One Hundred Years of Lumumba, Fanon, and Malcolm: Concerning Non-Violence

By Onwubiko Agozino 

 Abstract: 

100 years after the birth of Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Patrice Lumumba, let us be reminded that they were all advocates of the Africana philosophy of non-violence. Fanon was a psychiatrist who analyzed violence as a symptom of mental illness, and he prescribed revolutionary literature as the tool with which to educate and mobilize the peasant masses in the countryside. Malcolm prescribed that people should choose the ballot and not the bullet by joining civic organizations like the NAACP. And Lumumba campaigned against the use of corporal punishment by the violent criminal justice system of the colonizers in Colonie Belge - the cover design of my book, Counter-Colonial Criminology. As the African Union yearns for the guns to be silenced across Africa while the insurgencies rage across the wretched continent; and lumpen bourgeois politicians spend hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons from imperialist countries to kill fellow Africans in genocidal proportions, I advance the innovative interpretation that Lumumba, Fanon, and Malcolm were all adherents of the philosophy of Ubuntu as the non-Western path for the development of democracy in Africa. Both Edwin Madunagu and Joe Slovo have written to support the strategy of social democratic peoples revolutions., rather than wait for the armageddon of armed struggles as the only means necessary. From the perspective of organic intellectuals, books are mightier than bombs!

 Narrative: 

"Contrary to the Malcolm myth, violence was not a major part of Malcolm's program for building revolutionary politics in the West....Malcolm was not advocating violence but completely rejecting nonviolence because of his radical understanding of the real world" - Kehinde Andrews (2025) Nobody Can Give You Freedom: The Political Life of Malcolm X, London, Allen Lane, p. 78.

100 years after the birth of Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Patrice Lumumba in 1925, let us be reminded that they were all advocates of the Africana philosophy of non-violence. Fanon was a psychiatrist who analyzed violence as a symptom of mental illness and he prescribed revolutionary literature as the tool with which to educate and mobilize the peasant masses in the countryside, lest the 'phantom bourgeoisie' seize control of the new nation and continue the oppressive exploitation of the masses. Malcolm prescribed that people should choose the ballot and not the bullet by joining civic organizations like the NAACP and progressive religious organizations. 

Lumumba campaigned against the use of corporal punishment by the violent criminal justice system of the colonizers and privileged the call for reparations rather than retaliation. In his Independence Day speech, he stated as follows:

"We shall institute in the country a peace resting not on guns and bayonets but on concord and goodwill." https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/lumumba/1960/06/independence.htm

In his 'Address to Congolese Youth', August, 1960, Lumumba stated clearly:

"Young people who have been inactive and exploited for a long time have now become aware of their role of standard-bearer of the peaceful revolution."

https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/lumumba/1960/08/youth.htm

And in his Address to the All African Congress in Leopoldville, August 25, 1960 Lumumba emphasized his message of peace as follows:

"We are acutely in need of peace and concord, and our foreign policy is directed towards co-operation, loyalty and friendship among nations. We want to be a force of peaceful progress, a force of conciliation. An independent and united Africa will make a large and positive contribution to world peace. But torn into zones of hostile influence, she will only intensify world antagonism and increase tension." 

https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/lumumba/1960/08/25.htm

To emphasize the armed struggle today in the neocolonial situation across Africa means to kill fellow Africans with weapons of mass destruction supplied by former colonizers to facilitate the extraction of African mineral wealth. That is why some call it homeycide - the killing of homies! I survived one such genocidal violence in Biafra as a Biafra Baby, 1967-1970, costing 3.1 million lives in 30 months, or 100,000 per month, mainly through the use of 'starvation as a legitimate weapon of war', as claimed by Nigerian government officials who were diplomatically and militarily aided by the UK Labour Party government and by the Soviet Union.

When I posted this message to a radical sociology discussion group and to an African discourse group online, I received strong opposition that convinced me that the thesis needs to be tested in an extensive research project for a book monograph. A response quickly followed from a graduate student at a flagship state university in the US, telling me that he was an admirer of all three brothers and therefore could not stomach my revisionism to suggest that they were advocates of nonviolence. He said that my revision of their work to emphasize non-violence could only be true ‘… if one exempts defensive violence (self-defense, overthrow of colonialism and Jim Crow) from "violence." He went on to assert that ‘Fanon's "Wretched of the Earth" is a magnificently argued call for killing the colonizer, both mentally and physically.’ He added that Malcolm had no problem with violent self-defense, “By any means necessary”, including violent defense. He credited Lumumba with being a founding member of FRELIMO, “an organization dedicated to armed struggle to achieve Mozambique national independence.” Then he alluded to the claim by Malcolm that only the Black revolution claims to be a non-violent revolution whereas the American, French and Russian revolutions were very bloody. “The perpetrators of these revolutions are considered national and international heroes” he claimed, and added that “Fanon, Malcolm, and Lumumba asserted that Africans in America and in Africa had the same rights as white people.” In conclusion, he stated as follows: “Surely, it alters their contributions to say they were non-violent.” Yet he signed off with the greeting: ‘peace’ before his name. 

Another brother quoted Malcolm, in the African Dialogue Series, from his1963 Message to the Grassroots in Detroit to say:

"There’s nothing in our book, the Koran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery. That’s a good religion. In fact, that’s that old-time religion. That’s the one that Ma and Pa used to talk about: an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, and a head for a head, and a life for a life: That’s a good religion. And nobody resents that kind of religion being taught but a wolf, who intends to make you his meal.!" 

But Malcolm did not take any life (that we know of) in revenge for the lynching of his father, he did not drive anyone crazy the way his mother was institutionalized, he did not burn any home in retaliation for the fire-bombing of his home, and he did not burn any church in retaliation for the 50 bombing explosions between 1947 and 1965, including the killing of three black girls in church in 'Bombingham', Alabama. He said that he loved a white man to the amazement of Manning Marable, but Frederick Douglass also said that he loved that overseer who whipped him for learning to read the Bible. Malcolm apparently forgave his enemies, in my humble opinion, perhaps so that the All Merciful may forgive him his own sins!

 I responded to the brother as follows: I agree with you that self-defense is no offense by any means necessary. I propose to read the Africana classics more strategically. Reading The Wretched of the Earth strategically, I propose to test the hypothesis that Fanon, the psychiatrist, emphasized that the frequency of the violence of the colonizers was causal in relation to the violence of the colonized mainly against their own brothers and sisters; if x then y; if you do not wish to see y, then prevent x. It was the violence of the colonizers that drove Africans nuts and also drove the violent colonizers insane. It is still happening today all over neocolonial Africa and in the inner cities of internal colonies in the Diaspora, just as the colonial violence drove Europeans insane enough to embark on their tribal world wars over the greed for colonies in Africa that killed an estimated 80 million people, despite the warnings of Rosa Luxemburg and W.E.B. Du Bois against imperialism and its reckless greed for resources. 

 Moreover, when Fanon joined the national liberation movement after quitting his impossible job as a colonial psychiatrist, he dedicated himself to diplomacy, intellectual and moral leadership as a theorist and not as a suicide bomber. Same can be said about the rest of us intellectuals who write books rather than throw bombs. Antonio Gramsci concluded that even the bourgeoisie rules by coerced consent mostly (though not without threat of force) whereas when imperialists resort to violence, it is proof that they had lost the hegemonic struggle.

 Brother Malcolm never killed anyone that we know of. When asked if it was true that the Nation of Islam calls for violence as a means for achieving freedom in America, Malcolm X replied that 'we are not a violent group, we are taught to obey the law, but we are also taught that we reserve the right to defend ourselves against violence...we have never bombed white churches' unlike the white supremacist groups, and yet the propaganda of violence is attributed to the Nation of Islam but not to whites, he said.

I propose to analyze his speeches to explain why he answered the provocative question that agents provocateurs may have posed to him, 'By the Ballot or By the Bullet?' By the ballot, he chose even while defending the right to self-defense in a country where the right to bear arms is guaranteed by the liberal Constitution. 

There is no principle of armed violence in the 10-point program of the Black Panthers. Instead, they emphasized the principle of arming the people with knowledge, according to its former President, Elaine Brown, who gave this retort to a white woman who asked her why the Panthers fetishized the carrying of guns at a conference in the Schomberg Center, New York Public Library - carrying a gun did not make you a revolutionary or police officers will be the biggest revolutionaries, she said. Rather, the Panthers preferred to watch cops to make sure they did not abuse their enormous powers, they organized free breakfast programs for poor students, and organized free medical care for the poor while encouraging people to register to vote. To them, self defense included legal defense in courts, marches, and rallies. Often, the protests of the Panthers were nonviolent until the cops and the FBI started rioting.

 Same thing goes for Lumumba who called on the United Nations to send troops to defend the restoration of independence in the Congo. During the struggle for the restoration of independence, he campaigned against the violence of the colonizers and demanded reparative justice, just like Fanon, without calling for violence as a principle in the struggle to regain independence. 

Both FRELIMO and the ANC started as non-violent organizations before the violence of the colonizers drove them to adopt armed struggles which were suspended to allow for negotiations. Those African states that were forced to adopt the armed struggle as a tactic do not compare more favorably with those that adopted the non-violent positive action of Nnamdi Azikiwe and his mentee, Kwame Nkrumah; though Nkrumah later wrote the Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare after being overthrown by the same neocolonial army of occupation that he commanded. 

What the brothers were teaching us is evident today - wherever Africana people are armed, they tend to use the arms to kill one another in genocidal proportions while western arms companies laugh at us all the way to their banks with huge profits. On the other hand, those who have adopted the Ubuntu philosophy or what Jacques Derrida called the forgiveness of the unforgivable (to which Tutu responded that there is no such thing as the unforgivable under Ubuntu), such as Columbia after the bloody civil war from 1958-2016, or Northern Ireland after the troubles, have reaped greater dividends than those who continued fratricidal violence with western weapons of mass destruction in places like Biafra, Rwanda, Congo, Somalia, Sudan, Mali, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Niger, Nigeria, Algeria, Western Saharawi, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Angola, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Uganda, etc. 

The Abrahamic religions of the Book may claim to be the genesis of non-violence and forgiveness, but Derrida demonstrated that each of them also made exceptions for that which is unforgivable and each holy book is full of violent scenes. Only the Africana tradition, according to him, tends to forgive the unforgivable. Tutu and Tutu retorted that there is no such thing as the unforgivable under Ubuntu. The Igbo symbolize it with Mbari ritual architecture, according to Achebe, Martin Luther King Jr analogized it with the Great World House (preferring a beloved community to chaos, though Africans and modern architects and engineers use the system of African Fractals to integrate chaos into their designs for improved public safety - sometimes it is better to deconstruct the old house and rebuild on a new foundation, according to Ron Eglash), Rasta dub it One Love, and Rwanda calls it Gacaca. Gandhi admitted that he learned the experiments with truth from the warlike Zulu who taught him about non-violent resistance.

 I propose that non-violence, the philosophy that Gandhi claimed that he learned from the warlike Zulu, is one of the greatest contributions of Africans to world civilization. African languages have no word for violence but they all have expressions for peace! Kassala Kamara attributed its origin to classical African civilization when the rulers of Kemet granted independence to the rebellious principality of Damascus rather than seek to crush their rebellion. Maulana Karenga illustrated it with the case of the eloquent peasant who used logic to seek the recovery of his stolen property rather than take up arms against the government officials that robbed him. Chinua Achebe illustrated this with the case of Ezulu, the Chief Priest in Arrow of God who used non-violent battle of wits and a hunger strike to resist being forced to become a colonial chief among the democratic Igbo who brag that they know no kings. 

 Even Karl Marx, according to Friedrich Engles' preface to the first English edition of Capital, observed that a non-violent revolution, such as the abolition of slavery, was possible in England, provided that the enslavers did not launch a pro-slavery rebellion as they did in the US. I propose to test the original hypothesis about the centrality of non-violence in Africana civilizations. Rasta philosophy of One Love will back me up with the example of how Bob Marley refused to call ‘Babylonian’ forces to arrest the youth man who came to ask for forgiveness for having tried to assassinate him. One Love for All! Peace and Love! Can this philosophy be extended to resolve the insurgencies ravaging Africa today from state violence to Boko Haram, ISWA, and al Shabab militants? Mandela demonstrated the love for the enemy by jointly accepting the Nobel Prize for Peace with DeKlerk who had held him in prison..

Conclusion:

 Steve Biko denied instigating violence as alleged by the apartheid prosecutor in court. He was accused of calling for the people to confront apartheid. Biko answered that he was being confronted by the prosecutor but there was no violence in the court room. Anyone who wishes to ‘waste … time in sterile litanies and the nauseating mimicry’ of the European tradition of genocidal violence will need to re-read more carefully the conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth where Dr. Fanon, the psychiatrist, precisely and unambiguously prescribed repeatedly that we should shun violence as follows: 

"Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration." - Fanon, Conclusion, The Wretched of the Earth.

What Fanon, Lumumba, and Malcom preferred were war against illiteracy and diseases in Africa, the erasure of the colonial boundaries that divided and weakened Africans enough to incite xenophobic violence against fellow Africans who are suspected of stealing jobs and women, psychological healing of the slow-healing wounds of hundreds of years of terrible torture against Africans, party building for social democracy, and agrarian revolution to feed the people with adequate funding for infrastructures.  Walter Rodney stated in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa that when the colonizers pretended that there was no money for education, the Africans tasked themselves to build schools. C.L.R. James emphasized that the most important achievement by Nkrumah was the National School Movement.  

Azikiwe knew this when he recommended young men like Nkrumah to go abroad for the golden fleece of further education, and he called for scientific methods to be adopted by Africans in all their affairs. Awolowo introduced free primary school education in Western Nigeria but went on to commit the infamy of justifying the use of 'starvation as a legitimate weapon of war' during the genocidal war against the Igbo in Biafra that killed 3.1 million people in 30 months. Steve Biko identified the mind of the oppressed as the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressors, and South African students demanded that fees must fall. Ngugi called for the decolonization of the African mind. W.E.B. Du Bois called it a necessity to ensure that at least 10% or the talented tenth were given the chance to pursue higher education to help lead the Pan African Movement. Both Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey agreed that education is the key to uplift the people of African descent! Down with Militarism!

Happy 100 Years Birthdays to Lumumba, Fanon, and Malcom! Peace and Love!

"I lost so many peers

I shed so many tears!

Too many of my homies

In the cemeteries

I shed so many tears!"  

So Many Tears - Tupac.

Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061

Marxism in Africana Studies

 

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.

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani on Her Slave-Trading Grandfather

Adaobi Nwaubani narrates in the NewYorker the fact that there is hurt in every family that is self-inflicted. Having the humility to confess past wrongs and ask for forgiveness is part of the healing. Having the courage to forgive those who wronged you frees you from the resentment which Mandela called a poison that you take and hope that it kills your enemy. Desmond Tutu teaches that there is nothing that is unforgivable and there is no one who does not have something to be forgiven. Africans have forgiven the unforgivable crimes of 400 years of slavery, 100 years of colonization and 70 years of apartheid but some Africans still find it difficult to ask for forgiveness or to forgive members of their family for past wrongs. What Adaobi described is going on all the time in Igboland where the belief in witchcraft is not as pronounced as in some other cultures. Instead of hunting for witches to blame for your misfortune, the Igbo are encouraged to look inward and see if there are things that need atonement or to ask their Chi for a better deal. Adaobi's family did not kill or exile the adopted child of an enslaved ancestor but forgave him even after he was suspected of plotting to poison a leader of the family. Okonkwo was also told off by Achebe for killing Ikemefuna, a child that called him Papa, just because an oracle told him to do so. The Igbo have no history of raiding their neighbors for slavery or to execute genocide in order to colonize their land. They believe in letting the Eagle perch and letting the Kite perch. Egbe belu Ugo belu.

My Great-Grandfather, the Nigerian Slave-Trader African intellectuals tend to blame the West for the slave trade, but I knew that white traders couldn’t have lo...

Igbo culture, like all cultures, is not perfect. Culture is not defined as a way of life, contrary to colonial anthropology. Culture is defined by Cabral, Ngugi, Hall and James as a struggle between the forces of domination and the forces of liberation. The way poor people live under capitalism, the way women live under patriarchy, and the way that black people live under racism is not the way they chose to live as a way of life but represent the conditions that they did not choose, conditions imposed by law and tradition, under which they struggle to make history. Osu and Ohu emerged among the Igbo as a consequence of 400 years of being raided as prey during the European trans Atlantic slavery that cost an estimated 100 million lives to Africa, according to Du Bois. The Igbo, unlike their neighbors, had no kings and chiefs, nor did they have standing armies to defend them against slave raiders and kidnappers or with which to raid their neighbors; and that was why they were the predominant group of people captured for sale from what Europeans called the slave coast, according to Douglas Chambers, Murder in Montpelier: The Igbo Africans in Virginia. Despite the blight of Ohu and Osu (outlawed by Azikiwe in the 1950s) on the egalitarian Igbo system of direct democracy, the fact remains that the Igbo survived the impacts of the slave raids, colonialism, and post-colonial genocide very remarkably. We are survivors, sang Bob Marley and the Wailers.

The question that Adaobi is raising is the old one of how could Africans sell their own into slavery? This was the question that Walter Rodney tackled in his doctoral dissertation on the History of Upper Guinea Coast. He concluded that what happened during the 400 years of the African holocaust was the process of class formation and primitive accumulation. The few chiefs who sold fellow Africans did not regard the war captives as their own people because they belonged to a different class or to a different nation. It was not a trade of the sort where parents put their own children on the shelf to say that these ones are toro-toro, those ones are shishi-shishi, and those other ones are nai-nai pence. It was a long-running war of pillage and the hunting of labor in black skin that Marx condemned in Das Kapital. It is true that some African elites benefited from the enslavement of Africans just as some African elites continue to benefit from the looting of African resources today but the vast majority of the Igbo and other Africans have always been activists against oppression and the main beneficiaries were Europeans from royal families down to pirates. The fact that the wounds of slavery are slow to heal in Igboland is evidence that the Europeans still owe reparations to the survivors of the European slavery. Adaobi's family is showing the way by apologizing to those they hurt in their family and asking for forgiveness from the ancestors. When will Europeans make atonement for crimes against humanity?

Another Guyanese writer, Karen King-Aribisala, posed the same Rodneyian question in her novel, The Hangman's Game, in which a Guyanese professor of linguistics who was married to a Nigerian and who lived under a brutal military dictatorship that was killing fellow Nigerians with impunity, posed the question in the novel: how could Africans sell their own for 400 years? In the novel, her Nigerian husband retorted by asking, how could she write a novel today about a slave rebellion and still make the enslaved lose instead of giving them victory in her fiction? She protested that it was a historical novel but her husband encouraged her to revise the history. The pain of the African Diaspora is real and sometimes I get it from students in the US or in the Caribbean, were you not those who sold us? To which I would answer that I would never have sold anyone, I would have been among the warriors and freedom fighters who did fight back with sticks and stones against guns to try and save us from being captured as Olauda Equiano narrated and as Rodney documented in historical accounts written by even some Europeans. 

Chinweizu, in The West and the Rest of Us, disputes the 419 propaganda by the British that they came to fight against slavery in Arochukwu and that that was why they burnt the Long Juju. Chinweizi said that that was not true because by that time, the slave trade that the British and other Europeans had initiated had come to an end and that the British were only after the trade in palm oil that they wanted to monopolize in order to dictate prices against the interests of the middlemen in the interior. It is true that there are always saboteurs and collaborators in any system of oppression especially one that lasted for more than 400 years but it is not smart to blame the survivors for the massive crimes against humanity committed by Europeans against Africans. Frantz Fanon said that Europe owes massive reparations to people of African descent at home and abroad. Chinweizu also agrees that reparations are due since people of African descent appear to be the only survivors of historic wrongs that have not been offered any form of reparations and not even apologies simply because of racism. 

Adaobi played into this by starting her opinion with a doubt as to whether Africans deserve reparations given that Africans, like all human beings, have also hurt one another. Africans never traveled thousands of miles to enslave others for 400 years and colonize the survivors for another 100 years and ridiculously turn round to say that Africans owe them billions, according to Ekwe-Ekwe in Africa 2001. In Specters of Marx, Derrida agreed that Africans deserve to have the unpayable international debts cancelled. It is time for Europe to start paying back the debts owed to Africa and the Caribbean countries are demanding such reparations from European enslavers. It is high time that the African states joined the demand for reparations even while recognizing that, like all human beings, we have also hurt ourselves in our struggle for survival and we should ask for forgiveness the way that Mathew Kerekou visited an African American church, knelt down and asked for forgiveness for the role of Dahomey in the capture and enslavement of fellow Africans..

The vexing question was posed repeatedly by Henry Louis Gates in his infamous documentary for the BBC, Wonders of the African World, where he asked market women in Ghana what it felt like to meet a descendant of one of those that her ancestors sold into slavery. Gates never asked a similar question to the white BBC crew or to any white person he met, how does it feel to work with the descendant of those that your ancestors enslaved? Many poor whites resent such questions and claim that they did not benefit directly from slavery even though they did benefit directly and indirectly from the national wealth created by slave labor. It was poor whites who were the crew of the slave ships, who fought the American civil war to keep slavery going, and it is poor whites who join the KKK and the police to terrorize the survivors of slavery today in defense of white privilege without knowing that they too pay the price for white supremacy since injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, according to Martin Luther King Jr. Reparations for slavery will not come out of the pockets of poor whites but would be paid as percentages of the GDP which would have gone to corporate welfare and not necessarily to the poor. Europeans and North Americans should follow the example of Adaobi's family and ask for forgiveness from Africans, they should offer reparations too.

Adaobi's family should go beyond the annual singing of Psalms for forgiveness and endow scholarships for the children of their estranged family descendants of the adopted Nwaokonkwo. Education is the key to lifting the poor from poverty. The reason why a widow died and her children died mysteriously could be due to infections in a country where the life expectancy is 50 years. Adaobi's cousin was right that this sounds like the story of the bogeyman with which naughty children are warned to eat their greens or else. Africans should invest more in research to find cures for tropical diseases instead of simply praying for forgiveness for past wrongs. Families that educate their sons and daughters to the highest levels tend to thrive better whether they are Ohu, Osu or Amaala. Education is the key to the healing of the wounds of slavery in Africa. 

With more emphasis on education for which the Igbo are the leading achievers in Nigeria, people like Adaobi will make friends with more school mates irrespective of their family backgrounds and Adaobi may learn the Igbo language enough to understand the meaning of names. Her family name, Nwaubani does not mean someone from the coastal area, it is the name of King Ja Ja of Opobo who rose from 'slavery' to become king over the community of his master to show that it was not really slavery and whose name was actually, JoJo Ubani or someone who was wealthy in real estates: Uba is wealth and Ani is land. Similarly, the name of the town that they changed, Umuojameze, does not mean that the oracle is king. On the contrary, it means that the children of the flute, Oja, know no king, Ama eze. It is the Igbo egalitarian philosophy that the Igbo know no king but it is understandable that after the military imposed chiefs on Igbo ommunitiues in 1976 under the dictatorship of Obasanjo, those who wanted to be kings might be embarrassed by a name that said that the Igbo know no king.

Biko Agozino

NB: The following opinion editorial in response to this blog post may interest some:

https://www.sunnewsonline.com/igbo-cosmology-the-meaning-of-ubani/

Biko

Lost Path: Sociology of Depression

By Biko Agozino

On December 23, 2016, a young Nigerian Engineer contacted me by email to say that his Uncle, a Professor of Chemistry at the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, Nigeria, recommended that he should interview me for a video documentary on ‘getting lost’ or depression from a Sociological perspective. Having written a book chapter on ‘Postcolonialism and Insanity’ in the past, I quickly accepted the invitation to contribute to his documentary. But I wanted to know more about the purpose of the video. He told me that he nearly lost a close friend to suicide and decided to do the documentary as a way to help others.

With Kwanzaa approaching, I had the seven principles of Umoja (Unity), Kujichugulia (Self-Determination), Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility), Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics), Nia (Purpose), Kuumba (Creativity), and Imani (Faith or Wellness) in mind when I suggested that we could conduct the interview any day from 26 December, 2016. Kwanzaa is a celebration at the end of the year from December 26 to 31 by people of African descent based on African cultural principles developed by Dr. Maulana Karenga. It is celebrated more in the African Diaspora than in Africa itself today.

The young man asked if I could record a video of myself answering his questions and send to him. I suggested a live Skype interview for him to record but the picture quality may not be ideal for a documentary. In the end, I decided to do a Powerpoint presentation with narration and I mailed this to him on December 28. He downloaded the large file from Google Documents but could not hear the narration. I suggested that he should download the most up to date Powerpoint X program and he did. He later posted on his Facebook page that I gave him the most valuable gift of the year through my presentation and I thanked him for giving me the opportunity to engage the community.  He went on to edit the Powerpoint presentation into a video with soundtracks and posted the series of slides and commentaries on Youtube. Feel free to see the work and leave a comment by clicking the link.

You will notice that the powerpoint presentation does not cover all the relevant sociological texts but you are welcome to fill in the gaps by, for example, bringing in the genres of Black Psychology and Symbolic Interactionism which I left out of my present(ation).

Fractal Motifs in Africana Arts

This clip of my Seminar at the Harrison Museum of African American Arts in Roanoke, 2 March 2014, (as part of 'The Spirit That Knows Beauty' Exhibition that runs until June) may interest you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANZCdplulBo&feature=youtu.be

Let me know what you think of my inclusion of the sixth principle of inter-connectivity among the elements of fractal designs. Let me know also if you have any tips on how to improve the quality of the video before I upload other clips of the presentation.

Biko Agozino