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9. BLACK AFRICA DEFENDED, HISTORY AND PEOPLE (March 2006)
There is something about Africa and Blacks that has brought out the disregard and contempt even in educated Western men and women, and made them say that there was nothing there; people, yes, though inferior people, but nothing worth calling history or civilization. The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), in his Philosophy of History, said that Black Africa "is not a historical continent; it shows neither change nor development". Hegel called Africans "non-historical peoples". So confident was he of these judgments that he didn't even let his ignorance of African history stand in the way of making them. Arnold Toynbee, in A Study of History, published in 10 volumes between 1933 and 1954, seems to almost shake with disdain when, in his endless work, he makes one of his rare comments on Africa: "The Black races alone have not contributed positively to any civilization-- as yet....We shall find that in Africa the plateau was no more productive of a 'civilized' society than the tropical forests of the great river valley [Congo River]....His primitive social heritage was of so frail a texture...he came to America spiritually as well as physically naked...a simple and impressionable mind...childlike spiritual intuition...." etc. I looked to H.G. Wells, a more politically progressive writer than Toynbee, whose The Outline of History is subtitled The Whole Story of Man, but the story is whole without some of its parts: Black Africa is barely mentioned. He admits, though, that those Black slugs did manage to fly a little when they had some lucky white wings attached:
"To the south of the civilized zone, in central and
southern Africa, the negro was making a slower progress,
and that, it would seem, under the stimulus of whiter tribes
from the Mediterranean regions, bringing with them in
succession cultivation and the use of metals. These tribes
came to the black by two routes: across the Sahara to the
west as Berbers and Tuaregs and the like, to mix with the
negro and create such quasi-white races as the Fulas; and
also by way of the Nile, where the Baganda (= Gandafolk)
of Uganda, for example, may possibly include some
element of a remote white origin."
That's from the updated (by Raymond Postgate) edition of 1961.
Even a work as recent as Jacquetta Hawkes' The Atlas of Early Man, which
covers 35,000 BC to 500 AD, published in 1976, by which date it's hard to make
excuses for any writer, gives Black Africa three sentences. One. And then
there's the other two. She seems to include Black Africa in a few other
sentences primarily referring to Egypt and North Africa.
And I'm not even discussing the more violently racist work which has littered
the discussion for centuries. A recent example would be J. Philippe Rushton's Race,
Evolution, and Behavior, published in 1995. He'd object to my calling his
production "violently racist". He considers the conclusions reasoned
and objective, as do others who write like him. Rushton, an exceptionally
learned man, marshals a mountain of what he considers scientific evidence (and
much is) to make an open and almost refreshingly unapologetic case for Black
inferiority, and the inferiority of their societies in the Old World. We will
return to him later.
We can't now, because it's 1483-- and all the works we've mentioned have yet to
be written, and attitudes haven't hardened. Even Christopher Columbus is still a
year away from his first attempt to interest a European monarch in this idea he
has, this...inspiration, for what will turn out to be the most important journey
in the history of the human race. But the first Western ships have already
sailed south to Africa. Indeed, it was in Spring of 1441 that a Portuguese
expedition of 2 caravels set off down the Atlantic coast of Africa, barely
reaching what is now western Mauritania, and taking Portugal's first slaves by
sea. Another expedition of 5 ships in the Summer of 1444 went a bit further
south. A chronicler of the voyage, Gomes Eannes de Azurara, wrote how
"On the following day, the eighth in the month of
August, the crews put the boats in order at an early hour
because of the heat and led the [165] captives ashore. It was
truly a wonderful sight to see them all standing there, for some
were fairly white and well-formed, some were as yellow as
mulattos, and some were as black as Ethiopians and so
revoltingly ugly and misshapen that one regarded them as
creatures from a lower world...Some lowered their tear-
splashed faces, others bewailed themselves loudly and turned
their eyes to the heavens, and still others struck themselves
in the face and threw themselves to the ground. There were
those who sang lamentations...."
Columbus himself voyaged once, maybe twice, to Africa in the 1480's, commanding
one of the expeditions. His journeys were as far as present-day Ghana. But by
then the Westerners had gone even further. By 1483 the Portuguese Diogo Cao had
reached the mouth of the Congo. The natives called the river the Zaire, Cao
named it Rio Sao Jorge, but it would come to be known as the Congo River, after
"Mani Congo"-- "Chief of the Congo"-- the title of the King.
Diogo Cao sailed just a bit up the River, not far enough to reach Mani Congo's
court, though he did send several Portuguese-- 4 Franciscan monks-- on to the
court with gifts. His relations with the Africans he met were friendly and
honorable, a rare exception to the bloody Conquistador ethos of his time, and
the Congolese reciprocated. As a chronicler of this particular voyage, Luca
Wadding, a Franciscan friar, put it, Cao "saw the black heathen Ethiopians
[sic], who in mind as in behaviour are amiable...Their movements were confident
and fearless, and he treated them well." When Cao sailed back to Europe it
was with 4 Congolese on board as free passengers, not captives or slaves, with
the assurance they'd be returned to their land after their trip to Portugal was
finished. (Which they were, and as Christians.)
They were hardly the first Black Africans in Europe. There had been Blacks in
Europe since ancient times, often but not always as slaves, and they were
accepted as normal human beings, good and bad. And in more recent times King
Wedem Ar'ad of Ethiopia had sent a 30-person-strong delegation to Europe in
1306. The Ethiopians visited Spain, France and Italy before returning home.
Their main goals, being Christians, were to establish an alliance with the
Europeans against Islam, and to reinforce their tenuous ties with Christians in
distant lands. The trip was long and hard and dangerous, but Ethiopians
continued to make it on occasion. By the 1400's they were asking Europeans to in
turn travel to Ethiopia and include among them experts in such areas as
architecture and metalwork (gold and silver), and in fact a 1450 Ethiopian
mission to Italy did gather some such craftsmen and brought them back. The 4-man
Congolese delegation reached Portugal in 1484, and was quickly followed by a
Beninese delegation in 1486, 2 from Senegal in 1487 and 1488, and another from
the Congo in 1488. One of the Senegalese delegations included Bumi Jeleen,
effectively the King of the Jolof people. (Jeleen's maternal half-brother,
technically the King, had asked Jeleen to run that kingdom for him, as he
"preferred to devote his life to the pursuit of pleasure.") (Africa's
Discovery of Europe: 1450-1850, David Northrup, 24) There was no feeling on
the Portuguese's part that they were dealing with inferiors, either in Europe or
back in Africa. "King Jeleen had a commanding presence", and the
chronicler Rui de Pina commented on how he displayed "great ease, majesty
and considerable gravity...with all the eloquence of a Greek prince...shrewd
judgment and very natural dignity.' " (Ibid., 25)
Many of the Africans who met the first European expeditions showed eagerness, in
a dignified way, to learn from them, not to become them, but to learn from them.
The Europeans, for their part, respected the Africans as beings...though the
devilish worm that forever gnaws at Western minds was at work.
They respected them. And, while never doubting the superiority of their own
European and Christian civilization, were often quite impressed. Olfert Dapper,
a Dutchman, who published a book on Africa in 1668-- he had never been there
himself, but drew on accounts by contemporary and earlier Dutch visitors--
offered a view of the royal palace in the city of Benin, in what is now Nigeria,
by the Dutch merchant Samuel Bloemart:
"The king's court is square...and is certainly as large
as the town of Haarlem, and entirely surrounded by a
special wall, like that which encircles the town. It is
divided into many magnificent palaces, houses, and
apartments of the courtiers, and comprises beautiful and
long square galleries, about as large as the [Stock]
Exchange at Amsterdam, but one larger than another,
resting on wooden pillars, from top to bottom covered with
cast copper, on which are engraved the pictures of their
war exploits and battles, and are kept very clean."
It is so interesting how cultures and peoples so firmly assigned to inferiority
centuries later by persons who never actually experienced them could have had
such an opposite effect on the Westerners who were actually there at the time.
This phenomenon was observed in Africa as in the New World and elsewhere. For
instance, Pedro Sancho de la Hoz, a Conquistador with Pizarro, wrote of the Inca
capital Cuzco that "The city...is so beautiful that it is worthy of being
seen in Spain. It is full of lordly palaces and there are no poor people in
sight." Cortez's Conquistadors, looking down into the Valley of Mexico for
the first time and finally gazing on the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, were
awestruck. One of them, Bernal Diaz, wrote "...we were amazed and we said
it was like the enchanted things related in the book of Amadis because of the
great towers, temples and buildings rising from the water....Gazing on such
wonderful sights, we did not know what to say or whether what appeared before us
was real...."
The city of Benin, while not on Tenochtitlan's level, still was an impressive
sight to a European's eyes. Its population in 1600 was about 65,000, one of the
largest cities in Black Africa, a population about the same as or even bigger
than Antwerp, Hamburg, Florence or Madrid. Within its walls it well featured 2
of the primary characteristics of all advanced societies-- social stratification
and specialization. As in the cities of Europe, craftsmen organized themselves
in guilds, about 50 of them: ironsmiths, brassworkers, bronzeworkers,
woodcarvers, ivorycarvers, weavers, doctors, leatherworkers and others. The city
and the Kingdom of Benin surrounding it were also the location of one of
Africa's greatest schools of sculpture, producing works that are now treasured
by museums around the world, though it wasn't until the 20th Century that the
Western eye could appreciate them. As for the city's (earthen) walls, Fiona
Macdonald in Ancient African Town claims that "The walls in and
around Benin City are the second largest man-made structure after the Great Wall
of China." (30)
It is simply not true that Africans were unchanging and uninventive and lacking
in effort and reach as human beings. Not far from Benin, still in Nigeria, in
what was then an ancient kingdom of the Yoruba people, are the remains of an
earthen wall 100 miles long and 70 feet high and surrounded by a moat, enclosing
an area of about 550 square miles, dated to
the 900's AD, built apparently for spiritual reasons, and called Sungbo's Eredo, after Sungbo, the African woman who
legend says had it constructed. Now "Much of the Eredo lies in ruins, or hidden
in the nearly impenetrable rain forest, ignored by locals and Government
officials alike....the country has drawn relatively few archaeologists...Many of
the country's museums have been looted; and when artifacts are discovered in
digs, they are usually sold overseas...." ("A Wall, a Moat, Behold! A
Lost Yoruba Kingdom", Norimitsu Onishi, N.Y. Times, 9/20/99, A4)
It is important to understand that civilizations and societies rise and fall
like the tides, and what's unshining today may once have shone, may indeed have
had a richness and complexity the present state of things doesn't indicate. Yet,
inevitably, people make sharp judgments. There are endless examples of this
phenomenon. A for instance. Findings by modern archaeologists indicate that the
current (technologically) backward condition of Amazon tribesmen is the result
not of an eternal lag, but of the breakdown, after the European onslaught, of a
once far more complex and developed Amazonian civilization, and the result too
of their desperate attempt to flee from the Europeans deeper into impenetrable
jungle, where their lives became inevitably poorer. (Or what they hoped
was impenetrable.) There are so many similar examples-- Cambodia after Angkor
Wat's fall, the Native American Mound Cultures of the Southeast with civic
centers like Cohokia and Etowah, and the Congolese themselves.
Today the Congo is indeed a torn and tragic land. And a backward one. But is
that a reflection of Africans' fundamental nature-- a gene for torn, a gene for
tragic, and 100 genes for backward?-- or does it reflect one of the consequences
of a modern, worldspanning civilization which builds unprecedentedly and by its
nature seemingly must tear greatly too, and tragically, and especially has in
the last 100 years? In other words, some societies are left as road kill.
A civilization from whose effects there seems to be no escape, no matter how
distant your nation, how deep the jungle.
Certainly, when the Europeans first explored the Congo region-- not that it was
ever a paradise, because no place is-- there turned out to be much they in fact
liked and admired and were impressed by. The Italian Filippo Pigafetta-- who
worked with a Portuguese, Duarte Lopez, who had traveled to the Congo in 1578,
to produce A Report Of The Kingdom Of Congo And Of The Surrounding Countries
in 1591-- wrote how
"These people are...simple, sincere and loyal....it is
necessary to relate the wonderful manner in which the people
of this and the adjacent countries make various kinds of
stuffs, such as velvets with and without nap, brocades,
satins, taffetas, damasks, and suchlike....Every one who
possibly can dresses in these garments, for they have the
quality of resisting water, and are very light. The Portuguese
also use them for tent cloths, as they are wonderfully proof
against both rain and wind....This belt, as we have said, is of
exquisite workmanship....The country is peculiarly rich in
mines of silver and copper...It also abounds in all manner of
produce....The whole plain is fruitful and cultivated...and from
the white flour excellent bread is made....The variety of trees
is so great as to produce sufficient fruit to supply nearly the
whole population with food. Amongst them are citrons, lemons,
and, above all, luscious orange-trees....The gardens produce
every kind of vegetable and fruit, such as melons, water-melons,
cucumbers, cauliflowers, and many others of like kind....King
Dom Diego [his Christian name], a man of noble mind, witty,
intelligent, prudent in counsel....Pipes and flutes are also played
with great skill at the king's court, whilst the people dance
somewhat in Moorish fashion, with gravity and dignity."
These Europeans were welcomed first as gods and then as brothers and teachers,
and treated with the kindness and consideration and open hospitality that so
many early travelers to Africa comment on. The great Ibn Battuta, the Marco Polo
of the Islamic world, traveled to Mali in the 1350's, and tells a characteristic
story: "One day I had gone to the [Niger River] to accomplish a need when
one of the Sudan [a generic Arab term for Black people] came and stood between
the river and me. I was amazed at his ill manners and lack of modesty and
mentioned this to somebody, who said: 'He did that only because he feared for
you on account of the crocodile, so he placed himself between you and it.'
" (Ibn Battuta also comments on "the security embracing the whole
country, so that neither the traveler there nor dweller has anything to fear
from thief or usurper.")
My favorite story of this kindness of Africans is an incident that happened
along the coast of Mozambique in 1589:
"...Africans in southern Mozambique who encountered
survivors of the Sao Thome wreck in 1589...made the refugees
welcome, offered them shelter, and came to stare. The
'women of the village gathered to see the white women, as
something marvelous, and all night they gave them many
entertainments and dances.' At another village a few days
later, the African women also marveled at the unfamiliar sight
of their European sisters trudging toward their village, and,
'seeing them so weary and distressed, made signs of
compassion, and drawing near caressed and fondled them,
offering them their huts and desiring even to take them there
at once.' " (Africa's Discovery of Europe: 1450-1850, David
Northrup, 17)
Famous is the account by Mungo Park, the British explorer who recklessly traveled through West Africa sometimes alone in the 1790's, and could have died many times and in many places had Africans not reached out to him with pity and kindness (Really, by the 1790's they should have known better.):
"I set off for the village; where I found, to my great
mortification, that no person would admit me into his house...
and was obliged to sit all day without victuals, in the shade
of a tree; and the night threatened to be very uncomfortable...
About sunset, however...a woman, returning from the
labours of the field, stopped to observe me, and perceiving
that I was weary and dejected...with looks of great compassion,
she took up my saddle and bridle, and told me to follow her.
Having conducted me into her hut...she said she would
procure me something to eat...and returned in a short time
with a very fine fish...called to the female part of her family,
who...lightened their labour by songs...and the words,
literally translated, were these.--...'The poor white man,
faint and weary, came and sat under our tree.--He has no
mother to bring him milk; no wife to grind his corn.
Chorus. Let us pity the white man; no mother has he....' "
And these are the people so many White writers pounded with hate and contempt for centuries.
"In Natal in 1589 and again in 1593, the Africans
decided, on the basis of the Europeans' light coloring, that
they had come from the sky, rather than from the sea. One
old man joyfully shouted to his village, 'Come, come and
see these men who are children of the sun.' " (Northrup, 18)
The 1500's were a unique time, a time that could happen only once in human
history: the great coming together of the human family after 10's of 1,000's of
years of separation. And it was given to the West to determine the course of
this in-gathering-- and, perhaps, set the tone of human history for all time to
come. They were like guides given their choice: to take their charges down a
tunnel of light or a tunnel of darkness, either journey for eternity. No other
group of humans was ever blessed with such an opportunity.
Now I don't mean to use this essay to add to the romanticizing of Africa, or Black people, or to make excuses for Africans out of guilt or pity or ignorance
or-- characteristic of many Whites now-- a conscious or subconscious envy of
them and actual kind of lust to transform into them. The Africa the explorers
discovered showed great beauty and accomplishment combined with the dangerous
and the dispiriting. Not every Black was kind to Whites. (And, as always, the
women were kinder than the men.) Sometimes Whites were robbed or cheated or
killed. The first two happened to Mungo Park, and on his second trip to Africa
he died in an ambush. Indeed, his entire expedition was wiped out. Nothing
proves the essential humanity of Africans more than that they were a mixed bag.
But surely, taken overall, this was not a primitive land the Europeans had
happened upon. It was not at all comparable to Polynesia, or Melanesia, or
Micronesia, or Australia, or Tasmania or much of North or South America. It was
cuts above. The best of it was certainly more advanced than the more backward
parts of Europe, such as Finland or the Ural-Volga region or some other areas. If
you're looking for primitive-- we only mean technologically, no value judgment
implied-- you have to look elsewhere, to people like the Polynesians, who had no
cities, no metal, no pottery, no writing, no loom textiles outside of the crude
bark thread cloth of the Maoris in New Zealand, simpler art, simpler
agriculture, and no large domesticated animals (pig, dog and chicken only). Yet
somehow Whites have never ranted against Polynesians, never questioned their
humanity or capacity the way they have with Blacks-- whose societies were
objectively more advanced. Indeed, as is well known, the West has deeply
romanticized and praised Polynesia. Even peoples like the Australian Aborigines
or the tragic Tasmanians south of them (wiped out to the very last one by the
Whites, except for a few mixed-bloods-- a Final Solution so clean and brutal, and
total, that it still gives Adolf Hitler a hard-on as he burns eternally in
Hell)-- without agriculture, with no domesticated animals other than dogs (and
the Tasmanians didn't even have those), tools so simple they're comparable to
what other people were using in the Ice Age (neither even had bows and arrows),
the most rudimentary of governments, naked or at most wearing skins, housing
crude huts or lean-to's, where they didn't simply settle for lying on the ground
beside a fire (which possibly the Tasmanians didn't even know how to make)--
even these two peoples have never had to bear the sustained opprobrium Whites
have directed at Africans and their New World descendents. J. Philippe Rushton
actually speaks of "Negroids and the Australian aborigines" in the
same damning breath, even though African civilization was an order of magnitude
higher. The simple, undramatic truth-- equally unsatisfying to racists at one
end and racial cheerleaders (Martin Bernal: "Among the group now known as 'Afrocentrists'
there is little or no doubt about black African origins of European
civilization.") at the other-- is that, on average, Africans were in the
middle of the pack in the run of civilization-- behind, on average, most of
Europe and some of Asia, and ahead of everybody else. Why then the fury of
argument about them, the continual reaching for evidence to prove them dead last
amongst humanity for capacity, the search for every possible proof from IQ tests
to the Bible-- when the truth is so obvious and unexceptionable? I think we need
to go deep into the psychology of the accusers, not the accused.
The fact that Black Africa learned some of civilization's techniques from others
over the millennia-- though not nearly as much as many people think-- is no mark
against them. An eagerness to learn, to advance, from whatever source, and a
capacity to do so-- is in fact an indicator of energy and intelligence. By
contrast, the Australian Aborigines-- though fundamentally as intelligent as
other groups-- basically closed themselves off from outside influences. And,
yes, there were such influences-- the Aborigines' isolation wasn't complete.
Just across the narrow Torres Strait in the north were the agricultural Papuans,
with whom the northernmost Aborigines had some contact. Unquestionably,
Indonesians voyaged to Australia, though how far back is uncertain. Possibly,
Chinese junks reached Australia, even a few Polynesian vessels too. But the
Aborigines basically went on as they had.
Most Africans, on the other hand, were open to change. In April of 1491 the hope
of at least a good portion of the Congolese people to receive the knowledge and
faith of the Europeans appeared to be answered, as a large group of Portuguese,
including missionaries and craftsmen, approached the Kingdom's capital. Waiting
to greet them was King Nzinga a Nkuwu, who within a month would be baptized and
renamed Joao the First.
The welcome by the Congolese was open-hearted and rapturous. Pigafetta writes:
"So great was the multitude who ran to see the
Portuguese Christians, that is seemed as if the whole
country were covered with people, who loaded them
with kindnesses, singing and making sounds with cymbals
and trumpets, and other instruments of the country. And
it is pleasant to add that for 150 miles between the
sea-coast and San Salvador [as the capital was to be
renamed] the roads were all clean and swept, and
abundantly furnished with food and other provisions for the
Portuguese...the Portuguese being honored as heroes
for bringing the King the gift of faith, for the welfare of
his soul, and to every one alike the light of God and
eternal salvation...Within three miles of the city, all the
Court came to meet the Portuguese with great pomp,
and with music and singing...and so great was the crowd
that not a tree or a raised place but was covered with
people running together to see these strangers...The king
awaited them...seated on a throne....rose from his seat,
and showed by words and countenance the great joy he
felt at the arrival of the Christians, and sat down again
in presence of his people. These last, immediately after
the speech of the king, with songs and music, and
other signs of delight, also manifested their satisfaction
with the embassy, and as an act of submission, prostrated
themselves three times on the ground...."
One is reminded here of some of Cortez's procession to Tenochtitlan, though the
Africans' emotions were more genuine and less mixed with fear than the Indians',
or, on a smaller scale, the full-hearted friendliness and joy with which the
Native Americans greeted Columbus, as he wrote in his ship's log on October 14,
1492, his third day in the New World: "...and the people came to the beach,
shouting and praising God. Some brought us water; others, things to eat...and
others shouted in loud voices to everyone on the beach, saying, 'Come see the
men from Heaven; bring them food and drink.'...They threw themselves on the sand
and raised their hands to the sky, shouting for us to come ashore, while giving
thanks to God."
These were indeed pivotal moments in the history of man, and one wonders where
morality and kindness could have taken us.
Jeleen, the de facto King of Jolof, was eventually sent back to his land after
his conversion. The returning expedition looked grand, 20 ships in all, an
enormous fleet for the 1400's. The main reason it was so large was that the
Portuguese were looking to place a puppet Christian King on an African throne.
But something went wrong.
"Soon after arriving in Senegal, the captain of the fleet, fearful of dying
of a tropical disease, killed King Jeleen and sailed straight back to
Portugal...The kingdom remained in the hands of the rebels [who didn't want a
Christian King or a Portuguese puppet] and the plans for its conversion to
Christianity were abandoned.
King Joao [of Portugal] was deeply saddened by Jeleen's death, but he left its
perpetrator unpunished. [So was he really "deeply saddened"?] (Africa's
Discovery of Europe: 1450-1850, David Northrup, 25-26)
Something went wrong in the Congo too. The Portuguese began burning the
unconverted Africans' religious sculptures, attacked polygamy, and began
interfering in the workings of government. But King Joao/Nzinga a Nkuwu's
successor King Afonso continued the Christianization and Westernizing of his
land. It was hard, though. His people were being enslaved by the Christians. In
1526 he wrote poignantly to his "brother" in Portugal: "...the
merchants are taking every day our natives, sons of the land and the sons of our
noblemen and vassals and our relatives...they grab them and get them to be
sold....We beg of Your Highness to help and assist us in this matter...."
But actually the clergy who'd been welcomed with open arms were involved in the
enslaving! "We even know of the revealing case of a priest, Father Ribeiro,
who sold the sacerdotal objects in order to buy slaves!....In the Kongo and
Angola the clergy openly participated in the system of slavery. The bishops and
missionaries had slaves for their personal service and for their
plantations." (Daily Life in the Kingdom of the Kongo,
Georges Balandier, 81) In neighboring Angola the Jesuits would end up employing
3 of their own ships in the slave trade. (Primitive Peoples Today, Edward
Weyer Jr., 169-170)
The angel-demons had indeed arrived, the Gods-Who-Are-Devils with all their
magical and hard ways.
You can see it in Columbus' log, his mind ticking and tocking, back and forth,
evolving the possibilities, the whole next half-a-millennium laid out in advance:
"I want the natives to develop a friendly attitude toward us because I know
that they are a people who can be made free and converted to our Holy Faith more
by love than by force." (October 12, 1492, first day in the New World)
"They ought to make good and skilled servants...." (October 12, 1492)
"I have been very attentive and tried very hard to find out if there is any
gold here....I cannot get over the fact of how docile these people are."
(October 13, 1492)
"...these people are very unskilled in arms." (October 14, 1492)
"...I cannot stay long enough to see everything. I must move on to discover
others and to find gold." (October 17, 1492)
"...they are the best and gentlest people in the world....(December 16,
1492)
"They have no arms and are naked...A thousand of them would not face three
Christians, and so they are suitable to be governed and made to work...."
(December 16, 1492)
"...I am sure that I could subjugate the entire island...." (December
26, 1492)
Not that the Indians, or the Congolese, were pristine. Both had slavery before
the Great Ships arrived. King Afonso wasn't so much upset by the slave trade
going on-- he had agreed to it, and thought to profit by it-- as that his own
people, including noblemen! and relatives! were being caught up in it, not just
foreign Blacks as he'd expected. A successor to the Congolese throne, Garcia II,
wrote of the slave trade in the early 1640's that it was "our disgrace, and
that of our predecessors, that we, in our simplicity, have opened the way for
many evils in our kingdom...." But it was too late. The pact had been made.
The foreign goods, the metalware, those amazing things called firearms,
Portuguese troops when needed, all had been delivered for the warm Black bodies.
"...the evils were too great to be checked, let alone stopped...and in 1665
a Portuguese army, invading Kongo, smashed the king's armies in a decisive
battle. From that time onward...the kings were seldom more than Portuguese
puppets, and the Kongo kingdom fell apart in conflict and confusion." (East
and Central Africa to the Late Nineteenth Century, Basil Davidson,
271)
Long before, Tenochtitlan, the city Diaz and the other Conquistadors had gazed
on, or gaped on, had been destroyed, the Spaniards erecting a new European-style
city on its ruins, ruling over a new nation where the natives were second-class
citizens at best, at worst slaves. And those docile beings Columbus had praised,
sized up and targeted all at the same time?-- "the best and gentlest people
in the word"-- the Indians of the Caribbean islands-- they had been wiped
off the face of the Earth, close to every single one of them, in one of the
greatest Holocausts of all time.
The speed, and the stunning cruelty, with which the Spaniards fell on the
Caribbean, have few parallels in human history, despite all that would follow in
that history. It began with Columbus on the island of Hispaniola (today divided
into Haiti and the Dominican Republic) on his return from Spain. He was now
aided in rule by his brothers Bartholomew and Diego.
Nobody admires Columbus more than the historian Samuel Eliot Morison, twice his
biographer, especially as one sailor to another. Columbus was unquestionably the
greatest sailor of his time, and perhaps the greatest "dead reckoning"
sailor who ever lived, but he was to the Indians as a demon leaping on you from
your nightmare:
"For almost a year the Columbus brothers were
occupied with subjugating and organizing Hispaniola in
order to obtain as much gold as possible...and armed
men were sent to force the natives to deliver a tribute
of gold, the alternative to being killed...the only way they
could get enough to pay the tribute was by continual,
unremitting labor...Even after the tribute was cut down
fifty per cent, it was impossible, for the most part, to
fulfill. Indians took to the mountains, where the Spaniards
hunted them with hounds; many who escaped their
torturers died of starvation; others took cassava poison
to end their miseries." (Christopher Columbus, Mariner,
Samuel Eliot Morison, 99)
When Columbus reached Hispaniola the population was about 250,000 according to
some scholars, as much as a million according to others. By 1542 fewer than 500
remained
"The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors
resulted in complete genocide." (Ibid., 99)
The Europeans came to the New World from lands that had labored long in darkness
after the fall of Rome. They were children of the Black Death and an infinity of
other plagues (many diseases of dirtiness), before which the quackery they
called medicine was helpless, of the Little Ice Age, which at its worst made a
full measure of even primitive civilization impossible, of societies so backward
and prideless in personal hygiene that men and women lived their whole lives
unwashed and caked with their own feces (see my essay on the history of
toilets), of serfdom and slavery, houses barely warmed, streets barely lit,
people starved for the material, of famines that swept millions away, of endless
centuries of meaningless warfare where men hacked at each other as if cutting
away poisoned meat, hacked and chopped at each other and felt nothing or felt
elation-- and of a religion that nonetheless exalted each moment of this
miserable existence and glorified each and every Christian as the elite of
humanity-- and also a religion most comfortable with the enslavement and
degradation of others:
"Slaves, be obedient to the men who are
called your masters in this world...."
The Epistle of
Paul the Apostle to the Ephesians, 6:5
"Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids,
which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen
that are round about you...."
Leviticus,25:44
"And ye shall take them as an inheritance
for your children after you, to inherit them for a
possession; they shall be your bondmen for
ever...."
Leviticus, 25:46
A millennium-and-a-half of the greatest and purest of the religion's minds encouraged their children to strike and strike hard:
"Slavery has been imposed by the just
sentence of God upon the sinner."
St. Augustine
And
"Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), one of
the principal saints of the Catholic Church, said
slavery was one effect of Adam's sin. He believed
it was morally justifiable and an economic
necessity."
(Slavery I: From the Rise of Western
Civilization to the Renaissance, Milton Meltzer, 211)
Nay, even him called Him:
"And Jesus answering said unto them,
Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's,
and to God the things that are God's. And they
marvelled at him."
The Gospel According To
St. Mark, 12:17
Thus even the very God of the Universe bowing his head to the Caesars, Kings and
Conquistadors, and giving them free rein.
The superior civilization and its people-- they must be superior, since
they conquered the world and do better on IQ tests and make more money-- but
objectively, brutalized, damaged and fundamentally dissatisfied people,
emotionally and physically starved, and achingly greedy, and thinking the laws
of the Universe demanded it-- fell upon that world with a demonic and
over-confident savagery that will stain humanity till the end of time:
"In spite of himself, the unfortunate Inca
was dragged into the quarrels between Almagro
and Pizarro...Held responsible for isolated Indian
attacks on the Spaniards, he was imprisoned, at
first in his palace and later at Sacsahuaman. The
scoundrels who guarded him raped his wives in
front of his eyes. As if that was not enough, they
amused themselves by using his nose as a candle
snuffer and by urinating over his body, the body
of a living god." (The History of the Incas, Alfred
Metraux, 153)
"The priests...refused to give the slightest
religious instruction to their flocks even while
using police methods...sins were expiated by
whippings...three hundred strokes for singing and
dancing in the old style...." (Ibid., 171, 174)
It is almost impossible to believe what happened. 1 or 2 witnesses could be
dismissed, 2 or 3 accounts, but not centuries of testimony of what they did.
Father Bartolome de Las Casas, one of the few Spanish Christians with a soul,
whose father and uncle sailed with Columbus, who followed his father to the
New World in the 1490's, who personally knew Cortez, Pizarro and the Columbus
family,
and spoke over a dozen Indian languages, who made 14 journeys throughout the
West Indies, Court Chaplain to the King of Spain, copier of the log of Columbus
which we've quoted from (otherwise it would have been lost), widely traveled
throughout Mexico, Central America and South America as it was being conquered,
indeed, accompanying some of the very expeditions that conquered, and an
eyewitness to what they did, Bishop of Chiapis, transcriber of other
eyewitnesses, a half century in the New World, wrote in his Devastation of
the Indies:
"And they put the captives in chains and
made them carry heavy loads...The result was
that the number of captives soon dwindled, most
of them dying from exhaustion, so that from four
thousand captives there remained only six. They
left the dead bodies on the trail. They were
decapitated corpses, for when a captive sank
under the heavy load, the Spaniards cut off his
head, which fell to one side while the body fell
to the other while the captives chained together
continued their march without interruption....
Among other massacres there was the one in a
big city of more than thirty thousand inhabitants,
which is called Cholula...The Spaniards had
asked for five or six thousand Indians to carry
their cargo. When all the chiefs had come, they
and the burden-bearers were herded into the
patios of the houses....Then, at a command, all
the Spaniards drew their swords and pikes and
while the chiefs looked on, helpless, all those
tame sheep were butchered, cut to pieces....And
since he did not provide food for his Indians he
gave them permission to eat the enemy Indians
they captured. And thus he had, in his royal
kingdom, a butchery of human beings, where, in
his presence, children were killed, cooked, and
eaten, and where men were killed merely for
their hands and feet which were esteemed as
delicacies....The Spaniards broke up marriages...
took for themselves the wives and daughters
of the people, or gave them to the sailors and
soldiers....one woman (thinking to soften the
hearts of the Spaniards) tied her year-old child
to her foot and hanged herself from a beam. No
sooner had she done this than the dogs arrived
and tore the child to pieces....one of them told
the son of a chieftain of a certain village to come
with them. The boy still said No, he did not want
to leave his country...The Spaniard unsheathed
his dagger and cut off the boy's ears, first one,
then the other. And when the boy said again
that he did not want to leave his land, the
Spaniard cut off his nose, laughing as he did
so...This Godforsaken man boasted about
this act in front of a venerable religious, and
also said that he worked as hard as he could
to get Indian women with child, for when he
sold them as slaves he would be paid more if
they were pregnant....finding no game, and
wanting to satisfy his dogs, he took a baby from
its Indian mother and with his sword sliced off
the child's arms and legs for the dogs to share....
Scholars have tussled, raged and argued with each other for generations about
what the original Native American population was. It was supposed to be small,
the people were primitive. As the years passed, it was more and more understood
that a Holocaust of unprecedented scope happened in the New World, that the
original populations were far greater than originally estimated, their
civilizations more advanced, and a once-fancied total as low as 8 million was
probably as high as 100 million. As many as 30 million of them lived in Mexico,
and within 75 years of Columbus' coming it appears 90 % of them were dead.
Indeed, it is possible that 90 % of the entire New World native population was
wiped out. In all books the cause is given primarily as disease, especially
smallpox. It is indeed true that some kind of great tragedy was unavoidable,
because the Native Americans had lived in almost total genetic isolation from
the rest of the world for over 10,000 years, and their bodies were intensely
vulnerable to the new diseases. But disease alone couldn't have wiped out 90 %,
or, even if it could, their civilizations wouldn't have fallen as a result
without some extra push. While deeply sick the Indians were also forced to fight
wars against an overwhelming foe determined to conquer them, and this foe kept
them from their fields at harvest time, destroyed their infrastructure, brought
death to so many that soon there weren't enough hands to plant and harvest--
many of those 90 % died of starvation, not disease, or of disease brought
on by malnutrition and reduced immunity. And it has been the aim of the West,
consciously, unconsciously, to finally demoralize the rest of the world, to convince
it of its essential inferiority and even ludicrousness, so its people would
surrender their ways and their selves to whatever was to follow. That is a
capsule description of the last 500 years of human history. You could even say
that World War II was simply an argument within the victor's camp as to which of
their ways would finally rule a conquered world.
And in the Western Hemisphere this breaking of the minds and hearts of the
people by the West succeeded. "Wholesale demoralization and simple
surrender of will to live certainly played a large part in the destruction of
Amerindian communities. Numerous recorded instances of failure to tend newborn
babies so that they died unnecessarily, as well as outright suicide, attest to
the intensity of Amerindian bewilderment and despair." (Plagues and
Peoples, William H. Mc Neill, 182)
Are you now thinking that this essay, initially about Africa, has gone off
course? No, it has not. Beginning some 560 years ago there came to the ancient
African continent the same challengers the Aztecs and the Incas and the
Tasmanians and others would have to face, with the same fate in store for the
Africans if they proved as weak. Indeed, there were Europeans who fought on two
fronts, and if they survived would one day be able to tell their grandchildren
of swordplay against both Africans and Amerindians. After the early 1400's it is
simply no longer possible to discuss, or, if you want to, judge any civilization
by itself. How it met the coming of the West is part of the test, and by that
standard the Africans proved powerful. Challenge-and-response-- that is Arnold
Toynbee's standard of judgment-- and, though he thinks little of Africans, even
by his standard they would now do well.
The Africans had gold, Indeed, the first great West African kingdom, Ghana (not
to be confused with the present-day nation, which is much to its southeast),
rose by at least the 700's AD (and perhaps as early as late Roman times), and
reached its zenith by gaining a monopoly of the gold trade from West Africa to
the Arab world. As the Iranian scholar Ibn al-Faqih wrote around 900 AD:
"In the country of Ghana gold grows in the sand as carrots do, and is
plucked at sunrise." (Actually, the gold fields were just south of Ghana's
border, but Ghana controlled the trade.)
Now in truth, Africans didn't value gold as highly as Europeans did. Iron,
copper, brass and bronze ranked higher. A cultural difference. Indeed, there's
nothing inherently so valuable about gold. It's what shines in the mind-- and to
Europeans it blazed like holy fire, so great was their attraction to it.
"I must move on to discover others and to find gold."
To it would be joined an even greater hunger, for the strong Black bodies to
work as slaves in the New World, especially needed to replace the Indian slaves.
Because the Indians were dead. Especially needed to dig and plant and harvest
and produce those basics of Western trade and wealth-- the meaningless (gold),
the unnecessary (sugar and coffee) and the harmful (sugar, rum and tobacco).
Like Columbus, who would have sailed to the New World under a Portuguese flag
had they financed him, the Portuguese had ticking minds, shifty eyes and hungry
hearts. They too praised, sized up and targeted at the same time, and if the
Africans proved weak they were dead men.
We've already seen that the Africans responded more vigorously to the arrival of
the aliens than did the Native Americans, or indeed any of the Asian peoples.
There were no Amerindian equivalents of the delegations the Africans sent to
Europe. Individual Amerindians were taken to Europe, but they did poorly
there compared to the Africans. As for the Chinese, who'd known about Europe, albeit it
in a vague and disinterested way, since Roman times at least, they stubbornly
and contemptuously stayed away, though they more than had the capacity to travel
to Europe by land or sea. (Chinese ships were far larger and more
technologically advanced than European vessels. Indeed, in the 1400's the
Chinese made their famous and well-documented voyages to East Africa and the
Middle East under Admiral Zheng He and others. And, as they'd done when the
Portuguese arrived, the Africans sent envoys back on the foreign ships to visit,
and learn from, China. Chinese accounts tell of how the Africans paraded
giraffes and other animals at the Emperor's court, and some beautiful paintings
survive showing these events.)
Africans picked up European languages quickly, as various Western groups
arrived. Sometimes in pure form, sometimes as creoles or pidgins. Thus the Black
Africans, who'd already mastered 4 linguistic families-- the Niger-Kordofanian
(including the Bantu languages), Afro-Asiatic (which includes Hebrew, Arabic and
Ancient Egyptian), Nilo-Saharan (the languages of various peoples in West,
Central and East Africa), and Khoisan (best known among the Bushmen)-- added a
fifth: the Indo-European (sometimes called the Indo-Hittite). A French traveler,
Alexis de Saint-Lo, who went to Senegal in 1635, found Portuguese spoken all
along the coast. The King of Benin spoke Portuguese to his first English
visitors. In the early 1600's a Guinean King spoke French; his wife spoke Dutch.
(She'd been a Dutchman's girlfriend.) Jacobus E. J. Capitein, a West African
orphan sold to a Dutchman and taken to Holland in 1728 as a boy, learned Dutch,
Latin, Greek and Hebrew, graduated from Leiden University and was ordained. Good
Christian that he became, he ended up offering the same cant defense of slavery
most Christians then did, explaining how Christianity "demands only spiritual
freedom in order that we can worship God, not necessarily external
freedom."
The West Africans had complex trade networks in operation long before the first
European ships arrived, but they put their linguistic skills to use with these
new people, sometimes as independent traders and sometimes by going to work for
them. And, yes, that trade included the slave trade.
Impressive as all of this was, it proved frustrating to the Europeans. Their
preference was for direct control, for conquest. They certainly preferred taking
to trading for. So they tried to do it with the Africans. But the "direct
approach" that worked so well in the New World barely took. We have already
seen that the Jolof rebels proved too strong for the Portuguese to place their
puppet, Jeleen, on the Jolof throne. Thus in the end the Portuguese ruthlessly
murdered Jeleen, of no further use to them, and sailed away. In 1446 a
Portuguese slaving ship in Senegambia was attacked and boarded by Africans, the
crew wiped out almost to the last man. Another heavily-armed Venetian ship was
fought to a ceasefire in 1456. The Congolese seized a French ship for illegal
trading in 1525. A Portuguese attempt to capture the Bissagos Islands off Guinea
in 1535 was thrown back. In 1693 a big Danish fort in present-day Ghana was
seized by Africans and held until ransomed for gold. More impressively, in 1693,
on the other side of Africa, the King of Mwanamutapa (where was the famous stone
fortress of Great Zimbabwe, built by Africans with no help from ancient Egypt or
Atlantis or mysterious Whites, primarily in the 1300's and 1400's, with stone
walls over 800 feet long, 32 feet high and about 19 feet thick), sick of
Portuguese depredations in his land (Mwanamutapa was rich in gold), invited the
King of Urozwi, the Kingdom to his south, to hurl the Portuguese back. This that
King did. "His soldiers swept down on the Portuguese, utterly surprising
them. They killed all the Portuguese soldiers and settlers they found at
Dambarare, as well as some Indian traders, flayed two Dominican priests alive,
and marched on the remaining Portuguese outposts." (East and Central
Africa to the Late Nineteenth Century, Basil Davidson, 264) The Portuguese
were thrown out of Mwanamutapa. Another Portuguese army, seeking re-entry and
revenge, sailed from India (where Portugal then had some coastal holdings), and
this army too was utterly defeated by the Africans.
The Africans were fully capable of meeting the Europeans as intellectual equals,
trade equals, and, if necessary, war equals. (And the deadliness of African
diseases to Whites, and the unhealthiness of the climate to them, of course
helped too.) Perhaps part of the origin of the myth of African inferiority came
from European frustration at being blunted by them, unable to control them, to
do to them what they'd done to so many others. Up until the end of the 19th
Century the Africans were quite, quite unconquered by the Europeans, outside of
South Africa and some coastal seizures. Just how tough and able and advanced the
Africans and their descendents were, how they could do things to the Europeans
no other people the Europeans had met could do (and how the Europeans hated them
for these unexpected humiliations, and lashed back with demeaning words and
concepts, if nothing else, for the great White fear, deep deep down, was that
the Blacks were-- in fact-- in some ways-- superior), was shown by the great
Haitian revolt of 1791. The slaves rose, overthrew the French colonial
government, and went on to defeat armies sent by Spain and Britain, and finally
an enormous army sent by Napoleon (who called the Haitian leader, Toussaint
L'Overture, son of an African chieftain, a "cockroach", and no doubt
worse). 60,000 French soldiers and sailors died before Napoleon conceded defeat
and withdrew in 1803, Haiti winning its independence.
What the Europeans wanted to do to the Africans early on, what they would
have done if they could have, is shown by what they did do to the Swahili
mini-states along the East African coast. The Swahili culture, which began to
grow up in the 900's AD, was one of those vigorous "mutt cultures"
made up of a hybrid of peoples-- New York City is a great contemporary example--
devoted not to conquest but to gaining wealth. A mix of African, Arab, Persian,
Indian and Indonesian (by way of Madagascar), it was a center for African,
Middle Eastern and Asian trade centuries before the Europeans arrived. The
Portuguese tried to fit themselves into the mix and probably could have if
they'd been smart enough and patient enough and moral, but sensing weakness they
hadn't sensed anywhere else in Africa forced their inner Cortez/Pizarro to the
surface, and they simply exploded into that violence and cruelty which has
characterized so much of Western history-- when Westerners thought they could
get away with it:
"They brought a new and savage piracy to the
Indian Ocean....They spared no violence...They wrecked
and looted and burned with a destructiveness not
known before in these lands of Africa and Asia....
When the people of Mombasa came back to their
fire-blackened city...they found 'no living thing there,
neither man nor woman, young or old, nor child however
small: all who had failed to escape had been killed and
burned.'....Faza suffered worse still. The Portuguese
not only sacked it, but are said to have killed every living
thing they found, men, women and children, even down
to the household dogs and parrots....Another big
consequence of all these burnings and battles was
the gradual depopulation of some of the cities. People
left them in fear and despair. A few dwindled never
to recover...Others went into a long decline. None of
them ever regained the brilliance of the years before the
coming of the Portuguese." (East and Central Africa to
the Late Nineteenth Century, Basil Davidson, 116-130)
But this time the Conquistadors failed. By the mid-1600's the Portuguese had
been mostly thrown out of the Swahili world, partly by 2 bigger European powers,
England and Holland, partly by the revived Omani Arabs, who'd long been active
along the Swahili coast. Of course, the Portuguese never reaped more than a
smidgen of the riches they'd hoped for, any more than a twisted husband who says
he wants love reaps any by spending every day of his marriage raping his wife.
Had the Africans been united they would have been unconquerable, and never
colonized. Had they been morally greater their future was brilliant. Alas, in
the end, just humans with darker faces. That, and not some imagined inferiority,
is the real tragedy of the African.
Greed, moral weakness, and the seductions of the slave trade-- these in the end
were the worms that would gnaw through and finally roar through Africa,
hollowing it out and leading to its fall.
Not every African was infected. But at the top-- and