Visiting the Whitney Plantation

My wife and I recently visited the Whitney Plantation. It is about 40 minutes west of the New Orleans. While we have visited Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, as well as the African Burial Ground in New York, this was our first visit to a plantation.

We learned that the Whitney Plantation was founded by a German immigrant who later became assimilated into the surrounding French Creole culture. In the 18th Century, his and his family’s fortunes were made off of indigo. Once this crop ceased to be viable, they transitioned to sugar. Both crops were profoundly dangerous to the enslaved Africans whose forced labor they exploited. As in other parts of the Americas, those who worked in the cane fields had short, miserable lives of about 7 to 8 years.

When touring the plantation you can learn how the plantation functioned as an economic engine. It was highly regimented with ringing bells to signal shift changes and a 24-hour labor force. While I am familiar with the labor dynamics of cotton plantations, sugar plantations were quite different in terms of the nature, structure, and hazards of the work which our ancestors were compelled to do.

Even after the end of legalized slavery, the brutal exploitation of African labor continued as a type of neo-slavery, a practice that was given legal sanction via laws which both restricted the movement of newly freed Africans/Blacks, mandated their employment on the local plantations where they were previously enslaved, and assigned convict labor to the cane fields.

Today, the Whitney functions as a museum and a research site. Several of the structures from the 18th and 19th Century have been preserved there. There are also structures from surrounding areas that have been transported to the site for preservation. You can even see the large iron vats that were used to process sugar. Various memorials and monuments have been erected to tell the story of the 500 Africans who were enslaved there. These monuments were very moving.

One monument details the Africans who were sold when two brothers, who owned the site parted company over 200 years ago. Each of the Africans who were sold in this “transaction” are listed. Another set of monuments lists the names of each African who has been identified as having been enslaved on the Whitney Plantation. You can see various names that indicate their place of origin (i.e., the Senegambia or Congo) or their ethnicity (i.e. Bambara, Congo, Igbo, and so on). Some African names are also visible. I noted a number of popular West African names like Mamadou and Boubacar, as well as various Akan and Ewe, as Kofi, Kwaku, and Aba. They also shared accounts of the savage violence that our ancestors were subject to.

There was a memorial to the Africans who took part in the 1811 German Coast Revolt who were later executed, and another to the many children who died on the plantation. We were so moved by the latter two, that Safia suggested that we do a libation in their honor, which we did—one near each memorial.

It was a moving experience, one which reminds me of the importance of study and reflection upon our past, and determination in our efforts to create, as Maulana Karenga says, “the world that we want and deserve to live in.”

Internal colonialism

I have always been puzzled about the debate as to whether the Black/African community in the US constitutes an internal colony. To me it was always obvious that we are an internal colony due to the form and degree of exploitation that we are subject to. Our community is subject to racialized containment, state surveillance, resource extraction, labor exploitation and suppression, systemic violence, ineffective/extractive institutions, cultural suppression and malformation, and co-opted leadership.

Racialized containment are the measures employed to restrict our movement within various areas within the US, such as restricting us to certain neighborhoods of the city or certain towns within a region. One one level we are surveilled as a consequence of hyper-policing and the carceral state. On another level our social movements have historically been subject to surveillance, infiltration, and disruption by the US government as in the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program. One of the principle resources extracted from our community is our culture. It is, for instance, commodified by the entertainment industry. Additionally, our community is mined for intellects capable of servicing the dominant system. Further, we are variously displaced from our communities on the basis of racist hostility (via massacres) or capitalist accumulation (i.e., gentrification). Black labor is either eschewed (resulting in high levels of unemployment) or undervalued (resulting in high levels of under-employment) in the broader labor market. Institutions which are located within the community often are ineffective or facilitate the extractive ends of the state or corporate interests. Our culture is either suppressed in practice (consider the suppression of African culture during the era of enslavement) or policy (consider the restrictions on hairstyles or the regulation of Black speech in schools). Further, via the entertainment industry, cultural forms which originated with Black/African people are reconstituted into mediums that fetishize sex, violence, substance abuse, and materialism. Finally, those who are elevated as Black leaders, generally serve the interest of the state or capital.

This is internal colonialism.

On Pan-African Languages

In this discussion, Dr. Souleymane Bachir Diagne advocates for multiple Pan-African languages. While he includes the colonial languages along with Swahili in his formulation, he also suggests Manding and Fula.

His recommendation of Manding, which I would broaden to include the Mandé languages generally, is a logical one. These languages possess a high degree of mutual intelligibility.

His recommendation of Fula surprised me, though perhaps it should not have. When I was in grad school, a colleague of mine, Rama who was from Senegal, told me that she considered Fula to be an ideal candidate as a Pan-African language. Consider that it is enjoys a wide geographic dispersion (see the map below).

Fula_language_map

I consider Dr. Diagne’s suggestion that the colonial languages are acceptable vehicles of Pan-Africanism problematic for reasons that may be obvious. If they are not, you can read my thoughts on this here: http://libjournals.unca.edu/moja/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/MOJA21-v2i1-Rashid.pdf. I do accept that such languages are a part of our social milieu, however I also recognize that the impacts of languages extend beyond their utility and includes the political, economic, and conceptual. I contend that we leave the fetters of colonialism on our social systems and our minds by remaining wedded to these languages.

These criticisms notwithstanding, it is a worthwhile dialog.

Pan-African Forums – The Question of Language (23 Feb 2021) https://youtu.be/_BdKKOxYkdQ

Reconstituting ourselves

I would assert that the cultural crisis that we face as a people is born of our subordinate political, economic, and cultural power.

Political power is the instrument via which a group’s will is affected upon society. It is manifest in a people’s capacity to establish rules and protocols, that all members of a given society are answerable to.

Economic power is the system that a group utilizes to propagate, sustain, and refine their worldview via the material and non-material expressions thereof. Systems of resource exchange, extraction, processing, and distribution, in addition to the provisioning of vital services fall under this domain.

Cultural power is the tool which a group utilizes to institutionalize its ethos, demarcate its bodies of practices, conceptions of historical knowledge, and worldview from competing forces, and the intergenerational transmission of such to subsequent generations.

The superordinate position of Europe and America vis-a-vis the African world community not only accounts for our subordinate state in the present, but our difficulty to reconstitute ourselves culturally in the wake of the withering legacies of slavery and colonialism. Thus, while culture is the domain that should inform a protracted struggle for self-determination informed by a “grand theory of the future” (to quote Dr. Anderson Thompson), we are largely bereft of economic and political power, thus making such a cultural vision fragile due to its lack of a powerful institutional basis to support and sustain it over time. Thus those few individuals, who due to their own constitutions, some inexplicable serendipity, or the circumstance of living in such a situation as this take up such work we are often limited in our output, to say nothing of our capacity to scale up such work. Even for those that do take on this struggle, sustainability, vision, and conceptual clarity remain as daunting challenges.

Illuminating the form and character of a better world

I just watched film Whale Rider for maybe the 10th time. I watch it from time-to-time it to remind myself of certain ideals that I have committed myself to, and how these are expressed in the stories of other people who are seeking to heal themselves in the wake of the tragedy of conquest and oppression that has established the “modern era”.

Two things that stood out to me this time was that the character Koro, though perceived as harsh and stubborn, did not see himself as acting in his own self-interest. He saw himself as one who labored for his people’s survival. This was especially evident in his interaction with his oldest son, where when asked how he was doing, he responded that “We are alright”, not referring to himself singly, but to the whole community. He saw no separation in his welfare and theirs, and as a result was under immense pressure to find a new leader, which he believed was the solution to his people’s troubles.

The other thing that stood out to me was that there was no emphasis on the context of colonialism in the film. One can interpret this many ways, but I think that this was done to emphasize that their identity as a people was not based on the arrival of the British Navy. Their history as Maori people did not begin with colonization. It began in time immemorial. Unlike many African Americans, they did not begin their history at their nadir. For us this is symbolically represented as the year 1619, and next month we will witness an abundance of presentations about our past that begin in this unhappy year. As an aide, I’ll also be doing some lecturing next month, and I assure you that I won’t be starting with Africans on a slave ship. It is true that we have to tell and re-tell our history, especially the story of the Maafa, but our history cannot start there. We cannot know who we are as a people if our history begins at the point where our capacity to control our destiny was at its weakest.

I always enjoy the end of this film because it emphasizes that the path of a people into the future will necessarily be a synthesis of their traditions and their dynamic responses to the present. I paid particular attention to the last line in the movie: “I’m not a prophet but I know that our people will keep going forward all together, with all of our strength.” I hope that this is true for the many peoples of Earth, those whose past and ancestral wisdom may yet illuminate the form and character of a better world.