by David Lamb
However valuable the church has been in assisting Africa’s five million refugees, in helping during times of drought, famine and sickness, it traditionally has acted as a tool of the white establishment. The church did not play an active role in supporting the Africans’ struggle for independence, largely because white clergy in Africa were racist in attitude and approach. White missionaries did not speak in protest when barbaric governments killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Africans in places such as Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, the Central African Empire, because, they reasoned, Africans have always killed Africans. “I’d hate to think what they would have done to each other if it hadn’t been for Christianity,” an American missionary in Burundi told me. The church also has failed to follow its own doctrine in South Africa, where many of the Ten Commandments are ignored as part of national policy.
But not long ago, a large congregation gathered in Germiston, South Africa, for the funeral of Christian Smith, a white who had been assistant manager of a plastics factory. The mourners included blacks, coloreds (people of mixed blood) and Indians, some of whom had worked with Smith for as long as fifteen years. The minister, Rev. J. J. du Toit, mounted the pulpit and looked out over the congregation in his normally white-only church. His eyes narrowed and his words came slowly: there would be no service until the blacks left the church.
Robina Smith, the widow, stood and led the entire congregation, black and white, out of the church, leaving the minister alone in the pulpit. An undertaker conducted an informal gravesite service. “And just to think that we have the nerve to call ourselves Christians,” Mrs. Smith said.
The incident occurred in a church belonging to Nederduitsch Harvormde Kerk, the most conservative of South Africa’s three Dutch Reformed churches. The three have a white membership of about 1.8 million, or 40 percent of the country’s white Christians. At a 1974 synod, the church dropped its openly racist theology and now nominally supports racial equality. But it holds that apartheid is morally acceptable, saying that “the New Testament does not regard the diversity of peoples, as such, as something sinful.” Remarkably enough, the Dutch Reformed churches in South Africa have almost a million black members, who, not allowed to sit with white congregations, have formed their own separate churches.
There is a little island called Goree off the Senegalese coast in West Africa, and here one finds more scars of the colonial heritage. Goree’s streets are sandy and narrow. They wind past rows of tidy houses, their blue shutters drawn tight against the sun’s afternoon assault, and meander up a hill where rusting cannon point out to sea. Near the cannon, at the foot of Saint Germain Street, stands a rambling weather-beaten structure built by the Dutch two hundred years ago. Its empty basement cells are filled with silence. The ocean beats against their stone foundations and from their windows you can gaze out across the Atlantic toward the New World, so far away.
For millions of West Africans—the ancestors of what would become the United States’ largest minority class—this is where freedom ended and serfdom began. It was here, in the dark, dank slave house, that Arab traders bartered and bickered with European shippers, here that the Africans spent the last weeks in their homeland, chained to a wall in underground cubicles, awaiting a buyer, a boat and, at the end of a long, harrowing voyage, a master.
In the weighing room below the trading office, the men’s muscles were examined, the women’s breasts measured, the children’s teeth checked. Those were the qualities—muscles, breasts, teeth—on which human worth was judged. The slaves were fattened like livestock up to what was considered an ideal shipping weight, 140 pounds, and those who remained sickly or fell victim to pneumonia or tuberculosis were segregated from the rest by an Arab doctor, led into a corridor whose open door overlooked the ocean and tossed out for the sharks. The selection process was similar to the one the Nazis would use two centuries later in World War II death camps.
I took the thirty-minute ferry ride one day from Dakar, the modern capital of Senegal, with a group of black American tourists. Goree, named for an island in the Netherlands and once a French naval base, is a quiet, peaceful place with only 500 inhabitants and no cars or crime. In the streets, African children tugged at our sleeves, saying, “You need guide? I take you. I show you where you become slave.”
The slave house was turned into a museum some years ago and the Senegalese curator, Joseph Ndiaye, greeted us by the open door. The tides below smashed against the same rocks on which the visitors’ forefathers had trod onto vessels with names such as the Five Brothers, the Diane and the Regina Cook for the trip with no return. One of every seven Africans who took that journey died at sea, a victim of disease or maritime disaster.
Unlike Goree, most of Africa’s slavery monuments have been allowed to fall into disrepair and slip quietly into an unobserved past. The stone blocks in Zanzibar on which slaves were auctioned are now occupied by vegetable sellers. The forts used to protect trading routes along Ghana’s Gold Coast are crumbling. All that remains in Lagos, Nigeria, are a few chains and spikes pounded into buildings on Breadfruit Street. In Freetown, Sierra Leone, the immense cottonwood tree around which former slaves rallied to proclaim their freedom still stands in the main square, but no one attaches much historical significance to it anymore. African children, in fact, are given only a cursory glimpse of slavery in their history classes. It is a chapter of the past most Africans would rather forget.
The black American visitors were as respectfully silent as worshipers in a cathedral while Ndiaye led us through the slave house, talking about three centuries of trade in human cargo, dangling handcuffs and tools of torture in front of us like a courtroom prosecutor. For slaves who tried to escape there were anklets with a spike that was driven through the foot. For the verbally defiant there were oval rings through which the lips were pulled and sealed by a spike. The Yoruba tribe of Nigeria called the device an itenu, meaning “shut your mouth.”
“I’ll tell you,” said Geraldine Fair of New York City, “it’ll take a long time for this to sink in, before I know what 1 really feel inside. It’s a lot different, a lot more real than the half-assed way they teach it in the history books at home. Most of all, I think, seeing Goree, seeing West Africa, helps me establish my own identity, just knowing way down deep that I did have a homeland.”
Although no precise figures are available, the number of slaves transported from West Africa to the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century is believed to have ranged between 10 million and 15 million. The trade reached its peak in the 1790s, when about 70,000 slaves were landed annually in the Americas. In East Africa, where slavery continued from 1770 to 1896, between 1.2 million and 3 million slaves were exported, mainly to the Middle East. (Some historians place the total number of slaves taken from Africa at 50 million.)
Slavery as an institution came rather late to the United States. The first shipload of slaves did not arrive in Virginia until 1619, and as late as 1681 there were only 2,000 black slaves in the colony, compared to 6,000 European indentured servants. But slaving soon boomed as the United States sought cheap labor for its tobacco, sugar and cotton plantations, and in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, the U.S. census showed 4.4 million blacks among a total population of 36 million people. Thus the percentage of blacks in the U.S. population was precisely the same in 1860 as it was in 1970, 8.1 percent. (The percentage was 11.7 in 1980.)*
The Africans themselves—as well as the Arabs—were no less guilty than the whites in making sure that places such as Goree remained well stocked with merchandise. For the most part the Arab traders did not venture far into the interior to capture slaves. That service was provided by African kings and chieftains who, unable to adjust to the new economic temptations of a changing world, subjugated and sold their people for the luxuries and essentials they had only recently been introduced to: cloth, metals, beads, spirits, tobacco, firearms. The slave trade made kings rich in the interior, and along the coast created a new class of Afric
an merchants.
African wars in those days were fought for power and wealth. Land had little economic importance, and although territorial control and natural resources were of some value, the prime measure of one’s strength was manpower. As a result, wars were waged as much to increase the size of a chieftain’s human flock as to gain new land or settle old scores. Many of the Africans sold into bondage were prisoners of war. Others were criminals, debtors and those who simply had been outcast for various reasons from the extended family system. Some were the unfortunates who had strayed unknowingly across tribal boundaries and were captured. But it was the African himself who made slavery possible: he seized and traded his people to the Arabs, who in turn sold them to the Europeans. Everyone shared the burden of shame.
The Europeans argued that the acquisition of slaves was a natural consequence of Africa’s warfare. It was better, they said, to ship the African off to a Christian master in the civilized world than to leave him at the mercy of kings in a primitive, pagan society where he perhaps would be killed as a human sacrifice. The Christian church never condoned the morality of selling human beings—there were scattered antislavery protests in Europe as early as the 1700s—but the pillage of a continent’s human resources generally was not a topic of sustained debate.
Interestingly enough, the steps to abolish slavery were taken outside Africa, not in it. Denmark barred its citizens from slave trading in 1803, Britain followed in 1807, the United States in 1808 and France in 1818. Despite the ban, U.S. citizens continued to buy slaves, and slaving still flourished in many areas of the world because African and European merchants were unwilling to sever this lucrative economic link. Britain meanwhile had set out to enforce its abolishment decree, establishing a twenty-ship antislavery fleet that patrolled the West African coast and stopped vessels suspected of carrying slaves. Between 1825 and 1865, Britain detained 1,287 slave ships and liberated 130,000 slaves. But during that period, ships carrying 1.4 million slaves still managed to slip through the British patrols and land their cargoes in the Americas.
The decisive factor ending the trade was the U.S. Civil War and the resultant emancipation of slaves. That left only Cuba and Brazil as legal slave importers and the risk of transporting to just two markets became too great for the shippers. One sad era in Africa’s history had ended. Soon another one, a subtler form of bondage known as colonialism, would begin.
I know of no studies that adequately describe what long-range effects slavery had on Africa, a continent where up to 50 million people, mostly males between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five, were forced to migrate to other worlds. The migration had influenced events economically, politically and socially in the United States to this day. In Africa, one could argue that the economic impact of depopulation was relatively minor. The economy was a subsistence one, there was ample land and the young women left behind continued to produce large families. Africa, though, had been robbed of its masculine strength. Families were torn apart, tribes saw their warriors disappear, the white man became the symbol of a superior force that was evil enough to be feared and powerful enough to be respected. Psychologically the effect was devastating.
Europe later met great resistance confronting the Moslems in northern Africa. France needed 30,000 troops before Tunisia yielded to colonialism. Britain fought pitched battles with the Egyptians and spent a dozen years fighting in the deserts of the Sudan. But black Africa lost its first confrontation with the white man in the most humiliating way. It surrendered without a struggle, with hardly a bow raised in protest. It had been as passive as the Indians were fierce in defending their rights and land in the United States. The first seeds of the uncertainty and inferiority Africa still feels in its dealings with the outside world had been planted. If Africa had had the means to resist the slave traders, then the era of colonialism might never have spread to its shores. As it was, the course of African history had been changed unalterably.
“Sometimes I sit down and try to think what my life, my family’s life, would be like if I’d been born two hundred years ago,” a civil servant in the Gambia, Abdulla Secka, told me one day as we traveled by boat up the Gambia River to the village of Juffure, where author Alex Haley found his “roots” and later wrote a book that sold more than 20 million copies and was translated into thirty-two languages.
“I really can’t imagine it. Maybe somebody would be trying to sell me or my children. Or maybe I’d be trying to sell someone for some rum or beads. It’s all too distant, too impossible, to imagine. It’s just not something we talk about or think about anymore. God has been kind. He has let us forget the past.”
Africans can no more forget the past than can the 25 million Americans for whom Africa is the distant motherland, beckoning her children home with promises of black dignity, cultural affinity, a sense of belonging. Tens of thousands of these Americans answered that call during the past decade as the reorientation of black Americans gained momentum, signaling a shift from self-criticism and even self-hatred to fascination and pride in black origins. The return to Africa brings joy to some Americans, disillusionment to others. But for almost all, whether expatriate or tourist, there are two overriding impressions: first, the blackness of one’s skin does not guarantee immediate acceptance; second, Africa may be the homeland, but the United States is home.
“I think we’re perceived as Americans first, blacks second,” said David French, a Boston doctor who ran a twenty-county health program in West Africa for the World Health Organization. “When I first visited Africa eight or nine years ago, I had the feeling there was some disdain on the part of Africans toward black Americans. We were suspect because we ended up in the United States in the first place, and because we put up with all we did for three hundred years.
“Now I get the impression that Africans are asking themselves, ‘Where are the most educated, prosperous, technically trained blacks in the world?’ Well, they’re in the United States. And the Africans are saying, ‘If you’ve got something to offer, come on over and join us.’ ”
In the 1960s a group of Black Panthers from the United States went to Kenya, hoping to learn the tactics of revolution. It was in Kenya, after all, that the Mau Mau guerrillas fought black Africa’s first war of liberation and the Panthers expected to find many sympathetic brothers there. Not so. They were ignored by the government, harassed by the police, laughed at by the university students and never even saw an Afro haircut. The Panthers’ intended revolution was a luxury of the middle class in a free society. But in Kenya they were outsiders in an impoverished land of passive people and conservative government. They found no audience at all and within a week were on their way back to the United States.
In Ethiopia, black U.S. Peace Corps volunteers always had a difficult time finding acceptance; they were looked down on, as are most Africans, by the European-featured Ethiopians. And in many capitals, African government officials are distinctly displeased when Washington assigns an abundance of black diplomats to its forty-two embassies on the continent. At one point in the late 1970s when the ambassador, aide director and Peace Corps director at the U.S. embassy in Kenya were all black, a ranking Kenyan official remarked at a cocktail party, “Why doesn’t Washington send us its top diplomats, instead of sticking us with all its blacks?” The assumption was both unfair and incorrect; the black American diplomats I met in Africa were on the whole no better or worse than the white diplomats. But most Africans are still imprisoned by a colonial mentality, believing that a European—as all whites are called in East Africa—is somehow more capable than a black. This attitude is not surprising when you consider that most whites an African encounters are in positions of authority, or at least are involved with missions that can bring change to Africa: they are doctors, businessmen, diplomats dispensing advice and money, missionaries, relief agency workers, journalists, highly trained technicians and professionals with skills in communications, construction, aviation, agriculture and finance.
The African experience for American blacks is a more poignant and moving one than a white American would experience traveling for the first time to, say, England. But blacks are not immune to the lethargy, frustrations, inefficiency and ignorance in Africa, and no small number merely throw up their hands in disillusionment. “Thank God my granddaddy got aboard that ship,” said a member of Muhammad Ali’s entourage during the 1974 Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire. And on a continent where individual liberty is the privilege of a chosen few, there is also the realization that the American black has more dignity, freedom and security at home than most Africans have ever known in their own lands.
“I’ll tell you what I tell blacks who write me, asking if they should come to Africa,” said Clifford Sharp, a Detroit mechanic who moved to Guinea in West Africa in 1968. “I tell them: If you want to come to Africa for fun, don’t come. If you have a superior attitude, don’t come. If you expect to have no problems here, don’t come. But if you want to aid the development of the black race, if you care, then come. But you must have pioneer spirit and missionary zeal, because you’re certainly going to have some problems getting by day to day.”
Sharp was sixty-six years old when I met him in Conakry, as depressing, dilapidated and filthy a capital as you’ll find anywhere in Africa. He had maintained his U.S. passport and voted Democratic on an absentee ballot in each U.S. presidential election, but he considered himself a “returned African,” not an American. He and his wife, Laverna, lived simply on his monthly $404 Social Security check, which he supplemented by tending to President Sékou Touré’s fleet of cars. Touré had run one of the most repressive regimes in Africa for more than twenty years, but the Sharps had remained apolitical, not meddling at all in local affairs, and they spoke with great pride of being black people in a country run by a black president.
Back in the early sixties, when Sharp had decided “I just wanted to be with my own kind,” he and Laverna, a teacher, had started saving their money for a “return” to Africa. They wrote to four countries asking about the possibility of immigrating. Nigeria never bothered to reply; Ghana responded that the Sharps had flunked the examination for entry, although they had never taken any test; Liberia said it did not need mechanics or teachers; and President Touré had written back personally, saying; “Come. We welcome any brother who wants to help us develop our country.”