FEATURES The idea of ‘idling vast lands in Africa’ is dangerous Antoine Roger Lokongo 2014-11-13, Issue 702 pambazuka.org/en/category/features/93362 Printer friendly version Western powers have been devastating Africa’s land, resources and populations for centuries. Africans must now throw off that legacy by first understanding it and then making the best use of their continent’s assets without the detrimental western intervention. The fact that western powers have a well-drawn plan to recolonize and reoccupy Africa’s rich land, soil and subsoil by killing Africans, the original owners of the land, this time using fellow Africans to kill fellow Africans and employing bio-warfare against African people (Ebola), in order to clear African people off their land and free it for western exploitation, is not a conspiracy theory anymore. It has become an open secret. Western powers want to reach that end by all means necessary. The war in Congo has now cost eight million lives (higher than the Holocaust) since 1998 when Britain and America used Rwanda and Uganda as proxies to invade Congo, occupy land, massacre Congolese, rape Congolese women (rape is used as a weapon of war) and systematically loot Congo’s natural and mineral resources. Recently, ‘Ugandan rebels’ hacked more than 100 Congolese people to death using axes and machetes in the Beni region. The strategy is the same: kill African people, wipe them off their land and turn around and say, ‘In Africa, land is just idling’, when you have already killed the rightful owners of the land. What is astonishing is the fact that the blood of slaughtered Congolese in this genocide had not yet dried up, yet you heard former US Under-Secretary of State for African Affairs Herman Cohen and former French President Nicholas Sarkozy asking the Democratic Republic of Congo to share its wealth (i.e. land and minerals) with Rwanda and Uganda. As a reminder, both Cohen and Sarkozy are of Jewish descent. First of all, it was the same strategy that European settlers used in the Americas. Before going to Africa to depopulate Africa through kidnapping Africans (slavery), European settlers had already committed genocide against Native Americans and took over their land. According to J. Sakai (1983), North America was already inhabited by some 300 indigenous nations, encompassing over 10 million people. Between 1600 and 1900 the Indian population was reduced from 10 million to approximately 250,000. They were the victims of the largest genocide in the history of mankind. Another problem European settlers were confronted with was a major labor shortage in the colonies. Since the majority of settlers owned their own farmlands, there were very few, if any, wage laborers. At the time of the War of Independence, 15 per cent of the population was made up of temporary workers who would soon move on to become small capitalist farmers, while only five per cent of people were laborers, according to J. Sakai. To solve this problem the settlers simply ‘imported’ millions of African slaves to do all the necessary work of building up the colonies. ‘Imported’ is not the right word because Africans were captured like animals and sold like goods. In Longando, this writer’s mother tongue, the slavers were called ‘Batambatamba’, meaning ‘takers of people’. Nathan Nunn (2008), who extensively carried out research on slavery in Africa, argued that the production of slaves, which occurred through ‘divide and rule’ strategies employed by Europeans, resulting in domestic warfare, raiding and kidnapping, was not only detrimental to African society (social fragmentation) but also had negative impacts on subsequent development (the gap between Africa and the West in terms of development). According to Nathan Nunn, for a period of nearly 500 years, from 1400 to 1900, the African continent simultaneously experienced four slave trades. The largest and most well-known is the trans-Atlantic slave trade in which, beginning in the 15th century, slaves were shipped from West Africa, West-Central Africa and Eastern Africa to the European colonies in the New World. The three other slave trades—the trans-Saharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean slave trades—were much older and predated the trans-Atlantic slave trade. During the trans-Saharan slave trade, slaves were taken from south of the Saharan desert to Northern Africa. In the Red Sea slave trade, slaves were taken from inland of the Red Sea and shipped to the Middle East and India. In the Indian Ocean slave trade, slaves were taken from Eastern Africa and shipped either to the Middle East and India or to plantation islands in the Indian Ocean. During the trans-Atlantic slave trade, 12 million slaves were exported from Africa to the Americas. Another six million were exported in the other three slave trades. That is what this writer calls the ‘pre-Berlin Conference scramble for Africa’s human resources’. In the words of former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (2008), it was America that benefited most from that ‘pre-Berlin Conference scramble for Africa’s human resources’. According to Condoleezza Rice, ‘Africa has given so much to America—more than anyone. It was the stolen sons and daughters of Africa who lifted up the body of America, brick by brick, field by field, city by city’. Slave export data collected during the trans-Atlantic slave trade show that slaves were taken in the greatest numbers from the ‘Slave Coast’ (Benin and Nigeria), West-Central Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo and Angola, in other words the Kingdom of Kongo), and the ‘Gold Coast’ (Ghana). As far as the Kongo Kingdom was concerned, Portuguese were responsible for the kidnapping of local Kongo subjects for sale to the Americas. Nathan Nunn writes that as early as 1514, the kidnapping had become rampant, threatening social order and the King’s authority, eventually leading to the collapse of the once-powerful kingdom that encompassed modern day Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Republic of Congo and parts of Gabon. As Adam Hochschild wrote in his book titled King Leopold’s Ghost, published in 2000, by 1491, Portuguese explorers and missionaries visiting the kingdom of Kongo ruled by the ‘ManiKongo’ or Kings, led the way for the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In 1526, King Nzinga Mbemba Affonso, who had acceded to the throne as a ManiKongo in 1506 and ruled as Affonso I after converting to Chrsitianity, wrote a letter to his counterpart Joao III, the King of Portugal in 1526, complaining that ‘there are many slave traders in all corners of the country. They bring ruin to the country. Every day people are enslaved and kidnapped, even nobles, even members of the king’s own family.’ It is estimated that between 1400 and 1900, more than eight million slaves were exported from the Kingdom of Kongo to the Americas. Slaves from the Kingdom of Kongo reportedly toiled under slave labour in South Carolina, New Orleans and Georgia. Mike Byfield (2013) writes that in 1739, about 20 slaves from the Kingdom of Kongo took up arms in South Carolina, chanting ‘liberty’ as they slaughtered 20 or so whites on half a dozen plantations. As Antonio J. García (2006) wrote, the birth of Jazz Music, an important feature of the American culture, is associated with ‘Congo Square’ (located in what is now Armstrong Park) in New Orleans, where, before the Civil War, slaves were allowed to congregate on Sundays to drum and dance according to their African traditions. In addition, The Wanderer was the last documented ship to have brought a cargo of almost 600 slaves from Angola（Kingdom of Kongo）to the United States on 28 November 1858, even after the US outlawed the slave trade in 1807. The Wanderer reached Jekyll Island, Georgia on 28 November 1858 and delivered only 409 slaves alive (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wanderer_slave_ship). Furthermore, as Hochschild wrote, after converting the Kingdom of Kongo to Christianity, some Western missionaries were known to have engaged in the slave trade themselves. For instance, the case of Ota Benga, a Mbuti, that is, a Pygmy from Congo, speaks for itself. Ota Benga was brought to the United States by Samuel Phillips Verner, a ‘missionary’ turned self-styled entrepreneur/explorer. In September 1906, Ota Benga was displayed in the monkey house in New York’s Bronx Zoo. An orangutan shared his space. A poem published in the New York Times declared that ‘Ota Benga had been brought from his native land of darkness, to the country of the free, in the interest of science and of broad humanity’. After more than a century of colonization, you still hear some western scholars, western policymakers and western leaders declaring that ‘Africa is not ready for international cooperation and foreign investment’, including in the agricultural sector. As concrete proof, former French President Nicholas Sarkozy said in 2007 in Dakar, Senegal that ‘the tragedy of Africa is that the African has never really entered into history’. This is a new ploy by those who yet again are targeting Africa’s rich land, soil and subsoil to solve their problems following the global financial crisis caused by the corruption of their own financial system and their fear to death of China’s rise. As a reminder, in the 19th century, no European country could count itself as a power without having a colony in Africa. Poverty, hunger, diseases, religious wars, oppression by their kings and especially tales of rich mineral deposits, grain and rubber attracted Europeans to Africa, so much so that, it is right to say that Africa at that time was richer than Europe but was subsequently under-developed by Europe’s incursion, as Dr Walter Rodney (1972) put it. Land was the main target because without land, there is no country and you cannot talk about African people. Let us admit that the new western powers’ tactic of divide and rule is still working very well in Africa. Catholic and Protestant churches still represent the mechanism through which Africans were mentally colonized and divided and ruled because members of the same clan or tribe had to adhere either to the Catholic Church or the Protestant Church and became antagonistic toward each other while the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church were not two separate entities at all because they are all Europeans and share the same agenda in Africa: the occupation of vast land areas in Africa. Remember what Jomo Kenyatta famously said of these churches: ‘When the Missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the Missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.’
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 14:38:46 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015