SLAVERY DISTORSIONS

Racism distortions on Slavery
Subject: Let's stop perpetuating racism distortions
EDMONTON JOURNAL
Let's stop perpetuating racism distortions: Black Africa must admit its complicity in the slave trade, and teach the truth in its schools
Wednesday 5 September 2001
p. A14

Five years ago, in a body-blow of a book entitled Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa, former Washington Post Africa bureau chief Keith Richburg made a stunning confession. He was glad -- glad -- an ancestor of his had been "taken from his village ... shackled in leg irons, kept in a holding pen or a dark pit ... (then) put in the crowded, filthy cargo hold of a ship for the long and treacherous voyage across the Atlantic to the New World."

He was relieved his ancestor had been a slave. Not relieved for the slavery this first New-World Richburg had had to endure, but relieved the ordeal of slavery had at least, some generations later, the sanguine effect of making Keith Richburg a free and reasonably prosperous American.

He was educated, employed and content, rather than a casualty in some brutal inter-tribal war, or a victim of famine, or a dispossessed farmer whose land had been confiscated or rendered sterile in some tin-pot despot's cockamamie grand plan to produce universal prosperity through Marxist agrarian reform -- Africa was full of such grandiose dreamers and schemers in the '60s and '70s.

Had Richburg's ancestor never been captured and sold into bondage, Richburg could easily have found himself in Africa and the victim of one of these fates; they are a common reality for many black Africans.

Leaders in the African-American community, Richburg argued, were wrong to hold up "Mother Africa ... as some kind of black Valhalla, where the descendants of slaves would be welcomed back and where black men and women can walk in true dignity."

It is a deeply troubled continent, whose troubles are just as often the fault of black leaders as whites, where blacks are more likely to commit atrocities against blacks than whites are. Colonialism, while it deepened many of Africa's problems, was not the sole source of them, nor even the source of most of them.

"And so I thank God my ancestor survived the voyage."

In all the recent talk about the western world apologizing for slavery and paying reparations, we would do well to get beyond the fashionable hype and group-think, to contemplate the consequences of slavery as Richburg did. Slavery was immoral, inexcusable, inhuman and inhumane. There can be no arguing that it was good for those who suffered through it. It also corrupted those who benefited from it. So it could probably be said that slavery did no real good for anyone.

Still, neither was slavery the only reason for the current plight of either Africa or black Americans.

Because of this, apologies and reparations will never make right what is wrong with the Dark Continent nor the American underclass.

Thus the current obsession with slavery reparations, which has dominated the UN conference against racism in Durban, South Africa (when delegates aren't working themselves into a fever of anti-Semitism) amounts to putting all of Africa's and black America's eggs into the wrong basket. Moreover, if the practical argument for reparations fails because it will produce no positive consequences, the moral argument against it is without merit, too.

Worst Racists Mostly Africans

Not only are the worst racists in the world today mostly Africans -- Hutu militiamen who hack to bits Tutsi villagers, black Zimbabweans who drive white Zimbabweans from their own land, north Sudanese governors who butcher, starve and enslave southern Sudanese peasants -- the slave trade was never only a whites-over-blacks phenomenon. Not even close. The whole reparations drive is based on so many falsehoods and self-deluded myths it would topple in a gentle puff of air, if any western politician had the courage to blow.

The enslavement of blacks by blacks existed in Africa long before Europeans "discovered" the continent, and it survived long after slavery was outlawed in Europe and America. Indeed, it survives today.

The principal captors and sellers of blacks to white slavers were other blacks. And it is not as though these black slavers were blissfully minding their own business, living in harmony with their fellow blacks, until greedy, bigoted, cunning whites showed up and tricked/bribed/coerced them into doing so.

The West African slave trade with America, the Caribbean and Brazil was merely an expansion of an already thriving slave trade that had supplied human cargo to African and Arab masters for centuries.

According to the chronicles of 17th Century French slave trader Theodore Canneau, there were five principal reasons Africans enslaved other Africans: capture in war, failure to repay a debt, intra-family or intra-tribal rivalry (a chief, upon ascension, would enslave his rivals, or a father might enslave a son who refused an arranged marriage), criminal behaviour and destitution. Orphans, widows, vagrants and surplus children were often sold into slavery by blacks, to other blacks because they were incapable of providing for themselves.

In the current issue of the British magazine, The Spectator, South African writer Andrew Kenny asserts that what set whites apart was not their willingness to buy and sell black Africans: "It was only among white Europeans that opposition to slavery grew." In fact, many black Africans were so affronted by the British drive to end this culturally-ingrained trade in all Britain's African colonies that delegations from Gambia, the Congo and Dahomey travelled to London in the 19th Century to lobby for slavery's continuation.

So here's the deal: White Europeans and North Americans will apologize for slavery, we might even consider reparations, if black Africans will admit their complicity in the trade and agree to teach the truth in their schools. Perpetuating the distortions by blaming only whites would be its own kind of bigotry.

Lorne Gunter
Columnist, The Edmonton Journal
Editorial Board Member, The National Post
Tele: (780) 916-0719
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E-mail: lgunter@powersurfr.com