Marxism in Africana Studies

 

My Great-Grand Father Fought for Justice

By Biko Agozino

 

Senior colleagues in Africana Studies have been asking me to explain if it is true that Africans sold their own people during the Trans Atlantic slavery as alleged by Henry Louis Gates in his BBC series, Wonders of the African World. This renewed interest follows the historical fiction by a Nigerian writer, Adaobi Tricia Obinne Nwaubani, who published a story in New Yorker, ‘My Great-Grandfather - the Nigerian Slave Trader’ and another on the BBC website, ‘My Nigerian Great-Grand Father Sold Slaves’. The BBC presented her as a ‘journalist’ to legitimize her invented stories but she is better known as a novelist who makes things up. I blogged a response to her New Yorker article but I was told off for going soft on her supposedly because she is a fellow Igbo. Here is my slightly tougher but hopefully shorter response to her imaginary BBC story:

 

For full disclosure, Adaobi advertised on her own website that while growing up in the 1980s, she had the strange saboteur dream of becoming a CIA or KGB agent presumably to work against the interests of Africa. She may still be looking for such jobs by writing eagerly like a character witness for European enslavers of Africans against the pending legal writ for reparative justice by people of African descent. First of all, she keeps calling her notorious great-grandfather a famous Nigerian but he pre-existed the invention of Nigeria by the British. Secondly, Africans were not slaves but kidnapped people being trafficked. She is not a historian, so I will not go hard on her.

 

Adaobi correctly translated the Igbo word, ohu, as slave but being neither a sociologist nor an anthropologist nor a historian, she did not know that the context and contents of igba ohu or slavery in ancient Africa were nothing like chattel slavery. As a matter of fact, there was no slave mode of production in Africa, said Rodney in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. That was why Amanyanabo Jo Jo Ubani, King Jaja, could rise to be King of Opobo and Joseph became Prime Minister in Kemet. They were servants or odibo and not slaves or ohu.

 

Adaobi may also be right that some cruel families like hers insisted on burying their dead patriarchs with living human beings but that was never part of Igbo culture. During the World Court case over the disputed Bakassi peninsula that was allegedly ceded to Cameroon earlier by Nigeria to blockade and starve the Igbo in Biafra, a Calabar ruler, Obong of Calabar, was a witness for Nigeria around the year 2005. He told the court that there was a similarity in the culture of the Efik of Nigeria and the Bakassi of Cameroon who were one people, in his view, because they buried their King or Obong with four human heads. Nigeria promptly lost the dispute to Cameroon who may have rebutted that such barbarity was not allowed in Cameroon. Neither is it part of the radically democratic Igbo culture where all heads are equal and the Igbo say that they know no king!

 

I responded in detail when Adaobi displayed ignorance about Igbo language and mistranslated her family name in an earlier version of her historical fiction for the New Yorker. The proverbs that she mistranslated for the BBC would say servants or odibo and not ohu, when referring to the ability of servants to learn from the instruction of sons by fathers. The Igbo may say that a man who owns no servant owns himself since inwe onwe is self-ownership or freedom. Yes, the word slave means ohu in Igbo but the Efik still call civil servants the white man's slave or ntop mbakara while the Igbo call them those who do the white man’s work or ndi olu bekee. Even when the word ohu is used to warn children about slave-traders, everybody knows that Europeans warn their children that there is a monster or bogeyman under every bed ready to devour naughty children but it is the pervert uncles, priests, and parents that the children should beware.

 

If Adaobi’s great-grand father was a slave trader, then he was obviously a lumpen scum bag who must have been shunned by the masses that resisted the kidnappers whom she said that her great-grand father hired to go and kidnap people from distant places for sale by him. That may have been why the colonizers made him their paramount chief and tax collector, a deplorable role that led Igbo women to declare war against colonialism in 1929 and force the abolition of Warrant Chiefs among the Igbo who still believe that all heads are equal and boast that the Igbo know no king.

 

Notice that Adaobi ignorantly reported that her great-grand father did not appear to have an extended family, friends, age-grade members, in-laws, or community supporters that rallied around him when his possessions, including ten wives and slaves, were seized by the colonizers who only returned them when he showed the certificate issued to him as a trader by the Royal Niger Company. He was surely a sad lonely figure in a society that valued people more than wealth and still name their children Nwakaego or Ndukaku meaning, child is greater than money or life is greater than wealth. No wonder his name was also Oriaku – a pejorative title by the Igbo for a parasitic wife who only consumes wealth, a title that Igbo women rejected in preference for Odoziaku or wealth manager.

 

In the New Yorker, Adaobi exposed her motivation for her hagiography when she wondered if Africans deserve reparations given that her great-grandfather was a highway robber and kidnapper. Fallacy of the straw man. She also claimed that her family was facing mysterious disasters attributed to the sins and abominations committed by her great-grandfather, forcing the family to contemplate changing their name, to chant psalms annually and pray for forgiveness, and to destroy some family juju pots, perhaps to attract rich wives and husbands for their beautiful children (the thinly disguised theme of her debut novel about 419 fraud, I did not Come to You by Chance).

 

I advised Adaobi in my earlier blog response to tell her wealthy family to set up scholarship funds for her cousins who descended from those that her great-grandfather oppressed instead of simply praying to be washed as white as snow for as she reported, schooling is a great leveler of social statuses – school children make friends without being constrained by ancient claims to status, wealth or caste.

 

In the BBC story, Adaobi quoted the eminent historian, Adiele Afigbo, to give credibility to her amateur psychoanalysis of her dysfunctional family by suggesting that the residues of the slave trade continued until the 1950s before the British finally ended the crimes against humanity that they themselves initiated and ran for hundreds of years without apology or reparations, charged Chinweizu in The West and the Rest of Us. Not being a historian, Adaobi failed to interpret this riddle from Afigbo who was obviously inviting scrutiny of the fact that Africans were to blame for their inability to mobilize and end the slave raids by themselves for more than 400 years. Look how long! For that, Mathew Kerekou, president of Benin Republic, rightfully took a knee at an African American church and apologized for the despicable roles that some African chiefs were forced to play in the inhumane crimes against humanity but Rodney insists in The History of the Upper Guinea Coast that Africans were mostly warriors against slavery.

 

Afigbo was reminding us that since Africans were conscripted as enslaved people to fight for the British during the European tribal wars as if they were slaves, the British cannot claim to have ended slavery. When unarmed African women demanded not to be taxed without representation in the colonial government, the British massacred dozens of them as if they were homo sacer or slaves whose lives could be taken with impunity, wrote also Afigbo in The Warrant Chiefs. And when coal miners demanded for a living wage in Enugu, the colonizers massacred dozens of them in 1949 to prove that it was never their intention to end slavery in Africa, they only wanted to transform it into colonial slave labor and Africans continued to resist, wrote Du Bois, Azikiwe and Rodney. How can the British claim that they ended slavery and barbarity in Africa when they orchestrated the genocide that took 3.1 million Igbo lives in Biafra?

 

All I know is that my great-grandfather was not a slave trader, he was a resistance warrior for justice quite unlike Thomas Jefferson who raped little African girls and then sold his own children for money. When will Adaobi write about American Founding Fathers who were perverts like her great-grandfather and who raped children and called them his ten wives like Boko Haram? 

Maybe I should write that book in answer to the bewildering question repeatedly posed by African Diaspora colleagues: were you not the ones who sold us? No.

 

HARRIET AS IGBO

By Biko Agozino

This is not a spoiler. Harriet is a film without spoilers because the audience already can tell how the movie was going to end. What I would like to comment on are the symbolic representations that the Director, Kasi Lemmons, brought into the narrative that will not make sense to viewers who are not familiar with the background Igbo world views of both Harriet Tubman and the actress who played that role, Cynthia Chinasaokwu Erivo.

Some critics reportedly protested against the casting of the award-winning ‘British’ actress and singer to play the role of the iconic African American hero but if only the protesters knew that it is a case of an Igbo woman being portrayed by another Igbo woman... Besides African Americans have played the roles of Africans in Hollywood without protests from Africans who simply admire good acting by our black brothers and sisters.

There was a carving that the father of Minty, short for Araminta, gave her when she went to tell him that she was fleeing to freedom from slavery. She kept it with her always just as Frederick Douglas kept a piece of wood that an elderly enslaved man gave him after he was beaten by an overseer. According to Douglas, no one ever beat him again in his life for he kept that piece of wood with him, just as the old man told him. The Igbo call such a piece of wood or carving, Ofo na Ogu, the symbol of innocence and blessings. The Director, Kasi Lemmons, was probably reminding us throughout the movie that Harriet Tubman held Ofo and Ogu as a blessed innocent person and that that, in addition to her strong faith in God, was part of the reasons why she was bold in fighting for freedom from slavery for all, unlike Django who only went back to unchain his boo.

Harriet repeatedly claimed that she heard the voice of God but that was attributed, even by black abolitionists, to ‘possible brain damage’ from her head injury as a child when she was found in a barn with the white boy. The Igbo will agree with her claim that she heard the voice of God because the Igbo also believe that God is present in everyone as Chi, or God, a part of the Great God or Chiukwu, also known as Chineke, God the creator. Such a God or Chi would never subscribe to the pro-slavery gospel that the black preacher was paid to preach to the congregation of the enslaved who were called upon to obey their masters and work hard for them as an honor to a white God. Harriet did not say amen to that prayer.

It is a shame that the leading actress, Cynthia Erivo, chose to go by her English first name when her Igbo name would have been more appropriate to the role. Chinasaokwu, the name that her Igbo parents gave her in England when she was born, means God answers accusations. Just as Minty dropped her slave name and chose a free name, perhaps to evade slave catchers who continued to search for runaway enslaved people especially after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, Cynthia should be challenged by her fans to drop the slave name and adopt her Igbo name, Chinasa, as her first name in honor of Harriet if not in honor of her own family. Her real last name, Erivo, literally translates as the unfed or the starving, a strange name that echoes memories of the mass starvation of the Igbo in Biafra during which 3.1 million died. The actress owes it to herself to recover her Igbo name as her first name.

Incidentally, the name Harriet and her original slave name, Araminta, may have onomatopeic meanings in Igbo as Ha aya eti – they will never beat us and Ala mu nta - my little land, or Aninta, a common Igbo name. Hayeti is, by coincidence, similar to the name that the Haitian Igbo revolutionaries gave to their new republic – Ayeti – and that is the way they still spell it in creole today, like the way that Harriet said that people pronounced Rit, her mother's name that she took. It means in Igbo, they will never beat us. Even the name of the Director of this movie, Kasi, also transliterates in Igbo as to console, suggesting the consolation for those who have suffered great injustice without being offered reparative justice.

Moreover, the name Moses that was attributed to Harriet by almost everyone, may also have an Igbo-sounding meaning – Moshishi, or the spirit said to say. The enslavers could not believe that an African woman was capable of leading such daring raids to free the enslaved and lead them to freedom in their hundreds. They claimed that she was a white abolitionist in ‘black face’ which must have been a popular pastime of influential white men then and even now. 

The Harriet model of womanist activism can be found in Ogu Umunwanyi during which Igbo women declared war against colonialism in 1929, only sixteen years after Harriet passed away; the Abeokuta women’s rebellion against taxation in 1945, the Kikuyu women’s uprising against forced labor in the 1950s, the South African women’s defiance against the pass laws of apartheid in the 1950s, and the Liberian women’s praying of the devil back to hell to end the bloody civil war in the 1990s.

Unlike Western feminist activists who seek gender-separatism, the Africana womanists are exemplary in the sense that their demands always included the interests of suffering men and women in articulation or intersectionally instead of seeking divisive gender essentialism. This is part of the reasons why Professor Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi theorized that womanism was more appropriate than feminism as a description of the interests of African women within cultures that also inevitably include men as allies who can also be opponents in some ways but cannot be pigeon-holed essentially as all the enemies of ‘womandom’. The film, Harriet, showed that not even all white men were enemies during slavery given the important role played by white abolitionists, though some white women were among the worst enslavers and some black men worked for the slave catchers to earn some money.

Harriet was fond of singing the freedom song, ‘Go down Moses, go down to Egypt land and tell old Pharaoh to let my people go’, as a rallying signal for the enslaved to join the underground railroad to freedom. The biblical Moses was called an Egyptian and so, Harriet was not a black Moses – the biblical Moses was obviously not white. The fact that Harriet was suspected to be a man goes to challenge the western invention of women as gendered in submissive relations under patriarchy whereas gender is not a central feature of the conception of people in African cultures where generation, not gender, is more deferential and hegemonic, according to Oyeronke Oyemumi in The Invention of Women.

Harriet carried a gun with her for protection and used it to threaten some of her own family members who were too scared to go with her to freedom. But when she had the opportunity to shoot and kill her enslavers, she chose not to kill. This may seem strange to many fans of Hollywood who have come to expect the hero to be a blood-thirsty maniac in Tarantino movies. However, to the Igbo who suffered genocide, pogroms and mass killings in Nigeria without resorting to retaliatory killings, it is normal to leave the gravest wrongs in the hands of our Chi and instead invest our energies into rebuilding our beloved communities in accordance with the African philosophy of nonviolence that Gandhi admitted that he was taught in Africa and Martin Luther King Jr. followed to lead the Civil Rights Movement.

A puzzle that the film tried to solve was why many poor whites who did not enslave Africans continued to fight in support of what the film called the ‘lost cause’ of slavery even after the Africans had asserted their right to freedom as fellow human beings. W.E.B. Du Bois explained this with the theory of the psychological wages of whiteness. However, the film differed slightly from the conventional interpretation of this theory by explaining that, according to Du Bois, it was not just psychological wages because there were huge structural privileges to even poor whites that they would like to defend; not to mention the hefty rewards placed on the heads of ‘Moses’ and the runaway enslaved people to motivate poor whites to join the posse to try and recapture them. Also, the young white men were motivated by their lust for the bodies of young black girls who were gang raped even ‘before their first blood’ perhaps because they were brought up to think of black girls as ‘pigs to be sold or eaten’ but never to be loved by white men who fathered children that looked exactly like them and still enslaved their own flesh and blood or sold them for money.

The film represented Harriet leading a unit of African American soldiers in battle during the Civil War at the historic Combahee River point of the Black Womanist Rebellion statement. This was the only time that a woman commanded men in battle during the civil war. It came to pass in fulfillment of the vision that Harriet shared with the young white man who was trying to recapture her as his property even though she prayed for him to survive typhoid as a child. She had disarmed him and made him climb down from his white horse, knelt him down and aimed his own rifle at him, and told him to listen to the coming sounds of the civil war even before the war started. She prophesied that he was going to die with thousands of other young white men fighting for a lost cause. Then she rode off on his white horse which did not discriminate between a white male rider and a black female rider. That war soon took an estimated 750,000 lives but it could have been avoided if white people simply accepted the fact that black people were equally human and not property. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

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

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.