Mali: Der Kampf der Tuareg and the fall of Timbuktu and Gao

This is a brief "heads up" post about the fight of the Tuareg for an independent state (Azawad) in the Sahel.  You may have already read news articles about the takeover of the historic cities of Timbuktu (Tomboctou) and Gao in northern Mali by Tuareg militias.  Just yesterday various news agencies were reporting about the wanton destruction of centuries-old historical mosques, mausoleums and sacred tombs, along with the theft of irreplaceable Medieval Islamic books, scripts, and historical documents by an alarmingly increasing number of radical Islamist militants and thieves who have swept into Timbuktu and Gao in the wake of the security vacum created by the March 22nd coup.  I would hope that some of my fellow blog authors, friends and readers around the blogosphere will stay on top of this catastrophe taking place in what was once one of West Africa's stable democracies.

The above video clip is the German language version of a documentary program ARTE Reportage "Mali: Der Kampf der Tuareg" which aired last week on the French/German cultural TV network ARTE TV. This excellent documentary examines the situation in Timbuktu and across northern Mali just weeks before the rape and pillage of the cities of Timbuktu and Gao.  It features interviews with leaders of the Tuareg militias and the MLNA.  What is also interesting are the various scenes showing how the Salafist network Ansar Dine and AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) is grabbing control of the vast desert region in northern Mali (about the size of Spain) and setting up thier base and training camps.  There is not a sign of Mali government soldiers, ECOWAS military observers, African Union troops, US Army and Marines, or CIA operatives within 500 miles of the place (albeit the CIA is definately in the neighborhood, no doubt about it).

I am posting this information today because the ARTE TV video program will only be available online for a limited time.  The cable/satellite TV program is scheduled to air again on Saturday, July 6th at 10:30 A.M. CET.  Unfortunately for my readers living outside of Europe the ARTE TV programs are available only in France and Germany__ but the program videos and text info on their website may be accessable from abroad.  Nonetheless, it is a don't miss opportunity to learn about another side of this long-running conflict between the nomadic Tuareg and black African tribes (i.e. the Songhai people) who have settled in northern Mali for centuries vs. the government and people living in the south of the country at Bamako.

It's a very different Mali that we see today on our TV and computer screens in comparison to the wonderful and proud country celebrating 50 years of independence depicted in this great interactive video program on the ARTE TV website just two years ago.

More to come after I find the time to compose, edit, and publish what I have on the subject (as usual, I have plenty of info about this subject), including how this story ties in with recent testimony by the commander of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) in Washington D.C. last month.

Nice to be back with my fans and readers at Jewels in the Jungle if only briefly after such a long, long break.

African History in Europe: "What Color is Your Valentine?" re-visited

Meeting of Saint Erasmus of Formiae and Saint Maurice
by Matthias Grünewald (1517-23)

One year ago today, on Valentine’s Day 2007, an historian and university professor living in the southern U.S. and who writes under the pseudonym ‘Aphra Behn’ published an excellent essay about Africans in European history. I discovered her article, “What Color is Your Valentine?” a few weeks after publication and referenced it in a post on a similar subject that I published to Jewels in March 2007. I had the honor of a visit to my blog by Aphra Behn when she stopped by to read my post and leave a comment.

Unfortunately I cannot find recent articles by Aphra Behn published to either the Daily Kos or the Progressive Historians. If she is no longer writing for the blogosphere that would be a sad loss for many of her fans as she helped to make important themes in history both fun and interesting for thousands of readers. So if you are reading this Aphra, please let us know where we can find you online and read your latest work about history.

The original article “What Color is Your Valentine?” is still available at the Daily Kos blog, one of the Top 100-ranked blogs in the world. I highly recommend that you read the original version of Aphra’s wonderful essay with accompanying graphics and links in order to enjoy the full impact of the author’s work. You can find other great articles by Aphra Behn published to the Daily Kos by visiting her archives: Aphra Behn’s Diary at dKos.

For the past 3 weeks a small group of blog authors and friends living in various parts of Europe (Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and the UK) have been quietly organizing an online workgroup for collaboration on themes in black and African History in Europe. At present our group consists of seven people and we are working together on the composition and publishing of essays, commentaries on books and book reviews and academic studies, and sharing our research sources with readers in an attempt to help raise interest and global awareness about this important but long neglected field of study. This is an effort by a multi-national group of people who are truly interested in history and literature. Two members of the group are very qualified in the field of history and education.

This initiative is the follow-up to a project for black and African history in Europe launched in February/March 2007 at Jewels in the Jungle and the Atlantic Review. We should be ready for publication of new work next week and plan to continue publishing articles on the subject throughout March 2008.

Below are the opening paragraphs from Aphra Behn’s original article. I wanted to once again draw my readers’ attention to her fine work, especially on the date when people around the world are celebrating Valentines Day, and in recognition of the month of February when people in the USA and Canada celebrate the rich heritage and legacy of their citizens of color, Black History Month. I will add additional links to external online resources at a later date in order to help clarify some of the historical names and places.


What Color is Your Valentine? Black History at dKos
by aphra behn
Wed Feb 14, 2007 at 10:45:43 AM PST

St. Valentine (depending on whom you ask) was a priest. No, he was a bishop. No he was an African martyr.... An African martyr? Ahhh, listen to the wingnut heads explode as we consider the possibility that good old St. Valentine (patron of a thousands trysts!) might not have been a blue-eyed blonde-haired European, but a Berber, a Semite, or an Ethiopian.

This Saint Valentine lived in the multi-ethnic, multi-colored world of later Imperial Rome, where Africans played key roles in the development of "Western" Civilization. Whether it’s founding monasticism, writing literature, developing theology, or sitting on the Imperial Throne of Rome itself, Africans were everywhere in this world. Join me for a joint Valentine's Day-Black History Month special, as we try to re-imagine the world of Saint Valentine...in all its colors.


The World of St. Valentine

Of the three men known as "Saint Valentine," the African martyr is the least well known; no romantic associations are attached to his legend, and beyond his martyrdom in what is now North Africa around the year 270, little is recorded of his life. In that year, Roman rule encompassed many provinces across the northern band of the continent, stretching from Egypt to modern-day Morocco.

In the previous centuries, northern Africa had seen waves of colonization by Semitic-speaking Phoenicians (Carthage), Greek-speaking Macedonian and Hellenes (in Libya and Egypt). These newcomers mixed with the native inhabitants, dubbed "Berbers" by the Greeks. It wasn't a compliment; the term is related to the term "barbarian" as a derogatory name for non-Greek speakers: people whose language was nonsense–"berberberberber," the approximate equivalent of "blablahblah." Today their descendents prefer "Amazigh" or "Imazighen," "free men."

By the time of St. Valentine, the entire province had come under Roman jurisdiction, adding Latins and the other peoples of the Roman Empire to the mix. Roman African consisted of several different provinces. Throw in extensive trading links to Nubia (Kush) and Ethiopia, and we can imagine those provinces as an ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse mix of peoples, languages, and goods. Kushite mercenaries mixed with Romanized Amazigh merchants, Egyptian priests of Isis, and Greek-speaking Latin administrators in the cities of Alexandria and other cities. From these provinces, Rome was well-supplied with grains, figs, grapes, beans, marble, pottery, olives, textiles, and papyrus.

Philosophers and Emperors

Ideas, religions, and philosophies flowed in and out along with the trade goods. Part of the wider Hellenistic (Greek) world, Alexandria in particular attracted many noted philosophers and produced its own. The Jewish philosopher Philo, who lived in Alexandria around 40 CE, worked to reconcile Jewish teaching with Greek philosophy. The Athenian philosopher Antiochus of Askalon eventually settled in Alexandria, and taught a number of pupils, including Arius Didymus. Didymus, a Stoic thinker, was a friend of Emperor Octavian (Augustus); allegedly their friendship helped save Alexandria from destruction as he battled Mark Antony for control of Egypt and Rome.

Did I say friends of emperors? How about Africa as the source of emperors? In CE 193, Libyan native Lucius Severus was proclaimed emperor by his troops. Although not born into the Senatorial class, he had been made a senator by Marcus Aurelius in 172, and had made a name for himself in the army. His rule was rent by wars and financial difficulty, but he also made significant military and legal reforms in the Empire:

Severus brought many changes to the Roman military. Soldiers' pay was increased by half, they were allowed to be married while in service, and greater opportunities were provided for promotion into officer ranks and the civil service. .... The emperor created a new, larger praetorian guard out of provincial soldiers from the legions. Increases were also made to the two other security forces based in Rome: the urban cohorts, who maintained order; and the night watch, who fought fires and dealt with overnight disturbances, break-ins and other petty crime.... The emperor's position as ultimate appeals judge had brought an ever-increasing legal workload to his office. During the second century, a career path for legal experts was established, and an emperor came to rely heavily upon his consilium, an advisory panel of experienced jurists, in rendering decisions. Severus brought these jurists to even greater prominence. A diligent administrator and conscientious judge, the emperor appreciated legal reasoning and nurtured its development. His reign ushered in the golden age of Roman jurisprudence, and his court employed the talents of the three greatest Roman lawyers: Papinian, Paul and Ulpian.—Michael L. Meckler Ohio State University

The First Black Emperor?

Ok, so we've established that Severus was from Africa. Was he "black"? (This is a Black history Month diary, after all.) Frustratingly for modern North Americans, the ancient Romans did not share our view of race. Pre-darwinian in their thinking, they certainly did not categorize inheritable characteristics as 19th century racist theorists did (and as their 21st century counterparts sadly still do.) Recording physical characteristics was less important to the Romans than to us; their lines of "us and them" were drawn more firmly around notions of citizenship than race, "civility" (i.e., Hellenization) than ethnicity.

Linguistics suggest that Severus' family was Phoenician in background; portraiture suggests he may have been darker complected than his wife, who was of Latin descent. It' s probably an exaggeration to call him a "Black " emperor. But it is no exaggeration to say that many of the authors and figures we consider "Roman" were in fact not simply Latinate, but from a wide mix of peoples and "races": Germanic. Amazigh (Berber). Celtic. Egyptian. Macedonian. Germanic. And more...

An Amazigh Author

Take Lucius Apuleius of Madaurus, author of The Golden Ass and other "Roman" works. He was a follower of the Mystery religion of Isis, one of Egypt's great exports to the Hellenic World. The Golden Ass is a funny, often bawdy, yet deeply spiritual account of one initiate's travels through this religion of love, magic, and transformation. He was also the author of several philosophical treatises.

Sometime between 150 and 160, he was accused of practicing malignant magic, entrapping a wealthy older widow into marrying him. His defense, so eloquent that it was preserved, explicitly claimed his own status as a "barbarian" (Berber), and contains this impassioned, unapologetic assertion of his African identity:

About my homeland, it is situated on the border of Numidia and Gaetulia. I am part Numidian and part Gaetulian. I don’t see why I should be ashamed of this...Why did I offer this information? So that from now on, Semelianus, you may be less offended by me, and so that you may extend your good-will and forgiveness, if by some negligence, I did not select your Attic Zarat as my birthplace.

I don't know about you, but when I studied Apuleius' works in school, he was presented to me as "Roman" author, rather than an African one. While not denying that he was part of a wider Latin-speaking community and living in a Roman polity, is it not also significant that this practitioner of an African mystery religion was also proud of his African roots? It’s impossible to say if he would be seen as "black" today; modern Amazigh range in colors from what North Americans call "Black" to what they call "white," thanks to centuries of intermarriage with Europeans, Sub-Saharan Africans, Arabs, and others. But he was not perceived as entirely Roman, and it seems only right to acknowledge that.

Saint Valentine and the African Martyrs

And what about poor St. Valentine? I haven't forgotten him. Frankly, we don't know if he was what we would identify in North America as "black"–nor do we have this information for most of the North African Christians who were later revered as saints. Three early Popes (or Bishops of Rome) hailed from Africa. Pope Saint Victor I, the first of these, was born while the writer Apuleius was still alive, and served as Pope from 186 CE until 197. We know frustratingly little of his life (or complexion), but it's interesting to compare the picture of him drawn by European Christians (Note: see original article at Daily Kos for image) with that of modern American Catholics (found at this link and not reproduced because of copyright—but please go check out this beautiful icon.)

Certainly, as Christianity spread through the empire, it attracted many adherents in Africa–of all of its varied ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. One of the earliest texts written by a Christian woman is from African Carthage–the Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas, written in part by Perpetua herself, a 22 year-old-mother awaiting martyrdom along with her heavily pregnant servant, Felicitas. Revered in Christian martyrologies for centuries hence, they were favourite subjects of medieval European martyrologies, often presented as, well, European:

Read more of "What Color is Your Valentine?" at the Daily Kos
Read more about the 3rd Century Christian martyr Saint Maurice, a leader and highly venerated patron saint of the legendary Roman Theban Legion.

Technorati tags:Africa Europe history european history black history black history month global voices

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: HBO Films re-examines a tragic chapter in 19th Century American history

Note: Part I of my series on the 400-year commemoration of Jamestown (Virginia) was posted to Jewels in the Jungle on May 11th. The second installment, New Perspectives on Anglo-America’s birth in the 17th Century, was posted on May 17th.

For the history buffs and readers who stop by “Jewels” to get the lowdown on stuff they didn’t bother to teach us at school about world history, let’s fast-forward through American (U.S.) history by 283 years from the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to the year 1890. I am doing this in order to highlight a groundbreaking HBO Films TV movie based upon the well known book “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” by Dee Alexander Brown. Even some of my German friends and readers know about this book although people generally know little about the true stories of the battles between the U.S. government and the Lakota and Dakota Sioux after the American Civil War. The German public has a romantic, nostalgic attachment to the myths about European expansion into the American West as do many people across Europe. This is partly due to a profusion of Hollywood westerns and American TV films imported into the European market since the end of WWII, and of course the beloved stories by the famous German author Karl May converted to German film and TV productions about the American West. It would be interesting to learn how German and other European educators have taught the history of the contact and conflicts between Europeans and Native Americans during the settlement of North America between 1600-1900.

The HBO Films’ website for Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee offers more insight into this important chapter of 19th century American history. Pay particular attention to the interview with the actor Adam Beach (a descendent of the Saulteux-Ojibwa nation in Canada) who portrays the young Dartmouth university-educated doctor Charles Eastman (Lakota name: né Ohiyesa), and you should also visit the HBO multimedia feature ‘The Road to Wounded Knee’. The documentary film Spirit Rider (18 min.) narrated by leading elders and scholars from the Lakota Nation is an excellent insight into the lives of the Lakota Sioux today. As a young man I had the privilege to spend considerable time out on their ancestral lands and that experience has been with me ever since. The Sacred Hoop of the Lakota and Dakota may be coming together again after more than 100 years of being broken… at Wounded Knee.

HBO FILMS
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee – main website home
The Road to Wounded Knee – a special multimedia feature on the history of the events that led up to the massacre of the Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee on Dec. 29, 1890
Interview with actor Adam Beach (native-American film actor and TV star) and other cast members, film producer, and script writer
Photos and Video – trailers
Spirit Rider documentary and additional resources on native-American people

Excerpt from interview with actor Adam Beach – HBO FILMS

HBO: What were your first impressions about your character?

Adam Beach: Well, I play Charles Eastman. And the first thing I did was hire a voice coach who could help me with the details of this era, 'cause man, that was the toughest thing for me, was just to explore that world of being a distinguished Victorian gentleman, and walking and talking a certain way. And the way they saw things, their values, how they wore their clothes. There were so many details. So that was really exciting learning about all that.

I learned that Charles Eastman was a product of assimilation by the government. He did succeed in becoming an educated man, but what he came to realize is that if you lose your culture and traditions, you lose your identity not only as an Indian, but as a part of society. He learned that in the end it didn't matter how educated he was if he was not helping his people. It didn't matter at all. And in the story you see how much he loses of himself because there's nothing he can do to help his people move forward when there's a government pushing them and killing them off.

HBO: What do you think the government was trying to accomplish through assimilation, and what do you think actually happened?

Adam Beach: The idea was to help motivate the Indian people by molding them into becoming part of white society. But what they didn't realize is that you can't get rid of the Indian. You can't take away their identity to make them a part of another society. And that's where the conflict was: they didn't realize that as Indian people, they already embodied a tradition that connected to Mother Earth and there was a spiritual guidance; everything was already laid down in stone. The Indians didn't want to change. So there was this idea being forced onto a people that had been living this valued life for generations. And that's where it went wrong. The government didn't want to understand the lifestyle and culture and traditions of the Indian.

HBO: And the legacy of this assimilation has had a lasting impact on American Indian peoples to this day, hasn't it?

Adam Beach: Absolutely. One of the things I want people to understand with this film is that the tragedy of Indian people across North America still exists. You know, everybody wonders why we are the way we are today. There's so much that comes from this story. I want people to understand how in the late 1800s, the government and the churches established residential schools, boarding schools to rid the Indian, to bring them into society, and to destroy their culture and tradition.

And if you can imagine people trying to tell you being Indian is bad, is wrong - your culture, your tradition is dealing with the devil. It affects my generation, why is my world so much more of a struggle? It's because after a hundred years of this manipulation of 'you're not a good person,' it really affects us.

Our generation is starting to understand that we have to rid ourselves of this subconscious mentality that you're a bad person. That's gonna take time. But I've come to understand where the pain comes from in living on a reservation, at being corralled onto a little piece of land. A lot of the generation that I speak for now are just starting to come out of it, to say, we are proud, we are a strong people. We have traditions that could teach the world how to relate with Mother Earth, how to relate with themselves, to the animals, to plants, to a stone, to the trees. I could go on.

HBO: How did your own personal experiences feed into your work on this role?

Adam Beach: Charles Eastman has to see a lot of his people die. And for me, when I was eight years old, my mother was hit by a drunk driver and she was eight months pregnant and she died in front of my house in a ditch. And then two months later, my dad, he drowned. He was drinking a lot and under medication for depression.

And after those two experiences, I've had to grow up with this loss. Once you lose your parents, you get this numbness, this feeling of having to really be able to connect yourself with someone. I depended on my brothers for that connection, but to have that feeling of being taken care of...I lost it when my parents passed away.

So with Charles Eastman having to see his people die, there's an easy connection with having to hold in all those feeling of loss. And the thing I want people to learn with Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is that this incident is just one of many. They chose "Wounded Knee" as the story to tell, but this has happened throughout history with many different tribes across North America. And I hope people understand that these stories have to be told truthfully from a perspective where you get to feel what these people have gone through.

End excerpt

Update May 30th: Additional reading, viewing, and listening about this important subject in American History and the HBO Film "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee"

American Indians in Childrens Literature by Debbie Reese of the University of Illinois - Urbana/Champaign. Critical discussion(s) of American Indians in childrens books, school curriculum, and popular culture

Hanay Geiogamah, Director UCLA American Indian Studies Center
Indian Country Diaries (a 2006 PBS special report about the challenges facing Native Americans in the 21st Century plus a great history roundup)
The End of the Hollywood Trail (Press release about the HBO Films release of Wounded Knee, Hat Tip to Debbie Reese)

The Long Now Foundation
The Political History of North America from 25,000 BC to 2100 AD
A riveting 1 hour lecture by Roger Kennedy (Harvard University, The Smithsonian National Museum of American History, U.S. National Park Service) - Hat Tip to Michael Fisher
Long Now seminars archive: assorted media downloads of Roger Kennedy's Nov. 2005 lecture

Press Reviews of HBO Films ‘Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee’

Argus Media (Sioux Falls, South Dakota)
The Unresolved Story of Wounded Knee, 05/27/07

TIME Magazine blogs - Tuned In
Weekend TV: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 05/25/07

New York Times, May 25, 2007
TV Review 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee'
There’s an Allegory in Those Hills by Virginia Heffernan

Indian Country Today (Native American national newspaper)
‘Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee’ Debuts on HBO, 05/18/07

Native Unity Digest (blog)
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 05/15/07

Related articles and resources on Native-American history 1670-1900

Smithsonian Institute – Encyclopedia Smithsonian
American Indian History and Culture

University of Washington Libraries – Native American History

U.S. Library of Congress
American Memory – Native American History collections

Lakota people, Lakota mythology (Wikipedia)

Lakota da Dakota Wowapi Oti Kin: Lakota Dakota Information website

HBO Films – Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Resources on national Indian organizations incl. National Congress of American Indians

And what does all of this have to do with Africa and Africans you ask? Check this out..

Buffalo Soldier (Wikipedia)
Buffalo Soldiers & The Indian Wars by Stanford L. Davis
The Buffalo Soldier Story - the proud history of the 9th and 10th Calvary
Buffalo Soldiers National Museum

As you can imagine, the Lakota Sioux and African-Americans may still have some "open issues" that need resolving in the 21st Century.

More stuff on the settlement of Jamestown, VA. in 1607

Jamestown, from the Powhatan’s perspective by Helen C. Rountree
Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown by Helen C. Rountree, Virginia University Press 2005
June 2006 review of book “Pochanontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough” - History Cooperative

Indian Country Today
The True Story of Pocahontas – the other side of history (book review), 05/02/07


Technorati tags:Jamestown History American History Native American American Indian African-American European History America Global Voices

Jamestown at 400 Years - Part II: New perspectives on Anglo-America's birth in the 17th Century

Note: Part I of this series on the 400-year commemoration of Jamestown (Virginia) was posted to Jewels in the Jungle on May 11th. The story continues…

The Harvard University Press blog wrote on March 26th about an AP article and quote from NYU Professor Karen Ordahl Kupperman’s new book “The Jamestown Project”. Much of the information contained in this post is taken from Professor Kupperman’s book and from selected essays written by leading U.S. scholars who participated in the NEH Summer 2000 Institute at the Folger Institute/Folger Shakespeare Library: Texts of Imagination and Empire: The Founding of Jamestown in its Atlantic Context.

The research on the subject of America’s first permanent English settlement published to the Net by historians, archeologists, educators, and other scholars is so interesting and comprehensive that it would be a distraction for our readers to say (write) anything more at this stage in the series. Without any further ado, here is the latest historical re-mix on colonial America’s early ‘birthing pains’. Professor Kupperman writes in the introduction to her book “The Jamestown Project”:

Introduction - Creation Myths (selected excerpts)

“In May 1607 a party of just over a hundred men and boys landed on the James River in Virginia and planted the colony they named Jamestown in honor of the English king. The little colony struggled through a horrible first decade in which it barely held on before the settlers began to find their footing on the path that would lead to stability and, eventually, success. Jamestown has always occupied an equivocal position in American history. It is celebrated as the first permanent English settlement in the territory that would become the United States. These colonists planted the tiny seed from which would grow a powerful nation where all [of] the world’s people would mingle.

And yet Jamestown makes us uncomfortable. The portrait of it that has come down to us depicts greedy, grasping colonists in America and their arrogant backers in England. The settlement’s first years were marked by belligerent intrusions on the Chesapeake Algonquians which manifested mainly the ignorance of the English. Within Jamestown, life degenerated into a shambles of death and despair. When John Rolfe finally developed a marketable crop—tobacco--the colonists exploited the land and one another in the scramble for profits. Ultimately they would institute slavery for imported Africans in their insatiable search for profits. This is the creation story from Hell.
………………………………

England was a laggard in overseas ventures. By 1606, when the Virginia Company was organized and plans for the colony were laid, English merchants in collaboration with political leaders had begun to establish a role for their nation in the newly opening trades around the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and in the East. In these endeavors they were attempting to emulate, and often intrude on, the Spanish and Portuguese, united under the Spanish crown since 1580, who were the pioneers in creating the connections and bases through which trading operations were carried on.

New Spain was almost a century old when Jamestown was founded, and French traders had established firm partnerships with Indian nations in the fur trade along the St. Lawrence [river] to the north. Spanish ships had scouted Chesapeake Bay repeatedly before concluding that the region would not repay the effort required to sustain settlement. The Spanish had planted St. Augustine on the Florida coast, and this, not Jamestown, was actually the first permanent European colony within the future Untied States; it was settled in 1565, almost half a century before Jamestown. And Santa Fe in New Mexico* was founded shortly after Jamestown.

*Blog author's note: Recent historical findings indicates that Juan Martinez de Montoya founded Santa Fe between 1601-1602. Also read the article An Uncertain Founding: Santa Fe by New Mexico research historian James Ivey at Common Place Vol. 3 Issue 4, July 2003.

By 1607 English fishermen had been visiting the Newfoundland Banks [off the eastern coast of Canada] and the New England coast for a century or more, and they built temporary settlements there, but no permanent English presence existed. In the last decades of the sixteenth century, a time when England and Spain were at war [Anglo-Spanish War 1585], English ships participated enthusiastically in privateering—licensed piracy against Spanish fleets traveling from the Caribbean to Seville. In the 1580’s Sir Walter Raleigh’s colony at Roanoke [Roanoke Island or Lost Colony], within the Outer Banks of North Carolina, was initially designed to serve as a base for those patriotic privateers.

The first group of settlers sent to Roanoke in 1585 conformed to the classic model: a group of young men under military authority. Their governor was Captain Ralph Lane. As always with such a design, Lane found the settlers, whom he characterized as the “wylde menn of myne owene nacione,” hard to control and motivate. By the end of the colony’s first winter, relationships with the coastal Carolina Algonquians [Pamlico], on whom they depended for food, had broken down completely. They deserted the site early the next summer, and Lane scorned the whole enterprise, writing that “the discovery of good mine by the goodnesse of God, or a passage to the Southsea, or someway to it, and nothing els can bring this country in request to be inhabited by our nation.”
………………………………..

English venturers were very conscious of being newcomers in all these places where they sought a foothold, and the keynote of their activities was improvisation. Everywhere they went, they necessarily employed trial and error—and error often predominated. Promoters laid plans, but the ordinary people who carried them out, often very young men and women, were the ones who had to deal with realities on the ground and who ultimately founded a successful colony. Many involved in early-seventeenth-century America—Indians, Europeans, and Africans—had had experience of other Atlantic and Mediterranean regions before they came together on the James River. Often their experience was as captives or as individuals left behind when the ships on which they had arrived departed hurriedly in the face of dangers ranging from armed resistance to violent Atlantic storms. Those who could improvise were the ones who survived. And the knowledge of transatlantic others gained from these people informed planning and responses on all sides when Europeans attempted to create bases in America. All players brought vast experience, some relevant and some irrelevant, to the changed situations that Europeans ventures created; and they drew on this experience, for good or ill, when confronted by the necessity of making choices.

END of excerpts from “The Jamestown Project”
Note: Links to Wikipedia sources have been added to the original text for clarification and to provide resources for further reading.

In a May 13th opinion article for The Washington Post online titled “America’s Founding Fictions” Professor Kupperman contrasts the two popular historical versions of colonial America’s early beginnings (Plymouth vs. Jamestown).

America's Founding Fictions
By Karen Ordahl Kupperman
Sunday, May 13, 2007; B02

The colonists landed, short of food and supplies, after a long and harrowing transatlantic voyage. The initial exploring party stole a large quantity of corn that the Indians had carefully stored away for the hard winter. They then dug up some graves, looted items that had been buried with the dead and ransacked Indian houses. Furious fighting with the natives soon ensued. Once they had selected a site for their settlement, the migrants endured a winter of death in which they lost more than half their number.

Ah, of course, you're thinking -- Jamestown. All that looting and fighting and stealing and death. It's the creation story from hell. But think again.

That description is not of the troubled Virginia colony settled by a group of men popularly derided, then and now, as the scum of the Earth. Rather, it depicts the arduous first days of Massachusetts's Plymouth colony, our favorite myth of the nation's founding.

These aren't the kinds of events we remember the Pilgrims by, even though the description is drawn from their own words. Instead, our national mythmakers have accentuated the positive to carve the story of the pious Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving out of Plymouth's more complicated, less pure beginnings. In contrast, the earlier Jamestown colony, whose 400th anniversary we commemorate tomorrow, is depicted as a saga of unrelieved degradation and failure, relegated to second-tier status in the history books. But it shouldn't be.

American history today begins with the Pilgrims because their experience in Plymouth has been molded to offer a more acceptable foundation story than the exploitative dog-eat-dog world of the early Chesapeake. The Puritans' arrival in Boston, where they built John Winthrop's "city on a hill," clinched it for Massachusetts.

The Pilgrim story took over as our founding fiction after the Revolutionary War, when New England and the South began to pull in different directions. The Massachusetts colonists were labeled the Pilgrim Fathers in the 1790s, and the agreement they signed on arrival became the Mayflower Compact about the same time. Because Puritanism had come to be seen as repressive (think of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter"), early American leaders such as Daniel Webster brought the Plymouth colonists forward as the kinder, gentler Puritans.

This is the origins story we prefer and the one we promote. We prefer it because we like to think that we are descended from a humble and saintly band, religiously motivated and communal in organization, who wanted nothing more than the freedom to worship God. The individualistic, grasping capitalists of Virginia offer much less appealing antecedents.

Encasing our national founding in a myth of immaculate conception feeds the assumption that the United States is unlike other nations, that it acts in the world only to serve the greater good…

But America's true founding story is much more interesting and much more real. All early colonies had tremendous difficulties becoming established. The reports sent home from Jamestown were overwhelmingly dismal; it was all harder than anyone had expected, and everyone had different ideas about how to proceed.

Dismayed by the high death rate and the disorder of Jamestown's first couple of years, the colony's London sponsor, the Virginia Company -- a kind of early venture-capital outfit -- decided to compel the settlers to be virtuous. It imposed the most severe martial law, regulating every aspect of life to force the men to work for the collective interest. The death penalty was ordered for almost any infraction. If civic virtue could be achieved by force, the Virginia Company was going to do it. (Read more at the Washington Post)

End of excerpt from article “America’s Founding Fictions” by Karen O. Kupperman

Resources used for this post and additional online resources:

Karen Ordahl Kupperman “The Jamestown Project” (Amazon.com) and (Powell’s Books)
Plymouth vs. Jamestown: America’s Founding Fictions (Washington Post, 05/13/07)

Virtual Jamestown Project by Crandall Shifflett (Virginia Tech University) - Jamestown Interpretive Essays
Women in Early Jamestown by Kathleen M. Brown (University of Pennsylvania)
First Hand Accounts (documents from 1570-1705)

The Folger Institute / Folger Shakespeare Library Washington, D.C.
Texts of Imagination and Empire: The Founding of Jamestown in its Atlantic Context
Introduction by Professor Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Includes references to arrival of first African slaves to Jamestown in 1619)
Forced Afro-Atlantic Migration and the Middle Passage by Phyllis Peres (University of Maryland, 2000)
The Shadow of the ‘Black Legend’ in John Smith’s General History of Virginia by Eric Griffin, Milsaps College
The Three Turks’ Heads: Travels in the Middle East before Jamestown by Karen Ordahl Kupperman (profiles of Capt. John Smith and George Sandys)
Bibliographies - primary sources and web resources


Technorati tags:Jamestown History American History Native American African-American European History England America Africa Spanish history French history Global Voices

Jamestown at 400-years: What is the true story of this early American settlement?

"Sometimes I choose these really difficult subjects to write about. This is one of them."

America commemorates the 400th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement on the North American continent, Jamestown (Virginia) this weekend with a great deal of fanfare, pomp and ceremony___ and cost (zillions of $$$). After all, there are not many 400 year-old birthdays in the United States of America to celebrate in 2007 and this one is important from a historical perspective not only for the multi-ethnic and multi-national immigrant population of the U.S.A. but it is just as important for the (remaining) Native-American tribes of the U.S. and Canada and for Africans and Europeans too.

The “Black and African History in Europe” project launched in February 2007 was the most successful series of posts ever published to Jewels in the Jungle since its inception in May 2004 (Yep, we’re 3 years old today!) so it is a special pleasure for me to be able to return to the subject of history and focus on the difficult beginnings (birthing pains) of the country of my birth and of my recent ancestral heritage for over 250 years.

Note: see my archives for February and March 2007 for a list of all the posts re: the Black and African History in Europe group project. New posts are coming soon.

I like many people from around the world am very proud and loving of my country as this is a learned behavior developed from information we receive from family and friends, our formal and informal education, and our respective national press and media such as films, television and radio programming___ and of course today the Internet. But I want my own personal feelings of patriotism and allegiance to my country to be based upon the knowledge of the hard facts about our past and the belief that we as Americans have a shared responsibility and national commitment to overcome the many errors and even atrocities against one another (and “others”) as we move forward into the 21st Century.

The diligent research carried out for my own contributions to the Black and African History in Europe project over many weeks helped me to better understand the real value of solid academic research and analysis by leading historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and various scholars that were referenced for that project. All of the project team members are deeply indebted to the scholars and fellow blog authors who helped us launch the series in February 2007 and create a renewed interest and excitement for history both in ourselves and for our readers around the world.

Some of you may have read or seen news reports about Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to the United States in May for the 400th Anniversary of the Jamestown Settlement. The international press and TV news focused on everything from the Queen’s hats to the White House “white tie” dinner reception for the Queen or the “special friendship” between Great Britain and the United States or some other aspect of her visit. These news angles have nothing to do with the real significance of the Queen’s historic visit, the founding of the Jamestown Settlement in 1607. Jamestown is a story from 400 years ago that could challenge today’s best historical fiction, tragedies, mysteries, and adventure stories__ Jamestown was, in the words of New York University’s Professor Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “…the creation story from Hell.”.

In this short series of posts about the founding of Jamestown I will focus primarily on the work recently published by leading U.S. historians and writers which sheds new light on a story that has been so heaped in myth, outright lies, romantic literary excesses, and general bullshit for so long that the true history was in danger of being lost forever___ as is the case about the national history of some people who may be reading these words right now. Who are we, where did we come from, and what is the truth about how we got to where we are today? What the Hell really happened way back then?

JAMESTOWN REVISITED AND THE INVENTING OF AMERICA

The renowned ethno-historian and scholar on Native-American peoples, Professor J. Frederick Fausz of the University of Missouri – St. Louis, wrote a scathing article for the History News Network titled ‘Jamestown at 400: Caught between a rock and a slippery slope’. Dr. Fausz chastises his fellow historians and literary scholars, the press and film and TV networks, promoters and politicians and a host of other folks for having done a potentially great injustice to the true story of the Jamestown Settlement. We’ll get to the Professor’s article(s) at the HNN in a bit but first I would like to quote from a quote in the year 1622 that Dr. Fred Fausz used in his introduction:

Readers seldom take the pain to gather together all that hath been written on any subject but usually content themselves with one or two books and some former treatises, whereby they gain but a lame and partial knowledge, and so prejudice the Truth. -- Edward Waterhouse, Virginia Company Secretary, 1622

Edward Waterhouse was the secretary of the Virginia Company of London setup in 1606 by King James I of England to establish settlements on the eastern coast of North America. TIME Magazine explains in its April 2007 Jamestown at 400 commemorative feature article ‘Inventing America’:

The Virginia colony had John Smith, Pocahontas, slavery, famine, battles and a great Indian chief. So how come Plymouth Rock gets all the press? An in-depth look at the place where our nation began to take shape They thought they were lost. The Susan Constant, the Godspeed and the Discovery had sailed from London on Dec. 20, 1606, carrying 144 passengers and crew, bound for Virginia. Howling winds pinned them to the coast of England for six weeks. After crossing the Atlantic by a southerly route and reprovisioning in the West Indies, they headed north, expecting landfall in the third week of April 1607. Instead they found a tempest. For four days they sounded, seeking offshore shallows in vain. Then, at 4 a.m. on April 26, they saw land. The three ships sailed into Chesapeake Bay and found, in the words of one voyager, "fair meadows and goodly tall trees, with such fresh waters running through the woods, as I was almost ravished at the first sight thereof." They picked an island in a river for a fortified outpost and named it after their king, James. ………………..

But it's worth remembering that Jamestown was a giant gamble. The trials were severe, the errors numerous, the losses colossal, the gains, eventually, great. Life in Jamestown was a three-way tug-of-war between daily survival, the settlers' own preconceptions and the need to adapt to a new world. Jamestown did not invent America, but in its will to survive, its quest for democracy, its exploitation of both Indians and slaves, it created the template for so many of the struggles--and achievements--that have made us who we are. It contained in embryo the same contradictions that still resonate in America today--the tension between freedom and authority, between public purpose and private initiative, between our hopes and our fears.
……………….

Jamestown spawned four centuries of myths….In reality, Jamestown was a hardheaded business proposition. The 104 English settlers who stayed when the ships went home--gentlemen, soldiers, privateers, artisans, laborers, boys (no women yet)--were late entrants in the New World sweepstakes. Spain had conquered Mexico by 1521, Peru by 1534. The mines disgorged silver, and by the end of the 16th century, Mexico City and Lima had universities, printing presses and tens of thousands of inhabitants. The Portuguese were harvesting dyewood in Brazil, and the French were trading for furs in Canada.
………………..

Note: for more information on African slaves who worked in the silver and gold mines of Mexico during the 16th-17th Century see the writing by Daniel Hernandez at Intersections (Los Angeles CA.). Also see Daniel’s Jan 14th post “But you don’t look Mexican…”

…the England of James I and his predecessor, Elizabeth I, suffered from overpopulation and poverty. Pushing people into other lands could solve both problems and even have a side benefit. As the Rev. Richard Hakluyt, England's premier geographer, put it, "Valiant youths rusting [from] lack of employment" would flourish in America and produce goods and crops that would enrich their homeland. The notion was so prevalent that it inspired a blowhard character in the 1605 play Eastward Ho! to declare that all Virginia colonists had chamber pots of "pure gold."

That would have surprised the Jamestown settlers, who faced an array of challenges, all of them together crushing…..
........................

End of Excerpt from TIME Magazine

End of Jamestown at 400 years - Part I

Technorati tags:Jamestown History American History Native American African-American European History England America Africa Spanish history French history Global Voices

The Slavery Essays - Part I: U.K.'s 200th anniversary of the abolition of the Slave Trade Act 1807

The Slave Market by Gustave Boulanger ca. 1888

The Introduction

I always find it difficult to talk or write about slavery in the New World and the Atlantic World as it has such a powerful legacy in my own country, the United States of America, as well as the whole of the Americas (North and South), and of course my own family. There have been so many myths and lies and half-truths regarding the enslavement of black Africans in the former European colonies of the Americas that it is no wonder that many Americans (North and South) and Europeans and the rest of the world spend their whole lives in ignorance and denial about the grim legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and the impact it has had on all of our respective societies.

I welcome the effort being made by the U.K. to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the Slave Trade Act (1807) as it helps to bring out into the open a public discussion and recognition of the role that various people and entities played in this most despicable of human endeavors AND the commemoration helps to remind us all that the legacy of slavery is still with us in so many ways today, especially when you stop to think that there are more people enslaved today in 2007 than has ever been in human history. In other words, we all have a burden of great shame to bear in regards to the subject of slavery, one of the most ancient and enduring atrocities in the human experience and world history.

So, hats off to U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and many others in the U.K. who have put such a great effort into making this 200 anniversary commemoration a memorable event for many of us and to use it as a Call to Action for people everywhere to become more engaged in helping to end modern-day slavery.

One thing that our team project on the history of blacks and Africans in Europe has helped me to understand is that one cannot go through life using tragic events caused by the acts of contemptible personalities in history like a blunt weapon to bludgeon one’s so-called enemies into submission or death. People are going to believe what is comfortable for them to believe and ignore and deny everything else, no matter how much truth another opinion or indisputable factual evidence you present, everything else will be rejected___ oft times violently rejected as we clearly see everyday on our televisions and read about in the press. History, religion, literature, and the media (news, entertainment) has been so abused and misused by people seeking power over others down through the ages to grossly mislead people and pit one idiot group against another that it is absolutely awful.

Slavery and abolition played a pivotal role in the history of my home, Saint Louis, Missouri and the surrounding tri-State region (Kansas, Illinois, Iowa: see Bleeding Kansas era before the American Civil War). Slavery not only affected black Africans but also the indigenous tribes of the region (also see Mississippian culture and Cahokia) and the European settlers who entered this frontier around 1699 in search of land and gold and animal furs; escaping the misery that they had left behind in Europe. If my African-American ancestors who had arrived at the confluence of the great Mississippi and Missouri rivers in 1790 had decided to crossover to the Missouri side and settle in the bustling frontier outposts of what would later become Saint Louis, they probably would have lost their hard won freedom. I presume that they were freed from bondage shortly before or after the American Revolutionary War with England, 1775-1783.

Note: Although the early history of European presence in the area starts with the expeditions of Louis Joliet and Jacques Marquette (1673), the first settlement at what is today Saint Louis, MO. didn’t begin until almost 100 years later with the arrival of Pierre Laclède and his 13-year old stepson René Auguste Chouteau and a group of 30 men in 1763. These territories were actually controlled by the Spanish royal court (a particularly brutal and murderous government for black African slaves in the colonies) but after the end of the French - Indian War (1754-1763) and the 1763 Treaty of Paris that gave all lands east of the Mississippi river to England the small settlement of Saint Louis began to grow rapidly. By the time my early American ancestors showed up in the area the settlement of St. Louis had grown to the enormous size of approximately 1000 people. Massive!

Napoléan Bonaparte, who worked out a deal with President Thomas Jefferson and the U.S. government administration of 1801 to purchase the vast Louisiana Territory had re-introduced black slavery into the French colonies and territories in 1803. For more on the history of St. Louis click here and here ( also see: history and heritage of Missouri including St. Louis).

As a young man growing up in St. Louis, Missouri I had the privilege to know and be close friends with an old southern couple, Mr. and Mrs. Wofford, who hailed from the great State of Mississippi. Mr. Wofford had worked as a black sharecropper (a farmer without land) in rural Mississippi if I remember correctly, and he and his wife would spend hours talking with their lovely grand daughter and me about life in the early 20th Century rural South. We affectionately addressed them as “Big Mama” and “Big Papa”, an expression used by many people of the southern United States of that time to describe a grandparent. Big Mama was a very pretty petite woman and Big Papa was a strapping, strong man of about six feet (1.85 meters) in height.

I can clearly picture Big Mama rocking back and forth in her favorite chair on their front porch (veranda) during a warm summer evening while enjoying a chew of tobacco or pinch of snuff discreetly lodged in her cheek explaining to us “citified youngsters” what slavery and post-Civil War America was like for black folks and white folks alike. She recalled stories that had been handed down to them from their own grandparents and relatives and older friends, many who had labored the great majority of their lives as slaves in America’s Deep South. I learned everything I needed to know about “slavery and forgiveness” from these two beautiful people who helped to shape my own life in such a powerful way. Of course I have learned even more about the horrible institution of human slavery since my youth, and although I have been able to improve and expand my knowledge on Big Mama’s lessons about slavery, I struggle to this very day with the “forgiveness” part. Can’t do it, forgive whom? They all dead, those who dunnit, aren’t they? Non?

So, I’ve come up with a few brief essays for the 200th Anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in the U.K. and I am dedicating this humble effort to the memory of Mr. and Mrs. Wofford, who have both passed away from us. Big Mama would be tinkled pink that the British are struggling to come to terms with this terrible legacy in their history, and I can imagine that she would be mighty proud that her “adopted grandson” would speak out with a message from the Colonies. Big Mama’s own message for the citizens of the United Kingdom and the world would be quite simple and to the point:

“Look into the mirror of your history and face up to the Truth, then get on with your lives and make sure you don’t behave as bad as those lost souls who came before you.”

The “Jewels in the Jungle” Essay on Slavery – Part I

It has not escaped my attention while researching information necessary to compose the articles and posts for our Black History in Europe project that slavery has played a key role in the lives of Africans and Europeans alike for hundreds of years. Dr. Kate Lowe, co-editor with T.F. Earle of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, 2005) has eloquently written about the complexity of problems surrounding this sad legacy of European history in the introduction to her book. There were many, many people involved from several nations, races and religions. Attempting to place blame on any one race of people or nation would be a terrible mistake in my opinion and an injustice to all the people who have suffered under the misery of human enslavement down through the ages. This scourge of human suffering has been with us for several millennia and practically all human beings have been affected by slavery in some way or another. Slavery is not a black & white thing and it never was… it has affected humans on the Earth from the time that our first ancestors raided neighboring villages in war and conflict and enslaved the survivors who were probably women and children. We are talking about 10’s of thousands of years ago (see National Geographic magazine’s special feature The Human Journey, Human Origins March 2006 issue). Slavery has been around for a very long time!

The glorious empires of the Antiquity, those of the Eastern world and the Middle East, of Africa (Nubia and Kush, Egypt, Ethiopia and the Land of Punt, Mali and the kingdoms of the Sahel, the Kingdom of Kongo, Great Zimbabwe), the Western world with the Greek and Roman empires and the ancient peoples of the Americas, all of these great periods in human history were overshadowed by the brutal and inhuman practice of slavery.

That’s why it was so strange for me to see in a BBC News article a photo of U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair apologizing to the President of Ghana, John Kufuor, for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. That’s why it was so confusing to hear the newly elected Archbishop of York, Dr. John Sentamu, himself an African by birth, demanding that the U.K. Government make a clear and formal apology for slavery. Should it not be that the governments of Ghana, Nigeria, Benin, Niger, Mali, Congo, Tanzania, Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, and many other African nations also be making an apology to the descendents of the transatlantic and the trans-Sahara and trans-Sahel and Indian Ocean and Arab slave trades? I mean let’s make this an equal opportunity deal here and not leave any nation out that was deeply, deeply involved.

The Ashanti kings of the Gold Coast of West Africa and kings and rulers of several African countries (Saharan and sub-Saharan) did not stop the wicked trade of human beings for sale to Europeans and Arabs until the beginning of the 20th Century. Hell, the trade in slaves from Africa has never stopped and continues right up to this very day! So let’s lighten up on demands for apologies because the way I see it, everybody is guilty in some way or another. If you need an apology from someone, go look into the mirror and pray, “Lord, I sure am sorry for (conciously or unconsciously) supporting and/or ignoring modern-day slavery”.

I know that some folks reading this will feel insulted and that’s fine. Be insulted. You should be insulted especially if you can’t accept that the few facts listed below are just the “tip of the iceberg” in regards to Africa’s own involvement in the peculiar institution of human slavery

Source: The Story of Africa – Slavery - BBC World Service website and radio program. A history of the continent from an African perspective (authored by African writers and historians).

Growing Rich with Slavery

Royalty

In the early 18th century, Kings of Dahomey (known today as Benin) became big players in the slave trade, waging a bitter war on their neighbours, resulting in the capture of 10,000 [slaves], including another important slave trader, the King of Whydah. King Tegbesu made £250,000 a year selling people into slavery in 1750. King Gezo said in the 1840's he would do anything the British wanted him to do apart from giving up slave trade:

"The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth…the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery…"

LIVING WITNESS
Some of the descendants of African traders are alive today. Mohammed Ibrahim Babatu is the great great grandson of Baba-ato (also known as Babatu), the famous Muslim slave trader, who was born in Niger and conducted his slave raids in Northern Ghana in the 1880's. Mohammed Ibrahim Babatu, the deputy head teacher of a Junior secondary school in Yendi, lives in Ghana.

"In our curriculum, we teach a little part of the history of our land. Because some of the children ask questions about the past history of our grandfather Babatu.

Babatu, and others, didn't see anything wrong with slavery. They didn't have any knowledge of what the people were used for. They were only aware that some of the slaves would serve others of the royal families within the sub-region.

He has done a great deal of harm to the people of Africa. I have studied history and I know the effect of slavery.

I have seen that the slave raids did harm to Africa, but some members of our family feel he was ignorant…we feel that what he did was fine, because it has given the family a great fame within the Dagomba society.

He gave some of the slaves to the Dagombas and then he sent the rest of the slaves to the Salaga market. He didn't know they were going to plantations…he was ignorant…"

SONGHAY
The young Moroccan traveler and commentator, Leo Africanus, was amazed at the wealth and quantity of slaves to be found in Gao, the capital of Songhay [Songhay empire], which he visited in 1510 and 1513 when the empire was at the height of its power under Askiya Mohammed.

"...here there is a certain place where slaves are sold, especially on those days when the merchants are assembled. And a young slave of fifteen years of age is sold for six ducats, and children are also sold. The king of this region has a certain private palace where he maintains a great number of concubines and slaves."

SWAHILI
The ruling class of coastal Swahili society - Sultans, government officials and wealthy merchants - used non-Muslim slaves as domestic servants and to work on farms and estates. The craftsmen, artisans and clerks tended to be Muslim and freed men. But the divisions between the different classes were often very flexible. The powerful slave and ivory trader Tippu Tip was the grandson of a slave.

The Omani Sultan, Seyyid Said, became immensely rich when he started up cloves plantations in 1820 with slave labour - so successful was he that he moved the Omani capital to Zanzibar in 1840.

Note: see additional information about the Omani African slave trade on Zanzibar below

PUNISHED FOR KEEPING SLAVES
The Asanti (the capital, Kumasi, is in modern Ghana) had a long tradition of domestic slavery. But gold was the main commodity for selling. With the arrival of Europeans the slaves displaced gold as the main commodity for trade. As late as 1895 the British Colonial Office was not concerned by this.

"It would be a mistake to frighten the King of Kumasi and the Ashantis generally on the question of slavery. We cannot sweep away their customs and institutions all at once. Domestic slavery should not be troubled at present."

British attitudes changed when the King of the Asanti (the Asantehene) resisted British colonial authority. The suppression of the slave trade became a justification for the extension of European power. With the humiliation and exile of King Prempeh I in 1896, the Asanti were placed under the authority of the Governor of the Gold Coast and forced therefore to conform to British law and abolish the slave trade.

SLAVERY DECREED BY THE GODS
In 1807, Britain declared all slave trading illegal. The king of Bonny (in what is now the Nigerian delta) was dismayed at the conclusion of the practice.

"We think this trade must go on. That is the verdict of our oracle and the priests. They say that your country, however great, can never stop a trade ordained by God himself."

End of BBC World Service Story of Africa excerpt

Source: HMS Surprise – documents and diary of the 19th Century British Royal Navy surgeon William Loney by Peter Davies

Excerpts from the Frere Mission to Zanzibar (1872)

Early history of Zanzibar

Round 1500 Portugal gained control of Zanzibar and most of the East African coast. In 1698 Arabs from Oman ousted the Portuguese. In 1792 Britain signed a treaty with the Sultan of Muscat providing British protection for Zanzibar in exchange for Omani support against any French thrust via Oman towards India. So started a gradual British involvement in Zanzibar affairs.

The Omani arabs only started to take a serious interest in Zanzibar, when Sayyid ("Lord") Said, Sultan of Muscat since 1804 (family tree), encouraged merchants to trade with, or move to, the island, and to expand into mainland Africa. In 1840 he moved his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar, where he presided over a flourishing trading empire….

The Zanzibar slave trade

The slave trade from Zanzibar had started soon after the Arab conquest, initially for the date plantations in Arabia. Although slaves were also supplied to Persian and India, it was the establishment of sugar and clove plantations in Mauritius and Reunion in the 18th century which led to the greatest development of the trade.

In 1811, just four years after Britain had abolished slavery, Said opened the Great Slave Market in Zanzibar; a year later he introduced cloves to the island, generating a significant need for slaves on the island itself. In 1822, the Sultan's dependence on British naval strength allowed Governor Sir Robert Townsend Farquhar of Mauritius (which under French rule had been a primary destination of slavers from Zanzibar) to send Captain Fairfax Moresby, senior officer at that island, in the Menai to conclude a treaty limiting the slave traffic to the Sultans own (East African and Arabic) dominions, and forbidding any trade of slaves to Christians. A later treaty, effective from 1847, and negotiated in 1845 by Colonel Atkins Hammerton (appointed as the first British Consul at Zanzibar in 1841) further limited - in theory - the traffic from Zanzibar to the Sultan's African dominions between Lamu in the north and Kilwa in the south.

Prevention of incursion by other European powers was the initial reason for a British naval presence on the East African coast. To this were later added protection of British traders, and suppression of the slave trade. This last factor only became prominent round 1860, when the Foreign Office requesting a ship permanently on the station for that purpose. Lack of knowledge about the trade, and a desire not to offend Britain's ally, the Sultan, were responsible for the later development of the anti-slavery issue on the East coast than on the West coast. The explorations of David Livingstone, Richard Burton and John Speke increased the interest of the British public in the area.

The small number of British cruisers on the station, and the fact that large numbers of comparatively small dhows were involved in the slave trade, meant that much of the navy's patrol work had to be done in ships boats, often working independently for days on end.

Poor communications with home, and lack of explicit instructions from the Admiralty, meant that the ship's commanders had to decide how to proceed in individual cases; destruction of captured dhows on the spot was often considered to be the only viable alternative. Protest against this procedure led in 1869 to the giving of full powers of adjudication to the Vice-Admiralty Court at Zanzibar (established in 1866, then only for slavers captured within the Sultans dominions), to which all captures had then to be taken, and to "clarification" of the general instructions to the commanders on the station (often irrelevant, being based on those for the West African station), which in fact only made them more unclear. These aspects, together with the small number of ships on the station (generally not more than two; see for example Cumming's report for 1872) meant that the navy's impact on the slave trade was minimal.

End excerpts from the HMS Surprise – Frere Mission to Zanzibar

My good friend Reza, an Iranian exile who has lived here in Germany for almost 30 years and I have been discussing this Black History in Europe project for weeks now with great fervor and interest and excitement. Reza often reminds me as he describes the ancient history of his own beloved country Iran that it was the famous Persian king Cyrus II (ca. 576-530 BC) of the Achaemenid Empire (559– 330 BC) that first forbid slavery in his empire, making him one of the first slavery abolitionists in history.

I can hear my friend Reza now as I write this article, “Kurush (Cyrus), my King, said to all of the people of ancient Persia:
“In my land there will be no slavery, slavery is verboten! All people are welcome in my kingdom. All religions are welcome in my kingdom, for I am Kurush the Great, the king of kings.””

An excerpt from Wikipedia about Cyrus II (Cyrus the Great):

During his reign, Cyrus maintained control over a vast region of conquered kingdoms, achieved partly through retaining and expanding Median satrapies. Further organization of newly conquered territories into provinces ruled by vassal kings called satraps, was continued by Cyrus' successor Darius the Great. Cyrus' empire demanded only tribute and conscripts from many parts of the realm.

Cyrus' conquests began a new era in the age of empire building, where a vast superstate, comprising many dozens of countries, races, religions, and languages, were ruled under a single administration headed by a central government. This system lasted for centuries, and was retained both by the invading Seleucid dynasty during their control of Persia, and later Iranian dynasties including the Persian Parthians and Sassanids.

In 1992, he was ranked #87 on Michael H. Hart's list of the most influential figures in history. On December 10, 2003, in her acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, Shirin Ebadi evoked Cyrus, saying:

I am an Iranian, a descendant of Cyrus the Great. This emperor proclaimed at the pinnacle of power 2,500 years ago that he 'would not reign over the people if they did not wish it.' He promised not to force any person to change his religion and faith and guaranteed freedom for all. The Charter of Cyrus the Great should be studied in the history of human rights.

End excerpts from Wikipedia on Cyrus the Great

The Slavery Essays - Part II coming soon


Technorati tags: Africa America Europe U.K. U.S.A. Iran History World History African History American History European History Slavery Abolition Freedom civil rights human rights Global Voices