A Book Review by Coffie Agble
Title: Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan Holocaust,
Slavery and the rise of
European Capitalism.
Author: Dr. John Henrik Clarke
Publisher: A & B Publisher Group, Brooklyn,
New York (1994)
ISBN: 1-886433-18-6
According to Euro-centric mythorians (myth-creators
masquerading as
history scholars), some well-fed European adventurers sailed
down the coast of West Africa in their pleasure boats and chanced upon some
naked savage Black people hopping from tree to tree, and their Christian,
civilized hearts sank, and they decided to help. Always the altruists, the
Europeans set up camp and began the enterprise to bring the savages to God and
also to civilization. Mission
accomplished, the Europeans left the natives to manage their own affairs, and
within fifty years look at the mess the noble savages have made of things! The
slave trade, oh, the savages were doing it all the time? And colonialism, oh,
that was necessary to teach the Africans the art and science of
self-government!
It is these types of make-me-happy fabrications European
scholarship continue to pass on as history, and sadly it is the same kind of
sophomoric nonsense African governments continue to spend their money on -
passing it on to African children as history! Mungo
Park, The Landers, David
Livingstone, Hawkins and rest we were taught were civilized discoverers and not
pirates and thugs. That the stories of these thugs continue to fill our
syllabuses is a serious indictment of African intellectuals and academics and
governments!
Dr. John Henrik Clarke should require no introduction to any
educated African. For more than half a century until he joined the ancestors in
1998, the erudite African-American professor taught African-centered world
history. He wrote numerous books and gave countless lectures. Dr. Clarke was
among those that rescued Africa from the dustbin into
which European scholars have dumped the birthplace of Man and the cradle of
civilization.
In the book, Dr. Clarke analyzes the role played by
Cristobal Colon, aka, Christopher Columbus in this horrendous crime against the
African people which led to consequences such like racism that African people
still confront today in their daily lives. To Dr. Clarke, “The Columbus
anniversary is a celebration of mass murder,
slavery, and conquest. More: it
exalts the continuing oppression of billions of people today. Columbus
is something only oppressors (or fools) could celebrate.”
Another popular misconception fabricated by European
scholars is that Europeans somehow miraculously sprang from nowhere and got
things figured out – inventing philosophies and sciences and technologies. This
is pure fabrication. The basis of European civilization lays in the ideas
Europe borrowed or stole from ancient Egypt
among other places. The source of Europe’s wealth lies
squarely with the African Slave Trade. Walter Rodney in “How Europe underdeveloped Africa,” and Eric Williams “Capitalism and Slavery,” dealt
extensively with the role slavery played in the development of Europe’s
economies. And Dr. Clarke reminds us that “Slavery and the slave trade was the
first international investment in capital. It was the first large-scale
investment that was intercontinental. Many Europeans invested in ships and in
the goods and services taken from these African countries and became
independently wealthy.”
In chapter eleven, Dr. Clarke poses a question which he says
was also the purpose of the book: “Why haven’t we as a People, without asking
foundations to do it, why haven’t we set up a suitable memorial for the
Africans who died in the Middle Passage? Why haven’t we done it ourselves? Why
haven’t we done it in the past, why can’t we do it now, although belatedly? Why
can’t we also have a slave museum either adjacent to it or separate from itto
preserve, so that our children will remember, the chains and the neck irons and
the foot irons and the leg irons? This is what we came through and we are
obligated never to let this happen again. First, we are obligated never to let
it happen again to us. That is our first obligation and the world’s obligation,
after we take care of the first, is to join others of good will, if you can
find them, to make sure that it never happens to anybody else in the world.”
This is a most profound question and I scratched my head in vain
to find a suitable answer! The Kingdom of the Netherlands
was occupied by the Nazis from 1940-1945 during which about 20,000 Dutch people
were killed; May the 5th is set aside to commemorate the Liberation
of the Netherlands
from Nazi occupation. Again, the Premier of the state of Israel
recently toured Europe where, among other offices, he
performed the commissioning of a new Museum dedicated to victims of the Nazi
Holocaust. Six million Jews perished in the Nazi atrocities. Dr. Clarke asks:
“Why haven’t we memorialized our dead? It was almost like the crime of not
burying them!”
“The one thing, in conclusion, that I’m asking you not to do
is to forgive and forget. Your mission is to remember and to teach your
children so that they can remember it. Because it happened to us, we have a
special responsibility to ourselves to build a kind of humanity and partnership
with all African people of the world that could serve as a role model for all
of the people of the world.”