The new attacks on the Reparations movement: BLAME AFRIKANS for the European Holocaust in Afrika

Sister Suzette Gardner writes: "As the movement for Trans-Atlantic slavery reparations gathers steam, the opposition is busy waging a strategic battle for the sub-consciousness of slavery's victims.

"Reels of film are being thrown into production to depict Africa's part in the slave trade. Beautifully shot, their point is clear and simplistic: Africans sold Africans in slavery. There is no discussion of European guilt or responsibility, instead their plots go straight to the point and blame the victims.

"The latest film inflicting this 'blame the victim syndrome' on our collective consciousness is the Swiss produced 'Adanggaman " distributed in the U.S. by New York Films. Frankly, this film has no relevance outside of being a conduit for an idea which, left un-discussed will 'guilt trip' slavery's victims into renouncing their due reparations.

"The question then is not whether Africans are responsible for their own slavery, but who were these alleged Africans who sold other Africans in slavery, and how can we understand their identities today?

"Psychoanalysts agree that in order to inflict misfortune upon another, it is essential to see oneself as separate and different from one's victim. This also rang true in 17th century Africa-and Africa today. If Africans were caught and sold in slavery, it was not by people who regarded themselves as the same Africans. The Swiss production and others like it deliberately omit the presence of cultural ascendancies and politics at play in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. By oversimplifying the African context, they fall into that racist mold which denies Africans a history of society, commerce and imperfect humanity at work.

"As Englishmen enslaved their own and fellow Europeans to achieve the aims of their Christian crusade in the 11th century, so too did the 'African' under the aegis of Islam. As Italy's liaison with Nazi Germany bloodied its history for the sake of commerce and political power, so too did the kings of Dahomey with the Portuguese in the 17th century. Africans who craftily speared themselves the middle passage are no different from their political and social counterparts elsewhere in the world or history. All are given to exchange and discourse leading to selfish survival and domination as opportunity and circumstances may arise.

"These Africans that supposedly sold Africans in slavery can be further understood in the modern context by shaking open almost any daily newspaper. If silence is still consent, then the world has sanctioned the new 'slave-catchers' in the form of 'recruiters', free-zone bosses, multi-national agents and our own black Third World politicians. All are engaged in rounding up our best and brightest and employing them in the pursuit of other nation's pleasures and prosperity-without a living wage, a.k.a. 'pay'."

Comments

Anonymous said…
word!
Anonymous said…
Why would Africans, or anyone else, feel any guilt about what occured centuries ago? Why would anyone be surprised that Africans participated in the slave trade? Slavery existed in Africa since time immemorial, as it also had in Eurasia and the Americas. Slavery was a universal institution for for all peoples beyond the hunting gathering stages. The abolition of slavery in 1834 for the British Empire is one of the most remarkable precedents in history.
But wait! A political struggle engaged by Caucasians that liberated people other than themselves! Those pesky historic facts do make it difficult to milk the great cow of white liberal guilt, don't they? No wonder you are indignant.
Minister Faust said…
Malcolm X on Reparations: "If you are the son of a man who had a wealthy estate and you inherit your father's estate, you have to pay off the debts that your father incurred before he died. The only reason that the present generation of white Americans are in a position of economic strength...is because their fathers worked our fathers for over 400 years with no pay...We were sold from plantation to plantation like you sell a horse, or a cow, or a chicken, or a bushel of wheat...All that money...is what gives the present generation of American whites the ability to walk around the earth with their chest out...like they have some kind of economic ingenuity. Your father isn't here to pay. My father isn't here to collect. But I'm here to collect and you're here to pay."

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X); November 23, 1964, Paris, France; [Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970, p123]

Sean Gonsalves wrote: "[S]everal years ago, a University of California at Berkeley study found that the value of lost income to black Americans because of discrimination between 1929 and 1969 alone comes to about $1.6 trillion.

"So, contrary to Thomas Sowell's distortions, the idea of reparations is not about convincing people whose ancestors arrived in America after the Civil War that they owe anybody anything for what happened in the ante- bellum South. Clearly, black economic deprivation goes far beyond the Civil War and the ante-bellum South.

"It was AFTER slavery that America allowed the Black Codes, a set of laws designed to restrict the labor mobility of the newly freed slaves, guaranteeing cheap labor for white planters. One code stipulated that any freed slave without "lawful employment" would be subject to arrest and then be leased to a white employer.

"So there is a qualitative and quantitative difference between the economic hardships faced by black America and those confronted by every other immigrant group in this nation's history."

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2001-09/02gonsalves.htm

Not really a big surprise that the enemies of justice wish to erase debts owed to Afrikans by Europeans. I believe Neely Fuller gave us a term for them. Your empire wouldn't exist without the massive exploitation and mass murder of us for centuries. Anyway, say "hi" to Adolph for us when you see him.

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