Precisely a week ago, on Friday 23rd August, the global community marked the International Day for the Remembrance of Slave Trade and its Abolition. Slavery was officially abolished in Britain as far back as 1883 and in the US in 1865. But its legacy lives on. Of the 15 million that were transported to the New World, an estimated 10 percent perished on the high seas. Some revolted and threw themselves overboard to escape their benighted fate. Millions more perished within our continent, as white slave drivers fomented internecine wars, in connivance with local chiefs, to enable them capture slaves.
The story of the white man’s assault on the black race did not end with abolition of slavery, however. The so-called Age of “legitimate commerce”, and, eventually, colonialism, had its own challenges. The conquest of our continent was achieved by force of arms and gunboat diplomacy. Probably as many Africans died during the slave trade as did during the age of imperialism.
A particularly heartbreaking example was King Leopold’s 19th century Congo Free State; an entity that was neither free nor was it a state in any genuine sense of the word. An estimated 6 million Bakongo perished on account of forced labour and indentured slavery. Genocide and racial extermination was used by the imperial powers to enforce their hegemony over the colonised peoples. The Hottentots, a beautiful race of Africans on the Cape, were exterminated by the Dutch Boers while the Germans launched a savage campaign of genocide against the heroic Herero people of South West Africa (now Namibia).
Schoolchildren in Europe are, sadly, taught little or nothing about these atrocities. With the removal of history from our curriculum, generations of schoolchildren in Nigeria have grown up without knowing whence they came from and where they are going.
While I sympathise with the Jewish victims of the Shoah, I make bold to say that the Black Holocaust is the worst crime in history of human infamy. For over 400 years, the Europeans were battering us in the coast while the Arabs were hunting us down from across the Sahara. Slavery still goes on in places like Mauritania and Sudan.
There is also the “New Slavery”. Every year thousands of young Africans are conned into forced labour, prostitution and other forms of enslavement in Europe.
Many die either from hunger or thirst while others fall prey to wild animals. Some are sold as slaves in Libya, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria. The “lucky” ones pay extortionate fares to get on rickety boats headed for Europe. Many of these boats capsize. Those who manage to make it into Europe are taken to refugee centres. Many sink without a trace, never to be heard of again!
Some are used for harvesting vital organs which are then sold in Asia, Arabia and the West. There are young Africans who are literarily working under slave conditions in the citrus farms of Italy, Spain and Greece. There are prostitution rings involving young African women all over the world.
In many of our home countries in Africa, slavery persists in various forms. Boko Haram deploys enslavement, forced conversions and sex slavery as weapons of war. The herdsmen militias that are killing, maiming and raping defenceless communities throughout our country use enslavement as a weapon of savagery; often pursuing scorched earth policies. Once they wipe off the indigenes and take over their ancestral lands, they rename the villages and make them their own permanent homesteads. They have done that in Zamfara, Birnin Gwari, Southern Kaduna, Nasarawa, Plateau, Benue and Taraba.
I humbly submit that no group of people have endured such unspeakable crimes as the Africans since time immemorial. These traumatic experiences have inevitably imposed a heavy toll on our collective. This explains why Africans feel no confidence in themselves. Without such confidence we cannot build new inner-directed and inner-propelled prosperous industrial-technological democracies on our glorious continent.
This dilemma is further complicated by what late Kenyan political scientist Ali Mazrui termed “Global Apartheid”. Global Apartheid comes in many forms. In academia it is fuelled by pseudo-scientific race theories that spread the evil lies of intellectual-cognitive deficiencies in the DNA of African people. They also strenuously deny that ancient Pharaonic Egypt was an African civilisation. Some are so stupid enough as to propagate the theory that the pyramids were built by aliens!
Global Apartheid works through multinational companies that exploit our untold mineral wealth while we remain poor. It works through shadowy economic hit men and trans-Atlantic secret clubs such as the Mont Pelerin Society, the Trilateral Commission, the Club of Rome and the Bilderberg Group that patently exclude Africans from their inner sanctums. Through mass media manipulation, Hollywood propaganda and subliminal brainwashing black people have been consigned to the scrapheap of history.
Official slavery may be dead, but its spirit is very much alive and kicking. It is up to our generation of leaders to read the signs of the times and to rise to the occasion. The fate of a billion black people on earth depends on us.
OBADIAH MAILAFIA
