Maafa

The word Maafa (also known as the African Holocaust or Holocaust of Enslavement) is derived from a Swahili word meaning disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy. [Nicole Cheeves, Denise. "Legacy". 2004, page 1.] Harp, O.J. "Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx". 2007, page 247.] The term refers to the 500 years of suffering of Africans and the African diaspora, through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, invasion, oppression, dehumanization and exploitation.] . In both African Slavery and Arab enslavement of Africans, the enslaved were allowed great social ascension. In the 8th century Africa was dominated by Arab-Berbers in the north: Islam moved southwards along the Nile and along the desert trails. The Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia often exported Nilotic slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. Native Muslim Ethiopian sultanates (rulership) exported slaves as well, such as the sometimes independent sultanate (rulership) of Adal (a sixteenth century province-cum-rulership located in East Africa north of Northwestern Somalia). [Pankhurst (1997) p. 59] The Arab (African identifying as Arab) Tippu Tib extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the Gulf of Guinea, the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan Hamoud bin Mohammed. [Ingrams (1967) p.175] The rest of Africa had no direct contact with Muslim slave-traders.

The primary boom of the trade in African slaves by Arabs was during the 18th century. The Portuguese had destroyed the Swahili coast and Zanzibar emerged as the hub of wealth for the Arabian state of Muscat. By 1839, slaving became the prime Arab enterprise. The demand for slaves in Arabia, Egypt, Persia and India, but more notability by the Portuguese who occupied Mozambique created a wave of destruction on Eastern Africa. 45,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year.cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher="African Holocaust"|title="18th century Boom"|] .

Legacy of Arab enslavement of Africans

Islam like Christianity became the context for the cultural prevalence of Arab culture. Arab names became Islamic names and those who adopted Islam automatically adopted Arab culture in an attempt to become "Islamic." The Afro-Arab relationship was riddled with complexities and nuance. Some Arabs were Arab linguistically but racially African. Thus, the Arab trade in enslaved Africans was not only conducted by Asiatic and Caucasian Arabs, but also African Arabs: Africans speaking Arabic as a first language embracing an Arab culture.cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=Owen 'Alik Shahadah|title="Arab Slave Trade"|]

Scholarship on Arab slavery has historically been limited, because most people who know themselves to have had enslaved ancestors are people of the African Diaspora whose ancestors were involved in the Transatlantic slave trade. The impact of the Arab trade on people of the Americas was negligible. Another reason why the Arab Slave Trade is far less scrutinized than the European trade is that the social legacy of western slavery is far more salient today: in the West, ghettos of concentrated poverty, populated by a black-skinned minority, are not uncommon, nor are prison systems disproportionately incarcerating impoverished black minorities. The African Diaspora in Arab lands, on the other hand, has almost disappeared through inter-marriage. The resurgence of Islamaphobia, some argue, has brought this aspect of history to the foreground.cite web|url=http://www.arabslavetrade.com|publisher=Owen 'Alik Shahadah|title="Myths regarding the Arab Slave Trade"|] According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had to be cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. Sadat considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, like many black-looking Latin Americans, often consider themselves white because they have some white ancestry. [ [http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125 The Subtle Racism of Latin America, UCLA International Institute ] ] Similarly, 19th century slave trader Tippu Tip is often identified as Arab [ [http://www.ntz.info/gen/n00880.html#id04963 Tippu Tip ] ] despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of the Arab tradition of assigning race through paternal descent. Tip, whose Arab father raped his mother, was conceived in violence against Africans, a tradition he continued by earning a reputation for being merciless to his slaves. [ [http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html Ayanna - Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders ] ] According to J. Phillipe Rushton, Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

cale

There is debate that the widely accepted view of the arrival of 10 million neglects to state how many left the continent of Africa. Estimates range from 40 million to 100 million from both the Arab Slave trade and the Transatlantic trade.cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"| (marxists.org)] It has been estimated that the population of Africa in the mid 19th century would have been 50 million instead of 25 million had slavery not taken place. Many Africans died during capturing or deportation to the coast, in the coastal dungeons or during the middle passage. It is estimated that the Portuguese trade was underestimated by half and the British trade by 1/3. There were also indirect effects of the slavers' actions, including broken families left behind and the spreading of European diseases.cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm|publisher="Walter Rodney"|title="How Europe underdeveloped Africa"| (marxists.org)]

It is estimated that by the height of the slave trade the population of Africa unlike the rest of the World had stagnated by 50%. Not only was the trade of demographic significance in the aggregate population losses but also in the profound changes to settlement patterns, epidemiological exposure, and reproductive and social development potential.cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm|publisher="Owen 'Alik Shahadah"|title="African Holocaust: Dark Voyage audio CD"|]

Effects

Few scholars dispute the harm done to the slaves themselves, nor the legacy of social and financial alienation. African scholar Maulana Karenga puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="Ron Karenga"|title="Effects on Africa"|]

Slavery, colonialism and racism engendered a broad array of aftereffects, which are very visible in western society. The emotional stress of societal alienation and the burden of social and economic disadvantage fall under the scope of this legacy, and Africans of the diaspora are continually "tested by the engagement with Eurocentric culture." Several scholars have suggested that black families often seem to present "symptoms of imbalance, alienation, and non-cohesion within themselves and their communities", linking this tendency to the brutal disconnect in familial tradition that slavery made, when families were arbitrarily destroyed as slaves were bought and sold.Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. "Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience". 2006, page 7-8.] Rather than family--"community, harmony, and balance"--as a generational norm, "alienation and chaos in the wake of the Maafa seems more familiar."Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. "Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies". 2000, page 251.]

The destruction of the family unit was furthered by the destruction of the institution of marriage. Not only were slaves disallowed legal marriage and forbidden any American religious and civil proceedings, but also their tribal ceremonies were not permitted or honored. Children were not raised among their own parents, who were themselves never formally united in union; and children were often sold away. These practices born of the economics of the slave trade, in addition to undermining family traditions, [Fredrickson, George M. "The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality". 1988, page 113.] were justified with arguments that dehumanized African people. One scholar speaks to the "residual effects" of this prolonged campaign of dehumanization as a "collective posttraumatic stress disorder",Boyd-Franklin, Nancy. "Black Families in Therapy, Second Edition: Understanding the African American Experience". 2006, page 9.] an anxiety innate to the African American experience which is exacerbated by the barrage of statistics and studies that categorize African Americans as an "other", often seeming to revive the bigoted, dehumanizing sentiments of the past.

Economics of slavery

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries in history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop.Fact|date=March 2008 The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect and retain them. For example, at the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of New France to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian island of Guadeloupe.

Slave trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around 6% in France in the eighteenth century), but they were higher than domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime and commercial—were important for individual voyages. Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian Walter Rodney estimates that by c.1770, the King of Dahomey was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados and the territory of British Guiana gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, some made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, St. Dominigue (western Hispaniola, now Haiti), to a slave revolt in 1791 and supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of liberty (but in fact opportunistic selectivity). Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar. After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labor soon permeated every level of British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable elements of daily life for all classes.Fact|date=February 2007

Colonialism and the European scramble for Africa

In the late nineteenth century, European powers staged the "Scramble for Africa", carving up most of the continent into colonial states. Only Liberia and Abyssinia (Ethiopia) escaped colonization. This colonial occupation continued until after World War II, when the colonial states gradually attained formal independence.

Colonialism had a destabilizing effect that still resonates in African politics. Before European intervention, national borders were no real concern, as a group's territory was generally congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence on drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the Congo River appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there had formerly been linguistically and culturally like groups living on each side, in mutually dependent community; border demarcation, in this case between Belgium and France along the river, permanently separated such groups, undermining these societies. Africans who lived in Saharan or Sub-Saharan Africa, some of whom had subsisted in trading across the continent for centuries, often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

European intervention often undermined the local balance of power, creating ethnic conflict where it was previously nonexistent, now that territorial boundaries were artificially redrawn by outsiders. Peoples of like ethnicity, religion, and language were often separated by virtue of having been conquered by different European states; the states themselves often grouped unlike peoples together, such that the nascent political entities completely lacked political unity. Peoples of differing religions, ethnicities, and even languages were jumbled together according to the sphere of influence under which they happened to fall, encouraging internecine conflict and disunity.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and South Africa, systems of second-class citizenship were established to give Europeans political power far in excess of their numbers. In the Congo Free State, which was the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium, the native population was subjected to inhumane treatment and near-slavery status; forced labor was not uncommon.

In what are now Rwanda and Burundi, two ethnic groups Hutus and Tutsis had merged into one cultureFact|date=March 2008 by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide,Fact|date=March 2008 Belgium instituted a policy of racial categorization upon taking control of the region, as race-based categorization was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term Hutu originally referred to the agricultural-based Bantu-speaking peoples that moved into present day Rwanda and Burundi from the West, and the term Tutsi referred to Northeastern cattle-based peoples that migrated into the region later.Fact|date=March 2008 The terms described a person's economic class; individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system; European-like features such as fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses were seen as more ideally Hamitic, and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry, who were thus given power amongst the colonized peoples.Fact|date=March 2008 Identity cards were issued based on this philosophy.

Academic legacy of the African holocaust

The persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or whitewashed in historiography. Conventional western historical narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side affect of commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies, cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound, with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated to the periphery. Until the 1960s, African Americans suffered from what one historian deemed "historical invisibility". [Fredrickson, George M. "The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality". 1988, page 112.]

Owen 'Alik Shahadah traces this pattern of scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.cite web|url=http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/agencyandafrica.htm|publisher="Owen 'Alik Shahadah"|title="Removal of Agency from Africa"|accessdate=2005]

Questions of terminology

The term "African Holocaust" is preferred by some academics, such as Maulana Karenga, because it implies intention.cite web|url=http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ethics.htm|publisher="Ron Karenga"|title="Problem with Maafa"|] One problem noted by Karenga is that the word "Maafa" can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly "no accident". The term "holocaust", however, can be misleading as it is primarily used to refer to the Nazi genocide and etymologically refers to something being "completely (ολος - holos) burnt (καυστός - kaustos)". [cite web|url=http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107252?query_type=word&queryword=holocaust&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1&search_id=PkAi-tOxPxL-1944&hilite=50107252|publisher=Oxford University Press|title=Oxford English Dictionary|year=1989|accessdate=2007-03-21]

Many Afrocentric scholars prefer the term "Maafa" to "African Holocaust", [Tarpley, Natasha. "Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity". 1995, page 252.] because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events. The term "Maafa" may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the "Holocaust" serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. "Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies". 2000, page 250.] Other arguments in favor of "Maafa" rather than "African Holocaust" emphasize that the "denial of the validity of the African people's humanity" is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."

The terms "Transatlantic Slave Trade", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity. With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "collateral damage" of a commercial venture.

Further reading

* "Let The Circle Be Unbroken", by Marimba Ani
* Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. "The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam" (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
* Van Sertima, Ivan. ed. "The Journal of African Civilization."
* Rodney, Walter. "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa." Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
* "World's Great Men Of Color." Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
* "The Negro Impact on Western Civilization." New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
* Quarles, Benjamin. "The Negro and the Making of the Americas."
* "The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam" by John Hunwick

References

External links

* [http://www.africanholocaust.net African Holocaust Society]
* [http://www.swagga.com/maafa.htm swagga.com/maafa Swagga Maafa]
* [http://www.maafa.org maafa.org Maafa.org]
* [http://www.africawithin.com/maafa/slavery.htm africawithin.com/maafa/slavery Africa Within]
* [http://www.temple-news.com/media/storage/paper143/news/2003/10/30/Opinion/What-African.Holocaust-543918.shtml?norewrite200609241340&sourcedomain=www.temple-news.com What African Holocaust]
* [http://www.iWantToRemember.com I Want To Remember the African Holocaust]