History of Racism

As a Puritan minister, Richard Mather had walked uprightly through fifteen years of British persecution before embarking on the perilous journey across the Atlantic to begin life anew in New England. There, he would be reunited with his illustrious ministerial friend John Cotton, who had faced British persecution for twenty years in Boston, England. In 1630, Cotton had given the farewell sermon to hundreds of Puritan founders of New England communities, blessing their fulfillment of God’s prophetic vision. As dissenters from the Church of England, Puritans believed themselves to be God’s chosen piece of humanity, a special, superior people, and New England, their Israel, was to be their exceptional land.

Within a week of the Great Hurricane, Richard Mather was installed as pastor of Dorchester’s North Church near the renowned North Church of the new Boston, which was pastored by John Cotton. Mather and Cotton then embarked on a sacred mission to create, articulate, and defend the New England Way. They used their pens as much as their pulpits, and they used their power as much as their pens and pulpits. They penned the colonies’ first adult and children’s books as part of this endeavor. Mather, in all likelihood, steered the selection of Henry Dunster to lead colonial America’s first college, Harvard’s forerunner, in 1640. And Cotton did not mind when Dunster fashioned Harvard’s curriculum after their alma mater, Cambridge, setting off an ideological trend. Like the founders of Cambridge and Harvard before them, the founders of William & Mary (1693), Yale (1701), the University of Pennsylvania (1740), Princeton (1746), Columbia (1754), Brown (1764), Rutgers (1766), and Dartmouth (1769)—the other eight colonial colleges—regarded ancient Greek and Latin literature as universal truths worthy of memorization and unworthy of critique. At the center of the Old and New England Greek library hailed the resurrected Aristotle, who had come under suspicion as a threat to doctrine among some factions in Christianity during the medieval period.

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AFTER ARAB MUSLIMS conquered parts of North Africa, Portugal, and Spain during the seventh century, Christians and Muslims battled for centuries over the prize of Mediterranean supremacy. Meanwhile, below the Sahara Desert, the West African empires of Ghana (700–1200), Mali (1200–1500), and Songhay (1350–1600) were situated at the crossroads of the lucrative trade routes for gold and salt. A robust trans-Saharan trade emerged, allowing Europeans to obtain West African goods through Muslim intermediaries.

Ghana, Mali, and Songhay developed empires that could rival in size, power, scholarship, and wealth any in the world. Intellectuals at universities in Timbuktu and Jenne pumped out scholarship and pumped in students from around West Africa. Songhay grew to be the largest. Mali may have been the most illustrious. The world’s greatest globe-trotter of the fourteenth century, who trotted from North Africa to Eastern Europe to Eastern Asia, decided to see Mali for himself in 1352. “There is complete security in their country,” Moroccan Ibn Battuta marveled in his travel notes. “Neither traveler nor inhabitant in it has anything to fear from robbers or men of violence.”

Ibn Battuta was an oddity—an abhorred oddity—among the Islamic intelligentsia in Fez, Morocco. Hardly any scholars had traveled far from home, and Battuta’s travel accounts threatened their own armchair credibility in depicting foreigners. None of Battuta’s antagonists was more influential than the intellectual tower of the Muslim world at that time, Tunisian Ibn Khaldun, who arrived in Fez just as Battuta returned from Mali. “People in the dynasty (in official positions) whispered to each other that he must be a liar,” Khaldun reported in 1377 in The Muqaddimah, the foremost Islamic history of the premodern world. Khaldun then painted a very different picture of sub-Sahara Africa in The Muqaddimah: “The Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery,” Khaldun surmised, “because (Negroes) have little that is (essentially) human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals.” And the “same applies to the Slavs,” argued this disciple of Aristotle. Following Greek and Roman justifiers, Khaldun used climate theory to justify Islamic enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans and Eastern European Slavs—groups sharing only one obvious characteristic: their remoteness. “All their conditions are remote from those of human beings and close to those of wild animals,” Khaldun suggested. Their inferior conditions were neither permanent nor hereditary, however. “Negroes” who migrated to the cooler north were “found to produce descendants whose colour gradually turns white,” Khaldun stressed. Dark-skinned people had the capacity for physical assimilation in a colder climate. Later, cultural assimilationists would imagine that culturally inferior African people, placed in the proper European cultural environment, could or should adopt European culture. But first physical assimilationists like Khaldun imagined that physically inferior African people, placed in the proper cold environment, could or should adopt European physicality: white skin and straight hair.

Ibn Khaldun did not intend merely to demean African people as inferior. He intended to belittle all the different-looking African and Slavic peoples whom the Muslims were trading as slaves. Even so, he reinforced the conceptual foundation for racist ideas. On the eve of the fifteenth century, Khaldun helped bolster the foundation for assimilationist ideas, for racist notions of the environment producing African inferiority. All an enslaver had to do was to stop justifying Slavic slavery and inferiority using climate theory, and focus the theory on African people, for the racist attitude toward dark-skinned people to be complete.

There was one enslavement theory focused on Black people already circulating, a theory somehow derived from Genesis 9:18–29, which said “that Negroes were the children of Ham, the son of Noah, and that they were singled out to be black as the result of Noah’s curse, which produced Ham’s colour and the slavery God inflicted upon his descendants,” as Khaldun explained. The lineage of this curse of Ham theory curves back through the great Persian scholar Tabari (838–923) all the way to Islamic and Hebrew sources. God had permanently cursed ugly Blackness and slavery into the very nature of African people, curse theorists maintained. As strictly a climate theorist, Khaldun discarded the “silly story” of the curse of Ham.

Although it clearly supposed Black inferiority, the curse theory was like an unelected politician during the medieval period. Muslim and Christian enslavers hardly gave credence to the curse theory: they enslaved too many non-Black descendants of Shem and Japheth, Ham’s supposed non-cursed brothers, for that. But the medieval curse theorists laid the foundation for segregationist ideas and for racist notions of Black genetic inferiority. The shift to solely enslaving Black people, and justifying it using the curse of Ham, was in the offing. Once that shift occurred, the disempowered curse theory became empowered, and racist ideas truly came into being.

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The Portuguese made history as the first Europeans to sail along the Atlantic beyond the Western Sahara’s Cape Bojador in order to bring enslaved Africans back to Europe, as Zurara shared in his book. The six caravels, carrying 240 captives, arrived in Lagos, Portugal, on August 6, 1444. Prince Henry made the slave auction into a spectacle to show the Portuguese had joined the European league of serious slave-traders of African people. For some time, the Genoese of Italy, the Catalans of northern Spain, and the Valencians of eastern Spain had been raiding the Canary Islands or purchasing African slaves from Moroccan traders. Zurara distinguished the Portuguese by framing their African slave-trading ventures as missionary expeditions. Prince Henry’s competitors could not play that mind game as effectively as he did, in all likelihood because they still traded so many Eastern Europeans.

But the market was changing. Around the time the Portuguese opened their sea route to a new slave export area, the old slave export area started to close up. In Ibn Khaldun’s day, most of the captives sold in Western Europe were Eastern Europeans who had been seized by Turkish raiders from areas around the Black Sea. So many of the seized captives were “Slavs” that the ethnic term became the root word for “slave” in most Western European languages. By the mid-1400s, Slavic communities had built forts against slave raiders, causing the supply of Slavs in Western Europe’s slave market to plunge at around the same time that the supply of Africans was increasing. As a result, Western Europeans began to see the natural Slav(e) not as White, but Black.

Religion to help resist inequality

Stereotypically, Westerners have seen Africa as ‘the continent without history’. The misrepresentation follows G W F Hegel’s 1830s dictum that Africa ‘is no historical part of the world’. The misconception continues to condition the way that international agencies approach their work in Africa. Africa’s problems are pressing and can have immediate, proximate solutions (developed by external agencies, with international funding). But, of course, this approach merely replicates the idea of Africa as without history, of a continent that requires saving from the outside: by well-meaning abolitionists and missionaries in the 19th century, and by internationalists in the 21st century. History compels us to look at the causes of things, including current problems; and many powerful internal and external actors involved in African society today would apparently prefer to avoid that consideration.

In order to understand many of the challenges of contemporary Africa, a historical framework is vital. The essentialness of history is evident in three key areas. Much of the contemporary political news about Africa discusses, first, the rise of jihād movements in Mali and northern Nigeria; second, the lack of a strong financial base for many of the things that are associated with modern states; and third, the problem of ‘failed states’ (the Central African Republic, Guinea-Bissau, Somalia). These topics are at the basis of many policy papers and research agendas related to Africa, most of which are developed without any deeper sense of the African past. A historical perspective changes the way these questions seem, and also what answers might be effective.

In the case of jihād in West Africa, it can be understood only as part of Islam’s history as a path of resistance to slavery and social inequalities in West Africa. Outside the continent, Boko Haram is the most well-known of these jihād movements. Its leaders are well aware of their historicity, and have often referred to the Sokoto Caliphate as their inspiration. One of the largest states in 19th-century Africa, this caliphate was established in what is now northern Nigeria following a jihād movement led in 1804 by a sheikh called Uthmān dān Fodio.

Sokoto rose in the Hausa states around the northern centres of Kano and Borno (now the heartland of Boko Haram). Its influence quickly spread through what is now Nigeria. The major empire of Oyò in the south fell in 1835, following an uprising led by slaves of nobles who had converted to Islam after a jihād led in northern Nigeria. With the collapse of Oyò, Lagos was poised to become one of Africa’s supercities. Meanwhile, many of the dispossessed were finding in Islam a religion to help resist inequality and the rising power of capitalism. As inequalities had grown, so had more and more people converted, drawing on the power of Islam to fight back against austerity. It drove the uprisings in both northern and southern Nigeria, and quickly spread as far afield as what is now Mali and The Gambia. The dynamic relationship between inequality and the role of jihād to oppose it continues, as Boko Haram attests. The facts suggest that, as both grow in the 21st century, diminishing the appeal of jihād requires addressing the prevalence of inequalities, probably on a global level.

by Toby Green, aeon

British Slave Trade in Asante and Fante Land

James knew the British had been inciting tribal wars for years, knowing that whatever captives were taken from these wars would be sold to them for trade. His mother always said that the Gold Coast was like a pot of groundnut soup. Her people, the Asantes, were the broth, and his father’s people, the Fantes, were the groundnuts, and the many other nations that began at the edge of the Atlantic and moved up through the bushland into the North made up the meat and pepper and vegetables. This pot was already full to the brim before the white men came and added fire. Now it was all the Gold Coast people could do to keep from boiling over again and again and again. James wouldn’t be surprised if the British had killed his grandfather as a way to raise the heat. Ever since his mother had been stolen and married to his father, his village had been swelteringly hot.

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“Is it true?” he asked. “The rumors about the British abolishing slavery soon?”

Quey shrugged his shoulders. “The year James was born, they told everyone in the Castle that the slave trade was abolished and that we could not sell our slaves to America anymore, but did that stop the tribes from selling? Did that make the British leave? Don’t you see this war the Asantes and the British are fighting now and will continue to fight for far longer than you or I or even James can live to see? There’s more at stake here than just slavery, my brother. It’s a question of who will own the land, the people, the power. You cannot stick a knife in a goat and then say, Now I will remove my knife slowly, so let things be easy and clean, let there be no mess. There will always be blood.”

James had heard this speech or something like it many times before. The British were no longer selling slaves to America, but slavery had not ended, and his father did not seem to think that it would end. They would just trade one type of shackles for another, trade physical ones that wrapped around wrists and ankles for the invisible ones that wrapped around the mind. James hadn’t understood this when he was younger, when the legal slave exportation had ended and the illegal one had begun, but he understood now. The British had no intention of leaving Africa, even once the slave trade ended. They owned the Castle, and, though they had yet to speak it aloud, they intended to own the land as well.