MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 25 October 1996, online here https://web.archive.org/web/20120416011318/http://www.candw.ag/~jardinea/fanflame.htm.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
As I understand it the theme for this the 15th anniversary of independence is: Our Heritage, Our Future. Naturally it struck me, what did the authorities mean by Our Heritage. For here in Antigua, we boast of a Heritage Quay built by Italians entirely in the Italian architectural style, and we have had the sheer gall to name this Italian conceived, designed and executed shopping Mall: Heritage Quay. There is nothing Caribbean about it. Nothing African. It is entirely alien in conception and execution, and yet this alienated structure is labelled our Heritage.
It continues to amaze me too, that in 1996, children are taught ad nauseam, about the Santa Maria, the Pinta and the Nina.
These same children who are taught so repetitiously about these three European boats, know nothing at all about the three great West African Empires, of Ghana, Mali and Songhay. Not a word of these African Empires which lasted beyond 1492, and which were equal to or more advanced than European states of the time. Not a word do they know. We educate children after independence to feel the same self-contempt, the same inferiority, which people of African descent were made to feel for more than 300 years now.
The other day, I quizzed a very bright second former who knew all there was to know about the Santa Maria, Pinta and Nina and asked him if he knew that the chief navigator on Columbus’ first European cruise in the Caribbean was an African. He did not know. He was so incredulous as to believe that I was telling a tall tale, that I had to show it to him in a book!
Wherefore are these things hid? Colonialism required us to be wholly ignorant of “Our Heritage”. It was necessary that every Afro-Caribbean colonial child believe that he was descended from ignorant black savages, who had no history of learning and no history, period. Hegel, the great Western philosopher believed this nonsense that Africa had no history. Henry Kissinger was to repeat this idiocy in his memoirs in the 1990’s!
It is perhaps wholly unacceptable that a Caribbean child would or should grow up as ignorant as Henry Kissinger, the former American Secretary of State, whose appalling ignorance led him into unspeakable horrors and criminality, in Vietnam, in Cambodia, in Chile, and not least, in East Timor. Maybe, I thought, it is the dominance and hegemony of the Kissinger-type in the world why here in Antigua, a black person could be educated and know nothing at all about his or her heritage.
Needless to say, it is one of the reasons why no black country has up to now achieved independence.
In the Caribbean in particular, if one is educated to believe that one has only a 300 hundred year history of slavery with another 130 years of colonial rule, one is being educated into one’s own irrelevance in the scheme of human affairs. Achievement is outside of us. Belonging entirely to alien cultures and alien peoples, except, of course in sports. And so we remain, despite our braggadocio or bravado, outside the human history of achievement.
How comes it, I ask, that after 34 years of independence the English-speaking Caribbean is wholly oblivious to Black History. It remains quaint, the province of the Afrocentric.
How comes it, that a Caribbean person, knows about 1066 and the founding of England, under King Harold, but knows not that in 1060 A.D., the black Emperor Tenkamenin ruled in Ghana with an army of some 200,000! 100,000 of Tenkamenin’s army were mounted.
How comes it that a Caribbean child, does not today learn routinely in school of the great African centres of learning at Jenne, Gao and Timbuktu. And that the leading University at Timbuktu in the 15th and 16th century, long after Columbus was dead, was the University of Sankore. And that all this was situated in the African Kingdom of Songhay, which kingdom occupied territory larger than Europe.
I must of necessity refer to one of the great books of the 20th century. It is The Destruction of Black Civilisation by Chancellor Williams. He wrote
“It was at Timbuktu that two of the great African writers of the period wrote their famous histories in Arabic. Tarikh al Tattasah by Mahmud Kati and Tarikh Al Sudan by Rahman as Sadi. The most famous African scholar during this period of Songhay’s intellectual flowering was the biographer and lexicographer Ahmad Babo.”
A personal note is in order here. In 1958, when 16 years old, I gave up colonising Christianity for Islam. I was influenced by the return to Antigua at that time of one Haji Dawud, and one of his early converts, the auto-didact, George ‘Nugget’ Joseph. By 1959, I gave up Islam when I learnt of its destruction of the Songhay Empire.
But I return to Chancellor Williams and The Destruction of Black Civilisation. He wrote
“Ahmed Babo, the last black president of the University of Sankore, tried to tell us [of the great African past] in his biographies. But these too were destroyed with 40 other works of which he was the author.”
Chancellor Williams continued:
“There seems to be no question at all about Babo being the greatest and most prolific African writer and scholar in the 16th century. Perhaps ‘African’ should be dropped here, for who else, Asian or European, authored a comprehensive dictionary and forty other works during this period. Ahmad Babo’s fame as a scholar – educator spread to distant lands.”
His name is unknown to Antiguan students in 1996! It is that scant regard we have for our heritage.
I must of necessity add, that in the Muslim or Islamic destruction of the Songhay empire, the main centres of learning with all their precious libraries and original manuscripts were destroyed first. Then the age-old practice was adopted of seizing all men of learning and skilled craftsmen for enslavement. Foremost among those captured and carried off to the Magreb was Ahmad Babo. There he was treated as an honoured guest and made to use his great learning to instruct his conquerors and enslavers!
Perhaps I need explain why the great African scholars wrote in Arabic, much as we do today in English or French. I shall use an historical anecdote to illustrate the point and still relate the point to “Our Heritage”.
Sunni Ali was, without doubt, the greatest of emperors of the African Empire of Songhay. He came to the throne in 1464. He, Sunni Ali, became a nominal Muslim. He did so for the same economic reasons that influenced other black kings. The Muslims not only dominated trade with Asia and Europe, but Arabic was the language of international trade then. The wealth of any African kingdom depended on international trade.
The African people, on the other hand, were generally anti-Islam. The problem of all African rulers of the time, was how to be a Muslim without alienating the people. Sunni Ali was powerful enough to play it both ways. It became clear to the Arabs and Berbers that Sunni Ali’s real loyalty was to the traditional religion of his people. They never forgave him. However, at the close of his near 30 years of leadership as a great general and statesman in 1492, the Songhay empire unrivalled even by Mali in wealth and territory, Sunni Ali renounced Islam, but he continued to use Arabic as the language of trade and so the principal language.
History, as the discussion of heritage demands a scrupulous fairness. Lest the impression be gained that black civilisations, that is to say, the Black Heritage, was destroyed by Muslims and Christian Europeans alone, I need add that there was also a third destructive “black” force as well, in the destruction of the Black Heritage.
So as to prevent any personal bias I may have, I will rely on Chancellor Williams. He wrote:
“There were many tribes or societies in Africa which were exclusively Mulatto (to use the term loosely). Nothing was more characteristic of the mixed breed clans, tribes and societies than their unceasing efforts to emphasise their separate identity, and their constant fear of being considered ‘Negroes,’ or Black Africans. Hence their over-anxious crusades of jihads against black states and their spear-heading of most of the slave raids in Africa. They further emphasised their ‘ethnic difference’ by always retaining thousands of black slaves in their own service, while selling the others ... The most murderous of the Mulatto slave traders was Tippu Tib, with his slave empire headquarters on Zanzibar. His slave trails extended in every direction from the East Coast far into the interior where white slave traders feared to go.”
The Mulattoes were to do the same in Haiti as in Ethiopia where they collaborated with the Italian invaders.
It was the mulattoes, sometimes known to history, as “the Moors” who destroyed the Songhay empire. As a matter of ‘heritage’ it is a fact that has to be noted, since as several great historians have noted “it is nearly always glossed over in history.”
I come now to my penultimate point. The African heritage is often written of as though it were Egyptian, that is, those civilisations which established themselves along the Nile. Or West African, which, through Ethiopia shared a close historical kinship with black Egyptian civilisation.
I need now to demonstrate that there were civilisations all over Africa, which were not inferior to Europe and in many ways superior.
The land and people I want to look at extended from the North above the Zambezi River, included what is now Zimbabwe, westward into the Kalahara, eastward over Mozambique to the Indian Ocean and southward into the Transvaal in South Africa below the Limpopo River.
Archaeologists and historians are now agreed, that the evidence collected over this vast territory, and known in history as the Empire of Monomotapa, was the centre of African iron technology and allied crafts long before the Christian era, and that the technology spread throughout the Empire of Monomotapa, as well as from Meroe in the northeast. From the period, roughly say about 300 B.C. the people of Monomotapa were engaged in a wide range of diversified economic activities that led not only to interstate trade but foreign commerce over the Indian Ocean as well. Ivan Van Sertima, the great Guyanese and world-renowned scholar, in his justly famous They Came Before Columbus, has shown that the African people who came to the Caribbean long before Columbus’ misadventure, came in part from the Empire of Monomotapa.
What the people who inhabited this vast area of Africa were best known for was reflected in their artistic endeavours. As one historian wrote “The huge jars for storing grain were glazed and as beautifully channelled as were the cups used by priests and kings. Here as elsewhere in early Africa there seems to have been an insatiable drive for beauty and perfection.” Be reminded, I am emphasising our heritage.
Chancellor Williams again observed of the people of Monomopata that “There was an underlying philosophy: Each craftsman felt that his finished work was at once a reflection and an actual measure of what he himself was, his character.” It is a profound message and an essential part of our heritage. It has been lost. It can be restored.
Another great historian, the white African historian, Basil Davidson had this to say about the Empire of Monomotapa.
“The industrial activities, particularly mining, overshadowed agriculture and even threatened the existence of this very basic economy. Over four thousand ancient mining sites have been discovered and no one claims that these are all. Iron, ore, gold and to a lesser extent copper and tin were the leading industrial activities, although ivory and ivory carvings always played a considerable role in the total economy.”
Yet again, the great Chancellor Williams, had this to say.
“The widespread industrial activities” in Monomotapa “along with the ever increasing number of cattle brought in by migrating pastoral groups drove the farmers to the hills – to a new type of terrace farming on every available hillside. As difficult as all this was the genius of African man was further tested in overcoming the more formidable problem of water and an irrigation system for hillsides and mounds. Widespread mining meant widespread deforestation because too of the demand for timber for charcoal production – another industry by itself. Soil erosion kept pace, unchecked. The steady disappearance of grasslands was assured by cattle and other roaming animals that fed on grass, the goats being the most ravishing. The agricultural life of the country was sustained by intensive terrace farming in the northeast region of which Inyanga was the centre.”
There is a picture here of a most innovative African people, pioneering in some instances, in both industry and agriculture. It is essential to the Black Heritage. It is too, a completely different image of the African in history, from that which you would get from Carlyle or Hegel.
I said before that the Empire of Monomotapa was my penultimate point. Now my ultimate point.
Black people in the Caribbean and elsewhere have behaved as if Westminster is the last word in political democracy. And therefore all they have to do is ape the ways of Whigs and Tories.
History shows that African people were among the most radical democrats that ever lived in times past and present. Not only did they influence Greek democracy as Martin Bernal showed in his excellent work Black Athena, but we by negating their democratic influence have found ourselves in the pits in Africa and the Caribbean.
Again because I am introducing the great Chancellor Williams to many of my readers let me rely on him to point out an essential of African democracy found everywhere on the continent in times past.
He wrote:
“The African community is conceived of as One Party opposition being conducted by leaders of various factions.
“(1) faction of opposition are usually formed by the different age groups [ It would take another Fan the Flame to describe an African ‘age-group’, but that should not detain us now.]
“(2) Debates may go on indefinitely or until a consensus is reached.
“(3) Once a consensus is reached and the community Will determined all open opposition to the common Will must cease.”
But dear readers that is not the end of the matter. African democracy was far more thorough-going than that.
“(4) Those whose opposition was so serious that they were unwilling to accept the new law would ‘splinter off’ either individually or in groups under a leader to form a new state or the nucleus of it.”
Fairness compels me to state that this democratic ethos and practice was to lead to the undoing of Africa and its civilisations. In that there were so many mini-states in Africa, called “stateless societies” that these mini-states were easily over-run by conquerors. But those who today contend that the socialist end of the state “withering away” is but a pipe-dream need to look at African democracy in the Stateless societies.
On the other hand, the African sense of community functioning as a community in debate, has not been matched by any other civilisation. So much so that the African community, produced a family structure – cutely referred to as the extended family – which produced exemplary child rearing. Sir Arthur Lewis, in his remarkable piece On Being Different has paid tribute to this. It is compulsory reading as part of our heritage. So too, is the African sense of a community in democratic dynamism, as opposed to the modern stasis of Democrat and Republican each indistinguishable from the other, in mock adversarial relation. Need I say more? Not now. Perhaps another time.
I want now to end with the words of one of the great historians of our time, the Welshman Basil Davidson. He wrote in The Black Man’s Burden this:
“Africa’s history can be said to have begun, as a record or description of that process, with the onset and spread of farming after the seventh millennium before the Christian era: after, say, about 6000 B.C. It then entered a new phase, ancestral to modern times, with the introduction of iron-bladed tools, above all iron-bladed hoes around 500 B.C. The second major spur to social and productive development, again a long and complex process, was that of metal technology – the mining, smelting and forging of iron ore, and of some other minerals – and it began first in the grasslands of the Central and Western Sudan as well as in those of the upper Nile Valley. This ushered in a period, many centuries long, of socio-political growth and corresponding structural development.”
I am certain that by this and other passages above I have proved to you that Africa was central and essential in human development in freedom and democracy. It is that Heritage we have to hold fast to, for a new future. Or else we will go down the road of greed and corruption, following in the paths of Europe and America, alienated from our own history as a people.
Last updated on 9 February 2022