The Blackworld_ Evolution to Revolution

The Blackworld
Evolution to Revolution
Prince Justice
3 rd Edition
Second Edition The Blackworld: Evolution to Revolution by Prince Justice
ISBN 978-0-9551770-7-1
Copyright 2018
All rights reserved under International, U.S.A and U.K Copyright
Conventions.
An AU Media Book
www.aumedia.info
www.princejustice.com
Copyright © 2018 PRINCE JUSTICE All rights reserved.
Telephone 234(0)8063167994
Dedication
To my late father, Prince Jaiyeola Faloye LL.B LL.M.
Daddy, this is the new, fortified edition that we often spoke about. Thanks.
The truth and nothing but the truth dedicated to all those who have lived and
died for truth and justice.
Prince Justice Faloye
Omo Akure amuda sile afi ogun enu pa eni
(Son of akure that lays down the sword and uses words to win)
CONTENTS
Chapter1:TheTruhWillSetYouFree............................................................. 1
Chapter 2: Charity Begins on the Home Coast ...................................................... 30 African
foundations of human civilization in the true Garden of Eden ................ 30
Chapter 3: Globalization of African Culture: Africans’ Frontier Empires ................ 62 The spread of

black African global prominence and their destruction by the First Horsemen from Eurasia 10,000 BC
to 500 BC ...................................................... 62
Chapter 4: The Rise of the Second Horseman and Eurasian Dogmatization .......... 92 Jewish,
Assyrian, Greek, and Roman campaigns in Saharan Africa; Christianity starts in Africa (500 BC to AD
500)....................................................................... 92
Chapter 5: Peaceful Islam from Afro-Asiatic Horsemen with the Scimitar ............. 99 Creation and
rise of new Afro-Asian groups that challenge European and African sociopolitical structures (AD 500
to 1400) ........................................................... 99
Chapter 6: The Second Coming of the Europeans ................................................ 113 African slavery
by Latino Catholics building empires on sugar and silver; Benin and Congo empires challenged (1400
to 1568).................................................. 113
Chapter 7: The Dutchmasters Gangster Paradise................................................ 129 The Dutch,
British, and French rise against Latinos for African wealth and American land (1568 to
1650)............................................................................ 129
Chapter 8: Tale of Two Colonizers: French and English ....................................... 141 British and
French vie for world domination through slavery and colonization: The creation of the United States,
Haiti, and Brazil (1650 to 1808)................... 141
Chapter 9: From Land of Love to Land of Wickedness ......................................... 156 Yorubaland
burns with Muslim jihads in the north and Christian attacks on the Slave Coast: Africa bleeds to
America (1800s) ................................................... 156
Chapter 10: Cotton Is King .................................................................................. 167 Rise of US slavery,
abolitionists, and the consolidation of Anglo domination; Brazil and Cuba renew slavery efforts
(1800s) ................................................... 167
Chapter 11: Slavery 201: Colonisation and Sharecropping .................................. 180 Gentler form of
slavery introduced: The beginning of industrialisation (1800s) 180
Chapter 12: Queen Victoria’s Boys Scramble for Africa....................................... 198 The
entrenchment of European supremacy through small cliques (1800–1917)198
Chapter 13: The Ogun Military-Industrial Complex ............................................. 219 Iron and steel
makers create military complexes and take over Western economies to rule the world (late 1800s to
mid-1900s) ..................................... 219
Chapter 14: The Black Agitation ......................................................................... 233 Separatists and
integrationist lead the blackworld with the likes of Du Bois, Garvey, Solanke, Plaatje and Nascimento
(1900–1945)..................................... 233
Chapter 15: White Plutocracy ............................................................................. 247 European elitist
sociopolitical theories and systems (1900–1945) ..................... 247
Chapter 16: The Winds of Change Ziks across Africa ........................................... 257 Africans win
fragmented political but not economic freedom (1945–1965) ...... 257
Chapter 17: The Afro-Romantic Movements....................................................... 279 Liberation
movements in Central and South American nations (Brazil, Haiti, Cuba, and Jamaica); Gain political
but not economic freedom (1945–1965)..... 279
Chapter 18: Democracy: Demonstration of Craze? ............................................. 297 African American
civil rights won but not economic: The redesigning of European neo-imperialism (1945–
1965)............................................................................. 297
Chapter 19: The Black VIPs: Vagabonds in Power? ............................................. 309 Africa falls on
its face, tripped by invisible European shackles (1965–1980)...... 309
Chapter 20: Black Power Overpowered .............................................................. 345 African Americans
restricted economically, culturally, and sometimes physically (1965–1980)
....................................................................................................... 345
Chapter 21: Slavery 301: Trickle-Down Nigganomics .......................................... 366 The creation of
black plagues and ‘accounted’ slavery: HIV/AIDS, drug wars, and the IMF-inspired debt problem

(1980–2000)...................................................... 366
Chapter 22: Suffering and Smiling ...................................................................... 384 Small successes
and big failures of the African giants of Ghana, Nigeria, the US and Brazil (1980–
1999)....................................................................................... 384
Chapter 23: Things Fall Apart…Together ............................................................ 434 The rest of the
blackworld’s similar successes and failures (1980–1999)........... 434
Chapter 24: 2000AD: The Dawn of the New, Utopian African Millennium .......... 476
Chapter 25: The Evolution of the Revolution....................................................... 508 Concluding
analysis of the blackworld—past, present, and future .................... 508 Selected
Bibliography......................................................................................... 526
Tables
1.Twenty Most Populous Black Nations/Communities in 2013
Nation
Nigeria Brazil
Ethiopia
Population in Millions
175
105 *
94
Congo (Zaire) 76
Tanzania
Kenya
US
South Africa 48
44
43
42 **
Uganda
Ghana
Mozambique 35 25 24
Ivory Coast Cameroon Angola
23
21

19
Burkina Faso Malawi
18 17
Mali
Niger
Zambia 16
16
14.3
Zimbabwe
Location
West Africa
Official
Language English
South America Portuguese Northeast
Africa
West Central Africa
East Africa
East Africa
English
French
English English
Southern
Africa
East Africa West Africa Southern
Africa
West Africa West Africa Southern
Africa
West Africa Southern
Africa
West Africa West Africa Southern
Africa

Southern
Africa
North America English
13 English
English
English
Portuguese
French
French
Portuguese
French English
French French English
English * Excludes whites but includes mulattos. ** Excludes whites.
2.Five Largest Original African Languages in 2013
Language
Numbers of Speakers
Yoruba 52 million Igbo 47 million Kituba/Lingala 43 million Nguni 40
million
Akan 25 million
Country
Nigeria/Benin/Togo Nigeria
Congo
South
Africa/Zimbabwe Ghana/Ivory coast
3.Seven Largest Black Islander Populations
Island
Lagos (Nigeria) Haiti

Cuba
Jamaica
New York, US + England, UK Trinidad
Barbados
Population
18 million(approx.)
9.9 million
6 million
3 million
2.9 million approx.)
2.3 million
1.3 million
300,000
Language
English/Yoruba French
Spanish
English
English
English
English
English
4.Ten Largest Black Ethnic Groups/Languages
+ Excludes whites and other blacks in other parts of New York tristate area; New York islands only.
Ethnic Group Afro-Brazilians * Hausa
Yoruba(includin g Edo, Itshekiri, Aja)
Igbo (including 50 million Ibibio, Efik)
Population
105 million
60 million
55 million
African
Americans
(including black Hispanics)
Nguni(including Zulu, Xhosa, and Ndebele) Lingala/Kituba

Fulani/Fulbe
Amharic
Oromo
Total
Blackworld 48 million
US languages slightly differentiated
Ebonics (African Tonal English)
45 million
Countries Language Type
Brazil Afro-Portuguese
Nigeria, Niger, Ghana Afro-Asian Arabic trade
language in Sub-Saharan grasslands
Nigeria,Rep. of Benin, Original African
Togo, Brazil, Cuba, languages slightly UK differentiated
Nigeria Original African
South Africa Original African languages slightly differentiated
43 million Congo (Kinshasa), North and West Congo
Congo(Brazzaville) trade languages evolving from original African languages
30 million Nigeria, Guinea, Afro-Asian Arabic Gambia, Senegal, Mali,
Burkina Faso, Niger,
and Cameroon
language of the ‘white man of the desert’ that spread across West Africa grasslands
30 million Ethiopia Afro-Asian language with ancient Greek input
30 million Ethiopia Afro-Asian with Arabian Peninsula influences
1.4 billion (approx.)
Sources: US Census Bureau; Central Intelligence Agency: The World
Factbook; World Almanac; World Languages * * Excludes whites but includes
mulattos.

Chapter1:TheTruhWilSetYouFree
Nigeria is the scientifically proven origin of humanity and the centrepiece of
the future Black global ascendancy, destined to usher in an unrivalled era of
global peace, prosperity, and equality.
Meaning Niger (Negro) Area, Nigeria is the world’s most populous and
ethnically diverse Black nation. Its coast was formerly labelled ‘The Slave
Coast’ by Europeans, and its known northern reaches labelled Negritia by the
Romans.
It is the heart of the African Giant whose legs, arms, and hair have been cut
into numerous black nations and communities across the world. With 517 out
of Africa’s 2146 languages, Nigeria houses the two largest Original African
languages, Yoruba and Igbo, as well as one of the most populous Afro-Asian
languages, Hausa.
A DNA genomewide analysis of 2432 Africans from 121 geographically
diverse populations across Africa (and 1379 DNA samples of other races
across the world) proves that the ancestors of modern human beings
originated and migrated from the Lower Niger River basin of Southern
Nigeria.
In the beginning…
Around 66 million years ago, a meteorite struck planet Earth and killed most
dinosaurs and living things in what is known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene
Extinction Event 12 . This led to the further breakup of the supercontinent and
landmass, Pangea, into the present continents of this Cenozoic Era.
The new formation of continents and the warming up of the planet made the
Lower Niger basin the most conducive for evolution due to the wind system
that brought rain from the Atlantic Ocean at an angle due to the tilt of the
planet.
1 Renne, Paul R.; Deino, Alan L.; Hilgen, Frederik J.; Kuiper, Klaudia F.; Mark, Darren F.; Mitchell

III, William S.; Morgan, Leah E.; Mundil, Roland; Smit, Jan (7 February
2013). "Time Scales of Critical Events Around the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary". Science 339
(6120): 684–687
2 Fortey, R (1999). Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth. Vintage.
pp. 238–260.ISBN 978-0-375-70261-7.

The heavy rains dumped on the West African sub-region, accumulates and
drains back to the ocean, through the world’s largest continental mangrove
rainforest swamp in southern Nigeria, where rivers rising from Guinean
highlands (Niger), Cameroun highlands (Benue), Jos Plateau catchment area
(Sokoto/Kaduna), and the Yoruba and Igbo highlands rivers meet.
Regardless of the global Ice Age glacial cycles that made sea levels rise or

fall, coastlines advance or retreat and rainforest extend or retreat, this area
remained the world’s most fertile lowland area. The Atlantic rains could not
reach the eastern half of Africa, which depended on the Asian monsoon for
rains whose unreliability could not sustain life for long, even in Asia where it
originates.
Therefore Lower Niger remained the springboard of humanity with its wild
yams, palm trees and its high protein insects. Throughout prehistoric times,
the rich ecosystem produced improved stages of hominids that left the area to
colonize the world but faced evolutionary stagnation due to lower nutritional
intakes.
From genetic evidence, the modern man evolved around 150,000 to 200,000
years ago along the Nigerian coast. Pygmy hunter gatherers differentiated
from modern Africans 60,000years ago 3 , while out-of-Africa migrations were
dated between 50,000years ago and 70,000 years ago 4 after the Toba
supereruption in Indonesia and disturbance of the Asian-East African
monsoon rain system that would have killed earlier migrants.
In the Simmons Genome Study, it is stated that the Yoruba separated
substantially from the KhoeSan 87 (58–120) kya; from the Mbuti 56 (32–84)
kya; and from the Dinka 19 (9–25) kya 5 .
Human beings evolved and dispersed with a culture based on Wild Yams.
Wild Yam was the fuel of human civilization. Timing and festivals were
based around lunar and yam cycles. A civilization based on natural Laws of
Retributive Justice and an African Information Retrieval System, whose
sixteen branches of knowledge (agriculture, metallurgy, psychology, history,
etc.) evolved from keying natural language text to 256 ordered pairs of 4-bit
arrays. This knowledge bank that became the first ‘religion’ in the world is
called Ifa by the Yorubas, Iha by the Edos, Aha by Igbos and Ewe, and
extends across Africa with similar names and concepts given to the 16
branches of knowledge called Odus in Yoruba. It also formed the foundation
of Buddhism, I Ching and other Eurasian religions.
3 Patin E, Laval G, Barreiro LB, Salas A, Semino O, et al. (2009) Inferring the Demographic History of
African Farmers and Pygmy Hunter–Gatherers Using a Multilocus Resequencing Data Set. PLoS Genet
5(4): e1000448. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1000448

4 Soares P, Alshamali F, Pereira JB , et al. 2011. The expansion of mtDNA Haplogroup L3 within and
out of Africa. Mol. Biol. Evol. 29(3):915–927. 2012 doi:10.1093/molbev/msr245 5 Mallick S, Li H et
al (2016) The Simons Genome Diversity Project: 300 genomes from 142 diverse populations, Nature
538, 201-6. (Supplementary Materials). PMCID: PMC5161557
In what is known as the Great Coastal Migration 6 , successive waves of
humans migrated out of the Horn of Africa into Eurasia, initially settling on
the coast, all the way to China, Australia and the Americas 7 .
From around 10,000BC, the Original African culture bred civilisations from
Lower Niger to Nile and Indus Valley until about 2000BC, when Eurasians
(referred to in the Bible as the First Horsemen with composite bows and
horse drawn chariots) came down from the Eurasia Mountains to begin a new
era of violent civilization. This was the Age of Ogun, Iron Age.
Two thousand years later, with the advent of the Era of the Second Horseman
and the sword, the Age of Olokun, the slate was progressively wiped clean as
Original African contributions and time were reset to zero. Oduduwa, an
adherent of Olokun, also started a dynasty across Yorubaland which helped
mystify ancient Black history and turn the science of Ifa into a religion.
Now, from 2000AD with the advent of the Era of the Third Horseman, with
scales of justice to bring economic prosperity and global peace, there is a
need for the human race to identify these truths and unite along natural
Original African principles of sustainable economic development and laws of
retributive justice. This is the Age of Shango.
Rising from the ashes…
Africans now need to revive and propagate a socio-political platform and
belief system for their collective advancement or there will be no sustainable
Black socioeconomic development and global peace!
6 Phillip Endicott, Mait Metspalu and Toomas Kivisild (2007),The Evolution and History of Human
Populations in South Asia: Inter-disciplinary Studies in Archaeology, Biological Anthropology,
Linguistics and Genetics, Springer Netherlands, ISBN 978-1-4020-5561-4, 7 Renee Hetherington,
Edward Wiebe, Andrew J. Weaver, Shannon L. Carto, Michael Eby, Roger MacLeod (2007), Climate,
African and Beringian subaerial continental shelves, and migration of early peoples, Quaternary
International, International Union for Quaternary Research,

The vast majority of Black people worldwide will not only continue to be the
most socioeconomically and politically deprived, but they will also continue
to suffer from a racial inferiority complex and remain mentally enslaved to
those who profit from their socioeconomic domination.
What is the point of building factories and economic/political systems if
nobody will patronise or be proud of its designers or products? How can one
feel successful if one is not proud of oneself? Most important is how do we
fight the scourge of terrorism and corruption?
There will be no global peace or equality until the two prevailing belief
systems, Christianity and Islam that breed inequalities and anomalies, are
countered and defeated with an Original African belief system built on
naturalistic principles that imbibe equality and naturally conducive
behavioural patterns and economic systems.
Unfortunately, those who greatly benefit from the unfairness of Eurasian
belief systems are sabotaging all efforts to revive a naturally evolved and
balanced truthful African belief system. This is done through culturally
biased educational systems as well as religion, whereby they label
progenitors of Original African thought in every African ethnic group as
satanic.
For the Yoruba, Esu, the Orisha of information, created the body of historic,
scientific, and cultural knowledge known as Ifa. But, Esu is now unfairly
equated with and translated as the devil, thus scaring the Yoruba from
accessing important cultural and scientific information and leaving them open
to cultural disorientation and a racial inferiority complex.
It is the same with the Igbo Ekwensu and every other Original African group,
despite the fact that the concept of the devil does NOT exist in Original
African belief systems, which are based on the assumption of one Almighty
God that is good and bad, and people personally choose and are repaid
according to the rule of karma/Ofo and Ogu/Esan (laws of retributive justice).
The cultural disorientation is exacerbated by the cultural bias and
miseducation of Eurasian academia. At best, it misdirects and further
confuses the origin and history of the Black race, and at worst, it distorts

clear facts that can free the world from mental slavery. European academia
and religion are rather very linear, as opposed to the duality of Yoruba
knowledge based on a binary system. Yoruba exhibits knowledge as a thesis
and anti-thesis, theoretical and applied, physical and spiritual, making it easy
to understand.
European separation of applied mathematics from the theory makes it a
difficult subject. Geometry was easily understood through hair-styling
dividing the head as a cycle. Trigonometry would make more sense using
planetary alignments and their astrological meanings. History and Economics
will be more effective if trends are attached spiritual meanings.
In what is known as the Precession of the Sun, it takes the Sun 26,000yrs to
make a complete revolution. Ancient knowledge systems like Hinduism,
derived from Ifa, also calculated this and showed that history is not a linear
but cyclical function, based on the 26000 year precession cycle of the
Equinox – the binary movement of the Sun. Yuga in Hindu, Ugba in Eastern
Yoruba. This could be divided into 12 segments of 2000 years each. The
2,000yr eras of the Biblical Horsemen or of Orishas makes history clearer.
Age of Orunmila (10,000-8,000BC) beginning of civilization.
Age of Yemoja (8,000-6000BC) brought the lunar calendar tied to female
menstrual cycles, matriarchy. Age of Esu (6000 to 4000BC) brought
dispersal of knowledge, writing and Ifa;
Age of Osun (4000 to 2000BC) brought the building of pyramids and trading
empires of Sumner, Indus Valley Civilisations etc.;
Age of Ogun (2000 to 1BC) brought the spread of warring Eurasian
horsemen and their composite bows that overran Black empires from China
to Egypt;
Age of Olokun (1 to 2000AD) brought Christianity, Islam and other religious
dogma, and propaganda from racist capitalism etc. used to dominate the
world
Age of Shango (2000 to 4000AD) will bring enlightenment and global
economic justice.
For even better understanding, the 2000yr era can be broken into eight 250yr
eras of significant changes tied to Oya, the Orisha of change.
The current change era started in 2007 with the global economic crash,

Obama, Arab Springs, fall of Mbeki, GEJ-Buhari, Mubarak etc and will last
till 2023. 1763 to 1778 – American Revolution, beginning of the end of Oyo
Empire, the French Revolution leading to the Haiti Revolution etc.
1516 to 1532 transit – Nupe invaded Oyo, forcing its resettling in Igboho;
Christianity breakup, rise of Britain and France
1269-1287 introduction of Gun, defeat of Islam in Europe and the rise of
Europe etc.
These are rough but very useful guides to learning and remembering history.
It is the aim of this book to clearly outline the history of the Black Race from
the beginning to present day to challenge wrong beliefs and mental slavery,
and to unite and empower us towards a global socioeconomic renaissance and
global peace.
Clearing the fog of Western academia…
From pillaging and damaging historic artefacts that unravel Black history to
hiding scientific results, there is a concerted effort to keep Africans down
culturally, economically, and politically.
In a comparative DNA study of more than four hundred communities
worldwide from 1990 to 2002 called The Human Genome Project (headed by
born-again Christian Dr Francis Collins), it was discovered that the oldest
DNA strand traced along the female lineage came from southern Nigeria,
thus making it the true ‘Garden of Eden’. The fact was covered up in order to
not discredit the major belief systems, Christianity and Islam, and their
stories of human origin.
Nonetheless, the result was passed onto a new project (also headed by
Collins), called The International HapMap Project 8 , which was sponsored by
the National Institute of Health (NIH), several world powers, and
multinational firms. It used hundreds of DNA samples collected in Ibadan,
Nigeria as a template to study the genome for a better understanding of
human genetic makeup and its link to curing diseases. This would create a
complete life map and launch a biogenetic revolution that, like the last
Industrial Revolution, used black African resources without compensation.

8 http://hapmap.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
Later genome studies have also been unhelpful, though revealing. Another
project called The Human Genome Diversity Project was started by Stanford
University, in collaboration with France’s Centre for the Study of Human
Polymorphism. They created a HGDP-CEPH Human Genome Diversity Cell
Line – a resource of 1,063 cultured lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) from
1,050 individuals in 52 world populations, banked at the Foundation Jean
Dausset-CEPH in Paris. But, whether out of racism or ignorance, there were
questionable categorizations and conclusions that continued to obscure the
truth.
Various papers on human origins based on genetic deductions from the above
genome banks have been written (Soares et al 9 ; Tishkoff et al 10 ). Tishkoff et
al used a combined global data set containing a total of 1327 genotyped
markers (848 microsatellites, 476 indels and 3 SNPs) to differentiate 3945
DNA samples collected worldwide.
The only statistical data of value that provided the least biased insight,
although not perfect, was the Global Unsupervised Structure Run (Table S8)
that showed the proportion of genes of each ethnic group associated to 14
pre-determined ancestral homes. Even though the number of possible
Associated Ancestral Clusters (AACs) was too high with K=14 (where K is
number of possible ancestral clusters), it provides the true picture.
From the study, it is obvious from the probability values tying linguistic
groups to ancestral clusters that chances of being the origin of humanity fall
as you move away from Yoruba with 0.932 (93.2%)
– to the west Ashanti is 0.901, to the north Gwari 0.895, to the east, Igala is
0.931, Igbo 0.920, further east across the border into Cameroun Ewondo
0.912 Eton 0.895, eastward into Gabon Fang 0.895 and Kongo 0.907, Baluba
0.909. But, regardless of the telling values of major populations, a tiny group
Lemande of less than 5,000 speakers with 0.935 skewed the perception of the
obvious origin and migration route.
9 Soares P, Alshamali F, Pereira JB , et al. 2011. The expansion of mtDNA Haplogroup L3 within and
out of Africa. Mol. Biol. Evol. 29(3):915–927. 2012 doi:10.1093/molbev/msr245
10 Tishkoff SA, Reed FA, Friedlaender FR, et al. (25 co-authors). 2009. The genetic structure and

history of Africans and African Americans. Science 324:1035
Computer generated probability values tying linguistic groups to ancestral
clusters were wrongly skewed due to ill-defined linguistic groups and the
inclusion of relatively too many tiny hunter-gatherer groups in comparison to
larger Original African groups like Ijaw and Shona that were left out.
First, contrary to even mainstream linguistic classifications, they added the
Kodofanian languages to the Niger-Congo language family to create a Niger-
Kodofanian language family, which prevented the figures not being closer to
100% in Table 8. The wrong classifications were even made worse in Table
S9: Proportion of AACs from the Africa Structure Run at K=14, and rendered
the result pointless when instead of separating Kodofanian to make it Niger-
Congo, they separated East Bantu into a cluster that had no group above 0.48.
Second, contrary to basic logic and statistics, they concluded that Lemande of
a mere population of 6,000 was the ancestral home of Original Africans in
the Niger-Congo/Kodofanian phylum, despite the next five highest values in
the global structure run for NigerKodofanian showed a pattern while
Lemande was an exception.
Third, they concluded that the Namibia/Angola San homeland was the origin
of humanity because it had the highest AAC value among the huntergatherers,
regardless of the established fact that they migrated south after
their split with Western Pygmies and the high ancestral probability value is
retained due to their relative isolation in the Namib grasslands and desert.
The Genographic Project, by IBM and Geographic Society, also continued
the mainstream fallacy of our origins.
This cultural imperialism and bias is grossly unfair and racist. Not only will
the Black race lag behind in the quest to cure diseases, but its right to know
the true contents of God’s ‘logbook’ encoded in our blood is deprived. This is
vital information required to counter those that use God through religion and
tribalism to cause Islamic terrorism, ethnic strife and corruption across
Africa. It is needed to foster unity by making clear the close ethnic
relationships that are blurred by foreign dogma and ethnic politics.
Religious and cultural bias of mainstream academia…

It is obvious that regardless of the weight of logical conclusions that
humanity originated in West Africa, mainstream academia will continue to
support false assumptions at the foundations of their White supremacist belief
systems and prevent the realization of a truthful global unifying Original
African belief system.
They remain intent on maintaining the whitewash of a West Africa evolution
point that developed into the Original African civilizations in Egypt,
Mesopotamia and India before white Eurasians came from the Andronovo
Complex in Central Asian Caucasus/Ural Mountains to attack and take over.
Following the initial 2000-year era of violent conquest, the second 2000 year
era continued the imperialism with religion and dogma that gave birth to
modern academia.
The modern academic misconceptions have their roots in religious accounts
in the Bible/Koran and their concepts of creation and history. Historic
accounts were written by those who arrived on the global stage when black
Egypt was already a dominant global power. As recounted in the Bible, the
first notable Eurasian to come to the black superpower known as
Kemet/Egypt was Abraham around 2000BC. He arrived after the pyramids
were built and pharaohs had reigned for more than a thousand years.
Abraham’s descendants later wrote themselves into history by starting at a
beginning that no living man could have known with certainty without
modern tools of genetics, linguistics and geography. The first Jewish
accounts were written in Hebrew around 500BC in modern day Syria/Iraq
where they had been enslaved, and were translated into Greek in Alexandria,
Egypt around 250BC. Based on oral history and racial ego (wanting to be
justified in the overwhelming development of black Egypt in comparison to
their white, Caucasian wildernesses), those who wrote the Bible couldn’t
completely disguise the truth even though they usurped black African power
at the time.
The Bible starts with the creation of earth and man in the Garden of Eden,
which some Christians and Muslims vaguely tie to modernday Iraq, based on
the Genesis story. In Genesis 2:10–14, it is claimed that the river watering the
Garden of Eden split into four rivers: Pishon, which flowed through Havilah,
the Land of Gold; Gihon, which flowed through the Land of Cush; and the

Tigris and Euphrates, located in modern Iraq. (Havilah is a son of Cush, a
people whom religious theorists claim to be ancestors of black Africans.)
Most important, West Africa has been known as the Land of Gold. Pishon
and Gihon are Africa’s two major rivers: the Niger flowed through the West
Africa Land of Gold, and the Nile flowed through the Land of Cush.
However, Christian academicians prefer to refer to the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers, which didn’t have biblical descriptions that could stand the test of time
but had fairly recently formulated names.
There are obvious inconsistencies such as Cain’s expulsion from his father’s
lands and his life among other peoples, as told in Genesis 4. Skeletons of
dinosaurs preceding human life have been found, but dinosaurs are not
mentioned in the Bible. Egyptian writings and pyramids precede biblical
records by at least two thousand years. The number of descendants between
Adam and Abraham in Genesis 5 is suspect.
Biased by religious and cultural sentiments, academicians have concentrated
on East Africa where, due to the aridity of the valleys, prehistoric skeletons
are well preserved.
Cultural and geographic bias of Archaeology…
East Africa White settlers who filled the ranks of local archaeologists shied
away from the West Africa rainforest and the inhospitable Sahara Desert
(nearly the size of United States) above. Despite the fact that most East
Africa hominid skeletons, paraded by Western academia, have dental
structures and markings consistent with early rainforest development, the
academicians choose to ignore the West Africa rainforests. Instead, they
concentrated on the eastern and southern outskirts of the African rainforest!
This line of study turned up prehistoric skeletons from the Ethiopian-Kenyan
highlands: the Lake Turkana area. A 3.5-millionyear-old Australopithecus 11
afarensis skeleton called ‘Lucy’ was found in 1974; the next year, a whole
family was found. In 1993, a skeleton of a 4.4-million-year-old hominid,
Australopithecus ramidus, was found in the same area. These and other
findings were used to develop the theory of evolution, which conveniently

assumed that the evolution spot was nearby, because the oldest skeletons
were found around the Lake Turkana-Omo River.
11 Austral means southern, pithecus means monkey.
However, the Ethiopian-Kenyan highlands, and even most of the eastern
African plains, are too arid to be contemplated as evolution spots. This
geographic inconsistency was explained by the hypothesis that the area was
wet forestland millions of years ago and that the drying and transformation
into a savannah made humans stand up and walk.
The evolutionary theory based on skeletal discoveries was challenged in
2002, when a skeleton more than six million years old 12 (‘Toumai’) was
found in the Saharan Lake Chad, northeast of Nigeria! Lake Chad is served
by rivers from Nigeria and Cameroon, and the rivers were also migration
routes from the southern rainforests. Until 2002, only a few ancient skeletons
and tools were found in the West Africa subregion, but they were not
comparable in quantity to those found in South and East Africa.
It was only with the 2002 discovery of a hominid skeleton labeled ‘Toumai’
in Chad, to the immediate northwest of Nigeria, that renowned archaeologists
publicly admitted that the West Africa region had been vastly neglected
compared to East Africa. Nevertheless, a few findings of tools, artefacts, and
the occasional skeleton have shown that the Iwo Eleru caves in Isharun,
Akure (located in Yorubaland, southwestern Nigeria) are the oldest proven
settlement in black Africa, dating to more than ten thousand years before
Christ, and the Akure Palace is the oldest surviving palace in black Africa.
Most discoveries in Nigeria and the West Africa region had been by accident,
not scientific adventure. The Nok statutes in middle Nigeria were stumbled
upon by tin miners; the Iwo Eleru caves were brought to the attention of
academia by a local chief.
The neglect has been attributed to the hostile environment, the scorching sun,
and disorienting flies of the northern Nigeria desert, not to mention the
moving sand dunes that further bury evidence. There is stifling humidity and
rich insect life in its southern rainforests, where small sample studies show
that some civilizations flourished where some thick forests now stand.

12 Brunet, Michel, et al., ‘A New Hominid Finding in Chad,’ Nature 418 (2002).
In an archaeological study conducted in Okomu National Park 13 , between the
Akure and Edo kingdoms, an extensive layer of charcoal and pottery was
found below the forest, suggesting that the present forest block regenerated
over the last seven hundred years!
So, do we cut down all the southern Nigeria lowland rainforests to prove that
the area between Okomu and Ife forests and Ewa Island was the origin of
humanity, or do we drain the mangrove swamps in search of skeletons,
knowing that regardless the proof, Western scholars will continue to try to
authenticate biblical claims with cultural and geography-biased
archaeological studies.
From the female lineage to the mother tongue…
Recent scientific DNA studies of the female lineage like those mentioned
above prove that there is a high correlation between language and genetic
groups. Language has been the most authentic and lasting evidence.
Before the advent of genetic anthropology, knowledge in social sciences,
linguistics and other logical disciplines pointed to Nigeria as the origin of
humanity, but archaeologists and historians claimed the contrary due to the
lack of physical evidence since the acidic nature of rainforest soils prevents
the survival of prehistoric skeletons.
The single Original African language changed gradually into dialects, and
later languages, as the population spread across Africa, but the greatest
change in linguistics and genetics came through those that later migrated
back into Africa for trade, territory and religion.
In 1948, Greenberg classified African languages into major phyla/groups:
Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, Nilo Saharan and Khoesian 14 . Some scholars
have countered that Nilo-Saharan is part of the Afro-Asiatic group while
others argue that Mande is not part of Niger-Congo phylum. Also, some
scholars have wrongly included South Sudanese languages into the Niger-
Congo to create a new group called Niger-Kodofanian.

Nigeria, which boasts of the most languages in Africa (522), is the origin of
Niger-Congo languages. From there, all Original African languages spread to
Central, East, and South Africa through presentday Cameroon, which has the
second highest number of languages (280). In A History of African Societies
to 1870, Elizabeth Isichei, an acclaimed professor of African history,
categorically stated that ‘since the closest relatives of Bantu are in Nigeria,
it is virtually certain that the original proto-Bantu homeland and center of
dispersal was in Eastern Nigeria, or Cameroon’ 15 . All Original African
languages are tonal languages.
13 White, L.J.T., and Oates J.F. New data on the history of the plateau forest of Okomu, southern
Nigeria: an insight into how human disturbance has shaped the African rain forest. Global Ecology and
Bioeography Letters 8:355-361(1999) 14 Greenberg JH. 1948. The classification of African languages.
AmAnthropol. 50:24_30.
According to glottochronology (the study of language divergence based on
Indo-European models), Yoruba and Igbo diverged from a single, tonal
Original African language several thousand years ago around the present
Niger basin.
However, this is a gross age underestimation since glottochronology uses the
faster rate of language dispersal in Eurasia, with frequent external and violent
upheavals at the Middle East crossroads, to wrongly judge the date of the
more natural peaceful secluded divergence of tonal Original African
languages over a much longer period at a slower rate.

15 Elizabeth Isichei, A History of African Societies to 1870 (Cambridge University Press 1997) pg 53

The absurdity of using a single rate of change for all languages is highlighted
when the date of origin of Cushitic and Nilo-Saharan languages, which are
admixtures of Original African and Eurasian languages at the turbulent
Northeast African crossroads, greatly precede the dates given for Original
African languages.
Various ethnic groups evolved from the main body of Original Africans in
the lower Niger basin and moved in all directions, usually led by the smallerbodied
Africans labeled Pygmies, Khoi-Khoi, or San Bushmen. The
migration and divergence of Original Africans occurred in several stages over
several thousand years.

From the single Original African linguistic group in present day Southwest
Nigeria, Yoruba diverged into Igala, which diverged into Igbo and Idoma.
The Igbos filled up the Southeast region, diverging into various groups, while
the Idoma diverged into groups that filled the Benue basin into the central
Nigeria plateau area. Various groups like Igbira, Nupe and Gwari evolved
above the River Niger in Central and Northern Nigeria, Chad and modern
Niger Republic, where some later became Afro-Asiatic to become Hausa.

Original African Languages in Nigeria
Other groups migrated up the River Niger through Upper Volta/Burkina Faso
and Mali to its source in Guinea where the ancient Ghana Empire was
formed. Later, Islamic raids and jihads were to push the Original Africans
southwards towards the coast, especially along the Pra River Basin where
Akan groups spread to fill southern modern day Ghana and Ivory Coast.
Some like the Jukun migrated eastwards along the River Benue into
Cameroun either through Mambilla plateau or through Lake Chad. In

Cameroun, Original Africans diverged as Beti-Pahoun-Fang, moving down
along Sangha River into Gabon and the Congos.
Around the confluence of the Ubangi and Sangha Rivers, and Ubangi and
Chari Rivers watershed, Original African language groups labeled Bantu by
Europeans (meaning people), were split into western and eastern Bantu
language groups.

Original African Languages in Africa
The Western Bantus, relations of the Teke, migrated downstream towards the
coast to form the Kongo, Loango, and Mbundu/Umbundu of Angola, while
those who migrated onto the Kasai River became Mongo, Bobangi, and
Kuba.
The Eastern Bantu migrated farther north along the Ugbangi-Uele River to
the Nile River and Great Lakes area, where they formed the Mashariki

Bantus. The Mashariki Bantus brought iron and yam agriculture around Lake
Tangayinka, where they split into two groups.
The first group evolved into Nyoro and Ganda in Uganda, Hutu in Rwanda,
Kikuyu in Kenya etc. The second group of eastern Bantu migrated south to
fill the southern half of Africa as the Sukuma, Haya, and Nyambo in
Tanzania, the Bemba and Kaonde in Zambia, the Tonga in Zambia, and the
Shona and Nguni (Zulu/Xhosa).
Early humans that migrated to Ethiopia crossed over to Arabia in what is
known as the Great Coastal Migration to initially populate India, Southern
China and Oceania. Carrying the Mitochondrial DNA haplogroups M and N,
as well as the Y-DNA Haplogroups C and D, they are called Negritos and are
the Dravidian Indians, Papua New Guineans and various dark-skinned
peoples of Asia and Oceania.
Those who migrated to the north of the Niger River basin cultural melting
point towards Egypt via Lake Chad or southern Sudan, or those who migrated
to the East Africa coast, became Afro-Asian as they mixed with Eurasian
traders and colonists that came back into Africa much later. Many Original
African languages became known as Hausa/Fulani in the West African
grasslands, Amhara in Ethiopia, and Swahili on the East Africa coast.
The incessant attacks and colonisation from Eurasians and their Afro-Asian
offspring bred new ethnic groups and dislocated the older groups, thus
making it difficult to understand the ethnic spread across Africa. From
genetics, it is now understood that languages like Fulani underwent at least
two episodes of language changes along the Sahel grasslands – first in South
Sudan where they underwent Cushitic changes and later in Futa Jallon where
the encountered Afro-Arabic changes.
From the above, it can be observed that African history is fairly
straightforward, especially if we follow the river and language flows, but
Western academia has been a stumbling block to a unified African history
and perspective by concentrating on methodologies that are not viable across
Africa. Archaeological evidence is, in most cases, not viable in West Africa.
Skeletons don’t survive well in rainforests and mangrove swamps and, when
viable, they are misinterpreted as they now do in genetics.

Basic geography, science and common sense…
The Ethiopian area is naturally arid due to its location on the eastern half of
Africa. Even during the wettest epochs when a larger proportion of the world
was covered with forests, the West Africa equatorial areas would still have
been the wettest and most fertile. The Rift Valley geological shifts resulted in
the Ethiopian highlands, which enabled the area to attract enough rainfall to
become open woodland but never enough to become a rainforest.
African wind systems flow from northeast or southwest due to the fact that
the earth rotates on a tilted axis. The West African rainforests derive rain
through winds from the Atlantic Ocean, which is too far from the East Africa
coast. The rain-bearing, Asian monsoon winds are too dry by the time they
get to East Africa, having passed over China and India. Unless the earth
drastically shifted on its axis, the closest points to the sun are along the
equator, and the most fertile areas depend on the wind systems and oceans
dictated by the position of the continents.
It is a well-established fact that all the continents were once a single,
continuous landmass called Pangaea/Gondwanaland. The question is whether
hominids evolved before the breaks that created the present continents. It is
believed that such a significant event would have killed all life at the time and
was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. Most dinosaur skeletons
have been found on what would have been edge of a single landmass, like the
western coast of South America. If humans were created in Pangaea, the
point of population density and dispersal would be at its land extremes of
South America and Australia, but this is not the case. Moreover, it is
improbable that such an experience would not be recorded in the ethnic
histories across the globe.
It was safe to assume that the evolution of man occurred after the split of the
continents; the question is where—especially, where in Africa or Eurasia.
Whether taking a scientific or religious point of view, humans must have
been created or have evolved in the most fertile point with continuous water,
food, and oxygen to withstand climate epochs (which are believed to shift
from one extreme to another over twenty thousand years). The specific area

should not be impossible to pinpoint unless the planet drastically shifted on
its axis and continents were re-arranged, completely changing wind and
climatic patterns. Local geological shifts like the Great Rift Valley system
can’t account for the vast regional climatic change, which would have made
the biblical Garden of Eden at the Euphrates or Lake Turkana the most fertile
place on earth.
Starting from the basics, assuming that we want to create a man from a
‘natural’ laboratory, due to human qualities, evolutionary scientists believe
that humanity started in the tropics. Some believe that this occurred only in
Africa, while others believed that it started around the tropics in Africa and
Asia.
The theory starts with earth in an ice age, inching closer to the sun and
gradually thawing. Because the equatorial region was closest to the sun, it
was the first to thaw. As the planet moved closer, parts of the planet away
from the equator began to thaw. The equator would have been the first place
to reach a temperature conducive to life.
For life to occur organically, it is generally believed that certain factors need
to be present. The organic chemicals must have come from the earth’s
surface, ocean beds, and belly through volcanic eruptions. Because the
temperature of the human body is in the nineties, humans would need such
constantly high temperatures. Because the body is largely water cavities
(more than 70 percent), it was necessary for the site to have ample water. An
ample supply of oxygen was needed. Because nothing happens in a vacuum,
some form of energy was needed to begin the process.
These factors could be found over a wide area in the world, but together and
by making the model more complex, the choices should be narrowed. A
Garden of Eden with abundant oxygen and water, with the humidity
necessary for a 70 percent water balance and 90 degree body temperature,
rules out biblical accounts that place it in the arid Middle East and Ethiopia.
The water would have to be continuously present and preferably stagnant;
otherwise, the long, delicate, evolutionary process would have been
disrupted. The creation site would most likely be the stagnant water of a
swamp or, at worst, slow-moving water at low altitude for abundant oxygen.

The Tigris and Euphrates of Iraq, the Congo, and the Nile (the longest river
in Africa) all flow into arid regions that don’t have a mangrove coastal
swamp or rainforest environments and therefore don’t fulfill the
requirements. Lake Victoria and other great lakes in Central African are at
high altitudes with lower oxygen levels and are not in rainforests. The only
site in tropical Africa with these conditions is the huge, coastal swamp
around the Niger-Benue delta.

Central Niger Delta Map

Nigeria Vegetation Map.
The constant thunder and lightning could act as a source of energy to set the
process going. Ultimately, chemicals flowed out of the Guinean highlands,
Jos plateau, and Cameroonian Mountains into the Niger, Benue, and other
rivers systems, which took them downstream to the larger and swampier
Niger delta coast. There they reacted with other chemicals to start the
evolutionary process.

Eventually, by coming out of the swamps and onto dry land, man developed
in the rich and suitable rainforest environment. Despite the prehuman apes
that walked away from the creation site in Nigeria to Asia and Europe, there
is genetic proof that modern man evolved from a single ‘Eve’ in Africa.
Eve’s offspring continuously moved out of Africa to displace less developed
predecessors who had earlier colonised Eurasia.
A key question is why the proto-human beings that migrated to Eurasia did
not develop into modern man. The answer is food and environment, because
outside the garden of creation, the chances of starvation were high. Some
scholars claim that migrating to the savannah was a blessing for hominid
evolution, because the change in diet brought about walking and a higher
intellect.
This is wrong! When man left the rainforest, he left behind any hope of
developing further due to the poorer diet that he faced outside the West
Africa rainforest. More than a third of the population died before the age of
sixteen.
The West Africa chimpanzee, man’s closest genetic comparison, gives
insight into how man evolved. The African chimpanzee uses stone tools to
crack open palm nuts to extract the all-important palm protein. The nuts are
still the major source of oil and protein for humans living in the region today.
Protein and carbohydrates are the most important food for physiological and
genetic development, and these were abundant in the Niger delta. Palm trees
were one of the richest sources of protein, while yams were the richest
carbohydrate. Another important source of protein was flying termites, which
are 98 percent protein and are still eaten in the area.
Less than 10 percent of the earth’s surface is fertile. It is an arid place, and its
only major foods are fruits, grains, and tubers. Not many plants have edible
fruits, and most are tropical and seasonal, while grains like wheat and
sorghum are tiny seeds that need more effort and technology to process.

Africa Climate Map

Africa Vegetation Map
Roots and tubers were more available, were a source of water, and were more
edible. The Yam Belt extends from the Igbo/Efik Cross River in eastern
Nigeria to the Akan/Baoule Bandana River in central Ivory Coast.
Grains couldn’t be processed until the invention of pottery, but yams are
roasted without containers. It would take more effort to collect several
sheaves of wheat or potatoes in the wild to make a meal, not to mention that

potatoes had a lower nutritional content. Archaeological findings dated to
Homo erectus were stumbled upon in Okigwe (southeast Nigeria) in the form
of heavy cleavers and picks that were used for digging yams and cutting
trees. This high protein and carbohydrate intake made Homo erectus evolve
further while the migrant Eurasian Homo erectus stagnated. Man evolved into
his present form in the Niger rainforest before a few set out to colonise other
parts of the world. The majority left behind continued eating yams and oil in
the land so rich that even its plants secreted ‘blood’ in the form of palm oil.
Rainforests can’t be excavated nor mangrove swamps emptied, therefore the
only archaeological hope is the arid Lake Chad and northern Nigeria area,
where older and better preserved skeletons could be found to prove that
through the evolutionary stages, migrants from the delta moved and settled in
the area, especially in its much wetter epochs. However, the Sahara Desert is
now extremely dry, hot, fly infested, and unattractive to most archaeologists,
while its moving sand dunes have probably buried evidence miles deep.
Apart from archaeological findings, genetics now fully validates the above
hypothesis. As mentioned, studies have been conducted on the genetic
makeup of all peoples, and the genetic makeup of the Niger delta people is
older and more diverse.
In addition to mtDNA and Y-Chromosome phylogeny, studies in nuclear
DNA show that West Africans have more blood groups than any other race.
West Africans have various forms of sickle cell and other genetic mutations
that others don’t.
Before moving on from genetics, it would be good to address questions that
might be raised about mass migrations across Africa. Some religious and
academic accounts claim that the Yoruba migrated from the semi-arid
Egyptian-Ethiopian region, and though a few returned due to Eurasian
aggression, the vast majority of the Yoruba and Igbo never left Niger since
creation except to the Americas. The largest indigenous African groups must
have been in the swampy, rainforested, malaria-prone areas to have
developed a genetic resistance against malaria over tens of thousands of
years, which, unfortunately, resulted in the sickle cell trait.
Those who migrated out of the forest never had the opportunity to develop

genetic resistance, and the sickle cell trait is not common in the Northeast
Africa areas of Egypt, Ethiopia, and Kenya. If the Niger peoples migrated
from Central Africa or the northeast, Southern Nigeria won’t be the epicenter
of Sickle cell and they would have been decimated.
The above, and many other pieces of evidence, point to human evolution in
the Lower Niger, but cultural bias has led to the misinterpretation of genetics,
linguistics and every other logical and scientific study that proves it.
Yorubaland towards the coast is the ancestral home of humanity. To be more
geographically specific, more DNA sampling and analysis needs to be
conducted along the Nigerian coast, especially in towns around the Okomu
and Ife forests and Ewa Island, notably Benin (Edo), Akure, Igbokoda and
Ile-Ife.
Hominids left the mangrove swamps of the Niger (Negro) delta on the West
African coast to live on the dry ground of the world’s most fertile rainforest.
They picked palm nuts and gathered yams and fruits from the true Garden of
Eden, the Land of Love, the last place in the world that will ever experience
drought.
It was from the Niger Delta that the ancestors of modern man accumulated,
differentiated and radiated to East Africa and across the world. It is generally
agreed that migration bottlenecks and probably genetic differentiation were
tied to climatic factors. It has also been argued that there was a megadrought
in East Africa between 135,000 and 75,000 years ago 18 , and soon afterwards
the Toba Supereruption in Indonesia, around 73,000 years ago, wiped out
most life in the Asian monsoon area where East African rains also originate.
Therefore it defies logic that humans could have accumulated in Eastern
Africa, and radiated out to Western/Central Africa and Asia after the
superdrought.
18 Scholz CA, Johnson TC, Cohen AS, et al. (19 co-authors). 2007. East African megadroughts
between 135 and 75 thousands years ago and bearing on early-modern human origins. Proc Natl Acad
Sci U S A. 104:16416–16421.

Even though not publicly accepted, Haplogroup L is based on Yoruba DNA,
the oldest matrilinear common ancestor. Haplogroup L0 represents the San.
L1 represents the Mbuti and a mix of pygmies and normal stature humans,
while L2 represents all full stature Black Africans. L3 was calculated to have
differentiated from L0 around 60,000 years ago 19 (Soares et al 2011) and its
largest Africa populations are in Nigeria/Central Africa. L3 differentiated into
haplogroups M and N 60,000 years ago enroute or in Eurasia 20 . All non-
African ethnic groups belong to mtDNA haplogroups, M and N, daughters of
haplogroup L3 that are found only in Africa.
Also, Africans differentiated into the Original African (Bantu) and Pygmy
stock from the same ancestor around 60,000 years 21 . Therefore, since most of
the differentiations and spread occurred around the same period, it is more
likely that human beings accumulated and differentiated in the rich ecosystem
of the Niger Delta during the Afro-Asian monsoon drought and Toba
supereruption, after which part of L3 migrated to ‘recovering’ East Africa
and onto Arabia peninsula and Eurasia, where they diverged into M and N, as

modern day Caucasians.
There are questions on whether the single ancestor was a small stature Pygmy
or full bodied African, and whether the categorization is genetic or merely
based on social patterns of hunter-gatherers versus farmers. A better
hypothesis is that Eve had two daughters – one full sized and the other, a
Pygmy. There is still a large proportion of small-sized Yorubas and other
Southern Nigerians that could pass for Pygmies and the traditional
differentiation is along the lines of being a hunter-gatherer, an Egbere, or
being part of the normal sedentary society.
It appears that both groups lived together from Yoruba folklore. Yoruba
history ties prosperity to ‘gba eni lowo egbere’ taking the mat from Pygmies,
which could be translated to taking the land to settle down. Still held in high
spiritual reverence, Egbere in Yoruba means to ‘go missing forever’ in the
ancestral forests. Those in Nigeria have been widely assimilated and speak
the same Niger-Congo languages, but the evidence of intermarrying can be
seen from Original Africans that have inherited their protruding buttocks –
which Europeans derogatively call a medical condition known as Steatogyia.
19 Soares P, Alshamali F, Pereira JB, et al (12 co-authors) 2011 The Expansion of mtDNA Haplogroup
L3 within and out of Africa Molecular Biology and Evolution online
(http://www.mbe.oxfordjournals.org/ doi:10.1093/molbev/msr245
20 Soares P, Ermini L, Thomson N, Mormina M, Rito T, Ro¨hl A, Salas A, Oppenheimer S, Macaulay
V, Richards MB. 2009. Correcting for purifying selection: an improved human mitochondrial
molecular clock. Am J Hum Genet. 84:740–759.
21 Patin E, Laval G, Barreiro LB, Salas A, Semino O, et al. (2009) Inferring the Demographic History
of African Farmers and Pygmy Hunter–Gatherers Using a Multilocus Resequencing Data Set. PLoS
Genet 5(4): e1000448. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1000448
Original Africans and Pygmy staple diets of Yams, flying termites, Palm
kennels and oil remain the same. Contrary to widespread beliefs that
Pygmy’s are continuously migrating, they set up camps of huts for several
months during which they pick wild yams before moving on to fresh
territory. Original Africans also have a similar practice called shifting
cultivation whereby they rotate farms and crops but not homes. Yams are
about the easiest plants to cultivate by sticking the end bit of the yam back
into the ground. Therefore it is illogical to claim that yam agriculture did not
start till 3,500 years ago, 50,000 years after the separation into hunter

gatherers and farming populations. There is archaeological evidence that
blades used to ring-back and cut trees were in common use 80,000 to 90,000
years ago in present-day southern Nigeria
Genetic evidence proves that Western and East Pygmies differentiated around
20,000 years ago, probably in Central Africa. From the unmixed Pygmies
that led the migration across Africa, it appears that they spoke the same
language since there are still linguistic and cultural similarities between
Central African pygmies and those that migrated to South and East Africa.
There is an hypothesis that there were two sets of migrations of full sized
Africans from Nigeria – the older group that migrated out through Lake Chad
and mainly became Nilo-Saharan over time and those known as the Bantu
believed to have migrated out only 5,000 years ago.
It is believed that genetic analysis was inferred from wrong grottochronology
that underestimates the age of Niger-Congo languages, based on the faster
rate of change of Indo-European languages. And also because, as stated that
‘the great age of L3BCD and its wide distribution across Africa makes
phylogeographic inferences difficult… Furthermore L3C is extremely
rare… L3B and L3D most likely began to diversify in Central/West Africa,
representing the earliest major spread of L3 lineages within Africa that we
were able to detect 22 ’.
Unlike archaeology permanently stuck with an East African origin due to
West African acidic soils poor showing of skeletons, hopefully in the near
future, with a fuller genomewide sequencing of West/Central African groups,
paleoanthropologists and the Western academia will catch up with the logic
of a West African origin. A recent archaeological survey turned up old
skeletons around Morocco, which challenges the archaeological conclusion
of an East African evolution spot.
I am confident that more evidence could be found if required, although I am
not confident that the Eurocentric mainstream would require it. The essence
of the Land of Love (Ile-Ife) and the Niger River has been denied from
antiquity. The essence of the Land of Love was stolen and discarded by those
who wanted to change the course of history and claim white superiority.

Western ‘civilizations’ are aware of the ramifications if they agree to an exact
spot of evolution. Physically and mentally enslaved Africans will realize their
true place in human history from the Niger delta and departure from the Slave
Coast, and the knowledge will provide a global spiritual and economic
rallying point for Africans.
As the erudite African American writer Amos Wilson pointed out in
Blueprint for Black Power, * ‘economics is embedded in culture. A culture is
in good part an economic system…’
22 Soares P, Alshamali F, Pereira JB, et al (12 co-authors) 2011 The Expansion of mtDNA Haplogroup
L3 within and out of Africa Pg920 Molecular Biology and Evolution online
(http://www.mbe.oxfordjournals.org/ doi:10.1093/molbev/msr245
* Amos Wilson, Blueprint for Black Power (Afrikan World Infosystems, 1998), 339.

Chapter 2: Charity Begins on the Home Coast
African foundations of human civilization in the true Garden of Eden
Yam was at the root of human evolution and still central to the culture of
Yoruba, Igbo and many others in Central/West Africa. One of the arguments
advanced against a rainforest evolution and development was that it was not
possible to survive mainly on yams in the rainforest, without having to rely
on grassland cultivation during the dry season and early raining season.
From my personal experience, I know that not only will you survive but live
a very comfortably self-sufficient lifestyle. One person consumes 1.5kg of
Yam a day. With a yam patch producing 100 yams (300kg of tubers), and a
clan of fifty people with an average of 96 patches of over 15 species of Yam,
survival was guaranteed.
In a study of whether forest hunter-gatherers, Baka (Pygmies), in Southwest
Cameroun could survive solely on yams (Yasuoka 2013) 23 , it was proven
with the above figures that sufficient wild yams were available throughout
the year. Hirokazu Yasuoka observed that merely discarding the inedible end
of yam tubers propagate new yams more than planting the seeds of certain
yam species.
As Pygmies led in the migration along rivers, Yorubas, Igbos and other
Bantus followed, ‘picking up their mats’ of yam for permanent settlement.
Yams and palm oil were a staple diet with snails, flying termites (esunsun)
and small animals. Abundant palm trees, an important fuel for evolution,
became fuel for civilization and society as man adapted his most important
resource. At an early stage, he used palm trees leaves to protect himself from
the torrential rain and insects, and the practice evolved into breaking off
branches to build huts. From the palm tree, they also made fire, soap, food,
wine, brooms, clothing etc.
Yoruba penchant for urban settings dictated the culture of women
maintaining a small farm of yams, vegetables and plantain around the house,
while the men cultivated various yam patches in the forest, where they

practiced shift cultivation. The Igbos preferred smaller decentralized settings,
villages, but still engaged in the same gender related farming practices. This
initially brought about matriarchy and later polygamy, with the emphasis of
getting enough labor to harvest nature’s heavy bounty.
23 Hirokazu Yasuoka 2103 Dense Wild Yam Patches Established by Hunter-Gatherer Camps: Beyond
the Wild Yam Question, Toward the Historical Ecology of Rainforests Hum Ecol (2013) 41:465–475
DOI 10.1007/s10745-013-9574-z
In Yoruba, Igbo, Igala and Nupe cultures, the society was organized around
yams and the most important festivals were the New Yam festivals. Yam and
palm oil are main characters in Igbo mythology of its evolution. In Yoruba
and Igbo culture, the first sons inherited the land while others migrated for
fresh lands for hunting, picking, and farming. This might partly account for
the time and distance gained by the Pygmies constantly pushing the frontiers
and disturbing the forests as they spread throughout Africa.
In their quest for food, Pygmies/forest gatherer-hunters moved upstream
along the banks of the outlets of the Negro delta to its sources and across the
world. Although the majority of Bantus eventually migrate, the need to adapt
to survive harder conditions kept their numbers small compared to those who
stayed behind and gradually coalesced into hamlets and villages around the
fertile Niger delta.
Africans, Bantu and Pygmies, that migrated ended up filling the Earth, like
the early hominids that migrated across the world according to archaeological
findings. The series of megadroughts in the Asian-East African monsoon rain
catchment area, the last of which was brought about by the Toba
supereruption, had killed all the previous migrants – probably with the
exception of a few Neanderthals in the Eurasian mountain caves who some
scholars claim modern Africans impregnated to breed the White race.
Apart from food, the L3 haplogroup might have had to migrate for health
reasons or die if they did not have the sickle cell gene to protect them against
the rich insect life that included malaria giving mosquitoes, sleeping sickness
tsetse flies and river blindness.
The Bible states that Adam and Eve were sent out of the Garden of Eden

because of sin, and God blocked their reentry from the east— and only the
east—with a cherubim and burning swords. 24 This is interesting because
most of those leaving the Lower Niger to populate Europe-Asia went east
along the Benue River or the Lake Chad basin to the Nile via some river
systems in South Sudan and Central African Republic. Due to the lack of the
sickle-cell gene, Eurasians were naturally blocked from returning to the
Garden by the tsetse fly zone on its northern borders and dangerous insects.
24 Genesis 3:24.
Some religious theorists claim that Adam’s sin was tied to sex, which
resulted in his and other whites’ ‘genetic nakedness’ or lack of color. This
warranted migration from the hot African sun and malaria, until Eurasians
were able to come from the west and south through the Atlantic Ocean.
The east route was (and still is) plagued with insects detrimental to whites
and their horses. Rather than migrating out of Africa as albinos or Caucasians
due to the conditions (leaving unexplainable how they exited the tsetse fly
zone in the first place), it is logical to assume that they migrated out of Africa
to Europe as blacks and lost their color due to intermarriage with
Neanderthals or because of having to adapt to the conditions faced in Eurasia,
especially during its coldest epoch.
Africans migrated out of North East African used the Horn into south Arabia,
present day Yemen 25 and later Sinai out of Egypt into Arabia. They kept to
the coast 26 into Indus Valley and the earliest date of settlement in South East
Asia is 50,000 27 years ago while reaching Australia by 48,000 years ago 28 .
The migrations to different environments across the world led to the creation
of races. Those that remained behind in the delta became darker from the sun
as they built their collective knowledge and genetic resistance to indigenous
illnesses caused by the rich insect life.
For tens of thousands of years, those who migrated out of the Yam Belt
wandered across the planet for food in hot and freezing wildernesses, and
because they weren’t settled in one place, the knowledge brought along from
Niger Delta couldn’t be effectively built upon and passed down through
generations. Western scholars used to claim that civilization started fewer

than ten thousand years ago in Mesopotamia and Egypt, where humans came
together (after the invention of pottery and cooking) to form agricultural
societies, to plant, and to process grains. This would have been a laborious
process, because it required the invention of pottery and the forceful coercion
of other people and animals around what initially would have been an
outlandish idea. This was unlike the social and agricultural evolution of the
people of the Yam Belt as outlined above.
25 Derricourt R. 2005. Getting ‘‘Out of Africa’’: sea crossings, landcrossings and culture in the
hominin migrations. J World Prehist.19:119–132.
26 Forster P. 2004. Ice ages and the mitochondrial DNA chronology of human dispersals: a review.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci.359:255–264.
27 Barker G, Barton H, Bird M, et al. (27 co-authors). 2007. The ‘‘human revolution’’ in lowland
tropical Southeast Asia: the antiquity and behavior of anatomically modern humans at Niah Cave
(Sarawak, Borneo). J Hum Evol. 52:243–261.
28 Turney CSM, Kershaw AP, Moss P, Bird MI, Fifield LK, Cresswell RG, Santos GM, Tada MLD,
Hausladen PA, Zhou Y. 2001. Redating the onset of burning at Lynch’s Crater (North Queensland):
implications for human settlement in Australia. J Quat Sci. 16:767–771.
Contrary to some historical accounts, agriculture was not introduced from
Egypt, or anywhere else, to the Niger delta but the other way round. The diet
of most civilizations across the world centers around carbohydrate staples,
mainly grains and tubers, and the Lower Niger was blessed with the best and
biggest common tuber in the world. Yams grew in the wild in West Africa
and did not require extensive clearings, which was mandatory for grains and
potatoes in Eurasia (Homo erectus might have been the first to roast yams
without using a container). The black African woman easily adopted yam as a
staple food without external knowledge. There wasn’t much a latter-day grain
or potato planter could tell a yam planter, who, with little effort, used one
yam to feed three men, while three potatoes couldn’t feed one man.
Having the best diet in the world, the black Africans in the Niger delta, who
spoke the same language, began to fill the Niger-Benue areas that were
served by dense and complicated river networks. The clans became villages
and towns. The melting pot of the early human race lived in peace with their
environment and developed a strong, naturalistic culture.
With nature supplying their every need, the undifferentiated forest people
created a complex societal system geared towards brotherhood and a solution

based system known as the African Information Retrieval System. They
would rather share their yams with men than with ravenous insects; food
couldn’t be stored for long. It was this natural and peaceful coexistence that
brought about human civilization and not the forceful model portrayed by
Western scholars (‘the gangster paradise’). With sources of food more stable
than the rest of the world and a peaceful society, the population increased,
and villages spread along the migration routes of the Niger and the Benue
River into the Lake Chad region. Individuals and clan-groups migrated along
the Benue towards the Nile.
The grassland Africans on the fringes of the Yam Belt (the latterday Mande
and Hausa), substituted cattle and milk for the small, protein-laden
animals/insects and fruits diet of their forestland cousins. In addition to cattle
rearing, the grassland Africans were the ones most likely to develop grains to
supplement their supply of poorquality and low-quantity yams.
The Sape/Mande people at the source of the Niger and the Senegal River, in
present-day Guinea, were reported by George Murdock in his book Africa:
Its People and Culture to have independently developed ‘grassland
agriculture’ around 5000 BC. He went on to say, ‘This was, moreover, a
genuine invention, not a borrowing from another people. Furthermore, the
assemblage of cultivated plants ennobled from wild forms in Negro Africa
ranks it as one of the four major agricultural complexes evolved in the
entire course of human history’. 30
Blades used to ring-back and cut trees of Yoruba and Igbo forestlands were in
common use 80,000 to 90,000 years ago, long before Africans migrated with
their tools to Eurasia. Not only were tools passed on to the outside world, but
the savannah people developed sorghum, millet, and barley to supplement the
carbohydrates that yams provided. Pastoralism, in which animal milk was
used to supplement the high-protein content of rainforest insects and small
animals, helped to diversify the nutritional content of their diet.
The first evidence of milking in the world is seen on Saharan rock art, and it
is believed to have preceded grassland agriculture. Excavations in the western
Sudan and Sahara show agriculture and pastoralism as far back as 7000 BC,
which precedes the cultural complexes of the Egyptians.

However, grains and animal milk were poor nutritional substitutes that the
forest people never accepted. If all black Africans migrated into the forest
from a Garden of Eden in a savannah-like environment, their first food would
have been milk, and they wouldn’t be lactose intolerant today. Milk still
makes black Africans in West Africa and the Americas sick.
30 Ivan Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus (Random, 1976), 188.
Africans spread pastoral and sedentary agricultural practices into
Mesopotamia, India, and beyond, but the adopted palms and smaller tubers of
cocoyam and potato resulted in lower nutrition. Nevertheless, the date palm
became the most important plant in the arid North African and Asian plains.
Egypt followed in agriculture but was not able to fulfill its potential until a
black African called Menes, probably from the Niger delta, arrived in 4000
BC with the construction knowledge required to divert the Nile and the
technological expertise to advance agricultural practices. The diversion of the
Nile and the creation of a fertile delta were skills that could have been learnt
only in the Niger delta, the land of a thousand rivers.
Black Afro-Asians now called Negroids built the foundations of Asian
civilizations including that of the Harrappan Indus Valley, Southern China
and Oceania.
In the lower Niger region, black Africans developed socially and
productively, creating a system of loose organization through ‘religious’ sects
that protected the secrets of agriculture, trade and politics in the African
Information Retrieval System. Forced labor and tyrants were uncommon,
because people could easily move out of an area to another riverbank and
continue eating yams, palm products, and flying termites.
Two significant forest mountain ranges in southern Nigeria affected the
dispersal of people from the coast. The first was the mountain range from
Ilesha to Akure, which was an effective migration barrier. On the mountain
side of the thick forests facing the coast was Isharun, Akureland, the oldest
settlement in black Africa, and a lot of history is mostly likely buried there. It
was the defining line between Ekitiland, Ijesland, and Akureland, and people
could have migrated through its occasional breaks to Ekiti, especially from

the Akure-Edo lands (not the other way around, towards the coast, as
ascribed by academicians).
The second natural barrier is the mountain range that runs from south to north
on the eastern lower Niger area, Aba to Enugu, as well as the lower Niger
forests on both sides of the Niger. These obviously affected the dispersal of
the Igbo, as we see a greater concentration of settlements that appear to have
spread from Aguleri to Owerri and environs.
The clans coalesced into villages, and the first major conglomeration in the
lower Niger to become a town and empire was present-day Edo (Benin City),
whose sixteen-thousand-kilometer moat/wall was longer than the Great Wall
of China. The Yoruba Ijebu to the west of the Benin kingdom built a rampart
around Ijebuland. The Ndigbo to the immediate east of Edo congregated into
2,240 densely populated village groups, more than anything the One-River
Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations could boast during their long
histories.
The Lower Niger peoples had advanced cultures also tied to iron production
and farming. Carbon-dating of iron slags from ancient furnaces like those of
Lejja, Nsukka date to over 2000BC, which attests to the fact that Southern
Nigerians had moved into the Iron Age while the world was still coming out
the Late Stone and Bronze Ages.

However, unlike the ancient Egyptians, who stored millennia of history in
their desert pyramids, Yoruba Ife preeminence can only be archaeologically
traced to the first millennium AD due to acidic soils, while the Efik/Igbo
pictogram writing called Nsibidi was not used to store history. The most
effective store of history and culture due to the soils was the African
Information Retrieval System created around 10,000BC, Age of Orunmila.
Obatala is undoubtedly the Yoruba’s earliest distinguishable deity, tied to the
drying up of the marshes and Igbos. Yorubas earliest account of other people
is Moremi’s sacrifice of her child to ward off opposition from the eastern
forests, which signified the differentiation between the Yoruba and their
eastern Igbo-like cousins. Care has to be taken not to confuse the history of
kings and their dynasties with those of the initial settlers, who had inhabited
the land thousands of years before the creation of political power structures.
The advent of the Era of Olokun obscured Black history. It is believed that
the Olokun era started in Benin from about 4AD and spread across Yoruba

land around 1000AD. Oduduwa is Olokun and the current dynasty across
Yorubaland is an Olokun dynasty.
The current mainstream Yoruba historians have only been able to trace their
history to the 1141AD beginning of the present Ife Oduduwa dynasty, whose
descendants are kings in various Yoruba city-states, including Benin/Bini.
Some claim that the world was created by Oduduwa and thus negate any
history before him, but recent scholars claim that there is a mix up between
Oduduwa and Orunmila due to what they call Ife-centrism. Yoruba Ifecentrists
rigidity inadvertently appears to be complicit in the conspiracy to
keep the history of the largest Original African group a mystery, thus
preventing a concise history of the black race.
It is difficult to go against the different modern political dispositions of
Nigerian ethnolinguistic groups, but if selfish ethnic considerations are not
set aside, the black race will unable to decipher its collective history and
identity and unite towards global socioeconomic ascendancy. Unfortunately,
with the various power relations in present political and academic circles, the
current ruling dynasties appear to be paranoid that revealing the power source
they replaced will lead to being undermined politically. The ethnic pride and
fight for supremacy across Yorubaland prevent a proper analysis of claims
and counterclaims that question 1141 as the start of the largest and oldest
Original African group.
The Edo kingdom claimed that Oduduwa was a prince of Bini called
Ekaladerhan and the only son of the last Ogiso called Owodo, contrary to
Ife’s claim that Oduduwa dropped from heaven or was a prince from Mecca,
the son of Lamurudu (the biblical Nimrod).
The Edo vividly recount thirty kings/dynasties known as Ogisos that ruled
their kingdom, formerly known as Idu (Igodomigodo), for more than a
thousand years before Oranmiyan became king and the kingdom name was
changed to Bini.
The Edo say that Oduduwa fled Bini (Ile Binu, Land of Anger), escaping
being put to death at the orders of his father. He was said to have arrived in
Ife (Ile Ife, Land of Love), which at the time was ruled by a king from the
coastal Ilaje kingdom of Ugbo. Being a spiritually powerful, knowledgeable

but humble medicine man and royalty who provided medical and spiritual
help for free, Oduduwa was loved by the locals. The people were to revolt
against their Ugbo rulers who they sent packing to the Ugbo, while
enthroning Oduduwa.
However, when his father, Ogiso Owodo, died, being the heir apparent, the
Bini asked Prince Ekaladerhan (now known as Oduduwa), to take up the
throne, but he was believed to have refused to return to Bini due to old age
and poor health. Despite huge disagreements between Ife and Edo historians
on whether Oduduwa came from Bini or Mecca, as some Ife historians claim,
the Edo claim that he offered to send his scion, Oranmiyan, tallies with the
famous Yoruba mythology that Oduduwa sent Oranmiyan to rule Benin. He
first made sure that his son would be treated well by sending lice that the Bini
fattened up as big as cows. Oranmiyan didn’t stay long in Bini, but his son,
born in Benin, became the first oba called Eweka the First.
The Edo logically point out that the enthronement of Oduduwa’s descendants
in Bini was not out of pity but a fulfillment of an obligation. Oduduwa, being
the only surviving royal blood, refused a recall and sent his son, Oranmiyan.
They question why Bini, a major town at the time, would request a ruler from
a smaller town if there were no blood ties. The new Oduduwa dynasty in Ife
couldn’t have acquired a reputation throughout the land of being so special as
to warrant such a request from an established entity like Bini, nor was there
any conquest of Bini by Ife.
Regardless of whether or not the Yoruba mainstream accepts that Oduduwa
came from Bini, the fact remains that they can’t recount any history before
1140AD, which is several thousands of years after the creation of the Ifa
divination system or the time in which science has proven that people and
structures existed in Yorubaland.
On the other hand, the Edo provide names of kings and towns stretching back
a thousand years before the Oduduwa dynasty now ruling in Bini and across
Yorubaland, which though better than what Ife historians can come up with,
still falls short of what is expected regarding the origin of the black race. The
names of the first two Ogisos, Igodo and Ere, are still borne by the Ijaw on
the coast. This backs the belief that the Original people spread from the coast
and the known dynasties, wherever the leaders came from, and they came to

dominate the indigenous people who inhabited the territory.
Instead of digging deeper, Edo historians lazily fall for the fallacy of linking
everything before the Ogisos to their fabled migration from ancient Egypt.
This contradicts scientific evidence. Although a few rulers might have
returned from the Middle East due to upheaval, the DNA from the average
person in the area shows that the majority never left where they evolved in
the lower Niger basin!

Yorubaland
It would appear, as in the Ijebu oral history that follows, that the current
ruling class in Yorubaland would rather tie itself to faraway, Eurasian power

centers than with obvious, local blood ties. This is another symptom of the
‘racial inferiority complex’ that pervades the black race, both in Africa and
the Americas! One can’t but demand a better attitude from the ruling class to
divulge information about previous dynasties, confident that such information
will strengthen them in the global community, especially in the black African
race.
The Original African Information Retrieval System shared by at least a dozen
groups suggests that the diverging into their linguistic groups occurred after
its creation.
As shown earlier in this book that humanity evolved from each other in the
Ijebu-Ife-Benin forest, it is likely that Yoruba diverged into Igala and Igbo
closer to the Edo region. The Edo language appears to be a composite of
Yoruba and Igbo languages. The word oduduwa (the name of the
mythological creator of the Yoruba) has no direct translation in modern
Yoruba, but in Igbo, it means ‘leader or guide of the world’ (odu,
leader/guide; uwa, world). While Igbo means forest in Yoruba and the Igbo
mythological leader, Eri is tied to Ori (head) which apparently is also the
name of the first king of Ethiopia.
Another good example is the oral history of the Deji (king) of Akure and
Akureland, the oldest scientifically proven settlement and oldest surviving
palace in black Africa. Located between Ilesaland, ruled by descendants of
Oduduwa’s first son, Owa Obokun, and Edoland, ruled by his last son, legend
has it that the Deji of Akure was the son of an Akure woman and Owa
Obokun, the king of Ilesa, on a visit to Benin via Akure (akun re means ‘the
(hand) chain broke or cut’).
From the history, it is obvious that a woman lived there before the advent of
Owa Obokun. What is most profound, but meaningless to today’s casual
observer, is the long-held cultural funeral rites of the Deji of Akure. The king
of Isharun, a suburb of Akureland, is the first person summoned to the palace
when the Deji dies. The Isharun monarch sneaks through the back entrance to
ridicule the Deji’s dead body before dressing it and taking his best
possessions. After that, the public could be notified, and the women do a
ceremonial tonguelashing of the king as he exits from the front of the Akure
palace. Although many might disagree within my extended family, this

signifies that there were kings in the area before Oduduwa’s descendants
unified and took over the land, as demonstrated by the ceremonial show of
discontent by the lower king. Some scholars postulate that Oba-Ile is older
than the present Akure dynasty!
Unfortunately, with the advent of the Europeans, areas formerly subservient
to the Bini and other local powers rebelled and denied the course of history.
In some areas where the Muslims infiltrated, the elite tried to tie their history
to the northeast African Islamic power centers, while the Eurocentric Igbos
love to call themselves Jews!
To the west of Benin, the Ijebu Muslim elite bastardised and discarded their
history by neglecting the simple logic that Obanta, the king from outside the
Ijebu Eredo ring, was probably from Whydah (on the nearby coast of Benin
/Togo Republic) instead of a small, Sudanese town bearing a similar name,
Wadai.
The Ijebu were the cowrie (shell money) and salt merchants of Yorubaland,
and, being effective bankers, they held sway over the area. They traded gold
from their secret gold mines that extended to the Volta region of modern
Ghana until the advent of the Europeans.
The surrounding Eredo earthworks, visible from outer space, are
indestructible. They comprised a wall and ditch measuring 14 meters high
and 160 kilometers long. Though it can’t be dated, the existence of Eredo
attests to the fact that the area had an early civilization and large population,
because it required more labor than the largest pyramids in Egypt. An
estimated 3.5 million cubic meters of soil were shifted to build the Eredo
monument, a million cubic meters more than it took to build the Great
Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt. Thick forest now covers most of the
earthworks.
As time went on, the flourishing coastal trade compelled the western Yoruba
(Ijebu, Ketu, and Awori) to build coastal cities outside the Eredo earthworks
ring. They took advantage of the increase in coastal maritime business
between Ivory Coast and Angola along the naturally shielded waterways and
lagoons. It wouldn’t have been farfetched, during social unrest, to seek an
arbitrator prince from the same Ijebu royalty bloodline, Omo Obanta (son of

the outside king) from their satellite town, Whydah, on the frontier of the
Ijebu sphere of influence. The prince was to unite the Ijebu kingdom,
especially with his famed exposure and ability to settle quarrels, and made
Ijebu-Ode the capital city of the Ijebu.
Unfortunately, this information is a generation away from being lost as
Muslim elites have changed the official version of their history to suit new
religious and political alliances. These were the same type of Islamic
alliances that ultimately destroyed the Yoruba frontline city-states, Ilorin and
the Oyo kingdom, to the northwest of the Ijebu, which was believed to have
been created by Oranmiyan. The Oyo Muslim elite present since the 1500s
Nupe/Borgu jihadist attack are mainly responsible for the misrepresentation
that the Yoruba migrated from Mecca through Lamurudu; this is an
unfounded assertion.
The Oyo and the Egba were the middlemen between the Ijebu gold miners,
the Hausa, and other Trans-Saharan gold merchants. Oyo-Ile, created by
Oduduwa’s youngest son Oranmiyan, extended across the Niger. It was the
Yoruba frontier grassland empire and best known, but it was razed with all its
history in 1800s by Fulani jihadists. After the second jihadist destruction, the
Alaafin (king) of Oyo relocated the Oyo court in the 1830s to the present
Oyo. The town was rebuilt within the confines of the forest but devoid of true
history apart from the stories of Islamized historians.
Bordering Oyo-Ile to the southwest at Otun Ekiti was Ekitiland. It had
numerous towns and villages that extended to the border of Akureland at
Ikere, and it had mainly agriculturists with linguistic and historic traits similar
to the Akure and Edo. Akure was regarded as part of Ekiti until my
grandfather, Prince Adelola Faloye (the first Akure local government
chairman, and other patriarchs, with the support of the ruling Deji) removed
Akure from the Ekiti Parapo (Ekiti United Council).
From personal observation, the Edo language appears to be a mix of Ijebu
and Ekiti dialects, or the dialects were condensed from Edo. Some scholars
claim that stronger age-group work relationships and linguistic evidence
show that the more southern and eastern Yoruba, Ekiti/Akure, and Ijebu
towards Benin, are older than the northern and eastern Yorubalands of Oyo,
Egba, and Igbomina. This observation tallies with the oral history that

Oranmiyan left Benin to go and create Oyo to the northwest.
Benin/Edo tradition shows that the previous Ogiso dynasty included more
than thirty kings, who ruled for millennia before the present Oranmiyan
dynasty. The pre-Ogiso dynasty relates to a time when the marshes hadn’t
fully dried out and when the Yoruba, Edo, Igala, Igbo, and Ijaw were not
fully differentiated. Due to the lack of early external distortions, some
glottochronologists grossly underestimate the time of dispersal as just over
five thousand years. If it takes five thousand years to forcefully diverge Indo-
European languages, it might take fifteen thousand years in a peaceful forest
Africa environment with no culture shocks or imperialism.
The Ogboni secret cult in Yorubaland and the Igbos Nri cult relate to an
earlier period of social development, while the Ijesha of Central Yorubaland
link the Ogboni to the thicker, eastern forests on the way to Akure/Benin.
Akure is not only the geographical midpoint between Ife and Benin, but it has
the unique characteristic in Yorubaland of having ‘Yoruba’ and ‘Edo’
sections.
As one moves along the coast eastward, there is the notable exception of the
Ugbo kingdom, which claims that the Ife Odudwua dynasty replaced it in Ife.
It appears that it has a closer and older relationship with the Benin-Edo
sphere, but which came first is unclear. The Original African group initially
spread inland from the coast, so it is possible that it was the first settlement
before Bini, although another ruling class from Benin or those sacked from
Ife went to take over rulership of the coastal kingdoms.
It is recounted that when Oduduwa was blind and at the point of death, he
sent his son, Owa of Ijeshaland, to the ocean near Ugbo for medicinal ocean
water. This action ties to the fact that Oduduwa had knowledge of Ugbo and
its environs. Oduduwa died before Owa’s return, which enabled his herbalist,
who was not Oduduwa’s royal blood, to assume the throne. However, it is
argued that Oduduwa becoming a king in Ife was not based on royal linage or
conquest but because of his spiritual powers. It is a fact that all beaded
crowned kings came after a long period of priest kings/spiritual leaders, so
Ooni lineage is a continuation of the ancient priest king lineage which is why
Ife king continued to be the spiritual leader of Yorubas.

This is a thorny issue to this day, especially due to the fight for supremacy
between Oyo and Benin on one side and Ife on the other, as some royal
purists claim that the Ooni lineage is not a true Oduduwa bloodline. The issue
was vehemently raised during my visit to the Edo palace, especially during
my lengthy discussion with the chief priest of Benin. However, I conclude
that Ife is supreme, being the spiritual center that will always remain relevant,
while Oyo and Benin polities have been overwhelmed, destroyed and
absorbed.
The Igbo are the second largest Original African group and have the third
highest percentage proven by genetics of being the ancestral home. Before
undisputable DNA evidence, due to the large number of Bantus that evolved
from other groups to the east of the Niger and spread to Central and South
Africa, there was the question of which side of the Niger delta did humans
evolved from, if the Niger delta had fully developed before the split. The Obi
of Onitsha categorically stated that Igbos migrated from Ife. Igbo historians
point to Aguleri in northern Igboland as their ancestral home, which is far
from a coastal evolution site, but this is supported by DNA evidence and
cultural anthropology that they diverged from Igala at the northwestern
fringes of Igboland.
The Ijaw who lived on the coast and had links with the three inland ethnic
groups claimed to have moved from the west to the central and later the
eastern part of the delta. There is no continuous divergence from the Ijaw into
the southern Igbo, who would have spread north to Aguleri. Moreover, the
northern Igbo appear to be older than the southern Igbo near the Port
Harcourt coast. Igbo divergence from or into other cultures across the Niger
appears to have occurred around the northern, not the southern, crossing,
because there is a continuous formation of settlements from Idah to Aguleria
and Onitsha.

Igboland

The eastern spread from Benin takes a more inland route to Igboland along
which there are numerous tales of Bini royalty who organized and led in Esan
and western Igbo lands.
The Igboland and culture spread from/into the western side of the Niger. We
see how Edo culture diverges into Igbo through the Ika and Aniochi clans
from the midpoint between Benin and Asaba on the Niger riverbank.
Opposite Asaba, on the other bank of the Niger is Onitsha, a major Igbo town
that some scholars have stated is derived from orisha, the name for Yoruba
and Edo deities. The river is also called the Orunmili, a corruption of
Orunmila, one of the highest Yoruba Orishas.
Despite genetic and anthropological evidence shows the people diverged
from Igala, some trace Onitsha’s royal lineage to the first king, Eze Chima, a
rebel Edo Bini prince. Onitsha is slightly south of Aguleri, which the Ndigbo
claim as their origin. To the southwest of Onitsha is Nnewi and the Anaedo
kingdom, whose supreme deity is Edo. Next to Nnewi is Awka Etiti and
Igbo-Ukwu. Considering the terrain and natural distribution of people,
because the majority of Ndigbo towns are in the Onitsha-Owerri-Aba-Enugu
triangle, it would appear that the Igbo migrated across the Niger to Onitsha or
Aguleri and spread out. They were constrained in the west by the Niger (and
the thick, lower Niger forests on both sides of the river) and in the east by the
mountain range that ran from around Aba to Enugu. It is highly unlikely that
they spread northward from a coastal evolution point or crossed over the
Niger south of the lower Niger forests, via the Ughelli route, without leaving
a continuous, significant Ndigbo community presence until they arrived at
Aba/Owerri.
Towards the central Niger delta, land settlements thin out, especially after
Warri/Sapele, which used to be Bini/Edo territory. There are significant
settlements of Ijaw and other riverine people living on the lagoons. The
coastal peoples were the earliest conglomeration of people but also appeared
to have mixed histories with the Yoruba, Igbo, and Edo. While they appeared
to be the majority and rulers of Benin and Yoruba kingdoms before the Ogiso
and Oduduwa dynasties, there is also evidence that the Yoruba/Edo dynasties
ruled the coast.
The Idoma, Jukun and many other ethnicities spread along the Benue valley,

where they created the Kwararafa Empire. Jukun meaning people were
believed to have been the rulers of Kwararafa until it disintegrated and the
peoples dispersed across the Middlebelt.
Ethnic groups that migrated north of Yoruba and Igala became the Gwari,
Birom, Kanuri, Nupe, and Igbira that formed the central and northern Nigeria
Nok civilization.
The Western academia has conservatively put the Nok civilization to around
1000BC. From the Nok terracotta and other factors, it was deduced that the
people of the area had an advanced social system. It has been suggested that
iron smelting was independently discovered in the region prior to 1000 BC 31 .
The advanced civilization is believed to have disintegrated around 300AD.
They were broken up into Hausa, Birom and other middlebelt peoples and
made to move towards Cameroon or became Islamized by the Trans-Saharan
traders and colonists in West Africa.
31 Duncan E. Miller and N.J. Van Der Merwe, 'Early Metal Working in Sub Saharan Africa'Journal of
African History 35 (1994) 1-36
Two of Oduduwa’s sons are said to have migrated westward to lead Ketu,
Sabe, and lands towards the Volta River, which includes the Yoruba’s close

cousins, the Aja, Ewe, Dangme, and Ga. Atlantic slavery greatly depleted the
large population that filled the short savannah between Yorubaland and the
Volta River basin, leaving substantial earthworks at Tado that attest to lost
civilisations.
The Upper Volta groups, like the Mossi in the grasslands, were Islamized and
mostly lost their Original African history like the Hausa. The Original
African Akan and Bia, whose languages still closely resemble Yoruba and
Nigeria’s Middle Belt languages like Nupe and Gwari, relocated farther into
the forest to establish new political structures.
A few coastal groups migrated west along the West African coast to
Senegambia, but the rest of West Africa was mostly filled by migration along
the Niger to its Guinea highlands source onto the Senegambia delta. The
Dogon, around the Niger bend in Mali, have an ancient but advanced
knowledge base that proves the antiquity of the Upper Niger basin. The
Trans-Saharan invasions led to the majority moving into the forest towards
the coast in Guinea or becoming Islamized in Mali and Senegambia.
The man-made monuments of the ancient kingdoms didn’t survive, except in
places like Esie in northern Yorubaland that protrudes into drier, wooded
grasslands, the 295 monoliths in Upper Cross River on the eastern outskirts
of Igboland, and the substantial Tado earthworks in the narrow, western Aja
savannah, next to the Ijebu earthworks. Esie has hundreds of stone carvings
that have been dated to around the time when the Yoruba capital moved
northwards to Oyo-Ile in the first millennium. The Igbo had the stepped
Nsude pyramids that resembled earlier pyramids in the Sudan and Egypt but
were much smaller.
The Lower Niger ancient African societies, the Yoruba and Igbo, couldn’t
build huge monuments that would stand the test of time and the moist
rainforest climate and that did not, ultimately, fit into a naturalistic
environment that prevented the excesses of human architectural
accomplishment.
Despite the lack of huge physical monuments, the advanced social systems
attest to the age and development of the people. Between 8,000BC and
6000BC, the Age of Yemoja, Africans used their knowledge to develop the

stellar (lunar) calendar based on female principles. The African Information
Retrieval system based on the four-day week shows that this system was in
operation before the 4000BC evolution of the seven day solar calendar. The
Igbos system called Aha still operates on the four by four strings, unlike
many others that tie all the strings/Opele to make 16 cowries.
Instead of a four-day week and a seven-week month, the new solar calendar
was based on a seven-day week, a four-week month, and a twelve-month
year, based on the twelve months (moons) required for a complete revolution
of the sun.
The Ifa calendar was based on a four-day week (Ose) and a ninety-one-week
year. The days were named after deities. The first day of the week was Ojo
(day) Obatala, the second was Ojo Orunmila, the third was Ojo Ogun, and the
fourth was Ojo Shango. Converted to the solar year, the Yoruba year starts on
June 3 and ends on June 2. The Yoruba year in 2016 was 10,058.
The Igbo calendar was also based on a four-day week but had a seven-week
month and a thirteen-month year, with an extra day added in the last month.
The Ubochi (days) were known as Eke, Orie, Afo, and Nkwo. The year began
in late February and ended in early February, as follows:
Onwa Mbu—Third week of February
Onwa Abuo—March
Onwa Ife Eke—April
Onwa Ano—May
Onwa Agwu—June
Onwa Ifejioku – July
Onwa Alom Chi—August to early September
Onwa Ilo Mnuo—Late September
Onwa Ana—October
Onwa Okike—Early November
Onwa Ajana—Late November
Onwa Ede Ajana—Late December to early January
Onwa Uzo Alusi—Late January to early February
Original Africans inhabiting the Niger-Kongo riverbasin
developed complex social systems, especially the world’s first religion and a

complex divination system called Ifa by the Yoruba, Iha in Bini, Aha in Igbo
and Ewe etc. The foundation of Ifa was laid more than ten thousand years
ago, in the Age of Orunmila, and built on a binary code of 256 (16 x 16)
outcomes. The divination system could be advanced to have 256 x 256
outcomes (Odu Ifa) or as many outcomes as it was possible to count. It
became a gigantic memory bank of words on all sorts of events that one can
ever contemplate which are tied to all outcomes possible since the bank was
continuously replenished.
This was the first systematic, knowledge-based system, but it had no written
scripts and was recited orally to keep it secret. Its library of wisdom, called
the Odu Ifa, consisted of 16 major chapters of 240 minor categories.
These had to be memorized, and the outcomes identified as the Opele
(divination chain, nuts) fell during divination on the opon Ifa (divination
board). The names given to the Odus gradually changed with the divergence
of languages, but the principles behind them largely remained the same.
Similarities of 10 local variations westward from Fon in Benin Republic
to Idoma in Eastern Nigeria
FON
NW
NE
Nupe
Edo Urhobo GBE Yoruba Yoruba
W Nri Igbo Igala IdomaIgbo
Gbe Ogbe Osika Sikan Ogbi Ogbi Ogbi Obi Ebi Ebi
Yeku Oyeku Oyeku Eyako Ako Ako Akwu Ahwu Akwu Akwu
Woli Iwori Ogori Gori Oghoi Ogbori Ogoli Ogori Ogoli Ogoli
Di Odi Oji Eji Odin Edi/Odi Odi Odi Odi Oji
Abala Obara Obara Bara Ovba O(v)bara Obai Obala Obara Obla
Akana Okanran Okona Kana Okan Okanran Okai Okala Okono Okla
Loso
Irosun
Orosun
Rusu
Oruuh Urhur(h) u u Ulush Ururu Oloru Olo u
Wolin Oworin Oga Ega Oghae E/Aghare Ogali Agari Egali Egali
Guda Ogunda Ogunta Guta Ighitan Ighite Ejite Ijite Ogwute Ejita
Sa Osa Osa Esa Oha Orha Osha Ora Ora Ola
Lete Irete Irete Etia Ete Ete/Eke Ete Eke Olete Ete
Tula Otura Otura Turia Eture Erhure Etule Oture Otula Otle

Trukp Oturupo Otaru Rakpa Erhoxu Erhokpo/ e n n a a
Ka Ika Oyinka Yikan Eka Eka n
Atukp Aturukp Atunukp Etrukp a a a a
Aka Aka Eka Eka
Che Ose Okin Arikin Ose Ose Ose Ose Oche Oche
Fu Ofun Ofun Efu Ohun Ophu Ofu Ohu Ofu Ofu
Excerpted from people.bu.edu/manfredi/4bitArraySpreadsheet.pdf. As discussed elsewhere(Manfredi
2009a, §4.3)
A Yoruba interpretation of the sixteen Odus follows. The number before each
odu represents the binary number corresponding to the pattern:
0 Ogbe: Light, birth of Orunmila (wisdom)
1 Osa: Overcome fear
2 Otura: Govern wisely
3 Owonrin: Weather storms
4 Irete: If you refuse to sacrifice something, you might lose it anyway
5 Ofun: Olodumare creates earth, the sixteen odus, orishas, and humans
6 Edi: Watch out for obstacles
7 Okanran: Follow plans
8 Ogunda: Ogun, use technology wisely
9 Iwori: Ask diviner for advice
10 Ose: Truth protects good, destroys evil
11 Oturopon: Raise children well
12 Irosun: Crouch, wait, and plan
13 Ika: You reap what you sow
14 Obara: Cooperate, each hand washes the other
15 Oyeku: Dark, Olodumare’s earthly creations
Its intelligent outline of knowledge transferred across the world to aid in
developing other divination systems and lines of study. Ifa was advanced
enough to postulate abstract structures of the natural world, including
elementary particle physics, cosmology, quantum consciousness and physics,
voodoo physics, and maths. Its knowledge base was so advanced that
technology inventors adopted its 256 dimensional structure for the 256-bit
motherboard in computers.
Ifa was transferred to Mesopotamia where it became the basis of Western

astrology. It is much more advanced than Western astrology, but the major
Ifa Orishas are identified in the table below.
Ifa transferred to the Indus Valley 5,300 years ago, and from it, latter day
Indians established Buddhism. The African Information Retrieval System
introduced to South China was also fundamental to the creation of I Ching
with sixty-four dimensions or outcomes. It also helped the tarot system of
seventy-eight outcomes.
Hous Astrological e Sign
Ruling Planet
1
Aries Mars
Yoruba Ruling Orisha Ogun
2 Taurus Oshun Venus
Effect
War, iron technology, assertive and aggressive self
Love, fertility, wealth, joy
3 Gemini Mercury
4 Cancer Moon Esu/Ibeji Information and duality, yin and yang Yemoja
Ocean, moods,
5 Leo 6 Virgo
7 Libra
8 Scorpio Oya Oshun Love, fertility,
Pluto balance, and harmony
Storms and hurricanes, transformation, death, reincarnation/regenera tion
9 Sagittarius Jupiter
Obatala Higher education, religion, philosophy, wisdom, good fortune and
intelligence

10 Capricorn BabaluAiye
Saturn
Structure, career status, patience and discipline
11 Aquarius Uranus Shango Upheaval, rebellion
12 Pisces Sun
Mercury Orunmila Esu
maternal protective nurturing and instinct Destiny, creativity
Information systems and prophets like Jesus Venus
Neptune
Olokun for
justice/humanitarian ideals
Seclusion, spirituality, secrecy of ocean floor
Ancient Egyptians adopted the oracle through the worship of the Goddess
Wadjet, the grand patron of Ancient Egypt. Wadjet like the Yoruba
Osunmare was a rainbow snake goddess that brought fertility and prosperity.
Wadjet later spread to Greece where she was called Buto and brought about
divination skills to Europe.
Ifa was brought to the Arabs by Prophet Idris and was called ilm al-raml
(‘science of the sand’) or khatt al-raml (‘lines in the sand’). The divination
involved calculating outcomes in the sand poured onto the divination board.
To become a babalawo (a graduate practitioner in Ifa) was no easy feat.
Training began between the age of seven and ten and lasted for twelve years.
The progress between training grades was slow and laborious, as trainees
were subjected to intensive memory and bodily tests. Every outcome of the
divination system was tied to an event, name, place, and many other things or
words ranging from the historic to the scientific, cosmic, and proverbial. An
awo (obos in Edo) or practitioner had to memorize it all and be able to
recognize the 16 major signs and the 240 minor ones as they fell during
divination.

Contrary to the Christian or Islamic dogma of Esu’s knowledge base being
satanic, Original Africans like the Yoruba and Ndigbo developed naturalist
religions that reflected philosophies represented by common, important
natural objects. They were based on natural laws of retributive justice and
karma (known as Esan in Yoruba, Ofo and Ogu in Igbo), which ensured the
personal responsibility necessary for peaceful coexistence.
The Igbo religion, also known as Odinani or Odinala, was based on a central
figure and almighty god called Chukwu. Odinani was the ancient Igbo
traditional religion that connected Mmadu (humans) to Chukwu (God)
through one’s chi (personal soul). As in the Yoruba culture, Chukwu was best
approached through the Alusi/Arushi (Orishas) who represented specific
aspects of nature.
The top Alusis were as follows: Ala, the earth goddess, represented by the
moon, the first and most important Alusi, was responsible for fertility and
morality; Amadioha/Amadiora (‘free will of the people’) was the Alusi of
thunder and lightning, the god of justice and represented by the sun;
Anyanwu (‘the eye of the sun’) was also seen as a goddess of justice with an
all-knowing eye that resides in the sun; Ikenga (‘place of strength’) was a
horned Alusi represented by Mars and known as the god of human endeavor,
assertiveness, success, and victory; Ekwensu was the god of bargains and
trade like Esu but not the devil as misconceptualized by Christian dogma.
One’s chi chose whether or not to desecrate ala (earth), while the goddess
Ala, Mother Earth, the Alusi of morality, judged how one’s chi found its way
back to the chi ukwu – soul collective – supreme god (Chukwu). The Igbo
believed that Ofo and Ogu were rendered with thunder by Amadiora, the god
of the sky and husband of the goddess Ala, who fed her with rains.
The Original African culture, having evolved in tune with its bountiful
environment, was holistic and reflected in all aspects of life. The African
spirituality was wrongly regarded as a religion. His heartbeat (the engine of
his soul) was connected with his environment through singing and dancing to
drumbeats that reflected spiritual emotion and appreciation. The physical
appreciation of the environment was expressed through art, expressive of all
nature forms. Every torque of the drum was to convey messages to the
orishas. His spirituality made the African appreciate the wide range of

nature’s gifts, from paintings on his body to paintings on the rocks and
molding wood, metals, and fabric, which he wore as clothing in all the colors
that nature provided.
The fertile environment inspired a live-and-let-live atmosphere. Without food
shortages or other restrictions, the Yam Belt was holy land, thus allowing a
polytheistic environment. Everybody was allowed to participate and came out
to celebrate the gods and beliefs of other people. This practice spread to the
Nile region and across the world after the Ice Age, but it was eventually
curtailed and bastardised in the quest to control scarce resources like water,
food and gold. This need for control brought about the later and more
restrictive forms of monotheism with jealous gods.
In the Yam Belt, everyone initially had a voice in government and could
voice their complaints in a daily, open court consisting of elders and priests
and presided over by a king who did not possess absolute power. Knowledge
was power, which was why the secrets of Ifa were never written down to try
to prevent the abuse later witnessed in the Eurasian belief systems that
evolved from excerpts of Ifa.
In later civilizations, one man could amass a fortune of wheat or other grains
that could be stored. The common Yoruba saying was that one man could
never eat all of what the area had to offer. Whoever cleared the land of trees
owned the land, resulting in communal ownership of land that extended to
communal meals split among age and gender groups. This was the basis of
the ancient African mentality of consensus as opposed to that of the majority
or the strongest.
While other races were migrating and trying to organize to survive in less
favorable conditions, the Lower Niger people were busy formulating strong
societal norms and mores. Their gods didn’t require taking someone else’s
land as part of one’s manifest destiny, as was the case in Christianity, Islam,
and other religions of the naturally deprived. Under no circumstances was
taking another man’s property accepted, especially under the authority of
personal religious visions with no corroborative witnesses. Otherwise, it was
believed that Shango/Amadiora, the god of justice and thunder, the provider
of the rains of the rainforest, would strike offenders down while Oya would
blow and carry them away.

In Yoruba culture, the rhythmic language of Ifa and music encapsulated
history and philosophy better than any other known means. The word ogun
showed how one word could describe a whole philosophy. Ogun could be
pronounced in five different tones, each with different meanings; Ogun meant
war; Ogun was the god of iron, Ogun was biological and spiritual poisons,
Ogun meant sweat/assertive self, and Ogun meant inheritance/wealth. This
encompassed a natural philosophy of positive action that stated that one could
attain wealth only through laborious sweat (working/farming) or war
(plundering), both of which were accomplished with iron tools/weapons or
through spiritual and biological means. The choice of plundering was
administered with the warning of the nature of Ogun, the god of war and iron.
Praises sung of Ogun reflected his fierce character: 32
Ogun kills on the right and destroys on the right,
Ogun kills on the left and destroys on the left,
Ogun kills suddenly in the house and suddenly in the fields, Ogun kills the
child with the iron with which it plays,
Ogun kills in silence.
32 Joseph M Murphy, Santeria: An African Religion in America (Beacon Press, 1988), 11.
In a rich mythology that also depicted Ogun as preferring a bath of blood to
one of water, this was a societal warning against unrelenting wars for
material gain. The worship of Ogun was a fraction of the Yoruba pantheon,
although Ogun became more important with the arrival of iron-wrought guns
borne by Europeans whose Ogun rage the Africans could not pacify. A
seven-day Ogun festival in 1791 prompted the revolution that gave birth to
Haiti, the first modern black nation.
Oya, another Orisha, encapsulated revolutionary trends and philosophy, while
Osun encapsulated love.
Respect for elders and societal responsibility was at the core of the Yoruba
tradition, despite their love for urban settings and gatherings. Prior to fluoride
toothpaste, the West African chewing stick was the best dental cleaner, and
black palm oil soap still has its advantages. African naturalist tendencies
resulted in a pattern of dressing that was suitable to the environment and
physical health, similar to the black hip-hop baggy dressing. No color was,

and still is, too loud for African dress.
In order not to interfere with nature, loose clothing was adopted, especially
the trousers, which were loose in order to keep the male sex organs cool.
Sperm is sensitive to high temperatures, and the body has a natural system of
letting the scrotum fall away from the body; tight European clothing results
in lower fertility. Modern-day black youth in loose, baggy trousers suffer
abuse for dressing irresponsibly from a black middle class with a colonial
mentality that thinks they should dress more like the repressed but ‘civilised’
Europeans.
In Africa, training was a lifetime societal responsibility, because people were
born into occupational groups and houses that undertook their training in the
necessary life skills. Those named with the Ifa (Ifa is knowledge) or Fa
prefix were trained to be Awos, like my name Faloye (knowledge is
power/wisdom, a philosopher-king); those with an Ayan prefix were trained
with drums and music; those with an Ade prefix were trained to be
politicians/ruling houses. The Ogun prefix was for blacksmiths, Ode was for
hunting, etc.
Apart from biological and clan groups, a person belonged to an age group
that was assigned a specific task in the existing social order. Young males
kept the forest paths clear and charged tolls in Igboland, while older men
often controlled politics and important rituals.
African families were large, and distant relatives were welcome to contribute
to the clan’s objectives. At a certain age, Igbo children were sent to
successful relatives for indentured service, after which the role model set him
or her up in a chosen career or business. This was a cultural trait that many
have wrongly interpreted as being akin to slavery. The vast, thick vegetation
that promoted easy habitation prevented harsh slavery regimes, because a
slave could easily disappear into the rainforest. To increase production,
families invited the teenage children of relatives with poorer lands to live and
work with them. Even enslaved prisoners of war were not treated much
differently than the clan’s legitimate children, and they could even become
chiefs.
Production was sometimes organized by age and gender. Men of a certain age

group came together to clear the forests and extend their yam farms, which
were normally situated on the outskirts of their towns. They then returned for
the socially enjoyable, communal meal. Women took care of the small
vegetable farms within the compound, cooked, sewed, picked gold on
riverbanks, and traded. An African woman often preempted her husband by
choosing trusted junior wives to do certain tasks that she believed were
beneath her in terms of age like cooking, collecting firewood, and sex. This
was to prevent the arrival of an unknown rival who might seek to usurp her
productive power within the family and clan. The economic system was
embedded in the culture.
As the importance of trade grew along with population, women became more
visible outside the forest region as they traded their family wares over longer
distances. This trait made outsiders conclude that women led African
societies, but the point is that the African sense of wealth and belonging was
different. Through trade, a woman could accumulate and allocate wealth, but
it was not hers or anybody’s to will or pass to anyone outside the family.
When she died, her role was taken over and nothing else.
An African’s life was one of communal enterprise in different gender and age
groups. As children, they respected elders with the hope of one day becoming
an elder, after which they died, joined those who had come before, and
become a god. Only in death they became revered, or so it appeared, but
while they were on earth, they had to enjoy elaborate burial and reburial
parties of the dead every day.
There was a natural balance to everything as women and men worked with
what nature provided. The African culture reflected the natural societal
balance with both female and male gods. A complete lifecycle of life, death,
and rebirth needed a female presence (unlike Christianity with a Father, a
Son, and a Holy Ghost). Matriarchal worship of female ancestors came to an
end, as seen in the Bible. The snake that was the symbol of the female and
her curative powers, probably from the Egyptian snake Goddess Wadjet, was
demonized when Adam ate from the Tree of Life (women) for knowledge
and guidance. Medicine was equated with female curative powers as signified
by the snakes on the emblem of the Hippocratic Oath/Rod of Asclepius.
Archaeological findings show that Jews worshipped a female opposite of

Yahweh called Asherah when they left black Egypt and arrived in Israel, but
the male dominance in their production function based on wars eventually
erased the female god. Female gods of fertility appeared redundant in the arid
deserts. Eurasians eventually called their mothers ‘bitches’ while the opposite
of God became a dog, man’s best friend, who wandered with him in the
wilderness. Homosexuality rose in the ranks of the Eurasian nomads, and
their women were left behind as exemplified in Greece, their first empire.
This natural societal and sexual balance was reflected by forestdwelling
African unwavering taboo regarding homosexuality, which, at present,
threatens to split African Anglican churches from Western Anglican
churches. Homosexuality was believed to be a product of gender-unbalanced
societies where migrant men lived in the arid environments, and the women
couldn’t take significant roles in societal production because of warfare
against other men and the environment. Homosexuality amounted to selfish
enjoyment as opposed to positive African communal leisure and the
productive capacity of the continent’s forests.
African laws on sex were formulated with the realization that sex was the
easiest way to destroy or build a society, and clearly defined roles were
ascribed to remove any form of ambiguity. What was female was removed
from a male child in his first week, while what was male was removed from a
week-old female child. The male foreskin was believed to hold onto fluids
and germs after sex, which could be easily passed to partners and result in
sexually transmitted diseases. In modern times, some research has shown that
uncircumcised men are more likely to spread HIV/AIDS.
To protect against sexual laxity, sex was only for procreation, and therefore a
woman’s clitoris was removed. The clitoris was viewed to be highly
sensitive, like the male organ, but without any productive capacity. A
corollary of the African belief was that sex for mere enjoyment led to sexual
excess and homosexuality. Without a clitoris, oral sex and lesbianism were
unattractive.
In the interest of the community, to have more children, male promiscuity
was encouraged, but female promiscuity was frowned upon. The
reproduction rate was much higher than average because a man had to do
more ‘rounds’ to satisfy a ‘clit-less’ woman, and the only way to arouse her

was through internal erogenous spots, which increased the chances of
conception.
Circumcision was done early in life to prevent enforcing the societal norms
on a grown adult. The environment prevented forceful doctrines and
promoted tolerance among adults no matter their private beliefs.
With these societal norms in place, the Niger people lived in peace and
prosperity in the Land of Love. As they spread, pressures upon the land
brought about a culture whereby the first son inherited land while others
migrated to the next plot. This was especially common among the Igbo and
the Bantu who eventually inhabited the land to the far south of Africa.
Without too much to bother about, black Africans concentrated on clothing,
art, and music, and they produced the Nok and Ife terracotta, brass, and other
artwork. They invented the talking drum, rhyming their words into music.
There was also the Yoruba Ewi—it was like poetry with drums and a forum
to recount history or make social criticism and praise, similar to modern-day
rap.
The philosophy and practice of forest African religion did not concentrate on
social organization for production and ‘law and order’, because they weren’t
constraining problems. Worship evolved as a means of meditation and
healing. Dancing and music were means of cleansing, mediating, and
rejuvenating the soul. They were also used to invoke the spirits of the dead
whose specific influence was required.
The people left in the Niger-Benue basin could have anything, but they
couldn’t keep records or accumulate wealth unnecessarily due to the humid
climate. Trade for essential food like salt, peppers, palm products, and fruits
developed between the Yam Belt and the outlying savannas, whose
inhabitants tried to exchange grains and animals for the richer forest
products. Rice, millet, and other grains never appealed to the forest people of
the Yam Belt, who regarded them as bird food, while the forest people had
abundant and better-tasting animals instead of tasteless cow meat. Forest
Africans had their own dwarf cows that they reared for its tastier meat but not
for its milk.

Having so much time on their side, and fuller stomachs, the people of the
Yam Belt made commercial artistic and decorative clothing and artworks.
Starting with cloth made from palms, they tested and went onto other
materials, like cotton, while experimenting with metals for artwork or to be
sold unprocessed in the trade between the forest and savannah areas. This
caused the savannah peoples to travel as far as Egypt and India in order to
bring a better deal than grains and cows to the market.
The forest people did not demand much for their goods, and in most cases, a
rare item went a long way. International trade was unimportant to the
common man, and subregional trade was based on items like salt for those
living far from the sea. Rich forest dwellers often bought trade items, like
grass, from an unknown land to thatch their roofs even though it was of an
inferior quality. The entertainment capital of short-lived but exotic animals
from other lands also appreciated. Horses were luxuries that normally lasted
for a few months before falling prey to Africa’s rich insect life.
On the other hand, many in the forest were enticed by the savannah traders
with tall tales of exotic, faraway places. Black youth were the most
impressionable. They felt overburdened by social responsibilities, were
unable to accumulate wealth selfishly, and saw the fruits of their labors
exchanged cheaply for exotic goods. From then on, forest people migrated to
distant lands only to be disappointed by their inability to assimilate. They
returned home to continue the circle of fabled lands and disappointment.
Peoples of the savannah and desert were increasingly identified by their
darker complexion—jet black, ‘burnt’ due to the lack of cloud cover in the
hot, arid regions (compared to their original habitat in the cloudy rainforest).
Their languages changed as they dealt with Eurasians and their Afro-Asian
offspring.
The cultural mores and Ifa-based knowledge in the Niger delta diffused
throughout the world, although the real messages from the Land of Love and
the Land of the Gods were later lost. From antiquity to modernity, it is clear
that as people moved farther away from the Yam Belt, the crops became
smaller and less nutritional, requiring more organization and land as well as
stronger tools and animals for a lower quality of life. These typified,
ironically, what were believed to be more technologically advanced

civilizations.

Chapter 3: Globalization of African Culture:
Africans’ Frontier Empires
The spread of black African global prominence and their destruction by the
First Horsemen from Eurasia 10,000 BC to 500 BC
Africans with the L3 haplogroup migrated from the Horn of Africa into
Yemen/Arabia, settling on the coast along the way into present day Iran,
Pakistan, India, until they got into Southern China and Taiwan, in what is
called The Great Coastal Migration.
Initially, due to ice caps covering most of Eurasia, they didn’t settle in the
interior but migrated along the coast. The ice caps meant that sea levels were
low so there were still land bridges between the Horn of Africa and Arabia,
as well as Arabia and the Near Asia. Also, the low sea levels enabled
crossing into Indonesia and Philippines onto Australia easier due to land
bridges or low sea levels that made island hopping possible for ancient
canoes.
The Eurasian migrants took their African culture along; while some
continued to be hunter-gatherers, others settled to farm African crops like
millet and other grains, as well as Yams in India. Since they populated land
all the way to Australia by 40,000 years ago, over time they began to form
societies and cities. Detailed information of ancient African civilizations in
Asia is scant due to the long time frame and the global racist agenda to wipe
off all traces of ancient African civilizations across the world. Obvious
African influences in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China are
vehemently denied.
Thanks to contemporary historians like the Senegalese historian Anta Diop,
African-American scholar Runoko Rashidi, Nigerian Professor Catherine
Acholonu and a few others, the new information trickling in on African
frontier empires would not be accessed. Also, the new advances in genetics
have countered mainstream claims that Africans only stepped out of Africa as
slaves. New genetic evidence has confirmed that Africans were the first
modern human settlers in Eurasia. Out of all continental ancestral clades, it

has been proven that the Oceania clade, composed of Asian Africans called
Negroids, is the closest clade to the African clade, especially the East African
subclade, their last stopover in Africa.
They gradually settled in small settlements that became villages and towns by
8000BC, and then around 4000 BC became known as civilizations and major
trade centers that traded afar. Ethiopia, Ancient Egypt, Sumer, Elam,
Harappan Indus Valley and the Far East all had African civilizations, based
on African culture and trade. The first king in Ethiopia around 4470BC was
called Ori meaning head/leader in Yoruba, and Orisha called Erecha religion
still survives there. Like in ancient Egypt, Eurasian academia claims that the
ancient Eurasia civilizations wrote in what is now regarded as lost languages,
but this is because the languages were African originated. Otherwise if they
had been Eurasian languages, they would have been deciphered by one of the
Indo-European or Asiatic languages.
The dark-skinned African civilizations laid the foundations of global trade
and human civilization, while Europeans were in the central Asia plains and
mountains until they came south to overrun the African civilizations from
around 2000BC in what is known as the Era of the First Horseman/Era of
Ogun. With climate change in the central Asian freezing plains, where they
domesticated horses and designed the war chariot, Eurasians migrated south
to destroy the civilizations, brutally suppressed the survivors and tried to
erase traces of Africa and blackness.
On the coast migration route from Ethiopia into Arabia and around the
peninsula, Sumer were various settlements that coalesced into citystates in
Mesopotamian Euphrates-Tigris Delta, on the shores of the Persian Gulf,
southern modern day Iraq. It was reputed to be one of the earliest
civilizations that brought about writing, plough agriculture and astronomy. Its
growth can mainly be attributed to being on the trade route of African goods
to Asia that begins in Egypt and ended in the Indus Valley and China.
Akkadian Afro-Asian Semitic kings were to overthrow the original kings and
takeover the culture. Though the people called themselves ‘ug sag giga ga’
meaning the ‘Black headed people’ 33 , they were named Sumer by the
Akkadians that took up their culture and told the history from their own
perspective.

Elam, also on the Persian Gulf, suffered the same fate being one of the Black
empires in the region that was destroyed and erased by the Eurasians and
their Afro-Asiatic offspring, the Akkadians. Sumer and Elam were midpoints
between the two great population and trade centers, Ancient Egypt and the
Harappan Indus Valley Black civilizations, and enjoyed the benefits of trade
and synergies that arose from being in the center. However while it was
possible to completely erase their physical legacies and dilute their African
gene pool because of the nearby Eurasian homeland in the Caucasus
mountains, the Harappan Indus Valley and ancient Egypt with much bigger
populations were a bit more resistant.
33 W. Hallo, W. Simpson (1971). The Ancient Near East. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. p.
28.
WHITE-SKINNED PEOPLES SPREAD FROM ANDRONOVO

The Harappan Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) was based in the Indus basin
in present-day Pakistan, northwest India and Afghanistan. From about
60,000yrs ago African Indians, Dravidians, filled up the Indian sub-region all
the way to South China and as expected small settlements coalesced over
time to form a civilization and trade center of cities by 3,350BC – Age of

Osun, physical wealth and love.
The main Dravidian cities of the IVC were Harappa and Mohenjo Daro and
were well laid out with street drainage. The 1900BC arrival of barbarian
Indo-European groups from Andronovo Cultural complex of Western Siberia
(Kazakhstan) that destroyed the IVC towns by 1800BC, compressed black
Indians, Dravidian Indians, into South and Eastern India and Sri Lanka,
where they currently number nearly two hundred million.
The Indo-Europeans destroyed the northwest India civilization and built a
new empire using the Black Indian culture and practices, which include
ancestor worship, the African Information Retrieval System like Ifa that they
transformed into Buddhism and Hinduism. Since the Indo-Europeans
couldn’t completely kill off the African civilizers or dilute their gene pool
beyond recognition, they subjected them to brutal racial caste systems as they
engaged in cultural genocide that persists till date in India.

It wasn’t until the 1920s that the Eurasian falsehood, of Dravidians being
primitive Black people, was exposed by archaeological excavations in British
India Punjab district that brought to view over 1050 lost and forgotten cities.
The white Eurasian mainstream was to deny that it was a black Indian
civilization, but the evidence was overwhelmingly. The cultural and linguistic
similarities of Dravidian and IVC has been cited by researchers like Finnish
Indologist Asko Parpola.
Sir Mortimer Wheeler, director of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1944
and Archaeological Adviser to Pakistan in 1949, who directed the digging of
IVC, proposed that the decline of IVC was caused by the invasion of an Indo-
European tribe called Aryans from Central Asia and cited evidence of a group
of 37 skeletons found in Mohenjo Daro and passages in the Vedas referring
to battles and forts.
The Indus Valley Civilization, with no large monuments and palaces, was an
egalitarian society with planned cities filled with traders and artisans and no
single ruler. It mainly depended on trade with Sumer and especially Elam that
was quite geographically close. Many scholars have proposed that there was
an Elamo-Dravidian linguistic family 34 and cultural linkage 35 , especially
David McAlpin 36 that found that they had over 30% similar cognates.
The Mature Harappan Phase is contemporary to the Old Elamite Period,
Early Dynastic to UR111 Mesopotamia and Old kingdom to Ist Intermediate
Ancient Egypt, and they all began to witness decline with the 2000BC advent
of Indo-European barbarians – the First Horsemen with the composite bow
and horse-drawn chariots, the Age of Ogun.
34 Lockard, Craig (2010). Societies, Networks, and Transitions, Volume 1: To 1500 (2nd ed.). India:
Cengage Learning. p. 40. ISBN 1439085358.
35 Ratnagar, Shereen (2006). Trading Encounters: From the Euphrates to the Indus in the Bronze Age.
Oxford University Press, India. ISBN 0-19-568088-X.
36 David McAlpin, "Toward Proto-Elamo-Dravidian", Language vol. 50 no. 1 (1974); David McAlpin:
"Elamite and Dravidian, Further Evidence of Relationships", Current Anthropology vol. 16 no. 1
(1975); David McAlpin: "Linguistic prehistory: the Dravidian situation", in Madhav M. Deshpande and
Peter Edwin Hook: Aryan and Non-Aryan in India, Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1979); David McAlpin, "Proto-Elamo-Dravidian: The Evidence
and its Implications", Transactions of the American Philosophical Society vol. 71 pt. 3, (1981)

It is noteworthy to mention some writers have propounded an African Indian,
Dravidian, origin to some South China civilizations and dynasties like
Yangshao (5000 to 3000BC) and Dawenkou (4100 to 2600BC) civilisations,
as well as Xia (2100 to 1600BC) and early Shang(1700 to 1046BC)
dynasties. It is logical that with the spread of Dravidian and Pygmy Africans
across South Asia and Oceania there would have come a time, probably
around the Yangshao and Dawenkou eras, when they would coalesce into
civilizations in South China to the Yellow River.
The red and black pottery from the Yangshao era are similar to those found in
Harappan IVC and it is claimed that that the fish and bird totems belonged to
Africans from Africa, Mesopotamia and especially the Dravidian religion,
which formed the foundations of Hinduism and Buddhism later practiced in
China. However, unless the attacks of the First Horseman came at a much
later date than those of Egypt and Western Asia, the African claim of Shang
and Xia dynasty needs more evidence.
Mainstream Chinese history starts with Xia (2100BC to 1600BC) and Shang
dynasties (1700BC to 1050BC), but provides no significant evidence of the
existence or ethnic identity of the early dynastic era, and until recently were
actually taken as mere myths. There are also cultural myths of ancient Black
people in Korea, Japan and Taiwan that were tied to prosperity and revered in
particular festivals. Some African scholars have claimed that the Zhou
dynasty, representing modern Chinese known as Hua, defeated the black
Shang dynasty and pushed them to the Pacific coast, where they were forced
to move to the Philippines and Oceania. But, we need more evidence to ask
more questions and form an historical construct of what happened to the
Dravidian and Pygmy peoples that migrated to the area.
With most Eurasians unwilling to divulge information on the African input
into their latter Eurasian civilizations, it would be difficult if not impossible
to get more information, knowing what Africans had to go through to lay
claim to Ancient Egypt on African soil. An argument only put to rest recently
with the advent of genetic anthropology.
In prehistoric Africa, nomadic hunter-gatherers had spread to the Nile Valley
and Northeast Africa by 120,000 years ago. The protosedentary farmers
slowly accumulated in the Niger delta and as the forests along the complex

waterways were filled, new sites were settled along the riverbanks in the
grasslands, which eventually included the Blue and White Nile.
Western Africa was blessed with abundant water through heavy rains that
culminated in river basins like the Niger, Benue, Volta, Pra, and Senegambia.
Due to the rains from the Atlantic that approached West Africa at an angle,
Nigeria was always the most fertile. The Jos Plateau was a great water
catchment area that gave rise to rivers like the Sokoto and Kaduna that
watered modern northwest and central Nigerian grasslands. The Yobe and
others watered northeast Nigeria and Lake Chad area.
The western boundary of the West Africa population was between the source
of the Niger and the Atlantic mouth of the Senegal, while the center of the
grassland population was between the middle Niger, the Chad river system,
and the source of the Benue in Cameroon. The lands between the source of
the Benue and the Nile (present-day Central Africa Republic and Sudan
Republic) were wooded grasslands that were often threatened by the Sahara
Desert and vulnerable to long, dry periods. They were intermittently
inhabited by Africans who moved farther east to the White Nile and the
Ethiopian highlands.
Probably due to climatic changes between 18000 and 8000BC, the sea levels
rose to submerge the land bridge connecting the Horn of Africa to Arabia
(Mesopotamia), therefore making Ethiopia a dead end for land migrations.
The populations around Ethiopia coalesced into communities, with Ori being
the first king in 4470BC, but Ethiopia was surpassed by other areas due to its
relative aridity and lack of land routes to Arabia for trade.
The immediate Nile (in present-day southern Sudan) could not sustain large
agricultural communities due to its narrow floodplains, but the foundations of
Meroe and Kush were laid as blacks moved north to the wider, fertile
floodplains called Upper Egypt.
Due to climatic changes brought about by the end of the Ice Age, the
pressures of pastoralism and grain cultivation on the grasslands, Western
Sahara and Sudan became more arid, and the desert reached Kano in northcentral
Nigeria. As water became the most important resource in western
Sudan, the grasslands were unable to sustain the population from about 8000

BC, and famine made survivors relocate closer to riverbanks that hadn’t dried
up.
Africans from the surrounding dry grasslands were attracted to Upper Egypt,
which attests to successive African settlements from about 8000 BC. Upper
Egypt was a fertile area about 700 kilometers long and 10 to 20 kilometers
wide that was fertilized by the rich, seasonal, equatorial silt deposited on the
Nile banks. By about 5500BC, small African tribes living in the Nile Valley
had developed an advanced culture with firm control of agriculture, animal
husbandry and cottage industries. They produced distinctive pottery and
personal items like combs and beads.
The largest of the early Nile cultures was known as the Badari, which
originated from the Western Sahara towards Nigeria, and were known for
quality ceramics, stone tools and copper 37 . They traded with other Africans in
the area and from afar – they imported obsidian from Ethiopia used to shape
blades and other objects from flakes 38 . The Badari were followed by the
Amratian and Gerzeh along the valley 39 . The Nile tribes slowly developed
and traded with Mesopotamia as they coalesced into bigger settlements. They
were believed to be culturally and economically united before the political
union of ancient Egypt. It must be noted that most ancient Egyptian names
were identified and spelt by Greek invaders that wrote the history thousands
of years after the occurrence.
Probably due to population pressures caused by the savannah’s aridity, and
the need to control trade coming in from Mesopotamia, a significant change
occurred under Menes (Narmer), the black pharaoh of Upper Egypt that
united it with Lower Nile and the Nile Delta in what became known as
Kemit/Kemi and later Egypt. However, the title pharaoh was not used until
1500BC, two thousand years later.
Menes took over the Nile delta between 4000 BC and 3300 BC, and he made
improvements to the Lower Nile River by diverting it at Inbu-Hedj (Memphis
in Greek) with technology that could have originated only from the land of a
thousand rivers, the Niger delta.
37 Hayes, W. C. (October 1964). "Most Ancient Egypt: Chapter III. The Neolithic and Chalcolithic
Communities of Northern Egypt".JNES (No. 4 ed.) 23: pg220.

38 Barbara G. Aston, James A. Harrell, Ian Shaw (2000). Paul T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw editors.
"Stone," in Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology, Cambridge, 5–77, pp. 46–
47. Also note: Barbara G. Aston (1994). "Ancient Egyptian Stone Vessels," Studien zur Archäologie
und Geschichte Altägyptens 5, Heidelberg, pp. 23–26
39 Childe, V. Gordon (1953), "New light on the most ancient Near East" (Praeger Publications)
The Nile diversion resulted in rapid growth with more reclaimed land for
agriculture, settlement, and foreign trade. By opening the delta, Egypt
became the first frontier black African empire to the world that others were to
emulate and build upon. A ship with planks sewn together, 75 feet long
(23m), dated to 3000BC was among the 14 ships found in Abdju and is
believed to belong to the second king, Pharaoh Aha 40 .

Menes
Archaeological Institute of America.
40 Schuster, Angela M.H. "This Old Boat", 11 December 2000.
Kemet’s long civilization is divided into various stages: the predynastic
period (7000 to 3100BC); Old Kingdom (3100-2181BC); dynastic period
(7000 to 3100BC); Old Kingdom (3100-2181BC); 1650BC); Second
Intermediate period (1650-1550BC); New Kingdom (1550-1069BC); Third
Intermediate period (1069-664BC) and the Late period (664-30BC).
It should be noted that the dates are not written in stone and have been
challenged by African scholars that alleged that the times have been greatly
reduced by Eurocentric scholars. The intermediate and late periods were
times of internal strife, anarchy and structural changes, which by the New
Kingdom Ancient Egypt had lost its true essence of Original African cultures.
The first capital was Abdju (Abydos in Greek) but was moved to Memphis
during the Old Kingdom, probably under King Djoser, the first king of the
third dynasty (2691-2625). Djoser is reputed to have started the first step
pyramids in Saqqara. The kings like Yoruba kings were living Gods (Igba
keji Orisha – second in command to the gods), and were able to centralize
power, collect taxes and push collective projects. During the 3 rd dynasty of
the Old Kingdom formerly independent ancient Egyptian states became
Nomes and their rulers Nomarchs that were subservient to the king.

The Old Kingdom reached its zenith under the 4 thth 2494BC) which began
with King Sneferu that built three pyramids. He was succeeded by his son,
Khufu (Cheops), who built the great Giza pyramid and in conjunction with
his sons built the Sphinx. The 5 th dynasty turned away from pyramid building
to temple building for the Sun god Ra as its religious importance grew. The
Old Kingdom began to wane as the nomes grew more independent, especially
in the Nile Delta. The break occurred after 8 th dynasty under the rule of King
Ibi that is believed to have built a small pyramid in Saqqara 41 .
With the increase in foreign trade into the delta area, the nomes interests
became divergent to those of the king up the river, because of their economic
and cultural association with nomads and traders they relied on for trade.
Therefore with widespread famine, they broke away from the main body of
Ancient Egypt to form a Lower Niger kingdom with a capital at Nen-nesu
(Heracleopolis in Greek).
41 Kathryn A. Bard, An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt (Malden: Blackwell
Publishing, 2008), 163
This made the original Egyptian rulers move down south to Waset, ‘city of
specter’, renamed Thebes in Greek.
Waste (Thebes) had been an original African town established before
Memphis and the unification, and was the second largest city in the world
with 40,000 people by 2000BC, second only to Memphis with 60,000 people.
It was often viewed as the ancestral home of Egyptian rulers, the gateway to
Sudan and Africa as a whole, as well as the key religious center being the
seat of Amun, Mut and Khonsu.
Throughout ancient Egypt, whenever the kings got overwhelmed in the
Lower Nile, it was Thebes that they fell back on to give them black African
power to regain their power. Therefore, Kings were to regroup in Thebes to
recapture Abdju and later the whole Nile under Mentuhotep, who reunified
Egypt in 2033BC to start the 11 th dynasty under the middle kingdom.
Mentuhotep and his 11 th dynasty successors continued to rule from Thebes.
Under the 12 th dynasty, efforts were made to strengthen the political and
economic security of Egypt with the construction of huge land reclamation to

boost agricultural produce, while the military secured the borders with walls.
The reunified kingdom was to enjoy an increase in arts and quality of living,
as democratization of spiritual rights increased and access to God was not
restricted to the elites only. However, with the push to increase agricultural
productivity, white Hyksos Canaanites were allowed into the Nile Delta,
where they were to foment trouble that eventually led to the collapse of the
Old Kingdom and the Second Intermediate Period.
The Hyksos (shepherd foreign rulers), between 1730 BC and 1580 BC, were
the First Horseman era tied to the global attack of Eurasians on African
civilizations with the effective use of composite bows and horse drawn
chariots. The influx of the Hyksos has been linked to the biblical immigration
of Joseph and his brothers into Egypt. The rapidly growing population of
migrant Eurasians in the eastern half of the delta, especially Avaris, was
augmented by their cousins, who eventually invaded with the new, fast war
technology of horses and chariots 42 .
They seized control of Egypt and forced the central government to retreat to
Thebes, where the Pharaoh was treated as a vassal and expected to pay
tribute 43 . The First Horsemen, the Hyksos, retained Egyptian models of
government and took the role of pharaohs as they integrated African Egyptian
cultural traits into their own culture. Apart from the problem of the enemies
within the territory, Africans were at a disadvantage; horses couldn’t survive
the insect life of the African continent, and breeding them en mass was an
expensive exercise.
42 Shaw, Ian (2003). The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
ISBN 0-19-280458-8. Pg189
The African dynasties had to again take refuge in Thebes, Upper Nile in 1730
BC. The few centuries of Hyksos domination permanently affected the
cultural makeup of Egypt and the Northeast region due to intermarrying that
bred a large mulatto Afro-Asiatic race, proto-Arabs. The Jews were initially
the largest group of AfroAsians. They adapted the social structure of Egypt
and transformed it into a world religion that mimicked the African religion,
making it acceptable to Eurasians, who were ascribed an elevated role in the
evolution of human civilization.

Moses, their leader, grew up in a black Egyptian court and temple, and he
realized that the best way to foster unity among his people was through
monotheism. Just like with circumcision and Abraham, Moses copied the
Egyptian social code, because Egypt was the model state of that time (similar
to how many countries today copy the US constitution and form of
democratic government). The biblical Ten Commandments summarized
Egyptian mores as stated in the negative confessions of the Book of the Dead.
Although refuted by many Christians, it is unrealistic to believe that a
minority people could live in a host country for four hundred years and not
reflect that country’s cultural norms. A relationship surely existed between
the similar laws, especially when Moses and his people had no strong culture
apart from that of the Egyptians. According to biblical accounts, they started
as a clan of seventy members of Joseph’s family among more than a million
African people.
The denial of any beneficial relationship is believed to be due to the
expulsion, which resulted in the negative portrayal of Egypt and blacks in
Jewish writings. In Genesis 9:25, Noah is said to have cursed Ham and his
son Canaan to slavery. According to Genesis 10:6, Ham was the father of
blacks to include the people of Cush, Egypt, Punt, and Canaan. This was used
as justification for the genocide and robbing of Africans in Canaan.
43 Ryholt, Kim (January 1997). The Political Situation in Egypt During the Second Intermediate
Period. Copenhagen, Denmark: Museum Tusculanum. ISBN 87-7289-421-0. Pg310
After a long period of subservience, Egyptians were able to get the support of
Nubia and challenged the Hyksos in a 30 year that ended in 1555BC.
Ahmose 1 waged a series of campaigns against the Hyksos to rid them from
the land and established the New Kingdom.
The New Kingdom was strengthened by Tuthmosis 1, Hatshepsut and
Tuthmosis 111 through military campaigns that extended the empire to its
greatest extent. They established a period of unrivalled prosperity by securing
borders and strengthening diplomatic ties with their neighbors. Hatshepsut
was reputed to have made a trip far into Black Africa and cemented loyalties
of Nubia to open access to critical imports.

The constant presence of foreign immigrants and the large mulatto class led
to the extension of the administrative policy of centralization to an un-
African policy of monotheism, introduced by Amenophis. Ramses II of the
Nineteenth Dynasty succeeded in implementing it. This misdirection of the
African religious system continued to undermine Egyptian culture, internally
and externally.
Africans in Egypt remained hostile to the Eurasian men, but they acquired a
taste for white women, who were sold by their men for food and goods, as
exemplified by the story of Abraham and Sarah. This ‘jungle fever’ pastime
proved costly to the sociopolitical health of Africans for a long time to come.
The mixed-race Egyptians exploited their middleman advantage in wrestling
for power and, in so doing, undermined the African system. Mulatto Afro-
Asians abused the system of African extended families by enslaving their
numerous African immigrant cousins. When the numbers of black
immigrants dwindled, the Afro-Asians carried out raids down south.
Administrative posts that were hereditary were filled with the corrupt and
inefficient mixed-race sons of decadent officials. In the typical African
setting of age-gender workgroups and the understanding, partnership role of
the African woman, lineage might be a necessary condition of certain posts,
but the post did go to the best person within the workgroup of inheritors who
had been groomed from birth to take its responsibilities. A foreign mother,
whose interests and background were at odds with the African mentality,
could use the female power inherent in the African system to upset the
system in favour of her unworthy, mixed-race inheritors.
Ramses II and his father, Seti I, were not the rightful heirs to the throne, and
they used the wrong orientation while trying to secure Egypt from attack
from European migrants. An attempt to confront the incessant delta troubles
resulted in the employment of foreign mercenaries in the delta and
coastlands, which subsequently destroyed the black African national
character of the army.
Under Ramesses II Egypt had to withdraw from the Near East with the rise of
the Hittites and the middle Assyrian Empire. The Libyan Berbers and Aegean
sea peoples placed the delta under constant attack that was initially repelled

by the military, but Egypt was soon to lose the area to the Assyrians. Also
beset by internal problems caused by corruption and misrule, Egypt fell into
anarchy and the end of the New Kingdom gave way to another intermediate
period.
Various ethnicities were to usurp power in Lower Nile and the Delta ranging
from Arabs, Jews, Greeks etc. It was not until 727BC that Nubia rose again to
support the Africans in their quest to regain their frontiers. Based on
millennia of trade and acculturation, the Kushite King Piye (Piankhi) left his
Nubian capital of Napata to seize back from Thebes all the way to the
Delta 44 . He laid the foundations of the 25 th dynasty with pharaohs like
Taharqa to usher in a period of renaissance in arts, architecture and religion 45 .
They restored or built temples and monuments throughout the land and the
Nile valley saw the first widespread pyramid building since the Middle
Kingdom, even in Sudan 46 .
Shabaka, Piankhi’s brother, succeeded him in 706 BC and moved the
administrative capital closer to the delta for better control. In spite of this,
Egypt was still belabored by incessant attacks from foreigners in the delta,
which became overwhelmingly white with the arrival and settlement of
Assyrians.
44 Bonnet, Charles (2006). The Nubian Pharaohs. New York: The American University in Cairo Press.
pp. 142–154.ISBN 978-977-416-010-3.
45 Diop, Cheikh Anta (1974). The African Origin of Civilization. Chicago, Illinois: Lawrence Hill
Books. pp. 219–221. ISBN 1-55652-072-7.
46 Emberling, Geoff (2011). Nubia: Ancient Kingdoms of Africa. New York: Institute for the Study of
the Ancient World. pp. 9–11.
The ironclad Assyrians became the new superpower of the Mediterranean.
They took Judah, led the Jews away in chains, and came down heavily on the
Phoenicians and Egyptians scouring for iron to compete, though to no avail.
In collaboration with the Nile delta Eurasian enemies, the Assyrians, with
their iron weapons, gave the black African pharaoh, Taharqa, the youngest
son of Piankhi, a fatal and resounding defeat.
Despite black Egyptians regrouping at Thebes and briefly recapturing
Memphis in 669 BC, Assyrians relaunched an attack on Egypt, with the

backing of the delta feudal lords, and they pillaged all the way to Thebes in
661 BC. With Egypt becoming an Assyrian province under a white pharaoh,
the black pharaoh had to escape south to Napata.
Blacks lost control of Egypt forever and began the long process of retreating
into the Sub-Sahara as each successive white invader ventured farther into
Africa. In 525 BC, Egypt became a province of Persia. This lasted until 332
BC when the Greeks, under Alexander the Great, took over.
The frontline African civilization was gradually withered down by various
Eurasian and Afro-Asian groups. Unfortunately, this was why Eurasians
could later deny any Black African input in one of Africa’s greatest
civilizations.
Ancient Egypt’s Original African cultural complex…
There has been controversy over the race of the ancient Egyptians, as many
argue that Eurasians went out of their way to site an empire at the entrance of
Africa. This is because over the last few millennia, people from the Eurasian
wildernesses migrated back into black Africa. This resulted in the
disfiguration and disorientation of a culture that Eurasians were never able to
truly represent because of the harsh freezing wilderness background encoded
in their cultural psyche that made them prone to war against Man and
environment.
At the beginning of this century, the world watched in horror as Muslim
extremists destroyed historic texts and monuments in Mali and ancient Indian
Buddha statues in Afghanistan. African history repeatedly faced such
barbarism over the last twenty-five hundred years from Jews, Persians,
Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, French, Anglo-Saxons, and others.
The fact that North African countries have been whitened and Arabized over
three thousand years should not surprise anyone, considering the change in
the more distant Americas over a mere five hundred years, where Native
American Indians are now less than 2 percent of the population.
Though the French were the first modern Europeans, in the early 1800s, to
discover and try to erase black Egyptian history, the European cover-up was

perfected in Chicago universities in the early 1900s with dubious radioactive
tests and other ‘scientific’ fallacies confusing the timing and nature of
Egyptian history.
There is much forensic evidence to prove the African-ness of the Egyptian
civilization, which is well elaborated in Chiek Anta Diop’s The African
Origin of Civilization. Diop explained the true nature of Egyptian history, but
being a Senegalese from the grasslands, he failed to realize the significance
of the rainforest, despite alluding to the fact that the Yoruba and other forest
West Africans held the key to ancient Egypt.
Apart from the remaining statues that clearly portray Africans, many other
cultural and social similarities exist, ranging from mode of worship to social
organization. African languages were not completely differentiated by 5000
BC, and older mainstream dates given for Afro-Asian languages were derived
inaccurately from glottochronology. The basic estimation is that after a
thousand years of divergence, 74 percent of the common vocabulary will be
retained 47 . This is based on trends exhibited by Indo-European languages that
don’t apply directly to African settings, where the attempts of Eurasian
invaders to erase the presence of a superior African grassland culture makes
the actual divergence appear older than rainforest Africans’ divergence
amongst each other.
When Menes united Lower and Upper Egypt, African languages and religion
were still similar. The savannah grasslands spoke a slightly differentiated
major lingua franca from the forest regions, especially because the spread of
the Sahara caused black communities to move closer to the riverbanks of the
Nile, Benue, and Niger. Though new linguistic and cultural traits began to
appear with the opening of the Lower Nile, Africans retained the tenets of
their Ifalike beliefs: communal feasts, naturalistic gods, circumcision of both
sexes, prohibition of homosexuality, religious and social tolerance, and
‘democracy’.
47 Elizabeth Isichei, A History of African Societies to 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), 47.
After improving the Nile delta, black African Pharaohs built Memphis where
they worshipped in true African fashion. Although they acknowledged

Shango in some texts, they devised new gods in the African naturalistic style.
In the stormy rainforest where thunder was the most prominent weather
feature, Shango was one of the most prominent gods. There in the sunny
desert, Amon-Ra, the sun god, took the center stage (in Yoruba, amon means
a terrifying spirit; ara is ‘thunder’, and i-ra-wo is ‘a shining star’).
The totemic symbols used in the rainforest and the Nile religions were
similar, with snake and bird symbols used to represent the most
supernaturally important beliefs, especially in Yoruba and Egyptian cultures
with snake goddesses Osunmare and Wadjet. The allknowing eye of
Anyanwu was replicated in Egyptian mythology, while its goddess
Ma’at/Mother Earth was similar to the Igbo goddess Ala, both being central
to the belief systems.
Their divine kings were usually masters of tradition and knowledge, and they
respected the gods of their ancestors. In both Egyptian and Yoruba cultures,
when the king died (to become a god), essential parts had to be removed from
his body before another king could take on his divine, earthly powers.

Khufu (Cheops)
(built the Sphinx and Great pyramid of Giza)
The pictures of their statues show these pharaohs were undoubtedly black

until Eurasians arrived after Egypt passed its zenith with the building of the
pyramids. The first pyramids were not built in Egypt but in western Sudan
and Sahara by black Africans who later moved east to the Nile due to
desertification. The Igbo Nsude stepped pyramids looked like the stepped
pyramids in Sudan and Western Sahara, which were much older than those of
Egypt.
Nsudde Pyramids in Igboland

The Sphinx
Osiris

Pharaoh Mentuhotep, 11th Dynasty, 2100 BC.
The pharaohs ensured that they kept law and order and were not initially
tyrannical, but to use the Nile and its seasonal floods in the most optimal
fashion, a tendency towards centralization and overbearing government
arose. Socioeconomic and natural laws were codified in religious rituals
performed by black African priests who eventually departed from the oral
secrecy of Ifa traditions by writing them down in the Book of the Dead.
The concept of death was similar in Yorubaland and Igboland, where people
endeavored to provide themselves a comfortable afterlife. The celebration of
passing to another spiritual level was peculiar to Africans, which made the
Eurasians who came into Egypt call Africans ‘death worshippers’ (Nekro
Manteia in Greek, which became Nigro Mantia in Latin). The mantia was
lost, and Africans were called Nigro, Negro, or Niger depending on the
European tribe.
The Yoruba word for burial is sin oku (‘worshipping the dead’), and even
though the pyramids in the forest couldn’t stand the test of time, this social
trait is still present among Yoruba, who remain the world’s merriest
mourners. In present-day New York, Chicago, and most world-class cities,
the Yoruba ‘spray money’ at funeral parties. Even poor Yorubas in Nigeria
endeavor to spiritually ‘turn over’ their long-dead relatives once a while,
whereby people practically shower friends and strangers with money in a
party atmosphere. One-dollar notes are shunned, falling to the floor, while
unaffordable hundred dollar bills are ‘sprayed’ away, as they celebrate
relating the present to a time of past glory and plenty.
Cultural beliefs apart from burial social traits were passed on from the forest
and pervaded the entirety of Egyptian society. There was freedom of worship,
freedom of association and freedom of trade extended to foreigners. There
was also appreciable equality of the sexes in religious and political settings,
as Yoruba women controlled the trade with the all-powerful Iyalode roles.
Women held similar roles, with black Egyptian priestesses being a strong
societal force behind the pharaoh, and both sexes were circumcised at birth.

Like other Yoruba cultural traits that spread to other parts of the world, the
spread of circumcision to other peoples was documented in the Bible.
In Genesis 12, Abraham, the forerunner of the Jews, took refuge in Egypt due
to a famine in Mesopotamia. When he arrived, he came up with a feeble
excuse to pimp his wife to the pharaoh by calling her his sister in return for
food, gold, and animals. Unfortunately, Sarah gave the pharaoh and his
family sexual diseases, and they were deported. It is said that God instructed
Abraham to begin circumcision as a step towards building a great nation.
Obviously, the only great nation in their arid world was Egypt, from whence
they had just been deported. It is only logical that the circumcision lesson
was well learnt, because they realized that a strong, healthy nation had to be
protected from sexual diseases. The only problem was that because Abraham
devised the solution, he was not aware of female circumcision and took only
half of the lesson.
This partial circumcision had huge ramifications, as the Jews disseminated
the practice of male circumcision, which is still popular. Ironically, the West
now condemns the practice of circumcising girls in the first few weeks of life.
Although only a small minority still practices the tradition, the Yoruba and
other Africans have seen socalled authorities from Western governments, in
television talk shows, complaining about depriving women of the right to
enjoy sex for its own sake. In the modern world, it is difficult to argue for
‘sex for procreation only’, despite the rise in HIV/AIDS and other Sexually
transmitted diseases.
Apart from the social traits observed by Egyptian society, tangible
technologies and trade items were imported from the south. After the
redirection of the Nile, West Africa plants were introduced including the
bottle gourd, watermelon, and the tamarind fruit. Much later, cotton and
tobacco were passed to Egypt or sometimes ‘jumped’ to Mesopotamia and
India. Egyptian barley and wheat were a continuation of the sorghum/millet
grain culture invented in the African savannah.
Egypt did not give the Sub-Sahara new technology, either agricultural or
metallurgical. No new plants were introduced from Egypt into the western
Sudan or Niger forests, and black African metal technologies were developed
independently. Iron working got to western Sudan and Nigeria before Egypt,

and the Yoruba lost-wax method of casting metals like bronze was one of the
best in the world. There is ample proof that Southern Nigeria had got into the
Iron Age centuries before anywhere else in the world.
Igbo women were the iron and steel smelters, with a production mode
encoded in their culture. The women smelt iron naked due to the extreme
temperatures.
Until the 1800s and the discovery of gold in South Africa, West Africa was
also the world’s major Gold Belt. Initially, it was mainly mined by secret
cults of Yoruba. They sold it to the savannah peoples who sold it to Asia
through Egypt.
Meanwhile, the troubles in Egypt had ramifications for the SubSaharan
Africans who wanted to trade or migrate. New trade routes and empires were
created to bypass the trouble spots on the Nile. To the northwest of Egypt,
Phoenicians and Sub-Saharan Africans formed a trading post called Carthage
in 813 BC on the coast of present-day Tunisia.
BLACK AFRICAN CARTHAGE

With the influx of Caucasians from Central Asia, Black African trade and
influence westward. To the south of Egypt, Meroe (slightly south of the Blue
and White Nile confluence in present-day Sudan and Ethiopia, around the
Blue Nile headwaters and the Omo Valley) continued to absorb the
population influx.
Ethiopia, the Biblical land of Punt, existed as a vibrant community before
political harmonization along the Nile and the Ancient Egyptian Old
Kingdom. The first king of Ethiopia around 4470BC was an Original African
named Ori, meaning head/leader in Yoruba. Due to the loss of a land route to
Mesopotamia, Ethiopia was overshadowed by Egypt that became the frontier
land empire in Africa. Trade was recorded between Egypt and Ethiopia,
especially in myrrh, ‘and Egyptian ships sailed the Red Sea as far as the
myrrhcountry 48 ’. In addition to myrrh, it is believed that ivory, gold and

many other products were imported from Ethiopia, but there was a
misconception by later Eurasian historians of what really was Ethiopia.
Ethiopia , meaning Ethiop/Aithiop area, was initially used to refer to blacks
from outside Egypt. It was derived from the Greek word aithiops from
aithein, meaning ‘to burn’, while ops meant ‘face’. The Greeks around the
Egyptian coast called their African civilizers ‘Nekro Mantias’ and the recent
African migrants ‘Aithiops’. To the Greeks, Africa was like a straight line
along the Nile, with Egypt in the front and all other Africans in a country to
its south called Ethiopia. This wrong impression was fueled by the perception
that most black traders who traveled to Egypt joined the Nile to the south of
the delta region.
From recent studies, it appears Ethiopia might have engaged in foreign trade
earlier than previously thought, due to evidence of early iron-working and
mining by the Mashariki Bantus and Zimbabweans, as well as Ethiopian
shipping. The eastern half of Africa appears to have been a source of minerals
and metals that would have been traded through Ethiopia to Asia, however
they remained unknown until the trouble in Nile Delta that made traders seek
alternative African ports.
The first internationally recognized kingdom in Ethiopia was known as D’mt
in Tigray with its capital at Yeha. D’mt rose to power around 10 th century BC
and was based on the socioeconomic linkage between the Horn of Africa
(Ethiopia) and Yemen (Southern Arabia/Mesopotamia) 49 . This and other
proto-Aksum empires 50 had strong ties with Arabia and were the nearest
ports to Asia.
48 Agatharchides, in Wilfred Harvey Schoff (Secretary of the Commercial Museum of Philadelphia)
with a foreword by W. P. Wilson, Sc. Director, The Philadelphia Museums.Periplus of the Erythraean
Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century, Translated from the
Greek and Annotated (1912). New York, New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., pages 50 (for
attribution) and 57 (for quote
The accumulation of Eurasians in Mesopotamia led to the resident blacks
moving farther into the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia and Yemen), where
they were cornered into widely intermingling and exchanging cultural traits
with Eurasians, which led to a number of new Afro-Asian groups. While
many of the blacks in Canaan coexisted and intermingled with white refugees

and formed Semitic groups like the Jews, some Canaanites relocated farther
down the Arabian Peninsula or the Egyptian delta and coast.
Phoenicians went west to the African Mediterranean coast. This was in line
with them being a seafaring people who eventually sailed to scantly
populated Spain and Britain in search of the metals needed by the Egyptian
super-state. Other North African ports were later created with the westward
expansion of whites into Europe. This led to more direct routes across the
desert in Roman times, when areas to the east of the Nile were identified as
Ethiopia and those to the west as Negritia.
Trans-Saharan trade routes were created across the desert from the Niger and
Lake Chad area that supplied Carthage with gold, an increasingly popular
item used for exchange in the Asian spice market. Without the guidance of
rivers to help the traders, travel across the desert was a daunting task, slightly
assisted by the few oases on the way and the later advent of the compass.
On the whole, Africans were able to showcase their culture to the world in
Egypt more than they could have in the forest, especially in building stone
pyramids the likes of which could not stand the abrasive weather of the Yam
Belt. However, the population of the one-river Egyptian state was never as
high, or as prosperous, as the Lower Niger Yam Belt. Unfortunately but not
unexpectedly, the ostentatious life and culture of Egyptian blacks living on
the frontier attracted foreign thieves and usurpers, who would not relent until
it was destroyed, from the Nile all the way back to its source in West Africa.
49 Phillipson. "The First Millennium BC in the Highlands of Northern Ethiopia and South– Central
Eritrea: A Reassessment of Cultural and Political Development". African Archaeological Review(2009)
26:257–274
50 Uhlig, Siegbert (ed.), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica: D-Ha. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005. p.
185.
The fall of Egypt to Eurasian control adversely affected all black Africans.
The turmoil in Egypt made Africans move west to Carthage and south farther
up the Nile, but due to the narrow floodplains of Nubia, the excess people
had to move farther up the Nile and into the Blue Nile, which led to the
Ethiopian plateaus and Omo River Valley.
The Assyrians and Persians (Iranians) also caused huge displacements in

Arabia that resulted in blacks retreating farther into the arid Arabian
Peninsula and eventually crossing over the Red Sea into Ethiopia. The initial
crossovers might have been made by unmixed Africans, but soon their mixed
race brothers followed, as the Assyrians and Persians spared no one.
The diverse waves of refugees streaming into Ethiopia had different
ramifications for the locals. While some Africans fled immediately, most of
them stayed to see whether they could coexist peacefully with the
immigrants. Despite learning the languages of the invaders and
intermarrying, many of the Africans eventually realized that the bellicose
Afro-Asians were impossible to live with as they lost their land and capital
under racist tyrannies.
The Afro-Asian blacks who migrated south, like the Luo, realized that
indigenous Africans, who viewed them as foreigners, did not particularly
welcome them. Many of the native Africans in Ethiopia were engaged in
sedentary pastoralism, whereby they planted grains and kept medium-size
herds or fished, but the refugees were more than often full-time weaponized
herdsmen. Eventually, the unmixed Africans had to move farther south, away
from the constant influx of war-like refugee pastoralists like the Masai.
At present, there are more than seventy distinct languages in Ethiopia, and
most of them are Afro-Asian, reflecting the amount of turmoil experienced
from about 700 BC to 1900 AD. Based on the Indo-European languages
model, glottochronologists wrongly claim that the Ethiopian Afro-Asian
languages formed before 5000 BC, and they fail to take into full
consideration the constant sociopolitical upheaval caused by incessant and
varied migration flow. One of the first waves of Afro-Asians, a mixture of
those from Egypt and those from Yemen (Arabia), took over the
northwestern Ethiopian plateaus, where they later formed the Axum empire.
The unmixed Africans moved farther into Kenya and Tanzania or west to
Chad and northern Nigeria.
Many of the displaced native Africans returned to the NigerBenue area and
even to the Yoruba and Igbo areas, but the large resident populations easily
absorbed them without any Asiatic trace in the language, political structures,
or dress. The return of the migrants led some ‘learned’ Yoruba, including
Samuel Johnson (who propagated the name Yoruba in his 1897 first written

history of the Yoruba), to wrongly claim that the Yoruba migrated from the
arid lands after the Middle East upheavals.
The Oduduwa dynasty normally referred to by Johnson and others in their
historical accounts, actually replaced earlier dynasties in Ife, while his
descendants replaced the eastern Bini Ogiso dynasty before going to Oyo.
Oduduwa was the enthronement of the Olokun, Second Horsemen era over
previous Ogun dynasties with the use of Ifa that had been converted from a
science to religion. Apart from the possibility that the Afro-Asian upheavals
might have brought indirect benefits through the rise in the price of gold,
Oduduwa or Oranmiyan showed no Afro-Asian influence in language, dress,
political organization, or any other cultural trait.
The Afro-Asian migrants must have been minorities who left no trace of
Asiatic languages, and the mistaken perception is largely due to the tendency
of Christian, Muslim, and Eurocentric black scholars trying to forcibly link
African history to the current global sphere of influence. There is
overwhelming evidence that the linguistic differentiation between the
Yoruba, Edo, and Igbo occurred in situ with no sign of migrating from
anywhere or of external influences on their languages. They remained
original African forest people as their tonal language changed gradually
throughout most of black Africa.
The savannah peoples of central and northern Nigeria were served by the
Kaduna and Sokoto River basins, which flowed into the Niger, and the Yobe
basin that ended in Lake Chad. The original inhabitants, like the Gwari,
Birom and Kanuri, migrated north along these river basins from the Niger
delta to form the Nok civilization, until they were split by people from the
troubled lands of the northeast. The unmixed, local Africans merged back
into Nigeria’s Middle Belt, which was the African cultural hothouse.
Hundreds of ancient, unknown states developed and disintegrated and then
moved into Cameroon, spreading across Africa. The Middle Belt still has
more than a hundred original ‘non-Asian’ African languages.
The Akoko, Nupe, Igala, Igbira, Anaguta, and other Middle Belt people in
Nigeria developed polities near the Niger-Benue confluence, which was a
busy point between different ecological and economic zones. Based in the
wooded grassland between the southern rainforest and northern Sahel

savannah, the Middle Belt produced yams as well as grains. It serviced the
close cousins, the Yoruba and the Hausa, who passed through to trade gold,
tobacco, kola, cotton, palm oil, and a host of other goods. The Igala were
riverine people who plied the Niger, acting as middlemen between the
regions of the Lower Niger.
The Yoruba extended west into the slim savannah of present-day Republic of
Benin and the adjacent forests of Togo and eastern Ghana, where they
became the Aja people (Ewe, Fon, Ga, etc.). The expansion process was
slower because of having to clear the forest as the Gold Belt shifted west, but
the Aja communities mined and fished the Gold Coast up to the Volta River.
Their Yoruba overlords, known as the Eso or Eyo, sold gold to the savannah
peoples later known as the Hausa and Mande. To the immediate north of
Yorubaland, along the River Niger into Burkina Faso and Mali, are the Gur
subgroup of languages.
The ancient Niger delta people, who migrated to the sources of the Niger,
Gambia, and Senegal rivers in the Guinea highlands, were scattered by Afro-
Asian upheavals. This group of West Africans, who had been in the forefront
of the grain agricultural revolution, also mined gold on the western outskirts
of the Yam Belt and Gold Belt in present-day Guinea and Ivory Coast. The
upheavals saw the southward shift of people from the Upper Niger grasslands
in Mali, Guinea, and Upper Volta into the forests of Ivory Coast and Ghana.
Due to the lack of an escape route like the Nigeria-Cameroon waterways,
many communities became Mande as many of the overrun, original grassland
people of Nigeria became Hausa.
West African gold continued to attract foreign trade and made some goldtrading
savannah polities known outside black Africa. Like Egypt and
Ethiopia, the frontier polities called empires were not necessarily the richest,
safest, or most populous.
The Igbo enjoyed a relatively prosperous existence in their forest homeland,
undisturbed by internal strife or the wars in the savannahs, and even if
through a complex network of middlemen, they still enjoyed the luxuries of
foreign trade.
The Eze Nri was the priest-king who dictated social life through religious

rituals, which included the Ozo title system and Ikenga, the cult of the right
hand, ‘with which a person works out a successful living in this difficult
world’. * The Igbo planted yams, made iron tools and good clothes that they
exchanged for salt and seafood with the riverine Ijaw people to the south,
while they bought grains and meat from the varied peoples to the north. A
few Igbo merchants traveled long distances to trade in Yorubaland or the
savannas all the way to Egypt, even though the vast majority of the Igbo
retained their yam diet and African beliefs that fostered peace and prosperity.
The prosperity fostered a population increase in eastern Nigeria that couldn’t
be siphoned off to the far north after the Egyptian upheavals. This resulted in
an increase in the numbers of Africans, later named Bantus, migrating
through the Cameroon river system into the northwest Congo River basin.
The population overflow into Cameroon was not only from Igbos but also
people from around the Benue River in present-day Nigeria. The Jukun, Tiv,
Idoma, and who diverged from the main body of Yoruba, Edo, Igala and
Igbo, and other original Africans went through Gboko into Cameroon and
into the Kongos.
Though the bulk of the Congo River basin was in the rainforest region, it was
on a high plateau that prevented yams but allowed palm trees. The lack of
suitable crops prevented a population build-up until a variant of yam—the
cocoyam—was introduced. The migration through the complex waterways
and the natural, clear ground on riverbanks led the populations to settle along
the banks, fishing and planting grains and cocoyams for survival. The oldest
of the western Bantu communities was the Teke people on the middle Ubangi
and Congo rivers. They later migrated downstream to become the Kongos
and Loango. The Bobangi, Mongo, Luba and Kuba were part of the
communities settled to the south and east of the Upper Congo riverbasin.
* Isichei, A History of African Societies to 1870, 247.
Black Africans known as eastern Bantus migrated east along the upper
Ubangi and Congo rivers to the Nile and Lake Victoria, where they began
forming the Bunyoro, Buganda, and Rwanda communities. Some slowly
filtered south to fill southern Africa as the Sukuma, Bemba, Shona, and
Nguni (Zulu and Xhosa). They were mixed agriculturists but concentrated on
pastoralism because of the aridity of eastern and southern Africa. Eastern

Bantus also settled on the grass highlands of East Africa.

Chapter 4: The Rise of the Second Horseman and
Eurasian Dogmatization
Jewish, Assyrian, Greek, and Roman campaigns in Saharan Africa;
Christianity starts in Africa (500 BC to AD 500)
Alexander the Greek’s conquest of Egypt in 332 BC spelt more doom for
Africans, not so much in the direct influence that they had in Africa but
through the diffusion of civilization to other areas of southern and Western
Europe in what is known as the Spatha (Sword) Migration that started the
Second Horseman Era. The Greeks, whose barren homeland drove them to
trade and colonization, built settlements in Italy, southern France, and Spain,
whose inhabitants eventually made direct links to the North Africa coast.
The Greeks initially settled in Libya and then moved into the Lower Nile
delta as merchants and mercenaries under the Saite kings. They became more
important in Egyptian life when it was conquered by Alexander the Great and
given to Ptolemy, one of his generals. The city of Alexandria was built in his
honor and made the intellectual center of Egypt, which was divided between
the wealthy Greek-speaking oppressors and the poor, indigenous black
Egyptians. This further encouraged intermarrying and watered down the
black African stock in Egypt.
There was also an influx of Jews into Alexandria and its surroundings, where
they formed part of the cosmopolitan elite and intermarried with the ruling
Europeans to shed any trace of blackness. The Jews had written the first five
books of the Torah in Babylon where they had been enslaved. Being one of
the first usurpers of Egypt in the Hyksos invasion more than a thousand years
before the Greeks, the Jewish religion was comforting to the white usurpers
of Africa, because it condoned the mistreatment of blacks by relegating them
to slavery, a common practice from the time of the Jewish usurpation of
Canaanites. Jews were at the center of the Eurasian intellectual world in
Alexandria, where they legitimizing robbing Africans by converting the Old
Testament from Hebrew to Greek.
Although the Greek administration was credited with the evolution of new

farming and irrigation technologies, the benefits did not reach the indigenous
Egyptians. The reopening of the Suez Canal, initially opened during Assyrian
indirect rule, led to increased trade. The opening of northeast and eastern
Africa led to foreign exploitation. This further complicated the Afro-Asian
situation in Axum (Ethiopia) through its port in Adulis, as even the king of
Axum spoke Greek. The Adulis port was controlled by foreigners, especially
the Greeks and Jews.
In the Mediterranean, the Phoenicians continued their seafaring trade from
Carthage and their cities Sidon and Tyre in modern-day Syria, as well as in
Spain. Carthage became a major terminal of the Trans-Saharan trade from
West Africa, especially in gold. The North African Mediterranean coast,
called the Maghreb, soon became a cultural center where Romans, Greeks,
and other Europeans created settlements on the coast to take advantage of the
western shift of the Trans-Saharan gold trade.
Being more African oriented than Eurasian, the Phoenicians rejected the
European migrants who were milling around the Maghreb. Among other
nations, Phoenicia attacked Libya to its east, which was the largest European
settlement on the coast, and the new Roman settlement on the nearby Italian
Peninsula, which was attempting to divert its trade. This earned the
Phoenicians a bad name in Western history as a wild, barbaric people. At the
time, it was the only nation on the Mediterranean not ruled and dominated by
whites.
The Greeks enjoyed a commanding presence during their direct rule of
Egypt, forming pharaoh dynasties known as Ptolemies. There were fourteen
Ptolemais, and Cleopatra was the last and the only one to speak Egyptian.
She committed suicide after being defeated by the Romans.
The Romans started the 2000-year Era of the Second Horseman with their
introduction of long Spatha swords for imperialistic motives disguised with
religion and ideology.They stated their imperialistic ascendancy with the
burning of Carthage in the Third Punic War of 147 BC. Carthage (presentday
Tunis) was located nearly opposite the Roman Peninsula and engaged in
two wars with the Romans before it was destroyed. From Carthage, the
Romans colonized two small Numidian kingdoms based in Morocco and
Algeria, which were cultural hotbeds of African and European descendants.

The Romans won Egypt in 30 BC, but its administration remained with the
Greeks, who continued to dictate the intellectual discourse in Alexandria
along with the influential Jewish population. The Romans moved up the Nile
to Meroe, where they met stiff opposition from the black Queen Candace and
her army. Unable to defeat the Black African army over the distance
separating them, the Romans eventually signed a treaty with Meroe in 21 BC,
and it remained independent.
With narrower Upper Nile floodplains, Meroe was a small polity that
couldn’t sustain a viable and independent African state at the edge of the
savannah and desert. Its foreign trade was gradually overtaken by the Afro-
Asian Axum empire, which attacked and destroyed it around AD 350.
The Maghreb North African coast was heavily exploited under Rome. It
provided two-thirds of Rome’s corn while Egypt provided the rest. The
Roman Empire in Africa was limited to the Mediterranean coast and did not
extend to local Afro-Asian Berbers, who lived barely fifty miles off the coast
on the Atlas Mountains grasslands and farther down in the Sahara Desert.
The large European coastal Maghreb court and elite spoke Latin, while those
in Egypt stuck to Greek.
On the European side of the Mediterranean, the importation of African food,
technology, and gold led to populating Western Europe. The Romans spread
to France, Spain, and Portugal, attracting the Germanic peoples of Germany,
Denmark, England, and Holland from the Russian and Central Asian plains.
This was to spell trouble for the Romans and greater havoc in Africa.
With Meroe’s decline and eventual demise following that of Egypt in
northeast Africa, the original African socioeconomic frontier moved back a
step from the Eurasians into the western Sudan on the southwest edge of the
Sahara Desert. Many Sudanic kingdoms were ancient midpoints on the
shortest routes between the West African forest and the increasingly mixed
population on the northwest Saharan Maghreb. The European and Afro-Asian
settlers on the northwest African coast did most of the trading for the Roman
Empire across the Mediterranean.
A black trade zone and empire called Ghana, in southwest Sahara, expanded
west from the Niger bend around Gao in modern Mali to the Senegal in

modern Senegal and Mauritania. The Soninke, Sape, Akan, Bia and other
peoples had flourished in the fertile grassland plains around the watershed of
the Niger, Gambia, and Senegal rivers. Apart from the gold trade that initially
put the area in the Muslim history books, there was an ancient, viable,
interregional trade between the wooded grasslands, the Sahel savannah, and
the Sahara Desert, which had large salt deposits. The Sape, Akan, and Bia
migrated into the safety of the forests to the south, in Ghana and Ivory Coast,
or were transformed into the Mande by Muslim invasions in present-day
Mali, Guinea, and Senegal.
The savannah-based empire called Ghana was the first West Africa empire to
enjoy recognition from the outside world. Being on the western boundaries of
the Gold Belt, the area’s economy and population increased by the trading
across the desert with the Maghreb coast and those trading with Lower Niger.
Middle Niger, the southern limit of the Sahara Desert in presentday Mali, saw
growth in the settlements around the Niger bend. These settlements
eventually came under the name of Jenne, and Gao eventually became a
larger trading center than Meroe. Old Jenne was settled as a trade town from
at least 250 BC, while others date from about 500 BC.
In the west of Lower Niger, the main body of the Yoruba gradually split into
two. While the oldest Yoruba ethnic groups, the Ifes Ekiti, Ijesa, Ijebu, and
Edo, remained in the south and eastern Yoruba rainforests, the western
Yoruba (Egun) pushed the receding gold mines west toward the Volta area in
the center of modern Ghana. Yorubaland also extended north toward the
regional grassland markets, ostensibly to prevent direct access to the mines
by the savannah traders. The northern Yoruba created the Oyo empire, and its
capital was called Oyo-Ile, although Ile-Ife remained the spiritual capital over
the larger Yoruba sphere.
Other Yoruba city-states developed, like the Ijesa kingdom, which had 134
towns and villages with 70 large quarters in Ilesa, its capital. The Ijesas,
Ekitis, Akokos and Edos still used yams as their main staple and weren’t
enticed by the ‘sneaky’ northwestern gold trade of Oyo. The Akoko in
northeastern Yorubaland engaged in regional yam trade around the Niger-
Benue confluence.

The Benin/Edo city-states coalesced to become the coastal Edo empire that
extended west through southern Yorubaland via Akure, all the way to Lagos
and into the land of the Ajas and Fon in Dahomey. The Bini/Edo language
was a mixture of the oldest Yoruba dialects, Ijebu and Ekiti, with Igbo. To
the east, the Edo empire extended to the western Ibo on their side of the
Niger River, but on the other side, the eastern Ibo remained out of their
control.
After the climax of the Igbo’s Nri kingdom, the Igbo opted for a
decentralized village democracy that came together for defense, attempting to
form an egalitarian society before most other societies conceived of the
possibility. The Igbo entrusted religious and ‘law and order’ duties to
outsiders for the sake of fairness and to prevent those given the power from
abusing or extending their sphere of influence. The separation of state and
religion was their downfall millennia later when the ‘foreigners’ sold man on
the altar of God.
Around the time that the Romans took Egypt, Jesus was born across the
border in Israel and came to Egypt, the intellectual center, which was
reflected by his summarization of all laws. Sweeping aside the legal,
intellectual, and spiritual arguments, he said that the love of God and of one’s
neighbor was paramount. He accused the intellectual scribes of being a false
and misguided ‘brood of vipers’. Having visited Africa, Jesus summarized
the basic philosophy of the remaining poor Egyptian people from Ile-Ife, the
Land of Love, where the love of nature, God, and one’s neighbor was
paramount.
Jesus saw that despite the early warnings against symbolism in the second of
the Ten Commandments, Judaism and other Middle East religions, with their
strong monotheistic laws, had become tools for the upper classes that vied for
power and profit. Jesus went to the temple to chase out the traders, and five
days later, he was crucified.
Departing from the African traditions whereby worshippers placed food at
secluded shrines in a free-sharing communal spirit, in the arid nations, greedy
foreign exchange and metal dealers conducted their trade on benches and
tables in temples. The word bank came from banca, which is Latin for the
‘bench’ used by money-changers in temples before the Industrial Age (they

then transferred to the office buildings next door). Temples were also the
major tax collection points for the ruling class across the Mediterranean and
the Middle East. It was no surprise that five days after arriving in Jerusalem
as a stranger, the upper classes had Jesus crucified for disrupting the temple’s
business, despite feeding thousands free!
The adulterated Egyptian cults of Osiris and Isis, and Judaism to a lesser
extent, were the most prominent religions in Europe, North Africa, and the
Middle East, and all had commercial temples. With the death of Jesus, a new
religion, Christianity, was ushered in. Christianity won converts, because the
common man couldn’t identify with the official religions that had been
corrupted by colonial masters.
The story of Jesus and his message of hope for the poor and oppressed
appealed to many in the Mediterranean world, especially politically and
economically disenfranchised blacks. Women and the poor were the first
Christian converts. African gold meant more to the rich merchants trading in
temples than the free giving-spirit of the Niger delta’s Garden of Eden.
Contrary to modern vanities that depict him as a blonde, blueeyed European,
Jesus must have been an Afro-Asian whose skin was light brown (like most
Jews until their skin became whiter between 700 and 1400). Initially, North
Africa had as many Christians as any region in the world, and in the third
century AD, Egypt was one of three regions with a majority Christian
population, as Alexandria competed with Antioch in Syria and Rome for
prominence.
Having witnessed how the Greeks used their language and the Jewish Bible
to remotely control Ethiopia, the Romans saw an opportunity to use
Christianity to unite their empire and raise taxes. But, they wanted to make it
wholly European and shed the shadow of ancient Egypt and African
civilization in their sociopolitical life. The use of religion and dogma with the
long Spatha sword for conquests was the beginning of the era of The Second
Horseman over the next two thousand years; Islam, racist capitalism,
communism were to devise newer weapons to globally spread their cultural
and economic imperialism.
Powerful and whiter Jews in Mesopotamia supported the idea and provided

the intellectual and religious arguments. In the fourth and fifth centuries, the
churches were faced with theological controversies that had roots in racism
and nationalism under the guise of a debate over the nature of Christ. Some
even claimed he was born in Egypt. Emperor Constantine counted this
development inimical to the unity of the Roman Empire, and he called the
Council of Nicea, which ruled against the Eastern/African churches.
Again in 451, the Romans summoned the Council of Chalcedon that ruled
against the African Eastern Church over the nature of
Christ. The African Eastern Christians found this unacceptable and broke
away to become the Monophysite church, which was known as the Orthodox
Church. Three of the five Orthodox Churches were African: Ethiopian,
Egyptian, and Nubian (Central Sudan). The Latin Maghreb coast had its
divisions, although they were not as powerful as those dividing the Greekspeaking
areas of Africa. Nevertheless, the Afro-Asian Berbers used the
Donatist Church to promote their nationalistic and sociopolitical problems in
the form of theological arguments.
The church in Axum (Ethiopia) was the strongest and most successful in
Africa, as even its king was baptized before Emperor Constantine. Ethiopia
had been a Greek enclave for some time. Unlike Egypt and the Maghreb
coast, where the poor and women were the initial converts, Christianity in
Axum diffused hierarchically from the ruling to the lower classes. Churches
were built and traditional African values were shunned as the Afro-Asian
minority monarchy ruled as a Solomonic dynasty for six hundred years. Once
converted by the Romans, Nubia became heavily Christianized and built
churches throughout the land lined with beautiful palm trees.
Notwithstanding these developments, Afro-Asians and Africans were
alienated from the church after it was hijacked by the Roman Empire and the
rich, who turned it into a European club. The religious money-making
schemes and the oppressive taxation introduced into Christianity paved the
way, in the seventh century, for a new religious and sociopolitical ideology
called Islam.

Chapter 5: Peaceful Islam from Afro-Asiatic
Horsemen with the Scimitar
Creation and rise of new Afro-Asian groups that challenge European and
African sociopolitical structures (AD 500 to 1400)
Islam was supposed to bring a peaceful and fair way of life to the poor and
oppressed, but, to date, brought a great deal of war and oppression to black
Africans. Beginning in 622, when Muhammad appealed to the downtrodden
against the corrupt rulers of Arabia and had to flee Medina for Mecca, Islam
appealed to the large number of Afro-Asians who felt alienated by the
European hijacking of Christianity.
Islam was originally viewed as a Christian reformation sect, and its
practitioners were known as Ishmaelites, the Arab ethnic group believed to
have originated from Ishmael, the son of Abraham and Hagar, the black
Egyptian woman. Like the Jews, the Arabs were a product of the continuous
Eurasian migration and intermarrying in Egypt and the Middle East. Arabs
were initially dark-skinned AfroAsians, but with time, they whitened
considerably by intermarrying with the new Eurasian elites in an environment
where African power had been overthrown and its essence continuously
eroded.
With the permanent overthrow of Africans, the sociopolitical settings in
Egypt and Arabia were similar to that of present-day Brazil and the colonial
Americas. Europeans were the ruling elite, mulattos were the middle class,
and black Africans were firmly and permanently relegated to ‘the bottom of
the pile’. The Arabs, who had at least a generation more African blood than
the Jews, felt alienated when the Romans hijacked Christianity and the
lighter-skinned AfroAsian Jews and white Greeks continued as local elites.
Even in the backwaters of arid Arabia, which hardly warranted a direct Greek
Byzantine rule, the lightest Afro-Asians ruled while Africans remained at the
bottom of the social ladder. Most fullblooded Africans migrated back to the
Sub-Sahara, and those who remained tried to marry Eurasian or ingratiate
themselves to their light-skinned rulers.

There were a few who believed that the ‘good old days’ would return. Many
of these peasant and enslaved Africans supported the middle-class, Arabic
demand for a better system and a return to old values, when Muhammad and
his believers overthrew the ruling elite. Like most middle-class revolutions,
the system was changed to suit its protagonists, which was why they were
initially viewed as reforming Christians.
The new religion was a mere mutation of the 2 nd Horseman with a sword to
enforce his religious dogma. The Arabs were to tribalize God in their own
image and use it as the foundation of their cultural imperialism and disguise
to control other people and their resources. Religion was a guise to wrestle
power over scare resources, instead of the brute force of the First Horseman,
the era of Ogun. Religion was to be a captivating mystery aptly represented
by the Yorubas concept of Olokun, the Orisha of the Oceans, whose depths
and diversity of life captivated the human mind. Oduduwa was Olokun.
By virtue of its population and economic clout in the Middle East, Egypt was
the main target in the initial Islamic expansion years after Muhammad’s
death. Egypt’s government was easily taken with the cooperation of the
Coptic Church, which handed the Egyptian fleet to invading Muslims in
return for recognition as a partner. With the promise of alms for the poor and
protection of merchants and strong antitheft laws, the population in the
Middle East fell in line against the European-centered Christianity that was
so insensitive to their regional ethnic and cultural needs. The peasant-led
Orthodox Coptic Church in Egypt had fallen out with the Western churches
and was glad to get rid of the ‘king’s men’ in Egypt.
This all amounted to empty promises over the next thousand years, but it was
obvious from the beginning, when Arabs refused to acknowledge their
African beginnings, like their Jewish cousins. The Arabs and other Afro-
Asians were ultimately Eurocentric, because they were of the same
disposition that did not foment harmonious natural production, but forceful
subjugation of nature that results in a constant state of war between man and
environment. Apart from their lighter skin and philosophies that differed
from those of the Africans, the Arabs could never have sided with Africans,
because they were part of the ‘have nots’. They desperately needed the
resources the Niger-Benue had in abundance, people and gold, which put

them in competition with Europeans.
Prophet Muhammad died ten years after fleeing Mecca and becoming the
head of a large Arab state, but he was succeeded by four caliphs who were
close associates during his lifetime. It wasn’t till Umar’s reign (634 to 644)
that the supposedly peaceful Muslims began building empires with the
capture of Syria from the Greek Byzantines and the 642 takeover of Egypt.
Like the Jews and Europeans, who used religious crusades to support their
actions against other races and peoples, the Muslims used jihad (‘fight
against spiritual corruption’) to take over the lands and resources of
unbelievers. In some cases, they accused the Muslim rulers of moral
corruption and deposed them violently. Major divisions within the religion
along economic and ethnic lines appeared fewer than thirty years after the
creation of Islam and the death of Muhammad. Despite the Koran’s obvious
preference for the jihad of the heart, jakhanke, greedy usurpers disguised as
learned, religious men instigated the masses to take up the jihad of the sword
—the sword of truth.
The new Second Horseman’s sword was wielded mercilessly against black
Africans in the quest for resources, because it was right to enslave
‘unbelievers’, although European or Christians were not enslaved. The Coptic
Church was in alliance with the Islamists during the takeover and survived as
a majority in Egypt for three hundred more years by paying heavily. Similar
arrangements were made with Christian Afro-Asian regimes in Nubia, which
signed pacts to supply four hundred black African slaves each year. This
proved that it was all about power, money and resources, and not about moral
purity and godliness.
The Maghreb northwest African coastal polities, aligned with the Catholic
Church, were overrun by the Arabs. The Europeans in the urban centers
around the North African coast didn’t resist as much as the Afro-Asian
Berbers in the interior plains and mountains, where foreign control was
traditionally weak.
Berbers were a mix of the small number of Europeans and Africans on the
North Africa coast, while Arabs were a mix of a larger number of Europeans
and Africans in Mesopotamia and Egypt, so it was only a matter of time until

they realized that they had similar backgrounds and interests. When the
Berbers were won over by the late 600s, they became one of the greatest
vehicles of Islam on all sides of the Sahara Desert. They saw an opportunity
to lead an AfroAsian empire of their own by playing the dubious middleman
in the gold and slave trade.
The Sanhaja Berbers were veil-wearing men who stuck terror into hearts and
minds across the Sahara with their surprise attacks and stern rule over their
subjects. They rapidly became ‘Arabized’. In 705, they took over the former
Carthage region in the Tunisian plains opposite the Italian Peninsula. The
Berbers created the Tunis and Ifriqiya province, which invaded and ruled
modern Spain and Portugal, named Andalus.
The Sanhaja Berbers chased out the Christian Visigoth kings, who had ended
Roman rule in Spain, and secured the whole area as an outlet for Islamic
trade around 711. They created and expanded the Almoravid empire by
securing the Middle and Upper Niger trade terminals on the southern edge of
the Sahara.
The Sanhaja Berbers, being mulattos, initially had the trust of full-blooded
Africans who joined in the wars and supplied gold. Their strict laws and
inherent racism saw most Original Africans migrate southward. Those who

remained behind, many of whom had been made redundant by famine and
then converted to Islam, were indoctrinated with the belief that it wasn’t bad
to help in the enslavement of their ‘pagan’ African brothers for money. Afro-
Asian groups like Fulani/Fulbe were created due to intermarrying, and
together, they and the Sanhaja Berbers built the first and only empire to span
both sides of the desert and import more gold into Western Europe than the
Romans. Although most of the gold went to the Maghreb coast and Spain, the
Berbers built their capital in Marrakech, Morocco, in 1070.
Original black Africans realized that a creed that focused on the Middle East,
with inherent negative connotations about black Africans, could never be
concerned with their best interests. The western Sudan empire of Ghana was
the next victim in the advance for the resources that Eurasians and their Afro-
Asian descendants badly needed.
The naturalistic African philosophy of free markets and the right to practice
any religion caused the downfall of the Ghanaian Empire, which allowed the
desert usurpers to settle and multiply within its boundaries. With the obvious
benefits of the Saharan trade flashed around by desert merchants doubling as
clerics, Ghana’s citizens were gradually converted to Islam, and eventually
the African traditional elite were overthrown with the usual cries of
corruption and jihad.
Like the latter-day European missionaries in West Africa who promised the
freedom of a Christian society (without mentioning Freemasonry and racial
barriers), the Islamists had core, exclusive groups called Sufis. The Sufis
were ethnoreligious brotherhoods that extended into the sociopolitical area
for the main purpose of securing power over resources.
During the frequent famines suffered in the arid grasslands, a small Sufi
clique usually operated a public front, where they gave out alms according to
the Koran while indoctrinating the masses against the ruling class. After the
Sufis sufficiently increased their membership, they incited new believers and
turned them into the sword of jihad. As a Kunta cleric warned Al-Hajj Umar,
a West Africa jihadist, ‘Jihad leads to kingship and kingship to oppression;
our present situation is…safe from the error to which Jihad leads’.
Unfortunately, many of the warnings were never heeded. After the overthrow

of the African system, at which point the peace had been murdered, the
people realized that they would never be fully accepted into the new Afro-
Asian Eurocentric system. Even worse, the old way of doing things was gone
forever. Though the changing locations of the grassland empires in the
western Sudan were decided by the changing boundaries of the Sahara Desert
—Mali, Songhai, Sokoto, and Bornu—African traditional interests were
forever relegated to the fringe, and the light-skinned, Afro-Asian Muslims
dictated power.
Even if the black history of Egypt is disputed, Arab historians and visitors
testify to the fact that traditional Ghana was rich, peaceful, and free, a country
in which religions peacefully coexisted, and there was virtually no crime. The
ancient Ghanaians never touched the belongings of a dead foreigner but kept
them intact until someone of his ethnic origin came around to dispense the
wealth as he saw fit. This was a cultural trait based on natural laws of
retributive Justice/Karma common to the Lower Niger populations of
Yorubaland and Igboland, where food for sale was put unmanned on paths,
and prospective buyers were expected to leave the amount expected by their
commonsense in cowries or barter.
The more civilized Africans of the forest and wooded savannahs still vastly
outnumbered the desert Afro-Asians and remained out of the reach of their
cowardly fighting techniques. The people of the arid lands engaged in
surprise attacks made possible by the hordes of animals ridden to the attack,
but this was not feasible in the forest, where they would have had to dismount
and fight man to man.
Many of them were frail and didn’t relish the thought of pitting their grainsfilled
stomachs and muscles against those of heavy yam eaters like the Igbo.
Moreover, the attackers and their animals had to survive the insect life in the
forests, which gave them sleeping sickness, river blindness, and malaria. The
Muslim Afro-Asians kept to the outskirts of the forest, kidnapping black
African children and women for slavery whenever they came to trade in gold
and food.
In the Yoruba language, Islam is called Imole, meaning ‘the draconian
teachings’. With the imposition of the strict Islamic laws in the Upper and
Middle Niger savannah regions, many Africans moved back into the wooded

savannah to the south. The average Yoruba, or other Lower Niger traders,
stayed away from the Muslim trade points if the laws were applied to them,
which made the Muslims realize that if they pushed too hard, the gold would
disappear. Despite adopting bits of Ifa (which they called ‘science of the
sand’ and attached to the prophet Idris), Afro-Asians found the rainforest
jungle and people of Yorubaland too secretive and couldn’t break into the
secrets of the gold trade carried out by the Eyo. The Eso taxed those who
tried to trade directly with gold mines to the immediate southwest of
Yorubaland.
Eventually, Muslim Afro-Asians built a university at Timbuktu to study the
enigma of the Niger forests. This goes a long way to show the importance
attached to the Niger area, despite the wide area of Muslim influence that
spread across the arid lands of Morocco all the way to the Indian region. The
Timbuktu university was obviously of no great use, because they could not
penetrate the rainforests until the second advent of the Europeans, but it
promoted Islam across the Sahel grasslands.
Some Afro-Asians were regular visitors to northwestern Yorubaland around
the Niger River, but the Muslims found the Yoruba culture too strong to
overcome despite its openness. Many took silent offence to the proud Yoruba
and Igbo, who looked down on them as vagrant, socially backward people.
The Afro-Asian’s only psychological defense was his holy book, which told
him to look down on the Yoruba as unbelievers (kaffirs in Arabic,
pronounced ‘keferi’ in Yoruba).
To the northeast, in Egypt and Arabia, Central Eurasians from Persians to
Mongols and Turks took turns controlling the Muslim population and
religious centers. The third caliph after Muhammad, his son-in-law, was
overthrown by a pre-Islamic leading family in Arabia that moved the Islamic
capital to Damascus, but they were overthrown in 750 by a Central Asian
group that moved the capital to Baghdad.
Despite the migration of the Islamic dynasties to different locations,
depending on the ruling desert clan, the basic foundation of these states was
still the importation of slaves and gold from black Africa. Being a small
people limited by nature, they needed labor to help in agriculture, mining, the
military arts, and building and maintaining elaborate state structures. Their

restrictive social laws made most free blacks move farther south of Nubia and
Axum.
On the East Coast, Afro-Asians followed behind the Original Africans
moving farther down from Axum onto the Somali coast and, eventually, all
the way down to Tanzania and Mozambique. East Africa was arid, so people
had to move around in order to use the fertile ground necessary for
pastoralism, which was found only around a few lakes or highlands. An
increasing number of AfroAsians traded with the sparsely settled East Africa
regions, whose people had migrated there from the north and west and were
migrating farther inland or south because of the fear of Arab slavery.
Small cliques claiming to be from the Middle East, although the truth of their
origins was sometimes questionable, repeated the practice of overthrowing
the African authority as was done in Ghana. Despite intermarrying with
Africans, the majority of Somalis linked their ancestry to Persian (Iranian)
royalty. Claiming ancestral links with the Middle East became a pattern with
Muslims all over Africa out of ignorance or wanting to appear well connected
to the Islamic power center in order to prevent further jihads.
Across the southern fringes of the Sahara desert, two groups evolved to
advance Islamic interests: a class of light-skinned black Afro-Asians (along
the desert fringes from East Africa, where they were known as Somalis, to
West Africa, where they were called Fulani/Fulbe); and a lower class of darkskinned
Afro-Asians whose original African languages were twisted with
Arabic to form a lingua franca of Hausa in the West Africa grasslands and
Swahili in the East Africa grasslands.
The light-skinned Afro-Asians formed coastal polities in East Africa all the
way down to Kilwa and Sofala, Mozambique. The East Africa trade to the
Middle East and India resulted in increased African slavery, some of which
resulted in revolts like the Iraqi Zanj revolt (Zanj was a port on the East
African coast whose name was lent to the African slaves). The gold came
from farther south and west of the East Africa coast. Some gold came from
the Shona of the Zambezi River area, although it was not likely much,
because of their small population. The majority of the gold still came from
West Africa.

In the Lake Chad area, Berbers from the north took over the local African
Zangawa and Sao cultures of the Kanem-Bornu area, while some black
cultures like the Sara and Sango remained unchanged and moved south into
the present-day southern Chad and northern Central African Republic
wooded grasslands. The Kanemi Bornu area had developed and served as a
trade post when Egypt was the outlet for African gold to Asia. However, it
was Islamized as early as 1000, and it suffered several jihads as groups took
over power and trading posts shifted around the edges of the Sahara.
The Berbers and Arabs gradually overran the Nok peoples of Nigeria’s
northern savannah from the northeast to the northwest, resulting in
widespread use of the Afro-Asian trade language, Hausa. Farther west, the
African peoples became the Mande.
The Hausa had a mythology claiming that the founder of Hausaland was
Bayajida or Abuyazid, a prince from Baghdad. He came to Daura, killed a
snake that lived in a well, and married the princess of the land. According to
the Daura version, Bayajida’s six sons founded Kano, Zazzau, Gobir,
Katsina, and Rano. However, Baghdad was founded in 750, several millennia
after the first settlements on the Hausa Rivers rising from the Jos Plateau and
flowing to Lake Chad.
It is inherent in the Hausa oral history that there was an African princess in a
traditional African state and setting, part of whose religion was the totemic
worship of snakes, as with the snake-bird motif at the center of Egyptian and
Yoruba religions. Located in the grasslands, northern Nigerian environment
provided little or no protection against being run over by intruders from the
Sahara, so it suffered various conquests and jihads by 1000AD.
Slightly to the south of the Hausa savannah, there are many relics of
unknown empires in the wooded grassland Middle Belt, and the sophisticated
iron mines of the Nok culture conservatively dated to the 1000 BC. The Nok
civilization was broken up and its northernmost peoples were Islamized
towards the end of the first millennium AD, when the first wave of Arabs and
Berbers swept through the sparsely populated and scattered villages in the
arid northern Nigerian grasslands (probably during one of the recurrent
famines that made the elite vulnerable to revolts).

However, due to the proximity of the large population of unadulterated
Africans in the south, the Hausa, like the Mande of the Upper Niger, never
left their traditional worship and way of life entirely and relapsed into it
between jihads. Hausaland was the buffer zone between the two groups of
mulatto Afro-Asians on Lake Chad to the northeast and the Niger-Senegal
River area to the northwest. The dark-skinned Hausa were the middlemen
between desert Berbers and the forest Yoruba and Igbo. The Berbers
occasionally ventured into the forest, while Hausa traders ventured past Lake
Chad to cross the desert to northeast Africa and India.
In Arabic, Ethiopia was called Habasha, which translated to the European
word Abyssinia, while in the Katsina dialect, Habasha was pronounced
hausa. Hausas and Ethiopians are the largest black AfroAsian ethnic groups.
Although one is Islamized and the other Christianized, both possess the jetblack
tan earned from their arid climate without cloud cover. (Probably due
to the aggressive nature of the new, Islamic Afro-Asian-speaking converts,
habasha means ‘rubbish’ in Yoruba.)
The Islamic usurpers and slave raiders coming from the north heightened the
migration out of the Niger-Benue savannas and wooded grasslands in all
directions but more east into the forest via the Cameroon complex
waterways. In Cameroon, the later migrants from Nigeria formed another
layer of migrant trails (AdamawaUgbangi) in grasslands to the north of the
original African group forest migration trail, which pushed the original
African groups farther into the Congo River basin.
The grassland migrants, like some Jukunoid groups that left Adamawa,
moved through central Cameroon into Central African Republic and northern
Congo Zaire. In Central African Republic, they diverged into Baya and
Banda, as well as other sparsely populated groups.
The rainforest Beti-Pahuin-Fang language group that spread through southern
Cameroon into Equatorial Guinea and Gabon diverged into the Bateke that
followed the Sangha River across Congo (Brazzaville) and spread to Gabon
and Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire), part of which includes the
present-day Kinshasa City on the Congo River. The Bateke coalesced into the
Tio/Teke Confederacy, also known as the Anziku Kingdom, situated around
the Malebo Pool/Lake Nkuda. They mined and processed copper as well as

cloth.
Farther downstream the Congo towards the coast, the Bateke diverged into
the Bakongo/Kongo people (Kongo means ‘hunter’). The Bakongo spread
along the coast from present-day Pointe Notre in Congo (Brazzaville) to
Luanda in Angola. They occupied less than 10 percent of land of the huge
Congo (Zaire) country and the Congo River basin that bears their name.
The Bakongo worshipped a creator god called Nzambia Mpungu in a
religious setting similar to those left behind in their West Africa homelands.
The Bakongo to the north on the coast of Congo (Brazzaville) formed the
Loango empire, while those to the south built the coastal Kongo empire that
extended from the Atlantic in the west to Kwango River in the east and from
Kongo River in the north to Kwanza River in the south (present-day northern
Angola, Cabinda, and western Zaire). The Bakongo diverged into the
Mbundus in Angola, which included the Ovimbundu.
The Kongo empire was initiated south of Matadi inland port on the bank of
the Congo. The original kings built and ruled along the Kwilu Valley. The
first known king was Lukeni Lua Nimi (1280– 1360), and he captured
Kabunga and transferred the Kongo capital to its mountain to be known as
Mongo dia Kongo.

African Kingdoms
His lineage ruled unopposed until 1567 when the Portuguese entered and
ruined its sociopolitical existence. Like the Yoruba, Central Africans spent
cowries mined off the Luanda Island by royal monopoly, and like the Ijebu,
the Kongos became the financial controllers of the area. The Kongos also
made great cloth as they became one of the most populous Original African
groups outside Nigeria.
The Congo River basin in Central Africa filled, and migrants sometimes
bypassed the existing communities or joined them to the point that the

overflow had to move farther along the riverbanks for space. Those who
migrated down the Congo and Ubangi River into the Kasai River, and other
western Congo tributaries, and those who continued down the Congo to the
coast were called the western Bantu. They included the Mongo in the Central
Congo basin and Congo (Zaire).
Like the eastern Bantu, the western Bantu came into the mineralrich Katanga
plateau of south-central Congo. This was the source of rivers like the Kasai,
which flowed into the Congo basin, as well as the watershed of the Zambezi
River that flowed in the opposite direction towards the East Africa coast.
The Luba were the major group in Katanga and were fairly prosperous
traders, selling ivory and other products to the East Africa coast until the
advent of the Nyamezi and Swahili Arabic traders who cut off their trade
route to the sea.
The eastern Bantu, also known as forest savanna Bantu, migrated along the
northeastern limits of the Congo and Ubangi rivers before coming down
south to the Great Lakes before 3000BC as Mashariki Bantu to form a sizable
number of communities like the Haya, Busoga, Rwanda, Bunyoro, and
Buganda. Most Great lakes communities in Uganda, North Tanzania, East
Congo Zaire, Rwanda and Burundi tie their origin to Kitara Empire fabled to
have been created by a mythical dynasty known as Bachwezi, or simply
Chwezi.
The Chwezi are believed to have arrived in western Uganda around 2,000 BC
and built impressive earthwork sites in the western modern Uganda district of
Mubende. Being close to the eastern border of Congo (Zaire), the Mongo and
Luba, the two largest Bantu groups to the immediate west of the Great Lakes
area, probably hold secrets of the mysterious Chwezi.
The Bunyoro kingdom of the Nyoro, the first offshoot of Kitara Empire, was
the most powerful Great Lakes kingdom between thirteenth and nineteenth
centuries. The Bunyoro king, whose title is the Omukama, extended influence
between Lake Victoria, Lake Edward and Lake Albert. As Bunyoro kingdom
weakened, Buganda kingdom of the Ganda became the prominent kingdom
in the area, with the Kabaka being the title of the king.

Because East Africa was very arid, those who didn’t settle around the lakes
migrated to the wooded savannas of the Ethiopia/Kenya highland, like the
Kikuyu and Kamba. The pressures and the East Africa aridity prevented
long-lasting empires, as the people had to migrate due to famine or attacks
from the north or the Arabs from the coast.
The Kikuyu were mixed agriculturalists that faced constant pressure from the
northern, dark-skinned, Afro-Asian pastoralists like the Masai and the Luo
from Sudan and Ethiopia. The Nilotic pastoralists isolated the Kikuyu and
Kamba in Kenya from the continuous chain of Bantus that extended from
Ganda and Soga on the northern shores of the Great Lakes, and also from the
Sukuma and Nyamwezi in northern Tanzania. Although the Luo and Masai
spoke Afro-Asian languages, the majority of them were neither Christian nor
Muslim.
The Luo had a disruptive influence across the region as they came down the
Nile, overwhelming kingdoms like Bunyoro along the Great Lakes and
spreading towards the east coast, which was beset by Swahili Arabs. The
Masai and other Nilotic groups also disrupted societies from the Ethiopian
region into Kenya and Tanzania. Due to land pressures, the eastern Bantu
continued south as the Sukuma, in present-day Tanzania, while a large group
of mixed agriculturalists settled around the Zambezi River. The Bemba
settled in the upper floodplains of modern Zambia, while slightly to the south
of the midZambezi was the gold-bearing area of the Shona, who built the
Zimbabwe. Early in 1000, the people of Zambezi area began trading with
Arabs on the coast. This eventually culminated in the creation of the Swahili
coastal polity of Kilwa where gold and Asian imports were traded.
The reasons for the Shona’s Great Zimbabwe decline in the 1200s are not
clear, but it might have been due to aggressive Swahili traders, the creation of
a more competitive market to the north, or ecological factors. The Zimbabwe
built impressive stone monuments but were never more than one hundred
thousand people strong. This was due to the limited productivity of the
African savannah for mixed agriculturalists and pastoralists that made people
continue south into southern Africa. A few later returned to Zambezi as the
Ndebele.
In southern Africa, south of the Limpopo River, eastern Bantu separated into

two main groups: those of the Nguniland, on the eastern coastal strip between
the Drakensberg Mountains and the Indian Ocean, and those of the high veld
(mountain grasslands) known as the Sotho-Tswana. The Zulu were in
northern Nguniland, and the Xhosa were in the south. The Sotho were in the
southern velds in Central South Africa, while the Tswana in Botswana were
up north.
The difference in languages was not that distinct in the Nguniland or even
across the language spectrum. Even words in Tswana relate to faraway
Yoruba. The name Morounwa means the same in both languages and is a
composite of three words meaning ‘I brought something’ or simply ‘a
messenger’ of a blessing or a gift. Ngozi, a common female Igbo name, has
variants all the way to South Africa. The Zulu Nguniland is phonetically
similar to the Ijaw Ogoniland in the Niger delta.
Ninety percent of those living in southern Africa inhabited its wooded
grassland in its eastern half. The west had the Kalahari and the Namib Desert,
inhabited by a few San and Khoi-Khoi. The San and Khoi-Khoi’s differences
in height and stature were believed to be due to diet, because they didn’t take
up agriculture in large numbers but remained naturalistic migrant hunters and
gatherers. The Bantu mixed with the San and Khoi-Khoi, who were always
ahead of other migrants across Africa, especially at that time, in the southern
Africa land terminal. Though the Khoi-Khoi clans were mostly
huntergatherers, they were also pastoralists like their eastern Bantu cousins,
the Xhosa, who borrowed many Khoi-Khoi words.

Chapter 6: The Second Coming of the Europeans
African slavery by Latino Catholics building empires on sugar and silver;
Benin and Congo empires challenged (1400 to 1568)
It is necessary to retrace the natural progression from the time blacks stepped
out of the Niger-Benue Yam Belt to flaunt their wealth in Egypt and filled
Southern Asia all the way down to China. After several thousand years of
unabated and unrivaled Black African progress, Caucasians rose around
2000BC and spread from the Andronovo complex in Central Asia with their
composite bow to destroy all the black empires from South China to Egypt in
the era of the First horseman.
They ran over the Blacks in South China, destroyed 100s of cities in the
Indus Valley Civilization, as well as Elam and Sumner civilizations. The
white, immigrant spillover to the immediate west of the Nile delta initially
resulted in the founding of Libya and Greece, the nearest point in Europe to
Egypt.
After destroying Egypt, Black Africans created Carthage to its west which
attracted Europeans to the Italian Peninsula to start the Roman Empire,
resulting in the destruction of Carthage, at the start of the era of the Second
Horseman with the long sword and religious dogma.
As previously stated, the 2000yr eras could be divided into 8 two hundred
and fifty year changes signified by the Yorubas Orisha of Change, Oya. The
first three 250 year eras saw the introduction of Christianity, the rise of the
Roman Catholic empire with the long sword, Spatha, that was used by
Europeans from Central Asia to spread into Westen Europe, annihilating the
indigenous people.
The next two 250yr cycles, 750 and 1000AD, saw the Arabs use Islam and
their curved long sword to conquer grassland Africa and Europe up to Paris.
Oduduwa and the Olokun dynasty takeover Yorubaland and Yoruba history
lost in the sea of Olokuns deceit.

The sixth 250yr cycle in the 2000 year Olokun era, era of the 2 nd Horseman,
around 1270AD, brought the introduction of the Gun used to change the
global structure. Europeans began to regain lost territory from Afro-Asian
Muslims during the Reconquista in Spain and Portugal and marched towards
world domination with the introduction of a new war technology: firearms.
By the seventh 250 year cycle in 1520, Christianity was split and a new
financial caste system was born based on African slavery in American
plantations.
From 711, when Berbers and Arabs invaded Spain, Europeans were not able
to reverse Muslim gains in the European Iberian Peninsula until 1276 when
guns were introduced. Granada wasn’t free until 1492.
Starting from the Greco-Roman rule, which supplied ample food as well as
infrastructural innovations from Africa, Western Europe grew in population
and organization. Western Europe greatly benefited from five hundred years
of Islamic rule, because the Muslims provided enough African gold to offset
the Mediterranean balance of payments with Asia.
Food was more available from North Africa, but the most significant
contribution was the transfer of technology that developed the European
political economy, especially in agriculture, shipping, and science.
Another important contribution was the improvement made to Arabic ships,
which had developed further from those of the Egyptian era. Europeans made
improvements to Arabic maritime technology by developing the caravel,
which had better maneuverability and greater carrying capacity.
Italian Genovese Jews were crucial in the revitalization of Europe, because
they remained close to the center of international trade at the Mediterranean
gateway to Africa and Asia. They were able to keep a positive trade balance
with the gold coming from black Africa, some of which they got through the
Sephardic (Iberian) Jews under Muslim rule in Spain and Portugal. The
Romans paved pathways all the way to England in the first millennium AD,
while in 1290, Italian Jews pumped funds into England to bolster the English
contribution in the Crusades to free southern European lands.
Portugal was the first to purge itself of Islamic Afro-Asian rule with the help

of Christian European allies. The introduction of firearms was a turning point
in history as Portugal went on to claim territory in Africa.
Portugal got its first foothold in Africa with the capture of Ceuta in 1415, and
by 1500, it had taken over most Moroccan ports. Spain concentrated on the
North Africa coast nations of modern-day Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia, while
the Portuguese inched along the Moroccan northwest African coast until they
reached the Niger delta area and reentered the ‘Garden of Eden’ in the 1470s.
The Catholic pope Alexander VI gave the Portuguese a monopoly of
exploration and missionary activity in West Africa. This was the first time
since their ‘biblical Garden of Eden expulsion’ that Europeans entered the
Niger delta area in large numbers. Maybe God put a barrier only in the east,
according to Genesis 3:24, and not through the south underbelly that they
eventually found (even though the West Africa coast was to be known as ‘the
white man’s grave’).
The northwest Afro-Asian Muslims had pushed the European Christians off
the African coast and inadvertently caused problems for the whole continent
when they went through the Iberian Peninsula all the way to Paris. The
Europeans, growing in numbers and knowledge under their prosperous rule,
eventually pushed the Afro-Asian Muslims back to Africa and traced their
power source to West Africa with the help of Iberian Jews. On reaching the
West Africa black heartland, the Negro area, the Iberians successfully moved
European power from the southeast to Western Europe and began
supplanting Muslim world power with Christian world power.
The Portuguese had no valuable trade item to command respect in Africa
apart from their guns. They started by taking over the middleman role in the
Arabic Moroccan economy, transporting copper from the mines off the
southern Moroccan coast to the refineries off the northern Moroccan coast.
They also took advantage of the saltpeter, used to make gunpowder, and
Moroccan sugar, which had been exported since the eleventh century.
The Portuguese moved farther down the West Africa Atlantic coast,
exchanging goods from the Moroccan coast, like Moroccan wool and copper,
for gold and slaves. Unlike the Moroccan ports and other savannah areas, the
Portuguese were to be restricted to the West African coast for centuries. They

were unable to attack and capture, because their war technology of surprise
attacks couldn’t capture and colonies the vast peoples of the Niger forests.
They traded and raided, relegated to the coasts.
The first point they visited on the West Africa coast was the Senegal River in
1446, and they sailed up to its source where savannah Muslim kingdoms had
taken over from the indigenous African kingdoms. After the ancient savannah
kingdom of Ghana was overrun by Muslims, the ancient Mali empire evolved
into a major Muslim trade post, slightly to the east of the Middle Niger bend.
Gold and slaves were at the core of the Muslim economies in West Africa.
The gold of the Upper Niger savannah was being exhausted while major
reserves deep in the forest were still unknown to the world except to a few
Akans and Aja/Yorubas. The Afro-Asian slave raids pushed traditional
African societies deeper into the forest, including the Akan, which made the
Muslims travel even farther for slaves and gold. The Portuguese mainly
procured slaves, grains, and marginal gold dust from the Muslim traders of
the SenegambiaGuinea area of the far West Africa coast.
The Portuguese arrived in Sierra Leone in 1460, but the modernday Sierra
Leone, Liberia, and western Ivory Coast to the Bandama River were sparsely
populated by former savannah peoples. A few came down to the coast along
the small rivers, but there was no major population center or activity when
the Portuguese initially visited. Ivory Coast later became a major ivory port
in West Africa.
Original black African groups that relocated from the Guinea/Mali grasslands
down into the Brong-Ahafo River basin around the present Ghana-Ivory
Coast border split even further, becoming the Agni and Baoule in Ivory Coast
and the Akan in Ghana. They spoke the Volta-Comoe languages and were
within the Yam Belt, whose western boundary was the Bandama River in
Ivory Coast. Neolithic tools were found in Kumasi, and archaeological dating
revealed iron-working in the area since 200AD, even though the region had
been sparsely settled by people migrating from the Niger into the Volta area
since the beginning of humanity.
The Akan dispersed from the savannah grasslands, where the first Akan
polities developed by taking advantage of the gold trade in old Jenne on the

Middle Niger during the ancient Ghana empire and afterward. The Akans’
long stay in the savannah was reflected by their darker-than-normal hue for
their present habitat in the forest lands. Muslim raids compressed the
population towards the forest edges of Kumasi, which was fifty miles into the
forest. The movement into the rainforest and later down the Pra River to the
coast prevented Arabic ethnolinguistic changes like the Mande and Hausa.
When the Portuguese arrived at the Gold Coast, the Akan forests were still
virgin, uncleared rainforests and were sparsely inhabited by the Akan who
came down the Pra-Ofin River basin to the coast before moving east to form
the Akwamu kingdom. The Yoruba-Aja people still controlled the eastern
Gold Belt from Accra west by virtue of their population and the powerful
Oyo empire and Ijebu kingdoms.
The Aja peoples were part of the wide Yoruba spectrum and were as close to
the Yoruba center as the Bini and Itsekiris on its eastern extremes, if not
closer, despite the slight effects Europeans had on their languages and
classifications. Western Yoruba mined and traded gold and salt, loosely
controlling the Aja people of present-day Benin, Togo, and eastern Ghana.
The clandestine Eyo of the Ijebu kingdoms mined the gold discreetly while
the Eso of the Oyo Empire collected the taxes.
The Portuguese backed the Akan, who had recently resettled from Islamized
grasslands to the Pra-Ofin basin, to build new kingdoms of Denkyira to the
west of modern Ghana and Akwamu to the east. This cut out the Yoruba and
Mande merchants on both outskirts of the Gold Coast. They cornered the
gold trade and developed a minute slave trade with the Akan peoples on the
Pra-Ofin basin, east of the gold basin, and the Aja peoples from Accra west.
Before the advent of the Portuguese on the West Africa coast, the majority of
the coastal population consisted of small, fishing-based Ilaje, Awori, and
Egun communities that mainly provided salt and cowries to the inland Ijebu
and Egbado Yoruba populations. Jakin and Whydah were the major ports
where the Ijebu traded fish and salt, but they were the first to fall to new
Akan empires, like Akwamu, from the east.
Farther inland, into the Yoruba lowland rainforest, the Ijebu kingdom
flourished with Ijebu-Ode as the capital city. To the north of the Ijebus were
the Egba and Egbado of southern Oyo Empire, around Ibarapa area. To the

immediate west of Ijebu kingdom and Oyo Empire were Sabe, Ketu and
Anago Yoruba territories followed by scattered Aja polities up to Tado and
the Volta area.
Jakin, Ajase Po, Eko and other Yoruba/Awori settlements were close to the
coast, but the main population of Yoruba was to the north and east. The Oyo
Empire had no use for coastal territories, apart from fisheries and cowries,
until the advent of the Atlantic trade, which was conducted through Egbado
land. However, the inland Aja territories were useful for the gold and trade
tariffs exacted on traders passing through the Oyo Empire.
The riverine Benin empire extended across coastal Yorubaland and Ajaland
in present-day Republic of Benin and Togo. The Portuguese might not have
been impressed by the fishing communities on the western Slave Coast,
which were on the fringes of the Yoruba cultural sphere, but this was not the
case to the east of the Yoruba center, Benin.
In 1486, the Portuguese reached Benin City, the capital of Edo/Benin empire,
where they were welcome enthusiastically by Oba Ozolua. Benin City was a
cosmopolis with a large section of artisans, ivory and wood carvers, brass and
blacksmiths, leather craftsmen, and other specialists like drummers, poets,
and astrologers. It was a large, clean, and crime-free metropolis on the
beautiful Benin River, which flowed into the Atlantic. Benin City was bigger
and better than any European city in the 1500s. Present-day Benin City has
shrunk several times from its ancient size, having been razed by Europeans a
couple of times, but its ancient city wall was several times longer than the
Great Wall of China.
With a population in the millions in the rainforest, there was no way the
Portuguese could think of conquering the Edo/Benin Empire. They
ingratiated themselves to the ruling elite with trade while they undermined
the empire with cultural and economic influences. The Edo/Bini exchanged
gold, cotton, camwood, pepper, and prisoners of war for Moroccan leather,
alcohol, and imported cotton.
The Bini were eager to create fruitful business ties with the Portuguese and
sent ambassadors to Portugal. The business relationship, including some trade
in gold dust, was, at the start, beneficial to both sides. The traditional African

ruling elite were eager to please them. Because their most important Orisha
was Olokun, the goddess of the seas, the white people from the seas were
well received until their trade intentions changed with the discovery of the
Americas. Land was given for churches in accordance with the African
tradition that allowed foreigners to practice their religion free of fear of
persecution, but rapid Westernization led to social upheaval and instability.
The immediate eastern Niger delta (known at the time as the Oil Rivers) had
no major kingdom, because the Igbo preferred to live in decentralized
villages. Nevertheless, they traded their oil palm products and cotton for
Moroccan wool, leather, and alcohol. The thick mangrove forest in the delta
and Igboland left the Africans open to kidnappings, which was the main
source of slavery in the area.
Farther east, when the Portuguese arrived in the Kongos in 1483, they
received the same reception as in the Benin Empire. The accumulation of
people down the Kongo River near the coast resulted in the advanced society
of the Kongo kingdom.
Kongo was the largest state of the Lower Congo River, while the Loango
kingdom was the largest of the three Kikongo empires on the Loango coast to
the north of the Congo delta. All these empires are believed to have
descended from the Tio/Teke Confederacy, located upstream to the north of
Lake Malebo, because they all had similar matrilineal institutions and shared
political symbols and vocabulary.
CENTRAL AFRICAN KINGDOMS

Kongo was a state of about five hundred thousand in the 1400s. Its capital

was Mbanza Kongo (renamed Sao Salvador by the Portuguese). Its king,
called the Mane Kongo, was selected from the male members of aristocratic
clans called the Mwisskongo. Like other West Africa kingdoms, Kongo used
cowries as money, because metals were too readily available.
The ruling elite of Kongo accepted the Portuguese, like the Bini. The Mane
Kongo was baptized as Joao. In 1506, fewer than twenty years after the
Portuguese arrival, civil war broke out when a proChristian aspirant for
kingship from the wrong lineage took over illegally, with the help of
Portuguese. He effectively derailed the ancient traditions of the land. The
illegal king was known as Alfonso, and he made his lineage permanent
despite the matrilineal Kongo culture, thus sending the Kongo area on a
downward slope of anarchy and war.
Alfonso Christianized the Kongo Empire and instituted the Atlantic slave
trade for the Portuguese, who backed him into power. His son became a
priest, and tax extractions from the Bakongo were used to sponsor the
activities of the church. Alfonso changed meaningful traditional African titles
into irrelevant European titles; his chiefs and governors were called dukes
and duchesses. Despite trying to tightly control slave trade for revenue
collection, he realized that the Europeans tried every gimmick to bypass him.
The long-held Bakongo traditions were tossed out like rubbish. The
Portuguese were involved in every aspect of decision making, including
choosing traditional title holders.
The slaves taken from the West Africa coast from 1480 to 1520 were small in
number. They were mainly sent to the Sao Tome islands off the Nigerian
coast, where the Portuguese set up sugar plantations to augment those of
Morocco and the Canary Islands. However, West Africans and their original
products of sugarcane, tobacco, and cotton soon spread farther afield.
Christopher Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the Americas in 1492 changed
everything. Although black Africans had been across the Atlantic, the
landmasses were known as the Americas, which in Yoruba meant ‘we shall
see wickedness’ (A ma ri ika—there is no letter c in Yoruba). Some claimed
that ‘America’ meanst something else, perhaps the name of the explorer
Amerigo Vespucci, but even if so, the Yoruba meaning had an eerie feeling
to it when realizing what the Yoruba and others faced in these lands.

The Portuguese heard rumors of lands across the Atlantic to the west from the
locals on the West Africa coast. The Sahara trade winds had already blown
blacks to Central America, * especially from the Senegambian rivers. The
dusty West Africa trade winds changed, once on the Atlantic, into tropical
storms and hurricanes whose force could carry any water-borne transport to
the Americas.
Columbus asked the European monarchs, King Ferdinand and Queen
Isabella, to sponsor such a trip with the agreement that anything found would
be shared with the king. This ensured for Columbus the backing of the king if
anyone else tried to lay claim on new lands. The king of Portugal, Don Juan,
was slow to take the offer, but Ferdinand and Isabella, who had united Spain
with their marriage, took the offer and backed Columbus in January 1492.
On Columbus’s return, he stopped in Lisbon, Portugal, where he struck an
agreement with Don Juan. His dubious agreements with the Spanish and
Portuguese leaders were legitimatized with the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed
on June 7, 1494, by Pope Alexander VI, the infamously corrupt pope. The
agreement sanctioned by the pope gave all lands to the west of a vertical line
(longitude) to the Spanish and all lands to its east to the Portuguese. It was
later discovered that the more powerful Spanish had been cheated out of a
whole landmass that came to be known as Brazil.
The Spanish took control of the islands of Cuba, Jamaica, and Hispaniola
(Haiti and the Dominican Republic) as well as the South American continent
with the exception of Brazil. Western South America was covered by the
Andes highlands, whose altitude changed the vegetation expected of the
latitude. The equatorial areas of Colombia and Ecuador (like the Congo
highlands) were less productive, and the normal desert latitudes were wooded
grasslands like those in Ethiopia.
The Spanish focused on the discovery of metals, especially gold, but its
colonies were rich in silver with the exception of the gold found in Havana,
Cuba. Mining gold and silver didn’t require as much slave labor as did the
later sugar plantations, so initially the Spanish were not overly bothered by
West Africa being a Portuguese monopoly. Nevertheless, the Spanish used
African slave labor for mining and in small agricultural settings.

* Ivan Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus (Random, 1976).
The silver had a greater indirect effect on Africans, because it led to
economic disequilibria that brought other Europeans into the race for metals
and colonies. This fueled an era of cheap money that financed shipbuilding
and expeditions through Sephardic and Italian Jews and their banks (Banco di
Santo Spirito in Rome and Bank Palermo in Sicily). *
Brazil was named Brasa, Portuguese for ‘glowing coals’—the name given to
a red dyewood that was initially the only commercial use of the territory
larger than Western Europe. The Portuguese crown divided and allocated
parcels of Brazil as captaincies to wealthy families, but until 1530,
Portuguese settlers did not populate the captaincies due to their poor
economy compared to West Africa. The Portuguese began taking their colony
more seriously when the French and English, unhappy over the division of
the Americas solely between the Iberians, decided to challenge the weaker of
the two nations.
The first most important Brazilian colonies were the southeastern Sao Paulo,
where forays were made into the interior, and the northeastern Pernambuco,
which had the first sugar plantations. The Iberian Jews’ transfer of sugar
production from West Africa to Brazil led to a significant increase in Indian
slavery from the 1530s to the 1560s, when the pope outlawed it due to rapid
depopulation caused by mistreatment and diseases. From 1538, Africans were
imported in small numbers, but their numbers increased sharply. By 1588,
Africans were 25–30 percent of the slaves, while by 1620, they were 100
percent.
Having used Africans in the slave plantations on Sao Tome and the Canary
Islands, the Portuguese preferred Africans to Indians because of the natural
West African aptitude for agriculture and wider genetic spectrum, which gave
them a higher resistance to diseases than any other ethnic group. They,
especially the Aja-Yoruba and Akan, were also famed for having a good
‘nose’ for finding gold deposits.
* Anthony Sampson, The Money Lenders (Penguin, 1983), 35.
Bahia became the leading captaincy in sugar plantations and African slaves.

By 1580, Brazil prospered from sugar and brasa dyewood, with sixty sugar
mills funded by Sephardic and Dutch Jews. It had a population of seventeen
thousand to twenty-five thousand Portuguese, eighteen thousand enslaved
Indians, and fourteen thousand African slaves. * By the end of the 1500s,
Portugal and Spain were ascending to the status of world powers.
In addition to the major changes across Africa discussed earlier, the ancient
African gold trade was diverted to the coast with the arrival of Europeans and
the disenfranchisement of the Yoruba and Mande. The savannah Muslim
empires were deprived of the gold trade that came to Jenne and other
savannah trade posts. To make matters worse, the European push on Morocco
and the Maghreb had a ripple effect across the Sahara.
Muslims pushed closer to the forest boundaries, making communities shift
deeper into the safe confines of the forest. Because the income from gold was
reduced, many more slaves were needed to balance the Muslims’ books,
which resulted in an increased frequency of slave raids. The goods traded
across the Sahara expanded to include products like gum Arabic, ivory, and
other items that were never bothered with before the advent of the Portuguese
and the subsequent diversion of the gold trade.
The pressure put on the ethnic groups located on the fringes of the forest, like
the Akan, had far-reaching implications. The presence of new trading points
on the coast attracted peoples to the south. A combination of these factors
resulted in the southeastern migration of the Akan heartland into space that
historically belonged to the Dangme and Ewe of the Aja/Yoruba, with the
creation of Denyika on the west and Akwamu on the eastern side of the Gold
Coast.
In breaking the secretive Eyo hold on the Gold Coast, the Portuguese
established a fort they called El Mina (the mine), where they kept gold and
promoted the destabilization of the area. It was a small fortress built to store
gold and slaves. For various reasons, they made no attempt to conquer more
land. Instead, they employed and armed coastal ethnic groups for protection
and the management of possible competitive elements.
* Ronald Segal, The Black Diaspora (Faber and Faber, 1994), 71–72.

The recently arrived Akan groups established new hegemonies in the Volta
River basin and began charging tariffs on anyone trying to conduct business
in the area. This was an affront to the Yoruba, who bluntly refused in the
popular Eyo anthem: ‘Eyo oh! E eyo oh! Eyo were our fathers, who played
with gold. We are not paying any border tariffs. We’re going home!’
This was a fatal stroke to the northern and western Yoruba kingdoms of Oyo
and Ijebu that relied upon the gold, especially the Oyo, who had extended
into the grasslands around the Niger River. The Oyo used the trade and taxes
collected by the Eso to buy, among other things, horses from the north to
build its cavalry. The loss of the income had an effect on the expensive
cavalry, which had a high death rate for horses due to the environment, and
the Oyo soon lost their power.
Oyo-Ile, the capital of the Oyo empire, was sacked by the Nupe in the 1520s,
and the Alaafin and the Oyo court moved to Ighoho in the west before
moving back in the early 1600s. The Ijebu kingdom had no chance of
recovering, as it coastal lands like Whydah, Jakin and Eko were overran by
European sponsored groups. It would lose its trade, its peace, and its
freedom!
The Akan taking full control of the gold area led to another problem. Gold
mining was labor intensive and needed a large population to enable full
exploitation while other functions, like clearing the forest and agriculture,
were not left unattended. To fill the labor shortage, the Akan bought slaves
from the Portuguese, who engaged in slave raiding in Yorubaland and sold
slaves for gold. Eventually, the coastal Akan conducted slave raids west into
Aja and Yorubaland as well as into the northern Upper Volta Muslim Mossi
communities.
Prior to the advent of Europeans, the coastal lagoon people lacked large
populations, viable economies, and an independent state infrastructure. The
people of the coast, mainly fishermen, were often resentful of those in the
rainforest hinterlands who, until the advent of Europeans, were the
‘mainstream’ culture. This resentment, coupled with the destruction of their
fishing livelihood by Europeans, made it easier morally for the lagoon people
to sell their former overlords from the hinterland. This was the case with the
coastal Akan groups who raided the main body of the Akan to the north and

the AjaYoruba people who raided the Yoruba hinterland (similar to
presentday, poor Mexicans making illegal forays into the United States).
Unsettled by northern and southern raids, the Akan organized themselves into
business houses and clans with military leaders whose main functions were to
catch slaves, sell gold, and clear the forest. The militancy that pervaded the
Akan society was reflected when it fell to slavery through reprisal raids and
led slave revolts across the Americas, even when being the minority amongst
slaves.
The relocated Akan built culturally shallow but modern empires along the
violent Eurasian model, and due to labor scarcity, it was an unending and
vicious cycle. Freed slaves moved away with the sole purpose of creating
their own clans with European guns bought with slaves and gold. This was
the beginning of an era of ‘Ogun Complex’ that fueled mayhem and anarchy
in the heart of the blackworld, starting with flooding the West Africa coast
with hundreds of thousands of European guns every year.
From the late 1500s, European nationals armed vagrant, coastal clans through
their renegade military leaders to muscle in on the gold market. Akwamu was
founded in 1600 in the east of the Gold Coast, and it was the first Akan polity
to use guns successfully. To the east were the Dangme and Ga, close relations
of Yoruba people. The war brought on in the 1600s by the Akan—Akwamu
and Denkyira—led other people of the region, especially the Aja, to join the
slave trade.
The Aja joined the slave trade to buy European weapons for protection as
well as to make money. The ancient, large Yoruba market for gold, salt,
cowries, and other sea products had been compromised. With Whydah under
Akan control, the Aja-Fon people formed the Allada kingdom in the space to
its north, which was close to their ancestral home. Allada was to evolve into
other kingdoms with the succession battles between three princes, which led
to Ahomey farther north, and Porto Novo (Ajase) on the coast to the east,
close to Ijebu Kingdom.
Allada, meaning swordsmen, represented a new poignant chapter in the Era
of the Second Horseman with the sword to spread religion and dogma for
resources control. The Europeans not only used religion but fueled tribalism

to recruit African mercenaries and partners. It took over Whydah on the coast
to gain direct access to the European slave traders. Allada was to be the most
successful, earning the name the Slave Coast, since it was closest to the
Yoruba population centers in the hinterland.
East of Yorubaland, the Bini kingdom, which had forged a good relationship
with the Portuguese, became involved in wars with its northern and eastern
neighbors in Igala kingdom of Idah and Igboland. This was encouraged and
fueled by the Portuguese, who wanted the prisoners of war. It became
obvious that all their Portuguese friends wanted were slaves, and the Benin
elite rejected the idea of war for slaves. They refused to sell any of their male
subjects because of their contribution to the society, especially in agriculture
and defense. The sale of female slaves was allowed, because the society gave
brides in exchange for dowries, and the African idea of slavery was not as
commercial and harsh as what the Europeans did on their American
plantations.
The Europeans rejected Benin’s strong trade policy, and Europeans were
officially expelled from the kingdom in 1515. However, this did not stop or
abate slave raids within the kingdom by other smaller polities like the Itsekiri
and Ijaw, who the Europeans sponsored to engage in terrorist acts, especially
when the Dutch and English arrived on the scene.
In Kongo, King Alfonso didn’t have the prerogative to stop slavery, because
he had claimed the throne illegally with the backing of the Portuguese in
1506. Alfonso encouraged importing guns that were used to raid for slaves in
the interior, because most of the slaves were taken from outside the kingdom
to the east, although some kidnappings occurred within the empire. The
Portuguese prohibited the sale of guns to Africans, but other Europeans with
no long-term plans sold arms freely. When the kidnappings got out of hand
and no one was safe within Kongo, the ruling elite tried to prohibit the act,
but it was too late.
In 1568, the Jaga people of the interior got fed up and attacked Kongo towns
and villages. They would have destroyed the empire entirely if not for the
Portuguese from Sao Tome, who helped the Mane Kongo. The Jaga attack
inadvertently pushed the region downhill by making the Kongos cede their
southern territory as payment to the Portuguese in return for their help in

expelling the Jaga. The relinquished territory was later known as Angola,
where the Portuguese were to launch their Central Africa operations. It was
climatically conductive to the Europeans and for forming garrisons, although
sustaining them in the aridity was a long-term problem.
In 1571, the Portuguese established a trade route from Luanda, Angola, along
the southern Congo basin grassland that nearly, and eventually, cut across
Africa, although it was handled by different mulatto middlemen and newly
militarized kingdoms. Three mediumsize states, Kasanje on the Kwango,
Mwata Yamvo on the Kasai, and Mwata Kazembe on the Luapula, collected
and distributed goods throughout the sparsely populated southern Congo
basin.
On the East Africa coast of the Indian Ocean, in 1505, the Portuguese
attacked and destroyed Kilwa, the Arabic Swahili port, before establishing
their own refueling station and trade post in Mozambique on their way to
Asia. Arabs had been dealing on the coast with inland Shona kingdoms on
the Zambezi and the Yao on Lake Malawi.
Before the Portuguese arrived in the region, Zimbabwe had been destroyed,
but another small, gold-mining Shona state, Mwene Mutapa, had developed
closer to the Zambezi River, north of the relics of monument-building
Zimbabwe. The Mutapa, like their folk across Africa after the Eurasian
annihilation, shunned monumental stone building and built in clay and
thatched roofs. This was why they were better equipped to fight off the
Portuguese, who wanted to control their gold in 1569. The Mutapa had been
initially receptive of them, in the misguided tradition of the Bini and the
Kongos.
The cultural proximity of the Shona to those slightly to their north and all the
way to Igboland was reflected in the nearness of their titles: Mwene Mutapa,
Mane Kongo, and Mwami of Rwanda all mean ‘lord conqueror’. The Kongos
are the branch of eastern Nigerians who followed the Congo River
downstream, while the Shona, Nguni, Rwanda, and Buganda formed the
branch that followed it upstream through Ubangi to the Great Rift Valley and
eastern Africa.
The present coast of Kenya was under Islamic influences, which resulted in

the major African peoples, like the Kikuyu, remaining inland for fear of
Arabic slavery. The administrative and trading center of the Arabic Singwaya
Swahili connection was farther south on the coasts of Tanganyika and the
Zanzibar islands.

Chapter 7: The Dutchmasters Gangster Paradise
The Dutch, British, and French rise against Latinos for African wealth and
American land (1568 to 1650)
Natural justice appeared to occur when the Iberians, causing sociopolitical
upheavals across Africa through divisions, faced rebellion at home. There
was a rebellion in 1568 against the Spanish empire in the urban Dutch
provinces of northern Netherlands when the large Sephardic Jewish
community, merchants, and sundry dissidents involved in the Africa-
Americas trade made a declaration of independence.
The fault lines in Europe caused by money ran deeper than little Netherlands
and pervaded the European belief system. The Ogun war economics shrouded
in Olokuns dogma was at the foundations of the Netherlands, the new
Gangsters paradise.
European elites hijacked Christianity to authenticate their existence in the
civilized world, and over time, it was such a useful tool in uniting against the
Muslims that they all waged crusades to expel them from their lands.
Discontent began to show when Spain and Portugal divided the ‘new world’
between themselves, and it was signed by the pope, who saw no wrong done,
because the complaining nations had initially rejected Columbus’s proposal.
Francis I, the king of France and a Catholic, dismissed the authority of the
pope in sustaining Spanish claims to the Americas. He commented, ‘I should
very much like to see the clause in Adam’s will that excludes me from a
share in the world’. *
The wealth enjoyed by the Iberians from the 1470s brought about
nationalistic jealousies among the Europeans, leading to a split in their
religious beliefs similar to that of the Muslims and their many factions
(Shiites, Sunnis, Kharjites, etc.). This questions the depth of Abrahamic
religions and their link to money and war. The increased benefits of easy
credit extended to all Europeans were not enough, and they wanted a bigger
share as they split the Western church along nationalistic lines.

* Segal, The Black Diaspora, 37.
To compete in the global economic imperialism, it was necessary for each
nation to be in control of its own tools of cultural imperialism
– religion, racism, tribalism and other forms of differentiation. The age of the
Second Horseman/Olokun was essentially about using religion and dogma to
justify economic imperialism.
By 1517, fewer than forty years of Europeans stepping on West Africa,
Martin Luther launched a protest movement against the Roman Catholic
Church, and by 1534, King Henry VIII of England had repudiated the
spiritual authority of the pope and created his Protestant Church. The domino
effect of these defections across Western Europe culminated in the
Netherlands, which went on to create the perfect, exploitative, money-making
machine.
The marshy terrain that was reclaimed in northern Netherlands permitted
shipbuilding, and its location allowed its Iberian Jews and European
merchants to corner the Baltic grain market, which had grown due to
improved plough agriculture in Europe. Following their declaration of
independence from Spain, the Dutch founded limited liability companies
worth seven million guilders: the East and West India Companies. The sole
aim of the companies was to plunder, conquer, and foment commerce
through maintaining their warships, which were supplemented by the
government fleet when war was formally declared.
This was an improvement over Queen Elizabeth I employing pirates like
Hawkins and Drake, who used escaped African slaves to challenge the
Spanish Catholic influence, an effort that led to war with Spain and didn’t
achieve any long-term gains on its own. Most importantly, the Dutch
companies were permanent money-making schemes without the uncertainty
of political swings. This was the mother of joint-stock companies, whose
numbers and profitability increased to a colossal amount that eventually
culminated in the creation of the London Stock Exchange.
When the Spanish king took advantage of the vacant Portuguese throne by
taking over Portugal in 1580, the Dutch companies quickly took over
Portuguese foreign possessions, especially El Mina on the Gold Coast, where

they armed the Ashantes to attack Portuguese interests with other Akans. The
Dutch moved swiftly into foreign lands, challenging both local and European
players in the field, because the companies didn’t need a monarchy to raise
money for expeditions. The Dutch private enterprise, backed by a mercantile
government, soon built the best fleet in the world.
Without colonies of their own, the Dutch became the almighty middleman by
selling cheaper West Africa slaves and European goods to Iberian colonies
and gold in Europe. The British and French soon joined the Dutch ships in
the precarious trade, which could have led to total loss and death if caught by
the Spanish. This further exacerbated the tensions between the southern and
the northwestern Europeans, who came together to fight wars to challenge
and destroy the Catholic Spanish supremacy in the Americas.
The overflow of West Africa slaves began to fill northwestern Europe, where
they were used as housekeepers, musicians, and entertainers. In England,
they became a fashion accessory among the rich. The sexual relationships
between black men and English women heightened the push to find a colony
of their own where they could put Africans to productive use and rid England
of blacks. Queen Elizabeth I issued an edict to deport all Africans in 1601.
With a change in their aggressive rulers at the turn of the 1600s, the new
English and French monarchs decided, in separate treaties, to back off the
occupied Iberian colonies but take North America, which hadn’t been
claimed by the Iberians. The Spanish power was already stretched thin by
trying to protect its Central and South American colonies, and the English
and French faced no serious challenges when trying to take North American
colonies. The French settled Acadia in 1604 and Quebec in 1608, while to the
south, the English settled Virginia in 1607 and Cape Cod in 1620.
Queen Elizabeth’s successor in 1603, King James, had ambitions of an
imperialistic Britain. He commissioned the best English writers, like
Shakespeare, to write the English Bible, called the King James Version. It
was different from other versions but became standard issue for the soldiers
of fortune sent to the Americas and Africa. By 1619, the English had begun
planting tobacco in Jamestown using twenty African slaves.
The Dutch, whose treaty with Spain included only its independence and a

twelve-year truce, attacked Brazil as soon as the truce was over in 1621. By
1624, the Dutch had seized the most prosperous of the Iberian colonies,
Brazil, where they took over its main captaincies in the northeastern, sugargrowing
region.

Map of the Americas.

With control of West Africa, the main source of labor in the sugar
plantations, and northeast Brazil, where the delicate technology of sugar
processing was already in place, money soon flowed into the United
Provinces of the Netherlands, which became ‘a high-voltage urban
economy’. *
* J H Parry, P Sherlock, and A Maingot, A Short History of the West Indies (Macmillan, 1987), 45.
The Dutch were initially repelled from Brazil, which resulted in them
ransacking the Spanish West Indian islands and practically driving the local
Spanish fleet out to sea. In one such raid off Matanzas Bay, the Dutch
captured a fleet of thirty-one sails that yielded booty of more than fifteen
million guilders. This ruined Spanish credit in Europe and paralyzed their
West Indian communications and defense.
The Dutch then seized the little island of Curacao, which became the center
of Dutch power in the West Indies. They returned to Brazil in 1630 and took
Recife to the north of Bahia. Apart from the salt-rich Curacao, the Dutch
weren’t interested in land colonies except to trade commodities and slaves
between all ports, which was why they were the first to take New York port.
The Dutch initially named present-day New York ‘New Amsterdam’. They
set up an outpost on the Upper Hudson River in 1624 to buy fur at presentday
Albany in upstate New York, which they called New Netherlands. Two
years later, they took over Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River. The
bay of New York (New Amsterdam) served as a port to export the produce
and furs of the Americas and to import goods, credit, and slaves. The Dutch
Jews set up present-day Wall Street as a trade zone in Manhattan from which
they traded commodities and finance on benches. It was so named because
trading was behind a wall that kept out unfriendly Manhattan Indians from
the hilly north of New Amsterdam Island, as well as the African slaves who
lived in the buffer zone between Bowery Street and Thirty-Fourth Street.
The Dutch made no serious attempt to occupy the New Amsterdam colony
until the English took over, renamed it New York, encouraged European
immigration, and increased African slavery. Likewise, in Cape Town, South
Africa, the Dutch created a refueling station in 1652 for ships on the way to

Asia, especially for vegetables to fight scurvy, and it remained so for a long
while until the English arrived.
‘England undertook colonies of settlement rather than of trade or
exploration’. * The crowded British islanders wanted to rid themselves of
criminals and dissidents, but they wanted to do it economically, a policy that
later reaped immense benefits. The English and French took over where the
Dutch finished the Spanish by attacking and claiming the outward-lying
Caribbean Islands of St Kitts, Barbados, Trinidad, and the Virgin Islands.
* J H Parry, P Sherlock, and A Maingot, A Short History of the West Indies, 51.
In Brazil, the wealthy families and their captaincies became increasingly
agitated by the state of affairs, especially the 1630 Dutch occupation of Brazil
and the Spanish takeover of the Portuguese crown. These regional captaincies
had local police and paramilitaries, because they were more or less centuryold
confederates of plantations. They eventually came together in 1654 to
expel the Dutch from Recife in northeast Brazil. On their own terms, the
Portuguese in Brazil returned Brazil to Portugal, free of Spanish rule, and by
so doing, they forever loosened Portugal’s grip on Brazil.
To keep the Dutch trade cycle intact after their expulsion from Brazil, the
Dutch merchants moved north to the Caribbean islands. They were ready to
give any European national long-term credit for the sugar processing
technology with free credits of African slaves, European goods and food, as
well as guaranteeing the purchase of all their produce. In the Guianas, the
territories to the north of Brazil and east of Venezuela, where the French and
British had coastal strips, the Dutch invited the French and Jews to plant
sugar with full packages of slave labor, technology, credit, and marketing.
Every new colony in the Americas meant more cargo for Dutch shipping and
a blow to the former Iberian masters. This policy helped to sustain the new
British and French colonies, and in time, they overtook a weakened Brazil as
the leading sugar producer. Barbados was Britain’s main sugar island until
British Jamaica overtook it in the 1700s. The British and French also
overtook the Dutch to become the world’s leading powers through their
colonies.

The British and French monarchies vigorously pursued the settlement of
North America by giving people incentives to migrate from Europe. They
issued charters of whole regions in the Americas to joint-stock companies.
Thirteen British royal-chartered colonies called states were formed on the
North American Atlantic coast. The Mid-Atlantic and southern coast of the
British-American colony, Virginia and its surroundings, was quickly
converted to tobacco and rice plantations that were worked by black slaves
with know-how from West Africa.
The northeast coast of Massachusetts was labeled a ‘barren coast’ that
produced no export crop of value to Europeans, because it had the same
European, wintry climate. However, it produced wheat for the West Indies
and became the trading point of southern agricultural produce and
northwestern furs.
Most importantly, the concentration of business and intellectual classes in the
northeast resulted in cottage industries that partially processed or finished
products for export and import substitution. The New England States, as the
Northeast was known, bought and processed sugar from the West Indies into
rum, which was taken to Africa. They also started making slave handcuffs
and guns.
This did not go down well with the British home government that lost income
to nontaxpaying interlopers. Moreover, the North American colony wasn’t
making any profit. The government, backed by powerful business concerns,
proposed a series of laws to change the old system of colonies of settlement,
based on a balanced subsistence economy, to a plantation system based on
forced labor and huge profits.
The British turned their envy against the Dutch and made laws like the
Navigation Ordinance of 1651. This act was designed to strengthen British
shipping and colonies by prohibiting foreign vessels from carrying goods to
British colonies and from carrying British goods. Not forgetting its old
enemy, Spain, Britain attacked and captured Jamaica to complete its West
Indies island collection.
The increasing power of the merchant class led to the effective challenge and
1649 beheading of the Catholic-friendly British monarch, Charles I. The huge

profits flowing into the previously deprived European lands caused serious
sociopolitical upheaval in the resultant struggle for power. The British
monarchy was restored in 1659 but was shaken by the 1688 Glorious
Revolution before finally settling down with the merchant-friendly King
William III.
Over the next fifty years, Caribbean sugar plantations, and to a lesser extent
North American tobacco and rice plantations, increased in number and size as
prices of sugar and tobacco remained high. The English followed the Dutch
example by creating the Royal African Company in 1672, which enabled
them to build a larger fleet to transport cargo, with special emphasis on
African slaves, needed to till the land.
In West and Central Africa, the Portuguese monopoly was shattered by the
Dutch, who weren’t able to maintain a monopoly. The British, Dutch, and
French had better goods to offer Africans than the Portuguese, because
Brazil, or even Portugal, didn’t have a growing industrial base. The British
closely copied Indian and African cloth designs for the forest Africans, who
had an advanced local cotton and glass industry long before the Europeans
arrived and continued to export cloth and beads after they arrived. The Bini
and Ijebu of the Slave Coast exported large quantities of cotton. The
Europeans were stunned by the wider spectrum of cloth ranging from cotton,
velvet, and damask to raffia, as well as the different colors that existed in
Yorubaland and Igboland, where people were long accustomed to tasteful
dressing.
Before 1650, with the exception of guns, no goods were imported into West
Africa that were not locally produced. The foreign goods only supplemented
local production but, in time, destroyed the local African industry. The cotton
industry in Manchester grew at the African industry’s expense, while a glass
industry for African beads grew in Bristol. The Jamaican and Brazilian rum
imported from New England and England were poor substitutes for the
ancient African palm wine that had a better nutritional content than sugarbased
liquor.
The missionaries had a lot to do with the loss of belief in anything African, as
they depicted blackness as pagan, backward, and negative. This was backed
by their converted scriptures and the gun. The bad side of African religion

was highlighted, and the good side, which provided the necessary social skills
to maintain a polite and civilized society, was shunned, leading to a loss of
knowledge in metals, medicine, education, and social organization. African
words of endearment were turned into ridicule. The Yoruba word for black is
dudu, which turned into shit (excrement) in the English-speaking world.
The most important items of trade that Europeans brought were guns
produced in the new industries in Birmingham and later New England.
Without the introduction of guns into the West Africa region, the majority of
Africans wouldn’t have been aware of the presence of Europeans, but even
those not buying into the Ogun Complex arms race had their lives affected by
the kidnappings and the unnecessarily bloody wars caused by reckless
ambition. The Dutch, French, and English, who had established a new order
in the Americas, needed slave labor to promote their interests and promoted
unrest in the region.
Even with guns and psychological warfare masked as religion, the Europeans
were not able to make an impressionable impact on the economy of West
Africa. Initially, the terror attacks were less frequent in the interior central
and eastern Yorubaland of Ekiti, Ijesha, and Akoko, but Europeans resorted
to economic sabotage of the local currencies. Due to the abundance of metals
in the region, cowries, which were less abundant and difficult to get, were
used as the currency.
Unable to sell better food than yams or clothing better than those locally
produced, Europeans resorted to distorting and destroying the economy with
excess cowries that they ‘mined’ heavily off the East Africa coast. The few
who used metals for currency also had their metal currencies debased. People
soon lost faith in the currency and fell back on their parallel system of trade
by barter, which was a big shock to the economy but couldn’t stall it
completely.
The most successful approach was still the fueling of unrest in the western
Yoruba frontier lands, where the coastal polity of Whydah declared its
independence from Allada and, from 1671 onwards, ran at the whims of
European slavers. Learning from the Akan experience of allowing the
Portuguese to set up the El Mina fort, which was used to overwhelm the Gold
Coast, the Allada monarch refused European forts on his coastal domains, but

Europeans sponsored coastal cliques of former fishing villages in their quest
to break away and later the interior of Dahomey. Whydah earned the name
‘Slave Coast’ from the number of Yoruba slaves who were shipped from its
coast. Constant wars and kidnappings were waged against and among the
western Yoruba, especially the Egba, Egbado, Nago, and Ijebu.
Unable to produce their own guns, some Yorubas responded by resorting to
slave raiding in the European-inspired Ajalands to the west and Muslim
north. This was a reaction that the Oyo empire, which extended into the
northern savannas, bore as it came under attack from the north, west, and
south, but the reaction was not supported by the main core of forest Yoruba
to the east and south. The Oyo people earned a negative reputation among the
Ijesha, Ekiti, and other central and eastern Yoruba, who opposed the Oyo
antics in the grasslands.
Though slavery was initially only an irritation at the western and south
frontiers of Yorubaland, it increased dramatically towards the end of 1600s
but never overwhelmed and derailed the Yoruba sphere in its entirety. The
effects were felt more in the northwestern Yoruba Oyo court, which had been
sacked from its ancient Oyo-Ile court and relocated to Igboho. With the loss
of gold trade, it needed resources to buy weapons and revitalize its cavalry to
push out the northern aggressors, the Nupe.
To the east, on the Bight of Benin, the smaller Warri kingdom was used by
Europeans to raid the large Benin Empire that had banned all European
activities. Apart from those that raided Benin, some militarized coastal
groups moved west along the coast and then inland, where oral history
accounts suggest that they became the kings of the first row of forest
kingdoms like Ondo and Iwoye.
With the first row of forest kingdoms overran and militarized, their coastal
fishing and salt trade killed, the people carried out slave raiding incursions
into eastern Yorubaland. Ondo raided areas to its north, like Akure and Ekitis
kingdoms, for slaves easily conveyed by short rivers to the coast. This
practice was evident in the Niger delta proper, where Igbo coastal relatives,
the Ijaw and Ibibio, carried out kidnapping raids on the inland Igbo.
The Igbo rejection of unnatural authority, which resulted in their

decentralized villages, earned them a reputation of being the most
uncooperative slaves with the highest suicide rate. Even a secondgeneration
Igbo slave had a desire to escape or cause a revolt. In some areas in America,
the Igbo were eventually marked with the compulsory removal of their two
front teeth and identified and separated from the general slave populations to
prevent uprisings.
In Central Africa, the Portuguese savannah colony of Angola abandoned
hopes of obtaining metals and concentrated on fueling unrest in the eastern
hinterlands. It eventually fell out with the Kongo court and raised a black
mercenary army to attack and defeat the Kongolese kings and empire in
1658. With the demise of Kongo, a few of its component states took over its
former relationships with the Portuguese, although they couldn’t stop the
slave trade from spreading to other areas in the region.
The Loango coast, at the mouth of the Congo River basin, slowly took over
the slave trade from the inland Kongo empire. The trade was serviced by the
upstream Bobangi canoe merchants, who scoured the scattered villages in the
sparsely populated rainforest highlands along the Kongo River and the
Ubangi River, which is named after the Bobangi.
The Portuguese established another trade fort farther south from Luanda in
Benguela, which started exporting slaves from 1615. They found partners in
the Ovimbundu, who spoke Umbundu and lived on the Benguela plateau,
which was even more sparsely populated than Luanda. However, they
encountered great opposition from the Ngola, and their Queen Nzinga waged
war, unsuccessfully, to drive them out. Initially allying with the Dutch,
Nzinga, who became Christianized, had to strike an uneasy compromise with
the Europeans, despite harboring intentions to drive them out. She died at the
ripe age of eighty years old.
There was a large Afro-Portuguese mulatto population on the ground in
Africa to push for slavery, but they had to travel far and wide in central and
eastern Africa for slaves due to the low population concentrations. Many of
the inhabitants were just migrating to the area, but when the raids became
incessant, some of them moved back into the interior Congo highland
rainforest, accessible only through complex waterways. Others moved into
the vast South and East African savannahs.

The Zambezi basin region was the next vital area after the Congo basin and
Rift Valley Lakes. From the 1630s, hungry Portuguese renegades, some from
the Angola garrisons, formed Prazeiros—more or less terrorist cells with a
small slave army—to launch raids around the Zambezi area. Their main
revenue came from extortion and elephant hunting.
The sparsely populated southeastern African savannah was good for cattle
and ivory, which the Shona, especially those of the Rowzi empire, provided.
The Shona cultural center moved from Zimbabwe to Mutapa to Torwa.
Torwa was taken over by a Shona general, Dombo Changamire, in the late
1600s. They were known as the Rozwi (‘destroyers’). At the zenith of its
power in the 1700s, the Rozwi kingdom confined the Portuguese influence to
the Zambezi River.
Farther north, along the East Africa coast, the sparse Swahili polities were
mainly depended on trade from the Zambezi and Lake Victoria areas.
In South Africa, the Dutch refueling station for vegetables, fruits, and grains
for Asia-bound ships, established in 1652, became a reluctant Dutch ‘colony
for settlement’ against the Dutch policy of ‘colonies for trade only’. The
Dutch, some company ex-officials, and recruits came from the sea to settle
the Table Mountains in the southwest corner of the region where they built
Cape Town. They spread east, planting fruits and vegetables and establishing
cattle ranches.
As they claimed territory for the company, they met some of the largest San
and Bushmen clans. Being on the African migration frontline, they were the
first to experience loss of land, slavery, and extreme cruelties. They died in
relatively large numbers from European diseases.
The Nguni (Xhosa, Thembu, Pondo, and Zulu) were in the east of South
Africa but were yet to establish centralized states and empires. The Nguni
occupied the most fertile land in South Africa, which was in the east and was
wooded grassland, while in the west and northwest, the Namib Desert was
between the Drakensberg mountains and the grassland plateaus.
With their strong, Calvinist religion, the Dutch settlers quoted chapters from
their Bible that backed robbing and maltreatment of Africans. Many of the

Dutch believed that they were Jews returning to the Promised land, and it was
their manifest destiny to rid the area of Canaanites. The worst was still to
come across Africa, because the majority of Africans remained oblivious of
the impending doom.

Chapter 8: Tale of Two Colonizers: French and
English
British and French vie for world domination through slavery and
colonization: The creation of the United States, Haiti, and Brazil (1650 to
1808)
The British and French took over the Dutch global ascendancy by reaping
greater benefits from their colonies of settlement than the Dutch did from
their colonies of trade. The Dutch couldn’t pursue a colony of settlement
policy due to their much smaller population.
To promote free trade and prosperity, the Dutch financed and transferred the
sugar technology to French and English colonies, which resulted in Haiti and
Jamaica catching up and surpassing Brazil’s sugar production. The Dutch
were later disappointed and weakened by the closure of British and French
ports to free trade, which deprived them of the benefits of their sugar
‘technology transfer’ and resultant increase in financial success. By the
1700s, British sugar colonies earned more income than the rest of the British
Empire colonies combined due to the high sugar prices in Europe.
The main business drive was the slave trade, which created the first
millionaires in Nantes in France and Bristol and Liverpool in England. The
slave trade led to the growth of Bristol and Liverpool for shipyards and the
glass industry, Manchester for cotton, and Birmingham for guns. The port of
Nantes became the most prosperous French town. French ships carried more
than 1 million slaves, while British carried more than 2.5 million slaves in the
1700s. Each trip of two to three hundred slaves made more than 100 percent
profit. The slave ship, Ann, left Liverpool in 1751 with an outfit and cargo
costing ₤1,604 and returned to record a net profit of ₤3,287. *
At the time, there was little difference between a merchant ship and a
warship. Merchant ships were easily converted, which allowed the British to
possess a navy that ruled the world’s seas. The Sugar Boom enabled the
English to finance a far-flung British Empire, which built a fleet larger than
the Dutch, because they had more colonies of settlements with monopolised

trade. In addition to giant sugar companies like Tate and Lyle, financiers and
insurers like Lloyds of London built fortunes from the trade.
Following William III’s crowning after the 1688 Glorious Revolution, a
group of merchants agreed, in 1694, to lend the British monarch ₤1.2 million
at 8 percent interest per year, in return for creating and running a Bank of
England—a central bank that gave the merchants a monopoly of banknotes
and the right to receive deposits. **
With the English monarch signing over to merchants his sovereign right to
issue currency and his control over the economy, London became a haven for
merchant bankers and the world financial center for notables such as the
Rothschilds and Barings. Throughout the 1700s, the British made ₤1 million
yearly (a conservative estimate) directly from the African slave trade, while
the merchants under the name of Bank of England continued to finance
government war efforts with its bonds.
Just before the Haiti Revolution, Saint Domingue (Haiti) accounted for no
less than 40 percent of France’s foreign trade, probably more than the output
of the British West Indies, and 60 percent of the world’s coffee supply. The
French West Indies experienced a massive increase in slaves. In 1681, Haiti
had two thousand slaves; this grew to four hundred and eighty thousand in
1791, even though 850,000 were imported. In 1664, Martinique had twentyseven
hundred slaves, and that number grew to eighty-four thousand by 1790.
From 1700 to 1793, an ‘official total’ of 3,321 French ships collected slaves
in West Africa (one-third, 1143, were Nantes ships). *
The only real value added to the economies was that of the slaves, who were
brutally used over a ten-year period. The rationale was that it was cheaper to
use a slave to death before he became a liability and needed healthcare and
sustenance when old. The most torturous devices were introduced to punish
and kill them, like tearing the slaves apart by tying them to horses that were
whipped to run in opposite directions, hanging them with hooks in the rib
cage, or using whips with nails—anything to dehumanize and kill the body
and soul.
Nevertheless, the slave revolts, often led by the Akan, Igbo, and Yoruba,
were on the increase as the numbers of African slaves grew in relation to

whites. The vegetation and topography of the colonies dictated whether the
Africans could escape or wage war, like in the Guianas, Brazil, and Jamaica,
with the formation of escaped African communities called the Maroons.
** Sampson, The Money Lenders, 36.
The Jamaican Maroons, often led by Igbo and Akan religious juju Obeah men
and women, were able to run up the Forest Mountains at the center of the
island. To survive, the Maroons launched raids downhill on their former
plantations for food and weapons. Many of them were hunted down by the
Europeans. Jamaica was Britain’s most productive island and the most
turbulent. Its increasing production brought more slaves and more revolts,
which produced more Maroon communities, eventually leading to the First
Maroon War in 1728 and the Second Maroon War in 1795.
Brazil’s Maroon communities were called quilombos, and the most popular
one was called Palmares, named after the large forest of palm trees. It
probably came into existence around 1612. Exchange Qu for K, and
quilombo means ‘what are you hiding/covering?’ in Yoruba. * With more than
twenty thousand people, Palmares was the largest Maroon community in the
Americas, and it withstood at least twenty attacks from the Portuguese and
Dutch between 1630 and 1695 under the legendary Zumbi, their warrior
leader. The large rainforest permitted the formation of many quilombos,
although on a smaller scale.
The Bush Negroes in Guyana were slaves who escaped into the forest in the
1660s during the exchange of colonies between the British and Dutch. Falling
short of nearly ridding the country of whites in an early surprise attack, the
Bush Negroes retreated into the forest and continued to strengthen their
resistance with escaped slaves throughout the 1700s until their British
colonizers abolished slavery in 1832.
Although the numbers of Maroons increased in the 1700s, they were
prominent from the beginning. A large Maroon community headed by an
African slave called Bayano existed in Panama in the 1550s, while Hawkins,
on a mission for Queen Elizabeth I, used Maroons from Spanish colonies to
assail Catholic Spanish rule.

The huge population explosion in the Caribbean islands, consisting primarily
of Africans, peaked by the end of 1700s. Europeans began to migrate to
North America for fear of being overwhelmed by the imported African slaves
and the ominous threat of the burgeoning Maroon communities.
* It also means ‘what is coming?’ if each o is underlined and voiced with a deep tonation.
Unlike the Portuguese and Spanish, who were more familiar with black
Africans because of their Islamic history, the northwest Europeans were more
detached and harsh. Their belief was that to keep their system of slave
plantation agriculture alive, they had to instill fear in the Africans while
answering their societal and personal conscience that did, perhaps, inform
them that what they were doing was clearly wrong. Religion was the answer
—only God could have authorized such wickedness—if they and their
relatives were to sleep at night.
The religious and middle classes were apt to show that the Africans were
cursed in the Bible and only they could save the soul of ‘black savages’. The
harsher the regime, the harder the brand of Christianity from the Dutch
Reformist Church in South Africa to the English Southern churches in the
United States, where the Slave Belt was also the Bible Belt.
Like the Muslim university in Timbuktu, of the Mali empire, that tried
studying the roots of black African prosperity and produced agent
provocateurs in the Niger area, the English created the University of Oxford
and University of Cambridge at home, which were important in developing
ways to approach the African issue. There were initially two main fields of
study: human sciences (religion, economics, and philosophy) on one hand
and alchemy and natural sciences on the other. Chem or khem was the name
of black Egypt, and al-chem, the chemistry of black prosperity, had at its
forefront the way to convert other metals to gold.
With scarcely any agriculturists among them, the first group of religious
philosophers and economists were let into the colonies, where they
propagated the backwardness and hopelessness of the black race in order to
expropriate the sins of their unfair plantation system.
From 1666 in British North America, starting at Harvard, English graduates

built universities from New Hampshire to Philadelphia, where an
‘enlightened group’ was based and its philosophies developed, to move
society moved away from the old religious belief system. New York, whose
detachment from the mainland aided its atmosphere of free commerce, later
became the focal point of the merchant class of Europeans as well as Dutch
and Iberian Jews. The South attracted more of the uneducated lower classes
who had been farmers in England and remained piously religious.
The shift away from religion to explain social and natural phenomenon began
in Europe and North America in the 1600s and 1700s, a time known as the
Age of Enlightenment for the few Europeans who had grown fat on African
slavery and gold. Theories of social contract and organization were
propounded due to an increasingly powerful merchant class that didn’t want
the overbearing influence of the Church, its European monarchies, or the
ominous problem of a slave-based production system. This mercantile,
‘enlightened’ class eventually took the wheels of destiny from the churches
and the aristocracy.
A slight majority of African slaves imported into British North America were
taken to the south of the colony, where the subtemperate climate allowed
agriculture of tobacco, rice, and later cotton. In the north, slavery became a
nuisance. The northeast coast was barren, as far as export crops were
concerned and apart from the mid-latitudinal wheat exported to the West
Indies. However, New York had a number of Africans relatively proportional
to that of South Carolina. On the whole, 75 percent of African American
slaves didn’t arrive until the end of the 1700s, when cotton became king.
As in the West Indies and Brazil, African Americans did not exist in blissful
ignorance, with many revolting or fleeing to join the Indians. There was a
Yoruba/Akan slave revolt in 1712, and an even bigger revolt in 1741 resulted
in the hanging of eighteen Africans. Slave ship revolts were on the rise.
Africans tried to break the barriers peacefully, with the first black school in
New York in 1704, while some formed towns like Chicago, founded in 1774
by a black trader, Jean Baptiste du Sable.
New York had been a major slave port since 1662, when its merchants
became involved in the ‘African trade triangle’. They transported slaves from

West Africa to the South and exported finished products to Africa and the
South, where they also provided credit and technology to farmers. Shipyards
were built in Baltimore, New York, and Boston. However, their prospective
development became a challenge to the British colonial government, which
lost revenue in tax and profit. The immediate challenge was the other
European players in the region.
The French took the interior of the North American continent from both ends
of the waterways that cut across the United States. In the north, having gone
through the Hudson Bay, the French conducted whale hunting and
established contact with Indians who supplied them with furs. The area was
not conductive to sugar or tobacco plantations that could attract a large
population influx. In the South, the French had a large presence around the
mouth of the Mississippi River from Louisiana west.
Just as ancient African gold and labor attracted and sustained the flow of
Europeans to the west of the Eurasian continent from the Caucasus
Mountains and Russian plains, the fruits of African American slavery filled
the Americas with Europeans. By the mideighteenth century, there were 1.5
million English colonists and ninety thousand French on the North American
continent. The French and English clashed around Ohio and engaged in
major warfare in 1760, which had huge ramifications on their empires.
Despite the large number of English colonists, the British poured regular land
soldiers into the land war while also fighting a tough naval battle. The war
spread to Europe and became known as the Seven Years’ War, in which
Prussia sided with Britain, and Austria sided with the French. Britain took the
French Caribbean possessions of St Lucia, Grenada, and Tobago, as well as
its possessions in Africa and India. The British won the war after spending
more than $82 million, which it got from its sugar colonies and African gold
(the North American colonies were yet to yield a profit).
The British returned the captured French and Spanish islands in the Treaty of
Paris, which heralded the beginning of the end of the French empire in North
America. Spain gave up its underdeveloped Florida colony in return for Cuba
and the Philippines colonies seized by the British, but Spain received
Louisiana in another deal.

In the eighteenth century, the Iberians had lost their supreme position in the
world, but Spain wasn’t a completely spent force. The Spanish held on to
their silver-mining South American colonies and Cuba, where they slowly
introduced sugar and discovered gold in Havana. In 1701, the Spanish gave
the French a contract to supply them with four thousand slaves a year, but the
French couldn’t fulfill this agreement because of their needs in Haiti and
other colonies. The contract was re-awarded to the British.
With the largest South American colony, the Portuguese were still the largest
importers of slaves, but British merchants had taken over much of their
importation volume. The Portuguese colonists were too weak to take
advantage of their colonies due to their small merchant fleet and because of
Brazil’s location, which made it attractive to foreign interlopers on the
African trade route. The British took control of the Brazilian economy by
providing credit and supplying manufactured goods and slaves from British
ships that also transported Brazilian exports.
The Dutch dissemination of Brazilian sugar technology to British and French
islands in the mid-1600s hurt the Brazilian local production as the returns on
capital shrunk due to the stiff competition. Gold was found in 1693 and
diamonds in 1728 in the south, which directed London’s capital and profits
away from the northeastern Sugar Coast of Bahia. It has been estimated that
Brazil produced more than thirty million ounces of gold and three million
carats of diamonds during the 1700s. Most were sold in the London markets.
The administrative capital was moved from Bahia’s Sao Salvador to Rio de
Janeiro, which had been the gateway into the interior for the earlier Indian
slave trade and trade in metals. For a short while, Sao Paulo, General Mines,
and other southern regions grew rapidly and drew financial and labor
resources from Bahia, but the easy gold dried up, and further exploitation
required more intensive mining.
The Seven Years’ War that disrupted sugar production in the French and
British Caribbean islands enabled Brazil to again grab a foothold in the sugar
market. Tobacco also gained popularity as an export crop. Cotton was
introduced around 1760, and Brazil was the world’s leading exporter until
cheaper US production took over, supplying the large British cotton industry
geared towards western African markets.

The Afro-Brazilian slaves behind these economic successes were subjected to
harsh regimes. They were slightly less harsh than the English and French
regimes, because slaves had a better chance of buying their freedom. Many
Portuguese men had the habit of sleeping with their slaves, which resulted in
a huge mulatto class that ‘wished itself white’ and tried unsuccessfully to
bridge the gap.
Many components of the Yoruba society remained intact among the slaves,
despite attempts to whiten it. Yoruba food like akara and pepper-spiced foods
and Yoruba music survived. Yoruba religions survived. This also occurred
with the incursion of Islam in West Africa, and eventually the Catholic
Church agreed to a form of mixing, whereby Yoruba gods were given the
names of Catholic saints. The name of the Afro-Brazilian religion was
Candomble, Macumba, or Santuario; Shango, Yemanja, and Ogun featured
prominently.
Apart from the South American jungles that helped Yorubas to hide in
Quilombos and continue practicing their religion, one reason why Yoruba
religions lasted was probably because the Iberian home governments frowned
upon ‘enlightenment’ and universities. In the US, enlightenment eventually
reduced the importance of religion, the very thing that the Catholics feared
would happen.
The British might have wished that they had kept a lid on the ‘enlightenment’
movement in their North American colonies, especially after the enlightened
classes of merchants and intellectuals based in England wrested power from
the monarchy. After the war with the French and the extension of British
North American territories (that had an unfavorable balance of payments for
fifty years before the war), British administrative costs multiplied fivefold.
They also worsened by the overextension of the British Empire across the
world. Like most previous empires at their peak, overextension was its
downfall, because taxes and tariffs were increased to cover costs. The Sugar
Act of 1764, the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Acts of 1767, and the
Tea Act resulted in protests in America that grew to resistance and then
‘revolution’. The enlightened Americans claimed ‘no taxation without
representation’ in the Parliament.
George Washington, a Southern plantation owner with three hundred slaves

and one of the richest Americans, became one of the most prominent
revolutionaries. The enlightened classes of lawyers, merchants, and
academicians revolted against Britain, and because the taxes brought
hardships on everyone, the lower classes rioted against both the British
colonists and the American upper classes.
Incorrectly gauging the mood in America, the British remained obstinate until
they realized that their traditional enemies were taking advantage of the
situation in the colonies. By the time they realized this in 1776, it was too
late. The French, and to a lesser extent enfeebled Spain, backed the United
States with arms and future trade treaties. Still bitter over the defeat of the
1760 Seven Years’ War, the French attacked Britain in other parts of the
world to dissipate British military power in 1778, while the Spanish attacked
in 1779.
Both sides used Africans in the American Independence War, and Britain
freed the slaves of occupied areas in the effort to destabilize the white
Americans. Some of the freed African slaves joined and died in the fighting,
while others left after the war, going to Canada, England, and the new
country of Sierra Leone in British West Africa. George Washington fought
hard to prevent many from leaving and reenslaved them.
As Britain faced defeats across the world and its debt doubled, it was forced
to come to the table in the 1782 Treaty of Paris, when it agreed to American
independence.
The newly independent American nation was a poor and weak confederacy of
thirteen East Coast colonies. The Spanish still held land from Florida to the
Mississippi, and the French held all land to the west of the Mississippi. The
economic troubles of the colonies were blamed on the weak, central
government and were corrected by the Congress of Philadelphia, with a
constitution prompted by Alexander Hamilton (who had written the 1784
constitution of the first US bank, The Bank of New York).
Divisions from the onset along ‘Federalist’ and ‘Democrat’ lines beset the
resulting union of states, headed by President Washington in 1789. The
Federalists, mostly from the Northeast, wanted an industrially oriented state,
while the Southern Democrats wanted to keep the agricultural status quo. The

members of the Enlightenment, who had shouted about the virtues of
freedom, failed to give freedom to African Americans by inserting a clause
that made it illegal for Congress to outlaw slavery for twenty years, with a
review slated for 1808.
Thomas Jefferson obviously didn’t believe his famous words, enshrined in
the 1776 Declaration of Independence, when he wrote, ‘We hold these truths
to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’. A Southern plantation owner with
more than two hundred slaves, Jefferson later ‘stated his suspicions’ that
black Africans were ‘inferior to whites in the endowments of body and
mind’. *
Northerners wanted the slaves to be counted when determining each state’s
share of direct federal taxes, but Southerners wanted them excluded from the
count for taxes but not from the count for determining their state’s
representation in the House of Representatives—even though they had no
intention of allowing slaves to vote. In what was known as the Three-Fifths
Compromise, it was agreed to regard the full-bodied Yoruba, Igbo, Kongos,
and Akan as three-fifths of a person!
Alexander Hamilton, a white, West Indian immigrant who married into a
wealthy and influential New York family, was the father of big business and
banking in the United States. The New York lawyer, who wrote the Bank of
New York’s constitution in 1784, became the first secretary of the treasury,
and he called the US Constitution Convention in 1786. He single-handedly
brought New York into the Union. He set the financial tone of the new nation
by creating the first central bank, the Bank of the United States, in 1791.
There was serious opposition from Southern, Jeffersonian Republican
Democrats, who accused him of paying off the financial interests of the rich
Northeast and Britain. Hamilton, who also owned slaves, was a realist who
stated flatly of blacks, ‘Their natural faculties are as good as ours’. *
If he and his Federalist camp appeared to be pro-black with the freeing of
slaves in Northeastern states after independence, it was because of a ‘higher
vision’ of a worldwide industrial society, one where nearly everyone was

indirectly enslaved to big, moneyed interests. The international merchant
class set up the London Stock Exchange in 1773, and US merchants
desperately wanted to set up the necessary economic environment with a
central but not necessarily democratic government that could enforce the
interests of the business community.
* John A Garraty, The American Nation: A History of the United States to 1877, vol. 1, 6th ed. (New
York: Harper & Row, 1987), 173.
The United States became the first major European political system to claim
the separation of church and state, and it couldn’t resort to religion to cover
inconsistencies in the system (as was the custom with Rome, the European
monarchies, and the Islamic caliphates). The United States resorted to boldfaced,
English semantics as the merchants continued to dominate on the
benches.
The third arm of government, the judiciary, which was supposed to be the
balance and conscience of the country, was taken over by merchant bankers
(benchers) and became their most effective tool. Even the symbolic name,
where the judges presided, was called ‘the bench’. The judiciary was ready to
enforce contracts made by the public but dodged the societal responsibility of
the business class as property became paramount while people and the
environment came in a poor second.
The judiciary was not geared towards truth and justice but towards an
adversarial advocatory system that merely played a ‘game of law’, whereby
defense and prosecution teams battled within a framework towards gaining a
legal victory and not the victory of truth. Money and power employed the
best legal teams, as the Enlighted got paid, beneath the blindfolded Lady
Justice, while commoners remained deprived.
Judges were to be chosen not by their peers like the bar association but by
political parties through the executive branch. Therefore, judges were
partisan and their party’s legal representatives on the most important bench of
all. When the Federalists lost power, it was the judiciary, under Chief Justice
John Marshall, that blessed the business community with the contract laws *
and centralized power, which worked to their ultimate advantage.

On the other hand, Jeffersonian, Southern Republican Democrats proclaimed
to stand for freedom from a tyrannical, overcentralized government and big
business while they oppressed and exploited Africans. The judiciary made
some devastatingly negative judgments that further entrenched slavery and
racial prejudice.
* Feb.1819 Sturges v. Crowinshield; Dartmouth College v. Woodward; McCulloch v. Maryland.
Hamilton’s Federalists of the Northeastern financial powerhouses, who
claimed to stand for business, capitalism, and free trade, put up tariffs and
blocked competition from abroad while using discriminatory credit practices
at home to promote Anglo-Saxon monopolies. Although the Federalists’
Northeastern regions abolished slavery following the 1776 Declaration of
Independence (Vermont in 1777, Pennsylvania in 1780, Massachusetts in
1783, and Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784), the laws didn’t extend to
the slaves in the Southern plantations, nor did they assuage the plight of the
Northeastern African, whose labor was used for next to nothing in the
shipping docks of New York.
To the Anglo-Saxon American, the new system was democracy, but to
Africans, it was a demonstration of craze. Dem all crazy! Religion was not
the ancient Eurasian problem behind politics, but the depraved craze for
money and control was disguised by religion— from Jesus chasing merchants
from the temple to the merchandised pope apportioning America to special
interests, resulting in Protestantism.
The veil of religion was discarded for the full effect of money. The US
democratic system could not stop the unfair influence of big money special
interests in politics and the judiciary, and the masses couldn’t appeal to God
anymore when in need of healthcare, education, and access to the legal
system that had been priced out of their reach.
The British monetary establishment was able to recover lost ground in
business through the Federalists, while Republican Democrats supported the
dodgy French revolutionaries like themselves.
The Seven Years’ war, indirectly leading to the loss of British North
American colonies, had an even worse effect in France as the financial

weight of the loss became overburdening. The French masses could not
understand the intricate dynamics of losing the French empire in America,
which had provided them with undeserved prosperity but was drying up. The
poor saw that the rich were still relatively rich and accused them of
corruption. Their anger was encouraged by the middle-class members of the
Enlightenment who no longer believed in the monarch’s divine authority to
rule.
In 1789, a revolution broke out in France that led to the 1793 beheading of
King Louis XVI, who had sided with the Americans in their war of
independence from Britain. Thomas Jefferson, the American political theorist
and constitution writer, was constantly briefed on the evolving situation, and
he advised the revolutionaries throughout the Revolution. In the division and
confusion that ensued, Napoleon, a soldier, took over government and formed
a republic in 1799. Fearful of the revolutionary Republican ideals spreading
to England and Spain, their monarchies waged war against France.
Napoleon intended to reestablish French ascendancy by using Haiti and
Louisiana to conquer the North American continent, but the French colony of
Haiti was not the springboard that Napoleon had hoped for. As the French
revolted against their monarchy, their most important colony in the West
Indies, Haiti, was consumed by an African revolt in 1791. The horrendous
conditions in Haiti led to a bloody revolution, provoked by whites discussing
their quest for freedom in the ongoing French Revolution in front of
supposedly dumb Africans. Vociferous French abolitionists groups like Amis
des Noirs helped to provoke thought on both sides.
The Yoruba, called Nago, in Haiti retained their African culture due to the
harshness of their French masters, which prevented any integration.
Moreover, at least 70 percent of the slaves, at the time of the revolution, were
first- or second-generation Africans who still spoke their language and
related, on the cultural level, with each other behind the planters’ backs.
Despite bans, they continued their dances and the religion that they called
voodoo (a spelling variant of the Yoruba juju).
Around 1750 an Ifa/voodoo priest, Francois Mackandral, was to inspire a
revolt and the use of poisons to kill the slave owners. This spread fear among
the Haitian plantation owners, who sought him out and eventually killed him.

However, his actions inspired a network of Ifa practitioners and the belief
that Africans could gain freedom through positive action and revolt based on
their African traditions.
The knowledge of African traditional medicine enabled them and others
across the Americas to use poisons as a weapon and for suicide. Poison and
escapes became prevalent as the brutality of the French increased—
mutilation by cutting off limbs, ears, and genitals as well as having hot wax
or boiling sugar poured over their heads, or tying them around a cart wheel
that was then turned until the slave’s spine was broken.
These barbaric treatments were backed by a series of laws called Code Noir
(the Black Code), which used examples from the Roman Empire and the
Catholic Church. The French pushed the island to the limit in the pursuit of
sugar profits by cramming the island with Africans in one of the most
murderous regimes in history. Three hundred and seventeen thousand slaves
were killed between 1779 and 1788.
On August 14, 1791, a seven-day Ogun ceremony led by voodoo priest
Boukman Dutty triggered the Haitian Revolution. The spiritual ceremony
took place at Bwa Kayiman (Alligator Woods) where 200 Ifa priests from the
North came together to discuss plans for the only successful slave rebellion
during the chattel slavery period. The 1791 slave revolt in Haiti, with one
hundred thousand rebel Africans, resulted in the destruction of two hundred
and twenty sugar plantations, six hundred coffee plantations, and two
hundred cotton and indigo plantations.
Francois Dominique Toussaint, allegedly with US backing, took over the
revolt and organized it into a movement with a formidable force that defeated
the British, French, and other Europeans, who were horrified by the prospect
of an independent African state in the Americas. Fifty thousand French
soldiers, and probably one hundred thousand African freedom fighters, died
in the horrendous struggles, which were worsened by the mulattos switching
sides. Toussaint did not push for complete independence but better treatment
for Africans as a colony.
Even after Toussaint made the mistake of seeking a compromise with the
French, which led to his arrest and deportation, the strength of the African

movement secured independence in 1804 and left French North American
ambitions in tatters. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, an African-born slave, became
the king of Saint Domingue, renamed Haiti, which had its own constitution.
Haiti (Ayiti) means ‘unbeatable/un-turn-able’ in Yoruba. Like the French
duplicity that had led to the death of tens of thousands of Africans, the
Haitians conned the whites into relaxing before massacring most of them in
revenge.
News of the Haitian Revolution sparked the 1795–1796 Second Maroon War
in Jamaica, the 1798 Slave Revolts in conjunction with Bush Negro Maroons
in Surinam (Dutch Guyana), the 1795–1797 Fedon rebellion in Grenada, the
1795–1796 Second Black Carib War in St Vincent, and others on practically
every island in the West Indies.
The law of natural justice, Shango and Ogun’s double-edged sword, brought
about by Haitian independence, was carried across the Atlantic Ocean, where
the ramifications of the Haitian defeat turned Europe into a bloodbath.
Napoleon had to come up with something else to keep French dominance
afloat. The aftermath of the Haitian Ogun Revolution led to the end of direct
Spanish rule in South America and the eventual liberation of the small
African populations in Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, and other South
American colonies.
Napoleon’s war in Europe eventually led to treaties that crystalized the global
concept of the ‘nationstate’ and the scramble for Africa to put Africans in
colonial straitjackets.

Chapter 9: From Land of Love to Land of
Wickedness
Yorubaland burns with Muslim jihads in the north and Christian attacks on
the Slave Coast: Africa bleeds to America (1800s)
The slave trade figures mentioned earlier are those that most academicians
quote. They were derived from Cutin’s 1969 seminal study of the number of
slaves who landed in the Americas, a number greatly underestimated at fewer
than ten million. The lack of better statistics is partly due to the erasure of
records, like Brazil’s Rui Barbosa’s 1891 Decree 29, which destroyed all
slave records. Lovejoy updated the Cutin figures in his 1983 book to twelve
million, but the figures still remain largely underestimated.
The available records of ‘landed numbers’ are also incomplete because of tax
evasion and smugglers in unfriendly foreign ports, such as Dutch smugglers
in the small ports of British or French colonies. Some Afrocentric estimates
have estimated the loss at fifty to hundred million people. I haven’t made a
guess because it would be purely academic, but I believe the numbers lost in
real time is the difference of the present populations of India or China to
Nigeria and its immediate surrounding nations—several hundred million.
Nigeria/West Africa should be the most populous region in the world.
Nevertheless, the mainstream Cutin/Lovejoy figures are useful for the longterm
economic dynamics of the trade, because they authenticate the
socioeconomic history of the blackworld. According to Lovejoy, the years of
the Atlantic slave trade from 1450 to 1600 involved only 367,000 slaves, and
most went to Latin America. In the 1600s, the figure for the whole Atlantic
slave trade rose to 1,868,000. The figure rose astronomically in 1700s to
6,133,000, more than 300 percent growth—a 4.3 million increase! * The
3,330,000 figure for the 1800s is lower due to the 1820s ban on the slave
trade, which increased underreporting and smuggling before the trade died
out in the late 1800s.
* Isichei, A History of African Societies to 1870, 329.

AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE MAP
All figures exclude the extra millions killed at the point of capture, especially
the slavery-induced wars in Yoruba and Kikongo lands and the millions who
died aboard the slave ships. A good 25 percent of those who landed in the
Americas died within a year.
The supply of slaves gradually moved from the less populated savannahs of
Senegambia and Angola into the population centers of forest West Africa.
The western edge of the slaving zone in West Africa —around the
Senegambia Muslim savannah—became sparse by 1700, because the non-
Muslims moved farther into the forest. Next on the coast were Sierra Leone
and Ivory Coast, which were lightly populated by Mande and Akan, who had
recently moved south.
The Gold Coast forests witnessed an influx of former savannadwelling Akan,

whose population couldn’t clear the forests and mine the gold and had to raid
Yoruba and Aja land to the east for slaves. Their northern savannah
neighbors, the Muslim Mossi states, were too small and militant for any
sizable flow of slaves.
The Denkyira, and especially the Akwamu polity that first usurped the
original Aja/Yoruba speakers from the Volta area, were themselves attacked
by the main body of Akans to the north, the Ashantes. The Akwamu resettled
farther east, complicating the greatly militarized area since the advent of the
European.
The first head of the Ashanti was Osei Tutu, who reigned from 1695 to 1717,
and the state was also modeled on the replaced Akwamu state institutions,
copied from the original Aja/Yoruba around Accra. The Ashante state started
not with war but with an alliance between a few small, Akan polities that
took the king of Kumasi as their supreme head: Ashantehene. The Akan had
had an ancient, small kingdom around Kumasi for more than a millennium,
on the Volta River trade route to Jenne on the Niger, and they were
displeased by the southern Denyira and Akwamu hegemony over the gold
trade and their northern raids for slaves.
The need for more slaves saw the rise of militant kingdoms springing up
much farther inland where the ancient population centers accumulated around
the Sahara trade routes. By 1750, the Ashanti expanded to cover much of
modern Ghana and parts of Ivory Coast and Togo by selling war captives and
gold to Europeans.
The Ashantis were supported by the Dutch, while the British armed their
southern cousins, the Fante. The Fante spoke the same language as the Akan
(Twi) but were closer to the coast and more militarized. The Fante didn’t
have a kingdom and were small polities without a king but with a military
commander with the title, Braffo.
The slave trade dynamics on the Gold Coast were more evident in the Slave
Coast, the Aja peoples of western Yorubaland. Aja in Yoruba means
‘fighters’ or ‘we fought’ and is a collective name for the people on the stretch
of a few hundred miles on the immediate western outskirts of Yorubaland
from Benin to Togo.

The Dahomey empire of the Fon people, a subgroup of the Aja, was the most
disruptive in the region. Fon means ‘disperse’ or ‘scatter’ in Yoruba, and the
people of the region scattered because of the anarchy and upheaval they
brought about. The Dahomey kingdom was founded in 1625 by one of the
warring Allada princes, and it was initially a northern tributary of the Allada
kingdom, which itself was a tributary of Oyo and Ketu. Allada means
‘sword-wielder/owner’ in Yoruba—those who wield the power of the sword.
Like the second Horsemen of the Roman Catholics and Islamists, however
their motivating philosophy was based not on religion, but on tribalism.
Dahomey rose from the northern Allada territory and was more geared
towards war with an early adoption of European guns. It took over Allada in
1724, and in 1727 took over the coastal polity, Whydah, which broke off
from Allada in 1671. The Dahomey empire spread farther inland into
Yorubaland in response to the demand, especially from the 1720s onward.
Anarchy and war increased exponentially by the late 1700s, when nearly half
a million guns were dumped in West Africa annually, even though many
were faulty and exploded on use.
The Portuguese on the ground were known as Aguda in Yoruba. The king of
Dahomey coordinated the slave raiding and transport of captives, who were
loaded onto British, French, and American ships filled with guns, fake
cowries, and fake Indian cotton. The Dahomey king gave his soldiers one
pound for every ‘prisoner of war’ brought back alive, while he sold them to
the Portuguese for fifteen pounds, which made many small, European
startups cut out the king’s middlemen. This could be done by making flash
guerrilla incursions up the Ogun and Osun rivers, known as the Egbado
corridor, which cut deep into western Yorubaland from the Atlantic lagoons.
The Yoruba Ijebu coastal kingdoms became early casualties with the advent
of Europeans. With the rise of inland Dahomey, a recently reinstated Oyo
court around the same latitude to the east had to contend with increasing
slave raids into its territory. There was constant war between Oyo and
Dahomey, with Oyo having the upper hand until Dahomey eventually
defeated an Oyo, weakened by jihadists, in 1823. The Oyo government had
become increasingly militarized, following its expulsion by the Nupe to
Igboho, to the west near the militarized Aja kingdoms. On returning to Oyo-

Ile, they extended into the vacuum left by the Ijebu to its south, with the help
of Egbados that migrated towards the coast. The Egbados created a slave
corridor through which Oyo conveyed Muslims and other prisoners of war
that attacked from the north and west. Oyo also raided central and eastern
Yoruba for slaves.
The vast majority of Yoruba in the forests were against Oyo’s new
dependence on the slave trade, as shown by their local ‘kings’, but the
constitutional monarchy system failed in their savannah empire. As the
ancient system was abused, regional upheavals resulted in leaders who were
more repressive. Because laws were explained through religion, offenders
were sacrificed to the gods who traditionally took only fruit and animal
sacrifices. The majority of human sacrifices in Yorubaland were made to
Ogun, where the accused were beheaded on Ogun’s shrine. This practice
spread from dealing with traitors and usurpers to being used to settle personal
and political scores.
The Oyo Mesi (Oyo’s voice) was the upper legislative branch of the Oyo
government, while the Ogboni was the lower branch. The Oyo Mesi had the
power to overrule the king, the Alaafin, and even order his suicide. The
leader of the Oyo Mesi, the bashorun (meaning ‘heaven assistant’) was the
chief of the armed forces, because members of the Oyo Mesi, and not the
king, raised the army from their constituents. The Bashorun had to commit
suicide when the king died as a means of keeping the balance of power, but
the tradition was disregarded when the Bashorun faced defeat from smaller
clans that had been subservient for millennia. In the 1700s, when military
considerations clashed with moral interests, the Bashorun increasingly
wrestled for the upper hand.
In addition to the European terrorism from the Atlantic coast, there were
major problems from the north through the Nupe and Borgu kingdoms, which
the Oyo constantly tried to keep at bay. Bashorun Gaa usurped power for
twenty years and ushered in a freefor-all type of slavery as millions of
Yoruba were killed and enslaved in Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, and the
United States.
Bashorun Gaa was overthrown by Alaafin Abiodun in 1774, with the help of
the Oyo Mesi and other provincial leaders, but Oyo was fatally damaged. In

1783, Oyo was defeated by the northern savannah Muslim kingdoms of
Borgu and Nupe, to Oyo’s immediate north, and it was defeated again in
1790.
Alaafin Awole was overthrown by one of his provincial rulers, Bashorun
Afonja, the ruler of Ilorin. Afonja hoped for the Alaafin throne but was
refused by the Oyo Mesi and ceded the Ilorin province from the Oyo empire.
Farther south, the Egba Yoruba revolted against the Oyo hegemony under the
leadership of Lisabi, the Liberator, and moved further south to present day,
Abeokuta in 1830s.
Afonja of Ilorin revolted with the help of Muslims, who had increased in
number in his northwestern Yoruba province bordering the northern Muslim
states. The Fulani cleric, Alimi, who helped Afonja mobilize Muslim rebels
against Oyo, led a jihad against Afonja a few years later. Afonja, a non-
Muslim, could not control the Muslim residents and slaves from wars with
Borgu and Nupe, and the jihad led to his death in 1823–1824. Ilorin became
the first and only Muslim emirate in Yorubaland.
The Muslims had been busy with piracy against ships bound for America and
jihads across the arid western Sudan. Having the Europeans divert trade from
them made the Muslims diversify into other products and intensify their
slaving operations, but this was not enough to stop widespread
discontentment when the frequent famines hit the arid areas. There was also
an influx of light-skinned AfroAsians, Fulani, from Senegambia and the
Maghreb, which had been overrun by Europeans.
The Fulani, labeled ‘white men of the desert’ due to their imperialism over
wide distances of the desert and their olive complexion and aquiline features,
came as beggars and were known as torodbe (‘those who beg for alms’).
Toronkawa in Hausa appears to be derived from the Yoruba phrases toro
debe and toro nkan wa. * The nomadic Fulani from the far West Africa corner
of Senegambia, who doubled as clerics, and other light-skinned Afro-Asians,
incited the masses of the dark-skinned savannah Africans. The locals were
forcibly converted centuries earlier but again revolted against their leaders
when new jihadists, trying to control the European west coast trade, made a
major push towards the sea.

The western Sudan empires in Senegambia and northern Nigeria were already
Muslim, but the Fulani and their taliban (students/disciples) accused the elite
of paganism and corruption to incite social upheaval that led to the overthrow
of the dark-skinned Hausa rulers for the lighter-skinned Fulani. The notable
exception was Bornu Empire near Lake Chad, where Al-Kanemi pled, ‘No
age and country was free from its share of heresy and sin, 51 and it was sin
rather than unbelief’.
The leader of the northern Nigerian Sokoto jihad, Usman Dan Fodio (1754–
1817), condemned ‘a group of talaba (students) who accuse ordinary
Muslims of unbelief’ in his later writings, although he was guilty of the same
crime. They used the Sufi as a tool of mass mobilization, making the darkskinned
Hausa and Mande feel a sense of belonging, only to realize that the
Fulani had an ethnically exclusive club at the top, like the Sanhaja Berbers of
the Almoravid empire where they originated.
* Isichei, A History of African Societies to 1870, 296. 51 Hodgkin, Nigerian Perspectives, 263.
Isichei, A History of African Societies to 1870, 297.
The jihads started in Senegambia in the far west corner of West Africa,
because the arid region depended on the lost trade more than anywhere else
and was closer to Maghreb. African Muslim governments fell like a pack of
cards eastward until the biggest jihad occurred in Hausaland, in northern
Nigeria. It was the biggest by virtue of the population and closeness to the
African population center of Lower Niger. The last, big African Muslim
empire in the western Sudan was Bornu in northeast Nigeria, and the jihad
there was stemmed by Shehu Al-Kanemi, even though Bornu eventually split
up, losing Bauchi.
The Hausaland Fulani jihad resulted in a vast conglomerate of states that
extended over fourteen hundred kilometers of arid land from east to west and
seven hundred kilometers from north to south, thus earning the Fulani the
title of ‘the white man of the desert’. The jihad started in the desert edge
Hausa kingdom of Gobir, which at the time was buoyant but affected by
ecological and political factors in other parts of the western Sudan and
Maghreb. This resulted in an influx of begging Fulani, who turned their
jealousies and feelings of alienation into pious religious accusations of
corruption and syncretism against their hosts.

Fodio, the leader of the Sokoto jihad, was backed by close relatives like his
brother, Abdullahi, and his second son, Mohammed Bello. Fodio lived at
Degel, a rural Fulani settlement on the borders of Gobir, and he overthrew the
Hausa kingdoms of Gobir, Kano, Katsina, Zazzau, and Daura. Most of the
Hausa kings fought bravely, exemplified by Katsina, where five successive
kings died fighting the jihadists, but they all fell by 1810.
In the Middle Belt of wooded grasslands, from whence many nations
migrated into East, Central, and South Africa, new Muslim caliphates like
Adamawa and Bauchi were formed. All the widely spread and sparsely
populated grassland states were ruled by relations of Fodio. They became
fairly autonomous client-states of the Sokoto caliphate, whose court was
based in Sokoto City in the arid northwest corner of Nigeria. Despite the
wide area of influence, their population and resources were still dwarfed by
those of the Lower Niger rainforest lands.
The Islamic expansion moved south by taking over Nupe and, through
Afonja’s blunder, Ilorin, the Yoruba northern province. OyoIle, the Oyo
empire capital, was razed in 1820 by Muslims living within the city while
Oyo was at war with the Muslim north. The Alaafin of Oyo never bothered
rebuilding Oyo-Ile and relocated the court to the safety of the forest at the
new Oyo. Rebuilding was impractical, with Yorubaland straining under the
weight of the aggressive Muslims from the north and Christian slavery in the
south. Millions more were transported to the increasingly profitable cotton
fields of the southern United States and the productive sugar fields of Cuba
and Brazil.
Eastern Yorubaland, from Ekiti through Akoko to the Edo kingdoms and
Niger River, was not spared from the upheaval that swept the region. The
Bini tried to maintain their ban on the export of slaves from the kingdom, but
the geopolitical mechanisms were beyond what any single leader or nation
could control, as seen from the political upheavals in Europe, the Americas,
and elsewhere in Africa. It is commendable that the ban on slaves lasted from
the early 1500s to the 1600s.
Eventually, there was a foreign-inspired civil war, at the end of which Oba
Akensua won and reintroduced slave trading. This did not increase the levels
of slave raiding astronomically, because the Edo kingdom was not directly

located on the coast, and small, coastal polities like those of the Urhobo and
Itsekiri allowed the shipping of slaves from their ports anyway.
Many ports existed on the complex waterways of the Niger delta, which had
on its west the Yoruba’s close cousins, the Urhobo and Itsekiri. The Ijaw, the
close cousins to the Edo and Igbos, were on the central and eastern delta.
Farther east were the Efik in Calabar and the Duala in the Cameroon estuary,
who were also close cousins to the Igbo.
Many of the ports had existed since antiquity for buying yams, camwood, and
other foods of the interior while supplying salt, fish, and other sea products to
the Igbo. Brass, Bonny, and Elim Kalabari became significant riverine states
before the advent of the Atlantic slave trade. With the coming of the
Europeans, trade was disrupted, and the riverine people increasingly
kidnapped and sold Igbos. Canoe houses and states with philosophies like
those of the Fante sprang up in the creeks of the Niger delta.
To the east of the Niger delta, the Cross River flowed through the eastern
Igbo heartland to the Atlantic Ocean. The Ibibio lived between the eastern
Igbo and the ocean, and they shared the Arochukwu Oracle with the Igbo and
Ijaw. The Oracle was supposed to be used by impartial judges to settle
disputes, especially land disputes; therefore, riverine Ibibio and Aro without
any land interests were chosen as judges. The Aro were the only Igbo that
didn’t farm and were full-time merchants. The system was designed to fulfill
the role of a centralized state by settling communal disputes and preventing
civil war, because the Igbo village groups had remained autonomous due to
the fear of a centralised authority’s tendency to tyranny and corruption.
With the destruction of the river economy, the Arochukwu Oracle was
corrupted and used according to the deceitful tenets of Olokun/Second
Horsemen era that used religion and other dogma for economic exploitation.
Its practitioners started issuing stern sentences like banishment or death,
which were deceptively converted to slavery. Because the Oracle was mainly
consulted in disputes between villages to avoid war, sometimes there were
mass sentences that resulted in a large number of slaves on ships. The Aro
formed nearly a hundred villages, many of which were founded by ex-Igbo
slaves, who repeated the Olokun/Second Horsemen cycle exhibited by the
Ijaw Canoe houses, or small states based on the kidnapping and slavery of the

interior Igbo. Many Igbos were to become Ijaws.
In West Central Africa, despotic kings put in place by the Europeans turned
on their peoples with draconian religious laws when it became difficult to
find other villages and groups to enslave. With the destruction of the Kongo
kingdom by the Portuguese and their African mercenaries in 1665, the
Loango coast was the next important trade post on the West Central African
coast from 1670 onward.
Unlike those of the Slave Coast and Niger delta, the Bobangi slave traders
were inland fishermen on the complex waterways of the Congo basin. The
fluency and prevalence of their canoe trade brought about a major trade
language called Lingala, which most people in modern-day Congo (Zaire)
now speak.
Farther south, the Portuguese colony in Angola was in an arid, sparsely
populated area, unlike their foothold in Dahomey or Lagos, and although the
Angola area withstood the initial assault of the 1500s, by the late 1600s, it
was almost totally depopulated. Many people had been shipped to Brazil and
Latin America, while the rest of the naturally migratory pastoralists fled into
the interior. A few continued to be taken from the wooded grasslands in the
southern Congo basin.
Benguela was settled to the south of Luanda in 1615 by the Portuguese and
Afro-Portuguese who were avoiding Portuguese taxation in Luanda. They
succeeded in creating new ethnic groups as they married the Ovimbundus.
The Portuguese dug deep into the center of Africa for slaves, but the
population was not dense enough to fulfill the needs of the 1700s and early
1800s.
The ecology of the area couldn’t permit a large western Bantu population,
which had settled in the area in large numbers due to the introduction of the
cassava food crop from the Americas. The majority of those people, who had
previously migrated through the Congo basin into southwest Africa, were
pastoralists belonging to the southern Bantu complex. With the upheavals on
the western coast, they continued to move into the Zambezi River basin in
East Central and South Africa. The Shona, in the Middle Zambezi, developed
new kingdoms despite the debilitating presence of the Portuguese until

trouble erupted in the South Africa land terminal.
In South Africa, the Dutch bought a few slaves from the West African Coast
to augment the labor shortage as the San died or fled their oppression. It
wasn’t feasible to enslave individual black Africans from Nguniland or the
high velds, because they could easily escape like the American Indians.
The Boers/Afrikaners drifted away from the main body of Dutch
development as they copied and adapted to the African environment. There
was no major advancement to the level of technology found in the region
with the exception of guns. Because the Dutch didn’t develop colonies of
settlement, they didn’t create universities or railroads that could use the
surplus created to advance relevant technologies that would benefit everyone
in the future, as was done in America.

Chapter 10: Cotton Is King
Rise of US slavery, abolitionists, and the consolidation of Anglo domination;
Brazil and Cuba renew slavery efforts (1800s)
Unlike the Caribbean and South American colonies, the North American
colonies were yet to bring a tangible surplus in the 1780s, excepting the
tobacco plantations that weren’t overwhelmingly prosperous because of
increasing competition.
The Latinos used the sugar plantations and mining of metals to achieve
supremacy from 1450 to the 1600s. The Dutch, British, and French used the
Caribbean sugar plantations, slavery, and its attendant trades to launch vast
empires and accumulate capital in the 1600s and 1700s. Towards the end of
the 1700s, with the power of the Western European colonists waning, a
unified European-American state was the developing European nation.
In 1760, the machines used in British cotton textile manufacturing were as
simple as those of Africa. The opportunity to leave Africa behind in its
nightmare and realize the American dream came in the late 1700s with the
improvements made to cotton production and the adaptation of engines to use
steam.
Eli Whitney was part of the Enlightenment based in New England and a
graduate of Yale University. He visited the South in 1793 and became aware
of the problem of ginning cotton (separating it from its seed). Setting his
mind to it in an environment where everything else was taken care of by
blacks, Whitney was able to solve the ancient problem in ten days. The new
ginning device enabled a slave to clean fifty times as much cotton as by
hand. * This revolutionized the cotton industry, and with the steam engine,
Europeans were able to usher what they called the Industrial Revolution,
which still relied on the output of Africans—loads of them!
In 1790, only three thousand bales of cotton were produced, and in 1793, ten
thousand bales were produced. In 1795, it was seventeen thousand, and by
1801, it was one hundred thousand. The US production of cotton was directly

related to the number of slaves imported as well as the flooding of West
Africa with guns.
* Garraty and McCaughey, The American Nation: A History of United States to 1877, 245.
Other slight improvements from Europe were introduced, which meant that
by 1825, it took 135 hours of human effort instead of the usual 50,000 hours
to spin one hundred pounds of cotton. Within fifty years, running parallel to
the Slave Coast conflagration, African Americans increased from 1.5 million
to more than 4.5 million. This meant that the number of people imported was
not three million but probably five million, because many didn’t survive the
harsh regimes encountered in the Southeastern quarter, the Bible Belt/Slave
Belt.
Those in the Bible Belt could only pray for the help of the Enlightenment and
Establishment to provide for them in every way while they used the Bible to
justify African slavery and genocide. Whitney, a member of the Enlightened
northeast who blessed his fellow whites with the cotton bounty, couldn’t
effectively patent his simple device as farmers and dodgy manufacturers
flooded the market. He was awarded a contract for ten thousand guns by the
government that knew the arms trade was a key factor in the Industrial
Revolution.
There was nothing new in this European revolution, because it relied on
ultimate force that was produced through arms. Guns were only the
beginning. While assembling the guns for the government, Whitney
transferred the principle of interchangeable parts to the machine used to spin
cotton thread. He and others in New England were awarded contracts to wage
war while using the spin-off and surplus on consumer production. The same
principle exists today.
A major ingredient that allowed Whitney’s idea to become a reality in the
South was the key question of investment. This was also important to funding
the northeast Enlightenment arms makers and their accessories (many of the
arms makers also made handcuffs and leg cuffs, like Weston and Smith). The
money to fund the cotton industry, and its attendant industries, was ample in
supply, especially if the terms suited the Enlightenment, their European circle
of monarchs, and top merchant bankers like the Barings and Rothschilds.

As noted earlier, Alex Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, was
influential in the formation of the US financial system. In 1793, Hamilton
formed the US Central Bank to regulate the monetary and fiscal policies of
the new nation, which had a credibility problem worsened by the popular
sentiment against big business. The system he created financed the cotton
industry, the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon, and whatever the Industrial
Revolution had coming.
The anti-banking Jeffersonian Republican Democrats complained that the
Bank of New York’s lending was restrictive and discriminatory. In 1799,
Aaron Burr, the Republican Democratic vice president, set up the Bank of
Manhattan. The return on profit was astronomical as the number of slaves
imported increased. In 1812, a third bank, the City Bank of New York, was
created by New York merchants and Colonel Osgood, a friend of George
Washington.
With the New England and New York banks in place, the shipyards pushing
out ships and gun makers churning out guns, America was ready to ascend in
world domination, but the old European masters were still very much around,
struggling for dominance.
The British still owned the biggest navy throughout the 1800s, but their loss
of the United States and the increasingly disruptive slave revolts in the West
Indies fueled doubt over the slavery issue. They were alarmed by the
numerous failed African revolutions and the bloody success in Haiti. In their
main West Indian colony, Jamaica, they fought a series of long Maroon wars.
Moreover, the British were at a disadvantage against a large nation that could
use slaves indefinitely and produce at lower prices than they could compete
against.
Voices of concern were raised in London. The Gentleman’s Magazine
claimed, in 1764, that there were twenty thousand blacks in London alone.
This was before the large number of blacks who fought for the British
Loyalist army in the United States followed it back to the English shores.
One of the most important voices was that of Olaudah Equiano. He was
brought to England in 1757 at age twelve as a slave from the Niger delta area,
and he later bought his freedom from Montserrat Island in the West Indies to

return to England as a free man. He highlighted the fate of the 132 slaves
thrown alive into the sea from the Liverpool slave ship, Zong, and he
prompted a public will to enact a law regulating the slave trade in 1788. He
wrote letters to the press, addressed meetings, and coordinated the work of
black militants within other components of the abolition movement.
His most influential contribution to the abolitionist cause was the 1789
publication of his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of
Olaudah Equiano. It captivated audiences with its stark details of how he was
kidnapped from his family compound as a boy and his suffering ever since.
Ottobah Cugoano, a slave brought by his master to England and later freed,
was another influential abolitionist voice. Working closely with Olaudah
Equiano and Granville Sharp in 1787, Cugoano produced his Thoughts and
Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of
the Human Species. It was a grave indictment not only of those directly
involved in the slave trade but of the society that benefited from its profits.
Most importantly, he gave Europeans a ‘get out of jail free’ clause by
presenting them with an alternative economic system: colonization of
Africans everywhere. Instead of shipping Africans to slavery on sugar islands
in the West Indies, causing revolts close to whites, a safer and more
productive system was to make Africans slave on their own land in Africa,
where they can be made to produce a wider range of crops and raw materials
for the British. He assured them that it ‘would soon bring more revenue in a
righteous way to the British nation, than ten times its share in all the profits
that slavery can produce’. *
Europeans must have been impressed by the economic argument, judging
from the reaction and subsequent growth of abolitionism in Britain. ‘Why
supply slaves to build economies of countries that turn around to ban
Britain’s manufactured goods, leaving Britain to buy more expensive sugar
from its colonies of declining productivity in a system of closed markets?’ the
Enlightened classes asked. They clamored for a belated, self-serving free
trade and labor. To the Enlightenment, the cry was no longer lip service to
God’s principles but the very principles of free trade and democracy.
At the time, little was known of the African interior, because trade forts were

limited to the African coast, and direct European slave raids never passed a
fifty-mile incursion. Land exploratory expeditions were soon launched. In
1795 and 1805, Mungo Park explored the Niger, and many other explorations
were to come under the auspices of the British Royal Geographic Society.
* Segal, The Black Diaspora, 267.
Meanwhile, the British embarked on a policy of arming the Latin colonies
against a weakened Spain, like the Spanish and French colluded to ensure
that they lost possession of the United States.
In 1808, at the height of hypocritical traditions, Britain banned slave trade
across its empire but not slavery, and it continued financing slavery in Brazil,
the United States, and Cuba. As the largest slave exporter and major world
power, Britain had the power to push others towards the abolition of slavery.
But, there was to be no abolition of slavery before their conspirator in the
African nightmare, France, provoked the law of natural justice to wreak
havoc across Europe, where the bloodthirsty dogs of war turned on each
other.
Napoleon’s 1803 defeat in Haiti spelt the loss of 40 percent of France’s
earnings and an end to a viable sugar-coated American dream. One of
Napoleon’s greatest regrets was not taking the peace offer by Toussaint to
colonize. The only option he saw fit to pursue was continued aggression
against the other European powers for wealth and colonies.
To concentrate on winning Europe, Napoleon sold Louisiana in 1803 to the
United States for ₤15 million. He took the Netherlands, but the British
preempted his move by taking over the Dutch colonies of South Africa and
Indonesia while the rich, Dutch Jewish merchants moved to London.
Napoleon marched into Portugal, but the Portuguese monarch escaped on
British warships to Brazil.
Napoleon could not win the British on the high seas and was defeated in the
1805 Battle of Trafalgar, but his land armies defeated and ruled continental
Europe. This affected the British by cutting away supplies from the temperate
world, especially wood for British shipping.

The British and French attacked and seized hundreds of merchant ships from
the Americas, despite the US claim of neutrality, which made the US War
Hawks clamor for war. Despite seizures on the high seas earlier during the
war, US businesses multiplied nearly ten times before the British Embargo
Act. The increase was mainly in New York and Boston shipbuilding, because
merchants from the West Indies were changing their ships to neutral US ships
before crossing the Atlantic Ocean.
Napoleon played close to the United States, having sold Louisiana, which
showed that he no longer had territorial ambitions in America, especially with
President Thomas Jefferson, who was viewed as a pro-French revolutionary.
The War Hawks believed that they could use the opportunity to evict Britain
from their backyard in Canada, which produced wood for ships and wheat for
the British West Indian colonies. Britain was suffering a depression due to
the war of tariffs and was ready to relax them in the face of riots and deep
divisions at home.
The different tariffs killed business and ultimately pushed the United States
to an ill-advised war against Britain (the War of 1812), unaware that the
British had repealed the tariffs a few days earlier. The merchants and bankers
of New England and their Federalist party were against it, but the popular
anti-British/big business South moved the United States to war.
The war led to the British invasion of Washington, DC, including pillaging
the White House and the Bank of the United States. Giant British ships were
sunk by meager US ships. They eventually settled in The Treaty of Ghent,
when a more understanding business relationship began. Britain realized that
it couldn’t effectively recapture the United States, and it was good economic
sense to invest in it as a partner.
Napoleon was defeated by Britain and Prussia in 1813 after making the fatal
mistake of attacking Russia and overstretching his military capabilities. After
the Napoleonic Wars, the Europeans convened the Congress of Vienna in
1814–1815 to define national borders to the advantage of the bigger powers.
During the war, Britain had invaded South Africa through its Cape and
permanently settled the region by agreements secured through the Congress
of Vienna. This was a further encroachment on the people of Nguniland, who

were caused immense pain, resettled, and crammed into the arid South Africa
plains.
The Xhosa in southern Nguniland faced the brunt of the European advance
for land with the first war in 1779–1781 and the last war in 1877–1878. The
average Dutch believed that it was his birthright to own a six thousand-acre
ranch when he married. By 1819, this led to the expulsion of the Xhosa from
the region between the Fish and Keiskamma rivers in the southeast of South
Africa.
In northern Nguniland, land pressures were caused by those moving north
from Xhosaland, those moving inland from the Natal east coast, and the
Portuguese influence in Mozambique’s Delagoa Bay to the northeast. This
resulted in conflicts between three northern communities—Ndwandwe,
Ngwane, and Mthethwa—which resulted in the unification and dispersal of
the Nguni.
In 1817, the Ngwane were driven from their homeland by the Ndwandwe,
which made some of them flee to what later became Swaziland. The
Ndwandwe defeated the Mthethwas and their leader Dingiswayo, whom
Shaka replaced. Shaka’s army defeated the Ndwandwe, some of whom fled
to Mozambique, while others were unified in the first major Zulu state.
Shaka created his kingdom with military innovations, using stabbing instead
of throwing spears and new battle formations, which were effective against
other Zulus but suicidal against European horsemen with guns. Shaka was
reputed to be a ferocious warrior and ruler, and there were many stories of his
excesses, which were expected in a newly formed, militaristic state with no
political experience.
The attacks and counterattacks resulted in mass migrations of the warrior
clans, who started out with no more than a few hundred followers but
snowballed into tens of thousands. Some of the Ndwandwe warriors fled into
Mozambique, while others continued into Malawi and Tanzania as far as
Lake Victoria. Khumalo migrants from northern Nguniland moved into
Zimbabwe, where they were known as Ndebele, and they disrupted the Shona
Rowzi state to form Matabeleland.

The British later defeated and annexed the whole South Africa colony, but it
wasn’t initially profitable because it produced vegetables and fruits, not
sugar, cotton, or coffee. Its lower population density and new political
structures made it the first African colony that the British would fight for, but
it didn’t warrant British attention until gold was found much later.
Meanwhile, the British concentrated on the West African Coast and South
America, where it funded and armed revolutionaries against the Iberians.
After being overrun by Napoleon in 1808, the Portuguese King John (Joao)
VI was based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His presence brought a few changes
to the sociopolitical life of the colony, bringing long-lasting effects,
especially for blacks. The British secured a monopoly of the Rio de Janeiro
port for their efforts in spiriting away the Portuguese royal family from
Napoleon’s clutches and into their warships. Due to the presence of the
Portuguese court in Rio, printing presses and other modernizations were
introduced. These also brought about regional jealousies, especially from the
northeast sugar-growing colonies that resented the mining-oriented southern
region of Brazil.
Calls rose for John VI to return to Portugal when Napoleon was pushed out
of Portugal in 1811, but he enjoyed sunny Brazil, declined, and wanted to
rule from there. The divisions over his Brazilian presence resulted in the
secession of part of the northeast, which was regained with the help of
Portugal’s army. Portugal witnessed a revolt at home, which led to the
introduction of a constitutional monarchy whose first law ordered John VI to
return home.
John VI succumbed to pressure and returned home, but his son, Peter, refused
and confronted Portugal. He declared Brazilian independence in 1821, and
the following month, he declared himself the emperor of Brazil, Pedro I. This
resulted in skirmishes in the northeast, but the Portuguese were forced out.
This was inimical to the true revolutionary forces in the country, especially
the millions of Africans slaves who were without a voice. Pedro instituted a
constitutional monarchy that ignored the question of freedom and civil rights
for blacks, as had occurred in the United States. Unfortunately, Africans
couldn’t claim to be comrades in the fight for colonial freedom like those of

the United States. Pedro’s British trading partners pressured him on the
abolition issue though not too hard, because they were profiting from the
trade.
The effort to move away from plantation slavery by developing their country
through the domestic production of imports was sabotaged by the British,
who pushed the fake lines of free trade backed by arms across South
America. Brazil was the only newly freed South American nation that wasn’t
hugely indebted to Britain in wars of independence, because Brazil didn’t go
to war.
For nearly twenty years, Britain enjoyed a near monopoly of the Rio de
Janeiro port until other Europeans and the Americans challenged it in the
mid-1820s. The slave trade reached new heights, as the Anglo-American
dream, and the African nightmare, were to take off.
The abolition movement waxed stronger and prompted superficial antislavery
trade laws in 1808 in Britain and the United States, but the economics and
sociopolitical environment heralded a different outcome. After the War of
1812, Britain and the United States started a special mother-child relationship
of mutual respect and cooperation against all others. To secure the American
continents for AngloSaxons, the US government announced the advent of the
Monroe Doctrine, which frowned upon renewed colonization of the newly
independent nations, especially in Latin America.
Espousing the doctrine of free trade was especially beneficial to Britain,
which had ensnared its Latin American ex-colonies with arms debt and
wanted the Americas door firmly shut on Spain and France. The USA did not
have the market power in Latin America and could not defend it;
Washington, DC and the White House had just been overrun by a mere
raiding party a decade earlier.
With the ports and markets of Latin America and Africa secured, the British
and Anglo-Americans moved into a period of economic expansion, mainly
through guns, cotton, and transportation. With 394,000 guns dumped on the
Slave Coast annually and the Muslim wars in the northern grasslands, the
ports of Bristol, Liverpool, New York, Boston, and Baltimore, backed by
financers like Lloyds of London, built ships full time to transport Africans en

mass from present-day Nigeria and Ghana. The Loango-Congo area had fifty
thousand guns per year, which was indicative of the population density and
the number of slaves. Considering the total conflagration in Yorubaland,
more than half of the slaves at the peak and end of slavery (1780–1880) were
from Nigeria.
Despite the Enlightenment Federalist Party falling out of favor (over its
seditious siding with money-making Britain during the War of 1812), New
Englanders benefited the most from the stronger geopolitical role that the
United States came to play with Britain. The income from agriculture, guns,
canals, railroads, and shipbuilding was astronomical, and it promoted the
development of iron and other metal industries.
Immediately after the War of 1812, the Northeast United States was
manufacturing less than $200 million worth of goods, which increased to
$1,270 million by 1859 out of the total $2 billion. * The merchants’ only
misgiving was the termination of the Central Bank by Southern farming
interests, who felt that it was overwhelming power in the hands of a few
private investors who wanted to dictate their lives. The merchant class
claimed that the bank was essential in creating a uniform financial
environment beneficial to creditors.
The Northeast continued to control the finances and credit of the cotton farms
that sprung up to the South and West as more states were added to the Union
and more whites signed up for credit agreements. In addition, they
increasingly processed produce from the South in New England, where they
built cotton mills that were run by rivers and later by coal-fueled steam
engines.
What made the British great in the 1700s was the provision of a capable
naval fleet to transport slaves, link their colonies, and provide the guns used
to subject Africans into a peaceful whole or warring tribes. For the new
American state to fully optimize its resources in the 1800s, the existing
technologies had to be adapted, because the maritime improvements of the
British islanders weren’t overly helpful to a continental empire like the
United States. No point in the British Isles was more than 150 miles from the
sea.

After a certain point, the US agricultural economy reached a plateau due to
the problem of transporting produce from the hinterland fields of the Midwest
and the South to the coastal markets of New England and England. The
introduction of the steam engine freed cotton factories from river locations
for their power needs, and it was also used in river transportation. Starting
with New York’s Erie Canal, which linked the Northeast to the Midwest,
canals were built in a frenzy fueled by the booming cotton economy. It was
an ineffective mode of transport for those living far from rivers. The
steamboat had better advantages in foreign trade, because the technology cut
travel time across the Atlantic to England and continental Europe.
* Garraty and McCaughey, The American Nation: A History of United States to 1877, 379.
England provided the land transport solution in 1820 with the introduction of
railroads, which, in the beginning, were a little better than a few stagecoaches
strung together on wooden rails. It was an expensive task to lay track across
the vast North American continent in the 1830s and 1840s. It was a challenge
for the merchant banks, especially those of Europe led by the Barings and the
United States, with ‘robber barons’ like J. P. Morgan dealing in railroad
bonds, and local businessmen who raised finance from the rich farmers and
gun makers. The government’s major revenue came from the land sales and
tariffs. By 1850, more than thirty thousand miles of track had been built,
extending the frontier and bolstering the economic boom in the 1840s and
1850s.
By the 1840s, Anglo-Americans began to feel it was their manifest destiny to
rule the whole continent, if not the whole world. As farmers and prospectors
pushed the boundaries towards the Pacific Ocean, the US government bullied
the new Mexico republic, which became independent in 1823. The United
States invaded Mexico, fighting all the way to the capital before signing a
treaty that granted it Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California. The
Spanish invaded and colonized the area in the 1520s, but failed to develop the
local economy to attract a significant population.
The 1849 discovery of gold in California led to an influx of people who later
found employment making airplanes in the early 1900s. Initially part of the
agricultural South with its cotton and cattle, Texas led the South in the 1900s
when large oil reserves were found that greatly increased the political and

economic importance of the Southwest. The United States threatened the
Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico, but Spain refused to sell, and the
prospect of bringing another slaveholding polity into the Union caused uproar
from the Northerners.
Westward expansion created another power base in the Northwest, Illinois
and Iowa, which sided with the Northeast against the South. This was
possible with the advent of railroads, because the Northwest previously
transported its produce down the Mississippi River through Southern territory
and wouldn’t have dared to oppose them. In addition to the hostile abolition
arguments that preceded their entry into the Union, the cheaper and unfair
price of Southern slave labor pitted the Northwest against the South.
The majority of the produce went to Britain and Europe, which were still
recovering from the ravages of the Napoleonic Wars. Britain dumped cloth,
at bargain prices, in the United States. This caused friction between the
North, which wanted to protect local industry from foreign competition with
the 1828 tariff laws, and the South, which provided the highest amount of
exports and wanted to keep all markets open and the prices of imports down.
Following the 1828 tariffs, the South made serious threats to secede in its
1832 Ordinance of Nullification but was threatened with force by President
Jackson’s Force Bill.
An attempt to secure a balance of power between the North and the South
resulted in an argument over the admission of the new Western states into the
Union, especially because the rich Southern slave owners, mostly Virginians,
had dominated the presidency from independence. The Missouri Compromise
of 1820, made when Missouri was formally admitted to the Union, stated that
an equal number of slave states and free states were to be admitted. To keep
the numbers equal, the northernmost state, Maine, was admitted and slavery
was barred above a certain latitude. This compromise did not address the
moral issue of slavery and was about the balance of power and keeping the
peace, but this was possible only for a while.
Meanwhile, the Abolitionists pushed for the colonization of Africans on
separate lands and created the American Colonization Society in 1817. The
society ‘purchased’ African land and established the Republic of Liberia
(‘liberated area’) next to the British abolitionists’ effort called the Republic of

Sierra Leone (‘lion mountains’). Liberia was colonized by a few returning
slaves from the Americas and a few recaptured by the antislavery trade patrol
off the West Africa coast.
Nevertheless, as the cotton industry boomed, the price of slaves skyrocketed,
which made the most generous slave owners rethink the idea of freeing their
slaves. Many of those free in the North were even kidnapped and transported
to the South, where prices rose to more than $1,500 per slave. Some states
like Maryland forcibly made blacks breed more children who were then sold
farther ‘down the river’.
Contrary to some reports, stating that the growth of Africans in the United
States was due to natural increase, the majority of the slaves were ‘saltwater
Negroes’ (fresh imports), due to the harsh use and conditions Africans faced
in the cotton fields. There was no way that there could be a significant natural
increase of slaves anywhere in the Americas due to the ‘unnatural’ abuses
they suffered. The imported slaves were smuggled through the vast American
borders, which had been done occasionally but the money-hungry slave
traders permanently resorted to.
The British patrolled the seas off the West Africa coast halfheartedly, as more
slaves went past them than at any time in history, and their plan of Cugoano’s
colonization was deemed unworkable. The French and Spanish resumed
prominent roles as the French, without any large sugar colony after losing
Haiti, sold slaves to other nations, including the United States and Brazil.
The Spanish, having lost South America, concentrated on Cuba as a sugar
colony. Cuba was larger than the other fifty West Indian islands combined
and ten times larger than Jamaica. Between 1820, when the Spanish joined
other Europeans in making duplicitous statements about abolishing the slave
trade, and 1865, they imported more than five hundred thousand slaves into
Cuba. In 1835, the price of a slave was four pounds in Dahomey and eightyfour
pounds in Havana.
The British financed Havana merchants like Pedro Forcade, who built their
ships in Liverpool and New York, and dealt with the supreme enslaver on the
Slave Coast, the Cuban-born mulatto Felix da Souza. Souza gave King Gezo
of Dahomey the military power over Yorubaland from the 1820s to the late

1840s. The Yoruba taken to Cuba were called Lucumi, from Oluku Mi
(meaning ‘my friend’) in archaic Yoruba.

Chapter 11: Slavery 201: Colonization and
Sharecropping
Gentler form of slavery introduced: The beginning of industrialization
(1800s)
Despite winning the Second Maroon War in 1795, the British continued to
face costly revolts in Jamaica. In 1815, an Igbo revolt to wipe out all whites
on the island was foiled, and the Igbo king and his conspirators were hanged.
The greatest African revolt in the history of British West Indies started on the
night of December 27, 1831 and, despite the huge navy and army committed,
it took until April 1832 to find peace. This revolt made the British rush the
1833 Emancipation Act throughout the British Empire before they faced the
same fate as the French in Haiti, especially in Jamaica, with a population of
more than three hundred thousand blacks to thirty thousand whites.
In England, an economic downturn in the 1820s and 1830s (due to bad
harvests and high military and administrative costs) resulted in social
upheaval and calls for parliamentary reform. Moreover, Haiti had
implemented a system that gave former slaves more rights than what the
White working class enjoyed in England. The working-class movement,
permeated by abolitionists, included the abolition of slavery in its demands,
resulting in the 1832 Reform Act. The merchant class, which gained
politically from the Reform Act, did not mind doing away with the costly
protectionism given to the sugar colonies. The conditions were not right for
the full implementation of Cugoano’s colonization model, but the Jamaican
riot pushed the British to declare the Emancipation Acts in the West Indies.
The Emancipation Act of 1833 freed children immediately but also imposed a
period of compulsory apprenticeship of six to eight years on all slaves with
their ex-masters. They had to work for threequarters of the week without pay
and could use the remaining onequarter to buy their early release. The details
were left to the local colonial apparatus controlled by the planter class,
especially in Jamaica. The sugar field workers, who were the majority, were
to work a forty-and-a-half-hour week until August 1840. They were made to
work longer and harder, and were deprived of their traditional free days.

At the end of the compulsory apprenticeship, the planters devised ways to
keep the slaves in servitude with harsh labor contracts. Most of the Africans
rejected the contracts and faced threats of eviction from their shacks and
small provision farms. However, the threats couldn’t carry the same potency
that they had in Barbados, because even at the height of the sugar boom, the
majority of the Jamaican island was not touched by plantation agriculture.
Also, many slave plantations had been abandoned when their owners left
after the Emancipation Act. Some of the disused plantations and previously
uncultivated lands were ‘illegally’ converted to subsistence agricultural plots
by black squatter farmers (who were liable to face eviction when noticed).
The land was cheap initially, but prices slowly rose out of the reach of
Africans when labor shortages became acute and European planters had to
import Asian Indians, as was done in other British colonies.
Christian missionaries bought land used to create ‘free villages’ and provided
European-oriented education for the Africans, because the colonial powers
initially refused to acknowledge the right of education and training for
blacks. The competing Christian sects attracted converts with their social
services, which were used to inculcate the colonial mentality into future black
leaders. The Christian ethics of work and subservience were useful; one of
their underlying principles was that all people should be content with their
place in society, especially Africans, who were at the bottom of the social
ladder.
The missionaries and British colonists frowned on the African revivalist
churches that spread from black America to Africa and the West Indies.
Whites complained of the loud music, dancing, and overcelebration of
Christmas. The Europeans shunned the warm, colorful African spirituality
brought to Christianity, which became an empty parade of symbolic rites
since the split of the African churches in AD 400.
In case the blacks didn’t get the Western Christian message, the colonial
apparatus had laws to force them to do so. The police and militia became the
foremen of colonization and were heavy handed, sometimes sadistic, in their
conduct. Property and many other impossible qualification requirements kept
black Jamaicans out of the ‘representative assembly’ that included whites and
a few mulattos.

Sugar’s importance to the economy rapidly declined and was replaced by US
investment in banana production. Jamaican peasants did not require the
intensive labor and expensive machinery of the sugar business, and they
became a major source for the banana export market. The spread of banana
estates soon took up the land but left many people unemployed and caused a
drastic drop in the percent of people employed in agriculture.
Many people moved into trading and domestic services, while many more
started what became the Great Jamaican dispersal. From 1850 onwards,
Jamaicans migrated for employment in the construction of the Panama Canal
and Costa Rica railroads as well as to plantations in Cuba and the United
States.
Due to the overwhelming number of blacks to whites and mulattos, mulattos
didn’t have the same kind of powerful, negative influence that they had in
Haiti and Brazil. Nevertheless, the mulattos exhibited the same Arab
complex, which whites were apt to use as capital in their economic model
that relied on White supremacy and terrorism.
Barbados was initially the most productive British sugar island, but due to
revolts and overused soils, it was overtaken by Jamaica in the early 1700s
and was a major slave port until 1833. The nearcomplete cultivation of the
island, which left no forest cover for Maroons to hide in, left no virgin areas
that the slaves could cultivate after emancipation. Barbados had more than
five hundred apprenticeships per square mile, each person expected to serve
for six years, and a Masters and Servants Act was introduced to keep the
person in place when the apprenticeship ended. The act effectively made the
slaves free labor with the right to look for alternative employment at the cost
of losing their accommodations, food rations, and land. They were
transported in large numbers to build the Panama Canal by the United States,
and due to pro-British attitudes, they became civil servants, police, and
soldiers across the British Caribbean Islands.
All other British possessions in the Americas, like Trinidad and St Lucia,
were covered by the Emancipation Act and experienced the same problems as
Jamaica and Barbados: ignorance, no compensation, poverty, and epidemics
resulting from deliberate cuts in public funds due to planter influences.
Christianity was the only route for most people to get out of the quagmire of

‘accounted slavery’. They used it to gain access to education, which led to
strong Eurocentric influences in the long run.
Guyana (Britain’s only South American land colony with its ‘troublesome’
Bush Negroes) experienced severe labor shortages after the 1833
Emancipation Act. The freed Africans set off into the large rainforest to
establish their own farms alongside Bush Negroes. This led to the mass
importation of Asian Indians, by the British, to help production. The influx of
Indians, who later became the majority, created awkward situations in the
1900s, which set Guyana and Trinidad apart from other colonies. Africans
remained the majority in all other British colonies, and although the presence
of a third race increased due to labor shortages, the Indians didn’t have the
effect that mulattos had in other colonies, where they counted themselves as
an intermediary class in opposition to blacks.
The mulattos of Haiti became the greatest adversary of the blacks after the
whites were pushed out in 1803. The mulatto elite believed that they had to
hold onto the white supremacy doctrine, otherwise they might lose out. Even
the poorest and lowest-level mulattos and whites were content in the belief
that they were better than blacks and therefore part of the middle class. A
corollary to the Keynesian Law of relative income and consumption alludes
to the fact that relative income (both economic and sociopolitical) is
paramount in consumption patterns.
The Africans taken to Haiti over the span of a hundred years before the
revolution in the 1790s retained their culture, because their population
increased from two thousand in 1681 to four hundred and eighty thousand,
out of the 850,000 imported. At least two-thirds of them were first-generation
continental Africans who still spoke or understood the language and culture
and would have found it difficult to accept mulatto dominance on the basis of
color.
Mulattos also fought for independence, but their idea of independence and
freedom was like that of the Northeast US white abolitionists: black freedom
but definitely not black equality with whites or mulattos. Dessalines, a black
general, became king of Haiti after Toussaint’s capture, but he was
challenged by mulatto armies controlling the south that wanted to keep the
mulattos socially separate from the blacks.

The northern blacks wanted to keep their peaceful African way of life,
possessing the full Yoruba pantheon of gods, culture, and beliefs as they did,
but the mulattos wanted to identify with the militaristic and economically
advantageous culture of their European fathers. This culminated in
Dessalines’ ambush and death in October 1806, three years into a reign
remembered forever as that of a genuine, noteworthy African leader. He was
even made an orisha and added to the pantheon of voodoo (Ifa) Yoruba saints
in Haiti.
Henri Christophe, one of Toussaint’s revolutionary black generals, took over
control after Dessalines’s death in 1806. He was crowned in 1811 but lost
control of the south to a mulatto general called Alexander Petion. The
rancorous division of Haiti continued for fourteen years. The blacks in the
north introduced a good educational system, organized labor in free
plantation villages, and encouraged subsistence farming for those tired of
plantations. Plantations were paid a quarter of the revenue, and the treasury
was paid a quarter in taxes. This led to an economic revival in the local
market, and exports of sugar, coffee, and indigo increased. There was a
prevalent sense of equality and freedom in the north.
In the south, a mulatto oligarchy ruled, and although it did well for public
services like education, agriculture suffered, and exports declined compared
to that of the black territory. This contravened European propaganda that
‘blacks were like kids who had to be steered by whites, otherwise the savages
would fall into decay’. France and other Europeans refused to accept the
north’s independence and engaged in duplicitous sabotage. They made
alignments and armed mulatto dissidents while bluntly refusing any alliance
with the legitimate Christophe government.
Eventually, after Petion the mulatto leader died in 1818, his successor,
General Jean Pierre Boyer, led the army north while Christophe recovered
from a stroke. Incapacitated, the old revolutionary general refused to be
overrun by the advancing army revolt and committed suicide. Boyer, backed
by the French, took over the north and united Haiti before attacking the west
to capture Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He handed over the island’s
future to France by agreeing to pay an indemnity of 150 million francs, and
he gave France a 50 percent cut on import duties charged to other foreigners.

The indemnity, paid through overtaxation, and the tariff deal prevented
diversification of the economy and trade.
Boyer and his mulatto clique ruled for twenty-five years and ran the country
down. Public services and education were neglected, and Haiti became
extremely dirty. He tried to return blacks to neoslavery through the 1826
Rural Code. Blacks fled the rural areas, and the production of sugar fell from
₤2.5 million in 1820 to a petty ₤6,000 in 1842.
The only public services promoted were the police and National Guard,
which employed eighty thousand of the population of eight hundred
thousand. Boyer funded an expensive law-and-order outfit to keep people in
check with violent oppression, especially those who accused him of a ploy to
keep Africans in ignorance and poverty. Boyer turned Catholicism into the
state religion and persecuted African voodoo but couldn’t eradicate it.
A serious revolt rose against Boyer, and he escaped to Jamaica on a British
ship in 1843. The new mulatto president, Charles Herard, pledged to be better
in his public administration and treatment of the African majority but in
actuality was no good. Among the few prominent black families in the south,
the Salomons raised objections to the mulatto dominance and called for a
revolt. Their resolve was exacerbated when the government harassed their
family members. While this happened, the east of the island declared
independence as the Dominican Republic. The Haitian government was too
burdened to challenge this because of revolts closer to the capital in the
south.
Herard was overthrown by the army and replaced with an old black general,
Philippe Guerrier. The real power in the regime remained with the mulattos, a
policy known as la politique de doublure (the politics of the double, stand in,
or understudy). This was the beginning of a policy that is still present across
the blackworld; an old, African sellout is placed at the head of a
Westernstyled puppet government while Europeans loot the economy.The
people are kept in check with heavy-handed policing, while the government
is checked by the army. If the president dares to take away from the ‘profits’
to help the plight of his poor people through public services, the merchants
and the army overthrow him. If he manages to convince the army to back
him, Western merchants sponsor armed revolts that defeat the revenue-

gulping army, which soon runs out of bullets. Ultimately, the Western army
invades them.
When Guerrier died in 1845 and the mulatto army clique put in another old
black general, Louis Perrot, they made the mistake of not realizing that he
was an Afrocentric nationalist who would move the capital away from the
southern mulatto enclave to the north. He denounced the excessive French
intervention in Haitian politics, but he was cut down within a year and
replaced by another old black general. The list of generals, faked elections,
revolts, and counterrevolutions was as long as the Isle of Hispaniola. In 1865,
a revolt was crushed with the aid of a British warship as diverse European
interests threw weapons into the arena.
Lysius Salomon, the scion of a distinguished black family, came back to
Haiti from exile to become president and still had a cabinet full of mulattos.
He and the alliances that brought him back opened the country for
exploitation and even offered to give the United States some of Haiti’s land
in an effort to keep the overbearing British away. The plight of the poor exslaves
worsened with the constant ravages of war, and he was toppled by a
revolt in the north.
In the United States, calls for abolition increased with the realization that the
abolition of the slave trade didn’t restrict the practice. More authentic calls
than those of the colonization societies, especially those of William Garrison
of Massachusetts, made a difference. Garrison, a white Bostonian, established
his own newspaper, The Liberator, and the New England Anti-Slavery
Society in 1831. He was uncompromising in his approach to abolition, which
didn’t include colonization or compensating slave owners. The
colonizationists attacked Garrison as well as many others. A few accepted his
message but not always publicly.
Garrison provided the platform for an ex-slave, Frederick Douglass, who had
a great impact on the slavery argument. This was reminiscent of what
happened in London fifty years earlier, when a white, Granville Sharp, aided
Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano in the colonization argument and
slave trade ban.
Born a slave in 1817 in Maryland, Douglass escaped to the North in 1838,

and in 1845, he published one of the most gripping autobiographies of a
slave, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which attracted attention
in America and Europe. He also edited a weekly publication called The North
Star. Unlike Garrison, who burnt the US Constitution publicly and refused to
deal with politicians, Douglass decided to fight within the political system
and became a major black leader and the most effective speaker of the
movement. The black movement didn’t initially have much success, due to
white economics and war-based technology.
A major development for the Northeast US abolitionists was the 1852 release
of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which
broke sales records and informed those outside the Slave Belt of its dreary
conditions. This aroused sympathy from many apolitical, non-slaving whites
who had never considered the moral question of slavery. It shone a spotlight
on Southern slave owners, who reacted defensively.
The heated public discourse was further provoked in 1854 when Kansas
petitioned to be admitted into the Union. Violence engulfed the state as proslavery
and anti-slavery groups brought people from outside the state to
influence a referendum to decide whether it should be slave-free or not (this
was known as the popular sovereignty doctrine). The violence spread outside
the state, even to the Congress, where a new and vociferous white,
antislavery Massachusetts senator, Charles Sumner, was violently attacked by
an opponent in 1856. Sumner was later one of the strongest instruments in
opening the chains of slavery.
In 1857, the Supreme Court made an asinine ruling in the famous Dred Scott
case, declaring that Africans were not citizens but property and that the equal
entry of states in the Missouri Compromise, as so declared, was illegal. This
ruling heightened tensions and resulted in political parties splitting over the
smokescreen issue of state rights.
Blacks were kept out of the discourse, but they voiced their grief through
revolts, escapes, and all other available means, especially arson and poison.
Harriet Tubman was a female slave from Maryland who escaped to Albany,
New York, but she showed exemplary courage by returning to the south
twenty times to lead groups of escaping Africans through her ‘underground
railroad’. She organized railroad escapes for slaves from the South to Albany

and into British Canada, which became slave free in 1832.
Her efforts and those of a few others contributed to the fuss over the Fugitive
Slave Act, which allowed slave owners to retrieve their slaves from the North
but which white Northerners openly flouted from the 1850s until the Civil
War. Chicago, founded by an African American called Jean Baptiste du Sable
in 1774, was also another important escape route to Canada, while Texas
suffered a huge loss of slave labor to Mexico.
Some believed that the white divisions finally hardened following the 1859
insurrection of a white abolitionist named John Brown, who had initially
contributed to the Kansas melee. In an October 1859 plan to arm slaves for
revolt with federal weaponry, John Brown staged an attack on a federal
arsenal at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, but he was overpowered and hanged.
The Northeast and many abroad enshrined him as a martyr. Even school
children in Nigeria sang of him until the 1980s.
The 1860 elections were the final straw, as those in the Deep South believed
that the Northeast was out to dominate them and override their state rights,
including their self-perceived right of owning slaves as property. Abraham
Lincoln did not commit to outlawing slavery, nor did he support the policy,
which he agreed was immoral and eventually had to be replaced. Immediately
after Lincoln won the presidential election, seven Southern states, led by
South Carolina, seceded with the exception of those in the Middle Belt.
The Southern States formed the Confederate States of America by February
1861 before Lincoln assumed office with the hope that he wouldn’t go to
war. If he did, they were confident of economic and military backing from
Britain, because they believed that ‘cotton was king’. Lincoln sued for peace,
and as he stated in his reply to an editorial: ‘My paramount objective in the
struggle is to save the Union and it is not to save or destroy slavery. If I
could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, if I could save
it by freeing all slaves I would’.
The British, French, and other Europeans wanted to see the breakup of what
they thought to be an oversized, unfair competitor. The British initially armed
the South, but when the North protested over the building of ships for the
South, Britain had to withdraw into the shadows, especially with its poor crop

season that was dependent on grain imports from the Northeast United States.
Knowing the power of the abolition movement in Europe, Lincoln issued an
Emancipation Declaration on September 22, 1862, freeing all slaves. Lincoln
basically did this to win more backing from the Northeast and Europe as well
as to undermine the Confederacy, but it did not have solid legal backing.
For a long while, the war was balanced, even though the North was more
populous, and the lack of an industrial base in the South was a disadvantage.
To boost the ranks, the northern Union issued a Conscription Act, which the
rich largely avoided with a $300 exemption fee clause. This led to riots,
especially by Irish immigrants in New York, who lynched blacks
unmercifully.
Blacks from the North enlisted for the Union as well as Southern, escaped
slaves, especially when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
Again, Harriet Tubman showed her exceptional qualities by raiding the
Confederacy and freeing enough slaves to warrant deep concern high in the
Confederacy hierarchy. The Confederacy lost the war in 1865, and most
importantly, Lincoln died just after winning his reelection and the war.
With Lincoln assassinated by pro-Southerners, his vice-president, Southern
Democrat Andrew Johnson, became president. If Lincoln had lived, the status
quo would have continued with his policy of ‘constructive engagement’ with
the South, giving them time to gradually stop slavery. Over the next decade,
blacks made some progress due to Johnson’s inability to manage Charles
Sumner’s Radical Republicans, who controlled the Congress in the absence
of the South after the 1864 elections.
Sumner, who had been physically attacked by a Southern antiabolitionist, got
his vengeance on the South by backing the Emancipation Proclamation with
the necessary constitutional amendments in the Congress. Frederick
Douglass, the African American leader, acknowledged Sumner as ‘higher
than the highest, better than the best of all our statesmen’. Thaddeus
Stevens, also white, led the push in the House of Representatives. They
opposed the readmission of the South under the status quo and passed the
Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution as conditions of
reentry. The Thirteenth Amendment freed all slaves; the Fourteenth made all

those born in the United States automatically citizens and banned all those
involved in the Civil War from public office. The Fifteenth Amendment gave
all US citizens the right to vote.
The Fourteenth Amendment kept all the political leaders of the South out of
contention and rendered all opposition from the South ineffective. The South
was treated as a captured territory and had to toe the line. This line appeared
too radical for most whites, who wanted to see Africans freed but did not
assume equality with them.
Southern whites turned to intimidation and violence, openly and through
clandestine terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which appealed to the
sympathetic white North. The KKK killed 153 blacks in a single Florida
county in 1871, regardless of the Force Acts enacted to curb the violence
with the provision of federal supervisors during Southern elections.
With the Southern political class silenced, blacks and white Northerners
called Carpetbaggers began to fill Southern political posts. During the
Radical Republican revolution known as the Reconstruction Period (1867 to
1877), Africans came to hold a majority of the state legislature seats in
Louisiana and South Carolina. Oscar J Dunn, an ex-slave, was elected
lieutenant governor in Louisiana in 1868, while P. B. S. Pinchback was
acting governor in 1872. J. P. Long was the first African in the House of
Representatives. Blanche Bruce was the first full-term black senator in 1875,
and Edward Brooke was the next in 1961!
Because most black politicians had historically been deprived of education,
money, and experience, many were accused of being ineffective or mere
fronts for their white, Northern sponsors. Black politicians tried to implement
educational facilities to help African Americans assimilate into society. An
effective political class would have flourished if blacks had been allowed to
develop, but this was a far-fetched dream that Southern whites resisted in
many ways, like the planters in the West Indies. Some Northern states even
voted to keep the voting franchise white: Connecticut, Minnesota and
Wisconsin voted in 1865, followed by New Jersey in 1867 and Michigan and
Pennsylvania in 1868.
With the 1868 death of Thaddeus Stevens in the House of Representatives,

and the 1874 death of Charles Sumner in the Senate, the Radical Republicans
lost steam, and Africans lost recently gained ground. The 1872 Amnesty Act
that restored the voting rights of one hundred and sixty thousand staunch
former Confederates was the beginning of the end for black reconstruction. In
the next election, in 1876, the South rigged the election by submitting two
sets of electoral results from Florida (similar to the George W Bush debacle
in 2000). The authentic Republican winner, Rutherford Hayes, was forced to
promise to stop the reconstruction and withdraw military forces from the
South before he was allowed to take office.
This allowed the former Confederates to take back power in the South, but
because the amendments to the Constitution restricted them from stopping
black freedom, they resorted to new restrictions under state laws. The new
state laws included voter registration requirements including property
requirements, literacy tests, and even grandfather clauses, which stated that
individuals could vote only if their grandfather voted in a previous election.
Most important was the return to neoslavery, as the promise of ‘forty acres
and a mule’ to compensate and help the slaves to adjust to a free society
never materialized. Conforming ever to events in other parts of the
blackworld, Christian groups and missionaries initially took over black
education. Without money, land, or education, Africans were left to the
caprices of their ex-slave masters who ‘reenslaved’ them under the auspices
of tenant farming and predatory sharecropping schemes.
They were forced to rent land and plant only the crops prescribed by the
plantation master, who provided credit on stringent terms. This was
‘accounted slavery’ because the only difference was that the exslave made
accounts of his production to the plantation master. The ex-slave rarely made
any profit over the carefully calculated extractions that were made to keep
him permanently in debt.
This was by no means a new system; it was created and tested by the British
in the West Indies through their 1833 Emancipation Proclamation.
Slightly to the south of the United States, Cuban slaves, who didn’t win
freedom in the early 1800s like their compatriots in much of South America,
had to go through a revolt in 1868 called the Ten Years’ War, which cost two

hundred thousand lives and $700 million. Although Cuba was one of the first
islands colonized by the Spanish, it was late in its adoption of plantation
agriculture and the mass importation of slaves. The two main factors
contributing to its growth were the ex-Haitian planters who fled to Cuba
following the 1791– 1803 revolution and the loss of Spanish economic
control of its South American colonies to the British by 1808.
With not much income coming from elsewhere, the Spanish turned to sugar
production in Cuba and Puerto Rico and imported more slaves between 1790
and 1868 than from 1508 to 1808. Bound by a treaty with Britain, enacted in
1817, the Spanish declared a ban on the slave trade in 1820, much like the
other Europeans, but between 1790 and 1820, more than two hundred and
twenty-five thousand slaves were officially shipped to Havana, Cuba, and
550,000 slaves between 1811 and 1870. The ships were built in Baltimore,
New York, and Boston as well as in Liverpool.
By 1855, sugar and sugar products accounted for almost 84 percent of Cuba’s
export items. It became a single-crop economy, virtually dependent on the
United States to buy its sugar. Although it was said that Spanish slavery
practices were more benevolent, out of the seven hundred and seventy
thousand slaves imported from 1790, there were no more than three hundred
and ninety-four thousand alive in 1870.
As in Haiti, the percentage of the slave population that consisted of first- and
second-generations continental Africans, who still spoke and related to the
Yoruba culture, was extremely high and helped to bring about the coalition
needed to pursue a movement. The Yoruba Ifa, voodoo, was popular in its
original form or the form mixed with Catholicism called Santeria (‘the way
of the saints’).
The 1868 Cuban rebellion was inspired by planters who wanted to dispose of
the Spanish colonial hold in order to have a more assured future, including
prolonged slavery, because Spain was succumbing to the British on the
subject of abolition. The rebellion would have failed woefully if not for two
exceptional military commanders, Maximo Gomez and the mulatto Antonio
Maceo, who were committed to the struggle of freeing slaves and burnt
plantation farms and buildings in the process.

The tide of the war turned against them in 1878, and the rebels came to the
table with Spain’s negotiator Martinez Campos, who offered a revised form
of continuing colonization, amnesty, and freedom for only the slaves who
fought on the rebels’ side. Maceo refused and demanded complete
independence and the total abolition of slavery. Maceo lost the war as his
support dwindled to fifteen hundred fighters, but Martinez Campos, the
negotiator, became Spain’s prime minister in 1879, and in 1880, he
announced the future abolition of slavery. *
Similar to the British West Indian colonies, slaves were expected to do an
eight-year apprenticeship, called patronato, out of which they were expected
to pay for their freedom at a rate of fifty to eighty dollars a year. Between
1880 and 1886, the number of slaves fell from two hundred thousand to
barely twenty-six thousand, and the patronato had to be abolished two years
early. The planters also issued labor contracts like those in the British
colonies.
Spain’s colonial reform was discounted as a farce, because the Spanish party
dominated Cuba’s politics with a restricted voting franchise. This was not
acceptable to the independence movement that found a leader in the inspiring
journalist, Jose Marti. Some people in the United States believed that it was
their manifest destiny to rule Cuba like Texas—the US president James Polk
offered money to buy it from Spain in 1848, but they had refused to sell.
Marti, jailed at sixteen for sedition, fled to New York where he wrote
columns and agitated Cubans and their sympathizers in New York and
Florida. He planned on overthrowing the Spanish government through
popular revolt, and in 1892, he brought Gomez and Maceo into his plans.
Gomez and Maceo led groups of revolutionaries from the United States,
armed with Marti’s manifesto promising a free republic and new economic
system that guaranteed full paid work for everyone. They urged blacks to join
the revolt, because they were only six thousand to eight thousand strong and
were up against fifty-two thousand Spanish troops and nineteen warships.
The small revolt started on May 19, 1895, but it spread to the countryside,
and by the end of the year, Africans constituted 80 percent of the fighting
force rampaging the countryside and targeting significant economic
infrastructure.

The war dragged on, costing Spain heavily in men and money, but eventually
Spain gained the upper hand when Marti was killed in 1896. When it
appeared that the tide of the war was turning against the rebels, they
exaggerated Spain’s heavy handedness, which the United States seized upon
and invaded when its warship, the USS Maine, exploded in Havana Harbor in
February 1898. By April, the United States declared war on Spain and took
over Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in southeast Asia.
* Segal, The Black Diaspora, 225.
Eventually, US military administrations left the Philippines but held onto
Puerto Rico and Cuba. Cuba pressed for independence in 1902, but the fate of
the largest island in the Americas continued to rest on the manifest destiny of
the largest country in the Americas.
The largest country in South America, Brazil, had been taken over by Pedro
I, the Portuguese monarch’s son, who created long-lasting obstacles to black
progress. Coffee and cocoa rose in prominence in the 1800s and made the
population again shift heavily to the plantations near the coast. In the 1860s,
the United States, France, and other European nations split up the market,
although Britain still retained the leading role.
Despite the British pushing for abolition in Brazil, at least 1,145,000 slaves
were imported between 1811 and 1870, with the help of British finance and
shipbuilding. One shipload of slaves could provide a profit of a ₤100,000.
The strong regional captaincies grew richer with the trade and more
militarized. Brazil’s war with Uruguay and Paraguay in 1864, which it won,
led it down the path of other South American nations, whose independence
wars allowed the European-inspired armies to gain political power.
There were increasing revolts by Yoruba and Hausa Muslims, who had been
caught and sold in their war against Oyo. The Muslims were called male,
derived from their Yoruba name imole (‘draconian teachings’). As a group,
they were militaristic and revolutionary in temperament, able to read the
Koran and write in Arabic. The Yoruba and Hausa came together to fight the
common enemy admirably, but most of the revolts were foiled before
execution or after a prolonged battle. Either case often resulted in mass slave
hangings and executions from an increasingly oppressive Brazilian society.

The king tried to abolish the trade, but due to the military power concentrated
in the hands of the slave plantation captaincies, he ended up gradually
introducing measures in the effort to abolish it. King Peter II promoted the
idea of a racial democracy. He had the backing of the abolitionists and those
who wanted to see Brazil whitened in order to attract European immigrants
and finance. The abolition of the trade commenced in 1851, and in 1871, the
Free Womb Law that freed babies was promulgated, followed by the 1885
Sexagenarian Law that freed the old. In 1888, slavery was abolished and led
to the overthrow of the monarchy by the army and planters.
No social policy was developed for the freed Africans with the exception of
trying to erase the African in them. The elite called for assimilation and
increased European migration to erase the bloody footprints of history. The
attacks on the quilombos continued, and Africans continued to be violently
evicted from their lands. Rui Barbosa issued a decree ordering the destruction
of all records of slavery, as the ex-slavemasters tried pointing to other parts
of Africa while the people worshipped mainly Yoruba gods and spoke
Yoruba.
Many of the ex-slaves ended up in shantytowns, but a few remained in the
interior and illegally farmed their quilombos or lands that their absentee,
foreign landlords left fallow. Unlike in the British sugar colonies and the
United States, where exploitation of Africans continued with colonization
and sharecropping before becoming industrial exploitation, Afro-Brazilians
were left in wasteful unemployment and illiteracy. This was not a deliberate
policy but a failing that pervaded the whole of society and kept it
underdeveloped and out of the new league of industrialized nations.
The republic was distracted by regional rivalries in politics and in the army,
as foreign suppliers took sides and promoted divisions to keep it an
agricultural supplier and dumping market for foreign goods. With the old
system of slavery finally discarded in Brazil in 1888, the last country to do
so, Britain and the United States were to become the effective rulers of Brazil
and the world.
After the Muslim destruction of Oyo in 1833, the Oyo royal court moved to
the new capital at the fringes of the rainforest in 1836. Most of the inhabitants
of Old Oyo moved south towards the coast. The Oyo empire became a shell

of its former self as many provincial governments declared their
independence, especially with the arms provided on the coast.
A group of Oyo refugees under Kurunmi fled to a deserted Egba town called
Ijaye, while others created new towns like Ibadan and Abeokuta. Ibadan
(meaning ‘by the plains’) was a wide, flat plain that became the largest and
most populous black city until Lagos surpassed it in the 1970s. Ibadan was
filled with former Oyo, hustling cosmopolitan Yoruba who wreaked havoc in
the area because they had no farms, and many had been hustling gold and
other foreign trades. The Ibadan exhibited a fast-talking, shady cosmopolitan
attitude with a sharp tongue, which set them apart from most Yoruba, similar
to the comparison between present-day black New Yorkers and African
Americans in general. (The unique Ibadan sharp tongue baffled me until I fell
victim to New York ‘snapping’ and realized the effect of cosmopolitan living
on the creative African tongue.)
The Ibadan rulers led by Oluyole had no crown and royal backing, which was
necessary in tradition-conscious Yorubaland. Especially with Oluyole
coming from a female lineage and thus unable to become king, the new
Alaafin of Oyo gave Oluyole the title of Bashorun, commander in chief of the
armed forces.
In 1838, the Ibadan halted the Ilorin Muslim advance at Offa in what turned
out to be one of the most important battles in Nigerian history. The Ibadan
militocracy fostered a dream of taking over Yorubaland with the demise of
Oyo Empire, but was rejected by several citystates that wanted to retain their
independence. The Ibadan attacked the more reserved agricultural Ekiti, who
were the keepers of Yoruba metal technology through Ogun, the god of iron.
Iron had not been heavily militarized within the community, because the Ekiti
and Akoko had enjoyed a relatively peaceful existence under Edo Benin
Empire. They were unprepared for the Ibadan onslaught from the northwest
and the Ondo from the south.
The Ekitis and Ijesas were to unify as Ekiti Parapo with their main garrison
located in Ilara, Akureland. Under the leadership Ogedengbe Agbogungoro,
the Ekitis were to defeat the Ibadans, who were hampered by infighting and
also spread thin due to other battlefronts. Initially armed by Iyalode
Efunsetan Aniwura, the largest slave trader that sold slaves for European

arms, her fallout with Aare Latosa and other military Ibadan leaders
weakened Ibadan’s military poweress.
In 1860, the two new settlements ruled by military leaders, Ibadan and Ijaye,
clashed for supremacy, which led to the destruction of Ijaye. Ijaye was
reputed to be one of the Yoruba’s finest cities and labeled a model of town
planning. *
* Isichei, A History of African Societies to 1870, 374.
Farther to the south, Owu, an Oyo province, went on a rampage and attacked
the spiritual center of Ile-Ife for the first time. They attacked the Ijebu who
defeated them with imported firearms and destroyed Owu in 1817. The war
between Owu and the Ijebu arose out of kidnapping at the Apomu market but
resulted in town after town engulfed in flames, as those who escaped often
bonded together to become the scourges of other towns.
In 1835, some Egba founded Abeokuta (meaning ‘under the rock’), where
they hoped to seek refugee from the wars ravaging Yorubaland.
Unfortunately, this was a dream because they had relocated closer to
Dahomey, King Gezo, and his Latino backers. The British seized the repeated
attacks on Abeokuta, despite being partially unsuccessful, as an excuse in
1861 to move farther inland from the Lagos forts.

Chapter 12: Queen Victoria’s Boys Scramble for
Africa
The entrenchment of European supremacy through small cliques (1800–
1917)
Queen Victoria’s reign, from 1837 to 1901, represents one of the three most
important reigns in British history. Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603)
challenged the Spanish economic sphere and, with African slavery and sugar
plantations, put Britain on a path of economic ascendancy. The reign of
Queen Elizabeth II witnessed the end of colonial Britain.
Queen Victoria consolidated Britain into a world, colonial power with a
landmass and population that exceeded any other in history. Cugoano’s
economic plan of colonization had only been fulfilled in the Caribbean, while
Africa remained on the shelf until Victoria’s reign and new technologies of
war and social organization brought the world to the feet of the Anglo-
Saxons. Her long reign, which saw her family members marry or rule as
monarchs of major European nations, helped to make her great. In addition,
she encouraged the formation of exclusive societies of young men dedicated
to the cause of Anglo supremacy.
It was not possible to conquer Southern Nigeria, the rest of Africa, and India
without a new war technology, considering that four hundred thousand guns
were dumped in West Africa yearly. This restricted the Europeans to the
African shores, which they patrolled from the 1820s as ‘an antislavery’ force,
with colonial bases in sparsely populated areas: the United States in Liberia
and the British in Sierra Leone.
With the American plantations booming and the clandestine slave trade
profitable until the 1880s, European capitals, especially Victoria’s London,
attracted ambitious young men who came together to form a new world order
with new technology and old slave money from the merchant bankers. John
Rockefeller, Alfred Nobel, J. P. Morgan, Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Vickers, and
Hiram Maxim were part of a small clique that wielded enormous influence
and power, especially with the creation of the British Conservative party in
1848 and the US Republican party in 1854.
A new horizon of American prosperity and industrialization appeared with
the 1820s upgrade of the horse-drawn stagecoach to railways. This had the

same effect that mass shipbuilding had on the British Empire, efficiently
transporting the slave produce to England and New England markets. People
like Vickers made fortunes exporting British iron to build American
railroads. After the 1850s US railroad boom, railroad building extended south
to Brazil and Argentina. Britain owed nearly 70 percent of all public debt in
Latin America.
George Peabody moved to London from Massachusetts in 1837 and started
buying and selling during the cotton boom before turning to financing other
people’s deals and becoming a banker. He became an informal US financial
ambassador, and when he grew old, he found a young partner, Junius Spencer
Morgan (J. S. Morgan) from his native New England.
In 1854, Morgan, a young Hartford graduate, joined and ably took over from
Peabody, who died and left money to the education of the Southern US in
recognition of the contribution of the cotton kings and slaves.
Morgan changed the company name to J. S. Morgan in 1864 and raised funds
for the North during the war while everyone else in London was raising
money for the South. After the Civil War, Morgan was well placed to expand
his business as the new American merchant banker, while he also syndicated
loans for France during the 1870 German-Franco war. Morgan focused on
America where he made various alliances, especially with Anthony J. Drexel,
who joined him to raise money from British investors and sponsor the
Pennsylvania steel mills and coal mines with the likes of Andrew Carnegie
from Scotland.
Carnegie was one of the young Anglo-Saxons who came to dominate the
business world after making his first fortune in Civil War supplies, like
Rockefeller. After the war and relaunching the railroad fervor, Carnegie
developed Pittsburgh Steel Mills with backing from the J. S. Morgan/Barings
Bank.
When the railroad business reached its peak, the iron and steel merchants like
Vickers and Carnegie turned to arms making and began forming the modern
military-industrial complex with their merchant bankers. Alfred Krupp,
proprietor of the major German steelworks, turned to armaments and supplied
the Prussian army under Otto von Bismarck, who from the 1860s united the

fragmented German peoples and defeated the French.
Britain made no major improvements to its army’s gunnery between the 1815
Napoleonic Wars and their Rothschilds-sponsored 1854 Crimean War, so
William Armstrong was commissioned to develop a gun that was perfected in
1858 and called ‘the Armstrong gun’. Armstrong supplied both sides during
the American Civil War with the Armstrong gun, and he and Krupp became
major arms dealers, the bulk of their profits coming through foreign orders.
The British navy developed the Gatling machine gun, which it handed to
Armstrong to manufacture and market in the 1870s.
Carnegie turned to making armored plates for the US navy and made large
profits, while Vickers built guns, engines, and armor plates for the British
navy. The Civil War and other wars increased the need for inventions in war
technology. Moreover, the British and French started their African
colonization by taking over coastal forts, but the pace was slow due to the
lack of a superior weapon.
Vickers was able to profit from the work of a young inventor from Maine
called Hiram Maxim, who changed the world with his invention of the
Maxim submachine gun. Maxim considered his gun as especially useful ‘in
stopping the mad rush of savages’, * and its advantages were soon realized in
the colonial wars.
Another young European in the mid-1800s, who developed war technology,
was Alfred Nobel (whose foundation awarded Nobel Peace Prizes out of the
fortune made from the invention of explosives). In 1862, Nobel made
nitroglycerin explode, which he patented in 1863, and it was valuable for
blasting in new mining colonies like California. In 1867, Nobel made
dynamite from clay called Kieselguhr mixed with nitroglycerin, which made
the latter more stable for use. Nobel made millions from inventions that
transformed into the main ingredients of the new weapons industry.
Rockefeller was one of the young Europeans in London who made a fortune
from the Civil War and had inside knowledge of where the technology was
heading. With the railroad boom in full swing, a new fuel to run the coalpowered
steam engines was discovered: petroleum. He initially lit USA
households and businesses with kerosene paraffin oil used in lamps. With the

backing of his rich friends, Rockefeller formed a world monopoly, beginning
in Pennsylvania, that took over the Texan oilfields and others across the
world.
* Anthony Sampson, Arms Bazaar: From Lebanon to Lockheed (Viking, 1977), 47.
Morgan’s son, John Pierpont (J. P. Morgan), took over in 1879 and turned the
J. P. Morgan Bank into one of the biggest banks through the financing of
railroads. Eventually, he became the owner of more than half of all US
railroads. He also sponsored the arms industry, which was not very different
from the steel business, because the steel business covered large overhead
costs with arms exportation. In 1901, J. P. Morgan took over Carnegie’s
Pittsburgh Steel Mills to establish the monopoly of US Steel in rail and arms
production. After being bought out by JP Morgan, Carnegie, like Nobel, left a
large foundation to the promotion of peace to lighten his conscience over his
deadly legacy to humanity.
Another important contribution of JP Morgan, despite stiff competition and
opposition from the likes of Rockefeller, was his investment in electricity that
was to change the face of USA and ushered in the modern world.
Rothschild, a main beneficiary of African slave money and respected
financier of old Europe, sponsored the Nobel brothers in their bid to take over
the Russian oilfields while also sponsoring the British war machine. Another
young European of the mid-1800s, Cecil Rhodes, opened up southern Africa,
where the world’s largest diamond and gold reserves were discovered in 1867
and 1886, respectively. Rothschilds sponsored the South African Boer War to
keep control of the mines with the British, as Rhodes gained a world
monopoly on diamonds by age thirty-eight.
Rhodes talked of Africa from Cairo to the Cape as a single country ‘fit for
white men, fit for Englishmen more populous and prosperous than the USA’,
in his ‘idea’ of a Western Hemisphere united under the leadership of a
secretive clique of Anglo-Saxons.
The British had taken control of the Cape in South Africa in the first decade
of the 1800s and established a new administration in their language and
religion. Their ban of the slave trade in 1833 angered the local Afrikaner

Dutch and resulted in Boer migration from the Cape towards the war-stricken
northeast Zulu Natal Bay.
By 1839, the Boers defeated the Mfecane-weakened Zulu ruled by Dingane
and set up a colony in Natal Bay. Not wanting another European presence on
the Indian Ocean coastline, the British stopped the Dutch by annexing the
Natal area in 1845. This caused the Dutch to again migrate north, where they
founded republics, straddling the Orange and Vaal Rivers, called the
Transvaal and Orange Free State. The British followed them but soon
counted the inland plains unworthy of the cause and granted them
independence between 1852 and 1854.
On the West Africa coast, British colonists made their first move towards
colonization from their Sierra Leone colony of freed slaves founded by the
British abolitionists in 1787. A new class of African Christians and
merchants slowly developed in Sierra Leone, and they spread the new
European ‘script’ across Africa. From Sierra Leone, the British increased
their presence on the Gold Coast by taking over the coastal forts formerly
owned by an English company of merchants, while the Dutch and Danes
gave up forts that had become unprofitable.
The withdrawal of other Europeans caused problems, because the British
favored the coastal Fante while the Ashante relied on the Dutch. The Ashante
wanted to capture the coast but were repulsed by the Fante. Eventually, the
fourth Ashante-Fante war of 1823–1824 became the first Anglo-Ashante
War, as the British took control of the coast. The Ashante were defeated in
Katamanso with new technology, which included the Congreve rockets, used
by twelve thousand African soldiers and sixty Europeans officers. This was
the beginning of the Ashante decline, disintegration, and defeat.
With the abolition of slavery and dwindling gold supplies, the Gold Coast
switched to raw materials like palm oil, kola, and later cocoa. The Ashante
continued to invade the south, sometimes in pursuit of criminals, which led to
another British attack in 1874. The new war technology, including the new
Enfield rifle, led to the sacking of Kumasi and the dethronement of the king,
Ashantehene Kofi Karikari.
Initially, the British hoped to run an informal empire without high

administrative and military costs, but on the far West Africa coast, the French
were the ones to first monopolize their coastal colonies. The British and
French, the main European powers—and to a lesser extent the Portuguese,
Dutch, and Danish—had small coastal trade forts on the African coast.
After the Napoleonic Wars, the defeated French returned to their Senegal
River coastal colony in 1817 and erected a tariff barrier to exclude
competitors, because the war had greatly reduced the quality and
competitiveness of French-manufactured goods. From the 1840s, the French
extended this policy to Guinea, Ivory Coast, Dahomey, Gabon, and
Madagascar. The British charged a uniform rate to avoid administration and
enforcement costs, because, most importantly, the coast was too large to
demarcate, and most of the trade took place in stretches where no European
flag flew.
Following the ravages of slavery and its attendant wars, Europeans
approached African kings with an offer to make them a protectorate, which,
as they explained to the Euro-illiterate kings, was a protection from slavery
and a free-trade area. Africans soon realized that they had signed away their
freedoms to trade and to tax trade. This was similar to what occurred in the
1980s drug wars, where the fear of drug crimes made middle-class Afro-
Americans sign away many civil rights, leading to the extraordinary black
incarceration rates of the 1990s and early 2000s.
Many kings signed away territories that were in contention or not even theirs
to sign away, causing huge misunderstandings when the Europeans wanted to
claim their protectorates. This occurred in Opobo in the Niger delta area
known as Oil Rivers and led to a bitter war between Jaja of Opobo and the
British.
In 1854, France stepped up its administration in Senegal with plans to link
the Upper Senegal River to the Upper Niger. This was to secure a market for
French exports only and corner the huge Hausa and Mande grassland trade of
groundnuts, gum Arabic, leather, and other raw materials. The new
technologies of railways and steamboats opened up the recently explored
African interior and diverted the trade into French hands at the Senegal
Coast.

The British were scared that this could adversely affect their coastal colonies,
Sierra Leone and Gold Coast, whose northern trade would be diverted away.
Moreover, the British already had their charter companies running their own
steamboats on the Lower Niger and would eventually meet those of the
French on the Upper Niger. To avoid conflict, it was proposed that the British
give up their little colony of Gambia River in exchange for Dahomey and
Ivory Coast. This would have meant that the British would own the land from
Ivory Coast to the Cameroon Mountains and the French, from Morocco to
Ivory Coast, but other Europeans challenged them, as they had done to the
Iberians. The Germans and Belgians upset the Anglo-Franco balance, as the
new European nations also wanted the promise of African wealth.
The Belgians weren’t overly concerned with colonies, but their monarch,
King Leopold II, felt the need to find power outside his tiny nation that was
sandwiched between two major European powers. He employed the explorer,
Henry Morton Stanley, who had discovered that the Congo and its tributaries
were navigable for four thousand miles upstream after Malebo Pool but
needed a railway to link the coast (due to the thirty-two cataracts in the 225
miles between Malebo Pool and the coast). The British and others rejected
Stanley’s services, due to their experience that the Congo basin was not
overly resource rich and profitable, but Leopold wanted to have his own
colony and backed Stanley anyway.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the most important trade on the
laborious Lower Congo route was ivory. More perishable goods were taken
to the Portuguese in Angola through trade routes that ran across the savannah
kingdoms on the southern edges of the Upper Congo basin. With the end of
slavery and better accessibility in the area, the demand for palm products,
coffee, and cotton increased.
Leopold, like George Goldie on the Niger, aimed for a complete monopoly
with his steamers and railways on the Congo but did not bother to obtain
protectorate treaties. His success attracted French competition, Pierre
Savorgnam de Brazza, who was quick to obtain to a treaty from Bakoko, the
king of the Teke, inhabiting the northern edges of Malebo Pool. The French
ratified the treaty in 1882 and pushed for more territory by turning towards
the Niger delta coast. This alerted the British, who knew the value of the

Nigerian raw materials and huge market due to its population, and made them
hurriedly secure treaties around the area.
Bismarck, the German leader, was busy unifying and building the new
German state during the 1850s and 1860s but was eventually urged on by
north German merchants. To have a say in international European politics
and distract France over the 1870 German seizure of the Rhineland, Bismarck
decided to throw his hat in the ring with the surprise announcement of
German claims to Togo, Cameroon, South West Africa, and East Africa. The
claims were not substantiated by any commitment on the ground, but
nevertheless, the pieces of paper upon which the treaties were written were
acceptable. The only lands not partitioned were those of Egypt, which the
French and British had earlier invaded on grounds of financial default.
Although the French later withdrew, the British stubbornly lingered.
The Berlin Conference popularly known as the ‘Scramble for Africa’ was
held in 1884–1885 in Germany. Africa was partitioned on the basis of
dubious treaties, setting a precedent for future lands to be claimed. It
appeared to have taken a measure of modernity for the warlike Europeans to
have peacefully agreed on dividing Africa, but it was possible only because
Queen Victoria’s family members ruled or were married to the monarchs of
the different nations. From the initial coastal claims, the Europeans scrambled
for every inch left, the sole aim being to monopolize all trade.
The British, having done their homework, appeared to have come out with a
poor deal as they held onto Egypt, a few scattered West Africa territories, and
South Africa. The French appeared to have won with their larger, West
Africa colony, an equally large French Equatorial Africa that extended from
the Congo coast to Lake Chad, and Algeria and Morocco. Leopold was
grateful for the substantial portion of Congo basin that he secured, while
Bismarck made the political gains he set out to achieve.
The French later realized that with the exception of its coastal territories of
Ivory Coast and Senegal, French West Africa encompassing the Sahara was
largely an arid, sparsely populated subregion. Despite French Equatorial
Africa starting from the rainforest of Gabon and extending to Lake Chad, it
couldn’t compete economically with Nigeria or the Gold Coast. The
combined population of the fourteen countries in French black Africa was

less than the population of Nigeria.
Ivory was the main product of the East Africa grasslands, and trade was
conducted by coastal Swahili Arabs, who bought from the Nyamwezi and
Yao. The Arabian Muslim caliph of Oman initially ran the east coast, but the
Europeans restricted his claims to fifteen miles inland, after which East
Africa was divided into two spheres of influence: German in Tanganyika to
the south and British in Kenya. The Germans bought the coast from the
caliph, while Britain leased.
King Leopold, the British, and the Germans scrambled for the land around
the Great Lakes. Britain secured Uganda between its coastal colony of Kenya
and Belgian Congo, and the Germans secured the land between Tanzania and
Belgian Congo called Rwanda-Urundi. The Germans signed with the Tutsi
minority rulers, who were happy to use the Europeans to gain total control
over the remaining, independent Hutu kingdoms outside Tutsi control.
The British faced more difficulties in Buganda and Bunyoro, the main
Uganda kingdoms, which had experienced an influx of Arabs in the mid-
1800s. While the Nyoro accepted the Muslims, the Ganda invited the British
Protestants and French Catholics to keep a balance of power, which
ultimately led to a civil war that the British won. Afterwards, Britain used the
Ganda to suppress all other peoples in the area, especially the Arab-supported
Nyoro, and established the colony of Uganda.
In Afro-Asian North Africa, the French took over Algeria and Tunisia. The
Italians took Libya and wanted to include Ethiopia, but they were soundly
defeated by an Ethiopian state led by Haile Selassie. Ethiopia was still ruled
by light-skinned Afro-Asians who came during the Roman-Byzantine era,
and they greatly increased Ethiopia’s historical borders in the scramble for
Africa conducted by their European cousins. The rest of the horn of Africa
was divided between the Italians in Eritrea, British Somaliland to the east,
and Italian Somaliland.
The British defended their stake in Egypt and moved into Sudan, where they
faced down the French coming from French West and Equatorial Africa.
The partitioning on paper was easy, and due to the size of the continent, the

small, European treaty-seeking groups hardly clashed. Problems occurred
when the treaties were enforced. Waiting for the arrival of the machine gun
and rocket bombs gave the Europeans an enormous advantage over the more
numerous Africans who were equipped with obsolete weaponry, but the
Europeans still faced pockets of fierce opposition.
In 1857, the French made their initial thrust into West Africa through Senegal
and met fierce opposition from the Fulani jihadists of Futa Toro and Futa
Jallon, who were armed with European weapons from the coast. They broke
Alhaji Umar’s military power and captured Bamako in 1883.
Another important opponent was Samori, who led Muslim Mandingoes in the
interior borderlines of Guinea, Mali, and Burkina Faso between Upper Niger
and Upper Volta. They weren’t defeated until 1898 and delayed French
penetration down the Niger, although the French took Timbuktu in 1894 and
Say in 1896. The French could not go beyond Say in Middle Niger, because
the British took all of the territory from the Niger delta.
To enforce treaties in Nigeria was a nightmare. Even after centuries of slave
raiding to the Americas, Nigeria still had more than five hundred language
groups and spheres of influence, especially with the breakup of the major
kingdoms. The first British foothold was on the sparsely populated Lagos
Island, strategically located off the Yoruba coast. They initially came in
support of Akitoye against his brother, Kosoko, for the Lagos throne in 1851
but declared it a colony in 1861.
The British had become masters of divide and rule and didn’t have to fight
wars in many areas. They often split polities into camps and then financed
and armed the friendly camp against the others, no matter how small a
minority it might be. Unfortunately, once the underdog had revenge dreams
funded by the Europeans, the sudden reversal sometimes spelt annihilation
for the historically stronger and more populous group or area, as occurred in
Uganda, Rwanda, and a host of other African polities.
After taking Lagos Island off the Slave Coast, the British moved farther east
to the mouth of the Niger delta, where they faced opposition from the small
trading states. When the British realized that they couldn’t easily beat King
Jaja of Opobo in the complex waterways of the delta, they waited until the

dry season and hurled fireballs from their warships onto the farmland to
starve the people into submission. Being a conscientious leader, Jaja called
for a truce and was invited to a meeting on the warship. He made the same
mistake as Haiti’s Toussaint. Jaja went for the peace talks and was then
deported to cold Canada.
The British reached the Niger-Benue confluence and moved into Sokoto
caliphate territory to face resistance from the new southern Muslim provinces
of Nupe and Ilorin. Reports from Upper Niger and Senegal of the European
onslaught reached the caliph of Sokoto long before the British appeared. He
wisely sued for peace with Goldie in 1885, although he couldn’t convince the
Ilorin and Nupe to surrender until they were later attacked and conquered
with Maxim guns and rockets. The operations were chartered to a number of
companies that were combined, in 1886, into a monopoly called the Royal
Niger Company under Goldie.
The Sokoto caliph, being of the minority Fulani jihadist class, realized that
instead of fighting the better-equipped British, he could use them to stabilize
his grip on the Hausa majority. The British also realized that leaving the
Sokoto caliphate and its Muslim administration in place would reduce
colonial administrative costs.
Having subdued the Muslim Sokoto caliphate in the northwest and
stalemated the French at Say, the British moved across to the Muslim Bornu
empire and Chad in northeast Nigeria. They stopped the French who were
encroaching on their territory from three directions: around northwest Nigeria
from Say, across the desert from Algeria, and from French Equatorial Africa.
After taking the Lagos port, the next move in Yorubaland was against
Dahomey, which still raided for slaves in the western Yorubaland until the
late 1800s. After that time, the British placed a protectorate over the Egba
and the Ijebu. The Ijebu and Egba resisted fiercely but were mowed down by
the Maxim gun, wielded by a small band of African mercenaries directed by
British officers. The defeat was so resounding that when the Egba
surrendered to sign the treaty, they refused to partake in the official
photographs taken of the ceremony. The camera, balanced on its tripod,
looked like the Maxim gun on its stand, and they did not want to risk being
cut down by the hundred-bullets-per-minute gun—not to mention the rocket

bombs!
The Benin kingdom raised stiff opposition to the British treaty, as when it
opposed male slavery by banning it in the territory. The British secured the
treaty in 1892 from Oba Ovonramwen, but the Bini didn’t take it seriously
and disregarded all British efforts to consolidate their gains. In January 1897,
the British sent J. R. Philips, the acting consul-general of the Niger Coast
protectorate, to give the Bini a last warning that an army was being
assembled to invade if they continued their obstinate behavior. Despite pleas
by Oba Ovonramwen on behalf of the consul-general and his entourage, the
Bini chiefs insisted upon making them the first casualties of the war. The
boldness of the British, in that instance, ended in the death of the entire party.
The aggrieved British assembled an army and launched an attack but met stiff
opposition on the way to Benin City. With their vastly superior firepower, the
British eventually sacked the ancient and populous forest empire and burnt
the palace that had been evacuated by the Oba of Benin before they arrived.
The Oba and his people continued to resist, but because of the high casualty
rate, he gave himself up by the end of the year and was deported to Calabar
on the other side of the delta.
The British swept through war-ravaged Yorubaland, killing thousands while
losing only a few. Nevertheless, there were other lands to be taken as planned
by the British merchants, Queen Victoria and the Conservatives, led by the
British Prime Minister Marques of Salisbury (1885–1891).
The southern half of Africa had a slightly different path to colonial rule,
which diverged with the discovery of diamonds in Kimberly. Nineteen-year
old Cecil Rhodes exemplified the British colonial spirit in Africa. He took a
two-year break from Oxford University to take over the world’s diamond
market before going back to complete his degree and preach Anglo-Saxon
world domination.
With diamonds changing the economic landscape, the British Cape colonists
tried to change the political landscape by annexing the diamonds mines in the
Boers Orange Free State and taking over the independent African states. Cape
colonists took over Basutoland in the 1870s, and they broke the fighting
power of the Xhosa and other Nguni peoples on the eastern front in 1878.

They were unable to suppress Basutoland in 1880 until the British
government stepped in 1884, following the calls of people like Rhodes and
his enlightened group in Oxford.
The British initially tried to annex the Boer republics in the First Boer War
(1800 to 1801) but failed. Calls for action by Rhodes and others led to a
retrial through the Second Boer War (1899 to 1902), which they won and
were able to successfully annex both republics. There were deep divisions
between the Dutch settlers and the British, because the Boers saw the British
taking over their economy and power over the Africans. Black Africans
tended to favor the big business British, who appeared to be more lenient
conquerors than the religious Boer settler ranchers (who, like the plantation
farmers in the Southern United States, had used brute force backed by the
Bible).
Rhodes returned to South Africa to form the De Beers monopoly in 1880, and
in 1889, he received a charter from the Conservative Prime Minister
Salisbury to explore and take all lands possible. Rhodes was the prime
minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896.
As a British prime minister eager to push a pro-colonial policy, Salisbury’s
first move in 1885 was to declare a protectorate over the grasslands between
German Southwest Africa (Namibia) and Transvaal, the northern Boer
republic, which he called Bechuanaland (now called Botswana). This opened
the way to Central Africa, which Salisbury chartered to Cecil Rhodes’s
British South Africa Company in 1889.
The initial charter, which entailed the acquisition of lands from the Limpopo
River to the Zambezi River, was fulfilled and extended in 1891 to cover all of
the land down to the Great Lakes and Katanga Plateau in southern Zaire.
Salisbury gave Rhodes all the leeway required. ‘Take first, ask me later,’
Salisbury told him. Rhodes was once heard saying, ‘If I could annex the
planets, I would!’

Rhodes declared that the only thing standing between him and Cairo was
Matabeleland (Zimbabwe). He was quick to sign a treaty in 1890 with the
Shona, who had been subjected by the Ndebele fleeing from the Nguni
Mfecane troubles of South Africa, half a century earlier. The Rhodes-Shona
treaty resulted in the creation of Fort Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia in
Mashonaland, from where he provoked, attacked, and conquered the
Ndebele.
The territory to the immediate west, Malawi, was excluded from Rhodes’s
charter, because it was already in British hands through the significant
presence of British missionaries. Moving farther along the Zambezi River,
the grasslands on the Congo side of the Congo/Zambezi watershed of

Katanga Plateau were left to King Leopold, according to the Berlin
agreements. The grasslands on the Zambezi side became northern Rhodesia,
later renamed Zambia.
The greed of the European imperial powers made them grab land across
Africa without a full cost and benefit analysis. They were burdened with how
to keep administrative costs down and make the colonial undertakings at least
self-sufficient before fulfilling their dream of obtaining a cheap source of raw
materials and a closed, buoyant market for their expensive, poor-quality
manufactured goods. To get white staff to run the colonial administration was
expensive, and they had to resort to local people who they had to train in at
least a European language. Similar to the Caribbean and black America,
missionaries fulfilled this role with their initial, four-year schools.
The first step towards profitability, especially in colonies without rich
mineral deposits, was to introduce ‘cash crops’ as opposed to food crops
(crops in demand in Europe and America, as was done in the American slave
colonies). Africans were expected to plant the cash crops on their own land
beside their food crops. From the 1830s on, abolitionists/colonists
encouraged planting groundnuts, cotton, and gum Arabic in the West Africa
grasslands while promoting palm produce, cocoa, and coffee in forest coastal
colonies. Sierra Leone had diamonds and iron, while the Gold Coast had gold
and tin. Even though the British had all the gold and diamonds they needed in
South Africa, the West Africa productions were to defray local colonial costs,
plus profit.
The second step was to increase supply by ensuring the transportation of the
goods from the deep African interior to the seaports, where they were
transported to their home countries. Like America in 1830–1850, when the
Barings and Morgan banks financed the canals, steamboats, and railroads that
opened the agricultural Midwest, the European colonists raised the finances
to build the necessary infrastructure from the Rothschilds and other colonial
speculators, a group that later included the Rhodes moneymen.
These measures weren’t effective on their own, because the Africans weren’t
slaves on their own land, even though they had been hoodwinked, coerced,
and killed to get them to accept the idea of being colonized. Despite the
slavery, guns, and other trade brought by Europeans, they never directly

accounted for the lion’s share of the local economies of the larger, more
established communities like the Edo, Igbo, Kongos, Nupe, and many others
across Africa. The food, clothing, housing, and other necessities were mainly
provided by the intra-African trade, and the majority had local credit
cooperatives. The Yoruba, with their Esusu and ajo, * were organized by
traders and managed at markets headed by the Iyalode (head of women). The
Hausa and Dyula merchants had appropriate credit bodies that served their
regular sphere of trading.
The European important economic influences were mostly negative
intangibles, like cowry trading, that sabotaged and devalued African
economies. The gun culture caused insecurity, leading to a serious drain on
labor and skills through slavery, dispersal, death, and the abandonment of
traditional employment training.
The colonists banned all forms of traditional and other foreign media of
exchange and introduced their own currency in the colonies. However, even
these measures weren’t enough to promote production, because Africans
needed to plant only enough to buy the occasional Manchester cotton and not
guns. To cover colonial costs, they began to charge a ‘head tax’, which
resulted in revolts that were brutally put down by the new masters with their
American plantation habits.
In many forested African regions, especially in Yorubaland, women were the
traders and wove clothing materials. They were the most affected and easily
caught up in the vagaries of the market, where they were charged both head
and produce taxes. The men could be out of public view on their farms, secret
mines, or art crafts. The cost couldn’t be easily shifted onto them, because
they initially passed the wares to their wives without monetary costs. An
affected wife would probably be told to find another market with less hassle.
In Ijebuland and Aba in Igboland, on two occasions women planned to shock
the humanity of the European men by carrying out demonstrations naked to
show that they were being stripped to the bone. To their surprise, they were
ruthlessly gunned down, as was done to Africans in the Americas. The
British had to fight crucial wars with the Ashante in 1896 and 1900 before
finally subjecting them, after many years, of declaring a protectorate. In some
savannah areas where the men protested, they were stripped of their land and

cattle, their main source of livelihood. In the Belgian Congo, their wives were
held hostage, and failure to reach the prescribed quotas led to rape and
mutilation.
* Pronounced aj-au.
The colonial plans worked and production picked up, especially in the coastal
colonies, with the help of Sierra Leone creoles, former slave warlords, longdistance
coastal merchants, displaced peoples, and missionaries. Palm
products and cocoa didn’t need much labor to plant and harvest, because they
were trees that took years to grow. Palm trees were already growing in
abundance, and with a little incentive and organization to pick the palm
kernels, supply greatly shot up in southern Nigeria, especially with the
improvement of transportation.
Slavery had been mainly a chief or caliph business, but now their mercenaries
and displaced peasants were able to make money. In the Muslim savannah
states, cattle and slavery were the economic mainstays. Although slavery
continued to be a major trade in the Middle East, many were quick to jump
on the cash crop bandwagon, especially with groundnuts and improved
hybridized cattle. The caliph facilitated the collection of taxes not only at
markets or on cattle but also through mosques and other socioreligious
avenues.
The British consolidated colonies around the Lower Niger, adding the
protectorate of Lagos to that of the Oil Rivers to become the protectorate of
the southern Niger area, which was placed under direct colonial rule. The
northern Niger area, placed under the Fulani Islamic caliphate of Sokoto, had
Lord Lugard as its first governor from 1900 to 1906. Lugard realized that the
vast northern colony couldn’t function on its own without linkage to the sea
through the southern colony, especially because the French had taken over
the longer western route to Senegal.
The two most populous and prosperous British colonies of West Africa were
amalgamated into one protectorate in 1914. It was named Nigeria by Lady
Shaw, Lugard’s mistress, which officially meant ‘Niger Area’, but the Niger
River’s greatest length was not in the area, nor was it as important in the
daily lives of those in the area as it was to those in Mali. The tongue-in-cheek

meaning was ‘Nigger Area’, because it was the most populous and the
acknowledged source of all blacks. The river itself had been named Niger
River, * because it was the river that flowed through the Nigger/Negro
heartland. The white Lady Shaw, a wordsmith, was fully aware of this. The
northern area was even called Negritia by some medieval scholars who
realized that the highest number of Negroes came from its south. Niger,
nigger, negro, and nigga were all later variations in the new European
languages, terms initially coined by the Greeks and Romans to refer to black
Africans.
* The Yoruba call the Niger the River Oya (‘the flood’), even though there are hundreds of other rivers.
Nigeria, the Gold Coast, and South Africa became the jewels of the British
African colonies. Britain chartered the first colonial banks in the 1890s in
Accra, Lagos, and Johannesburg: Standard Chartered and Barclays. The
banks printed and regulated currency, on behalf of the British government, in
relation to the productivity of the colonies. However, this was another way to
siphon the productive capacity of Africans. The colony’s currency was
exchangeable only with its colonists’ currency at a rate decided solely by the
colonial master, and the creamed surplus was shared between the bankers and
colonists.
Monetary and fiscal policies were used to control production by reducing the
money supply or charging high tariffs on ‘unfavorable’ production, like local
food production and manufacturing, not geared towards exports or British
interests. In addition, marketing boards, which gathered the produce and were
supposed to work in favor of the farmers by helping to market their products,
purposefully kept prices low with their Western orientation and failure to
create viable African markets. With the destruction of traditional cooperatives
and credit facilities, entry was barred to most sectors like marketing,
transportation, and distribution or ‘unfavorable’ production.
To cut costs, the French amalgamated their vast colonies into large blocks
with the hope that the fast-growing coastal areas would carry the slower ones
in the interior. Within a few years in French West Africa, its coastal colonies
of Dahomey, Ivory Coast, and Senegal were making healthy profits from
palm products, cocoa, coffee, and groundnuts. Funds from these colonies
were used to fund developments across French West Africa towards

exporting more raw materials.
In Central Africa, the French mostly followed the Belgian approach of
concession companies that were like charter companies. European greed in
the scramble for Africa was most evident in the Belgian takeover of Zaire. It
was a momentous task for tiny Belgium (11,700 square miles), with its small
population, to effectively manage Zaire, as their Dutch neighbors had realized
in the Americas during slavery. Zaire (874,500 square miles) was bigger than
the combined size of the ten Westernmost European nations, including the
British Isles, France, Germany, Portugal, Italy, Spain, and Belgium.
Costs were to be relatively higher than in West Africa due to the low
population density and scattered local economies in the highland rainforest of
Congo basin that formed the majority of the colony. Nevertheless, the
Belgians promoted a coastal market for palm produce and a few other
products, which the Bobangi canoe men were apt to supply from the many
tributaries in the mountainous Congo basin.
To raise credit to finance the roads, railroads, and steamboats, the Belgians
offered companies huge parcels of land around the railway tracks. The first
company, in 1886, built a railway from the coast to Malebo Pool at a cost of
14 square miles per mile of rail built, which amounted to the loss of 8,000
square miles * of African land (Belgium is 11,700 square miles). The
concession companies concentrated on exploration for minerals, which they
found in abundance in the savannah lands of Katanga, southern Zaire—
copper, diamonds, coal, uranium, manganese, tin, zinc, and gold.
Due to the sparse labor supply in the highland rainforest of the Congo basin,
forced labor was adopted by a few concession companies, as well as by King
Leopold himself, which led to an international outcry. From 1895, the advent
of rubber tires brought a huge demand for rubber, which grew wild in the
tropical forest, and resulted in the concession companies making huge profits
from rubber tapping.
When Leopold realized the massive profits being made, he conscripted both
land and people into rubber production, nearly reminiscent of slavery.
Leopold set quotas for the white administrators who ran slave camps and
killed at random, burning down villages and raping and torturing Africans.

Leopold made $231 million from rubber while introducing mutilation into the
sociopolitical fabric of the area, which later manifested in the local wars seen
across the area in the 1990s.
In addition to iron mining, the United States turned its only African colony,
Liberia, into a massive rubber plantation in the name of Firestone. The
French applied the same Leopold principles in French Equatorial Africa,
where it had been running massive deficits. Eventually, as the wild rubber
trees diminished in Africa and another source was found in Indonesia, there
was an international outcry against Leopold and other Europeans murderous
actions in 1910.
* Roland Oliver and Anthony Atmore, Africa Since 1800 (Cambridge, 1994), 131.
In East Africa, ivory was the main trade item, and the number of elephants
was in decline. Unlike in Central and West Africa, there wasn’t a dense
network of river waterways, and therefore, transportation was largely over
land. Kenya and Uganda were developed by grants from the Colonial Office,
which slowly tried to promote the export economy of the grasslands. After
their subjection of the Bunyoro, the British gave their main allies in the
Buganda royalty huge parcels of land, which were used to promote cotton
cultivation. Other European colonists, not having the advantage of allying
with the moderately dense populations around the Great Lakes, brought in
people from Europe.
Without the malaria of West Africa, Europeans were able and encouraged to
settle in the sparsely populated plains of East Central Africa, especially to
administer and help develop infrastructure in return for land. It was like the
Belgian concession company model, but instead of companies looking for
fast profit, families migrated to take advantage of a feudalistic system based
on racism.
Germany needed territory to offload its citizens, who had been migrating to
the Americas in the millions, so its government encouraged migration to the
East African colony of Tanganyika and Southwest Africa (Namibia). This
was achieved by giving the settlers land for farming and ranches along
railway lines and increasingly marginalizing Africans. Seventy thousand
Herero were killed by the turn of the century in proto-Nazism. Many Africans

were relocated to concentration camps, dispossessed of their land and cattle,
and forced to labor.
The pace of colonization reenergized the Portuguese colonies of Angola and
Mozambique, as European settlement was encouraged to boost the economy.
The British were to unify their Black African and Boer colonies in South
Africa but didn’t plan to pursue a ‘colonies of settlement’ policy in Africa
like it had in the Americas, although Rhodes had dreams of repeating the
American dream in Africa. Through his British South Africa Company,
Rhodes encouraged European settlement in northern and southern Rhodesia.
Indians were imported as in the Guyana and West Indies. Southern Africa
ended up with the largest Eurasian settlement in Africa, reminiscent of
Ancient Egypt and the rest of North Africa.
The maneuvers across Africa strengthened the imperialistic European nations
to spread across the world.
The imperialistic club was increased with American Navy Commodore M C
Perry’s visit to Japan in the 1850s. Perry led a trade delegation to market US
iron products, especially guns and railways, and a treaty was signed in 1854
to allow American goods in Japan. At the time, Japan was an unstable
country ruled by shoguns (military dictators) since 1192, but it was
centralized in 1868 under Emperor Meiji with Anglo-Saxon military backing.
The British saw in Japan an opportunity to launch from the island onto the
populous China mainland, as well as to check Russian expansionism from
Europe into eastern Asia. ‘British banks raised loans to build the Japanese
railroads, to equip the Japanese forces, and to finance Japanese wars against
China and Russia, while the British government provided political support’. *
During the reign of its allies (the Meiji dynasty), Japan rapidly industrialized
within thirty years, and by 1900, it joined the war syndicate, in which there
were no permanent friends or allies.
* Sampson, The Money Lenders, 51.

Chapter 13: The Ogun Military-Industrial Complex
Iron and steel makers create military complexes and take over Western
economies to rule the world (late 1800s to mid-1900s)
In the United States, at the turn of the twentieth century, cotton was booming.
Most importantly, British finance was flowing and ushering in the next stage
of economic development, according to economists.
Economic theory postulates that the lowest level of development is an
agricultural economy. The second stage is a semiprocessing and processing
economy that processes raw materials like cotton, clothing, and food. The
next stage is the heavy industry economy of iron, steel, and chemicals, while
the most advanced stage being the service industry economy. All these
industries are usually present in most stages, but the industry providing the
most income and employment dictates what stage of development an
economy is in. (It is noteworthy to mention that at all times, blacks in the
Americas and Africa were involved in most industries at most levels, even
though their percentages might be insignificant.) Overall, at the turn of the
century, more than 70 percent of Africans were employed in the rudimental
agricultural/vocational sectors of the US economy.
The economy moved into the heavy industrial stage by the end of the Civil
War, when huge investments to rebuild and extend infrastructure poured in
from Britain, which was recycling profits from slavery and new monies from
the West and South African colonies. In the Northeast United States, bridges,
roads, railroads, and ships were built to take advantage of the iron and steel
boom, but there was a limit to which the racially selective credit and the steel
produced could be used up by these peaceful endeavors.
According to Anthony Simpson in his Arms Bazaar: From Lebanon to
Lockheed, ‘It was not till the end of the century, as the railway boom receded
and successive governments became more imperialistic, that American steel
companies were more dependent on government contracts for arms, and on
exporting arms abroad’. However, as shown in previous chapters, the
relationship had been present since slavery when guns, sugar, cotton, and

alcohol promoted the white economy.
The Enlightened classes of the Northeast and other areas concentrated on
how to increase the uses of steel by adapting it to other processes and keep
the boom going. They continued to design more lethal weapons and better
defenses. The British financed the American Maxim gun and improvements
that were used to gain territory across the world. They invested in the USbased
Electric Boat (now called General Dynamics) that had acquired a
patent for making submarines. The British Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI)
was a major partner of DuPont, the US explosives giant. The heavy British
investment later dragged the United States into World War I to help the
Allies.
Carnegie continued to produce steel in the millions of tons as the company
turned to army demands to help with its huge overhead and running costs. In
1881, launching the modern military-industrial complex, Carnegie received
orders to supply the navy with four modern steel warships, in addition to
supplying armor plates, orders that continued into World War I and beyond.
With the adaptation of engines that ran on petroleum, it was easier to design
smaller engines and carriers than those used by the rail system. With the
introduction of bicycles and the use of rubber tires, the new engines didn’t
need to run on rails and could act as army personnel carriers. However, the
average cost to produce the cars was too expensive for the average consumer
until Henry Ford’s assemblyline production provided mass production and
lower prices.
Nonetheless, it required a huge capital outlay to build a car factory, and
private investors naturally took it as a risky, huge, longterm investment. The
research and development of untested consumer goods and markets like those
required government guarantees, in addition to the steady flow of British
finances. The engines were also adapted to fly over small distances with
lighter carriages.
To take advantage of the long-awaited technology of petroleum engines,
Rockefeller used insider information, and his powerful connections gained
during the Civil War, to monopolise oil supplies under his Standard Oil (later
divided into Mobil and Exxon). The huge profits of Standard Oil’s monopoly

were used to take over the cotton-boom banks of Chase Manhattan and
Citibank, which were created in the early 1800s but soon became major
players in the financial world.
In the meantime, the steel companies joined the world arms race of the 1890s
and 1900s as new car companies in the North drew on cheap labor from the
South. The US economy began to show signs of stagnation by the mid-1890s,
like the rest of the imperialist world. The Northeast manufacturers were
initially able to keep their heads above water with relatively lower labor
costs, especially with the help of J. P. Morgan, who came to the rescue in the
financial crashes.
Despite the mass European immigration into the US, encouraged to weaken
black prominence, the establishment of labor unions demanding better
treatment for workers increased labor costs across the white world. American
industrialists weakened the wage pressures by employing African Americans
to break strikes and dilute union power.
The African Americans in the North were traditionally underpaid, if they
could find employment, which was worsened by the African Americans from
the South who hadn’t been paid for centuries and were now migrating north.
The violence meted out to Africans in the South gradually seeped to the
North, as angry ‘undercut’ immigrant Irish laborers and other poor whites
carried out lynchings and race riots. In 1865, the Irish carried out the
bloodiest race riot in US history, known as the New York Draft Riots, and in
1875, blacks were lynched in Confederate North Carolina. It wasn’t until the
1890s that the spate of race riots increased as the effect of industrialization
was being felt.
The 1900 New York race riot carried out by Irish policemen, who attacked
African Americans, came within a generation of the 1865 New York Draft
Riots and resulted in blacks moving from their homes and businesses of more
than two hundred years, in midtown Manhattan, to its northern tip of Harlem.
This was possible with the help of black churches that bought and distributed
land among the black community.
At the turn of the century, 90 percent of Africans in the United States lived in
the South, out of which over 80 percent lived in rural areas. With the

abolition of slavery, a few blacks ventured north, but the majority stayed in
the South—without land, uneducated, and in debt to former slave
masters/landlords cum creditors.
Their hopes of socioeconomic equality were stolen with the Florida
presidential election fraud in 1877. The Southern state legislatures and
governors passed laws that their farmers and white society needed to keep
blacks down. This was in addition to widespread violent intimidation that
resulted in at least four thousand lynchings in the South from 1890 to 1920.
The police became the new foremen, tasked to uphold the racist economic
system based on sharecropping. It was the new ‘accounted enslavement’ of
Africans worldwide.
Ellen and William Craft, escaped slaves who fled to Britain via Boston in
1851, returned to Georgia in 1868 to form the Southern Industrial School and
Labor Enterprise. It educated and enlightened blacks with the skills needed to
face the new agricultural system.
Another ex-slave but more prominent educator, born in 1856, was Booker T
Washington. He created in 1881 the Nominal and Industrial School for
Negroes in Tuskegee, Alabama, for Africans to learn vocational skills and
gradually climb the rungs of society. In the absence of a better alternative to
help the large Southern African American populations, Washington
proselytized a self-help strategy to develop the black community with its
large pool of vocational skills, which were organized, sold, and used to build
a black economy in the South. By 1900, he worked to advance his self-help
principles by spearheading the creation of the National Negro Business
League, ostensibly formed to bring together the mainly vocational African
American businesses in the quest for socioeconomic progress.
Higher education for blacks remained wholly in the hands of the white
missionaries and black churches running private school systems. Between
1860 and 1900, Christian groups created about thirty colleges, but from 1901,
industrialists, led by Rockefeller, created the General Education Board * to
fund and regulate the education of African Americans through donations and
foundations.
Starting with J. P. Morgan’s founder, George Peabody (who dedicated part of

his fortune to the creation of the Peabody Educational Fund in 1867),
Rockefeller, and other industrialists saw the need to control black education
—or miseducation—and gear it towards keeping blacks in servitude in the
new industrial order. The black elite were to be ‘enlightened’, or
brainwashed, towards being workers and not entrepreneurs and leaders.
Education reaffirmed culture, and if culture included economics and social
systems, the black people’s miseducation was bound to confuse black cultural
and economic progress that could challenge white domination.
* Wilson, Blueprint for Black Power, 190.
Due to ordinances restricting the assembly of blacks for sociopolitical
purposes, the church was the main body that brought blacks together. Even
though it relegated black culture to a subservient position, it was still
persecuted. Many whites complained of the ‘demonization of churches’ due
to the introduction of music and dancing. However, blacks used the church,
with its European connotations, as a vehicle to express their African soul and
personal relationship with God, like in Jamaica, Brazil, and Cuba.
The black church became the most financially viable institution in the black
community and across the blackworld. An Afrocentric class of reverend
activists from African Methodist and Baptist Revivalist Churches slowly
grew, but they remained cautious over their utterances, which they knew
could provoke severe reprisals from the white society.
Outside the church, blacks continued to fight for their rights with Frederick
Douglass in the front, although new, more educated leaders with the benefit
of his hindsight took over after his death in 1895 at the ripe age of seventyeight.
Although he could rest in peace that the old system of slavery was
over, he was disheartened before his death that the benefits of freedom were
being rolled back. In one of his major public addresses in the United States,
at a mass meeting in 1883 protesting an adverse ‘civil rights’ decision,
Douglass said, ‘We have been, as a class, grievously wounded, wounded in
the house of our friends, and this wound is too deep and too painful for
ordinary measured speech’. He became the first ambassador to Haiti in 1889
in an effort to get him out of the United States and reduce his political
agitation.

W E B Du Bois, a Bostonian mulatto different from those in Haiti and Brazil,
stepped up to the mantle of truth and social justice in the 1890s. Probably
because Anglo-Saxons frowned on interracial marriage, mulattos in the
United States didn’t have much chance to form a class of their own and
joined with blacks to fight their common oppressor.
Du Bois was born in 1868, the postslavery generation, to a wellto-do family
that provided him with a good education. He received his BA in sociology
from Fisk University and became the first African American to earn a
postgraduate degree from Harvard University before teaching at Atlanta
University.
His initial public contributions were his dissemination of information to
reeducate and unite the black race. He wrote The Suppression of the African
Slave in 1896 and The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. As a social scientist, he
believed more in social engineering and the value of passing the right
information through the right channels towards creating a cohesive, positive
black movement—the intangibles of sociology and psychology—rather than
the sharp economic measures taken by Booker T Washington, Marcus
Garvey, and the Nation of Islam.
Du Bois derided the reverends for being weak and ineffective and failing in
their efforts to highlight the plight of blacks or castigate white society, whose
religion they preached. As a graduate, he saw no reason why blacks couldn’t
make the same leap forward instead of maintaining the status quo by slowly
crawling up the socioeconomic ladder. He called Washington an ‘Uncle
Tom’, a sellout, for pushing the white propaganda that blacks weren’t ready
for the higher levels of education and society.
Booker’s Tuskegee Institute, teaching basic technical skills, attracted praise
and finance from white industrialists and honor from poor Africans in the
South (United States) and western Africa, because they marginally improved
their welfare with his principle of self-help and building from the base
upwards. However, he attracted abuse from the black middle class, which
believed it was a working relationship with segregation to keep blacks
oppressed. Booker later showed his concept of self-help to be more far
reaching with his campaign to unite small black businesses towards
socioeconomic progress in 1900, but his Atlanta Speech of 1895 was

interpreted as playing into the hands of disingenuous industrialists trying to
stop black progress.
To complete the rollback of African American freedoms and equality, in
1896, the Supreme Court passed a judgment upholding the ‘separate but
equal doctrine’—an apartheid doctrine. This shut the door on those
campaigning for the government to provide proper education instead of a
piecemeal approach that found missionaries and industrialists funding a
substandard educational system from the trickling crumbs of their
international efforts. The forty black colleges had a combined fund of less
than 1 percent of Harvard’s endowment. It was to this disparity that Du Bois
addressed his The Souls of Black Folk, in which he condemned America’s
gradualism policy. Two years later, he formed the Niagara Movement to
challenge segregation through the courts.
Around this time, due to worldwide, white labor unrest and the use of blacks
in Northern cities to undercut wages, race riots and lynching increased
astronomically—the 1900 New York police race riots and the Atlanta race
riot in 1906. The 1909 lynching in Springfield, Illinois, led to Du Bois
forming the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) in 1910.
Despite Du Bois accusing reverends and others of a silent, collusive approach
with the white establishment, he worked and was backed by white liberals
and Jews, who funded and staffed his organization in New York, in addition
to black contributors like Madame C. J. Walker. Ironically, Walker, the black
laundress who became a millionaire by inventing and marketing a hairstraightening
process, was part of the process that saw an increase in black
businesses from twenty thousand in 1900 to forty thousand in 1917. * These
were mainly vocational businesses designed to cater to black people. They
were attributed, by some historians, to Booker T Washington, whose National
Negro Business League reported, in the same period, an increase of black
banks from four to fifty-one and retailers from ten thousand to twenty-five
thousand. This proved that a self-help approach was more effective in
uplifting Africans than the integration approach or begging whites to
assimilate blacks as their underclass.
Notwithstanding, the vast majority of blacks remained illiterate sharecroppers

and underemployed menial workers, while those who ventured into business
were financially redlined by creditors, sabotaged, violently attacked, and
destroyed. To educate and agitate the majority, Du Bois created and edited a
monthly publication called The Crisis. He employed a Pan-Africanist
approach to solving black problems by attending and arranging conferences
for all Africans under European imperialism.
* Wilson, Blueprint for Black Power, 420.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Sylvester Williams, a Trinidadian law
student in London and the secretary of the newly created African
Association, called for a world conference of black people in 1898. Williams
continued the work of the Equiano and Cugoano Pan-African movement in
Britain, which took a subservient approach to the British. The world
conference met in London in 1900, where an ‘Address to the Nations of the
World’ warned that the ‘problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of
the color-line’. The conference established the Pan-African Association to
advance the course of Africans towards equality.
Williams traveled to the Americas, especially the United States, Jamaica, and
Trinidad, to spread the word. The movement never attracted wide support in
Britain, and the association was short-lived as he went on to become the first
black British lawyer. Although Williams’ publication, Pan-African, didn’t
last more than an issue, Duse Mohammed Ali, an Egypto-Sudanese, financed
by a Sierra Leone businessman, created a longer-lasting black publication
called African Times and Orient Review.
Duse Mohammed Ali’s business premise at 158 Fleet Street London was a
crucial meeting point of the growing rank of black students and professionals
that would come to promote black internationalism and Pan-Africanism over
the next three decades. Majority were male African students and
professionals from British West African colonies of Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra
Leone and Gambia until later joined by more female African and West Indian
students.
John Dube, a Zulu student taken to the USA by missionaries in the early
1890s to study at Oberlin College, was influenced by Booker T Washington
and returned to create the first black-owned school in 1901 called Zulu

Christian Industrial School and a newspaper. The 1910 creation of the Union
of South Africa by an Act of the British Parliament (the 1909 South African
Act), which unified the British colonies of the Cape of Good Hope and Natal
with the annexed Boer republics renamed Orange River and Transvaal
colonies, threatened the disenfranchisement of Black Africans, even in the
Cape Colony that had a color blind voting franchise based on being literate
and earning at least £50 a year.
On January 8 1912, the South African Native National Congress (ANNC)
was created by John Dube, who became the first president, Sol Plaatje, also a
missionary educated journalist and author that became the General Secretary,
and a few other South Africans came together to challenge the imminent
disenfranchisement, on realization that the British would not be upholding
their rights in the new Union of South Africa. Eventually, they had to take
their fight to London, the seat of the monarchy and Pan-Africanism.
The next London conference held in 1913 raised issues pertaining to the
disenfranchisement of South Africans, as well as called on the Colonial
Office to build an African student hostel in London to alleviate the problem
of racist poor cramped substandard housing, but the calls were ignored 52 .
John Robert Archer, a black Barbadian from Liverpool who moved to
London, entered politics in Battersea, London’s most radical borough at the
time, and he won a council seat in 1906, to the surprise of many people. He
became the mayor in 1913, which, although was a flash in the pan, had a
momentous impact on blacks throughout the diaspora. Archer was also an
advocate of PanAfricanism, but European imperialism interrupted the African
quest for freedom throughout the world.
The world economy slowly ground to a halt with astronomical arms
stockpiles. The industrialized powers built dozens of warships, and armies
doubled between 1900 and 1914. The business community refused to divert
investment into black or other new industries and continued to push out
armaments.
The United States kept its economy going longer than others because of the
huge British investment, low black wages, continental expansion towards the
Pacific, its 1898 takeover of the Spanish sugar colonies of Cuba and Puerto

Rico, and its increasing South America investments that were second only to
Britain’s. Barings bank ran into trouble by August 1890 with its bad debts in
Argentina but was saved by the Bank of England and several other banks.
52 Marc Matera, Black Internationalism and African and Caribbean Intellectuals in London, 1919-1950,
(Proquest 2011) ISBN-9781243527479
Britain maintained its economic growth with the acquisition of African
colonies like Nigeria and Ghana. Although the British conceded to white
South African political independence, they held the control of the gold and
diamonds mines as well as most other aspects of the economy. This was in
addition to their Asian, Caribbean, and South American colonies. The
bankers’ confidence in lending was based on the knowledge that in case of
default, the Imperial navy and army would back them. They often trapped
countries with debt that led to taking over the country militarily, as occurred
with Chase and J. P. Morgan in Cuba, Citibank in Haiti, and British and
French banks in Egypt.
France was buoyed by its vast African colonies and invested the surplus in
Eastern Europe and the Russians, who were taking over the northern half of
Asia into the Far East. Its lending to Russia, even in the face of political
instability, cost the French bankers heavily but only after World War I.
The new industrial powers, like Germany, challenged the status quo when
their economies stagnated without substantial colonies to help continue
growth like the Franco-Anglophiles. The only way to achieve growth on their
investment was by putting their arms stockpile to ‘productive’ use by going
to war for new territory.
Japan began a massive industrialization programme in the 1860s, financed by
the British, but experienced an economic plateau in the mid-1890s with a
need for more labor and resources. With its iron and steel industry not having
enough new railroad and other steel construction orders, it produced weapons
to pursue an expansionist policy. Japan took over the Korean Peninsula and
went to war for territory with Russia, pursuing an expansionist policy
eastward.
Germany, led by William II (1888–1918), realized its mistake of not pressing

for more colonies during the scramble for Africa. Germany landed troops in
Haiti under the pretext of protecting its citizens but later turned to Europe like
Napoleon. The Germans overran Belgium and moved into France, while their
ally, the AustroHungarian Empire, invaded Serbia and other areas, which
brought Britain and Russia into the war. The Muslim Ottoman Empire, whose
North Africa and Asian lands were divided between the British and French,
entered the war, siding with the Germans and AustroHungarians.
The United States supplied weapons and drastically increased weapons
production but remained out of the war due to widespread public disapproval.
Moreover, the United States was engaged in Cuba and Haiti, the two largest
African populations in the Caribbean. The United States didn’t relinquish
control in Cuba after the 1898 takeover from Spain, as J. P. Morgan and other
New York banks took over the ownership of sugar estates, national
infrastructure, and finances. This made the United States invade whenever
unfavorable populist governments entered or Africans revolted, as in 1906.
The United States invaded Haiti in 1915 to protect Citibank’s investment and
quell a black rebellion from the north. The incumbent Western puppet
president was torn to pieces in the sanctuary of the French embassy where he
and his family fled. In 1917, Haitian resistance movements engaged the US
army for three years until the United States killed the last guerrilla leader and
thousands of blacks. It militarily occupied Haiti for twenty years and
exercised fiscal control for another thirteen years.
On the home and European front, J. P. Morgan raised ₤100 million for the
Anglo-Franco war effort and remained the allies’ purchasing agent until the
United States entered the war. Morgan bought Carnegie Steel in 1900 and
renamed it US Steel; it made an annual profit of $240 million during the three
years of the war.
The US government commandeered production like a Socialist state to
develop tank-making assembly lines and long-distance radio communication.
The national economy was planned and geared towards the first industrial
war in Europe, and eventually, the United States entered on the side of
Britain.
Because the war was basically about colonies, the war extended to Africa and

was fought by a huge African contingent, normally used to break deadlocks.
The war was fought in the arid plains of Muslim Ottoman North Africa and
in the southwest African plains, where Germany had its Namibian colony,
beside British South Africa.
Most important was the number of Africans used by the United States,
Britain, Germany, and France in a war that was of no benefit to Africans. As
the US army was killing thousands of Africans in Haiti, more than 367,000 *
African Americans from the United States fought in World War I. More than
one hundred thousand fought in the battlefront in France, liberating the
French and protecting the British, who had enslaved and continued to exploit
Africans. The British and French committed over a million black Africans
from their African and American colonies to war.
In the end, the Europeans with most African bodies, wealth, and sweat, won
World War I and reinforced their own world order. The Anglo-Francophiles
reigned supreme in Africa, while the EuroAmericans continued the
exploitation of their African American communities. This was in addition to
the largely black islands to their south – Cuba, the largest American island,
and Haiti, the most populous black island.
Farther south in Brazil, Afro-Brazilians continued to be subjugated by the
US/UK-inspired and military-backed plutocracy, which came after abolition
in 1888 and lasted until 1934. In the meantime, the world’s second-largest
African population was wished away in Brazil, and their contributions
smoked away in the assimilation pipe dream.
The Germans lost all their African colonies after losing the War of Colonies
(called World War I). The British took over half of Togo and Cameroon in
West Africa. The French took over the other halves of Togo and Cameroon,
in addition to the rich coal and iron mines in the Rhineland (East France) that
they had lost to Bismarck in 1870. The British also took over the German
East Africa colony of Tanganyika, which became Tanzania when added to
the Zanzibar islands previously colonized by the British. The Belgians
received the remaining lands of German East Africa, next to their border near
the Great Lakes, Burundi, and Rwanda. German Southwest Africa, Namibia,
was given to white South Africa, which gained independence from British
rule in 1910.

Economically and in terms of world dominance, the end of World War I
brought America closer to Britain and France. With the destruction of their
productive capacities, the British used its huge US investments to balance its
war debts, while the French faced additional heavy losses with the
Communist takeover of Russia. Before the war, America had been a debtor
country, but by the end of the war, America became a creditor nation that was
owed $14 billion.
* World Almanac and Book of Facts, 2002.
America was able to reorganize its economy with Socialist market controls
due to its wartime state of emergency. The War Industries Board regulated
more than thirty thousand commodities, while the War Finance Corporation
and Emergency Fleet Corporation took care of the rest. With the full
establishment of a military-industrial (Ogun) complex, the government
dashed away the hard labor and taxes of the masses to a few white
industrialists in the name of competitive freemarket economics. Although
unfair, it produced the longest boom in history before the 1990s computer
cold war peace dividend.
The industrialists were able to mass-produce cars in Michigan and Illinois,
profiteering from the government-initiated factory lines of General Motors
(GM) and others. The mass production of radios, from government
investment in military communications, was passed to the likes of General
Electric (GE) and other giant, governmentaided conglomerates.
There was an immediate economic boom after the war, followed by a slump
in 1919, before picking up in what was known as the Roaring Twenties. The
1920s brought an ample supply of capital that led to the mushrooming of
factories and radio stations. This investment capital was restricted to a small
circle of white industrialists, which led to unsound investments and the 1929
crash and Great Depression, after which there were unavoidable
recriminations.
There was a prevalent sense of injustice and backlash against the arms
makers for profiteering, excessive overcharging, and causing World War I by
deviously playing nations against each other, while making the United States

go to war because of its financial entanglements in Europe. This led to the
1934 Nye Committee in the United States and the British Royal Commission.
US Senator Gerald Nye commented, ‘It makes one wonder whether the army
or the navy are just organizations of salesmen for private industry, paid for by
the American government’. *
The lamentations came to nothing, because the merchants of death kept the
spoils of war that they got in form of factories and received large orders to
replenish war stocks when World War II came knocking. There had been
ample investment into research and development of new products between
1919 and 1929, especially military hardware like fighter jets, but the
Depression staved off funds and profits until the 1934 war preparations.
* Sampson, The Arms Bazaar, 77.
Rhodes’s plan ‘to create a secret society…placed at our universities and
schools… in every colonial legislature, which would crush all disloyalty and
every movement for the severance of the British Empire’, * took form as
English-speaking elites took firm control through the Rhodes Scholars,
Rockefeller bankers, and Republican foot soldiers. Immense power was
concentrated in the hands of a few merchants and the alumni of universities
like Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge.
Although a small, Freemason-like clique existed at the pinnacle, which
included the Morgans and Rockefellers, the most visible clique within the
United States was the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR). It controlled
political and economic power, and its membership was selected by an even
more select few. According to Pat Robertson, chairman and founder of the
Christian Broadcasting Network, ‘The visible home of the Establishment is
Pratt House, on the corner of Park Avenue and Sixty-Eighth Street in New
York City…This is the headquarters of the Council of Foreign Relations’. **
Every secretary of war and defense from the 1940s, as well as every secretary
of state except one, was to have come from the CFR, a private clique, while
many passed through the Rockefeller businesses and foundations.
After more than a century of obstruction by Southerners fearful of total
domination by Northern industrialists, a central bank called the Federal

Reserve was created. It was run by a tiny circle of bankers and industrialists
that included J. P. Morgan and Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank and
Citibank.
* Autobiography of Cecil Rhodes.
** Pat Robertson, The New World Order, 96.

Chapter 14: The Black Agitation
Separatists and integrationist lead the blackworld with the likes of Du Bois,
Garvey, Solanke, Plaatje and Nascimento (1900–1945)
The merchant-industrialists who had called for the abolition of slavery
enjoyed the benefits, as they exploited cheap black labor that couldn’t
organize itself against further exploitation, especially with the continued
miseducation of Rockefeller’s General Education Board. The underfunding
of black education and black poverty and unemployment (due to the
increased machination of Southern agriculture and financial redlining in the
oppressive South) led to a mass migration to the North. Between 1910 and
1930, the population of African Americans in Northern cities more than
quadrupled due to the flood migrating up Route 66 along the River
Mississippi to industrial Chicago and ‘motor town’ Detroit.
Chicago became the largest Midwest metropolis, being the main US
commodity market and second-largest industrial city. Although white
immigrants recently surpassed the black population, African Americans
caught up and eventually comprised the largest ethnic population in Chicago.
The black population went from 44,000 in 1910 to 109,000 in 1920 and
234,000 in 1930. * Detroit became majority African American.
The white lower classes, frustrated by the influx of blacks and the downward
effect on their wages, reacted violently by regenerating the KKK (formed in
the South during the 1870s reconstruction but disbanded after whites
reassumed control of the South). The KKK was relaunched in 1915 in
Atlanta, Georgia, and it soon spread north.
Lynching became a pastime enjoyed by the whole white family; postcards
were made and memorabilia taken from the African’s dead body. This was a
social phenomenon peculiar to the white race dating back to Roman times,
when people threw men into a pit of lions and displayed a chilling,
bloodthirsty, wild dog mentality, exemplified by the Latino custom of
taunting bulls with red.

In an incident replicated across the United States—reminiscent of raging
Muslims emerging from desert mosques to wage jihad and kill black kaffirs
—immediately after church on a Sunday after sharing the body and blood of
Christ, almost a whole town in Texas set out to lynch an African, whom they
slowly beat to death as the townspeople jeered. After hours of torture and the
black man’s inevitable death, his body was cleaned, dressed, and hanged.
Pictures were taken with the man dangling from a branch in the background.
With the dead man’s body parts as memorabilia in their pockets, they sat
down with their families to picnic on sandwiches and discuss the necessity of
‘putting the savage Africans in their place!’ There is a book of five thousand
postcards and photographs of social lynchings, many with chilling, funny
remarks, more prominent in the South until the 1950s when it became a
police function. 53
* Segal, The Black Diaspora, 249 / Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land, 16.
The growth of the Northern cities and the influx of blacks brought about an
increase in income and greater freedoms exhibited by the black Harlem
renaissance of the 1920s. The booming postwar business, especially in New
York and Chicago, brought about the boom in radios and radios stations,
which Africans living in the cities took advantage of to promote their culture.
Black music was waxed on records. It spread to a wider audience than that of
the church and other ‘chittlin’ circuits where blacks showcased their talents to
their communities.
In the segregated cities, where the repressive white society ensured that an
African had no voice, the first music to gain prominence was a voiceless
music called jazz, which couldn’t offend the white clientele, record
companies, and the targeted audiences. Mainstream musical acceptance
progressed to ‘the blues’, where Africans rhymed in metaphors and ironies
that told of their pain and suffering. The antagonist in the African call-andresponse
music system was a lover, instead of whites, so it was agreeable to
the white populations that bought and copied it.
Apart from singing about their plights indirectly, the black political class rose
to the challenge of educating and agitating their people about the problems
that they faced. The likes of Du Bois continued and increased their opposition
against the status quo of black servitude through publications and media like

the NAACP Crisis.
After Booker T Washington’s death in 1915, the black political forum was
divided between integrationists, like Du Bois, and separatists, like Marcus
Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant who came to the United States in 1916, intent
upon furthering Booker’s concept of collective self-help. Garvey wasn’t
entirely a separatist, but he believed in the development of blacks
independently of whites. Born in 1887, Garvey left school at fourteen to
become a printer’s apprentice, but he was blacklisted when he led a printers’
strike in Jamaica. He traveled to the UK and United States and realized that
Africans everywhere suffered from European exploitation. He formed the
Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the African
Communities League in accordance to Washington’s selfhelp doctrine.
5353 1918. Arno Press and the New York Times, New York. 1969.
He dreamt of ‘uniting all the Negro peoples of the world into one great body to establish a country and
government absolutely their own’. He created within the UNIA the Black Cross Nurses to take care of
disabled Africans, the Negro Factories Co-op, which included a chain of groceries, restaurants, smallscale
industries, the Black Star Shipping Line and publishing houses with weekly publications like
Negro World. This increased and encouraged blacks’ self-belief and entrepreneurship.
Garvey’s call to Africa was for partial repatriation of skilled workers to build an Afro-centric economic
system, but he was widely misinterpreted as calling on all blacks to return to Africa. People like Du
Bois attacked him for being impractical and feared that whites, who were interested in ‘whitening’
America, might take up his call and twist it into colonization of African Americans on another territory
in Africa. Garvey realized this in Liberia, where white powers pushed him aside and exploited the
African territory for its rubber and labor through the white-owned firm, Firestone.
Likewise, when Du Bois told blacks to enlist in World War I with the hope that the moral indebtedness
would help change things at home, Garvey attacked Du Bois with his light skin and white backers as
being ‘more of a white man than a Negro’. Du Bois was disproved when, in 1919 after the war, antiblack
riots occurred in twenty-six cities (mostly in the Northern United States, Chicago being the
worst), just as in Liverpool and Cardiff in Britain.
The differences between approaches deepened with their successive movements, but the actions of Du
Bois and Garvey were not entirely hardened into camps. Despite his ‘separatist’ Back to Africa
movement, in 1924 Garvey formed the Negro Political Union (NPU), which endorsed candidates
sympathetic to the black cause. Du Bois waged the war through courts but not through political
machinery. By the 1936 election, the vote mobilization of several hundred thousand Africans migrating
to the North became an important political tool for integrationists. Democrats courted the black vote,
and Roosevelt won more than 75 percent of black votes.
To some observers, it was ironic that the separatist Garvey could be responsible for organizing the first
African American political party, but in a very real sense, it was compatible with the concept of black
self-help, the foundation of which was black ethnic identity and nationalism as opposed to integration

and assimilation into another identity. The simpler, social-engineering, integrationist approach took the
upper hand, especially after Garvey’s deportation and death. The trend of lesser-educated blacks
leading the separatist/nationalist movement, and its goal of attacking the root problem of economics
and culture, led to losing ground to middle-class integrationists. This adversely affected the outlook of
the blackworld and its movement.
Due to the seeming futility of integration, the chief integrationist, Du Bois, turned to separatism
towards the end of his long career in 1960, even though he lost the backing of many in his organization.
Nevertheless, from 1890 to 1950, he promoted education and agitation towards integration while
planning the Pan-African Congresses in Europe.
The black movement was initially restricted to a small group of middle-class African Americans
students and professionals in New York, Chicago, and Detroit. Apart from a small group of black
businessmen, increasing numbers of blacks got teaching jobs and industrial supervisory roles, which
led to a mushrooming black working class and middle class.
African American entrepreneurships in most industries were stifled through monetary and fiscal
measures, just like in Africa, especially in long-haul transportation, marketing, advertising and media,
and heavy industry. Unfortunately, the black church, the most financial viable institution, directed its
resources towards producing civil servants in the universities they sponsored, not entrepreneurs.
The urban environment of America’s two most industrial cities, New York and Chicago, bred a small
but visible class of entertainers, hustlers, and low-level criminals. They showed off their wealth from
adult entertainment including prostitution, gambling, and drugs. With the barring of investment in black
communities, generation of income outside the bottom rungs of the white society was possible mainly
through vocational trades and the provision of entertainment, which occasioned increased frustration.
Blacks began to show their frustration with boycotts and demonstrations, as seen in the 1935 Harlem
riots.
The majority of African Americans remained in the rural South, and their economic plight was scarcely
better than what it had been during slavery. Even when Southern blacks struggled to break the yoke of
oppression by using their large population and market to create business communities in Tulsa,
Durham, and Memphis, they were attacked and destroyed financially, legally, and, most important,
through terror and violence. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the large black business community known as ‘Black
Wall Street’, after trying everything else, the police held back blacks under false pretenses while whites
burnt and destroyed the black business district in May 1921.
Many blacks were saddened by the fact that hundreds of thousands of African Americans fought abroad
for the freedom of the European cousins of their oppressors, while African Americans remained
oppressed at home.
In Britain, immediately after the war, there was widespread resentment against blacks. It was clear that
the people whom they had oppressed came to provide their slight margin of victory. Before the war,
blacks found it difficult to get jobs, because whites and their labor unions refused to work beside them,
but during the war, jobs came begging from the arms and chemical industries as well as the merchant
navy and the army.
Immediately after World War I, whites wanted to ‘put blacks in their place’ as thousands were
dismissed. Not satisfied with the resulting black unemployment, they made physical attacks, and race
riots spread in the Midlands and Northern England, especially in the ports of Liverpool and Cardiff that
had blossomed with the slave trade. During the Paris Peace Conference (January to June 1919) and in

Liverpool (May to June), violence against blacks grew in intensity and incidence, culminating in race
riots that saw mobs burning homes and boarding houses. By June 10, close to a thousand Africans were
forced to take refuge in fire stations.
The following day, the Liverpool Courier reported, ‘One of the chief reasons of popular anger behind
the present disturbances lies in the fact that the average Negro is nearer animal than is the average
white man, and that there are (white) women in Liverpool who have no self-respect’. The reference to
white women sleeping with black men was a pathological fear and deep-rooted inferiority complex
dating to black Egypt but which first manifested officially with Queen Elizabeth I’s 1601 edict ordering
the deportation of all Africans.
In the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, it led to entire black towns in the United States being
slaughtered on the mere accusations of a black man having sexual intercourse with a white woman. The
excuse was given for the thousands of lynchings up until the 1950s and resulted in murders in 1999 at
the hands of the local police, who disguised it as suicide in detention cells in Mississippi.
The 1919 victory riots spread to Cardiff, where three thousand blacks were under siege by white mobs.
By June 13, the blacks were escorted out of the city, although quite a few residents remained to fight
for their rights. By the July 19 victory parade in London, blacks who had fought in hundreds of
thousands were officially excluded from the march.
The immediate response to the insults and injuries, for the African seamen and ex-military men
returning to their colonies in the West Indies and Africa, was to set upon their resident white
populations. There was deep resentment across the blackworld, especially in Trinidad and Jamaica,
where blacks attacked whites in race riots.
In Britain, black intellectuals returned to Pan-Africanism with a vengeance. Claude McKay, a Jamaican
poet who had been in the United States during the 1919 riots, hoped that he could get a better treatment
in England, but he was disappointed. He tried to enlighten white labor unionists who appeared
libertarian, but he realized that their self-interest made them the most ardent racists of the day.
In South Africa, the African Native National Congress created to challenge the imminent loss of their
voting franchise in 1912 by John Dube, the newspaper proprietor that became its first president, Sol
Plaatje, the author and journalist that became its General Secretary, and many others were to face new
racist laws like the 1913 Native Land Laws that laid the foundations of apartheid.
The Native Land Laws that banned land ownership by blacks in most arable areas and forced them into
cities as laborers agitated the likes of Plaatje and Dube, who wrote articles to protest the injustice. They
took their case to London in 1914 but were ignored by the British government that hypocritically
claimed they did not want to interfere in the internal affairs of the Union they created. In 1919, the
ANNC led a campaign against issue of passes but the situation worsened as the Boers enacted various
Pass Laws to further restrict Africans and lay the foundations of apartheid.
In 1923, the ANNC was changed to the African National Congress but its significance began to waned
in the mid-1920s as the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union and the Communist Party
represented blacks. The refusal to unite with the communists and labor unions saw the ANC pale into
insignificance during the 1930s and 1940s, especially with the 1932 death of Plaatije. However, they
were able to network with London Pan-Africanists, as well as WEB DuBois and Marcus Garvey, to
seek a solution to the global black problem.
In Nigeria, Herbert Macaulay decried European corruption and the rape of Africa in 1908, and most

important, fought for the Lagos chiefs whose lands were seized by the British. He took their case to
court in London and secured compensation in 1919. He was jailed twice as his popularity rose and in
1923 he formed Nigeria’s first political party, Nigerian National Democratic Party, centered in Lagos.
However, the fight for freedom needed a London base that was close to the door of the imperialists, in
the comfort of other panAfricanists, and a more militant approach of another generation.
The Africans in London pushed on with Pan-Africanism, and London became the acknowledged center
of Pan-Africanists. In 1916, initially named the African Students Union it was changed, with the
inclusion of West Indian students, to Union of Students of African Descent. It was created to bring all
African students in London to together, ‘with the purpose of dealing with African history and
sociology’ by keeping students in a condition of active intellectuality and inciting investigations
through debates by members and others 54 ’.
54 Marc Matera, Black Internationalism and African and Caribbean Intellectuals in London, 1919-
1950, Pg16 (Proquest 2011) ISBN-9781243527479
By the end of the war in 1918, John R Archer, who had become the mayor of the radical London
borough of Battersea, established the African Progress Union that he led as president until 1921.
The African Progress Union served as a rallying point for the growing black student population in
London and delegates of the newly formed National Congress of British West Africa, like Bankole-
Bright, as well as those of the South African Native National Congress, like Sol Plaatje.
Ladipo Solanke, a Yoruba Law student, wrote to protest the negative wrong media representations of
African culture. This was especially highlighted with the British Empire Exhibition held in Wembley in
1924. He wrote a series of letters and articles criticizing the false and eroticized representations and the
attempt to paint Igbo culture as cannibalism. This brought him to forefront of Black activism in
London, as Amy Ashwood Garvey, Garvey’s first wife, wrote to express her support and shared visions
of reforms in British West Africa.
Ladipo Solanke, Ashwood Garvey and 13 other Nigerians launched the Nigeria Progress Union in July
1924, the first Nigerian organization outside Nigeria, with the vision to build the long demanded
African Student hostel required to improve their living conditions. Ladipo became the first person to
broadcast Yoruba in radio and sought to teach Yoruba and the culture. On August 7, 1925, Solanke,
Bankole-Bright and a group of West African law students established the West African Student Union
in London to organize a major section of the blackworld to become the primary catalysts behind black
internationalism and Pan-Africanism. London was the site of sessions of the second Pan-African
Congress in 1921 and all of the third Congress in 1923.
Under Solanke’s leadership, WASU served as a port of call for blacks in London and was the most
important pressure group devoted to African issues. Two of WASU aims and objectives were to act as a
center for research on all subjects pertaining to Africa and its developments, and also ‘to present to the
world a true picture of African life and philosophy’. The Union used its position in London to decry
abuses of colonial rule and publicize those struggling against them in the colonies at the time when
government repression made it increasingly difficult to do so outside London. They fought for full
citizenship rights of the British Empire for West Africans, and not independence.
In 1929, Solanke travelled to West Africa for three years to set up branches across West Africa and to
raise funds to build the African House. He returned with enough funds and built the Africa House and
became its first warden 55 . It was co-managed by Opeolu Obisanya, who met on his trip and married.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Solanke was able to use his friendships with Garvey, Paul Robeson,
Reginald Sorensen to advance the cause of West African unity and anti-racism and increase the profile
of WASU. When cocoa farmers wanted to break the stranglehold of the British cartel, he was
approached and was able to raise questions in the parliament over the issue.
African students were a much easier group to mobilize than the vast populations of Africa, many of
whom had nothing to do with the Europeans except for taxes. Those who were directly affected by
European imperialism in Africa, and could effectively do something about it, were the middle and
upper classes. They were composed of traditional chiefs, a few wealthy farmers who planted export
crops, middlemen merchants, and pockets of coastal Christian elites and northern Muslim leaders. This
was a mixed bunch that didn’t mind the existing status quo and had conflicting interests. The students,
most of who were children of the above-mentioned classes, were the real ambassadors of their parents
and people of Africa. Their mixing with black European, West Indian, and American intellectuals in
London, Philadelphia, and Paris provided the key to freedom across the blackworld.
A Trinidadian, C L R James, came to London in 1932 and provided a wealth of knowledge to the
blackworld by publishing analytical books on the situation in Trinidad, the first African revolution in
Haiti, and the contemporary Communist revolutions and their African relevance. With several major
books to his credit, he left London in 1938 to go on a lecture circuit in the United States, where he lived
for fifteen years as an illegal immigrant.
George T N Griffith, a Londoner from British Guyana (who changed his name to Ras Tefari
Makonnen), was a major financier of the Pan-African movement. Blacks in diaspora looked at Ethiopia
with pride, being the only independent ‘African’ monarchy with an ancient Christian background,
which authenticated African ascendancy before the slavery that brought them to the Western world.
The light-skinned, Afro-Asian Ethiopian monarchy disguised its oppression of the dark-skinned, Afro-
Asian-speaking majority. It attracted widespread support during and after the 1936 Italian invasion,
especially from African West Indians.
55 Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain, 1900-1960: Nationalism, Pan-. Africanism and Communism
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998).
Ras Tefari Makonnen began business in Manchester with the Ethiopian Teashop; this grew into a chain
of restaurants that proved profitable during World War II. This enabled him to organize lodging and
partly finance the most important fifth Pan-African Congress in 1945, which included activists from
around the world.
The West Africa student and political activist base was indirectly strengthened along the prescribed
lines of Lord Lugard, the creator of the Nigger Area, who became the world authority on colonial
administration after the war. Lugard devised his style of indirect rule and local administration in
northern Nigeria through the Fulani Sokoto caliphate and its local Hausa emirs before later adapting it
to southern Nigeria through the Yoruba obas and Igbo obis. The Yoruba council of Obas was headed by
the spiritual head of the Yoruba, the Ooni of Ife, flanked by the leading Oba of the twin Yoruba
kingdoms (the Alaafin of Oyo and Oba of Benin).
After subjecting the people with machine guns, but without the resident white population for direct
colonial administration, the colonists pressured the kings to motivate their people to grow cocoa, palm
trees, rubber, and other raw materials sold through the Royal African Company monopoly. The
uncooperative kings were replaced by a lineage established by Europeans. In parts of Igboland, kings
were created where no feudal system existed due to the preexistence of ancient, village democracies.

The salaried kings, through their established local governments, organized the collection of head and
income tax payments, which were forwarded to the colonial government while retaining a little for
local government administration. Lugard proposed that the kings would grow into the roles provided
for them and could eventually be expected to run the whole system, semi-independently, at a national
level. At the business end, the European colonialists ‘milked the Garden of Eden’ through the trading
monopoly of the Royal African Company and the banking monopolies of Standard Chartered and
Barclays.
To staff the local governments and companies, one of Lugard’s greatest followers, Lord Harlech (who
had become the undersecretary of state for the colonies) made it clear to the colonial governors in a
1925 meeting that the educational and employment training policy was to subsidize, regulate, and
promote mission schools except in Muslim areas, where local authority schools had to be freshly built.
The Christian mission schools, created with the advent of colonial missionaries in the early 1800s,
spread throughout coastal and forest West Africa with the creation of teacher training colleges. Harlech
set a new standard of at least four years in primary education. This policy extended and resulted in
more secondary schools, especially in the coastal southern areas. Nigeria was the only country to have
more than a dozen secondary schools by 1939.
In British East Africa, which now included German East Africa, as well as in Central Africa, where
Rhodes’s British South Africa Company gave up control in 1923, the white settlers wrestled the power
prescribed by Lugard for local chiefs. This led to chronic labor shortages, malfunctioning, unprofitable
colonial administrations, and even revolts, which was unlike the West Africa experience.
In 1925, a British parliamentary commission, headed by OrmsbyGore, drew up a colonial policy like
that of Lugard and tried to eliminate friction between European settlers and the indigenous Africans.
This was done by colonial powers limiting the numbers of settlers and the settlers’ intended absolute
control of political power. The colonial government knew that settlers’ absolute control would build
resentment among the Africans and stifle the production of much-needed raw materials, income
generation, and tax collection. The British employment training in West Africa of subsidizing mission
schools was adopted.
In French West and Equatorial Africa, Lugard’s equivalent was Albert Sarraut, the minister of colonies
in 1920–1924 and 1932–1933. After the experiences of Haiti and the Napoleonic Wars, the French plan
was to never leave the African colonies. This led to a policy of assimilation and cultural subjugation,
the aim being to turn the colonies into permanent raw materials depots.
Sarraut wrote that their ‘colonies must be centers of production and no longer museums for
specimens’. * This was disguised as a mutual working relationship with promises of the gradual
development of the colonies. The French colonies became economically and politically centralized, and
the local chiefs were not allowed to assume larger roles. The French permeated every facet of African
life as they tried to milk the territories, because they were hungrier than the British, who didn’t mind
chiefs and middlemen profiting as long as they remained loyal. The French West African chiefs were
no more than regional clerks and mainly chosen from among the more efficient clerks and interpreters
in government service rather than from any hereditary principle that may have operated in the British
colonies.
Probably due to the fact that the large Muslim areas of French West Africa didn’t experience the
precolonial business and education influences of the Sierra Leone Creole/Saro and missionaries, 90
percent of European education was directly from the French colonial government through regional
schools. This was opposite to the stated British policy of subsidizing mission schools but was more like

the exception used in northern Muslim Nigeria, under similar circumstances.
Only a handful of exceptional mission schools were subsidized by the French. The result was fewer
primary schools and even fewer secondary schools than in the British colonies, because the provision of
education was rigidly tied to the amount of low-level African administrators needed in the centralized
French system.
The Belgians in Congo and the ex-German colonies pursued the same direct-rule policy as the French,
leading to more than six thousand chiefdoms in Congo and even a larger cumulative white
administrative staff than the French. Like the British, the Belgians didn’t bother creating their own
educational systems and instead funded mission schools. Unlike the British, the Belgians funded only
Catholic mission schools.
* Oliver, Africa Since 1800, 158.
From this first set of expanded secondary school attendants, the first student and political activists
developed as they traveled to the United States, Britain, and France for degree courses, because the first
real universities weren’t created until after World War II. Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone began
awarding degrees in 1876 from the University of Durham, but they were essentially teaching and clergy
degrees.
One of the most exceptional of the new class of student-political activists was Nnamidi Azikwe, fondly
known as ‘Zik of Africa’. Azikwe was a Christian Igbo born in Muslim northern Nigeria, but he
attended the mission schools of Igboland before he went to Lagos and to the United States for a
university education.
Azikwe attended Pennsylvanian universities that provided more enrollment spaces for blacks than most
other Northern Ivy League colleges. Its melting pot provided the opportunity for West African students
to get involved with the northeast civil rights movement and music. Azikwe obtained a master’s degree
in political science from Lincoln University and another master’s degree in anthropology from the
University of Pennsylvania. Most importantly, he learnt and followed the Pan-Africanist visions of
Garvey, Du Bois, and other black intellectuals making the lecture circuit.
On his return to Africa, Azikwe stopped in Ghana to edit a newspaper. This was in accordance with the
Pan-African Congresses principle of educating and agitating the masses to form a movement large
enough to defeat European imperialism. Following a riot in Accra, caused by the paper that he edited,
he left Ghana for Lagos, where he established his influential newspaper, the African Pilot, as well as
accosted the British through sociopolitical and economic means.
Before leaving for Lagos, Azikwe helped to send eight Nigerians and four Gold Coasters (Ghanaians)
to study in the United States. All of them were from the younger generation of the extended mission
schools and grew into key figures in the black movement after World War II. Most notable among them
was an Akan, Kwame Nkrumah, who attended his mentor’s University of Pennsylvania and Lincoln
University. Following the ideology of Azikwe and Garvey, Nkrumah continued his education in
England, where he co-chaired the fifth Pan-African Congress with Du Bois (which was partly financed
by Ras Tefari Makonnen).
Throughout the blackworld, with the exception of the Romantic * colonies, the student-political activists
were ready to advance the black movement from education and agitation to economic boycotts,
demonstrations, and civil disobedience. This was exhibited by the first sit-in protestors, Tucker and five
others, who walked into a library in Virginia on August 21, 1939, and demanded to read—blacks

weren’t allowed in Southern public libraries. The incident was kept from the newspapers due to Hitler’s
September 3 invasion of Poland, which caused the postponement of the black movement’s first major
thrust.
* Latino and French.

Chapter 15: White Plutocracy
European elitist sociopolitical theories and systems (1900–1945)
As the engineers of the Enlightenment ushered in the Industrial Age in the mid-1800s, its intellectuals
heralded the notion of an advanced industrial society based upon free-market principles and democracy.
Like the Christian enslavers calling slavery a ‘saving mission of savages’, with Latinos baptizing
captives, the intellectuals describing the new industrial system perpetuated outlandish new theories to
explain its failures: survival of the fittest and ‘the Tarzan mentality’.
This was the continuation of the era of the Second Horseman, the Age of Olokun, a time when religion
and other dogma was deceptively used to control Man and his environment. The lack of truth and
clarity at the foundations of their theories caused the divisions seen in Christianity, Islam, and every
other creed they professed. After the rush for African wealth split Christianity, and the
conceptualization and formation of nation-states required new laws and guidelines, the white
Enlightenment moved away from the ‘heaven and hell syndrome’ and hypothesized the ideal of freemarket
democratic principles and individualism.
Being the 8 th and last two hundred and fifty Oya cycle in the 2000yr era, it also showed the theme of
the next 2000yr era of the 3 rd Horseman, the era of Shango, an age of global economic justice,
humanitarism and enlightenment. Therefore the Shango enlightenment and quest for justice was
shrouded in the mystery and deceptions of Olokun.
Adam Smith, the father of economics, postulated in his The Wealth of Nations that labor was the most
important economic factor, but he refused to identify the economic significance of African labor,
conveniently accounted as the wealth of white nations. He and later economists claimed that free trade
and competition would bring prosperity as nations and individuals exploited their comparative
advantages.
Britain and the United States proclaimed the ‘Free Trade’ crusade to the four corners of the world, but
in reality, it came down to using comparative military advantages to freely exploit Africans through
slavery and colonization, with the gun and transportation industries being essential. The spirit of
individualism was nowhere to be found in the Anglo-Saxon world, as Peabody passed the baton to his
New England tribesmen, the Morgans, who financed the businesses of a few select whites, including
the Rockefellers, who also built an Anglo dynasty.
Under the auspices of a philosophy called democracy, the new system was hijacked from birth by
Hamilton-led merchant bankers and other special interests. The framers of the constitution disregarded
African rights essential to the system. The judiciary, the societal conscience, was sold on the benches.
Following Napoleon’s discovery of the glorious black history of Egypt, French intellectuals like
Gobineau led a virulent and racist attack on Africans in the early 1800s. The racist
conceptualization/dogma was advanced by Darwin’s survival of the fittest hypothesis (The Origin of
Species and The Descent of Man) and by Rhodes and his Oxbridge (University of Oxford) clique. The
rich intellectuals went on a racial ego trip until the 1930s, disregarding Africans and their essential
human and labor rights, like those of the previous century’s era of slavery, as explained by Adam Smith
and his dreamland free-trade theories.

The mid-1800s, Enlightenment social scientists professed that everyone could fulfill their ‘American
dream’ if the correct economic principles were followed, unless the person was an African (thought to
be pathologically challenged). They advanced outlandish theories to explain the continued mistreatment
of Africans after slavery. These included Gradualism and economic theories like the Native Supply
Curve Function, but these so-called theories never addressed the real issue of free black labor and were
merely Olokun’s dogma/propaganda.
Human beings are the most important component in any economic system, and they are either labor
(workers) or entrepreneurs (business owners). In many modern businesses, labor costs are about twothirds
of the whole production costs. The actual labor costs of the sugar and cotton economy in the
Americas would have exceeded the benefits and prevented European development if not for forced
African labor, especially Africans genetically blessed with special agricultural skills and disease
resistance. The Europeans would have died trying to cultivate America by themselves.
At the beginning of the ‘modern’ world economy, labor was differentiated by the demands of nature,
which only Africans could withstand with the sickle cell trait that naturally developed against fever,
headache, and disease. Only Africans with this trait, mostly among Yoruba and Igbo, were genetically
strong enough to withstand the demanding plantation conditions.
Abolitionists/colonists and industrialists fought to inherit this labor pool from the South, in order to
move the economy into the industrial stage. After the Civil War and slavery, industrialists were able to
undercut labor costs due to their price discrimination of labor. Although many economists directly
avoided the issue of price discrimination of labor, the price discrimination of goods was described as
the way to take consumers’ surplus income by charging different prices for the same good, if the
consumers could be differentiated and the goods couldn’t be exchanged between consumers. With the
price discrimination of labor, since labor could be differentiated by skin color, which couldn’t be
exchanged, it allowed a major cut in labor cost.
In addition, economic theories of specialization were advanced to basically place blacks at a
disadvantage. The labor specialization theories explained away the restriction of individual Africans to
lowpaying menial jobs, while national specialization of production theories, in terms of ‘national
comparative advantages in a free world trade’, rooted Africans in the lowest role of raw materials
providers. There was, eventually, the Native Supply Curve Function, which theorized along the
traditional lines that Africans were lazy, stipulating that after a certain income level, Africans couldn’t
be motivated to work.
With a lower wage structure given to blacks and barriers against black entrepreneurs, Anglo-Franco
industrialists did better than their competitors in Germany and Russia. The industrialists in Germany
and Russia had to use their own race. It soon became obvious that industrial development couldn’t
provide the utopia of free trade and democracy, because it needed an underpaid working class and
constant war.
Russia was able to extend into Asia, but Germany wasn’t. German intellectuals like Karl Marx
criticized the unfair, unsustainable growth derived by rich capitalist nations, even though he never
recognized the full significance of Africans. In addition, Marxists argued against ownership of private
property, which they believed was detrimental to overall societal development. Lenin stated in 1916
that, ‘a handful of monopolists subordinate to their will all the operations, both commercial and
industrial, of the whole capitalist society’.
The problem of gathering private property towards societal and industrial development was
encountered, because free market principles couldn’t efficiently direct funds into large, long-term

investments. At the turn of the century, there were many inventions and investment opportunities like
cars, radios, telephones, and airplanes, but the investment capital was not available unless it was war
oriented.
Pondering on the German economy, Lenin said, ‘the question is: what means other than war could there
be under capitalism to overcome the disparity between the development of productive forces and the
accumulation of capital on the one side, and the division of colonies and spheres of influence for
finance and capital on the other?’ 56 Socialists and Communists entered the European political forum
on the platform to make more equitable changes to the existing capitalist system and won a few seats.
The world industrial stagnation of the early 1900s affected the Russians, whose imperial dreams had
grown drastically since the 1850s. The Russian military and territorial expansion was halted by their
loss to the British-sponsored Japanese in the 1904–1905 war. The defeat ultimately led to the 1906
revolution that saw the weakening of the tsar, the creation of a legislature called Dumas, with inclusion
of Socialists and Marxists, as well as agricultural reforms.
The Russian social reforms of 1906 were like those of the Western world, which was also facing
economic slowdown. The British Labor Party in 1906, US antitrust suits against Rockefeller and
employer liability acts, and the 1904 French ten-hour work day all provided a brief respite without
attacking the root economic problem. The reforms showed promise for major labor groups, but the
entrepreneurial aspect was neglected.
It wasn’t until World War I that factors of production were reorganized to push the world economy to
its next stage with the mass production of war-related goods. The US government took the lead by
taking over production factories and won the war with the resultant increased production, which
extended into the 1920s consumer and investor boom. The Russians didn’t organize their war
production efforts in a Socialist manner like the United States and suffered economically, leading to
Bolshevik Socialists taking over the political and economic realm in November 1917.
56 Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1917, Chapter V11
Lenin, leading the Socialists, wrongly believed that by taking over the production factories, they could
stop the failures of a corrupt, inefficient, capitalist system, not realizing that money was just a veil.
They only accomplished the transfer of power from a few industrialists to the hands of a few
politicians, which still resulted in a huge underpaid underclass whose price discrimination of labor
couldn’t be explained in religion or race, only ideology.
Gradually, the stepped divisibility, transferability, and unaccountability of economic power clogged the
economic wheel and killed competition. Capitalism and Communism failed because they were never
practiced in totality. Ultimately if both systems were practiced perfectly they would tend towards the
same results. The problem of huge long term investments is better resolved with government directing
productive resources to the intended production, then privatizing it for natural growth.
However, despite the evolution of national communism/socialism as seen in Russia and China,
international Communism was to be the way to bring about a fairer level ground between slaving and
nonslaving White nations. China and Russia realized that without politically and economically freeing
African colonies from Western Capitalists, there would not be a level playing field in the global
marketplace and they would be disadvantaged.
America was able to continue enjoying lower labor costs from its suppression of the black populace,
but human beings naturally fulfill two production function roles: labor and entrepreneurship. The ample

financing available after the war was restricted from blacks and resulted in investments being pumped
into less efficient sectors while profitable black sectors were starved.
With peace prevalent in the world, the expected income was not enough to attract investments into the
new range of goods, and because white society would rather ‘cut its nose to spite its face’ than sponsor
black economic growth, its subsequent weak investments led to the Great Depression. The small, black
businesses strictly catering to the segregated black populace survived the Depression because there was
always space for growth. In the mainstream US heavyindustrial economy, without its natural black
quota, economic growth could be derived only through refitting an army during war or due to new
weapons that made the existing stock obsolete.
The inability of the Western nations to get out of the Depression led to an increasingly restive public.
By 1932, 12 million were unemployed in the United States, 5.6 million in Germany, and 2.7 million in
the UK. Socialist revolutions were prevented only by the introduction of economic planning and
welfarism. France was the first to go along the route of welfarism, but by 1935, US President Roosevelt
had introduced a Social Security programme, called the New Deal, that covered low-income white
families. Housing, agriculture, and other sectors were subsidized to pacify the hungry and angry lower
classes, but the economy still couldn’t escape the Depression.
Instead of investing in the black community, the United States started investing in its old enemy of
World War I, Germany. Ultraconservative Hitler was elected in 1933, and Germany soon rebuilt its
industrial base. It began rebuilding its army with the help of Krupps and finances from US banks,
including those of the Rockefellers, and Senator Prescott Bush (President George Bush’s father). For its
industrial development, Germany needed to retake the Rhineland and its African colonies lost in World
War I to France and Britain. Hitler had no other means of getting them except through war on others,
which was initially allowed by Britain and France, until he turned against them.
Even during war with the European Allies, US banks continued to finance Hitler until Senator Bush
was sanctioned by the US Congress for acting as a go-between for Hitler’s regime and his American
bankers. The Catholic Church, Rockefeller, and the Swiss banks were also deeply involved with
Hitler’s finances. However, Hitler wasn’t the only beneficiary. By 1934–1935, most of the Western
economies that had been stagnant for several years were reawakened, as steel/arms companies received
huge orders for the arms race.
Most important were military jets, a technology that had been underused for two decades until it was
needed on the battlefield. Aviation enthusiasts had been able to secure investment in the mid1920s, but
with the Depression and antiwar feelings running high, they withered until right-wing Hitler gave them
a breather.
Using the defunct New England factories of Colt gun makers from the slavery era, the founder of
United Technologies and Pratt Whitney Aircrafts secured loans from New York banks to develop
aircraft engines for navy aircraft. Before World War II, the Airforce was not a distinct armed force and
operated under the navy to transport ground troops from ships to land.
The Electric Boat, which made huge profits making submarines during World War I, was reduced to
repairing hair curlers from hair salons. Bill Boeing saw opportunities for aviation and sold planes to the
navy but had to convert his plant into making furniture during the reign of peace. Lockheed Aircraft
Corporation, in California, collapsed during the Depression until it was given a kiss of life in 1938 from
the British, who ordered more than three hundred bombers within a year after Hitler invaded Austria.
Their orders went to seventeen hundred by 1941.

The heavy-industry sector of the Northeast United States experienced a major shift when the center of
the arms industry operations in New England made a major relocation to the more spacious territories
of the Southwest, which was required for flying and huge aircraft plants. California, with clear skies
and wide, arid plains, was the first to benefit from the influx, especially with its largely redundant
population after the gold rush. The industry spread to Texas, Georgia, Missouri, and a few other states.
By May 1940, Roosevelt announced a target of fifty thousand planes a year to be produced primarily by
Boeing, Lockheed, and McDonnell Douglas. In 1939, defense spending accounted for 1.5 percent of
the gross national product (GNP), and unemployment was running at 17 percent, but by 1944, defense
was 44 percent of the GNP and unemployment was 1.2 percent. * This was repeated in France and
Britain but not on the scale of the Americans, who had the land, labor, and capital.
California became the most populous US state, as companies like Lockheed employed fifty thousand
people. California’s wealth spread to the Hollywood film industry, which was used to propagate and
inspire people towards the war. The US government, as in World War I, commanded the diversion of
national resources into the creation of the necessary infrastructure to produce war materials. After the
war, the materials were committed into the hands of a few industrialists who purchased industries for
prices far cheaper than their real value. The few military industrialists turned around to take unfair
advantage of the consumer peace dividend of World War II in the form of air travel.
* Sampson, The Arms Bazaar, 93.
The United States committed more than a million African Americans to war, while the various
European colonists committed millions of Africans to a war that killed forty-five million people
worldwide, at the end of which nothing was accomplished. Hitler was never caught, nor were his racist
ideas repudiated. His officers and engineers were tapped for their skills, and it was business as usual for
his sponsors. More odiously, a more dangerous weapon was created at the end of the war: the atomic
bomb.
As the machine gun had been hailed as a colonizing machine to ‘cut down African savages’, the atomic
bomb was to destroy large, advancing Asian armies. It was dropped on Japan, which had had every
right to compete with Europeans in the scramble for Asian colonies in contested east and southeast
Asia. At the end of World War I, the airplane was unveiled as the weapon of the future that the whites
seemed to be racing towards, culminating in World War II. Now, it was the atomic bomb!
The atomic bomb marked US military supremacy, which had already surpassed that of Europe due to
World War II, the destruction of Europe, and the mass development of its military-industrial complex
in the United States.
Following Germany’s surrender on May 7, 1945, the United Nations charter, that authenticated US
world supremacy, was signed by fifty nations in San Francisco (the center of the aircraft-building West
Coast). Nelson Rockefeller, John Dulles, and John McCloy led the US delegation. The UN offices were
to be on Rockefeller’s land in New York, the new world financial center, where sponsors of the
military-industrial complex congregated. The body was largely controlled by the Security Council
comprised of the United States, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and China.
The first four countries had caused the most insecurity in the world for three hundred years and still
held the world hostage. The United States, Britain, and France were under the rule of the ‘merchant
bankers of death’. They had progressed from slavery to guns, ships, and airplanes, and they were now
in charge of world security.

China was admitted to the Security Council due to its large population, which came together to take a
nationalist stand. Lenin, in the spirit of international communism, backed Chairman Mao in China in
his fight to free China from yoke of Western imperialist, especially the British and the Japanese they
used. After gaining control, Mao received Soviet help towards industrialization through the building of
its steel mills.
The Soviet Union felt threatened by the US bomb, because it was one of only two natural enemies with
a large army. Russia had been attacked unsuccessfully by Western capitalists after its 1917 Socialist
revolution, so it developed its own atomic bomb within four years.
Germany was no longer the enemy, but the Soviets were, as whites ushered in a new arms race called
the Cold War. While Germany had resorted to fighting for colonies in the two world wars and failed,
Russia resorted to making the world marketplace a level playing ground by freeing peoples used by the
Western world to gain their global hegemony.
With the division of Germany among the French, United States, British, and Russians, a line was drawn
in the white world between the Socialists/Communists in the east and the capitalist nations in the West.
The Communists helped African liberation movements to achieve their civil rights/political
independence objectives, and promised to help in their industrialization efforts. The division was
beneficial to the merchants of death in control, who used the fear of invasion to promote the arms race
that brought jobs, profit, and power to a few, especially in the West.
Due to the widespread destruction of postwar Europe and the looting of treasuries by the Germans,
most European finances were suspect and the value of their currencies uncertain. With US home
production and the value of its economy unharmed by the war, the US dollar was the only credible
Western currency that could be used to make international payments. Secure in its newly found
financial and military might after the war, the United States became the sole world superpower. It left
Britain and France behind.
However, the US Europeans couldn’t leave their European cousins to suffer, so they formulated a club
whereby they could all share the blood money derived from Africans and other nations. The US
establishment believed that its survival depended on its European cousins, who controlled the raw
materials sources in Africa and Asia. Without Europeans, the Euro-Americans could be overwhelmed
in numbers by Africans and Asians.
Starting with the Marshall Plan (which was to rebuild Europe and buy its allegiance), the United States,
backed by weakened Britain and France, set in place infrastructure that perpetuated European
supremacy over Africans. Because Britain and France still had their colonies to fleece, the Marshall
loans were more effective in South and East Europe, where they were supposed to keep the Russians at
bay.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank were set up to put effective control of the
world’s economy in the hands of bankers in New York, London, and Paris, who had grown by
shortchanging Africans. The new financial system was geared towards Europe’s reconstruction, but it
turned to furthering the neoimperialist aims of Western capitalists.

Chapter 16: The Winds of Change Ziks across Africa
Africans win fragmented political but not economic freedom (1945– 1965)
Africans’ contribution to the war worldwide earned them a moral authority that they used to challenge
white establishments over their mistreatment. The postwar generation was more militant and decisive,
from Azikwe’s energizing the Nigerian Youth wing to Mandela’s ANC Young Wing in South Africa.
Help also came from the Soviets and Chinese that realized that they will forever remain in the shadow
of Western Imperialistic nations as long as the West had their colonies that gave them an unfair
advantage.
In Britain, the West African Students Union leadership was taken over by more militant students like
Nkrumah, in the absence of Solanke that had travelled in 1944 to Africa to raise funds for a second
African hostel and did not return till 1949. Unlike Solanke and others of his generation that fought to be
treated as full British citizens within the British Empire, the new postwar generation agitated for
immediate independence from the European imperialists.
In addition to the moral capital earned by blacks during the war, a few reaped financial benefits that
were used to fund the Pan-African movement. Ras Tefari Makonnen’s chain of restaurants proved to be
profitable by attracting a large number of black servicemen stationed in northern England. He
contributed his profits to the postwar fifth Pan-African Congress held in Manchester and cohosted by
Nkrumah and Du Bois.
The financial benefits extended beyond a few restaurant chains, because the war in Asia cut off
Western raw materials sources located in Malaysia and Indonesia. This made the prices of rubber and
palm oil skyrocket. The rise in agricultural prices benefited a lot of African farmers, whose increased
earnings helped the black movement.
On his return to Nigeria, Nnamidi Azikwe prompted the creation of the first indigenous bank. He raised
awareness of how European banks were enforcing other European monopolies by redlining African
participation, especially in marketing, transporting, and manufacturing. The first indigenous Nigerian
bank was created shortly before World War II, and by the end of the war, the black heartland had
created more than 150 banks with the excess income derived from the war scarcities.
The growth in indigenous banks was frowned upon by the British colonial masters, because it reduced
the amount that could be siphoned. Moreover, the Nigerian indigenous banks could create credit with
the money deposited with them, which opened the gates to many restricted industries.
In a callous display of unfair, dualistic financial rules, the collapse of one of the indigenous banks led to
a colonial panel that prescribed measures that led to the closure of 148 of the 152 banks. The surviving
four banks were saved by regional governments. This financial witch hunt, in the 1950s, was an
opposite reaction to that exhibited during financial scares and crashes in Britain and the United States.
A socially conscious panel would have prescribed measures to regulate and, most importantly, keep the
indigenous banks alive. This prompted local calls for a central bank to ensure economic independence
and transparency, which went along with the call for political independence.
The call for political independence by the new generation of militant students-professionals like
Azikwe led to the growth of political parties, especially in Lagos and other major towns. Nnamidi, born
under Oya’s influence, brought a revolutionary spirit to bear across Africa, and found a kindred spirit in

Herbert Macauley, who was also born under Oya’s influences.
Herbert Macaulay, a scion of Bishop Ajayi Crowther, the first Nigerian bishop, formed the first
important political party, known as Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), on June 24, 1923. Its
membership was limited to the Lagos elite, and it won all seats in 1923, 1928, and 1938.
Nnamidi Azikwe, a key figure in the Pan-African movement, began mass mobilization and militancy
with the Lagos Youth Movement, which was renamed the National Youth Movement. It challenged and
defeated Macauley’s NNDP in 1938. In 1944, Azikwe united with Macaulay and forty other parties to
form the National Convention of Nigeria and Cameroon.
Azikwe was a political leader free of petty ethnic politics and with a vision of a single prosperous black
African nation. ‘The decisive event in the history of nationalism in British West Africa was
undoubtedly the return in 1935 of Nnamidi Azikwe from his studies in America and his launching, first
in the Gold Coast and then in his native Nigeria, of a popular press’. * Following the philosophy of Du
Bois and Garvey, he inspired the following generation of Nkrumah, who he had directed to America.
Azikwe moved to Lagos from Accra. He and Nkrumah pushed the agenda for British West Africa,
which was to unify with the French West African bloc in the move towards forming a viable African
nation. Unfortunately, some questionable characters upset the whole plan.
With Azikwe following the Pan-African approach of writing through his African Pilot newspaper to
educate and agitate the black community, the British government became agitated and reacted, in July
1945, by banning the paper and making an assassination attempt on his life. Nevertheless, the push for
freedom on all fronts, especially through the West African Students Union, forced Britain and France to
rethink their colonial plans. The failed repression of the Indian selfrule movement was clear for all to
see, even if the Haitian experience was fading.
The creation of secondary schools created a large number of students hungry for higher levels of
education. They flocked to British, American, and French universities, where they formed organized
groups. The European colonists were slow to create universities in the colonies, but during the four
years following 1945, the British established the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, the University of
Achimota in Ghana, a university in Makerere in Uganda, and another in Khartoum, Sudan. The French
took nearly a decade afterwards to create their first university in Africa, and the Belgians were even
slower. This had a negative effect on the labor pool when the French-speaking African nations
eventually obtained their political independence.
Instead of a complete refusal by the European colonial powers, they devised ways to keep indirect rule
in place, allowing political but not economic freedom. In British West Africa, their cause was helped by
the Islamist Sokoto Caliphate and some Yoruba elites, in French West Africa, it was Houphouet-
Boigny of Ivory Coast; in French Equatorial Africa, it was Leon Mba in Gabon.
* Oliver, Africa Since 1800, 160.
Initially a schoolteacher, Obafemi Awolowo, a Yoruba, became a businessman and politician in Ibadan
when he joined Azikwe’s militant Nigeria Youth Movement. However, Awolowo was born under the
Olokun’s influences. He went to London in 1944 to complete a correspondence course in law. In the
mist of the PanAfrican student movements in London, unlike Ladipo Solanke that sought West African
unity, Awolowo decided in 1945 to launch a Yorubacentric body called Egbe Omo Oduduwa
(Association of the Children of Oduduwa). This was an association only for the descendants of the
mythical Adam of the Yoruba race, who was essentially Olokun. It was the poignant beginning of tribal
politics and the beginning of the end of Pan-African ideals, especially the unification of black Africa.

On Awolowo’s return to Nigeria, he relaunched Egbe Omo Oduduwa in Lagos in 1948 and its political
party, Action Group, in 1951. With the death of the revolutionary Oya inspiration, Herbert Macauley,
the erudite Yoruba Lagos politician (who with Azikwe unified all political parties), Awolowo, an
Olokun inspiration, with the backing of Ooni of Ife, Yorubas Spiritual leader, wrestled power from the
Oba of Benin and Oyo, the de facto Yoruba political leaders, to become the Yoruba political leader.
However, unable to wrestle the party from Azikwe, he went on to form Action Group party.
Awolowo and other Yorubas insisted that it would be fair if he relocated and contested in his Igbo
homeland, instead of controlling both Yoruba and Igbo lands. Some Igbos argue that this was the
beginning of tribal politics. Awolowo was accused of selfish ambition since he knew fully well that he
couldn’t win the Nigerian presidency without the support of the eastern Igbo or Muslim north.
However, Awolowo struck alliances with the Middlebelt minorities.
The black movement, without the combination of Yoruba and Igbo groups, was a largely weakened
movement that could never achieve Pan-African ideals, especially with the pro-British Northern
Muslim political elite. Azikwe and his followers were increasingly persecuted by the British: they were
arrested for sedition in November 1948, a trial of ‘Zikist leaders’ was held in February 1949, and his
ban in April 1950 was a fait accompli, which Awolowo left free to organize and consolidate his power.
Some claim Awolowo grabbing of power from the traditional power brokers effectively destroyed the
Yoruba traditional structures, in comparison to the North where the Caliph remained in control. He
attacked the Alaafin of Oyo, the ancient head of western and northern Yoruba, the Oba of Benin, the
head of the eastern Yoruba and many other powerful, traditional Yoruba leaders.
A contrary opinion is that since Oyo and Benin empires had become defunct and absorbed into the
British colony, it was only right that the Yoruba spiritual leader Ooni of Ife, Oba Adesoji Aderemi,
choose and back a Yoruba king of modern colonial politics. However, som insist that Awolowo further
maladjusted Yoruba traditional institutions by placing the nonterritorial Ooni of Ife, the spiritual head,
above the territorial kings, the Alaafin of Oyo and the Oba of Benin, making Yoruba lose their
territorial aggressive posture.
In Benin, he weakened the Oba of Benin by dividing up his territory and sphere of influence by making
his subordinate, the Olu of Warri, its paramount ruler and equal of the Oba of Benin. His disregard for
Yoruba traditional settings led to the infamous curse to lifelong failure and underachievement by the
Deji of Akure, the paramount ruler of the oldest scientifically proven land and surviving palace, who
felt insulted by him in a Westernized court setting.
Being a Eurocentric Christian, Awolowo’s political maneuvers debased Yoruba traditions and relegated
its traditional beliefs below his Christian religion and education, whereby traditional systems were
discarded for confused foreign values. Unlike the northern peoples who held onto their precolonial
political structures, the Yoruba Oba and institutions lost respect and relevance, because they could be
sacked and dethroned like ordinary clerks. Pictures of Jesus Christ replaced those of the Orishas in the
palace of the Ooni, who was supposed to be the spiritual leader of the largest original African group
and religion. Henceforth, all Yoruba Obas, who wanted to align with the new political setting, became
born-again Christians who cast aspersions on the very traditions that they were meant to propagate.
Awolowo was later charged and found guilty of corruption and embezzlement, but until his death, he
remained the political head of the traditionally confused and mentally enslaved Yoruba. Due to a lack
of sense of their true history, they saw nothing good about themselves and their culture while they were
hungry for foreign cultures.

Awolowo established a personality cult that led the Yoruba to believe that they would amount to
nothing without his free, Western education and massive infrastructure development. Unfortunately, the
people were not taught that they were the oldest and largest Original African group who had imparted
knowledge to humanity even before the whites who they now glorified came out of their Caucasian
caves of Central Asia. Instead of the enslaving, colonizing white being the enemy, the Yoruba were
misguided to see the enemy in all other African groups that had worked with them, at home and abroad,
to get political independence.
The makeup of the most populous black area, Nigeria, was such that the Yoruba and their minorities
were roughly one-third of the population. The Igbo and their minorities were one-third, and the
remaining third belonged to the Hausa and other northern Muslim minorities. With the conservative
Muslim north realizing the split among the progressives in the south, they led a conservative front to
continue the status quo of British indirect rule through the Muslim caliphate. When the southerners
clamored for independence, the Muslim northerners complained of not being ready for self-rule.
The Northerners rioted and tried to sabotage the independence movement until they were assured that
the British would rig the process in their favor to continue the indirect rule with Caliphate on all
Nigerians.
Over in the Gold Coast, a few hundred miles to the west of Nigeria, Nkrumah had returned to take over

the mass mobilization of his people after completing his studies and chairing the fifth PanAfrican
Congress in England. The chiefs, lawyers, rich farmers, and merchants of the older generation
organized a political party called the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), which didn’t expect
independence until Nkrumah fostered a sense of urgency in 1947. Violent demonstrations by exservicemen
resulted in the detention of Nkrumah and five other members of the UGCC. The UGCC
split with Nkrumah, whom they reckoned was too revolutionary with his backing of force and victory
by any means possible.
Nkrumah founded his own party, the Convention People’s Party, in 1949 and waged a campaign of
‘positive action’, a movement of strikes and boycotts that destabilized the whole country and led to his
arrest and imprisonment in 1950. He came out of prison to take over power when his Convention
People’s Party won the election in 1951. He became the prime minister of the first independent African
nation in 1957, and the Gold Coast was renamed Ghana. He and his Convention People’s Party looked
to join Macauley/Azikwe’s National Convention of Nigeria and Cameroon (NCNC), but the plan was
going awry everywhere else.
With the stalemate Awolowo created by pulling the Yoruba, the largest indigenous African group, out
of the black movement’s NCNC, Nigeria, the largest Negro area, was at a crossroads. Nkrumah pled
with Azikwe to try everything to keep the most populous and historically important piece of Africa
together. Unable to reconcile his differences with Awolowo, Azikwe joined with the northern Muslims
in a marriage between progressive Pan-Africanists and conservative Muslims. It was a shaky marriage
that tested, and still tests, the delicate federal unity of Nigeria. Awolowo became the premier of the
Yoruba western region, Azikwe was the premier of the eastern Igbo region, and the caliph of Sokoto
ruled the north.
In 1960, Nigeria became independent. Azikwe was the ceremonial president, while the northern
Muslim candidate, Tafawa Balewa, became the premier. It was initially believed to be a continuation of
British Indirect Rule through the Northern Sokoto Caliphate.
The selfish, ethnic politics of ambitious politicians were also the experience of French Africa, where
unification was already in place because the French had centralized the management of their colonies in
the area. Brazzaville, Congo was the administrative capital of French Equatorial Africa. Dakar,
Senegal, was the administrative capital of the Federation of French West Africa, while Ivory Coast was
the richest of the French colonies in West Africa. The Ivory Coast provided 40 percent of the French
West African colonial revenue through cocoa, palm produce, and other raw materials, which were used
to support other less profitable colonies. Gabon supported other territories in French Equatorial Africa.
One of the most exemplary black leaders in French West Africa was Leopold Sedar Senghor, who was
born in Dakar. His well-to-do family gave him a good education in Dakar and Paris. In Paris, he
fomented the black cultural revolution, which determined the essence of the postwar, Francophone
African liberation movement. He and others created the concept of Negritude: the affirmation of the
values of African culture.
French-speaking West Africans concentrated on the cultural front, because the French refused to accept
the existence of racism. The French employed the disguise that Arabs and Latinos used to hide their
racist exploitation, ‘cultural assimilation’, whereby the African stood for everything negative that was
assimilated and done away with. They were the ‘black sheep of the family’—the kaffir/pagan/criminal
syndrome!
The Francophone West Africa cultural movement produced the likes of Chiek Anta Diop, who
challenged European whitewashing lies about black African Egyptian history.

Despite not being like the English-speaking West Africans, who agitated over constitutions and
economics, Senghor and Guinea’s Sekou Toure believed firmly in the Pan-African ideals, and he
vouched for the independence of French West Africa as a whole, not as units. Toure formed his own
party with popular backing after refusing, in 1946, to join the first French West African party, the
Rassemblement Democratique Africaine (RDA), which had been taken over by colonial sympathizers.
In French Equatorial Africa, Leon Mba formed the Comite Mixte Gabonais (CMG) with close ties to
RDA and colonial sympathizers.
Felix Houphouet-Boigny, a medical assistant turned rich cocoa farmer, entered politics and became the
first president of the RDA. Being a farmers’ representative, he promoted the selfish view of dissecting
the federation and ending Ivory Coast’s subsidization of its poor neighbors, as was done under the
French. Houphouet-Boigny and his pro-French clique took over the party, and with the approaching
independence of Ghana and Nigeria, he was influential as a government minister in preparing the Loi
Cadre (Outline Law) in 1956.
The Loi Cadre created a new French super-state in French Africa, stipulating that France kept control of
foreign policy and defense, while all other aspects of government belonged to the twelve independent
colonies formerly organized under the federations of French West and Equatorial Africa. Houphouet-
Boigny’s work with the French ensured that the resultant states were so small in population that they
would remain under French control forever.
There were intense negotiations, but when Charles de Gaulle came into power in France in 1958, he
insisted on offering the colonies self-government under the new French community or immediate
independence and severance of all ties with France. Because the Francophone Africans hadn’t been
well agitated, they voted to stay in the French community, with the exception of Guinea, where Toure
had enlightened his people.
However, France resorted to economic blackmail and sabotage that threatened the collapse of Guinea if
Toure didn’t rescind the decision to become independent. Fortunately, Nkrumah offered financial
assistance and declared a union between the two countries, although it was mere political statement
because Guinea and Ghana were geographically separated by Houphouet-Boigny’s ‘separatist’ Ivory
Coast.
Nevertheless, the unification statement and Nkrumah’s dynamism were enough to send French plans
tumbling by prompting the other colonies to change their minds and vote for independence. Senegal
and French Sudan came together to form the Mali Federation, and it demanded independence in 1959
while opting to remain a member of the French community. The French realized that they were bound
to lose against the tide of nationalism and were forced to ease their hardline approach of breaking all
ties and economic sabotage. All other French colonies formed small, looser groupings while
negotiating their independence separately with the French.
The former German colonies that were split between the British and the French also petitioned for
independence. In French Cameroon, France outlawed on 13 July 1955 the most radical and popular
political party, Union Des Populations Du Cameroon (UPC), which prompted a long guerrilla war and
the assassination of the party leader. Regardless of the ongoing hostilities, France gave French
Cameroon independence with Ahmadou Ahidjo as the President, who went on to consolidate himself in
power through a one party system under the guise of national security against the guerrilla warfare.
The British divided their share of German Kamerun into Northern and Southern Cameroon provinces
administered from Nigeria. At independence, Northern Cameroon voted to join Nigeria, while Southern
Cameroon joined French Cameroun to become the Federal Republic of Cameroon. British Togoland

voted to join Ghana, while French Togo became independent without joining Dahomey (which was
renamed Benin).
Although the Pan-African dream had been derailed by the likes of Houphouet-Boigny and Mba,
Nkrumah continued his push to make Africa free of European colonists. Nkrumah was effectively the
African leader, because his mentor, Azikwe, had been greatly weakened by his compromise to keep
Nigeria together. Despite the breakup of the French Federation, if Azikwe had had the backing of
Yorubas, with his strong Igbo support in his quest to become the authentic leader of Nigeria, he and
Nkrumah would surely have united black Africans into one nation and led them towards the Pan-
African ideals of economic and political ascendancy that we dream of today.
In December 1958, Nkrumah called the first All-African People’s Conference in Accra, where he
invited representatives of nationalist movements in the twenty-eight territories still under colonial rule.
East Africans belatedly joined the African revolution with the formation of the Pan-African Freedom
Movement of East and Central Africa by Tom Mboya of Kenya and Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika.
Nkrumah gave the leaders backing and exposure, especially those in East Africa and Belgian Africa
like Patrice Lumumba. The Belgian colonists later admitted the importance of the Accra conference,
which ‘brought decisive results for the Congo. There Lumumba got the support which he needed to
implement his demand for independence’. *
The Belgians weren’t prepared to grant independence for at least another fifty years. There were no
plans for the future by creating and strengthening local governments and the adequate provision of
education to staff the new country.
The independence came not as a result of effective Congolese nationalism but due to the inability of a
small country like Belgium to control the situation. With the first signs of dissent and rioting that
followed the independence of the neighboring French colonies, being a small country, Belgium
couldn’t send troops to restore peace and pulled out abruptly. The abruptness of independence didn’t
allow a political culture to evolve, and politics were still largely at the local level, with only Lumumba
having a national focus.
The national elections that Lumumba and Kasavubu won in May 1960 were soon overshadowed by
anarchy throughout the land. Western powers, Belgium and the United States in particular, didn’t like
the voters’ choice of Lumumba, especially in Belgian Congo, with its history of concessionaries
companies, so they instigated sabotage. The concessionary companies feared losing the outrageous
concessions made under Leopold, especially Union Miniere, in the copper-rich Zambezi-Congo
watershed area of Katanga in the south, and the Compagnie du Congo pour le Commerce et l’Industrie
CCCI in Lower Congo in the west.
* Oliver, Africa Since 1800, 225.
Lumumba called upon the UN to stop the anarchy and balkanization of Zaire, but he was ignored and
had to call on the Russians for help. This incident was the first clear sign that the UN was not set up to
respond to African needs. The nonchalance of the UN was clear for all to see in 1960 and again in the
1990s when millions died in Zaire and Rwanda.
Without any real military backing, Lumumba was overthrown by US-backed soldiers and killed in a
way that sent shock and sorrow throughout the blackworld. The country was united under Colonel
Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled and pillaged for three decades.
The shaky national foundation the Belgian Congo inherited was also experienced in the former German

colonies, Rwanda and Burundi, now run by Belgium. The two tiny territories refused to amalgamate
into one territory, although they both had ethnic problems between the Tutsi and the 90 percent,
subjected Hutu majority. The Tutsi were pastoralists from the grasslands who came at a later date to
subject and intermarry with the Hutu, who were agriculturists and retained a few independent
kingdoms. The European colonial structures made Tutsi hegemony complete.
In 1959, the subservient Hutu majority in Rwanda violently overthrew their Tutsi (minority) rulers in
the Rwandan civil war before independence, at which time many Tutsi were driven out of the land to
become refugees in Belgian Congo (Zaire). Belgium gave them independence without resolving the
conflict, and the Tutsi minority monarchy survived as a constitutional monarchy in Burundi, while the
Hutu held power in Rwanda. In 1963, the Rwandan Tutsi exiles launched an unsuccessful coup to
overthrow the Rwanda Hutumajority government, resulting in large-scale massacre of the Tutsi. The
ethnic warfare dictated the lives of millions for years to come.
The violent exit of the colonial powers was not only limited to Belgian Africa, but it was also
experienced in the eastern and southern parts of Africa, where there were white settlers. The British
never expected East Africa to follow West African nationalism as soon as it did; the East Africans were
viewed as being poorer, less educated, and with less sociopolitical cohesion. Moreover, white settlers in
the territories prevented them from taking the same approach used in West Africa, because whites
vouched for a ‘multiracial’ system that would give them preference. It was meant to be different
political systems for each race, whereby the black system was subservient to the white system.
In 1951, a Kikuyu rebellion started in Kenya that put to rest all doubt about their readiness for
independence. The Mau Mau began with killing a few white farmers, mutilating their cattle, and other
acts of violence, which grew to a reign of terror for white settlers and their sympathisers. Frustrated by
their inability to identify the rebels, the British arrested top Kikuyu politicians like Jomo Kenyatta, and
Kikuyu peasants were rounded up from their scattered villages into ‘protected villages’. The rebellion
wasn’t crushed until 1955. It cost the British ₤20 million, hundreds of British lives, and thousands of
African lives.
The Mau Mau insurrection put the colonial administration and independence movement on the wrong
footing, because nothing could be discussed during the rebellion. However, it made the British realize
that the white settler communities were vulnerable and that it would be impossibly expensive to protect
the planned multiracial systems. Due to the measures the British took to prevent the insurrection from
spreading nationwide, national politics were restricted to regions, which fostered divisive regional
politics. The two major parties were the Kenya African National Union (KANU) and the Kenya
African Democratic Union (KADU), but their divisiveness delayed Kenya’s independence until
December 1963.
The Tanganyika nationalists, led by Nyerere under the Tanganyika African National Union, electorally
defeated the concept of multiracialism. In 1954, Nyerere organized the most efficient political party,
because he agitated the nation to its grassroots and made it clear that multiracialism was not a viable
alternative.
His task was made easier due to the absence of major powerful ethnic groups and the fact that Arab
penetration, followed by the colonial educational system, had made Afro-Asian Swahili a national
language, which he used to communicate with everyone. His effectiveness was realized when his party
won all the seats, even under the existing multiracial constitution. This victory spelled an end to plans
of multiracialism in East Africa as Tanganyika attained independence in December 1961 (two years
before Kenya, which started its independence movement earlier).

The divisiveness in the Ugandan territory was of a different kind, because there was no major, white
settler community. The problem was caused by three groups: the Buganda monarch, who wanted to
keep his ethnic privileges won by conniving with the British colonists; other kingdoms to the west and
south, who wanted to challenge British/Buganda hegemony; and the new radicals of the black
movement.
Milton Obote, the founder of Uganda People’s Party and leader of the Uganda black movement, had to
strike an alliance with the royalist Buganda party, which led to the Kabaka of Uganda becoming the
head of state at independence in 1962.
Around the same time that the British were trying to implement the multiracial system in East Africa,
they were also trying to implement it in their southern African River Zambezi territories. They created
the Central African Federation, comprised of the protectorates of northern and southern Rhodesia, as
well as Nyasaland (Malawi). Nyasaland was fully African occupied, while northern Rhodesia had only
a small, white settler community. Southern Rhodesia had a large, dominant, white settler community.
The Federation was based on a multiracial constitution, although the different regions reserved the right
to pull out.
Southern Rhodesia had the most European settlers, especially after World War II, when many exservicemen
settled in the main towns of Salisbury and Bulawayo. The white population rose from
eighty thousand in 1954 to two hundred and twenty thousand in 1960, among four million Africans.
Like South Africa, blacks were forced to live in separate satellite towns on arid patches outside the
major white towns that they serviced.
White manufacturing industries were located in southern Rhodesia alongside the agricultural
production of tobacco, cattle, and corn. The Federation was economically beneficial to the British,
because the Rhodesians were dependent on Nyasaland for cheap black labor, while Nyasaland and
northern Rhodesia were dependent on southern Rhodesia for manufactured and agricultural goods. This
led to the rapid economic growth enjoyed only by white settlers.
Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo, and Ndabaningi Sithole led parties during the 1950s struggle against
white rule, especially in South Rhodesia. The 1959 return of Dr. Hastings Banda to Nyasaland
heightened demonstrations, strikes, and riots, which culminated in a state of emergency in Nyasaland
and South Rhodesia and the detention without trial of many of the African nationalist leaders.
The 1959 riots marked the turning point for the Federation, especially with the British discarding the
multiracialism system in East Africa and the Belgians leaving the Congo next door. The British gave
the colonies in the Federation the choice to secede if they set up a black majority government. The
northern territories with far fewer white settlers, Nyasaland and North Rhodesia, took the choice and
got independence. Nyasaland became independent (as Malawi) in July 1964, while North Rhodesia got
its independence (as Zambia) in October 1964.
The white settlers in southern Rhodesia proved far more obstinate. Following their unsuccessful
attempt to force through a constitution that was to greatly compromise African rights, they increasingly
used murderous and repressive tactics to destroy the African movements. The African movements were
forced to relocate to Lusaka Zambia, where they made additional efforts to keep in touch with their
support down south.
The British made superficial attempts to increase pressure on white southern Rhodesia, but in 1965, Ian
Smith, the white leader, made a unilateral declaration of independence. Although no nations apart from
South Africa and Portugal recognized it, no nation challenged it. The African liberation fighters had to

continue for over a decade before there was any significant breakthrough.
Farther south, in the Union of South Africa, which had the largest white settler community in Sub-
Sahara Africa, black South African political rights suffered a major reversal as West African cousins
became independent.
Missionary schools had been introduced in the mid-1800s, like in West Africa, and the Union of South
Africa didn’t lack its share of African academicians/activists who could agitate the masses. John Dube,
inspired by Booker T Washington, had created the first Zulu Christian Industrial School in 1901 and, in
1912, the first movement, the African Native National Congress that became ANC in 1923.
Cecil Rhodes dream of turning South Africa into another America by flooding it with European settlers
was pursued under a new racial caste system called Apartheid. Following the Boer War that the British
successfully annexed the Boer Republics, there was an agreement to leave the running of the new
Union to the settlers.
The 1910 ‘independence’ of white South Africa left power in the hands of the English concentrated in
the Cape colony. However, the larger number of Dutch settlers, in a ‘democratic’ system that
disenfranchised blacks, soon saw the Dutch National party take over political control from the English
and the further disenfranchisement of Africans.
Starting with the Native Land Use that deprived Africans of their land, the ANC realized that the
British plan was to claim noninterference in the pseudo independent union while profiting at a distance
from the new Apartheid system. The Europeans sought ways to cause divisions among the Africans
with the likes of John Tengo Jabavu. ANC’s power also waned as the Industrial and Commercial
Workers Union and Communist Party also fought indirectly on behalf of Africans.
It would take another generation to revive and change the course of South African liberation, especially
the Youth and those ‘born in the struggle’ of the 1940s. Anton Lembede led Nelson Mandela, Walter
Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and a new set of leaders to create the Youth Wing of the ANC.
The ANC-YG gained control of ANC through mass mobilization and called for civil disobedience and
strikes to challenge the news laws associated with the apartheid system. Black South Africans attended
the fifth Pan-African Congress, and in December 1945, they demanded one-man-one-vote and all other
sociopolitical freedoms.
The war brought a slight increase in their standard of living, as blacks had been able to step into the
lowly jobs left by whites who enlisted to fight. The war brought prosperity, as mining and arms
manufacturing drastically increased employment and income. Cheap black labor fueled high economic
growth from 1945 to 1975, comparable to that of Japan and Singapore.
Whites went to every length to keep the racial advantage enshrined by the price discrimination of labor,
notably enjoyed in America. In the first of many white military onslaughts, the army was called in to
quell a peaceful strike in 1946 by seventy-four thousand African mineworkers, resulting in the death of
nine Africans and twelve hundred wounded.
Boer nationalism and the English merchants’ fear of losing political, and hence economic power, led to
the 1948 switch to the Boer conservative National Party, which set out to wipe out any hope of black
political equality. The National Party Prime Minister Strijdom said, ‘Call it paramountcy, baaskap or
what you will, it is still domination. I am being as blunt as I can. I am making no excuses. Either the
white man dominates or the black man takes over’. *

White South Africans initiated a policy of apartheid based on the separation of races by relocating and
cramming the 80 percent majority African population on reservations with poor soil that constituted
only 13 percent of the South African land. Slightly larger than US Indian reservations but with many
more times the population, these reservations were called bantustans. However, a huge percentage of
Africans seeking employment were crammed into shantytowns outside the cities. The shantytowns
were on dusty, arid lands. The white authorities allowed little or no business activity except beer
parlors, similar to the situation in many black ghettos in the United States.
Following the 1948 election, the right-wing National Party introduced the Prohibition of Mixed
Marriages Act of 1949, the Immorality Act of 1950, the Abolition of Passes and Coordination of
Documents Act of 1952, the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950, and the Unlawful Organizations
Act of 1950. All these were law-and-order, conservative, right-wing laws used to hound the Africans.
‘The policy of apartheid has grown out of the experience of the established white population of the
country, and is based on the Christian principle of right and justice’. *
* Oliver, Africa Since 1800, 252.
Africans rose in protest and, in 1952, the African National Congress (ANC) organized a campaign of
passive resistance, which included refusing to carry passes and other social insults. (Peaceful resistance
was tested when Gandhi refused, as an Indian migrant, to register as an Indian.) Albert Luthuli, Oliver
Tambo, Nelson Mandela, and Walter Sisulu led the ANC, which joined with the leaders of the coloreds,
Indians, and liberals to form the Congress of the People that issued a freedom charter in 1953. This
resulted in a government clamp down that led to more than 150 of the leaders being charged and tried,
although they were all acquitted four years later.
The ANC split in two over the inclusion of other races in the struggle, like in the US black movement.
In 1959, Robert Sobukwe founded the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), which concentrated solely on
African aims. The PAC continued passive resistance and mass demonstrations, which included the
largely successful Alexandria bus boycott in Transvaal.
On March 21, 1960, the South African police fired on kids and women peacefully protesting the pass
laws in Transvaal, resulting in seventy-two people killed and hundreds injured. A few days later, the
police fired on a thirty thousand-strong demonstration in Sharpsville, Cape Town. The likes of Thabo
Mbeki, ‘born into the struggle’, joined the ANC-YG as school children in 1956 and organized student
protests, which earned him explusion from high school in 1956.
The publicity received by the Sharpsville incident embarrassed the government, which responded by
declaring a state of emergency, arresting the African political leaders, and proscribing the ANC and
PAC.
The government’s full-scale war against the Pondo ethnic group signified a turning point in the history
of South Africa that was marked with violent resistance. The freedom movement moved away from the
nonviolent approach when people realized that they had to use all means possible. The ANC started the
Umkonto we Sizwe (‘the spear of the nation’), which sabotaged government installations. The PAC
formed Poqo, which aimed to terrorize the white populace.
The outlawed African leaders had to operate covertly, which made it difficult to keep in touch with
their grassroots support and left them open to great dangers. Most important, the leaders wisely sent the
teenagers ‘born into struggle’ abroad and out of reach of the new draconian approach to be employed
by the European authorities. Nelson Mandela was captured in 1962, and the Umkonto leadership was
arrested in July 1963—they all received life sentences. The sentences set back the South African

movement, and the apartheid system survived for a few more decades, as the new youth ran abroad to
fight another day.
The Portuguese were also in the southern half of Africa and equally determined to keep their unfair
privileges in Angola and Mozambique. Following its loss of power to other European imperialists,
Portugal had become a poor nation that was desperate to hold onto the sparse African territories in its
possession: Angola, Mozambique, a tiny enclave on the West Africa coast called Portuguese
Guinea/Guinea-Bissau, and the tiny islands called Sao Tome and Principe. While Britain and France
prepared to exit their colonies, the Portuguese tried to dig in by encouraging further European
settlements and viciously repressing opposition.
The Kongo people were divided between Portuguese Angola and Belgian Congo, and Congo’s
Lumumba influenced Holden Roberto, who, in 1958, formed the Uniao das Populacoes de Angola
(United Peoples of Angola or UPA). Soon after Belgian Congo’s independence, a large Congolese
revolt occurred in northern Angola in 1961, which resulted in the death of more than two thousand
Europeans and six thousand ‘loyal’ Africans fighting for the colonists. The Portuguese were unprepared
for the scale of the revolt and had to send a fifty thousand-strong military reinforcement from Portugal.
They crushed the rebellion by the end of the year, leaving more than fifty thousand Africans dead.
Similar revolts broke out in Portuguese Guinea in 1962, in Mozambique in 1964, and in Sao Tome.
In Angola, an alternative party called the Movimento Popular de Libertacao de Angola (MPLA) was
created. To give Roberto’s UPA a wider audience and include Angola’s central and southern
Ovimbundu peoples, he joined with another party in 1962 to form the Frente Nacional de Libertacao de
Angola (FNLA). The FNLA formed a black Angolan government in exile in Kinshasa, Zaire, with
Roberto as the prime minister and Jonas Savimbi, an Ovimbundu, as the foreign secretary. In 1964,
Savimbi broke away to form his own party on Angola’s southern border with South Africa-held
Namibia. He was funded by white South Africa to act as a counterweight to the authentic freedom
fighters.
In 1962, the MPLA formed a government in Congo (Brazzaville), the former French colony, and
Augustus Neto, their black president in exile, was supported by Russia. The MPLA became the
legitimate Angolan leaders, because Lumumba’s downfall led to the split of the FNLA. Mobutu was a
sellout who was bound to contaminate any movement based in Zaire. However, the three movements
operated in rural Angola, dividing it into regions of influence, while the Portuguese held tightly to the
towns.
There was a hushed international condemnation of the brutality used by Portugal to repress the freedom
movements. Portugal made cosmetic changes to appeal to the Africans by making all inhabitants of the
colonies Portuguese citizens; this was possible due to the small populations in the areas that could be
absorbed into Portugal if they decided to take the offer. However, the Africans weren’t impressed and
wanted equal political rights in their own land, not in faraway Portugal. Unfortunately, that freedom did
not arrive for another decade.
In northern Africa, black Africans had been an insignificant minority for centuries, and their
independence movement was more tied to a Pan-Islamic movement that sprang from Egyptian
universities. To Egypt, the main North Africa country, the present colonization was just another wave
of Europeans, the type that the land had experienced since the Assyrian invasion of 661 BC, which had
weathered the black population in the region to a bare minimum.
In Sudan, Arab resurgence had grave consequences for those in the southern wooded grasslands.
Although most spoke Afro-Asian languages, the Dinka, Nuer, and other black Africans in southern

Sudan had never been subjected. They converted to Islam, but thanks to the British, they were now
under the northern Arabs who had raided them for centuries and were still raiding them for slavery!
There was immediate strife when the British pulled out and their posts were refilled, because out of the
eight hundred posts, only six were filled by the southerners. Even before independence, the first open
hostilities happened in 1955, when the northern government brutally repressed a mutiny by southern
members of the army, who were to form a rebel group that made sporadic attacks on government
infrastructure.
Despite the ethnic upheavals in the British creation called Sudan, the British shoved the new nation into
independence in 1956. By 1958, the unworkable system was overthrown by British-backed Muslims
soldiers who worsened the situation as the country slid into anarchy and civil war. The Muslim soldiers
imposed a centralized Muslim government, which led to a prolonged strike in southern Christian
schools that refused to be Islamized as the foreign staff of the mission schools were expelled.
By 1963, a well-organised resistance movement evolved in the south called the Anya Nya. It organized
guerrilla attacks against their Muslim overlords as one of Africa’s longest civil wars began to claim
lives on both sides.
The divide between the Muslim north and the unconquered indigenous Africans ran from Senegal on
the far West Africa coast to Kenya on the East Africa coast. It was worsened by Western governments
who were apt to supply weapons and sabotage an ‘unfriendly’ incorruptible government.
In the Horn of Africa, after Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia were freed from Italian rule (1936 to 1941),
Ethiopia was returned to the rule of the Afro-Asian monarchy of Haile Selassie, who had fled to
England during the Italian invasion. He returned with British aid to expel the Italians. He was the only
African king ever accorded the protection of Buckingham Palace, which goes a long way to show how
Eurocentric he was, knowing the world’s racial relations in the 1930s.
Italians greatly improved the infrastructure during their brief rule with the provision of a network of
engineered roads and telecommunications, which later helped Ethiopia in its local administration and
international trade. After the war, the other coastal territories were placed under Ethiopian rule, which
caused immense problems in the future. Although Eritrea was loosely mandated to Ethiopia by the UN,
it was later fully absorbed with an Ethiopian imperial decree, to the displeasure of the surrounding
Arabs. From 1953, Ethiopia received US military support in its bid to hold onto its Somali-populated
eastern provinces.
To counterbalance the real African leaders like Nkrumah, the West sponsored the Ethiopian
monarchy’s attempt to assume the leadership position in the blackworld. This was to have an immense
miseducational effect, especially on the Africans in diaspora. Jamaican Rastas, for instance, turned to
Ethiopia for spiritual guidance instead of West Africa. The Organization of African Unity, which
served as the Pan-African headquarters of the newly independent African nations, was based in
Ethiopia as the PanAfrican movement lost its direction.
The Original Africans of Ethiopia were not heard or represented by the corrupt Afro-Asian, Eurocentric
monarchy of Selassie, and they eventually overthrew him in hopes of enjoying the freedoms that blacks
sought throughout Africa.
In neighboring Somalia, the movement was aided by the uniformity of the Afro-Asian Somalis, who
were split across colonial territories. The Somalis were not delayed in their quest for independence, and
the Italian and British Somalilands were united at independence in July 1960. After independence, the

Somali government concentrated on unifying with other Somalis, especially those in the eastern
Ethiopian district of Ogaden, the northern frontier district of Kenya and Djibouti.
The British, who gave the Somali Ogaden province to Ethiopia in 1954, ignored the Somali claims in
Kenya as they tried to sort out the freedom movement in Kenya. This resulted in Somalia breaking
diplomatic ties with Britain and sponsoring insurgents in Kenya, resulting in a four-year war. Border
skirmishes with Ethiopia resulted in a full-scale but inconclusive war, as the merchants of death built
the Somali army that wreaked immense havoc in the region.
Across Africa, even the countries that had received independence peacefully realized that true freedom
from the European militaryindustrial complex would remain a dream, as those in the Americas had
realized earlier.

Chapter 17: The Afro-Romantic Movements
Liberation movements in Central and South American nations (Brazil, Haiti, Cuba, and Jamaica);
Gain political but not economic freedom (1945– 1965)
Afro-Brazilians were the largest African population directly ruled by Europeans, and despite being 50
percent of Brazil’s population, they still found the fruits of freedom elusive after their 1888
emancipation. The military takeover and constitutional rule, introduced in 1893, tried to negate
Africans and their influences with its concept of assimilation and white immigration. A prominent
white Brazilian politician of the first republic declared, in 1923, that ‘the Negro would disappear in
seventy years, while in the United States he constitutes a permanent danger’.*
In the 1930 election, a losing candidate, Getulio Vargas, backed by the Anglo-inspired army, marched
on Rio de Janeiro to take over the government and bring an end to the first republic. The second
republic’s constitution of 1934, for the first time, recognized the race problem and prescribed racial
equality, but this mandate took a poor third to nationalism and business during the Vargas era (1930–
1944).
Afro-Brazilians were concentrated in the agricultural northeast region of the Bahia and Maranhao
states, where sugar, and later, cocoa plantations were concentrated. They formed more than 70 percent
of the population as they moved to Salvador, the capital of Bahia. The move away from rural
agricultural areas also saw the numbers of Africans soar to nearly half of the population in the southeast
cities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, but Liberville, Salvador City, on the Bahia coast was the
modern black heartland.
The Brazilian race problem, which was being denied, had interesting qualities that were reminiscent of
other imperialistic cultures. The pretentious racial interrelationship and social organization that
originated with the Jews and Arabs was passed to the Latinos, who passed it to the French in a modified
form. In the quest to whiten Brazil and isolate Afro-Brazilians, laws were enacted banning African
immigration, but like French West Africa students in Paris, Afro-Brazilians focused on cultural
revolution to fight their oppressors.
* Segal, The Black Diaspora, 346.
The movement was led by home-based intellectuals like Gilberto Feyre. On his return from US
universities to Recife in 1923, he led a handful of authors called the Regionalista Movement to help
raise the historical consciousness of all Brazilians. He went on self-exile with the rise of Vargas but
returned in 1933. In 1934, he published CasaGrande e Senzala, examining the positive contributions of
Africans to the Brazilian society. He encouraged Afro-Brazilians to celebrate their African heritage but
as a contribution to a distinct Brazilian identity based on interracial marriage and social intermingling.
He failed to address the victimization of black people and their restricted social mobility while he
joined the mainstream intellectuals with their insincere talk of racial democracy.
Gilberto Feyre was regarded as the father of the term LusoTropicalism, which described and attempted
to dignify the distinctive paternalistic character of Portuguese imperialism, as opposed to the harsher
slavery regimes of North Europeans. Luso-tropicalism essentially propagated that any prejudice or
discrimination in Portuguese colonies can be traced to class but never racism. It celebrated both actual
and myths of racial democracy.

Feyre encountered huge positive and negative criticisms for the views expressed in his books, and made
to qualify and sometimes retreat his position on Luso-Tropicalism. Despite criticisms of propagating
assimilation and racial intermarriage, the reality was that Afro-Brazilians had more access to the
political arena than AfricanAmericans at the time since Latino racism was usual hidden.
Feyre’s main contribution to the black movement was educational. He was a major figure in the
organization of the first Afro-Brazilian Congress in 1934 and the following congress in Bahia. The
congresses dealt mainly with cultural issues, whereby a wide range of Afro-Brazilian cultural
expressions and influences were studied and published.
The first Afro-Brazilian political organization, Frente Negra Brasileira (FNB), emerged in 1932 to
make an important step in the national black consciousness within the Afro-Brazilian community. It
was a mainly inward-looking movement, attempting to foment action within the black community, and
it was not a direct protest against white oppression. This awareness drive was a necessary step, because
the vast majority of blacks continued to be economically and sociopolitically deprived, especially in
terms of income and education. The regional politics that divided white Brazil also prevented a
nationwide cohesion and identity among Afro-Brazilians who, despite been the world’s second-largest
black population, were largely compartmentalized into captaincies/states.
The vast majority of Africans, still living in the rural areas doing menial farm work, gradually emptied
into Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, and Sao Paulo, where they lived in shantytowns or favelas. Most were
unemployed and underemployed. Just like their US African cousins, police constantly persecuted Afro-
Brazilians, while the financial and business community redlined them.
The lighter you were, the more assimilated you became, and you got lighter only through marriage or
skin bleaching.
A few Afro-Brazilians were able to slip through the poverty trap, but the government did nothing to
compensate the majority of the exslaves or alleviate their suffering, especially when the sugar business
crashed. The adaptation of the sugarcane plant to grow in the temperate zone brought about beet sugar,
which crashed the market for the tropical American territories.
The Brazilian government and rich Portuguese Brazilians tried to industrialize by substituting imports
with home manufactures, but Brazil essentially remained an agricultural economy. Britain and the
United States remained the highest investors and were not keen on developing Brazil to compete
against them, especially with its lower labor costs. Often subsidized by the profits of the increasingly
deprived agricultural sector, the few foreign heavy industrialists did harm to the economy with their
capital flight, which constantly drained the economy of foreign exchange. The agricultural base shifted
to cocoa, rubber, and coffee, which placed Brazil in direct competition with African colonies, but Afro-
Brazilians were systematically excluded from farm ownership, despite the large land holdings left
vacant by their foreign landlords.
The rich landowners with huge parcels of land exercised immense, divisive, political power through
their captaincies, which were augmented by military power. Since the Paraguay war, the army had
grown in importance, as was true everywhere on the South American continent. The army brought its
1893 constitution to an end by giving power to a losing opponent in 1930.
Vargas initially appeared to be liberal and in favor of AfroBrazilians, with his 1934 constitution that
ensured all citizens equality regardless of race, and he made voting compulsory. However, there was no
legislation to alleviate the suffering of blacks, and the nationalism that the constitution bred made it
difficult to question fundamental issues without being label subversive (the Muslims and Christians
labeled people blasphemers and sinners, and the US labeled black civil activists Communists in the
1950s).
There was a continued fixation on whitening Brazil during his term especially for economic reasons.
This attempt was based upon the belief that it would attract investors and industrialists. To allay the

fears of would-be migrants, the Portuguese ruling class wanted to portray an image of a social paradise
where races peacefully coexisted with no threat of a Haiti-like revolution. The phrase ‘racial
democracy’ was coined for the assimilation of the ‘primitive’ Africans into the European system,
normally through interracial marriage and cultural whitewashing.
During the Vargas years, the FNB registered as a party and had more than two hundred thousand
members at its height. Unfortunately, though it tried not to be militant, Vargas eventually banned it,
along with all other parties. Vargas came down on those he regarded as political dissenters, who were
subversively impeding national unity in World War II, not only those in the political arena but those
who organized around their African religion.
Towards the end of the war in 1944, he was overthrown and a new constitution was written in
September 1946, which had the same racial equality guarantees but was contextually more potent,
coming as it did during the new era of democracy due to the Jewish holocaust. Gilberto Feyre was
elected to federal congress. Vargas was to return to power in 1950 through elections but committed
suicide in 1954 over a political scandal.
Feyre changed his political leanings, from first being labeled a communist in the 1930s, he became
being regarded a member of the political right with his support of Portuguese colonists in the 1950s and
the military government in 1964. However, his writings left an indelible mark on Brazil’s sociopolitical
existence, with Casa Grand and Senzala being the first of a trilogy that would act as a turning point in
the analysis of African heritage in Brazil.
Abdias do Nascimento, a full Afro-Brazilian had a more consistent pro-African approach. Born in the
state of Sao Paulo, he first participated in the local Brazilian Black Front in 1929, before leading the
organization of Afro-Campineiro Congress challenging racial discrimination in the city of Campinas in
1938.
Abdias started Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN) in 1944 as a black arts movement. It was formed
to provide a forum to promote black civil rights through theatre arts and address issues like cultural and
economic discrimination. Like Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal, the initial poet, Nascimento created
the black experimental theatre to register dissent through art. The clearly defined objectives were to
educate Afro-Brazilians that there was no superior race, to propose policies to enhance black education,
and to combat racism following the code of conduct put forth in the constitution. It also highlighted the
persecution of African Candomble practitioners.
Nascimento attended the 1945 fifth Pan-African Congress in England and between 1945 and 1946, he
sponsored the National Black Convention in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, where they formulated antidiscrimination
and affirmative policies that were presented to the 1946 Constituent Assembly. In 1949,
he led a coalition of TEN and other groups to organize the First National Negro Congress. In an address
to the congress, Nascimento pointed out that channels for the dissemination of information open to
blacks were inadequate and that those organized around African religions were being attacked by the
state.
Nascimento led the Afro-Brazilian movement with an aggressive pursuit of the goal of consciousness
raising like his contemporaries. Like Du Bois’ NAACP using its Crisis newsletter to disseminate
information in the United States, and Azikwe using the African Pilot in Africa, TEN created a
newsletter called Quilombo. In Brazil, it organized literacy campaigns and put out cultural information.
It demanded equal and proper treatment, even if the TEN voices were not as forceful as those of the
protesters and agitators in the United States and Africa.
TEN also gave resources and attention to the role of AfroBrazilian women. They formed a sister
organization called the National Congress of Black Women (NCBW), which included professional
women, domestic workers, female artists, and others who called for the integration of black women into
sociopolitical life.
The fruits of the movement were reaped slowly as AfroBrazilians expressed their political will through
the ballot box. Although they made up a greater percentage of the population than their African
compatriots in the United States, their power was diluted through regional politics, the splintering of

civil rights groups, and the political parties they allied themselves with. If the effects of their political
advancement were difficult to notice, their socioeconomic progress was even more inconsequential,
because the majority still remained in poverty. Nevertheless, they progressed slowly with the hope of
eventually getting to the promised land, if not waylaid by external forces.
In other South American nations like Colombia and Venezuela, both with much smaller African
populations, black Latinos were gradually made to disappear from public view.
In Haiti, the Caribbean island with the largest Afro-descended community, despite being the first
independent black nation in 1803, it found itself under US neocolonisation inspired by Citibank after a
century of mulatto dominance and mismanagement in the early 1900s.
From recent evidence that corruption propaganda is a tool of regime change resorted to by neoimperialists,
it is difficult to know who genuinely served the people. It is now obvious that this
neoimperialist tool was devised in Haiti and Cuba before spread to African nations.
Following the 1915 revolt in the northern black heartland, when the Haitian president was lynched in
the French Embassy and the US marines landed to safeguard Citibank’s interests, three mulatto
presidents ruled under US guidance before a substantial guerrilla movement emerged.
Apart from Haitian nationalism and Anglo-American racism, the anger that fueled the resistance
movement included the US extractions that saw 40 percent of Haitian income servicing their alleged
American debt and an additional 20 percent to upkeep the army in Haiti, which left the Haitian
population hungry. This was in addition to the unfair labor practices employed to bring about
infrastructural and agricultural developments, which were geared towards US needs and special
interests.
The largely peasant guerrilla war in Haiti, the Cacos War, started in 1917 and lasted until May 1920. In
November 1919, the leader of the guerrilla movement, Charlemagne Perault, was ambushed, killed, and
tied to a door for public exhibition, similar to how blacks were lynched and portrayed in the United
States at the time. The continued US occupation led to the 1920s African renaissance. This occurred as
resurgent nationalism increased black intellectual interest in African heritage as a form of identity and
protest, as was occurring in Brazil and the United States. It was difficult sharing the same God with a
wicked oppressor!
By the end of the 1920s, US occupation became morally indefensible and increasingly repressive. With
all systems in place economically, it was cheaper to run the island indirectly. A student demonstration
in 1929 led to nationwide strikes and demonstrations that culminated in the 1930 elections. All
candidates demanded US withdrawal, and Stenio Vincent won.
The United States did not leave Haiti until 1934, when preparations for World War II required all hands
on board at home. It left a fiscal agent behind to take care of finances. This was in line with the partial
withdrawal of other European forces from the African colonies to prepare for and fight World War II,
giving Africans a brief respite to move ahead.
Unfortunately, President Vincent’s ability to attract support across the board, especially from blacks,
was lost as the old mulatto dominance resurfaced amid poor economic conditions. Many Haitians
rushed to the sugarcane farms for work in the neighboring Dominican Republic under the murderous
President Rafael Trujillo. He ordered them killed under the pretext of an antivoodoo campaign, while
the Haitian mulatto elites showed no concern.
Another mulatto president, Elie Lescot, succeeded Vincent in 1941, despite mulattos being less than 5

percent of the population, out of which power rested with three hundred mulatto families of the total
two thousand mulatto families. Under Lescot, Africans continued to be politically and economically
disenfranchised, while the state supported the campaigns of the Catholic Church against African
religions.
By 1945, Lescot had earned formidable opponents, including mulatto liberals, who lobbied against his
increasingly repressive government and its debilitating pro-US economic policies, as well as a black
elite disenfranchised in all facets of society. He was forced into exile in 1946 by student demonstrations
that sparked strikes and rioting.
Haiti was not left out of the worldwide black movement. The Trinidadian, C L R James, who went to
London in 1932, further highlighted the Haitian war of independence. Being part of the Romantic
culture, the ex-French colony had problems that deeply affected its stability through the development
and dominance of a mulatto class, which arose from the culture of assimilation and its underlying
principle of ‘light being right’.
To attack the problem, like those in French Africa and Brazil, Haitian intellectuals chose cultural
revolution. They aptly named themselves ‘The Griots’ from the West African griots who were poets,
storytellers, healers, and guardians of customs and myths. The Griots had their own periodical and had
Francois Duvalier in their camp—a qualified physician who had worked with the US army medical
corps. Black intellectuals and activists rallied around their Yoruba/Original African beliefs against US
occupation and continued white imperialism.
In August 1946, following Lescot’s exile, a new government took over after a contest between seven
candidates who raised the race issue to heights never before witnessed in Haitian politics. Dumarsais
Estime became the president, and he initiated a number of public works and social programmes:
minimum wage, maternity and child welfare programmes in rural areas, and projects to strengthen the
economic and agricultural infrastructure.
To show the new government’s commitment to the black movement, Duvalier was offered and took a
cabinet post as secretary of state for labor and public health. However, the lofty plans couldn’t be
backed by finance, and the industrialization plans were a pipe dream. Haiti couldn’t be allowed to erect
an iron and steel complex to economically and militarily challenge the West and its dominion in the
region.
The governmental support for the revival of African religion throughout the country upset the Catholic
Church, while the mulatto elite complained of black dominance. The business community was unhappy
over the establishment of an income tax. The formidable enemies of the Estime regime backed him to
the wall, where he had to use increasingly repressive methods to stay in power such as banning political
parties, student associations, and publications.
In May 1950, Estime was overthrown by an army coup that entrusted the transitional government to a
junta of three. Paul Magloire, one of the three, presided. The junta outlawed voodoo and other African
ceremonies in public, while Magloire looted the treasury before fleeing into self-exile in 1956.
After a brief period of instability, the first full adult suffrage election was held in September 1957, and
people elected the black movement leader, Duvalier (colloquially known as ‘Papa Doc’). He promised
to continue the policies of Estime while giving reassurances to those who had been alienated. Papa
Doc’s power base was in the 90 percent black populace, 80 percent of whom lived in the rural areas,
where they formed a militia to act against the counterweight of the urban militias of the mulatto and
church powerbase. Knowing the army and its long history of Western-inspired coups, Papa Doc

reorganized the army by placing trusted blacks at the top and sacking the entire mulatto officer class.
Duvalier’s elevation of his African heritage and religion led to serious confrontation with the powerful
Catholic Church, which he overcame with marked success. He clamped down on their subversive
influences by banning their publications and sent a few bishops and other clergy packing to the
Vatican. In 1962, he expelled the Bishop of Gonaives for his campaigns against voodoo.
There were more than six invasions inspired by the United States, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba,
in an effort to win Haiti over in the Cold War. They all failed due to the huge black peasant support of
Papa Doc. Rural platoons under local chiefs wore Ogun’s traditional red sashes and the big, straw hats
of the old Cacos, who had fought the US marines, as they faced down any threat to the long-awaited
government of the people.
Papa Doc challenged the United States in a speech blaming the United States for preventing Haiti’s
development. There was little or nothing to spring open the gate that was effectively closed against the
blackworld. However, his threat to look to the Russians for help prompted the easing of restrictions on
US finance. During his reign, he increased the size of the Black middle class but wasn’t able to
significantly improve the economic lot of his people for the long term. His long lasting legacy was
successfully winning the cultural revolution that made Haitians show pride in their African culture.
They became more known for juju than the Yoruba and Brazilians.
Duvalier redirected some of the political spoils normally enjoyed by the mulattos to the black elites and
the rural platoons, which infuriated and further alienated mulattos. Blacks did not frown upon his
repressive methods, disproportionately applied to mulattos, because they viewed it as payback for the
atrocities the mulattos committed intermittently over the previous century.
Cuba was another major Afro-Caribbean population center that had to fight US neocolonialism and
mulatto dominance. From the US takeover in 1898, Cuba experienced military and political intrusions
from the United States, which had negative effects on black freedom and political development. Afro-
Cubans would probably have fared better under continued Spanish colonization, because they would
have been able to successfully revolt against a weak, faded power like Spain.
White Americans had tried keeping the Yoruba-Congo culture to a bare minimum in the United States,
but they were confronted with a far more resistant strain of the culture in Cuba. In the attempt to
suppress it in Cuba, it inadvertently spread to the United States. The Yoruba culture was expressed in
Cuba through the practice of Santeria (‘way of the saints’ and Orishas/Ocha), which resulted in the
Catholic Church’s unsuccessful attempt to suppress it. Yoruba gods were given Catholic saint names 57
in the hope that eventually Yoruba culture would disappear. Instead, as with Yoruba Muslims, the older
and more natural philosophy persevered, and the Yoruba philosophy remained nearly intact. The Afro-
Cubans’ culture survived and intermittently challenged the mainstream for a long time to come.
Blacks revolted again in 1912. All the gains of the ten-year independence war against the Spanish had
been stolen and were being monopolized by whites and mulattos. US marines quelled the black revolt
and protected US investments by defeating nearly five thousand black rebels commanded by Evaristo
Estenoz. Over the next decade, the United States imported more than 150,000 Africans from Jamaica
and Haiti into Cuba, because the immigrants were easier to control and could be paid much less.
The US backed General Mario Menocal, a conservative, in his bid to become the president and preside
over the raping of the country that soon left the treasury dry. Menocal was supplied arms by the United
States to crush subsequent revolts. He was succeeded in 1920 by Alfredo Zayas, who was declared the
winner of a fraudulent presidential election that was marred by widespread violence, but the United

States and J. P. Morgan bank provided ample financing.
57 Sango became St Barbara, Ogun became St Peter, Yemoja became St Regla, Osanyin became St
Joseph, Obatala became St Mercedes, etc.
Gerardo Machado won the 1924 presidential election on the threat of a black and liberal revolt, but he
was soon labelled corrupt. Unwilling to leave power, Machado extended his term from four to six years
by calling a constitutional conference in 1928 for a further extension. J. P. Morgan Bank publicly
expressed their hope that he could remain in power indefinitely in order to continue the corruption,
while Chase Bank supplied a succession of questionable loans.
Politically, Machado safeguarded himself with a repressive army and police force that he personally
selected for loyalty. To buy black loyalty or indifference, he didn’t persecute their Afro-Cuban religion
and was even known to fund them in their practices. In the end, he was forced to step down by a mass
strike that effectively crippled Cuba in 1933.
The United States tried to replace him with another favored candidate, but the unrest that ensued with
Machado’s exile led a mulatto army sergeant, Fulgencio Batista, to mount a successful military coup
with the help of noncommissioned officers and students. Batista made himself a colonel and made
Colonel Carlos Mendieta the president. He was largely supported by the black community, which saw
someone from a background of poverty and farm labor.
Despite the fact that a few others were to become presidents, Batista was the real power in Cuba, from
his 1933 coup to his presiding over the rewriting of the constitution in 1940. New social measures
attributed to Batista include the outlawing of racial segregation, education for all from age eight, and
the introduction of a minimum wage. Some trade agreements he signed with the United States were
detrimental to Cuba (like one giving the United States a protected market for manufactured goods and
effectively killing plans for local industry).
He polled 60 percent of the vote in 1940 but didn’t bother to stand for reelection in 1944, passing the
role to Dr Grau San Martin as he left for Florida. Following two presidents, Batista again contested for
the presidency in 1952, and when it appeared that he might lose the election, he overthrew the legit
Cuban government as Vargas did in Brazil. The United States recognized and accepted the government
of its long-time friend.
A revolt planned in 1953 by Fidel Castro against Batista failed woefully, and Castro was sentenced to
fifteen years of imprisonment. However, Batista made a magnanimous but overconfident gesture by
releasing Castro and others in April 1955. This gave Castro the chance to relaunch his revolt. It was
planned in Mexico and started in the eastern region of the island, and it rapidly spread across the island
with the support of hungry peasants. On January 1, 1959, Batista accepted defeat and fled to the
Dominican Republic.
Castro and his Revolutionary Council, which had a few Africans in notable positions, were initially
silent on the race issue until black leaders publicly challenged him. In a televised speech on March 22,
1959, Castro proclaimed that the revolution would confront racism in education, employment, and
recreation. His seemingly genuine racial revolution delighted the Black population, while agitating
whites and mulattos to move to the United States to wage a vicious anti-Castro campaign. The mass
white immigration allowed the black population to increase from half to around 66 percent of the
population.
Although there was a dramatic improvement in the welfare of Afro-Cubans, Castro was still inherently

racist in the Latino way, making one realize the point of Romantic black nationalists who choose
cultural revolution to tackle racism. Castro’s statements and actions exhibited the Hispanic,
paternalistic racism of a nice slave owner who fed, educated, and housed blacks better than any other
slave owner and expected gratitude in return. Despite Castro’s good intentions towards blacks, his
miseducation couldn’t allow him debunk the white supremacy theory. Although he claimed ‘nobody
can consider himself as being of pure, much less superior, race’ in Cuba, it showed that he believed
whites were the superior race if proven to be pure, not mixed with African blood.
He didn’t think much of African culture and religion, because he banned and repressed African cults,
whose adherents fled by the thousands to places like New York and Miami, where they spread
Santeria’s Orishas. Blacks were conspicuously absent from the government, because they were made to
stand back while ‘kindhearted and knowledgeable’ whites took good care of them. Castro must have
been impressed traveling to and relating with Africa, but this didn’t translate into much change at
home, proving that he was probably unable to explain the phenomenon and, like many others, pushed
the problem to the back of his mind.
Moreover, American neo-imperialism prevented a full discourse of the race issue, because Castro was
forced to employ a strict, centralized style of government, while an African cultural revolution wasn’t
forthcoming.
Cultural revolutions never took prominence among Anglophone Africans in the Americas and Africa,
but their political and economic revolutions had an effect on promoting their culture, especially for
Jamaicans. The Jamaican mass migration for jobs across the Americas and Britain had an impact on
their music as it became internationalized.
At home, Garvey, who had also traveled the Anglo world, setup up the political revolution. After
forming the Negro Political Union (NPU) in 1924 to mobilize African American votes in the
northeastern United States, Garvey was deported in 1927 (on false fraud charges) to Jamaica, where he
founded the People’s Political Party.
In the 1930s, after Garvey’s death, Jamaican revolutions were distorted by mulattos at home and in
Africa. Unlike Haiti and Brazil, which rightly looked toward West Africa for spiritual guidance,
Jamaicans fell for the Europeans’ disingenuous promotion of the Afro-Asian mulatto Christian
Ethiopian monarchy. The cultural revolution was misled by the Ethiopian monarchy of Haile Selassie.
Jamaicans saw him as a source of pride and culture, being a king of the only African nation not under
European imperialism.
Not realizing that the Ethiopian monarchy was a Eurocentric minority government that had oppressed
original Africans for centuries, Jamaicans developed Rastafarianism based on the worship of Selassie
and the concept of black Jews. This era saw nonconformist religions develop in the United States, with
the Nation of Islam and revivalist Christianity, as well as in Nigeria, with the Aladura revivalist
Christianity, although these movements were not as political as their counterparts in Jamaica and the
United States.
The cultural counterrevolution pervaded other revolutions, and the black movement had been taken
over by the mulatto elite at home. Garvey had sufficiently agitated his people, but he didn’t hand over
power to a chosen successor before going to London in 1935 to spend his last days. Unlike in other
black communities, where African intellectuals were behind the Pan-African movement, the numbers
of black Jamaican middle-class elite were small and never challenged the less educated Garvey as the
undisputed black leader. The mulattos that tookover didn’t do so out of a commitment to black
development but out of Socialist ideals copied from the British Labor Party.

Alexander Bustamante, a mulatto moneylender, organized the labor movement by starting the
Bustamante Industrial Trade Union in 1936. A single sugar-estate strike culminated in the 1938
nationwide general strike that brought Jamaica to a standstill and the colonial authorities rushing to the
negotiation table. Bustamante’s charisma and the appalling labor conditions developed a mass
movement that demanded better labor treatment and eventually culminated in independence.
Meanwhile, the general strike won a minimum wage for sugar workers and the recognition that labor
unions were a force to respect in Jamaica. Bustamante’s cousin, Norman Manley, a mulatto lawyer,
negotiated the general strike settlement with the colonial masters and was influential in the formation of
the People’s National Party (PNP) in September 1938.The PNP campaigned for full adult voting and
increased participation in the colonial legislature before Bustamante formed a rival party in 1942, the
Jamaica Labor Party (JLP). Manley’s PNP formed its own labor union ally, which put it at par with
Bustamante’s JLP.
In 1944, the first election based on full adult suffrage was held, and the two parties contested. The PNP
campaigned for independence, but the JLP countered by saying ‘self-government’ meant slavery.
Bustamamte warned that it would ‘replace a white man with a brown man on the backs of black men’.
This line of campaigning and Bustamante’s charisma won the JLP a sweeping victory at the polls.
Jamaica, St Lucia, and other British Caribbean Islands were made to join the Federation of the West
Indies, an unlikely union that was short lived due to the impracticalities of a federation of different
islands separated by more than space and water. The islands received independence soon after the
Federation was dissolved.
Jamaica won its independence in 1962 from the British, who had left their other colonies in Africa and
thought it would be cheaper to let Jamaica and the other sugar islands run as ‘independent’ nations
(especially because sugar had lost its importance with the introduction of beet sugar). Although the
Jamaican economy was weak, due to its reliance on sugar, bananas, and bauxite, its surplus black labor
was important as the British encouraged Jamaicans to rebuild postwar Britain. Jamaicans immigrated in
large numbers to Britain to rebuild the infrastructure that had been damaged during the war, and they
helped in the major urban renewal.
There was a mass migration in the 1950s, throughout the West Indies, to the major cities of the United
States and Europe, which invited the Afro-Caribbean communities to take up employment. Many of
them, especially those from Barbados, were surprised by the racist sentiments they met in their new
lands but stayed for the lack of better opportunities. At home, the Caribbean islands related along
colonial lines as the Anglophones formed the Caribbean Free Trade Area and later the Caribbean
Common Market. This was unfulfilling, because their focus was directed at Europeans instead of their
immediate geographic or ethnic cousins, especially with their broken sugar economies and the unlikely
chance that they would be welcomed into the industrial community.
In Guyana, Britain’s only South American colony, the mass importation of cheap, East Indian labor
after abolition turned the Africans into a minority, which produced a striking comparison to the mulatto
divisiveness in other parts of the Americas. Like other parts of the blackworld directly tied to England,
Guyana’s prominent black activists grew agitated in London. George T N Griffith (aka Ras Tefari
Makonnen) partly financed the Pan-African Congress. However, as in Jamaica, the local challenge to
colonization came from a lighter-skinned activist, an East Indian student called Cheddi Jagan.
Jagan returned from his studies in the United States in 1943, radicalized by the US black movement,
and he set out to form political apparatus to challenge the British. He and his white Canadian wife,
Janet, who was more of a ‘Marxist’, joined with other intellectuals in 1946 to form the Political Affairs

Committee, which they hoped would unify Africans and Indians with its planned ‘scientific Socialism’.
In the ‘liberalized’ colony legislature, they fielded three candidates, but only Jagan won a seat.
Jagan used his political platform to attack the sugar and bauxite companies, and he attracted a popular
support that he mobilized during the 1948 strikes. In their drive towards forming a real political party,
even though they had their own racial prejudices to overcome, Jagan and others realized that they
needed a black man with the spirit of the worldwide black movement. They approached the head of the
black movement, Linden Burnham, who was studying in London, and the 1947 president of the West
Indian student union, which had fought for independence as a group. Like Azikwe and Nkrumah,
Burnham returned to Guyana in 1949 and became the chairman of the proposed People’s Progressive
Party (PPP), while Jagan became the leader and his wife was the general secretary.
The repressive reaction of the British government only served to increase the popularity of the PPP,
which demanded full adult suffrage and independence. The British eventually conceded on universal
suffrage and a new constitution, while elections for the Legislative Assembly were slated for 1953.
Contrary to colonial expectations, the PPP won 51 percent of the votes in the election, which showed a
popular interracial movement as candidates won across racial lines. Below the surface, they were fault
lines between Jagan and Burnham, who wanted to form a black party but couldn’t attract black
intellectuals away from Jagan and the PPP.
Like in other colonial settings, the PPP was expected to mellow its firebrand election promises, which it
didn’t, as Jagan tried to correct the many wrongs that had been perpetuated by the British. This didn’t
go down well with the West, especially the United States, which didn’t want pro-Soviet governments in
‘its backyard’. The British colonial government vetoed Jagan populist measures. The veto resulted in
strikes and violent demonstrations in August and September 1953 and led to the British threat of naval
and military deployments as the colonial masters also suspended the new constitution.
The harassment and banning of PPP politicians made Jagan and Burnham decide to present their case in
London, but in a display of European imperialist unity, French, British and US airlines refused to sell
them tickets. Undeterred, they charted a flight to England, where the government accused the PPP of
inciting racial hatred and spreading Communist aspirations. They couldn’t be charged in London on
such baseless accusations, having brought the Indians and blacks together like no other time in their
history, but on their return to Guyana, Jagan and his wife were imprisoned for six months for infringing
on the emergency orders in place.
A Royal Commission appointed to investigate the upheavals made a distinction between Jagan, who
was labeled a Communist, and Burnham, who was labeled a moderate Socialist. This appeared to be an
indication of how the West was to play its divide-and-rule game, causing the racial hatred that it had
accused the PPP of fomenting. The unity of the East Indians and Africans had unsettled the Europeans,
who found nowhere to breed their disruptive influences. By 1955, the conflict between Jagan and
Burnham over the leadership of the PPP led the authorities to allow only those meetings that served to
widen the rift, as the party split into rival factions bearing the same name. *
Initially, black intellectuals remained in Jagan’s PPP, but they eventually moved over to Burnham’s
faction as the politics differentiated along racial lines. With the inspired divisions in place, the British
allowed a gradual return to colonial democracy in the August 1957 elections, which Jagan still won.
Burnham won the capital despite losing the elections and renamed his faction the People’s National
Congress (PNC).
In his four years in office, Jagan made huge improvements with the social programmes he pursued,
although the colonial governor often overruled measures that were viewed unacceptable to British

interests. Both parties called for independence with a constitution based on proportional representation,
which was rejected by the British government that had also rejected such an arrangement in Britain. In
1961, PPP won the election with 43 percent. The PNC won 41 percent, and the United Front (UF), the
party of the Portuguese and conservative middle class, took the rest. Jagan’s October 1961 visit to the
United States only provoked fears that he was a Soviet admirer amidst the furor of US paranoia, which
had to prevent the rise of another Fidel Castro in the Americas.
Beginning in February 1962, serious rioting broke out against the increase in taxes needed to fund
economic development, because it didn’t appear that foreign development funds were forthcoming.
Instead, the United States sent destructive funds to Burnham and Peter d’Aguair to finance the strikes
and demonstrations, which Jagan could quell only by calling on British troops and modifying his tax
reforms. Within a year, another social explosion aided by the United States disrupted Guyana, when
Jagan wanted to resurrect a formerly acceptable Labor Relations Bill. Riots, demonstrations, and food
and oil shortages, from March to July 1963, made Jagan request that the governor declare a state of
emergency enforced by British troops.
* Segal, The Black Diaspora, 193.
The colonial secretary announced plans for independence for the following year on December 7, 1964,
despite the ongoing sociopolitical upheavals. In the elections, the PPP won 46 percent, the PNC 40.5
percent, and the UF the remaining 13 percent. Because Jagan won the popular vote and not a clear
majority, he called the UF to join him in forming a government but was rejected. Burnham’s PNC
formed the government with Peter d’Aguiar’s UF and promised racial harmony, and they received
approval from the West with promises of development finance. Jagan boycotted the independence talks
in 1965, which led to independence on May 26, 1966.
In the new government, the two coalition parties promoted their special interests zealously. D’Aguair of
the UF became the finance minister to promote the conservative business class interests that he
represented, and Burnham vigorously advanced Africans into strategic positions. The need to
redistribute capital towards blacks gradually led to the split of the coalition with the big business party,
the UF.
In August 1967, d’Aguair resigned from the cabinet but didn’t break up the coalition, because it would
have led the more antibusiness PPP ‘Marxists’ into power. Burnham, knowing that he couldn’t secure a
domestic majority vote, started devising loopholes like overseas voting, because a significant number of
black Guyanese had migrated to the United States and UK. In the December 1968 elections, the
overseas voters gave the PNC a massive majority of 56 percent of the popular votes, but the
government was accused of electoral fraud and corruption, a familiar refrain across the blackworld.
Guyana was an exception in the Americas that showed the mulatto usurpations witnessed elsewhere
were not merely pigment problems but the results of the divide-and-rule policies of the Western
governments, bankers, and military-industrial complexes.

Chapter 18: Democracy: Demonstration of Craze?
African American civil rights won but not economic: The redesigning of European neo-imperialism
(1945–1965)
Back home in the world’s second-largest black ethnic group at the time, African Americans became
increasingly impatient with racism after fighting for white freedom in World War II. The lynching and
segregation continued despite the obvious moral debt owed. This made blacks more vociferous and was
reflected by popular music and a sizzling rhythm and blues—white’s rock and roll music.
However, the postwar black elite were ready to rock but not roll over the white boat, according to Du
Bois’s integration script, because Garvey was dead. Du Bois was now the grandfather of the
PanAfrican movement, having influenced Azikwe and Nkrumah, with whom he co-chaired the
important fifth Pan-African Congress, where his belief in educating and agitating the masses was
restated, in addition to taking all means necessary towards black freedom.
Du Bois and other members of the civil rights community continued to write in the Crisis while
intensifying the fight against racism and segregation in the courts. The NAACP, which Du Bois formed
in 1909, began maturing into a formidable organization by attracting to its ranks a new generation of
brilliant black activists. Two of the most public and important brains of the era were Thurgood
Marshall and Martin Luther King, Jr, who represented and openly challenged the two major systems of
white society: the court and the church.
President Roosevelt’s packing of the Supreme Court with liberal judges to help the passage of his New
Deal welfare package made the traditionally conservative Supreme Court sensitive to the shift in world
public opinion (exemplified by UN human rights declarations following the Jewish Holocaust). To
greatly embarrass the government, the NAACP filed formal charges, in October 1947, at the newly
created UN, accusing the United States of racial discrimination. This forced the United States to use
diplomatic capital to defeat the Soviet proposal to investigate the charges.
There was a mobilization of black votes in the North, where the black population continued to be
amplified by immigrants from the South and black West Indians attracted by the wartime boom.
Blacks, never compensated or aided in their flight from the poverty trap, were attracted to the
Democrats with their New Deal welfare programmes. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., a black reverend/civil
rights activist, was elected in Harlem to the House of Representatives, serving from 1945–1969. He
played a vociferous role in the legislative branch, which tried to reduce his effectiveness and disbar him
from Congress. President Truman’s election campaign of 1948 brought the race issue to the forefront of
political discourse, and Truman desegregated the army that more than a million blacks had joined to
win the war.
In a judicial system where the caliber of the players was more important than the game, Marshall was a
legal luminary and a blessing to the black movement. As a brilliant, youthful lawyer, working under the
auspices of NAACP, he relentlessly challenged segregation by filing numerous suits against state
governments. He had a breakthrough against racial segregation with the May 1954 ruling in the
Supreme Court case of Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka.
The case reversed the ‘separate but equal’ ruling of the 1898 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which
legalized segregation and had agitated the likes of Du Bois sixty years earlier. The Supreme Court

ruling that segregation in the provision of education was unconstitutional had ramifications in other
aspects of governance, where Marshall was apt to turn his attentions, which the Courts could not refuse
to deliberate in a legal context.
The progress of the civil rights movement in the United States, and across the blackworld, continued to
be disseminated through the Crisis, university students, and other middle-class circuits. The Southern
white reaction to the desegregation rulings inadvertently motivated the black masses and white liberals
in the civil rights struggle. The improvements in military communications, which had been customized
to radio and television, were major weapons in the struggle. Evil acts that would have gone unnoticed,
especially in the Deep South, were now beamed across the world, even to Africa, during the television
boom of the 1950s.
The white racists enraged even the disinterested with the August 1955 brutal murder of a fifteen-yearold
boy, Emmett Till. He was holidaying in Mississippi from Illinois and killed for whistling at a white
lady while merely trying to overcome his stammering. Till was killed and his body tossed into the river,
with the assumption that he was just one of the Southern blacks, but the state of Illinois requested his
body, and it was placed in public view to show the barbarism of the Southern white society. It was a
pungent reminder to the large number of blacks who had migrated north to Illinois and New York of
what was still happening to their cousins left behind.
The nonviolent pursuit of racism through the courts was joined by a nonviolent civil disobedience
movement, which was more than justified, because whites openly disobeyed the new desegregation
court rulings. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat and move to the back of
the bus for a white person in Montgomery, Alabama, led to her arrest and triggered a massive,
nonviolent movement and a year-long Montgomery bus boycott.
The black middle class, especially the reverends, were not keen on the potentially disruptive
confrontation. They eventually succumbed, under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr, who led the
black movement with the greatest oratory skills ever witnessed in a black leader. The boycott was
initially called for a day, but its success encouraged an indefinite extension. Although most of the fifty
thousand people had to walk, the boycott was a huge success, and the determination in the face of
intimidation attracted worldwide attention and support funds from the North. Meanwhile, the arrest and
treatment of Rosa Parks was contested in the courts, and on November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court
ruled that segregated transportation was unconstitutional and ordered it desegregated. Southern
Congressmen, 101 of them, called for a massive resistance to the spate of Supreme Court desegregation
rulings.
In January 1957, black ministers came together in the South to organize a body called the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). It drew up plans on how to tackle segregation; Dr. King was
the leader, and Ella Baker of the NAACP was its coordinator. The increased mobilization saw the
largest black demonstration in May 1957 and, three months later, saw the passage of the first civil
rights bill since reconstruction, even though it was watered down considerably.
Nevertheless, the nonviolent attack on segregation continued and resulted in a court victory with an
order for desegregation in Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The state governor
strongly resisted, first by calling in the National Guard, which was ruled illegal, then calling local
vigilantes to resist the black ‘intrusion’. The mob violently assaulted blacks trying to enter the school,
which was televised and aroused feelings of dismay across the world. On September 24, 1957,
Republican President Eisenhower was forced to dispatch federal troops to Little Rock to end the
embarrassing situation, declaring that ‘mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our
courts’. In continued resistance, the governor sold the schools to a private company but was overruled

by the courts.
On the other side of the black political spectrum, with Garvey out of the picture, black separatism
advanced with the emergence of the Nation of Islam. Forwarding Garvey’s proposal of a viable black
state in Africa and black self-sufficiency throughout the existing European structures in the Americas,
the Nation of Islam called for a separate black nation on US territory and represented a form of black
separatism that arose out of frustration with the present system.
It developed in the 1930s black heartland of the industrial city of Detroit, becoming a melting pot of
Garvey’s old, black selfempowerment network and new black Muslims inspired by the large, local
Arab community. The need to have a black religion and belief system behind a black movement
fostered the idea behind the ‘Five percenters’ and the Nation of Islam with its outlandish theories of
creation and the curse on whites. This was a striking, but not surprising, parallel of how the Jews
reacted when they carved Israel out of northeastern Egypt and wrote the biblical book of Genesis of
how blacks were the erring race that needed to be deprived. In the new black religions, the white man
was an experiment by one mad doctor or nutty professor, an experiment that went wrong and was
banished from one arid area to another!
Despite the limited formal education and historical knowledge of the founder, Robert Poole (later called
Elijah Mohammed), the Nation of Islam fulfilled the need for a black religion. It promoted
selfsufficiency and served as a strong social support system for the large number of poor blacks
deprived of freedoms. The Nation of Islam’s programmes promoting charity and discipline attracted
many young black men. They felt so alienated and insecure in the new, faceless, industrial society that
they migrated to in the North (which, coupled with poor, segregated education and underemployment,
also jailed them unfairly).
Malcolm Little was one of those jailed and disillusioned by the system and its religion. After finding
the Nation of Islam’s comfort and education in jail, he came out to take them to the forefront of the
black movement. In a display of alienation from white American society, Nation of Islam converts
dropped their Anglo-Saxon surname for the letter X, representing the unknown. Malcolm X later took a
more cherished and appropriate Yoruba name, Omowale, and identification card in Ibadan, Nigeria.
Reflecting the impatience of the lower classes from the mosques that mushroomed under his leadership,
Malcolm X verbally attacked the exploitative white system and the black middle class for hypocrisy
and being miseducated to be servile instead of entrepreneurial. Malcolm X vouched for a black-inspired
development movement and saw no end to the gradualism employed by white liberals and the black
middle class seeking integration through the courts. The Nation of Islam exemplified its concept of
black self-development by building an economic base that boasted of its own farms and aircraft for
transportation (like Garvey, who owned ships). However, the Nation of Islam remained a small group,
while nonviolent integrationists gained more prominence.
On February 1, 1960, a new chapter in the nonviolent, directaction demonstrations started when four
black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at the white-only lunch counter in the
local store of a national chain. Within a week, sit-ins spread across fifteen cities in five Southern states,
and by the end of the month, four national chains had desegregated their services. The sitins spread to
many other aspects of society and business, and black students were increasingly joined by their fellow
white students.
Ella Baker, the NAACP coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was quick to
coordinate and organize the students into a formidable force with the formation of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had representatives from fifty-six Southern

campuses and nineteen from the North. The SNCC took part in freedom rides to challenge segregation
on interstate buses and related services, as well as to set up voter registration ‘schools’ called freedom
schools. The freedom schools went into rural, Southern areas to encourage blacks to register and
supported them when attacked and hounded by white thugs.
All these nonviolent actions towards desegregation attracted a ferocious attack from racist whites, but
the protestors of both races withstood all that was thrown at them, mostly with singing and praying.
When Dr. King’s SCLC decided to confront racism in Birmingham, Alabama, it faced the stiffest test
of the nonviolent movement. Police resorted to dogs, whips, fire hoses, and mass arrests to break the
protest.
The staunch racists even resorted to bombing, which provoked blacks to riot on May 11–12, 1963. The
rioting, which included attacks on white business areas, was an unexpected reaction. Detractors of the
nonviolent movement proclaimed that it was proof that the policy of nonviolence was indecisive and
couldn’t withstand the test of extreme provocation.
This was especially relevant with the increasing militancy of the black movement as people became
disillusioned. Even Du Bois, the leader of black integrationist politics, became disillusioned and left the
country in 1961 to spend his last years in Ghana with Nkrumah. (His relocation preempted a move by
the United States to arrest him on false charges of Communism and subversion.)
Malcolm X epitomized the feeling of blacks in the ghetto, whose open anger was a warning to white
society that they had to diffuse the situation, preferably through the middle class of reverends and
intellectuals in the nonviolent movements of the NAACP and the SCLC. Noting the frequency with
which African American leaders courted the new African diplomats in the UN in New York, not to
mention Nkrumah openly sponsoring dissent across Africa, eventually one of the new African nations
would have supplied weapons, probably from the Chinese and Russians. This would arm the African
Americans who were clamoring for freedom through revolution. The urgency of African American
freedom couldn’t be overstated in the Pan-African movement, because there were only three African
nations, (Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Zaire) with more black people, and they were already ‘free’.
As tempers rose in black America, President John F Kennedy rightly identified the propensity for
anarchy, and he introduced a civil rights bill to Congress in June 1963. To keep the pressure on, the
civil rights movement called for a protest march. It took place in August in Washington, where King
made his moving ‘I have a dream’ speech to more than 250,000 people at the rally and tens of millions
more across the world on television and radio. He and other speakers decried government and society
over their commitment to civil rights.
The answer to the reverends was a bomb in a black church in Birmingham, killing four children. The
progenitor of the civil rights bill, President Kennedy, who appeared to blacks to be the most
approachable president to date, was assassinated. The fears that arose due to the setbacks were put to
rest when President Johnson fought through and signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was probably
more than Kennedy would have done. It caused a major split in the Democratic Party, which led to the
Republicans gaining a sizable defection of ‘Dixie Democrats’. They were rich, racist whites who had
supported the Democratic Party since the Jeffersonian period of slavery, when the South supplied the
most presidents.
Although the Civil Rights Act might have been a party-splitting event, it wasn’t a groundbreaking event
for African Americans. They were not economically better off by being able to use desegregate
facilities, and the civil rights law did not address the issue of Southern whites preventing blacks from
exercising their constitutional right to vote given a century earlier. The riots sparked across six cities

brought the message home, as militant black leaders like Malcolm X threatened to step up to the
oppressors.
Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam won a major publicity campaign with the conversion of
Muhammad Ali, the world heavyweight boxing champion, whose vociferous attack on the racist
establishment spread the message far and wide. Ali later became a force in his own right, making the
Black Power movement visible all the way to Africa, where he symbolized the new, free African in the
white lands of America.
Malcolm X talked about his African heritage even though the religion he represented, Islam,
misrepresented the African past. After his break from the Nation of Islam, which tried to curtail his
astronomical rise on the political forum, he traveled to Africa and the Middle East to increase his
understanding of the world. On a pilgrimage to Mecca through Egypt, he realized that Islam was not
entirely a black religion, as portrayed in the United States.
On his visit to Nigeria, the most populous black nation, and Ibadan, the largest black city at the time,
Malcolm X was fascinated by what he saw and by his reception. He was dutifully renamed Omowale
(‘our child has come home’) as opposed to Akata (fox or wildcat), the Yoruba nickname for African
Americans. In the African totemic fashion, akata represented Yoruba people born outside the land,
without the culture—a wildcat that grew up with the wild, white race instead of a domesticated cat that
was taught the respectful, naturalistic African culture. At Malcolm X’s delightful homecoming he
became Omowale.
He went from Nigeria to Ghana and other parts of West Africa before returning to the United States
with the belief that the only way forward was a united African front throughout the world. He
envisioned a United States of African Peoples that could provide political, financial, and military
support to black ideals, a black power based on self-sufficiency, not forced integration.
He formed a black liberation army composed of Africans from around the blackworld, especially
Cubans and Congolese. Unfortunately, he didn’t live long enough to lay the foundation. He was
assassinated on February 21, 1965, while delivering a speech in Harlem, allegedly by those who were
bitter about his ‘defection’ from the Nation of Islam and his continued rise. The lovable militant leader
was replaced, in November of the same year, by a militant group called the Black Panthers, who were
formed by a faction of university student members of the SNCC.
The Black Panthers, being more educated and determined than previous activists, scared whites with
their military drills, mass education, and agitation on the streets. Although formed in Alabama, their
main power stemmed from the ghettoes and schools of Northern and Western cities. Even before the
group’s formation, black militancy was on the rise and on exhibit in the Northern city riots, which were
partly fueled by the televised white violence against those trying to register to vote despite the Civil
Rights Act.
The establishment further courted Dr. King, in absence of softer alternatives. He was awarded the
Nobel Peace prize (named for the creator of dynamite, a paragon at the apex of the military-industrial
complex), which conferred more recognition and respect upon him from white society.
Notwithstanding this achievement, when he led a peaceful protest from Selma to Montgomery, the state
capital, he was violently handled by the police and treated like a common criminal. This prompted
President Johnson, in March 1965, to submit the Voting Rights Act, a bill to empower federal officers
to register voters if they were restricted from exercising their constitutional rights.
The Watts Riot in the same month that the voting bill was passed, which killed thirty-four blacks,

showed that something more than voting rights were required to diffuse the frustration, especially by
taking care of economic and political disenfranchisement. The attention span of the nation was cut short
by the Vietnam War, which took whites from the civil rights movement to the antiwar movement,
believing the Africans had gotten enough civil rights.
This was as far as the European machinery wished to go, having made plans to counter the postwar
political revolutions, which meant little economically. Political independence and civil rights with no
economic independence was a black, middle-class, integrationist dream that blacks were soon to
awaken from. The initial euphoria among the black middle class across the world could be likened to
that of a hundred years earlier – when the Civil War was won and Reconstruction started in the United
States while slavery was abolished in Africa, and there were signs that the present euphoria of freedom
was a mirage.
Across the Atlantic, the European powers rebuilt their warravaged economies by importing Africans
from their colonies, despite the maltreatment of returning black soldiers in postwar, anti-black race riots
in Liverpool (a repeat of the post-World War I race riots). The 1948 Nationality Act paved the way for
mass migration with the offer of British citizenship, which led to about 150,000 AfroCaribbean
migrants and an unknown number of continental Africans being imported between 1948 and 1958.
Apart from direct employment in the reconstruction sector, London Transport, British Hotels, and the
National Health Service were some of the first pioneers to offer to pay travel expenses in advance to
willing blacks in the West Indies and Africa.
The population of blacks and Indians greatly increased in the cities of Britain and other European
colonial powers. This reignited racial resentments that had waned with the postwar departure of white
American Southern soldiers, who had had a negative effect on race relations in wartime Britain. From
1956, as the rebuilding drew to an end, blacks faced increasing discrimination in housing and
employment.
By 1958, the black unemployment rate was 14.5 percent compared to the 1 percent national rate. In
addition, the black community began to experience more heavy handedness from police and attacks
from poor whites in deprived areas. Both factors culminated in the August 1958 black rioting in
Nottingham and London’s Notting Hill. The following month, neo-Nazi groups attacked blacks and
their properties.
The government response, led by parliamentary members from Birmingham, submitted new laws to
restrict immigration. Before the laws could be enacted, the news prompted a huge rush to beat the
deadline for citizenship. By 1962, West Indian numbers swelled to 300,000 across Britain, with
135,000 in London and 67,000 in Birmingham. In 1962 and 1964, the Conservatives pushed the first
Commonwealth Immigrants Bill through Parliament, which restricted working migrants to eight
thousand persons per annum and didn’t include African whites.
Due to the large number of students and workers from British colonies, most of them hoping to return
home soon, the black community’s political efforts were split between securing political independence
at home in Africa and the West Indies and in securing civil rights in Britain. With the US black
struggles televised, blacks in Britain were inspired, and liberal whites became more vocal.
The Labor government of Harold Wilson introduced the 1966 Race Relations Act to show that Labor
was opposed to racism, although the law was first used against a black man for racial hatred. The
weakened economy allowed Conservatives to raise the fears of the lower classes being culturally
overwhelmed by immigrants, who were also blamed for causing the economic malaise.

Following World War II, the old European powers had to accept the supremacy of the United States
with its new fighter jet economy, which small, Western European nations could not afford on their own
except through US investment and the embryonic European Union (EU). Instead of using the postwarera
opportunity to launch the world on a path of peace and prosperity, they strengthened the militaryindustrial
complex amongst themselves.
The French, led by Marcel Dassault, used German scientists like Herman Oestrich and US finances to
start Snecma, which became one of the world’s largest aircraft makers. US airplane contracts were
meted out to other European nations as the Americans took over Hitler’s missile technology and former
Nazi scientists. The West implemented laws to convert fighter jet technology to consumer purposes like
airmail and air travel.
European dominance was ensured in sinister plans that unfolded as divisions between Communist
Russians and the West deepened into the Cold War. The West was paranoid that communism would
extend into their territories to agitate and free their underclasses, especially their African colonies that
International Communism was to free from the slaving nations in order to bring about a level playing
field in the global marketplace. In 1950, the Western world, under the auspices of the UN, went to war
in Korea against the Communists. The Korean War launched new weapons and the ‘deterrence
ideology’ that bolstered faltering Western economies and restored confidence. This resulted in the
defeat of the notion that the atomic bomb had made conventional warfare, and its profitable production
facilities, obsolete.
This allowed the United States and its allies to base their economies on the fear of Communism; more
than 33 percent of the economy was directly related to defense industries. It also provided an unwritten
rule never to use the atomic bomb, wherever and whenever their merchant bankers and arms dealers
decided to play their game of death in the ex-colonies. Though they were Communists, Russians based
their economy on the ideology of war against internal and external enemies and conscripted a
significant percentage of their population and resources to its pursuit.
With their historical background of African exploitation, the crusade of the Western nations ultimately
returned blacks to exploitation mode, disguised as containment of Russians and Communism by
neutralizing the Black movement, which they conveniently labeled communist. This was the third
phase of European exploitation: the first was slavery, the second was colonization and sharecropping,
and the third was neo-imperialism.
This phase evolved from the world order that emerged after World War II, with the United States
hijacking the world economic and financial systems. These were controlled through the IMF, the World
Bank, and other UN bodies, located in the United States—the continuation of a monetary caste system.
The Communist bloc formed its own systems that included the Council for Mutual Economic
Assistance (COMECON) as its world bank.
To fight the Cold War, the former Office of Strategic Studies was upgraded with Nazi scientists to a
new outfit called the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Some of the Nazi scientists were employed to
work on biological and chemical programmes, because Germany had been in the forefront of biological
and chemical technologies from the turn of the century. During the 1952–1960 presidency of Ike
Eisenhower, an ex-army general, and his vice president Richard Nixon, there was a major defense
reorganization. Scientists under the CIA, headed by Allen Dulles, embarked on some questionable
projects. The CIA project MK Delta was initiated in 1952 to research the use of biochemicals to alter
human behavior and the use of covert biowarfare agents. It was continued as MK Ultra from 1953 to
1966 and as MK Search from 1965 to 1975. This was revealed in the first session of hearings before the
Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources of the

Ninety-Fifth Congress.
To keep the West ahead in the Cold War, which required spying, gathering, and processing voluminous
amounts of information, the US government made a huge military investment in the research and
development of machines to process and store information. Research funds were directed to traditional
military designers in the New England universities of Harvard, MIT, and others. They worked in
conjunction with a government-backed company called International Business Machines (IBM) to
create computer technology.
Before the West could initiate the next world-domination master plan through the UN bodies and the
CIA, which would disorientate blacks for another century, the Europeans had to regain control of the
free African people through covert methods. The United States helped bolster Western European
economies financially, while both realms built large public debt through their urban renewal
programmes and the arms race. By 1965, they were ready to use their militaryindustrial complexes to
clear the field on which the new system was deployed.

Chapter 19: The Black VIPs: Vagabonds in Power?
Africa falls on its face, tripped by invisible European shackles (1965– 1980)
Nkrumah said ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and all these other things shall be added unto you’,
but it became clear that his dreams, so eloquently portrayed during his 1957 independence speech, were
nothing without economic independence. The utopia desired in Ghana attracted African American
intellectuals and artists like Du Bois and Maya Angelou, but it rapidly became apparent that talk of
‘free trade and democracy’ was Anglo-jargon!
The new pseudopolitical system accorded blacks a little more respect, but the economic system based
on European racial and military superiority and restrictions remained intact. The Europeans had taken
over the colonies to keep the ‘potential slaves’ on their own land for the provision of primary goods and
to be a privileged-butclosed market for the European manufacturing sector.
Nkrumah expected to drastically improve the welfare of his citizens and the black race with rapid
industrialization, improved agriculture, and exports by investing heavily in infrastructure like
education, health, water, roads, and electricity dams. However, the restrictive Western tariffs placed on
processed goods from the former black colonies were still in place, working to prevent competition
with the colonial masters’ manufacturing concerns, while the colonies lost their coveted market of raw
materials.
The new black nations could increase income only by increasing agriculture and mining, which led to
the crash in commodity prices in the sixties. The Blackworld’s commodity supply market was
fragmented into ex-colonies against a unified buyers’ market in the West that dictated the price, while
Western industrial products the blackworld bought in exchange had no unified pricing control structure.
To get a better control of the economy, Nkrumah had to nationalize some strategic industries, which
only confirmed his negative Socialist label in the West. His plan was to build a major electricity dam on
the Volta River to supply power to the aluminum plant to feed planned African motor and airplane
manufacturing plants.
The fact that the US national income in the 1900s had increased dramatically through the arms dealers’
motor and aircraft industry (the largest industrial employers and sources of income) affected the
prevailing thinking on industrialization and economic prosperity. However, the European powers were
not inclined to let Nkrumah or any full African nation develop an industrial complex like 1800s Japan.
They believed that industrialized Africans would turn to arms production to ensure continuous profit
and progress like them. This would not only challenge whites economically, but blacks would have the
military ability to revenge or redress past evils committed by European imperialism.
In case the African leaders persisted, the manufacturing lobby pushed their Western governments to
take all steps necessary to stop Africans from competing on an equal basis. Pressure was placed on
Western companies providing technical and financial assistance, whereby they either wasted time and
money, knowing full well that they were constrained, or they pulled out straightaway. If a company
refused to pull out, it was bought out or blacklisted. Eventually, Nkrumah realized the insurmountable
barrier erected by the West, and he turned to Russia for technical assistance, which turned him into a
pariah who had to be replaced by the West.
Because overambitious, greedy bastards were abundant in every nation, the Europeans found sellouts to

undermine the black government, especially the young African vagabonds recruited in the UN Congo
Mission against Lumumba. In addition, a powerful but negative media was apt to exaggerate the
common weaknesses of anti-Western governments—rumors of corruption were always good for
character assassination.
This relentless onslaught to undermine black nations, dating back to the slavery era and the first
Western black nation, Haiti, inadvertently drove black leaders to become more repressive to stay in
power.
It was a dicey situation for leaders trying to do their best and gain popular support while being
undermined by foreign agent provocateurs and having to clamp down on the human rights that they
initially fought for. The workability of democracy in the blackworld became questionable, because
foreign usurpers could finance and influence the political parties. The parties ended up being mere
foreign or tribal representatives, and in some countries, they discarded a divisive, multiparty system for
a single-party system, which had its own faults.
With the notable exception of Senegal, most Francophone nations had one-party systems. Their
sociopolitical life was still glued to France, which dictated the political discourse and left little or no
space for freedom of expression in the political scene. Some Anglophone African nations changed to
one-party Socialist states, which were different from those of the French that were capitalistic, but they
often had to give up some autonomy to the Russians.
Many of the African leaders who became Socialists were driven to it by having to go to Russia for
technical help, which was given at the price of joining the restrictive Socialist club. Some form of
‘Socialism’ was needed in many of the nations to redistribute and reorganize resources towards nation
building and economic development, because most were mere colonial outposts for raw materials that
couldn’t support a viable economy. For effective control, strategic industries had to be nationalized,
because there was no fully developed, local capitalist class to takeover. Some industries were
nationalized because the most profitable sectors remained in European hands. By and large, the
economies of the colonies were still very much in European hands, and the black political leaders were
merely reporting clerks.
With Gold and other commodity prices purposely depressed, the way to industrialization blocked, and
Western financers playing God, Ghana’s economy faltered, unemployment increased, and the masses
became restless. The realization that he was powerless in the colonial straitjacket called Ghana, and that
his dreams of Pan-African unification had vanished, made Nkrumah frustrated and ‘repressive’. Claims
of corruption were mounted to discredit him in a political system that had been fashioned after the
inherently corrupt British system that allowed special interest funding and party patronage.
With his image torn to tatters by the world’s conservative media, the Western Powers backed their
colonial soldiers recruited in Congo, Col. Kotoka and Major Afrifa of the Ghanaian army, to overthrow
him without a whimper from his people. Joseph Ankrah, the Chief of Ghanaian Army staff, one of the
most senior UN Congo colonial soldiers, became the the head of state. A former CIA employee, John
Stockwell, confessed that the CIA had an effective hand in forcing the coup. *
This became a pattern across Africa. An Afrocentric, ‘uncooperative’ black president is disparaged, the
economy ruined by international forces, and the Western-trained military takes over. Coups and
countercoups racked the Ghanaian political scene after Nkrumah’s exit, while export earnings of gold,
cocoa, and other agricultural exports declined. Afrifa, one of the key coup plotters against Nkrumah
was to replace Ankrah in 1969. The cost of petrol imports worsened the balance of trade and foreign
exchange payments. Two consecutive governments could do nothing to reverse this, but they worsened

the situation as they grabbed whatever they could from the sinking ship.
In 1979, Jerry Rawlings came with the loudest cry of corruption, and despite an international outcry, he
lined up all military ex-head of states – Generals Afrifa, Acheampong, Akuffo and other members of
the Congo Cabal – before a firing squad and shot them for corruption. The question of whether Ghana,
like most other African nations, was too small to sustain a viable economy, especially with the IMF
knocking, remained.
If Ghana (with a population under twenty million in 1999) was too small to justify the investment
required to build an industrial complex and break out of the European mold, one would expect Nigeria
(with the largest black population of 130 million) to kick start black development worldwide. Apart
from being the largest black consumer market and labor supply, it was blessed with oil, gas, and iron.
Some said that Nigeria was lucky to have struck oil a year before independence; otherwise, the British
might have rethought leaving the country.
Although the oil in the Niger delta area became the mainstay of Nigeria’s economy, the commercial
and administrative center was Lagos Island on the Yoruba shores. The little manufacturing sector was
still controlled by Europeans, especially the United African Company (UAC), an offspring of the Royal
African Company that traded in slaves and African products for the British.
* Adam Curtis (22 June 1992). "Interview with John Stockwell on 'Black Power'". BBC Two series,
Pandora's Box:.
The financial power remained with the predatory foreign banks, whose numbers greatly increased after
independence to include other European and American banks. Most production facilities were based
within the Lagos-Ibadan-Benin triangle of Yorubaland, southwest Nigeria, which produced more than
half of the country’s industrial output.
The Yoruba Southwest and Igbo Southeast produced the two main export crops, cocoa and palm
products. The Muslim north produced groundnuts. Apart from being naturally richer, the Yoruba
southwest and Igbo southeast regions pushed more vigorously for economic independence from the
likes of UAC. The push for industrial and overall economic development was pursued, especially
through their banks: the National Bank, and other related financial institutions like Odua Investments
for the Western region, and the African Continental Bank for the Igbo eastern region. It was hoped that
export earnings from agriculture could be used to build a balanced economy that wouldn’t be merely a
raw materials source to Europeans.
Nigerians developed light food-processing and cloth-processing industries to service its huge market,
but they soon came against the same brick wall as Ghana when they set out to build a heavy-industry
complex. As noticed in the industrial development of the Europeans, a heavy-industry economy wasn’t
overly complicated. It mainly required a full iron and steel complex and chemical and electrical plants.
If in place with other infrastructure, like transportation and communication, these would turn a nation
around in ten years (like in Japan, Sweden, and latter-day South Korea). Nigeria had a local supply of
iron and abundant petrol for petrochemical plants, which Japan didn’t even have, but the Nigerians
were the wrong color.
All Western nations refused and tried to discourage Nigerians and those that might help them achieve
their aim of competing with the West. The American oil and pharmaceutical lobbies did not allow such
development and blackmailed the US government, because it would have meant a substantial loss in
US jobs. Eventually, Sweden agreed to build the iron and steel complex in the mid-1960s but withdrew
in 1974 in what appeared to be a deliberate, time-wasting sabotage. The Europeans were directly

sabotaging the largest Nigger area.
The political fabric of the new Nigerian state was greatly strained by ethnic problems carried over from
colonial times due to the fusion of three regions, of different histories, that had to team up to make
Nigeria work. The unlikely team included the Conservative Muslim Fulani caliphate over the northern
Hausa, the republican Igbo, historically accustomed to participative village democracy, and the middleof-the
road Yoruba, whose populist leader usurped Yoruba’s traditional power structures and derailed
Azikwe’s Pan-African movement.
Without a clear electoral majority, the alliance struck between the winner, Tafawa Balewa, representing
the Muslim north, and the third, Azikwe, representing the southeast Igbo, made Balewa the prime
minister and the effective head of government. Azikwe was the ceremonial president without much
power.
Because the Yoruba were second in population to the Afro-Asian Hausa-Fulani group, Awolowo, the
Yoruba leader, came second in the election and became the leader of the opposition. However,
divisions began to appear among the Yoruba before independence and widened immediately
afterwards. Yoruba leaders like Chief S L Akintola pointed out that the Yoruba couldn’t continue to
survive in the political wilderness, and the present non-alliance policy was beneficial only to Awolowo,
who ruled over the Yoruba Action Group (AG) in opposition. The suggestion to strike an alliance with
the Hausa, because Awolowo made grave enemies of Azikwe and the Igbo, was rejected by Awolowo,
whose autocratic style frowned on independent political suggestions and quests for power.
The failure of the progressive southeast and southwest to unite led to another victory by the Muslim
north, with Balewa continuing as the prime minister at the federal level. The 1964 elections were
marred by violence and electoral fraud, which moved the nation to the edge of disintegration, largely
caused by political realignments in the southwest and the north’s religious violence.
The switch was mainly among Yoruba politicians rejecting the autocratic structure in the AG, in which
their political careers depended solely on Awolowo’s acceptance, as well as the prospect of spending
their careers in opposition without the benefit of federal largesse. The result was political mayhem and
violence, especially when Awolowo wanted to impose his will on his party’s western region governor,
Akintola, and the North backed Akintola to cause more divisiveness in Yorubaland. Awolowo was
charged for treason and jailed, which prompted his party to strike an alliance with Azikwe and Igbos to
boycott the 1964 election. However, the agreement fell through as Azikwe’s party contested for Yoruba
seats boycotted by AG, resulting in cries of betrayal ny the Yorubas.
In a situation whereby the southern progressives were in disarray, the northern Muslims had a free hand
to run a corrupt, disinterested government, because the north’s leadership was accountable not to its
people but to the Caliphate and Allah. Like most Islamic rulers, they were not overly interested in mass
education and industrialization, which they believed would create an enlightened middle class that
would challenge them for power. This was not unnecessary paranoia. An educated elite, like in the
United States, would present a more logical alternative to the rule of religion and the false belief that
the rulers were godsent from Mecca (where the majority were wrongly taught that they originated).
Under the guise of Islam, the Sokoto caliphate was based on the ascendancy of the smaller, Fulani
group of light-skinned Afro-Asians over the majority of very dark-skinned Hausa.
Nevertheless, the British colonists believed that the Nigerian government was challenging its authority
within the Commonwealth and across Africa, so they sought regime change by discrediting the entire
political class. The CIA inspired global corruption propaganda was also set up against Nigeria.
Between 1958 and 1963, the British trained young Nigerian vagabonds to win back the African Giant

to their tentacles. The neocolonial soldiers were trained in UK, USA and India and tested in the Congo
battlefields. One of the young officers, Olusegun Obasanjo, gained their attention and backing.
With the media still within the control of the imperialists, they placed CIA agents in Nigeria, like in
Ghana, to disseminate false or exaggerated information to the media to smear the characters of the
political leaders. An agent known as John Thorne was located in Kaduna where he spread damaging
news to the likes of Charles Sharp, the Briton managing director of a new publication for Northern
Nigeria called The New Nigerian. Stories of corruption by the ruling elite were fed to him and others
across the media.
In addition to being agitated by foreign agent provocateurs, Olusegun Obasanjo is believed to have
played an important role in instigating a clique of young Igbo army officers led by Major Kaduna
Nzeogwu, who claimed to be tired of the corrupt system and set out on January 15 th 1966 to
assassinate the northern leadership without a concrete plan to take over and do better. Olusegun
Obasanjo flew in on January 12 th 1966 from London and was picked up Nzeogwu, his close friend.
What exactly transpired is unknown, but it is known that Nzeogwu met with Obasanjo at 8.00am the
morning after the coup at a roundabout to brief him of the previous night events.
The clique that operated in Lagos was directly handled by British and American agents, who were at a
party that paired the coupists with the targeted officers and leaders. The coupists were to tail their
targets home from the party to kill them. The coup plotters tookover three cities and blocked Niger and
Benue bridges until they were overwhelmed two days later by the army led by Aguiyi Ironsi, an Igbo
that had also served the Western Powers in Congo.
The Igbo dominated the ranks of the colonial army that had been converted at independence to the
Nigerian army. The overthrow of the political leadership required the army to take over the
government. This complicated matters, because the Igbo who controlled the army’s leadership corps
headed the new government, and the northerners weren’t going to allow what appeared as an ethnicinspired
coup to stand. They believed that the British were breaking the Indirect Rule arrangement with
the Caliphate.
On the northern streets, waves of reprisal mob attacks were made on the Yoruba and Igbo, whom the
Northerners blamed for killing their leaders. This was also inspired with false news propagated by the
CIA that Northerners were being lynched on southern streets. A few months after the first coup, on July
29 th 1966, the Nigerian military head of state, General Aguyi Ironsi, was assassinated. Murtala
Muhammed led a clique of Northern soldiers that included Sani Abacha, Muhammadu Buhari,
Theophilus Danjuma, Ibrahim Babaginda et al to overturn what they deemed as a tribally motivated
coup. They became head of States and vagabonds in power that were to later hold the nation to ransom
over the next fifty years.
The Nigerian and Ghanaian soldiers involved in the corruption propaganda used for regime change had
been recruited by the Western Powers in Kongo where most of them served on the UN mission to get
rid of Patrice Lumumba.
To head the new government in July 1966, a delicate balance was struck as a twenty-nine year old,
Christian northerner had to be promoted from lieutenant colonel to general to act as the face of the
Northern inspired government. General Yakubu Gowon wasn’t part of the coup nor a full member of
the northern elite, as southerners believed, but from the minority region known as the Middle Belt, the
underbelly of the Muslim north around the Niger-Benue confluence. The Middle Belt became a
political center and force of its own by playing both sides, being a composite of all sides, like the

mulattos in the Americas.
The British made it clear that the North could not rule Nigeria, especially the Southern Protectorate that
included Yoruba and Igbolands, which the British had conquered and directly ruled, therefore they set
out to cause divisions through false media reports. False news reports were carried that southerners
were killing northerners, which provoked reprisal attacks across the North. The governor of the south
Eastern Region, Emeka Ojukwu, complained about the ethnic cleansing and threatened secession,
emboldened by foreign arms backers like France, Portugal and Apartheid South Africa.
The British allowed the French to arm Ojukwu while they placed an arms embargo on Nigeria to
frustrate the Northerners in power in their bid to stop the breakaway Biafra. They made it clear that the
Northerners were not to cross the River Niger in their attempt to win back the Eastern Region. The war
was stalemated for awhile and when the leader of the July 1996 coupists, Murtala Muhammed tried to
cross the River Niger, he was summoned to London and went on leave.
Eventually, the Northern coupists realized that they won’t be allowed to rule a united Nigeria and since
the North couldn’t survive as a landlocked nation they had to succumb to British demands. Once they
succumbed the British armed Olusegun Obasanjo of the Southern Protectorate to get the surrender of
Biafra. The arrangement was that Obasanjo will be the voice and foreman of the British who will lead
the Northern officers. This was to be the arrangement over the next fifty years as Nigeria lost its true
sovereignty.
With the war over in 1970, the African giant faced nation building with the surplus income that the oil
boom provided. A lot of socioeconomic infrastructure was put into place; roads, universities, and
hospitals were built in addition to useless parts of an incomplete industrial complex, as was seen in
Haiti.
Crude oil was mined and exported to the Western world for processing before the finished petroleum
products were reimported into Nigeria. There were eventual concessions by the chemical industry but
only in the form of refineries that could process only crude oil into petrol and not the hundreds of other
chemicals that the rich oil could provide. Moreover, the Western world erected tariffs and barriers
against exporting any processed product. The iron and steel complex was made an even more distant
dream when the Swedes succumbed to Western pressure and deserted the steel complex.
Eventually, the Gowon government decided to go against the Imperialist economic status quo by
implementing an indigenization decree in banking and other major sectors. The government turned to
the Russians to build the Ajaokuta steel complex, which the Russians claimed would involve
restructuring the system from its foundation and cost another fortune. With no other choice, Nigeria
went ahead with the Russian steel complex and continued to prod the Western chemical industry for the
few concessions it was willing to give.
The racist trade barriers were not limited to industrial production but also applied to agriculture. The
US farmers lobby pressured the Nigerian government, like others in the vast African grasslands, to not
grow wheat to feed its people and to rely on US imports. This was similar to the killing of pastoralism
in Mali and other ancient West Africa pastoral regions by white, Western milk producers who were
protected by tariffs and heavily subsidized. The African cotton industry was also decimated by the $4
billion in annual subsidies to the US cotton industry. It was made clear that if Nigeria tried to cultivate
its vast Middle Belt grassland, it would be taken as an unfair trading practice, and sanctions would be
made against its oil exports. The vast population, especially the middle-class cornflake eaters, had to
rely on the West for breakfast, while 300 percent tariffs were placed on African agricultural exports to
the West.

This was not immediately apparent in Nigeria with the skyrocketing oil prices in 1973 caused by
Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan colonel who took power in 1969. The Nigerian economy was revamped
from the three-year civil war, with $50 billion surpluses by 1975, but the reactionary government put
forth no socioeconomic vision and did not know how to move ahead.
The young, inexperienced head of state, Gowon, said ‘money was not the problem but how to spend it’,
while increasing wages more than 100 percent, fueling inflation and poor consumer habits. In
increasing government wages across the board while agricultural export prices fell, Gowon caused the
destruction of the agricultural sector and the bloating of the civil service. Rural dwellers and farmers
left agriculture and migrated to the cities in search of nonexistent white-collar jobs in a Europeanconstrained
manufacturing sector, forcing the government to provide employment in a vast and
inefficient civil service.
When it became apparent that Gowon was bent on breaking the colonial economic status quo, a coup
was carried out against him based on corruption allegations. Muritala Muhammed that led the 1996
counter coup and Olusegun Obasanjo took over from General Gowon in a July 1975 coup.
With the Western markets effectively protected against competition, as was true in Haiti since 1803, the
unfavorable balance of payments and excessive capital flight resulted. To worsen the picture, the
Western bankers started a ‘hustle’ similar to the slavery era, when the Dutch Jews offered any willing
European the full package of sugar technology, slaves, and capital. Now, they offered corrupt officials
loans for projects that were clearly unprofitable, especially with the knowledge that they were
nonfunctional parts of a complete industrial system that would never be fully transferred.
Many of the projects were nonexistent, and the loans were split between the European arranger and the
African official, who shortsightedly thought, ‘It’s the white man’s money’—like his poor cousin in the
US ghetto who got an unsolicited credit card in the post. The US cousin would be blacklisted, while in
Africa, millions were hounded for the mutually irresponsible debt.
Apart from the traditional methods of using the army to collect national debt, the United States and its
allies built a watertight, financial ‘caste system’ through the IMF, the world’s financial police force
controlled by Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan banks. The IMF rated national creditworthiness. Therefore,
all countries except the Communist bloc relied on the IMF credit report to do international business,
especially in shipping and air travel, which the West still monopolized. An IMF blacklisting might lead
to having to use foreign exchange cash reserves or gold for every international transaction, and the
national economy would collapse.
Nigeria, the African giant without a focus, couldn’t challenge white economic supremacy. The military
rulers made a few sluggish steps towards leading blacks throughout the world by generously providing
oil and other aids to a few other black nations battling the oil crisis of the mid-1970s. Nigerians, who
had been silenced in their call for a return to democracy during the war, became vociferous in their calls
for a democratic government when Gowon postponed the promised 1975 election date.
General Murtala Mohammed claimed he intended to stand up to the West and was getting rid of a
corrupt regime. Muritala surrounded himself with known intellectuals in their fields and carried out a
massive purge of the civil service, especially those found to be corrupt or to belong to secret societies.
To increase national control of business and open the economy up to local people, the government
improved upon the weak indigenization laws that Gowon decreed to protect Nigerians, as well as
further increasing infrastructure investment from the oil surplus.
Foreign investment, mainly European and Asian, was limited to varying degrees in sectors like

banking, public utilities, and lower businesses. Retailing earned a complete ban. Established companies
were nationalized and compensated, but some foreigners escaped by organizing fake sales to local
friends who represented them in public while they kept control and ownership.
The redistribution of racial ownership and management gave a substantial number of people the
opportunity to move up the economic ladder, even if the business base was too small to affect a larger
percentage of the population. More states were created out of the existing ones to bring the government
closer to the people and provide employment through rural development and local government
infrastructure. In addition, the progressive government introduced a land reform decree that, although
didn’t go far enough, helped to alleviate land problems faced in rural areas by farmers and reduce citybound
migration.
Being an Afrocentric, progressive government that placed the right intellectuals in specialist
departments, the likes of Professor Bolaji Akinyemi (Director, Nigerian Institute of International
Affairs), made an impact on the international scene, especially in the continuing independence
movement in southern Africa.
The new government upset the Western powers over its opposite stance on the Angola independence
movement. The diplomatically inept government of President Gerald Ford, with Henry Kissinger as
secretary of state and George H W Bush coming into the CIA directorship, inadvertently agitated the
African giant with a form letter addressed to all African heads of state. Like a 2000 US presidential
aspirant that called Africa a country, Ford addressed a letter ‘To All African Heads of State’ as if
addressing mere department heads, which is probably how he regarded them. In the letter, he sternly
instructed them not to vote in support of the MPLA at the upcoming Organization of African Unity
meeting, because the Angola freedom movement was labeled Communist.
The Nigerian government took this as an insult and unnecessary meddling in African matters. Murtala
Muhammed replied in a publicized letter in which he told the United States that Africa was not a
department or a state of the Americas. The External Affairs ministry led by General Joseph Garba went
on a diplomatic offensive among African nations. Some were bribed with free oil and finances, which
led to the Nigerian win over the United States, European, and South African lobby. Not known to take
such defeats lightly from an African nation, the Europeans, through South Africa, backed an invasion
of Angola, but the Cubans were apt to come to Angola’s defense with Soviet weapons in addition to
those supplied by Nigeria.
The West punished Nigeria by tightening US immigration controls and other diplomatic measures
while tightening financial controls. Most importantly, Murtala was soon assassinated in an unsuccessful
coup, which its plotters allegedly confessed to have been briefed by the CIA in a London hotel.
Olusegun Obasanjo, the British neo-imperialist agent, Murtala’s deputy was to take over as head of
state, despite suggestions to pass power to Muhammadu Buhari, the highest ranking Fulani and second
in line to Murtala in the 1966 counter coup. More sinister plans were to be launched, but Jimmy
Carter’s presidential win disrupted the global rightwing agenda.
On the cultural front, Nigeria organized the African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977,
which attracted black musicians and intellectuals from around the world. In one symposium, delegates
could not agree on choosing a common African language, because the Yoruba vehemently disagreed to
the choice of Hausa or Swahili on the basis that they were Afro-Asian and not Original African
languages. In the end, no important decisions were made, but all types of music were showcased.
On the domestic scene, various types of traditional music were being put on wax, although most were
regionalized. Yoruba juju music gained slightly more prominence due to the larger urban population

around the Lagos-Ibadan-Benin triangle. The music with the widest coverage was sung in African
English, mainly from the southeast Igbo or Midwesterners like Victor Uwaifo. Afro-American music
was popular among the Nigerian middle class, who enjoyed jazz, rhythm and blues, disco, and rap, as
well as Caribbean reggae and calypso called ‘hi-life’.
Though it was agreed that Afro-American music owed its origins to West Africa, a continuous cultural
exchange resulted in modernday rap. Ewi was an ancient Yoruba art of social commentary and
documentary, which involved poetic rhyming over a background of musical instruments, especially the
talking drum, in a call-andresponse musical arrangement. This Yoruba art form was modernized and
hybridized by a young musician, Fela Ransome-Kuti, the son of Nigeria’s foremost female suffragist.
He was sent to English universities, where he was introduced to Pan-Africanism in the late 1960s. Fela
returned to Nigeria, singing African folklore songs before turning to social enlightenment and criticism
over a mixture of Yoruba drums and Hausa horns. This clearly distinguished him from the numerous
other musical types in the world.
Fela’s sociopolitical criticism in the 1970s was refreshing, because the old Pan-Africanists were either
dead or had become bedfellows of the imperialists that they had fought and replaced. Fela called his
new music ‘Afro-beats’, although he essentially ‘rapped’ on his albums with an anti-establishment
posture, wearing no shirt and smoking marijuana, with a band of half-naked women ‘gyrating’. He was
accused of promoting the weed-smoking thug culture among Nigerians of the early 1970s, and his
‘shrine’ in Lagos attracted youth from near and far to listen to ‘jams’ or ‘yapping’ nights.
His records sold at home and abroad with black power songs like ‘International Thief Thief (ITT)’,
‘Vagabonds in Power (VIP)’, ‘Army Arrangement’, ‘Sorrow, Tears, and Blood (STB)’, and ‘Follow
Follow’. Fela enlightened the new generation of Africans born during and after the civil rights era and
independence, many of whom were ignorant of the new crimes waged against the common African by
European and American ‘ITTs’ and their local ‘zombie’ armies and ‘follow follow’ elite. The
generation born in the 1950s and 1960s reacted to Fela’s music coupled with the American crime
stories, particularly the James Hadley Chase crime series and espionage stories like Day of the Jackal,
which broke down Western administrative systems, and cult films like The Godfather and Scarface,
with the advent of video players.
Fela not only attacked the neo-imperialist corrupt Nigerian government and global European
imperialism, but social ills like skin bleaching (‘yellow fever’) and the colonial mentality (racial
inferiority complex). The posture cost him financially and physically, because the military government
came down heavily on him, leading to imprisonment and familial loss, but the message was delivered.
The decimation of Fela and his form of meaningful music led to the switch of local tastes to reggae and
rap from the diaspora by the late 1970s.
The expansion of the middle class and income levels augured well for Africans in diaspora. Nigeria was
the largest black market and didn’t need much of a hard sale, especially for new artists. It was an era
that saw Zaire, through Mobutu, sponsor the Ali-Foreman heavyweight boxing fight, which effectively
stabilized the business of boxing in the hands of an African American, Don King.
The seventies saw African American music tours with the likes of the Brothers Johnson, Skyy, and
Whispers. Reggae artists like Jimmy Cliff, Aswad, Black Uhuru, and Third World made financial and
spiritual profit from their tours. From my experience of living on both sides of the Atlantic, the hip-hop
culture took strong roots in Yorubaland from its inception in the mid-1970s, as many middleclass
Yoruba families never missed the TV show Soul Train.
As coastal Yorubas and Igbos became more ‘Afro-Westernized’ by identifying with their cousins in the

Americas in their attitudes and religion, the rise of worldwide Islamic fundamentalism spread to Islamic
northern Nigeria, funded by Libyan and Saudi Arabian oil money. In the south, this resulted in the
worsening of the mental slavery that pervaded the southern Nigeria sociopolitical scene. More took to
the wave of American Pentecostalism to the detriment of original African religions and values.
In the north, the advent of fundamental Islam resulted in the Matasine, the religious killing of
southerners in the north, where Afro-Asian religious leaders incited the largely uneducated masses
against Original African groups from the south. The majority in the north still relied on pastoralism and
regional trading dating back to antiquity, but with the death of the Trans-Saharan route and the
European war of tariffs and subsidies on pastoralism, a larger percentage than the national average were
unemployed and in poverty. Instead of their political and religious elite educating them away from the
outdated, Muslim economic system, they incited jihads to help them gain political power and resources
that only God could hold them accountable for embezzling.
Although African traditional religion was still popular across the country, it took a second place to
Christianity in the south or Islam in the north. Many people still believed in the efficacy of traditional
African spiritual powers but preferred to avoid its negative connotations in the Westernized public,
while seeking its positive effects in private when all else failed.
In the south, the Anglican Church of England and the Catholic Church, which appeared elitist with their
solemn English and Latin services, were challenged by the gradual rise of African revivalist spiritual
churches, which spread upwards from the poorer classes. Ayo Babalola and others introduced the
Aladura, ‘the prayerful’ church, that swept Yorubaland in the 1930s (even though the British tried to
stop him by refusing him land grants and jailing him for six months for practicing a witch-eradication
scheme). New sects continued to grow, and in the 1970s, the Celestial Church grew to include the
Yoruba at home and those who had migrated to the United States during the 1967 civil war. The Igbo
largely remained Catholic, but many crossed over to Anglicism and the US ‘born-again’ Scripture
Union of the late seventies, which preceded Pentecostalism.
After the Nigerian civil war and its recriminations, which were limited by the oil boom that satisfied
most immediate needs, the Igbo again launched the dynamic business drive that earned them the label
‘Jews of Africa’. This aptitude for trade appeared to have generated from a number of factors: the
merchant status of the historical Aro clan, the strong Igbo communal mentality that promoted self-help
and strong business bonds amongst each other, and their presence on both sides of the Niger River,
which allowed them to trade with both the Yoruba and the Hausa. However, unlike the Yoruba women,
who still held the pivotal role in the trade scheme, the riverine terrain that historically required strong
canoeing skills probably prevented Igbo women from developing a larger presence in trade.
During the war, a large number of Igbos migrated to the United States, where they had a business
presence from New York to Florida, but they developed a stronger trade link with Asian manufacturing
economies. Igbo merchants led in importing cheap manufactured goods from Hong Kong, Japan, and
the rest of the Far East.
They tried local import substitution strategies that turned Nnewi into the largest Black-owned
manufacturing center in Africa, but their products were generally frowned upon as inferior by the
miseducated Nigerian elite. Due to the Igbo aptitude for trade, they had the most widespread presence
across Nigeria, cornering the electronics and imported goods markets buoyed by the oil boom and
inflationary tendencies of the government.
Sadly, this was an Indian summer in the short and unforgettable warming up of African freedoms,
which were to be chilled by the right-winged political victories in the United States, United Kingdom

and United Nations.
The French indirectly held on to most of their colonies and, in many cases, organized coups against
governments with Afrocentric populism, like in Togo, Upper Volta, and Central African Republic.
Though some nations didn’t provide essential raw materials, they remained protected markets for
French goods, especially the French arms industry. Although the population of French Africa was
lower than that of Nigeria, its balkanization profited the French arms industry, because it had more
national armies to supply. France’s arms industry became the second-largest arms supplier after the
United States.
In Houphouet-Boigny’s Ivory Coast, the French maintained a visible stranglehold on the economy.
French businessmen continued to trade directly at the source, cutting out African retailers and
middlemen and preventing the development of a significant black middle class. Ivory Coast, with a
population of sixteen million in 1999, was portrayed as a model West African nation that was able to
achieve a steady rise in its GNP, but the increase was accounted for by an increase in French business
that never trickled down to the Africans, except for Houphouet-Boigny’s tiny clique.
Houphouet-Boigny and the French restricted all opposition in Ivory Coast before independence, and the
army was effectively constrained. Unlike its Afrocentric neighbor, Ghana, many years after
‘independence’, Ivory Coast shamelessly permitted the continued existence of white-only areas, bars,
and entertainment in the capital, Abidjan. While all African nations put up a united front against
apartheid, Ivory Coast opened its ports to become the gateway to racist South Africa.
Houphouet-Boigny was reputed to have built an escape corridor leading from the Ivory Coast
presidential palace to the French Embassy—leaving one to wonder what state of mind would let him
think of running from his own people into the hands of oppressors of four centuries.
This trait was also exhibited in sparsely populated but oil-rich Gabon, where President Leon Mba had
proposed the breakup of French Equatorial Africa and the colonists financed his 1960 election
campaign in appreciation of the favor. In 1964 French paratroopers landed in the country within 24
hours to restore him to power after being ousted in a 1964 coup that arose due to his dissolution of the
national assembly, suppression of the press and imposition of a one party rule.
After Mba died in 1967, his vice-president Omar Bongo took over, dissolved all parties and created a
new party under a one party political system. Bongo remained in power, backed by the French, despite
several unsuccessful coups, until he died of cardiac arrest in 2009 in Spain. His son, Ali Bongo, took
over in a rigged election and remains in power, regardless of Gabonese outcries. With a low population
density and high oil revenue, Gabonese have the third highest per capital income in black Africa on
paper, but in reality the people are economically deprived by the French and their imposed puppets.
Guinea, with a population under ten million, was one of the outstanding Francophone countries due to
the Pan-Africanist Toure, who was frozen out of French politics for pushing for the independence of
French Africa and turning to Nkrumah. Toure formed a one-party state and turned to Russia and China
for technical expertise, Guinea being a nation endowed with iron, bauxite, gold, and diamonds.
However, Guinea was unable to develop an industrial base with its small, largely Muslim population
and low literacy rates. Portugal invaded but was repelled by Toure, who ruled until his death in 1984.
His reign was marred by his repression of various foreign-inspired insurgents at home, as he was forced
to cross the ‘unacceptable line’ by Western powers and their arms.
Chad, another French West Africa colony, faced both internal and external insurgents. Its population

was under ten million. Like Nigeria and Sudan, the colonial amalgamation of Afro-Asian Muslims and
indigenous Africans proved again a recipe for trouble between the southern Chad agriculturalists and
the northern, Arab desert pastoralists. The southern agriculturists, mainly Sara people, had been more
easily subjected by the French than the northern cattle nomads, the Toubou, who held out from the
1930s and were on the wrong side of the French.
The French handed over power to the southerners, who had embraced Christianity and embarked upon
a cultural Africanization that irritated the Muslim north into war from 1966. French troops aided the
southern indigenous African government in its fight against the northern Arabic rebels. President
Francois Toumbalaye was assassinated in 1975 by northern Muslims who had formed a government but
couldn’t keep the peace, and the nation slipped into civil war in 1979. When the Muslim government
realized that it was on the verge of losing to the French-backed southerners, it called upon Gaddafi of
Libya next door for help.
Libya, like in other parts of Africa, used its oil wealth to help the Muslim Chad government against its
Christian, southern rivals backed by the West. Gaddafi had more than enough oil money to spend in his
sparsely populated Libyan desert, with under five million people, and used it to sponsor the Muslim
agenda in black Africa, causing upheavals like his Roman Baribari ancestors in ancient Egypt. The
Muslim conflicts remained one of the highest African killers of the last thousand years, as slavery
continued in western and central Sudan.
Niger Republic, the French ex-colony to the north of Nigeria, was especially notorious for its slavery of
original black Africans by northern Tuareg/Arabic populations that came down from the desert to
kidnap. During the 1970s, it enjoyed prosperity from the sale of uranium deposits, but the fall in prices
returned Niger to being one of the world’s poorest nations. The arid country suffered severe drought
from 1968 to 1975 and was saved only by humanitarian aid from the international community. In 1974,
President Hamani Diori, who held office since the 1960 independence, was overthrown by his Chief of
Army Staff Lieutenant Colonel Seyni Kountche.
Senegal was one of the few countries in black Africa that was able to strike a delicate balance,
especially as Christian President Leopold Senghor governed an 85 percent Muslim majority in a
population of fewer than ten million. Despite the fallout with France during independence, it kept close
links with France and the Western world with its own brand of Socialism, which was more like French
Socialism than Russian Socialism. The French and the West could not afford to lose the gateway into
the vast western savannah and made sure to keep their trade links intact, while the industrial barriers
ensured that Senegal remained a French raw materials depot.
The intertwining geography of Senegal and Gambia reflected the stupidity of keeping the colonial
straitjackets left behind by Europeans. In the 1600s, the British had established a trade post on the
Gambia River, which they retained as the French took all the surrounding land. The narrow strips of
land on both sides of the Gambia River became the English-speaking nation of Gambia, right in the
middle of French-speaking Senegal. Senghor couldn’t promote his Pan-African ideals due to lack of
support and logistics, but they showed in Senegal’s dealings with other African nations. He and
Gambia’s President Dawda Jawara briefly unified Senegal and Gambia in 1981, although this later
failed like the earlier unification with Mali.
Mali briefly united its population of five million with Senegal in 1963. It experienced its first coup in
1968. This was the end of its Socialist regime and the beginning of a long, corrupt regime. President
Moussa Traore’s regime swept out the Pan-Africanists in the mid-1960s and resold their nations to the
West.

The Central African Republic was one of the French colonies that turned to the East to overcome
French neocolonisation. Although it exhibited the one-party syndrome common across French Africa, it
became the center of Chinese influence in Africa from 1960 under President David Dacko. In 1965, the
French inspired a coup through Chief of Army Staff Jean Bokassa and chased the Chinese out of the
country.
Like the Uganda Chief of Army Staff Idi Amin, who turned out to be a Western embarrassment after
being aided to power, Bokassa was a madman who thought that he was Napoleon. He called himself
Emperor Bokassa while killing his people en mass and squandering their money. Nevertheless, he was
courted by French presidents and their elite. Despite the dirty money the French received, they
eventually had to dispose him in 1979, partly because of the international embarrassment that he
caused, parading around and calling himself an emperor.
Coups and countercoups racked Nigeria’s western Francophone neighbor, Dahomey, the former slavetrading
capital that was renamed Benin in 1975. The governments kept switching between corrupt pro-
French governments and confused Marxists regimes even though the country less than two hundred
kilometers wide was too small to develop a fully industrialized economy (its population was under five
million in the 1970s). Colonel Usman Kerekou took power in 1972 and two years later declared a
Marxist Socialist state, which didn’t change its dependence on France. It was better suited to be a
service economy to its giant neighbor, Nigeria, as its free ports of trade were used to import and
smuggle goods into and out of Nigeria.
Kerekou’s Benin was like French Congo, also with a population of fewer than three million, situated
beside the major population center of Belgian Congo-Kinshasa. In 1963, labor strikes led to the
overthrow of the pro-French government, and the West labeled the new government under Denis
Sassou-Nguesso Marxist. Although the Russians and Chinese vied for political influence, the French
still dominated the economy, because French Congo, like Benin, continued spending the CFA franc,
and its public utilities remained under French control. The Congo-Brazzaville economy wasn’t geared
towards servicing the large population center of Belgian CongoKinshasa.
Cameroon, the German-turned-French colony located on the ancient migration route from Nigeria, was
given independence while there was an ongoing guerrilla war waged by UPC, a popular radical banned
by the French in 1955. The guerrilla war did not end till 1971. It claimed the life of the leader of UPC
and the sociopolitical life of Cameroon, as President Ahmadi Ahidjo suppressed all political freedoms
and turned his party into the sole legal party in 1966.
Ahidjo’s suppression continued after the defeat of UPC and the 1971 end of the guerrilla war. In 1982
he was wrongly diagnosed with a terminal disease and had to stand down for Paul Biya, with the hope
of continuing to control from behind the scenes. Within a year they fell out, as Biya consolidated
power, and Ahidjo was exiled to France, where he plotted unsuccessful coups in Cameroon against
Biya. Biya sentenced Ahidjo to death in absentia, but he died of a heart attack in Senegal in 1989.
Biya removed Ahidjo’s loyalists from power but continued Ahidjo’s economic liberalization policies
and high level of corruption. One of the more populous French colonies, with a population of 15.8
million in 1999, Cameroon remained close to France, and the stability allowed it moderate economic
development but not economic independence from France.
Togo, another former German-turned-French colony located between Benin and Ghana, saw its
legitimate government swept from power by a pro-French corrupt government in 1967, led by President
Gnassingbe Eyadema, who retained power through unsavory means until his death, similar to Benin’s
Kerekou.

If most French-speaking African nations appeared to be in a mess because of the vagabonds in power,
they were not as bad as metal-rich Belgian Congo, the second-most populous indigenous African
nation. Zaire, with a population of fifty-three million in 1999, was one of three black African nations
with more Africans than the United States. However, apart from corruption and neocolonisation,
Belgian Congo lacked competent manpower on all levels of government.
Belgium had never contemplated indirect rule, not to mention independence, which was reflected by its
educational policy that provided only for a few primary schools. While newly independent countries
like Nigeria and Ghana had thousands of university graduates, and Kenya and Uganda had a few
hundred, other parts of Africa had been deprived by colonists, leaving Tanzania with only twelve and
Zaire with none. * This had an immense negative effect. There was no large, educated middle class to
challenge the United States/Belgian military imposition in the person of Mobutu, who renamed Belgian
Congo as Zaire.
* Oliver, Africa Since 1800, 281.
Apart from the low skills level of the population, and the way Zaire had been bastardised by King
Leopold for his concession companies, it was unlikely that even a large middle class could have done
anything other than bring the 1998 bloodbath closer. Irrespective of a capable Lumumba being aided by
Nkrumah and other Africans, the United States and Belgium came in with military force as the Union
Miniere Concessionaire Company engineered the secession of the copper-rich Katanga province.
Mobutu, the ignorant soldier who was put in charge, had no chance of successfully wrestling power
from the West, even if he were so inclined. He joined in the continued fleecing of the Congo basin and
openly boasted of being one of the richest men in the world. Unlike many other African nations,
Mobutu never had a concerted, massive programme of building schools, hospitals, roads, and other
social infrastructure despite the riches of the Congo basin.
He tried to attain the industrial stage, unreachable even by more skilled African nations, by paying and
borrowing for the construction of a hydroelectric plant, a copper-smelting plant, and an iron and steel
complex. After two decades of delays, like those plaguing the entire continent, the copper-smelting
plant remained incomplete, as its raw copper continued to be exported. The steel complex never
produced the full array of iron products, especially the types useful for industrialization. Even if the
copper plant had been completed, there was a barrier in the West against African-processed products,
which showed that the West was siphoning Zaire’s wealth knowing full well that the expensive projects
were duds.
To compound Congo-Kinshasa’s woes, raw copper prices fell, and the economy faltered from the mid-
1970s. The deficient social services that the Belgians had provided ran down with no money or local
personnel to run the facilities, while the foreign staff in place before independence left the country as
everything ground to a halt. Nevertheless, the US conglomerate Citibank, British Morgan Grenfell, and
French Societe Generale bankers kept awarding Mobutu loans that they split amongst each other and
saved in European banks, while digging future Zairians into a debt trap. It got to a stage that Mobutu
had to lend his country some of the money that he had stolen and kept in Citibank and the others!
In 1977, when Angola-backed Kongolese insurgents tried to take the copper-rich Katanga province
from Mobutu without the support of the concessionaire companies, the West threw military support
behind Mobutu’s undisciplined army, even though it was being overrun. Because the Kongos extended
into Angola, they were apt to pick up the spirit of the African liberation wars in Angola, where they
received training from the Cubans. However, the West ensured that Mobutu remained firmly in power

with all the financial and military support he required.
A similar situation arose on Zaire’s eastern borders in the former British colony of Uganda. The
sycophantic relationship between the British colonists and the Buganda kingdom created immense
problems in the dysfunctional political system that evolved. With a 1999 population of twenty-four
million, Uganda was made up of indigenous Africans in the more densely populated south and
AfroAsian Muslims in the north. At independence in 1963, Obote, who had been in the forefront of the
independence movement, became the prime minister, while the Buganda royalty was made the
constitutional monarch in a land of many kingdoms where Bugandas accounted for only 16% of the
national population.
This system was beneficial only to the Buganda monarchy, which was placed there by the British to
undermine the new Afrocentric government. In 1967, Obote used the army to retire the monarchy from
government, and he set about implementing a more realistic central government, which didn’t go down
well with the British. By 1971, the British had had enough. They inspired his semiliterate Muslim army
commander, Idi Amin Dada, to overthrow Obote’s ‘wayward’ government.
Amin played along, but problems developed that made a joke of the British selection of a mere armed
thug over Uganda’s intellectuals. A problematic, incomplete economy coupled with the oil crisis
demanded tough economic measures, which Amin felt were unfair and blamed on the British and
Indian business class. Unfortunately for the British, Gaddafi was spreading his oil dollars around and
had found a friend in his fellow Muslim, Amin.
Uganda had a relatively influential Indian population, like in other British colonies of South Africa,
Trinidad, and Guyana (where the British had imported a large number of Indians to augment labor
shortages). The Indians were given more freedom and were more cohesive as an immigrant group than
black Africans and therefore stepped into the intermediate business class. This fact built resentment
against the British and their ‘imported’ friends, who became first- and second-class citizens while the
‘sons of the soil’ remained at the bottom of colonial society. When the Ugandans fell out with the
British and wanted to send them packing, being that there were only a few British on the ground in
Uganda, the semiliterate Amin picked on their closest allies.
In many newly independent African nations, Indians were excluded from business sectors that they
controlled from colonial times, which might have also influenced Amin’s decision. Elsewhere it was
done in a legal and civilized manner through nationalization/localization laws with appropriate
compensation.
In addition to throwing out the British Indians, Amin, being a Muslim, picked on the church, which he
believed was subversive. He imprisoned and killed a few church clergy, which aroused international
condemnation as the Western media exaggerated and overplayed the ‘tape’. To avoid a military coup,
Amin negated all those who could be instigated against him, both in the military and political arenas,
and he could have stayed in power forever. Like the African saying, ‘those who the Gods want to kill,
they first make mad’, Amin, in his contorted thinking, attacked neighboring Tanzania, a more populous
nation. The ex-Ugandan president, Obote, had fled to Nyerere’s Tanzania when Amin overthrew him
and Amin had accused the Tanzanians of aiding Obote factions across the border, which he now
decided to stop.
Nyerere gave Amin a heavy routing all the way to the capital in Kampala in April 1979. This was not
only due to a better equipped and disciplined Tanzanian army but also because the Tanzanians came
through the traditional south, which was against Amin’s northern Muslims. Power remained in the
north as Obote, a Christian, was reinstalled through elections conducted by the conquering Tanzanians.

The West resorted to arming the south against Obote, their old enemy who they had previously backed
Amin to overthrow.
The north-south strife witnessed in Uganda could not compare in magnitude or duration to that of
Sudan, the ex-British colony sharing its northern borders. Sudan was the largest land territory in black
Africa, although most of its population (thirty-six million in 1999) lived on the Nile, like Egypt to its
north. The war in Sudan was a continuation of the Afro-Asian aggression that saw indigenous Africans
pushed south from their ancient Egypt homeland. Unfortunately for present-day Africans, the British
cut them out from the main body of Africans to the south and joined them with the Arabs extending
south from Egypt.
By 1967, the Anya Nya under Colonel John Garang demanded a complete secession of the southern
section from the majority Islamic north, but their numbers were too small to effectively challenge the
Arabs. The Arabic Sudanese government held tightly onto the southern towns, while the Anya Nya
carried out its resistance from the countryside. The Muslim, Afro-Asian slave traders continued to
kidnap Original Africans from the south while the Islamic government conveniently looked away. It
should be noted that the slave trade was also continuing in Mauritania, which was on the same latitude
in the desert to the far west.
The south’s ability to fight wars had been limited by the British. During colonization, they built most of
the socioeconomic infrastructure in the north, because the Muslims provided a unified front and culture
that they easily understood. The northern Arab rulers shared the imperialistic objective of dispossessing
the Original Africans of their land and labor. Like in other parts of the Arab world, and also the
Nigerian Sokoto caliphate, it was much easier for the British to deal with oppressive regimes that owed
nothing to the land and people.
Northern soldiers committed genocide in Juba and massacred a church congregation in Wau, which led
to a heightening of hostilities with hundreds of thousands displaced. In 1969, General Gaafar Nimeiri
led a coup and opened negotiations with the help of Haile Selassie, which led to the end of the first
phase of the civil war in 1972. The peace agreement ensured a federation that gave the south its
autonomy, allowing the free practice of African and Christian religions and recognizing English instead
of Arabic as its official language. It was a short respite from the millennia-long Islamic fundamentalism
and aggression that rose in the next decade.
Selassie was able to broker the peace in Sudan on his western borders, but he was not able to extend the
peace to his eastern and northern borders, where Muslim Somalis clamored for the unification of all
Somalis into one Muslim nation. Most important to the AfroAsian Muslim Somalis was the land
claimed by the Christian Selassie during the Christian European land grab, which he undertook to
greatly extend the borders of ancient Ethiopia. Even after the Italians were chased out, the British
handed over the Ogaden province to their Ethiopian allies instead of keeping it as part of British
Somaliland and avoiding the gruesome war that ensued after independence. The Somalis wanted back
the historically important Ogaden province in eastern Ethiopia, which served as grazing ground for
Somali herdsmen.
Somalis, seven million in number in 1999, took on a more populated Ethiopia, which had nine times
their population. This was done with the help of the Russians until Selassie was overthrown and the
West switched sides. Student demonstrations, strikes, and an army mutiny brought about the end of the
Solomonic dynasty. Some quarters claimed that Selassie’s overthrow was inspired by the Russians, but
it had popular support as the masses were seen rejoicing in the streets after the fall of the detached
emperor. In a callous display of cold-blooded economics regardless of ideologies, Western arms dealers
switched supply of weapons from Ethiopia to Somali.

The new government in the second-most populous black African nation faced serious embattlement
from both Eritrea and Somali. Addis Ababa, the capital of the Organization of African Unity (OAU),
fell to a reign of terror. Hundreds of thousands fell as the death merchants fed on the blood let out from
Africa’s horn. Africa was drained through the false promises of industrialization or war, supported by
dubious loans from New York and London bankers or the Kremlin.
In 1977, with Brigadier Mengistu Haile Mariam in power, the Russians pumped $12 billion in arms and
military aid into Ethiopia, which served as a training ground for South African freedom fighters. This
Soviet military infusion was to defeat and rid the Somalis of Ogaden but at a terrible cost to be suffered
in the near future. The defeat of the Somali under Siad Barre led to an increase infusion of American
arms, which only served to drag down both countries. Dumping arms into the Horn of Africa for jobs
and profit in the United States and Russia led to the disintegration of the African nations. The warlords
who were created challenged the central authority for power, reminiscent of the slavery wars waged
across Yorubaland.
To the south of the Horn of Africa was Kenya. After the initial Somali claims and attacks in northern
Kenya were crushed, Kenyans enjoyed a relatively sedate political life. Jomo Kenyatta, the Kikuyu
nationalist leader who became the first president, weakened the army and opposition party as he held
onto power for life. Kenya was the closest British ex-colony to the French Ivory Coast example of the
perfect ex-colony. The colonial educational system adopted by the British in East Africa had an
indelible effect on the African sociopolitical culture, whereby the education of the majority indigenous
Africans was left in the hands of the minority, coastal Afro-Asian Swahili merchant class.
Despite East Africa being poorer than West Africa, Swahili indoctrination appeared to have taken the
fire out of the African nationalism evident in other black nations. This was especially evident in Kenya,
with a population of thirty million in 1999. In Uganda, the kingdoms of Buganda and Bunyoro, and the
Muslim north, made political life more challenging, and Nyerere and his African Socialism pervaded
the Tanzanian national identity.
Failing to get the key to heavy industrialization from the West, unlike other African nations that turned
to the East for technical aid, the Kenyan government turned its safari game reserves into moneymakers
through tourism. It settled for being the world’s animal kingdom, happy to portray the ‘Tarzan
backwardness’ of Africa wherein the animals were the most important players. Despite the fact that
Kenya made up a small fraction of Africa and its people, the international media reinforced the racist
view of all Africa as a continent of lions and elephants where Africans, wearing only animal skins,
chased animals around the plains. Enlightened Africans became infuriated by the stereotype bred across
the world, especially from Africans in diaspora.
Kenya remained close to the British colonial masters and Asians by leaving them in control of most
local businesses and industry. This made it one of the few nations in Africa that was given a free
immigration access to Europe and America, even though its processed goods were not.
Kenya experienced a moderate growth of its light industry and a stable political life until 1975, when
Kenyatta was accused of corruption and oppression by the opposition, which caused political turmoil.
The declining prices of its agricultural products like coffee, and the rising prices of its oil imports,
shook the economy in the late 1970s. Kenyatta died in office in 1978, and power was handed over to
his vice president, Arap Moi, who also intended to rule for life.
Tanzania’s Nyerere implemented a one-party system but showed a genuine commitment to the
economic development of the former German-turned-British colony, despite its natural aridity. Nyerere
turned to what he called African Socialism, which was required to mobilize and redistribute income and

production factories, without the confrontational multiparty system whose divisiveness was viewed as
too expensive for the poor, new nation. He implemented a massive education system along the colonial
Swahili lines but didn’t leave the concentration of business in the hands of Europeans and Asians.
Tanzania, with thirty-five million people in 1999, could not get a foot on the ladder of industrialization,
which, apart from European barriers, was due to the control that it insisted on having on the economy
and flight of foreign capital. Tanzania’s main agricultural exports were sisal, coffee, and cotton, while
its mineral exports were tin and phosphates, whose fall in export prices in the mid-1970s and rise in oil
imports led to increased debt.
The other former German colonies to the northwest of Tanzania, landlocked Rwanda and Burundi,
were not fortunate to enjoy a stable political life like Tanzania. Instead of Britain, Belgium took over
from the Germans and mishandled them, as they had in neighboring Zaire, by not leaving and thus
promoting and arming dissent. Rwanda was the most troubled. The Hutu overthrow of the Tutsi
minority resulted in sporadic ethnic clashes launched from Zaire. The West was more in favor of the
Tutsi minorities but couldn’t unseat the Rwandan Hutu throughout the sixties and seventies.
Like in Uganda, the Burundi Tutsi monarchy retained power by becoming a constitutional monarchy. It
was overthrown in 1966 by its Tutsi Prime Minister Michel Micombero, who declared himself
president and retained the Tutsi minority rule. An unsuccessful Hutu rebellion left 10,000 Tutsi and
150,000 Hutu dead, with another 100,000 Hutu fleeing east to Tanzania as ethnic clashes continued.
South of the Rift Valley, northern Rhodesia was renamed Zambia after independence in 1964 under
Kenneth Kaunda. It appeared to be the most impressive nation with a peaceful political atmosphere and
growing economy. The one-party state of Kaunda had strained relations with its twin sister, southern
Rhodesia, after its white regime made a unilateral declaration of independence and its black
independence movement relocated to the Zambian capital, Lusaka. Zambia, being landlocked, was
reliant on the surrounding whiteminority governments, which it fraternized with and was corrupted by.
In a balanced approach to economic development and independence, with copper being the mainstay of
the Zambian economy, the government took 51 percent of the shares of the foreign mining companies
in the mineral-rich Zambezi-Congo watershed area. Despite the fact that its population was under ten
million in 1999, Zambia tried unsuccessfully to launch an industrialization drive to strengthen an
economy that, apart from small processing industries, remained reliant on copper exports. Like
elsewhere, the crash in commodity prices, increase in oil prices, and exploitative foreign loans for
dodgy industrialization projects and oil caused economic decline.
Nyasaland, renamed Malawi, was one of the three nations in the colonial, multiracial Central African
Federation whose independence with Zambia led to the breakup of the federation. Dr. Hastings Banda
kept a one-party state in the poorer neighbor of the Federation. Reliance on tea and tobacco for export
income wasn’t enough to sustain the population of under ten million during the best of times.
Botswana, to the south of Zambia, received its independence from the British in 1966. It was in a more
arid region, with a population of under a million, that largely left the economy and the mining of its
valuable resources to the Europeans.
Despite the economic problems of Zambia and Malawi, they were better off than the Africans in the
surrounding coastal nations of Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia, and South Africa. After the Portuguese
brutally crushed the 1960s rebellions in their African colonies, the resistance movements waned before
Mozambique provided ‘the straw that broke the back’ of the Portuguese colonists.

The Frente de Libertacao de Mozambique (Mozambique Liberation Front or FRELIMO), led by
Eduardo Mondlane, relaunched from Tanzania where most of the dissidents had fled. It laboriously
worked its way south without much effect until it got to the Tete region, where the Portuguese
government and South Africa were building the world’s fifth-largest hydroelectric dam to supply the
region.
Mondlane planned to sabotage the plant but was killed by a letter bomb. His successor, FRELIMO
army commander Samora Machel, carried on and sabotaged the railroads linking Mozambique and
Rhodesia. The sabotage became so disruptive that the Portuguese, in March 1974, sent an additional ten
thousand soldiers to join the sixty thousand soldiers they sent to quell the rebellions in their three
continental African colonies.
This put a tremendous military cost burden on poor Portugal, which provoked a military coup by those
who believed that Portugal should discard its colonial pipe dreams of some faraway, arid, African land
and concentrate on growth within the new European Union. The Portuguese monarch was overthrown
in April 1974 and the new rulers announced that they would grant the African colonies some form of
self-rule.
True to their word, Portugal’s only West Africa colony, GuineaBissau, became independent a few
months afterwards, but Angola and Mozambique were more complicated. In Mozambique, although the
Portuguese tried to delay with a promise of referendum, the social unrest made them give up the
territory in June 1975. Samora Machel became the first president of Mozambique. He governed along
Socialist lines, although he maintained all the foreign agreements with the country’s neighbors.
Mozambique became the launching pad for Rhodesian freedom fighters. This earned it attacks and raids
from the white governments of Rhodesia and later South Africa. The white minority governments
trained a counterrevolutionary movement called the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO),
which launched disruptive attacks within Mozambique but fizzled out without much local support.
Angola proved the most difficult with the presence of three movements that split the country into areas
of influence with no hope of unifying when the pre-independence provincial government collapsed a
few months before the November 1975 independence date. The MPLA was the only authentic
movement, and it was backed by Nigeria and Cuba, while Savimbi’s National Union for the Total
Independence of Angola (UNITA) and FNLA were backed by South Africa and the West. The backing
of the OAU led by Nigeria and the arrival of Cuban troops swung the conflict in favor of the MPLA,
which became the recognized Angolan government, with the northern FNLA and southern UNITA
defeated. South Africa and the West continued supporting UNITA, leading to a thirty-year war in
southern Angola. The African-recognized MPLA, despite being Marxist, honored its foreign
agreements, even with the US Gulf Oil company prospecting for oil on its shores.
Following white Rhodesia’s 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence, the UN, inspired by free
African nations, issued sanctions that were openly flouted. The United States bought its chrome for
military use and supplied South Africa with oil and everything else. The UN sanctions made Rhodesia
more industrialized through its import substitution programme that was aided by the Western world.
The negotiations between 1966 and 1969 achieved nothing, and in 1969, the white electorate accepted a
new constitution with more severe segregation practices.
From 1967 to 1970, guerrilla attacks from Zambia were launched by the Zimbabwe African People’s
Union (ZAPU) and the ANC into the Zambezi valley. From 1972, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African
National Union (ZANU) started an offensive from FRELIMO’s enclaves in the Tete region of
Mozambique, which intensified with Mozambique’s independence. The white minority government’s

reprisals became more brutal as the guerrilla attacks intensified.
By 1974, the black movement parties had regular armies with some members trained by Cubans and
Ethiopia—the Zimbabwe Independence People’s Army (ZIPA) and Zimbabwe African National
Liberation Army (ZANLA). In 1975, Mugabe moved to Mozambique to organize the army with
Michel’s help, and by 1976, the guerrilla activities had escalated into war. By 1979, the black armies
had nearly progressed to the Rhodesian capital of Salisbury.
The menacing progress of the black freedom fighters made the whites realize that they needed another
approach, which was to forget about fighting black majority rule and find a way of diluting the freedom
by ‘placing a friendly Negro in power’. The ‘friendly Negro’ decided upon was Bishop Abel
Muzorewa. In 1978, a fraudulent election was arranged from which he emerged victorious but
unrecognized by the freedom fighters and African nations.
Nigeria clashed with the British and threatened to nationalize British Petroleum in Nigeria and give its
assets to the black movement. The British, who had politically but not economically disengaged from
the white regime’s atrocities, took over Rhodesia to have a future say in the black government of
Rhodesia. It was a ‘good cop, bad cop’ scenario.
Another election was called for an organized handover before the African ‘rebels’ forcefully took over.
To their surprise, Mugabe’s Marxist party won the election even though he was forced to drop some of
his hardline measures, especially the nationalization of assets and the redistribution of land. Knowing
that the system was patently unfair and unsustainable (whites were 1 percent of the population but held
70 percent of the land), the British agreed to pay compensation to the white farmers. They failed to
keep their promise, and the unjust land distribution continued for another two decades.
The South African freedom movement was violently crushed by the Apartheid government that
resorted to killing and jailing its leaders at the turn of the Sixties decade. Luckily, the teenagers
smuggled out of the country were to provide the lifeline to the liberation movement.
From the beginning of Black Internationalism and PanAfricanism in the early 1900s, London had
presented the opportunity to present a global front at the doorstep of the British imperialists, which
couldn’t be ignored or wished away being the hub of international media.
Nineteen year old Xhosa, Thabo Mbeki, was to identify the significance of London and use it to fight a
fight a media war intended to highlight the injustices of apartheid and bring international pressure on
the racist South African government. After the banning of ANC, Mbeki and a group of comrades were
smuggled out in a minibus disguise as a football team through Botswana, from where to Tanzania.
Mbeki was accompanied by Kenneth Kaunda to London where he was to stay with Oliver Tambo,
ANC’s new leader, and study in University of Sussex.
Mbeki, the born rebel, was elected in February 1963 into the Student Union Government within three
months of admission into University of Sussex. Barely five months later, on July 11 th 1963, the ANC
High Command was caught at Rivonia and his father was one of those charged for treason, with
retroactive laws quickly enacted to sentence them to death.
Mbeki mobilized support by leading a successful motion in the Student Union, which resulted in
hundreds of signatures from students and lecturers, and a protest march to Downing Street. From
Downing Street they moved to the South African embassy, where they attracted the attention of the
international media.
In April 1964, Mbeki appeared with a delegation to the United Nations Special Committee against

Apartheid to plead for his father’s life. The international attention and pressure led the apartheid
government to spare their lives, making Mbeki realizing the immense power of London as a center of
Black internationalism and international media.
Mbeki sponsored a 24hr vigil at Brighton’s clock tower against Ian Smith’s 1966 Unilateral Declaration
of Independence in Zimbabwe. In London, working for ANC Mbeki fully developed into his role
ascribed by destiny to be a born rebel, as he carried various protests ranging from school fees to anti-
Vietnam, nuclear disarmament, solidarity struggles with peoples of Spain, Zimbabwe, Iraq, Iran,
Cyprus, Portuguese Africa etc.
After his Masters degree in Economics, ANC sent Mbeki to attend military training and leadership in
Moscow, where he also excelled. In 1970, at age 28, he became the youngest member and first African
in the South African Communist Party hierarchy.
At home, the movement experienced a lull after the jailing of Mandela and other ANC leaders. A new
movement developed in 1969 among black students led by Steve Biko. He formed the South African
Students Organization (SASO), which was followed by a new black party, the Black People’s
Convention (BPC).
In April 1971, Mbeki started on the long life-defining journey to directly confront and defeat apartheid
beast that still kept his father in jail and his people in slavery. He left for Lusaka with Oliver Tambo,
initially as the assistant secretary of ANC’s Revolutionary Council, setting up bases, recruiting and
arming fighters in Lusaka, Botswana and Swaziland. He was arrested with Jacob Zuma in Swaziland,
but they were lucky to escaped deportation to South Africa. He also struck an agreement with Robert
Mugabe to allow arms pass through Zimbabwe.
Whites enjoyed immense economic development, the second fastest growth in world from 1945 to
1970, and one of the world’s highest standards of living gleaned from the country’s rich resources and
cheap black labor.
Apart from organizing militant liberation struggles, Thabo Mbeki made use of his ability to court
support of the international media and fellow African with Pan-African aspirations. Thabo Mbeki
moved to Nigeria in the mid-Seventies and was lucky to court the new leaders in Nigeria, who provided
diplomatic, financial and military support. This made ANC overshadow PAC as the leading liberation
movement in South Africa.
Nigeria led African nations to focus international pressure on the South African government to
dismantle apartheid and alleviate the squalid conditions in which Africans lived. Many blacks were
relocated to one of the ten bantustans, black homelands, that the white government created in its
separate development policy of apartheid. This crammed 80 percent of the population into 10 percent of
the land.
The economy experienced a downturn in the mid-1970s due to oil prices and international sanctions
and pressures to improve the wages and conditions of black workers. The bantustans were given
autonomy, which was to lead to independence on the small parcel of arid lands ascribed to each
subethnic group. This was an absurd policy, because there were more blacks than whites in the
designated white areas outside the bantustans, and, at any time, there were more supposed natives of
the bantustans living permanently outside its borders. Chief Buthelezi of Kwazulu was the first to reject
autonomy before being followed by seven other heads of bantustans. The puppet leaders of Transkei
and Bophuthatswana bantustans who accepted autonomy were granted independence in 1976 and 1978,
respectively, but were refused recognition by the African nations, the OAU, and the UN.

The separate development extended to education as an average of R 664 was spent on white children,
while R42 was spent on black children. To isolate and worsen the education of black Africans, a law
was introduced to make Afrikaans (Africanized Dutch) the teaching language in secondary schools,
which led to an outbreak of violent resistance that lasted two years. The white minority regime of B. J.
Vorster brutally came down on blacks, leaving hundreds dead and arresting its leaders, including the
SASO leader, Biko, who was killed in government custody.
As it became apparent that blacks were destined to rule in their own land, the white regime became
even more brutal, like the 1950s in the American South. They developed a brutal, secret police that was
armed to the teeth. They also developed military capabilities, including nuclear, in response to the fear
of attack from African nations. Nigeria had threatened to back the Africans if war was the only means
left. By the end of the seventies, the apartheid government realized that it had to find a way to diffuse
the situation by finding a ‘friendly Negro’ to take over, one who wouldn’t nationalize the gold and
diamond mines as insisted upon by the ANC leadership. A solution couldn’t be found, and the situation
deteriorated.
South Africa continued to hold onto the former German colony to its northwest, South West Africa. It
had been mandated to South Africa by the League of Nations for its role in World War I, but the UN
reversed the mandate in 1966 and was upheld by the international court in 1971. South Africa
disregarded the rulings and international pressure. Covertly supported by the United States, it brutally
crushed a rebellion, set up bantustans, and continued the repression through the 1980s.

Chapter 20: Black Power Overpowered
African Americans restricted economically, culturally, and sometimes physically (1965–1980)
Afro-Brazilians were also affected by the mid-1960s wave of political armed robberies designed to
negate the recently achieved political rights of Afrocentric nations; this goes a long way to show that it
was a concerted, worldwide effort. Through the 1940s and 1950s, Nascimento, the leader of the black
movement, including TEN and other civil rights bodies, inspired Africans to use the ballot box as a
weapon in their struggle.
With the crash in coffee and other commodity prices, Brazilians under President Joao Goulart tried to
introduce popular socioeconomic reforms that the Rockefeller Citibank bankers detested. Afro-
Brazilians’ slow but apparent socioeconomic progress was blocked by a right-wing military coup in
1964, led by Castelo Branco. He was succeeded in 1968 by President Costa Silva before General
Emilio Medici took over and began a long reign of corruption supported by irresponsible foreign
lenders and domestic repression.
Under the new regime, no rights were guaranteed, and black and civil rights advocates were branded
subversive. The Catholic Church and police used various means to suppress artistic and cultural
expressions that went against the national image of whiteness. In 1969, the repressive regime, in denial
of the apparent racism in Brazil, told its military-police agency to target ‘the campaign conducted
through the press and television… of international studies on racial discrimination, with the vision of
creating new areas of friction and dissatisfaction with the regime and the constituted authorities’. * The
military regime promoted nationalism along technocratic, scientific, and other professional lines, which
entailed the establishment of national research institutions. *
The legendary Afro-Brazilian civil rights leader, Abdias do Nascimento, was forced into exile where he
remained from 1968 to 1980, lecturing in major universities like the University of Ife, Nigeria and
playing an active role in Pan-Africanism across the globe.
* Thales de Azevedo, Democracia Racial: Ideologia e Realidade (Petropolis:Editoria, 1975) pg53.
* Minority Rights Group International Report Afro-Brazilians: Time for Recognition, 11.
Florestan Fernandes was the most prominent voice of the independent advocates from the academia. In
a study sponsored to authenticate Gilberto Feyre’s diagnosis of Afro-Brazilian socioeconomic existence
in his 1933 Masters and Slaves (CasaGrande and Senzala), Professor Fernandes was chosen as a
research partner, who in turn included his student Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who later became
president.
In his research about ‘The Integration of Blacks into the Class Society’(1966), Fernandes denounced
Feyre’s analysis and the ideology of racial democracy for concealing a conflict between races and
classes. He exposed in a dramatic manner the way racial discrimination and exclusion worked
throughout Brazil. He published the classic work on race relations in Brazil that used social science
research methods to depict historic and continuing discrimination against Afro-Brazilians.
Fernandes pointed out that black Brazilians were handicapped because of the debasement of history,
pauperism, and isolation. He argued that Brazil’s primary prejudice was the belief that there was no

prejudice. Fernandes’s study had widespread resonance because the industrialization efforts
concentrated in Brazil’s largest city left out the vast numbers of Africans in the Sao Paulo favelas, as it
did in favelas across urbanized Brazil.
Fernandes, Cardoso and other academicians were sacked and stopped from lecturing by the army.
Fernandes went on a brief selfexile to Canada before returning in 1973 to earn a living. He refused to
join other academicians like Cardoso that had formed CEBRAP, a think tank being funded by the Ford
Foundation, on the grounds that he had no wish to work with military-industrialists that overthrew
Brazil’s democracy.
Regardless, the repression continued as the economy experienced a boom and rapid industrialization in
pockets of European areas. This was sponsored by US banks, led by Citibank, which had surpassed the
British banks after World War 1. Following the US-inspired 1964 coup and the
‘liberalization’/corruption of the economy, US banks rapidly notched up Brazils’ foreign debt through
puppet governments.
The corrupt regimes entered into dubious loan agreements with foreign banks, especially Citibank.
Some financed friendly, whiteowned industries, while the rest went into the pockets of the military
rulers and their sponsors. Brazil’s vast iron reserves were put into use in steel mills, car assembly
plants, and other parts of the industrial complex, which also took advantage of the huge, cheap labor
market. It looked good as national income figures rose, but the vast majority of blacks, 47 percent of
Brazilians, didn’t feel the industrialization and economic growth. A huge chunk of Brazil’s domestic
market was marginalized, while tariff restrictions to the West negated any hope of balancing the books
with export sales.
By the mid-seventies, the masses who had hardly enjoyed any benefit from the military-industrialist
relationship had to pay when the boom collapsed due to the fall in the commodity prices of cocoa,
rubber, and coffee, coupled with rising oil prices and capital flight. In addition to the extremely high
debt repayment-to-income ratio, which deprived Brazil of scarce foreign exchange, European
multinationals drained the foreign reserves with repatriation of profits, legally and illegally. Despite the
stringent foreign exchange controls, the capital flight was effected through false accounting practices
like overbilling foreign services and materials through sister companies in the United States and
Europe. This and other practices deprived the nation of taxes and cumulative investment.
In spite of the downturn in the pace of industrialization and job creation in the cities in the midseventies,
the oppressive situation in the rural areas led to more than thirty million people migrating to
the cities between 1970 and 1990. Many rural plantations closed due to poor export prices. Afro-
Brazilians and American Indians were prevented from peasant farming the huge tracts of uncultivated
land, leaving the rural people no choice but to move to the urban, hillside slums.
Many of the rural dwellers who refused to relocate to urban slums damned the consequences and
became squatter farmers, tilling the uncultivated land illegally. The police were apt to forcefully evict
and kill the squatter farmers and those living in the historical quilombos and Indian villages that
remained outside the realm of Portuguese Brazil.
The repressive nature of the military regime became even more sickening with the murder of ‘street
kids’—the mostly homeless, hungry, black children who roamed the streets in search of food and ended
up stealing. In their so-called ‘street cleaning exercises’, children were given ‘instant justice’ by being
shot on the spot where they were caught or were taken to youth detention centers, where they were
viciously tortured and sometimes killed.

The torture culture was hard to break, because the corporal punishment mentality inherited from the
slave era persisted in the national psyche, which made it right to ‘flog senses into the dumb, obstinate
Negro’. A century after the abolition of slavery, there were still a few cases of forced labor in the deep
rainforest interior, where people were trapped into forced labor through dubious contracts and false
debts.
The Catholic Church initially encouraged mixing Yoruba religion with Catholicism in the hope that the
Yoruba religion would fade away (like Afro-Brazilians were expected to fade). To the Church’s
dismay, the naturalistic African cultures comfortably assimilated Catholicism. This called for a more
repressive stance from the Church. It banned events celebrating African culture, and the police were
made to disperse crowds and arrest anyone engaged in celebrations outside of the influence of the
Church. The Police Museum came to possess a rich collection of African figurines and symbols seized
during the raids.
The Candomble and Santuario African religions, and other aspects of African culture, were watered
down in public, especially in the Carnival that was supposed to be a display of cultures. The
commercialization of Carnival and samba schools financially barred the authentic African contributors
in the era of expensive, gigantic floats. The spontaneous cultural celebrations were replaced by
European corporate planning, which recouped its investment through cordoning off the space and
selling overpriced seats and media rights. This commercialization, especially since the mid-sixties,
relegated the importance of Afro-Brazilians, who were deprived of seeing the display while the rest of
the world enjoyed it for a price.
By the late 1970s, Brazilians were clamoring for a return to democracy, like in Nigeria. The generals
realized that their time was up as the economy worsened, the national debt was near $100 billion, and
the people were increasingly restless. This restlessness was aggravated by occurrences in other parts of
their ‘secluded’ Portuguese world, especially with Afro-Brazilians empathizing with the freedom
movements of the Portuguese African colonies of Angola, Mozambique, and Portuguese Guinea.
Despite the ban on black immigration, news of developments in other parts of the blackworld, outside
of the Portuguese realm, seeped through to Afro-Brazilians. The US Black Power movement influenced
Afro-Brazilians, although not much could be done with the repressive government at home. In music,
the influence was a twoway street, as Afro-Brazilians warmed up to the beats coming out of the black
United States. They also developed new music types that influenced the world, all with African,
rhythmic beats and call-andresponse techniques.
African cultures were more suppressed in Fidel Castro’s Cuba during the mid-sixties and seventies.
More than five hundred societies of color (African sociocultural organizations) were banned under the
guise of suppressing American-inspired insurgents. Absolute control was exercised to stand up to the
American giant that went all out to sabotage the economy and unity of the island. The Florida-Cuban
mafia, through the US Republican Party, continued driving a wedge between the United States and
Cuba. It remained angry for being deprived of huge plantations and the planned income from turning
the island into a holiday and gambling resort, which it had expected to develop in the sixties.
Despite the debilitating US-led trade embargo, Afro-Cubans made huge strides in education; the
literacy rate increased to more than 85 percent. In absolute terms, living standards increased fourfold,
which was attributed to infusions of Soviet military and technical aid. With the highest black literacy
rate in the world, Afro-Cubans were allowed to progress only in a European-idealized Cuba, where
African culture was still viewed as subversive and inferior despite the revolutionary rhetoric. Cuba and
Communism claimed to frown on religion in general, but the Catholic Church was given a freer hand.
Dissenting blacks, no matter how minute, were regarded as ingrates for all the benefits ‘given’ to them

and punished more severely.
Even with Communism, apart from being the major chunk of the labor force, Afro-Cubans were the
crucial part of the Soviet-backed revolution. Although blacks were insignificant in the government at
home, they were more than compensated in Cuba’s diplomatic corps in Africa. Cuba’s strategic
importance to the Soviets was its historic link with African Americans and even more importantly in
Africa, where Cuba more than compensated the Soviets for the economic and political backing it
received.
Suspicious of European imperialistic interests, African freedom fighters were more receptive of black
Cuban diplomats, fighters, and technical support than they were of having white Russians running
around Africa—not that the Russians were eager to get involved in the dirty work that they had passed
to the Cubans. Africans wanted the Soviet technical and military support but were wary that
Communist ideology would bar their cultural and artistic expressions. They found Cuba to be a lesser
evil.
In October 1964, Cuba declared its support and backing of the all black liberation movements in Africa.
Plans were made to form a black diaspora army, which was in line with Malcolm X’s Organization of
Afro-American Unity (OAAU). The first test was supposed to be in 1964–1965 in Congo, where the
Cubans had sent two advance battalions, but Malcolm X was assassinated in February 1965 before the
plans came to fruition. Cubans remained committed to the plan, but it was further weakened as the
Algerian government, a main supporter, was overthrown in June 1965.
With other African leaders running scared as coups swept across Africa, Cubans were left to contend
with the United States and Belgium, which overthrew Lumumba. This made Cuba withdraw to the
French Congo across Belgian Congo’s borders, where it hoped to continue the war but had to leave
when no support was forthcoming.
Cuba’s growing relationship with Africa led to many African nations sending their students to Cuba for
training, which amounted to about six hundred by 1966. The regime took to isolating the foreign
students on Youth Island to hide its dirty, racist secrets. The students were dismayed to find racism in
Cuba, and some were deported for being racially divisive. Ninety Congolese students demanded to be
returned home after a fight with Cuban officials who had made racially offensive remarks.
Some African Americans were disappointed by the true, racist face of the revolution, especially after
leaders like Stokely Carmichael, the Black Power leader, expressed his doubts about the racial
democracy after his August 1967 visit to Cuba. Cuba’s interest shifted to the US Black Panthers, but a
visit by their leader, Eldridge Cleaver, on Christmas Day of 1968, led to disillusionment and complaints
of racism in Cuba.
The suppression of Afro-Cuban values was not limited to the historic Yoruba ‘Lucumi’ culture. From
1967, US Afrocentric hairstyles and dress were prohibited and often led to rounding up recalcitrant
offenders. In 1969, Afro-Cuban intellectuals formed the Movimiento Black Power, which adopted the
Afro hairstyle and discussed foreign black writers, but by 1971, many had been imprisoned, ‘reformed’,
or exiled.
Castro was visibly impressed during his first visit to Africa in May 1972, and he voiced his ignorance
of African culture. When he returned to Cuba, he continued his patronizing attitude of AfroCubans and
their culture as he clamped down on the 1974 emergence of Afro-Cuban study groups. Castro sent
troops to Angola in 1975 to help the authentic freedom fighters against the United States and South
Africa, but its involvement in the Ethiopian-Somali-Eritrea wars only served the Cold War agenda of

Russian and US military industrialists.
In 1980, some twenty-five thousand Afro-Cubans fled to the US for economic and spiritual freedom.
Their influence was soon felt with the spread of the Yoruba, Ifa-based Santeria religions in Miami and
New York, especially in the Bronx, where more than a hundred shops catered to the needs of Santeria
practitioners.
In Haiti, Francois Duvalier (‘Papa Doc’) believed in and promoted African religions to the annoyance
of Catholic, mulatto elites. After his death in 1971, his nineteen-year-old son, Jean Claude Duvalier
(known as ‘Baby Doc’), became the president of Haiti. Baby Doc was nothing like the visionary leader
that his father had been in his earlier years. He received support from the Church and the United States
—they felt safer with a smooth transition from father to son rather than having to support, or depose, a
real ‘Duvalierist’ who would have been difficult to control.
Needing more than his father’s prestige, which he lacked, to stay in power, Baby Doc greatly increased
his patronage of the African traditionalists in rural platoons. They acted as an internal secret police
known as the Macoutes. The employment of 10 percent of the population in the secret police was a
great drain on the economy, but Western bankers increased their loan output irresponsibly against
doubtful future income receipts. As long as the Soviets had no influence in Haiti, the West was ready to
finance and keep Baby Doc in power with all the arms he deemed necessary in suppressing the Haitian
population.
The stable, pro-US environment led to investment in assemblyline, low-level production of baseball
caps, bras, and imported radio components. In return, Baby Doc ran a corrupt government, which was
exemplified by his $7 million state wedding in 1980, in which everything was imported from Paris.
This largesse ended in the early 1980s, as the economy contracted 15 percent yearly.
The corruption in Jamaica was more institutionalized through the party patronage system that was
modeled on British and American political systems. The Jamaican system was based on a two-party
system that included Norman Manley’s PNP to the center left and Bustamante’s JLP to the center right.
The parties alternated power by winning two terms at a time. There wasn’t much difference between
them until 1972, when the advent of the Black Power movement in the United States and the economic
realities of the seventies made the PNP become more ‘radical’—pro-Jamaica poor. The mulattos still
held the upper hand in the sociopolitical scene, and Jamaica did not get a black president until 1992
despite blacks being the majority population.
Corrupt party patronage led to the parties succumbing to foreign big business, particularly special
interests that were contrary to public interests. The ‘financed’ parties were expected to provide large
economic advantages in return.
Michael Manley, the PNP founder’s son, led a 1972–1980 PNP government that drastically changed the
status quo when it faced rising oil prices, inflationary pressures, and relatively poor export prices. Like
everywhere across the blackworld, Manley was mislabeled a Marxist because of his economic
assertiveness and less submissive foreign policy, which included normalization of ties with its much
larger neighbor Cuba, despite US sanctions.
To rectify the economic problems, the government turned to devaluation, which brought no
improvement other than an inflation rate of 27 percent. The PNP turned to fiscal policies to increase the
living standards of Jamaicans: raising the minimum wage, progressive job creation, land-use laws that
made uncultivated land available to peasant farmers, and indirect taxes and tariffs on big business.
These measures resulted in a huge capital flight by foreign, multinational companies and bankers, who

exported money legally and illegally through false accounting schemes. Despite tightening foreign
exchange controls, like in other new nations, the foreign exchange reserves dried up rapidly. This
caused a balance-of-payment problem that made Jamaica vulnerable to the dictates of foreign bankers,
and probably a military attack, to secure debt.
The right-wing JLP put up a fierce opposition in the 1976 elections, which saw an increase in the
accustomed political violence, but the PNP won a second term that lasted until December 1980. The
PNP win, due to the gratitude of the lower classes for more populist policies, ensured that the economy
would continue in a downward trend. The PNP policies were labeled Communist as Manley gave state
and idle private land to hungry peasants so that they could eke out a living.
One Jamaican export that didn’t dwindle was its reggae music, which rapidly became internationalized
with the arrival of artists like Bob Marley. Reggae music brought a few financial gains and
international recognition to the country, and it spread the cultural miseducation of Rastafarianism,
which bore no apparent fruit in the sociopolitical existence of Africans in Jamaica.
Guyana, the former British colony with a difference, continued to have a black minority government
supported by the United States and the UK. Burnham did much for black pride, being one of the few
African leaders in the Americas, but colonially inspired racial divisions and geopolitics took
prominence. The strange US-UK alliance with Burnham’s Socialist government went awry, and the
coalition with the pro-business party UF collapsed, but the only alternative was Jagan’s ‘Communist’
faction.
Like Manley’s Jamaica, to gain more control of the economy and income redistribution, Burnham was
forced to nationalize the nation’s major earners—the major sugar and bauxite firms—but he faced
racially inspired strikes and revolts by Jagan’s East Indians. His nationalization, like other countries in
the blackworld, led to serious capital flight coupled with high oil prices and predatory international
bankers. Unlike the colonial period, when Jagan called in British troops to quell riots, Burnham had to
use increasingly repressive laws, and as the economy worsened, his popularity declined, even among
black activists.
Burnham resorted to unsavory means to hold on to power, like Nkrumah and Papa Doc, but he didn’t
have to contend with the army. It was as ineffectual as the Jamaica army, with fewer than two thousand
personnel. With constant black migration to United States and Britain, Burnham introduced overseas
voting to stay in power, especially in the July 1973 election, in which he needed a two-thirds majority
to change the constitution. He ended up winning 70 percent, which solidified his regime.
Sydney King (who later changed his name to Eusi Kwayane to reflect his African origin), provided an
alternative among blacks and challenged Burnham. Kwayane had been influential since the beginning
of the PPP in 1949 when he was the assistant secretary. His austere life and constant fight for the poor
endeared him to the masses, who regarded him as an authentic leader. In November 1974, he joined
with other black and East Indian intellectuals to create the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), which
became a front of all working peoples, African and Indian, against Burnham. Walter Rodney, a worldrenowned
Afro-Guyanese historian and activist, was among the intellectuals who promised democratic
Socialism.
To deprive them of the joy of winning the 1978 election, Burnham called a referendum to have the
elections postponed for eighteen months. The response was a huge display of opposition across
Guyana, even from the Church, but to no avail. In July 1979, the opposition joined together under the
Council of National Safety to challenge the government with protests, which led to the arrest of Rodney
but with no significant effect. Being the prime minister, Burnham abolished the ceremonial post of

president and declared himself president.
The poor economy and political insecurity led to huge inflation and immigration to the United States
and Britain.
Following Harold Wilson’s Labour government’s 1966 Race Relations Act, and the racist scaremongering
of Conservatives in opposition, like Enoch Powell, coupled with the poor state of the
economy, the Conservatives won the election in 1970. Powell claimed that the British mainland was
being swamped by Africans and Asians, who were turning it into a ‘mongrel nation’ that would
disintegrate in strife. Although the Conservatives publicly disassociated themselves from the statement
and from Powell, once they returned to government in 1970, they pursued racist immigration and lawandorder
policies. This was around the same time that Republican US President Nixon was in power
and was setting the ball rolling.
Britain’s immigration policies became more stringent and racially limited. Most importantly, under the
guise of enforcing the new laws, blacks were routinely harassed, arrested, and imprisoned. Police and
immigration officials were empowered to randomly stop and search, make house searches without
warrants, and take other racist measures, as long as the blacks were suspected ‘illegal immigrants’.
Bernie Grant, a member of Parliament for Tottenham, was an outspoken black leader in the Labor Party
who pushed black issues to the forefront during Conservative rule. There was a brief interlude, with the
return of the labor government in 1974–1979, when the 1976 Race Relations Act was enacted to outlaw
direct and indirect racial discrimination. The indirect discrimination was to curb racism in employment
and housing, which was extremely high and continued to be high even after the enactment of the law.
Racism in housing and employment led to the concentration of blacks in urban areas like London,
Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool. In London, where the vast majority (more than 70 percent)
resided, they formed an immediate ring around the city center: Hackney and Tottenham in the north
and northeast, Notting Hill and Brent in the north and northwest, Brixton Lambeth in the southwest,
and Peckham Southwark in the southeast. Most black people lived in run-down, privately rented
houses, while a few bought properties or were able to rent from Jews in Hackney (like in Brooklyn,
New York). With high unemployment and poverty, overcrowding in poor living conditions was a
prevalent problem.
However, blacks slowly integrated and progressed within the system to attain education, housing, and
employment during the 1970s. The economic freedom of the new West Indian and African nations
(especially the oil-rich Nigerians, who formed a significant percentage of black Britons), had a
significant if not wholly positive effect. The large, Nigerian middle class that arose from the huge wage
increases at home, and a few with embezzled public funds, bought properties, sent their children to high
tuition fees colleges, and demanded first-class service from the best hotels and service providers that
their petro-dollars could buy.
Unfortunately, they weren’t inspired to establish their own economy apart from exporting British goods
to Nigeria. Huge clothing and consumer goods markets blossomed to cater to the insatiable Nigerian
demand, which led to large markets off Liverpool Street at the heart of the City of London, where the
white merchants even spoke Yoruba.
Nigerian cash buyers joined the early 1970s property boom in Britain, caused by excessive property
loans to the white populace made by British banks filled with Nigerian and Arab petro-dollars.
Ghanaians, East Africans, and West Indians also made impacts corresponding to their population and
national wealth. These foreign financial (and morale) infusions were concentrated in the urban areas,

where blacks were traditionally concentrated, and although they might have helped the self-perception
of a few blacks, the majority of black Britons were still poor. Luckily, the property boom allowed more
space in public housing and friendlier private landlords from excolonies: Africans, West Indians, and
Asians, especially African Indians.
This was a brief Indian summer as economic turmoil in Britain and the world economy, from 1974–
1979, due to inflationary pressures of oil and housing booms, spelt the end of the black-friendly Labor
government for eighteen years. While the labor unions agitated for better conditions, the Conservative
opposition, under a new leader named Margaret Thatcher, warned them in 1978 of the danger of being
swamped by foreigners, which could worsen their economic condition. Thatcher resorted to more
alarmist statements shortly before the 1979 election, which she won and which spelt doom for blacks in
and outside Britain.
British blacks were better off, financially and socio-politically, than others on the European continent.
French Africans were made to disappear from public view by relocating them to ghettos on the
outskirts of major cities. To prevent cohesion and identity, the French government outlawed statistics
from being collated on racial backgrounds for the national census or other governmental sources. The
concept of a black identity outside French parameters was frowned upon, and the weak cultural
revolution carried out by black intellectuals couldn’t allay the poverty and isolation that resulted from
the racism that pervaded French society. Germans, Italians, and other European tribes were in even
worse situations.
In the United States, the black movement began to falter after political rights were constitutionally
guaranteed by President Johnson’s Voting Rights Act of 1965. It forced Southerners to respect black
political rights, which were enforced by federal authorities. The Watts Riots in Los Angeles occurred
the following week, showing that poor African Americans needed more than political rights. They
needed economic rights. But the white society turned its concentration to Vietnam War protests, gay
rights, feminism, and animal rights. If blacks could have rights, why not animals?
As Ronald Segal pointed out, ‘Many of these (white liberals) distinguished between the struggle of
blacks for civil rights, which involved Southern acquiescence in the rule of law as well as decencies of
democracy, and the struggle against racism, which threaten the right of individual citizens in the United
States to be as racist as they pleased’. * To weaken the movement, black activists under the age of
twenty-five were drafted into the Vietnam War. Even Muhammad Ali was stripped of his title and
threatened with jail time when he refused his enlistment. Facing a brake in African American progress,
and possibly a rollback, it was up to the black leadership to find an alternative solution.
Malcolm X’s plan of forming a unified black front across the blackworld was scuttled with the wave of
assassinations that swept African leaders away in the 1960s. The February 1965 assassination of
Malcolm X passed the leadership of the Black Power movement to the university students of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who formed the Black Panther Party in
November 1965.
The Black Panthers, first and foremost, preached selfdetermination and black pride by any means
necessary. The selfdetermination principle towards black socioeconomic advancement, which had been
preached since Garvey’s era, was now more politically pertinent as white liberals turned to anti-
Vietnam protests. The corollary of ‘by all means possible’ was confronting violence with equal
violence, which was doomed from the start without any component of the Ogun industrial complex.
The black leadership was jailed, assassinated, and bombed by law enforcement agents who wrecked
black neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Chicago, and many other cities.

* Segal, The Black Diaspora, 259.
The chairman of the SNCC declared in 1967, ‘America won’t come around, so we’re gonna burn
America down’. Apart from the relatively few personal guns, having forgotten the Ogun (biological
poisons) weapons of the slavery era, fire was the main weapon the black community had left (fire was,
coincidentally, the Yoruba sign of the god of justice, Shango). The troops restrained the rioters to black
neighborhoods where they resorted to burning their own houses. Many people questioned this practice,
but some said it was frustration expressed in the hope of destruction and renewal. Truly, the living
conditions were appalling, and it was unlikely that they would have burnt reasonably well-cared-for
housing accommodations. The riot fires lit a sense of justice under the liberals, bringing about
affirmative action and equal opportunity laws, while Southerners obeyed the letter of the law on voting
practices—just barely.
The United States became even more segregated—in reality, two separate nations—because nearly half
of all Africans lived in areas that were more than 75 percent black. No significant funds were released
into the black communities for improvement or to compensate for the historical cost of slavery and
continuing exploitation. However, the Rockefeller/Morgan banking oligopoly released funds to build a
sprawling white suburbia, away from the rapidly desegregating cities. This left blacks to occupy the
decaying city centers, which had been left with poor city tax receipts and budgets. In these areas, only
tax-skimming banks and big businesses were building and then only for business, not residential or
community-oriented use.
Like the new African nations that continued to do most of their business with their ex-colonial masters
instead of other black nations, African American integrationist leaders failed to galvanize the sparse
resources within the community and synergize it with the rest of the blackworld. Moreover, African
Americans no longer patronized their own businesses but flocked to non-Black businesses to spend
their increasing income.
In the mid-sixties, the Ooni of Ife, Oba Aderemi, the Yoruba spiritual leader, came to Harlem in the
attempt to culturally unite the people from the Land of Love. Impressed by the number of Afrocentric
African Americans, he gave royal authority to some Ifa and Santeria leaders in the hope that they would
gather others towards a worldwide Yoruba nation. He didn’t take into consideration the prevalent
integrationists, who continued to push for more servile cultural and socioeconomic integration with the
Europeans, while ethnically conscious Asians moved in and took over food, retailing, and wholesaling
industries in the black and urban communities.
Like the Western industrialization of Japan from the 1860s, there was a free flow of Western capital
into South Korea (due to the extension of military industrialists in the Far East against Communist
North Korea and China), as well as a relaxation of immigration rules, tariffs, and barriers against South
Koreans. This resulted in an influx of South Koreans into the United States, where they used their
available resources and sense of ethnic unity to take over retailing and distribution outlets in black
neighborhoods, as Indians did across British Africa.
In the name of integration, poor blacks relying on half promises of affirmative action and equal
employment laws acquired a long, expensive education to seek employment for jobs slightly lower than
the level of education achieved. Some tried to achieve a higher level, but most couldn’t get out of the
poverty trap that was shifting focus. The Rockefeller-controlled General Education Board was
dissolved in the 1950s, and forty-one black universities were placed under the United Negro Fund,
which was kept on a shoestring budget by the industrial foundations that wanted a servile educational
system for African Americans. The military industrialist-sponsored politicians made the army the only
feasible avenue to college education for the poor. If you didn’t have the money up front or a sport

talent, you could deposit your life chances with the army!
Dr. King and others questioned the ideology of spending huge amounts of tax dollars to sponsor the
military-industrial complex agenda in Vietnam, while blacks were economically deprived and made to
sacrifice their lives for a country that had sacrificed little for them. In Memphis on April 4, 1968, King
was assassinated at his first series of economic demonstrations while attending a demonstration of lowpaid
workers who made up the majority of African Americans. Like other parts of the blackworld, the
European Ogun Complex was not willing to give way on the US economic front and was preparing to
roll back Black political gains, as seen elsewhere. The Conservative agenda was based on White
supremacy tied to its Ogun foundations and propagated through the current Olokun dogma.
This mood was personified by the victory of conservative President Nixon in 1968. As an incumbent
vice president, he lost to Kennedy, who disrupted the 1950s Ogun conservative agenda. Nelson
Rockefeller, governor of New York from 1959–1973, was Nixon’s employer, landlord, and neighbor
while Nixon waited after leaving his vice presidency. His huge defense reorganization benefited
Rockefeller interests. The Rockefeller clique placed in the forefront of Nixon’s administration Germanborn
Henry Kissinger and George W Bush (whose father had been Hitler’s banker and had been
instrumental in the formation of the CIA). While vice president from 1952–1960, Nixon oversaw the
recruitment of Nazi scientists in the CIA and their biochemical programmes MK Ultra and MK Delta.
With Nixon as president, everything seemed to be falling in place, as Rockefeller made a suspicious
move that appeared to support a hidden agenda.
In New York, where drugs weren’t yet an epidemic, Rockefeller declared a War on Drugs in 1970 and
draconian sentences (RICOH Laws) that targeted the black community. This ushered in a phase of the
criminalization of black community members that deprived them of their voting rights, employment
prospects, housing, and many sociopolitical benefits. Its nationwide implementation was interrupted by
the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s impeachment.
Meanwhile, black sociopolitical leaders who preached economic self-help were negated through
imprisonment or assassination, and with the Democrats out of power, the assimilationist leadership of
the Black Power movement ran out of steam without the power to counteract the new right-wing
agenda. The systematic underfunding and tightening of the Rockefeller industrialists’ grip on black
education prevented the developed of a true black middle class rather than one assimilated in service to
the whites. The Indians, South Koreans, and other Asians who fought to retain their ethnic identity and
remained segregated used their culture to further their economic goals.
Like Fela in Nigeria, the loudest cries for black justice shifted to the cultural forum through sports,
music, and other expressions, not through politicians and intellectuals. Black fashion and music sold
Black Power and pride through the efforts of popular personalities such as Muhammad Ali and James
Brown, but with ‘Blaxploitation’ and a dearth of leadership, the music floated to the shallow ends of
disco—from ‘say it loud, I am black and proud!’ it went to ‘ain’t no stopping us now…we on the
move’ to nowhere.
Like the Black Power movement, the middle classes promoted black music, but when it transformed
into the overassimilated disco of the late seventies, the black ghettos dug deep into their Yoruba-Igbo
origins to produce rap—Ewi that substituted modern instruments for the talking drum. Being closer to
the black majority, rappers were able to say what they felt and weren’t restricted by assimilationist
concerns. They proved that economics based upon culture was the best way forward.
On television and cinema, the likes of Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby opened the doors to a new
generation of actors who supposedly reflected the black community. However, the actors were not as

culturally successful as rappers, because it was more difficult to own or access the production and
distribution facilities of their art form. Their art was compromised by what was deemed right and, more
importantly, inoffensive to whites.
Blacks were told that the African in their products had to be assimilated in a European context in order
to be successful, while it was right for whites to sell the concept of a lily-white European product. A
single, Yoruba village in Sheldon, South Carolina, and the ‘Ibo Landing’ on the southeast coast were
distinct reminders of the Niger people brought to the coast, apart from the scattered Yoruba religion
believers. Black churches remained the major sociopolitical focal point, augmented by the larger
churches and radio shows that disseminated African spirituality in European technological and social
embodiments. This was reflected by popular music as many R&B musicians graduated from the church
choir to the world stage.
The churches had the largest share of black resources, but their integrationist background prevented
them from gathering and directing those resources toward black progress. The churches integrated their
financial resources into the white system, which they had no control over, while they indoctrinated and
mentally enslaved their followers to hand over their earnings to the white economy. The dissipation of
black resources occurred in the economic and political realms. African Baptist and Methodist reverends
were often the local Democratic Party’s avenues into the black community.
Reverend Jesse Jackson stepped into the shoes of Dr. King and became even more integrated into the
system. Although Jackson’s integration policy was initially effective in housing and employment, it
later raised suspicions of corruption and sycophancy that pervaded most other parts of the blackworld.
This was due to his policies that were effective for the 35 percent middle class that won employment
concessions but not an African American economic base that could be used to uplift the majority from
poverty. Notwithstanding these realities, Jackson continued to highlight social injustice as he climbed
within the structure of the Democratic Party and formed nongovernmental sociopolitical organizations
to further African American aims, especially during Carter’s presidency.
Separatist/self-help sociopolitical groups like the Nation of Islam saw their economic base and
significance grow, though they remained relatively and politically insignificant to the integrationist
Christians. The Nation of Islam, which had only low-key political backing due to its separatist views,
continued to be an important social and religious organization on the poor, black streets and in the jails
within which a large number of African Americans were being incarcerated. Led by Louis Farrakhan,
the Nation of Islam provided a support system to inner-city adolescents caught up in the whirlwind of
unemployment, drugs, imprisonment, homelessness, and the other maladies afflicting the black
community. Ironically, the self-help nation was especially useful since the increasingly successful
integrationist policies caused social pressures, which led to an alarming disintegration of black families
and an increase in single-parent families (three times greater than that of whites).
Black women became the most assimilated—culturally, with their straight, European hair and potato
instead of yam hips, and economically, because it was easier for a male employer to employ and
assimilate a female of another race. Unfortunately, the level of personal and familial success was tied to
the level of assimilation, and black men increasingly fared the worst from the grade-school level to the
workplace.
The percent of households headed by women in 1950 was 17.3 percent for blacks and 5.3 percent for
whites. In 1960, the ratio was 24.4 percent for blacks and 7.3 percent for whites, while in 1970, it was
34.5 percent and 9.6 percent, respectively. In 1980, it was 45.9 percent and 13.2 percent. * Black men
earned $613 (black women, $369) for every $1,000 earned by whites in 1950. The gap widened by
1980 to $751 for black men and $917 for black women. There are other factors to consider, but the

figures show that the lower the relative income of the black man to the black woman, the higher the
percentage of broken homes headed by women.
Black women were more welcome in the office economy that replaced the factory floor, and their
numbers and average incomes overtook those of black men. Many people claimed that the racist
employment system effeminated the black male, whereby black women formed 65.1 percent of black
professionals, 52.2 percent of black managers, and 57.3 percent of black technicians. What was truly
effeminizing was the black man’s leadership that continued to entrust his own and his woman’s
employment to men of other races.
Overall black unemployment was double that of whites throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and blacks
continued to face racist financial and other social barriers from entrepreneurial roles in most industries.
The white manufacturing sector, which had traditionally provided employment and attracted blacks to
the North, shrunk as the manufacturing economic stage advanced into the service economy stage.
A few, with their undeniable African natural abilities, excelled in sports and music, but for many black
youth, petty crime was the only way out of abject poverty. Drugs and prostitution became increasingly
common, but use of hard drugs was not prevalent. Marijuana remained the predominant drug in the
black community. Most importantly, hard drugs were too expensive for most people in the black
community and were sold to whites and black entertainers by a few drug dealers who doubled as pimps,
hanging around the edges of white and black segregated areas. Eateries, social clubs, and groceries
were the main forms of available self-employment, while alcohol had an insidious effect on the youth.
The only sure way out of the ghetto was getting an expensive college education.
* Andrew Hacker, Two Nations—Black and White (Ballantine, 1995), 74.
Although 60 percent of poor African Americans lived in cities, the rural areas weren’t much better.
Without a large population, rural dwellers couldn’t make a comfortable living from entertainment and
vocational industries, so the vast majority engaged in agriculture or teaching. In the agricultural sector,
the few who acquired their own land faced increasingly underhanded racist practices designed to chase
them off.
Despite over 50 percent of African Americans living in the South and the voting acts, blacks were still
not able to gain political power, even in states where they were nearly a majority. The Northern blacks
still remained the most politically active, especially since whites refused to desegregate in most major
inner cities like Newark, Detroit, and Philadelphia, and their flight to suburbia, which left the black
majority to start voting black mayors into office. The political advancements of the era brought a few
more congressmen into national power, but their increase was stunted because of the racist redrawing
of electoral districts by white men in a practice called gerrymandering, which cut up the districts to
reduce black political power. The Manhattan borough didn’t cover the whole of Manhattan Island. It
stopped where African Americans and Latinos lived, around 100th Street upwards, in the area called
Harlem, which was a part of Bronx county and had no say in the doings of the world’s greatest
financial center.
Black communities were lumped into a single district while the white, suburban fringes were cut into
several districts, or blacks were split across districts where they formed a tiny minority of voters. In
2003, there was another dubious redistricting in Texas and had also occurred across the South and as
far north as northern New Jersey. Single towns were divided in two and named north and south, or west
and east, which disguised the black and white electoral boundaries. With this rampant gerrymandering,
more than 80 percent of incumbent legislators kept their seats in Congress for decades and kept blacks
out by passing seats to other whites upon retirement.

Like Africa and the Caribbean, black political advances in US city councils didn’t bring corresponding
economic benefits to black neighborhoods. Without black financial power, black politicians had to rely
on white sponsors who often dictated the sharing of the spoils of the office in contracts awarded to
white contractors and jobs for suburban whites.
The new class of black politicians was under pressure to show that it wasn’t racist or Afrocentric. It
became too fair for the community’s own good, because white politicians never reciprocated when it
came to racial fairness. Suburban whites retained city hall jobs like the fire brigade, police, teaching,
and other services, which accounted for the lion’s share of recurring city expenditures. They spent the
income and paid taxes in suburbia, thus becoming a constant drain on the black taxpayers in the city.

Chapter 21: Slavery 301: Trickle-Down Nigganomics
The creation of black plagues and ‘accounted’ slavery: HIV/AIDS, drug wars, and the IMF-inspired
debt problem (1980–2000)
The liberalism era, which brought about societal changes from the 1940s onward, came to an end in the
late 1960s with Nixon. Like across Africa, African-American leaders were hounded with character and
physical assassinations. During Nixon’s presidency, the black movement ground to a halt but not a
reversal, even though the counter-revolutionary mechanisms devised during his vice presidency in the
early 1950s were coming to fruition. The plans were put on hold following the Nixon’s 1974
impeachment and the 1976 defeat of his replacement, Ford, by Carter.
The White supremacist agenda given birth in the Ogun era, now disguised in the ocean beds of Olokuns
religious and political dogma, was to advance one step further in global domination. No specific major
leader or party could be held directly responsible for what transpired against the blackworld, because
the political players were merely left or right wings of the Rockefeller military-industrial bird.
Rockefeller, Morgan, Rhodes, and the rest of the clique firmly established Anglo-Saxon ascendancy by
forming a strong, militaryindustrial Ogun Complex with a self-sustaining and regenerating structure,
disguised with Olokun’s democratic dogma. Even after their deaths, apart from the fact that they passed
their monies to foundations that were tasked to carry on their agenda forever, there was always
someone to step into their shoes and pursue their specialized racist agendas. The replacement might
come from within the clan, like the Rockefellers and Bushes, or someone who had been groomed for
years or decades with the promise of establishing a family tree connected to those who wielded global
power.
Despite the fact that the Ogun-based merchants of death sponsored most US presidents of both parties
over the last century, a Republican government was inadvertently bound to give its extreme right-wing
members access and opportunities to covertly carry out a minority extremist agenda. With the creation
of the Esu intelligence services, the Ogun military industrialists institutionalized their power base, and
used it to usurp popular sovereignty, especially from Eisenhower’s rule in the fifties.
The same clique of politicians in the Republican Party promoted fear only to the benefit of the defense
industries. This was a deadly mix of Olokun propaganda and Ogun weaponry. The antiCommunist,
witch-hunt protagonists of the 1950s covertly pursued trade with Communist China, and in the 1970s
under Nixon, they promoted public hysteria over Communist Russia, whom they practically fed.
The Nixon/Ford Conservative era ushered in the oil crisis. The CIA-inspired geopolitics continued in
the Reagan/Bush rule of the 1980s, ostensibly to ‘defeat’ Russia, while the Islamic oil allies against
Russia became the enemy in Bush’s War against Terrorism in 2001. This was similar to the aftermath
of the war against Germany and Japan, which produced the much-vaunted Soviet threat.
During the Democratic Carter years, there were slightly more opportunities for African Americans in
the public sector, where attitudes were easier to change with laws than in the private sector. Dr. King’s
close colleague and townsman, Andrew Young, was a widely celebrated example of the inclusion of
African faces in the government of the new South, with Carter being the first Southern president since
the Civil War. The government was the largest employer of the growing African American middle
class, enabling it to slowly reduce the racial income gap.

However, conservative politicians painted a picture of the white middle class male being marginalized
and oppressed through new laws that bred ‘inefficient’ black university students and civil servants. As
their Olokun propaganda went into overdrive, their calls for rationalization, downsizing, and
privatization gained prominence, ironically in an economy ruined by the Republican mismanagement
of the early seventies oil and housing boom.
Carter’s interruption of the North Atlantic right-wing agenda was brought to a halt by the likes of the
Rockefeller power circle, especially with the creation of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, *
Heritage, and other foundations, all funded by the Rockefellers to influence public opinion through
Olokun devices and promote right-wing politicians and their ideas. In 1954, the Rockefeller clique
created the Bilderberg Conference—a secret, worldwide summit of favored bankers, politicians, and
businessmen, along the lines of Cecil Rhodes’s dream. This was in addition to the strong Rockefeller
influences in creating the UN and the US central bank, the Federal Reserve.
* Rockefeller Chase Manhattan Foundation.
In 1979, the British left-wing Labor government was pushed out of power by inflationary pressures
inherited from the Conservatives. It was further assailed by Rockefeller’s IMF conditions, which
provoked social upheaval. Margaret Thatcher led a Conservative Party government into power in 1979,
which signaled the ascendancy of right-wing politics, trickle-down supply-side economics,
privatization, and all of the other neoclassical economic privations, backed by Irving Friedman,
professor at the Chicago School of Economics.
The supply-side economics neglected the consumer side, because the consumption of goods and
services produced was on battlefields (from the obvious ones like the Falklands and Grenada to the
much less defined theatres of war described in this chapter). Regardless of the fact that the 1970s
economic problems were caused by the oil price shocks and an outrageous property boom spurred by
irresponsible bankers, Thatcher turned on the public sector for employing too many blacks, leftwingers,
and other ‘undesirable’ minorities. Public utilities were sold cheaply to the
militaryindustrialist bankers. The car and airplane plants were sold to a few in the selected clique who
were expected to lay off poor workers in the name of commercialization.
In addition to having the same poor economics as Great Britain, key US right-wing politicians used the
Iran hostage crisis to embarrass Carter out of office by making sure that the US citizens held hostage
weren’t released until after the presidential elections. The new US president was Ronald Reagan, a
Republican who was the Olokun propaganda chief in Hollywood during World War II and known for
his racist tenure as governor of California.
The actual power behind the throne was his vice president, George H W Bush, the former CIA director,
whose father, Senator Prescott Bush, allegedly inspired the creation of the CIA from behind the scenes.
With conservatives in power across the Atlantic Ocean, Africans throughout the world experienced a
multifaceted attack that included a drug war, HIV/AIDS, and economic slavery.
The right-wing conservatives who controlled US television and British newspapers, with the master
propagandist and actor Reagan in the forefront, sold an extreme, neoclassical economic model that
entailed practically destroying major sources of black employment, making blacks unemployable and
‘reenslaveable’. Many governmental social functions and utility companies, which were seen as open to
the new, pro-black employment laws, were sold, privatized, and commercialized. The implication was
that if the companies were rationalized, they would not employ blacks except in times of acute labor
shortages.

In addition, what was termed as improved credit facilities in the eighties ended up being an efficient
drawing up of black districts to be redlined, deprived of finance and other social benefits. A key
mechanism that military industrialists in the 1950s researched was a machine to process and store
information necessary to fight the Cold War.
This system was based on the binary code of the African Information Retrieval System, Ifa. Fruits of
the New England/California-based research were being made available for use as mainframe computers
owned by government and militaryindustrial centers, especially California’s Silicon Valley of
arms/aircraft makers and New York bankers.
The computer’s most important use was a proper segregation of financial resources. However, African
Americans were the ‘lucky’ ones, because bankers couldn’t draw an effective barrier to completely bar
them from employment. The banker-driven policies were more devastating in every other land where
blacks lived as the IMF grew into its role as the world banker and police force. The IMF’s initial
function was to ascertain the true value of postwar Europe and reconstruct war-ravaged economies with
the Marshall Plan and other loans, but it was extended to cover the world outside the Iron Curtain,
especially the newly independent black nations.
The IMF loaned money raised from floating bonds that were bought by banks dominated by
Rockefeller’s Citibank and Chase Manhattan banks, J. P. Morgan, and the club of bankers in Paris and
London. Because the bondholders paid the piper, they dictated the tune of IMF policies, which were
reflected in its all-important credit report function (assigning values to national economies). The IMF
greatly undervalued the gold reserves and other values of the black nations, making them
uncreditworthy.
Being the lender of last resort and the monetary policeman, the IMF was known for its destructive and
unwavering financial ‘discipline’, especially towards black nations. Its loans were usually small but
symbolically important to other lenders, who were happy to give more loans to the nation with an IMF
sign of approval. The sign of approval had to be earned by following stringent, neoclassical economic
conditions that were codified and marketed as the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP).
These conditions included massive currency devaluations, import liberalization, deflation through
reduction of governmental investment and subsidies, high interest rates, privatization of social services,
and every other policy that sold the nation wholesale to the foreign banking clique of Rockefeller/J. P.
Morgan-led US banks, France’s Societe Generale and Credit Suisse, and the big four British banks:
National Westminster (NatWest), HSBC (Midland), Barclays, and Lloyds.
White commercial banks overtook the IMF and World Bank as the chief lenders when they became
awash with petro-dollars in the early seventies. The oil shock saw the share of commercial banks in
external public debt increase from 12 percent in 1967 to 50 percent by the end of 1975. Unlike the IMF
and the World Bank, the private banks increasingly lent to governments without attachment to any
specific project or any economic conditions.
The oil shock spelt trouble for everyone except for the bankers who had batted themselves into a
corner. The increase in oil prices and revenues brought about the greatest surge of money ever
witnessed in the Western world, as the oil-producing nations like Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab
nations saved the money in interest-bearing North Atlantic banks.
Nigerian oil was mainly mined by Mobil, Shell Oil, and BP. When Rockefeller’s Mobil had to pay
Nigeria, all that needed to be done was to debit Mobil’s account at Rockefeller’s Chase or Citibank and
credit Nigeria’s account. Whatever may have been the case, Rockefeller’s balance sheet remained the

same! The Rockefellerinspired IMF could easily keep record of national earnings and expenditures.
According to a 1994 World Bank report, from 1979 to 1994, 66 percent of Nigeria’s oil earnings were
paid into dubious private accounts held in these big banks while the Nigerian masses continued to be
entrenched in the debt trap.
These vast sums, kept in big banks, were expected to earn interest, which the Western nations’
economies could not provide without causing inflation. The petro-dollars caused massive inflation in
the saturated Western economies. With no more viable business investments to be made, rash loans
were made to property companies and any other willing non-black local industry. This led to the 1974
property boom and economic crashes in the United States and Europe. The bankers were saved from
domestic ruin by timely intervention as the property bubble burst and banks became overexposed to
bad debts.
Despite fears and warnings of a similar fate because of their foreign loans, bankers increasingly turned
their attention to the newly independent nations, which they entrapped as they passed on the financial
burden of securing interest on petro-dollars. Their aim was to trap the nations with loans that they knew
could never be repaid. As long as the nations were made to pay the exorbitant interest rates, the bankers
were assured a healthy profit over the petro-dollars in their care.
Unlike at home, where an insolvent person or business could seek protection under bankruptcy laws,
the leaders of borrowing black nations were unaware that their future generations were doomed to pay
unending interest or the Western military would invade to seize assets worth more than the debt. With
the control of the national military-industrial complexes, the IMF, and the UN, Western bankers
confidently went about entrapping the world with easy money, especially African and Asian nations
that faced huge oil bills. The greater the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)
petro-dollar surplus kept in the Western banks, the higher the oil bill deficit of nations in Africa and
Asia that did not produce oil.
Hundreds of shady lending officers were sent across Africa to persuade government officials to take
cheap loans instead of raising taxes to cover their oil bill deficits and development programmes. The
lending officials lived off their commissions and sign-up fees like insurance salesmen, and they were
not concerned by the long-term implications of the loans. This brought about rampant corruption,
wherein African government officials were bribed or convinced to sign for the loans, which were
directed into the personal accounts of the government officials and the lending bank officials involved.
On the basis of charging a slightly higher interest rate, determined by the local cartel of foreign
bankers, loans were made to African countries that obviously didn’t deserve it due to bad leadership or
inability to repay due to poor economic outlooks. In Mobutu’s corrupt Congo (Zaire), Citibank,
Morgan Grenfell, and the French Societe Generale raised syndicated loans for extravagances like the
construction of the world’s largest supermarket and buying five hundred British double-decker buses in
a nation with few roads. The loans were tied to the increased production of African commodities like
cocoa and metals, which led to oversupply, a crash in commodity prices, and decreased earnings in
African nations and their ability to pay.
In 1972, when Ghana needed financial help, due to the fall in cocoa prices, the IMF enforced its
stringent conditions, which led to social upheaval and the overthrow of the democratic government.
Soon afterwards, with the effects of the oil shock and excessive petrodollars in full swing, the same
group of banks showered Ghana with funds, despite the underlying weakness of the economy that had
relied heavily on the insolvent cocoa market. It was a blatant case of this condition: ‘Yes, we know you
can’t repay, but instead of having the funds sitting idly in our vaults, you can have it for free now, with
a disclaimer in small print that we will squeeze every drop of blood from future governments and

control the sociopolitical life of your country’. Government officials were more irresponsible due to the
false assurance that their deficit financing would cover their gross mismanagement and corruption
during their political tenure and much later.
Even in oil-producing Nigeria, with surplus petro-dollars and no foreign oil bill, the moneylenders
convinced corrupt officials to accept easy money against future oil receipts as the debt spiraled to $28
billion in no time. Most of the loan monies were shared between the ‘players’ and never reached the
shores of Nigeria, where future generations were sold for reenslavement to Western interests with the
simple signature of government officials and lenders—slave catchers and slave traders. These were
leaders who had been forced upon the people by foreign military-industrial complexes after their
struggles for independence.
By 1974, Citibank was earning 40 percent of its total profits from developing nations, where it had only
7 percent of its assets, fewer than 5 percent of its loans, and where it paid the salaries of nearly twenty
thousand Europeans. By 1976, Citibank earned 13 percent of its worldwide income from loans made to
Brazil alone. * The huge difference between the percent of loans given to Africans and the percentage of
the banks’ profits from Africa reflected the unfair and fraudulent actions of the big banks. Chase
Bank’s percentage of profits from international earnings increased from 34 percent in 1972 to 78
percent in 1976, while that of J. P. Morgan went from 35 percent in 1972 to 53 percent.
Other members of the military-industrial complex joined the fleecing by offering credit-financed
military weaponry like used-car salesmen—even better, because arms dealers banked with the
Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan clique. The Pentagon’s foreign sales of weapons doubled as early as
1974, and the effect was felt outside of Washington, DC, with more jobs in the California military
complex and happier New York bankers. Other big players from the militaryindustrialist circle made
significant intrusions, like ITT Corporation (ITT), which promised modern telecommunications in the
developing nations at a high cost financed by American bankers. With the aid of the CIA and the US
government, ITT was notorious for overthrowing governments that were labeled leftist for refusing to
follow the Western agenda.
The conservative agenda, which included a financial war, was reinstated with the inception of Nixon
but was impeded due to Nixon’s political troubles and the subsequent return of the Democrats. In 1972,
the IMF launched debilitating attacks on African nations like Ghana—needing to stabilize its economy
due to poor commodity prices that were designed to derail and reverse development made by the new
black nations.
Normally, this wasn’t asking for too much, because the bankers subsidized and stabilized agriculture in
their own countries, but in Ghana, the world bankers demanded that all progress be reversed. Ghana
was told to devalue its currency and economy in order to enable the Western military industrialists to
buy them out and take over. Education, health, and other subsidies for people, who had suffered
through slavery and colonization over the last few centuries, were halted. This was in addition to
ending public utilities development projects, like electricity and water, and socioeconomic
infrastructure that could change and relieve the dependence of these countries upon mono-product
economies.
* Sampson, The Money Lenders, 180–181.
The oil shock made the bankers rethink their strategy by temporarily calling off the financial
policeman, the IMF, while they dug the African nations into a greater and wider debt trap. Before the
oil shock, the monies owed to the IMF and the big banks weren’t outrageous and within the Africans’

ability to repay. The European neocolonisation objectives could only have been attained by their
closing ranks on the Africans, which would have demanded a more cohesive plan.
The oil shock and the resultant free credit led to the new nations sinking into a massive hole of debt that
they could never escape. The IMF and its Western masters ensured the permanent debt trap by
purposely undervaluing the debtors’ gold stock kept in its vaults. Although an ounce of gold was
valued by the markets at more than $400 between 1970 and 2000, the IMF valued the gold deposits
kept with it below $50. Nigeria’s debt was billed as $28 billion in 1980, and despite the oil wealth and
the IMF ‘curative’ conditions, it still owed $30 billion in 2000. It struggled to pay interest on interest
accrued for twenty years, while millions suffered from the austerity measures.
With Thatcher and Reagan singing the IMF rhetoric and the classical economic principles of Friedman,
the new African nations were coerced into implementing IMF SAP that would sap out any economic
life left. Alternately, they faced being ostracized by the North Atlantic bankers/Paris Club of creditors,
whose monopoly of shipping and air freighting could shut them down if their imports and exports were
left to rot in ports. If economic sanctions failed to work, the military industrialists were confident that
their military power would swing things to their favor.
Nation after nation in the blackworld was forced to take the bitter pill that the IMF offered, which often
resulted in sociopolitical upheaval widely known as IMF riots and coups. In Nigeria, Ghana, Brazil,
and a host of other countries, the IMF conditions led to coups and government changes as each new set
of leaders tried, usually unsuccessfully, to secure more accommodating conditions. Nigeria was told
that its currency was overvalued by the same clique of Europeans who built their fortunes on the slave
economy taken from its shores and who prospered during the colonial fleecing of the underdeveloped
countries.
Apart from the compulsory reduction of all government spending, the most telling condition on the
economy was the destabilization of their foreign exchange markets resulting in extreme devaluation,
whereby a nation was forced to freely auction its currency every week before it could get back stability.
No responsible government allowed its currency to be traded freely due to the negative effect of
currency speculators. In no time, black currencies were devalued 1,000 percent, which meant that real
wages were cut 1,000 percent as the prices of finished, imported goods and raw materials rose more
than 1,000 percent.
This was all in the name of British and American free market economics, which these countries had
never practiced. Their markets were still closed to African finished products while they forced Africans
to completely open their markets to European goods. To stop local competition in the African nations,
African governments were prevented from developing local businesses in the name of stopping
subsidies. Meanwhile, the United States and Europeans established the most elaborate protectionism at
home with agricultural and industrial subsidies, tax breaks, and tariffs. The United States gave its
mainly white farmers more than $20 billion worth of subsidies every year, while the EU gave more
than $80 billion. To compound the African agriculture nightmare, the West placed 300 percent tariffs
on African agricultural exports.
The most obvious unfairness was the currency sabotage that had its roots in the slavery era when
Europeans flooded West Africa with cowries. Now, they sabotaged and cornered Africans into reckless
devaluation and de facto auctioning of the economic life of future black generations.
The unfairness was ironically highlighted when Britain joined the European monetary exchange
system. This allowed currencies to fluctuate within a slightly wider percentage band to determine their
true value in the move towards implementing a single European currency. In 1990, sensing a temporary

weakness in the market from the volatility of the Italian lira and high German interest rates, currency
speculators jumped on the British pound and wreaked havoc within a few hours. The British pound lost
fifty pence against the German deutschmark, and the British Conservative Party government hurriedly
supported its currency with billions of pounds of bailout money. Currency dealers like George Soros
made billions in the saga.
Britain withdrew its currency from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and fixed its currency, like
the United States and other nations that pegged their currencies within an acceptable, smaller
percentage band. If the economically advanced countries like the United States and the UK protected
their currency using a fixed mechanism due to the fear of an onslaught from currency speculators, it
was disingenuous to argue that African nations should leave their currencies completely open to market
forces to decide a fair value (which resulted in ridiculous devaluations of several thousand percent).
The SAP was implemented in all black countries by 1990 (a total of sixty-six nations), and it was the
beginning of a new era of reenslavement, disease, and war for blacks. The IMF SAP sapped all life out
of the Africans, making them immunologically susceptible to other aspects of the sinister Olokun
conservative agenda.
The 1972 Ghana/IMF episode allowed for a preview of the economic war that later sapped African
economic life. The Carter government also allowed a delay and a peep into the other sinister plans
brewing since Nixon came to power in 1968. There were congressional hearings into the drug and
biological programmes, which had been initiated by the CIA Director Allen Dulles during the 1953–
1961 Eisenhower/Nixon presidency. Unwilling to divulge information when required by congressional
committees in 1977, the CIA and Department of Defense claimed to have destroyed all records
pertaining to the projects.
By the late sixties, Western scientists, especially in Europe, had studied and identified an incurable
virus that caused Green Monkey Disease, and their findings were disseminated to interested parties who
took it further. On June 9, 1969, Dr D M Macarthur, deputy director of research and technology for the
Department of Defense, appeared before the House Committee on Appropriations and requested $10
million from the Congress for the research and development of a new, infective micro-organism that
would have no known immunological defense and be resistant to all known treatments. He attested to
the fact that studies were already being made outside of the Department of Defense and guaranteed the
development of the virus in five to ten years.
The request was granted, and work started under the name of project MK Naomi, a continuation of MK
Delta. It was conducted in Fort Detrick, Maryland, a top-secret biological warfare facility that was later
taken over by the National Cancer Institute. Under an agreement reached with the army in 1952, the
Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick assisted the CIA in developing, testing, and maintaining
biological agents and delivery systems. In addition, work was contracted to biotechnological companies
in New Jersey and elsewhere.
These private subcontractors were normally less obligated in their ethical practices, as some were
known to perform experimental tests on unsuspecting US citizens, especially Africans. In 1952, in a
wellpublicized scandal, the Tuskegee Institute knowingly infected hundreds of African American men
with syphilis and other diseases.
The CIA and Department of Defense studies into biological warfare identified a T-cell attacking Simian
Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV), which caused nonfatal immune deficiency in some African monkeys.
When incubated through genetic-engineering into humans, it became an insidious pathogenic retrovirus
that didn’t show symptoms until long after infection. This was an ultimate weapon that, like the

discovery of the atomic bomb and its devastating effect upon Japan, was banned internationally to keep
the advantage.
Although Nixon and the leaders of other Western nations agreed to ban biological and chemical
weapons in a 1972 convention, the biological weapons programmes, especially the Acquired Immune
Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS)/Green Monkey Disease programme, was completed and in the process of
being disseminated by some extremists. Moreover, work continued under the guise of national security
and medicine, especially cancer research, as work on recombinant DNA and other genetic engineering
continued. By the time the projects were ready, especially projects like MK Ultra and MK Search that
sought an unlimited supply of drugs for mind control, the Republicans were out of power. It all had to
wait until the early eighties.
In the early 1980s, HIV/AIDS began to appear in black and homosexual communities. This was
suspicious because blacks had relatively fewer homosexuals compared to whites, and the only
correlation between blacks and gay groups was that they were both hated by the newly elected
conservatives. The concentration and dispersal of the disease was suspicious, because it was sometimes
possible to determine the source of a disease by noting the direction and intensity of the infection.
In a 2005 survey, nearly half of all African Americans believed that HIV/AIDS was a US governmentdesigned
biological weapon, and an even greater percent believed likewise across the blackworld. In
the United States, the initial epidemic occurred in towns with large populations and black majorities
like Newark and not among those of Manchester, New Hampshire, or Utah. In Africa, the initial
epidemic occurred in the eastern half of Africa, which had a much lower black population than West
Africa but large white settler communities that controlled business and medical supplies. By the mid-
1980s, millions had been infected in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
The racist diversionary excuse was that it must have originated with the Africans, but African
Americans were most likely to have sexual relationships with West Africans, who had a much greater
presence in the United States than East Africans. However, West Africans initially showed low or no
infection rates. Truly, Green Monkey Disease was an inhabitant of Africa, but it had been for millions
of years without any trouble.
According to long-held African traditions, monkeys were rarely eaten or domesticated. It was even an
abomination for a pregnant woman to see monkeys in many areas. I personally witnessed the anger felt
in a suburb of Ibadan, Nigeria, one afternoon in 1977 after a monkey escaped from a European’s
compound. Many adults voiced their perplexity about why Europeans were friendlier to animals than
people—kissing and hugging dogs and cats and domesticating the taboo animals. A popular European
saying that ‘a dog is a man’s best friend’ is opposite to the Yoruba saying A re eni pe, la fin pe aja la
awe (‘Only loneliness makes you refer to your dog as mate/buddy’). If HIV/AIDS was from the African
monkey, it was nearly certain that Europeans brought it to humans who had lived there for thousands of
years.
A study released by Rand Corporation and University of Oregon, reported in the January 26, 2005
edition of The Guardian.
Another doubtful claim about the HIV/AIDS virus was that the initial epidemic was spread through sex.
Though it is transmitted sexually, the majority of initial cases defied logic. If HIV/AIDS had not been
introduced into a large, sample population through artificial means, it was mathematically impossible to
have one or two originally diseased people spread the infection to 30 percent of the population in such a
short time. Although Europeans have traditionally painted blacks as promiscuous, HIV/AIDS was
unlikely to spread from one or two people to several millions in fewer than ten years unless it was

airborne!
The only feasible method of spreading the infection so rapidly was through tainted medical supplies
during mass vaccinations given throughout Africa or the experimental tests for new drugs carried out
on unwitting Africans. The Chinese admitted that the 2003 outbreak of HIV/AIDS in rural China was
due to tainted medical supplies.
Some CIA operatives attested to the fact that they conducted other tests on unwitting American
citizens, probably in prisons, where African Americans were the majority. From the top ranks of the
Conservative groups, someone, or a group, covertly infected sample populations of blacks and gays,
who spread the disease through sex and drug use across and beyond the blackworld. The government
most likely didn’t have a direct link, but the US government was a slave to the special interests that
created it, and the special interests used it to carry out the plan with the help of extremists in bodies like
the CIA and other right-wing camps.
Examining the motives, being that the initial infected areas were conducive to European inhabitation, a
few extremists among the white settlers in East and South Africa were major suspects. The only West
Africa country with an infection rate remotely comparable to those of East and South Africa was tiny
Gambia, whose economy was in European hands and was their only holiday spot in West Africa. The
Gambian outbreak occurred in the early 1990s, much later than the early 1980s initial outbreak.
Europeans had a history of clearing out original inhabitants by all means possible, as seen in North
Africa, Australia, North America, and South America. In the 1760s, the British commander, Lord
Jeffrey Amherst, suggested infecting the American Indians with smallpox to rid the land of their
presence, and whether it was a concerted plan or not, American Indians were mainly decimated by
diseases and guns. The same mentality was passed through southern Africa by Rhodes, similar to the
latter-day Tuskegee Institute experiments and the CIA extremists’ sinister geopolitical games.
Another suspect, when considering motives, was the petrochemical/pharmaceutical group, which stood
to profit from the disease that resulted in a form of medical slavery. Through international copyrights,
US pharmaceutical companies were to derive a huge slice of the income from HIV/AIDS victims, as
long as they tried to stay alive with expensive, daily medications. Even when the countries were too
poor to buy the drugs, they were prevented from making a copy or buying cheaper generic drugs.
Instead, loans were organized with the Rockefeller clique, which came with the small print that all
drugs had to be bought from the clique’s pharmaceutical companies.
The pharmaceutical companies had not only a motive but the means in the foreign-dominated East
Africa business and medical circles. Foreigners operated unchecked, unlike in Nigeria and Ghana,
where black middlemen furnished local medical needs with supplies originating in the Far East, and
any other sources cheaper than those of the West. Moreover, Nigeria and Ghana had a large, educated
class of medical professionals that preempted European medics from running the scene. In the United
States, still largely segregated, the large black towns and their hospitals, which primarily served black
patients as well as prisons, were easy targets for the extremists.
Blacks in Haiti and Brazil were not spared from high infection rates, but predictably, Cuba had low
infection rates, which can be attributed to the fact that Western conservatives and the big
pharmaceutical companies were barred. Despite the high infection rates in East Africa, the absolute
numbers were still relatively small, because the plague didn’t catch on in West Africa until the nineties.
Other plagues were designed to cover those who escaped HIV/AIDS.
The CIA MK Ultra and MK Search programmes identified two drugs, cocaine and heroin, that could be

used to destroy the fabric of the blackworld, but they were not produced in any locality within the
blackworld. This plague was used not only to destroy the community but also to sponsor other sinister
plans of the intelligence and business communities and their right-wing extremists.
As publicized in 1996 by the San Jose Mercury and by Democrat Congresswoman Maxine Walters, a
semiliterate African American called Ricky, in a California prison, was taught by people in the
intelligence community how to convert expensive cocaine into a cheaper but more addictive base called
crack cocaine. CIA renegades were involved in a conspiracy to import drugs from Colombia (via the
trouble spots of Nicaragua, Panama, and Haiti) into the United States, where Ricky and other black
pawns distributed it for a profit.
‘Crack’ swept through black America faster than a Harvard graduate marketer could have achieved,
considering the level of logistic support required to spread through mostly black neighborhoods with
the right price and packaging. The result was ‘crack babies’ and a skyrocketing black murder rate.
European and Asian gunrunners flooded the market, and the players quarreled over the pittance left to
them in the drug pricing structure.
The CIA may never have received any direct benefits, but it could bypass an uncooperative Congress
with the huge drug profits made by intelligence officers. Like bad cops who break laws to secure
convictions and promotion, rogue agents used the drug profits to pursue pro-US business and political
interests. Examples included maneuvering against the populist Nicaraguan Sandinistas government,
Cuba’s Castro, and other parts of the blackworld. US marines occupied Nicaragua from 1926–1933 like
in Cuba, Panama, and Haiti, but the 1980s Democratic-led Congress was more cautious in the postsixties
world and restricted the CIA and its operations.
Manuel Noriega, the president of Panama and friend of American conservatives, was deeply involved
in the drugs trade before he became an embarrassment and was removed. The United States broke off
Panama from Colombia in the early 1900s to lay a major strategic claim to the subregion.
Heroin was at least five times more expensive than cocaine and was used to finance a much bigger war
to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan, where 70 percent of the world’s heroin was produced. Rogue
CIA officers used the drug proceeds to finance Osama Bin Laden and other mujahedeen against the
Russians, because the Congress was not overly sympathetic to their needs. Nigeria and Turkey were
chosen as transit points, because they were friendly nations with no terrorist or major drug production,
and their nationals were able to easily blend and move into the Western world.
Nigeria was a transit point on an inland route stretching from Afghanistan to Pakistan. The flights were
either from Karachi straight to Lagos or with a stopover in Ethiopia before Lagos. The vital link was
found within the top Nigerian army clique (some of whom were alumni of West Point and Sandhurst
military academies, with strong US military and business links that ensured rapid promotion and
control of the country). The ‘army boys’ picked hundreds of poor Yoruba and Igbo, many of whom
were students indoctrinated by the movie Scarface, to become ‘drug mules’ from Lagos and Ibadan.
It was a convenient scheme that exploited the closeness between Yoruba, Igbo, and African Americans,
as drugs were distributed through African American gangs, many also Scarface-inspired, especially in
Chicago. Despite a Nigerian military coup, whose leaders made drug possession punishable by firing
squad, as the first few drug carriers were being executed in 1994, some top Nigerian military officers
close to the CIA wrongly assured would-be mules of smooth sailing through customs on both sides of
the Atlantic.
To make matters worse, the law from the new Islamist Nigerian government was too severe and only

served in popularizing the street knowledge of heroin. People inquired what could be so bad to deserve
the death penalty, especially in a land where politicians and the army embezzled millions with no
remorse. Although they were given a pittance, the lower classes saw the drug trade as a way to leave
the poverty trap and wrongly discounted the death penalty as only a barrier that the corrupt elite had
erected to prevent the poor from success.
The drug trade was made more lucrative by IMF conditions that devalued the local currency and made
the dollar highly desirable, while all legitimate exports were barred by racist tariff structures. The drug
circle rapidly expanded as those who knew anyone with army links went into the drug business, which
was concentrated around Yaba army barracks in Lagos. It got so bad that on some scheduled flights of
300 people, nearly 150 were drug mules. The top army officers and ‘big men’ played with numbers. If
seven out of twenty were caught out, they would hold up the available custom officers on duty, and the
rest could slip through to make a handsome profit for their drug barons.
Some FBI reports attributed the practice of swallowing heroinfilled condoms to a Nigerian origin;
South Americans soon copied it. Dangerous body cavities were surgically created for heroin, making
some African Americans jokingly label their African cousins ‘crash test dummies’. Many died on
arrival or had to be saved in prison hospitals across the country.
By the early nineties, the US government and President Clinton banned all direct flights from Nigeria,
citing drugs and the lack of security at Nigerian airports. The United States set up the Drug
Enforcement Agency (DEA), which paid the top military brass in dollars to come down heavily on
‘crash test dummies’. The travel ban didn’t do much to help as the oversupply in Nigeria destroyed
thousands of lives in a country with scarce drug rehabilitation and detoxification units. To feed their
habit, drug addicts, some from middle-class families, resorted to carrying out daring armed robberies
and reigned terror over huge areas. Their gun power was far superior to the ill-equipped Nigerian police
force, which the army had systematically weakened.
At the peak of the madness, Nigerian robber gangs were known to write, two weeks in advance, to
entire neighborhoods of their intention to raid. Arriving in gangs of twenty or more with assault
machine guns, they swept houses number one to one hundred over several hours! The common man
was not allowed to own or produce his own guns, but the Western Ogun Complex and the local
representatives armed the drug addicts, who rendered havoc as during the slavery era.
There was immense misery across the blackworld following the implementation of the three plagues,
whose effects began in the early 1980s and extended to 2000. This was the last Oya cycle in the 2000yr
Olokun era, and since Olokun covers propaganda, dogma and drugs, the Blackworld was to be awashed
with its suffocating mystery!

Chapter 22: Suffering and Smiling
Small successes and big failures of the African giants of Ghana, Nigeria, the US and Brazil (1980–
1999)
Ghana was the first ‘independent’ African nation, but from its inception, Nkrumah realized that no
African nation, on its own, could be truly independent from the white military-industrialist bankers.
The West had a special hatred for Nkrumah, who was blamed for the near loss of Africa. After
sabotaging delays to the Aksombo dam construction and outright industrial barriers against the bauxite
smelting plants, the exploitative debt repayments of loans to finance the industrial projects and other
social services bankrupted the Ghanaian economy, which relied upon the poor cocoa market. A foreigninspired
insurgency and a disinformation campaign of corruption brought down the first democratic
government in Africa.
This process was repeated in 1972, when bankers precipitated social upheaval that ended the
democratic rule of Prime Minister Kofi Busia. The downturn of the economy, especially with the
ruinous IMF 1,000 percent devaluation, sent millions of migrants to Nigeria and other surrounding
nations and a lesser amount to Europe and the United States due to visa restrictions.
Jerry Rawlings, a young air force officer, took over power in 1979 as the bankers turned the screws on
Ghana and another military government fell. Rawlings represented the rage of ordinary Africans
against their allegedly corrupt rulers and executed all surviving past leaders from the ‘Congo Cabal’
that had seized power on false grounds of corruption. He later realized, like many others before and
after him, that regardless of the corruption, most African nations were merely incomplete economic
units of the imperialist nations that created them. He handed over power to a civilian regime but
overthrew it in 1981, when the government appeared incapable of dealing with the debilitated economy
held ransom by the IMF.
On Rawlings’s return to power, he accepted all IMF conditions and tried various social engineering
techniques to evolve a genuine political culture from the grassroots. Rawlings was an Akan, and he
enjoyed the Akan dominance (58 percent of the population) over the other minorities in Ghana’s
sociopolitical life. He had an easier task of keeping the country together than Nigeria, Zaire, and many
other African nations. However, he was accused of being repressive, and the economy improved only
marginally with the inward-looking, government by example he portrayed.
The industrial barriers remained as tight as ever, despite following the IMF model. Ghana did not have
a substantial domestic market with its population of under twenty million. Even if Rawlings tried to
overcome the industrialization barriers, there were greater barriers ahead that included the tariffs
against African processed goods and the heavily subsidized Western competitors. For a larger free
market, he signed the pact with the Nigerian head of state, General Olusegun Obasanjo, and other West
Africa leaders to form the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
With the little additional income generated by Ghana’s acceptance of IMF confinement to being a
primary producer and the subsequent reorganization of agriculture, mining, and semiprocessing,
Rawlings tried to improve socioeconomic infrastructure like roads, water, electricity, and
telecommunications. However, these improvements were largely confined to a few urban and mining
areas due to the lack of funds and an IMF limitation on government subsidies and social programmes.

The IMF made the government price common drinking water out of the reach of the average man. It
calculated academic local prices in US dollars after currency speculators trashed the local currency to 2
percent of its original value, while local wages paid in local currency remained practically unadjusted.
Water was priced out of reach in the IMF-prescribed, ‘free-market’, high-unemployment economy as
were education and health.
By the 1980s, people across Africa were fed up with their leaders and the IMF, and they clamored for
democratic rule. The Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda, the black movement leader, bowed to
democratic rule after his term of twenty-five years in office was ended by two defeats against the IMF.
Kaunda turned down the IMF in 1985 due to widespread riots caused by corn subsidy withdrawal and
the overpricing of the vital food supply, but he was forced to return, cap in hand, in 1990 to implement
the IMF conditions, which again led to anarchy. Unable to contain the socioeconomic upheavals,
Kaunda abolished the one-party system and submitted himself to democratic, multiparty elections,
which he lost. He gracefully stepped down, knowing that there was no winning against the IMF. This
was a strong message by one of Africa’s favorite older leaders, and many others followed, like
Republic of Benin.
In 1992, after ten years of military power and due to political pressure, Rawlings promulgated a
constitution towards democratic government. He won the presidential election to the dismay of people
who didn’t agree with his autocratic policies and suspected the election results. In 1993, ethnic clashes
occurred in the Muslim north, killing more than a thousand people and disrupting the ethnic peace that
the Akan-dominated Ghana had known since independence. However, Rawlings survived the coup
attempts as he tried to find a solution to the economic problems.
Ghana’s trade balance began to show improvement while most other countries in Africa were just
hitting the IMF pit, although its cocoa income again took a dip soon afterwards. The initial rise was due
to the corresponding fall in cocoa production in Nigeria, Brazil, and other nations facing the IMF
economic collapse, but their competitors’ IMF restructuring saw an increase in world cocoa supply and
fall in prices and income for Ghana. This was a common problem across the mainly one-product
African nations that were cut out to supply the ex-colonial master and friends.
President Rawlings won reelection in 1996, but it became apparent that the promised economic
progress was a mirage. Despite implementing IMF conditions, there was not much left that he could do
to change the predominantly agricultural and mining economy or to open closed Western markets.
ECOWAS didn’t fulfill its promise due to the divisive nature of the French neocolonies, especially
Ivory Coast, and the fear of Nigerian domination by Eurocentric, selfish leaders. Rawlings attested to
the fact that Nigeria was the giant that could bring about a change in the African economy.
Rawlings kept Ghana in the forefront of black geopolitics by constantly and positively contributing to
peace and prosperity efforts across Africa and appealing to African Americans. Due to the fact that
southern indigenous groups like the Akan dominated national politics, Ghanaians maintained a more
Afrocentric foreign policy than Nigeria and its powerful northern Muslim interests. The
Akandominated government gave African Americans the right of dual citizenship and even built
Garvey city, which continues to attract African Americans, even though Ghana was the gold and not
the nearby Slave Coast.
At the turn of the century, Rawlings lost his reelection bid to an opponent, John Kufuor, and handed
over power in the first such transfer from one civilian government to another in Ghana, heralding a new
era. Although he left a much better socioeconomic infrastructure and an excellent political culture,
Rawlings and many people wished for an economy that could stand up against the West.

Nigeria, the African giant with potentially more cocoa, large oil and gas reserves, and a huge domestic
market, couldn’t stand up to the 1980s onslaught of the Western imperialists.
Until the IMF attack, the seventies oil boom allowed an explosion of the middle class through mass
education and an increase in private and public investment to challenge European control. The oil boom
of the seventies enabled Nigeria to play its black leadership role. This included its support of African
liberation movements, events like FESTAC, and benevolence to other African nations, especially in oil
and financial aid.
There was a large migration to the cities, especially Lagos, because the rural agricultural sector suffered
from a lack of investment and subsidies relative to what was spent in urban cities. Basically, the
structure of the Nigerian economy required the development of a steel complex and manufacturing in
the Southwest, development of petrochemical and pharmaceutical sector in the oil rich Niger Delta and
Southeast, and an agricultural revolution and solar energy in the vast grasslands in the North and
Middle Belt.
The Western Powers were to sabotage the economic development blueprint by refusing to help in
building the Steel and petrochemical infrastructure. The US and European farmers’ lobby used US
politicians and bankers to threaten an embargo against Nigerian oil if the government continued with
plans to turn the massive grasslands of the Middle Belt into one of the world’s largest Wheat Belts.
In the name of free trade, Nigeria was to no longer feed its people as it imported US rice and wheat to
compensate a ‘fair balance of trade’ and subsidy-free market. The increased reliance on food imports
into the Garden of Eden was paid with the oil revenue. However, the West broke the back of the oil
market by the late seventies, and things began to turn for the worse for the military government,
especially amidst allegations of corruption.
Despite the lack of unity, people were unified in calling for a return to democratic rule, which General
Obasanjo heeded and handed over to a democratic civilian government in October 1979. The political
landscape was still divided along the huge ethnic groupings of Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo. Obafemi
Awolowo again led the Yoruba-dominated party, and Nnamidi Azikwe led the Igbo. With the previous
northern leader killed in the January 1966 coup, one of the old guards of the conservative Muslim
north, Shehu Shagari, was favored and won the election. Yet again, the Muslim north formed a national
coalition with the Igbo leader Azikwe, because Awolowo remained essentially a Yoruba leader with
alliances in the Middlebelt.
Nigeria’s oil wealth still attracted dubious moneylenders, especially after the 1980 oil market crash
caused a budget deficit, which gave rise to even more reasons to make fraudulent loans. A 1994 World
Bank Report claimed that from the 1979 inception of democratic government, less than a third of
Nigeria’s income was repatriated back to Nigeria. The rest was stolen from the oil accounts held by the
Rockefeller New York and European banks.
It is now clear that the loud allegations of corruption, initiated by Obasanjo and amplified by his
Western Powers handlers, was part of the global conspiracy to bring down Nigeria, its government and
Black leadership role. With the Western economic sabotage of its oil and economy, the IMF began to
pressure Nigeria to implement its structural adjustment programmes, but President Shehu Shagari
refused, knowing that he couldn’t sell it to the public.
Shagari tightened import controls to ration scare foreign reserves, but the licensing bred corruption,
profiteering, and inflation. He continued to delicately balance the economy, but because a lack of
agreement with the IMF creditors led to extremely high repayment rates taken from the leftovers of the

fallen oil revenue, there was little left for economic sustenance and development. Living standards fell
slightly, due to the inflation caused by import controls and the reduction of subsidies that led to high
unemployment.
Despite the corruption propaganda and effects of the crashed oil market, President Shagari won
reelection in 1983. He was overthrown three months later by Buhari, the highest ranking Fulani in the
July 1966 coup, on claims of the riots caused by the elections, the worsening economy, and the
excessive corruption of the civilian government. Some newspaper reports claimed that it was a
preemptive palace coup to prevent a real revolution brewed by the socioeconomic conditions. In reality,
it was choreographed by the Western Powers that wanted to stop economic development, especially the
Steel Complex being built by Russia.
The caustic Islamic government of General Muhammadu Buhari came like a foreman sent to put the
‘Negros in their place’ on the plantation. Buhari alienated everyone with its domestic war against
indiscipline, a plan to disguise the gradual introduction of Muslim sharia penal codes while allowing
corrupt northern Muslim political leaders to escape to the West.
Among the politicians who fled to the West were people with alleged billions of Nigerian petro-dollars,
which Nigeria requested back from its uncooperative bankers and host governments. One such leader
was Umaru Dikko, who Britain chose to protect, along with his billions, with twenty-four-hour police
protection. With hindsight, it was all media play designed to distract people from the fact that the
Obasanjo-Buhari cabal were agents of Western imperialism sent to stop Nigeria’s growth and to chase
the Russians building Nigeria’s steel mills.
With the inspired destabilization of its foreign exchange markets, the Naira and the economy was sent
spiraling out of control. The Western bankers pressed Nigerians to accept IMF conditions or face the
impossible terms demanded for the repayment of loans. Margaret Thatcher heightened the corruption
propaganda by insisting on no leeway for Nigerian economic problems, claiming that she knew four
individuals out of tens who could pay the $28 billion debt out of their back pockets, but she refused to
instruct the bankers to release the alleged stolen funds neither did Buhari prove any of the allegations in
court.
The Buhari government refused the IMF conditions and stubbornly paid 44 percent of the national
income in annual debt repayments. Buhari further tightened foreign exchange and import controls in his
neo-imperialist agenda to destabilize Nigeria’s economy, causing economic distress to the citizens who
were contained only by repression.
As in the past whereby Abrahamists work together to sabotage Original African aspirations, from
Ancient Egypt to the Sokoto Caliphate colonial arrangement with the British, Buhari’s conservative
Muslim government put an end to dreams of industrialization by expelling the Russians building the
Ajaokuta iron and steel complex, the linchpin of Nigerian industrialization. Signed in 1979 and nearing
86% completion, the Russians were the only people in the world willing to give the Steel technology to
the African giant.
Buhari brought in the death penalty for the drugs trade, which had slowly grown during the civilian
regime through soldiers deprived of the largesse of defense contracts that were the mainstay of military
rule. This move only served to publicize the drug trade and recruit more drug mules. After completing
his sinister agenda as an economic hitman to derail Nigeria’s growth, Buhari was overthrown in a
palace coup by another of the 1966 cabal, Ibrahim Babangida, on grounds of human rights abuses.
General Ibrahim Babangida, a seemingly more apt political player who was the number three in the

Buhari government, took over in 1985 and promised ‘Western values’ like the respect of human rights
and liberalization of the economy. With increasing international financial pressure, Babangida threw
open the IMF conditionality to national debate, which caused lively debate throughout the country. The
anti-IMF proponents appeared to win but had no influence on the final decision.
Earning the nickname of the ‘Political Maradona’ (after Diego Maradona, the Argentine footballer with
fascinating skills), Babangida claimed that he was rejecting the IMF loans but implemented their
draconian conditions for the betterment of Nigeria. Like in Ghana, the local currency, the naira, was
‘tied to the dollar’ and reduced in value by more than 1,000 percent, resulting in 66 percent of the
population made to survive on less than a dollar a day. This was coupled with devastating subsidy
withdrawals in education and the public services and the unilateral opening of unsubsidized, domestic
markets to subsidized foreign competition.
The classical economists of the IMF ignored the huge subsidies used to build and sustain Western
economies extracted by their governments and bankers from the blackworld, which sponsored the 1812
canal boom, the 1830 railroad boom, the 1914 World War I car production boom, the 1940 World War
II airplane production boom and the Cold War computer/internet boom.
Every subsidy and effort to build the economy was stopped, except the oil subsidy. Though the subsidy
was academic in nature, its price regulation prevented the development of a private petrochemical
sector, so the IMF did not press for its removal like with all other subsidies on agriculture, education
and health.
Across Africa, public services rapidly collapsed due to lack of funding. Sick, poor people were refused
or detained in once-free hospitals for lack of payment. The debilitating effects of IMF conditions were
quick to manifest, especially with the rapid decimation of the middle class, as real wages fell 1,000
percent, and cuts in education and workers benefits led to constant student riots and labor strikes. With
less than a dollar a day, people were able to afford only bare essentials, like traditional food and
clothing, whose prices were not based on foreign inputs. Young, local industries and sources of
employment went bankrupt due to the imported raw materials that quickly became unaffordable in the
decimated local currency.
The only growing social institutions were religious organizations, as numbers in the south took to the
American Pentecostal Revivalist churches to assuage the disintegration of the social services and
growing economic and political insecurities. However, the churches were reactionary and couldn’t
channel the huge amount of resources received through charity into self-regenerating economic
ventures to alleviate the unemployment. Because the youth needed more than prayers, there was a
massive ‘brain drain’ of the large Yoruba-Igbo middle class. They were colonially miseducated and
mentally enslaved to be workers, much like their Rockefeller-educated, African American cousins.
A large number of doctors, engineers, and other professionals were absorbed into the late eighties and
early nineties Western economy, especially in the United States and Britain, where more than 45
percent of ‘immigrant Africans’ were college graduates. They surpassed the stereotypical
(overeducated) Asian graduate ratio of 44 percent. Graduates from Nigerian colleges took up
substantial roles in internationally important constructions from the construction of the world’s most
complicated airport in British Hong Kong to the tallest skyscrapers in Europe, like the NatWest
Towers. They contributed to the development of the computer and Internet technology. The unfulfilled
high demand for science, technical, and computer skills in the West overrode many racist employment
practices. This gave science-oriented graduates a chance to prove themselves at the highest technical
levels, even if at lower pay.

This leeway was not extended to arts, administration, law, and social science graduates, because
administrative and communication skills were a matter of personal, subjective opinion. By the early
1990s, there was a massive enrollment and conversion to professional accounting studies, but the
attention soon turned to computing skills. The computing boom and shortage of necessary skills
resulted in the highest pay structure, which largely benefited African and Asian immigrant graduates,
enabling them to reach the highest levels ever attained by non-whites in the Western economy. By
2000, there was a backlash from the white community as the computing boom came to an end. The
supply of whites with computer skills caught up with the excess demand that had opened the door for
blacks. In 2001, a website operated by computer technologists accused Nigerians of embellishing their
CVs, demonstrating petty, racist jealousy and the wish to ‘return blacks to their place’.
A significant percentage that couldn’t take computer conversion courses or find gainful employment, in
addition to many college dropouts and secondary-school graduates, became taxi drivers and other
menial laborers. A small number went into self-employment and other minor trading opportunities.
Southern Nigerians became popular taxi drivers, especially in London, England, Brooklyn, New York,
and Washington, DC—even around the White House. By 1999, many small and medium-size
businesses had developed in scope, although the Nigerian business community still remained tiny and
unable to effect a significant change among the disenfranchised majority.
Many of these disenfranchised people in the Western world, and a much larger number who were
‘stranded’ in Nigeria without visas, began a new phase of reciprocal criminality. A generation had
grown up listening to Fela, Nigeria’s foremost Afrobeats ‘rapper’, and understood the international
financial maneuverings and attendant white-collar crime from his songs like ITT (International Thief
Thief), Authority Stealing, Zombie, Army Arrangement etc. With the destruction of the economy by
foreign bankers known to have benefited from slavery to the billions of stolen Nigerian petro-dollars,
instead of getting violent, the Yoruba and Igbo youth decided to get even and beat the foreign crooks at
their own game.
Even in Nigeria, the government complained of the 1980s pervasive ‘Nigerialization’ mentality where
for every administrative and legal loophole blocked, a dozen loopholes were created. People realized
that during the Babangida IMF-friendly regime, 80 percent of the nation’s wealth was stashed in
Western banks, and they wanted some of it, either through the foreign governments or the foreign
banks. Although the criminal youth were less than 10 percent of the population, 10 percent of 130
million was 13 million—more than most African national populations or European nations like
Holland, Belgium, or Ireland.
Having to survive on less than a dollar a day, Nigerian youth went about reclaiming their fair share of
their ‘national cake’ from European and American financial and administrative systems that spent twodollar
subsidies on cows. Credit card, banking, and many other types of fraud were perpetuated with an
intensity and complexity never experienced by Western bankers, who were used to milking blacks
without a backlash. White bankers and media were perplexed due to their racist perception of blacks as
mentally inferior and subservient, which led them to allege that there was a mafia school in Lagos
churning out brainy criminals.
In reality, there was no rigid organization, but the language and the Yoruba’s extraordinary social skills
were the keys to unraveling the Western system. There were no secrets, no violence, or bitter feelings,
which made the ‘fraud game’ appeal to youth who normally abhorred violence or dangerous secret
societies. The bankers realized that they were incapable of stemming the tide and losing millions daily,
especially in cities with the largest immigrant Yoruba and Igbo communities (London and New York).
The Western welfare and tax systems were not spared as Nigerians went to reclaim monies owed since
slavery.

In the City of London financial center, brainstorming meetings among top bankers were held every
Friday in the early nineties to discuss the latest Nigerian fraudulent scheme. They sent alerts on major
US and UK news programmes to watch out for ‘sharp-suited’ Nigerians. The historic Yoruba fetish for
tasteful dressing was extended to the top. The youth sported expensive designer labels, which were the
perceived fruit of their ‘reclaimed wealth’ and fraudulent credit cards. In lessons taken from their home
experience (dodgy white men and their black conspirators, as well as Italian mafia films), they realized
that Europeans used suits and formal dressing as cloaks to hide dishonesty.
The British banking and law enforcement authorities worked closely with their American counterparts
without significant success. They couldn’t promulgate a new law to directly attack blacks, as they could
with different sentencing structures for cocaine and crack cocaine. The fraud type constantly changed,
and a tough law would affect more whites, especially in the corporate world and places like Florida,
with a high number of insurance scams.
As the authorities looked out for ‘sharp-suited’ Nigerians, Nigerians moved into the background. They
easily taught and confronted other races with their ‘U chop, I chop’ live-and-let-live attitude, especially
white women, who held the majority of counter and processing clerk positions, and poor Jews. An FBI
deputy director of fraud claimed that he investigated Nigerian fraudsters for fifteen years, but he
discovered mind-boggling frauds every day. The Nigerian fraudster named ‘the King of New York’
was much publicized due to the vastness and profits of his schemes. In a BBC documentary, the Office
of Serious Fraud discussed thousands of unsolved Nigerian frauds, which it complained were weighing
down its administrative system.
The American establishment greatly feared the influence of Yoruba and Igbo on their long-lost African
American cousins who it believed, if corrupted, would crash the racial caste financial system built on
the trust and subservience of blacks. The FBI had long held the belief that Nigerians would worsen
their ‘black problem’, because Nigeria’s educational system was out of its reach and couldn’t be used to
inculcate fear into the huge Yoruba and Igbo populations. The IMF conservative agenda to destroy the
African education system came ten years too late.
Fortunately for the US authorities, African Americans educated to fear the almighty white system were
reluctant to join in the bold attempt to take on the system. Most criminally inclined African Americans
kept to the street drug trade, scared to dress in suits and go into the large, white banking and
government halls. The ‘street’ forest Africans born after independence had no such inhibition, and their
attitude was that the white man was socially inept. They boasted that the Yoruba taught the Europeans
how to bathe and dress and other social skills before the Europeans came back with their guns to rob,
raid, and rule. Unlike the blacks in diaspora who had been brainwashed to feel inferior, even though a
large part of the Yoruba and Igbo also suffered from ‘colonial mentality’, they largely believed that
their social power and brain power were superior to those of the Europeans, who relied on gun power
for ascendancy.
A further proof of this cultural confidence, apart from the direct administrative raids on the Western
system, was a new class of scam artists known as 419, named after the Nigerian penal code 419,
‘Obtaining by deception’. Playing on the assumed greediness of the racist Europeans, Nigerians sent
millions of letters inviting wannabe African raiders to partake in the fleecing of Nigeria. Some of the
fake letters from Nigerian institutions offered billions of stolen petrodollars to those interested for a
small administration fee of 5–10 percent. Ten percent of $1 billion was $100 million, and it had to be
paid to the fake arranger before the nonexistent billions were paid. The exact words and plan changed,
but the basic ingredient was playing on European greed and assumed black subservience.
One of the popular scams was the black paper/washy-washy scam. Europeans were shown modern

black gold, which was supposedly millions of dollar bills covered in black ink for security purposes and
stolen from the Nigerian Central Bank during transportation. The scam artist performs the washing of a
few sample notes with an unknown chemical, which turns out crisp hundred dollar bills. Unknown to
the greedy European, the money bales were composed of carefully cut blank sheets of paper and
included only a few hundred genuine banknotes covered in ink. The ink easily washed off with
common solvents like turpentine or nail polish remover. The European was offered the lion share of the
black paper money for a large investment to buy the supposedly scarce chemical, whose source was
only known to the scam artist (because it was supposedly a banned substance).
Even after falling for this scam, some people became desperate to recoup their losses and fell to more
advanced scams like arrangement fees for stolen funds. A large number of whites and company
executives, used to getting something for nothing in Africa, fell prey to the scams as they parted with
millions of dollars in arrangement fees.
The scams highlighted the racist legal thinking of Europeans. The scammed whites had the audacity to
cry foul to the legal authorities, who tried to arrest the 419 artists while leaving the ‘intended’
conspirators alone. It was impossible for any African to walk into a police station in the United States
or UK to report that a European had defrauded him of an arrangement fee paid to transfer stolen US or
UK government funds. Not only would he be detained for conspiracy to defraud Her Majesty The
Queen, but no attempt to arrest the white conspirator would be made.
From the mid-nineties, the lower classes that had been employed as drug mules moved into fraud, while
some drug trade barons spread from the major cities into smaller towns for mules and into other
countries all the way to South Africa. Other black nationals like Zairians and Haitians, also victims of
European, banker-inspired, white-collar crimes in their respective nations, joined Nigerians in Paris,
London, and the United States, where a slightly increasing number of African Americans and
Jamaicans mixed with them in the ghettos and clubs. Unlike the civil rights era norm of mixing in
universities, which still happens, the most important mixing of black youth in the present economic
rights era was on the street level.
The Nigerian ‘invasion’ was not limited to the UK, United States, and France; Nigerians were
traditionally barred from these countries with visa and other restrictions. A significant number had to
go through other countries and citizenship changes to reach their final destination in the UK and United
States. Proof of the desperation caused by the imperialist IMF conditions was in thousands of poor
people who walked across the Sahara Desert. These desert trekkers were not the normal Trans-Saharan
nomadic groups, the Hausa, and other Arab-related groups, but the Yoruba and Igbo who had kept
under the shade of the rainforest since evolution. They migrated across a desert nearly as big as the
United States without camels, and they hitchhiked all the way to Europe and America, stopping
occasionally for hard labor earnings in order to move to the next city. Many died in the blistering heat
and the freezing Alps, if they were not shot in Italy or Spain or killed in German custody. More than
forty Nigerians were killed in German police custody in 1993–1994, leading to a top German minister’s
resignation in 1994 after a complaint by the normally nonchalant Nigerian embassy. Austria and other
countries also saw Nigerian human rights abuse scandals.
Prostitute trafficking was on the rise, especially from the Benin southern Nigeria area to continental
Europe. This phenomenon spread to Nigeria and other poor nations, including Eastern Europe and
Russia, and flowed from South American nations to the United States. Although the percentage of
foreign Nigerian prostitutes remained small, it was a major embarrassment. Women that fell prey to
prostitution went back to southern Nigeria to lure young girls from their parents under the pretense of
offering Western education and employment.

On arrival in the European capitals, the girls were held for ransom and forced to prostitute themselves
for grueling hours every day, in rough living conditions, until they paid their captors $30,000 to
$50,000 for alleged travel expenses. By the time most of the young women were free, they could only
join the prostitution ‘game’ and continue the cycle, and yet HIV/AIDS in Nigeria was relatively lower
than in East and South Africa. *
Another example of racist European legal and social structures was exhibited when the Italian
government deported seventy prostitutes to Nigeria after they were infected with HIV/AIDS working in
Italy, even though the European governments received income taxes from the prostitutes for the
immoral services.
This was hardly surprising, coming from the same Italian establishment that dumped barrels of
radioactive waste in the coastal rural areas on the Bight of Benin. Under the pretext of a special
business project, Italians leased land from an ignorant local landlord on the huge swathe of an
unpatrollable mangrove lagoon and deposited the ‘raw materials’ that they never returned to collect.
Several years later, these were discovered to be radioactive materials. Local kids were playing in the
emptied barrels, whose radioactive contents had leaked into the surrounding soil of the Niger delta
ecosystem, while mothers had converted some of the barrels to domestic use.
Despite the small percentage of Nigerians who were hitting back to get what they believed was rightly
theirs, legally and illegally, the majority still received a raw deal from the European military
industrialists and their imposed leaders. Around the same Niger coastal area where Italians dumped
radioactive waste into the womb of humanity, Western companies mined their oil and polluted without
adequate compensation to the people or environment. The huge oil revenue shared among the
Rockefeller clique and its African military boys trickled down only to the people of the Negro area. It
was ironic that US blacks in Alabama experienced a fraction of the oil industry pollutants that those in
the Niger delta suffered from.
* AIDS increased in Nigeria in the mid-1990s due to increased migration.
On the Niger delta, the Ogoni people rose against the unfair exploitation through demonstrations and
sit-ins, but their leaders were killed by Mobil and Shell-paid soldiers. The repressive Abacha
government hanged twelve internationally recognized Ogoni members, led by the poet Ken Saro Wiwa,
for treason in the midnineties, while oil companies practically planned, funded, and ‘rented’ the army to
launch attacks against the delta communities. Divisions festered among the local communities as some
community leaders were specially favored to act as mercenaries.
The resilient ecosystem continued to be blackened with oil spills and continuously burning gas into the
atmosphere. Nigeria was more of a gas-rich nation, with a mere hundred years of petrol reserves sitting
on a thousand years of gas, so the Western interests wastefully burnt off the Nigerian gas to keep the
price of gas up, regardless of the environmental hazard.
Although the south Nigerian peoples agitated for a more representative, democratic government and
fairer sharing of oil income, Western economic interests and their military boys did not take the
socioeconomic interests of the delta people into account. To their dismay, even with the advent of a
pseudo-democratic government in 1999, the people’s plight was not prominently and adequately
addressed, which led to small revolts and killings in the communities.
What had started as a basic rural revolt in the delta area rapidly grew into a modern revolt with the use
of foreign speedboats and modern weapons supplied by unknown European players. The trouble
precipitated by the oil companies attracted the arms dealers and others interested in the oil reserves.

Africans always had to get strange bedfellows to achieve what should have been rightly theirs—
bedfellows like apartheid white South Africa and Rhodesia, the Portuguese, and the French, who armed
and backed Ojukwu’s unsuccessful breakaway Republic of Biafra. With their small showing in the
Blackworld’s oil reserves limited to Gabon, the French, engaging in the traditional European infighting,
tried to challenge the Anglo-Saxon/Dutch oil monopoly by causing a fracas through its excolony
Cameroon (in the Bakassi Peninsula on the southeastern Nigerian borders).
The Nigerian public became fed up with the northern Babanginda pro-West military government,
which had introduced the IMF SAP that destroyed their livelihood from 1986 and saw the rise of
corruption, armed robbery, and drugs. The people clamored for civilian rule to give other ethnic groups
a chance. In the thirty-three years since independence from Britain, a southerner had ruled for only four
years. This break occurred only due to the 1976 Westerninspired coup that killed the Afrocentric
northern president and allowed Obasanjo to come into power. Obasanjo became the first Nigerian head
of state to hand over power to a democratically elected government. Although he was a Yoruba,
Obasanjo rightly handed over to the Muslim north electoral winner in 1979. In 1993, the Yoruba hoped
that the Northern General Babaginda would reciprocate by handing over to a southerner.
Babangida para-ambulated insincerely towards handing over to a civilian, canceling political startups
between 1987 and 1992 and agreeing to conduct elections in 1993. With the natural death of the
Yoruba’s leader, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Babangida allowed a politically tainted billionaire friend
from the military-industrial clique, Chief M K O Abiola, to represent the vociferous Yoruba and run
against one of his northern Muslim minions. The Nigerian military establishment failed to realize the
depth of Abiola’s convictions and ambition, and how resolutely their Western masters would react
against them.
Abiola was from a poor, Yoruba Muslim background, but he fought his way up the ladder after
graduating as an accountant in Britain. On his return to Nigeria, he struck gold in the late sixties when
he won a national telecommunications contract, which he sold to the US telecom giant (and CIA front
company) ITT in exchange for becoming its vice president in Africa and the Middle East.
Being a Muslim, Abiola easily found favor with the northern Muslim power base and the Western
interests he represented. Before the 1993 elections, he was rumored to be corrupt due to the halfbilliondollar
telecommunications contract, still incomplete after fifteen years. He was alleged to be a cohort of
the CIA and involved in coups in Nigeria and across Africa, especially in Uganda where the US-backed
General Yoweri Museveni took power.
Regardless of his questionable history, people across the country warmed up to Abiola when he
promised social welfare programmes to bring about economic justice. To the surprise of Western
interests, their ‘friendly Negro’ did not stop with local economic justice, but went all the way to the UN
to push for reparations and global economic justice, as his wealth opened doors in the United States and
across the world. Black US congressmen warmed up to ‘Moneybags’ Abiola and his message of global
economic justice.
By the elections, it was clear that Abiola had played the Western military industrialists for what they
were worth and was firmly standing up for his people and political ambitions. The people across the
nation responded in the first non-ethnic election. Even without his populist policies, Yorubas and other
southerners voted for the Yoruba candidate, and being a Muslim, the northern Muslims trusted and
voted for a man known for his overflowing philanthropy across the north, despite being a southerner.
The northern elite could not use the normal scare tactics of a pagan outsider coming to defile their
religion, because Abiola was the vice president of the national Supreme Islamic council.

Abiola won the election in a huge landslide, but Babangida immediately nullified the elections and
made the unprecedented step as a president of the most populous black nation by confessing that ‘the
powers’ prevented him from handing over rulership to Abiola. This led to sociopolitical mayhem in the
south, especially among the Yoruba. Unaware of the global importance, they were bitter that a Yoruba
man was still kept out of power even after succumbing to a less-than-perfect candidate, who was
known as a Western military industrialist to appease the Europeans and a Muslim to appease the
Muslim north. The European establishment Rothschild publication, The Economist, wrote that the
Western powers turned against Abiola for his Afrocentric populism and could not allow a
reparationspushing president at the wheels of the Slave Coast and the most populous black nation.
To show that it wasn’t a personal decision and to save his neck, General Babangida resigned and
handed over power to the head of the colonial Royal African Company, renamed the United African
Company (UAC). It was the largest manufacturing concern in Nigeria, and its imperialist links were
still prominent. It was a momentous insult to Africans that the UAC chairman should rule Nigeria in
1994.
Babangida claimed that because the economy crashed, due to the sociopolitical upheaval and IMF
conditions, he was handing over political power to the business leaders led by UAC chairman Ernest
Shonekan. Despite being a Yoruba technocrat who came up the ranks of the company, Shonekan shared
the views of his militaryindustrialist bosses in London.
Powerless against the local military stranglehold, which allegedly supported him until the West
threatened their position, Abiola left the country to appease the powers in London and the United States
but to no avail. To agitate and galvanize the support of the black diaspora, especially African
Americans, Abiola made a fatal political mistake of relying on the congressional black caucus of
politicians instead of going directly to the people through the reverends, whom the black politicians
relied on.
Babaginda’s former deputy, General Sani Abacha, ebbed out the business administrator after a few
months to provide military muscle against whatever Abiola and his southern supporters planned.
Without any progress in the Western world and the increasing allegations that he ran scared and was
unable to stand up for his mandate, Abiola returned to Nigeria to declare himself the president.
He made a second fatal political miscalculation by declaring his mandate in Lagos Yorubaland instead
of the Kaduna Hausaland, the volatile cultural boundary between Original African and Afro-Asian
cultures, which would have made it an original African agitation instead of the Yoruba tribal agitation
that it was made to look like. He was arrested and imprisoned by the repressive Abacha regime, which
rolled tanks into Yoruba cities and killed protestors.
The military government tried to pacify the riotous southwest, being the economic powerhouse, and
organized new elections excluding Abiola, which the Yoruba and other southerners shunned. They
stuck to the June 13, 1993 results and demanded that the reins of government be handed to the jailed
winner of the elections. Abacha used repressive techniques never believed possible in Nigeria, as he
imprisoned anyone who dared to voice their opposition including the former and only Yoruba ex-head
of state, Obasanjo.
He sentenced twelve Ogoni delta activists to death by hanging while killing minority military leaders,
capable of overthrowing him, by firing squad. Those he didn’t kill or imprison, like the Nobel laureate
poet Wole Soyinka and other pro-democracy activists, fled for their lives. Abacha’s rash behavior made
him a public embarrassment to the Western powers that levied trifling sanctions against him but still
did business with him in private, like they did with the mad Emperor Bokassa of the Central Africa

Republic.
Abacha’s repression was matched only by his corruption, as revealed in the Financial Times and a US
Senate report. Investigators were able to trace only $4 billion out of probably double that amount that
Abacha took in four years. He kept the loot in US Citibank and Chase and Britain’s NatWest, Barclays,
and HSBC banks, which were all reluctant to return the monies to Nigeria. The Abacha family was
reported to have employed the services of Johnnie Cochran in 2001.
In 1998, the Western powers stepped in after five years of impasse. Abacha kept himself in power with
brute force. The economy deteriorated due to the sociopolitical upheaval across the nation and
Abacha’s massive corruption. The West, in what appeared like a Hollywood script, decided to knock
out the two protagonists and start afresh.
Abacha was declared dead of a heart attack rumored to have been caused during sex with a prostitute
and a concoction of hard drugs and Viagra. Southerners were hopeful that the imprisoned
presidentelect, Abiola, would be freed to take up his mandate, but they were rudely shocked a few days
afterwards when Abiola was declared dead of an heart attack after a meeting with US State Department
officials (including Dr. Susan Rice)—it was rumored that they gave him a poisoned cup of tea.
There was an outcry of foul play, but the new military government denied any wrongdoing and called
on US health officials to do an autopsy to back the claim of heart attack. The choice of autopsy experts
didn’t allay suspicions, because the people knew that a heart attack could be used to describe a wide
range of conditions but not what actually caused it, especially with drugs that left no trace. Calls for
independent Cuban doctors were ignored.
MKO Abiola’s death was to usher in the era of the Third horseman, an era of global economic justice
that he had campaigned for seven years before its start. For the sake of peace, elections were declared
soon afterwards, with an arrangement that northerners shouldn’t contest to give others a chance.
Obasanjo was the only southerner that the Western powers and Muslim north trusted. Although as a
Yoruba he didn’t win the Yoruba vote, Obasanjo again became the only Yoruba to rule Nigeria, now as
a civilian president, twenty years after ruling as the only Yoruba military head of state.
In 1999, the Black horseman was given his scales of balance, in form of democracy, to begin a
laborious 2000 year journey towards global economic justice, prosperity and peace.
Unlike the reparations-demanding Abiola, Obasanjo was a ‘moderate’ politician who tried to delicately
balance implementing the necessary socioeconomic infrastructure while dancing to the tune of the West
and appeasing the north
Nigeria remained desperately in need of infrastructure to exploit the huge market and productive
capabilities. There was the obvious need for unfailing water and electricity, roads and other forms of
transportation infrastructure, the completion of the steel and petrochemical complexes as well as an
urgent need for reinvestment in health and educational facilities.
Thanks to mobile phone technology, Nigerians were able to enjoy the benefits of modern technology
after many failed promises to improve its phone system. At the inception of democratic rule in 1999,
Nigeria still suffered from a sporadic electricity supply from the north, so southern politicians
commissioned the building of a thermal power station off the shores of Lagos Island to supply the
industrial southwest.
In a rare and frank interview in Tell, * Governor Abdulkadir Kure of the northern Muslim Niger State

(which held the majority of the hydroelectric plants that supplied the bulk of electricity) admitted that
the north had been sabotaging the energy needs of the industrial south for fear of being left behind. The
ignorant, miseducated politician prayed that Allah would prevent the successful completion of the new
plant meant to supply the largest black market. Kure didn’t have to pray too hard. The now-infamous,
insolvent US electricity giant ENRON was in charge and collapsed soon afterwards! As was the case
with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), Nigeria suffered from ENRON’s corrupt
practices.
The government remained the largest employer. Local manufacturing accounted for less than 10
percent of the national income, while more than 50 percent foreign raw materials input further reduced
manufacturing’s socioeconomic significance. Even the ancient local glass industry that produced
Yoruba beads relied on more than 80 percent foreign input.
* April 16, 2001 issue.
With the government still under the IMF spell, there were no massive subsidies to improve the
industrial and agricultural sectors, especially towards local production and away from the cash
crop/colonial economics. The underinvestment in agricultural rural areas continued to produce huge
migrations to the large cities, especially to Lagos, which surpassed Ibadan as the most populous black
city in the world.
The socioeconomic infrastructure remained poor, even in Lagos, as it grew into the world’s secondmost
densely populated island. (With a present population of fifteen million and a high growth rate,
Lagos is expected to become the world’s third-most populous city, rising from its present position as
sixth, after New York, which holds fifth place.) The huge population rise made all town-planning
dreams obsolete and created a desperate need for employment and socioeconomic investment in
housing, electricity, transport, and communications.
The constant, IMF-related riots turned the university system into a joke, whereby a four-year course
extended to seven years or more due to closures after riots. Apart from the obvious benefits of using
education to build a strong industrial economy, it was only through proper education that Nigerians,
especially in the north, could discount the divisive religious and ethnic politics and hold their political
leaders accountable towards unified, Afrocentric growth and prosperity.
The SAP had the advantage of stimulating the populace through hunger to become businessmen, but
without the necessary infrastructure and investment, many became importers, preachers, and hustlers.
In the 1990s, Nigeria became infamous as the world’s most corrupt nation. Because the government
remained the largest employer, the devaluation of real wages led to a significant number of families
subsisting on the corruption of governmental services at all levels of the political class, civil service,
police, and army. Outside the government, the corrupting influences of trying to survive extended to the
spiritual sphere and led to the mushrooming of churches that amassed wealth but couldn’t use it to
promote socioeconomic progress through economic and cultural cooperation.
Ironically, the government monopoly on the television industry led to the 1990s growth of the private
video industry, and Nigeria became the world’s largest producer of films and the major disseminator of
Yoruba-Igbo culture. Regardless of the negative northern Islamic leaders and the passive southern
churches, the growth of the film industry was indicative of how the Blackworld’s economy could grow
astronomically; economics were embedded in culture. It was the only way the Negro area could provide
for its people and the less fortunate black nations. Nigeria was to the black race what the United States
was, economically and politically, to whites.

In the US during the eighties, African Americans continued to face impediments from the white
establishment as well as from themselves, as was the situation across the blackworld. Despite continued
white segregation, the prevalent black integrationist leaders continued to prevent the realization that
African Americans were a nation within a nation and a viable and integral part of the blackworld. Its
forty million people and huge consumer expenditure made it one of the three most important African
communities. Like most other black nations, its economy relied on the ‘export’ of just one commodity,
labor, while it hemorrhaged money to myriad non-black goods and services.
With the continued shift from white agriculture to manufacturing, African Americans continued to
migrate in the eighties, searching for employment away from Southern rural areas and immigrating to
industrial areas in the North and West (and later to Atlanta, the Southern black capital). Although the
majority of Africans still lived in the South, New York had the largest black metropolitan population
(50 percent). Chicago was a distant second, and Los Angeles was a close third. Detroit had a 75.7
percent black population by 1990, Atlanta had 67 percent, Washington, DC had 66 percent,
Philadelphia and Chicago had 40 percent each, and New York had 29 percent.
With the passing of the ‘white economy’ from the industrial stage to the service economy stage,
manufacturing jobs dried up in most major cities that increasingly became African and poor. Black
wages were pushed down with immigration policies that encouraged the influx of Asians and Hispanics
—reminiscent of how the British used Indians in the postslavery blackworld and how blacks were used
to break white strikes in the early 1900s.
However, like other parts of the blackworld, there was a relatively large increase in the size of the
educated, black middle class that mostly relied on government jobs and lived in prosperous African
suburbs. Prince George’s County in Maryland was the largest black suburb, and it was based on the
outskirts of Washington, DC, the seat of the federal government and the largest black employer.
Despite its significant increase, the middle class remained relatively insignificant to the black majority.
It couldn’t improve its lot by developing black agriculture and industry or by winning further
significant concessions from whites.
Republican President Reagan relegated progressive African American issues to the background. The
black movement, led by Jesse Jackson and the Congressional Black Caucus, pushed through
affirmative programmes for a fairer employment system and a few distributorships from white-owned
businesses instead of concentrating on creating an Afrocentric economic system.
To avoid the public embarrassment of being labeled an oldfashioned racist (old-fashioned being the key
word), white businesses and government organizations began adopting a policy of tokenism, whereby
one or two blacks were employed in a business to pacify activists. The greatest form of tokenism
occurred in the media, where a few entertainers, actors, musicians, and athletes came to represent the
face of African America, while its common people and sociopolitical leaders were conveniently
ignored.
These groups of naturally talented black people enjoyed huge incomes sometimes comparable to or
exceeding those of whites, which the media were quick to use as examples of racial equality and
progress. These were the Michael Jacksons, Michael Jordans, and Michael Tysons of their professions.
The vast majority of blacks in more mundane professions were relatively underpaid, but there was vast
improvement. Jackie Robinson became the first black baseball player in the major leagues. Things were
slowly moving forward.
The rise in income of working-class African Americans was slower as it inched forward to catch up
with the income of whites. Black women made the most astronomical rise in employment and income.

This was not surprising because the white man naturally felt less threatened by a female than by any
other man (especially a black man). From slavery to sharecropping and the era up to the 1940s, a
significant percentage of black women were employed in white homes where they took over the white
wife’s duties. From the civil rights era to the 1970s, black women took over the low-level, routine jobs
like typing and other clerical jobs that white women had taken over when freed from household duties.
Once on the white corporate ladder, black women spread up and through the organizations in the 1980s.
Men didn’t find such a welcome but pushed the ceiling nevertheless.
The majority of the changes in employment policies were in government and large companies, which
couldn’t turn a blind eye to the new antiracism laws. The small and medium-size companies that
formed the majority of business organizations were obstinate in their racist employment practices.
However, many whites couldn’t be openly racist and used indirect methods of turning down blacks,
because most administrative job evaluations were based on subjective, qualitative analysis.
More than 50 percent of black college graduates in the 1980s and 1990s were from the social sciences,
arts, and business administration courses. They were easier to discriminate against than the 11 percent
of graduates with science and engineering skills that were measured more quantitatively. The common
excuse given to black graduates was that they were underqualified, overqualified, or did not have
suitable interpersonal and communication skills. When a black man squeezed through, he was easily
gotten rid of by allegations of not fitting in, being a troublemaker, or harassing white women.
In the political arena, racist conservatives modernized their approach. The national attacks on blacks
were codified in political catchphrases like ‘government downsizing’ black employment, ‘law and
order’ with anticrime bills to jail blacks, good ‘family values’ against the African ‘welfare queens’ who
used white taxes to fund a higher black birth rate, and selective ‘anti-immigration bills’ to make
America whiter, even if Spanish speaking.
HIV/AIDS was epidemic through the eighties, but the rates began falling with proper public education,
even though blacks still had the highest infection rates. In 2004, African Americans accounted for over
50 percent of new cases in the United States, and more than 70 percent of female HIV/AIDS victims
were black women. The HIV/AIDS and drugs epidemics of the mid-eighties hit the African American
community at an inopportune time when there were major cutbacks in jobs and social services with the
advent of neoclassical downsizing and privatization. Black unemployment rose to more than 15
percent, 2.5 times that of whites.
Without wealth accumulated over time, and the continuous financial redlining of black communities,
there were no avenues to the American Dream of successful entrepreneurship that the Reagan
government pushed, popularized by the 1980s syndrome of independent and socially irresponsible
young professionals (yuppies). Education not made more attainable for black populations; only 11
percent graduated from college in the eighties.
The only ways for poor black kids to succeed were through sports scholarships or by enrolling in the
army, and after graduation, many still faced employment barriers. With nearly 50 percent of African
Americans in poverty in the 1980s, colleges remained out of reach for many families. Nearly 60 percent
of black families were headed by women, and 50 percent of the one-parent families were in poverty.
The need for additional income to survive often led to the older children going to work once they were
sixteen.
Even when their parents survived on a moderate income, most teenagers wanted to leave their poor,
congested, high-rise buildings (known as projects). In the consumerist society, they believed that they
had many immediate needs. While the majority found legitimate part-time jobs that soon became full-

time, at the expense of further education, a few desperate girls became pregnant in order to form their
own family homes. A few fell prey to vices like prostitution and lap dancing.
The young African American male wanting to survive or raise business capital sometimes had only the
drug market or robbery to raise the necessary funds. This was why the drug trade attracted a sizable
number of young black men like the CIA-inspired Ricky in California and the army-inspired African
heroin trade. Crack cocaine’s low price and addictive potential made it popular in the black community
in the 1980s, leading to an increase in junkie robberies and addicted babies. However, the effects and
spread of the drug trade weren’t half as debilitating as the cure.
In 1986, the white media caused pandemonium over the drug overdose death of a young NBA player.
This enabled conservatives to railroad the United States into committing to the most draconian and
racist drug laws imaginable as they launched a ‘War against Drugs’ that was practically a war against
blacks. Without going through the necessary checks and balances of congressional committees, and
facing a summer holiday just before the 1986 elections, politicians heaped heavy jail times on drug
dealers to appear tough on crime in the elections.
Having been put on the defensive with Olokun’s biased media reporting, blacks got ten times harsher
sentences when caught with drugs of the same chemical composition but known by different names
(cocaine and crack cocaine). In addition, new conspiracy laws admitting hearsay and convictions
without evidence were a throwback to the 1692 Salem witch hunts in a nation that prided itself as a
bastion of law and order. While blacks should have charged the government with conspiracy, an
increasing percentage of young black men were locked up for conspiracy on mere accusations.
Apart from the HIV/AIDS medical slavery, the War on Drugs was a form of reenslavement, as blacks
had their rights trampled upon while they paid for the trampling. Large numbers of white law
enforcement officers were employed from white suburbs to patrol and harass blacks at random under
the pretext of drug searches. The drug war was fully honed from Governor Rockefeller’s New York
drug law to Governor Reagan’s policies in California, where it was packaged as ‘zero-tolerance
policing’ and sold across the Western world, especially in New York and London. A memo was
circulated in 1990 to the New Jersey state police ordering them to be on the lookout on Route 95 and
other state roads for African Americans, Nigerians, Jamaicans, and Haitians, who all had to be brought
in for a full investigation.
By 1992, there was an explosion in California, the birthplace of zero-tolerance policing. The acquittal
of four police officers, videotaped semi-lynching a black motorist named Rodney King, led to rioting
and destruction that claimed fifty-three lives, with more than two thousand injured. Despite being the
worst race riot in the 1900s, the drug war was not called off, and African Americans continued to
experience homicide and arrest rates ten times those of whites.
In 2000, in Passaic County, New Jersey, the local police gleefully announced that they made more than
three hundred drug dealer arrests during a single summer. How many drug addicts were in the small
community to warrant such a clear-out? Entire age groups within black communities were sometimes
taken off the streets in an overthe-top War on Drugs. On a major US television network, an
investigation in the South showed nearly a hundred black people being arrested and their properties
confiscated because of a single drug dealer in the small town. (He was freed to continue dealing once
he falsely snitched on others to strike a deal.)
According to the 2000 Human Rights Watch Report on Drugs in the USA, blacks comprised 62.7
percent of all drug offenders in state prisons. Although there were five times more white drug users
than black users, blacks were 13.4 times more likely to be imprisoned than whites. Seventy-three

percent of those imprisoned had committed nonviolent, economic related crimes. Maryland, with a 25
percent black population, had the highest black prison admission rate at 79 percent in 1996. Illinois,
with a 15 percent black population, followed with 74 percent black prisoners. New Jersey, with 13
percent blacks, had 72 percent black prisoners (these numbers do not include the large numbers of
immigrant blacks like Nigerians, Haitians, and Jamaicans).
Young African American men got smeared at an early age. By the time they were in their early
twenties, when they should be graduating from the third level of education into adulthood, they got a
third offence and were sent off to jail for eternity under the three strike rule. The banker-inspired
judicial system was not geared towards justice and fairness but towards deals and plea bargains.
Bargains extended even to killers, who were told to snitch on someone else for a reduction in time, and
the more innocent people they snitched, the earlier they left to start another cycle. At arrest, an accused
black was economically strangulated. The resources that could be used for his legal defense were
seized, and friends and family were too intimidated to come to his support.
With legal costs priced out of the reach of the common man, the accused African’s only hope was a
free but overworked, unmotivated government lawyer, located next door to the prosecutor’s office. The
government lawyer, normally called a public defender, was renamed the ‘public pretender’ by many in
the black community. The FBI secured a conviction rate averaging 92 percent, the highest in the world,
due to underhanded practices rather than efficiency. The public defender, on average, managed to
secure 8.2 times more punishment and sentences for black clients.
To accommodate the rising numbers of ‘captured’ black males, more prisons were built in white
neighborhoods that enjoyed a boom in the local economy through construction contracts, catering, and
jobs for thousands of white youth. The political struggles between white communities for the location
of prisons could only be explained by stating that the government paid an average of $40,000 per
annum per prisoner. This was more beneficial to the white communities than building a college,
because students wouldn’t pay $30,000 per annum in community colleges, and rowdy students were
never kept off the streets.
In addition to monopolizing prison commissary services by wellconnected conservatives, national
telephone companies cashed in heavily on the black community by charging them 500 percent the
normal rate to speak to their relatives in jail. A telephone company gave New York State $5 million as
part of periodic payments within a year, which was not based on a predetermined rate but left entirely
to the telephone company. Knowing they were in business and not a charity, we could be left guessing
how hefty a profit they kept. Black families, broken up by jailed fathers and struggling to survive on
one or no income, were financially drained by expensive reverse-charge calls and long-distance
transportation to white suburbs to visit the jailed family member.
The arms dealers made huge profits, because their sponsored Christian conservative politicians blocked
legislation to ban guns in America. To the conservatives, guns gave the family law and order. Even
when individual northern states restricted and banned some machine guns, the southern Bible Belt
states relaxed the gun laws and indirectly allowed the northern urban centers to be flooded with guns.
The large-scale domestic supply of guns, augmented by those from Asia and Eastern Europe, left in the
hands of excitable black youth, spelt doom for the black community. Street gangs caused hell in some
communities, like the military cliques in other parts of the blackworld took over and rampaged
communities. In the United States, those not killed in the streets were arrested for gun possession and
jailed for long periods.
On a higher scale, the larger arms companies used prison labor to produce weapons and other
components required while paying a pittance: 1 percent of the normal wage rate. This practice arose

from the cunning argument that prisoners shouldn’t be given a free ride and be made to work, but the
large companies that provide the ‘job experience’ still billed the final customer the market price of the
weapons.
The loss to the black community was exponential, because most of these monies were never redirected
back into black communities, especially the confiscated ‘criminal’ property and the fact that the
prisoner’s family lost income on lawyers, phone calls, and visits. With one in every three black men
between the ages of twenty and twentynine, the childbearing age, under correctional supervision, the
loss of father figures in the community did not augur well for the growing generation. Because 73
percent of blacks were imprisoned for nonviolent economic crimes that presented no physical danger to
society, the mass arrests of black youth did nothing but force generations deprived of fathers and
income to prematurely step into the field to earn money, at times leading to the drug market. The
community reacted by creating mentoring groups like 100 Black Men of America and other charities.
Serious economic questions arose from the drug market and the criminalization of nonviolent black
men. The drug market was made profitable and enticing by government policies, which made the price
of drugs high by restricting supply without being able to affect demand. This was a simple economic
reaction of supply and demand. The government could crush the drug market by taking over supply and
heavily undercutting the price, but it appeared that the freemarket right wingers never let the market
play in the blacks’ favor.
With this approach, not only would the government be able to affect demand, there would be no
incentive to sell, because a dealer couldn’t beat the government’s low price. The right wing engaged in
scare tactics, fostering the belief that drugs would pervade society, which was untrue because it took
the anti-establishment, hip feeling out of drug usage. With proper public education, the percentage of
users would fall.
Aggressive street drug dealers, hanging out in schools, clubs, and public alleyways, set out to entrap
unsuspecting and impressionable youngsters into becoming new addicts by offering them free or
subsidized supply with glitzy temptations and peer pressure. Gun dealers and other merchants of death
came into play, leaving large numbers dead and the community under a siege mentality.
The second economic argument, as seen from earlier chapters, is that it is usually the minority criminal
class that raises the living standards of the majority, which turns a blind eye to the source of the
investment into its community. Examples are the small percentage of criminal slave traders and
plantation owners who funded the European Industrial Revolution, the Italian mafia that transferred its
criminal proceeds to industrialize agricultural Italy in the mid-1940s, and the overseas Chinese who
used proceeds from gunrunning and copyright piracy to develop southeast China.
It is a racist injustice of historical proportions if African American criminals are dispossessed of their
proceeds and their communities squeezed dry while whites, whose historic crimes drained and put
blacks in the situation, are allowed to keep their funds and the benefits. If blacks have to be punished
and deprived, whites have to pay reparations to the blackworld, as Germans, and their US banker
Chase, are still paying Jews.
However, in the name of solving black inner-city crime, millions of suburban whites are employed and
overpaid to unfairly disenfranchise blacks socially, economically, and politically. Most exfelons are
barred from public housing benefits and prevented from voting in many US states, which goes back to
the post-reconstruction period when laws were promulgated to keep the blacks disenfranchised despite
constitutional amendments.

In addition to other electoral tricks, with nearly 20 percent of black adult males criminally blemished
and with no right to vote, blacks might see their politically effective numbers dwindle to 60 percent.
This is reminiscent of the Three-Fifths Compromise made during the 1789 constitution assembly, when
white southerners wanted Africans to be regarded as three-fifths (60 percent) of a person.
The police receive outrageous salaries and overtime payments in comparison to the average income of
the blacks they are ‘serving’. They are more than satisfied to be the domestic front of the rightwing,
law-and-order drug conspiracy of the military-industrial complex. The police and other agencies vote
overwhelmingly for the conservative Republican Party, and a number of them can’t demarcate the line
between professional and political interests, especially policemen largely chosen from the suburbs,
where their parents fled from blacks in the city.
Cops descend onto the streets of black America the summer before every election. While blacks vote
overwhelming for Democrats, Republican police ‘wipe clean the streets’ by arresting potential black
voters. On election day, even though majority of the cops don’t live or vote in black electoral districts,
the cops parade the streets menacingly and pick up people on warrants, found later to be computer
errors. From New York to Florida, in the 2000 presidential election, black radio reported instances of
police malpractice including bearing arms at electoral booths, which was against the constitution. In the
nineties, Al Sharpton found himself deprived of a certain win in a New York mayoral contest.
Other electoral tricks used in bringing the value of the black vote down include the use of different
electoral machines with widely different error margins. Newer, more efficient electoral machines, with
a 33 percent improvement in accuracy, are brought in to replace the older ones but not in black
neighborhoods, especially those in the South (as seen in the 2000 election, when huge numbers were
omitted in Florida). In 2004, a computerized voting machine with no audit trail was designed by a
Republican and introduced in Ohio and other key swing states to win the election. Another trick is the
ancient and widely accepted redistricting and election gerrymandering, where elections are won by the
dubious demarcation of electoral districts, sometimes based on faulty population data.
The impact of undercounting blacks is difficult to ascertain because there’s a subculture, especially
comprised of poor blacks and others, of suspecting government agents. Based on the fear of forced
family separations by social services, being charged with one of many economic crimes, or even being
exposed as illegal immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa, some blacks ‘float around outside’ when
government officials are coming or refuse to open the door for an unidentified white person.
Unfortunately, the African American middle classes are unable to stop the cancers eating into the black
community. Many of the black yuppies even alienated themselves from the black neighborhoods. A
few become neoconservatives, acting as mouthpieces of the military industrialists—political foremen.
From the selfish Reagan yuppie revolution, with the notable exception of a few intellectuals like Cornel
West, African American intellectuals stall on developing new ideas for black progress. Like
everywhere else in the blackworld, they are stuck in civil rights mode instead of moving to authenticate
cultural and economic rights.
Some black activists with genuine concerns for the blackworld are themselves miseducated and end up
culturally misdirecting the masses. They introduce the descendants of the West Africa coast to an
unrelated Afro-Asian Swahili culture originated by Arab merchants and spread by 1900s European
colonists across eastern Africa. Children are given meaningless Afro-Asian-sounding names or Muslim
names. Ironically, a few whites who have discovered the real deal, and worship and disseminate
Santeria Ifa wisdom and the practices of the Yoruba from New York to Miami, fund ifacollege.com and
related sites.

Nevertheless, African Americans, especially through Santeria, are slowly rediscovering the Yoruba
tradition. Since starting in 1975 in Philadelphia, the Odunde Festival (Yoruba New Year) opens every
second Sunday in June and continues to grow. Following the Ooni of Ife Oba Aderemi’s visit and
empowerment of Yoruba believers in the mid-sixties, his successor, Oba Sijuwade, crowned the
African American head of the traditional Yoruba kingdom in 1981 in Sheldon, South Carolina, as Oba
Efuntola Adefunmi the First. However, the expected Afrocentric results have not been achieved,
because most elite Yoruba still suffer from a colonial mentality and are not fully aware of their
relationship to African Americans. Although, the mainly Christianized Yoruba have switched from the
boring colonial, Christian Anglican sect to African American-inspired Christian Pentecostal sects with
colorful bands and soul.
Ebonics is widely spoken black English, or Yoruba-English, and it shows strong linguistic patterns
similar to Yoruba and other West African languages. Blacks transferred the rhythmic tonalities that
give Yoruba words meaning into English. Words like ‘mufucka’ or ‘ass’ have several negative and
positive meanings of the original word(s), depending on the tone. Ebonics was suggested as a
nationally recognized language, but it was opposed by many who believed it would be
counterproductive to their integration and that its mistaken stereotypes would affect employment
prospects.
A proper approach would be teaching Yoruba, Lingala, and Igbo and encouraging bi- and
multilingualism among African Americans, like most educated forest Africans are presently. This
policy would help African American youth to reestablish proper cultural ties for the socioeconomic
benefits that would arise from a better understanding of Africa, its people, and its resources. Hebrew
and European languages are taught and sponsored in the United States to establish and cement white
historic and socioeconomic ties, reinforcing their cultural survival and dominance. With Asian
languages being added to the education curriculum, one can’t but wonder why African languages have
not been.
It is imperative that black youth reconnect with Africa, because black culture has been distorted by
impressions fostered by television and the rest of the mainstream media. The media are apt to depict
African American men as ignorant, violent, and unstable and those in Africa as backward, violent
people in animal skins or nude, chasing animals around the plains. Thankfully, magazines like Ebony,
Essence, and the Source, despite having a fraction of mainstream media resources, counter the
mainstream, negative aspersions by portraying positive black middle classes, fashions, and views across
America and the world.
Black women have made more significant progress in mainstream media, exemplified by the
exceptional Oprah Winfrey, a talk show hostess and opinion leader in nearly seventy countries. Having
the greatest audience and influence ever held by a black woman, Winfrey is the de facto Iyalode, the
women’s leader, of the blackworld even though her friend, the renowned Yoruba spiritualist/social
psychologist, is called Iyanla Vanzant (Iyanla means ‘topmost/big woman’ in Yoruba).
A few Afrocentric film producers like Spike Lee, John Singleton, and Van Peebles produced a host of
impressive black films and a crop of black actors in the 1990s. The dearth of black ownership of media
platforms and distribution facilities, like black cinemas and competitive black television stations,
greatly reduces the audience and impact of African art and thought. The paucity of black-owned media
companies is not only a function of black poverty but part of the white racist agenda.
Media companies derive most of their income from advertising. A case filed in 2000 by the Latino
media against the US government showed that non-white media have been starved by the US
government and the white advertising industry concentrated in New York’s Madison Avenue. The poor

are the target audience of most government advertising, especially for welfare and army recruitment
programmes, but black media receive less than 0.02 percent of government advertising expenditure
raised from taxes.
Similarly, despite the theoretical $600 billion African American consumer expenditure, white
companies that receive the majority of this expenditure refuse to direct the advertising funds to black
media, especially black radio, which is the most common medium among blacks. It is unsurprising
when the largest advertising spenders are military industrialists, like General Motors (GM), Daimler
Chrysler, and Ford, that make consumer and military vehicles and hardware.
Independent black radio attracts the majority of blacks, because it is more Afrocentric and less
influenced by military industrialists, but the federal government delivered an insidious, fatal blow to
black radio. This was done through the 1994 Federal Communications Commission Act, which saw a
rapid decline in the number of blackowned and operated radio stations. They were taken over by big,
white companies with more than their fair share of advertising funds.
African Americans also face racist barriers in the television industry, which employs fewer black
actors, technicians, writers, and other professionals. Blacks continued to be a rarity on television until
the NAACP, led by Kweisi Mfume, threatened the major television networks with a black boycott in
2000. The improvement in the number of black programmes was slight. Black-owned television was
rare, and the world-renowned Black Entertainment Television (BET) was swallowed up in the
computer media boom of the late 1990s.
The most widely recognized African American cultural form is rap music and the hip-hop lifestyle,
which many wrongly criticize for singing about the drug and gun culture that permeates the society.
Grown out of the lower middle-class neighborhoods of New York, a cultural hothouse of the
blackworld in the 1970s, they were initially funded by traditional, white, Jewish money but soon
became a viable investment for the ‘ghetto blacks’ they depicted. Niggaz With Attitude and Nas are
politically philosophical rappers whose Afrocentric lyrics appeal to youth facing poverty and the
heavyhandedness of racist military industrialists throughout the blackworld.
In the mid-1990s, with the expansion and acknowledgement of the African American middle class,
African American R&B/rap largely moved to more consumerist, fast-life lyrics. This fostered black
pride, especially across the blackworld outside the United States, attracting billions of dollars in record
sales and a hip-hop fashion sense that cut across races, as popularized by the likes of Sean Combs (aka
P Diddy). Heart-searching, sickle-cell crisis tempering, soulful R&B tunes became worldwide anthems
from the likes of Mary J Blige, Anita Baker, and Lauryn Hill.
The hip-hop culture is a powerful vehicle towards political and economic progression, which authentic
political leaders like Reverend Al Sharpton have identified and are trying to employ through the likes
of Russell Simmons, the rap mogul. The black hip-hop dress and fashion is a multibillion-dollar
business that the likes of Russell Simmons, Jayzee, FUBU, Master P, and Sean Combs wisely
exploited.
However, the huge fortunes made by sports personalities and entertainers are often stored with the
military-industrialist bankers who pass it on to the white community, which continues to starve the
black community of investment funds. The astronomical revenue and influence hip hop came to
command in the 1990s needed to be directed and solidified so that African Americans didn’t continue
the mistakes of their African forefathers—whose only alleged contributions to humanity were the
talking drum and worshipping the dead with lavish parties, exotic burial goods, and large edifices.

Black culture has continued and strengthened in some cases, but the break and ‘theft’ of its economics
by outsiders has yet to be properly addressed. In the eighties and nineties, more than 90 percent of the
$600 billion black consumer expenditure, mainly derived from wages, was saved in white banks and
spent in white-owned businesses while whites don’t reciprocate by spending in black businesses. The
civil rights political assimilation came at the price of depriving black businesses investment capital and
a consumer base, because blacks were ‘allowed to save and shop in Massa’s institutions’. This was the
same colonial mentality across the Atlantic in Africa, where people jumped at European wares at the
expense of items made locally, derogatively called ‘Igbo-made’ in Nigeria.
Apart from franchising, light processing, and clothing industries also present across Africa, due to the
inability to garner black resources worldwide, African Americans failed to significantly move into
heavy industry and the technological sectors of the world’s most technologically advanced economy.
Although it is known that whites achieved their heavy industries mostly through government
giveaways, African American leaders and their African counterparts failed to gather their resources
towards heavy industry by building viable Afrocentric financial structures and attitudes.
No African American owned an iron and steel complex or a car/weapons assembly plant. Black farmers
nearly disappeared in the nineties, as they continue to be financially and administratively redlined by
the white institutions that their black, integrationist leaders favor. The level of financial redlining can
only be imagined when the New York tristate area, the richest black community in the world and with a
population of 3.6 million blacks, had its first blackowned, large supermarket in 2000.
However, the mid-nineties saw a few people, especially in the Midwest, make huge fortunes in
franchises and car retailing. Atlanta became a budding black economic center in the South, which
attracted entrepreneurial blacks from the North. By the 2000 census, the migration flow reversed, as
blacks migrated south while keeping in touch with the northern industrial bases through the Internet.
Similar to World War I peace dividend of car and radio production that provided jobs in the Midwest
and Northeast, the 1990s Cold War peace dividend of the computing and Internet boom provided
African Americans with information technology (IT) jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities. The
formation of IT companies and dot coms required low capital outlays.
The success rate wasn’t great, mainly because African Americans were not well placed to make an
early start. Many were kept out of the information loop in their respective professions or were
financially restricted. The US government invested billions of taxpayer dollars in the research and
development of computing through IBM and the New England universities, which enabled a few
selected, non-black staff and students in the information loop to capitalize on future developments,
including Microsoft and eBay.
Many African Americans who enjoyed the late 1990s economic boom wrongly speculated in the stocks
and property boom. They were big losers in the stock market, where a bit of goodwill and privy
information and the powerful institutional players made a huge difference. Some hoped that blacks
would escape the imminent property crash and be able to redirect their surplus equity value to a viable
black economic base, but this was not to be.
Political and economic leadership has not been able to properly harness the largest black income in the
world to make significant multiplier effects throughout the blackworld. Instead, the historically black
penchant of excessive enjoyment, arising from the ancient yam mentality, has seen the rise of a ‘blingbling’
materialistic culture exemplified by excessive metallic ornaments and expensive cars and drinks.
The Yoruba have an irresponsible saying, Ariya olo pin, ojo iku ni ojo isimi (‘entertainment has no end,
the day of death is the day of rest’). This has taken a literal meaning as the entertainment world

glamorizes fast living instead of a savings-oriented lifestyle.
Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH, Operation Cash the Check, and others against white corporate giants
(like Coca-Cola, Texaco, and Wall Street companies) have succeeded in securing a few distributorships
for rich blacks while continuing to drain black income regardless of their charity-masked marketing
programmes. The intensity of Jackson’s moral and political leadership began to wane in the 1990s,
especially after his presidential candidacy. He became a mainstream politician renown throughout the
world and was forced to deal with more abstract issues than those of his poor, black constituents. After
twenty years at the pinnacle of black politics, he was expected to leave the frontline to become an elder
statesman, advising the upcoming generation.
The Nation of Islam and its leader, Minister Louis Farrakhan, grew but still paled to the point of
insignificance when compared to integrationist black churches in terms of economic and political
power. The 1930s noble quest to create an Afrocentric religion by its founders inadvertently confined
its spread to the African diaspora, especially in the United States and the UK. They could attract a tiny
fraction from the black churches but not in Africa, except for those countries with repressive Muslim
regimes like Nigeria’s Abacha (1994–1999).
The enigmatic Al Sharpton came out of the next generation of African American leaders. He came to
prominence when fighting to bring to light the alleged sexual assault of an African American woman
by powerful white officials in New York State. He vigorously supported employment and business
issues concerning the black community, especially in his native Harlem. He was particularly vociferous
against non-black businesses coming to drain black neighborhoods while correctly educating his people
of their West African roots. Equally important, he shed light on police brutality and racial profiling in
America, showing that the large numbers of black arrests were due to racial profiling and the adage that
‘you only find what you look for’.
Having lived in America, Africa, and Europe, I found Sharpton to be one of the most authentic leaders
in the blackworld. He was the leader who inspired confidence while I lived in Rudy Giuliani’s police
state of New York in the 1990s. His handling of the Amodu Diallo case (whereby a young street trader
from Guinea, West Africa, was shot dead by white policemen on his doorstep with forty-one bullets),
confirmed Sharpton as the true de facto leader of black America. Normally, the government, especially
Mayor Giuliani, was quick to castigate black men killed by police as deserving and provide criminal
records to show that the dead was an unsavory character. On this occasion, Diallo had a spotless record,
being a recent immigrant worker, and Sharpton strenuously highlighted the case, comparing it to that of
some college undergraduates shot on the New Jersey Turnpike, also for flimsy reasons.
An independent and progressive thinker, Sharpton’s authenticity was further highlighted during the
2000 elections, when he held the Democratic Party for ransom by refusing to toe the line by spouting
the same talking points as the other candidates, because the Democrats refused to offer blacks any
tangible promise of progress.
In early 2000, he questioned the purpose of demonstration marches on Washington politicians and
proposed a peaceful demonstration targeting their New York banker sponsors, who would bring about
more tangible changes to avert more losses to the business classes. His call for peaceful demonstrations
(to bring about a slowdown in business by overcrowding the seven entrances into Manhattan Island, the
US financial center) brought a knee-jerk reaction from the establishment.
Not that Sharpton is one to run from tough decisions. He had a near-fatal attack on his life during a
demonstration. He was jailed in 2001 for protesting against using an airfield in Puerto Rico as a navy
shooting range, which had caused an increase in the rate of cancer and other radiation-related

sicknesses in the black population.
After being released from detention, Sharpton signified his intention to run for the US presidency in
2004, but he lost in the primaries. It appears to be a long shot for a black man, not a mulatto, to win the
presidency of white America, but like Jesse Jackson, Sharpton might use clout and experience to further
African American aims. It was hoped that he won’t become too endeared to the establishment. His
greatest legacy would be if he could use his position to garner the church and hip-hop resources
towards building a solid black economy in the Americas and Africa, strengthening the links between
African Americans and the largest groups of Nigerians, Afro-Brazilians, and Afro-Caribbeans.
Although most black legislators become overwhelmed and ineffective when they get to Washington,
DC, Congressman John Conyers of Michigan was an exceptional representative of the blackworld. In
addition to championing major domestic black issues, he introduced legislation to study the long-term
effects of slavery and the question of reparations. The reparations issue heated up in the United States
in the 1990s, being one of the ways to bring investment into the black community. Democratic
President Bill Clinton officially apologized for the US role in African slavery, even though he was
pilloried by Republicans like Tom Delay and there was no effort to pay reparations. It is only
reasonable for the government and bankers to pay up their historical costs, which Africans could use to
build their own financial base.
Another exemplary African American is Randall Robinson, a writer, Washington lobbyist, and activist,
who has pushed the reparations objective through writing books (The Debt) and other political
measures. He was at the forefront of the US-South African anti-apartheid movement in 1986, anti-
Haitian racist deportations in 1994, and reparations for the race riots that destroyed Tulsa, Oklahoma’s
‘Black Wall Street’ in 1921 and Rosewood, Florida in 1923. However, Robinson is an unassuming man
who has shown no intention of leading politically but who continues to contribute by agitating and
lobbying in Washington, DC.
There have been legal challenges for reparations against companies like the Tate and Lyle Sugar
Company, while hip-hop media has contributed to the dissemination of information through hip-hop
summits.
The Olokun agenda shifted gears, with the September 11 terrorist attacks, as the conservative Ogun
Complex successfully shifted public attention from the wars against Communists and drugs to the War
against Terrorists. In a bizarre twist, which if it had happened in any black neighborhood would have
landed all the players in jail for conspiracy, the friends of the CIA and the establishment who indirectly
helped in the drug war to defeat the Cold War turned against them. The CIA ‘Massas’ son became
president and needed help with his ratings and power. Richard Clarke, the head of counterterrorism in
the United States, stated that President Bush knowingly dropped the ball by not having a plan until
September 4, a week before the attacks. Bush refused to make a truly independent public inquiry into
the incident by putting his father’s contemporary, Henry Kissinger, in charge, and he later refused a full
exposure of the financial and oil maneuverings of the Arabic Muslim wing of the Ogun Complex.
The day after the terrorist attacks, after spiriting away bin Laden’s relatives to safety in military jets,
Bush instructed his counterterrorism chief to find a way to pin the attacks on Iraq, despite the clear fact
that bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda wouldn’t have dealt with Saddam Hussein, who was regarded as a sellout.
As stated in the 2003 Labor Party conference in England, the 2001 principle of preemptive strikes was
an ultra-right-wing 1990s conspiracy designed in the Bible Belt to dictate this century’s quest for oil
under the guise of a religious war called the War against Terrorism. This was a refined use of Olokun to
further the White Ogun industrialist agenda.

The right-wing conservatives stifled public opinion by using their normal Olokun ‘fear factor’ that bred
paranoiac patriotism, as they advanced the law-and-order agenda in the Patriot Act for a police state
mentality. This gave them a free hand to pursue preemptive wars that further enriched the arms, oil, and
biological/pharmaceutical companies of the Ogun Complex. The only solution to the sluggish world
economy implemented by the Bush presidency was the War against Terrorism, $200 billion for new
fighter jets, and $100 billion post-Iraq War contracts given to cronies. These were monies that, if
invested in the blackworld (held hostage by $200 billion in debt to Western bankers) would
exponentially promote worldwide prosperity and probably the loss of a bit of paranoiac control, which
the Ogun war merchants were not willing to relinquish.
According to the legal system, used to excessively imprison blacks, the Bush right-wingers have the
motive and the means to create the terrorist dilemma themselves through direct instigation or, most
likely, by purposely letting down their guard—criminal negligence, indeed! Whatever the case might
be, African American issues like reparations have been put on the mainstream back burner, a tactic
reminiscent of the 1909 civil rights movement delayed for two world wars, after which white nations
rebuilt and then neglected the African input again.
A few blacks have been caught up in the patriotic frenzy, failing to realize that the historic battle is
between the sons of white Abraham/Ibrahim brought by the dogmatic Olokun era. The Taliban had a
hand in the Muslim upheaval in West Africa that ultimately led to the destruction of the Oyo empire,
while Christian Europeans carted blacks away to American plantations. Until the mid-1990s, bin Laden
and his Arabic friends in Sudan carried out genocide and continued to enslave indigenous Africans,
while the United States supported them for Arabic oil.
Though labeled a battle of two arid and warlike civilizations, Islam and Christianity, the African
American, with his older African civilization from the Land of Love, has a duty to the world and, most
importantly, to himself, to make a unique contribution towards resolving the crisis. This duty can’t be
military like as it was during the world wars but must be accomplished in peace, truth, and justice.
Realizing that this thousand-year war that can’t be won with blood, care must be taken that it doesn’t
ultimately destroy centuries of African blood, sweat, and tears used to build the Western economy,
which is still expected to pay them. The next few decades of religious war could destroy not only the
Western world but the heart of blackworld. Peace can be achieved only from the truthful and wise
judgment of the older civilization.
The lack of black leaders across the blackworld is attributed to the phenomenon of wrongly identifying
black progress in personal terms instead of a worldwide, generational phenomenon. Tying movements
to charismatic leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr and Malcolm X usually causes a problem of
succession. Charisma can’t be inherited, but ideas do pass on smoothly.
In addition to the old War on Drugs and the new War on Terrorism, African American leaders need to
address serious economic issues like the black poverty rate, which was more than double that of whites
in 2000. This was clear in the New Orleans Katrina disaster, where poor blacks were left to die by the
white authorities.
Other pressing issues include excessive criminalization, the urgent need for urban renewal in black
neighborhoods, the provision of medical coverage, especially for sicklers, the financial redlining that
kills black industry, and the excessive fragmentation and hemorrhaging of black financial resources and
institutions. As long as the list might be, it is all about getting the right unifying Afrocentric perception.
African Americans have lost their place as the second-largest ethnic group in the United States, through
the mass immigration of whites from Latin America called Hispanics. Without a more racially balanced

immigration policy, the black community may find that other races eat the fruits of black labor while
blacks fade away, like the white Brazilians prayed that their blacks would eventually fade away.
Some in the African American community confuse linguistics with race and are lured into a false
perception that Hispanic immigrants are minorities like them, but they have come to realize that the
only difference between American whites and the mainly white Hispanics is the language. As later
witnessed from the killing of an innocent teenager, Trayvon Martin by an Hispanic white man, George
Zimmerman, who was freed by an all-white jury in Florida. The problem is not in the language, as
African Americans know well, but in the lighter skin color of European supremacists.
Afro-Brazilians, the largest black ethnolinguistic group, were still socio-politically disjointed into
regions and captaincies. Salvador in Bahia was still the black heartland, where pockets of Yoruba
speakers remained, and Akara (fried, ground black-eyed beans) and other pepper-laced Yoruba foods
were commonplace. In the eighties and nineties, Northeast and Southeast Brazil were the most
populous Black regions, with the northeast state of Bahia having a 79 percent black population.
Another northeastern state, Maranhao, had a 78 percent black population. Southeast Rio de Janeiro had
44 percent, and Sao Paulo, the most populous Brazilian state, had 25 percent.
Afro-Brazilians were not spared from the HIV/AIDS and drugs plagues that disproportionately beset
the blackworld in the eighties. They required some form of cohesion to move forward in a country
where, according to the Data Focha Institute, 87 percent of whites were racist. The white military rulers
continued to deny the existence of racism in Brazil, but it was not their racism that spelt the end of their
reign, because both whites and blacks suffered from their misadministration.
Like Nigeria and Ghana in the late seventies, Brazilian militaryindustrial regimes caused economic
decline and worsened the IMF debt burden. Brazil owed the highest foreign debt in the world at $100
billion and did not have much to show for it in terms of infrastructure. This led to a huge, multiracial,
pro-democracy rally against the army, which came to power in the 1964 right-wing coup to prevent
further socioeconomic reforms. These were frowned upon by Rockefeller interests, to whom the
military regimes were paying 75 percent of Brazil’s export earnings as debt repayment. In 1976,
Citibank made 20 percent of its global profits from Brazil’s interest payments.
The foreign loans for fostering rapid industrialization and socioeconomic infrastructure were
concentrated in the cities, especially Sao Paulo. On paper and in GNP figures, Brazil grew into one of
the world’s largest and newest industrial and agricultural economies, but income growth was
concentrated in the hands of a few Citibank-friendly Europeans, while Afro-Brazilians remained in
abject poverty in the slums.
Most Afro-Brazilians had migrated and continued to be joined by millions from the rural areas, where
they had been oppressed and pushed out of agriculture due to unfair land distribution that saw 1 percent
of Brazilians owning 40 percent of the land. This was in addition to more than a million uncompensated
rural dwellers being displaced by the construction of hydroelectric dams that provided more than 93
percent of Brazil’s electricity.
A large percent of Afro-Brazilians lived in poverty, high in the favelas, away from sight and with little
or no socioeconomic infrastructure. Only 1 percent of blacks passed through universities, and
widespread racist stereotypes prevented them from getting fair employment and remuneration. A
significant number of the uneducated blacks in the favelas were used as house servants and cheap labor
in the new factories, while many were left with no option but the illegal economy.
With 1 percent of Brazilians, mainly whites, owning 40 percent of land and more than half of blacks

surviving on less than one dollar a day, a few young men resorted to supplying drugs or kidnapping the
rich. This led to a conservative backlash in the 1980s that brought about police brutality that
outweighed the social malaise, especially when considering that police accounted for more than twenty
deaths each day. Favelas became a breeding ground for drugs and HIV/AIDS, and due to the lack of
positive governmental concern, this festered for a long time. However, the general economic downturn
led directly to change.
The exorbitant petrol price increases and withdrawal of subsidies in the 1970s led the largely white
middle class and black leaders to push for a democratic government and better rationalization of
resources. The military government, put on the defensive by the shattered economy amid claims of
mismanagement and corruption, allowed pro-democracy movements to foster a political opening
known as Abertura from 1979 to 1985. In addition to the domestic conditions, Afro-Brazilians were
agitated by the mid-1970s liberation wars of their fellow Portuguese-speaking Africans in Angola and
Mozambique.
Abdias do Nascimento was a co-founder of Democratic Labor Party (PDT). He spearheaded The
Movimento Negro Unificado (MNU) formed in 1978 in Sao Paulo, and it became an important black
movement that brought blacks together across the vast nation to voice their complaints over racial
inequalities. The most national of all movements, the MNU focused on old issues like discrimination
and lack of employment and new issues like healthcare in the HIV/AIDS era and police brutality in the
War against Drugs in the law-and-order era.
Florestan Fernandes, the prominent academician that had assailed Feyre’s Luso-Tropicalism, initially
turned down invitations by Lula Da Silva in 1980 to join the newly created Workers Party, but
eventually joined in 1986 and was elected as a deputy in Sao Paulo. He helped elaborate the 1988
constitution but soon retired from active politics due to health reasons. His student Cardoso joined the
political right.
The spearhead of the Afro-Brazilian movement was again Abdias do Nascimento, the resilient leader of
TEN who unified blacks in the first National Negro Congress , which won the Afro-Brazilians voting
rights between 1940 and 1964. In 1983, he contested and was elected as the first Afro-Brazilian to fight
his people’s cause. By 1985, civil rights movements towards the political, cultural, and spiritual
development of Afro-Brazilians blossomed into more than four hundred groups, mostly regional in
scope.
In a nation with 47 percent Afro-Brazilians, Nascimento was the only Afro-Brazilian in the 1985
constituent assembly working towards the 1988 constitution. Nevertheless, he fully represented his
people by demanding that the new constitution defined racism as a crime against humanity and the
institution of mandatory literacy campaigns. Unsurprisingly, most of his demands were not met.
Serving on the Foreign Relations Committee, Nascimento led Congress in articulating anti-apartheid
measures, supporting African liberation movements like South Africa’s ANC and Namibia’s SWAPO,
as well as other measures on the Pan-African world stage.
The new democratic government, in continuance of the Brazilian racial democracy myth, approached
the black issue as a poverty issue. However, with the creation of the Palmares Cultural Foundation
(FCP), it followed the constitutional requirement towards AfroBrazilian civil rights and cultural
promotion.
In the tradition of civil rights leaders of the Romantic nations, cultural revolution was necessary. The
system had made it economically and socially detrimental to be regarded as black, which was

associated with lower wages and social odium. Out of the 47 percent blacks in Brazil, only 6 percent
admitted to being black, while the rest claimed to be mulatto. Due to their international isolation by
linguistic barriers and racist immigration laws, many Afro-Brazilians were systematically indoctrinated
to see themselves as an inferior race. Some wouldn’t even vote for a fellow African, while most black
politicians didn’t campaign on black issues. Despite the apparent racial inequalities that pervaded
Brazilian society, with blacks having double the poverty, illiteracy, and police brutality rates of whites,
open discussion of racism, even in the democratic era, was still taboo.
This prevented the MNU from becoming a national political party as it became fractionalized by the
1990s. Nascimento was instrumental in the creation of the Democratic Labor Party, but it was not
limited or identified as a wholly Afro-Brazilian party. Prominent MNU and other Afro-Brazilian civil
rights activists were courted by parties for their public profile in their regions, and the activists often
chose to run on party platforms that had similar objectives. Once elected, Afro-Brazilian objectives
were usually relegated down the party’s list of priorities, and the political arena became a weak avenue
for pursuing black objectives.
The Brazilian parties often fielded high percentages of blacks, but many weren’t voted for by their own
people. In Salvador, with the highest black population at 74 percent, Afro-Brazilians formed 50.6
percent of candidates fielded by Democratic Labor Party (PDT); 57.5 percent were fielded by the
Liberal Party (PL), 52.6 percent by the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT), and 42.8 percent by the
Christian Democratic Party (PDC). Only 34.4 percent were elected as local officials in 1992, which was
more than double the 11.4 percent elected in 1988. Although there were improvements in the numbers
of blacks in public offices, their political significance and numbers were still below what their
demographic importance deserved. There were a few governors and no senators.
Despite having a much higher national population ratio, AfroBrazilian’s political power was as weak as
that of blacks with much lower population ratios in Western two-party systems (blacks in the US
Democratic Party and the British Labor Party). The AfroBrazilian movement was dissipated by the
suspect multiparty system that was also implemented in Nigeria.
Further improvements in the Afro-Brazilian community were pushed through forums outside the
multiparty political system. In accordance with the demands of the Romantic cultural revolutionaries,
as stated in the new constitution, the federal government created and funded the Palmares Cultural
Foundation (FCP) under the Ministry of Culture. The foundation was named Palmares, being the name
of the largest quilombo under Zumbi in the 1600s, and the new foundation was to promote Afro-
Brazilian culture through research, with the aims of deterring racial discrimination and harassment and
promoting racial harmony.
The FCP’s most important task was the accreditation of quilombos and assisting their residents in
attaining titles to their land. The task was done by researching and mapping the quilombos to establish
the legitimacy of seven hundred claims out of more than three thousand quilombos, which, initially,
overburdened the FCP despite its constitutional access to federal funds. The FCP was exceptional,
because few organizations could cut across state lines to have the national effect of a black movement,
especially after the fracturing of the MNU.
One of the few nongovernmental organizations to aid blacks was the Conselho Nacional de Entidades
Negras (CONEN or National Council for Black Entities), which brought together differently oriented
groups from all over the federation under one umbrella to pursue strategies of mutual support and
advance the black movement’s agenda on a national level. On the international level, the Ooni of Ife,
Oba Okunade Sijuwade, often acknowledged by AfroBrazilians traditionalists as the supreme African
leader, was well received during a visit to Brazil.

Most movements remained regional, like Ile Aye, created in 1974 from Liberdade, the poor suburb of
Salvador and center of black consciousness. Ile Aye started as a Bahian Afro-carnival group but
developed well-known social programmes that focused on raising black consciousness and education.
Ile Aiye, in Yoruba, strictly translates to ‘land of the living’ but means ‘planet earth’. Ile Aiye signified
the blackworld in the Brazilian context, and its membership was restricted to Afro-Brazilians. Ile Aye
celebrated African beauty, hair, and music by developing rhythms that combined the Candomble
Yoruba drums. A controversy arose over accusations that Ile Aye was racist because it catered to blacks
and rejected white finances and cooperation, which Ile Aye believed commercialized and watered down
the Afrocentrism of the carnivals in Rio de Janeiro and other areas.
Olodum (shortened from the Yoruba word Olodumare meaning almighty god) was a Bahian carnival
samba-reggae group that focused on raising black consciousness and pride. Its international reputation
allowed it to sponsor computer classes for poor black youth. Olodum extended its membership to all
races, enabling it to spread the AfroBahian culture across the world through the likes of the legendary
white musician Paul Simon.
The Iyalode, meaning head/chief of women in Yoruba promoted female education and self-esteem in
Bahia, especially going against the popular Brazilian saying that ‘white women are for marriage,
mulattos are for sex, and black women are for work’. Other Bahian groups like Ara Ketu (meaning
‘natives of Ketu’, the historical Yoruba city-state) and Male Debale became household names.
The Steve Biko Cooperative specialized in preparing poor black youth for the university entrance exam
(the vestibular) but broadened its goals to include consciousness raising. The first week of the course
included classes on human rights, legal rights, and competences in the market place.
A recent and innovative development was a scheme in Rio de Janeiro whereby children were organized
to be tourist guides in the favelas. It was promoted outside mainstream Brazil to raise money for
education and awareness of the black communities, while effectively countering excessive negative
media coverage. Even without the fantastic sights of New York and Paris, it had the propensity to
attract a huge number of visitors and income from across the blackworld, especially those who want to
feel the environment and realize, as said in Nigeria, ‘Na poor I poor, I no craze!’ – ‘I am poor but I am
not crazy!’
Glossy Afro-Brazilian magazines like Raca Brasil and Black People started in the eighties and
contributed to cultural awareness and black pride across the world, like the African American
magazines Ebony and Essence. Despite their limited resources, the various nongovernmental groups
achieved tremendous success since the 1980s.
Fernando Cardoso, who described himself as slightly mulatto and participated in the research by
Florestan Fernandes on ‘The Integration of Blacks into the Class Society’, which debunked earlier
theories of racial democracy, was to take an active role in the new democratic era. The sociologist from
wealthy parents moved a bit to the political right and was elected for senate in 1986 under the banner of
Party for Democratic Movement. He took part in the 1988 Constituent Assembly and was his party’s
Senate leader until 1992. In 1994 as Finance Minister, he pushed the Plano Real advocated by
academicians and stabilized the Brazilian economy by curtailing its hyper-inflation. Based on his
success as finance minister, he resigned and stood for elections against Lula Da Silva, who he beat with
a landslide victory in 1994 and 1998.
President Fernando Cardoso engaged in liberalization of the economy and massive privatization. He
was heavily criticized by his former leftist colleagues over his right wing IMF inspired policies and the
increase of the public debt to GDP ratio from 30% to 50%. However, the economy improved and most

important was the implementation of his findings in the earlier research conducted on Afro-Brazilian
socioeconomic exclusion. He reserved 20 percent of all federal posts for Afro-Brazilians.
There have been significant increases in the number of AfroBrazilian graduates, as well as the numbers
employed in academia and government organizations. There is still a long way to go before Afro-
Brazilians are fully represented in accordance with their population ratios. There is still a ceiling that
halts black progress in many sectors, as only the lower rungs of the sociopolitical ladder are
relinquished to blacks.
Cardoso and his successor fought against the army in the eighties but found it more difficult fighting
the Western IMF military industrialists for economic concessions. Cardoso was only slightly more
successful with human rights issues. Analysis presented by the Global Justice Center in 2000 showed
that of those killed by police in Sao Paulo, 51 percent were shot in the back, 49.5 percent were between
eighteen and twenty-five years old, 60 percent had no prior criminal record, and 23 percent were shot
more than five times.
The excessive police brutality showed that for every AfroBrazilian injured, five were killed—zero
tolerance for life. The infamous ‘street cleaning’ and killing of street kids did not completely stop in the
new democracy, especially in youth detention centers, where many were still tortured and beaten to
death. Despite Cardoso’s clamor for human rights, police brutality did not decrease, especially with the
increased industrialization based on military hardware. Without access to Western markets or an
aggressive foreign policy sponsoring state terrorism and war, Brazil’s arms industry could only profit
locally with conservative law-and-order campaigns for more armed police against the black criminal
element, public enemy number one.
For Afro-Brazilians to take their rightful position as the majority group in Brazil and a major force
across the blackworld, there must be a more significant cultural revolution that enables them to proudly
identify as African. Most importantly, there must be a more equitable distribution of income, which
entails an economic revolution that discards the Ogun ideology of war at the heart of Brazil’s economy.
An ideology that wages war on the environment and people can benefit only a few people and needs to
be changed.
The use of Brazil’s vast solar energy, instead of oil and building dams that kill rivers and destroy
ecosystems, is a starting point. AfroBrazilians must be intellectually and economically empowered to
exploit their historical relationships throughout the blackworld, especially in Africa and with African
Americans, but not by causing wars with its restless military-industrial complex. They could act as a
counterweight to the blocked US markets to Cuba, Haiti, and other smaller black nations in the Western
Hemisphere.

Chapter 23: Things Fall Apart…Together
The rest of the Blackworld’s similar successes and failures (1980– 1999)
Haiti, the first Western-styled black nation (and one of the most important, though poorest, in the
Americas), was not spared the ignominious plagues of the eighties. Unsubstantiated propaganda
claimed that HIV/AIDS started in Haiti, because it was one of the first places to experience an epidemic
in 1982. However, Haitians contacted HIV/AIDS the same way as other parts of the blackworld.
The United States and the Catholic Church continued to support nineteen year-old ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier
after his father’s death. Baby Doc was easier to manipulate than an adult Duvalierist with a strong set of
Afrocentric beliefs. ‘Papa Doc’ had weaned the Haitian army away from the Catholic mulatto elites by
replacing them with African traditionalists who remained in control of the army. In addition, the rural
militia created by Papa Doc served as a counterweight against an urban, mulatto-inspired revolt. Baby
Doc was able to pacify opposing groups due to his lack of strong beliefs and by buying their allegiance.
His lack of experience made it impossible for him to turn around an economy that was based on coffee
and sugar against a mountain of Western tariffs and subsidies. Although Haiti had been France’s most
profitable colony for a century, it was now the poorest nation of the Americas, and like most other
islands, it was like an exhausted sugar mine. The people were prevented from moving their economy to
the industrial stage, and in hope of a pittance, they were made to scrape the bottom of the foreignowned
sugar/coffee ‘mines’ in the Citibank, Western-controlled economy.
By the early 1980s, with the renewed conservative/IMF attack, the rug was pulled from under Haiti’s
economy and Baby Doc. Like nearly every other country across the blackworld, the foreign exchange
markets were sabotaged and destabilized, leaving them at the mercy of IMF and its destructive SAP
conditions that were rejected by resorting to import controls. This led to nepotism and corruption and
the distortion of the real economy, which contracted 15 percent each year.
There was a massive ‘brain drain’ as people migrated to the United States, Canada, France, and other
Caribbean nations. A large number of doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, and other professionals
found work in US cities, where they interacted with the African American community. A small percent
became involved in drugs, especially as Haiti was initially used as a transit point for South American
cocaine.
Due to the public experience of high-level corruption, some younger immigrants were apt to turn to
white-collar crime, even though there was a linguistic barrier. When it came to black fraud, Haitians
came second only to Nigerians in the United States (like Zairians were the second-likeliest group in
Europe after Nigerians to directly reclaim their monies from the European financial system). Legal and
illegal money remittances to the families and businesses of Haitian migrants rose to more than one-third
of Haiti’s total earning from exports.
With over 40 percent of the population below the poverty line due to the stringent IMF conditions,
demonstrations and riots were aggravated by the deaths of demonstrators in November 1985. Baby Doc
could have used the Macoutes to brutally suppress the riots, but realizing the futility of the imposed
IMF conditions, he asked the US government to provide him with a military jet on February 7, 1986
and fled into exile in France with his family.
The army took over, and military-industrialists playing both sides (one through the IMF), ushered in an

era of the type of sociopolitical upheaval witnessed in other parts of the blackworld. General Henri
Namphy, the head of the new military regime, promised a just and good transition to democracy. In the
meantime, the Catholic Church and mulatto elites saw the IMF upheavals as an opportunity to reclaim
their hegemony, and they incited mobs to the streets to revenge the wrongs done by the former
Duvalierist supporters.
Many of the prominent Duvalierists fled the country with the help of the new government, though more
than two thousand were lynched and the properties of those who escaped were destroyed. Many
Catholic priests were at the forefront of the lynching of Duvalierists who were traditional African
believers. Although Baby Doc wasn’t a genuine Africanist, he had protected the diehards from his
father’s regime and other traditional believers. Soon the cry of Dechoukay (revenge) from the mulatto
urban elite and the Church power base was directed at the top army officers, including Namphy.
The army resisted mulatto and Church calls for it to step down by brutally suppressing riots and
allowing the former Macoutes and Duvalierists back on the streets. Under pressure to return to
democracy, a constituent assembly was nominated from supposedly safe nominees, who turned around
to produce an anti-Duvalierist constitution. The new constitution prescribed the creation of an
independent Electoral Council to conduct and supervise elections, and it banned all Duvalierists from
partaking in the new system for ten years. With the current military leadership affected by the
constitution, they supported protests with slogans like Aba Konstitisyon Kominis! (‘Down with the
Communist constitution’).
Haitians voted in favor of the constitution on March 29, 1987, and demonstrations erupted in June
when Namphy insisted that only the army could supervise elections. He retreated after a few deaths, but
the militant Church demonstrators called for a coup, which was unsuccessful and led to more deaths.
A few weeks before the November elections, the independent Electoral Council released the names of
twenty-three acceptable candidates after disqualifying twelve other candidates for being former
associates of the Duvalier government. A few hours later, the Macoutes launched an attack on the
Electoral Council’s building and burnt it down. On election day, November 29, 1987, the Church and
mulatto radio stations, which had been instigating against the traditionalist Duvalierists, were
sabotaged, and their transmitters were destroyed by armed Macoute men. The ensuing violence led to
the cancellation of the elections.
Namphy created another Electoral Council to supervise new elections, but the first four leading
candidates in the previous election refused to partake in new elections and called for a strike. New
elections were held on January 17, 1988, and Leslie Magnat was declared the winner with 50 percent of
the vote. Magnat was the World Bank official who became Baby Doc’s finance minister and who
claimed that 36 percent of Haiti’s national income was being stolen, in what was likely Western
inspired corruption propaganda.
Magnat lasted only a few months as he foolishly set out to rid the Haitian government of its
overwhelmingly Africanist military influence by removing Namphy as the head of the army and
Colonel Prosper Avril (also a former Duvalierist) as the commander of the Presidential Guard. Two
days later, on June 19, 1988, the Presidential Guard mounted a coup that brought Namphy back as
president and Avril as his assistant and sent Magnat into exile in the Dominican Republic.
Although Baby Doc thawed government relations with the Catholic Church and its mulatto elite by
stopping their repression and giving them back the economic concessions lost under Papa Doc, in 1988,
after their cries for vengeance and lynching former Duvalierists were defeated, the Church still resented
many Duvalierists and voiced their incitements from the pulpits.

On Sunday, September 11, 1988, several hundred rural Africanist militias marched on Father Jean-
Betrand Aristide’s Catholic church, where he campaigned against the Duvalierist military government
of Namphy and Avril. Thirteen people were killed and dozens wounded before the church was set on
fire. Six days later, there was a palace coup, and Avril announced that he was ‘forced to accept the
presidency of the military government’.
The September 17 ‘window dressing’ impressed the public, especially as the United States gave Avril a
public endorsement and $30 million in aid. A US spokesman declared, ‘We are encouraged by what the
Avril government is doing’. * The positive public approval was short lived, as Avril’s government was
made to follow IMF conditions. The West wasn’t overly interested in local politics as long as Avril
signed up with the conservative agenda. After fewer than eighteen months in power, Avril realized that
Haiti was ungovernable with the IMF conditions. On March 12, 1990, he left on a US military jet, like
Baby Doc, to self-exile in the United States.
After several months of protracted political wrangling, Aristide won the June 1991 elections. Although
Aristide belonged to the Church and mulatto elite powerhouse, he was a black radical whose populist
intent was clear and rejected by both the Catholic mulatto elite and the Africanist army. He was
overthrown and exiled by the head of the army, General Raoul Cedras, as the army came back to
power.
In June 1992, Marc Bazin, who had been resoundingly defeated by Aristide in the elections, was made
prime minister. Trade embargoes by the Organization of American States couldn’t have any sufficient
impact, because IMF conditions had sapped the life out of the economy. Dodgy officials and
businessmen used the embargo to make more money through sanction busting and overpricing goods to
the consumer. The army had to struggle to keep control against the IMF upheaval, which was worsened
by ancient mulatto and Church influences.
* Segal, The Black Diaspora, 222.
Without immigrant dollar remittances to survive, the lower classes emigrated in large numbers
(primarily by unsavory means, which included unseaworthy vessels that killed thousands), while many
others became drug mules. The cocaine trade flourished through the availability of a large pool of
people willing to risk being caught in the United States as mules rather than risk drowning in unsafe
vessels in the Gulf of Mexico.
Despite being drained by Citibank IMF military industrialists, Haitian refugees received inhumane
treatment at the hands of the US establishment, which arrested them and returned them to Haiti. The US
navy formed a blockade that flouted international law to stop Haitians from immigrating to the United
States, while the mostly white Cubans were given free entry. The international embarrassment caused
by the conservative US Republican racist policy was continued by the new Democratic president,
Clinton, who piled unfair pressure on the Haitian government to allow the return of Aristide.
Despite United States and UN diplomatic pressures leading to worldwide oil and arms sanctions and
freezing Haiti’s foreign accounts on June 23, 1993, the army, led by Cedras, refused to let Aristide
return to power. Eventually, under the real threat of a US/UN invasion in September 1994, the army
stepped down, and Aristide returned to power on October 15, 1994, after three years in exile.
The restoration of ‘democracy’ and Aristide didn’t pacify tempers agitated by the IMF conditions,
which had dogged every leader since Baby Doc. A US-inspired UN ‘peacekeeping’ force had to
militarily exercise authority in Haiti from March 31, 1995 to November 30, 1997. Aristide disbanded
the Afrocentric Duvalierist army but lost the elections on February 7, 1996. President Rene Preval also

found Haiti impossible to rule, especially with a hostile parliament.
Like other black nations that stagnated since the early 1980s, the Haitian economy stagnated and
worsened over the intervening twenty-year period. Western markets remained closed, and Haitians
were deprived of investment funds, subsidies, and tariffs in the name of IMF free-trade conditions. The
large numbers of emigrants still contributed a significant amount of foreign earnings, because with
Western barriers and tariffs, labor was the only exportable commodity in the export-oriented economy.
Those emigrating still faced numerous barriers including emigration restrictions, linguistic differences,
lack of job training, and racist employment practices.
The Catholic Church, locally controlled by the mulatto middle class, restricted access to education to
those who kept their YorubaCongo traditions. With the Haiti educational system in their hands,
children of black voodoo practitioners were prevented from attending school, which led to the
continued, relatively high illiteracy rate of black Haitians. The Church’s negative influences were not
only directed at black children but also at their naturalist African religion, based on the environment.
Trees and their mighty roots were important aspects in shrines of the Orishas in the rainforest religions,
so the Church and the establishment set out to clear Haiti of trees, leaving less than 1 percent of tree
cover before the ‘green era’ of the nineties. However, the sins against the environment were ruthlessly
punished in 2004 by rains that flooded the treeless nation and swept many innocent thousands away.
Coffee and sugar were still the main exports, but on their own, they couldn’t provide full employment
to the majority of the population, especially with the unfair sugar subsidies in the Western world.
Haitians, like other Africans, retained their artistic qualities, which were more fully represented by their
paintings and artworks, because their Creole Haiti French language (Yoruba-French) was a barrier to
success in international hip-hop music. Nevertheless, the vibrant, Haitian musical scene included juju
music and hip-hop with the same rhythmic call-and-response melodies.
Haiti, the first modern black nation, was the poorest in the Western Hemisphere and had a long way to
go to fulfill the dreams of its 1804 revolution, but the rest of the blackworld had to be free before
meaningful house reordering could commence.
South Africa was the last black African nation to gain political independence—not because its people
were docile, but because Nguniland had the largest European settler community in Africa. The black
movement encountered an increasingly repressive reactionary government as the leader of the South
African Students Organization, Steve Biko, and many others, were killed. Many fled into exile or were
tortured and imprisoned.
Thabo Mbeki returned to Southern Africa in 1971 but due to the jailing and killing of activists, ANC
set up their headquarters and army of freedom fighters in Lusaka and neighboring countries.
In 1978, the white South African presidency passed from Vorster to P W Botha, both of the National
Party (NP) that had ruled since 1948. Botha’s government launched attacks in 1981 against supposed
guerrilla ‘terrorists’ in Mozambique and Angola. The white regime made it clear that it was ready to
attack independent African nations in its desperate attempt to hold onto power in South Africa and
South West Africa (Namibia), an ex-German colony.
South Africa developed a nuclear bomb to scare other African nations away from helping the freedom
fighters. In response, Nigeria made it clear that it wasn’t scared of the white regime’s devices, and
some generals boasted of being confident of taking on the white regime and fighting with Ogun
(biological and spiritual) warfare. Although Nigeria’s threat appeared to be an empty boast, the white

regime continued to develop weapons to help it stay in power, including biological weapons to be used
against the black populations and supporters.
With the independence of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), the apartheid regime felt the increased pressure from
its freedom fighters and their supporters within and outside South Africa. With Mbeki’s agreement with
Robert Mugabe, there were signs that the liberation struggle was getting more militarized, while
Nigerians and other nations pushed for sanctions at the UN. The rapid industrialization achieved by
whites since the 1940s, with cheap black labor and abundant mines, was targeted with sanctions and
increasing black strikes.
In 1982, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) was created by the Council of Unions of South
Africa (CUSA) through Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa. Ramaphosa was born in 1952 in Soweto
Johannesburg and was a former member of the South African Students Union (SASO) and Black
Peoples Convention (BPC) in the 1970s, when he was jailed twice. He returned to university for further
studies and after graduation went to work for the unionists.
Raised in the Johannesburg mining region, Ramaphosa, as NUM General Secretary, was able to rapidly
increase the membership of NUM from 6,000 in 1982 to 300,000 in 1992. In 1985, he broke NUM
away from CUSA to form Congress of South African Trade Unions, which formed an alliance with a
coalition of 400 non-racial non-violent groups of students, workers, churches and others called the
United Democratic Front (UDF). NUM, UDF and ANC launched a Mass Democratic Movement in
which Cyril Rampahosa took a leading role.
Countering Africans were conservative calls for restraint by the Thatcher and Reagan governments,
who vouched for ‘constructive engagement’ with the racist regime. The calls were reminiscent of calls
made after the US Civil War, when President Johnson unsuccessfully fought for ‘constructive
engagement’ with the Southern slavers against the Radical Republicans’ immediate reconstruction
programmes. The Western conservatives blocked every move to place embargoes on South African
gold and labeled the liberation fighters as terrorists and Communists, not to be dealt with. Archconservative
Congressman Dick Cheney (later US vice president) earned the ignoble title of the most
pro-apartheid congressman by voting more than seventy times against anti-apartheid laws in the United
States.
The apartheid government employed delaying tactics to ease pressure by passing a constitution that
extended the voting franchise to mulattos and Asians but not the black African majority, which was left
to hope for future progress.
They set out to divide the black freedom movement by sponsoring Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi
Inkatha’s Freedom Party to breed clashes between Xhosas and Zulus in Natal and around
Johannesburg. With Mbeki, Mandela, Tambo and Sisulu all being Xhosa, who revived the ANC
through its Youth Wing, the apartheid government instigated tribal divisions by promoting ANC as an
Xhosa attempt to dominate their slightly more populous Zulu cousins within the Nguni sphere, despite
ANC being formed by John Dube, a Zulu. Xhosas, whose homeland was in East Cape colony, were the
first to lose their lands to the Dutch and English colonists.
Being situated in the English controlled Cape Colony that a nonracial franchise, a larger proportion of
the population were made politically conscious with the loss of their voting franchise at the 1910
beginning of the Union. This coupled with the fact that there were slightly more political freedoms in
the area led to the initial overwhelming influence of the Xhosa, which the apartheid government
exploited for their traditional divide and rule tactics.

The main bone of contention the white military industrialists had was the black movement’s rightful
stance, which was to take back the gold and diamond mines for the benefit of the African people
instead of the merchants in London, Amsterdam, and New York who controlled the wealth. The
nationalization of the productive resources of the country, the mines and good agricultural land stolen
from Africans, was labeled Communism by the white apartheid government, the US Republicans, and
the UK Conservative party. They continued the delay tactics to give them more time to find a way out,
and another piece of the apartheid system was brought down in 1985 as anti-interracial sex and
marriage laws were repealed.
The appeasements did little to stop an increase in the diplomatic and military offensives against the
apartheid government, especially with the ANC becoming more equipped and organized and
international calls for sanctions strengthening. The international white establishment gave Bishop
Desmond Tutu the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize to signify that he was working according to their favored
route, like Martin Luther King Jr was awarded the prize in the sixties due to his nonviolent approach.
Despite the encouragement of peace talks and the promise to scrap racist pass laws, on May 19, 1986,
Botha launched preemptive attacks against ANC ‘terrorist training camps’ in the three neighboring
nations: Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Zambia. Still unable to control the rising black resistance, the Botha
government declared a nationwide state of emergency on June 12, which in effect was a state of war
waged against blacks by the security services. Blacks were shot, arrested, tortured, and killed by the
desperate apartheid government.
Over the next two years, with the pressure building to the June 6– 8, 1988 strike of two million black
workers, it was apparent that the apartheid government had to find a way of convincing the ANC to
accept a political solution without economic independence. Otherwise, the downward slide of the
economy would continue. Many whites were just workers in the system and not fearful of change, but
the few ranch owners and businessmen were the nucleus of the conservative Nationalist Party. With the
end of Cold War, the overwhelming pressure forced out the conservative Botha government in 1989 to
allow the more liberal Frederik Willem de Klerk to preside over the dismantling of the apartheid
system.
Winnie Mandela and her two daughters, the international faces of black South Africa, aroused immense
international support against the apartheid system that had jailed her husband for more than twenty
years. Mandela cut a figure of a strong African woman fighting the white oppressor that had negated
her African male and resorted to anything to keep power. She held onto the ANC demand of a
meaningful political and economic independence.
Thabo Mbeki remained the face of the liberation movement. The unions, white businessmen and
liberals travelled to hold talks with him in Lusaka to find a way forward, and he undertook the first
secret talks with apartheid government. When the serious talks began, he was replaced by Cyril
Ramaphosa, who had grown in statue with his union power. Ramaphosa was to become ANC General
Secretary in 1991 as he ironed out the resolution details with Roelf Meyer of the National Party.
Many people have cruised the resultant deal for black freedom that Ramaphosa made as selling out
cheap and the whites found their ‘friendly Negro’, who was willing to drop immediate nationalization
and income redistribution demands. Without deep convictions like Mbeki and true freedom fighters, it
was a typical unionist compromise with management, which never really frees the slave but fattens
both sides of the negotiating table.
This perception was not helped by the fact Ramaphosa ended up in the boardrooms of most of the
military-industrialists and became one of the richest men in South Africa, whose companies continued

racist practices. Others argue that the whole black political elite realized that ‘half bread was better than
none’—especially when considering that all other African nations that had received political
independence were still in economic shackles. Nationalization of mines and immediate land
redistribution wasn’t possible without war. Winnie Mandela and others who refused the compromise
were labeled hardliners and hounded.
The end of the Cold War made it easier for the West to deal without the fear of losing the monopoly of
gold and diamonds to the Russians. President de Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC in 1990 and released
Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners on February 11. He announced plans to abolished
apartheid laws in February 1991, as plans for a constituent assembly were set into motion and
completed in 1993.
Thabo Mbeki and others liberation fighters were able to return home. With his first son, Kwanda, and
his brother, Jamal, killed during the struggle Mbeki, the ‘man born in the struggle’ reunited with his
father who was also released. The first time since early 1960s both will walk as free men in South
Africa. With Oliver Tambo dead, Mandela was the natural head of the free black South Africa, while
Mbeki was the operational head.
To weaken the ANC, the apartheid government continued to sponsor divisions, especially through
Chief Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party, leading to fifteen thousand deaths. South African security
forces used, aided, and abetted the Inkatha to commit atrocities, as Buthelezi used ethnic differences for
his own selfish ambitions.
The last major African peoples took political control in the April 1994 elections. The ANC won 62.7
percent of the vote, making Nelson Mandela the president. The NP, which had ruled since 1948, won
20.4 percent, while the troublesome Inkatha won 10.5 percent and control of the local legislature of
Kwazulu.
The first black majority government led by Mandela faced the enormous task of delivering the
socioeconomic benefits expected of political independence but not with the full economic tools of the
political unit. Less than 1 percent of the population (forty-five thousand whites) owned more than 75
percent of the arable land, and the De Beers mines were still owned by the Rhodes and Rothschild
military industrialists.
Mbeki, with a Masters degree in Economics, proposed an ambitious reconstruction and development
programme to help the vast majority of Africans in poverty, living in shantytowns and dispossessed of
fertile lands. Blacks expected to receive an increase in income to bring them on a par with whites,
which increased costs to businesses built on the assumption of cheap labor.
The new black government realized a huge percent of its people were infected with the HIV virus and
South Africa had the world’s largest number of AIDS victims. As noted, the virus mysteriously affected
a much higher percentage of blacks wherever there was a large white settlement or white control of
medical services. How and when 40 percent of the adult population could suddenly be infected was a
mystery that has not fully been explored, but the motives and means of white, military-industrialist
extremists are clear. The apartheid government conducted a biological weapons research programme
(one of its scientists has been brought to court for his evil practices).
Mbeki came under media attack for discounting the importance of AIDS by tying it to the issue of
poverty and diet. However, faced with a high level of poverty, homelessness and illiteracy that
exacerbated the AIDS problem, it was rational to approach it from a socioeconomic perspective. The
South African government challenged the copyrights that were meant to medically enslave them to

Western interests. US pharmaceutical companies were brought to court, being known to conduct all
types of lethal tests across Africa and profiteering on their copyrights to alleviate the problems caused
by their industrial complex. They won the right to produce much cheaper generic drugs to alleviate but
not cure the disease that was rapidly debilitating the Nguni.
In addition to the huge HIV/AIDS bill, improvements in housing, education, and other social services
were expected, especially to cover historical underinvestment, but this could be achieved only by an
increase in taxation on the white-owned military-industrial complex. New black industries and markets
took more time and investment before they could provide the required increase in personal and national
income. An advantage was that South African businesses could grow faster. The African markets,
formerly closed to apartheid South Africa, were opened, especially the Nigerian market that the South
African telecommunications industry later found profitable.
Transferring ownership and the management of the economy to black South Africans were major
problems. Mbeki devised the Black Economic Employment (BEE) and created employment in middle
sector. With the racist educational and social policies, black South Africans lacked the managerial and
professional skills to fully take control of the economy, even before taking into account the huge
number of HIV/AIDS victims. This led to imported foreign labor, especially black professionals from
the United States, Nigeria, Ghana, and England, to fill the posts of many racist white professionals who
left due to the black majority rule. It provoked anger among Ngunis who felt ‘jumped over’ by ‘foreign
blacks’, and many unsavory politicians employed it as a political platform in South Africa.
Moreover, not only Black professionals flocked to the new South Africa but a whole array of Blacks,
due to the poor IMF economic conditions across the blackworld. A large number of unskilled workers
flooded South Africa from its neighboring nations of Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique, as well
as a large number of Nigerians.
Unlike the colonial South African seasonal immigrants, who were more interested in mining jobs and
were in direct competition with black South Africans, the West Africans evolved their form of street
trading and black economy. Imported goods were hawked by Nigerians and other West Africans, but
they were joined by black South Africans who rightly wanted to control at least the lowest rungs of the
new economy.
Most other African nations had restricted retailing to their citizens, and the poorer classes enforced their
dominance brutally. Ghanaians and other African nations had exhibited xenophobic tendencies towards
immigrant Nigerians during the Nigerian civil war, while Nigerians had also mistreated Ghanaians
during the IMF deprivations of the mid-seventies. This was due to misguided politicians who sacrificed
the spirit of the Afrocentric politics that won their political independence for the economic exigencies
of local politics.
Despite Nigeria’s help during South Africa’s liberation struggle, Nigerians were especially targeted due
to their large numbers and exposure, which even more developed and populous nations found
overbearing. Nigerians were made to pay a huge immigration bond before being allowed into South
Africa, where they could easily overwhelm the thirty million black Africans with potentially one
hundred million from the nigger area. They were accused of taking jobs at all levels as well as
promoting the drug trade. A tiny percent, but a significant absolute number, of Nigerians in the drug
trade, who had been shut down in Nigeria, found South Africa to be a virgin transit land. Fraud
schemes against the rich, white South Africans were also perpetrated.
Due to their exposure and education, the majority of the immigrants achieved a relatively higher
standard of living through legitimate avenues in labor and retail markets. Poor South Africans were

misdirected by their politicians, who in an effort to cover their inadequacies, stereotyped the tiny
percent of criminal immigrants as the majority and the source of all social problems.
South Africans became the world’s most xenophobic nation as politicians pointed to the immigrants as
the ones who were taking housing and employment and were the source of all crime. In a speech to
parliament, the Home Affairs Minister Chief Buthelezi warned that South Africa could forget its
reconstruction and development plans if it didn’t stop the flow of immigrants. The Inkatha Freedom
Party threatened to organize marches and take ‘physical action’ if the government failed to respond to
the alleged crisis, while the white National Party spokesman alleged that ‘eighty percent of all suspects
appearing in court in Johannesburg in connection with drugs were Nigerians’.
The negative attitude towards foreigners encouraged and condoned abuses against those suspected of
being illegal immigrants and non-South Africans in the country legally. Research showed that the level
of xenophobia hovered around 75 percent of the population, and it was higher among whites—93
percent were hostile to immigrants while only 53 percent of blacks * were similarly inclined.
A year after black majority rule, the South African Bishops Conference released a report on the high
levels of xenophobia, expressing concern that the unrealizable expectations of the populations,
bolstered by the promises of the ANC’s reconstruction and development plan, were translating into
xenophobia. The masses became impatient, because they expected the government to perform miracles
in their socioeconomic lives. There were limits to the creation of new capital, and the overtaxation of
the existing industries was bound to terminate the economy.
However, there was a mass improvement, reminiscent of the sixties, in Nigeria, Ghana, and other newly
independent countries, but it was not fast enough to stop the growing division and alienation in the
sociopolitical structures. The Western media labeled South Africa as the murder capital of the world.
Young, black South Africans became desperate and more involved in crime, especially drugs, lowlevel
and violent personal robbery, and extortion-based crimes. Without a proper education, there was little
hope of bringing the majority to the skill level required to earn well-enumerated, modern jobs.
* Human Rights Watch 1998 Report, ‘South Africa—Xenophobia and Attacks against Migrants’,
http://www.hrw.org/reports98/sareports.
There should have been free and universal education up to the university level for everyone, but this
would cause an enormous strain on the resources of the government, which would be forced into
raising income by increasing taxes on the mines and industry.
South Africa provided the hope of widespread industrialization across Africa with its mineral resources
and established industrial complex. Despite the infant political economy, black South Africans began to
play a role corresponding to their wealth as they joined Nigeria in the front row of Africa’s geopolitics.
South Africa was the last member of the ‘free’ blackworld, but apart from the Nguni being the thirdlargest
original African group, its huge gold and diamonds reserves, modern army, and industrial
complex from the apartheid regime allowed it to stake its claim in the Blackworld’s leadership.
A concrete political tradition was built with the 1999 transfer of power from Nelson Mandela, who
served one term, to Mbeki to take South Africa into the new era.
Congo-Zaire was one of the most important African nations for having the second-largest indigenous
African population, its history, and its abundant mineral resources, but its sociopolitical system was
derailed from its inception. The US-installed President Mobutu wreaked havoc in Zaire and its

surroundings after taking power in 1965. With a poor educational system and ragtag army left behind
by the Belgians, there wasn’t a sufficient pool of intellectuals and military officers to challenge
Mobutu. The few who did found themselves victims of a repressive government and an ‘uninterested’
international community that was happy with Mobutu’s reign.
In the bankers’ rush (which started with Mobutu’s 1970 visit to Washington, DC where Bankers Trust
raised the first $25 million general loan), US Citibank, British Morgan Grenfell, and French Societe
Generale made Zaire flush with loans to the tune of $400 million. Despite the obvious economic
mismanagement and the crash in copper prices that led to a default on interest payments on the $400
million debt by 1976, Citibank and the Paris Club raised even more petro-dollars to keep Mobutu in
power. The debt multiplied nearly ten times in three years, and the foreign debt reached $3 billion by
1979.
In March 1977, members of the Kongo extended family tree in Angola attempted to secede the copperrich
Katanga province from Mobutu’s Zaire. They successfully pushed Mobutu’s army back before
Western powers arrived to reverse their gains and defeat their cause. The French transported Moroccan
soldiers to fend off the cessation reattempts, but the Europeans became more directly involved, and
French and Belgian troops were inserted when the rebels pushed up to the copper city of Kolwezi and
killed forty-four whites.
To repay the Westerners and keep a good credit rating with Citibank IMF bankers, Mobutu agreed to
sign the control of the Zairian Central Bank, the Audit Office, and the finance ministry to them.
German banker Erwin Blumenthal of the IMF took over the Central Bank and finances in August 1978.
With the Central Bank in their control, the Western bankers continued to pile on Zaire’s national debt;
devaluation and inflation ran up a thousand percent. Mobutu continued to parcel out concessions to
companies, including giving a German missile company land for weapons testing.
Throughout the eighties and early nineties, the corruption and IMF conditions debilitated Zaire’s
socioeconomic infrastructure. Luckily, probably due to the low number of white settlers, Zaire initially
had a lower HIV/AIDS infection rate than the East African nations on the Indian Ocean Coast.
A huge domestic and regional trade continued across the Kongo River basin. The Kongos retained a
close cultural similarity with eastern Nigerians, who traded clothing and music across the vast country.
Zaire experienced migrations to Belgium and Europe, but due to the low literacy levels and being
French speakers, the people didn’t have a significant influence on the international black labor market
until the 1999 war sent millions fleeing across the world.
Mobutu’s negative influence extended outside Zaire’s borders, especially into Uganda, Burundi, and
Rwanda, where he sponsored Western-favored rebels in Belgian-mandated ex-colonies. Mobutu
contributed to the Western efforts to again get rid of Uganda’s President Obote in the eighties and the
ascendancy of Museveni, who still held the fort for Western interests in Uganda. Idi Amin was a
Western replacement for Obote, but with the fall of Amin and the return of Obote, Museveni became
the Western favorite in Uganda.
Mobutu and Museveni were a dangerous mix of Western puppet leaders. They caused the worst
carnage in Africa, leading to more than five million deaths in the mineral-rich Great Lakes area,
especially in Burundi and Rwanda. They filtered Western support to Tutsi rebels trying to overthrow
the legitimate, Hutu-majority, Rwandan government, which had not been in Western favor since
overthrowing the European-friendly Tutsi minority government in 1959.
Following the 1972–1973 Hutu uprising in Burundi that left 150,000 Hutus dead and an equal number

displaced in Tanzania and Zaire, the Tutsi minority government agreed to the first democratic elections
in Burundi. The Tutsi minority lost power to a Hutu majority government in June 1993, but the first
Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, was killed in an attempted coup in October 1993. Cyprien
Ntaryamira, another Hutu Burundi president, was elected in January 1994 but was killed in a suspicious
plane crash with the Rwandan president—who was also of Hutu origin and faced Tutsi insurgents at
home.
The deaths of both Hutu presidents sparked ethnic clashes, in which the UN and French were quick to
interfere. They tricked the majority Hutu into disarming before allowing the Tutsi-led Rwandan
Patriotic Front to run over and slaughter millions of Hutu as the Tutsi took over power in Rwanda and
were strengthened by the West. The Hutu fled into eastern Zaire, where they clashed with previous
Tutsi refugees, and Mobutu intervened on the side of the Tutsi. This was his downfall; the Hutu and
Congolese rebels, led by General Laurent Kabila, a long-time opponent of Mobutu and labeled a
Marxist, marched west towards the Zairian capital, Kinshasa.
The success of the rebels was attributed to the fact that Mobutu was receiving treatment for prostate
cancer in Western Europe during the last four months of 1996, when the civil war started and rapidly
accelerated towards the capital. His army showed little or no resistance. The Western military
industrialists were unsure of what to do in Mobutu’s absence, and his weak army structure had been left
in command, so they played both sides through Rwanda and Uganda, who were inspired to grab
territory. When Mobutu returned in March 1997, all efforts to negotiate with Kabila were ineffectual,
because Kabila had already won half of the country. On May 17, 1997, Kabila marched into Kinshasa,
and Mobutu fled into exile after thirty-two years of the worst rule in Africa.
The Western powers would not allow the ‘Marxist’ Kabila to retain power, so they sponsored Ugandan
and Rwandan puppet governments to start Africa’s first ‘world war’, in which nine countries mauled
the Kongo nation. Rebels assisted by the West through Uganda and Rwanda threatened Kinshasa in
August 1998, but Angola, Zimbabwe, and Namibia came to Kabila’s aid. South Africa, Tanzania,
Central African Republic, and Malawi had contributory influences in a war that took three million lives
in four years.
The shady UN missions sometimes indirectly aided mass killings like Rwanda by disarming the
disfavored communities in a peace effort but then allowing the pro-Western groups to aggress with
impunity. On January 16, 2001, Kabila was assassinated, and his son stepped into his shoes and
attempted to find a workable solution. Many truces had been called before 2003, but it appeared that
peace would not be attained until the West called back its dogs of war in Uganda and Rwanda—not
likely if an Afrocentric government remained in power in Zaire.
This was the case in Burundi as Western-inspired coups and countercoups resulted in ethnic clashes
between the Tutsi puppet leaders and the Hutu majorities. Nelson Mandela and President Clinton tried
to broker an uneasy peace between the warring factions, but the nations around the Great Lakes were
still unstable, especially the French-inspired government of Rwanda and the British/USinspired
government of Uganda.
France made it a point to remain strong in Africa and was ready to send troops into any Francophone
ex-colony that tried to break the ‘apron strings’. Its ex-colonies were like a variety of companies in its
business portfolio valued in the CFA, whose value was tied to and decided by the French franc. The
French indirectly developed plantations and kept tight controls on the economic life of Senegal, Ivory
Coast, Gabon, and Cameroon, its four most prosperous excolonies, all with populations of under twenty
million. Gabon had large oil reserves and a population of under two million but with a standard of
living only slightly better than the remaining sixteen Francophone nations.

Senegal and Gabon had pro-French governments for long periods (especially President Bongo of
Gabon, who had been in office since 1967), despite serious IMF riots. The French military
industrialists, through the Paris Club, ensured that the IMF conditions didn’t upset the political and
economic control of their African neocolonies. They prevented widespread riots and social upheavals
by softening the effects of subsidy withdrawals and the mass devaluations witnessed in other black
nations, since Francophone countries used the CFA whose value was set by France. If all else failed,
they sent in troops in dubious ‘peace efforts’ to keep the status quo.
In Ivory Coast, the model Francophone ex-colony, the French kept Houphouet-Boigny in power after
he had helped split French West Africa into manageable, neocolonised units in the sixties. The
economic power remained with the French, who largely did away with African middlemen, and
prevented a more equitable distribution of income. There were large coffee and cocoa plantations in
Ivory Coast owned by the French, usually run by an African caretaker. Due to Ivory Coast’s small
population, the plantations relied on migrant labor from Burkina Faso and other neighboring nations for
20 percent of their labor supply. The persistent, European, slave-labor mentality and the IMF cut in
workers’ real wages led to increased child labor and alleged reports of child slavery.
The ex-French colonies didn’t suffer from the HIV/AIDS epidemic suffered by the East and South
African ex-British colonies with significant white settlers.
Due to the large presence and control of the French in the Ivorian economy, the Paris Club and the IMF
didn’t press too hard on French businesses. However, the tiny, black middle class working for the
government was debilitated because of the cuts in subsidies and services. The French were directly
involved in all Francophone African nations, where dissent and Pan-African thought was frowned upon
and excluded and local politicians were capitalist or Socialist pro-French.
The first to voice opposition to French dominance in Ivory Coast was Laurent Gbagbo, a history
professor who bravely questioned Houphouet-Boigny’s dominant presidency for life and brought about
dissent. The 1990 demonstrations demanded that Houphouet-Boigny be ousted, and the first multiparty
elections were called, but he fraudulently won and retained power. In 1993, Houphouet-Boigny died in
office, and the National Assembly named a successor, Henri Bedie, who belonged to the Houphouet-
Boigny camp.
Bedie won reelection in 1995 and continued the same masterservant relationship with the French. A
mutiny by underpaid soldiers and workers led to the coup that brought an end to the HouphouetBoigny
era on December 24, 1999—the last revolution of a millennium of revolutions across Africa.
Cameroon enjoyed a relatively docile sociopolitical existence, and President Paul Biya retained power
for more than twenty years in a farcical, multiparty democracy. After a brief period of instability in the
early 1980s, the French secured Biya and their interests in Cameroon and surroundings. It was alleged
that after the loss of Iraqi oilfields to Anglo-American interests, the French inspired Cameroon’s
diplomatic struggle for oil along the Nigerian border, especially along the oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula,
and that the French used their power in the UN to secure a favorable diplomatic outcome.
It was hoped that this would not cause war with Nigeria, which vowed to disregard the UN resolution
based upon the 1920 colonial agreement between the British and French to split the ex-German colony.
The UN resolution awarded the Bakassi Peninsula, under Nigerian rule since 1960 independence, to
Cameroon in 2002. The French had already sponsored the Biafra War, and it was hoped it would be the
last war in the Niger delta area between French and Anglo-American interests.
In Mauritania, France’s westernmost African desert colony, the French sent bombers to aid the

Mauritanian government, which grabbed territory from Spanish Sahara and was fighting against the
Polisario Front. Reminiscent of Zaire’s Mobutu, using French and Moroccans against his insurgents in
1977, Mauritania used eight thousand Moroccan fighters and French bombers, but the Mauritanian
government eventually signed a peace treaty with the Polisario Front. With a population of under three
million in 2002, Mauritania had a reputation of being one of the last few nations where Islamic slavery
of original Africans was reported in recent times.
In Mali, Mauritania’s eastern neighbor also on the desert fringes, a pro-French coup in 1968 overthrew
the Afrocentric government, and President Traore ruled until 1991, when the IMF conditions finally
turned the masses against him. Backed by the French, Traore used repressive means to stay in power
until March 26, 1991, when he was overthrown by a military coup led by Alpha Oumar Konare.
In April 1992, Konare held presidential elections, which he won and retained power over the
population of ten million. He won public and French support due to the indefensible long reign of
Traore, who was charged with human rights crimes and sentenced to death, which was commuted to a
life sentence. Mali continued to implement the IMF conditions, which made one of the poorest nations
even poorer. In an area that gave humanity pastoralism and milk, the ancient, local pastoralism industry
was destroyed, and the West flooded Mali with cheap, subsidized milk. Malians couldn’t compete
when an average Malian lived on a dollar a day and the West subsidized every cow with two dollars.
The poor economic situation provoked sociopolitical upheaval that saw the Tuareg and other Arabic
clans take over government and destroy many of its rich historical monuments, as the ultra-Islamic
groups sought to ‘purify’ the Islamic nation with their own extremist brand of Islam.
To the east of Mali, in Upper Volta, a young army officer, Thomas Sankara, took over power when the
Francophone nation stagnated due to the global currency manipulations and pressure from the IMF and
the Paris Club. The existing government refused to implement the conditions and chose to enforce
import and foreignexchange controls, but the ensuing inflation and corruption attached to its fiscal
policies led to its overthrow.
Sankara turned out to be one of the great Pan-Africanists and revolutionaries of post-colonial Africa,
launching one of the most ambitious programmes for socio-political and economic change in Africa.
His direct approach saw the nationalization of foreign owned assets and redistribution of land that
brought about a doubling of agricultural output. He was termed a Marxist by the Western as he sought
to wean Upper Volta from French domination. Though he ruled for only four years, he left an indelible
mark on the national consciousness, and across Africa.
His Afrocentric stance against Western neo-colonization led to his assassination by his close aide,
Compaore, backed by Western powers through their West African puppets. Compaore was to sellout
the nation as he held onto power for the next two decades. He rescinded all Sankara’s policies, reversed
the nationalizations and returned control to France. Burkina Faso, with a population of thirteen million,
was to remain a poor nation, heavily reliant on aid and the income earned by its migrant workers from
Ivory Coast plantations.
Along the same grassland latitude to the east was Chad, where the French, like in Mauritania,
committed troops to fight the northern Muslim Arabs. Following an armed struggle since 1966,
Toumbalaye, leading the southern pro-French African naturalist/Christian government, was killed in
1975. He was succeeded by General Felix Malloum, who continued to face Libyan-inspired rebels in
the civil war.
In March 1979, nine rival groups conducted peace talks in Lagos, Nigeria, where they agreed to form a
provisional government headed by Goukouni Queddei, a former rebel leader. In June 1982,

Frenchbacked southern rebels, led by Hissene Habre, took the capital and power, forcing Queddei to
flee.
In 1983, the French sent three thousand troops to Chad to help President Habre against the Libyanbacked
northern rebels. The French struggled to keep Habre in power for eight years before a
proLibyan insurgent group, called Patriotic Salvation Movement and led by Idriss Deby, overthrew him
in December 1990. This led to the withdrawal of the French and Americans and later the Libyan forces.
The struggle between the two factions continued, but following the approval of a new constitution in
March 1996, multiparty presidential elections were held in June/July 1996, and Deby won. Despite
allegations of repression and corruption, he won reelection on May 20, 2001 for another five-year term.
Although the divisions continued to simmer, the foreign usurpers appeared to be tiring in their fight for
the arid desert nation with crude oil deposits. In November 2004, Chad received its first oil payment
and was expected to earn $80 million annually over the next two decades, which would increase its
revenue by at least 50 percent and, it was hoped, bring the much-needed relief to its poor inhabitants.
In 2004, Chad experienced a huge influx of Sudan refugees who fled from Arabs.
To its south, in Central African Republic, after the overthrow of Bokassa by the French government in
September 1979, the former president David Dacko was reinstalled but was soon overthrown by
General Andre Kolingba, who ruled from 1981 to 1993. Due to ethnic tensions, exacerbated by IMF
hardships, calls rose for multiparty elections in the population of four million. Legislative and
presidential elections were held in October 1992, but Kolingba cancelled the results when he found
himself losing the presidential race. He lost elections held in August/September 1993 and was forced to
hand over power to President Ange-Felix Patasse.
Despite Central African Republic’s small deposits of gold, diamonds, and uranium, Patasse couldn’t
bring about the muchneeded improvements in socioeconomic infrastructure, as more than 50 percent
remained on subsistence agriculture. The IMF squeeze led to riots and strikes in schools and the civil
service, in addition to ethnic clashes fueled by the French-backed Kolingba. To compound Patasse’s
economic problems, Central Africa Republic’s main trade routes to the sea were the Ubangi and Kongo
River waterways, which were blocked by the 1990s war in Congo (Zaire) to its south.
In 2001, Kolingba and his French-equipped rebels launched an unsuccessful attack to overthrow the
Patasse government in Bangui, the capital. In addition to the French weapons recovered, the Central
African Republic government claimed that the rebels were supported by Ugandan and Rwandan
military personnel, notorious for causing mayhem across the Kongo basin.
Hundreds were reported killed, and hundreds of thousands were displaced, especially when government
supporters carried out reprisals against the Yakoma people, Kolingba’s ethnic group based in the south,
favored by the French and formerly in control of the nation’s political economy. Patasse, from the
northern Sara people, was backed by Libya’s Gaddafi, who sent planes and equipment.
The French support for the southern Yakoma people against the Sara people in Central African
Republic was a stark opposite to what transpired in Chad, to the north, where the French supported the
northern portion of Central African Republic’s Sara people based in southern Chad, while Libya
supported northern Chadians. It went a long way to show that the French and other Europeans, as well
as Gaddafi, had no consideration for black African lives or principles and were interested only in
geopolitical games for African resources.
In 2003, Patasse was overthrown and replaced by General Francois Bozize, who established a

transitional government but did not fully control the countryside, where pockets of lawlessness
persisted. In 2005, Bozize conducted presidential elections that he won, and he has since remained in
power.
Sudan, Chad’s eastern neighbor, was a site of the Islamic AfroAsian wars between the twenty-five
million Muslim Arabs in the north and the ten million black Africans, with African and Christian
beliefs, in the south. The British supported the majority northern Arab-Muslims to the detriment of the
non-Muslim southerners, and the first open conflicts broke out in 1955, two years after independence.
The first phase of the war ended in 1972 when Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie brokered the peace between
Anya Nya rebels from the south and General Gaafar Nimeiri’s regime. The rise of Islamic
fundamentalism during the mid-seventies threatened Nimeiri’s Sudanese government, which had
engendered peace through a more secular rule over the indigenous African believers in southern Sudan.
The ten-year peace brought no major improvement to the economy, and the demands of the IMF, which
worsened the delicate socioeconomic situation, inadvertently pushed the northern Muslim government
into the hands of Saudi and Libyan Islamic fundamentalists with promises of interest-free petro-dollars.
Following the urgings of the Saudis and Libyans, Nimeiri proclaimed Islamic law throughout the
Republic of Sudan, and Colonel Garang and his southern Sudanese People’s Liberation Army reacted
by renewing hostilities.
Unfortunately for the southerners, due to the oil-rich friends of the northern Muslim-Arabs and the rule
of northern Muslims in Nigeria at the time, they had no significant backer, as the West labeled them
terrorists and rebels. Moreover, the West was using the Muslim Arab-Sudanese government to
destabilize its Christian, proSoviet neighbor, Ethiopia, by instigating and arming separatists within
Ethiopia. The West was also using associates of the ArabSudanese government, like Osama bin Laden
and other Afghan mujadeens, to fight the Russians.
After the brief interlude of a democratically elected government in Sudan, following a bloodless coup
against Nimeiri, the debilitating war continued into the nineties. The war caused more than two million
deaths, and millions were displaced. It wasn’t until the late nineties, when bin Laden became a Western
enemy, that the world began to address the carnage in Sudan. It listened to the Church, which decried
the ethnic cleansing carried out by the Muslim northern leaders, and African Americans decried the
continued slavery of southern blacks.
President Clinton signed the Sudan Peace Act in November 1999, while the UN took greater interest in
how the Muslim Arabs were prosecuting their war against the southern minorities. Despite the promise
of a long-lasting solution, when the Arab north agreed to talks in 2003, especially with the discovery of
oil in the south, by 2004, Arab militia waged ethnic-cleansing wars against the black Africans in the
western Darfur province. Apart from the hundreds of thousands of deaths and more than a million
persons displaced, the Arab-Sudanese government’s ties with bin Laden allowed the West to take
action, summon international condemnation, and demand that all ethnic-cleansing to cease, despite
Arabic denial.
The legendary southern leader, Garang, successfully conducted peace talks and was offered a seat in the
supposedly new federal structure. Sadly, this appeared to be a trick taken from the Haitian revolution.
Within months, the unsuspecting Garang was killed in 2005 in a mysterious helicopter crash. It was
hoped that an able replacement would be found to continue the fight for African liberation.
It appeared that the international pressure would bring peace to the black Africans in West, South, and
East Sudan, but a final solution couldn’t be assumed, given the structure that included the murderous

northern Arabs. A new republic named South Sudan was to be created.
East of Sudan, war waged because of the unworkable colonial structures left by the colonists and
Ethiopia’s grab for land during the 1890s European colonial scramble for Africa. The Somalis
continued to fight for the right to have all Somalis under one Islamic nation instead of the three
‘Christian/African’ nations that they were split between, while the Ogun industrialists happily and
profitably supplied the firepower. Following Selassie’s overthrow and the United States switching
support to Somalia, the Somali army and the Somalis living in eastern Ethiopia waged war against the
Ethiopians, who were backed by twelve thousand Cuban soldiers and $12 billion dollars’ worth of
Soviet arms.
The United States and its allies, through Sudan’s Muslim Arab northern government, sponsored
internal strife on the northwestern borders of Ethiopia, in addition to the conflicts occupying Eritrean
separatists on the northeastern border. The Ethiopians defeated the US-backed Somalis in 1978, but
both nations knew no peace as hostilities continued. The Ethiopians cleared the Somali fighters from
the Ogaden province but continued fighting the Eritrean separatist and the new separatist movements of
the Oromo and Tigre. There was only so much that the marginally fertile grasslands of Ethiopia could
take before famine struck, especially when the 1984 drought swept the war-debilitated agricultural
areas.
The Ethiopian famine killed more than a million people and attracted the attention of the world,
especially the media and entertainers, and millions of dollars in aid were raised. Although it brought
immense pride to many in the Western world, many Afrocentrics felt that it was an outright insult for
musicians from the arms capital of the world to come around singing ‘we are the world’—they were
implicitly involved in the warfare and might as well have said, ‘Here is a small percent of the arms
dollars that were used to bring you to this situation’.
Somalia disintegrated under President Siad Barre after the Ethiopian defeat. A peace treaty was signed
between Ethiopia and Somalia in 1988. From 1991 onward, the warlords that Barre armed for support
during the Ethiopian war turned their guns on one another in a scramble for local power. Despite
American aid, the Somali nation disintegrated, as large numbers of starving Somali refugees returned
from Ethiopia and ambitious, uncontrollable warlords turned on their own people. The warring factions
prevented any solution to the famine, and even Barre fled from the country that was known as the most
dangerous country in Africa by 1992.
Despite UN and US intervention, Somalia sank into a sociopolitical quagmire. Their US allies, who
came to secure peace in 1992, fled the land after suffering a few casualties from the monsters they had
created, leaving the poor, innocent people to grapple with the unsavory situation. In 1995, the UN
pulled out of Somalia with no central government in control, and it wasn’t until 1999 that a central
police force was introduced. The land was still wracked by widespread violence and hunger from
famine, even in 2004, when there was still no tangible solution to put Somalia back on its feet.
In Ethiopia, following the 1988 peace treaty with Somalia, its six rebel armies came together under an
umbrella group called the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which
launched a major push against the government in February 1991. With the demise of Ethiopia’s Soviet
backing after the Cold War, the West wanted to get rid of President Mengistu Mariam, who had
defeated the West in Somalia in 1978 and trained South African rebels. Mengistu, facing a formidable
opposition without his Soviet backing, resigned and left the country in May 1991. The EPRDF took
over and set up a transitional government that called for the 1995 multiparty presidential elections in
the new pro-West Ethiopia. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who led the armies, retained power in the
2000 and 2005 elections, despite widespread allegations of election fraud and government intimidation.

Nevertheless, the flames of war flickered in the north with the Eritrean separatists declaring
independence in 1993, and fresh fighting erupted in 1998. The fighting intensified in May 2000, but a
peace treaty was signed in June 2000. However, a lasting solution wasn’t found to the Oromo’s
legitimate claims of subjection by the Amharic peoples, who continued to dictate their political
economy since the Ethiopian monarchy extended Ethiopia’s borders, during the colonial scramble, to
include the Oromo and their land.
Ethiopia, the second-most populous African nation, with a population of sixty-six million, squandered
the money meant for socioeconomic development on war and still couldn’t boast of a lasting, peaceful
solution.
In Liberia, with a population of under two million, the proAmerican ‘resettled slaves’ dynasty was
brought to a violent end in 1980. Like Zaire, the Liberian economy revolved around US companies like
Firestone, the tire maker that relied upon Liberian rubber, and later, mining companies interested in the
iron and diamond deposits. The plantation owners and other big businesses shared a tiny fraction of
their proceeds with the resettlers, but the profits didn’t filter down to the indigenous natives who were
largely kept out of the socioeconomic system.
Although the resettled slaves were black, they behaved like the divisive mulattos of the Americas. The
minority, black resettler elites didn’t blend into the African way or intermarry with indigenous peoples,
who remained uneducated and poor with allowance made for them only at the lowest rungs of
sociopolitical life. The African resettlers became corrupt and arrogant as they dealt with their former
white masters.
The status quo was challenged by low-ranking officers who overthrew President William Tolbert in a
bloody predawn coup on April 12, 1980, and brought a semiliterate Sergeant Samuel Doe to power. It
was a rude shock to the outside world, especially in the United States, where all Liberians were merely
taken as Africans. The United States dealt only with the resettled ex-slaves, who had probably
originated in Nigeria/Congo farther down the coast. The indigenous people felt alienated in their own
land by having to Anglicize their names and cultures before they could be accepted. The indigenous
people despised the European culture and arrogance of the resettlers. The resettlers looked down on
them as backward Africans who should be grateful for having the resettler’s sophisticated European
know-how in business and politics in their midst.
Despite the resettlers know-how, the IMF push in the late seventies brought about austere conditions
that were felt more in poorer sections of the society, where Doe appealed and counted on his support.
The allegations of corruption and mismanagement cited by Doe, like all other African usurpers, were
later found to be unbeatable and enticing as he fell in the same trap.
Doe realized that he wasn’t capable of getting the masses a better deal from the IMF bankers or the big
American businesses that controlled the economy, so he decided to ‘sleep with the enemy’ and enrich
himself and his close associates. The Western powers were happy with a ‘jheri-curled’, tamed Doe,
who obviously had little intellect and was incapable of driving a better deal. To their disadvantage, he
was also incapable of hiding the fact that he had lost his way as he flaunted his wrongly acquired
wealth, which attracted criticism and enemies.
Doe tried to permanentize his grip on power by winning a widely disputed election organized in
response to calls for a return to democratic rule. Soon after declaring himself president, there was an
unsuccessful coup in 1985, but he managed to hold onto power with the help of his US allies. With
increasingly debilitating IMF conditions, Liberia disintegrated into factions as foreign players like
Libya entered the fray. The Liberian civil war began in December 1989, and rebel forces seeking to

overthrow Doe made significant territorial gains towards Monrovia by June 1990.
In September 1990, Doe was captured and killed, which left Liberia to transitional governments that
couldn’t bring back peace under the previous status quo. The UN peacekeepers were incapable of
bringing about peace along the lines the West desired. It was agreed in 1997 to have a multiparty
presidential election, which the Libyan-backed rebel leader Charles Taylor won.
President Taylor was probably an Afrocentric populist leader who wanted to give his people a better
deal, but, like Ethiopia and Zaire, the West did not take the election defeat honorably. The United
States continued funding a rebel group called Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy
(LURD) through neighboring Guinea.
Guinea had become pro-West with the Western-inspired military coup that followed the 1984 death of
the Afrocentric leader Sekou Toure. General Lansana Conte led the Guinea coup and permanentized his
stay with dodgy elections, which he won, and he was president for two decades. Henceforth, Conte was
the Western stooge in the area who supplied LURD with arms to destabilize Liberia.
Taylor had an uneasy working relationship with the West, because they couldn’t control him since they
did not support him in his original bid for power. He refused to succumb to the wars waged on several
fronts including economics and media. Moreover, he continued his fight against what he believed were
corrupt Western influences, especially in neighboring Sierra Leone.
With a larger population of just under six million and more precious stones, Sierra Leone was the
British equivalent of the USinfluenced country, Liberia, where the British had colonized and resettled
slaves under their control. Taylor and his backers were sympathetic to the indigenous rebels in Sierra
Leone, but the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) capture of partisan UN peacekeepers brought
enormous pressure, and Taylor was declared a war criminal. The diamond traders and the Libyans
backers who provided their finances and weaponry were bought, cajoled, and won over by a Western
military-industrial complex spurned by the capture of the UN peacekeepers—the Rockefellersponsored
‘God’s own army’!
The pressure became overwhelming for Taylor, who had seen his people die for fourteen years while
the Western powers remained committed to winning at all costs. Immediately after his Iraqi War
victory in 2003, US President Bush turned his focus on Liberia and threatened Taylor to step down or
face more warfare. Seeing the dogs of war closing in, Taylor stepped down and went into self-exile in
Nigeria. This raised a pertinent question in the minds of many Africans: what do you do if you
genuinely love your people and believe in your ideals, but you realize that you are fighting an
unwinnable war? Do you selfishly keep to your ideals while innocent lives are wasted on your behalf,
or do you step aside and hope that things will work out right?
In Sierra Leone, the IMF onslaught on President Siaka Stevens entrenched mass corruption and
mismanagement in the Creole ‘Krio’ pro-Western government, leading to a one-party state that was
approved by a dubious referendum in 1978. When Stevens retired, power was passed to one of his
disciples, Joseph Momoh, who continued the pro-Western resettled slaves’ Creole hegemony, with IMF
austerity conditions.
Eventually, President Momoh was overthrown on April 30, 1992, by people who were fed up with the
dire IMF conditions and corruption. The coup by populists claiming to bring an end to the proWest
resettled slave’s hegemony triggered a civil war. Britain armed sympathizers of its overthrown
interests, while Liberia and Libya sponsored the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), which used
smuggled diamonds to buy weapons.

The new government, led by Immanuel Steasser in 1992, wasn’t allowed to stay in power for long.
There was a 1996 pro-West counter-coup, whose leaders signed a peace accord with the RUF in
November, 1996, and called for multiparty elections that Kabbah won.
President Kabbah continued the pro-Western Creole hegemony, but on May 25, 1997, there was
another coup by Johnny Koroma, which sparked Western indignation. Despite the public display of
indignation against the brutal Nigerian dictator, General Sani Abacha, the Western military
industrialists used him and the Nigerian army to invade and restore Kabbah on March 10, 1998.
However, the Libyan/Liberian-backed Revolutionary United Front of indigenous African peoples
continued the civil war, which claimed tens of thousands of lives across Sierra Leone. Despite a powersharing
agreement between the Kabbah government and the RUF, on July 7, 1999, the war continued,
and the RUF took more than five hundred UN peacekeepers hostage in early May 2000. The RUF
leader, Foday Sankoh, didn’t last a fortnight after kidnapping members of the Rockefeller-inspired
God’s own army. The move backfired badly by arousing the fury of the almighty military industrialists,
who sent in British troops to put the ‘daring rebels’ in their ‘rightful place’ and turned Liberia’s Taylor
into an international war criminal. Even then, it was difficult to curtail the RUF, because it could easily
sell the abundant diamonds in Sierra Leone.
The West pursued a vigorous, international campaign to stop the sale of what it labeled bloody or
conflict diamonds, using innocent victims to provoke self-righteous anger to turn around the diamond
industry, controlled by Dutch Jews. The West decided to woo the rebels’ backer, the troublesome
Libyan Muammar Gaddafi, who blew their private airliners out of the skies in the eighties and
supported many anti-Western revolts. This campaign was successful in that funds for the RUF
gradually decreased, and the interests of AngloAmerican military industrialist secured the western
African nations of Sierra Leone and Liberia.
The military-industrialist interests in southern Africa became paramount with the weakening and fall of
their Soviet competitors. The end of the Cold War, which greatly influenced the changes in the
Republic of South Africa, also affected South Africa’s colony, Namibia, and Portugal’s ex-colonies,
Angola and Mozambique.
Portugal had wanted to offload its colonies after the 1974 coup, and the authentic black movements that
sought firepower elsewhere won popular support and elections. The West was intransigent, and
throughout the 1980s, the Anglo-American military industrialists used white South Africa, which still
held onto Namibia, to attack Angola and sponsor UNITA under Savimbi. In Mozambique, next door to
South Africa, they sponsored the RENAMO rebels.
With the end of the Cold War, the Communist paranoia that had caused the mass wasting of lives
waned, and the West was willing to do business with the legitimate rulers. Despite having to turn to the
Russians and Cubans to win their independence and being labeled Marxists, President Jose dos Santos’
MPLA-led Angolan government showed belief in a market-oriented economy on Angolan terms and
was open to business with Western oil companies and other big businesses. The United States
instructed white South Africa to pull out from Angola and support for Savimbi’s rebel UNITA
dwindled, while Cubans and Russians also pulled out rather more victoriously. With just over a million
people, Namibia received independence on March 21, 1990.
A peace treaty between the Angola government and UNITA rebels was signed on May 1, 1991, and
elections were held in September 1992, but fighting broke out again when Savimbi lost the election to
Santos. The fighting was not intense, because support had dwindled for UNITA, especially with
President Antonio Neto turning out good oil business and finding favor with the West. Savimbi was

placed under UN sanctions on August 28, 1997, and was eventually caught and killed in 2002.
Angola opened up its ten million people to the corrupting influences of oil and big businesses. This
raised suspicions that the former ‘Marxists’ had turned corrupt and Eurocentric, even though they sent
troops to support Kabila in Zaire. Brazilian President Da Silva visited in 2003 and promised the
Portuguese colonial sister genuine financial and technical assistance, as opposed to corrupt Western
influences.
In Mozambique, FRELIMO, led by President Samora Michel, took over from the Portuguese in 1974
and formed a government. Michel was labeled a real Communist as he gradually nationalized the
private sector. The counterrevolutionary RENAMO was never as efficient as UNITA in Angola, but
with Mozambique next door, white South Africa was able to wage direct attacks. In 1986, Michel’s
plane was shot down inside South Africa.
With the end of the Cold War, the military industrialists pulled back, and the ruling party discarded
Marxist-Leninism. Mozambiqicans wrote a new constitution supporting the idea of free markets and
multiparty elections, which took effect on November 30, 1990. In 1992, the RENAMO rebels laid
down their dried-out weapons and came to the table as the country with nineteen million people hoped
for a peaceful, prosperous existence. Mozambique suffered flood disasters in 1999 and 2000, which
killed many and affected the economy, but over time, the pace towards development gained
momentum.
Kenya, unlike its belligerent neighbors Ethiopia and Somalia, was lucky to enjoy a peaceful
sociopolitical life after the initial Somali attacks, which occurred immediately after independence in the
sixties. Kenyans then suffered from the medical and economic wars of the eighties.
The pro-West, one-party rule, which fostered the kind of stability suited for agricultural and industrial
development, under Jomo Kenyatta’s government, faced the IMF bankers’ attack from the
midseventies. This was accompanied by the usual Western inspired allegations of corruption and
repression coupled with foreign exchange sabotage, which made Kenya one of the first African
countries to hand over control of its central bank to Western bankers. When Kenyatta died in 1978, the
baton was passed to his vice president, Daniel Arap Moi.
Tourism remained one of Kenya’s largest income earners through the eighties and nineties, even
though Kenyans made an effort towards industrialization. Europeans and Asians continued to control
the economy while the majority of Africans were provided with jobs in tourism, government,
agriculture, and light-processing industries. However, the economy was debilitated by inflation and
high unemployment, and even the Kikuyu called for change.
Moi entrenched himself with fraudulent elections and was backed by Western bankers. They liked the
passive, nonchalant attitude of the corrupt, ruling elite that left strategic economic sectors and huge
tracts of land in the hands of their former colonial masters and European resettlers. It wasn’t until 2003
that under immense domestic and international pressure, the ruling class grudgingly allowed freer
elections, which the opposition won for the first time since independence. As was the case across the
blackworld, the new Kenyan government under Mwai Kibaki couldn’t improve the welfare of the
people as fast as expected and faced accusations of corruption and mismanagement.
Most importantly, Kenya was at the center of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the eighties, which equally
affected neighboring Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, and other southern African nations. All the eastern
and southern African nations experienced extremely high infection rates, but the epidemic was
gradually brought under control in Uganda and Kenya.

The situation was worsened by the IMF conditions, which had destroyed the social and health
infrastructure required to deal with the epidemic and weakened the government’s ability to effectively
deal with the US companies that provided the drugs. Africans weren’t able to effectively secure a fairer
deal with US pharmaceutical firms until black South Africa had a serious HIV/AIDS outbreak.
Tanzania faced grave economic problems but managed to stay its course and remain independent from
direct Western meddling, with its peculiar form of African Socialism as implemented by Julius
Nyerere. This slowly changed after Nyerere resigned in the mideighties amidst the IMF onslaught. In
1992, multiparty elections were held and won by Ali Hassan Mwinyi, a coastal Swahili Arab, who
opened up Tanzania to Western bankers that pushed for privatization across the Tanzanian economy.
He was succeeded by President Benjamin Mkapa that further liberalized the economy and moved the
capital from its major commercial center, Dar es Salaam, on the coast to Dodoma in the center.
Like the other IMF-prescribed policies, this disrupted the economy and wiped out the middle class as
the gap between poor and rich widened. President Mkapa was dogged by allegations of corruption,
especially over the privatization of a government mine that he ended up owning. Westernization also
attracted Muslim fundamentalist groups like Al-Qaeda, who saw Tanzania and Kenya as corrupt
Western outposts and carried out bombings of US embassies and interests.
Although Tanzania had marginally productive grasslands of cash crops like tobacco and sisal, and a
few minerals at its disposal, the country faced an urgent demand for industrial development. Its
population (under forty million in 2003) is expected to rise by 2090 to more than two hundred fifty
million, making it the third-most populous African nation. Industrialization is required to survive the
constant droughts and volatile export prices of tobacco and other cash crops.
Cuba’s revolution had yet to see blacks (60 percent of the population of ten million in 1990) free to
pursue their own destiny. Although Cuba produced one of the highest black literacy rates, AfroCuban
entrepreneurial and political development lagged behind other parts of the blackworld. However, Cuba
could boast of being the most egalitarian society with the longest running and least corrupt government
in the blackworld.
In the eighties, when the rest of the blackworld was facing IMFsapping conditions, Cuba experienced
increases in production, education, health services, employment, and income. These were due to Soviet
subsidies, vital oil supplies, technical and military support, and open Communist markets. The demise
of the Soviet Union and failure of its Communist ideology in 1989 left Cuba isolated in the Communist
world and ended the era of Soviet subsidies. This led to a considerable drop in income, and factories
closed for lack of raw materials and markets.
Despite increased US anticipation and pressure to end Castro’s reign in the nineties, marked by stiffer
US trade sanctions, the ageing ruler was able to keep the Communist sociopolitical structure intact with
majority support. A few changes were made to the system to adjust to the changing times, especially
the flaws of Communism that were exposed with the fall of the Iron Curtain (primarily, political and
economic abuses, as well as immigration restrictions).
The greatest threat to Cuba’s peaceful sociopolitical existence was the question of succession after
Castro’s death, considering the power of the Cuban exiles in Florida (who allegedly bombed Havana
hotels in the summer of 1997). Like at Toure’s death in Guinea and Nyerere’s in Tanzania, there was a
possibility that Cuban exiles would inspire a military intervention, the success of which would largely
depend upon the ability of Castro’s successor to hold the nation together and prevent the growth of
Western-sponsored factions, as seen in Haiti and across Africa.

There was also the question of Cuba opening up after lifting Western sanctions. Cubans needed vital
foreign input in their economy, but opening the market might not be as desirable as it appeared if there
were no corresponding increase in exports to pay for the import bill. An economy based on sugar and a
population of twelve million was not enough for a near self-sustainable market economy, and Cuba
might find itself at the mercy of the militaryindustrialist bankers, as was the case in other parts of the
blackworld.
The only other option appeared to be switching from the Ogun mode, which saw Cuba send thousands
of soldiers across Africa, to a more peaceful mode that sends its highly skilled black professionals to
develop the Blackworld’s economic and industrial infrastructure. It might require another revolution in
which the paternalistic, white ruling class steps aside and allows blacks to cultivate the colossal
economic potential of the blackworld. However, any change in the present socioeconomic structure
would most probably be towards the North Atlantic military industrialists and their attendant white
Cuban exiles, in which case blacks would be used as pawns in their dealings.
Judging from the other Caribbean nations, with the exception of Trinidad, the only benefits accrued
from any eventual opening would be tourism. Tourism would provide a high return on investment for
the military industrialists (especially the Florida Cuban mafia, which would turn it into a tourist
gambling island), but this would provide only low-income jobs as seen in Barbados and Jamaica.
Jamaica, with a population of 2.5 million, remained the most populous and visible English-speaking
Caribbean island. Jamaica’s economy faced oil price shocks and negative US and IMF financial
pressures in the late 1970s, leading to capital flight and runaway inflation. This paralyzed the Jamaican
economy and brought an end to the Cuba-friendly populist government of Michael Manley (1972–
1980) as living standards fell 30 percent by 1980. The conservative JLP, under Edward Seaga, won 60
percent of the popular vote in the 1980 elections by alleging mismanagement, corruption, and Marxism
in the PNP.
Despite the new JLP government pursuing a pro-US foreign policy with a break in ties with Cuba and
accepting the IMF conditions religiously, Jamaica became more indebted, and living standards
worsened. Allegations of corruption and mismanagement increased, despite the JLP election promises.
More important than the domestic politics were the geopolitical wars that, in addition to the IMF’s
economic war, included drug wars from South America to the United States. The historic methods of
smuggling Indian hemp were converted to cocaine smuggling, while the ghetto infighting, historically
settled with fist fights and knives, were now settled with automatic machine guns. The violence that
had permeated Jamaican society since the British stepped on the island in the 1600s, skyrocketed with
guns and drugs flooding the island.
The violence was not only limited to the streets. It extended into the political arena, where political
scores were increasing settled by commando attacks. It appeared that the only reason there wasn’t a
military takeover in Jamaica and other Caribbean islands was the practically nonexistent army – with
the Jamaican army having only 2830 soldiers in 2001.
The falling living standards and increasing violence led to mass migration from the late seventies
onwards. The migration rate had fallen after the 1950s and 1960s postwar reconstruction of the Western
world. Huge immigration to the United States and Britain in the eighties had significant but debilitating
effects on the islands. Cumulatively, over the last fifty years, there were probably more Jamaican
nationals living abroad than on the island.
Like the US African American community, Jamaican women were more mobile within traditional

white employment sectors than the men. This was reflected in the regions that they migrated to in the
Western world. Although the vast majority of Jamaican men worked in legitimate employment, like the
post-IMF Nigerian fraudsters, they gained notoriety for crime, especially drugs and gun-related
offenses. This image was stereotyped by the much-publicized ultraviolent yardie/rudeboy/ragga culture,
similar to the US homeboy/hip-hop gun culture or the more domestic Nigerian Areaboys and their Fuji
culture.
With IMF economic destruction virtually assured, there were no easy solutions to Jamaica’s
socioeconomic problems. Manley and the PNP came back to power in 1988, but Manley retired for
health reasons in 1992. He handed over power to P. J. Patterson, who became the first fully black prime
minister in the thirty years of independence. Despite highly derogative attacks on his personal life,
Patterson sought reelection in 1998 and served a longer stretch than all previous leaders. Patterson and
the PNP had learnt the lessons of the seventies and were now adherents of the free-market economics of
the IMF and military-industrialist bankers.
There wasn’t much the PNP could do to change the $4 billion debt that required nearly half of export
earnings to make interest payments. With a population of under three million people, Jamaica was a
primary producer and exporter of sugar and bauxite, with little hope of developing its economy with
Western tariffs and protectionism. The structural adjustment programme of the IMF, preaching that the
liberation of the economy would develop its export market, was a fallacy that led to huge trade deficits
and was relevant only to the huge export of Jamaicans’ brains and culture.
The rich, African Jamaican culture expressed in music like ska, calypso, reggae, ragga, and lovers was
an international force with strong bases in London and New York due to the large number of Jamaican
immigrants. Reggae influence exploded in the seventies through musicians like Peter Tosh and Bob
Marley, representing the feelings of the black movement throughout the blackworld and securing a
strong fan base across Africa. The eighties and nineties saw the birth of ragga, reflecting the
rudeboy/homeboy/areaboy mentality inspired by IMF deprivations and the drug war.
Most other Caribbean islands faced the same challenges, even though they exhibited less violent social
upheaval. Barbados had a population of under one-half million in 1990, and sugar and citrus fruits
remained the economic mainstay. Trinidad and Tobago, with 1.2 million people, was the second-most
populous ex-British Caribbean colony in an area where mass migrations had kept the populations
down.
Trinidad was the most prosperous of all Caribbean colonies because of its oil supplies and the ability of
a pro-Western government to attract oil-processing facilities. The crash in oil prices (which provided 66
percent of government revenue and 80 percent of exports) and the IMF brought about a drastic fall in
living standards in the eighties. The docile government was shaken by a Muslim revolt in July 1990,
when its top officials were held hostage in a raid on Parliament and a television station. With a 40
percent East Indian population that was prominent in trade and farming, Trinidad had its first Indian
prime minister in 1995, without the racial disharmony experienced in Guyana.
This was not the case in Guyana with its politically assertive Africans, who were turned into a minority
with the mass Indian importation and black emigration. Unlike the other South American African
minorities in Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, locked away from public view and enslaved to the
Latin American agenda, or even Afro-Brazilians with their sizable population, the AfroGuyanese set
the tone of public discourse. Although the British used the Indians to break black power after slavery,
they used the Africans to stop the Jagan East Indian movement, which they labeled Marxist.
The Western-favored black leader, Burnham, fell out with the business class but stayed in power from

1966 to 1985. He was accused of resorting to repressive and electioneering methods like overseas
voting in a country with fewer than seven hundred thousand people in-country but five hundred
thousand abroad. Burnham died of ill health in office, and his power passed to his vice president,
Desmond Hoyte, who, before Burnham’s death, was in control of economic planning and finance. The
economy was in tatters due to the debt crisis and IMF conditions, but most attributed the poor economy
to mismanagement.
Hoyte continued the election engineering that kept Burnham in power, but after seven years, he decided
to have a freer election and press. Jagan won the election in 1992 but not with an overwhelming
majority as expected, because people still voted along racial lines. He couldn’t do much for the IMFsapped
economy and died in office in 1997. His Canadian wife took over in a disputed election but
resigned due to ill health in 1999.
Bharrat Jagdeo, an East Indian, took over and was reelected in 2001. Blacks lost their grip on political
power, especially as AfroGuyanese continued to emigrate in large numbers to the United States and
Britain due to the poor IMF socioeconomic conditions.
Only a few Caribbean and American ex-colonies had more blacks than Britain, France, or Spain,
because they were favored destinations for many of the ex-colonials suffering from IMF conditions and
in search of better prospects.
Despite its significant black population, France kept its blacks from public view in the housing slums of
city suburbs. It prevented a cohesive black forum by not allowing racial or ethnic identification in its
population census or any other governmental statistics. This was backed by the argument that everyone
was French through birth or integration, therefore continuing the historic, romantic problem of a false
racial democracy. Unlike those in the United States and Britain, blacks in France didn’t have a voice,
and they continued to face direct and indirect racism and maltreatment, resulting in high rates of
unemployment and poverty.
In November 2005, France’s minorities enacted riots and mass arson attacks. The politicians failed to
take the opportunity to redress the injustices blacks suffered and instead became more repressive with
emergency reactionary laws. The smaller black populations in Belgium, Spain, Italy, and Germany
faced similar racist maltreatment and poverty.
Britain, which ruled the most populous African and AfroCaribbean colonies, ended up with the largest
black population in Europe. The black population was a good indicator of the prevailing geopolitics in
the blackworld since 1600, when Queen Elizabeth I ordered all Africans deported at the beginning of
Anglo plantation agriculture.
Britain’s prominence in the blackworld problems through time was ironic, because Britain was an
intellectual springboard for the leaders of the black movement with each succeeding wave of black
immigration. With the latest onslaught of the IMF/London Club of creditors on the blackworld, many
Africans migrated to England for a better life under the immigration and citizenship laws formulated
for the reconstruction era of the 1950s. These laws were gradually tightened as the black population
more than doubled in the fifties and sixties.
When child milk-snatcher Margaret Thatcher came to power, she passed laws restricting citizenship
and government assistance to the children of immigrants. The children born in England after 1982 by
foreign parents were no longer entitled to British citizenship. The Conservative Party attack on the
black community was not restricted to black immigrants, since Thatcher scared voters into thinking that
they were being swamped by blacks with unsavory cultures.

Despite the overall small percentage of black Britons, it wasn’t politically expedient to launch direct
political attacks on legal black Britons. The minority black immigrants were blamed for crime and
made ‘legitimate’ targets for the police’s stop-and-search harassment tactics, which extended to every
black person in Britain. In the eighties, Africans were targeted in airports and other ports of entry for
drugs, while on the streets, Nigerians were targeted for fraud and Afro-Caribbeans for drugs under the
guise of checking for illegal immigrants or robberies.
This obsession with crime was not a true and fair reflection of the black community, whose numbers of
well-educated secondgeneration immigrants were also greatly swelled by graduates and highly-skilled
workers from IMF debilitated nations looking for work. In this class of immigrants, many were Britishborn
children of the 1950s and 1960s—immigrant reconstruction workers and students from the
colonies who followed their parents home after their studies and contracts but returned with the eighties
IMF flow.
Most black people found jobs that paid less than their skills warranted, but the IT explosion in the
nineties provided a large source of employment in England and across the Western world. Although
African men were more upwardly mobile in their national economies and earned a higher income than
women, the European preoccupation with reversing the roles in black families was evident in the black
British community, with the black woman being the higher earner.
Through the eighties, the relative percentage of blacks in British prisons was several times higher than
that of whites. Cases of police brutality and custodial deaths rose in the eighteen years of continuous
Conservative Party rule. It came to a head with the death of a black youth, Steven Lawrence, at the
hands of a local Nazi group and public inquiry into the insensitive police inquiry. The results of the
inquiry and signs of increased agitation by black militant groups like the US Nation of Islam prompted
the new Labor government of Prime Minister Tony Blair to relax the police stranglehold on the black
community.
The center-left leader, Tony Blair, appeared to want to improve the lot of Africans by establishing the
Commission for Africa, even though its modest recommendations were largely opposed by the United
States and EU as unworkable and detrimental to Western interests. Blair and his finance chief, Gordon
Brown, used their positions as heads of the Group of 8 (G8), the EU, and the UN committees, but it was
to no avail, even after the much-publicized Africa 8 and War against Poverty concerts. The French
threatened to veto any move before 2013 to reduce its astronomical subsidies in the EU or any trade
redress in favor of the poor black nations in the allimportant World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting
in Hong Kong in December 2005.
The lot of black Britons slightly improved during Labor rule. Britain had a number of rich black
people. For many of them, their wealth came from the embezzled funds of the ex-British colonies. A
new class of entrepreneurial blacks rose in the nineties with funds from the IT and housing booms as
well as funds garnered as a result of maturing business networks. Many of the fifties/sixties black
immigrants developed long-term businesses and began to seriously consider Britain their home,
especially as the numbers of thirdgeneration Africans grew. However, in 2002, the number of those
born in Africa but living in Britain surpassed the number of black Britons and Afro-Caribbean
immigrants. The total official black population was 1.2 million (due to illegal immigrants and
misclassifications, the total population should have been a little over two million).
With the most ethnically mixed black community in the blackworld, reflecting the range of historic
British interests across the Americas and Caribbean to the heart of Africa, black Britons had a higher
chance of having second or third national interests across the blackworld. It was hoped that a black
person could provide a better vision for the future of the blackworld, like the colonization movement of

Oladuah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano and Sylvester Williams’s 1898 Pan-African Association.

Chapter 24: 2000AD: The Dawn of the New, Utopian
African Millennium
Africa, if not the entire blackworld, was left for dead socioeconomically and politically by the Western
world at the turn of the century following slavery, colonization, and neocolonialism, but Africa started
a slow but impressive rejuvenation as its growth rate doubled between 2000 and 2008.
In 1999, at the end of the millennium, the largest conglomeration of black people, Nigeria, the Third
Horseman was given a scale of balance, in terms of a democratic dispensation, to usher in a new era of
economic prosperity and justice proclaimed and died for by MKO Abiola. In South Africa, the born
Pan-Africanist revolutionary Thabo Mbeki took direct charge of Africa’s richest economy, while in
Ivory Coast, the most prosperous ex-French colony, the populace was startled awake from its Frenchinduced
slumber to revolt against continued French neocolonisation.
The winds of change were not limited to Nigeria, South Africa and Ivory Coast, nor did they bring the
immediate desired changes to the socioeconomics and politics of the black race. But, the winds were
refreshing and shone a ray of hope.
Most important were the economic changes for a people who, over the last five hundred years, had
been enslaved, colonized, and exploited to a point that no one could see how they would climb out of
the economic bottomless pit. However, China ushered in an unexpected turn of fortune for the
blackworld, whose economies had been trashed and deserted by the IMF and the Western world.
As earlier stated, Russian Communists realized that the only way to stop Western global dominance
was by freeing peoples being exploited to attain their economic supremacy. Lenin and later Stalin had
helped Chairman Mao Zedong’s efforts to chase out the British, Japanese and Nationalists. After Mao’s
victory, the Soviets helped China build its steel complex necessary for industrialization and economic
development.
Russia helped achieve the Black civil rights/independence movement, but didn’t succeed in freeing
Africans from the imperialist economic stranglehold. Shortly after being chased out of Nigeria, where it
was building the steel complex, their Soviet Union was bankrupted and dismembered.
Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution placed China in the fast lane of economic development, and its
economy grew at 9 percent annually through the eighties and nineties. By the turn of the century, the
Chinese economic engine required substantial raw materials input and new markets, which left it with
no place to turn but Africa.
With the need for construction and heavy engineering infrastructure reaching a plateau in China, after
twenty years of fast infrastructural development, the Chinese needed to offset the huge overheads of
their mammoth government-owned companies. The only way to accomplish this was to have them
employed in Africa.
China was also aware that freeing African economies from the claws of the West would bring about a
fairer global economic system, so it delved into building African socioeconomic infrastructure that will
empower Africans from being ‘only a raw materials source and protected market for Western
manufactures’.

The increase in commodity and raw materials demand and prices breathed life into African economies,
especially the mines that had been taken over and shut down by Western investors. Chinese rebuilt and
reopened the mines, which transpired into more money for Africans that relied on minerals and cash
crops. Nigeria, for example, saw the price paid for its crude oil increase over 100 percent, bringing
more developmental funds.
As most African economies and currencies were in ruins, China had to offer credit below global rates
and even accepted commodity swaps, allowing African nations to pay with their commodities
immediately or at a future date. Even though the step might not earn immediate profits, it would cover
the overhead, provide employment and weaken Western economic dominance.
Despite Western-instigated alarms that the Chinese were colonizing Africa, the fact remained that
China had no history of imperialism. The infrastructural development in Africa was not being
undertaken by greedy, profit-motivated, private loan sharks and investors but by Chinese governmentowned
conglomerates like the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC). Unlike
European private investors who often abandoned projects like ENRON, the Chinese government
backed and acted as a long-time, ever-present guarantor of the large scale projects undertaken.
Just like the squabbles over colonies resulted in the two world wars, and Russia’s backing to China and
the global Black liberation movement led to the Cold War, a new Cold War was started against the
Chinese trying to bring about Black economic liberation. The Western powers armed Islamists, crashed
commodity prices and waged scathing propaganda against leaders that used Chinese help.
In addition to increases in global commodity prices, African governments undertook sweeping
structural changes to their respective economies, which helped promote the private sector, especially in
telecommunications, banking, and retailing. Mobile phone telecommunications changed the face of
Africa, bringing people closer. This growth sector helped to drive other sectors like retail, marketing,
and information and computer technology.
In Nigeria, mobile phone subscribers went from zero in 2000 to more than one hundred million by
2012, while Internet connections grew to more than fifty million. Nearly every black nation enjoyed
more than 4,000 percent growth in telecoms, which had multiplier effects throughout the economy,
because they sponsored the arts, sports, and sectors like marketing and environmental beautification.
(The foreign telecom companies aiding serious capital flight through sharp practices was a negative
aspect.) Telecoms helped bring the African diaspora closer to Africa, enabling people to easily access
and exchange cultural information.
From 2000, it became obvious that African populations were growing at a fast rate and, most important,
were becoming highly urbanized. This brought about a construction boom, as housing estates and new
cities were built to house the young, teeming populations. Within a few years, the construction boom
allowed Aliko Dangote, a Nigerian businessman, to become the richest man in Africa through his
cement businesses.
The population that prompted the growth of the telecom and construction sectors drove the growth in
retail sectors as giant retail companies built shopping malls across Africa. With 40 percent of the
population being under twenty-five and a fast-growing middle class, African markets attracted investors
from around the globe who realized that this was the market of the twenty-first century.
In 1999, Nigeria did away with military dictators and returned to democracy after fifteen years of prodemocracy
agitation, especially the last six years when Chief MKO Abiola, the winner of the 1993
presidential elections, was denied, jailed, and killed due to his demand for slavery reparations from the

West.
Abiola was the herald of the new era of economic justice but it was to be ushered in with his death.
Turning around the last two thousand years of the Second Horseman, the Era of Shango, was not going
to be a fast and easy event, but a slow laborious process that required a lot of tact and diplomacy.
In his place, the Western powers backed the enthronement of a trusted ex-military head of state,
General Olusegun Obasanjo, who was a Yoruba like Abiola. Obasanjo’s return to power as a
democratically elected head of Nigeria crowned him as the most powerful and influential black African
leader ever. He fitted the role required to delicately balance the change in times, as well as the needs of
Southern Progressives, Northern Islamists and Western Imperialist. Some quarters queried his ties with
the West and the likes of Henry Kissinger, and accused him of being a Western puppet.
General Obasanjo had been a key player, an agent provocateur, in the 1966 corruption propaganda that
brought down Nigeria’s democracy. He was chosen to act as counterbalance and an agent of the British
against Northern soldiers that sought to reverse the January 15 th coup that overthrew and killed
Northern leaders. Ultimately, the power struggle tipped Nigeria into a Civil War, which was only ended
when the Northern soldiers catapulted and agreed to share power with the British, who were to be
represented by Obasanjo.
Obasanjo was to once again launch the corruption propaganda that brought down the democratically
elected government of Shehu Shagari in 1983 and enthroned General Buhari, his ex-oil minister, exgovernor
and one of the highest ranking Fulani soldiers in the 1966 counter coup. Buhari was ousted by
a fellow 1966 coupist, Ibrahim Babaginda, who was to be followed by Sani Abacha, another of the
1966 coupists, before power came back to Obasanjo, the head of the cabal.
In a shocking contrast to Abiola, Obasanjo declared that Nigeria and the entire blackworld were not
deserving of reparations at an important summit on racism held in South Africa. Obasanjo, a cunning
political player, was a technocrat who shied away from confrontation with the West while endeavoring
to put into place administrative systems and new partnerships with the Chinese that could uplift the
socioeconomics of the country.
To the disgust of many Pan-Africanists, through his utterances at the antiracism conference held in
South Africa, Obasanjo, the leader of the most populous black nation and former Slave Coast,
indirectly absolved the Western world of its economic crimes against the black race, especially slavery,
colonization, and neo-imperialism.
Whatever his weaknesses, Obasanjo was known for his deft foreign policy during his time as a military
head of state, when he had been instrumental in the creation of ECOWAS, supported the liberation
struggles and made Nigeria act its role as the African Giant. Now, he joined Thabo Mbeki and other
African leaders in forming the new African Union, as well as proposing and implementing NEPAD,
which many commentators criticized as a programme of begging for investment from the world
economic powers.
However, with hindsight, NEPAD helped clear the table of past reliance on European investment.
National debts to the Paris Club and London Club of creditors were cleared, and new partnerships were
made with the Chinese. NEPAD did not open the floodgates to European investment, but it made
Africans design a long-term blueprint for socioeconomic development.
Obasanjo’s administration concentrated on laying down the necessary legal and administrative
framework for an industrialized society, even if the money and expertise were not immediately visible.

The government enacted legislation to empower private enterprise to build and own the socioeconomic
infrastructure required to place the nation on the path of industrial development. Bills were passed for
the private ownership of mobile telecommunication companies, the consolidation of private banks, and
the creation of independent power plants.
He surprised the West that expected him to keep the status role, but while being non-confrontational he
managed to steer the African Giant away from the apron strings of the West and usher in a new era of
Sino-African relations. However, the Western Powers were unaware of the monumental scale of
Chinese involvement until 2009, long after Obasanjo had left office.
With the lack of European development partners, the Chinese were willing to help finance and build
necessary infrastructure like railways and refineries. They supplied 80 percent of the investment at
prices lower than global loan rates, while the Nigeria government provided the remaining 20 percent
from its increased oil revenues. New roads and railroads were planned across the country as the
blueprint for a new Africa was gradually implemented. However, it now appears that Obasanjo stalled
the most important projects like railways and power plants to avoid confrontation with his Western
backers.
Despite being unable to secure significant fresh development funds and more accessible Western
markets, Obasanjo and his able finance minister, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, tried to put Nigeria on a
stronger economic course through structural reorganization and debt management. The 2005 worldwide
push against poverty and the 100 percent cancellation of debts owed by the eighteen poorest African
nations, led to an agreement to cancel 66 percent of Nigerian debts owed to the Paris Club in 2006.
At home, Obasanjo unsuccessfully tried to keep the peace between factions. The new era was going to
require the religions and dogma imbued over the last two thousand years to burn out each other, as they
took their last stance. Northern conservative Muslims introduced sharia law in twelve northern states in
a secular federation of thirty-six states and a federal capital territory. This exacerbated the religious
violence in the intolerant Muslim north and in the mixed Middle Belt just above the Niger-Benue
confluence.
Even before the 1960 independence, northern Muslims had waged sporadic riots and lynching against
non-Muslim ethnic groups living among them, but the violence increased in the late seventies and
eighties with funding for Islamic fundamentalists coming from Libya and Saudi Arabia. Although the
violence abated in the early nineties, some northern religious leaders incited unrest under the southern
Yoruba president. With a change in the mood of southerners and those in the Middle Belt (because of
the cancelled 1993 elections), the non-Muslim youth wanted to hit back hard despite being a minority
in the north and having to be reinforced from their southern homelands.
The worldwide rise in Muslim conservatism, coupled with IMF hardships, saw an increasing number of
southerners convert from the colonial Anglican and Catholic churches to the new wave of Pentecostal
churches from the conservative US Bible Belt, especially with the likes of black preachers T D Jakes
and London’s Pastor Matthew Ashimolowo. The Christian religion, based on pacification and
servitude, was not a sufficient rallying point against the violent Islamic movement.
Like the Islamic attacks that crystallized a Hindu movement and a violent backlash in India, reprisal
acts began occurring in southern Nigeria with the independent formation of illegal, reactionary
paramilitary groups like the Yoruba Odua People’s Congress (OPC). They were more Afrocentric in
their religion and allegedly used traditional juju based on spiritual and biological warfare (Ogun). The
groups were crushed by federal might when it was realized that the nation was sliding towards
disintegration, but the federal government couldn’t provide adequate protection for non-Muslims in the

northern states.
Murderous riots arose for petty reasons like the one staged in 2003 against the Miss World Pageant
held in the federal capital, Abuja, in the Middle Belt. Conservative Muslims counted the beauty pageant
as immoral and became violently agitated when a reporter harmlessly claimed that the Prophet
Muhammad would have accepted the pageant and probably chosen and married one of the contestants.
Also, a murderous riot followed the September 11, 2001 terrorist acts in New York City, which
northern Muslims celebrated by going out to kill non-Muslims. More than ten thousand people were
killed between 1998 and 2003 in the northern religious riots and the Ogoni delta insurgency against the
oil companies and their supporters. However, the southern Yoruba cities of Lagos, Ibadan, and Benin
and the Igbo cities of Enugu, Owerri, and Onitsha remained peaceful.
The Nigerian federal structure was constantly challenged by problems caused by the northern Islamic
oligopolies, and it needed to be improved and made more Afrocentric to enable ethnic and personal
safety. The judiciary was modeled on the British and US systems and exhibited the same weaknesses of
their advocatory systems, which were priced out of the reach of the common man and made irrelevant
with ingrained delays and redundant processes. However, lawyers and civil rights advocates like Chief
Gani Fawehinmi used the courts to challenge legal thinking and power abuses at the highest levels.
The multiparty system was suspect because it allowed divisive politics along ethnic lines instead of
practical issues or positions on the political spectrum. A two-party system initially proposed would
have helped to stabilize the country, but Gani Fawehinmi wrongly challenged it in court and won the
right for a multiparty system.
The new democracy remained on shaky ground, even though Obasanjo saw his northern-oriented party
win in Yorubaland for the first time since independence. The most pertinent question remained over his
succession and the ethnic group of his successor—the Igbo rightly had a claim and if continuously
denied, they might again attempt to secede, as occurred during the bloody civil war of 1967.
A solution on how to rotate the presidency fairly had to be found. As the northern Muslims stepped
back for Yorubas, they would have to do so for the Igbo, although signs of Muslim impatience could be
seen in the northern revolts. Notwithstanding, if the Yoruba and Igbo could put the ‘Awolowo betrayal’
behind them and come together, their much greater combined numbers, including the Middle Belt
groups, would defeat the Muslim north in any election. A more permanent solution was a large, secular
African union, whereby no single group could dominate, and everyone was just African.
With the population of Lagos, the commercial capital, expected to exceed twenty-five million by 2015,
and Nigerians expected to reach 900 million by 2090, foreign investors were attracted to the huge
market potentials as socioeconomic and legal infrastructures were put in place.
The new democratic disposition brought about steady growth, as professional politicians tried to earn
their pay. Unlike in military regimes where soldiers could dip their sticky fingers into the public purse,
politicians had to commission new projects in order to derive kickbacks. With the establishment of
anticorruption bodies like the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and Best Practices
guidelines, the politicians and the contractors had to tread carefully to avoid arrest. Nevertheless, there
were national outcries over the huge salaries and allowances that the politicians awarded themselves
through state and national assemblies.
The new, democratic setting renewed tribal rivalries in the world’s most complex society. The Muslim
north became restive with a Christian Yoruba leader that broke the northern hegemony. In the Middle

Belt, especially in Plateau State, where the Islamic HausaFulani group had encroached on smaller,
Original African groups’ homelands, bloody riots could be stemmed only through the army’s heavyhanded,
undemocratic handling. In the oil-rich Niger delta, militants continued to kidnap foreign
workers and sabotage oil pipelines and other government infrastructure.
Having appeased the Yoruba—denying the Yoruba president, Abiola, of his mandate by having
Obasanjo take power—the question was how to appease all the other aggrieved groups on their quest
for federal power, especially those of the Niger delta region that provided 80 percent of the oil income
but had never produced a president. Due to the ethnic politics being played, it was nearly impossible to
have a Niger delta personality or one from any minority group elected as president unless he was an
incumbent president.
The northern Islamists continued to whip up sentiments against southerners, who they saw as pagans
coming to defile their Islamic character, which resulted in bloody riots and a general breakdown of law
and order. To appease them, sharia law was introduced into twelve Muslim-majority states, but this was
seen as temporary appeasement. They agitated to take back the reins of power that they had
monopolized since independence. The unwritten agreement in the ruling People’s Democratic Party,
the only party with a national geographic spread, was that the power would return to the north after
Obasanjo’s rule.
The Yoruba and Igbo, the two most populous Original African groups, were yet to retrieve their Pan-
Africanist focus lost through Awolowo’s opposition to Azikwe’s global black movement. They were
unable to furnish a much-needed, alternative Pan-African perspective that could tell the truth and settle
the agitations once and for all. Instead, they conveniently approached from a ChristianMuslim
perspective.
Although the influence of the Yoruba leader, the late Awolowo, and his political machinery waned after
the first four years, the new Yoruba political elite played the local tribal politics from the
proindependence era now coupled with money politics under Ahmed Tinubu, the leader of the Action
Congress of Nigeria (ACN). Many of the Yoruba old guard accused Tinubu of being a closet friend of
northern Islamists and the West, but he was an apt and successful politician who swept Yorubaland,
with the exception of Ondo and Ekiti States, and was the de facto national opposition leader.
Like Awolowo, the new Yoruba political elite brought about impressive public-oriented works across
Yorubaland but continued to ignore the geopolitical importance of the Yoruba. They wrongly assumed
that the Yoruba could go it alone, failing to realize that a united, Original African platform was required
to survive united Islamic fronts from the desert and a united European front from United Kingdom,
United States and United Nations.
Nevertheless, they brought about impressive changes to Lagos through the second executive governor
of Lagos, Raji Fashola, who brought sanity and the required standards to the world-class city. They
designed a new waterfront city called Eko Atlantic, the size of New York’s Manhattan Island, which at
completion would proudly compete with any city across the world and serve as the economic center of
the West Africa coast, if not all Africa. It was an enviable achievement, especially because it was being
built entirely with money from private developers.
To the east, across the Niger River, the new democratic disposition brought impressive changes to cities
like Port Harcourt, Owerri, and Calabar. However, the Eastern region boasted the worst roads in the
federation and probably the world, breeding accusations of marginalization by the federal government,
due to the Igbo failed agitation and war for separation of Biafra. There was an obvious need for more
functioning socioeconomic infrastructure, especially rebuilding the roads connecting the city-state of

Port Harcourt to the surrounding Igbo cities that were the pride of local technological development.
Nnewi, Aba, and other Igbo towns were at the frontier of national mechanical and technological
development built on local enterprise and know-how.
To the north of the Niger, being naturally less endowed, the poverty was more visible. The Islamic
environment prevented proper education and industrialization from filtering down to the masses.
Instead of empowering the youth with education and new technology, its leadership, especially the
Islamic clerics, instigated the youth into violent, Islamic agitation and bombing, which scared away
investors and saw the region sink deeper into poverty.
Just like European, Christian, cultural imperialism preceded European economic imperialism, the
Nigerian cultural sphere took a global role as it broke down barriers across the world with music and
films. ‘Nollywood’ films were watched across the blackworld. Previously, the only news about
Nigerians included negative reports of their propensity for fraud and drugs.
Across Nigeria, in most of its fifty-eight cities, there were clear signs of development and advancement
towards taking its rightful place as the black superpower.
To stop the economic sabotage by the Niger delta militants who complained of their oil being used to
develop the country while they were kept from its political and economic benefits, the powers that be
had to find a way to get a Niger Deltan in power while fulfilling the promise to return power for the
northern Islamists. In what appeared to be the part two of the drama of incredible turn of events in the
late nineties—General Abacha, the military ruler, and Abiola, the deprived president-elect, died in
mysterious circumstances, and Obasanjo was brought to power from jail—Nigeria resolved its political
quagmire.
To resolve the presidency succession problem, Obasanjo picked from the Muslim north Musa Yar
Adua, the brother of his former military vice head of state in the seventies, and a relatively unknown
Niger delta politician, Goodluck Jonathan, as his vice president. It was apparent as they were sworn
into office that Yar Adua was gravely ill, and he died soon afterwards leaving the Niger Deltan to
assume presidency. Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, who had in mysterious circumstances, four years earlier as
a deputy governor of his state became governor without being voted in due to the London arrest of his
boss, became the unelected president of Nigeria.
This did not go down well with the northerners who accused Obasanjo of knowingly playing them out
of their eight years in office with a dead-on-arrival presidential candidate. Despite macabre political
maneuvers that included the disappearance of the dead or alive body of President Yar Adua, which
delayed swearing in the vice president as the acting president, and a bitterly contested presidential
primary election on the party platform the following year, Jonathan, an unassuming man, contested and
won a fresh presidential mandate.
However, before President Yar Adua died, he put mechanisms in place to advance the Northern
Islamist agenda and to reverse economic gains made by southerners under Obasanjo and to disturb his
successor. During Obasanjo’s rule from 1999 to 2007, he tried to redress the unfair northern
accumulation and control of the economy, especially the banking and oil sectors, due to their long
hegemony.
Yar Adua appointed northerners in the four key economic posts. The governorship of the Central Bank
went to Lamido Sanusi, an Islamist intellectual and the prince of Kano, the commercial center and
largest city of the north. Sanusi dreamt of fulfilling his Fulani ancestors’ dream of Islamizing all
Nigeria.

With the guidance of Obasanjo, Sanusi was to lead a modern Jihad by bringing Jonathan’s
administration into disrepute with what blossomed into a full corruption propaganda campaign against
the banking, legislative and presidential systems. Despite the fact that the 2007 global economic crash
was caused by irresponsible, long-term, consumer mortgage lending in Europe and America, Sanusi
raised a false alarm that Nigerian banks were dangerously exposed to what he regarded as bad debts by
ongoing business concerns in Nigeria’s vital oil industry.
In a typical Islamic jihadist fashion that has seen traditional African rulers overthrown and their
institutions discarded by Islamists, Sanusi accused southern bank owners and businessmen of
corruption in what was a temporary imbalance on the books due to huge oil price swings within the last
year. He took over the banks and jailed the bank executives, shaking business confidence and
criminalizing debt. This was unexpected from a Central Bank governor, whose role was to bring
confidence and stability to the banking sector and economy. The economy survived despite being
drastically slowed.
Afterwards, he resorted to making unfounded disparaging claims against the president and his
ministers.
From the inception of Jonathan’s rule, it was clear that he was the anointed candidate of the Western
military-industrial complex when he clearly supported the West and threatened to invade Ivory Coast
on behalf of the West to push out the populist President Gbagbo, who had disturbed French neoimperialistic
designs in Francophone Africa. Jonathan also led the Western crusade against Islamic
insurgents in Mali.
However, Dr. Jonathan’s technocratic nature and cabinet full of the best Nigerian professionals
naturally sought to advance Nigeria’s economy beyond the colonial prescribed mode, which made him
fallout with Obasanjo and his Western masters. He carried out the long-awaited economic revaluation
which turned Nigeria into Africa’s largest economy, overtaking South Africa. Dr. Jonathan’s Dream
Cabinet was composed of:
Diezani Allison-Madueke, the first female Nigeria director of Shell oil company, as the Minister of
Petroleum that sought to redress the unfair trade practices of the foreign oil companies. She used the
Local Content Act to force foreign oil companies to use local contractors, while her Petroleum Industry
Bill sought to block loopholes used by oil companies to milk Nigeria. This led to economic blackmail
that resulted in a silent embargo against Nigeria’s oil and a vicious corruption propaganda against her.
Dr. Segun Aganga, a fund manager of Rothschilds as Minister of Industry and Investment that raised
the highest foreign direct investment ever, towards completing the steel complex, developing the
manufacturing sector e.g. car plants, as well securing the largest Chinese foreign investment in the
world, in form of a new railway system traversing the whole nation. Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina, the world
renowned agricultural expert as Minister of Agriculture that unleashed an agricultural revolution across
the Middle Belt and Northern grasslands. Dr. Ngozi Iweala, the World Bank executive, who oversaw
the cancellation of debts and turned Nigeria into one of the fastest growing economies in the world until
the onslaught of Western market forces.
Economic sabotage became rife especially with the vandalizing of pipelines. Jonathan had revamped
the power sector to increase electricity supply through more gas powerplants, which if left to
materialize would have made him a darling of the masses. Jonathan had lost popular support when he
tried to remove oil subsidies to enable the growth of the petrochemical sector and hoped a constant
power supply will win them back. However, with the systematic sabotage, instead of improving
electricity supply worsened.
More disturbing was the emergence of the Islamic terrorist group, Boko Haram, which claimed that it

was against Western education and values. Originating from the oldest Nigerian Islamic kingdom,
Bornu, in northeast Nigeria, it carried out suicide and other forms of bombings against the Nigerian
police and army as well as Western institutions like the UN building. Like in the US where the truth
was not being told about the historical foundations of global, Islamic agitation, Nigerians wrongly
attributed these acts to poverty and a reaction to the corruption and misrule by the Nigerian elite.
Western powers that wanted the Jonathan government out of power, not only hampered the
government’s fight against the terrorists, but also are believed to have use its military command center,
Africom in Sudan to tunnel weapons to the terrorists. Under the guise of corruption and human rights
abuses, the USA stopped arms being sold to government, frustrating and embarrassing President
Jonathan’s attempt to buy arms through a South African backdoor sale, as well as stopping the Israelis
from selling 18 Cobra helicopters to pursue the terrorist in the grasslands.
Susan Rice, who had rose to the post of National security adviser, following her alleged role in MKO
Abiola death as the Tea Lady, suddenly reappeared on the Nigerian political scene. Immediately after
meeting with the Northern governors, many of who had the terrorist activities in their state, things
changed for the worse for Jonathan’s government. On their return to Nigeria, they verbally abused the
presidency and sought to decamp from the ruling party.
About nineteen days later, on the day China was to sign its largest foreign investment in the world, in
form of a new railway system, over 200 girls were declared kidnapped by Boko Haram, causing huge
embarrassment to the government, especially when its response was lukewarm since it believed it was a
conspiracy. Notably US war hawks like Senator McCain launched verbal attacks against the sitting
president of another country.
The US Obama administration employed the services of Axelrod Political agency that used the Change
mantra to get Barack Obama into office, to form a viable opposition that could take over. The Northern
faction of the ruling party, PDP, decamped to forge an alliance with the Yoruba party of a Yoruba
Muslim, Ahmed Tinubu, while the ex-military head of state, General Muhammed Buhari was billed as
president to take advantage of the anti-corruption propaganda and unresolved terrorist problem. US
President Obama made an unprecedented move of directly addressing Nigerians in a video broadcast,
appealing to them, indirectly, to vote out President Goodluck in order to stop Boko Haram and other
ills.
The most worrying were the actions and utterances of the expresident General Obasanjo that had
‘arranged’ Goodluck Jonathan into power. It appeared that Obasanjo’s Western masters had put the
blame on him for bringing Jonathan that had turned against their economic interests. This was
Obasanjo’s third corruption propaganda to unseat a government trying to uplift Nigeria and the Black
Race.
For Jonathan to increase steel mills from 5 to 15 and attract car and electronic manufacturers in a short
while, it was clear that the military rulers that knew that it was the basic requirement for manufacturing,
especially arms, had always sabotaged African’s development in favor of their Western trainers.
Although Obasanjo had initiated the dealings with the Chinese and appeared to move towards
industrialization, it is now questionable whether Obasanjo wanted any true development. Were all his
efforts to privatize the steel companies designed to fail as they did when he left office, while the talks to
build a new railway system were not genuine?
It is believed that the monumental pressure Obasanjo was placed under by the West made him throw
caution to wind, as he had his party membership card torn in public, while threatening the president
with arrest and jailing in The Hague if he didn’t give up power. His daughter had to write a public letter

to caution after he wrote an eighteen page letter, accusing Goodluck of corruption, maladministration
etc.
Ultimately, the global oil market was crashed and the currency experienced sustained attacks, like
President Shagari faced before being overthrown. By the time of the election, President Jonathan was
faced with sustained terrorist attacks, mass political decamping, economic sabotage that included
shutting down the power system, oil and currency crashes. With betrayals and attacks from all areas,
the USA/UK secured a regime change as President Jonathan lost reelection.
There were valid claims that he was rigged out based on the fact that 38million voters had been
registered in 2011 while only 28 million voters were registered in 2015 – majority of the lost voters
came from Original African voters in his Southern stronghold.
In his place was the General Buhari, the former military head of state now backed by the West as a
civilian president, to once again stop Nigeria’s development like he did in 1984 when he chased out the
Russians and stopped the Ajaokuta Steel complex under the guise of anti-corruption. Now, even before
forming a cabinet, it was announced that the Petroleum Industry Bill was to be withdrawn, and oil
swaps used to finance Chinese development projects were to be stopped, putting an end to any
meaningful hopes of economic development.
Buhari’s most devastating policy change, carried out without an economic team or ministers in place,
was the introduction of foreign exchange controls and extensive import licensing under the guise that
Nigeria had been looted dry. He falsely claimed that Nigeria was broke while in reality he had inherited
nearly $40billion dollars in cash reserves and sovereign funds. He also blamed the fall in crude oil
prices to $38.
A few years earlier, Obasanjo had come into power to meet only $3billion cash reserves and oil prices
at $12, and still ran the economy without fail. Buhari was to bring about the greatest divestment since
the Civil War, as the world’s third fastest growing economy backflipped from 7percent to minus 3
percent within a year. Buhari, the economic hitman par excellence, shot dead the economy on arrival!
However, it is believed that Jonathan had set true economic and political development in motion which
will resume fully once the people know that Buhari was put in place to retard their development. The
new railway system is a key socioeconomic infrastructure that will propel Nigeria’s economy.
The Confab Report, from the Sovereign National Conference setup by President Goodluck, came up
with hundreds of fundamental resolutions that will place Nigeria on a strong political platform. The
British colonists had given independence to Nigeria, its geographical creation, but not the peoples
living within it. The most profound resolution was the clause for ethnic self-determination, which put
the control and exploitation of resources in the hands of the states and its people. The states were to
manage the resources and give the central federal government a smaller percentage probably 33%. This
took the power from the federal government and made it difficult for the neoimperialists to control
resources and the economy using divide and run tactics through a single leader at the center or through
a favored ethnic group.
The Sovereign National Conference brought about the first united platform of Original Africans that
reside in 4 of the 6 regions – Yorubas Southwest region, the Igbos Southeast region, Deltans South-
South region and Middlebelters of the Northern-Central region. They proposed fundamental changes
and voted along their similar interests to bring about the most profound quest for genuine freedom and
development, opposed by the predatory Islamic Core North and the Western Powers. This was based on
the fact that Original African, not only had common origins and identity, but also had common

collective aspirations, which required an articulate intellectual, cultural and economic platform.
Buhari refused to implement its recommendations since it was against his Core Northern Islamist
agenda and the global Abrahamist agenda to exploit Africans, but it is clear that Nigeria can’t survive
its current structure. It would eventually slip into anarchy and civil war if a just system is not
implemented as prescribed by the Confab Report. When eventually implemented, the Confab Report
has the propensity to spread across Africa and unite its peoples into a single continentwide superstate,
since it guarantees every group their ethnic self-determination over their resources, culture and identity.
The smallest groups will be free of hegemonic tendencies of larger groups.
Along the coast, in Ghana, President Kufuor continued his proWest policies, which earned support
from the West and debt relief from the Paris Club of creditors in 2005.
In addition to keeping the peace with the West, Kufour built stronger ties with Nigeria and other
African nations, and also joined the trend of doing business with the Chinese.
At the end of his two terms, the ruling party was defeated by the opposition party, National Democratic
Congress, led by John Fifii Atta Mills, Rawlings’s former vice president (1997-2001), who had stood
unsuccessfully in 2000 and 2004. Atta Mills died in office in 2012 and was succeeded by his vicepresident,
Dramani Mahama. The peaceful sociopolitical life enjoyed allowed Ghanaian ports and cities
to slowly become buoyant with new found income from crude oil and an increasing middle class.
However, Obasanjo launched the corruption propaganda against President Mahama, accusing him
publicly in a London Summit of using Ghana’s stolen funds to buy houses abroad and support President
Goodluck. This effectively focused public political discourse on corruption. Obasanjo’s actions
confirmed it was a repeat of the mid-sixties CIA inspired global corruption propaganda that brought
regime change in Nigeria, Ghana, Brazil and a few others.
In South Africa, President Nelson Mandela, after only one term in office, stepped down in 1999 at the
dawn of the new era. Thabo Mbeki won a landslide victory, with over 66% of the votes, to continue his
vision of a new South Africa in the new global Black era.
Mbeki had a globalist view to African issues and worked hard to set the Blackworld on the right route.
He spearheaded measures to rejuvenate Pan-African ideals through the advancing of the mere talkshop
known as Organization of African Unity into the May 26 th 2001 creation of the African Union of 54
member states. The most important decisions are initially to be made by the Assembly of the African
Union, a bi-annual meeting by heads of states. The PanAfrican Parliament was also formed and
relocated to Midrand, SA, but is not fully representative with parliamentarians voted from the masses.
Mbeki proposed and sought continentwide support for the New Partnership for African Development
(NEPAD) with the likes of Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya, and had its headquarters in Midrand. To counter
the racist Eurocentric imperialistic geopolitics and economics, he struck alliances with Brazil, Russia,
India and China (BRICs).
At home, the economy grew at an average 5% during his tenure but he faced increase pressure to
spread the wealth and uplift the majority out of the poverty trap created by decades of apartheid
underfunding of education and other socioeconomic infrastructure. The one-time master of
demonstrations saw South Africa become the world capital of demonstrations as people impatiently
clamored for change.
In 2001, an attempt to raise tuition fees in South African universities brought students into the streets.

This was reminiscent of the Nigerian student demonstrations of the seventies, ostensibly over tuition
fees and IMF subsidy withdrawals.
Apart from the more organized pressures, there was sociopolitical pressure for land reform to help
those who wanted to farm in the rural areas but were disenfranchised by the huge white ranches. To
repossess their lands from the whites, even though they were immorally obtained, would cause an
international outcry by vociferous whites with access to the international media. Despite the South
African government’s attempts to redistribute land, they were slow and couldn’t strike at the heart of
the problem, as whites experienced increasing attacks from rural blacks.
This was made more complicated when South African’s northern neighbor, Zimbabwe, facing a similar
problem decided to go ahead with land reform. This was provoked by the new 1998 Labor government
in Britain that irresponsibly decided to renege on the Lancashire agreement made by the Conservatives
in 1982. With whites who were 1 percent of the population holding on to 70 percent of Zimbabwe land,
obtained through illegal means, the British reneged on a promise to pay for the land reform to bring
about a more equitable distribution. At political independence in 1982 without the economic factors of
production, an agreement was reached to prevent Mugabe from nationalizing the productive lands and
mines after winning significant military and electoral victories, but fifteen years after the agreement,
the West threatened and caused mayhem after Mugabe allowed his people to dispossess the whites of
the land.
The whites grew export crops like tobacco for Western markets, being part of a selected few African
products not blocked by racist Western tariffs and unfair trading practices. The whites kept the income
for themselves and employed Africans as cheap farm hands. Yet, Mugabe was hounded for causing a
natural famine and hunger by chasing whites from the land that they farmed for export markets only.
Mbeki was placed under immense international pressure to rein in Mugabe, but apart from being
friends and the past history of Mugabe helping ANC in their liberation fight, Mbeki knew very well
that they shared the same problem of land redistribution and Mugabe had no other choice after fifteen
years of British insincerity. The British attempted to overthrow Mugabe, but the veteran liberation
fighter had the support of the majority. The West employed their divide and rule tactics by sponsoring
an opposition politician, Morgan Tsvangirai, but they were unsuccessful in their attempts to teleguide
and rig the election against Mugabe.
The West went all the way out to destroy Zimbabwean economy with sanctions, resulting in
hyperinflation and a near total collapse. However, the economy survived and rebounded with the help
of South Africa and China by the end of the decade. Luckily, Zimbabwe also struck the biggest
diamond find in a century that was to provide an additional income stream, as it sought to put its land
use and agricultural sector in order.
Many Africans believed that the international uproar caused over Zimbabwe, with its commonwealth
suspension and EU sanctions, was to warn South Africa from taking the same route of reclaiming its
economic sovereignty.
South African leaders have to devise a way to take over the ownership of the industrial complex and
combat the xenophobia of its citizens, or it might find the huge African markets closed to its industries
and goods.
President Mbeki, the intellectual freedom fighter, won his reelection convincingly, because the
economy continued to flourish a decade after independence, especially with its rich array of minerals
and an increasing industrial and market base. However, the majority of people remained expectant of

increasing socioeconomic benefits and improvements, in addition to demanding free HIV/AIDS
healthcare.
The success of any political system depends on how soon it could deliver the expected benefits to the
vast majority before divisive voices took control and derailed the sociopolitical system, as seen in other
nations.
Mbeki steered South Africa into regional prominence and a leadership position, displayed in the pivotal
role South Africa played in the formation of the African Union (AU) and NEPAD, the 2004 agreement
to locate the Pan-African Parliament in South Africa, as well as settling the conflicts in Rwanda,
Burundi, Zaire, and Ivory Coast. This aggressive foreign policy was not welcomed by everyone,
especially in Zaire, where other southern African nations formed an opposing block to countermand
what was deemed a quest to win the huge mineral resources in the Congo River basin and Great Lakes.
Apart from winning the right to host the 2010 World Cup—the first African nation to do so—the
aggressive foreign policy could not be fully appreciated at home by those who wanted an immediate
improvement in socioeconomic benefits and not military and diplomatic glories, even though the
importance of foreign markets couldn’t be overstated. The South African mobile telecommunications
company saw its market base quadruple in a matter of months as an increasing share of its profit came
from the Nigerian market. This success extended to other sectors especially cable TV and retail outlets.
The wider African market was not only important to its consumer products but also to its labor market,
due to the shortage of skills in South Africa.
In 2005, allegations of corruption were hurled at the leadership of the ANC, which had to tread
carefully and openly to prevent the loss of faith in its ability. Jacob Zuma, the vice-president, was
accused of receiving kickbacks from a huge arms deal. Mbeki forced him to resign but he was accused
of political interference and in the political storm that followed that saw the ANC back Zuma, Mbeki
was forced to resign shortly before the end of his second term in office. His vicepresident stepped into
power till the next election, which Jacob Zuma won to become president.
Zuma followed Mbeki’s domestic and foreign policies, but showed he did not have the convictions
when he backed away from supporting Ivory Coast against French neo-imperialism. Zuma reassured
those that feared that he was a communist or anti-white liberation fighter by not adopting any
revolutionary economic measure to redress the income imbalance. Nevertheless, the allegations of
corruption continued against him and Cyril Ramaphosa.
The South African government faced increased pressure to bring post-apartheid promises of black
poverty eradication and socioeconomic development to fruition. This brought about riots and the killing
of thirty miners in the continuous push for wage increases in Ramaphosa’s mining company.
South Africa lost its place as Africa’s largest economy but remained a counterbalance to Nigeria’s
corrupted position as the giant of Africa. Its economy was largely dominated by white-owned
companies that expanded into markets across the continent, especially in the telecom and retailing
sectors, making huge profits from the huge market of Nigeria. However, the high level of xenophobia
across South Africa is unabated and could lead to its companies being barred from economies across
Africa.
It appears that South Africa won’t escape the global corruption propaganda against its leaders, like
Jacob Zuma, thinking of land reform. It is rumored that the West favors Ramaphosa who allowed them
to keep the mines and land at the negotiating table with the Apartheid government. Already there has
been an onslaught of corruption allegations against Zuma that might force him out of power for a more

pro-West candidate.
In Zimbabwe, following the repossession of farm lands by war veterans, Mugabe was hounded by the
Anglo-Saxon imperialists. To preempt the West sponsoring rebels and anarchy, Mugabe was forced to
agree to a coalition government.
Mugabe won the 2013 election with a clear majority that couldn’t be disputed by the West, and brought
the coalition with the Western stooge to an end. However there were complaints that the old liberation
soldier was spending too long in power.
Unfortunately such complaints were never directed at Ugandan President Museveni that was enthroned
by the West in the eighties after Obote was hunted out of office. There was a love-hate relationship
between Museveni and his Western masters, who he indirectly helped to defeat the World Trade
Organization disputes brought by Africans for a fairer global trade deal. He continued to face unrest
from the northern Uganda rebels while he and Rwandan President Kigame continued to cause unrest in
eastern Congo-Zaire.
Angola continued to witness impressive growth due to its oil wealth and Chinese help to develop its
socioeconomic infrastructure. Crude oil was found in commercial quantities all along the Atlantic Coast
to Ghana, promising to change the fortunes of many economies on the western coast of Africa.
The signs of the imminent global black socioeconomic ascendancy were clear to see in the land of
white superpower and one of the most important black nations—the United States and African America
—where for the first time an African named Barack Obama became president against all odds.
In the tradition of the Americas, especially in the Caribbean and South America, mulattos had always
found it easier to integrate and be accepted into the white power structures, but it was a welcome
novelty in the US. Some commentators theorized that Obama was acceptable to the white
establishment, because his father was a Kenyan immigrant who impregnated an ‘establishment’ white
woman. It was argued that Obama could not yearn, or be pressured by African Americans, to exact
revenge for slavery, because East Africa slaves were never brought to the Americas.
His political expediency prevented him from making mention of slavery issues or promising African
Americans any tangible benefits from his presidency, apart from black pride, a sense of achievement,
and photo opportunities. Like most African American politicians, Obama tried too much to please the
white agenda while he neglected the black agenda.
Following George Bush’s shoddy handling of foreign affairs, which made the imperialism of the US
obvious and obnoxious, Obama was the ideal black face to continue white America’s imperialism.
Obama put the world at ease to enable the West’s geopolitical games in Africa and the Middle East to
succeed, as governments were toppled in Ivory Coast, Libya, Egypt, Nigeria, Brazil and elsewhere
without African Americans raising objections. He used his Black face to misguide the largest Black
population, Nigeria into the new Western imperialist agenda trap that was to destroy their economy and
re-enslave them.
Obama alienated his supporters on the African continent with his push for same sex marriage laws
sponsored by the powerful gay lobby in the West. He was criticized for bringing no direct
socioeconomic benefits to the African continent, while trying to corrupt conservative African values
with his backing for homosexuality. Unknown that he was also linked to increased Western inspired
Islamic terrorism and corruption propaganda that brought regime change across Africa.
At home, Obama’s first term brought no significant direct economic benefits to African Americans

through direct government programmes or substantially increased quotas for government contracts (like
in Africa where the enthronement of a president always resulted in improved economics for his or her
ethnic group). Obama’s presidency was the culmination of Dubois’s integration blueprint formed nearly
one hundred years earlier. Dubois later realized that the integration could only be superficial, and it
prevented the establishment of a strong, self-sustaining socioeconomic foundation for African
Americans.
With a population of 43.2 million and an expected $1.3 trillion consumer expenditure by 2015, African
Americans would be the sixteenth-richest nation if they were on their own. The middle class grew to
38.4 percent, as university attendance doubled from 1.8 million in 1993 to 3.8 million in 2010, but only
25 percent of the middle class was secure due to a lack of financial assets.
The destruction of the black family continued as 70 percent of black babies were born out of wedlock.
This could be attributed to the fact that African American men lagged in academics and income.
Female college graduates outnumbered males two to one, resulting in median income for black men
falling by 12 percent while rising 75 percent for women.
Despite the immense cultural pride and access that the Obama presidency afforded African Americans,
there was a racist backlash against them through police killings, like in Nigeria where the Islamists
increased their violent attacks against southerners when power briefly crossed the Niger. Obama
winning without a traditional political base is bound to cause a leadership vacuum when he leaves
office; the reverends who normally led and defended the black sociopolitical were effectively shut up
by the advent of the wonderkid, Obama.
African-Americans were faced with a bleak immediate future by having to choose between Hilary
Clinton, the Democratic Party and Western imperialists favored presidential candidate and Donald
Trump, the Republican and White racists candidate, both of whom were poised to relegate Black
economic interests.
In what appeared to be signs of frustration with the US political systems, despite Obama rule, the Black
Lives Matter movement gained recognition across the world for their calls against police brutality.
It was more difficult to push for equality, since institution racism was still very much alive and the
increase in racist physical attacks and employment barriers. The criminal justice system was still racist
as black males were six times more likely than whites to go to jail. Although within the college age
group (ages twenty-four to thirtyfive) there were more black men in college than in prison, across the
overall black population, more black men were in jail than enrolled in college.
Just as diluted black power became the leader of the political landscape, black music was diluted to
appeal to mainstream whites. Black music lost its soul and appeal across the blackworld, which turned
to Nigeria’s Nollywood for original, soulful music. African American musicians made ‘more money for
less soul’, which enabled them to advance in the business world. They had the wealth to move into
other sectors and across the blackworld, especially Nigeria, where they brought more investment and
exposure to the Nigerian hip-hop scene. Despite some African music purists frowning on the
development (fearing it would be ‘whitened’ and ‘de-soul-ed’), the well of Yoruba music ran far deeper
than whatever the white world could bring to dilute it.
African Americans built more bridges with their African homeland, as Yoruba Ifa tradition made
impressive inroads across the Americas. Some African Americans relocated to Nigeria and Ghana to
take up business opportunities, especially in media. However, African Americans couldn’t realize their
full potential until Africa got its socioeconomic potential together and served as their niche market.

In Brazil, Afro-Brazilians lost their most important black activist, Abdias do Nascimento, who died at
the ripe age of ninety-seven in 2011, but they continued to reap the benefits of his agitation. Officially
the majority population (51%), Afro-Brazilians climbed the socioeconomic ladder as more educational
opportunities opened due to new laws stipulating a quota for Afro-Brazilians in federal employment
and educational institutions. Afro-Brazilians became the new middle class as Brazil established itself as
a world economic power; its GDP surpassed that of Britain in 2012, making it the world’s sixth-largest
economy.
The ranks of black political candidates continued to swell, but like Obama avoided African Americans
issues, due to political expediency, they avoided issues specific to Afro-Brazilians. They didn’t have a
unified, national black movement due to the historic division of Brazil into captaincies. They were still
to have a black president (even though Cardoso described slightly mulatto), but presidents like the
populist, leftist President Lula Da Silva were responsive to the demands of Afro-Brazilians.
The ‘populist’ Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (who invited Florestan Fernandes to join the Workers Party)
won the presidency after the third attempt, and promised to reduce poverty, improve land reform, and
the Equality Plan for human rights. Silva promised to make a change, especially for the poor through
Bolsa Familia, a social welfare program, and he made gestures to Cuba and other Latinos to form a
market bloc while trying to limit the corrupt Western influences.
Many Latino nations saw the rise of left-wing governments and their joining with Silva’s struggle
against neo-imperialism and poverty. At best, Silva could only make changes in socioeconomic indices
like Cuba in education and employment, but the success was limited without foreign debt cancellations
and the full recognition of black rights and prosperity. He was successful in bringing the poverty rate
down by nearly 30%.
In May 2004, the army was called into Rio de Janeiro’s slums to take over from the police and
heightened the violence against blacks. The War against Drugs caused more than twenty black deaths
each day, at the hands of the police, for more than twenty years.
Most important was Da Silva’s creation of the Special Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality
(SEPPIR) in March 2003.
SEPPIR, later elevated to ministry status, had three main programmes:
1. The Citizenship Quilombo programme provided access to land, health, education, and construction
of housing, although it was slow, as fewer than one hundred out of sixteen hundred quilombos were yet
to receive titles to their lands.
2. The Color of Culture programme worked with businesses like Petrobras and TV Globo to promote
teaching the history and culture of Africa and people of African descent; this was implemented in
public and private schools in 2006.
3. The ProUni programme was a ‘university for all’ programme that awarded more than one hundred
thousand scholarships.
Abdias Nascimento’s cultural movement earned dividends from constitutional-stipulated funding
through the Ministry of Culture, which were spent on improving the socioeconomic existence of
Africans in the quilombos and rural areas.
The poor, crammed, hillside ghettos in the urban areas, known as favelas, persisted with poor
education, lack of investment finance, and lack of market access to Afro-Brazilians (who, despite being
more than 50 percent of the population, accounted for only 20 percent of the GNP and had 50 percent
higher unemployment than whites). For many of the 78 percent of Afro-Brazilians who lived below
poverty, the only source of investment was the illegal drug market like in the US, which only attracted

heavy-handed policing from the white military industrialists who continued to kill black youth on the
street. Africans were still twice likely to be shot by the death squads of police that roamed Afro-
Brazilian streets.
African culture continued to be watered down in Rio de Janerio and Sao Paulo, but Salvador held its
position as the African heartland of the Americas, attracting the African Diaspora from all over for
spiritual and cultural ‘tourism’. Afro-Brazilians were still not socioeconomically strong enough to
support smaller African groups hidden and oppressed across South America, like the seven million
Afro-Colombians who formed 18 percent of Colombia’s population and the 2.5 million Afro-
Venezuelans who formed 10 percent of Venezuela’s.
After concluding his constitutionally permitted maximum term, Lula Da Silva backed Dilma Rousseff
from his Worker’s Party into power. Dilma continued the same upliftment policies, but she soon faced
increased economic pressures instigated by the West, especially through the sabotage of Brazil’s
currency by Western currency speculators. Western imperialists were to relaunch a neo-imperialism
agenda, by securing regime change through a Western-inspired corruption propaganda, and what
amounted to a democratic coup to impeach Dilma.
Within a fortnight that the new rightwing came into power, they announced the dissolution of the
Ministry of Culture. Though this resulted in artistes’ sit-ins and a backtracking by the government, it
became obvious that the constitutional provision secured by Abdias Nascimento, to bring about cultural
and economic affirmative actions, was under attack and to be repealed. Just like in Nigeria, the second
largest Black population was to be economically arrested and reenslaved.
This corruption propaganda and democratic gimmick was also to be used against other Southern
American nations that had followed Brazil to the leftwing and used China to develop liberating
socioeconomic infrastructure.
Like with African Americans, it was becoming obvious that there would always be a ceiling to black
progress until blacks could exploit their niche markets across Africa.
Francophone Africa lagged behind in economic and political freedoms across the blackworld, as the
only serious challenge to France’s dominance was extinguished in Ivory Coast. In 1999, the French and
their puppet governments were unseated from their most prosperous African colony, Ivory Coast, but
the French went to every length to reclaim their unfair domination by 2011.
Still spending France’s currency, the CFA franc, across Africa, the colonies had their economic
existence controlled from Paris as well as their political life. Nationalistic and Pan-Africanist politicians
were barred from the political scene, as Francophone African puppet leaders stayed in power for life
despite widespread corruption and economic stagnation.
A mutiny by underpaid soldiers and workers led to the coup that brought an end to the Houphouet-
Boigny era on December 24, 1999—the last revolution of a millennium of revolutions across Africa.
Robert Guei, the coup leader, staged an election the following year on October 22, which he claimed to
win, but he was not allowed to stay in power because of southern protests. The mass protests made
Guei flee and hand power to Gbagbo. He was challenged by Frenchbacked rebels who held the Muslim
north, as the model ex-colony slipped into anarchy and civil war. Regardless of the change in
millennium, the French didn’t want to see a change in their interests and instigated a counterplan, and
they landed troops on a ‘peace mission’. The French air force attacked and destroyed the small, Ivory
Coast air force on a flimsy excuse as they continued backing the northern rebels and sabotaging the

government.
In 2005, the Nigerian and South African governments tried to settle the crisis by appointing a
provisional premier acceptable to both sides while arranging new elections.
Laurent Gbagbo set out to challenge and change French domination of its socioeconomic and political
life, but the French provoked a civil war and sabotaged the economic and political life of Ivoirians over
a period of ten years. Eventually, Gbagbo was forced to call for an election in the civil war-torn nation,
and the elections were rigged in favor of the pro-French candidate, Allasane Ouattara. Despite the
election results showing more votes than possible from the minority populations in the northern Muslim
areas controlled by the French (which led to the Ivorien electoral body ruling against the northern
results and declare Gbagbo the winner), the French mobilized the West against Gbagbo and invaded
southern Ivory Coast.
Initially, South Africa, under President Jacob Zuma, showed the Pan-Africanist spirit that led to South
Africa’s majority Black rule, by sending warships to the Ivorien coast in support of Gbagbo. This was
in response to the threat of invasion by Nigeria’s President Jonathan that was working for the West
military industrialists who empowered him. However, South Africa backed down in the face of French
diplomatic and economic pressure.
The French used UN helicopter gunships to attack the Ivorien presidential villa, where they arrested
President Gbagbo like a common criminal and dragged him to prison in The Hague under the auspices
of the International Court of (European) Justice. It was disheartening to see an African treated so
shabbily, like a runaway slave recaptured and dragged back to the master’s plantation, without a major
revolt. The lack of a reaction across the blackworld indicated the level of brainwashing by Western
media in recent times.
This was the immediate end of Francophone African agitation to be in control of their own destiny,
instead of the present situation whereby all banks and economic and political infrastructure was in the
hands of the French and their friends. The French decided the value of the currency, the tax regime,
what was produced, and who stood for what political office.
Without freeing Francophone Africa from the parasitic influences of the French, the prospects of a
unified African market and political structure remain distant. In Cameroun, the French puppet
president, Paul Biya, has remained in power for over twenty years after the 1982 succession of his boss,
Ahmadou Ahidjo – the initial French puppet. Will Africans have to wait for Francophone Africa to be
free, or should they go ahead with the African political and economic union and use their collective
power to force the French out of Africa? The question remains.
French imperialism across Africa scored a victory against its strongest opponent, Gaddafi, who had
armed rebels in neocolonies from Chad to Mauritania and Central African Republic. The West saw the
Libyan leader as the greatest threat in Africa, following his unification of the oil market that led to an
increase in oil prices, as well as his push for political and economic unification across Africa for
economic leverage.
Using the opportunity provided by mayhem across the border in Egypt (caused by a simulated
revolution and palace coup), the West smuggled rebels into Libya. They were armed and provided air
support to revolt against the Libyan leader. With eighty thousand bombs dropped in a short time over
the sparsely populated nation, French intelligence officers infiltrated and murdered Gaddafi. In his
place, they installed Islamic extremists under the auspices of AlQaeda, which set out to kill black
Africans resident in the country.

This was the end of a long reign known to arm revolutionaries across Africa and bring economic
prosperity.
Even without Gaddafi, the French witnessed revolt in their neocolony, Mali, where Tuaregs and other
Arabic extremists toppled the French puppet government and divided the nation. Islamic extremists
took their anger out on historic monuments and manuscripts that they alleged were a corruption of
conservative Islamic principles. As expected, the French used military force to regain their neocolonial
enclave with the help of the Nigerian land army.
In Haiti, the first French colony, Africans still suffered from economic deprivation that was worsen by
disasters like earthquakes and floods. The West-inspired political instability (thirty-two coups since
1806) prevented economic growth and socioeconomic infrastructure that could have helped during the
natural disasters. The people were further decimated by cholera.
In the election cycle in 2000, Aristide’s party swept both parliamentary and presidential elections that
were marred by violence and electoral fraud. Aristide remained in power through false promises and
repression, but in 2004, an uprising in the north spread across Haiti. Like his former US paymasters and
George Bush, Aristide labeled the poor black rioters as terrorists, disregarding the prevalent poverty
that left nearly 40 percent malnourished.
In a popular revolt from the north that spread to the capital, Aristide was carted away by the United
States in 2004, even though many accused the United States of fomenting the coup due to the fallout
between Aristide and his former paymasters who had paved his way to power. Rene Preval was made
president again in 2006 in a contentious election, while the US and French prevented the return of
Aristide from South Africa where he was exiled. In the 2010 elections, Michel Martelly defeated
Preval’s anointed candidate after a second round of elections that were also marred by violence and
demonstrations.
In 2012, Martelly announced his country’s desire to join the AU as an associate member, in the
realization that Haiti needed to become closer to exploit its African roots since the West purposely kept
Haiti underdeveloped.
In the largest Francophone African nation, Congo-Zaire, though a Belgian ex-colony, the West also
prevented lasting peace. Western puppet leaders in Uganda and Rwanda continued to fuel anarchy and
war in the eastern borders of Congo. Joseph Kabila won the first multiparty election since
independence and continued to rule to the disapproval of the French and the US. The war continued to
claim more than forty thousand a month as Uganda and Rwanda were bent on claiming the mineral rich
territories in eastern Congo-Zaire.
To the north, the nation of Sudan was split into north and south, aided by the discovery of crude oil in
South Sudan. This influenced the West to support the break of the southern blacks from the Arabic
north. Despite south Sudan becoming an independent nation after fifty years of bloody war, the Islamic
north continued to raid and cause anarchy across the border
This was a much better scenario than in Somali. Its fifty-year war led to anarchy and the collapse of the
state as warlords carved the country into tiny areas of influence. Due to Somali piracy on the busy sea
trade routes, the West was forced to intervene and try to bring sanity to Somali. While the United States
was not able to commit US soldiers on the ground, it armed and backed its former enemy, Ethiopia,
which invaded to bring peace but to no avail.
In Ethiopia, the West-backed President Meles Zenawi held power from 1995 until his death in 2012.

Ethiopia witnessed its worst drought and famine in sixty years. However, Ethiopia appeared to be
stabilizing economically due to its closeness with the West and the telecom, banking, and retail
businesses spreading across Africa. It also moved closer to China that helped sponsor and build its
socioeconomic infrastructure.
In Kenya, in December 2002, the long-serving President Arap Moi was succeeded by President Mwai
Kibaki, his former vice president (1978 to 1988) who later turned opposition leader. President Mwai
was to oversee profound economic changes as he increased growth from minus 1 percent to 7 percent,
mainly due to Chinese infrastructural development, as well as telecoms, retail and banking sectors that
grew in response to the fast growing educated young population.
Kenya witnessed a bloody ethnic conflict following the 2007 reelection of President Mwai Kibaki.
Nearly a thousand were killed and six hundred thousand were displaced in the conflict that ensued.
People were fed up with the Kikuyu dominance, especially the claims that most lands were unfairly
distributed and held by the Kikuyu and their European settler allies.
The former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and other prominent Africans pacified all sides and
pushed for a coalition. The loser in the presidential elections, Raila Odinga, was made prime minister,
and many of his party were included in the cabinet in the 2008 Grand Coalition. A new constitution
was instituted soon afterwards.
President Kibaki passed power to the younger and eloquent Kenyan generation represented by
President Uhuru Kenyatta, the on of the first president, Jomo Kenyatta. Uhuru continued to attract
Chinese infrastructural development that not only built its national railways but built a railway system
linking East and Central Africa, Nairobi to Rwanda’s Kigali. He faced increased Islamic terrorism,
Western inspired corruption propaganda and economic sabotage.
Like with Nigeria, the telecom industry was a large growth sector that enabled East Africa’s largest
economy to expand.

Chapter 25: The Evolution of the Revolution
Concluding analysis of the blackworld—past, present, and future
It is obvious that, across the world, mental slavery prevents a proper evaluation of African historical
achievements, ethnic interrelationships and future progressive unity. The Black Race, once again in the
mid-2010s, had its economic and sociopolitical development arrested, through a global rightwing
moralist campaign.
The mental slavery is due to ignorance caused by religion, Western miseducation, tribalism,
nationalism, and foreign ideologies. Progressive unity based on the understanding of our true ethnic
identities and interrelationships is required to defeat the divisive neoimperialistic forces that impede
black socioeconomic ascendancy.
There are only two African groups – Original Africans and AfroAsians. All Original Africans
originated from Southern Nigeria and from about 10,000BC spread civilization across the world.
AfroAsians are Africans on our grassland frontiers that intermingled with Eurasians, through cultural
and political imperialism. Starting from the First Horseman/Ogun Era that brought White expansion
from Southern Russia/Central Asia around 2000BC, Afro-Asians were the first African cultural
diaspora, before Africans were carted to the Americas from the 1500s to become Afro-Americans.
Original Africans had developed an African Information Retrieval System based on the first structured
knowledge base that tied all Original Africans together culturally and spiritually as we diverged away
from the Niger Delta. The knowledge was based on binary complementarity, as opposed to the
European binary opposition, based knowledge systems. However, the African system has been
bastardised and discarded for religions and belief systems of our colonial masters due to their
overwhelming Ogun force and Olokun dogma.
The cultural imperialism from this Olokun Second Horseman Era obscured our history, starting from
Ethiopia and Egypt around 4AD with Christian dogma, then to the African Sahel from 750AD with
Islam, then Christian slavery on the West African coast from the 1500s. Just as Afro-Asians propagated
Islamic dogma and domination across Africa, so have we recently witnessed Obasanjo and Obama
propagate neo-imperialist dogma and structures.
The greatest weapons used to mentally subject Africans are the Abrahamic religions that mischievously
equate African philosophers, historians, scientists, and systems developers with the devil. Because
religion is usually what humans learn first, mental slavery and racial inferiority complexes start from an
early age, when the African toddler realizes that God does not have the image of his ancestors.
At school age, the African child is constantly taught that his forebears were failures and slaves. The last
bad five hundred years are not put into context of a glorious African past that spanned ten thousand
years. The miseducation results in irrelevant technologies and greatly corrupts the African mind by the
time the person reaches leadership positions.
In the Sixties, as the Black Race was taking its hard earned independence and civil rights, the
imperialists recruited and indoctrinated some Black vagabonds, like Obasanjo and the rest of the Kongo
Cabal, that would wrestle power from our philosopher kings and return us back to our colonizers for the
next fifty years. In the 1970s, Pentecostalism and Islamic radicalism swept the blackworld, bringing a
fall in educational and moral standards. African selfregulatory moral codes, based on natural laws of

retributive justice and karma, were discarded for messianic creeds that promised irresponsible
forgiveness of sins and, most important, undeserved material blessings that promoted corruption.
Based on natural laws, Original African belief systems do not have a devil/Satan figure that is wholly
negative and diametrically opposite to Almighty God, as postulated by Christianity and Islam. This is
because in nature, negative and positive are components of a whole and do not exist separately. In an
atom, protons and electrons exist together to create a natural balance and even if separated by force,
they always attract each other to become one.
In African traditional religions, God is one and almighty, the alpha and omega, the good and the bad. If
God were almighty, he would have destroyed a separate entity called the devil. This misconception of
binary opposition is at the foundations of European belief and knowledge systems, as they separate God
into good and evil in religion, and in science, separate matter from non-matter or physical from
spiritual.
African religions and traditions have a universal, complimentary approach that make people
acknowledge all forces and concepts on earth and the heavens above, created by God, which can be
used for spiritual and bodily fulfillment. God is never addressed directly as a singular entity, but
through the various elements and spiritual forces that make the universe. Man is ultimately responsible
for all his actions and not the Devil.
Ifa, Afa, Aha, Iha are all variations of the same knowledge system shared by all Original Africans. In
the case of the Yoruba, the largest Original African group, Ifa is an information retrieval system created
and made available by Esu and Orunmila to access God and solutions to all types of questions that
could be possibly asked – personal, historical, scientific, medical, spiritual etc. In Christianity, Jesus is
the access to God. Unlike Esu, Jesus is equated to God, which Muslims reject by claiming that he is the
access or information system/prophet to God but not the son of God or God personified.
There is proof that all religions are reflections and conceptualizations of their immediate environment
and universe as a whole, with the Sun the source of life equated to God. The foundations of Abrahamic
religions are steeped in astrology—the mechanisms of the universe in relation to the solar system. It
takes twelve months (moons) for a complete revolution of the sun called a year, which is reflected in
Judaism’s twelve tribes of Israel and Christianity’s twelve disciples of Jesus. Each of the twelve moons
has specific characteristics attributed to the effect of where the Earth is on its revolving journey around
the Sun.
For example, September is known to be the moon of the virgin (Virgo) and signified by Mercury,
which is the planet or patron of information. Prophets are usually born in or complete their journeys
under this moon, which is why Jesus, named the son of the virgin, was born under this moon and
brought knowledge to his people. Esu is also tied to the Mercury moon. In modern times, Yasser Arafat
and Queen Elizabeth I were born in September.
However, Mideastern religions choose to mark their messiahs birthdays on December 25, starting with
Ancient Egypt’s Horus around 3000BC, Greeks Attis and Persians Mithra around 1200BC, and Krishna
900BC, before Christianity choose it in the new era. The reason is that the Sun reaches it farthest point
on December 22 in the southern hemisphere, which is the time of the least light, heat and warmth in the
northern hemisphere. On the 25 th of December, it makes its first step toward the north, beginning a
new cycle, which is termed that the Sun/Son is being born. But the good tidings and effects of the new
Sun cycle is not felt until the Sun travels back and is directly on top of the Middle East, where it brings
spring and rejuvenation termed resurrection.

The moon in March/April is represented by Aries, the sacrificial lamb/ram, which is the time that
Abraham sacrificed a ram instead of his son, the Passover took place, and Jesus was crucified. The
crucifixion signifies when the sun returns to the Northern Hemisphere after a long winter and a period
of suffering for a new planting season, a period of renewal/resurrection when all past deeds are forgiven
and a new leaf is opened. However, as expected, Jesus claimed that his information was the truth and
the only way to God, but this has been generalized to include all information of every people.
Before modern academia, democracies and judiciaries, religion was the instruction manual or law for
society, meant to bring order and sustainability. The Olokun Second Horseman Era brought about the
transformation of ancestral worship and knowledge bases into organized religions, used to educate and
control people in the administration of scare resources. There is no religion that works towards the
destruction of the society that postulated it, so it can never be regarded as evil. Each religion deals with
the particular set of environmental conditions that mold particular societies, and if it fails to do so, it is
discarded or redesigned.
The oldest religions like Ifa, and others like Buddhism that evolved from it, captured their rich
ecosystems with balanced gender gods (especially female gods that they attributed to the fertility of
man and earth), in terms of food/agriculture and children. However, as people moved into arid areas
where there was little or no chance of fertile land for food, female gods became redundant, demonized
and discarded, like in Christianity. Christians evolved a god of war that enabled them to rob other
people of their land and resources, like the Jews did in Canaan.
Just as Christianity evolved to deal with the conditions in the Middle East, as time went on, it was
adopted and molded by the southern European Roman Empire for control and taxation purposes. This
alienated and made it inappropriate for those in northern Africa, who remolded it to their own
conditions and called it Islam. Laws like those against alcohol were a response to the conditions in the
desert; alcohol made you thirsty and could cause you to drink all the water required for the long
journeys through the Sahara, thus putting fellow travelers at risk of dying of thirst. The strong antitheft
laws were a response to the armed robbers that waylaid Trans-Saharan caravans, causing immense
misery, considering the long journeys and high cost of traveling to West Africa for gold. For some to
believe that God never spoke to others and that their existing laws were evil was ignorant and egoistic.
The Abrahamic religions, which evolved in the harsh conditions that forced them to wage war against
man, the environment, and thus God, also led them to devise ways to forgive the evils of war and the
forceful acquisition/exploitation that was necessary for their survival. Every character in the Bible was
a criminal who broke natural laws to achieve what he wanted: the desert-hungry immigrant called
Abraham pimped his wife to the pharaoh for food and gold, David sent a man to die in war in order to
have sex with his wife, and Jacob conned his father for his inheritance. This was unlike the Yoruba Ifa,
whereby Shango, the only character who went against natural laws by causing rancor between his
opponents, was made to commit suicide despite being a king. Because the people who evolved in rich
ecosystems like the rainforest did not have constraining factors that threatened their survival, such
forgiveness of evil could not be adopted.
Eurasian colonization led to forceful conversion to Abrahamic creeds and economic deprivation, which
left Africans with no choice but to become corrupt to escape the poverty trap. Churches and mosques
are on every corner of poor African communities, whereby they promise forgiveness of debt and
blessings of undeserved credit. This is why when Nigeria became the world’s most ‘religious’ nation, in
terms of Christianity and Islam, it also became the most corrupt.
Apart from the loss of Africans moral compass, due to adopting laws made in response to different
environmental conditions, Africans also lost their history, science, and philosophy—due to the fact that

religion is singularly the most important record of history, science, and philosophy.
No matter how evil African religions are now painted, Africans fail to recognize that it was from this
knowledge base they learnt how to deliver babies, make food, raise families, metallurgy and keep law
and order. Were the religions not in place, the enslaving Europeans would probably have been eaten on
sight instead of being welcomed into societies based on religious tolerance and free trade. The Original
African kings, especially the Oba of Bini that welcomed them, did so out of the understanding that the
European Christians were products of the Olokun Era of which the Oduduwa dynasty belonged and
worshipped, therefore one of the first things given were lands for their churches. It was a brotherhood
of Olokun that backfired on the sphere of African spirituality, traditions and political systems.
With the demonization of the African knowledge base, especially continuously highlighting its
negatives by other religions and Nollywood/dramatizations, Africans are scared away from taking even
a cursory look into their philosophy, science, and history.
The greatest undoing of African belief systems was their oral and secretive nature, because they
evolved naturally and continuously, but made them vulnerable to misinterpretations, out of ignorance
or malice. However, this quality also helps Ifa to continuously adapt to new conditions and prevents it
from being rigid, and eventually obsolete, when conditions change, unlike Christianity and Islam,
which became intolerant and led to religious wars.
Regardless of Eurasian misrepresentations, the essence of Original African belief systems can never be
lost because they smoothly evolved from societal norms based on natural laws and relationships of their
environment and the universe. History and philosophy are products of natural conditions that could be
deciphered anytime with the proper understanding of the geography, economics, and social sciences
that brought them about. The denial of the fact that Eurasian belief systems usurped the original African
belief system is the reason that knowledge has become difficult to impart.
Apart from historical records being altered, the cycles of history has been derided as astrology, while
the practicality of mathematics has been reduced. Geometry would be better understood if taught with
the basic tool of hairstyles, by cutting up the circle of hair. Trigonometry would be easier understood
with the study of the electromagnetic fields between planets known as astrology. The binary arithmetic
at the foundations of Ifa divination which add up to 256 is also at the root of computer science and its
256 pulses.
Although major Original African groups like the Yoruba, Igbo, and Kongo left no written history, it
doesn’t take much to figure out what happened, or is happening, in arid or rainforested regions, to black
or white races, and in monotheistic Abrahamic or African religious areas. Because humans are products
of the environment, the environment tells history better than the victors and ‘big men’ who wrote of
and built monuments to their egoistic achievements. Written ancient history is not a product of the
rainforest environment, but the product of the rainforest people and environments made possible the
historic achievements of great civilizations, from ancient Egypt to the modern United States.
Human history can now be recounted with the use of DNA and linguistics from the beginning, which
ties to the ancient study of the 26,000yr eras of precession, the twelve 2000yr Ages of Orishas – called
the Great Year. DNA studies, like Western history is linear, preventing a full understanding without its
trends and cycles deciphered.
Basically, Man evolved from the swamps of Nigeria 150,000 to 200,000 years ago and migrated to the
four corners of the world. The Toba Super-eruption in Indonesia, 50,000 to 70,000 years ago, blocked
the Sun rays in Eurasia, making survival possible only in the caves of Central Asia Mountains, where

Man lost his color among other things to survive. In Africa, the effects of the Toba eruption was felt in
East Africa which depends on the Asian monsoon rain system. West Africa was not affected since its
rains come from the Atlantic wind system, and not the Pacific.
After a Great Year or so, the dust cleared for the Sun to warm up Eurasia and the built up populations
in Western Africa began to migrate out of Africa once again. In what is known as the Great Coastal
Migration, Africans migrated along southern Asia to Oceania. Around 10,000BC, the Age of Orunmila,
black Africans began to coalesce in settlements and civilizations. Around 8,000BC, the Age of
Yemanja, they formed matriarchal societies, tied the Moon cycles to female body systems and
ultimately behavioral patterns, and the establishment of the Lunar calendar system.
Around 6,000BC, Age of Esu, Black Africans evolved knowledge databases like Ifa and by 4,000BC
Age of Osun started building trading empires and civilizations from Southern Nigeria, Ethiopia, Egypt
Sumer, Elam, Harappan Indus Valley and South China civilizations. They laid the cultural foundations
that later became Buddhism and other world religions of Eurasians, still in the caves of the Himalayas
Central Asian Mountain Range to the north. Initially led by spiritual leaders, the Black civilizations
slowly became dynastic and ornamental towards the end of the era. The ostentation of Osun era
attracted Eurasians towards its end.
Around 2,000BC, Age of Ogun, Eurasians came down from the Central Asian plains and caves, where
they had adopted the use of horses, horse-drawn carriages and composite bows. In what is known as the
Era of the First Horseman, with the horse-drawn Chariot and the composite bow, Eurasians attacked
black civilizations from South China to the Indus Valley to Mesopotamia and Egypt over the next
2,000yrs. From around 1AD, the Era of Olokun, Age of the Second Horseman with the long sword,
Eurasians reset time and black history to zero as they took peace away from Earth with conquests
disguised by religion and dogma. Buddhism, Taoism, I Ching and Abrahamic religions were all derived
from Africans Information Retrieval system, Ifa.
Starting from the Indus Valley Civilization, Ifa was written down into Rig Veda scripts by the Indo-
Europeans that came down and attacked Blacks, chasing them down southeast into the Indian
subcontinent. The Chinese did the same, chasing the Blacks southwards to Austronesia. Indo-
Europeans tookover Greece and then Nile Delta, where from Alexandria, they propagated Jewish
dogma that evolved from Black Egypt traditions. Indo-Europeans were to takeover the Italian peninsula
where they became Romans, refined Judaism into Christianity and used their long Spatha sword to
build the Holy Roman Empire. Eurasians spread across Western Europe to correspond with western
movement of African trade points on the North African coast.
After Greeks took over the Nile Delta and Ethiopia, the African tradepost moved to Carthage which
resulted in the formation of Rome opposite, and the eventual destruction of Carthage. The next were
Numidia and Morocco corresponding to France, Spain and Portugal. Afroasian Islamists were to
introduce their own long sword called the Scimitar used to win territory in the name of religion and
ruled the world for 500 years. Europeans adopted Chinese gunpowder used for ceremonial purposes
into another long weapon known as a gun, which they used to beat back the Islamists and land on the
North African coast. They traced the source of African wealth and knowledge along the West Africa
coast until they arrived in the Benin and Kongo empires in the 1470s. From there, the African-
European relationship jumped to the Americas, giving birth to the Latino, Dutch, French, English, and
present-day American empires. In the final 250yrs Oya cycle of the 2000yr Olokun era, the United
States discarded religion as the dogma to dominate and exploit and used democracy and racist dogma,
as well as more potent weapons.
The continuous European advance and African retreat, was not due to superior European knowledge or

gods, but the natural need for survival of the European have-nots against the Africans who had the
resources. A rich man would always give way to an angry poor man.
Now that the tables have turned, Nigerians gained notoriety for fraud and drug schemes in European
territory, not because they had more knowledge and power but to survive, and having nothing to lose,
they dared to take on such exploits. In ancient times, Africans played the game according to the
balanced religious rules they followed. Starving Europeans developed aggressive religious creeds that
assuaged their collective consciences of whatever evil they had to do to survive, thus labeling others as
God-Rejects, Gentiles, and Unbelievers. Modern African youth adopted the same gangster religious
rules to commit crimes against Western institutions for survival and to escape from the poverty trap.
From the above recount of history, it is easier to understand our current situation and articulate how to
progress positively towards reinstating Africans lost, natural, global socioeconomic dominance in what
is to be known as the Era of the Third Horseman with scale of justice, the Age of Shango, the Age of
Enlightenment.
First and foremost, in this upcoming era of Enlightenment, Africans need to identify and reinstate the
African cultural platform, based on our political, economic, and geographic realities, which will
provide a rallying point to unite and progress together. First, the only relevant portions of the Bible to
the African is Revelations Chapter 4 to 6, the rest is Jewish history and culture unrelated to a long
African history. A Christian or Islamic culture that evolved in arid environments and based on
Messiahanic worship can not bring socioeconomic and political justice to the world like African natural
religions based on the natural laws of retributive justice!
Second, the present world powers through biased Eurocentric academia have set out to sabotage efforts
to identify the link between Africans, most important that of our common origins. The best historic
records are our DNA and blood. They are God’s own logbook, but recently deciphered records are
being kept from Africans.
The Human Genome Project and the subsequent International HapMap Project clearly show that the
Yoruba have the oldest DNA and thus are the origin of humanity, but the world powers buried the
report to protect the fallacious foundations of Eurasian belief systems while depriving Africans of a
cultural rallying point. This is also the case with other studies that clearly show Nigeria to be the origin
of humanity (for example, linguistic studies show that every original African ethnolinguistic group
originated in Nigeria, as well as evidence from our similar information retrieval systems).
This is not a mere historical or academic exercise based on an ethnic ego trip. It is required to enable
Africans to identify their close interrelationships and put an end to self-hate, tribalism, Abrahamic
religious wars and terrorism. It will make them realize that the laws of their traditional religions were
responses to environmental conditions. It is required to reset their self-regulating moral codes that are
especially important at this stage of human history. If care is not taken and they continue with the
gangster Abrahamic codes, there will be no global peace, and they will bring humanity to an untimely
end.
The identification of Nigeria as the origin of humanity will make it clear why it is essential to make
Nigeria the center of the black race. It has the largest population and market and the most languages.
It cannot be overstated that Anglo-Saxons won the European race for global socioeconomic
domination, because they identified the important aspects of Africa through their Royal Geographic
society. While the French rushed blindly into Africa during the 1880s scramble for Africa and took the
most land, the British won the contest because they intelligently identified and took modern Ghana as

the Gold Coast, Egypt as the source of Arabs, South Africa as the new Gold and Diamond Belt, and
most importantly, Nigeria as the source of black Africans (formerly named the Slave Coast). These four
important British colonies far outweighed the economic importance of the more than twenty French
colonies, most of which were in the Sahara. The Nigerian population is greater than the combined
populations of the seventeen French colonies.
The truth of our origins is important, especially now with the problem of belligerent Afro-Asians across
the grasslands that extend from the West African coast of Mauritania to the East African coast of
Somali. Africans split into European-defined boundaries, and the African diaspora occurred during
slavery. Although the term ‘diaspora’ is often associated with Africans taken and enslaved in the
Americas, there are Africans in Africa who can be considered cultural diaspora (instead of a geographic
diaspora) known as Afro-Asians; they cause the most problems across African due to the obscurity of
their true origins.
The term Afro-Asian is used to describe Africans who have had their blood or languages mixed with
those of Eurasian origin. Although most Afro-Asians are admixtures of the Original Africans and Arabs
(like Fulani, Hausa, and Swahili speakers), some like the Ethiopian Amhara are an admixture of Greek
and Original Africans. Because their African side has undocumented religions and history, they uphold
their Eurasian religions and belief systems over and above those of Africa. They denigrate everything
African, causing wars and enslaving Africans with the belief that Black Africans were unbelievers and
backward. They are the greatest instrument in the hands of Eurasians who seek to capture and exploit
African resources through them. It is necessary to clarify the truth of their origins for a peaceful
coexistence in Africa.
While most Africans in the American diaspora were taken from the two largest and oldest Original
African groups (the Yoruba and Igbo on the Nigerian coast), the others could be rest assured that
wherever they were taken from, their ancestors migrated from Nigeria. Unfortunately, many Africans in
diaspora look towards other parts of Africa for spiritual and personal fulfillment, especially Swahili,
Ethiopia, and ancient Egypt. These areas lack the depth of original living cultures and religions for
spiritual fulfillment as well as socioeconomic and political depth for modern economic progress. The
DNA of an average African-American holds more Original African DNA (74%) than an Afro-Asian
like Fulani (48%), whose African blood has been diluted with Eurasians over thousands of years.
The postindependence era of the sixties saw the return of many from the African diaspora end in
disillusionment, because many of them had more African socioeconomic and political history encoded
in their DNA than the places that they wrongly immigrated to. The majority of the African diaspora left
the African core only a few hundred years ago (compared to other African ethnic groups that broke
from the black heartland over a thousand years ago to distant lands where their sociopolitical
development was stunted). A good example is the returnee Yoruba slaves from America who were
dropped in Sierra Leone and Liberia and dominated the people they met.
Regarding the African ethnic groups divided by 1800s European colonists into different nations, where
their culture and languages were written down in different languages, there is a need to bring them
together for a better understanding of their evolutionary trends. This can be done only by abolishing
European-created boundaries and creating one political body.
At the beginning of African slavery, Western Europeans were mobilized by their kings with a
translation of the Bible that stressed the superiority of Eurasians over Africans. Africans need an
empowering, Original African platform that they can use to identify and unite towards progress. Unlike
the Europeans, Africans need only the truth of their origins for peaceful coexistence and not war, and
for a return to self-regulatory moral codes to move towards their global socioeconomic ascendancy.

The key to personal and overall black economic development is the efficient promotion of a unifying
Original black African culture and knowledge platform. Black economics are embedded in the Original
African culture of love for man and environment. Whites learnt the concept of worshipping (Nigger)
and God from Original black Africans in ancient Egypt. They turned this into hateful Christianity and
warlike Islam while adapting the concepts of free trade and village democracy to their own purposes.
They transformed the ancient but viable political systems into destructive capitalism and unfair
democracy (plutocracy).
The Yorubas had a more advanced political system than the Europeans when they arrived. European
systems combine the role of the chief executive/king/Oba with that of the commander-in-chief, which
made them very belligerent and unstable societies, while the Yorubas prevented such tyranny and
excessive war by separating the Oba from the Bashorun. The Bashorun and Oyo Mesi (Peoples
Parliament) raised and controlled the army, and had the power to order the kings suicide if he
misperformed.
Also, women had very strong roles as they controlled trade through the office of Iyalaje, as well as had
a powerful political voice through the office of Iyalode. Women were also the strongest spiritual
leaders, the Iya Osoromoniga. In addition to freedom of speech, there was freedom of association and
worship for all, which unfortunately Europeans used to abuse, sabotage and destroy African systems.
As a group, blacks need to reclaim their way of doing things (culture) and demand a truly free,
competitive market and participative democracy across the blackworld, without the unfair influence of
big business interests. One stark fact is that the blackworld has had more than five thousand years of
ascendancy, and it can resume that ascendancy after a break of a few thousand years. The last five
hundred years have been excruciating, reaching all the way to the core of the Negro Area, but the
darkest time of the day is just before dawn. The dawn of the era of Shango, the era of the Third
horseman, is here and gone is the deceitful era of Olokuns dogma and propaganda.
The Ooni of Ife, the Yoruba paramount monarch and spiritual leader, Oba Adeyeye Enitan Ogunwusi,
has reached out to all other Original African group’s paramount monarchs and spiritual leadership, to
educate, unify and empower the Black Race.
To take advantage of the dawn of a new era, Africans have to put their ‘home’ in order— our spiritual
home, the body, and then our physical home, our family, our neighborhoods, the home of our identity,
Africa, the home of the black race, and the earth, the home of the human race. This natural progression
is expressed by the basic Christian tenet of ‘love your god and love your neighbor’, but the world has
departed from this logic. Most Africans are now Christian or Muslim, but I will use the philosophy
behind African religion and language to reveal a more complete picture of the blackworld.
Racism is inherent to the human makeup and can’t be completely legislated against. It starts from a
mother showing preference for her kids, kids for their family, family links to a clan, and a clan to a
race.
Man is a rational being that makes decisions based upon preconceived assumptions, but the farther a
person or condition is, the foggier the perception that breeds religious intolerance, and ideological
irrationality. A European shows more preference for a white person, whom he can relate to, than for an
African farther down the family tree. A group of international bankers would excuse a mismanaged,
corrupt New York City government while condemning black nations to IMF-sapping conditions.
Ultimately, we all come from the Niger delta, but there is always a focus point from our present
situation. The hungry, light-skinned races needed a focal point in their spiritual and geographical

wilderness, so they misrepresented and continue to misrepresent the true global situation with
monotheistic religions and totalitarian ideologies.
For the Europeans to gain control, develop, and trade the scanty natural resources in the wilderness of
Eurasia and the dry Horn of Africa, a few imposed their selfish ideas on others. These ideas were
disguised as the religions that gave men a special relationship with God, who bequeathed to them his
powers of life and death. These powers were used to forcefully control others. Those with the special
relationship made the laws (supposedly backed by God) and spread their religious doctrine, which was
based on overwhelming force, to gain absolute control as opposed to the ancient, natural, consensual
beliefs of Africa.
The Eurasian Ogun foundations of brute force was evidenced by the history of the Jews and their
forceful eviction of black Canaanites. This was tempered by Olokun’s era into Christianity, the forceful
spread of Catholicism, and the mulatto Arabic-Muslim jihads against unbelievers. The Eurasians
acquired more power over life and death when more brute force became available in the 1700s, and
they discarded their dominating religion’s doctrines for bold-faced ideologies. The restrictive
ideologies of racist nationalism, free trade, democracy and capitalism, lack the basic notion of tolerance
and appreciation of everything that the environment has to offer. For those who believe in the concept
of one supreme god, there is no need to convert others who worship differently named gods. There
can’t be fake or dead gods if there is only one god, but Christians and Muslims wage crusades and
jihads in the name of God to disguise their wars for resources.
In addition to a synchronized intellectual and cultural platform, Africans need a unified socioeconomic
platform and a single political union across Africa. In 2001, the African Union was established and we
must move towards a United States of Africa as soon as possible.
This is to stop the anomaly whereby Africans are minorities in one nation but the majority in another or
same ethnic groups that can hardly relate to each other due to the different colonial languages and
settings. It is also to put collective and productive capacities together to better bargain in global trade,
business, and geopolitics.
Nigeria is the African giant whose legs, arms, and head have been cut into European colonies that
parade as nation-states. Africans have to work to put the parts together again, because without a
complete unification, Africa can never stand on its own feet. This goes beyond a geographic unification
under a continental political union. It must include the African diaspora, because one of the largest
parts of the African giant was carted away to the Americas. After Nigeria, Brazil has the most black
people, while African Americans are the fifth-most populous black community. This is why the present
population of Nigeria does not surpass that of China or India, but it will by the end of this century.
To make the most out of the new era of global Justice, the continentwide political union of Africans
cannot be along restrictive, domineering, Eurasian lines. It must be one that enshrines and promotes the
culture of every African group. Fortunately, a template known as the Confab Report that will give
every group its ethnic selfdetermination within a loose federation has been drawn up in Nigeria in 2014
and hopefully will spread across Africa once implemented. The Confab Report ensures that there would
be no hegemony by the larger groups at the expense of small groups. A continentwide parliament
would be best assembled as a bicameral house: one house being professional politicians, and the other
being ethnic leaders, Obas, and other protectors of each ethnic group’s cultural identity.
Currently, all African governments are working towards a political union, but without sorting out the
unifying African platform, it will be slow and on the wrong foundation. The choice of Swahili as the
official language will not last. The Original African groups will reject the East African, Afro-Arabic

trade language, popularized by European colonists, as they have resisted Hausa and other West African,
Afro-Arabic trade languages. Despite the Arabic north African nations and tradition-shallow eastern
and southern African nations choosing Swahili as an official language (with their national votes in the
AU), their combined smaller populations and resources compared to those of West Africa cannot
naturally spread its use across Africa. With time, the economic and cultural center will dictate
otherwise.
Like the OAU sited in Ethiopia, the Pan-African parliament— wrongly sited in South Africa due to the
gold and European settlements—would not stand the test of time. However, whatever the language and
location of the headquarters, Africans are heading in the right direction, and all inconsistencies will be
ironed out over time, especially because the current Nigerian leadership is not ready to lead an
Afrocentric union due to its ties with the Western militaryindustrial complexes.
The AU will enable Africans to secure fairer deals with other trading blocs like those of the US, the
European Union, China, and India. Like crude oil producers that could form the OPEC cartel to dictate
production and supply, and therefore price, Africans will be able to dictate the prices of their products
in the unified Western markets that exploit them unfairly. The AU would also serve as an umbrella to
protect against Western machinations and invasions and to reverse Eurocentric policies that don’t
benefit it.
Many people express doubt that the AU will be able to stand against a superior Western military that
will do everything to protect the unfair advantages enjoyed by its industrial complex. The Western
perspective is that metallic warfare is the ultimate weapon, but Africa’s rich ecosystem can provide all
that is required to win the war, especially in terms of biological and chemical warfare, in which
Africans have a comparative advantage. It is hoped that there will be no need for a war with Western
European military industrialists.
Russians and the Chinese know that the West will unfairly dominate the world as long as they can keep
onto their African neocolonies, so it is in their interest to support African political and economic
liberation movements. The Russian supported the political movements, while the Chinese is supporting
the economic movement.
Many people also doubt whether the Western puppet leaders who lead most African nations will allow
the collective African leadership to come together to derive a working formula towards unification.
They rightly point to how France, through its neocolonies, sabotaged the development of ECOWAS
and other African bodies, and how Afro-Asian Islamists like Buhari, the current Nigeria president,
objects to and obstructs the Confab Report that proposes a fair truly free political structure. One thing is
certain: Africa will unite and arise. The question is the means—peacefully or by war!
Nigeria will have to adopt the Confab Report by 2023 or it may slide into war with devastating
consequences, but eventually the people will be forced to do the needful, like Original Africans of the
South and Middlebelt uniting to politically and militarily challenge and bring down the Islamic
stranglehold.
If African nations can’t come together through dialogue, countries will progress slowly but will get to a
point where the need for resources and markets will bring about peaceful amalgamations or
imperialistic takeovers. Nigeria is expected to grow to nearly a billion people by the turn of the century,
and other African nations wanting to share the benefits of its large market will opt for union with it.
Nigeria may be forced to take over smaller countries due to market and resource requirements or
because they are harboring foreign elements that use them to breach its economic sovereignty.
Whatever the case, Africans will unite this century due to impending conditions, especially in this era

of huge trading blocs.
Africans provided the foundations for Chinese belief and divination systems, and the Chinese appear to
be paying them back by developing Africa’s modern socioeconomic infrastructure. It is hoped that
Africans can return to conducting business in peace across the world, like before it was interrupted by
the Horsemen. Like most ancient empires, the North Atlantic empires of America, Britain, and France
will eventually overextend themselves through territorial wars, especially against the Muslims and
Asians. Most important is that the populations of the North Atlantic are aging and falling and would be
overtaken by the growing population centers and markets of Africa, South America and Asia.
In conclusion, Africans need to identify and spread the knowledge of their common origins in the form
of a unifying Original African platform. Individually, Africans need to return to self-regulatory moral
codes that enable us to be spiritually and personally at peace with ourselves and the environment. As a
people, we need to unify in a continentwide political union that ensures fairness and equality as we
move the world towards a state of utopia, the Era of the Third Horseman, the era of Shango, who with
his scales brings economic justice to all mankind.

Selected Bibliography
Diop, Cheik Anta. The African Origin of Civilization. Lawrence Hill Books, 1974.
Brunet, Michel, et al. ‘A New Hominid Finding in Chad,’ Nature 418 (2002).
Davis, Darien J. Afro-Brazilians: Time for Recognition. Minority Rights Group International Report,
2000.
Garraty, J A and R A McCaughey. The American Nation: A History of United States to 1877. Vol. 1.
6th ed. Harper & Row, 1987.
Hacker, Andrew. Two Nations— Black and White. Ballantine, 1995.
‘Human Rights in Brazil, 2000,’ Global Justice Center.
Human Rights Watch, ‘South Africa—Xenophobia and Attacks against Migrants,’
http://www.hrw.org/reports98/sareports.
Human Rights Watch, ‘United States—Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on
Drugs’, http://www.hrw.org/reports.
Isichei, Elizabeth. A History of African Societies to 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995.
Murphy, Joseph M. Santeria: An African Religion in America. Beacon Press, 1988.
Oliver, Roland and Anthony Atmore. Africa Since 1800. Cambridge, 1994.
Parry, J H, P Sherlock, and A Maingot. A Short History of the West Indies. 4th ed. Macmillan, 1987.
Sampson, Anthony. The Arms Bazaar: From Lebanon to Lockheed. Viking, 1977.
Sampson, Anthony. The Money Lenders. Penguin, 1983.
Segal, Ronald. The Black Diaspora. Faber and Faber, 1994.
Van Sertima, Ivan. They Came Before Columbus. Random, 1976.
Wilson, Amos N. Blueprint for Black Power. Afrikan World Infosystems, 1998.
Christopher Ehret. An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History 1000B.C
to A.D 400. University of Virginia Press, 2001
1832 Ordinance of Nullification, 178
1832 Reform Act, 180
1868 Cuban rebellion, 192
1872 Amnesty Act, 190
419, 395, 396
atomic bomb, 254, 255, 307, 377
Abacha, 398, 401, 402, 420, 464, 486 Abeokuta, 160, 195, 197
Abiola, 399, 400, 401, 402, 403, 476, 479, 484, 486, 489
Abraham, 10, 11, 73, 74, 82, 99, 188, 424, 511, 512
Accra, 117, 158, 215, 245, 259, 267 Action Group, 260, 314
Adam Clayton Powell, 298
Adam Smith, 247, 248
Afonja, 160, 163
African American, 297, 422
African Information Retrieval, 3, 33, 35, 48, 508
African Information Retrieval System,, 3 African National Congress, 274
African Pilot, 245, 259, 283
African Progress Union, 240
African Americans, 9, 145, 345, 358, 422, 498, 500
Afrifa, 311, 312
Afro-Asian, 18, 94, 98, 99, 101, 103, 104, 105, 108, 113, 115, 242, 278, 291, 324, 334, 336, 401, 415,

518
Afro-Asian, 61, 87, 88
Afro-Brazilians, 9, 195, 230, 279, 280, 281, 283, 345, 346, 347, 348, 349, 422, 425, 426, 427, 428, 429,
430, 432, 433, 472, 500, 501, 502, 525 Afrocentric, 156, 186, 223, 312, 320, 325, 326, 332, 345, 351,
359, 365, 386, 399, 400, 404, 406, 415, 416, 417, 418, 419, 420, 425, 434, 438, 446, 451, 454, 462,
482, 523
Afro-Cubans, 288, 290, 349, 351
Afro-Brazilian, 147, 148, 280, 283, 428, 429, 431, 432, 501
Aganga, 488
Aguleri, 36, 44, 45
Aha, 4, 48, 49
Ahidjo, 266, 330, 504
Arap Moi, 337, 466
Aristide, 437, 438, 505
Armstrong, 200
Asaba, 44, 45
Ashantehene, 158, 202
Ashanti, 158
Assyrian, 76, 92, 276
Assyrians, 75, 76, 87, 113
Awolowo, 259, 260, 261, 264, 266, 314, 388, 399, 483, 484
Azikwe, 233, 245, 258, 259, 260, 264, 267, 283, 297, 314, 388, 484
Babangida, 390
Baby Doc, 351, 352, 434, 435, 436, 437, 438
Bahia, 123, 133, 147, 279, 280, 425, 431 Bakongo, 108, 120
Balewa, 264, 314
Banda, 108, 271, 338
Bandana River, 24
Bank of New York, 150, 169
Bankole-Bright, 240
Barbados, 8, 134, 181, 182, 293, 469, 471 Barings, 142, 168, 177, 199, 212, 228 Barre, 336, 459
Bashorun Gaa, 160
Batista, 289, 290
Bauchi, 162
Black Panthers, 304, 357
Belgian Africa, 267, 269
Belgians, 204, 216, 230, 244, 259, 267, 271, 331, 448
Bemba, 17, 91, 111
Benin, 8, 9, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 50, 89, 95, 113, 117, 118, 119, 126, 138, 158, 208,
209, 242, 260, 261, 266, 313, 322, 329, 330, 386, 396, 397, 482, 515
Benue River, 31, 34, 90
Berbers, 94, 98, 101, 102, 106, 107, 114, 162
Berlin Conference, 205
Bernie Grant, 355
Beti-Pahuin, 108
Biafra, 398, 453, 485
Bible Belt, 144, 168, 411, 423, 481 Biko, 343, 344, 431, 440
Carthage, 84, 86, 93, 102, 113
Castro, 290, 291, 295, 349, 351, 381, 468 Catholic Church, 101, 130, 148, 154, 252, 285, 286, 287,
288, 324, 345, 348, 349, 434, 435, 437, 439

Cenozoic Era, 1
Central African Federation, 270, 338 Central African Republic, 31, 106, 108, 325, 328, 451, 456, 504
Chad, 12, 68, 88, 106, 107, 208, 327, 455, 456, 457, 504, 525
Charles de Gaulle, 265
Charles Sharp, 315
Charles Sumner, 187, 189, 190
Chase Manhattan, 220, 232, 367, 369 Chicago, 77, 82, 145, 187, 233, 234, 235, 236, 358, 368, 382, 405
China, 19, 36, 118, 156, 218, 254, 255, 326, 359, 367, 379, 413, 476, 477, 514, 522, 523
Chukwu, 53, 54
Chwezi, 110
Citibank, 220, 228, 229, 232, 284, 331, 345, 346, 369, 370, 372, 373, 402, 426, 434, 438, 448, 449
civil rights, 174, 203, 223, 245, 283, 284, 297, 298, 299, 302, 303, 305, 306, 323, 345, 357, 396, 407,
415, 418, 424, 428, 429, 482
Claude McKay, 238
Clinton, 383, 422, 438, 451, 458
Cold War, 255, 287, 307, 308, 351, 369, 419, 423, 443, 460, 464, 465, 466 Colombia, 121, 155, 284,
381, 472, 502 Columbus, 34, 120, 121, 129, 525
COMECON, 308
Congo (Brazzaville), 9, 108, 276
Congo (Zaire), 7, 108, 110, 165, 268, 372, 456
Congo River, 90, 495
Congo River, 108, 127, 139
Congo Zaire, 108, 110
Congress of Vienna, 172
constructive engagement’, 189, 441 Coptic Church, 100, 101
Cornel West, 415
Council of Foreign Relations (CFR, 232 Edo, 9, 13, 15, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 53, 88, 90,
95, 118, 163, 212 Efik, 9, 24, 163
Egba, 42, 117, 160, 195
Egbado, 117, 137, 159
Egypt, 10, 18, 25, 33, 35, 39, 41, 48, 53, 58, 60, 62, 68, 69, 70, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 82, 83, 84, 85,
86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 104, 105, 106, 113, 144, 205, 206, 228, 238, 248,
276, 300, 303, 327, 334, 498, 505, 514, 517, 518, 519 Eisenhower, 300, 308, 366, 376
Ekiti, 35, 42, 96, 137, 138, 163
Ekwensu, 5, 54
Eli Whitney, 167
Elijah Mohammed, 300
Elizabeth Isichei, 14, 77
Ella Baker, 299, 301
Emancipation Act, 180, 181, 182, 183 Emancipation Proclamation, 189, 191 Emmett Till, 298
Emperor Meiji, 218
England, 8, 94, 114, 130, 131, 133, 135, 136, 141, 142, 145, 148, 149, 153, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172,
176, 177, 180, 186, 199, 228, 237, 238, 245, 248, 253, 257, 277, 283, 293, 294, 308, 324, 369, 392,
419, 423, 445, 473, 474
Enlightenment, 145, 149, 152, 167, 168, 170, 175, 247, 248
Eredo, 41
Eritrea, 206, 277, 335, 351
Esan, 5, 45, 53
Eso, 89, 104, 117, 124
Esu, 5, 52, 53, 54, 510

Ethiopia, 7, 9, 18, 20, 25, 84, 85, 87, 89, 93, 98, 108, 111, 121, 206, 241, 277, 278, 302, 335, 341, 382,
457, 458, 459, 460, 462, 506, 518, 523
Eurasians, 18, 58, 82, 94, 103, 105, 515, 518, 519, 521
Eurasians, 10, 31, 32, 61, 72, 76, 86 Ewe, 4, 47, 49, 89, 123
Ewi, 59, 322, 361
Eyadema, 330
Germany, 94, 205, 216, 217, 228, 229, 249, 252, 254, 255, 308, 367, 473 Ghana, 7, 8, 9, 16, 25, 41, 89,
94, 95, 103, 104, 106, 115, 116, 117, 158, 175, 228, 245, 259, 263, 265, 266, 302, 304, 309, 311, 312,
313, 326, 330, 372, 373, 374, 376, 380, 384, 385, 386, 387, 390, 426, 445, 447, 497, 500, 517
Gihon, 10, 11
Glorious Revolution, 135, 142
glottochronology, 14, 77
Gobineau, 248
Gold Belt, 117
Gold Coast, 89, 116, 117, 123, 125, 130, 137, 157, 158, 202, 203, 205, 212, 215, 259, 263, 517
Goldie, 204, 208
Goodluck Jonathan, 486
Gowon, 317, 319, 320
Granville Sharp, 170, 186
Great Coastal Migration, 4, 18, 62, 514 Great Depression, 231, 252
Great Lakes, 17, 110, 111, 206, 210, 217, 230, 450, 451, 495
Greeks, 76, 85, 92, 93, 99, 215
Guinea, 9, 16, 34, 47, 89, 95, 108, 116, 203, 207, 265, 266, 275, 326, 327, 339, 348, 421, 462, 468
Guinea-Bissau, 275
Guyana, 143, 155, 183, 218, 241, 293, 294, 295, 296, 333, 353, 354, 472 Gwari, 15, 46, 47, 88
Habre, 455
Haiti, 8, 56, 121, 141, 142, 147, 153, 154, 160, 169, 171, 179, 180, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 192, 207,
223, 228, 229, 230, 241, 243, 279, 282, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 291, 310, 317, 319, 351, 352, 380,
381, 384, 433, 434, 435, 436, 437, 438, 439, 468, 505, 506
Haitian Revolution, 154
Harlem, 221, 234, 237, 298, 304, 359, 364, 421
Harriet Tubman, 187, 189
Isabella, 121
Isharun, 12, 35, 40
Itsekiri, 126, 163
Ivory Coast, 7, 16, 24, 25, 41, 89, 95, 116, 157, 158, 203, 204, 205, 215, 259, 264, 265, 266, 325, 326,
336, 386, 451, 452, 455, 476, 487, 495, 498, 502, 503
Iwo Eleru, 12
iyalode, 213, 431
J. P. Morgan, 177, 198, 201, 221, 222, 228, 229, 232, 289, 319, 369, 370, 373
Jagan, 293, 294, 295, 296, 353, 472 Jaja, 203, 207
Jamaica, 8, 121, 134, 135, 141, 143, 154, 160, 169, 179, 180, 182, 185, 223, 226, 235, 238, 279, 288,
291, 292, 293, 352, 353, 354, 469, 470, 471 Jamaicans, 181, 182, 291, 293, 352, 396, 409, 410, 471
Jawara, 328
Jean Baptiste du Sable, 145, 187
Jefferson, 150, 153, 172
Jenne, 95, 116, 123, 158
Jesse Jackson, 362, 406, 420, 422
Jews, 58, 73, 76, 82, 83, 86, 92, 97, 99, 101, 113, 114, 115, 122, 123, 130, 133, 134, 140, 145, 225,
279, 291, 300, 319, 324, 355, 394, 413, 464, 511, 521

jihad, 101, 103, 160, 161, 162, 233 JLP, 292, 352, 353, 469
John Brown, 188
John Robert Archer, 227
John Rockefeller, 198
Jos Plateau, 3, 68, 107
Jukun, 90, 108
Kabila, 450, 451, 465, 506
Kaonde, 17
Karl Marx, 249
Kasai, 17, 110, 127
Kasavubu, 267
Katanga, 110, 210, 211, 216, 268, 331, 332, 449
Katsina, 107, 108, 162
Kaunda, 338, 385
Liberia, 116, 178, 198, 216, 235, 460, 462, 463, 464, 519
Libya, 92, 93, 113, 115, 206, 327, 456, 462, 463, 481, 498, 505
Limpopo River, 112, 210
Lincoln, 188, 189, 245
Lisabi, the Liberator, 160
Lower Niger, 25, 33, 48, 95, 104, 162, 163, 203, 214
Loango, 17, 108, 119, 139, 164, 175 London Stock Exchange, 130, 150 Lovejoy, 156
Lower Niger, 1, 3, 4, 31, 36, 55, 71, 86, 89
Luanda, 108, 109, 127, 139, 165
Luba, 90, 110
Lugard, 214, 242, 243
Lula Da Silva, 500
Lumumba, 267, 268, 275, 276, 310, 316, 331, 350
Luo, 87, 111
Lynching, 233, 234
Macaulay, 258
Machel, 339
Madame C. J. Walker, 225
Maghreb, 93, 94, 95, 98, 101, 103, 123, 161, 162
Magnat, 436
Makonnen, 241, 242, 246, 257, 293 Malawi, 7, 127, 173, 211, 270, 271, 338, 339, 451
Malcolm X, 301, 302, 303, 350, 357, 425 Mali, 7, 9, 16, 47, 76, 89, 94, 95, 104, 116, 144, 207, 214,
266, 318, 328, 454, 487, 505
Mande, 34, 89, 95, 107, 116, 123, 162, 203
Mandela, 274, 275, 343, 443, 444, 448, 451
Manley, 292, 352, 353, 469, 470
Mao, 476
Marcus Garvey, 224
Maroon War, 143, 154, 180
Maroons, 143, 155, 182
Marshall Plan, 256
Marti, 193
Martin Luther King, 297, 299, 425, 442 Nascimento, 233, 283, 345, 428, 429, 500, 501
Nation of Islam, 224, 291, 300, 301, 303, 304, 362, 420, 474
National Congress of British West Africa, 240
Ndigbo, 53

Negritia, 1, 86, 214
Negritude, 264
NEPAD, 480, 495
Neto, 276, 465
New England, 199
New York, 8, 82, 133, 144, 145, 149, 150, 152, 169, 171, 175, 176, 179, 187, 189, 192, 193, 196, 221,
225, 229, 232, 234, 236, 253, 254, 256, 290, 299, 302, 325, 335, 351, 355, 360, 369, 373, 388, 392,
393, 394, 404, 405, 409, 411, 414, 415, 417, 419, 421, 431, 442, 471, 482, 485, 521 Nguni, 9, 17, 127,
209, 211
Niger delta, 22, 29, 44, 70, 88, 89
Niger-Benue, 20, 33, 60, 88, 89, 95, 100, 108, 113, 208, 317, 481
Niger delta, 24, 31, 33, 35, 46, 55, 61, 68, 97, 112, 115, 118, 138, 163, 164, 165, 169, 198, 203, 204,
207, 312, 397, 398, 453, 483, 484, 486, 521
Nigeria, 1
Nigger Area, 214, 242
Nile delta, 69, 76, 113
Nile delta, 78, 92
Nilo Saharan, 13
Nilotic, 111
Nimeiri, 334, 457, 458
Nixon, 308, 355, 360, 366, 367, 373, 376, 377
Nkomo, 271
Nkrumah, 245, 257, 259, 263, 264, 266, 267, 278, 294, 297, 302, 309, 310, 311, 312, 326, 331, 354,
384
Nnamidi Azikwe, 245, 257, 258, 259, 388 Nobel, 198, 200, 201, 304, 402, 442 Nok culture, 107
Nok statutes, 12
Nri, 43, 90, 96
Nsibidi, 37
Oranmiyan, 38, 42, 88
Organisation of African Unity, 278, 321, 335
orishas, 51, 54
Oromo, 9, 459, 460
Orunmila, 6, 37, 45, 48, 49, 51, 52, 510, 514
Osei Tutu, 158
Osun, 6, 56, 65, 159, 514
Osunmare, 53, 78
Ottobah Cugoano, 170, 186, 475 Ottoman Empire, 228
Ovimbundu, 139, 275
Owu, 197
Oya, 52, 55, 214
Oyo, 42, 48, 88, 95, 117, 124, 137, 138, 158, 159, 160, 163, 194, 195, 196, 197, 242, 260, 261, 424
Oyo Mesi, 160
Oyo-Ile, 42, 95, 124, 138, 159, 163 PAC, 274
Palmares, 143, 428, 429
Pan-Africanism, 227, 238, 239, 322 Pangaea, 19
Pangea, 1
Papa Doc, 287, 351, 354, 434, 437 Paris Club, 374, 448, 452, 454
Paris Club, 480, 492
Peabody, 199, 222, 248
Perault, 284

pharaoh, 69, 76, 82, 83, 93
Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, 204 Pishon, 10, 11
PNP, 292, 352, 353, 470, 471
Pondo, 140, 274
Pope Alexander, 121
Port Harcourt, 44, 485
Portugal, 94, 102, 113, 114, 118, 121, 123, 129, 130, 134, 136, 171, 174, 216, 271, 275, 276, 327, 339,
464 Pra River, 16, 116
Precession, 6
Protestant Church, 130
Protestantism, 152
Puerto Rico, 177, 192, 194, 227, 422 Pygmies, 15
Pygmy, 3, 27, 28
Sao Paulo, 122, 147, 279, 281, 346, 426, 427, 432, 502
Sao Salvador, 120, 147
Sao Tome, 120, 122, 126, 275
SAP, 370, 374, 376, 399, 434
Saro Wiwa, 398
Sarraut, 244
Sassou-Nguesso, 329
Savimbi, 275, 340, 465
scientific Socialism, 293
SCLC, 299, 302
Security Council, 254, 255
Selassie, 206, 277, 278, 291, 334, 335, 457, 459
Senegal, 9, 34, 68, 89, 94, 107, 115, 203, 205, 207, 208, 214, 215, 264, 266, 277, 283, 311, 328, 330,
451, 452 Senegal River, 34, 107, 115, 203
Senegambia, 47, 68, 116, 157, 161, 162 Senghor, 264, 265, 283, 328
Separatist, 362
SEPPIR, 501
Seven Years’ War, 146, 147, 149
Shagari, 388
Shaka, 173
Shango, 4, 6, 48, 52, 55, 78, 148, 155, 247, 358, 479, 512, 516, 520, 524 Sharpsville, 274
Sharpton, 414, 418, 421, 422
Shona, 17, 91, 106, 111, 127, 139, 165, 173, 211
Shonekan, 401
Siaka Stevens, 463
sickle cell, 24, 25
sickle-cell, 418
sickle-cell, 31
Sierra Leone, 116, 149, 157, 178, 198, 202, 203, 212, 214, 226, 244, 245, 462, 463, 464, 519
Sijuwade, 415, 430
Sithole, 271
Slave Coast, 1, 29, 30, 118, 136, 137, 156, 158, 165, 168, 175, 179, 207, 386, 400, 480, 517
slave plantations, 122, 181
SNCC, 301, 357, 358
Ten Years’ War,, 191
Thatcher, 356, 368, 374, 389, 441, 473 The Human Genome Diversity Project, 8 Three-Fifths
Compromise, 150, 413 Thurgood Marshall, 297

Tiv, 90
Toba supereruption, 3, 27, 31
Togo, 8, 9, 41, 89, 117, 158, 205, 230, 266, 325, 330
tokenism, 406
Tolbert, 461
Tonga, 17
Toumai’, 12
Toumbalaye, 327, 455
Toure, 265, 266, 326, 327, 462, 468 Toussaint, 154, 171, 183, 184, 207 Trans-Saharan, 42, 46, 47, 86,
93, 324, 396, 512
Treaty of Paris, 146, 149
Treaty of Tordesillas, 121
Trinidad, 8, 134, 182, 183, 226, 238, 241, 333, 469, 471
Trujillo, 285
Truman, 298
tsetse fly, 32
Tuskegee, 222, 224, 377, 380
Tutsi, 206, 268, 338, 450, 451
UAC, 312, 313, 400, 401
Ubangi River, 139
Uganda, 7, 17, 110, 206, 207, 217, 259, 270, 329, 330, 332, 333, 334, 336, 338, 378, 399, 449, 450,
451, 467, 497, 506
Ugbangi, 16, 17, 108
Ugbo, 38, 43
United African Company, 312, 400 Upper Niger, 47, 89, 102, 107, 116, 203, 207, 208
Upper Nile, 73, 94
Upper Volta, 16, 89
Urhobo, 163
Upper Volta, 47, 124, 207, 325, 454 Vargas, 279, 281, 282, 289
Vatican, 287
Venezuela, 134, 155, 284, 472, 502 Vickers, 198, 199, 200
Volta River, 47, 89, 124, 158, 309 Zambezi River, 106, 110, 111, 127, 140, Zenawi, 460, 506
165, 210, 211 zero-tolerance, 409 Zambia, 7, 17, 111, 211, 271, 338, 339, Zimbabwe, 111
340, 378, 442, 467 Zulu, 9, 17, 112, 140, 173, 201, 448 Zayas, 289 Zumbi, 143
Ahomey, 125
Aja, 9, 47, 48, 89, 116, 117, 122, 123,
124, 125, 137, 157, 158, 159
Akan, 8, 16, 24, 47, 95, 116, 117, 123,
124, 125, 137, 143, 145, 158, 245,
384, 386
Akata, 303
Akintola, 314, 315
Akitoye, 207
Akoko, 89, 137, 163
Akuffo, 312
Akure, 12, 13, 35, 40, 42, 43, 95, 138,
261
Akureland, 35, 40, 42
Akwamu, 117, 123, 125, 157, 158 Ala, 53, 54, 78

Alaafin, 42, 124, 160, 163, 196, 242, 261 Aladura, 291, 324
Albert Sarraut, 243
Alexander Hamilton, 149, 150
Alfonso, 120, 126
Allada, 125, 137, 158
Amadiora, 53, 54, 55
Amhara, 18, 518
Amos Wilson, 29
Amy Ashwood Garvey, 240
ANC, 274, 340, 343, 344, 442, 443, 444,
447, 496
ancient Egyptians, 37, 76
Andrew Young, 367
Andronovo Complex, 10
Anglo-Ashante, 202
Anglo-Saxon, 152, 209, 218, 248, 301,
366, 398, 497
Angola, 7, 17, 41, 108, 109, 127, 138,
139, 157, 165, 204, 217, 275, 276,
321, 332, 339, 340, 348, 351, 427,
440, 449, 451, 464, 465, 497
Ankrah, 311, 312
Anta Diop, 77, 265
Anya Nya, 277, 334, 457
Anyanwu, 53, 78
apartheid, 225, 273, 275, 326, 343, 344,
398, 422, 440, 441, 442, 443, 444,
445, 448, 496
Arabia, 10, 19, 86, 87, 99, 105, 113, 370,
481
Bilderberg Conference, 368
binary system, 6
Bismarck, 199, 204, 205, 230
Biya, 330, 453, 504
Bob Marley, 353, 471
Bobangi, 17
Bokassa, 329, 402, 456
Bolshevik Socialists, 251
Bongo, 326, 452
Booker T Washington, 222, 224, 225, 234 Borgu, 42, 160, 161
Botha, 440, 442, 443
Botswana, 112, 210, 339, 442, 446 Boukman Dutty, 154
Braffo, 158
Brazil, 7, 9, 99, 121, 122, 123, 131, 133, 134, 136, 141, 143, 145, 147, 156, 160, 163, 165, 167, 171,
174, 179, 182, 194, 195, 199, 223, 230, 279, 281, 282, 283, 285, 286, 290, 291, 345, 346, 347, 373,
374, 380, 384, 386, 426, 428, 430, 431, 432, 433, 500, 522,525
Brong-Ahafo River, 116
Buganda, 91, 110, 127, 206, 217, 270, 332, 336
Buhari, 7, 316, 321, 388, 389, 390, 479, 489, 490, 491, 492, 523
Bunyoro, 91, 110, 111, 206, 217, 336 Burkina Faso, 7, 9, 16, 89, 207, 452 Burnham, 294, 295, 296,

353, 354, 472 Burundi, 110, 230, 268, 337, 338, 449, 450, 451, 495
Bush Negroes, 143, 183
Bustamante, 292, 352
Buthelezi, 344, 441, 444, 447
C L R James, 241, 286
Cacos War, 284
Cameroon, 7, 9, 12, 14, 68, 89, 90, 108, 163, 204, 205, 230, 258, 264, 266, 329, 330, 399, 451, 453
Cameroun, 3, 8, 16, 30, 266, 504
Candomble, 148, 283, 348, 430
Canoe houses, 164
Cape Town, 133, 140, 274
Cardoso, 346, 432, 500
Carnegie, 199, 200, 201, 220, 229
Cretaceous-Paleogene Event, 1
Cross River, 24, 25, 48, 164
Cuba, 8, 9, 121, 146, 147, 160, 163, 167,
171, 177, 179, 182, 191, 192, 193,
194, 223, 227, 228, 229, 230, 279,
287, 288, 289, 290, 340, 349, 350,
351, 352, 380, 381, 433, 468, 469,
500
cultural revolution, 264, 279, 286, 287,
290, 291, 356, 428, 433
Cush, 11, 74
Cutin, 156
Dahomey, 96, 137, 158, 159, 165, 179,
197, 203, 204, 208, 215, 266, 329 Dangme, 47, 123, 125
Dangote, 478
dan Fodio, 161
Democrats, 149, 150, 151, 152, 169, 236,
298, 303, 360, 373, 414, 421
dudu, 136
Denkyira, 117, 125, 157
Desmond Tutu, 442
Dessalines, 154, 183, 184
Diezani Allison-Madueke, 488
Dilma Rousseff, 502
divination, 39, 40, 49, 51, 53, 524 Doe, 461, 462
Dogon, 47
Dombo Changamire, 140
Dominican Republic, 121, 184, 185, 285,
287, 290, 437
Dr Francis Collins, 7
Drakensberg Mountains, 112
Dred Scott, 187
Drexel, 199
Du Bois, 224, 225, 226, 233, 234, 235,
236, 245, 246, 257, 259, 283, 297,
298, 302, 309
Dutch, 123, 126, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134,

135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 143,
144, 145, 147, 155, 156, 158, 165,
167, 171, 172, 201, 202, 203, 210,
215, 272, 319, 344, 398, 464, 516 Duvalier, 286, 287, 351, 434, 436
eastern Bantu, 16, 112
Eastern Bantus, 91
ECOWAS, 385, 386, 523
Eyo, 89, 104, 123, 124
Fang, 8, 16, 108
Farrakhan, 362, 420
favelas, 281, 346, 427, 431, 501
Fawehinmi, 482
Federalists, 149, 151, 152
Fela, 322, 323, 361, 392
Felix da Souza, 179
FESTAC, 321, 387
Feyre, 280
Florestan Fernandes, 346
FNLA, 275, 276, 340
Foundation Jean Dausset-CEPH, 8 Francis I, 129
Frederick Douglass, 186, 189, 223 free trade, 141, 152, 170, 174, 175, 247, 249, 309, 387, 513, 519,
521
French Embassy, 284, 326
French Equatorial Africa, 205, 208, 217, 326
French West Africa, 205, 215, 244, 259, 264, 265, 279, 452
Frente Nacional de Libertacao de Angola, 275
Frente Negra Brasileira, 280
Fulani, 9, 18, 42, 103, 160, 161, 162, 207, 208, 214, 242, 314, 315, 483, 487, 518
Gabon, 108, 203, 205, 259, 264, 326, 398, 451, 452
Gaddafi, 464, 504
Ganda, 17, 111, 206
Gandhi, 274
Garang, 334, 457, 458
Garba, 321
Garden of Eden, 7, 10, 19, 20, 25, 30, 31, 34, 39, 97, 115, 243, 387
Garvey, 224, 233, 234, 235, 236, 245, 259, 291, 297, 300, 301, 357, 386 Gbagbo, 452, 487, 503, 504
genetic anthropology, 13, 67
Genographic Project, 9
George H W Bush, 321, 368
George Washington, 148, 149, 169 George T N Griffith, 241, 293
Gerald Ford, 321
Hausa, 9, 1, 15, 18, 34, 42, 47, 89, 106,
107, 116, 161, 162, 194, 203, 208,
213, 242, 262, 314, 322, 388, 483,
518, 522
Havana, 121, 147, 179, 192, 193, 468 Havilah, 10
Haya, 17, 110
Henri Bedie, 453
Henri Christophe, 184
Henry VIII, 130

Herero, 217
Hinduism, 6, 65
hip-hop, 56, 323, 417, 418, 422, 423,
439, 470, 499
Hitler, 246, 252, 253, 254, 307, 360 Holden Roberto, 275
Homo erectus, 24, 33
Houphouet-Boigny, 259, 265, 266, 325,
326, 452, 453, 503
House of Representatives, 150, 189, 190,
298
Human Genome Diversity Project, 7, 24 Hutu, 17, 206, 268, 338, 450, 451 Hyksos, 72, 92
Ian Smith, 271
Ibadan, 7, 195, 196, 259, 260, 301, 303,
313, 322, 378, 382, 404, 482
Idi Amin, 329, 332, 449
Idoma, 50, 90
Ifa, 4, 5, 39, 48, 49, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 61,
78, 82, 104, 184, 192, 351, 359, 415,
500, 510, 511, 512, 513
Igala, 15, 89, 126
Igbira, 15, 46, 89
Iha, 4, 49
Ijaw, 9, 43, 44, 46, 90, 112, 126, 138, 164 Ijebu, 36, 40, 41, 42, 48, 96, 117, 124,
125, 159
Ijesha, 43, 138
Ikenga, 53, 90
Ilesa, 35, 40, 95
ilm al-raml, 53
Ilorin, 42, 160, 163, 196, 208
integrationist, 233, 236, 302, 305, 358,
361, 362, 405, 419, 420
International HapMap Project, 24, 517 International HapMap Project, 7
Kongo, 25, 49, 108, 109, 119, 120, 126, 127, 138, 139, 164, 275, 449, 456 Kennedy, 302, 303, 360
Kenya, 7, 17, 25, 88, 111, 127, 206, 217, 267, 269, 270, 277, 278, 330, 336, 337, 378, 466, 467, 507
Kenyatta, 269, 336, 337, 466
Kerekou, 329, 330
Ketu, 47, 117, 158, 431
Khoi-Khoi, 15, 112
Kikongo, 119, 157
Kikuyu, 17, 111, 127, 269, 336, 507 King Ferdinand, 121
King Gezo, 179, 197
King James, 131
King Leopold, 204, 206, 211, 216, 331 King Louis XVI, 153
Kissinger, 321, 360, 423, 479
KKK, 190, 233
Kodofanian, 13
Kolingba, 456
Konare, 454
Kongo, 17
Kongos, 90, 109, 119, 126, 127, 150, 212, 332, 449

Kosoko, 207
Krupp, 199, 200
Ku Klux Klan, 190
Kuba, 17, 90
Kufuor, 387, 492
Kumasi, 116, 158, 202
Labour Party, 250, 292, 355, 423, 429 Ladipo Solanke, 240
Lady Shaw, 214
Lagos, 8, 95, 165, 195, 197, 207, 208, 214, 215, 245, 258, 259, 260, 312, 322, 382, 387, 393, 401, 403,
404, 455, 482, 483, 485
Lake Chad, 12, 18, 24, 31, 34, 68, 86, 88, 106, 107, 161, 205
Lake Tangayinka, 17
Lake Turkana, 11, 19
Lake Victoria, 20, 91, 110, 140, 173 Land of Cush, 11
Latin America, 156, 165, 175, 199, 425 Lemande, 8
Lenin, 250, 251
Mashariki, 17, 110
Mau Mau, 269
Maxim, 198, 200, 208, 220
Maximo Gomez, 192
Mba, 259, 265, 266, 326
Mbeki, 274, 342, 343, 440, 448, 476, 480,
495
Mbundu, 17
Menes, 35, 69, 70, 77
Mengistu, 335, 460
Menocal, 288
Meroe, 68, 84, 94, 95
Mesopotamia, 33, 35, 82, 83, 86, 97,
101, 113
Micombero, 338
Middle Belt, 47, 88, 89, 107, 162, 188,
317, 318, 387, 481, 482, 483
Mississippi River, 146, 177
Missouri Compromise of 1820, 178 Mkapa, 467
Mobutu, 268, 276, 323, 331, 332, 372,
448, 449, 450, 453
Moi, 466
Momoh, 463
Mondlane, 339
Mongo, 17, 90, 109, 110
Monroe Doctrine, 175
Morgan, 199, 201, 212, 229, 331, 358,
366, 372, 448
Mossi, 47, 124, 157
Mozambique, 7, 105, 106, 127, 173, 217,
275, 339, 340, 341, 348, 427, 440,
446, 464, 465, 466
MPLA, 275, 276, 321, 340, 465
Mugabe, 271, 340, 341, 494, 497

Muhammad Ali, 303, 357, 361
Mungo Park, 170
Murtala Mohammed, 320
Museveni, 399, 449, 450, 497
Ndigbo, 45, 46
NAACP, 225, 234, 283, 297, 298, 299,
301, 302, 417
Namibia, 210, 217, 230, 275, 440, 451,
464, 465
Namphy, 435, 436, 437
Napoleon, 153, 155, 169, 171, 172, 174,
228, 248, 329
Nsude, 48, 79
Ntaryamira, 450
Nupe, 15, 42, 46, 47, 89, 124, 138, 159, 160, 161, 163, 208, 212
Nyambo, 17
Nyamezi, 110
Nyasaland, 270, 271, 338
Nyerere, 267, 269, 333, 336, 337, 467, 468
Nyoro, 17, 110, 206
Nzeogwu, 316
Oba Ovonramwen, 208
Oba Ozolua, 118
Obama, 497, 498, 499, 500
Obasanjo, 385, 388, 399, 401, 402, 403, 479, 480, 481, 483, 484, 486
Obas, 261
Obatala, 37, 48, 52, 288
Obote, 270, 332, 333, 449, 497
Odinani, 53
Oduduwa, 4, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 46, 47, 88, 100, 113, 260, 513 Ofo and Ogu, 5, 53, 54
Ogiso, 38, 42, 46, 88
Ogoni, 398, 401, 482
Ogun, 48, 51, 52, 55, 56, 125, 129, 137, 148, 154, 155, 159, 160, 196, 219, 231, 287, 288, 358, 360,
366, 383, 423, 433, 440, 459, 469, 482
Ogun military industrialists, 366
Ojukwu, 398
Okigwe, 24
Okomu National Park, 13
Okonjo Iweala, 481
Olaudah Equiano, 169, 170, 186 Olokun, 4, 6, 37, 52, 88, 100, 113, 118, 130, 164, 247, 248, 260, 360,
366, 367, 368, 376, 383, 409, 423, 424, 508, 511, 513, 515, 516, 521
Omo River, 12, 87
Omowale, 301, 303
Onitsha, 44, 45, 482
Ooni, 43, 260
Ooni, 242, 261, 359, 415, 430
OPC, 482
OPEC, 371, 523
opele, 49

Queen Elizabeth I, 130, 131, 143, 198, 238, 473, 510
Queen Elizabeth II, 198
Queen Nzinga, 139
Queen Victoria, 198, 205, 209
Race Relations Act, 306, 354, 355
racial democracy, 194, 280, 282, 350, 428, 473
Radical Republicans, 189, 190, 441
Ramaphosa, 440
Rawlings, 312, 384, 385, 386
Reagan, 367, 368, 369, 374, 406, 408, 409, 415, 441
RENAMO, 340, 465, 466
Revivalist Churches, 223
Rhodes, 198, 201, 209, 210, 211, 212, 217, 232, 243, 248, 366, 368, 380, 444
Rhodesia, 211, 218, 270, 271, 338, 339, 340, 341, 398, 440
Rift Valley, 18, 19, 127, 139, 338
Rio de Janeiro, 147, 174, 175, 279, 281, 426, 430, 431, 501
Rockefeller, 199, 200, 220, 222, 223, 232, 233, 250, 252, 254, 319, 345, 358, 359, 360, 366, 367, 368,
369, 370, 373, 380, 388, 391, 398, 409, 426, 463, 464
Romans, 1, 76, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 103, 114, 215
Roosevelt, 236, 252, 253, 297
Rothschilds, 142, 168, 200, 201, 212
Royal African Company, 135, 242, 243, 312, 400
Royal Niger Company, 208
Russia, 172, 218, 228, 231, 249, 255, 276, 310, 311, 326, 367, 397, 477
Rwanda, 17, 91, 110, 127, 206, 207, 230, 268, 337, 449, 450, 451, 495, 506
Samora Michel, 465
Samori, 207
Samuel Johnson, 88
Sangha River, 108
Sanhaja Berbers, 103
Sankara, 454
Santeria, 55, 192, 288, 290, 351, 359, 415, 525
Sokoto, 68, 88, 104, 161, 162, 208, 214, 242, 264, 315, 334
Sokoto caliphate, 208
Somalia, 277, 278, 459, 460, 466
Somalis, 106, 278, 335, 458, 459
Soninke, 94
South Africa, 7, 8, 9, 14, 44, 83, 84, 89, 99, 112, 133, 140, 144, 162, 165, 171, 172, 173, 201, 205, 210,
211, 212, 215, 218, 229, 230, 243, 270, 271, 272, 276, 321, 326, 333, 339, 340, 344, 351, 379, 384,
396, 397, 398, 439, 440, 443, 445, 446, 447, 448, 451, 464, 465, 467, 479, 480, 493, 495, 496, 504,
506, 517, 523, 525
Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, 299, 301
Southern Rhodesia, 270
Soyinka, 402
Spain, 53, 86, 92, 93, 94, 102, 103, 113, 114, 121, 123, 129, 130, 131, 135, 146, 149, 153, 171, 175,
177, 192, 193, 216, 229, 288, 326, 396, 472, 473, 515
Sphinx, 80
Sphinx, 7
St Kitts, 134

Strijdom, 273
Structural Adjustment Programme, 370
Sudan, 18, 31, 34, 48, 68, 79, 83, 84, 94, 98, 103, 111, 161, 162, 206, 259, 266, 276, 277, 327, 334,
335, 424, 455, 457, 458, 459, 506
Sufi, 103, 161
Sukuma, 17, 91, 111
Swahili, 18, 106, 110, 111, 127, 128, 140, 205, 270, 322, 336, 337, 415, 467, 518, 522
Sylvester Williams, 226, 475
Tambo, 274
Tanganyika, 128, 206, 217, 230, 267, 269, 270
Tanzania, 7, 17, 88, 105, 110, 111, 173, 206, 230, 330, 333, 337, 338, 339, 378, 450, 451, 467, 468
Taylor, 462, 463, 464
Teke, 17, 90, 108, 119, 204
voodoo physics, 51
Vorster, 344, 440
W E B Du Bois, 223
Wadjet, 53, 58, 78
Wall Street, 133, 237, 420, 422
War Industries Board, 231
War of 1812, 172, 175, 176
War on Drugs, 360, 409, 410, 425, 525 Warri, 46, 138, 261
Watts Riot, 305
West African Students Union, 241, 257, 259
West Indies, 133, 135, 142, 145, 153, 169, 170, 172, 180, 181, 190, 191, 218, 238, 292, 293, 305, 306,
525
western Bantu, 165
White supremacist, 10, 366
Whydah, 41, 117, 124, 125, 137, 159
Willem de Klerk, 443
William Garrison, 186
World Bank, 256, 307, 370, 388, 436
World War I, 220, 230, 231, 252, 305, 390
World War II, 232, 242, 245, 253, 390
Xhosa, 9, 17, 91, 112, 140, 172, 173, 209
Yam Belt, 24, 32, 33, 34, 60, 61, 84, 86, 89, 113
Yam Belt, 54
yams, 22, 25, 89, 90
Yams, 33
Yar Adua, 486
Yemoja, 6, 48, 52, 288
Yoruba culture, 45, 53, 55, 105, 192, 288
Yorubaland, 12, 37, 39, 40, 41, 43, 47, 48, 82, 89, 90, 95, 104, 105, 117, 124, 126, 136, 137, 138, 156,
158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 175, 179, 196, 197, 208, 209, 213, 313, 323, 324, 336, 401, 483, 484
Youth Movement, 258, 260
yams, 24, 33, 34, 35, 95, 137, 163
Zaire, 7, 108, 109, 110, 165, 210, 215, 216, 268, 275, 276, 302, 323, 330, 331, 332, 337, 372, 384, 448,
449, 450, 451, 453, 456, 460, 462, 465, 495, 497, 506