OPEN LETTER

NPP National Chairman, Jake Obetsebi Lamptey

Dear Editor,

I shall be very grateful if you could get this message printed in your highly esteemed paper. The behaviour-of most of our NPP Members of Parliament have proved beyond doubt, that they were in the business of politics just to pursue their selfish interests and not to work extra hard for the party to win power Some are only interested in occupying their seat whether their party wins power or not.

What is of paramount importance now is to use the sitting MPSs and other loyalists of the party, irrespective of degree qualification or not, to conduct a thorough research into why voters just decided not to vote for the party in 2008 and 2012 elections. I will not be labour the point that imposition of candidates, cronies etc. will cause a lot of harm. The issue of popularity of a candidate has never worked for any party. In the USA, unarguably the most popular figure in the Democrat Party in the former Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, but the party dislodged her and picked Barack Obama, in whom they reposed their confidence to win the teeming unemployed floating voters.

Imposition and no or little regard for the efforts of the grassroots breed factionalism and unfortunately that is what we are witnessing in the Bibiani- Anhwiaso-Bekwai constituency. There is this issue of divide and rule in our constituency. It has taken the efforts of some few loyalists in the constituency to consolidate the NPP on the parliamentary seat for 2004, 2008 and 2012 elections, out quite regrettably, the member of parliament feels that in order for him to win again in 2016, he must use money to pay polling station executives to get rid of the hardworking few selfless loyalists whom he has branded as 'enemies.' Now, we have executives who are lazy and opportunistic holding office in the constituency.

We are determined to resist any individual who, because of selfish interest, wants to bring factionalism into our party, thereby reducing the chances of securing victory for the NPP.

By Ben Ali-Seaman

Sefwi Anhwiaso

Blbiani Anhwiaso-Bekwai Constituency.

Editorial      

UKRAINE

The Western countries led by the United States of America are demonstrating their hypocrisy and ignorance in their brazen attempt to subvert democracy in Ukraine.

 Indeed, their biggest error is that they believe that they can do what they have done in Syria, Libya, Iraq and elsewhere in Ukraine.

Why do they think that they can get their way in Ukraine by threating Russia with sanctions? What effect will western sanctions have on Russia which is the main supplier of gas to Ukraine and several European countries?

The point has to be made that the vast majority of Ukrainians see Russia as a natural ally and they feel offended by the incursion into their lives by Western sponsored terrorist .

No matter what they do, the west will not be able to impose its will on the Ukrainian people who have demonstrated the desire to protect their independence and democratic institutions.

 The era of gunboat diplomacy is over and the earlier Washington and other western centres realized that the better it will be for all.

         Ukraine: Shock, anarchy, chaos

By Alexei Kovalev

In Ukraine, bandits called by EU representatives "peaceful protesters" are robbing, beating, raping and extorting money "for the revolution." Even the "Commandant of Maidan" Andrei Paruby acknowledged that "something went wrong," although earlier he promised that "Kiev will see order it has never seen before." Pravda.Ru correspondent in Ukraine talked about these events.

On the morning of February 26 Ukrainian and international media reported the dissolution of special police unit "Berkut." In particular, Russian BBC Service informed their audience that the Acting Minister of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov signed a decree on the Elimination of special police unit "Berkut" and reported it on his Facebook page.

Elimination of "Berkut" was proposed by deputies of the Verkhovna Rada faction "Freedom." The bill on the elimination of units that took part in the dispersal of mass protests in Kiev was registered on February 23.

For now let's put the question of the legitimacy of the newly declared "acting" heads of ministries and departments of revolutionary Ukraine aside. Instead, we will try to get a feel of the situation in the country in its entirety and Kiev and the surrounding area in particular.

Early in the morning on February 22, "the Commandant of the Maidan," Andrei Paruby declared from stage that "Maidan self-defense" was in full control of the government quarter. "Seventh unit is in the Verkhovna Rada along with a division of the "Right Sector." The Cabinet of Ministers is guarded. Nineteenth and third units are guarding the presidential administration. Fifteenth unit is guarding the interior ministry," said Andrei Paruby.

He also assured that from now on Maidan would take control of all Kiev. "It is important for us to show that when Kiev is under the control of the Maidan, Kiev will see order it has never seen before," summed up Paruby.

Taking control of the center by revolutionaries became possible on the afternoon of Friday, February 21, when last buses of internal forces left the capital of Ukraine. The security forces left as a result of the decisions taken on the night before by Ukrainian parliamentarians. Deputies voted for the Cabinet and state authorities issuing instructions on stopping the Security Service, Interior Ministry, the armed forces and other bodies from implementing anti-terrorism measures because they contradicted the Constitution .

The resolution, among other things, mandated cease fire, and the security forces units had to return to their places of permanent deployment. That, in fact, was done, and Kiev, respectively, was at the mercy of the revolutionaries and other "peaceful protesters."  

Blogger Arsen Avakov (also known as the "acting Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine") admitted the following the next day after the establishment of "the never seen before" order in Kiev. In the capital and its suburbs, it turns out, there were groups of people in masks, helmets, armed with batons and traumatic weapons and firearms. They call themselves representatives of "the Right Sector," "left wing", "Freedom party", "Maidan Self-Defense." They are acting on their own, namely, stopping and checking anyone "suspicious" and making decisions on the basis of revolutionary expediency. As a result, there were cases of burning houses, looting, and robbery. In addition to the government district, the groups acted near Borispol airport, at the perimeter of Zhuliany airport, major highways and suburbs of the capital.

Police is demoralized and this is understandable. No one wants to risk their lives trying to call to order armed masked men. Especially because there is likelihood to run into "peaceful protesters" violating whose rights to a peaceful protest would be costly. The situation is particularly tense in Kiev and the surrounding area. It is difficult to say what is happening in the western regions. There is information about the situation in the southeast bordering the center, in Dnipropetrovsk region.

In Dnipropetrovsk region extremists are no longer satisfied with pogroms and burning the offices of the Party of Regions. They have launched a full-scale persecution of party members and activists. This was stated by the press service of the Dnipropetrovsk regional organization on February 25. Here is one of the examples:   

"Eight masked men armed with automatic weapons entered the house of the chairman of Apostolovo district administration Andrei Leonov. They demanded him to resign and withdraw from the party, as well as pay them 300 thousand hryvnia. "We suffered on the Maidan, and you've been stealing money," they shouted, waving their arms. Andrei Leonov was able to call police. When the police arrive, there was gun fight in the center of Apostolovo. Some were wounded, some criminals managed to escape." End of quote.

One would assume that the opponents of the Maidan are trying to discredit the revolutionaries and exaggerating the events. But in the afternoon of February 26 suspicions that something was wrong were confirmed by "the Commandant of the Maidan." Under the guise of "Self Defense" in Kiev some gangs are looting. This was stated by Andrei Paruby on air to "Channel 5" a couple of hours after Avakov's statement about the dissolution of "Berkut." "We have to protect dozens of objects and deal with people who have gone beyond morality," explained Andrei Paruby.

But on the same day in the late afternoon the "Commandant of Maidan" was "backstabbed" by his fellow "Fatherland" party member Gennady Moskal, who said that an armed group calling itself "self-defense" engaged in robbery in the regions.  

"People armed with firearms have created stable gangs and attack property and residential complexes of the representatives of the former government," read a statement released by his press service.

According to Gennady Moskal, these people are robbing abandoned houses, taking valuables, there are even cases of rape. Also groups of masked people with guns "stop vehicles, insult passengers and demand money allegedly to support the revolution."

"Especially defiant are the gangs of criminals who are part of 31st and 33th units of Maidan self-defense. The 31st unit is headed by Sasha Bunker, and the 33rd unit is armed with ten Kalashnikovs. Furthermore, there is an unknown organization UPA "SWAT" armed with nearly 20 shotguns and nine Kalashnikovs," said Gennady Moskal.

According to him, some of the active parts of the 31st and 33rd units are transported by a vehicle with Verkhovna Rada license plate AA 0019 BP.

The MP demanded that the head of Maidan Andrei Paruby takes the situation under control.

"If Mr. Paruby is in charge of the 31st and 33th units, he has to put them in their place and finally ban masks (especially given that Yanukovych's regime has been already overthrown), or accept the responsibility for these outrageous acts," he said.

Gennady Moskal asked Interior Minister Arsen Avakov to take immediate action to protect civilians. "We must stop the arbitrariness of these gangs to avoid compromising the idea of Euro Maidan," said the MP.  

It appears that Gennady Moskal is still not satisfied with the effect of his statement because in the morning of February 27 he made ​​another one.

Representatives of some Maidan units have stolen cars from the residence of President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych. This was announced today in the Verkhovna Rada, said "Fatherland" lawmaker Gennady Moskal to a correspondent of RBC-Ukraine.

"Increasingly more units are arriving to Kiev. They are looting, stealing cars from the residence of Yanukovich, destroying property, getting into apartments. I do not support these people and do not treat them with respect, but we should not turn Maidan into a gang, steal art and alcohol, or shoot. How can a unit have ten machine guns and 20 shotguns?" said Gennady Moskal.

Can the decisions made recently, particularly by the Verkhovna Rada, be considered legitimate if the government is protected by the Maidan self-defense?

Chances are that the hostages of Banderivtsy/bandits are all residents of the government quarter. They not only include regional representatives and Communists (the latter, in particular, vote unanimously for any suggestions of the revolutionaries). It is understandable because meetings of Rada are broadcast and displayed on a large screen, and the exit from the parliament is "guarded" by the Maidan self-defense. The opposition trinity (Yatsenuk - Klitschko - Tyahnibok) are also held hostage by them, let alone completely defenseless civilian population.

The Canonisation Of Terror

Wole Soyimka

By Wole Soyinka

The sheer weight of indignation and revulsion of most of Nigerian humanity at the recent Boko Harma atrocity in Yobe is most likely to have overwhelmed a tiny footnote to that outrage, small indeed, but of an inversely proportionate significance.

 This was the name of the hospital to which the survivors of the massacre were taken. That minute detail calls into question, in a gruesome but chastening way, the entire ethical landscape into which this nation has been forced by insensate leadership.  It is an uncanny coincidence, one that I hope the new culture of ‘religious tourism’, spearheaded by none other than the nation’s president in his own person, may even come to recognize as a message from unseen forces.

For the name of that hospital, it is reported, is none other than that of General Sanni Abacha, a vicious usurper under whose authority the lives of an elected president and his wife were snuffed out.  Assassinations – including through bombs cynically ascribed to the opposition – became routine. Under that ruler, torture and other forms of barbarism were enthroned as the norm of governance.  To round up, nine Nigerian citizens, including the writer and environmentalist Ken Saro-wiwa, were hanged after a trial that was stomach churning even by the most primitive standards of judicial trial, and in defiance of the intervention of world leadership. We are speaking here of a man who placed this nation under siege during an unrelenting reign of terror that is barely different from the current rampage of Boko Haram. It is this very psychopath that was recently canonized by the government of Goodluck Jonathan in commemoration of one hundred years of Nigerian trauma.

It has been long a-coming. One of the broadest avenues in the nation’s capital, Abuja, bears the name of General Sanni Abacha. Successive governments have lacked the political courage to change this  signpost – among several others – of  national self degradation and wipe out the memory of the nation’s tormentor from daily encounter. Not even Ministers for the Federal Capital territory within whose portfolios rest such responsibilities, could muster the temerity to initiate the process and leave the rest to public approbation or repudiation. I urged the need of this purge on one such minister, and at least one Head of State. That minister promised, but that boast went the way of Nigerian electoral boast.  The Head of State murmured something about the fear of offending ‘sensibilities’. All evasions amounted to moral cowardice and a doubling of victim trauma. When you proudly display certificates of a nation’s admission to the club of global pariahs, it is only a matter of time before you move to beatify them as saints and other paragons of human perfection. What the government of Goodluck Jonathan has done is to scoop up a century’s accumulated degeneracy in one preeminent symbol, then place it on a podium for the nation to admire, emulate and even – worship.

There is a deplorable message for coming generations in this governance aberration that the entire world has been summoned to witness and indeed, to celebrate. The insertion of an embodiment of  ‘governance by terror’ into the company of committed democrats, professionals, humanists and human rights advocates in their own right, is a sordid effort to grant a certificate of health to a communicable disease that common sense demands should be isolated. It is a confidence trick that speaks volumes of the perpetrators of such a fraud. We shall pass over – for instance – the slave mentality that concocts loose formulas for an Honours List that automatically elevate any violent bird of passage to the status of nation builders who may, or may not be demonstrably motivated by genuine love of nation.  According generalized but false attributes to known killers and treasury robbers is a disservice to history and a desecration of memory.  It also compromises the future. This failure to discriminate, to assess, and thereby make it possible to grudgingly concede that even out of a ‘doctrine of necessity’ – such as military dictatorship -  some demonstrable governance virtue may emerge, reveals nothing but national self-glorification in a moral void, the breeding grounds of future cankerworm in the nation’s edifice.

Such abandonment of moral rigour comes full circle sooner or later. The survivors of a plague known as Boko Haram, students in a place of enlightenment and moral instruction, are taken to a place of healing dedicated to an individual contagion – a murderer and thief of no redeeming quality known as Sanni Abacha, one whose plunder is still being pursued all over the world and recovered piecemeal by international consortiums – at the behest of this same government which sees fit to place him on the nation’s Roll of Honour! I can think of nothing more grotesque and derisive of the lifetime struggle of several on this list, and their selfless services to humanity. It all fits. In this nation of portent readers, the coincidence should not be too difficult to decipher.

I reject my share of this national insult.

Wole SOYINKA

How Slavery Made the Modern World

Slavery was the flywheel on which America’s market revolution turned—not just in the United States, but in all of the Americas.

By Greg Grandin

A nineteenth-century bilboes for an adult, typically found on slave ships. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Many in the United States were outraged by the remarks of conservative evangelical preacher Pat Robertson, who blamed Haiti’s catastrophic 2010 earthquake on Haitians for selling their souls to Satan. Bodies were still being pulled from the rubble—as many as 300,000 died—when Robertson went on TV and gave his viewing audience a little history lesson: the Haitians had been “under the heel of the French” but they “got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’”

A supremely callous example of right-wing idiocy? Absolutely. Yet in his own kooky way, Robertson was also onto something. Haitians did, in fact, swear a pact with the devil for their freedom. Only Beelzebub arrived smelling not of sulfur, but of Parisian cologne.

Haitian slaves began to throw off the “heel of the French” in 1791, when they rose up and, after bitter years of fighting, eventually declared themselves free. Their French masters, however, refused to accept Haitian independence. The island, after all, had been an extremely profitable sugar producer, and so Paris offered Haiti a choice: compensate slave owners for lost property—their slaves (that is, themselves)—or face its imperial wrath. The fledgling nation was forced to finance this payout with usurious loans from French banks. As late as 1940, 80 percent of the government budget was still going to service this debt.

In the on-again, off-again debate that has taken place in the United States over the years about paying reparations for slavery, opponents of the idea insist that there is no precedent for such a proposal. But there is. It’s just that what was being paid was reparations-in-reverse, which has a venerable pedigree. After the War of 1812 between Great Britain and the US, London reimbursed Southern planters more than a million dollars for having encouraged their slaves to run away in wartime. Within the United Kingdom, the British government also paid a small fortune to British slave owners, including the ancestors of Britain’s current Prime Minister, David Cameron, to compensate for abolition (which Adam Hochschild calculated in his 2005 book Bury the Chains to be “an amount equal to roughly 40 percent of the national budget then, and to about $2.2 billion today”).

Advocates of reparations—made to the descendants of enslaved peoples, not to their owners—tend to calculate the amount due based on the negative impact of slavery. They want to redress either unpaid wages during the slave period or injustices that took place after formal abolition (including debt servitude and exclusion from the benefits extended to the white working class by the New Deal). According to one estimate, for instance, 222,505,049 hours of forced labor were performed by slaves between 1619 and 1865, when slavery was ended. Compounded at interest and calculated in today’s currency, this adds up to trillions of dollars.

But back pay is, in reality, the least of it. The modern world owes its very existence to slavery.

Voyage of the Blind

Consider, for example, the way the advancement of medical knowledge was paid for with the lives of slaves.

The death rate on the trans-Atlantic voyage to the New World was staggeringly high. Slave ships, however, were more than floating tombs. They were floating laboratories, offering researchers a chance to examine the course of diseases in fairly controlled, quarantined environments. Doctors and medical researchers could take advantage of high mortality rates to identify a bewildering number of symptoms, classify them into diseases and hypothesize about their causes.

Corps of doctors tended to slave ports up and down the Atlantic seaboard. Some of them were committed to relieving suffering; others were simply looking for ways to make the slave system more profitable. In either case, they identified types of fevers, learned how to decrease mortality and increase fertility, experimented with how much water was needed for optimum numbers of slaves to survive on a diet of salted fish and beef jerky, and identified the best ratio of caloric intake to labor hours. Priceless epidemiological information on a range of diseases—malaria, smallpox, yellow fever, dysentery, typhoid, cholera, and so on—was gleaned from the bodies of the dying and the dead.

When slaves couldn’t be kept alive, their autopsied bodies still provided useful information. Of course, as the writer Harriet Washington has demonstrated in her stunning Medical Apartheid, such experimentation continued long after slavery ended: in the 1940s, one doctor said that the “future of the Negro lies more in the research laboratory than in the schools.” As late as the 1960s, another researcher, reminiscing in a speech given at Tulane Medical School, said that it was “cheaper to use Niggers than cats because they were everywhere and cheap experimental animals.”

Medical knowledge slowly filtered out of the slave industry into broader communities, since slavers made no proprietary claims on the techniques or data that came from treating their slaves. For instance, an epidemic of blindness that broke out in 1819 on the French slaver Rôdeur, which had sailed from Bonny Island in the Niger Delta with about seventy-two slaves on board, helped eye doctors identify the causes, patterns and symptoms of what is today known as trachoma.

The disease first appeared on the Rôdeur not long after it set sail, initially in the hold among the slaves and then on deck. In the end, it blinded all the voyagers except one member of the crew. According to a passenger’s account, sightless sailors worked under the direction of that single man “like machines” tied to the captain with a thick rope. “We were blind—stone blind, drifting like a wreck upon the ocean,” he recalled. Some of the sailors went mad and tried to drink themselves to death. Others retired to their hammocks, immobilized. Each “lived in a little dark world of his own, peopled by shadows and phantasms. We did not see the ship, nor the heavens, nor the sea, nor the faces of our comrades.”

But they could still hear the cries of the blinded slaves in the hold.

This went on for ten days, through storms and calms, until the voyagers heard the sound of another ship. The Spanish slaver San León had drifted alongside the Rôdeur. But the entire crew and all the slaves of that ship, too, had been blinded. When the sailors of each vessel realized this “horrible coincidence,” they fell into a silence “like that of death.” Eventually, the San León drifted away and was never heard from again.

The Rôdeur’s one seeing mate managed to pilot the ship to Guadeloupe, an island in the Caribbean. By now, a few of the crew, including the captain, had regained some of their vision. But thirty-nine of the Africans hadn’t. So before entering the harbor the captain decided to drown them, tying weights to their legs and throwing them overboard. The ship was insured and their loss would be covered: the practice of insuring slaves and slave ships meant that slavers weighed the benefits of a dead slave versus living labor and acted accordingly.

Events on the Rôdeur caught the attention of Sébastien Guillié, chief of medicine at Paris’s Royal Institute for Blind Youth. He wrote up his findings—which included a discussion of the disease’s symptoms, the manner in which it spread, and best treatment options—and published them in Bibliothèque Ophtalmologique, which was then cited in other medical journals as well as in an 1846 US textbook, A Manual of the Diseases of the Eye.

Slaves spurred forward medicine in other ways, too. Africans, for instance, were the primary victims of smallpox in the New World and were also indispensable to its eradication. In the early 1800s, Spain ordered that all its American subjects be vaccinated against the disease, but didn’t provide enough money to carry out such an ambitious campaign. So doctors turned to the one institution that already reached across the far-flung Spanish Empire: slavery. They transported the live smallpox vaccine in the arms of Africans being moved along slave routes as cargo from one city to another to be sold: doctors chose one slave from a consignment, made a small incision in his or her arm, and inserted the vaccine (a mixture of lymph and pus containing the cowpox virus). A few days after the slaves set out on their journey, pustules would appear in the arm where the incision had been made, providing the material to perform the procedure on yet another slave in the lot—and then another and another until the consignment reached its destination. Thus the smallpox vaccine was disseminated through Spanish America, saving countless lives.

Slavery’s Great Schism

In 1945, Allied troops marched into the first of the Nazi death camps. What they saw inside, many have remarked, forced a radical break in the West’s moral imagination. The Nazi genocide of Jews, one scholar has written, is history’s “black hole,” swallowing up all the theological, ethical and philosophical certainties that had earlier existed.

Yet before there was the Holocaust, there was slavery, an institution that also transformed the West’s collective consciousness, as I’ve tried to show in my new book, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World.

Take, for example, the case of the Joaquín, a Portuguese frigate that left Mozambique in late 1803 with 301 enslaved East Africans. Nearly six months later, when a port surgeon opened the ship’s hatch in Montevideo, Uruguay, he was sickened by what he saw: only thirty-one bone-thin survivors in a foul, bare room, otherwise empty save for hundreds of unused shackles.

City officials convened a commission of inquiry to explain the deaths of the other 270 slaves, calling on the expertise of five surgeons—two British doctors, a Spaniard, a Swiss Italian and one from the United States. The doctors testified that before boarding the Joaquín, the captives would have felt extreme anguish, having already been forced to survive on roots and bugs until arriving on the African coast emaciated and with their stomachs distended. Then, once on the ocean, crowded into a dark hold with no ventilation, they would have had nothing to do other than listen to the cries of their companions and the clanking of their chains. Many would have gone mad trying to make sense of their situation, trying to ponder “the imponderable.” The surgeons decided that the East Africans had died from dehydration and chronic diarrhea, aggravated by the physical and psychological hardships of slavery—from, that is, what they called “nostalgia,” “melancholia,” and “cisma,” a Spanish word that loosely means brooding or mourning.

The collective opinion of the five surgeons—who represented the state of medical knowledge in the US, Great Britain, and Spain—reveals the way slavery helped in what might be called the disenchanting of medicine. In it you can see how doctors dealing with the slave trade began taking concepts like melancholia out of the hands of priests, poets, and philosophers and giving them actual medical meaning.

Prior to the arrival of the Joaquín in Montevideo, for instance, the Royal Spanish Academy was still associating melancholia with actual nighttime demon possession. Cisma literally meant schism, a theological concept Spaniards used to refer to the spiritual split personality of fallen man. The doctors investigating the Joaquín, however, used these concepts in a decidedly secular, matter-of-fact manner and in ways that unmistakably affirmed the humanity of slaves. To diagnose enslaved Africans as suffering from nostalgia and melancholia was to acknowledge that they had selves that could be lost, inner lives that could suffer schism or alienation, and pasts over which they could mourn.

Two decades after the incident involving the Joaquín, the Spanish medical profession no longer thought melancholia to be caused by an incubus, but considered it a type of delirium, often related to seasickness. Medical dictionaries would later describe the condition in terms similar to those used by critics of the Middle Passage—as caused by rancid food, too close contact, extreme weather, and above all the “isolation” and “uniform and monotonous life” one experiences at sea. As to nostalgia, one Spanish dictionary came to define it as “a violent desire compelling those taken out of their country to return home.”

It was as if each time a doctor threw back a slave hatch to reveal the human-made horrors below, it became a little bit more difficult to blame mental illness on demons.

In the case of the Joaquín, however, the doctors didn’t extend the logic of their own reasoning to the slave trade and condemn it. Instead, they focused on the hardships of the Middle Passage as a technical concern. “It is in the interests of commerce and humanity,” said the Connecticut-born, Edinburgh-educated John Redhead, “to get slaves off their ships as soon as possible.”

Follow the Money

Slavery transformed other fields of knowledge as well. For instance, centuries of buying and selling human beings, of shipping them across oceans and continents, of defending, excoriating, or trying reform the practice, revolutionized both Christianity and secular law, giving rise to what we think of as modern human rights law.

In the realm of economics, the importance of slaves went well beyond the wealth generated from their uncompensated labor. Slavery was the flywheel on which America’s market revolution turned—not just in the United States, but in all of the Americas.

Starting in the 1770s, Spain began to deregulate the slave trade, hoping to establish what merchants, not mincing any words, called a “free trade in blacks.” Decades before slavery exploded in the United States (following the War of 1812 with Great Britain), the slave population increased dramatically in Spanish America. Enslaved Africans and African Americans slaughtered cattle and sheared wool on the pampas of Argentina, spun cotton and wove clothing in textile workshops in Mexico City, and planted coffee in the mountains outside Bogotá. They fermented grapes for wine at the foot of the Andes and boiled Peruvian sugar to make candy. In Guayaquil, Ecuador, enslaved shipwrights built cargo vessels that were used for carrying more slaves from Africa to Montevideo. Throughout the thriving cities of mainland Spanish America, slaves worked, often for wages, as laborers, bakers, brick makers, liverymen, cobblers, carpenters, tanners, smiths, rag pickers, cooks, and servants.

It wasn’t just their labor that spurred the commercialization of society. The driving of more and more slaves inland and across the continent, the opening up of new slave routes and the expansion of old ones, tied hinterland markets together and created local circuits of finance and trade. Enslaved peoples were investments (purchased and then rented out as laborers), credit (used to secure loans), property, commodities, and capital, making them an odd mix of abstract and concrete value. Collateral for loans and items for speculation, slaves were also objects of nostalgia, mementos of a fading aristocratic world even as they served as the coin for the creation of a new commercialized one.

Slaves literally made money: working in Lima’s mint, they trampled quicksilver into ore with their bare feet, pressing toxic mercury into their bloodstream in order to amalgamate the silver used for coins. And they were money—at least in a way. It wasn’t that the value of individual slaves was standardized in relation to currency, but that slaves were quite literally the standard. When appraisers calculated the value of any given hacienda, or estate, slaves usually accounted for over half of its worth; they were, that is, much more valuable than inanimate capital goods like tools and millworks.

In the United States, scholars have demonstrated that profit wasn’t made just from Southerners selling the cotton that slaves picked or the cane they cut. Slavery was central to the establishment of the industries that today dominate the US economy: finance, insurance, and real estate. And historian Caitlan Rosenthal has shown how Caribbean slave plantations helped pioneer “accounting and management tools, including depreciation and standardized efficiency metrics, to manage their land and their slaves”—techniques that were then used in northern factories.

Slavery, as the historian Lorenzo Green argued half a century ago, “formed the very basis of the economic life of New England: about it revolved, and on it depended, most of her other industries.” Fathers grew wealthy building slave ships or selling fish, clothing, and shoes to slave islands in the Caribbean; when they died, they left their money to sons who “built factories, chartered banks, incorporated canal and railroad enterprises, invested in government securities, and speculated in new financial instruments.” In due course, they donated to build libraries, lecture halls, botanical gardens, and universities, as Craig Steven Wilder has revealed in his new book, Ebony and Ivy.

In Great Britain, historians have demonstrated how the “reparations” paid to slave-owning families “fuelled industry and the development of merchant banks and marine insurance, and how it was used to build country houses and to amass art collections.”

Follow the money, as the saying goes, and you don’t even have to move very far along the financial trail to begin to see the wealth and knowledge amassed through slavery. To this day, it remains all around us, in our museums, courts, places of learning and worship, and doctors’ offices. Even the tony clothier, Brooks Brothers (founded in New York in 1818), got its start selling coarse slave clothing to Southern plantations. It now describes itself as an “institution that has shaped the American style of dress.”

Fever Dreams and the Bleached Bones of the Dead

In the United States, the reparations debate faded away with the 2008 election of Barack Obama—except as an idea that continues to haunt the fever dreams of the right-wing imagination. A significant part of the backlash against the president is driven by the fantasy that he is presiding over a radical redistribution of wealth—think of all those free cell phones that the Drudge Report says he’s handing out to African-Americans!—part of a stealth plan to carry out reparations by any means possible.

“What they don’t know,” said Rush Limbaugh shortly after Obama’s inauguration, “is that Obama’s entire economic program is reparations.” The conservative National Legal Policy Center recently raised the specter of “slavery reparations courts”—Black Jacobin tribunals presided over by the likes of Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton and Russell Simmons and empowered to levy a $50,000 tax on every white “man, woman, and child in this country.” It’s time to rescue the discussion of reparations from the swamp of talk radio and the comment sections of the conservative blogosphere.

The idea that slavery made the modern world is not new, though it seems that every generation has to rediscover that truth anew. Almost a century ago, in 1915, W.E.B Du Bois wrote, “Raphael painted, Luther preached, Corneille wrote, and Milton sung; and through it all, for four hundred years, the dark captives wound to the sea amid the bleaching bones of the dead; for four hundred years the sharks followed the scurrying ships; for four hundred years America was strewn with the living and dying millions of a transplanted race; for four hundred years Ethiopia stretched forth her hands unto God.”

How would we calculate the value of what we today would call the intellectual property—in medicine and other fields—generated by slavery’s suffering? I’m not sure. But a revival of efforts to do so would be a step toward reckoning with slavery’s true legacy: our modern world.

Read Next: a review of Walter Johnson’s new book on slavery and capitalism

African-American Names: Creativity or Madness?

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Black American names have always intrigued me. I set out to write about this as part of my Black History Month articles when I came across this informative and insightful article by a David Zax titled “What’s up with black names, anyway?” I thought my readers would enjoy it. It was initially published on August 25, 2008 in the Salon, an online magazine. It has been edited for space.

That African-Americans have a tendency to buck more common names is obvious. In some parts of the country today, nearly a third of African-American girls are given a name belonging to no one else in the state (boys’ names tend to be somewhat more conservative).

Not long ago, a news item with the headline “Federal Judge: Enough With the Stupid Names” began to circulate in many people’s inboxes. The judge, declaring that he was fed up with black children’s “ridiculous names,” apparently issued an order requiring black women to receive approval from three whites before naming their babies. “They put in apostrophes where none are needed,” fumed the judge. “They think a ‘Q’ is a must. There was a time when Shaniqua and Tawanda were names you dreaded. Now, if you’re a black girl, you hope you get a name as sensible as one of those.” Soon, according to the article, elementary school teachers were expressing relief. No longer would they have to wonder in panic on the first day of school, “How do I pronounce Q’J’Q’Sha?”

The story, as you may have guessed, was satire (its origin, a comedy site called the Peoples News). It succeeded, though, in duping many of its readers, some of whom wrote in to say they agreed with at least the sentiment behind the judge’s decision. The matter had “gotten out of control,” wrote one. We need to address mothers’ mental health, wrote another. The comments reveal that many people indeed believe that distinctive black names are deserving of not merely ridicule but also regulation.

They’re not. The story of distinctive black names in the U.S. is far richer, more varied and interesting than the celebrity’s mere pathological dread of appearing normal. From the beginning, many black Americans had distinctive names. The weirdly classical Caesar was a particularly common slave name, bestowed, it would seem, by slaveholders with a profoundly unfunny sense of irony. And sometimes distinctive slave names were carried out of Africa and preserved: Some African societies name children after the day of the week they were born, and “there is a preponderance of day names among the leaders of the very early slave revolts,” writes Joey Lee Dillard in “Black Names.” From early on, then, some distinctive black names were tied to black resistance against white oppression.

Distinctive black naming persisted through the centuries; the folklorist Newbell Niles Puckett turned up thousands of such names culling records from 1619 to the mid-1940s, names like Electa, Valantine and Zebedee. But by and large, it remained a minority practice within black culture, and most black names weren’t all that different from those given to whites. Then, in the 1960s, something changed, resulting in an unprecedented spike in black creative names, to the point where just a few years ago, “Freakonomics” authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner noted that “nearly 30 percent of the black girls are given a name that is unique among the names of every baby, white and black, born that year in California.”

What happened? The dates, of course, are suggestive. The ’60s were a time of massive black protest from which emerged an accentuated separatist strain in black thought, epitomized in the Black Power movement. Blacks became increasingly interested in Africa and eager to show pride in their roots. (Indeed, “Roots” — Alex Haley’s book as well as the TV miniseries based upon it — itself had a remarkable effect on naming practices. According to Harvard sociologist Stanley Lieberson, the name Kizzy, which belonged to a “Roots” character, skyrocketed from oblivion to become the 17th most popular name for black girls in Illinois in 1977.) Islam began in these years to have a clear influence, too, most visibly with Cassius Clay adopting the name Muhammad Ali in 1964. Others followed suit, including two fellows named Lew Alcindor and LeRoi Jones, whom you know as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Amiri Baraka.

White ridicule kept pace with these names and even preceded them: A racist tradition dating to at least the early part of the 20th century has accused black people of having foolish names — often, goes the story, the result of an uneducated mother overhearing a medical term at the hospital and thinking it pretty. Interestingly, though, much of the recent backlash against black names has come from the black community itself. The Peoples News is written by African-Americans. In March, the black blogger behind Stuff Black People Hate posted a denunciation of “stupid names,” which he took the care to subcategorize into “Swahili Bastardizations” (Shaquan), “Luxury Latch-ons” (Prada), “Megalomaniacal Descriptors” (Heaven) and “The Unfathomably Ridiculous” (Anfernee). More than five months after its posting, a thread of feisty commentary still runs in response. Hating on black names is hardly a phenomenon confined to a small corner of the black blogosphere. Bill Cosby a few years back ranted at the NAACP about blacks “with names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed and all that crap and all of them are in jail.”

Much of this ridicule is either misguided or misleading. Exhibit A in the attack on black names is often a story about black schoolchildren that some friend of a friend met named Urine or Shithead, Chlamydia or Gonorrhea, or Lemonjello or Oranjello. Neither Lieberson nor Cleveland Evans (former president of the American Names Society) has ever encountered black people with such names, but Lieberson notes that the (white) comedian Dana Carvey chose the name Dex for his child after a bottle with the word “dextrose” on it, and Evans has more than once encountered a young woman on a baby name Web site (most often visited by whites) who rather likes the ring to the name Veruca, a character from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Roald Dahl chose that name carefully for the bratty girl he assigned it to: It’s a medical term for a wart.

Of course, the vast majority of unusual black names are nothing like Clitoria or Tanqueray. They are names like — to page at random through “Proud Heritage” — the catchy Maneesha and Tavonda, the magisterial Orencio and Percelle, or the evocative Lakazia and Swanzetta. They are names emerging from a tradition of linguistic and musical invention much like those that gave us jazz and rap. And they are names that have paved the way for Americans of all classes and colors to begin to loosen up a stodgy culture of traditional name giving. The census data show that whites, too, are increasingly looking for distinctive names.

David Zax is a writer living in Washington, DC.

President Mahama Emanates Confidence In Ghana

Presidnt John Dramani Mahama

By Nana Akua Tweneboah-Koduah

Ghanaians love running down their own country! To many people nothing in Ghana is good, which is why anytime something happens you commonly hear from Ghanaians who do not even know where the passport office is or have never travelled before comparing Ghana to other countries especially the US of A and eventually damning anything in Ghana.

To those fussbudgets and doomsayers the only good thing about the country is when they have loads of money to spend or they occupy positions of authority which brings power, money and prestige. To them there is unequivocally nothing good that can happen in Ghana if their political party is not in power. That is why Ghana has generally been divided into political lines today.

Ghana is definitely at a crossroad whereby her citizens need to put their confidence in her. If you have no confidence in something, there is no way you will like anything connected with that something. This is why many Ghanaians have written off the country as backache.

It is upon this background that President John Mahama has lately been whipping up the confidence of Ghanaians not only in the economy but the country in general. The President has been telling Ghanaians that if they do not trust that anything good can come from Ghana, then nobody will.

And the other truth is that people tend to put haphazard approach to issues and things they do not trust, which is why it has become a common norm for many Ghanaians especially public and civil servants to go to work but do nothing productive to help lift the country up.

The irony is that it is these same public and civil servants whose salaries and allowances eat over 70% of the country’s income leaving nothing much for other essentials the country has to grapple with. Yet, public and civil servantscollect their salaries, but go to work and practically do nothing and later turn round to harshly run down the country.

President Mahama in his State of the Nation address last week touched on this negative behaviour of Ghanaians which is seriously destroying the country. The President and many Ghanaians have realized that if the country continues to tread on this dangerous political lines behaviour, Ghana can never move forward. 

Hear President Mahama in his own words, “The world loves Ghana because we love Ghana. But the instant we allow ourselves to fall prey to pettiness of politics and the small-mindedness of doomsayers and people who actively wish for the failure of any action or policy intended to lift Ghana up, we turn our backs on that love and in so doing, we betray our own homeland”.

Ghana is bigger than any of us. She is bigger than any of our political parties. Ghana belongs to its people. But most of all, Ghana belongs to you, the people who get up every day and do their best to earn a living, to maintain your household, to feed and educate your children, to care for your elders, and to be a functional part of your communities. Your love of this country matters. Your service to this country makes a difference”.

President Mahama ended his speech with these words, “I must believe that we are still a patriotic society with citizens who feel a sense of responsibility to their nation. We must all rise to the challenge of transforming Ghana – because if not us, then who? We cannot falter and we must not be afraid because God is on our side, and the holy book says, if God be for us, who can be against us”.

Those were the uplifting words of the President to Ghanaians. It is important to state that as the Chief Executive of the country, President Mahama can set the agenda for Ghanaians, but those who must do the heavy lifting to get the country going are Ghanaians. Ghana will falter if Ghanaians continue to see the country as a failure and ran it down with their mouths.

This is the time for Ghanaians to behave as Ghanaians. I mean Ghanaians must love everything about Ghana and take it a step further by patronising goods and services locally made. We have been our own worst enemies for a long time.

nakuakoduah@yahoo.com

Alzheimer

New research has indicated that a life time consumption of excessive copper can play significant role in developing Alzheimer's disease.

A team of researchers from the University of Rochester Medical Center in the United States unveiled the dark side of copper and its affection on the body.

The study on mice shows that a steady diet of copper “interfered with the brain's shielding, the blood brain barrier.”

Copper contributes to initiating and fueling the abnormal protein (beta amyloid) build-up and brain inflammations that are hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease, according to the report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"It is clear that, over time, copper's cumulative effect is to impair the systems by which amyloid beta is removed from the brain," said the study leader Dr. Rashid Deane.

"The key will be striking the right balance between too much and too little copper consumption," Deane said.

Commenting on the recent findings, the professor of bioinorganic chemistry at Keele University, Chris Exley, expressed his opposite idea.

"In our most recent work we found evidence of lower total brain copper with ageing and Alzheimer's. We also found that lower brain copper correlated with higher deposition of beta amyloid in brain tissue,” Exley said.

"While the findings present clues to how copper could contribute to features of Alzheimer's in mice, the results will need replicating in further studies,” said Dr. Eric Karran, from Alzheimer's Research in UK.

“It is too early to know how normal exposure to copper could be influencing the development or progression of Alzheimer's in people," he emphasized.

The experts stress that more research is required to learn the true role that copper might play in the brain.

Copper is found in a wide range of the foods we eat, including red meat, shellfish, nuts and many fruits and vegetables, as well as in many vitamin supplements.