Moaning in Toronto

You know the silly season is here when the death of a racoon on a city street makes the obituary columns. I would probably not have taken much notice of the reports myself except that the creature apparently died just round the corner from where we live.

In the nature of things, racoons everywhere die all the time, whether they enjoy an urban life or reside in their country habitat. Also, few would normally shed a tear when a racoon passes on, least of all for city-dwelling racoons. These are animals that do not normally endear themselves to city humans, principally because of their habit of upsetting our garbage bins during the night and leaving the mess for us to clear up.

But July is the month when public sources of entertainment dry up. Politics, especially, is at an ebb, with Parliament in recess and politicians find themselves at a loose end, with fewer opportunities to keep their mouths shut except at the traditional constituency barbecue. True, there could be music entertainments of all kinds, jazz, pop, classical, etc. Besides, every weekend sees some street party or the other in celebration of the city’s cultural diversity.  And of course, there are the staple shootings, stabbings, road rage and other fracas that keep the police busy. All predictable, but apparently not quite enough to satisfy our desire for something out of the ordinary. Even something as big as the Pan-American Games coming to town was, initially, not enough to get residents animated, leading to no less than the New York Times harrumphing that, “most Torontonians seem to be greeting the event with a shrug” (NYTPanAMGames) And, not until the country’s athletes started winning shedloads of medals did the city wake up to the possibility that something special might be going on on their doorstep.

But it seems that when it comes to dead racoons, we get pumped up enough to send messages around the world through the internet.  How else can one explain the sensational spread of an inconsequential story of a racoon dying at a street corner in mid-town? (DeadRacoon) Of course the term “viral” has acquired a whole new meaning in the last few years, perhaps without a full appreciation of the word’s provenance or of how the original can be a potential killer not to be trifled with.

Tell Fren Tru

We hold these truths to be self-evident...

 

What is it about America and race? Why does that country obsess so much about it? And, if you ask Americans, I doubt whether they themselves can give a coherent explanation why it looms as large as it does in their nation’s psyche.

In less than one year, there have been at least half a dozen occasions when race in America became the focus of not only national but international attention as well. Here is a sample of some of the more notorious ones:

·        July 17, 2014, Eric Garner died in New York City, after a police officer locked him in a chokehold. 

·        August 9, 2014, an 18-year-old man, Michael Brown, is fatally shot by Darren Wilson, a Ferguson MO cop. 

·        April 4, 2015, Patrolman Michael Slager fatally shoots Walter Scott in the back following a traffic stop for a non-functioning brake light in North Charleston, South Carolina.

·        April 12, 2015 Freddie Gray suffers a fatal spinal injury while being transported in a Baltimore MD police van that made several rough stops, starts and turns. Gray did not have a seat belt on. His only restraint apparently was handcuffs, a latter-day version of the Middle Passage.

·        June 5, 2015 Officer Eric Casebolt, a McKinney TX cop is filmed pulling his gun on a bunch of teenagers at a pool party. He wrestles a 14 year-old girl to the ground for good measure. 

·        June 10, 2015 Rachel Dolezal, the Spokane WA NAACP president is outed by her parents. She had been “passing” as black for many years.

·        June 17, 2015 Dylann Roof, a 21 year old joins a Bible Study group in Charleston SC’s Emanuel AME Church and sits in quietly for an hour. Then, declaiming hatred, he pulls out a gun and opens fire on the group of churchgoers he was ostensibly studying with. He kills nine of them.

The thing about these incidents is that, in nearly all, the victims are black. The exception is Rachel Dolezal's, whose journey to victimhood may have been partially self-mediated although eventually sparked by intra-family dysfunction. 

When you stand back, the dynamic in the majority of these encounters favours those with the power. Yet, those wielding power, influence and authority never seem satisfied unless the disadvantaged are rendered even more disadvantaged and, still better, dead. True, no one in his right senses would describe Mr Roof, the alleged assassin in the Bible Study murders as powerful and privileged (America, that bastion of the classless society has a term for individuals like this) but such is the overwhelming grip of racism in America that it pops up in the most improbable of circumstances.

There are two reasons why I am writing this post. One is that, what happens in America and what America does have resonance for the entire world; American Law is virtually World Law and all of us are expected to tow its line. Just ask FIFA. Besides, America would not have come about except for their expressed conviction thal all men are created equal. They say that upfront in their Declaration of Independence document.

The other reason is that American racism is just another iteration of tribalism. And while we in Africa now generally experience little racism, tribalism is alive and well throughout the continent. It is an ism that is every bit as corrosive as America’s principal moral failing. Perhaps even worse.

Tell Fren Tru

Finding Ourselves

I know. I have been quiet over the last few weeks.

Hope you missed me.

          The thing is, I got caught up in the spring migration back to Canada from West Africa. Now, back in the condo jungle that is Toronto, spring has been rather slow in coming. Not altogether ideal conditions for working, contrary to what some might think. Ordinarily, at this time of the year, one would expect the weather to be such that it gets the creative juices flowing, in tandem with sap rising. But enough of weather-related excuses. Spring has now fully sprung with temperatures in the mid-twenties, albeit under a blanket of cloud.

          A more germane reason for not getting down to actually writing is “research”, an activity that covers a range of sins from sitting in the park observing people go by, to watching lots of TV or surfing the net or sticking your nose in a book, activities that require more or less undivided attention, depending on the seriousness with which the task is undertaken or on how interesting the subject is. This time, I have been much captivated (pun not intended) by the problem of how to trace the origins of  Africans that were forcibly taken to the Americas during the Atlantic Slave Trade. 

          It had always been a challenge to determine who the people were that had been dragged from their homeland and taken across the Atlantic to live in slavery. And, as to where they came from, there was no dependable information either, although it was clear that the field of this execrable harvest was along the entire west coast of Africa bounded by the northern and southern tropical latitudes. And by the time the trade ended, recorded information of the 20 million slave identities was scarce, if available at all and, for the majority of these individuals memory, handed down the generations was also vanishingly scanty. Nor was there any remembrance of where exactly on the continent they had been taken from. 

When African slaves were landed on American soil there was no reception committee inquiring about who they were and where they had come from. They were just sold. Like so much chattel. In due course, individual identities became submerged under the weight of slavery’s institutions, losing their own names for that of their “owners”. Two hundred years after the end of slavery, the search for these individuals’ names, faces and personalities remains much as that for the holy grail. Now, as researchers sift through the detritus of history they are beginning to discover sources that might indicate not only geographic origins but, as well, suggestions of slaves’ original names and identities. I came upon some of these when I was, myself, researching my own antecedents as a descendent of “Liberated Africans”. Liberated Africans, or “recaptives”, were individuals freed from captivity aboard slave ships by the Royal Navy after Britain passed a law in 1808 declaring the Atlantic Slave Trade unlawful. 

From then, on to about mid-19^th century, the navy intercepted and captured hundreds of slave-carrying ships, freeing over 90,000 Africans and landing them at Freetown, Sierra Leone. The power of these sources is that the identity of each liberated slave is written down in a ledger kept by clerks of Britain’s colonial administration in Freetown, giving details of name, age, sex, physical characteristics and, importantly, the port on the African coast from which they had been taken. The records were in duplicate, one set remaining in Sierra Leone and the other sent to Britain. These records can be seen in the National Archives of Sierra Leone or at the Britain's National Archives. Besides, the records have been digitised and are available at http://slavevoyages.org/tast/resources/slaves.faces  

The main limitations of the records is that the names were, presumably, phonetically recorded (the clash of accents among clerks from different regions of Britain is best not imagined) and are not easily referenced to currently recognizable African names although, with a bit of imagination, useful guesses can be made. 

Besides being useful for identifying where Liberated Africans came from in the post-abolition era, the records are a potential proxy for where others might have come from during the active phase of the Slave Trade itself. But I won’t go there for the moment. It is enough to say that whenever men do evil they leave a trail that ultimately leads to their indictment. A warning to those thugs who violate the continent today. 

 

Tell Fren Tru

Something Rotten

Some 20 years ago, an article in the Economist newspaper posited that the greatest threat to world order in the late 20^th and early 21^st century was migration. It is true that by 2015 we still have not seen the apocalypse that the article predicted, but it is clear that we seem destined for a day when millions or even billions would be on the move from areas of the world where life is intolerable to other less blighted places. Yes, we are no way near an apocalypse. But we are getting pretty close to a human disaster that we seem unable or unwilling to stop. This horror is unfolding right in front of our eyes in the region where Africa meets with a Europe that is in no mood to accept anyone’s "...tired, poor or huddled masses, yearning to breathe free".   

Refugees at Lampedusa

The urge to migrate to better conditions is an almost irresistible impulse in human beings, ever since the first humans trudged out of the continent of Africa. 

And that urge to leave continues to this day maybe for less romantic reasons than we like to fancy. True, those early humans who blazed the emigration trail almost certainly had no idea where they were going. They just followed their nose and, presumably climate trends and food opportunities, which eventually led to their populating the entire planet and the survival of our species. And that was good.

          That same instinctual drive may be as difficult to resist in today’s Africa as it was in the Africa of two million years ago. How else can you explain the madness of embarking across the vastness of the Mediterranean in unseaworthy craft, without navigation aids, safety equipment or competent mariners? 

          As I write this blog, European Union leaders are being dragged kicking an screaming to a summit to consider ways of alleviating the plight of these thousands of migrants willing to risk their lives and those of their children to cross a sea notorious for swallowing up the unprepared. So far this year, thousands have drowned, and in the latest casualty figures, some 800 would-be immigrants have died in the attempt to cross the sea.

        Quite coincidentally, the issue of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers has become part of the general debate involving immigration that is dominating the election campaign currently underway in Britain. One party in particular, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) is really rocking the electoral boat with its anti-immigration stance. Its leader, Nigel Farage is a highly articulate and, for some,

charismatic figure but who, himself, is also of immigrant stock. On a recent visit to the Gambia while, looking up a number in the Gambian phone directory, I was forced to do a double take at a half page of “Farages” living in the Greater Banjul Area. Admittedly, there were no “Nigels”, the closest thing being something like “Nabil”. Could our Nigel himself have been African after all?

          So, here on the northern pole of the continent a tragedy, most horrible is in the process of being enacted whilst on the continent's opposite pole  another of similar horror, though not yet of the same magnitude plays out in the rainbow Republic of South Africa, celebrated for its accommodation of different folks with different strokes. The republic`s current imbroglio arose after the Zulu King, Goodwill Zwelithini demanded that foreign workers go home, provoking his 'subjects' (irony no doubt unappreciated in the 'republic') to take the law into their own hands. Now, after several deaths and a short reign of terror against fellow 'other' Africans, the king is backpedalling, claiming that his words had been taken out of context. 

          What these polarities are telling us is that there is something rotten somewhere in the middle of the continent. As if we didn’t know that already. Not only do we know what sickens the continent, we know also what to do about it. We just don’t have the will.

That’s all.

Tell Fren Tru