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mariacallous · 2 years

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The Russian foreign minister’s recent tour of Africa may have been unannounced, but it was not unexpected. In his second trip in eight months, Sergey Lavrov visited Eswatini, Botswana, Angola, and South Africa. In February, he will visit Mali, Tunisia, Mauritania, Algeria, and Morocco. Across the continent, he and his colleagues will likely promote the view that Russia is an anti-imperialist force, instrumentalizing positive memories of Soviet support for various African wars of independence against exploitative Western colonialists. Moscow has long used “memory diplomacy” in Africa—invoking positive memories of the past to bolster its influence and interests—but now these tactics are standing in the way of Ukraine’s soft power.

“Russia was among the few world powers that neither had colonies in Africa or elsewhere nor participated in [the] slave trade throughout its history. Russia helped, in every possible way, the peoples of the African continent to attain their freedom and sovereignty.”

This is the message that the Russian Embassy in South Africa, one of the Kremlin’s more vociferous consular social media accounts, released to mark Abolition of Slavery Day on Dec. 2, 2022. Twitter users were quick with rejoinders that Russia’s lack of colonies in Africa was not for want of trying and that, in any case, it had subjugated peoples in Asia and Eastern Europe. More importantly, Russia’s self-depiction as anti-colonial struck many as outrageously cynical when that same country is simultaneously pursuing an imperial war of conquest against its neighbor Ukraine.

This tweet, however, isn’t just another attempt by the attention-seeking Russian Foreign Ministry to provoke reactions through trolling or promote itself as a reliable ally and friend to African elites: It is also part of Russia’s own self-conceptualization. While some have slapped the labels of malign influence and disinformation on Russia’s diplomatic language in Africa, it would be more productive to examine the resonance of Russia’s narrative than the narratives themselves, even if they are clearly delivered in bad faith and self-interest. The willingness of some African countries to embrace Russia’s claim of a shared struggle against the West often has more to do with the painful and enduring experience of imperialism than a love of Russia. With the right framing, Ukraine could not only undermine Russia’s arguments but even take advantage of this anti-imperialist sentiment.

Many Russians are, in fact, reluctant to view their country as an empire, arguing that the Soviet Union and even the Russian Empire could not be described as imperial in the same way as Britain or France because Russians lived alongside their colonized subjects and intermarried. Narratives of Russia as a self-colonizer persist throughout history: “The history of Russia is the history of a country that colonizes itself.” This phrase, first coined by the historian Sergey Solovyov in the 1840s, gained widespread popularity thanks to Vasily Klyuchevsky’s five-volume work, The Course of Russian History, published between 1904 and 1921 and still referenced regularly by historians today.

This colonial exceptionalism, or refusal to acknowledge the colonial nature of Russia’s political structures, is not based solely on the contiguity of Russia’s empires but rather on the official and long-standing claim that Russia did not conquer Siberia. Instead, it was invited and welcomed by the peoples living there, who entered into union freely with Russia. Popular Russian history books and documentaries even claim that minorities were treated better than Russians, with Russia an “inverted empire” in which the peripheries exploited the center. This train of thought, popularized by former Russian President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, is often used today by politicians and pro-Kremlin media, books, and television series to discredit the Baltic States when they discuss their countries’ exploitation at the hands of the Soviet authorities.

Even Russia’s current war in Ukraine, despite all its imperial accoutrements, is depicted by Russian media and politicians as a war of liberation, not just to free Russian-speaking Ukrainians but also to overcome Western—especially U.S.-led—hegemony. This line of thinking was summarized by Andrey Bezrukov, a professor at a leading Moscow university and former intelligence officer, in a June 2022 article in which he explained Russia’s war on Ukraine: “[F]or us this is, in essence, a liberating special operation (against the United States and Great Britain) for independence, it is anti-colonial.” Russians identify with the colonized and, seeing Ukrainians as Russian, cast themselves as the anti-imperialists, fighting the United States’ and the West’s political, cultural, and normative hegemony.

The Russian government has been adept at appropriating the history of Soviet support for a number of African struggles for independence and using it to bolster its image among many countries on the continent. But this is about more than nostalgia; it is about how Russian diplomats have been able to frame their war against Ukraine as a defensive response to Western aggression. In this view, Russia is not seeking to dominate Ukraine but striving for multipolarity, standing up to the West in a modern-day version of the anti-imperial struggles fought by African nations.

The Kremlin has been expending time, energy, and resources on convincing Africa of this vision, with some success. Russian ambassadors and diplomats have used public events, conferences, and media in countries from Algeria to Zimbabwe to celebrate and commemorate Soviet support for anti-colonial movements. During his most recent visit, Lavrov directly compared Russia’s war to “liberate” Ukraine from external Western influence with the Angolan War of Independence. Such comparisons are part of a wide spectrum of Russian diplomatic activities aimed at deepening alliances and cultural influence, from opening monuments to Soviet soldiers who fought in Angola’s Civil War to writing op-eds for Zimbabwean newspapers revisiting the Soviet Union’s liberating mission.

The strategy is effective because much of Africa holds positive memories of Soviet support for independence movements during the Cold War, and large numbers of African elites graduated from universities such as the Moscow-based Russian University of the Friendship of Nations. Those unable to study in Russia can join a new Africa-focused social network called Russosphère (Russian sphere), which launched around the same time as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The site already has tens of thousands of users who critique the French, dismissing them as modern-day colonialists, and celebrating the Wagner mercenary group, which has been widely accused of committing atrocities in the Central African Republic and elsewhere. Ironically, a BBC investigation found the man behind the network, Luc Michel, is from Belgium, another former colonial power.

These platforms, visits, and events are also used to discredit Western criticism of Russia. For example, during his first-ever visit to the Republic of Congo and meeting with President Denis Sassou Nguesso in summer 2022, Lavrov spent time discussing how the West colonized Africa for its own benefit.

Russian officials use such narratives to build ties with African countries, promising bilateral relations based on trust, equality, and respect for territorial integrity. Unlike the West, Lavrov depicts Russia as a defender of sovereignty that would never interfere in internal affairs. This line of argument resonates in some parts of the African continent, especially among those who suffered the most egregiously and recently from colonialism and slavery at the hands of the West. This was reflected in the president of Uganda’s assertion that “whenever issues come up and some people want us to take positions against Russia, we say: These people have stood with us for the last 100 years. How can we be automatically against them?”

Similarly, the ruling African National Congress party in South Africa has cited Soviet support against the apartheid regime as a driving factor in its close relations with Moscow. Following Lavrov’s January visit, South Africa will take part in Russia-led military drills scheduled for around the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

After all, (almost) nobody is denying that the West colonized Africa and has failed to make appropriate amends, or that the Soviet Union genuinely did support a number of African liberation movements in their struggles against colonial powers and the United States. The issue is that Russia and the Soviet Union have been colonizing forces elsewhere and have no right to any moral high ground—though that doesn’t make the anger to which Russian narratives appeal any less righteous or powerful. Instead, the narrative should be ceded to other countries without an imperial history, countries that were colonized by Russia. First and foremost, this should mean Ukraine.

Ukraine has a number of diplomatic interests in Africa, not least to maintain international pressure on Russia to adhere to the Turkey-brokered grain deal that has the potential to seriously disrupt food supplies to Africa. Other interests include U.N. votes and widening international support, which is why Ukrainian diplomats have so far focused their efforts on countries they perceive as strategically important in this regard—Kenya, Senegal, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast.

There is evidence that some African leaders already view Russia as the imperialist aggressor and relate to Ukraine’s position, as seen in the words of Martin Kimani, Kenya’s permanent representative to the United Nations. Explaining why Kenya joined 93 other countries in supporting a U.N. resolution calling for Russia to compensate Ukraine, he drew parallels between Russian and Western imperialism: “This is the right of Ukraine [to have reparations] but also for all the peoples and countries that are seeking reparations for colonial violence and dispossession, slavery, and other acts of aggression by powerful states, including members of the Security Council.” Although many African countries abstained or were absent, a number voted for the resolution, including Somalia, Djibouti, and Ghana, which had been the target of Russian memory diplomacy during the summer of 2019.

During his October visit to Senegal, the Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Kenya, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba sought to challenge Russia’s narrative across a wide range of issues, from grain deliveries to NATO.

The continent remains a battleground for influence. In this light, while it is difficult for ministers to leave the country, it could be worth tasking embassies with identifying any Ukrainian Soviet heroes or major actors who assisted anti-colonial struggles, organizing research, conferences, or evening dinners in their honor to raise Ukraine’s profile in-country.

Another way to tap into unused sources of Ukrainian soft power include developing current and past alumni networks. Prior to Feb. 24, 2022, there were close to 20,000 African students in Ukraine. Given the (admittedly panicked) Ukrainian border guards’ poor treatment of some African students as they tried to flee the advancing Russian military, it is important for Ukraine to address this issue by engaging with affected alumni. Kyiv should look beyond recent students, however. Russian media frequently reference Soviet education as a source of their soft power in the Middle East, especially Syria, and Africa, but many of these same students studied in Kyiv and Kharkiv—not Moscow. Ukraine could arrange receptions for them, similar to those held by Russian embassies across Africa.

Ukrainian politicians have demonstrated a willingness to engage with Africa and a readiness to embrace positive elements of the Soviet legacy. Ukrainian memory diplomacy aimed at colonized peoples within the Russian Federation has been well-pitched, as with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s video speech rallying the people of the Caucasus nations against the war, delivered in front of a memorial to the Chechen hero Imam Shamil, which drew on a shared experience of Russian colonization and fights for independence.

If Ukraine were able to adapt these stories for audiences beyond the Caucasus, this could be a productive path of development. These stories would likely be very effective, not so much because of Zelensky’s communication skills or the resonance of the issue, although both are considerable, but because Ukraine would be telling the truth: Ukraine is in a brutal war of colonization, fighting for its freedom, standing on the side of the oppressed. It isn’t just a story.

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magnoliamyrrh · 11 months

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lol another quote among the many ive been thinking about lately, in regards to why i find some libs and leftists so much more aggravating than many conservatives who are just straight about their bullshit

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

and yea yea c.s lewish was a british dude who had certain kinds of ideas etc but lets be real this quote fucking slaps. and is also a good representation of why probably in romania more than maybe ever before during soviet rule life became a 24/7 horrible satire and why it inflicted so much mental damage. second thing this brought to mind is all that research i did on chattle slavery in mauritania, and one of the most haunting quotes from an ex-slave, "the slaves here are what the americans wish they had in their plantations" due to how deeply dug through the use of islam and cultureal acceptence slave status is

also, much less dramatically. id rather someone hate me to my face than spin their hatred 70 ways in some progressive loving wokie way and end up w the same shit

#ie. progressive sexism progressive racism progressive homophobia ie. lets rebrand sex work as wooo a lovely empowering thing #bro id rather u just fucking b straight up 💀#also obviously. malcolms quote about the fox and wolf which i think ive quoted about a million times

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ausetkmt · 2 years

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How many slaves are there today, and who are they?

The word “slavery” conjures up images of shackles and transatlantic ships – depictions that seem relegated firmly to the past. But more people are enslaved today than at any other time in history. Experts have calculated that roughly 13 million people were captured and sold as slaves between the 15th and 19th centuries; today, an estimated 40.3 million people – more than three times the figure during the transatlantic slave trade – are living in some form of modern slavery, according to the latest figures published by the UN’s International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Walk Free Foundation.

Women and girls comprise 71% of all modern slavery victims. Children make up 25% and account for 10 million of all the slaves worldwide.

What are the slaves being forced to do?

A person today is considered enslaved if they are forced to work against their will; are owned or controlled by an exploiter or “employer”; have limited freedom of movement; or are dehumanised, treated as a commodity or bought and sold as property, according to abolitionist group Anti-Slavery International.

Of the 24.9 million people trapped in forced labour, the majority (16 million) work in the private sector. Slaves clean houses and flats; produce the clothes we wear; pick the fruit and vegetables we eat; trawl the seas for the shrimp on our restaurant plates; dig for the minerals used in our smartphones, makeup and electric cars; and work on construction jobs building infrastructure for the 2022 Qatar World Cup.

Another 4.8 million people working in forced labour are estimated to be sexually exploited, while roughly 4.1 million people are in state-sanctioned forced labour, which includes governmental abuse of military conscription and forced construction or agricultural work. In certain countries such as Mauritania, people are born into “hereditary” slavery if their mother was a slave.

Again, women and girls bear the brunt of these statistics, comprising 99% of all victims in the commercial sex industry, and 58% in other sectors, according to the ILO.

Where is this happening?

Statistically, modern slavery is most prevalent in Africa, followed by Asia and the Pacific, according to the Global Slavery Index, which publishes country-by-country rankings on modern slavery figures and government responses to tackle the issues.

But the ILO and Walk Free warn that these figures are likely skewed due to lack of data from key regions. “We believe that the global estimate of 40.3 million is the most reliable data to date, although we believe it to be a conservative estimate as there were millions of people we couldn’t reach in conflict zones or on the refugee trail and places where we couldn’t be sure of collecting robust data such as the Gulf states, where access and language barriers prevented us from reaching the migrant worker communities,” said Michaëlle de Cock, a senior statistician at the ILO.

More than 70% of the 4.8 million sex exploitation victims are in the Asia and Pacific region. Forced marriage is most prevalent in Africa. But there isn’t a single country that isn’t tainted by slavery: 1.5 million victims are living in developed countries, with an estimated 13,000 enslaved here in the UK.

Why are there so many slaves today?

Slavery is big business. Globally, slavery generates as much as $150bn (£116bn) in profits every year, more than one third of which ($46.9bn) is generated in developed countries, including the EU. Whereas slave traders two centuries ago were forced to contend with costly journeys and high mortality rates, modern exploiters have lower overheads thanks to huge advances in technology and transportation. Modern migration flows also mean that a large supply of vulnerable, exploitable people can be tapped into for global supply chains in the agriculture, beauty, fashion and sex industries.

“It turns out that slavery today is more profitable than I could have imagined,” Kara said. “Profits on a per-slave basis can range from a few thousand dollars to a few hundred thousand dollars a year, with total annual slavery profits estimated to be as high as $150bn.”

It’s important to acknowledge that global population rates also affect estimates: the top 10 countries with the highest estimated absolute number of victims are also some of the most populous. Together, these 10 countries – China, Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Indonesia, Iran, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines and Russia – comprise 60% of all the people living in modern slavery, as well as more than half the world’s population, according to the Global Slavery Index.

An increase in violent conflict worldwide over the past 30 years has also inflated the number of people at risk of slavery, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), with armed groups and terrorists turning to trafficking “to show they have control over the community, or to increase their force, either recruiting child soldiers or giving sex slaves as a reward for their recruitment”.

What’s the difference between slavery and human trafficking?

Human trafficking is just one way of enslaving someone. Whereas centuries ago it was common for a slave trader to simply buy another human being and “own” that person as their property (which does still happen), today the practice is largely more insidious.

Many times, the victim is led to believe they have been offered a well-paid job in a different city or country, only to find the job does not exist and they are now indebted to their “employer” or trafficker and must pay transportation, lodging and any other “fees” the exploiter demands, thereby forcing the victim into debt bondage.

For example?

Guardian investigations have revealed a slew of abuses from Qatar to Thailand, India to the United States. Qatar was forced to take action after revelations of abusive practices foisted on migrant workers helping build its infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup.

Trafficking on to fishing boats is still widespread, particularly in south-east and east Asia, where men are lured by the promise of jobs in agriculture or construction, then drugged or beaten and wake up at sea.

Exploitation of migrant workers has also been revealed in Malaysia, Cambodia, China, Italy, Vietnam and the UK.

How does someone end up becoming a slave?

Or a young girl forced to marry at 13 because climate change has flooded her family’s crops and they can no longer afford to keep her at home. Or a homeless person kidnapped from a London soup kitchen and forced to work on a caravan site. Or a migrant whose visa has expired and can be threatened with deportation if she doesn’t do what the trafficker demands.

Slavery is global but flourishes in places where the rule of law is weak and corruption goes unchecked, says Anti-Slavery International.

Will slavery ever end?

Activists such as Kara believe that slavery can be eradicated for good, but that it would take great political will and considerable research.

First, dedicated investigators would need to identify each level in the often murky supply chains of commodities in order to determine where labour abuses are taking place.

Then, independent certification processes would need to be designed for each commodity, so that consumers could make educated choices about the products they are buying and the slavery or labour abuses implicated with those purchases.

Finally, Kara says, industries would need to invest in the communities whose low-cost labour is being used to make the products. “Doing so would help mitigate vulnerability to being trafficked and exploited,” Kara said. “Consumers may have to pay slightly more for certain goods, and multinational corporations may have to accept slightly lower profits. But a freer and fairer labour environment would promote greater productivity, potentially offsetting some of those expenses.”

What do I do if I think someone is a victim of modern slavery?

According to Anti-Slavery International, slavery is so common that it is possible you come across victims “on a regular basis”. Key things to look out for are whether the person has freedom of movement; appears scared, withdrawn or shows signs of abuse; has few personal belongings or identifying documents with them; or seems under the control of someone else and scared to talk.

If you think someone may tick these boxes, it is best to contact authorities directly instead of approaching the person, as approaching them could put them in danger. In the UK, you can contact the Modern Slavery Helpline on 08000 121 700, the police, Crimestoppers or groups such as Anti-Slavery International.

Further reading

Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage ILO

Global Report on Human Trafficking UNODC

With Ash on Their Faces: Yezidi Women and the Islamic State Cathy Otten

Modern Slavery: A Global Perspective Siddharth Kara

Disposable People Kevin Bales

#One in 200 people is a slave. Why?#slavery in 2022

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warningsine · 3 months

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https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/mauritanians-go-polls-ghazouani-seeks-re-election-2024-06-29/

NOUAKCHOTT, June 29 (Reuters) - Mauritania's President Mohamed Ould Ghazouani opened an early lead as vote-counting was underway after Saturday's presidential election, provisional results from the country's electoral commission showed.

Ghazouani was leading with 49%, while his main rival, prominent anti-slavery activist Biram Dah Abeid, was at 22.68%, with around 6.49% of total votes counted, or 283 polling stations reporting out of 4,503 by 0010 GMT.

Ghazouani, 67, a former top soldier who is widely expected to win, has pledged to boost investment to spur a commodities boom in the West African country of 5 million people, as it prepares to start producing natural gas.

"The last word belongs to the Mauritanian voters. I commit myself to respecting their choice," Ghazouani said after he voted in the capital early on Saturday.

Elected for a first term in 2019, Ghazouani is facing a field of six opponents, among them Abeid, who came second in 2019 with over 18% of the vote.

Other challengers include lawyer Id Mohameden M'Bareck, economist Mohamed Lemine El Mourtaji El Wafi, and Hamadi Sidi El Mokhtar of the Islamist Tewassoul party.

Casting his ballot soon after polls opened in the capital Nouakchott, 39-year-old geographer Mohamed Cheikh Hadrami said he had voted for a candidate "who will be able to reconcile Mauritanians". He declined to say who he had voted for.

Some 2 million people were registered to vote, with major election issues including fighting corruption and creating jobs for the young.

If re-elected, Ghazouani has promised a natural gas-fired power plant from the Greater Tortue Ahmeyin offshore gas project, which is on track to start production by the end of the year. He has also pledged to invest in renewable energy and expand gold, uranium and iron-ore mining.

Ghazouani has presided with relative stability since 2019, while Mauritania's Sahel neighbours, including Mali, struggle with Islamist insurgencies that have led to military coups.

Mauritania has not recorded a militant attack on its soil in recent years and Ghazouani, who chairs the African Union, has promised to manage Islamist threats.

Abeid is challenging Ghazouani on his human rights record and the marginalisation of Mauritania's Black African population, while El Mokhtar has a following among conservative and religious voters.

"President Ghazouani will likely win the vote in the first round," said Mucahid Durmaz, senior West Africa analyst at risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft.

"The president's re-election bid has been boosted by the ruling party's landslide victory in legislative elections last year," he added.

If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, the election will go to a second round.

In the last election, some opposition candidates questioned the credibility of the vote, sparking small-scale protests.

"Everything indicates that people want change. I will have no problem recognising the results of a transparent election, but in case of fraud we'll not hesitate to call it a rigged election," El Mokhtar said after voting.

El Mokhtar was third with 14.42% of the vote, according to the provisional results on Saturday.

#mauritania #news tag #politics #elections

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go-ro · 1 year

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How do you fight against something the government doesn’t recognize?

From: The Politics of the Haratin Social Movement in Mauritania

#slavery in mauritania #islam and slavery #haratin

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williamchasterson · 3 months

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Slavery, migration and jihadists - the issues as Mauritania votes

This election is a litmus test of Mauritania’s democracy after its first democratic transfer of power in 2019. from BBC News https://ift.tt/rVL1oOR via IFTTT

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#BBC News #IFTTT

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farfrombrooklyn · 7 months

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Reader's Log, February 2024

Of the five books I read this month, two were extremely engaging and enlightening, if not absolutely enjoyable.

The remaining three were, for the most part, mysterious to me: What was it that has made these authors, or these works, worthy of praise? I'm not suggesting they don't necessarily merit that praise, but the qualities that made them praiseworthy eluded me.

First, the two that I found worthwhile:

Born in Blackness, by Howard W. French

This is a passionate and often angry work of history and journalism, the point of which is to re-center the historical narrative of the Atlantic slave trade, and the European colonization of the Americas, on Africa and Africans.

French takes up the story before the cliched 15th Century "age of discovery," noting that Africa already had a significant role in international trade, especially gold from the area around what now would be termed, I guess, the Western Sahel -- current-day Senegal, Mauritania, and Mali, basically. Gold from the Kingdom of Mali flowed up through Northern Africa and Egypt and helped underpin the economies of Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries. Indeed, an interruption in the flow of African gold led to economic meltdowns that, in turn, sparked widespread attacks on European Jews, who, as money traders and merchants, were erroneously believed to have caused the gold shortages and subsequent financial crises. Jews weren't the only ones suffering because of the financial squeezes: Economic pressures spurred unrest and enflamed the violence associated with the Reformation era, as Christians rejected the sclerotic Roman Catholic Church.

Anyway, the point is that Africa, distant as it was, was already having a significant impact on Europe, even before European rulers dispatched exploratory missions down Africa's Atlantic coast.

French's larger point in discussing medieval African societies is that European voyagers in the 15th Century were not merely seeking routes to China, nor were they exploring for the sake of exploration let alone to prove that the world was round. Rather they were in search of treasure, either through trading or raiding, and they believed it could be had in Africa. In other words, Africa was a destination unto itself, not merely a blank spot on the map to get around en route to someplace better, richer, or more culturally enticing. Africa was all those things already.

The problem was that there was not really so much gold as the rapacious Europeans had hoped. But there was something that would prove even more valuable: humans.

French does a good job addressing the fact that slavery was widespread in Africa before the mass arrival of Europeans in the 15th and 16th centuries, and lays out some of the not-very-convincing theories for why slavery had been common there. Under one theory, Africa's large landmass and low-population density made it difficult for rulers to exert authority except through, essentially, ownership of their constituents. Another theory was that land ownership was not a common concept in Africa, and therefore trade in humans somehow emerged as common marker of wealth. I'm sure my descriptions of these theories are oversimplified, but I didn't find them tremendously persuasive. French does not support one theory or another; he's just reporting on them.

In any case, the hunt for gold essentially gave way to the hunt for slaves, and soon Portugal had established, on the island of São Tomé, what I can only describe as a laboratory for the plantations that would soon be created in the Caribbean and South America and then North America. It was in these early sugar cane plantations that slavery was essentially industrialized.

One of the saddest sections of "Born in Blackness" is the story of Alfonso I, who ruled over the large and powerful Kingdom of Kongo for much of the first half of the 16th century. Alfonso adopted Christianity and was fluent in Portuguese, and made sure that members of the ruling class of his kingdom spent time in Portugal and elsewhere in Europe. I don't know that he could have withstood an out-and-out war with Portugal or Spain, but he didn't have to, at least at first, because he saw the Europeans essentially as allies and equals. He pushed back on a variety demands from his new colleagues, resisting Portuguese desires to acquire land, while encouraging trade in copper and other resources.

Unfortunately, he acquiesced in Portuguese slave trading. At first, the people taken were already being held as slaves in Alfonso's kingdom. But as the trade in humans became a torrent -- and, critically, began to envelop not merely people captured by Kongo but the people of the kingdom itself -- Alfonso saw that the trade was destroying his kingdom. He entreated European rulers to end or at least limit the practice, but nothing changed. In the end, and it is sad to say it, he seemed to have made peace with European slavers removing masses of Africans from their lands. The benefits of trade with Europe -- guns, especially, but many other goods -- were too good to give up.

This is really the height of the tragedy: Trade in, essentially, gewgaws and thingummies, was an essential driver of the mass trade in humans. I'm not sure that French would agree with my interpretation of this section of his book, but here's how I read it, at its most basic level: African rulers gave up their people--first their captives, then their own people--because they valued the crap that Europeans offered them.

My general belief, before I read "Born in Blackness," was that Europeans had essentially overwhelmed coastal Africa with superior firepower, and then, as I said above, weaponized or industrialized the already commonplace practice of slavery, especially as it was practiced by Arab traders. That's true to some extent, but it also seems to be true that the trade in humans was a cooperative effort that ended up swamping African societies and looting the lands of what were its most valuable assets -- people. As Alfonso I tragically learned, once the practice of selling humans began, it was seemingly impossible to stop. (And of course, there was the European hunger to buy, it goes without saying.)

(It's worth noting that societies throughout history have done this -- hunger for imported goods has often weakened or even undone societies in the past. Consider America's current-day hunger for drugs from Central and South America, not to say China and elsewhere.)

French's book helped reshape or even explode other assumptions that I had about slavery in America, and its growth. For example, I had always learned/accepted the idea that the pre-Civil War economy of the American South, reliant as it was on the work of slave labor, was rapidly becoming non-viable, at least economically. It was doomed to fail; it simply couldn't survive in the modern world.

That may have turned out to be true in the very, very long run, but there was nothing in 1861 that threatened the profitability or success of the south's main industry, which was producing cotton. French does an amazing job of showing how enormously important cotton was, not merely to the American South, but to the U.S. as a whole, underpinning the entire American economy, driving the financial markets of New York, the looms of New England, and international trade. Cotton was the backbone of the American economy, not some crutch that evil Southern plantation owners were using to prop up their dying way of life. The importance of cotton to the ultimate success of America cannot be understated; that nation-building wealth was created by enslaved African Americans.

It was not until 1943 that an effective cotton-picking machine was brought to market--more than eighty years after the start of the Civil War. That technical innovation could arguably have rendered slave-based agriculture less or non- competitive. But certainly slave-based cotton farming was an incredible economic engine until the Civil War, and it was in no way threatened by industrialization or modernization until much, much later.

French also does a great job defining the crucial importance of the Haitian Revolution, which he plausibly argues sparked the Louisiana Purchase. Somewhat less plausibly, he argues that the Louisiana Purchase was a scheme, of sorts, to move slaves out of the "old South," which means Virginia, I believe, into the newly acquired territory. This would, French argues, extend Jefferson's preferred vision of a society of yeoman farmers relying on slave labor to a huge new swath of the continent. In addition, French argues, Jefferson's fear of a revolution similar to Haiti's led Jefferson to want to reduce the number of slaves in Virginia, which led to a widespread forced migration of enslaved people to the Deep South. It is certainly true (as I learned from French) that in the first half of the 19th century, Virginia exported a huge number of enslaved people to the deeper South. But it seems to me (again, from reading French's book!) that this sharp shift reflected economic and political realities that had little to do with Haiti: First of all, the importation of new enslaved laborers to the U.S. had been blocked, making existing slaveholdings more valuable; second, the rich soils of the south, undepleted by tobacco farming, yielded far more income per acre via cotton production. Hence (in my reading) it was simple (gross) economic greed that led slaveholders in Virginia to send hundreds of thousands of enslaved workers to the Deep South. Had their slaveholdings been more valuable remaining in Virginia, my guess is that they would have remained there, never mind the fear of a successful uprising such as the one in Haiti.

One of the most effective aspects of "Born in Blackness" is French's various reporting trips to the historical sites related to the birth of the Atlantic slave trade and its metastasis into the economic engine that it became in the US and elsewhere. He visits the early fortress and slave-trading site of Elmina in what is now Ghana, which is at least preserved and now is a Unesco site. Other important sites in the history of Africans and their role in building the modern world are barely marked or remembered, here in the US, as well as in the Caribbean and in Africa. French visits them and in so doing allows us to honor the people who suffered there, so they are a little less forgotten.

Every Man for Himself and God Against All, by Werner Herzog

This is only the second time I have ever listened to an entire audiobook. The first was "Dreams of My Father," the Barack Obama memoir, which Obama himself narrated. In similar fashion, Herzog himself is the reader of his own memoir. I have tried to listen to any number of audio books and even audio magazine pieces and newspaper stories, over the years, and I have found them stultifying, so I think, for me at least, the only audiobooks I find engaging are those read by their own authors, and possibly only if they are memoirs, and even more so, only if they are read by people with rich, interesting voices.

Herzog really does have a wonderful voice, and he knows it. In one passage, late in the book, he boasts about all the many people who have tried to imitate the way he speaks, but none, he assures us, have succeeded.

Herzog does a lot of crowing in the book, which sometimes is charming and sometimes is not. When he turns his attentions to the accomplishments of his brothers and his wives and children, for example, he is decidedly not charming, but a bore.

The narrative is not really a memoir, per se, but rather a series of semi-related essays about Herzog's various passions -- ski jumping, for instance, or cave paintings, or hiking, or dying languages. The tale of his longstanding interest in ancient cave paintings is delightful: As a boy, he saw a coffee table book about cave paintings in France. Unable to afford it, but absolutely committed to acquiring it, he gets a job as a ballboy at a tennis club in Munich in order to save up enough money to buy the book.

That story in many ways encapsulates the essence of Herzog. He stumbles across something and becomes obsessed with it -- he must own the book, he must walk the trail, he must create the movie. But how? The answer, at least in the early part of his life, is work: He worked a really amazing number of different jobs, always in service of some other goal. For example:

Cuttlefish fisherman off the coast of Crete

Spot welder

Lumberyard laborer

Independent car exporter

Parking lot attendant

Whatever he was doing, it was always in service of some ambition -- raising money to get to Africa; raising money for a film; or just saving enough to buy a picture book of cave paintings.

By the way, the story of his long-ago infatuation with that coffee table book, and the job he took to save money for it, won him the job of directing "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," Herzog says. He was up against dozens of other directors for the coveted position, he relates, boastfully, and the rest of them were French, so presumably a local director would win the job, but when the producer heard about Herzog's childhood obsession with images of ancient cave paintings, he dropped everything and offered the role to the German.

I'm not a giant fan of Herzog's movies; I've seen Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo and a few of his documentaries. My sense of them is that, while they are often powerful and passionate works of art, they are also sloppy and slapdash. They work, but I suspect that is in spite of their sloppiness.

I know this is probably not a mainstream take on Herzog but there it is, it's my take.

The same goes for this memoir. It is unbearably sloppy in parts, as Herzog drones on and on, for instance, about his older brother's accomplishments as a businessman. Herzog has every right to be proud; the boys grew up under difficult circumstances, impoverished, with no father present, in the calamity of wartime and post-war Germany. But that doesn't justify a seemingly endless catalog of his brother, Till's, career, which we hear about at great length, including careful enumeration of the value of vast shipments of widgets to Greece, or whatever it is that Till was trading.

It's worth noting that Till provided critical funds when Herzog ran out of money in the midst of filming Aguirre -- again, an example of Herzog's sloppiness and impetuosity. By the way, the tale of how that funding came through is both charming but also quite obviously an invention. As Herzog tells it, the crew had used up its funds and was at risk of losing everything, still stationed in the jungle, with the filming unfinished. Till, at this point a successful businessman, agreed to bankroll the production, but the money couldn't arrive quickly enough. To save the day, Herzog's younger half-brother, Lucki, supposedly ventured into a rich neighborhood (in Peru, I think) and simply knocked on doors, asking if anyone would agree to provide a large sum of money so his brother could finish shooting his movie (this at a point when Herzog was still basically an unknown). Lo and behold, one of the doors Lucki knocks on happens to be answered by a music festival promoter, who agrees to front the money, which Till's funds then repay with interest.

I call bullshit on this story, charming as it is.

Tales of deprivation abound in the memoir -- of childhood hunger, of living in a cold hut in the mountains where the family (mother, Till and Werner) waited out the war, of suffering from dysentery while traveling as a teenager in Africa, and more. And hunger doesn't feature only in childhood memories: During the filming of Aguirre, Herzog and two other men paddle to the middle of the river to discuss the difficulties the production is facing--they are unable to move on with the shoot, and in fact, they haven't even enough to eat, and as they float together in the river they begin to cry from hunger and despair.

That story I believe.

Herzog's ego is Alp-sized; chapter after chapter feature him boasting about the famous and accomplished people who have made a point of meeting him. I'm sure these tales are true; obviously he is wildly magnetic. On the other hand, I'm not so sure that Herzog is as unimpressed with celebrity as he claims to be. Else why does he spend so much time mentioning the famous people he has spent time with?

The charming side of this boastful habit are stories where Herzog, in the grips of one obsession or another, simply reaches out to someone out of sheer passion in order to satisfy a curiosity or to create a new project. After reading "Awakenings" by Oliver Sachs, he makes contact and visits him in his home. Herzog is constantly doing this kind of thing to learn more about something that he become interested in. You can see this again and again in his documentaries--he loves to learn about the things that have caught his interest.

His passion is, of course, a dangerous thing to be around. His willingness to endanger those around him in pursuit of a good shot for a film has resulted in grievous injury. He would dispute this but there's an ugly selfishness attached to his furious curiosity. He puts himself and others at risk. I imagine that most of the people involved in shooting, say, Aguirre, are glad for a lifetime of stories that they can tell about being involved with the film, and yet they could easily have lost their lives for it.

Recalling the filming of Fitzcarraldo, Herzog expresses his admiration and appreciation for one of his key associates (I think it was Walter Saxer; the problem with audiobooks is the difficulty of going back to find recalled details). Apparently Herzog and (Saxer?) had a falling out at some point when Saxer felt that Herzog had not given him sufficient credit for making possible the difficult and absurdly dangerous stunt of hauling a riverboat over a mountain. Herzog, narrating the story, magnanimously makes amends, saying that he must give credit where credit is due -- it was Saxer who made the stunt possible. That would seem to settle it, except that Herzog immediately adds that, at the moment of filming, a piece of equipment broke, and Saxer said the shot could not continue--so Herzog himself steps in to do something physical -- turn a winch, wedge a support post up, I can't remember what -- and so, he concludes, in fact it was not Saxer at all who really made the shot possible, it was he, Herzog, who must take credit. And by the way, Herzog concedes that proceeding with that shot was extremely dangerous, both for him and for the crew around him. His need to get the shot overrode everything else, including the safety and well-being of his colleagues. And he still needed to boast about it and claim credit, fifty years later.

That's the two-edged sword of Herzog the storyteller: On the one hand, the selfishness, the bloated ego, the need to delve into endless, excruciating details of long-ago hiking trips, etc. On the other, the charming polymath, the autodidact constantly finding new things to learn, the childlike desire to share his interest with you. In the end, the art and the joy justify the irritating egoism.

In an interview in the New York Times, Herzog denied being an egomaniac, one of the most laughably deluded statements I've ever read. And yet he also said, to justify his acts of megalomania, something beautiful and true: "Ultimately they are great gestures. They are gestures of the soul and they give meaning to my existence."

Toward the end of "Every Man for Himself and God Against All," Herzog recalls being asked what he would do if he learned he only one day left to live. His answer: "I would start working on a new film."

***

OK, as to the books I did not like nearly so much as those first two...

Collected Poems by Anthony Hecht

Hecht, a 20th century American poet, is a fascinating oddity, a middle class Jewish kid from New York who, while serving in the army during World War II, conducted interviews with concentration camp survivors and was, I believe, present for the liberation of the Flossenberg camp, and who then, for some reason, adopted the poetic persona of an Oxford-educated Englishman, writing in rhyme and using strict formal structures, favoring impossibly sesquipedalian vocabulary, and even spelling words such as "labour" in the English style.

This and more I learned from a wonderfully concise review in the NYT by David Orr, a piece which manages to tweak Hecht for his tics and mannerisms but still address his poetry respectfully--while realistically assessing Hecht's place in the canon.

There's hardly a thing I can add to Orr's great review. All I can say is that Orr spurred my curiosity to the point of buying the Hecht collection, even though he was hardly enthusiastic for much of the work. Whatever, it made me want to read Hecht, and I'm glad I did, but the plumminess of his verse does not (as Orr warned) often sit well with the topics at hand, whether they are the grim remembrances of Nazi atrocities, or just minor rants about bad weather in Rochester.

One thing Orr did not mention is the weirdly specific and useless footnotes that Hecht added to his work. I think my favorite was attached to the line, "Over the rim of the glass containing a good martini with a twist..." To this, in the footnote, Hecht appends: "martini with a twist, I.e. the cocktail flavored with a sliver of lemon peel."

I could go on but I will simply commend to you the review by David Orr.

Homesick for Another World, by Otessa Moshfegh

As with the volume of Hecht's poetry, Moshfegh's work was recommended to me in a review in the New York Times, this one by Dwight Garner. The review was of a semi-recent Moshfegh novel, "Lapvona," and it was not a positive review. In fact it was scathing: "It’s a pungent book," Garner wrote, "but a flat one, narrow in its emotional range, a bleak, meandering and muddy-soled mix of fairy tale and folk horror."

Still, Garner was at pains to express his admiration for Moshfegh, noting that her earlier works had reminded him of Flannery O'Connor, among others, and also of Diane Arbus.

I can see the parallels, especially with Arbus, a photographer I've grown to have mixed feelings about. Arbus sought out societal outcasts (carnival/circus sideshow performers) and people with physical abnormalities (people with gigantism, dwarfism, etc.) Those pictures, like those of cross-dressers and strippers, are generally striking in the way they portray their subjects -- comfortable, relaxed, not posing exactly but aware of the camera. I might argue that Arbus was no less of a gawker at these "freak" subjects than fairgoers who paid a quarter to look at the bearded lady--Arbus just printed her images in black and white on good quality paper. She alchemized rubbernecking into art.

Meanwhile, Arbus also shot "normal" people -- men, women, children. Her most famous images, probably, are children, like the photograph of twin girls in ruffled dresses that served as a model for the ghost twins in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining," or the image of a knobby-kneed blond boy holding a toy grenade. For that one, the shutter clicked just as he was pretending, apparently, to blow up. In these and other pictures, whether the subject is "normal" or not, Arbus seems to be creating grotesques, almost but not quite nudging you in the ribs and saying, "Jeez, get a load of this guy."

My favorite comment on Arbus is from critic Wayne Koestenbaum, who asked if Arbus's photos humiliate the viewer or the subject.

Moshfegh elicits a similar response from me, but, as it's fiction, I wonder if the Koestenbaum question would be better put this way: "Do Otessa Moshfegh's stories humiliate the reader, or the writer?"

Like Arbus, Moshfegh deals in deformities -- withered hands, hair-covered moles, rashes, the like -- and stilted, ugly characters who neither reflect on themselves nor show much sympathy for others. That's fine, I guess, although I don't know what the point is. (Not that there has to be a point, I will concede.)

What really offends me about Moshfegh's stories is that I find them not believable in the least. I don't believe in the situations she describes; I don't believe in the characters she creates; I don't believe in the towns she puts them in. It all reads like it was written by a smart, creepy, smirking college student with no real knowledge of the world.

I don't buy any of it. I know she has been praised to the skies by readers whose opinions I respect. She has won the awards and racked up the advances. Good for her, I guess. It's just not for me.

Selected Stories, by Robert Walser

If it's not already obvious, I don't read with any grand plan. I just ping pong from book to book. I keep a list of books and authors on my phone, and any time I read or hear about something potentially interesting, I jot it down, and whenever next I am in a bookstore, I just click through the list.

Often the titles are relatively obscure and it is months or years before I come across a certain book, so the list is full of items that I may have taken note of years and years ago, never having found the work on a shelf. The list is long enough, and the entries are simple enough, without any notes as to why I added them to the list, that by the time I get to actually reading a title, not only do I not know why it caught my interest, I often have no idea what the book is about, or even who the author is.

In the case of Walser, I was at best faintly aware of him as an early 20th century European -- I probably would have lumped him in with Josef Roth and Stephan Zweig and Erich Kastner, which I guess is not far from accurate, although not exactly right, either.

I learned, or possibly re-learned, from the brief introduction by Susan Sontag, that Walser might be considered a "good humored, sweet Beckett." That seemed, at first blush, promising, but having thought about it a bit, I'm not even sure what it means. Walser was also compared to Kafka -- supposedly Robert Musil ("The Man Without Qualities") said that Kafka was a writer of the Walser type (!) and that, too, I cannot quite figure out.

In any case, these stories are miniatures--both in terms of their length and their focus. Some are basically short stories in standard story form; others are posed as parables. Many of them are not really fiction, per se, but musings. These often are little more than a page or two and yet seem to ramble on interminably. The longer items, in particular "The Walk," which seems to be his best-known work, is something beyond interminable.

I read somewhere that Walser was, or wished to be, a feuilletonist, that is, a writer for the entertainment pages of a newspaper, and I can see imagine his odd musings and humor pieces in the front section of a literary or society magazine. I would also imagine that they might be more entertaining to the reader of the day. But one hundred years later, in their deracinated and collected form, they just feel like rambling notes of nothing.

As with Moshfegh, much smarter people than me (Sontag! Sebald!) consider Walser a landmark writer. I'm sure I'm wrong about him but the glory of being a "just" a reader is that I can blithely sweep aside the expert class and dismiss this work as dated fish wrap.

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beardedmrbean · 9 months

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You that comic that said “white people invented slavery!” Is hilarious as Sony’s women king expose black people like me to the Dahomey, who practices were so inhuman any American slave owner would go “HOLY SHIT!” and made me to nearly have a mental breakdown after learning how the slave trade really went

As the movie is the equivalent of Hindus lionizing the Mughals, Koreans lionizing unit 731, or in some crazy ass future, Jews lionizing the Nazis.

I really need to make that “False Eden” book as far too many Black Americans think Africa was a paradise because the Europeans came.

Every culture created slavery independent of each other, so various European tribes and confederacies created slavery the same that various African tribes and confederacies did, same with Asia and both Americas, Australia, and most if not all of the islands that have been populated.

I don't think penguins do slavery so I think Antartica is ok, but

The claim that it was just black people enslaved, or that they had it the worst is ridiculous as well.

Go watch Spartacus, it's fiction but accurate as well when it comes to things like chaining galley slaves to the boat when it's battle time so they can't flee or attack their masters and will die chained to their seats if the galley sinks.,

Ottomans are a weird situation there, since some slaves managed to reach lofty heights in society, but you were still property and the jannisaries that managed to get status were also young men who had been kidnapped from Christian families at a a incredibly young age, forcibly converted to islam and brainwashed to have a fanatical devotion to whomever the sitting sultan was at the time.

I say weird because those existed, but all the other ones did too so there was regular chattel slavery, agricultural, those galley ones for their boats, and sexual slavery as well.

All through Africa there was much of the same, POW's had whatever freedom they had stripped away and became property of whomever the person in charge was whatever their title.

Mauritania that I mentioned last night, they had slavery since time immemorial, and there's families that could probably trace their lineage back dozens of generations while also tracing the lineage of the family that owned them through those generations.

Nobody's hands are clean, not if we're going to hold them guilty of the sins of their forefathers at least.

Sooner people figure that out and focus on their future instead of a past they never even lived the sooner things can move forward at a accelerated rate.

Wonder how much more we could accomplish as a species if we stopped blaming people for what someone else did 200 years ago and instead focused on now.

Doesn't mean we can't remember that bad things happened, just have to remember to blame the people that did it and make sure the sins of the past aren't repeated is all, can't get revenge on the dead anyhow.

They tried that with at least one Pope and Cromwell, neither of whom knew it happened.

#anonymous

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locustheologicus · 7 months

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Human Trafficking: an issue that concerns us all

Trafficking constitutes an unjustifiable violation of the freedom and dignity of victims, the constitutive dimension of the human being willed and created by God. It must therefore be considered a crime against humanity. Without a doubt, without a doubt. - Pope Francis

Part of the concerns that we have working with migrants is the possibility that some of our new arrivals are involved with human trafficking. Human Trafficking involves those who, out of desperation, are made to participate in the sex trade and those who are in the forced labor market, aka modern day slavery.

In March of 2023 I wrote a post where I shared my insights on a book titled “The Great Escape” by Saket Soni. It is a well researched book on an instance of a 2008 forced labor scheme that abused desperate Indian migrants. The situation that we currently experience, with the recent migrants, raises some possible red flags. Communities of illiterate North Africans who seem to be guided by a spokesman for basic food and clothing raises these concerns. Here is a list of red flags that we are aware of and attentive to:

Worker’s are not free to leave premises.

Worker’s live at the business.

Worker’s are transported to the location by the owner or manager and all workers arrive and leave at the same time.

Worker’s have excessively long and/or unusual hours or is always available on demand.

Worker’s owe a large debt that is continually increasing and cannot be paid off.

Workplace has high security features such as opaque windows, bars, locks outside doors.

Worker’s seems to be deferring to another person before giving information, avoids eye contact, or isn’t allowed to speak.

Goods or services are priced below general market rates.

Someone else controls the worker’s identification documents and finances.

Most of these communities are being placed in the shelter system so the first few flags do not come under our awareness. But the last three flags are sometimes seen and this is what concerns us. The situation of modern day slavery emerges from commercial exploitation of groups of people that live in desperate situations and are told that opportunities exist to become American citizens if they accept forms of indentured servitude. One of the things that we see is that smuggling rings are popping up all over to take advantage of these desperate communities. Currently, many nations are experiencing dramatic instability, such as Venezuela, Senegal, Haiti, Ecuador, Mauritania, Nicaragua, Guinea, and areas of Eastern Europe. This is creating a devastating situation for many desperate people and, at the same time, it is developing a gang-driven human smuggling market to take advantage of their despair.

The International Labor Organization has a link with resources on this issue and they offer a video below to help explain this situation better.

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Pope Francis captured the reality of human trafficking well in his most recent encyclical Fratelli Tutti:

Sadly, some “are attracted by Western culture, sometimes with unrealistic expectations that expose them to grave disappointments. Unscrupulous traffickers, frequently linked to drug cartels or arms cartels, exploit the weakness of migrants, who too often experience violence, trafficking, psychological and physical abuse and untold sufferings on their journey”. Those who emigrate “experience separation from their place of origin, and often a cultural and religious uprooting as well. Fragmentation is also felt by the communities they leave behind, which lose their most vigorous and enterprising elements, and by families, especially when one or both of the parents migrates, leaving the children in the country of origin”. For this reason, “there is also a need to reaffirm the right not to emigrate, that is, to remain in one’s homeland”. #38

The right not to emigrate is not a call to close the borders. Instead Pope Francis calls on all of us to stregthen the global political and economic infrustructure that can regulate these unjust abuses and to promote sustainable development that allows communities to live within their own sense of harmony and stability. Again, Pope Francis shares this vision in Fratelli Tutti.

I would also note the need for a reform of “the United Nations Organization, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth”… There is a need to ensure the uncontested rule of law and tireless recourse to negotiation, mediation and arbitration, as proposed by the Charter of the United Nations, which constitutes truly a fundamental juridical norm”. There is need to prevent this Organization from being delegitimized, since its problems and shortcomings are capable of being jointly addressed and resolved. #173

These are desperate times for sure, but we as Catholics are taught the social vision that emerges from our faith tradition. We respond to the dignity that we share with all members of the human community and as such we tend to the needs of those we encounter and advocate for the possibility of a better world.

In the coming days, the U.S. House of Representatives will vote on the Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Reauthorization Act of 2023 (H.R. 5856). This bipartisan bill would do several things to combat the scourge of human trafficking.

#youtube

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