The tendency to believe that Black Africa has always been behind other communities is a consequence of a blackout in Africa’s development occasioned by enslavement and colonization.
Whereas all communities in Europe and Asia have been enslaved and colonized at some time, the effects of slavery and colonization that have kept Black Africa in a state of virtual anomie seem unique and require to be accounted for.
I am not forgetting that Africans have fared better than the natives of Americas and Australia because whereas, so far, the Africans have managed to keep soul and body together, their counterparts in Australia and Americas are almost extinct.
Slavery was known to Africa prior to the advent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade – prisoners of war were kept as slaves by the victors. It was also known that debtors who failed to discharge their liabilities were liable to be enslaved by their creditors.
These two categories were more or less domestic slaves, as opposed to the transSahara slave trade, the Eastern Africa trade to the Middle East and Asia which entailed sale of the captives as well as the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the main focus of this article.
We are informed by Chancellor Williams in the Destruction of Black Civilization that the European enslavers, after exhausting the two sources – war prisoners and debtors – embarked upon systematic espionage.
They did so to establish the strengths and weaknesses of African societies before raiding and arming Africans against each other to kidnap and capture slaves to satisfy the incessant demand for labor in the Americas. This was from about 1510AD when the first African slaves were shipped from the Guinea coast to Haiti.
Prior to purchase of domestic slaves, Europeans had kidnapped and enslaved many native people at the coast, for trade.
The recourse to Africa was necessitated by the decimation of the natives of Americas who had perished in gold and silver mines and plantations. Incidentally,
Africans proved more resilient. The firearms which made it so easy to capture Africans were supplied by Europeans, against bearers of bows and arrows.
School textbooks teach that Africa lost its best labor force – the strong men and women who were forcefully shipped abroad for labor in white plantations and mines. But that is half of the story. The full story is that European slave hunters first targeted community leaders (chiefs), soldiers, doctors, teachers, surveyors, engineers, priests, etc.
After the decimation or extermination of the leaders and the intelligentsia, the leaderless masses became easy prey. Those who could tell or write the story of the clan or dynasty or community ceased to exist.
This is the blackout; so, rationalization and propaganda became credible and the powerless and leaderless communities begun to disbelieve their own history. A few examples will suffice.
As a result of King Leopold’s atrocities in Congo during his lifetime (1835-1909), the population of Congo was reduced by more than 50 per cent within 15 years. Violence in form of enslavement, conquest and colonization reduced Africa’s population to between 25 and 30 per cent of the original, when slavery was at its zenith.
Consequently, hunger, diseases and premature ageing became the order of the day. Those with capacity to apply technology to construct permanent buildings could no longer do so – the majority had been exterminated and survivors’ main concern was to escape violence ,and not plan for the future. In the meantime, the skills were forgotten.
Many of us, intellectuals included, no longer believe that African surgeons performed cesarean operations as late as 1873 as Dr Ivan Van Sertima recounts, quoting Dr Felkin in Lost Sciences of Africa, covering Bunyoro, and scientific animal husbandry was practiced by the Shilluk (ancestors of Acholi) in Sudan, or that natives of the Congo mouth at the Atlantic coast wore silk clothes of their own manufacture and lived in planned streets at the time of exploration.
After devastating Africa, the Americas, Australia, etc, the colonizers were out to rationalize genocide through their intellectuals. In Europe, racist theories of development carried the day. In France, intellectuals such as Condorcet and Diderot worked out a hierarchy of human beings at the apex of which were white people, while the University of Gottingen in Germany perfected racial theories of intellectual ability with Africans and other natives at the bottom.
Those are the ideas that substantially haunted mankind up to the Second World War when Adolf Hitler and fellow Nazis raised absurdities to the level of science.
So, when Europeans eventually established schools in Black Africa after abolition of slave trade, it is not surprising that what Africans were taught was a racist package in theory.
John Speke, the ‘discoverer’ of the source of the Nile, propounded the Hamitic theory which surmised that everything positive in Black Africa South of the Sahara came from a race somewhere in North Africa – not knowing that the Hamites were the black people of Egypt.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the distorted picture of Africa was bought by Africans hook, sinker and line, because of the blackout in the history of the continent’s development. It is to be reiterated that falsification of Africa achievements was invoked to justify the crimes committed against the native people.
It is interesting that whereas European religious leaders and some white political leaders have apologized for slave trade, not much has been done to correct the wrong impressions created in the minds of children and university students who are taught that slave trade was for the benefit of Africans because they were introduced to modern ideas in the Americas.
The author is a retired judge.