It has become an increasingly overwhelming endeavour to not only believe that Africa has developed, sustained, and regenerated world civilizations but to actual make it relevant to the current conditions affecting Africa today. Looking at the state of Africa it is obvious that the most basic necessities of life are of such crisis proportions. Food, shelter, and clothing have now come at a premium for the masses of the people; diseases such as A.I.D.S. have literally crippled many countries; corrupt governance has hampered the ability to create effective constitutions, human rights policies, and laws that equally redistribute the wealth of natural resources; colonial powers in the form of nation-states, churches, and NGO’s continually disorient African nations from doing for self and; the hemorrhaging of intelligence, or "brain drain", to foreign nations in the form of immigration and refugees have left little to be desired in African nations. These few examples of what Africa is currently going through lead us to where we are today; the necessity for Africa and its people, within the continent and the Diaspora, to rise to the proper status as the ultimate bearers and creators of culture, civilization, and spirituality. This paper will examine how Africa has reached its current state; the benefit that the rest of the world has garnered from Africa’s suffering and; philosophies on how Africa can spark its own renaissance.
It would be incorrect to assume that the institution of slavery was established overnight. Africa had consistently experienced foreigners penetrating their borders engaging in many wars but the last 1500 years saw Africa at its most dominated. Stan Chu Ilo shows that the first Africans to be sold into slavery may have been the Nubians who lived south of Egypt and who were sold into Europe and the Middle East. During the Carthaginian period, vast numbers of African slaves were sold from Sudan to North Africa. This was a tragic development which led to the slave trade between North African Berbers, Arabs, and Africans across the Sahara desert; the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade. The most important source of slaves for the Islamic world, until the fifteenth century, was East Africa. The majority of the slaves from there found their way to Asia and became important sections of the population in Turkey, Arabia, and Persia. The trade even spread to West Africa where slaves were took by force of arms. People were only able to escape slavery at the hands of the Muslims by converting to Islam.However, the selling of enslaved African across the Atlantic was by far the most extensive form of slavery in human history. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was as inhuman as it was degrading. The sugar plantations in the Caribbean islands, the vast tobacco fields of North America, the rice plantations of Carolina and the cotton plantations of the South needed cheap labour and the Black people of Africa would be that. The ports of Liverpool, Bristol, London, Seville, and Bordeaux among many other cities were seething with slaves. Enslaved Africans were obtained by banditry, warfare, trickery, kidnapping, alliance, and peaceful partnership. Much of the West African Empires were turned into bloody ravages for Western nations to capture and enslave Africans.The slave trade paved the way for the poverty of the African continent. It disrupted Africa’s political, economic and social life for over 300 years. It effectively put an end to any meaningful integration of the diverse African ethnic groups. The wars that were fought in order to capture and enslave Africans set the stage for the final cremation of the last relics of the various peoples and empires of Africa. These wars created ethnic animosities, which have continued to hamper the unity of the ethnic groups to this day. So much so that a class system amongst many ethnic groups still exists built around slaves, outcasts, and freeborn. Walter Rodney further shows us that colonialism was the logical extension to expand European capital and maintain African domination. European capitalists were forced by the internal logic of their competitive system to seek abroad, in less developed countries, opportunities to control raw material supplies, to find markets, and to find profitable fields of investment. The centuries of trade with Africa contributed greatly to that state of affairs where European capitalists were faced with the necessity to expand in a big way outside of their national economies. For example, many changes within Britain had transformed the seventeenth-century necessity for slaves into the nineteenth century necessity to clear the remnants of slaving from Africa so as to organize the local exploitation of land and labour. Therefore, slaving was rejected in so far as it had become an impediment on further capitalist development.The colonial state engaged directly in the economic exploitation and impoverishment of Africa. The colonial office in each colonizing country worked hand in hand with their governors in Africa to carry out a number of functions that worked to the benefit of Europe and the detriment of Africa. The key functions were to protect national interests against competition from other capitalists; arbitrate the conflicts between their own capitalists and; guarantee optimum conditions under which private companies could exploit Africans. The latter point must be seen as the most crucial because it allowed colonial governments to instill the idea of "maintaining law and order" which can be translated to "maintaining conditions most favourable to the expansion of European capitalism and the plundering of Africa."Today Africa and its people are at a major historic crossroads where the possibilities of doing for self are greater than they have ever been. However, the colonial powers are also ever more engaging in creating destructive forms of living to continue the domination of Africa; what must be done? After the independence movements that swept across Africa in the latter half of the twentieth century one of the major movements that were sparked was the demand for reparations. The necessity for the centuries of unpaid and forced labour to be restituted has been argued for by many Black people within the continent and the Diaspora.Mogobe Ramose shows that reparations are due to Africa as a matter of fundamental justice. The former colonial conqueror has the duty to do justice to the conquered by paying reparations. The conquered have a right to justice and the conqueror has the duty to perform. For this reason it is not up to the conqueror to change this question of right to one of privilege. If this happens then the conqueror would have been granted a blank cheque to make concessions to justice in a unilateral way. Therefore, doing justice to the conquered would be a matter of convenience and not compliance. Zimbabwe’s struggle for land is the perfect example of how reparations can be undertaken. Zimbabwe is the African pioneer engaged in the endeavour to make the demand for reparations a living reality.However, it would be most instructive to understand that the demand for reparations can have negative, in fact re-colonizing, effect. Paulin Hountondji properly shows that the current condition in Africa has garnered a mentality where Africans "constantly tend to reject onto others the responsibility for all our misfortunes and misdeeds. Yesterday it was imperialism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism, today it is the World Bank and the IMF, tomorrow it will probably be new incarnations of the same demon. We would be feeding, on the other hand, the discourse of Afro-pessimism, so fashionable today in the West, among people who, first, overlook the history and ongoing problems of their own societies and, secondly, fail to replace Africa within the context of her history and complex relationship with the rest of the world."He further poses penetrating questions that the people of Africa must ask in order to do for self. The real question, once a diagnosis has been made, is: What to do? How far did the dependence machine succeed in crushing all initiative and stifling all indigenous activity? Which islets of knowledge have remained untouched, and can they not only be safeguarded, but developed, improved, updated, and actively re-appropriated? In the field of science and technology, what is occurring in Africa? What are the research programs, what are the findings, what important results have been achieved during the past years? Given the fact that we have not cared, until now, to set up a strategy that could allow us to utilize our research finding for our own sake, what can be done to correct this state of affairs and start at last capitalizing, managing, mastering, and occasionally applying our own as well as other people’s findings to improve the quality of life in our countries?These questions highlight how we as a people can move ourselves out of the condition we are in today. The diagnoses of the conditions within Africa have been presented and can be easily seen. Furthermore, the solutions as to how these conditions can be changed are also easily formulated. Our difficulty is the willingness and desire to actualize them wholeheartedly as this is the only way liberation can be achieved.