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Black History Month 2002
Books and New Media
Set in the 18th century, this is a tale of a young African woman, captured and enslaved against her will in what is now northern Ghana. The writer follows her through Kumase, Elmina and the Middle Passage to the slave markets of Bahia, Brazil. Along the way there are vivid scenes of brutality and heroic actions against slavery's priests and slavemasters. "Ama restores the ancient link between history and literature," say reviewers at the Africa Book Centre, London. "Good reading for diasporic Blacks alienated from their African ancestors, and others who want to understand the true nature of the slave trade and its continuing impact on our world today," says the author, a white South African, married to an African and resident in Ghana since 1970. "The end of this story has yet to be written," concludes the author. The social evils of the past - enslavement, sexual abuse and humiliations - resonate today. People's of African descent, half of Brazil's 165 million people, remain overwhelmingly disadvantaged and poor. And in major European cities, thousands of immigrant Afro-Brazilians forced into desperation must eke out a precarious living as sex workers and drug dealers. Uniquely, this work was published as a print-on-demand book and won the author the £10,000 Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2002. Herbstein's web site http://www.ama.africatoday.com is a rich resource of primary and secondary texts on the slave trade and related issues.
Islam's Black Slaves: A History of Africa's Other Black Diaspora by Ronald Segal (Atlantic, £20.) ISBN 1-903809-80-0 The trouble with this book is that in attempting to expose the horrors of "Islam's Black Slaves" the author is completely enthralled to European historiography. It would be unlike Segal, one of the leading white veterans of South Africa's anti-apartheid movement to be so biased; but he is. There are three aspects to this. Segal denies the Black African share in the rich tapestry of Islamic societies; he makes ill-fitting remarks about the Nation of Islam (the so-called "Black Muslims") in the US in a time of intense Islamophobia; and he fails to draw upon the deep vein of African and African American scholarship. But, to start with the book itself. Black slavery in Islamic Arab societies is a forgotten chapter in world history, says the author whose previous work The Black Diaspora dealt with slavery and Black communities in the western hemisphere. Here he contends that few people are aware that in many respects the 14 centuries-old trans-Saharan trade - from eastern regions of Black Africa to its northern shores, the Mediterranean, Arabia, the Middle East, Northern India and China - matched the Atlantic trade to the Americas in scale and ferocity. Yet, Segal insists, "In Islam, slavery was never the moral, political, and economic issue that it was in the West". The eventual economic and social use of captives was profoundly different, he says. Slave marketeers supplied the Arab demand for domestic slaves and concubines, and this led to a preponderance of females in the Islamic trade. By contrast, the merchants of the slave trade on the West African coast targeted black males who became the brute force of the plantation system that launched capitalist modern industrial society. Segal's work has found favour in The Spectator in England and The New York Times. However there is much in the book that calls for greater clarity. Segal makes a persuasive case that the 14 million slaves transported east over the millennia were treated better under Arab Islamic rule than the 12 million or more transported across the Atlantic to serve British, American and western colonial masters. Nevertheless, the process of enslavement must have been just as cruel. And the ruin of African communities was surely as great, whether the destination was the slave markets of Arabia or the slave blocks of the Americas. We do know that there was no dominant ideology in the Arab eastern trade of racial superiority or any aversion to race mixing. Yet, contemporary evidence shows that racism did eventually enter the Islamic world, with effects that can still be seen today in places like the Islamic states of Sudan and Mauritania. Segal has done an impressive job of marshalling some important and relatively little known facts about the eastern slave trade. Unfortunately, he never seems to go anywhere with these facts, or suggest what we are to make of them. The book is too short (262 pages) for the complex subject, and Segal's sweeping generalisations often lead to unsubstantiated claims. There are several reasons for this assertion. Segal's title "Islam's Black Slaves" suggests the book is in some way a commentary on Islam, its beliefs, precepts and laws, but this is never developed in the text. Using the phrase Islamic slave trade is as dubious as calling the Atlantic slave trade "Christian", says reviewer Stephen Howe in the New Statesman. The sub-title "The Other Black Diaspora" has its difficulties, too. Western policy makers, weary of attack from the mounting Africa reparations movement, will be tempted to play down their own slave trading past and say "See, we are not the only guilty ones." Furthermore, in an inappropriate epilogue, Segal, veers from his academic pretensions. He condemns Louis Farrakhan, the spiritual leader of the Nation of Islam, an African American religious group, for ignoring "the survival of black slavery in parts of Islam"; and in a marked retreat from scholarly objectivity, Segal accuses Farrakhan of "anti-Semitism" and of scorning "the memorialisation of the Jewish holocaust". Crucially, Segal's work fails on several important academic criteria. His analysis and prescriptions are too deeply set in white Western perceptions to be enthusiastically endorsed by all scholars. His research sources do not range wide enough. He ignores progressive western historians such as Martin Bernal, author of Black Athena, an outstanding work on the Afro-Asiatic roots of classical civilisations. It would have helped if Segal had read, cited or even acknowledged prominent non-western Arab academics and African American scholars on Islamic African and Arab slavery. The monumental efforts of Dr W E B DuBois to explore the parallels and paradoxes of Arab-African-Western slave systems immediately come to mind. His Encyclopaedia Africana project, based at Fisk University, is curated by his son David G DuBois and Gamal Gorkeh Nkrumah, son of the first president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah. Segal completely ignores giants in the politics of knowledge and African Studies, John Henrik Clarke and Yusuf Ben Jochannan. Nothing is said of Cheikh Anta Diop, Chancellor Williams and Ali Mazrui. Advice was not sought from diasporic scholars Manning Marable, Professor and Director of African American Studies, Columbia University, Sulayman Nyang, professor of African Studies, Howard University, Molefi Kete Asante, author of The Afrocentric Idea. Nor is there mention of Princeton's Prof Kwame Anthony Appiah, formerly of Harvard University's prestigious African American Studies department and co-author of the well-researched Microsoft Encarta Africana. Only Prof Henry Louis Gates Jr, of the Center was quoted by Segal, selectively, to buttress his attack on the Nation of Islam. In the end, the difficulty with Segal's book is that you would never appreciate that Blacks were not mere tools of Islamic predators. He does not credit that Islam in Africa south of the Sahara gradually took on local garb and became the full possession of those it had enclosed. The Mali empire was one example of Islamic faith-based progressive governments. Great centres of Islamic learning thrived in Black Africa at Timbuktu, Niani and Jenne and attracted Muslim scholars from many countries. The exclusion of this not inconsequential body of knowledge and experience casts doubt on Segal's intent and academic pretensions. One is left only with his images of bedraggled, hand- and foot-bound captive Blacks, of obsequious blackamoor attendants in gilded palaces and well-muscled impotent Black eunuchs on guard at the sultan's womens quarters. This flawed work lends itself to perpetuating crude stereotypes of Black African peoples. Correcting this grievous imbalance is a challenge that future writers and historians must address.
Sugar and Slate by Charlotte Williams (Planet £6.95) ISBN 0-9540881-0-7 Seamlessly moving readers between cultures and continents - Africa, Guyana and Wales, her mother's land - the writer fashions a tale of interracial marriage and its cross generational effects. With this troubled story of conflicting global connections and local attachments, Ms Williams proves herself a worthy practitioner of the personal memoir as she fashions a story that speaks to the wider experience of a growing number of mixed race Britons. Raised in a small Welsh town where the epithet "nigger" was not a nice word for coloured (mixed) people, Ms Williams recalls feeling "Half of something but never anything quite whole". Later, in her travels to Africa and the Caribbean, her "Britishness and whiteness", she says, marked her out as a stranger; even as her "foreignness and darkness" had distinguished her in the Welsh valleys. Yet, through her tri-continental voyage of discovery she learns to envy less the "chalky complexions" of her girlfriends and to value more her African Caribbean heritage, and Ms Williams wisely concludes, "To be mixed (race) doesn't mean you have to be mixed up".
When I Came to England: An Oral History of life in 1950s and 1960s Britain by Z Nia Reynolds (Black Stock) ISBN 0-9540387-0-3 "It is vital that future generations have some understanding of life as we found it when we first came to Britain, the struggles and joys we underwent," prefaced the late Bernie Grant, MP, Caribbean born civil rights activist and one of the first Black parliamentarians. Drawn from interviews with Afro-Caribbean immigrants, the author has produced a short but richly patterned chronicle of the early stages of post war modern Black Britain, a remarkable period of British history. "They came, got low paid jobs (in hospitals, factories and transport companies), lived in single rooms, and brought up their families," says Donald Hinds, a journalist on Claudia Jones' campaigning West Indian Gazette at the time. Most hoped to make their contribution to post war Britain's reconstruction, work hard, save money and then return home. But this was a lost illusion for many of the newcomers. They had to to make do as best they could. There were good times as some recall with toothsome grins: "Parties? Yea, man! Every Saturday night there were house parties." But there were hard times, too. The reader will shiver in the cold with Mildred from Jamaica in her unheated room in wintry 1960s London; will feel pride with Doreen of Guyana as she protests to her factory boss that Blacks get all the dirty work; and dream with Whitfield of Jamaica that one day coloured people will be in good jobs. As Peter from Montserrat concludes: we were treated badly but "No one has ever apologised to us, even to this day". Reynolds is a London-based writer with a background in print and broadcast journalism. She is director of Black Stock, a specialist photo library and resource agency. Special selection from Multicultural Books www.multiculturalbooks.co.uk
Black History Print £8.50 (PB) +p&p £1.99 Whether you want an historical print for your library, child's room or school, this illuminating print depicting 20 historical images with brief biographies and information on important events will serve to inspire. Images include- Martin Luther king; Malcolm X; Haile Selaise; Lewis Latimer- Pioneer in electric lighting; Alexander Pushkin - father of Russian Literature. Different And Wonderful: Raising Black Children In A Race-Conscious Society By Dr Darlene Hopson & Dr Derek Hopson £16.99 (PB) +p&p £1.99 In this interesting book, the authors who are both parents and clinical psychologists, go through each stage of the lives of children and provide tools that can help in raising them well, without sacrificing family values or ethnic pride. Perhaps the most important message in this comprehensive guide is the affirmation that Black culture is different, and life affirmingly wonderful. Available
from: CDs
Same Boat. (One World to Share) by Alex Pascall. Limited edition CD single with excerpts of the soundtrack of Common Threads a play first performed in Wales. The story background is set on La Sagesse sugar cane plantation in Grenada and Big Pit coal mine in south Wales. The story weaves a legendary tale that unites the destinies of the toilers in the canefield and the miners in the coalfield. The CD single features orchestral keyboard programming, cellos, acoustic piano and vocals by a unique family ensemble, the Pascalls - Alex, wife Joyce and daughter Deirdre. "Common Threads the Sound Track is a magical mystery tour from the Caribbean to Wales and back again," says journalist Tony Wallace. Contact details:
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