Fire from Timbuktu

 1.   Chapter One

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Karamoh Kabba

karamohslylhorg@aol.com

Saturday, April 21, 2007

AN OVERVIEW

On April 27, 1961, the Duke of Kent exchanged the British Colonial flag for an economic imperial flag in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Many countries in Africa at that time were in a run up to independence or had just had one. Harold McMillan, the then British prime minister, had dubbed the burning desire for independence across Africa the “Winds of Change.”^i][i] In the late 50s, 60s to the mid 70s, the winds of change was blowing so fiercely that the Queen of England could not keep up with the busy schedule of swapping flags.

Earlier in the 15^th century, Pedro da Cintra, a Portuguese sailor, who was probably lost at sea, called present-day Sierra Leone, “Sierra Lyoa.” He stumbled upon the coast of West Africa, masqueraded as a naturalist historian of the region, and distorted history from the outset. An impostor alluding to thunderstorms for roaring of lions in the peninsular mountain ranges along the coast of present day Freetown declared in Portuguese, “Sierra Lyoa,” meaning “Lion Mountain.” Nonetheless, Africanist historians propped him and other such so-called discoverers in quixotic adjectives such as explorer.

Until one reads the atrocities one of the most acclaimed so-called explorer, Sir Henry Morton Stanley, committed in Africa, these accounts remain reinforcements of Europeans’ presumptuous superiority concept. Yet, these are the biased historical accounts African children read.

The distortion of the name of this coastal African land continued over centuries to suit the needs of Europeans who posed as good faith traders in the beginning before they started to take slaves. The British came later and changed the Portuguese word, “Lyoa” to “Sierra Leoa,” altered it to “Sierra Leona,” further yet “Sierra Leone Company” when it became a crown colony on Jan 1, 1808 and finally Sierra Leone before independence. They [British] named the coastal land of Sierra Leone we now know as Freetown, the Province of Freedom, when they settled freed slaves on it on May 14, 1787.

The Europeans forcefully grabbed Africans from their land, tortured them for centuries, changed their names, robbed them off their cultures, turned around, brought them back, settled them on the same land they stole them from, and called the land a Province of Freedom.

The freedman did not become a settler by choice alone. He was no more desirable amongst Europeans following the abolition of centuries of slavery. Europeans had found out also that slavery was better yet on the continent of Africa, away from mounting pressure from anti-slavery activists, where the land, the resources and the people were in abundance supply. They came to Africa and reintroduced new forms of slavery disguised in colonialism.

No need to wonder the British had called a whole country “Sierra Leone Company:” It was an enterprise for economic gains for them. Indeed, it was a bed down for European heisting in the region.

Sir John Hawkins, the first British, landed in Sierra Leone in 1562. During his third visit between 1567 and 1568, he took part in conflicts between two Mane kings, “… seized and took away 250 slaves.”^[ii][ii]

A termite colony is a better analogy for slavery: In slavery, the Queen of England knighted John Hawkins for showing huge profits when he stole those slaves in Sierra Leone. Mr. Hawkins moved up the social rank, for hard work, over and beyond. He became a highly placed economic soldier of the British Empire. He was a great asset to the Queen in inverse proportion; with an increase economic benefit in proportion as Africa’s wealth of human resources decreased with a subsequent decrease in economic development.

This pattern of seizing slaves in Africa, first by Arabs and later by Europeans and renaming places in Africa by the colonialists extended way beyond Sierra Leone and Liberia. In fact, the British took pleasure in naming almost every institution of learning in Africa after a British royalty. They named all the beautiful natural lacustrine sceneries of East and Central Africa after European royalties and explorers. Merely, it was consistent with colonialists’ over-presumptuousness and purport of knowing everything. Otherwise, the Arabs could have named African countries, cities, towns and villages after Arab kings, kingdoms, imams and sultans way before the advent of Europeans.

History taught us that Arab traders were the first external influence in Africa. But in nowhere would one find evidence of such manifest arrogance. European disregard for culture and tradition in Africa took more than the taken of slaves from Africa did. It derailed the consideration of observable cultures and traditions in policy-making for workableness. It nurtured inferiority complex in many Africans to a perceived European superiority. It served as the root of European racism. And it entrenched stoicism in the European from admitting sooner that slavery was wrong.

Over fifty years later, following flag decolonization of Africa, The Guardian Newspaper reported that historians signed a petition to repeal a French law that requires history-teaching stress on only positive aspects of slavery and colonialism. The report reads in part: “More than 1000 historians, writers, and intellectuals have signed a petition demanding the repeal of a new law requiring school history teachers to stress the ‘positive aspects’ of French colonialism.” The report, quoting one of the petitioners, states, “‘in retaining only the positive aspects of colonialism this law imposes an official lie on massacres that at times went as far as genocide on the slave trade, and on the racism that France has inherited.’”^[iii][iii]

This work is a commitment to tell a story of Africa, to urge an investigative study into how Africans ruled great Kingdoms in ancient times and adapt it to present times in order to complete what Walter Rodney began when he wrote, “a radical break with the international capitalist system.”^[iv][iv] It is a call to the exigency not to only break with international capitalist system, but also with international socialist and communist systems all at once.

Africa is the second largest continent in the world, the richest in both natural and human resources with twenty percent of the world’s total land mass and 14 percent of the world’s total population [900 million]^[v][v]. It must have had unique political and economic systems before foreign derailment.

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