It is time for Africans to stop playing the ostrich and man up on slavery and colonisation. They caused an unhealed oozing wound that needs urgent attention. The healing and restoration of our dignity is the beginning of all wisdom… Slavery and colonisation have to be a part of the curriculum in school and university systems across Africa, taught to every single child. Only when we hold ourselves accountable can we hold others accountable.
As a young mother decades ago, I strapped my baby to my back on quiet evenings in an apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and sang to her when she wouldn’t go to sleep. I sang from a repertoire of songs I remembered parents singing to comfort babies in Yorubaland. My baby often listened, quieting down as I did the foot-tapping dance that accompanied those songs, until one day, when I suddenly became mindful of the lyrics of a particular song. This song was sung routinely for Yoruba babies and has even become part of the larger Yoruba folk songs. It goes:
Aso to ba dara
Ma ra fomo mi
Ewu to ba dara
Ma ra fomo mi
Fila to ba dara
Ma ra fomo mi
Bata to ba dara
Ma ra fomo mi
Ti nba logun eru
Ki nya wofa ogbon
Ti nba logun eru
Ki nya wofa ogbon
Ijo taa ba ku o
S’omo ladele
Baba loke je k’omo wa
Wole dele wa
Nitori pe
Omo laso aye
Omo laso aye
Omo mi o, akuru bete kube
Omo mi o, akure bete kube
Ki me ku o, maa ra raso i o
Ki me ku o, maa regba orun
Egba orun o, la mu somo orun
Eru mo ra
Laa pon o a ka o
Akuru bete kube, akuru bete kube kube.
The rough translation goes:
I’ll buy nice clothes for my child
I’ll buy nice dresses for my child
I’ll buy nice caps for my child
I’ll buy nice shoes for my child
If I have twenty slaves
If I have thirty indentured servants
When I die
The child is the one that succeeds me
Father Above
Let our child succeed us
Because children are the cloth of the world
My dear child, little adorable thing
My dear child, little adorable thing
If I don’t die, I, I’ll buy you clothes
If I don’t die, I’ll buy you necklaces
I’ll put the necklaces around your neck
The slave I bought
Will be taking care of you
My little adorable thing
Lullabies, the first songs babies hear to comfort them, to affirm love and tenderness from mothers, to introduce them to the world they would inhabit, sung in the beautiful and sweet voices of mothers and other caregivers, regard the enslavement of other human beings as normal, see indentured servitude as a part of life, and indicate the child will be a beneficiary and inheritor of this enslavement and servitude.
Growing up, slavery was abstract. It had no real meaning in our lives. As an elementary school child, I acted the part of William Wilberforce in a school play. In this character, I announced that slavery has been abolished. The plot of the play was that of a returned slave who was for looking for his mother. He went from household to household singing, asking if the women were his mother. All of the mothers sang back that they were his mother and he asked where they gave birth to him, and they all sang back that they birthed him in wealthy, beautiful homes, until the last woman sang back that she gave birth to him while she was enslaved, “oko eru”. The returnee embraced her and was satisfied that was his real mother. I was under ten years old when we staged this play in our village primary school, with the whole school and parents in attendance. There was no context to it. My peers and I, perhaps even our teachers, had no idea of the horrendous Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade or the equally devastating Arab Trans-Sahara Slave Trade that came before it. Some say Arab enslavement of Africans inspired the European Slave Trade.
Between multi-century slavery and colonisation, Africa suffered the equivalence of the Jewish Holocaust and Hiroshima atomic bomb ten times over. The scale of devastation of these monumental human tragedies is yet to be fully understood on all the children of Africa.
Between multi-century slavery and colonisation, Africa suffered the equivalence of the Jewish Holocaust and Hiroshima atomic bomb ten times over. The scale of devastation of these monumental human tragedies is yet to be fully understood on all the children of Africa. While the descendants of perpetrators who profited mightily would want to banish those acts from memory, it is difficult to understand why Africa has refused to address these historical crimes that continue to destabilise the continent, and undermine the lives and dignity of black people all over the world. Racism became an entrenched philosophy and a way of life after these abominable trades. Because Africa has never seriously addressed the impact of slavery and colonisation, we’ve evolved over centuries with the habits, attitudes, customs, and assumptions that made the trade possible. Slavery is alive and thriving in the 21st century, with Africans and Arabs selling and buying black human beings on the African continent.
Late last year, I was going through my Facebook page late in the evening, when I saw a darkened posting that warned of graphic material. Since I had never seen such before, I clicked on it. I saw a black man on the floor with several men standing around him, stabbing him. His hands were tied behind his back, his legs tied, his mouth bound as he wriggled helplessly to avoid the blows. Since his mouth was bound, he could only grunt as each knife plunged into him. The video was said to be from Libya. His tormentors were talking and laughing as blood poured from his body. He bled and bled, and wriggled helplessly until he lay still, and the video ended. He was said to be one of the thousands of migrants diverted on their journey to Europe to lawless and ISIS-ridden Libya, where they were warehoused like animals. There were more horrific videos on social media which kept me awake for weeks. African sons and daughters were raped, beheaded, tortured, burnt alive and, thanks to CNN, the whole world saw them being sold as slaves on African soil. There were rumours of them being murdered deliberately for organs harvesting, with those organs sent to the Gulf States to renew Arab lives.
The tales of Nigerians airlifted out of Libya by the Nigerian government revealed who the slave traders were. A young girl interviewed by a reporter as she disembarked in Lagos said to a reporter that she identified a Nigerian woman slave trader and ran to her seeking protection and help as from an older sister, but the woman replied her along the lines of: “there is no brother or sister in this business.” What happened in Libya showed the state of humanity of Arabs and Africans, that how they regard black African lives has not changed in centuries! Nigerian traffickers and slave traders are making money from trafficking and selling their fellow Nigerians, so that they can buy the latest cars and gadgets manufactured in China and the West, just like our ancestors who sold our people for hundreds of years in exchange for glittering objects brought to them by Europeans. Slavery still exists in Mauritania as I write, and the victims are black Africans. Africans and Arabs have never renounced slavery. They have never said “Enough and Never Again!” African humanity has never been healed or restored.
I finally got to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture on the mall in Washington, D.C. It had been difficult to obtain the passes, which are free, but are high in demand by the millions of people eager to visit the museum. One has to book passes many months ahead. I had read a lot about the museum and its uniqueness in documenting the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. The design replicated a slave ship, with the exhibits at the bottom level representing the bowels where people were packed like sardines under extreme conditions. Many perished. I could only go through the bottom three floors of the five floors because of the excellent and highly detailed exhibits and the sad emotional response it elicited. The place was packed with people of all ages, and the atmosphere was heavy as it was meant to be, with the dimmed lighting. I was covered with chills, imagining what our ancestors went through in the Middle Passage (the journey in the bowels of slave ships) and hundreds of years of multi-generational chattel slavery. The scale and reach of the trade, and the sheer inhumanity that sustained it for generations was astounding.
Enslaved people, who have been made anonymous by history, were made human in the exhibits. They were named, when possible. Captured people were mostly from named tribes in West and West-Central Africa. Slavery became racialised and hereditary by 1705. The exhibits showed that by 1860, when America was still a young nation, four million enslaved Africans produced 60 per cent of America’s wealth, valued at $2.7 billion. America became a nation in 1776 with his leaders waxing strong about Liberty, Happiness, Freedom, Equality for all in their Constitution, while twelve of the first eighteen American presidents owned slaves. In an exhibit titled “Paradox of Liberty,” the statue of Thomas Jefferson, the third president, a Founding Father, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, stood on a platform with some of his slaves. Jefferson owned four plantations and hundreds of slaves. Joseph Fossett, a brilliant blacksmith, was one of his slaves, and he managed Jefferson’s farm and business well in Monticello, Jefferson’s grand plantation. Fossett was married to Edith Hern, another slave, and they had many children.
Under this cruel institution, families were regularly torn apart, with mothers, fathers, children sold separately to the highest bidders. Enslaved people could not form families, the most basic God-given right, and this went on for centuries. Edith was an excellent cook. When Jefferson became president, he took Edith with him to the White House to be his cook. There, she learnt how to cook French cuisine, serving Jefferson with diligence and loyalty, while her husband was left in Monticello, in Virginia. After he left the presidency, Jefferson retired to Monticello, making Edith his chef there. Both Joseph and Edit served him for decades until he died. After he died, Edith was sold along with seven of the children she and Joseph had together. Joseph was freed. The violence and terror used to manage slaves was mind-numbing. By 1705, it was legal to dismember any who tried to run away. Acts like these were meant to terrorise the enslaved population and discourage them from seeking freedom. Britain, Spain, Portugal, France, Denmark, The Netherlands, were all involved and profited hugely from this abominable criminal trade. Sheer greed was the motivation behind the trade.
Slave labour produced cotton, which was shipped to the new humming industries in New England and Britain. The wealth produced by slaves was so great that it transformed the new fledgling nation of America to a world power within two generations. A caption read, “Every American lived a life touched by slavery. They wore clothe made from cotton, ate cakes sweetened by sugar, and smoked tobacco. They traveled on slave-made roads, railroads, and canals. Working with little rest and facing the constant threat of violence, enslaved blacks provided other Americans with a higher standard of living through cheap consumer goods, and a strong national infrastructure. Slavery was deeply woven into daily life.”
The trauma of slavery is written in the social, cultural, and global DNA of every black person today. New studies are showing it’s also become a part of the biological DNA of the descendants of enslaved people in the diaspora. A line could be drawn from this catastrophe to the distress, discrimination and poverty black communities and countries are suffering all over the world.
Jefferson shared a lifetime and his most intimate spaces with his slaves, who served him devotedly in all ways, yet he was incapable of seeing their humanity. Greed, power, and ego ruled over any shred of humanity that he shared with these people who allowed him to live a fabulous life. They were sold like furniture or animals at his death. He never freed them. There were tales of slave masters selling their own children, mulatto children they sired with enslaved African women who were raped and forced to be mistresses. All facets of life profited from slavery. Medicine was not excluded. The Father of American Gynecology, Dr. J. Marion Sims, was a pioneer in the field of surgery. He made his fortune experimenting on enslaved women without anesthesia, while developing the treatment for Vesicovaginal Fistula (VVF) problems. This cruel experimentation on human beings was a precursor to the Nazi experiments on Jews and the Japanese vivisection on Filipino and Korean prisoners of wars during WWII. Among the unethical and cruel experimentation by doctors on black people in the 20th century was the Tuskegee Syphilis Study where African-American men were allowed to die horrible deaths even though the treatment for syphilis was already available.
The trauma of slavery is written in the social, cultural, and global DNA of every black person today. New studies are showing it’s also become a part of the biological DNA of the descendants of enslaved people in the diaspora. A line could be drawn from this catastrophe to the distress, discrimination and poverty black communities and countries are suffering all over the world. From the thousands of African migrants drowning in the Mediterranean without any response from African governments, to the murders of innocent black people on American streets by police officers, to the acquittance of George Zimmerman, a civilian who murdered 17-year-old Trayvon Martin one night as he was walking home eating skittles and drinking ice tea, to mass incarceration of black men in America, and the deaths, instability, and conflicts pervasive in many African countries, we should look to this terrible history. The humanity of black people is under assault daily wherever we reside in the world.
Slavery and colonisation left Africa impoverished. While we suffer material poverty (in spite of the huge natural resources on the continent), the greatest poverty is that of the mind, the can-do spirit, the integrity, boldness, and courage to cease our destiny in our hands and shape our future. It is also poverty of imagination and ethical living. We have been hobbled and badly damaged, tethered to the same ideas, people, and systems that degraded us for generations. It was not slaves that were taken away from our continent, it was the most productive people of our societies. Hundreds of years of people being hunted down, captured, and controlled left Africa weak, insecure, and unstable. Mere survival became the norm. Building prosperous societies depends on security and stability, which Africa had not had for a very long time.
We have to look at how all this is affecting modern Africans. What customs, traditions, and assumptions about our humanity have evolved with us after almost a millennium of slavery on our continent? Does it explain the chronic lack of visionary leadership, the stealing of huge public resources to be stored abroad, the wicked and inhumane treatment of the people by leaders, the trafficking and selling of human beings into prostitution and slavery for money? How about the unending wars and killings, and reckless disregard for human life that set societies back hundreds of years?
As my good friend and philosopher, Professor Olufemi Taiwo of Cornell University in Ithaca, reminded me, there is no university department or institution devoted to the study of slavery and colonisation across the continent. Listening to my angst and misery last year while questioning how it was possible for our people to be on sale in Libya, he said, “Why are you surprised? We sold our people into oblivion for centuries and we have never accounted for it.”
We have developed a remarkable amnesia about this horrible and shameful history. The cost to the children of Africa reverberates daily in our personal, social, and political lives. It is evident that we will not make any kind of progress until we gather to talk about our tragic past. It is time to reckon with our multi-century Hiroshima and Holocaust. African Union should convey a conference on slavery and colonisation, with all stakeholders on the continent and the diaspora to discuss this history and the strategies to heal and move the continent forward. We need to take moral and intellectual control over the research, discourse and dissemination of knowledge about slavery and colonisation, as Professor Taiwo suggested. We are still suffering the traumas, even though most of us like to think it’s only the descendants of those taken away to the Americas and Caribbean that are affected. Thanks to those descendants in the United States, we and the rest of the world could see in detail the genesis, operation, consequences of the criminal trade. We could also see hope and the triumph of the human spirit in the exhibits on the freedom and spectacular achievements of African-Americans in all fields of human endeavour. It is time for Africans to stop playing the ostrich and man up on slavery and colonisation. They caused an unhealed oozing wound that needs urgent attention. The healing and restoration of our dignity is the beginning of all wisdom. We have to acknowledge the role our ancestors played in that abominable trade, the how and why. Slavery and colonisation have to be a part of the curriculum in school and university systems across Africa, taught to every single child. Only when we hold ourselves accountable can we hold others accountable. It will be a long and difficult process because of the fierce internal and external head winds of resistance, but we have no choice. There is really no other way. Africa has to reclaim herself.
If you would like to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, it is free, but you need to book your passes many months ahead, although you will be allowed to enter on a weekday after 1p.m. with walk-in passes issued to visitors on site. All passes are free. Learn your history.
Bunmi Fatoye-Matory was educated at the Universities of Ife and Ibadan, and Harvard University. She lives with her family in Durham, North Carolina. She is a Writer and Culture Advocate. Email: bunmimatory@yahoo.com
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