STATE OF THE AFRICAN NATION
Rubadiri Victor
The State of Emergency in Trinidad and Tobago is
uncovering a lot of this country’s unfinished business. What was in darkness is
coming to light. The clampdown on hotspot communities has prompted debates on
the state of African communities and young black males. Some make snide remarks
that African people world-over are hotspots. Statistics are being used to
advance racist suggestions of African inferiority. There are many opinions-
with zero analysis. But it’s an important debate. What is the state of the
African population? Are there worldwide patterns? If so, why are they arising?
In the next 2 articles I will attempt to explore the complex processes
unleashed on African people in the last 500 years- especially within the last
50. But first we need context…
Let us be very clear. We live in a world that is
the result of 500 years of Western military conquest which at its height
slaughtered over three hundred million people worldwide and stole entire
continents and an entire hemisphere from Native people. More than 85 ethnic
tribes- distinct nations of peoples- were wiped out from the face of the earth
in the course of this conquest. This process created a planetary economic caste
system of white over brown over black. This is the modern world we live in
today. Plain talk. Bad manners.
Five centuries of slaughter is invested in this
system. Every Western institution- from legislatures and economies to
political, military, and media systems were formed from this process and
fashioned on the assumption of white over brown over black. Enormous amounts of
resources are invested to keep this in place. When Butler started labour unrest
in Trinidad in 1937 British warships were in the Gulf the next day. In the
1900s elected radical presidents in Latin America and the Middle East were
routinely assassinated because they did not tow the line. Up to today- in 75%
of Hollywood movies- a black male will be the first person ritually killed.
This is not a coincidence. A status quo is being upheld. White life is being
championed as premium. Black life is being sold as being expendable. The world
is the audience.
So let’s not fool ourselves. The forces that put
these systems in place did not disappear overnight. We did not suddenly wake up
in a world where everyone is singing ‘Kumbaya’ interested in equality.
Trillions of dollars are at stake… White America is not giving back North,
Central and South America to Native American tribes and saying sorry… Our world
has been brutally fashioned by advantage. African and Native American people
are systematically supposed to be at the bottom of that pyramid. The New World
began with an entire hemisphere stolen from Native People- and with 300 years
of unpaid African labour for over 20 million people. It also gave white Western
powers and their citizens trillions of dollars of wealth.
Yet despite this, African people have been spoilers
in the West and are at the heart of the Western equation for a number of
reasons.
The first reason is that African people have been
the principle resistance to the West- militarily, politically, economically and
culturally for the last 5 centuries. From Toussaint and Dessaline’s victory
over Napoleon in Haiti to Ethiopia’s victory over Italy at the Battle of Adwa.
Martin Luther King and others changed the civil rights shape of the West.
African people profoundly changed the course of civilisation by humanizing the
West and halting its worst excesses. In every territory African people made
economic and social systems more open and inclusive. Just years out of slavery-
Africans began fashioning upper and middle classes out of these struggles.
However large amounts of their population have been left behind in communities
that never had a shield from this historical inhumanity. Many of the hotspots
of the world are located in these communities.
The catch 22 for the West is that African’s
capacity for labour and inventiveness are indispensable to their civilisation.
The Western solution is to try to destroy the African capacity to organize and
resist, but to keep Africans around as labour. Castrated of agenda and
consciousness. This last process began in the plantation during slavery. There
has never been a process whereby a captive people have been scientifically
subjected to a series of institutional processes meant to remove from them all
aspects of culture and humanity as Western plantation slavery. From start to
finish it was fashioned to remove God, religion, language, nation, memory,
identity, manhood, womanhood, family, kinship, personality, and humanity from
the oldest civilized people on the planet… This process lasted 3 centuries!
This war on African identity and organising has remained continual into the 21st century.
The second reason that Africans are central to the
West is that the African continent is the most valuable piece of real estate in
the world. There is hardly one accessory in civilization that does not depend
on primary resources from Africa- from computers to cars. Without Africa there
is no Western civilization and its products. This is why Africa has been
straddled with military dictators for the last 2 centuries- placed there by
Western powers to prevent African ownership of their own resources.
With these things in mind we can now begin to examine the state of the
global African nation…