When they went to West Africa
Africans: first, forcibly transported away; now, forcibly prevented from leaving
When they went to West Africa, they brought with them their ships; they brought their languages and, Dr Livingstone, I presume they brought their fine explorers. They brought their linguists and their cartographers, their spades and their drills, their craftsmen and their architects; they built cities and citadels, and then mapped out the creeks and the hinterland of the luscious empires that they erected; and they also brought chains and they brought shackles and they brought goading and incentive, inducing the native indigenous African to do the dirtiest of all their work: to dig their mines and labour in their forests, to hew timber and diamonds, gold and ores, to harvest the crops from the land; and then to harvest the men, the women and the children from his neighbours.
When they went to West Africa, they not only exploited the commodities they found there; they not only exploited the people who lived there; they turned the people who lived there to commodities, and then they exploited them. When they came to West Africa, unseen and far from their fine homes, they knew no limits, they observed no limits, and they set no limits. Their limits lay far, far away, beyond the western horizon, in the Americas. Just who did they think they were?
When they came to West Africa, they were gods, who decided who lived, who died, who worked, who was idle, who was preserved, who was drowned, who would eat, who’d be sold, who’d be raped, who’d prevail, and who would perish. And this they all did because they had one thing that the West Africans did not. Not dignity and not rifles, not chains and not manacles, not gunpowder and not vessels, not plantations and not genes, not superiority and not wealth. Not even their audacity, and not even their gall. No, what they had that the West African did not was a developed legal system.
A developed legal system legitimises crime. Authorises arrogance. Establishes rights, and takes them away. It inserts a blanket of respectability between enforcer and enforced, subjugator and subjugated, lawmaker and legal subject, the maker and the maid, the god and the child.
When they came to West Africa, they brought a legal system that conferred legitimacy and entitlement; that created schisms and strata among humans; that proclaimed right by legal right and condemned wrong by writ of arrogance. That decreed banishment for defacing a bridge.
Image: Notice on a bridge in Sturminster Newton, Dorset, warning that anyone who damages it may be subject to penal transportation (by Steinsky: CC BY-SA 3.0).
When they went to West Africa, they shipped Africans to America, to oil the wheels of their mercantile enterprise with the sweat of African brows.
And, when their empires piously declared their trade in humankind to be an outrage to God, the God-fearing slavers demanded lucre to desist. What they’d lawfully purchased as merchantable goods were worth money’s value to be relinquished.
No man, so the writ of the law, shall be deprived of his life, liberty or property without due process of that self-same law. While a man’s life may be conferred without intervention of law, and his liberty instituted without let or hindrance at law, no property (furth of manna from Heaven) is appropriated to any man without intervention of law and, if he is only to be deprived of it with due process, then he is likewise not to be possessed of it without due process.
Show me the wage of a labouring man, on which his social security contributions and due and fair taxes have been paid as his membership of the working class, and I will show you a man who has acquired property in that wage by due process.
Show me a woman who has inherited the value of her husband’s estate, compiled from the sweat of his brow to the behoof of his wife and kin at home, and I shall show you a women possessed of her bequest by due process.
Show me a slave-owner who has wrenched native tribespeople from their African homes to set to forced labour on their American farmsteads and plantations, and I show to you a claim to property, but never by due process; for the kidnap and theft of a human being can never be deemed due process, setting them to labour under whips and shackles is no due process, and therefore dispossessing the thief of his booty is no undue process. The life and the liberty of the shackled slave is of equal worth to those of the enslaver, and the liberation of the slave is the most due process of all.
No enslaver was ever compensated by due process, for all their compensation was exacted in regard to stolen goods acquired on the blackest of markets. To present a bill of sale for a slave was to present an admission of a capital crime, for which the compensation ought rightly to have been imprisonment of the presenter.
Due process will come, mark my words. And not just to right the wrongs of centuries of iniquity, but to right the wrongs of this century of iniquity. Black Africans were shipped as goods to the Americas; the thieves were richly rewarded in terms of trade, and then in terms of abolitionist recompense. Now that Africans themselves desire to evade the climate catastrophe caused by the very likes of their former slave-owners and escape the belligerent morass that the Europeans left in the chaos of their post-colonial continent, in which colonialist hegemony has merely been supplanted by insidious debt, the African is left wondering: who are these automatons of the first and new worlds? Who come with their chains, and who steal men and women for their labour, bearing crosses on high with pious praises to their Lord? For we know not who they are; but we know who they think they are.
The full circle is turned, perpetuated by its own viciousness: when they come now to Africa, they bring their chains in the form of their aid; they induce one part of Africa’s peoples to subjugate today’s slaves, who might no longer be shipped to the Americas, but who can no more evade to Europe and could as easily be drowned with stones roped to their feet mid-Atlantic, mid-Channel, mid-Mediterranean. And the they of times past are no less than the we of times present.
It is decreed: the African must stay put in Africa, be ruled by the elites we sponsor and stay rooted to their red-dirt earth, for we in Europe will not have them, but still yearn for their labour. Exacted, now, there, where it always was: in West Africa. All by due process of law. Because nothing grants us our right more than a right granted by rule of law does.
God save Africa from the God-fearing. God save it from us.