Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

the black athlete has totally destroyed the myth of white genetic superiority time and again,

As long as whiteness is a metaphor for power, blackness must of course function as a metaphor for powerlessness, and as long as money whitens, poverty must blacken.

Despite the actual verse not mentioning Ham’s colour at all, from this passage a whole mythology developed around black people being the cursed sons of Ham and therefore eternally suited for slavery, well over a thousand years before the invention of ‘race’ as we think of it.

Ancient Greeks – Aristotle, Herodotus, Diodorus etc. – seemed to think that the Ancient Egyptians, who they saw with their own eyes, were black people.

Meanwhile, in the Americas, the Curse of Ham was applied and linked to a philosophy based on Plato and Aristotle’s ideas about ‘natural slaves’ to inform the largest and most intense experiments with industrial-scale slavery in human history.

The European prejudices about blackness and evil were by no means fixed or without contradiction, but by now they were over a millennium old and could be redeployed to serve a purpose, in the process clearly violating a professed Christian ethic of universal brotherhood.

Once slavery in the Americas was exclusively reserved for humans of African origin, black skin became a signal of merchandise rather than humanity, property rather than personhood and thus anti-blackness became one of the bedrocks of the emergent capitalist economies of western Europe and North America.

If you learn only three things during your education in Britain about transatlantic slavery they will be: 1. Wilberforce set Africans free 2. Britain was the first country to abolish slavery (and it did so primarily for moral reasons) 3. Africans sold their own people. The first two of these statements are total nonsense, the third is a serious oversimplification.

Upon abolition in Britain’s own colonies, it was the slave owners who were given compensation to the tune of £20 million, roughly £17 billion in today’s money,12 the largest public bailout until the aftermath of the 2008 banking crisis. The formerly enslaved were given nothing; in fact, they were expected to remain slaves for five more years under a system euphemistically entitled ‘apprenticeship’ and of course East Indian ‘coolies’ continued to be scattered across the Caribbean to labour as ‘indentured servants’ well after the abolition of slavery.

despite all of this, some ‘historians’, teachers and assorted nationalists are asking us all to believe the self-serving fairy tale that suddenly, in 1807 – just three years after Haitian independence – guided by William Wilberforce alone, Britain abolished slavery because it was ‘the right thing to do’. What a pile of twaddle.

But the ‘Wilberforce did it all’ idea also springs from two other ideological founts, one the aforementioned classic white saviour trope and the other a seemingly human need for simple solutions to complex problems, for great men instead of the convoluted mess that is human history – in short, a need for heroes.

There are a number of obvious problems with the ‘Africans sold their own people’ cliché, but that still does not seem to have stopped people offering it as an ‘argument’. First and foremost, does the fact that Britain had ‘African’ accomplices rid it of any and all wrongdoing?

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Africa was not a paradise where all humans sat together around the campfire in their loincloths singing ‘Kumbaya’ in one huge – but obviously primitive – black kingdom covering the entire continent and littered with quaint looking mud huts, any more than all of Europe or Asia was one big happy family. Africa had and has ethnic, cultural, class and imperial rivalries that every scholar of the period acknowledges are the very divisions that colonisers and slave traders played on.

Oyo, Dahomey, Ashanti – all passed laws banning or limiting the sale of their own citizens, i.e. ‘their own people’, while they of course continued to raid for and sell other nations’ people.

West African perspective, there is even evidence of wealthy African families sailing all the way to America to get their children back during the nineteenth century

there are copious records attesting to the practice of ransom, i.e the practice of people capturing and selling two or more people to get back a loved one that had been sold into slavery.

Can you be sure that you would not kidnap people you did not know to get back your child if faced with suc...

To make the simple bald claim that Africans were docile or that they generally ‘sold their own people’, knowing that most West Africans of the time were not involved in slave trading at all, is like saying the English killed their own people when they invaded Ireland or...

‘Africans sold their own people’ is the historical version of ‘black on black violence’.

The average Irishman would certainly resent being conflated with an Englishman, yet Geldof and others can gloss over centuries of diverse and complicated history with the ‘Africans sold their own people’ cliché.

Back in 2005, future prime minister Gordon Brown let the world know that ‘the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over’ – leaving us all wondering when those days of apology were.

The primary difference between Britain and other empires was not that ‘we were not as bad as the Belgians or the Third Reich’ – which is true but is such a shit boast – but that Britain succeeded in dominating the globe and still kind of does, albeit as a second fiddle to the USA in the Anglo-American Empire.

I’ll bet that he and others like him will be wearing their poppy every 11 November; that is, they will be ‘working themselves up into a state of high moral indignation’ about dead people when those dead people are truly British – the Kenyans tortured in the 1950s were legally British citizens but naturally there will be no poppies or tears for them.

Today ethnicity, as distinct from race, is a grouping of human beings based on culture, religion, geography or language.

Racism proper claims to be based on scientific truth.

Laws were directly inspired by American race laws in the Jim Crow south, and thus the scientific racism that had been used to justify colonising, and even where ‘necessary’ exterminating, Africans, Asians and the indigenous people of America and Australasia was returned to Europe and visited on Jewish people and others.

Racism as a word only really came into popular usage during the 1930s, and specifically in relation to the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the Nazis and American hatred of other European immigrants.8

If the overriding white nationalism of Anglo-American governments is to be fully understood then we need look no farther than the issue of apartheid South Africa.

supporting a regime whose ideas were rooted in the same kind of genocidal racial ‘logic’ as the Nazis.

If apartheid was primarily an economic system, surely to claim as we do that apartheid has ended there must then, by inference, be something resembling economic justice occurring over there in southern Africa? Sadly, this is not the case.

A newly elected black government paying back loans taken out with international creditors by a white supremacist regime; it would be laughable if its effects were not so sickening. I’m not sure there has ever been a clearer case of odious debt in history.

Killers and torturers were not imprisoned, as would be usual after a regime ‘fell’, but rather were invited to confess their crimes and walk free.

To this day, South African whites, who are still a small minority, control a hugely disproportionate amount of all forms of capital in South Africa.

This legacy leads us to the Marikana massacre of 2012, the single largest massacre in South Africa since the infamous Sharpeville massacre of 1960 – thirty-four striking miners were shot dead by police and to this day no one has been prosecuted.

‘post-apartheid’ South Africa, the message is still clear – black life is expendable in pursuit of profit.

But when black South Africans claim the ANC and the post-apartheid order has failed them, they more than have a point.

The average black South African still lives in conditions of extreme poverty,

the country remains one of the most violent and uneq...

This obvious omission, along with the simplistic narratives that surrounded Mandela and Castro, was a valuable lesson to me about how the powerful craft history and news media to their own ends.

British-ruled Hong Kong was governed by some of the same kind of racist apartheid laws as South Africa and other colonies.

In the end, I think I asked something like ‘Why did colonisers and enslavers rape their human property so frequently if they didn’t know that they were human?’

The message is clear: white people’s hurt feelings are conceptually equivalent to black humans’ actual lives.

I am a pan-Africanist, which means I am for cultivating a proper mutual understanding between the populations of Africa and its various diasporas – given that we face similar and connected historical challenges – to the extent that this is possible without being idealistic.

As you saw in the chapter on empire, during the same years that Americans were enjoying their lynching picnics Britain had put hundreds of thousands of British Kenyans into concentration camps and engaged in brutality every bit as savage as the American south.

While South African apartheid has usually been associated with the Afrikaner-led National Party and its rise after 1948, Britain played a key role in originally developing South African apartheid.

Despite hundreds of millions of ‘white’ people killing each other throughout European history, witch hunts, mass rapes, hangings, torture and sexual abuse, and despite the fact that the two most violent regions of Britain in the 1990s were almost entirely white, there was no such thing as white-on-white violence.

This is, after all, what the phrase ‘black-on-black crime’ is designed to suggest, is it not? That black people are not like the rest of humanity, and that they do not kill as a complex result of political, historical, economic, cultural, religious and psychological factors, they kill simply because of their skin: their excessive melanin syndrome.

If white police officers and/or vigilantes went to prison when they killed black people on camera, there would be no Black Lives Matter movement.

For example, a Gallup poll of 2014 asked 66,000 people from sixty-five countries which nation they thought was the greatest threat to world peace, and a quarter thought the United States, with just 6 per cent saying China.

There is a picture of several Indian women in saris I often use in one of my lectures about perception.