Islamic Terrorism And Slavery Controversy: A Corrective?Part ll

Why The Truth Matters! (Islamic Terrorism And Slavery Controversy: A Corrective?Part ll)

“The highest form of law exhibits itself when a system of law is able to answer for its own crimes. Nothing should prevent men and women of moral and political insight from making an argument for an idea whose legitimacy is fundamental to our concept of justice. We must act on the basis of our own sense of moral rightness (“The African American Warrant for Reparations: The Crime of European Enslavement of Africans and its Consequences,” Asante, 2009).

To begin with, please we recommend you to read Kirsten West Savali’s article “Divided States of America: 26 States Petition To Secede After Re-election of President Obama.” Then, let’s ask the following questions, first, what is “truth”? Second, is the legal codifiability of “truth” and “morals” possible? Third, are “truth” and “morals” culturally relativistic? Forth, are “truth” and “morals” interchangeable with godliness? Fifth, why must the Malaysian state legally forbid Malaysian Christians from referring to their God as Allah?

Next, have we Ghanaians, in fact, Africans, heard of or been acquainted with the international Jewish slogan “Never Again”? “’Never again,’ after all, was the pledge that followed Auschwitz and Belsen. ‘Never again,’ read the United Nations’ ritual resolve after Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Perhaps, in keeping with such ritual pronouncements, to acknowledge the triumph of Rites and Ritual over Rights and Redress, yes, if only as a footnote to that Ritual played against the flags of all nations that many read as ensigns of the Rights of Humanity…” (Soyinka, “Of Africa,” p. 89). Here, as elsewhere, Soyinka invokes the social importance of historical precedent to show us the way toward tolerance and harmony.

Yet, while we boldly charge Christianity and Islam with heinous historical and contemporary crimes, we must, on other hand, also, be willing to look at ourselves closely, deeper into ourselves, and, confidently, pinpoint, acknowledge, as well as evaluate where we, Africans, too, like Christianity and Islam, must have done or are still doing wrong. Among other moral, contemporary, and historical considerations, we must be willing to acknowledge that Traditional African Religion (“trokosi” and “ritual murdering” of albinos), for instance, has not been “perfect,” either (we address this question in one of our later essays which shall be published soon). In fact, not all of our problems and shortcomings as a people have external epidemiology. Therefore, collectivized critical intra-African self-analysis is a must for us!

Let’s move on. According to TV Multidiversity, 2011, the Malaysian sociology professor, Dr. Syed Farid Alatas (National University of Singapore), during the 2011 international conference, dubbed “Decolonizing Our Universities,” spoke “about the neglect of ideas that originate outside the West and the need to master Western thought so as to critique it and determine what aspects of it may be useful. He also urges social scientists of the Global South to confront problems in their own locales, including meddling by politicians and other forces outside the universities.”

We must learn to take Alatas’ admonition to the international conferees to heart. Moreover, other scholars, like Asante, have argued forcefully that we first build stronger institutions based on the best of African ancestral traditions before opening up to ideas from the rest of the world. The Chinese have done the same with Confucian ideas. The Americans did so with Enlightenment ideas, while, the West, in general, relied on Greece and Roman ideas to fashion its societies (both Greece and Rome owe their philosophical and epistemological existence to ancient Egypt).

Also, the Japanese have capitalized on the best ancestral traditions of Shintoism to create a relatively internal harmonious society (though Japan has its own ethnic issues with the Ainu, Yamato, and Ryukyuan). Jews have used their five-thousand-year old history to create a vibrant society (See Dimont’s “Jews, God, and History,” though the bestselling Israeli/Jewish scholar, Shlomo Sand, has his own take on Jews and their history, as he describes in “The Invention of the Jewish People) in what is now modern Israel (though the Falasha or Beta Israel are second-class citizens in Israel; see Yityish Aynaw, first black Miss Israel, on Jewish racism toward Ethiopian Jews in the State of Israel. Finally, on the controversies surrounding the nomenclature “Falasha,” see Wolf Leslau’s “Falasha Anthology: Translated From Ethiopic Sources”).

Let’s look at one of our internal problems via the narrative prism of Soyinkan intellectual vigilance. “Not that slavery, even in its formal sense, is extinct on the continent. Quite apart from truckloads of child slaves that are still rescued by the police en route to uncertain destinations in my own Nigeria and other West African states—read Uwen Akpan’s “Say You Are One of Them”—we know that more than mere vestiges of slavery exist, for instance, in Mauritania. That relationship was responsible for the massacre of some hundred soldiers twenty years ago—these incidents are ill-reported even in the foreign press—and that relationship also accounts for the massacre of about three times the same number of civilians in that same country three years after an uprising within the military, and led to the earlier-mentioned expulsion of Senegalese indigenes from the country…” (Soyinka, “Of Africa,” p. 85).

Today, we see “child slavery” still going in certain parts of Ghana. The investigative journalism of Anas Aremeyaw Anas which brought our attention to child murder in Ghana and Burkina Faso is shameful. The quarantining of our beautiful and hardworking women, the backbone of our economy and seat of African humanity, in Witch Camps in Northern Ghana is diabolically shameful. Why do we torture, maltreat, and abuse our beautiful mothers, sisters, grandmothers, nieces, and aunts? Why are there not as many Wizard Camps as there are of Witch Camps? In fact, how different are these Witch Camps from Gorée’s House of Slaves and Door of No Return, South Africa’s Aparthied, America’s Jim-Crowism, and Cape Coast slave dungeons? Therefore, we have a problem in own locales which demands our creative attention of remediation. Sometimes we need to take a complete break from criticizing Islam and Christianity to handle our own problems.

Of course, we all also agree that the continuing legacy of Islam and Christianity may be part of the problems we experience today within our own locales. Now let’s get back to the real topic of today. Jews have set up powerful organizations, Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, to name just two, to teach the world what Holocaust did to their people, among other things. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, for instance, tracks Nazi sympathizers and perpetrators and brings them to book. Yet the Holocaust did not even start with European Jews and others (the handicapped, Romas, homosexuals, communists, Slavs, etc.).

It started with the Herero and Nama Genocide (of South West Africa, otherwise today’s Namibia), the first recorded of such in modern history (See United Nations’ Whitaker Report, 1985; see also Olusoga’s and Erichsen’s book “The Kaiser’s Holocaust: German’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism”). This is what The Guardian’s Piers Brendon, a reviewer of the book, says:

“In 1904 his army (General Lothar von Trotha) encircled tens of thousands of Hereros at Waterberg and drove them into the desert. Here most died of thirst and hunger, some reduced to eating scorpions. The rest were subjected to Von Trothar’s notorious extermination order, which declared that every Herero within German borders would be shot on sight…The worst camp, situated on Shark Island, off the coast of present-day Namibia, was a bitterly cold penitentiary that took a hideous toll on its ill-clad, ill-housed inmates. Here, women were forced to boil heads severed from the corpses of their own people (sometimes their own relations) and scrape off the flesh with bits of glass so that the skulls could be sent to museums, universities and anthropological collections in Germany. The camp physician, Dr. Bofinger, used the prisoners for medical research. No one entering his clinic recovered.”

All these, the above description, happened before the European Holocaust and involved top-notch German scientists, physical anthropologists, cultural and race theorists, social Darwinists, racial geographers, and military men who would later join Hitler’s Nazi government. In fact, the eugenic and ethnic-cleansing expertise they acquired in South West Africa would be appropriated liberally by the Nazis and by their scientists. Our churches talk about the Jewish Holocaust but not the African Holocaust. How unfortunately sad!

Brendon continues: “Germans did their best to suppress the evidence and to portray their homicidal activities as a triumph of civilization, and British imperialists, with their own guilt to hide, were sometimes complicit in the obfuscation. But particularly since Horst Drechsler’s pioneering study, “Let Us Die Fighting (1966),” on which the present book draws heavily, academic and popular interest in the subject has been strong.” Let’s try to see our Witch Camps in the context of how Europeans and Arabs treated us.

In addition, another reviewer of the same book, The Telegraph’s Ian Thomson, has this to say: “The ‘killing fields’ of Namibia presaged not only Hitler’s genocidal madness, but served as inspiration for the dictator’s hoped-for empire in the European east, where Jews and Slavs were seen as ‘subhuman.” Clearly, the African Holocaust deserves equal attention in world affairs as its European counterpart since its antecedence confers historical legitimacy on it. On the contrary, reacting to the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, President Bill Clinton’s qualified apology to African American victims (and African Americans in general) went as follows:

“The eight men who are survivors of the syphilis study at Tuskegee are a living link to a time not so very long ago that many Americans would prefer not to remember, but we dare not forget. It was a time that our nation failed to live up to its ideals, when our nation broke the trust with our person that is the very foundation of our democracy. It’s not only in remembering that shameful past that we can make amends and repair our nation, but it is in remembering that past that we can build a better present and a better future. And without remembering it, we cannot make amends and we cannot go forward.”

This is it! It was the same philosophy, something identical to what Mandela and Tutu call Ubuntu, an idea on which the two elders and statesmen raised the moralized sociopolitical scaffolding of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Appropriately, we must be made aware that, while some readers of our articles on the history/historiography of terrorism vigorously objected to our invoking a 200-year-old history/historiography of religious terrorism against Africa as a moral backdrop to address contemporary issues with patent umbilical connections to the past, the third American President, Thomas Jefferson, nearly two hundred years ago, had predicted the horrible legacy of slavery on the American national conscience. This legacy is not markedly different from our own case.

Let’s consider this: “There is no difficulty in seeing Jefferson as the prophet of the American civil religion if one thinks of him as the author of its most sacred document, the Declaration of Independence, and leave at that. But there’s great difficulty in fitting the historical Jefferson, with all we know of him, into the civil religion of modern America (as it’s generally and semi-officially expounded) at all, let alone in seeing him as its prophet,” notes Conor Cruise O’Brien in the essay “Thomas Jefferson: Radical and Racist” (The Atlantic online). O’Brien continues: “God who gave us life gave us liberty…Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever…Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate that these people are to be free…”

Here is the bombshell, as noted by O’Brien: “All of this passage except for the last sentence is taken from “Notes on the State of Virginia.” The last sentence is taken from Jefferson’s “Autobiography.” That sentence, as isolated in the memorial inscription, deceives the public as to Jefferson’s meaning. For the original passage in the “Autobiography” continues, “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.” Yet we are constantly told Jefferson was an Abolitionist (gradualist)!

O’Brien concludes: “In short, these people are to be free, and then deported. Jefferson’s teaching on that matter is quite clear and often repeated. Those who edited that inscription on behalf of the memorial commission must have known what they were doing when they wrenched that resounding sentence from the Autobiography out of the context that so drastically qualifies its meaning. The distortion by suppression has to be deliberate!” Indeed, we do hope that those of our readers who showered unqualified praises on White Abolitionists will take note of this.

In this context, therefore, Jefferson and his colleagues feared a possible eventuation of racial war and its potentiality to undermine the national integrity of the body politic. It was against this backdrop, therefore, that, he, secretly, even sometimes openly, entertained the idea of repatriating African Americans. Unfortunately, some of our readers think it was right for Jefferson, the American social and political Nostradamus, to say all the unkind words he said about African Americans. But today’s Ghanaian and African victims of Arab slavery and terrorism don’t have that right, the same right of free expression! Does the doctor have more freedoms of medical expression than the sick patient whose beliefs shun the supremacy of medical science?

Let’s look at some more examples. President Obama recognized the importance of the social and political context of history. In addressing the American nation after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, he said: “But I did want to just talk a little bit about context and how people have responded to it and how people are feeling. You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin should have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African-America community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that---that doesn’t go away.”

Mr. Eric Holder, the first African American Attorney General, also sees the social and political value of history, saying: “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and I believe continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.”

Back to Africa. “South Africa is no longer the country it was when we adopted the Interim Constitution in 1993, when together we resolved to overcome the legacy of our violent and inhuman past. Out of that negotiation process emerged a pact to uncover the truth, to build a bright future for our children and grandchildren, without regard to race, culture, religion or language. Today we reap some of the harvest of what we sowed at the end of a South African famine,” said Mandela.

Mandela continues: “And so as we observe this stage of the TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) process, we should pay tribute to the 20,000 men and women who relived their pain and loss in order to share it with us; the hundreds who dared to open the wounds of guilt so as to exorcise it from the nation’s body politic; indeed the millions who make up the South African people and who made it happen so that we could indeed become a South African nation (See “Mandela Addresses Truth Report Ceremony,” BBC).

“Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called on the British Government to show magnanimity and compassion towards elderly Kenyans fighting for damages over alleged colonial atrocities during Mau Mau uprising,” reports The Independent.

So, why don’t we, Ghana and Africa, take a cue from these intelligent world leaders and do likewise?