PANAFRICANISM VS PANARABISM
ARABISM: devotion to Arab interests, culture, aspirations, or ideals ; a person who favors Arab interests and positions in international affairs ; to cause to acquire Arabic customs, manners, speech, or outlook ; to modify (a population) by intermarriage with Arabs.
BLACK MUSLIMS
The phrase Black Muslims may describe any black people who are Muslim, but historically it has been specifically used to refer to African-American Black nationalist organizations that describe themselves as Muslim. Some of these groups are not considered to be Muslim within mainstream Islam, however that has not stop the major Black muslim organizations from practicing Arabism.
WHO ARE THE BLACK MUSLIMS PUSHING ARABISM?
1- The Nation of Islam (NOI)
2- The Moorish Science Temple of America
3- The Nuwaubian Nation or Nuwaubian movement
4- The American Society of Muslims
AFRICANISM & PAN-AFRICANISM VS ARABISM & PAN-AFRICANISM
As I have said earlier, it is apparent that when weighed on the strength of the nature and outcome of the historical links between Africans and Arabs over the last thirteen centuries, it is the my hypothesis that the two ideological-political movements, Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism, are antithetical and that, in the final analysis, there is no room for the coexistence of the two on the African continent or in the disapora. An underlying premise of this hypothesis is that African-Arab relations have, to date, been woefully un- balanced and that this asymmetry, as expressed especially in inter- national and inter-racial political relations, has been weighted in favour of the Arabs and woefully to the disadvantage of the Africans.
Pan-Africanism vs Pan-Arabism, By OPOKU AGYEMAN (Excerpt from The Pan-African World View)
It needs to be emphasized, from the onset, that the terms "Africans" and "Arabs" are used here as racial, not cultural categories. As Chancellor Williams has noted, the Arabs are "a white people," and of the same racial stock as the European Jews "against whom they are now arrayed for war."
J. S. Trimingham's conception that the term Arab "has significance in a linguistic and cultural, rather than in a racial sense," and is therefore to be properly used in reference "to the result of the recent admixture" of Arabs and non-Arab peoples, smacks of ethnographic inaccuracy and has dubious analytic utility. The acculturated African in Northern Sudan is no more Arab than the Black-American is European. "In studying the actual records" in the history of the races, then, as Chancellor Williams counsels, "the role of White Arabs must not be obscured either by their Islamic religion or by the presence of the Africans and Afro-Arabs among them". As we shall see presently, the Arabs themselves insist that blood ties constitute the essence of their identity.
The Arabs played a role in the invasions and conquests that wrought destruction on the ancient Black Kingdoms and empires of North-East Africa, as well as on the West African Black states of Ghana, Mali and Songhay. The Arab slave trade in Africa was a destructive force that raged from the 9th through the 19th centuries in the Eastern seaboard of Africa, both preceding and outlasting even the transatlantic slave trade on the West Coast. The Arabs made depredations on the Sudan through the murderous campaigns of Muhammed Ali at the beginning of the 19th century, and joined in the European Scramble for Africa in the latter part of the same century in an effort, once again, to carve out an African empire for themselves. Through this nexus of social, economic and political assaults, the relations between Arabs and Africans took on the confirmed asymmetry of victimizer and victim.
Despite their awareness of the glaring disproportion in the ex- changes between the two races, the Africans, supposedly on the basis of geopolitical considerations flavored with presumptions of Third World solidarity, argued their way vigorously, in the post- World War II era, into a political alliance with the Arabs. As Nkrumah put the case, Africa's freedom "stands open to danger just as long as a single country on the continent remains fettered by colonial rule and just as long as there exist on African soil puppet governments manipulated from afar."
The construct involved here is one of a "marriage" founded on the conception that both the Africans and the Arabs on the continent shared identical interests in the independence of Africa that together they shared the aspiration of liberating Africa from the imperialist encroachments of the Boers to the South and Israelis in the Middle East.
To lay bare the essentially expedient nature of this "wedlock", we need only remind ourselves of the core ingredients of Pan- Africanism, and set them against the dynamics of the ideological- political movement of Pan-Arabism. The core ingredients of Pan-Africanism include Afrocentricity; positive racial self-concept, commitment to racial resurgence; racial privacy; positive concep- tion of African history; corporate racial family; and unity.
It is necessary to bear in mind the element of Afrocentricity in par- ticular, referring as it does to the Africa of the Africans, of Black people, and decidedly not to a geographical area which includes Africa's invaders whether they be the Arabs who set foot there over a thousand years ago, or the Dutch who made their incursion some five hundred years ago. In Chinweizu's observation: "The Arab world, even if part of it shares the same land mass with us (Africans), is still the Arab world. Their preoccupation is Pan- Arabism."
Pan-Arabism And what is Pan-Arabism? In a word, it is an ideological- political movement representing a conscious effort to create a united Arab nation. Its underlying principle is that the Arab states are parts of one indivisible Arab nation. Nasser articulated this principle, for example, in justification of the UARs interference in Iraq's internal affairs:
We are one Arab nation. Both our constitution and the Iraqi
Provisional Constitution provide in their articles that we are one
Arab nation. Accordingly, every Arab state has the right to
defend Iraq's Arabhood and independence from Britain, the
USA, the USSR, and all other countries.
We are one Arab family in a boat
caught in the tempest of international politics.
There is no question that the concept of Arab "peoplehood" in play here is a racial one. Nasser himself affirmed this and made it clear that all other bases of identity among the Arabs religious, geographic, etc. are of secondary importance. Of the three circles at whose centre he envisioned Egypt to be Arab, Islam and Africa
the first, the Arab circle, stood out in pre-eminence. "There can be no doubt," he stressed, "that... (it) is the most important, and the one with which we are most closely linked."
The Arabs are, of course, also very much bound together by a common religious heritage. Indeed, Islam is a core ingredient of Pan-Arabism. At the same time, being a more inclusive basis of identity, Islam embraces Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and other Islamic states which, W.A. Beling explains, by virtue of their non-Arabic languages, as well as their racial and other differences, are "excluded from the Pan-Arab concept."
Even so, the crucial role of Islam as an instrument of Pan-Arabism should not be missed. In this regard, it is necessary to remind ourselves that the religion of Islam arose partly in answer to the customary indictment by Jews and Christians that Arabs were "savages who did not even possess an organized church," and partly in response to the state of feuding separatism and decadence in which the Arabs were mired.
By launching the new religion, by permeating the nature of his fellow Arabs with an autochthonous religious impulse, one whose genesis, instrumentality and language they could readily relate to, Muhammad not only went a long way toward asserting the Arabs' creative genius, but he also succeeded in transforming his fellow Arabs, replacing their jealous divisiveness with a spirit of mutual defense designed to promote common politi- cal and material interests. His success in this was indeed staggering, for almost at once Islam proved to be "the most important force" in the Arabs' political and social rejuvenation.
Nor was this all. In its external ramifications, Islam soon triggered Arab empire-building as proselytizing brotherhoods "with an un- compromising aggressiveness unmatched in the history of religions" soon pierced into the heartland of Africa and beyond into Europe and Asia. The essentially imperialistic, rather than beneficent or missionary, role of Islam, is underscored by the fact, for instance, that it featured as an instrument of the Arab slave trade: the trade and the religion were "companions throughout, with the crescent following the commercial caravan".
Revealingly, following the Moroccan invasion of Songhay, the African Muslims who had built and ruled the empire were not spared destruction by the Arab Muslims. This is by no means an isolated case. The historical sources are replete with complaints by black Muslim rulers about "holy wars" launched against them to take captives. The enslavement of black Muslims became very much the confirmed pattern.
As far as Arabs were concerned, therefore, the utility of Islam, from the first, was seen to lie in its potential as a weapon for indoctrination, domination and, thereby, the augmentation of Arab power around the globe. In Nasser's own words:
When I consider the 80 million Muslims in Indonesia, and the 50
million in China, and the millions in Malaysia, Siam and Burma,
and the nearly 100 million in Pakistan ... and the 40 million in
the Soviet Union together with the other millions in far-flung
parts of the world when I consider these hundreds of millions
united by a single creed, I emerge with a sense of the tremendous
possibilities which we might realize through the co-operation of
all these Muslims.
From such a trajectory, it comes as no surprise that the remaining circle in Nasser's orbital schema, Africa, which he characterized as "the remotest depths of the jungle," featured as merely a candidate for Egypt's, "spread of enlightenment and civilization" via Islamiza- tion-Arabisation.
In all, at the dictates of Pan-Arabism, loyalty to a particular state in the Arab world has been, in Bernard Lewis' words, "tacit (and) even surreptitious," even as Arab unity has been "the sole publicly accepted objective of statesmen and ideologues alike."16 Despite
much recent talk, in some academic circles, of the demise of Pan- Arabism in the wake of the defection of Sadat's Egypt, the ideological current remains appreciably strong, as witness the very fact of the tremendous storm generated in the Arab world over Sadat's policy an indication, in itself, of a fight to keep the ideology alive.
At this juncture, it is well to sum up the essence of the Pan-Arabist ideology by noting that it is founded on the Arabs' belief, "illustrated by the jihads through which, in the 7th and 8th centuries, they spread Islam" into North Africa, Iberia and South Asia,
that in a rightly ordered world, dominion should belong to Muslims, and pre-eminently to the Arabs who gave Islam to the world. Since they not only lost dominion to the West but found themselves overrun by the West, they have suffered from a feeling that the universe is out of its proper order. They have therefore, as Muslim Brotherhoods demonstrate, longed for a restoration of dominion to the Faithful so the world will be set right again.
In terms of goals, the cross-purposes of the two movements are self-evident. And this means that any "alliance" between them could only be one of convenience, limited to collaboration in the elimina- tion of obstacles (as posed by South Africa and Israel) toward the attainment of what are fundamentally opposed ends. The point cannot be overlooked, in this connection, that, outside the obliga- tions of the "alliance", Israel, the adversary of the Arabs, was neither automatically nor necessarily the foe of the Africans; by the same token, South Africa, the enemy of the Africans, was neither neces- sarily nor mechanically the foe of the Arabs.
The lack of mutuality in the "Alliance"
It has to be emphasized that, even within such limited perimeters, success of the "alliance" depended entirely on a mutuality of com- mitment to its limited tactical purposes. And yet the evidence suggests that such a reciprocity was lacking from the beginning. The Africans drew upon, and were buttressed by, assumptions of Third World solidarity "the shared experience of devastation and
humiliation under the boots of an expansionist West . . ." In Nkrumah's words:
The fortunes of the African Revolution ... are linked with the world-wide struggle against imperialism. It does not matter where the battle erupts, be it in Africa, Asia or Latin America, the master-mind and master-hand at work are the same. The oppressed and exploited people are striving for their freedom against exploitation and suppression. Ghana must not, Ghana cannot, be neutral in the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor.
For their part, the Arabs seem to have conceived of the "alliance" solely in self-interested terms; in particular, there was concern to ensure their continued access to the waters of the Nile which, to Egypt, "is a matter of life or death" in the sense that "if the water of the river were discontinued or were controlled by a hostile state or a state that could become hostile, Egypt's life is over". In Nasser's words:
The Nile which runs from Lake Victoria to Cairo is not merely a route crossing the ... African continent to the Mediterranean, but is the path of life in the full sense of the word and with all its dimensions.
This anxiety over the Nile, as old as the Arabs' incursion and occupation of Egypt from 642 A.D., was a key motivating factor in Muhammed Ali's annexation of the Sudan to the Egyptian Empire in the 19th century, and remains as acute as ever, as in Sadat's threat of June 5, 1980 to "retaliate with force" if Ethiopia interfered with the river's flow to Egypt. This was in retort to Ethiopia's complaint to the OAU that Egypt was abusing its rights to the Nile by diverting it to irrigate stretches of Sinai Desert in a million-acre irrigation scheme launched by Sadat.
And now to sum up the essence of the matter. In the eyes of the Arab leaders, Egypt is the most important entity in the Arab nation. It therefore matters very much that Egypt's lifeline, the Nile, lies in African hands. A united and hostile Africa could strangulate Egypt. Among other uses, then, an "alliance" between Africans and Arabs could be exploited to forestall such a unification of Black Africa.
Organizationally, the "alliance" was born with the Conference of Independent African States (CIAS) which Nkrumah convened in Accra in March 1958, which assembled Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Ethiopia, Liberia and Ghana, and to which Nkrumah declared: "If in the past the Sahara divided us, now it unites us. And an injury to one is an injury to all of us."
We now proceed to assess the "praxis" of the alliance since its inauguration in 1958, drawing on case illustrations in African-Arab intercourse in the Sudan, Zanzibar, Mauritania and the Organiza- tion of African Unity (OAU); on the triangular mesh of African- Arab-Israeli relations; and on the effect of Islam on African-Arab connections.
The Sudan
The backdrop to African-Arab relations in Africa's largest country (sharing borders with 8 countries, including Ethiopia) is provided by the Turko-Egyptian conquest of 1821 and the sub- sequent rule of a Turko-Egyptian government headed by Muhammed Ali which witnessed, among other things, the traffic in over 1 million African slaves for the Middle East market. This was followed by the Anglo-Egyptian colonization and rule from 1898 which would end in a grant of independence to a united, Arab- dominated Sudan in 1956. By the time of the launching of the "alliance" at the 1958 CIAS in Accra, the Sudan had been inde- pendent for some two years, during which everything had been done to complete the process of African political incapacitation and economic disinheritance in that land.
For instance, on the insistence of the Egyptians, the British excluded the Africans from the independence talks. Then, a few months before independence, the Equatorial Corps of the Sudanese Army, which was based in the South, was disarmed and sent to the North, for fear that otherwise the Africans might break away from the imposed unity. In the economic area, some 300 African workers on the Nzara Cotton Scheme were arbitrarily replaced by Arabs. As for the new Sudanization policy which transferred posts held by the British to the Sudanese, all that the Africans got out of it was 4 posts out of the 800. The remaining 796 jobs went to Arabs.
Even though the Sudan attended the CIAS in Accra, it came away from it with no wish whatsoever to achieve any Afro-Arab synthesis in the country in line with the spirit of "solidarity" which the "al- liance" symbolized. On the contrary, the government continued the tradition of Arab predominance at the expense of the African majority. As a former Prime Minister, Sayed Sadiq el Mahdi, con- veyed the point:
The dominant feature of our nation is an Islamic one and its overpowering expression is Arab, and this nation will not have its entity identified and its prestige and pride preserved except under an Islamic revival.
This inner purpose has been echoed over the years by successive governments and remains the guiding principle of the Arabs in the Sudan to this day. Thus, another Sudanese Prime Minister, Mahgoub, proclaimed in 1968:
Sudan is geographically in Africa but is Arab in its aspirations
and destiny. We consider ourselves the Arab spearhead in
Africa, linking the Arab world to the African continent.
Nor did the "revolutionary rhetoric" spawned by President Nimeiry after coming to power in the aftermath of a May 1969 coup d'etat lessen the Arabization drive, as some maintained. Indeed, following Nimeiry's accession to office, the Pan-Arabists "gained disproportionately high influence," as reflected in his decision in the Summer of 1970 to sign the Tripoli Charter which committed the Sudan, Egypt and Libya to a political federation. When some Africans protested the new wave of Pan-Arabist effusion, expressing the fear that a Pan-Arab federation incorporating the Sudan would convert the Africans into a minority and thereby worsen their plight, they were readily dubbed "racialist conspirators" and then ar- rested.
Meanwhile, Nimeiry's Prime Minister intoned loudly and clearly the purpose of his government, for the benefit of those who still might misconstrue its essential character:
The revolutionary government, with complete understanding of
the bond of destiny and forces of Arab Revolution, will work for
the creation of economic, military, and cultural relations with
brother Arab nations to strengthen the Arab nation.
Not to be outdone, Nimeiry himself let it be known that the Sudan "is the basis of the Arab thrust into the heart of Black Africa, the Arab civilizing mission." Even though the African majority's value systems resisted as- similation into the minority Arab culture, the Arabs insisted on seeing them as a "cultural vacuum" to be filled by Arab culture "by all conceivable means." In consequence, under the Arab heel, a sizeable number of Africans Islamized and Arabised themselves to the point of "giving themselves Arab genealogies."
The ultimate ambition of the Arabs, however, as the official quotations cited above portray, was to have the Sudan wrenched from Africa and absorbed into the Arab fold made into an integral part of the Arab world on the basis of "the unity of blood, language and religion." To this end, and at the further impetus of a desire to create a room in the South of the country for settlement by the displaced Palestinians, they embarked on a policy of sys- tematic extermination of the African population.
By July 1965, as Allan Reed has ably chronicled, the intellectual class among the Africans, in particular, had become the object of a furious exter- mination campaign. Nor did this policy of extermination change under successive governments. As late as December 1969, Allan Reed witnessed the bombings of the cattle camps in Upper Nile. As he wrote: "I passed through villages that were totally levelled, just a few months after Nimeiry had talked about regional autonomy". Writing in 1968, The Daily Nation lamented that for years "whole villages have been destroyed" and untold atrocities committed by the Sudanese army.
Inevitably, through their own organization, the Sudan African National Union (SANU), the Africans resisted this regimen of carnage; inevitably, this resulted in a civil war pitting the SANU's Pan-Africanist nationalism against the Pan-Arabism of the Arabs. It was a classic conflict between a people's yearning for political self-determination and cultural autonomy and, in the words of the historian Arnold Toynbee, the "flagrant colonialist" ambitions of the Arabs.
Meanwhile, even as the Africans outside the Sudan, perhaps out of embarrassment, affected ignorance of the strife in the Sudan, or found specious excuses for staying aloof from it, the Arab world, for its part, threw in its collective weight as Syria, Libya and Egypt, among others, took on direct combat involvement against the out-gunned and out-supplied Africans.
The 1972 settlement which granted the Africans regional autonomy in the South was a tactical accommodation that changed little. Writing seven years later, D. M. Wai noted that the only thing that tied the two racial groups together was "a mutually hateful contiguity from which neither could escape." It was an "illusion", he emphasized, to think that the schism that separates the two races had been resolved. For, in spite of the numerical superiority of the Africans, and despite the settlement, Africans still remained "at the periphery of central decision-making". Only one person from the south was in the Cabinet; one out of 45 ambassadors was from the South; only 8 out of the more than 200 Sudanese in the diplomatic service were from the South.
Subsequent developments have overridden the tactical aims for which the Arabs made that settlement. Upon the discovery of oil in the South, Nimeiry moved, in February 1982, to unconstitutionally dissolve the South's ruling bodies, to replace them with a military-led administration of his own choosing, and to pursue a new policy of dividing the region into three subregions, the better to reduce the South's political influence and dilute its autonomy. When African politicians voiced opposition to these violations of the 1972 settlement, Nimeiry had them promptly detained.
Not a synthesis, then, but the triumph of Arabism over Africanism is the tale of the Sudan in the era of the "alliance."
The greatest achievement of Arabism in the Sudan has been the unquestioned acceptance by the whole world that this is an Arab state, in spite of the fact that only about 30% of the population is Arab. Indeed, the predominance of the Arab Sudanese in the country's culture, politics, administration, commerce and industry makes it de facto an Arab state.
The fact of the matter is that, invariably, the Arabs in the Sudan, like all other Arabs, "have conceived of the universe as rooted fundamentally in Arabism. For them, there is little disagreement about the national character the Sudan should adopt, and what its national aspirations and loyalties should be.
Zanzibar and Mauritania
The Arab slave trade and Arab enslavement of Africans in the lands they controlled were interrelated, indeed twin, phenomena. For centuries, African slaves in Arab hands served as domestics, eunuchs, soldiers, agricultural serfs, and as slave-gangs on irrigation works, in sugar and cotton plantations, as well as in gold, salt and copper mines.
Known as the "guardians of female virtue", the African eunuchs served at harems throughout Arabia. Thousands of African boys between eight and ten years old were castrated every year and the survivors of the crude and painful operation were reared into eunuchs. For the African military slaves, the tendency was, once they had outlived their usefulness, to be betrayed into slaughter by those they served self-sacrificially. Nor has the phenomenon evaporated into the thin air of history. Survivals of it, Bernard Lewis informs us, "can still be met" in Egypt, for instance, where the Nubian servant "remains a familiar figure... to this day." Likewise, the Anti-Slavery Society reports that there were in 1962 some 250,000 African slaves in Saudi Arabia alone.
Our concern however, is not so much with the remnants of the odious institution in some specific Arab countries. In other words, we are here addressing a historical phenomenon in the Arab world as a whole, which we deem to have "continued without interruption" to the present day.
Consider Zanzibar. It is difficult not to remember that the out- rage of Arab wholesale enslavement of Africans in that island, which began in 1698 with the Omani Arabs' creation of a plantation economy and a commercial empire in the North-Western Indian Ocean, ended only in 1964 with the Pan-Africanist Okello's heroic overthrow of the Sultanate. In the period between 1698 and 1964, Zanzibar attained a dubious distinction as the most important slave market in the Indian Ocean. It became a land where being "upper class" meant that one was not only an Arab first and foremost, but also that one could afford a great number of African slaves. It developed the convention that, once born an African, one was "a slave forever, even in the next world."
Indeed, the Africans were called washenzi "uncivilized beings of a lower order" and, on this account, were considered to be deserving of every abuse. Thus, it was customary to have the wombs of pregnant African women opened so that capricious Arab women could see how babies lay inside of them, even as it was fashionable to have Africans kneel for Arab women to step on their backs as they mounted their mules. Slaves suspected of fugitive intentions had their necks "secured into a cleft stick as thick as a man's thigh, and locked by a crossbar. Sometimes a double cleft stick was used and one man locked at each end of it." Routinely, men, women and children were killed or left tied to a tree,
for the scavengers to finish off when they couldn't keep up with the caravan, either through illness and exhaustion, or starvation, or both. Mostly, they were finished off with a blow from a rifle butt, or their skull smashed with a rock, as in the case of the child whose mother complained that she couldn't go on carrying him and the heavy ivory tusk. Ammunition was too precious to waste on a slave.
Okello, upon visiting the island, and before single-handedly plan- ning the coup that overthrew the Arab regime in 1964, learned, to
his chagrin, that a phenomenon he assumed to be buried in history
was alive and vigorous in that land; he heard an elderly African
lament: "My grandfather was a slave, my father was a slave and I
too am now an Arab slave;" and he heard the shrill retort of an
Arab: "Whether you like it or not, you niggers and black slaves will
forever remain under the flag of our Holy Sultan. We shall deal with
you as we please."
Significantly, Nasser gave the unqualified support of the United Arab Republic to the Arab oligarchy in Zanzibar. Like the British Colonial Office, the Arab leader took the side of the Arab minority against the African majority over the future of the protectorate, prompting this comment from a British newsletter: "Zanzibar is a part of Africa and not the Middle East. The Afro-Shirazi are a more important group than the Arab minority. These facts should be taken into account before the protectorate ends. If not, there will be trouble in the sweet-scented remote islands." And, once trouble erupted in the form of an African coup d'etat which even- tually ousted the Arab political order, it came the turn of Gaddafi of Libya to take up the championship of Arabism in Zanzibar. Speaking on October 7, 1972, at a rally at the Tripoli Stadium to mark the anniversary of the Italian evacuation from Libya, Gaddafi declared:
Zanzibar was all Muslim, and almost all the people were Arabs ... In 1964, the enemies of Zanzibar plotted and staged a massacre in which they slaughtered over 20,000 Arabs in Zanzibar. It was the most notorious massacre in the world. . . . All the Arabs were annihilated in Zanzibar and African rule developed there.
Partly in retaliation for this "massacre" of the Arabs, Gaddafi then set out, on his own admission, to support Idi Amin's Uganda in its war against Tanzania, the political entity that has, since 1964, incor- porated Zanzibar. But if Zanzibar in East Africa represents an outrage that has only recently been liquidated, Mauritania in Northwest Africa, occupying as it does another vital zone of interaction between Arabism and Black Africa, symbolizes a raging and perennial Arabian anachronism.
The process began with the invasion of "white Berber nomads" into the area in the first millennium A.D. An Arab invading force joined them from the 14th century and, in time, out of the fusion of the Berbers and Arabs, came the present ruling elite, "the white Moors." Whatever residual biological differences separate these "white Moors" from pure Arabs, they are now so completely identified with the Arabs linguistically, religiously, culturally and ideologically that, to all intents and purposes, they are indistinguish- able from them. Indeed, a number of historians, use "white Moors" and "Arabs" interchangeably in their works.
The official designation of this Northwestern portion of Africa is the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. As in the Sudan, the Pan- Arabist outlook of the political system has never been in question. Thus, upon the country's admission into the Arab League in 1973, President Ould Daddah pledged: "Mauritania will make every effort and mobilize all its energies for the Arab cause." Nor is it any surprise that a Pan-Arab Ministry was created in the country and that Jiddou Ould Salek, as its political head, reaffirmed in 1979 the country's attachment "in its totality to Arabo-Islamic culture." Again, as in the Sudan, policies of enforced Arabisation of the Africans have been the norm. For instance, in 1966, Arabic was declared the official language of the country, in the teeth of African opposition.
Out of a population of 1.5 million, the Africans constitute ap- proximately 500,000. They are all slaves, in varying degrees. As the Anti-Slavery Reporter has noted, no other nation has so many slaves. Entry into-slavery "is by birth, capture or purchase. The first... is the most common: being born to an existing slave woman."
Purchase is still current: the sale of children, who, incidentally, all belong to the mother's master, is the most common. Even those among the Africans who have managed to purchase their freedom, and who are thus legally free, continue to be regarded as property by their former Moorish masters. As Le Monde has indicated, whenever these "freed slaves" escape the grip of their former masters, they are hunted down by the police and the administration and quickly restored to bondage, all "in the name of an interpretation of Islamic law."
Slavery is indeed the way of life in Mauritania. A typical sight in Nouakchott, the capital, according to Bernard Nossiter, is that of "slaves working in gardens and vegetable plots . . . while their Moorish masters sit under trees, sipping mint tea." And the avenues of escape from servitude remain as elusive as ever. As recently as February 1980, demonstrations staged by the African Freedom Movement saw the movement's leaders arrested, held without trial for months, and then tortured to a point where some of them went mad.
On July 5, 1980, as a way of "calming the slaves until the Govern- ment (of President Haidala) has had time to work out plans on how to cope with the anti-slavery movement," and in an effort to improve the country's international image, the Mauritanian govern- ment published a decree abolishing slavery. Those who knew that slavery had been formally abolished twice before and that the country's independence constitution itself proclaims that "All men are born free and are equal before the law," could only greet the new announcement with skepticism.
Indeed, when investigators of the Anti-Slavery Society visited Mauritania "to see how far the new decree was being put into effect," they concluded that it had had no practical effect. No wonder, for "the upper and middle officials of the government, the judiciary, the police and the rest of the civil service", do, for the most part, have their own slaves and are determined to keep them. As it happens, the most dramatic consequence of the decree seems to have been the government's decision to set up a national commission, composed of Muslim jurists, economists and administrators, to work out compensation for the enslavers for the loss of slaves they have not yet incurred!
When the Anti-Slavery Society proposed that, to demonstrate its sincerity, the Mauritanian government should ratify the international convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, and the supplementary convention on the abolition of slavery, the slave trade, and institutions and practices similar to slavery, this triggered a revealing rejoinder in August 1981 from the Mauritanian government. It let it be known that it was not the only country which enslaved Africans and that, in any case, any effort "to wipe out this form of discrimination," no matter how earnest, would founder on the rock of Maurtania's technological underdevelopment "which makes all talk about human liberty completely derisory."
In other words, until the country becomes technologically sophisticated, there is, in the thinking of the white Moors in Mauritania, every justification for enslaving the Africans. As for Western critics, given the historical record of the West's own victimization of Africans, it was the Mauritanian government's view that they had no moral authority to hold brief for the Africans:
It is very easy for citizens of certain countries who in the past developed this form of discrimination called slavery to its most debasing degree within a framework of pure Machiavellianism and sheer materialism: It is easy ... for these people to try to relieve their consciences by setting themselves up as defenders of victims in countries which have not had the chance to ex-perience technological development.
That Arab enslavement of Africans is not a matter of the past but a continuous, persistent and present scourge is further underscored
by some gruesome details of "the slave trade route from Africa to
the Arab countries in the 1970s" provided by Tribune de Geneve.
Research done at the Encyclopaedia Africana Secretariat in Accra
has also pointed up cases of African pilgrims selling their children
to Arabs in order to pay their expenses for the pilgrimage to Mecca.
Scarcely less startling is the news that broke in February 1973 to the
effect that Arab traders had been for years exporting to the Middle
East Ghanaian children "between the tender and undiscerning ages
of thirteen and fourteen to become the virtual slaves of wealthy
Arab families." The shock this revelation registered on public
opinion in Ghana is well captured in a lengthy and poignant editorial
of the Weekly Spectator:
Over the past two decades Ghana has led the quest for the restoration of the black man's lost glory and set the pace for the rediscovery of the African personality. It is therefore revolting and exceedingly bewildering to note that this glorious land of liberty is being used for the watersheds of the revival of slave trade.... We recall vividly the uncertain days of the struggle for independence when Lebanese and Syrian merchants in Ghana constituted themselves into a volunteer force and with three-feet-long batons in their hands, cudgelled down freedom fighters in the streets of Accra in open daylight.... It would appear that we have taken our tolerance too far and they have taken our leniency for weakness and are now adding injury to insult by trading our young daughters like apples or any other commodity. ... Our children must be defended against slavery.
|
|
