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| Sunday, 05 September 2010 |
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African History in the Service of the Black Liberation |
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Written by Walter Rodney
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Friday, 25 November 2005 |
Initially I had written a short supplementary paper to that which was to be presented by Mr. Richard Moore.1
Therefore, the order having been inverted, it places me in a rather
tricky position. I had intended to continue on the basis of certain
things which he would have said. However, very briefly, my position is
this: Moore would have spoken on African civilizations according to the
program. I myself had intended and, in fact, I will consider certain
aspects of African history which would not normally fall under the
rubric of civilization. And in the process I would have liked to
question the very concept of civilization. I entitled my paper "African
History in the Service of the Black Revolution," and the first
contradiction, the first dilemma which one faces in attempting to
utilize African history as one of the weapons in our struggle is a
realization that, in a very real sense, we, as black people, are placed
in [the] invidious position of having to justify our existence by
antecedents, having to prove our humanity by what went before.Now this is very invidious. Humanity is not a thing one proves. One
asserts [it] perhaps, or one accepts [it]. One doesn't really set out
to prove it. But, unfortunately, the historical circumstances in which
black people have evolved in recent centuries have implanted in the
minds of black brothers and sisters a certain historical conception
and, in order to destroy that historical conception, one has to engage
in this type of game of saying, "This is what the white man said but
no, it isn't really so, we have a past," and that sort of thing.
Now, if we are forced into that position, it seems to me that
there are two rules which we can observe to make the exercise more
meaningful. The first rule is that I, as a black historian, am speaking
to fellow blacks. Now that means that, as far as the white audience is
concerned, here and in the world at large, they are perfectly entitled
to listen but I am not engaged in the game which they set up by which
they say to me, "You prove, black, that you're a man. Prove it to me by
showing that you have civilization," and that sort of thing. I'm not
engaged in that job as far as white people are concerned. I am engaged
[with], I must address myself solely to, black brothers. To the extent
that they have been involved and destroyed in a process, we are seeking
to re-create. And, furthermore, as I said, it's "in the service of
black revolution." Those whites, those few whites who may join the
Black Revolution, will certainly do so for reasons which are far more
profound than their knowledge or acquaintance with African history. So
that's another reason why we don't need to address ourselves to them.
The second rule is that African history must be seen as very
intimately linked to the contemporary struggle of black people. One
must not set up any false distinctions between reflection and action.
We are just another facet of the ongoing revolution. This is not
theory. It is a fact that black people everywhere, in Africa and in the
Western world, are already on the march. So nobody who wants to be
relevant to that situation can afford to withdraw and decide that he is
engaging in what is essentially an intellectual exercise. The African
historian, to me, is essentially involved in a process of mobilization,
just like any other individual within the society who says, "I'm for
black power. I'm going to talk about the way the blacks live down in
the South," etc. That's a facet of mobilization. The African historian
is also involved in that mobilization.
Now, having said that, I would like to illustrate the ways in
which, in fact--if there's to be any proving of our humanity--it will
have to be done with three examples. The first is Cuba. Cuba has proven
very concretely that the way of asserting that humanity is by
revolutionary struggle. And when I say it has proven that, it has
proven it to the black people in Cuba. Now this is a question with
which even black brothers outside of Cuba are not very familiar and so
I'll, just for a minute, indicate what the position was and is for the
black people of Cuba.
They started, like everybody else in the West, as slaves. They existed
as slaves longer than any other group except the Brazilians, well into
the 1880s. And subsequent to slavery, they became involved, very
rapidly, in the new imperialist relationship with the United States,
and this hardened the existing prejudice of Spanish slave and Spanish
colonial society. There is a very useful book recently published by
Esteban Montego, a Cuban slave who was a runaway and who reflects on
his life in this period and gives some insights into the type of
pressures which faced the black man in Cuba after slavery.2
Now, with the intensification [of economic and political activity] by
the United States [in Cuba and] the importation of Florida type
qualities, a black man in Cuba was just dirt. I mean it was the South;
it was apartheid. If you (the black man) were seen in a certain part of
Havana after a certain hour you were liable to be shot, guilty of being
black, you see. So that the black situation in Cuba was as bad as any
other sector that we can point to. But within the process of
revolutionary struggle, first as slaves--because they were the first
revolutionaries; we black people were the first revolutionaries, the
first guerrilla fighters in this part of the world, this
hemisphere--and then as freed men, the black people struggled in Cuba.
They struggled, of course, alongside white people who had a vested
interest in struggle--white people who wanted to break the imperialists
bonds. Not white liberals who are enjoying the luxuries of capitalism
and give us some platitudes about behaving in the right way and so on;
white people involved in struggle. It's a completely different
conception of white from the metropolitan white who, whatever category
he falls into, is objectively involved in our oppression and our
suppression. Every white person in this room is objectively involved in
the oppression of black people so long as they live in a metropolitan
center because the metropolitan center is dominating colonial black
people. It is as simple as that.
Anyway, in Cuba that's not a position. Whites fought against the
system, and in that process, the black people could be genuinely
emancipated. Now, in Cuba today, barriers to entering certain
buildings, certain eating houses, and that sort of thing completely
disappeared. Juan Almeida, one of the members of the Politburo of the
Cuban Communist Party, is a black man who was involved in the struggle
from the time of the Sierra Maestra with Fidel Castro. And the position
of the black people is such, not only socially and politically
emancipated, but moving in a direction of reasserting their culture
(the Afro-Cuban culture), of getting official encouragement to assert
that culture. So that we find in Cuba today more genuine interest in
the African Revolution, more interest in the African plastic arts and
in African drama than there exists in Jamaica, which is a place 95
percent black, because the black people of Jamaica are still involved
[in,] and are dominated under, imperialist relations. So that is Cuba
and that is Jamaica.
Now, it means that for the African historian in Cuba, he can go
ahead and research and talk about African history in a new social
context. But for anybody in Jamaica, he can't seriously talk about
history divorced from revolutionary struggle. He isn't serious if he's
doing that. You can't say that "African history will proceed as normal.
We'll just teach it in the curriculum and that will be fine. Let
imperialism proceed." In any event, the system doesn't even want you to
do a simple thing like teaching African history. The prime minister of
Jamaica, a black man (you know he looks black anyway), 3
was approached with a request to let African history and an African
language, Swahili, be taught in the schools, and he said, "No, we can't
have any of that." He gave some reason--a curious reason--something
about there being so many different races in Jamaica. Very curious. I
mean, 95 percent of the people are black but he can't teach an African
language. They teach Latin, French, Spanish, and everything else. A lot
of different reasons don't seem to come into that. But it shows that
the colonial structure is itself aware of the fact you can't separate a
new conception of self, which should spring from historical
investigation with a new actuality, [from the] revolutionary process to
change the situation that presently exists. So that for the Jamaican,
the system makes it impossible for him to come to this new awareness of
himself because it doesn't want him to be involved in a revolutionary
process. For any historian who seeks to reconstruct the African past,
to reconstruct the past of black peoples in this continent, in such a
context he cannot say that the revolution will wait until people are
re-educated and that re-education reaches an advanced stage because he
isn't even allowed to engage in that process of re-education.
Consequently, the revolution is with us already. The history will have
to be subsidiary to that, it will have to come during and after the
revolutionary process. In other words, the Jamaican freedom fighter
will have to be a man [who] will, perhaps in his spare time, read some
African history. You know Che Guevara said the guerrilla should always
carry something worthwhile in his knapsack. So the guerrilla fighter,
the freedom fighter in Jamaica, would read some African history but he
isn't waiting on that to move. He has to move because the only way that
he can establish a relationship with his own past is, in fact, by
breaking the present bonds which restrict and constrain us.
In the United States (and this will presumably apply in Canada
also) the situation is rather different. In the United States the
national bourgeoisie is powerful, the most powerful national bourgeois
group in the world, and undoubtedly, it will be the most powerful
national bourgeois group in the history of the world because there
won't be any more powerful group after the US, you know. That sort of
thing is coming to an end. Anyway, this national bourgeoisie, they have
the confidence which comes from their wealth. The Jamaican petty
bourgeoisie is a comprador class, the neocolonialist class. They don't
have any confidence because they don't have any capital. They know they
exist on handouts from the metropolitan system so they are very shaky
and very uncertain of themselves. And they will even stop you from, as
I said, studying African history. But the US bourgeoisie is employing a
different tactic. But the brothers and sisters, and here I am
addressing myself particularly to the brothers who have come up from
the United States, will have to be aware of the gambit which is in fact
already being utilized with respect to African history and culture. And
that is this: The national bourgeoisie in the United States appears to
be giving a concession. They are saying, "Okay, fine, you go ahead and
study African history and African culture," and they will give you so
much African history and culture [that] you just have time for nothing
else. The object is to divorce the process of thought and reflection on
our past from the process of changing the present so that you feel that
you've gained something but you end up in some remarkable
contradiction. What you will find is this (in fact it's happening
already): Rockefeller--who is making most of his money out of South
African gold, out of the Rand, out of exploiting and participating in
apartheid, the most vicious racial system in the world--that guy is
going to finance a chair in African history. That's the type of
contradiction. So that if a black progressive thinks he's doing
something by going into African history, using up a Rockefeller grant,
all he is doing is forgetting both the domestic and external
implications of American capitalism and, in fact, supporting that
system because the guys don't mind if you go in a library or museum and
lock yourself up all day. That's wonderful; keep you off the street,
keep you out of struggle. So we have to avoid that type of myth that
cultural revival, per se, is going to carry us a long way. I don't want
to seem to be critical of the development of interest in African
history and culture. Quite obviously not, that's what I myself am
involved in. What I am trying to suggest is that sometimes, while
involved in a process, we ourselves have to be very careful to delimit
how far that process should go. Let's all wear afros, let's put on
African clothes. Fine. But that doesn't mean we are not going to
struggle. The system still has to be broken before we can express
ourselves in any fundamental way.
I had to make that type of introduction before I could go on to talk
about African history as such. And when I go on to talk about that I
will return to my initial submission that I would like, in fact, to
question these categories of civilization.
We start off with a conception of civilization and it can be
proven, it can be demonstrated rather, that African history can provide
us with examples of civilization in the terms which the Europeans have
expressed. In other words, we can go to Egypt; we can go to Kush,
that's in the Sudan; we can go to the Western Sudan, to Ghana, Mali,
Songhai; we can take the central Sudan, Bornu and Kanem; the Hausa
states; Mossi, coming further South; we can go across to the eastern
part of the continent and find the early Bachwesi empires and the later
developments of Bunyoro, Baganda; we can go further south into Central
Africa, the Luba-Lunda Kingdoms; we can take the development in
southern Bantu in the eighteenth and nineteenth century in the Shona
sections in the center and over in the far east, that's the Zulu
rising. We can build up a picture which conforms to a European
conception. In other words, we can play the game of proving to white
society that "you were wrong when you said we had no history, that we
had no civilization. Look [at] what we produced."
Now, I'm only going to deal with one aspect of that and that's
Egypt. Everybody knows about Egypt. I don't have to delineate the
Egyptian civilization. But if you want to read about Egypt you have to
go and check some books on the Middle East or you have to go and find
some guy who calls himself an Egyptologist. You never find any
assessment of Egyptian culture, any serious assessment, within the
African continent. Not never. Of late, it is changing. But the
traditional approach, the years of study of Egypt, have taken place in
a context of [the] Middle East, Mesopotamia, background to European
culture, that sort of thing. Africa just doesn't come in.4
Very curious. To begin with, we have a simple geographical description.
European refers initially to either what is actually within Europe or
what proceeded from Europe as a geographical entity. American the same,
Chinese the same. But curiously, Egypt is well entrenched in Africa but
it never appears in any assessment of African civilization. In other
words, what I am trying to say, why I am taking this single point, is
to show the ways in which the issue can be evaded. White society can
either say you have had no history or, where they see an element of
civilization in their terms, they can say that was not yours, either by
saying it outright or ignoring it.
In the case of Egypt, a second argument is advanced: the question of
color. If you press the first argument I made, then a white [person]
will say, "Well, you know, the people in Egypt were white so that
really it has nothing to do with Africa which is a place for black
people." In that sense, one will have to go back and try to determine
what was the racial composition of dynastic Egypt. And, as far as we
can tell, the Egyptians represented themselves as red- or
copper-colored, as distinct from lighter-skinned white peoples living
outside of Egypt and as distinct from darker-skinned black peoples
living outside of Egypt also, to the south. So that their own
conception of themselves was certainly not white. Furthermore, the
whole history of Egypt is one of southward expansion and of contacts,
sometimes not very pleasant contacts, in the form of slave raids with
the south. So that it is clear that the whole Egyptian population must
have been infused with a large quantity of black blood, if we want to
take it in racial terms.
We can go further than that. For the whole of the eighth century
b.c., the Egyptian dynasty was actually in the hands of the Nubians, in
the hands of the Empire of Kush. In other words, for that period, black
men were ruling the society. Now, I found no evidence that the society
itself was racially conscious. I'm only making this distinction in
terms of race because we are attempting to break down certain myths.
And the myth is quite simple. In other words, if we look at Egyptian
society we see that it certainly was not white, we can take the medial
position that it was brown and that it had very large elements of
black, including a whole black dynasty. So this is just to illustrate
the ways in which, even within the terminology which Europeans have
established, one can indicate that African history exists, that African
civilizations exist, that the black man can look back on this and gain
the necessary revolutionary inspiration. But I want to move on from
there because I don't feel that we should accept these categories that
have been established by European writers. These categories are
established simply by looking at European society as it has existed,
extracting out the elements which they consider to be meaningful in
that society, and then judging the rest of the world with these
standards as though these are universal criteria. It is what I call
cultural egocentrism. These fellows have no concept of judging any
culture by attempting to get out of their own. They base themselves
solidly in their own limited perspectives and then you judge everybody
else by that.
In Africa, even apart from the state systems which I have merely
enumerated and which, presumably, Richard Moore will talk about in more
detail, one could find a whole variety of people, millions of people,
living outside of the normal political state. And in European terms
they were not civilized because to be civilized you had to be living in
this large political conglomeration, you had to be writing, preferably
(this is one of the criteria which is normally adduced for
civilization), and you had to be engaged in a political and
administrative process which is rather similar to that, let's say, of
the modern United States. In other words, the greatest expression of
human progress is in terms of the size of the state, in terms of the
size of the armies that the fellows can send against each other to kill
each other out and the like. I mean it really is amazing because, even
within white society, those people who question the society--and there
have been many in the postwar epoch who question the very basis of the
society--would wonder if, on sheer size and population and so on, the
United States is the most civilized country in the world, if we use
those criteria. We know that it is the most barbarous because of the
way in which it has exercised its power, because of the way in which it
has stifled its own population. And that is not only the black
population but the white population. So we have to challenge those
criteria and when I look back at African states, at African society in
the broadest sense, I would, in fact, like to throw out the word
civilization. I think it is a very arbitrary word, I don't think it
gets us very far. I mean, we use it as a prop so that we can advance
our thoughts and at a certain stage it will abolish itself, as it were.
I abolish it on a whole variety of grounds. I mean, one could add,
for instance, that we as black people--and this is a question that came
up yesterday in an embryonic form when C. L. R. James was
speaking--must define the world from our own position.5
So I want to talk about civilization and I'm a black man and i've been
subjected to slavery. And I can't look around and say European society
was civilized. I can't say this. i can't participate in what the French
call la mission civilatrice when this is what colonialism was for them.
"If that is civilization," as, was it brother Leroi who said it?6
"then give me back the jungle." So that is a definition which we as
black people cannot accept at all. And once we throw aside that
definition we have to start working with other things. We have to
forget the sort of formal approach and start trying to determine what
is meaningful in social relations and what were the features of African
social relations which were most meaningful. Now that's what i'll talk
about for a little while.
I think that, just as we can say, in the small societies, before
the European arrived in Africa, certain states and certain political
developments were in existence, similarly, we can emphasize the
culture-history; we can try to determine, in the period before the
fifteenth century, what were the lines along which African
culture-history was developing. And here we must understand that
Africans, for the most part, were living in small societies, some of
them so-called stateless societies--just a family, an extended family;
no superstructure of the state, no huge territorial delimitations. But,
whatever the situation in which they lived, whether it was an isolated
family unit, whether it was a clan arrangement, or whether it was a
state, it seems to me that certain principles can be extracted [as] the
dynamic principles of African culture. And this is what represents the
civilization--having eroded the erroneous concept surrounding it--of
Africa in that particular period. I'll try to select just a few [of]
the most outstanding (in my estimation) of these principles.
One of them is hospitality, the way people related to each other
in terms of hospitality. Another one is the way in which the people of
a certain age in this society were treated. Another is the whole
question of law in African society, the way that the law was
administered, the whole ethos behind the law. I think I would like to
take those three points and start to have a look at them now.
I start with hospitality. In the African systems, Europeans who
arrived in the fifteenth century or Europeans who arrived subsequently
within an indigenous context saw the Africans living by themselves.
It's amazing the regularity with which they stressed the nature of
African hospitality, the extent of African hospitality. This was not
just, as it were, an individual response of Africans. It was rooted in
the nature of their social organization. The extended family, for
instance, was, in itself, an agency of social relief. It was, in
itself, an agency which would deny the existence of the extremes of
poverty and abandonment in African society, which we find in modern
capitalist society. Because, as an extended family, it meant that the
responsibility was theirs. All members of the family share a
responsibility for others. This is the nucleus of the whole concept of
hospitality. One can go further and take the principle of the family
when it is projected into the clan arrangement. A clan, in a rough
sense, is a whole collection of families. It's a set of people who
share a common ancestor [and] common totems, [as] sometimes the term is
used. Now, within that clan there are numerous people who don't know
each other. They just know they belong to clan A. They've never seen
each other. Their relationship in terms of physical and genetic
proximity is very vague. They acknowledge an ancestor who is very
remote, on the borders between history and legend. But, nevertheless, a
clan brother is a brother and he's treated as a brother whenever the
occasion arises. In other words, I belong to clan A and I come from
three hundred miles away and I meet another clan brother; he has
certain responsibilities towards me--to house, feed, clothe me. The
system provides for that hospitality.
We can go further. Take the structure of authority, whether it be the
chief, or a king, or a ruling group. They too have certain very clearly
defined responsibilities with respect to the action of giving, the key
being hospitality. So much so that I came across a very interesting
incident of a small chief in a Sierra Leone system who they were about
to elect into a king and the guy says, "Well sorry, I'm not going to
take that job. I just don't have the funds to carry out the type of
hospitality which is normally expected from a ruler." That's his
job--to keep an open house. Guys just turn up there and, as I said
before, a brother is a brother, a sister is a sister.
Now, I don't know how it will appear to you but when I started off
and I looked at this, to me, this is a more profound aspect of
relationship than how big the state was and how many armies were
jumping across to kill each other. This was an aspect of interpersonal
relationship. This was a quality of life that doesn't exist in our
society. it couldn't exist in capitalism which is based on profit
motive. This is not to say that there aren't individuals within the
capitalist system who are hospitable. All over the world one finds
hospitable individuals. Here I'm talking about a hospitable society,
not the odd individual. The whole society is geared towards a
reciprocal relationship with those around. And this, to me, is very
very striking and it seems to me that, as a principle for human
organization, it is one of the facets about African cultural
development to which greater attention should be paid.
Let me talk about the old men: age. Again, we'll start with
capitalist society. The old people in the capitalist society have no
value. Capitalism wants labor. You've finished working, well that's
tough. In more recent times, you get a pension, but the system doesn't
have any further value for you. In West Indian society, in the period
of the slave trade, the planters used to make a concrete economic
calculation. They had this discussion going. The discussion went along
these lines: "Shall we let these blacks work for us for a long time and
get old and try to get the maximum period of work out of them? Or shall
we work them to death in a limited period of time and get new blacks?"
And most of the planters, in fact, felt that it was more advantageous
to avoid the problems of having old people in the society. What's an
old black going to do? He can't produce. he can't work the eighteen
hours a day which the plantation system required. So that it's better
not to have old black people in the society. And capitalist society all
over, not just on the question of race, adopts this attitude to elderly
people.
African society is fundamentally different. Throughout Africa, the
principle of gerontocracy prevails. The elder, by virtue of his age, is
vested with certain authority and certain power. This is basic because,
for them, wisdom is a reflection of an experience and, by that very
fact, all things being equal, the older the man in the society, the
more his experience in the problems within that society, the more his
reflection on it and, therefore, the greater his wisdom. There is more
to it than that: it means that the older man had had an opportunity
within that society to acquire [a] certain formal education, because
African society had its aspects of formal education. There was a period
of intensive education when a man or a woman, or should I say a boy or
a girl, was about to be initiated into the society, to become a man or
a woman. That was always a period of intensive education. And
subsequently, as individuals moved from age group to age group, or from
one level in a secret society to another, or from one age sect to
another--all these being institutions which related people on the basis
of age--he was also privy to additional knowledge, so that he was going
through a process of learning. So when he reached a certain stage he
was supposed be historian, lawyer, guardian of the constitution, and
the president of the state. He was supposed to be a tutor to the young
king when he came up, to the king's sons that is, or nephews depending
on the system, and in effect, these elders were given responsibility.
They were free, of course, because of the hospitality, from the task of
winning a living, and the system asked them to be alert.
This is the difference. I've seen a lot of old people--in England
in particular it struck me. It is not as bad in the West Indies. Our
black people still manage to survive, even in old age. But I looked at
English society and it has completely destroyed a certain sector of the
society. These women who reach a certain age, they can't relate to
anything else. They perhaps go to a little bingo party and then after a
while they can't even totter out to that. And then you just herd them
into old people's homes. They have no function. They do nothing, so
they rapidly degenerate and become cabbages, because your mind, if you
don't keep it going, is going to degenerate. And this is our society
that we live in now. African society catered for a completely different
conception. The man is always growing, the man is always learning,
until he dies. And that is why field researchers have found that when
you go into an African society you can go and find any old man. Find
him, he might be sixty, he might be seventy, and with perspicacity he
will point out to you elements of the culture and recall episodes of
history going back more than a hundred years--in other words, more than
his lifetime. He had been trained by the society to function in that
way. Now this, to me, is tremendous. A society that takes you from
birth and carries you all the way so that life has meaning to the end.
Well, you judge that for yourself.
I want to talk now about the attitude of the law in African
society. This is my third episode, third area of illustration. The law
in African society was, of course, customary law, rather than recorded
law. In recent times, that customary law has become the subject of
serious scholarship, and numerous treatises have been presented on
African law. The principles are very complex. To begin with, we must
understand the framework in which it functions, a framework, as I see
it, of social order, social stability. So that immediately limits the
areas in which the law is going to operate. Let me illustrate. And
this, again, is using European evidence. All the things I am saying I
can quote ad extentum from European sources. It is a useful technique.
The man says, "No, that's not so." then you say, "well, this man said
so, it wasn't me you know. White people went and saw this." So this is
European evidence. They go to African society and they're amazed at the
type of social security which existed there in the fifteenth century.
All this stuff I'm talking about is cultural history, the period before
the European arrival. Some of it carries over but I'm talking about
traditional African society. All of the travelers into the Western
Sudan, time and time again, they reiterated, "This is tremendous. How
can we travel such huge distances from one end of the Empire of Mali to
another and we don't find any robbers, we don't find any vagrants. If
we lose something, when we turn up at the court of the king we find
that thing has been transmitted there to be given to us." It was
amazing to them because they were operating from the background of
brigandage in Europe, highway robbery. I mean our society--well,
capitalist society--is a robber society, so this explains the whole
thing. [In] the whole development of capitalism--piracy, brigandage on
highways, etc.--the security for goods and persons is a very late
development in European and capitalist society and it has come about
through the establishment of massive mechanisms for keeping people in
their places; in other words, a police force and army. But in African
society this wasn't so. it wasn't the police who were all around to see
that goods and persons were secure. It was the social constraints.
People just didn't do that. Mungo Park went to the Gambia.7
He saw a little group called the Djolas. He said these are a bunch of
savages. But yet, he himself had to concede. He says, "I left my goods
there for months unattended and when I went back there wasn't a pin
removed." And this is a generalized type of remark that is made about
African traditional society; a socially induced security. Everybody
moves around and the like. Now, that's the norm. this doesn't mean that
there is no crime whatsoever. I'm just suggesting the area that, in
that society, was exemplary in its freedom, especially in comparison
with Europe.
Now, insofar as there was crime, it had to be dealt with by the
law. And the principle of the law was not to deal retribution to an
offender, which has largely been the principle of European law until
recent times [wherein] the whole penal system is still being
questioned. But, fundamentally, it hasn't changed. The law is to deal
retribution, the law is a means of controlling certain individuals. And
this is, of course, particularly relevant to us as black people in
white society. But, that apart, what was happening in African society
was that an offender was asked to make restitution, either to the
individual whom he offended, or to the state if his offence was against
the state, [or] against the society as a whole. So it was a question of
restitution rather than retribution being meted out to him. It meant
that if he stole, the object was to replace what he stole, not to put
him into jail. I have never ever read of a jail in traditional African
society. I have never read of stocks and fetters and chains before the
slave trade. This was the African traditional society which didn't jail
people. It said to them, "You replace what you have taken."
Again, the contrast with Europe is clear on all these points, and
what I am developing, therefore, is the idea that there are principles
of human activity which we need to look at which are quite distinct
from the so-called principles of civilization, and that when we look at
that, we begin to see how tremendously meaningful African life was.
Now, we as black brothers, we look around--in the West in
particular, and even in Africa this happens because Africans too have
been subjected to the processes of white cultural imperialism--and you
want to engage in the exercise which I mentioned at first, that is
trying to destroy the myths which the whites have prepared. Even though
this places you in a defensive position you have to do it for your own
benefit and for the benefit of your brothers and sisters. And you look
at the Western Sudan, and that is great. You see in the fifth
century--and, no doubt, brother Richard Moore, [who] is here now, will
talk at length about that--states which are developed in a period
comparable to the European Dark Ages and Middle Ages. I shan't go into
that, as I said. But there is a trick in that, when you are finished
saying we have states, we have civilizations like the European, the
guys are then going to say, "Well, what happened afterwards. We
developed, we produced the modern state." And that leaves you in a
rather bemused position if your initial premise was that human
development can only be expressed in its highest form in that type of
structure which Europeans call a state and within the terms that they
consider civilized. So that at some stage you have to supplement your
awareness of the great achievements, of the striking achievements of
African society. I know this from personal experience. I go to a black
and you can see anguish in him. He says to you, "I want to know
something about the great achievements [of] Africans. Tell me something
striking." So you start to tell him about Lalibella and about rock
churches shorn out of sheer rock in Egypt. You tell him about the
pilgrimages of Mansa Mussa to Egypt. A hundred years after, people in
Egypt were still recalling it. He carried so much gold that, years
afterwards, the Egyptian economy was still disjointed. You tell him
about the sculpture of Benin and Ife and suggest to him that these
things are the marvel of the modern European world. But then you go
further. I would go further. I'm suggesting to the black brothers and
sisters that we need to go further than that in illustrating these
principles which I indicated earlier. For an actual political purpose
related to the revolution, we have to indicate that this cultural basis
existed quite independent of states because, if not, there are certain
types of contradictions into which we fall. Here I have in mind the way
in which the white world normally plays up certain aspects of African
contemporary development as relapses into barbarism. You say that
what's happening in Nigeria, what happened in Congo, this is sort of
atavism--the blacks have gone back to the primeval savagery once the
restraining hand of white civilization has been removed. And to counter
that type of nonsense one doesn't only have to point to the development
of so-called civilization. One also has to show these aspects of
everyday life which were meaningful long before the Europeans arrived,
and if we were to pursue the process, we could see how, in fact, these
things were distorted during the era of contact with Europe; how they
were distorted, particularly in West Africa, during the era of the
slave trade.
My final reflections, before I give over to this brother, concern
some other questions which brothers, in my part of the world anyway,
have been asking. They say, "Well, if you recall African history and
you recapture African culture, to what extent is it possible to
practice this today? Is it just a question of doing this as a sort of
catharsis to throw out what the Europeans said or is there a
possibility of using these principles in constructive contemporary
action?" For Africa, the answer is clearly yes. In African society, any
serious attempt to revolutionize the society will have to take serious
cognizance of these principles. And the best example is the work being
done in Tanzania today and the type of analysis being carried out by
that remarkable man, Julius Nyerere. Take a document like "Socialism
and Rural Development," which is something blacks should all read.8
He is attempting to select the elements of culture in Tanzania, the
process of cultural history before the Europeans arrived and as it was
affected by European arrival, and then from that, to try and come to
terms with the modern situation. So you can extrapolate, you can see
the process. It's not just going back and taking out, harum-scarum. It
has to be a dialectical, you have to see what still exists in the
contemporary situation that comes from the traditional roots. And, in
that sense, the analysis of culture-history is extremely relevant to
the present revolution. Now, I wouldn't go that far for the New World.
I would not be able to say what the shape of this society is going to
be. It's a very tremendous question, but one that i don't really need
to ask. White people always keep asking, "After Black Power, what?"
This is not really for all of us to determine. That's another epoch.
it's like Marx writing about the class struggle and he says, "After all
that is finished, the history of humanity will begin." Well, I see it
that same way. When we have achieved what we want to achieve, the
history of humanity will begin. So humanity will work out its history.
We are concerned now with the blacks. The blacks have to get something
done and I don't think, really, that we can use African History in the
Western World in the sense that Nyerere used it. I think we can only
use it in the first sense, as a sort of catharsis towards action. We
probably could do more with our own history, the history of black
people in the New World, as a basis for working out what is a
revolutionary strategy in the New World and what will be revolutionary
in the new situation. But that is another matter.
For me then, African history, as carried out by the black brothers
and sisters, will have to be a process of coming to grips with all the
aspects of African history and with trying to determine what are the
categories into which we should fit things, as distinct from saying,
let us start and try to determine whether we can reconstruct African
history along the same terms in which European history has been
reconstructed. Because that analysis, where you utilize only the
European criteria is itself the same process of bastardization; the guy
oppresses you and then he selects your terms of reference [for you].
Even when you're fighting him you use his terms of reference. But what
I am trying to suggest here is that we have to break out from those
terms of reference. Thank you.
Notes
1.
Richard B. Moore was born in Barbados. Described in the Congress
brochure as a "deep student of African and Afro-American history," and
as someone who "played a significant part in founding the Barbados
Labour Party," Moore is the author of The Name "Negro": Its Origins and
Evil Use (New York: Afro-American Publishers, 1960), among other books.
Moore, who spoke directly after Rodney, presented a paper titled "The
Civilizations of Ancient Africa."
2.
Esteban Montejo, The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1968).
3.
The reference is to Hugh Shearer, who was prime minister of Jamaica between 1967 and 1972.
4.
Aspects of this important debate were recently precipitated by the
publication of Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of
Classical Civilization (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
See the debate assembled inBlack Athena Revisited, ed. M. R. Lefkowitz
and G. M. Rogers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1996).
5.
Rodney is perhaps referring to the negative response of some members of
the audience to James's comment that Greek civilization represented
humanity's highest achievement. Reference to this can be found in the
15 October 1968 issue of theMcGill Daily, 3.
6.
Rodney is referring to poet Leroi Jones, otherwise known as Amiri
Baraka, the renowned African American poet, playwright and politico
whose work helped to define the Black Power period of the sixties and
seventies.
7.
Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa in the Years
1795, 1796 and 1797 (London: printed by W. Bulmer and Co. for the
author; and sold by G. and W. Nicol, 1799).
8.
Julius K. Nyerere, "Socialism and Rural Development," Uhuru na
Ujamaa/Freedom and Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).
[This is a transcription of a lecture given by Walter Rodney
on 12 October 1968 at the Congress of Black Writers in Montreal,
Canada. The original audiotape of the lecture and the others from the
1968 Congress of Black Writers are in the possession of the Alfie
Roberts Institute, Montreal, Canada. They were entrusted to David
Austin by the late Alfie Roberts in 1995. Before his untimely death in
July 1996, Roberts and Austin were in the process of preparing the
speeches for publication. The original lecture was transcribed from
audiotapes by Mrs. Astrid Jacques and subsequently edited by Austin.
The footnotes have been added in the process. Special thanks to Adrian
Harewood for his comments on the text.]
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