Born Free? Are You Kidding Me?

By Biko Agozino

The movie, Born Free, was made in 1965 about safari hunters who killed a lion and ‘his’ lioness and adopted one of their four cubs while the other three were sent to zoos. They raised the adopted cub to adulthood and later released her back in the wild and tried to teach her how to survive on her own. Years later, they visited her and her cubs and were surprised to get a royal welcome. Some idea of freedom!

That theme of natural rights continues to be replayed in popular culture rather uncritically. For instance, Kid Rock has a song on the theme proclaiming that you can’t put chains around his feet because he was born free and he could reach the top of that mountain because, you guessed it, he was born free. Really?

Jean Jacques Rousseau theorized in political philosophy that man is born free but is everywhere in chains. That was his counter thesis to the original sin formulation of Thomas Hobbes according to which human beings are born as selfish bastards who require the Leviathan or benevolent dictatorship to keep them in check or life would remain nasty, brutish and short in the state of nature where might is right.

Rousseau and John Locke were of the view that human beings are good by nature and that is why they rationally came to the conclusion to give up some of their rights in return for the equal protection of all by the sovereign. A race of devils will be incapable of reaching the rational conclusion that the state of nature was not ideal and that the social contract was better, they concluded.

The American founding fathers were impressed by the ideas of natural rights, equality and liberty but as Condoleeza Rice asserted during her testimony to the Congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks, when they said that all men were created equal, they were not thinking of people like her (in terms of both gender and race).

For African Americans and the American Indian Natives and women generally, the constitution was content to compromise that they were less than full human beings for the purpose of allocating federal resources for a long time.

Paul Ryan is right in asserting that our rights come from the state of nature but he is mistaken to suggest that government should get out of the way for the protection of those rights because every right has been struggled over as a human right especially against stiff opposition by those who assume that they are more human than others – the poor, the women, the racial minorities, the gays – who are still constrained by visible and invisible chains but who remain human deserving human rights.

Thus, being born in chains does not mean that you are any less human than your compatriots who were born with silver spoons in their mouths. All are born chained to our mother’s umbilical cords: kings and queens, paupers and elites, men and women, gays and straights alike. We enjoy different regimes of human rights depending on the balance of forces in human history and the accident of our geographical locations but all of us were born stark naked and, without exception, chained to the baby mama.

Kid Rock was obviously just kidding when he sang that he was born free because no one is ever born free as a human being (although he may have been referring to drug addiction and all the enslaving chains associated with drugs). But for a major political party to adopt that song as the presidential campaign anthem calls for a sober reflection. If they claim to be born free, who do they suggest was born un-free?

No, Kid Rock and Republicans, seriously, you were not born free, you were born firmly attached to the umbilical cord of your mothers as Michael Moore joked in his autobiography, Here Comes Trouble; he said that he wailed like everyone of us when those superhero nurses severed his first guaranteed link to life after his birth, an honor sometimes reserved for the macho warrior father showing off in the maternity.

No human being is ever born free compared to the chicken or ‘lower animal’ that cracks open its own personhood shell or pops out from the womb and walks out already chirping in tribal tongues and running and feeding on its own.

Human beings are a different piece of work. We cannot even hold our own necks up for months, we have to depend on the mama glands too, then we need to learn to sit up before being taught to crawl, then walk before running, and before we go beyond blabbing about mama and dada to learn our ABC and 123, we learn the inconvenience of not wetting our diapers! Duh?

What are diapers for if not to be wet soggy? Before long we discover sex and symbolize maturity with matrimony (except if you want to marry the same sex which remains illegal in many states).

So you were ‘Born Free’ compared to whom? Compared to human beings who were born in chains or those who remain with the chains of the prison industrial complex clanging with every step?

Yeah, that is not just fairy tale, some of us had ancestors who were enslaved and who were enslaved just because their mama was in chains, nothing wrong with their human nature, just like the 99% shackled with twice the tax rate of 1%.

Of course chains are not racial in color and so Joe Biden was right in wondering if you promise to unchain or unshackle Wall Street, are you not suggesting that the shackles should be on the ankles of the middle class, white or black?

The Romney-Ryan Hood platform promises to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act that was ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court. Joe Biden suggested that they plan to unshackle the health insurance industry from regulation so that they can continue to refuse coverage to 40 million Americans, including those with pre-existing conditions; refuse women the preventive care coverage that they have a right to, yank young adults from their parental coverage, charge the elderly more for less coverage and hand over the hundreds of billions saved in agreement with healthcare providers back to millionaires as tax cuts; all in the name of free enterprise and because ‘corporations are people’.

Not even the big bad (or good, as you like it) Feds are ever without restraints given constitutional checks and balances and so why this fantasy about unchained market forces and the ‘idea’ of rights from nature? Freedom is not just an idea; regulation is not the same as a shackle; and civil society trumps the state of nature when it comes to the protection of rights! Check out life in the jungle today and compare with civil society if you are in doubt.

For the next four years, President Obama should put in place a job plan that will target the unacceptable unemployment rate among African Americans in particular and the poor working class Americans in general. Let him allocate $200 billion to be disbursed over four years at $50 billion per annum. On average, $1 billion will be given to each state annually to fund start ups for 1000 unemployed youth or 50,000 start ups at the cost of $1 million each. Multiply that with the number of employees that they are capable of hiring each year for the next four years!

Obama’s second term should also commit to ending the war on drugs that has seen millions of lives of poor youth, white and black, ruined over substances that are much less harmful than legal tobacco and alcohol. Let the unemployed youth grow and sell their marihuana legally and pay tax on their sales while we use education to get people to say no to drugs as we do with tobacco. Patients who need marijuana for chronic illnesses and recreational users in a democratic society deserve the freedom of choice that some people will give to rich corporations but not to people.

President Obama’s second term will be uneventful without a plan for African reparations in place from day one. All groups that have suffered great historical wrongs have received some form of reparation except people of African descent who suffered the greatest wrongs in history. This is one big ticket item that President Obama should promise, not because he is of African descent but, because it is the right thing to do.

Finally, the constitutional lawyer in President Obama should commit to abolition of the death penalty in America during his second term. Not everyone was born free but everyone deserves to have the right to life guaranteed as inalienable.

Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech.

Gambian Kongi's Harvest: Mass Executions

By Biko Agozino

Gambia has embarked on what Wole Soyinka indelibly condemned as Kongi's Harvest: Mass Executions.

President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria was reported as comparing the mass executions to the Rwanda genocide. All African states should avoid hypocrisy and appropriately respond to Gambia's display of barbarism by abolishing the death penalty in Africa the way Nelson Mandela did in South Africa at a time that the assassins of Chris Hani were still awaiting trial and could have been given the death penalty.

The reasons for abolishing the death penalty across Africa are:

1) The death penalty was imposed on Africans by colonial authorities and those colonizing countries have since abolished it in their own countries because the death penalty is barbaric and unconstitutional.

2) The death penalty leads to increased violence and homicide given that the states that have the death penalty also record higher rates of homicide. This is called the brutalization effect or the impact of state sanctioned killing on the psyche of citizens who tend to follow the example of the state by killing fellow citizens to settle disputes. Across Africa, the death penalty is no deterrent to violent crime maybe because the fear of the death penalty makes criminals to attempt to eliminate all witnesses.

3) The margin of error is huge in the death penalty and once executed, there is no way to correct the wrongful killing of innocent suspects like Ken Saro-Wiwa whereas a life sentence would give the innocent more chances of proving their innocence.

4) Violent criminals are more afraid of life sentences than the death penalty and some of them attempt suicide in prison rather than spend the rest of their lives behind bars. Life sentences would also allow society to attempt to reform dangerous criminals.

5) Nigeria should follow the good example of South Africa and immediately abolish the death penalty as contravening the human rights provisions in our constitution. Prof. Ben Nwabueze argued accordingly in his critique of the borrowing of the death penalty from the American Presidential Constitution by the drafters of the 1979 Nigerian Presidential Constitution.



6) The death penalty is biased against poor black men and is therefore arbitrary, cruel and unusual punishment.

For public discussions of the scholarly evidence, see the earlier post here: 

http://massliteracy.blogspot.com/2012/02/public-sociology-on-death-penalty.html   

Biko Agozino

Jonathan urges Africa to respond to Jammeh’s threats Africa » Gambiahttp://thepoint.gm/africa/gambia/article/jonathan-urges-africa-to-respond-to-jammehs-threats Friday, August 24, 2012 Reactions to President Yahya Jammeh’s threat that by the middle of next month (September 2012), all death penalties would have been carried out in The Gambia continues, with the latest coming from Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan. Jonathan, who arrived in neighbouring Senegal on a 24-hour working visit, told journalists in Dakar on Thursday that the entire African continent “should respond” to Jammeh’s threats to implement the death penalty, Senegalese daily Rewmi reported yesterday. “Such an act would mean genocide in Africa, after that of Rwanda,” Jonathan was quoted as saying. Jonathan’s reaction comes a day after France also condemned such a threat, saying The Gambia has applied a de facto moratorium on the death penalty since 1981. “France therefore urges Gambia to maintain this moratorium with a view toward the definitive abolition of the death penalty, and not to execute these death row prisoners. It also demands that Gambia commute all death sentences to custodial sentences,” France declared. The statement added: “France, in keeping with its opposition to the use of the death penalty in all circumstances, believes that the death penalty is a cruel punishment and that its abolition contributes to strengthening human dignity.” It said considerable progress has been made in the fight to abolish the death penalty in recent years. In an address to the nation to mark the Muslim holy feast of Eid-al-Fitr, Jammeh said by the middle of next month (September 2012), all the death sentences would have been carried out to the letter, though he did not give the exact number of the prison inmates currently on death row. “All punishments prescribed by law will be maintained in the country to ensure that criminals get what they deserve; that is, that those who kill are killed, and those who deserve to be put away from society are put away according to the dictates of the law,” Jammeh said.

SPORTS AS INDUSTRY

By Biko Agozino

Following the embarrassing showing of Nigeria at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, a Nigerian sports official proudly promised that the country will do better at the London Olympics by aiming for four medals or double the number of medals won in Beijing. Only four? Given that a Chinese official announced that the goal of his own country was to achieve 100 medals, I was surprised that the Nigerian official had such a low ambition for our own athletes. But after the London show of shamelessness by the Nigerian delegation, I stand corrected because that official knew something that I did not know about the lack of seriousness in the country regarding strategic preparedness for excellence in all fields.

The Guardian editorialized on August 16, 2012, and I opined as much on my Facebook page during the games, that the Sports Minister should do the honorable thing and resign before he is sacked for such a mediocre record after spending more than two billion naira to parade as one of the best dressed delegations. President Jonathan was reported also by The Guardian as calling for a retreat to plan the reorganization of sports in the country and to discuss the causes of the disastrous records of Nigeria in sporting contests recently. Here, I offer a few tips:

First of all, abolish the Ministry of Sports. The US, China, the UK, Russia and even proud Jamaica all have one thing in common – none of them has a Ministry of Sports - and yet they put Nigeria and many other big African countries to shame again and again at sporting contests. The staff of the Ministry of sports who have sporting experience should be redeployed after retraining to serve as coaches in educational institutions or they should be absorbed into other ministries.

Instead of a Ministry of Sports with huge estacodes for a waka-about Minister of Sports, channel more funding to schools for the development of sporting contests starting from the elementary and all the way to the university levels. Every elementary school should be equipped with a gym, basketball court, a tennis lawn, a beach volleyball sand pit, a football field with tracks; every town should have a swimming pool, every high school should have similar facilities and every university should be equipped with Olympic standard facilities in all sports.

Re-introduce the inter-house sporting competitions in schools, inter-school contests, university athletics contests with full scholarships for athletes to motivate them, then have the national leagues in all sports to keep them ready for international contests. Go beyond schools to award grants to private sporting clubs that will specialize in scouting talents and training them to get them ready to break world records. The clubs can enter into agreements with the athletes that they train for a small percentage of their earnings to be paid to the clubs to keep them sustainable.

I support the development of sports as an industry in which the child of poor parents with natural abilities and zero capital could be given the opportunity to pull the whole family out of poverty simply by playing the sport that he or she loves. Usain Bolt earns an estimated $20 million a year from running 9 seconds races and I am certain that if the talented youth in Nigeria have dedicated coaches in sprinting, many of them will give Bolt a run for his money in a very short time. 

The same goes for the long distance runners from East Africa, the tennis players from Europe and North America, the equestrian riders, the swimmers, the boxers, the basketball players, the footballers and the volleyball stars. Even acrobatics do not require a lot of equipments, nor do high jump, long jump, pole vaulting, javelin throwing, discuss and short-putt. Cycling is a common skill in Nigeria but no club exists to train poor youth to take on the best in the world and win the Tour de France and feed their family forever. All it takes is systematic daily practice rather than the folly of cramming lessons into a few weeks before competitions or exams.

Federal, State and Local Government executives should include at least 10% provisions in their annual budgets to be awarded directly to the people not only for the development of sporting facilities and training programs but also as grants for private citizens or cooperatives to set up their own farms or businesses, conduct research, pay for school fees, produce movies or music or manufacture sporting goods that would support the sporting talents of our blessed youth. Corporate citizens should also come up with sponsorships for athletes who excel in their fields.

Athletics is an industry that is not easily dominated by employers of labor because the athletes own themselves in most cases and act as free agents in search of better opportunities. If we refuse to invest in the youth of Nigeria simply because there is no loot there waiting to be embezzled by kleptocrats, more and more of our youth will be seen donning the colors of other countries and kicking our butts at international contests as Igudala did with the US basketball team. Team spirit is also a skill to be learned in all fields and it is a transferable skill that will benefit other aspects of national life.

As The Guardian pointed out in its editorial, sporting events usually unite Nigerians more than any other projects. At a time that ineptitude at all levels is threatening to tear the country apart, excellence in sports could be a national security priority to be taken seriously at the level of individuals who would be empowered to excel in their own interest and also in the national interest. If kidnappers, pick-pockets, terrorist bombers, bribe-takers, armed robbers, fake pastors and unemployed youth generally knew that the waist is made of money, they will not be using theirs simply to dance bongo, as one Igbo singer put it.

A brother shared an internet link where Transparency Nigeria has already outlined a regional strategy for national mobilization – target swimming clubs at the Niger Delta youth who would out-dive the Chinese and out-swim the Americans any day if they knew that there is a career in what comes naturally to them; target horse riding and archery to the Northern youth who would win every race with their Durban skills; target sprinting at Eastern youth whose distant cousin is no other than Usain Bolt; target ball players at the Westerners; distance runners could come from the Northerners; wrestlers and boxers from the East, etc.

My suggestion is that any such targets should be tempered with pragmatism because no matter where a Nigerian comes from, with the proper training, he or she will excel in any sport. No ethnic discrimination should be tolerated in the selection of representatives given that racism could have denied the US and the UK lots of medal opportunities won by black athletes if they had insisted on the ideology of white superiority.

More than half the medals won by the US and the Chinese teams in London were won by women. Also, the closest Nigeria came to medaling in London was the female relay team that came fourth. This means that we should avoid gender discrimination in sports and all other aspects of national development.

Finally, we should note that developing sports without developing education is not an option, hence the proposal above for sports to be developed as an integral part of the educational curriculum, the way it is done in the US and China. We could mandate that every sporting practice should start with 30 minutes lessons in English and Mathematics on a daily basis. Thus, we will not only aim for 100 medals at Rio 2016 but also aim for 100% pass in Mathematics and English exams as opposed to 80% failure currently.

Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Virginia Tech.

My Award-Winning Documentary: Shouters and the Control Freak Empire

 

http://www.imdb.com/video/wab/vi3129384217/

I have just learned that my film won the Best International Short Documentary at the 2011 Columbia Gorge International Film Festival (USA) and will be showcased at the 2012 Havana Film Festival this August:

‘This fascination led him (Tayo Ojoade) to co-direct Shouters and the 'Control Freak' Empire with Nigerian criminologist Professor Onwubiko Agozino. This short documentary which re-visits the 1917-1951 Prohibition Ordinance examines how Christianity, when infused with African cultural or religious practices, creates discords of power and class and so, he challenges laws that legislate against a belief system, questioning the effects of such laws for both the members of the faith and the general public. Shouters and the 'Control Freak' Empire questions power and social control through exposing the central conflict between Euro-centric and Afro-centric religions. It places these two elements side by side to give voice to the voiceless by exposing the schisms inherent in the unhappy marriage between the secular and the sacred.

'Shouters and the 'Control Freak' Empire has enjoyed local, regional and international audiences and has been highlighted on numerous occasions during the Shouter Baptist holiday. First screened at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival in 2010, it went on to win a prize at the 2011 Colombia Gorge International Film Festival (USA). Later that same year it was screened both at the Portobello Film Festival (London) and the Montreal International Black Film Festival (Canada). This year, 2012, it has been selected by the Trinidad and Tobago Film Company for the Caribbean Film Showcase to take place at Havana, Cuba in August.

'Shouters and the 'Control Freak' Empire remains Ojoade's most widely screened film. He attributes this success to his own Trini-gerian heritage, a fact which deeply informed his passion for this piece. Nigerian by birth, Ojoade's interest piqued in Trinidad when he noted how Afro-Christian spirituality sometimes becomes rooted with African cultural practices and the "Shouter" faith attracts his interest precisely because of this. Upon discovering how the Shouter faith was once ostracised when Prohibition laws were implemented, Ojoade's cultural conscience was piqued and he conceived a film which addresses these issues.’

To read more, follow the link:

http://www.trinidadexpress.com/sunday-mix/Trini-gerian_Filmmaker_Makes_His_Mark-160927745.html

Prof advocates legalising marijuana

Trinidad Guardian: Published: 

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Melissa Doughty

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Melissa Doughty

Published: 

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Director of Africana Studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Prof Onwubiko Agozino is calling for the legalisation of marijuana. He believes people who use/sell marijuana and may be arrested and sentenced to prison for it cannot be compared with one incarcerated for homicide. He also believes imprisoning someone for a marijuana offence exposes that individual to violent socialisation.

The right to sell marijuana, as in Netherlands or Portugal, he said, should also be decriminalised thereby allowing people to earn a living. Other illicit drugs such as cocaine, he said, should also be decriminalised, but through education, the public should be made alive to the the dangers.

“The war on drugs is a choice our leaders have made. Waging war on drugs is not working; what works is education. Marijuana never killed anybody. We should end the war on drugs, legalise marijuana and allow the young people here in Trinidad and Tobago to grow their little marijuana and make a decent living and pay some taxes,” he said.

Agozino’s comments came as he delivered the keynote address at the opening day of the 14th Biannual International Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA). The conference invites the opinions and expertise of activists, academics, journalists, practitioners, people currently or formerly imprisoned, survivors of State and personal harm and others from across the world working toward the abolition of imprisonment, the penal system, and the prison industrial complex.

Held in conjunction with the Institute of Industrial Relations at the University of the West Indies (UWI), St Augustine Campus, the conference is being hosted at the university’s Learning Resource Centre for participants from Jamaica, the USA, UK and T&T.

President of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), Sir Dennis Byron chaired the panel on Criminal to Reparative Law. Agozino also recommends the lifting of the death penalty. He described as ‘shameful’ that the death penalty is being retained in the constitutions of Caribbean countries. He said the death penalty encourages one to kill one’s wife or friend as a form of punishment.

“The people who imposed the death penalty on us, the Europeans, have all abolished it. We did not make the law to kill our own people as punishment. That is a European, modern fetish of control-freak technology. “As part of the decolonisation our people have been waging for centuries we should say enough to the death penalty as punishment. I say to you, people of Trinidad, you are the new Pharaohs of the age if you make it known that you do not want the death penalty any more,” he said.

Criminologists, he said, should advocate for the British to apologise and pay reparation to the Shouter Baptists for the 1917 Ordinance which prohibited Shouter Baptists from their form of worship. Agozino’s address, “Control-Freak Criminology and Penal Abolitionism” called for the discipline to take a peacemaking and lovemaking perspective as espoused by philosopher and criminologist Harold Pepinsky and others.

Trayvon Martin: Articulation or Intersectionality in Control-Freak Societies?

By Dr. Biko Agozino

Professor of Sociology and Director of Africana Studies, Virginia Tech

‘When I heard about the Trayvon Martin case, I thought that the real killer is the media that criminalizes black youth, black men and black people…. No one talks about the media spreading the poison that black people are dangerous to the extent that we do not see people as people but as trouble. Incarceration of the killer is not the solution if we fail to reeducate our people to recognize our common humanity.’ – Mumia Abu-Jamal, Plenary conversation with Angela Davis at the Manning Marable Memorial Conference, St John’s Cathedral, Columbia University, April 2012.

We live in authoritarian societies that are best described as control-freak societies. The control-freak ideology goes beyond the claim to a monopoly of force and violence by the state to include the authoritarianism of ordinary citizens who often internalize what Jacques Derrida (who observed that the word for justice and violence, Gewalt, is the same in German language) called ‘the force of the law’ and take it upon themselves to ‘enforce’ justice with emphasis on a final solution over not only total strangers but also over otherwise beloved family, friends and colleagues. As Mumia implied above, the control-freaks include scholars and journalists who spread the gospel of zero tolerance in otherwise democratic societies where tolerance should be taught more.

The control-freak state cheer-leads the lethal authoritarianism of private individuals and security corporations as ‘natural right’ by reinforcing ancient laws of self-defense that gave people the right to kill others in defense of their private property as if property is more valuable than human life or as if life is only another form of property in a ‘commercial society’: now only a vague ‘feeling’ of being threatened after ‘a series of burglaries’ in a gated community is enough to encourage a vigilante to follow an innocent youth on his way to his father’s residence and gun him down self-righteously. The police appeared to encourage this type of outrage by initially refusing to even arrest and charge the confessed murderer (not killer as the media would have it, he was finally charged with second-degree murder, not with killing) obviously because the life lost was that of a black male homo sacer, a disposable human being, as Zygmunt Bauman put it in Modernity and the Holocaust.

Most commentators on the case of Trayvon Benjamin Martin saw it as a case of the all too familiar fruit (no longer a ‘strange fruit’ with so frequent a recurrence) from the tree of racial profiling but it is much more than racial in character. Stuart Hall will always remind us to look beyond racism in situations like this and understand that it is the result of the articulation on race-class-gender relations in societies structured in dominance. In the US, the preferred theory is that of Kimberley Crenshaw on race-class-gender intersectionality.

The two theories are similar but not identical given that, according to Crenshaw, the intersections of streets or the intersections of circles could be used as metaphors with which to capture race-class-gender intersectionality while Hall prefers to use the analogy of the articulated train or lorry in conjunction with the linguistic concept of giving expression to underscore the fact that the exploitation of cheap black labor in South Africa, for instance, was not simply racist, sexist or classist but an articulation, dis-articulation and re-articulation of all three simultaneously as relations that are never separate, though different.

The analogy of streets or circles intersectionality fails this test of simultaneity because of the assumption that Trayvon Martin may have been walking on the ‘gender’ street (or circle) safely until he came to the point where that street or circle intersected with the ‘race’ and ‘class’ streets or circles whereas the theory of articulation assumes that there is no inch of the street or circle that is not always already racialized, gendered and class-specific; emptiness lies outside the intersectionality. In other words, race-class-gender ‘overlapping’ is closer to the reality of race-class-gender articulation than the mechanical metaphor of the intersection would have us believe.

When George Zimmerman confessed to the murder of Trayvon Martin, he did not go to one police precinct to enjoy the privileges of his masculinity, then to another to celebrate his Hispanic whiteness, before going to a third to perform his respectable middle class-ness in ways that would not hold if it was the truck driver father of Martin that had shot the son of Zimmerman the ex-judge even after the police dispatcher warned him to ‘stand his ground’ and desist from following the youngster. At the very least, a black man who murders an innocent white teenager will be arrested on the spot and asked to save his self-defense excuses for the jury. Respectable white male privilege and an enabling legal environment that devalues poor-black-male lives added insult to this injury. Similarly, when Trayvon was unjustly profiled, his blackness was not seen as threatening on one street before his maleness became an issue on another street and before his walking-rather-than-driving poverty status became an issue on yet another street or at the intersection of all three.

The point here is that authoritarianism is very popular in control-freak societies as is evident in the fact that after a few weeks of appealing for funds online, the confessed murderer raised over $200,000 for his defense and for his ‘personal expenses’ while an online gun shop that offered a shooting target in the image of Trayvon Martin said that the image sold out within two days despite some public outrage. It is this popularity of authoritarianism that encourages families to send their youth to go and kill and be killed in foreign lands just because those in authority asked them to do so and the escalation in street violence frequently correlates with periods of foreign wars and invasions. For instance, the involvement of Norway in the invasion and bombing of the Trayvon Martins in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya probably incited the white-supremacist into massacring 77 people in Oslo and just like Zimmerman, he claimed self-defense for the atrocity. 

This very same bloody control-freak populism encourages parents to brutalize their own children in the name of discipline even when the authoritarian state would hesitate in the cases of babies too young to know any better. Friends and neighbors, lovers, brothers and sisters, employees and employers, students and teachers all buy into this control-freak ideology that is alien to the African philosophy of non-violence which we need to rehabilitate as part of the solution rather than leave it to remain battered and bruised, accursed and ridiculed by imperialist reason.

Angela Davis followed the above epigraphic teaching from Mumia Abu-Jamal during the constantly interrupted 15 minute collect-phone call from a control-freak prison with a highlight of the lesson we can all learn from the South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission: A widow was asked by Desmond Tutu if she would ever forgive the police officer who murdered her husband and she responded that she would only forgive him if he will do three things: identify the ground where the corpse was burnt so that she could gather it and bury her husband; accept to become her son; and come and visit her family regularly to understand that the person he killed was a valued human being. On hearing this, the killer collapsed and fainted. Angela concluded by advising against the atomization of Trayvon Martin.

What Mumia and Angela suggest above is that the African philosophy of non-violence which Mahatma Gandhi claimed that he learned from the Zulu during his sojourn in South Africa and which Martin Luther King Junior suggested that he learned from Gandhi, a philosophy that was an essential part of the successful resistance against slavery, colonialism, sexism, class exploitation, and apartheid by people of African descent and their allies and by all those other colored people who adopted this philosophy, should be an essential part of the solution that we seek.

In other words, the injustice done here goes beyond the murdered youth to encompass the murderer who sleeps no more because he has murdered sleep. Racism-sexism-classism as the articulation of injustice is a multiple-edged sword that cuts the aggressor as well as the aggrieved but to different extents. This is probably why a carefully staged apology was volunteered by George Zimmerman to the parents of Trayvon Martin prematurely at the bail bond hearing – a clear indication that he had realized that he ruined his own life too due to the hate and fear that he was raised with when he could have been safer with love in his heart for all. His intolerance is widely condemned by people of all races, classes and genders.

When the Nazis were driven into a genocidal hatred by the control-freak state, little did they know that for each Jew who was killed, at least three Germans would pay with their lives. When the Hutu tried the final solution on their Tutsi brothers and sisters, little did they know that the media broadcasts urging them to kill all the ‘cockroaches’, including the young ones, would result in the Hutus themselves being dehumanized as well and Rwanda has responded mainly with reconciliation and healing rather than the obsession with revenge and Beccarian fantasy of making the punishment fit the crime given that no punishment would ever fit the crime. Responding to the atrocity in Norway, Nils Christie wrote that we should learn to love all and seek to punish less because punitive-mindedness escalates hate and vengeance without being able to heal the original wounds.

In conclusion, while we all must continue to organize for social justice, we should recognize the humanity of the aggressor rather than profile him as a monster. As Mumia suggested in a tone reminiscent of Martin Luther King Jr., we should direct our agitation more at the institutions that normalize the oppression of our people and insist on the transformation of such institutions through the non-violent means of mass protests and ballot measures. We can also challenge the gun lobby with the jurisprudence of big tobacco: when you make a defective product that kills thousands of people annually, the manufacturers and the gun-lobby should be made to pay some reparations to the bereaved.

Since (black) people are increasingly afraid to walk along their own streets, close-circuit television cameras should be installed on streets in neighborhoods that vote to have them and the images should be accessible through a public television channel where we can all see that it is dubious that a dead child banged the head of the aggressor against the sidewalk before being executed in cold blood (CCTV could show that his alleged wounds were self-inflicted after the killing).

Finally, the drug laws that amplify the fear of young black males should be abolished immediately while we use education to get our young people to say no to drugs and use the healthcare system to minimize harm so that no one is going to shoot another poor Black or Hispanic male youth on the pretext that he looked as if he was on drugs and the control-freak justice system would not be allowed to over-incarcerate poor young men on the suspicion that they possessed small quantities of drugs and thereby expel them from school, deny them job opportunities, exclude them from public housing and deny them the right to vote even after serving their sentences  as Michelle Alexander documented in The New Jim Crow.

President Barack Obama has shown courage in coming out in an election season by ending the war in Iraq and by supporting same-sex marriage for citizens who prefer that; it is about time he came out for ending the war on drugs that has escalated the violence on our streets and homes while contaminating otherwise law-abiding youth by sending them to prison where they are likely to be recruited by violent drug gangs. If Trayvon Martin was not suspended from school for alleged marihuana residues found in his school bag, perhaps he would be at home in his mother’s black community of Miami Gardens rather than be found in the red-neck garrison community of his father’s girlfriend in Sanford where he may have been sent by his mother on the mistaken assumption that it might be safer than the black neighborhood. The police autopsy report revealed that he had THC in his blood and urine but we are not told what substances George Zimmerman had in his system to make him so paranoid about a harmless youth on that fateful day.

Let us force the politicians to decriminalize drugs and control guns by sustaining the mass protest that Trayvon Martin’s murder and attempted impunity eventually inspired. Let us take the Occupy Movement beyond Wall Street and Occupy the Prison Industrial Complex with marches, pickets and teach-ins until funding is made available to teach love and tolerance in all schools and until the political prisoners are freed along with the drugs war prisoners. President Obama took a step in this direction by reducing the crack-powder cocaine disparity from 100:1 to 10:1; we need to make him see the logic of his South American colleagues who are calling for an end to the war on drugs that has resulted in the death of 50,000 Mexicans in the few years that they had a drug-war lord for president while implicating US officials in the scandalous shooting of two pregnant women and two men on a boat that was wrongly suspected of transporting drugs in Honduras recently. Only the increased democratization of the entire world via decolonization from imperialist reason in accordance with what Ron Eglash called African Fractals - the fact of the interconnectedness of humanity - would result in more peace and love as Hal Pepinsky argued in The Geometry of Violence and Democracy and as I did in Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason.

Dr Agozino is the Chair of the Social Policy Committee of the Association of Black Sociologists.

Before We Set Sail: A Review

Before We Set Sail:  A Review 

By Biko Agozino

Historical novels come with spoilers because the readers already know how the stories are going to end and yet the genre is popular enough to be read and reviewed like the classic movies and comedy shows that are watched compulsively on television reruns. Such novels are even more compelling than television because they are not simply entertaining but also instructive and interactive even when the subject matter is so painful that the story is one not to be told for fun. In the hands of the gifted story-teller, Dr. Chika Ezeanya, a nightmarish tragedy turns into a finger-licking un-put-down-able treat that leaves readers wishing that there were more pages to turn at the end of the historical narrative given that history never ends.

The Interesting Narratives of Olaudah Equiano is one such captivating story of captivity and sorrow that was an instant best seller when he published it in 1792 but he largely skipped over the culture and life of his people before he was kidnapped with his sister and shipped away into enslavement in the new world. After all these years, Chika has filled this lacuna in our collective memory with a prequel tale of immense beauty clothed with suspense and narrated from the point of view of the young Olaudah.

Chika displays evidence of thorough historical research on what Cheikh Anta Diop theorized as pre-colonial black Africa. The only distinction here to her credit is that Diop painted a Negritude picture of an improbable civilization that appeared so perfect that there were no villains while Ezeanya shocks the reader into accepting the obvious reality that there is no such thing as a perfect civilization in a history characterized by widespread violence and terrorism. Readers who expect to find an un-spoilt innocence in pre-colonial Africa will be disillusioned to find that there were already unscrupulous people driven by greed to seek to profit from the sorrows of their fellows. Similarly, those seeking the heart of darkness in Africa will be shamed to find a thriving civilization in the hinterland.

What Ezeanya presented in this novel is closer to the valid historiography of Walter Rodney in The History of the Upper Guinea Coast according to which it is false propaganda to assert that Africans sold their own children into slavery like commodities. On the contrary, Africans fought bravely against the raiding kidnappers while the slave-trading chiefs of the coastal kingdoms and the fraudulent priests of the hinterland made it clear that they were not enslaving their own people because they preyed on the lower classes of peasants especially in the village democracies that colonial anthropologists dubbed ‘headless societies’ which lacked standing armies that could have more effectively protected their people from the raids by hordes armed with rum and gunpowder from evil European merchants.

The suspicion that one father sold his child was rightly frowned upon in the novel because it was not the norm in a civilization characterized by parental love and affection. This is understandable today in the sense that news of the abuse of children by priests, parents and guardians always come across as unbelievable and shocking but is never accepted as the rule for the society despite the unprecedented levels of greed and immorality in capitalist societies of today. Moreover, those who insist that there was slavery in Africa before the trans Atlantic slavery will discover that what passed for slavery in Africa at that time was partly due to the demand by European merchants and that it was clearly different in contents and context compared to chattel slavery because the enslaved were integrated into the households of the coastal chiefs whom they called their father, Etenyin, and whose wives they called mother, Eka, in the Efik language. The wives worked in the fields with their enslaved ‘children’ and gossiped openly about who was having an affair with whom. The enslaved constantly plotted their escape back to their beloved homeland to the extent that the name of the main merchant port, Calabar, has meaning in neither Efik nor English but translates literally to ‘Let us Go Home’ in the Igbo language of the majority of the enslaved.

In the narrative, Ezeanya abundantly displays one of her scholarly passions – research and advocacy for indigenous technology. For instance, the highly developed science of iron smelting and blacksmithing that the plantations of the New World coveted aggressively is carefully represented in the story against a background of courtship of young maidens who played hard to get but still yearned to be touched by the much admired apprentice blacksmith – apprenticeship being the traditional business school system that is still the mainstay of Igbo commercial competitiveness. The story also indirectly reveals the environmental un-sustainability of the blacksmithing technology that relied on the charcoaling of whole trees without a program of reforestation for future uses or the invention of gas-fired furnaces for the blacksmiths who continue to burn charcoals today.

Another indigenous knowledge system highlighted in the story is that of mental health care. Unlike the oppressive dehumanization of the mentally ill that Freud, Goffman, Fanon, Foucault and others critiqued, the mental patient in pre-colonial black Africa remained a full member of the community whose humanity was never in doubt even while undergoing treatment at the home of the healer-priest and without any obsession about the cost of treatment quite unlike the alienating asylum powered by the profit motive that Ngugi’s Wizard of the Crow rejected outright. The husband was allowed to procreate with his wife while she was being treated for a nervous breakdown whereas America recorded the hysterical fascist sterilization of tens of thousands of the poor who were deemed to be burdens on society under the ideology of eugenics. When a man claimed to hear voices and see things that other people did not hear or see, he was not locked up and when he refused to come down from a tree, his family took food and drinks to the tree from which he accurately prophesied the coming holocaust that was slavery. No one would say with Rene Descartes, ‘I think therefore I am’, as if those who did not think exactly like him were not human enough. Those that Soyinka dismissed as Neo-Tarzanists who still believe that Africans lived on tree-tops could see that only a crazy African would try that even in the past while Europeans are the ones more likely to build tree-top houses today to try and save trees from being cut down by capitalist developers.

Similarly, contrary to the white-supremacist ideology propagated by Hume, Hegel, Levis-Strauss and many others that what makes Europeans more civilized than the rest of the supposedly Barbarian cultures of the world was that Europeans had literacy while the rest had oral traditions; Ezeanya correctly demonstrates, as Derrida did in Of Grammatology, that indeed writing in general was invented by Africans and is found in all cultures today. The problem could be that the colonial anthropologist was not literate in the scripts of the other and not that the native was completely illiterate. This is a direct warning against white-supremacy in the sense that any attempt to wipe away the memory of others by wiping away their scripts usually ends with attempts to wipe out their lives as the genocide against American Indian Natives and the holocaust of trans Atlantic slavery against Africans attempted long before the Nazi holocaust followed the same script. The enslaved child who accidentally revealed that he could read the secret sacred texts of Nsibiri was instantly elevated into the elite ranks of the ruling secret societies whereas the plantation owners in the new world deliberately outlawed the learning of reading and writing among the enslaved for obvious reasons.

This Achebesque narrative of Chika Ezeanya is recommended as a treat to all lovers of fascinating tales told by an entrancing artist capable of turning a painful tragedy into a memorable adventure that is guaranteed to intrude into the normal bed times of readers and insist that the pages keep turning compulsively. It is predictable that this novel will join the ranks of modern classics as permanent features on the required reading lists for students at all levels because the language is accessible enough to appeal to the general public. Readers who reach the end with a tantalizing feeling because they want to have more pages to turn and keep reading should be consoled by the fact that the young author of this novel is certainly going to deliver more from where this one came. I can’t wait.

Professor Agozino is the Director of Africana Studies Program at Virginia Tech University, Virginia.