Appreciation for Kasala Kamara’s Tribute to African Civilization

By Biko Agozino 

I received a signed copy of A Tribute To African Civilization (Atlanta, Sene Press, 1995) from the author, Kasala Kamara, on 10/11/2006 in St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago shortly after sharing a panel with him at the Center for Black Arts and Culture conference with delegates from Nigeria. He had just spoken about the energy sector and later that evening, the Honorable PM, Patrick Manning attended an evening reception where he promised to offer help in the energy sector to Nigeria. I shook hand with him later to commend him for the policy of publicly-funded university education for the citizens. 

Some of the Nigerians came with samples of their produce - roasted groundnuts in plastic bottles but with a dose of sand. One wanted to know how he could export cashew nuts to Trinidad and Tobago. Did they not hear the Prime Minister offer help with energy sector? I asked myself. I had just arrived the country a few months earlier to take up a job as a Professor of Sociology at the University of the West Indies. Brother Kasala must have been impressed with my modest contributions as a chair of the panel in which he presented; for he wrote in the autograph to me: ‘To Brother Onwubiko Agozino Positive Vibrations’ and singed. 

That was very touching for a reggae lover like me who understood what groundings with Rasta mean by positive vibration, popularized by Bob Marley and the Wailers in that iconic song. I purposively went to the Caribbean partly to reconnect with brothers and sisters whose ancestors were kidnapped from Africa for four hundred years without any expectations that we would survive and meet again, survivors of the slave raids and survivors of slavery, survivors all. And here was a brother I was meeting for the first time, and he called me, brother. 

 When I read the book, it struck me as an original contribution to knowledge in many different disciplines. Structured into five parts, the book covers in Part I, what is now a consensus among scholars in different disciplines that Africa is the genesis of civilization, science and technology. Such a thesis was argued by Cheikh Anta Diop in the 1950s with three successive Ph.D. dissertations before he was reluctantly passed in France. Like Diop, the author maintains that Black Africa built the ancient Egyptian civilization contrary to skepticism by Eurocentric authors. Kasala went beyond Diop’s theory of state building origins in Africa by delving into his own specialization in International Relations, in which he has published several other titles, to highlight the ancient African origin of diplomacy and international law. 

 Part II highlights the contributions of Africa to the development of world spirituality, morality, ethics and wisdom and how the African conception of God is related to other contributions to civilization. Part III profiles personalities like the Pharaoh, Akhenaton, and Imhotep, the first recorded multi-genius in the world who thrived in a civilization that respected the rights of women without slavery as a mode of production, without prisons, and without racism. 

What jumped out at me most, as a criminologist, is Part IV where the author offers a definition of national security based on the welfare of the people and the roles of Africans in the development of humanism, the family and the wider world. I have cited this part of the book in several of my publications because of its alignment with the decolonization paradigm that I am credited as having helped to develop in criminology following my book on Black Women and the Criminal Justice System: Towards the Decolonisation of Victimisation and also in my book, Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason. 

In an editorial essay for the African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies which I edit for the African Criminology and Justice Association, I answered the question: ‘What is Criminology?’ And I stated that it is ‘A Control-Freak Discipline’. I was invited back to The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine to present this paper as a Keynote Address for the International Conference on Penal Abolitionism. I was told by one of the organizers that the police officers attending were eager to challenge me, and I said to them, bring it on. When one lady officer objected that the national safety officers did not like being painted as the bad guys, I responded that the same bosses that pay them also pay us scholars but the difference is that we are hired to apply our critical thinking to the order of things while they have the mandate to impose order. 

The Chief Judge of the Caribbean Court of Justice who chaired the session privately agreed with many of my recommendations. A radio DJ had made a joke earlier about my call for Reparative Justice by using it as the subject of his daily ‘Tings that make me vex’. This time, he interviewed me live on radio about my call on the Prime Minister to legalize marijuana as reported that morning in The Guardian,  and I answered those who called in to say that it was a gate-way drug by asking them to help to take it out of the gate by making it legal. 

 One of the sources that supported my critique of the obsession with controlling others by criminologists is Kasala Kamara. I cited his revelation that in ancient Egypt, it was reported to the Pharaoh that the principality of Damascus was rebelling and demanding their independence from Egypt. The advisers recommended crushing the rebellion militarily to teach a lesson to other would-be rebels but the Pharaoh invited the rebellious prince to dinner instead. 

After liming (feasting and philosophizing) with him in the royal palace, the rebel prince was asked what his people wanted. He answered that they wanted to be free to govern themselves by themselves. The Pharaoh shook his hands and told him to go and tell his people that they were now independent and free to rule themselves as they saw fit. Compare that with the constant waging of wars through invasion, enslavement, colonization, genocide, and exploitation engaged in by the imperialist West for five hundred years at a huge cost in lives to poor Europeans who were used as cannon fodder around the world and also at home where militarized policing gave rise to the BlackLivesMatter movement worldwide.  South Africa massacred poor people protesting the jailing of President Jacob Zuma for alleged 'state capture' while the proven criminals of apartheid land, gold, and diamond theft and mass murder are forgiven to walk free in a deeply corrupt South Africa.

By forgiving the rebels and granting their request for freedom, the rulers of ancient Egypt avoided putting the lives of their own soldiers at harm’s way and avoided creating enemies abroad through the mass killings of the loved ones of others. The wealth that could have been wasted in such wars were instead devoted to education, the development of canals, science, arts, architecture, medicine and philosophy in the longest lasting dynasties ever recorded in history. I was also borrowing indirectly from this book when I Directed and Produced an award-winning documentary on the banning and eventual liberation of Shouters Baptist Faith in Trinidad and Tobago. 

The documentary, ‘Shouters and the Control Freak Empire’ asked criminologists to explain what crimes the Shouters committed that made the colonial administration to proscribe them, arrest, and harass them just for praising God in their own bell-ringing ways. In accordance with the decolonization paradigm, I suggested that the Shouters were right to see themselves as people who were victimized and abused by the imperialist state for their freedom of conscience, a people who resisted non-violently by holding services secretly in the liberation struggle to regain their freedom, making them deserving of reparative justice. It premiered on Gayelle TV and later won the International Best Short Documentary Prize at the Columbia Gorge Film Festival, USA, 2011. 

 As I look back at the book and the author, I now understand better why he is named Kasala Kamara, which literally means in my Igbo language – complain (Kasala) and let it be known (Kamara), appropriate meanings for the rebellious Igbo man who led a rebellion in Guyana, and the common West African name for great teacher from whom he took his second name. However, the name could also be meaningful in other African languages. 

I came to hear from those carrying commerce that he was one of the Sixth Form student activists who supported the 1970s Black Power revolution in the country to end discrimination against people of African descent. On graduation from the St. Augustine campus of UWI in 1975, he became one of the leaders of the National Joint Action Committee and the book emerged from his 30 part radio program series that he narrated in 1988 in his capacity as Director of the Caribbean Institute of Regional Affairs and International Relations in observance of  African Liberation Day and with a commitment to the re-emergence of Africa as a leading world power. I heard that when the activists were rounded up and put on trial, a Nigerian genocidist army officer who led the genocide against the Igbo in Biafra (in which an estimated 3.1 million died in 30 months, 1967-1970) was said to have been seconded from Nigeria to be one of the military judges that tried the activists. 

I heard that he recommended the death penalty as appropriate because that was what he would do in Nigeria to coup plotters. Prime Minister Eric Williams rejected the death penalty and all but forgave the activists while implementing some of their demands to see Africans hired as bank tellers or air hostesses in Trinidad and Tobago, the only country in the world where people of African descent are officially known as Africans. 

 The forgiveness of the unforgivable is common among people of African descent who went through slavery, colonialism, apartheid, neocolonialism, and internal colonialism without seeking revenge, only reparative justice i9n accordance with the Africana philosophy of forgiveness, compared to Abrahamic traditions that rule out the forgiveness of the unforgivable, according to Derrida. Such apparent forgiveness was not rare in the Caribbean for Fidel Castro was spared after the June 26 Movement failed to capture state power and he, in turn, forgave the captured Bay Of Pigs invaders and sent them back to the US whereas Che was executed after being wounded and taken prisoner. 

Hugo Chavez was forgiven by Venezuela, the first country in the world to abolish the death penalty, and Chavez forgave the military officers who had briefly overthrown him. Granada has also released from the death row, members of the New Jewel Movement who had been sentenced to death for the killing of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and others that prompted the US to invade the country. Mandela abolished the death penalty while the killers of Chris Hani were awaiting trial and possible sentencing to death. He launched the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to hear confessions and offer forgiveness, but no offers of reparative justice there. 

 Twenty years after the Black Power revolution in Trinidad and Tobago, the July 27, 1990 uprising by Muslimeen activists again rocked the government at the Red Building in Port of Spain. Instead of detaining the leaders without trial or assassinating them as was common practice across the world, the government went to court to try and evict the group from a piece of land that they were occupying without authorization. 

If the government leaders had read this book by Kamara, they would have allowed the Muslimeen to occupy the land and grow their own dasheen or okra and things as they wanted. The government should not be evicting citizens from land where they want to grow food while the same government spends huge resources to import foreign food that the poor people may not be able to afford, or just not wanted by people who want to grow their own. 

 This book was at the back of my mind as a journalist, Nazma Muller, interviewed me for The Express Newspaper on policy options to reduce the mass violence in the beautiful country. I told her that the people were brutalized by history and so it was not surprising that they would be violent.  I suggested that the government could help to reduce the violence by ending the death penalty which brutalizes the conscience of the people, as I argued in a paper written in the country; by ending the war on drugs which escalates violence, by legalizing sex work, abortion, and same sex marriage, the prohibition of which promotes toxic masculinity, and by offering reparations to the descendants of enslaved Africans who got nothing at the end of enslavement. The corrupt, brutal, neocolonial regimes in Nigeria have been prone to be overthrown despite the use of the death penalty as a punishment for failed frequent coups. 

 I heard that some preachers preached against me at church after reading the interview but if they had read this book by Kamara, they would have agreed with at least some of my recommendations. Someone reproduced the interview as a booklet with an artist impression of my interview photograph on the cover and with the title, The Big Bad Book, with copies sent to all the banks in the country, just for so. I was informed that a credit company used the article as the cover for their annual report on bad debts. Huh? Eventually, Prime Minister Keith Rowley bowed to reason by accepting the recommendation of the Caricom Cannabis Commission to decriminalize marijuana for medical uses. I hope that the people of Trinidad and Tobago will have the courage to push for full legalization of marijuana to allow poor women and men to grow it and sell it to tourists during carnival and thereby earn legitimate wealth from which they would pay taxes, as I argued in a written submission to the commission. 

I hope that they will have the courage to abolish the death penalty as we recommended (in a joint paper with David Greenberg of New York University) published in the British Journal of Criminology. When the country of The Gambia proposed to execute 37 people at once, this paper was sent to them with the observation that it was the colonial administration that imposed the death penalty that African countries have retained long after the colonizers abolished it as barbaric in the metropole, partly because there is proof that it is not a deterrent. I hope that this was one of the reasons that made the government to suspend the mass execution. Ent (no be so)? 

 In agreement with the final Part V of the book on the present-day riches and potentials of Africa, I invited Kasala Kamara to guest teach my political sociology class for Graduate Students. The students evaluated his teaching to be of very high quality and if I had stayed longer in the country, I would have recommended that he should be hired as a permanent lecturer. Readers can support his work by asking their libraries to order copies for them if they cannot afford it. Students can also use inter-library loan to access the book and they can write to various departments on campus to raise funding to bring the author as a speaker by Zoom or in person. I recommend the book to all levels of readers. 

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

US: WE HAVE MET THE ENEMIES AND THEY ARE US

-->

 By Biko Agozino

The film, US, written, directed and co-produced by Jordan Peele, is a clever metaphor for the United States of America. The statement that ‘we have met the enemy and he is us' is attributed to popular US characters from Abraham Lincoln, to Rooselvelt and to the cartoon character, Pogo. This was repeated by the mirror image of Lupita Nyongo’s characters (Adelaide Wilson and the double, Red) who said in a strange foreign accent, ‘we are American’.

The film is a horror story with the moral that the greatest threat to the US is literally, us. It is a fact that domestic terrorism kills more people in the US than foreign terrorists every year. For African Americans, the greatest threat is fellow African Americans and for white Americans, the greatest threat is fellow white Americans.  Women killed women and children killed children in 'US'. There is evidence that people kill more of the people that they know or people who look like them than they kill total strangers or enemies.

Exceptions to this criminological law of domestic terrorism as mass ‘homeycide’ is when white people travel thousands of miles to invade and conquer indigenous people and commit genocide against them to steal their land, labor and resources. But even then, they kill lots of fellow white people to decide which group would be the ones to claim ownership over new colonies and the wealth therein. The scramble for Africa was what led to both the first and the second imperialist world wars in which an estimated 80 million, mostly white people, were killed by people who looked like them, according to W.E.B. Du Bois.

The germinal idea of the movie is that everyone has a shadow that we tend to ignore while we have fun without realizing that the shadow people are jealous of us and would like to come out of the shadows to enjoy the good things in life. The quotation of Jeremiah 11:11 may mislead many into thinking that the epidemic of violence in the world was brought by God who refuses to listen to cries for help because the people are wicked sinners. But as Ola Rotimi stated in his reinterpretation of Oedipus Rex during the genocidal war against Biafra in Nigeria, The Gods Are Not To Blame.

A father (Winston Duke as Gabe Wilson and the double Abraham) obsessed with winning fair-ground games, neglected to watch over his daughter who wandered off and found herself in an attraction spot that invited the visitor to ‘find yourself’. The distraction that digital games cause in families is imagined here. The young girl entered the house of mirrors and found her own double image who yearned to come out of the mirror and join her in the real world but she screamed and ran out of the place (or she was kidnapped by the mirror image and chained to a bed to enable her to steal the identity of the girl, a twist in the tale suggested towards the end, spoiler alert).

The trauma made the girl unable to speak until a psychiatrist advised her parents to try arts therapy and ballet classes that she ended up enjoying with the invisible shadow. Now grown up with a middle class family of her own, the woman (Lupita Nyongo) is persuaded by her rich husband to go back to the fair-ground beach for a family holiday and she reluctantly agrees. Then she realizes that she was not the only one with a living shadow, everyone is followed by a shadow that wishes to kill the original and replace them in the world with the simulacra shadow images.

The family is attacked in their holiday home by a family that looks exactly like them. ‘They are us’, they realized. In shock, they tried to run away but the shadow remained with them. They fled in their new boat to their white family friends for help when the police failed to answer their 911 calls. But they only found that the shadows of the white family had already murdered them while Alexa played 'Fuck the Police' by N.W.A. instead of calling the police as the frightened white woman had requested. The African American family that fled from their own house now fought back and killed the mass murderer white shadow clones that killed their white family friends. This is probably an allusion to the fact that people of African descent fought in the wars between European nations to save one group from being murdered by another group of white people. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Contributing to the discourse of gun control, the movie created a world without guns but the crude weapons of scissors and baseball bats, arson and spear wielded by the heroic family and the triumphant shadows dressed in red show that guns are not the only deadly weapons of mass destruction. 

The root cause of the violence, the movie suggested, is that while parents scream at their son for saying to his sister, 'Kiss my ass', the same parents were happy to invite the children to sing along to a song that glorified drugs addiction. The white family drank hard liquor as medicine but neither family ever sat down to nourish the body with food or sleep nor was there any schooling for the children. A teenage girl was congratulated by her parents for using a car as a weapon with which to kill another teenage girl that looked like her and her mother went to make sure that she was dead. Her brother set his own clone on fire by mere will power after watching his mother stab another woman to death. The father even boasted of killing himself. Something is terribly wrong with a society in which parents bragged with their children about who killed more people that looked like them.

The shadow attackers were forming a human chain by holding hands across the map of the US but holding hands represented division between humans and shadows instead of global unity. By dressing them in red, the film director may be suggesting that they represented a communist threat from a different world out there. In reality, the threat of the revenge of the mirror people is a home-grown threat, the film emphasizes, though the guttural foreign accent of the mirror people feeds into xenophobia.

The film echoes the postmodern theory of Jean Baudrillard who imagined what it would feel like for the mirror images to take a revenge against the real world or what he called the revenge of the crystal. What if virtual reality murders reality and replaces everything with the simulacrum to such an extent that what matters is the difference between good and evil and not the distinction between real and fake? He concluded that the result would be a fatal strategy according to which:

... the human being can find a greater boredom in vacations than in everyday life- a boredom intensified because comprised of all the elements of happiness and distraction. The main point is the predestination of vacations to boredom, the bitter and triumphal presentiment of its inescapability. Do people really disavow their everyday life when they seek an alternative to it ~ On the contrary, they embrace it as their fate: they intensify it in appearances of the contrary, they immerse themselves in it to the point of ecstasy, and they confirm the monotony of it by an even greater monotony. If one doesn't understand that, one understands nothing of this collective stupefaction, since it is a magnificent act of excess. l'm not joking: people don't want to be amused, they seek a fatal distraction.  – Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies.

The hidden message of the film is that if we are our own worst enemies, then we could actually secure more peace by loving ourselves more. Instead of saying that sometimes you want to kill your husband just for fixing you a drink, how about saying thanks? Instead of grabbing a baseball bat to confront the mirror image at the driveway who are probably neighbors, why not try inviting them in for a drink? Peacemaking Criminology by Pepinsky and others suggests that we can choose to go down the path of peace and reject the path of war because war leads to more violence.

Once you know that the people attacking you are your mirror images, why not smile and say that the only way they could hurt you is if you hurt yourself because they are just mimic people. Unfortunately, the real world glamorizes suicide and warfare more than loving acts of kindness and so there are no Love Institutes around the world where Military Schools are preferred. Love the enemy as yourself because sometimes you are your own worst enemy, implied Martin Luther King Jr., following the gospel of Jesus Christ.

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

Liberation Sociology

Colleagues,

I was told that Joe Feagin mentioned me in his Plenary at the Southern Sociological Society meeting last year. This year, the Third Edition of his Liberation Sociology text has just come out from Paradigm Publishers and I am one of the sociologists profiled multiple times in the book. As if this is not enough honor for me, I am credited in the book as developing a paradigm that the authors called 'Liberation Criminology: The Decolonization Paradigm' which was highlighted in a couple of pages of their book.

https://paradigm.presswarehouse.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=409713

I recommend the book to all social scientists and all those working to make the world a better place. Here is my personal description of the book:

Numerous sociologists have exhaustively analyzed multiple systems of oppression that plague society in many ways; the entire point, however, to paraphrase some pioneer liberation sociologists, is to free the entire global society from all systems of oppression. Enter Liberation Sociology as a major contribution from a long line of critical activist intellectuals who were mostly sidelined by mainstream bourgeois sociologists until Joe Feagin and colleagues courageously came out with the eye-opening innovative eponymous text. Now in its third edition, it comes with extensive highlighting of even more contributions from hitherto relatively marginalized critical sociologists for the benefit of every discipline of social science and as a contribution to the liberation of the entire global society from all systems of oppression.

This kind of recognition did not happen overnight but resulted from the support of colleagues that deserve to be mentioned: Thanks to you all for making this happen especially in the ASC round-table review of Counter-Colonial Criminology that we later published in maiden issue of our journal, African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies, that I continue to edit as the founding editor-in-chief. Professor Ihekwoaba Onwudiwe started the ball rolling in 1998 when he reviewed my first book, Black Women and the Criminal Justice System (which started the Ashgate Publishers Interdisciplinary Research Series in Ethnic, Gender and Class Relations that I continue to edit), and identified what he called the Decolonization paradigm as my major contribution.

In 1995, an excerpt from the doctoral dissertation that led to the book was awarded the Mike Brake Memorial Prize in Radical Social Policy and Social work by an international jury of eminent scholars. This was followed by Professor Shaun Gabbidon in 2007 when he devoted several pages to my work in one of his book. Then Professor Emmanuel Onyeozili had the audacity  to mention my name in the same sentence as intellectual giants in his contribution to the round-table review. Dr. Mark Christian was generous in the African Studies Review for crediting Counter-Colonial Criminology with making an original contribution to the discipline of Black Studies even while critiquing the choice to focus on feminist theory rather than on Africana Womanism. Professor Temitope Oriola followed up (whilst still a graduate student) with that rave review essay on Counter-Colonial Criminology that credited me with founding Post-Colonial Criminology and colleagues from around the world kept it up as you can see from the current special issue of our journal honoring the 10th anniversary of Counter-colonial Criminology. May others support your work the way you have supported mine

Biko

Libraries Are Full of Lies: 8 Tips for Researchers in Africa

-->

Biko Agozino

They are called libraries because libraries are full of lies. When next you consult your library catalog, search for the keyword, lies, and you will get numerous hits.  The biggest library lie is the suggestion that the truth only lies in libraries waiting to be excavated, so be careful about online sources, they warn. The knowledge society of today has exposed that lie enough for researchers to know better but the allure of tradition still holds many brilliant minds captive and makes them skeptical about sources of knowledge beyond the walls of libraries. Here are some tips for scholars who do not have access to well-stocked libraries:

1.     An African colleague once asked an online forum for suggestions of books on a topic to help a graduate student under his supervision who could not find relevant publications on a certain topic. This is a common assumption among doctoral students – that they are always the first to chance on an uncharted territory even though we know that there is nothing new under the sun. I in-boxed the colleague on Face Book and suggested that he should have the graduate student do a Google search on the topic and then narrow down by selecting ‘More’ and then selecting ‘Books’ to see many recent book publications on the topic. As an example, I copied and pasted the web address for a search that I did on the topic and the books displayed. The colleague wrote back to verify if I was trying to spam him or infect his computer with a virus by asking him to click on the search results that I pasted? I responded that he did not have to click on my results, he should just replicate the steps and he will find similar results. I reassured him that Google Books often offers previews of many relevant books that students can read and decide if to order the book. I never heard back from the colleague since then despite the fact that we were college mates and friend each other on FB. Was it something that I said?

2.     Another African colleague complained recently that a university of technology where he works has no library worth that name and that the few reference materials in the library were not properly archived, making it impossible for his students to find any relevant materials. Again I suggested that he should ask his students to try Google Books search to help them. However, he said that in the natural sciences, they value refereed journal articles more than books. In that case, I suggested that they get their university libraries to subscribe to databases such as Proquest, Project Muse (for the arts), or EBSCO-HOST to enable them to access full texts of journal articles online. Individual subscriptions may also be cheaper. He told me that he had been looking for a 1985 journal article that is crucial for his teaching but could not find it. I Googled the title of the article and came up with nothing...

3.     So I tried another strategy. I did a Google Scholar search on the name of the lead author and the article came up. I clicked on it and my college library allowed me access to the article online. In case your college library does not subscribe to the particular journal, a Google Scholar search on the author might throw up other articles written by the same author that may cover similar grounds and that may be openly accessible on the internet.

4.     A simple Google web keyword search will also throw up PDF copies of complete documents that could be downloaded and read for academic use. And many authors place their personal copies of their articles in PDF format under their personal websites to be found through a general Google search. Other search engines also throw up stuff but Google stands out for me by adding specialized book and scholar searches. Thank you Google!

5.     I have also received requests from Law Professors in Africa asking for suggestions on journals to submit their articles for possible publication. I tell them that almost every university with a law school in the US also has a Law Review Board that is edited by the students but with publications by professors. For instance, Barrack Obama was the President of the Harvard Law Review Board when he was a student. I advise them to search online and read articles in the Law Reviews and see if their own article could fit in.

6.     More importantly, I advise them to encourage their own students to establish their own on-line Law Review Journals and start publishing articles through their university websites. Such publications will have more respectability if they regularly publish top scholars and if they do not make them seem like vanity publishing by charging authors hefty sums the way many open access journals are doing now. Feminist Africa is a highly respected scholarly online journal that was launched by the Nigerian scholar, Amina Mama and colleagues at the University of Cape Town. Many top journals in the medical sciences now regularly publish many articles online as well as in hard copies but commercial publishers still require subscriptions before a full access to contents.

7.     Online archives of complete books for academic uses can also be found in sites like the Gutenberg Project and Marxism.org. A search for an author followed by comma and then by Gutenberg Project may show whether that author has books already archived. A search for any work by major Marxists from around the world may indicate that the complete text or major portion is already archived online for fair use by scholars. Marxism.org reported last year that publishers had challenged them to take down the links because they claimed to hold the copyrights to the complete works but many users persuaded the publishers to back off because the online versions do not compete with the hard copies since many of those who use the online versions may already have hard copies too.

8.     With internet technology serving as what someone called the digital talking drum, African scholars should seek to bring the many journals they have been struggling to publish epileptically in hard copies with limited resources online to cut costs drastically and reach a wider audience. For example, the African Criminology and Justice Association launched its online journal, African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies and I have been serving as the founding Editor in Chief since 2005. Authors do not pay to publish in it and it is openly accessible to readers worldwide. It is also archived by the Africa Knowledge Project along with other Africa themed journals on philosophy, gender, arts, and West Africa that AKP supplies to subscribers.

Although public libraries originated in Africa more than 7,000 years ago following the invention of writing in Africa, it is unfortunate to note that up-to-date libraries are less likely to be found in Africa today and ancient texts that survived in Timbuktu recently ran the risk of being burnt by fanatics due to our peculiar history of arrested development.  Arise and organize discovery, do not agonize! A mind is a terrible thing to waste and the most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed because if you control the minds of a people, you need not worry about what actions they may take, warned several African ancestors.

Press Release on Black Unemployment

Press Release: African Criminology and Justice Association Policy Proposal on Black Unemployment

The unemployment rate for African Americans (16.7%) has been reported to be at its highest level since 1984.[i] At nearly double the national average (9.1%) or over double the rate for white Americans (8%), the members of the African Criminology and Justice Association, meeting in Washington DC, November 2011, hereby vote to propose feasible policies for the elimination of such a scandalous level of unemployment among African Americans in particular and Africans in general who were always at the receiving end of hardship even in 1984 when unemployment was lower than it is today.

Source: Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2011.

We disagree with the rightwing proposal of Mr. Arthur Laffer, chairman of Laffer Associates, who is co-author, with Stephen Moore, of "Return to Prosperity: How America Can Regain Its Economic Superpower Status" (Threshold, 2010).[ii] In an opinion editorial article published in The Wall Street Journal of September 12, 2011, Mr. Laffer called for the creation of ‘Enterprize Zones’ in the inner cities where a) There should be zero payroll tax on employers employing people who live in the inner city zone; b) The minimum wage legislation would be suspended; c) Building codes in the zone should be audited quickly with the view not to constrain entrepreneurs and union membership requirements should be suspended; and d) Profits from the zone should be taxed at one-third the normal tax rate.

Such a policy of sweat-shop zones in American inner cities would make matters worse by turning our fellow citizens into working poor who would be trapped in unsafe working conditions with less than minimum wages while corporate fat cats would enjoy tax holidays. Mr. Laffer’s ludicrous suggestions would only take African Americans back to the years of share-cropping with all the attendant oppression, exploitation and impunity. There must be a better way for African Americans and indeed for all people of African descent.

First of all, we call on President Obama and all the presidents of African countries to look beyond the Jobs Bill and consider an entrepreneurship bill for African Americans and all Africans. Obama needs to set aside at least $50 billion from the proposed Jobs Bill (estimated at $470b) to be disbursed to unemployed Americans to enable them to set up their own small and medium businesses. The same way that the government gives out huge grants as agricultural subsidies and business start-ups for the richest one per cent, we call on the government to initiate enterprise subsidies for the urban poor. 

We commend the governor of Anambra State in Nigeria, Mr. Peter Obi, for disbursing one hundred million naira to a thousand unemployed youth after their training to help them to be self-employed. We urge him to make this an annual part of the budget and not a one off and to increase the size of the checks given to some to enable them to become medium to large-scale entrepreneurs. Governor Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State in Nigeria has also implemented a similar grants program worth about fifty million naira while the federal government announced that it has fifty billion naira set aside for similar purposes. 

We condemn the plan of Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich to turn poor inner city school children into janitors and toilet cleaners for their schools in the guise of training them as apprentices on the assumption that poor children have no work ethics even though poor people are the hardest working people.

The entrepreneurship policy we advocate will work as follows: select 1000 unemployed citizens from each state and send them to be trained as apprentices by successful businesses. On completion of the short apprenticeship, award each of them one million dollars to set up their own enterprises. If each of them goes on to employ 100 people, that will be 5,000,000 new jobs every year! Repeat this every year and we will be creating millions of jobs every decade while making sure that the wealth created will stay in our communities to help transform the urban neighborhoods into zones of prosperity. The Hip Hop generation has been telling us that they are not into seeking jobs to work for Massa anymore, they want to be their own bosses and our simple and practical proposal will help to do this quickly and save the economy too. The government already does this to bail out Wall Street, it is time to bail out the street corner too.

We support the current Occupy Movement that is sweeping across the world but we go beyond the call to occupy Wall Street and to occupy cities to call for the occupation of the prison industrial complex. The excessive incarceration of African Americans and other minorities is helping to fuel to job crisis because corporations that rely on prison labor would be unlikely to hire free labor until we end the inhumanity of what Michelle Alexander[iii] aptly dubbed The New Jim Crow and free the captives from the unjust drug wars, decriminalize all drugs and restore the voting rights of all felons.

Across Africa, unemployed youth are increasingly being drawn into violent armed robbery and kidnapping for ransom gangs. We believe that have every African state implement our entrepreneurship policy proposal would result in massive wealth creation and possible reduction of street violence across Africa. Every industrialized country gives out massive grants to spur entrepreneurship while African countries neglect the creative talents that abound in Africa and only call on developed countries to end subsidies to their own entrepreneurs.

With the decriminalization of drugs and the ending of the war against African Americans in the guise of the war on drugs, as we have called for in a previous Press Release, many of the youth who may not get grants to start their own businesses could grow their own marijuana and sell them legally to medical patients and recreational users alike, pay taxes on their sales, create jobs that will pay well and end the ‘homey-cidal’ violence that is associated with the war on drugs. We can rely on education to get our fellow citizens to say no to drugs the same way we do with more dangerous drugs like alcohol and tobacco which kill more people than all the illicit drugs put together.[iv]

---

[i] ‘Black unemployment at highest level in 27-years’ Chicago Tribune, September 2, 2011.

[ii] Arthur, Laffer, ‘How to Fight Black Unemployment: The tragedy of the failed stimulus is felt hard in minority communities. There's a better way.’ Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2011.

[iii] Alexander, M. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, New York, New Press, 2010.

[iv] Rieman, J. (1979). The Rich Get Rich and The Poor Get Poorer. New York: Wiley.