the “solitary” hand of Abraham Lincoln about. The truth of the matter is that what had become the politics of slavery in the US as the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 had shifted its process burdens from the slave owners in the south and was increasingly imposing itself on the liberties on the citizens in the north. As an institution therefore, slaves had contributed to the demise of slavery in the US just as the other historically related factors, as they actually fought in the Civil War while providing labor for its other operations.
For blacks in the US, the proclamation of 1863 never set the stage for their political and economic progress in the literal sense. What it had succeeded in partaking was the initiation of such legalized discrimination operations as the Jim Crow. Meant to prevent or delay the advancement of blacks in the sectors of politics and economics by employing skewed tactics around voting rights and access to credit or employment, their consequences adding to the already weighty burdens picked by the black community under slavery, Jim Crow meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to their future generations. The subsequent reality to this story is that 250 years after the Civil War, the unemployment rate for the black community stands at 15.5% while the national rate is a manageable figure of about 9% today.
Slave rebellions, resistances and black push for republicanism
Even though rebellions from the Africans slaves in the Atlantic World were an everyday occurrence on the plantations, they were spurred to monumental heights following the Haitian revolution of 1791. From Virginia to Rio Grande do Sul, slave resistances and rebellions became well intentioned and well planned to the effect that in places as the Gran Colombia (those states that became today’s Venezuela and Colombia among others), they were able to exploit their experiences to attain their liberty from Spain. In the fugitive slave communities of Brazil, the Quilombos or Mocambos, the large number of slaves living there had managed to establish a state-supported army with weapons stolen or purchased from the enemy.
With the increased revolutionary movements, there appeared divisions and the inevitable betrayals within the overall black communities in the societies where they occurred. In the Caribbean and Latin America where the black community was culturally sectioned into various identities as pardos, mulattoes, meztizados, bozales, creoles, trigue?os and morenos, the divisions became quite intense. Personalities as George William Gordon of Jamaica, Antonio Maceo of Cuba and Simon Bolivar’s non-white allies and potential rivals in Piar and Padilla of Gran Colombia ended up suffering political exclusion or assassinations as a result of such betrayals. This peculiar and deliberate political process that was meant to safeguard the exclusion of the non-white population from the center of political power was replayed in Argentina following Juan Manuel de Rosas’ period there. In Mexico, Vicente Guerrero who was a mulatto, ex-slave and president of Mexico in 1825, had a major discord with the upper class simply because they had considered him in all manners as a triple-blooded outsider. For Afro-Cubans who spent decades of marginalization on the island, they were forced to form Partido Independiente de Color (PIC) in 1908 to activate for full participation.
In the mainland union of the American colonies, revolutionaries against slavery as Nat Turner had to endure full-fledged federal machinery that comprised the military from Virginia, federal forces from Fort Monroe and detachments from the USS Warren and USS Natchez.
Black push for economic advancement and its modern challenges
For the majority of former black slaves, the initial push for economic advancement was marked by the life of sharecropping. Of course there were those who had plied their trade as carpenters or masons, but like most blacks in the US at the time, a dream into business ventures were cut short on the grounds of education, access to credit and legalized discrimination.
Forced to fight for full representation in all sectors of development, the black community in the US came up with the associations as the National Urban League (NUL) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in particular. In 1925, there came the brotherhood of sleeping car porters, through which A Philip Randolph helped form the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BCSP).
With the civil rights movements that peaked in the 1960s with the arrival of Martin Luther Jr, blacks’ push for full representation resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act and its subsequent amendments had established that race is a protected category under the US constitution’s equal protection doctrine and due process rights.
With their notable advancement in capitalization which has been supported from such avenues as the black churches, black banks and insurance companies, athletes and the hip-hop, the challenge has been on the community to realign its investment choices and consumerism. While the challenge for black businesses at the top has been the need to break into the manufacturing sector where their presence is very low comparatively, the challenge for the lower end black consumers has been to divert away from the visible urge to buy dignity and respect as a way of upstaging a past of social discrimination.
Black quest for reparations
The quest for reparation for unpaid labor during slavery and its side-effects, as a form of compensation for centuries of slave labor, the disruption of the eco-sociopolitical structure (for Africans and) for African Americans, and the lingering effects therein, has had movements dating as way back as the mid 1800s.
Following on the actions of the likes of Sojourner Truth and Callie House immediately after the Civil War, the quest for reparations has renewed its activism among African Americans, Africa and Africa’s children in the Diaspora, of whom the movement has emerged as an important issue. A growing number of activists, scholars and political leaders such as British Member of Parliament Bernie Grant and US congressman John Conyers (through the Conyers bill) have heeded the call.
Founded in 1989, the National Coalition of Black for reparations in America is an umbrella group that sponsors the Reparation Awareness Day, an annual convention held on every 25th day of February. The increased awareness toward the struggle to seek reparations for blacks led to the formation of Africa Reparations Movement in 1993.
The continent of Africa, its developmental challenges and hopes for the future
In what was supposedly a position of strategic backdrop for blacks and their descendants who suffered under slavery and discrimination away from it, the continent of Africa proved largely as a disappointment in the would-be relevant reference of “the motherland!” This was mainly because of the events that encapsulated the continent over the last one hundred years, pertaining to colonization and the ensuing mess that became a disappointment, from the continent’s post-independent political leaders.
Of all the disruptions that European colonization impacted onto the continent of Africa that led to the stagnation of its development through such process as the abandonment of traditional iron smelting in most parts of the continent, the most lethal has been European form of a corrupted Christianity. As early as the year 1778, agents of the would-be European colonization agenda as Rev. Thomas Thompson who was then an educator on the Gold Coast (Ghana) wrote in a pamphlet how “The African Trade for Negro Slaves (was) Shown to be Consistent with the Principles of Humanity and the Laws of Revealed Religion”.
For the continent of Africa today, after decades of bad governance on the ground and interference from the international community, and billions of dollars in aid, it has become the poorest region in the world. Half of the continent’s population lives on less than one dollar a day and there is even the most disturbing picture that in a world with more options than ever before, life expectancy is actually falling for Africans. Africans live on average to an age of a mere 46 years while the figure for India and Bangladesh posts a significant 17 years more.
Once considered a bread basket capable of feeding its burgeoning population, most parts of Africa are today reflective of one famine story after another. It so happened that while South Asia was busy expanding the area of land under irrigation, Africa’s proportion of irrigated land hardly changed over the last fifty years.
On the political front, bad governance that has led to rampant corruption at almost every section of the African society has meant that in some sense of foolhardiness, most of the money made on the continent is employed in the abundance of capital flight to foreign countries, instead of the more plausible option of reinvestments there. Relative statistics show that about 40% of African savings are kept outside the continent, a value that compares sadly to just about 6% and 3% for East Asia and South Asia respectively. The resulting state of despondency means that many educated Africans have over the years quit their homelands because they are frustrated at not being able to put their skills to good use. In the end, what the developed world as the US has come to denote, ironically in its relation to the continent of Africa, is some form of a graveyard for the latter. While the average African in the Diaspora, professional or not, may not fully realize his potential in the foreign countries because of the realities of cultural barriers and the baggage that he may still need to contend with from his motherland in supporting extended families back there or otherwise, it’s a fact that the continent of Africa would have benefited more from him, had the environment back home been supportive enough to avert his emigration.
While it’s true that the last five or so decades of self-rule in Africa has been fraught with negativity, the future is starting to look promising. Programs, policies and association as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) and the African Union’s NEPAD amongst many others that have fostered the need for regional integrations across the continent are more of the norm than the exception. When well tended to, these programs will help the continent reorganize its political and economic structures in manners that they can deal with the current maladies of illiteracy and AIDS. The ensuing regional trade will also help in spurring the currently dismal value of 10% which is posted as the total exports between African countries, while the comparative values for the countries of North America and Western Europe are 40% and 63% respectively.