When you think of capitalism, what may automatically come to mind is the thought of large corporations exploiting the “little” poor guy in sweat shops or African children collecting the coffee bean, cocoa or on gold and coltan mining fields toiling just at survival level. But what about the ongoing exodus of African youth (18-35 years) to Europe and their contemporary slavery position —working for the pennies on the Italian and Spanish fruits and vegetables doing the most unsecured jobs to help their impoverished families back home without monthly income?

Paradoxically, today there are more Africans exposed to slavery than during the so-called transatlantic slave trade. As such, this commentary analysis draw a bitter comparison between Transatlantic slavery and the contemporary slavery position of Senegambians and African identity in Europe and the Americas.

From Kunta Kinteh to Alagie Jinkang: “Alinga-wuli”(Rise up)

It is fundamental to note that, Transatlantic Slave Trade (TaST) —the ‘legitimised buying and selling of Senegambians— 15th-19th century) was organised as capitalistic from the outset, enslaving African captives for the profit of slave merchants, plantation owners, European political institutions and markets. As it already broke the fabric of the local labour, peace and governance, TaST gave way to colonialism and new ways to plunder Africa and never to allow it develop its powerful civilisation harmoniously.

This is especially more evident in the wealth of today’s economic and technological powers of the worlds and the peripheral role played by Africa. Granted, todays’ extreme structural poverty, chronic hunger and increasing technological backwardness of African nations can be measured as the extend to which Western Europe, the US and now China,  has enriched themselves by under-developing and impoverishing Africa.

One may think of the controversies surrounding the world opulent corporations like Nike, Coca-Cola, Monsanto and their labor scandal, resource plunder, and human right violations, meanwhile, what comes to mind for myself is the rising figures of African youths as victims of contemporary slavery most particularly in Europe.

In our globalised so-called “smart” world of Homo Sapiens, as the historian Yuval Noah Harari puts it in the Homo Sapians: A Brief History of Humankind (2015) “the craving to increase profits and production blinds people to anything that might stand in the way”. Thus “When growth become the supreme [god], unrestricted by any other ethical considerations, it can easily lead to catastrophe”. “Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed” since the Turing Point when Africans were first itemised and imported as goods to Americas.

….commercialisation of African people to the Americas….

Suddenly, as European colonies developed, slavery became an important source of labor that would help boost economies of the so-called North by producing large amounts of sugar, tobacco, cotton and maize to be sold on the global market.

According to the historian Keven Shillington in History of Africa (1995), “From early on in the Portuguese presence along the coast of tropical west Africa captives were bought from local chiefdoms for sale into slavery. Initially, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, they came largely from the Senegal and Gambia region and were transported to the farms and plantations of southern Spain and Portugal.

Those taken from the Niger delta and the Zaire river region went mostly to the island of Sao Tome. As the need, or shall I say greed of plantation owners grew so did the reliance on enslave skilful, strong and flexible labor directly and predominately from sub-Saharan Africa, for which Senegambia particularly played a crucial role not least its strategic position for the for the transportation of captives. Millions of Kunta Kintehs but also Sarabas and   Kumbas were caged, pinned  and exported directly from Senegambian ports in a one way journey —if they will make it.

Although numbers vary according to who you consulted or what you’re reading, there were an estimated 12.5 million Africans shipped to the Americas in an effort to further production of profitable capitalist commodities. It is estimated that for every three Africans that arrived at the American shores, one is said to have died on the journey.

The buying and selling of Africans proved to be so profitable and therefore, a wise investment for slave-owners and European markets and venture capitalists. For the European settlers of the Americas, it was imperative that they develop a governmental system that will promote a sustainable way to maintain the human trafficking of Africans as a legitimate trade — an independent entity for the growth of economies that mastermind it. This resulted to the infamous Transatlantic slave trade (TaST) that connected for the first-time economies of Africa and Asia to the economies of Europe and the Americas.

Historically, the commercialisation of African people and their natural resources was the first recorded system of globalisation that helped developed European industrial production of sugar, maize, cotton, tobacco on global market by massively under-developing Africa. As a matter of slave master’s laws at the time,  Africans were exported as personal properties of slave merchants and plantation owners, predominantly European settlers of the Americans. So sadly, yesterday’s forced migration of Kunta Kinteh, the Sarabas and Kumbas is not so far away from today’s Mediterranean exodus of the Alagies, Saikous, Lamins, the Fatous, Mariamas, —the young and most healthy African brain and labour force.

Slavery was at that time the most economic way of making money; with the one time purchase of a captured skilful African, private owners reaped the benefits of all the labor and production of that strong person and his/her offspring to come. In 1860, at the height of slavery, 25% of all Southerners who owned enslaved Africans (about 3% of the entire so-called white population) controlled the social, political, and economic power of the South.

In my opinion, slavery in the New World (US) was a pivotal time in human civilisation. The commercialisation of Africans sold as slaves and trafficked through the Atlantic ocean into the Americas catapulted economic development in the so-called north and destroyed the so-called south, particularly sub-Saharan Africa and for that mattar Senegambia. With a devastating impact on Africa, slavery of African integrated the Western and Eastern Hemisphere into an international economy. With the increasing contemporary slavery conditions of the majority coalition of African migrants in Europe, yet developed countries’ economies heavily benefit from low skilled and deskilled labour from the so-called poor and  southern hemisphere.

Therefore, it very significant to underline that, it was the generational slavery on the backs of millions of African men, women and children —sold as slaves— that enabled the US to become one of the superpowers. Apparently this is the most underestimated and overlooked part of Africa’s contribution to building the so-called “Whitehouse”. Africa’s contribution to the civilisation of the US and the Americas as a whole has been utterly whitewashed; when it was so ugly and unpleasant to our senses, African identity was simply dispatched into the trash by the powers that be.

The situation of Afro-Europeans today is not very far from the historic slavery that Kunta Kinteh went through. Unfortunately, like the collective indifference and intolerance on the increasing relevance of Transatlantic slavery and Afro-American identity today in politics as in the academia, their is as much oblivion on the forceful brain and labour drainage of Africa’s last youth: those who should fight back the undergoing recolonisation of Africa by China in particular. While doing the dirty, dangerous and dull jobs in Europe, Senegambian diaspora are therefore disenfranchised. I can only hope that in today’s so-called “smart world” while in my house in Italy, this commentary will successfully reach all Senegambians youth who put all their good eggs in the European basket, support bad governance and all those who eat the fruits and vegetables produced by their exploited sons, daughters, brothers and sisters in European factories and plantations fields.

Buffalo Soldier: Fighting on arrival, fighting for survival….

 

Today, Afro-Americans and their abandoned culture continue to suffer from senseless murders, mass incarceration, discrimination in employment and housing and made a complete mockery of since the slave trade took place.

Although the 44th president of the most famous country in the world was governed by a Barack Obama from 2008 to 2017, meanwhile, racially discriminatory attitudes and beliefs are still shockingly prevalent and exaggerated by Trumphalism.

According to White Fragility by Robin Di Angelo, the US Congress is made up of 90% so-called white Americans; 96% of US governors are so-called white Americans; all the top military advisors are so-called white Americans (100%); President and Vice president (so-called 99/100 white Americans); US House Freedom Caucus (99% so-called white Americans); Current US presidential cabinet are 91% so-called white Americans); People who decide which TV shows we see (are 93% so-called white Americans); People who decide which books we read (are 90% so-called white Americans); People who decide which news is covered (85% so-called white  Americans); People who decide which music is produced (95% so-called white Americans); People who directed the top 100 grossing films (95% so-called white Americans); Teachers (82% so-called white Americans); Full-time college professors (84% so-called white Americans); Owners of professional football teams (97% so-called white Americans).

Supported by the US political architecture, these groups push and sustain the deceptive ideology of so-called “white supremacy” that is becoming everyday more evident in the US. These so-called everything-white-ideology propagandists, ultra Afro-phobics and anti-Africanists have sought for the complete subjugation of African people, their history and identity in the Americas.

This is the most evident widespread effect on future African generations that would not only be “culture-less” in the Americas but also born into contemporary slavery, institutional oppression and extreme structural poverty, marginalisation and discrimination. The negative effects of which still haunt Afro-Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, Afro-Brazailians and present-day Afro-Europeans far away from Mama Africa. Certainly, and even more statistically, these groups above are today the most powerful in the US since the emancipation and civil right movements.

Capitalism ruins African development, kills its identity in the Americas

According to Martin Luther King Jr., “Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That’s the way the system works.” Capitalism is an economic and political system in which investment in and ownership of production, distribution, and the exchange of wealth are privately maintained by individuals or corporations seeking a profit for popular commodities on the market.

What is important to understand about this definition in context, are the concepts of land, labor and capital. For our purposes, skilful labor is the key asset to production and consequently, African labour has been sold into slavery for four centuries. I will like to anticipate that, while slave trade (the selling and buying of Africans) was abolished towards the end of the 19th century, slavery in practice never stoped and more Africans and people of African ancestry are institutionally enslave today than ever before.

For this capitalist economic system to acquire wealth for a small privileged few through slavery, the African life in the Americas was therefore institutionally doomed  to poverty. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it: not only did the system foreshadows the fate of the “African-American,” but so did the intellectual legitimization of the system with the development of anti-black ideology and the legal concepts to follow.

Through religion, abuse and government, these small privileged few (European merchants and slavers) sought to make slavery acceptable by using propaganda to dehumanise Africans. For example, there were slave codes, which were laws that outlined the rights of enslaved Africans, defined what they were, and how to handle them. From slaves being classified as property to the prohibition of educating them, African-American were systematically oppressed for the economic benefit of the wealthy few.

Today’s Senegambians population in Europe majority of whom were rejected asylum and therefore permit of stay, have to abide by laws that significantly discriminated and excluded them.

….between discrimination, destitution and extreme poverty….

Although, the Civil Rights Act of 1991 made it illegal to discriminate in employment based on race, sex, religion or national origin, according to Aaron Morrison’s 2015 article Black Unemployment Rate 2015: In Better Economy, African-Americans See Minimal Gains.” African-Americans are still disproportionately unemployed in comparison to their American counter-parts. A 2014 study by the “Young Invincibles” found that an African-American college graduate has the same job prospects as a white high-school dropout or a so-called white person with a prison record.

A famous field experiment on labor market discrimination by Marianne Bertrand and Mullainathanthe Sendhil in the American Economic Review found that job seekers with resumes that had so-called white-sounding names received 50 percent more callbacks for interviews.

The study also revealed that names such as Jamal or Lakisha that are perceived as black-sounding names, received fewer callbacks. Hence, names such as Njundu, Saikou or Madi will be too African to receive any callbacks at all. Another study found that favouritism or the so-called colour of the hiring manager was a contributing factor to racial disparity in the workplace as well.

We know all too well that without work, there is no income and without income, there is poverty. African-Americans are disproportionately unemployed, work for minimum wage and live below the poverty line. It is apparent that, the socio-economic situation of Afro-Americans, Afro-Brazilians, Afro-Caribbeans and present day Afro-Europeans is not too far ahead of the circumstances of historic slavery, my PhD dissertation confirms even ‘worse’ conditions of contemporary slavery.

Significantly, many are working for next to nothing while remaining poor and in total alienation. For the African-American identity, this means that African-American children are the poorest in schools, they have to grow up with the stigma of government assistance —also known as food stamps or welfare. It means low-self esteem and less opportunity in economic mobility for the majority Afro-Americans. It is easier to maintain wealth than to acquire it by own means for a socio-economically and institutionally discriminated African-American. It seems like it takes money to make money.

….the remnants of racism and slavery….

Despite the strides taken since the abolition of slavery, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Movement, African-Americans still suffer from the aftermath of slavery and the anti-black ideologies that haunt the U.S so-called Caucasian population. The remnants of racism and slavery are apparent today in the United States of America, in several ways. For example, African-Americans continue to be at the bottom of the economic totem poll in regards to jobs and wealth.

Approximately 14.6% of the U.S. is of African descent according to the 2018 U.S Census Bureau. However, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded the unemployment rate for African-Americans is at about 10.4% compared to 4.7% for so-called whites.

….mass Incarceration of Afro-Americans….

Another example of social dumping of Africans in the Americas is the concept of the for-profit prison industry, in which people in power legally target African-American communities with laws that disproportionately put them behind bars. This institutional targeting of African-Americans was famously coined by civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander in her New York Times bestselling book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Alexander explained how the rebirth of a system in the United States has reinvented itself by incarcerating African-

Americans at an astonishing rate, labelling them as felons, and then again legally denying them of the very rights that were (we supposed) finally won in the Civil Rights Movement. Today, the U.S. is 5% of the World population but since 2015 it houses 25% of the world’s prison population according to the Criminal Justice Fact Sheet and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. According to the report, African Americans constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population at nearly six times the rate of so-called white Americans.

In a different way and under different socio-political and economic contexts, today hundreds of thousands of African youths are caught up as prisoners, detainees and ‘slaves’ in Europe between the asylum walls and the deep exploitative firms.

….war on drugs….

The most well-known policy that heavily contribute to African—American incarceration is the infamous so-called war on drugs. In an effort to provide for their low-income families and to avoid the stigma of being a poor African-American, many men turn to selling drugs. It is a fast way to accumulate wealth without an education, which is very familiar to the African-American community.

According to the Criminal Justice Fact Sheet and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 2015, nationwide African-Americans represent 26% of juvenile arrests, 44% of youth who are detained, 46% of the youth who are judicially waived to criminal court, and 58% of the youth admitted to state prisons. This is due to a number of reasons, most of which only apply to African-Americans. Inner city crime is prompted by the social and economic isolation of African-Americans through government policies that target those areas.

According to the Criminal Justice Fact Sheet, African Americans represent 12% of the total population of drug users, but 38% of those arrested for drug offenses, and 59% of those in state prison for a drug offense in 2015. Five times as many Whites are using drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are sent to prison for drug offences at 10 times the rate of Whites. African Americans serve virtually as much time in prison for drug offences (58.7 months) as so-called white Americans do for a violent offence (61.7 months).

According to the same study in 2002, African-Americans constituted more than 80% of the people sentenced under the federal crack cocaine laws and served substantially more time in prison for drug offences than did so-called white Americans, despite that fact more than 2/3 of crack cocaine users in the U.S. are so-called white or Hispanic Americans. Additionally, when mandatory minimum sentencing policies were introduced, disparities skyrocketed since African-Americans were already being arrested more for those crimes. These incarceration statistics disrupt the lives of a large portion of the African-American community, which in turn rob those individuals of the rights that were withheld from them during pre-Civil Rights era.

The anti-black ideologies that went along and worked hand-in-hand with capitalism, slavery and colonialism, still resonate across the US government and policies. As Alexander explained, the effects of the targeted mass incarceration of African-Americans resulted in a racial caste-like system that keeps them locked into an inferior position by law and custom.

In the U.S today, an average so-called white American thinks African-Americans have Barack Obama to look up to, when the reality is that most cannot identify with him. The truth is, African-American children look up to athletes and the men in their communities, whom they are exposed to. Granted, when the men and women that little girls and little boys look up to are labelled as felons and denied basic human rights such as voting, discrimination in housing, employment and education, that becomes their new normal. That is the life that they will more than likely be subject to lead.

….African identities in the West Indies….

Although by 1825, the United States housed about 25% of Afro-Americans, approximately, 90%of enslaved Africans trafficked through the Transatlantic slave trade were taken to South America and the Caribbean. This is also because the southern plantations were on a much larger scale than in the U.S. and enslave Africans were cultivating mostly sugar.

In Brazil, the work was much more laborious and soon the mortality rates outnumbered the birth rates. This made it difficult for plantation owners to sustain the population of enslaved Africans, making it impossible to maintain without the consistent human trafficking of Africans to be enslaved.

Therefore, enslaved Africans in Brazil were distributed based on the primary export at the time. African were populating Brazil all over, in almost every profession. Over the course of the slave trade, Brazil received over 4 million trafficked Africans and did not abolish slavery until 1888, the latest of the Americas. Additionally, the majority enslaved in Brazil were African-born than in the U.S. which has led to the strong transference of African culture to Brazil during its development and independence in 1822.

This differs from the slave experience in the U.S. where the intention was to strip Africans of their culture and education by dividing families and prohibiting literacy. Slavery in Brazil was solely defended by the need for labor and rarely on so-called racial grounds, hence the late abolition.

Unlike in the U.S. where the nation have enacted laws that preserve a pseudo-slavery society well after the abolition of slavery, Brazil seems to have incorporated their enslaved population comparatively more smoothly into society, free from the conflict of a civil war.

The eventual emancipation of enslaved Africans was a result of the high risks involved in trafficking Africans across the Mediterranean coupled with ‘free labor’ being praised by capitalism as much more profitable. Brazil did not have formal segregation or discriminatory policies because after the emancipation most Africans held the same jobs and performed the same labor thus keeping them in the lowest of economic classes, and as an unlikely threat to the few so-called white upper-class population.

In Brazil, the African slave trade was in operation for 300 years, and by 1872 42% of the population registered as mulatto (a term used to describe a mixed “coloured” individual as if s/he were a cocktail or an omelet). The life and culture of the enslaved African in Brazil is somewhat different as there are not systematic divides based on skin colour in government and politics. The Brazilian population is openly commingled with the Africans as well as other immigrants. The racism in Brazil is much different than in the U.S. as it is veiled and on more of a social level rather than open or institutional.

Because of the constant human trafficking of Africans into Brazil, Africans far outnumbered native Brazilians and thus much of African culture is alive and well, celebrated by the country today. In contrast to the U.S. in which, African-Americans have essentially adopted the identity that slave-owners gave them, void of their African cultural dances, religions, foods, music and art, Brazil is one of the most culturally beautiful and exotic countries in the world because of the influence of African culture.

According to the 2012 World Bank poverty assessment, Brazil is still characterised by a very wide disparity in income, wealth, education and economic opportunity that is closely associated with skin colour, but it may be due to economic mobility regionally (since more than half of all poor Brazilians live in the Northeast) rather than a systematic effort to oppress the Afro-Brazilian people.

The legacy of slavery led to the economic inequality along racial lines, which means among the 21% of the population that live below the poverty line, over half are of African descent. Africans in Brazil, and the U.S. suffer a similar fate in that they are faced with the intense poverty and economic social class stigma that inevitably welcomes a variety of lifetime hardships. The main difference among the three is the embracing of the African culture within the widespread idea of Brazilian culture.

Today, the same story rings true for the African identity struggle in Europe. The largest forced migration in world history has pitted the modern day African in the worst of economic positions in the Western Hemisphere, but created some of the wealthiest streams of revenue for the so-called European political and economic powers that be.

For instance, Haiti, being 95% African descent and 5% mixed or so-called white, was at one time the richest enslave colony on earth and formerly the mainstay of France’s economy. But unfortunately, the uprising of enslaved Africans and revolts that threatened the capitalistic wealth of Europe caused those powers to place oppressive and suffocating trade laws and reparations on the small independent country, never allowing it to build up it’s infrastructure and standard of living.

Today, partly from the exacerbation of the 2010 Haitian Earthquake, the 24.7% of the population lives in extreme poverty (less than $2 per day) and 59% of the population lives on less than $3.00 per day. Only 50% of children attend school and of those, 60% will drop out before the 6th grade. Compare the socio-political and economic conditions of Haitians and Senegambians today.

Essentially, the effects of capitalism and colonial economies and the means by which to accomplish that system shaped the lives of millions and billions of African people and their generations to follow. At it’s inception, the concept of gaining wealth at the expense of others was not only capitalistic, but entailed dehumanising and ostracising those who are dominated.

As the reggae star Nasio Fauntaina puts it the content of one one right upon another. The impacts of slavery of Africa seem to be never-ending and worldwide wherever African people live.

Today’s forced Senegambian diaspora —pilgrim fathers— has not resulted into an economically successful population, in the contrary, a significant number live and work under contemporary situations of slavery in other to support there ‘dying’ families.

There are mixed reviews of what should be done and what has been successful in the attempts to raise the standard of living for Africans in the Americas, the Caribbean, and in Europe, but one thing is clear: this system must change for the better.

A great Nigerian proverb says that “In the moment of crisis, the wise build bridges and the foolish build dams.” We must build bridges to close the gaps in inequality around the world, it is the responsibility of the wise. This it what it means in Mandinka ‘Alinga Wuli’: #Rise up to the awakening call.

Dr. Alagie Jinkang is a research assistant at the International University College of Turin (IUC). From a marginalised position as a Mediterranean victim, and most importantly as a former victim of Italian agricultural exploitation while in the detention camp, Dr. Jinkang turned the tides when he worn a scholarship 2016 to do his Ph.D. He wrote his PhD dissertation on “Contemporary Slavery: The Exploitation of Migrants in Italian Agriculture” at the University of Palermo (Italy), Department of Law, PhD Programme in Human Rights: Evolution, Protection and Limits in cotutela with the University of Valencia, Department of Moral and Political Legal Philosophy, Doctoral Programme in Sustainability and Peace in the Post-Globalisation Era. Dr. Jinkang carried out several field works on migration in Italy, Spain, Senegal and The Gambia since 2015 and has written extensively on migration from Africa, most particularly on the so-called irregular (Back Way) migration from Senegambia.