Destroying the Lie that Africa Didn't Fight Against Our Enslavement

Samory Ture, leader of the Wasslouluu Empire, led fierce and uncompromising resistance against French slave raids in the mid 1800s in West Africa.

As incredible as it is, there are a growing number of people, particularly Africans within the U.S., who believe that Africa stood by twiddling its thumbs while the ancestors of those of us living in the Western Hemisphere were savagely kidnapped and brought to this part of the world.  There are at least a couple of reasons why this insanity continues to grow legs.  First, as much as people don't want to acknowledge it, people don't engage in serious study of history.  Africans don't study African history and no one else does either.  The danger in this is if you don't put in the work to properly understand our true history, you have absolutely no choice except to believe the false narratives promoted by our enemies.  And, they have plenty of them that they cram down our throats 24/7.  They tell us Africans in Africa don't want a connection with us.  They tell us our people in Africa willingly sold us into slavery.  They desire us to believe that slavery actually, as astounding as this is, has benefited those of us living within the U.S.  No matter what confusion rolls out of people's mouths, if you don't know our glorious history in Africa fighting tooth and nail against those who would colonize and enslave us, you have no option except to accept, at least on some dysfunctional and sub-conscious level, the lies being told to us about our history and the fact so many of these myths still have legs beneath them confirms their effectiveness.

The second reason is much more insidious.  There are Africans among us who have figured out that there are financial advantages available to them if they decide to accept the the master's narrative of our history.  From a strategic perspective, an African articulating the lies indicated above is more potent than a European advancing these backward notions.  The capitalist system certainly understands this so there is a lane that is always open for opportunistic Africans to parrot the perspectives of those who want to keep Africans disconnected from each other and especially from Africa.

So, this piece is dedicated to our courageous ancestors who fought relentlessly for our lives.  Africa lost millions from this resistance and this reality is directly responsible for many of the issues impacting Africa and her children everywhere on earth today.  So, we wish to firmly and resolutely acknowledge, respect, and thank our ancestors for fighting so hard to save the millions of us who currently inhabit North, Central, South America, and the Caribbean.

We start by speaking of the Kongo, or Bakongo people of the Central African coastal region.  They first encountered the Portuguese around 1490 and as was the consistently the case, they saw the new people as equals where mutually beneficial relationships could be established.  Direct trade resulted initially from this relationship in the areas of gold, ivory, etc. The people of this region had access to the rich Victoria River trade routes from which to engage the Europeans. Unfortunately, the Portuguese reached a point where they wanted trade for our human ancestors to sub-plant the previous trade relationships.  When the Bakongo people immediately resisted this inhumane request, the Portuguese initiated "slave raids" against the desires of the Bakongo people.  These raids were deep incursions by the Portuguese into Central African territories where Africans were brutally and savagely kidnapped and forced into slave dungeons to be shipped against their will to the Western world. 

What's important is that the story of our history doesn't stop there.  Its essential that we recognize that our people in Africa never stopped and watched while we were kidnapped and brutalized.  Its crucial that we know that the terror we experienced wasn't just a terror those of us now in the West experienced.  The pain was spread to our relatives at home in Africa because they always resisted.  As the Portuguese, Dutch, and French continued raiding our people through the 1500s, the Bakongo countered by fighting back fiercely.  In 1568, the Jaga rebellion resulted in the Bakongo burning down several Portuguese settlements throughout the Kongo region.  The resistance from that point forward was so intense that in 1575, the Portuguese established the city of Luanda, which is the capitol city in Angola today, as a strategic location from which to launch their military attacks against the Bakongo people.  The challenge to Portuguese domination continued until the 1920s and the only reason the Bakongo were not successful was because the Portuguese, through their racist policy of assimilation/domination, sent infinite people resources to Central Africa, much the same way the zionists have used settlements in occupied Palestine, to challenge the very existence of the Bakongo.  Literary millions of Africans were murdered by a combination of Portugal, Belgium, and France, and this happened for absolutely no other reason beyond the desire of our people in that region to sacrifice their lives in order to protect us.

During the early late 1870s, Samory Ture was the Muslim leader of the Wassouluu Empire in the area known as Guinea, West Africa, today.  It was a vast area that this empire encompassed.  Major parts of what is today Sierra Leone, Mali, Burkina Faso, and the Ivory Coast, were then a part of the Wassouluu Empire.  The French descended upon Wassouluu around 1880 and the same trade relationships initially developed until the French decided trading for human bodies would be much more lucrative.  When Ture and the Wassouluu of course rejected this demand, the French also initiated slave raids on Wassouluu people.  The Wassouluu response was to mount a massive war against the French from 1882 until 1898.  This means the Wassouluu continued to fight even after the Berlin Conference where Europe officially cemented its colonial relationship with Africa.  The Wassouluu were undeterred, fighting back.  Losing hundreds of thousands in the process, but not without inflicting major damage against the French.  In 1895, the Wassouluu overwhelmed several military columns of French troops in the area known as Kankan.  This victory bolstered Ture's confidence to defeat the French and he sought to establish a united front with the massive Ashanti Empire.  Unfortunately, the Ashanti were engaged in their own fierce resistance against the British at the same time and the ability of the British to eventually overwhelm the Ashanti set the stage for the eventual dominance of the French against the Wassouluu.  

We could provide many more stories of our proud history.  The Satiru uprising against the British in Nigeria.  The Ovimbundu resistance in Angola.  The Malinde in Sierra Leone. The resistance of the Hausa, Mandinka, and Wolof.  There was resistance against enslavement efforts in East Africa.  There are so many other examples of African resistance to European efforts to enslave our people, but the important point here is that this resistance happened.  Our people fought for us, vigilantly, and with great costs to Africa.  And, that resistance didn't just start with slavery.  That resistance existed because of the dignity of our people.  A dignity that many today are attempting to claim didn't exist.  Clearly, the armed resistance from the U.S. civil rights and Black power movement, the Land and Freedom Movement (the Mau Mau) in Kenya, the successful Maroon rebellions in the Caribbean, Brazil, Central America, are reflections of that dignity.  The fact Samory Ture is the great grandfather of that great Pan-Africanist Sekou Ture was no accident.  And the fact Sekou Ture was the political mentor of many of our best Pan-Africanists over the last 50 years is no accident either.  We are always a part of a continuum.  A Pan-African continuum of struggle and resistance against anyone who would impose their oppression against our people.

The last element of this history that must be discussed are the class contradictions among our people.  Certainly, just as we expressed how there are some Africans today who choose to side with our enemies for personal advancement, there were some Africans then who decided to side with our colonizers.  Class struggle is a reality for all of humanity, but it doesn't in any way negate the unquestionable fact that our people lost millions of lives fighting to keep all of us in Africa.  Any understanding of the problems Africa faces today illustrates how no African on the continent, except the elites who sided with our enemies, had anything to gain by not resisting European expansion, slave raids, etc.  The truth is we fought for ourselves.  We always resisted.  We continue to resist.  And, we always will resist.  That's what people just do when they have dignity as a people and we have as much dignity as any other people.  The only difference with us is we have permitted our people to be misled by those who wish to continue to exploit us people.  Once we can tell our true history, we can once and for all eliminate this insane lack of pride in Africa.  Once we do away with that, victory for our people is near on the horizon.