Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire, on the "Slave Trail" at the Manchester Docks on the James River in Richmond, Virginia. (Photo: Ana Edwards)
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos
A response to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and the need for an accurate interpretation of history
By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire
Commentary
An essay published on April 23, 2010 in the New York Times by Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. took up the ongoing contentious debate around the demand for reparations for the centuries of unpaid labor extracted from Africans brought to the United States during the period of slavery. Gates says that the demand for reparations is not valid since there were some Africans who collaborated with the European slave traders in the dislocation of millions of people from the continent between the 16th and 19th centuries.
These are not new arguments in relationship to a broader question and that is the historical significance of slavery as an economic system in the development of Western Europe, North America, the Caribbean, Central America and South America. The denial and refusal to apportion adequate blame to the wealthy elites of monarchs, merchants, explorers and plantation owners, who not only orchestrated the Atlantic Slave Trade for centuries but benefited immensely from the profits gained as a result of the exploitation of African labor and resources, continues today through academics such as Gates who seek to negate the seriousness of the unresolved national question in the U.S.
A recent debate around the importance of slavery in American history was sparked by Gov. McDonnell of Virginia’s proclamation declaring April as “Confederate Heritage Month” without any initial mention of slavery and its role in the state. The academic and popular history of slavery in the United States had been dominated for decades by white southerners and those who sympathize with their basic assumptions.
Two major assumptions that guide the pro-slavery and confederate thinking are both that slavery was not only the natural order of relations between Africans and Europeans but that traditional African societies were just as culpable as the traffickers and plantation owners. These assumptions ignore the facts that many African societies fought for centuries against slavery and colonialism and that it was the European merchants, landowners and later industrial capitalists who reaped the enormous wealth derived from the importation of African slave labor and the theft of the continent’s resources.
Not only did Africans resist slavery on the continent, they fought it on the ships that transported them to Europe and the Western hemisphere. During the course of slavery on the plantations, small farms, towns and cities, there was flight and rebellion against this form of human bondage. The slave rebellions led by Gabriel, Denmark Vessey, Nat Turner, John Brown and Osborne P. Anderson are testaments to the self-directed efforts to end this system of human bondage in North America.
Who Really Benefited From the Atlantic Slave Trade?
Many historians of the 20th century such as W.E.B. DuBois, Eric Williams, Walter Rodney and Kwame Nkrumah have documented the impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade and colonialism on the growth of industrial capitalism in Western Europe and North America. Eric Williams in his work “Capitalism and Slavery” stated that “Many of the 18th century banks established in Liverpool and Manchester, the slaving metropolis and the cotton capital respectively, were directly associated with the triangular trade. Here large sums were needed for the cotton factories and the canals which improved the means of communications between the two towns.” (Capitalism and Slavery, p.99, 1943)
Yet when arguments are made that Africans benefited from their own enslavement any objective observer must ask for the evidence of this historical assertion. One leading Marxist historian on Africa, Walter Rodney, wrote in his book “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” that “Undoubtedly, with few exceptions such as Hawkins, European buyers purchased African captives on the coasts of Africa and the transaction between themselves and Africans was a form of trade.”(Rodney, p. 95, 1972)
Rodney continues that “It is also true that very often a captive was sold and resold as he made his way from the interior to the port of embarkation—and that too was a form of trade. However, on the whole, the process by which captives were obtained on African soil was not trade at all. It was through warfare, trickery, banditry, and kidnapping. When one tries to measure the effect of European slave trading on the African continent, it is essential to realize that one is measuring the effect of social violence rather than trade in any normal sense of the word.” (Rodney, p. 95)
Former Guinean President Ahmed Sekou Toure said in 1962 that “The relation between the degree of destitution of peoples of Africa and the length and nature of the exploitation they had to endure is evident. Africa remains marked by the crimes of the slave-traders: up to now, her potentialities are restricted by under-population.” (Rodney, p. 95)
The Legacy of Enslavement Today
Gates’ essay in the New York Times raises several fundamental questions about not only who is to blame for the Atlantic Slave Trade and which national and class interests benefited economically from the system of exploitation but what impact has this legacy had on contemporary U.S. society. Flowing from this argument, that the European slave owners and capitalist not only gained tremendous wealth from the exploitation of African labor and built the industrial capitalist system, it is also important to acknowledge that in modern society the legacy of racial dominance and national oppression is very much a cornerstone in the continuation of imperialism.
Even today African-Americans are still suffering the most severe impact of the U.S. economic crisis with significantly higher rates of unemployment, the lost of homes, pensions, healthcare services and a drastic decline in household wealth. In the criminal justice system, African-Americans disproportionately constitute the largest percentage of people who are serving sentences in correctional facilities resulting from social depravation and the racist character of the legal system.
Racial profiling by law-enforcement is a point of induction for African-Americans and other people of color into the criminal justice system. African-Americans are more likely to be stopped by the police and arrested on spurious charges. Many others are beaten and even killed during routine traffic stops by police and in encounters with law-enforcement agents.
Prof. Gates was a victim of such practice himself in 2009 when he was arrested inside his own home in Cambridge, Massachusetts by the local police despite the fact that he identified himself as the owner and a leading faculty member at the prestigious Harvard University. Needless to say that Prof. Gates was fortunate somewhat in his encounter with Cambridge police because many African-Americans and other people of color in the U.S. are severely beaten, tortured and killed every week in similar uninvited interactions with law-enforcement.
Reparations, National Liberation and Socialism
Any honest assessment of the social impact of slavery in the U.S. would have to acknowledge that it was the European-American planters, slave traders and later capitalists who were the exclusive beneficiaries of the trade in human beings from Africa. In the 21st century, it is the African people on the continent and in Western Europe as well as the Americas who are still suffering from national oppression, neo-colonialism and imperialism.
Every effort on the part of any oppressed African nation-state to exert its independence and sovereignty has been challenged by the imperialist countries led principally by the U.S. capitalist class. Consequently, it is necessary to not only emphasize the role of world capitalism as the system that derived its strength and power from the slave trade and colonialism but that it is necessary to replace this system of exploitation with a society where the labor of the workers and farmers are not extracted for profit but for its equal distribution to all.
The demand for reparations places emphasis on how the most profitable banks and corporations gained their wealth through the exploitation of African labor. Institutions such as J.P. Morgan Chase, Aetna Insurance Company and many other firms have been forced to admit in recent years their role in the slave system in the United States and internationally.
Yet this admission is not adequate without efforts to re-correct the historical damage done to the people who have still not reclaimed their rightful place within modern society. Only with the overthrow of capitalism and imperialism and the seizure of the wealth stolen by the capitalists can true reparations be granted to the African people.
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