This carefully reserched book is a significant addition to this vital foeld of knowledge. It sets forth, in fascinating detail, the history, from earliset recorded times, of the black races of the Middle East and Africa.
This carefully researched book is a significant addition to this vital field of knowledge. It sets forth, in fascinating detail, the history, from earliest recorded times, of the black races of the Middle East and Africa.
From Babylon To Timbuktu Pdf Free Download
In Part Two of this article series, we argued that racism predates the modern world system. Drawing from Cedric Robinson and Sylvia Wynter, our position has been that rather than being the recent by-products of modern capitalist relations, dehumanizing ideas about African people were old residue from the feudal era, that was shrewdly absorbed by Western capitalism at the dawn of euromodernity, to support the chattel slavery and colonialism of the rising white nations.
Historical materialism is therefore quite helpful for explaining much about the antagonistic relationship of Black labor and white capital. Yet as we have seen (in Part Three), it does not account for why its discoverer, Karl Marx, was equally as susceptible as his bourgeois targets to racist, even pro-imperialist arguments about the colonized world's economic, cultural, and political relationship to Europe; why he abandoned empirical methodology at the crucial moment, choosing not to contest Hegel's infamous claim about the African subject's exclusion from History.
With help from Wynter, Gomez, Rodney, Achebe, and Inikori, among others, the following essay will attempt to fill in some of these missing pages of primitive accumulation, concerning all that Africa lost in the vile traffic of our people across the Atlantic. In Part Five, we will conclude by describing the dialectic of Black labor in the capitalist West, before summarizing our project's implications for the general study of capitalism and racism.
In The Cultural Unity of Black Africa, CA Diop very ambitiously argued that continental unity was possible owing to the shared cultural practices of all Black Africans, which he believed points to their common origin in an earlier cultural complex in Egypt. With painstakingly gathered, if sometimes unconvincing evidence from anthropology, philology, and written and oral records, Diop made the case that our social, political, and cultural affinities result from the ancient dispersion of Nilotic peoples throughout the Continent, following the decline of pharaonic Egypt and of Nubia, its historical source and successor.
Our task in this first section is more modest, and unconcerned with the ultimate provenance of Sub-Saharan cultures. We will describe some of the similarities of worldview and way of life of those West and Central Africans who were stolen away by the Atlantic Trade. Whose descendants forged a Pan-African culture right here, in the imperial West; like ironworkers from Nok, thrown to the furnace of Babylon.
Since a systematic treatment of these primary elements is a specialist's task, we have to limit ourselves to the following topics: the character of African philosophy, in particular its metaphysics and the ethical-existential implications that follow from it; gender and sexual categories in pre-colonial Africa, and their great danger for our oppressor's categories; and class stratification and wealth accumulation in the Black societies that Walter Rodney describes as "transitional" forms between communalism and early feudalism (How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 68-69).
African traditional religions (ATRs) are systematic responses to perennial questions that have exercised philosophers from Europe, Asia, North America, and everywhere else that human beings are found. For human beings everywhere have posed fundamental questions about life's meaning, and tried to answer them with some degree of logical consistency. In discussing their content below, I am not advocating for any particular African religion, or for religion in general. I am only summarizing some of the advances in speculative thought made by precolonial Black Africans, which have a religious rather than a secular character in traditional (non-Westernized) societies.
According to the Bantu ideograms, our universe begins in paradox. A straight line represents mbungi, the emptiness or nothingness of the world prior to its beginning, that is also said not to be nothing, as in creation ex nihilo; but instead is believed to harbor many inert "active forces", that lack dynamism and form; they are only potential being (17-18). The world is finally created when a so-called fire-force, "complete by itself", emerges from this pregnant nothingness, throwing the inert powers of mbungi into motion. The undying principle of change or becoming (kalunga) that is sustained by the movement of this force, eventually engenders the Earth (20) as well as an "immensity...that one cannot measure" beyond it (21): presumably the expanse of the entire universe.
Much of the modern prejudice against exploring the merits of traditional African thought stems from the Abrahamic contempt for polytheism, which is often regarded as a lower stage in the mental and moral development of Western Man. African polytheism has been disparaged as mere "animism" or "fetishism" by that discourse, which prides itself on the comparative sophistication of its concept of God. It is assumed that African polytheism, conceived as a kind of nature worship, evinces less capacity than monotheism for abstract theological ideas like the unity, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence of a God who stands above His creation. This "fact" is then held to confirm the African predisposition toward mimetic (imitative) and crudely empirical modes of thought, and our related inability to think universally and abstractly. But the truth is that traditional African religions conceive of the Supreme Being in ways that are no less sophisticated than the philosopher's God of Islamic Spain, and that are surely more advanced than the personified God of popular Christianity.
Historian Nwando Achebe explains that the Supreme Being is known by many names across African cultures. They are called Chukwu by the Igbo of eastern Nigeria, Ngai by the Kikuyu and Masai of Kenya, uNkulunkulu by the Zulu of Azania (southern Africa), Imana by the Ruanda of Tanzania, Meketa by the Kono of Sierra Leone. Across these diverse systems, the same paradoxy reigns in opinions on the nature of the Supreme Being. They are said to be totally transcendent of matter and space and time, and yet somehow always present with Their creations. They are an entity that is impossibly remote from the concerns of human beings; but They are also present in the smallest movement of dust, and equally in the big affairs of kingdoms, as the prime force that underlies all phenomenal change (Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa, 37-40).
Dismissing outright the colonial lie that the African mentality is irrationalist, we can see that the paradox of the Supreme Being invites interpretive comparisons from the critical theology of the West; where early modernist thinkers tried to reconcile belief in an all-powerful God, with the apparent determination of nature, according to scientific laws. From this changed perspective, it is arguably the case that the nearest cognate of the African God in Western thought is not the crude, anthropomorphic God of popular Christianity, but rather the God of pantheism: "Spinoza's God," as Einstein famously described Them.
The Supreme Being of the African is everywhere, and because of that They are nowhere (in particular). They are the source of all potency; and Their "remoteness" from the believer refers to Their incomprehensibility and terrifying power, rather than their "physical location", which is as expansive as the universe. This is all fairly consistent with the pantheism of Western philosophers like Giordano Bruno and Baruch Spinoza, who were persecuted for rejecting the anthropomorphic God of the Bible. Again, the Supreme Being effects changes in nature strictly according to the laws that govern creative force, and never from any personal desire to intervene in an established course of events. This point especially is redolent of Spinoza's pantheism. In the Theological-Political Treatise (1670), Spinoza controversially rejected the possibility of God's miraculous intervention in nature, claiming it would be an affront to the scientific laws by which He Himself had ordered nature, according to His own perfect wisdom.
Sylvia Wynter has noted that the belief in incontrovertible natural laws, and the corresponding rejection of miracles, on the grounds that a perfectly wise God would not establish such laws only to later subvert them in violation of (God-given) reason, was key for the development of Western science away from the theocentric idea of the cosmos and toward a humanistic one, wherein the universe was created for us (propter nos) rather than to express God's inscrutable glory; was therefore intended to be understood by us ("1492: A New World View", 27). The belief in God's supreme aloofness is closer to the Western-modern scientific mentality, than is the anthropomorphic miracle-worker of the Old Testament.
According to Paget Henry, the negation of the ego by events beyond its power to control, is a cornerstone of the ethics of African existentialism. Its ideal result is to limit the claims made by the individual personality on the social collective, and to readjust the rebellious ego to the order of super/natural forces, sustained by the Supreme Being, that leap forth suddenly to destroy her carefully laid plans (Caliban's Reason, 32-33). On this view, it is to the advantage of the believer, whether plotting for good or evil, to remember that her cleverness and strength are limited, while the wisdom and power of the Being that sustains all things is not. And They are with us always, ready to defend Their design from petty conspiracies of the ego, through the generation of forces that are hidden and unpredictable, waiting like landmines for the wicked and unwise.
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