"Choices" note to Kanye West
K-K-Kanye West darling of the "alt-right" at the moment, has been invited to visit Nigeria by Shehu Sani, a member of the "All Progressive Congress", the ruling party in Nigeria. As one should historically be very wary of Greeks bearing gifts, one should well examine progressives of any stripe peddling a narrative, wanting to 'inform" you.
Lagos, Nigeria (CNN) A Nigerian senator has invited American rapper Kanye West to visit slave ports in Africa for an education on the slave trade.
Kanye West is facing immense criticism following his remarks during an interview with TMZ live this week in Los Angeles, where he said the slave trade was a "choice".
The musician opened up about his mental health, his family, and his art during the show. He also said this about slavery, "When you hear about slavery for 400 years ... For 400 years? That sounds like a choice.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/04/africa/nigeria-lawmaker-kanye-west/index.html
I believe that this is truly a gift, a wonderful opportunity to learn more about the truly horrific trans-Atlantic and localized indigenous slave trade of the area. (pre-colonial and post-colonial)
I'm hopeful he will take to heart on this trip, the true meaning of the Thomas Sowell quote that he, Mr. West recently posted on Twitter. As it is, in my opinion, an apt companion for his journey of intellectual discovery.
“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.”
Now, what may we be ignorant about regarding Nigeria? Where to start? I've studied West Africa, particularly Nigeria for twenty years and yet still discover the depths of my own ignorance on a semi-regular basis.
Who knows of the terrible "choice" made in Georgia in 1803 by enslaved Igbo?
Igbo Landing is a historic site at Dunbar Creek on St. Simons Island, Glynn County, Georgia. In 1803 one of the largest mass suicides of enslaved people took place when Igbo captives from what is now Nigeria were taken to the Georgia coast. In May 1803, the Igbo and other West African captives arrived in Savannah, Georgia, on the slave ship the Wanderer. They were purchased for an average of $100 each by slave merchants John Couper and Thomas Spalding to be resold to plantations on nearby St. Simons Island. The chained slaves were packed under deck of a coastal vessel, the York, which would take them to St. Simons. During the voyage, approximately 75 Igbo slaves rose in rebellion, took control of the ship, drowned their captors, and in the process caused the grounding of the ship in Dunbar Creek.
The sequence of events that occurred next remains unclear. It is known only that the Igbo marched ashore, singing, led by their high chief. Then at his direction, they walked into the marshy waters of Dunbar Creek, committing mass suicide.
http://www.blackpast.org/aah/igbo-landing-mass-suicide-1803
How many know the percentage of enslaved Africans from this area that were brought to America? Nigeria and America have deep and everlasting ties few acknowledge or are even remotely aware of.
The Igbo and Yoruba peoples from the Bights of Benin and Biafra compromised roughly one-third of all enslaved Africans transported to the Americas. Professor Childs examines how the transatlantic slave trade during the 18th and 19th centuries brought about the formation of a common identity in Africa among the Yoruba and Igbo peoples, and how their culture was both transferred and transformed in the Americas.
https://barnard.edu/events/trans-atlantic-slave-trade-its-effect-igbo-yoruba-cultures
Bringing us to Olaudah Equiano the first Nigerian abolitionist.
Olaudah Equiano, whose father was an Ibo chief, was born in 1745 in what is now Southern Nigeria. At the age of 11 years, Olaudah was captured by African slave traders and sold into bondage in the New World. Equiano, given the name Gustavus Vassa by one of his many owners, was forced to serve several masters, among them a Virginia plantation owner, a British Naval officer, and a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania merchant. While a slave to the naval officer Equiano traveled between four continents. These global experiences within the Atlantic Slave Trade allowed Equiano to produce the most popular and vivid slave narrative of his era.
By 1777 at the age of 32, Equiano, after having mastered reading, writing and arithmetic, purchased his freedom. He settled in England, befriended Granville Sharp, the first prominent British abolitionist, and soon became a leader of the emerging anti-slavery movement. Equiano presented one of the first petitions to the British Parliament calling for the abolition of slavery.
Equiano married an Englishwoman, Susanna Cullen, in 1792. The couple had two daughters, one of whom survived to inherit her father’s estate. Olaudah Equiano died in 1797, ten years before the slave trade was abolished and 36 years before Parliament outlawed slavery throughout the British Empire.
http://www.blackpast.org/gah/equiano-olaudah-1745-1797
First, for the purposes of this article the word Benin, as used is not the post-colonial nation-state of Benin (the ancient kingdom of Dahomey/ Fon peoples) but the area around Benin city Nigeria ( Edo peoples).
The people of the south-east were heavily preyed upon by slave traders from the north and along the coast. Forced to abandon their settlements and move into the forests to evade their captors, the struggles of the Igbo peoples were preserved in long epics, memorised and passed down the generations.
Colonial period
In the 15th century, Benin began to trade with the Portuguese, selling slaves and acquiring spices, firearms, the art of writing and the Christian religion. By the 18th century, the British had displaced the Portuguese as leaders of the slave trade. A century later, in 1807, the missionaries’ campaign against slavery had gained support, leading the British parliament to ban the slave trade. The navy began to patrol the coast, arresting slavers and settling captured slaves (most of them Nigerians) in the resettlement colony of Sierra Leone. Several missionaries in Nigeria were themselves freed Nigerian slaves who had converted to Christianity in Sierra Leone. The missionaries introduced quinine to control malaria, a new trade in palm oil also began, and the economies of southern Nigeria became increasingly powerful. Steamboats took this new culture up-river and into the forests.
In the early 19th century, there was upheaval in the north, as Fulani emirs declared a jihad (holy war) against the Hausa state of Gobir and created a new empire with city states, a common religious and judicial system and Qur’anic schools. The Muslim empire spread rapidly.
http://thecommonwealth.org/our-member-countries/nigeria/history
From the Harriet Tubman Institute.
Slaves in Kano are categorised into two classes:
bayin gida(domestic slaves) and bayin aiki
(farmyard slaves). Bayin gida were also referred to as “trusted” slaves that have earned the trust of their master either through hard work, obedience or bravery at the battlefield. These slaves
are mostly found among the royal households as identified by Imam Imoru in the table below:
Bayin aiki on the other hand are the slaves that were
recently captured and enslaved and have very little or no
knowledge of their status in the society. They are mostly
being considered first-generation slaves.
http://www.tubmaninstitute.ca/sites/default/files/file/Hamza_Ibrahim_2005.pdf
At a time when coastal West Africa was responding to the growth of legitimate trade, the Sokoto Caliphate was experiencing dramatic expansion in the plantation sector. Plantations (gandu, rinji, tungazi), which used slaves captured by the Caliphate armies, were established near all the major towns and were particularly important around Sokoto, Kano, Zaria and other capitals. Plantation development originated with the policies of Muhammad Bello, first Caliph and successor to Uthman dan Fodio, who was concerned with the consolidation and defence of the empire.
Another notable Islamic slave society was that of the Sokoto caliphate formed by Hausas in sub-Saharan Africa (northern Nigeria and Cameroon) in the 19th century. At least half the population was enslaved. That was only the most notable of the Fulani jihad states of the western and central Sudan, where between 1750 and 1900 from one- to two-thirds of the entire population consisted of slaves.In Islamic Ghana, between 1076 and 1600, about a third of the population were slaves. The same was true among other early states of the western Sudan, including Mali (1200–1500), Segou (1720–1861), and Songhai (1464–1720). It should be noted that slavery was prominent in Ghana and Mali, and presumably elsewhere in Africa in areas for which information is not available, long before the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade. The population of the notorious slave-trading state of the central Sudan, Ouidah (Whydah), was half-slave in the 19th century. It was about a third in Kanem (1600–1800) and perhaps 40 percent in Bornu (1580–1890). Most slaves probably were acquired by raiding neighbouring peoples, but others entered slavery because of criminal convictions or defaulting on debts (often not their own); subsequently, many of those people were sold into the international slave trade.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/slavery-sociology
In the following article Professor Emeritus Jere L. Bacharach, a specialist in Medieval Middle Eastern history, describes the little known saga of one of the largest groups of persons of African descent in the region, military slaves. These enslaved men, utilized for centuries in the Muslim world, had no counterpart in Europe or the Americas
http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/african-military-slaves-muslim-middle-east
An attempted coup d'état by the general of the cavalry in 1817 backfired when the cavalry itself revolted and pledged its allegiance to the Sokoto Caliphate. The cavalry was largely composed of Muslim slaves from farther north, and they saw in the jihad a justification for rebellion. In the 1820s, Oyo had been torn asunder, and the defeated king and the warlords of the Oyo Mesi retreated south to form new cities, including Ibadan, where they carried on their resistance to the caliphate and fought among themselves as well.
http://countrystudies.us/nigeria/9.htm
They fought on the side of those who enslaved them. That as well was a choice.
kpr37 with a pagan's perspective.
As Kanye said, "love to all".
Hi all. Two questions.
Why did I have to upload a photo to publish, and what happened to my Islam group?
Two questions answered
1. You have to upload a picture so that you article will get noticed better by google.
2. I am not sure what happened to your Islam group. I will investigate.
I have a question. I am confused to your point. Are you saying that it is more nobel for slaves to have killed themselves than to be slaves, or that slaves would never adapt to their captors. In fact, most slaves in America, took on the faith of their slave owners and served their families well. Even upon becoming freemen, they often stayed where they were abused and even fought for south, so I find the latter story of the slaves remaining with their Muslim slave owners and fighting for them, not so unusual. Human nature is such, that most people will remain in a bad situation that they know, then flee it to one that they might not know.. Hence the expression about "The devil you know".
But it is important to know history. If you don't you are doomed to repeat it.
I am confused to your point.
I was trying to make Thomas Sowell's point. It is important what we do not know.
Sargon of Akkad says it best. starts around 5;00 in
Are you saying that it is more nobel for slaves to have killed themselves than to be slaves,
No.
No.
just present a series of facts in a sort of chronological order. Plus I really don't like the APP "all progressive party" They are oppressing the Igbo once more and some how the time frame of slavery of Nigeria would be glossed over. 900 AD to the 1920s.
From The Harvard Crimson 1969
President Muhammadu Buhari has been accused (sort of admitted) of personally participating in the killing of several hundred Igbos in the Biafran war. They were not all soldiers however, it's alleged some were students, intellectuals and politicians in his murderous mix as well.
Forgetting, perhaps momentarily, that it was the large scale killings of Igbos that directly lead to the call for independence in Biafra in the first place.
But it is important to know history.
I could not agree more.
At first, I thought Kanye's "choice" quote was from here.
Why, so you can lock me up? Nah. Just bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from ships, 'cause they knew death was better than bondage.
But after watching Sargon video his explanation makes more sense.
Thomas Sowell is one of my all time favorites. I don't think I've seen this video. I will though.
they often stayed where they were abused
I suspect it was a form of what is now called Stockholm's Syndrome.
I have to say, that crossed my mind, too.
I have read a lot of what Sowell has had to say, and there are some things i agree with and other I totally disagree with.
Slavery here in the US, is kind of like discussing the Irish in England. Very complex. I have seen both first hand, teaching in a tough inner city school for over 20 years and growing up in England, where my grandfather owned a second hand men's clothing store, that was mostly visited by Irishmen.
It can even be compared to Russian mentality.
Once a people's social constructs has been replaced, it is hard to fix. Once they have become subservient, complacency sets in.
For instance, the condition of black families. Slavery destroyed the family unit. 300 years later, some of that has been fixed, but there are too many black men who are not staying with their children. This has been going on long before any social welfare system was in place. This is a remnant of slavery. That being said, in Ms. Berlin's class (that is me), I talked every day about how to get out of this. That education was the key and not having babies before getting married. How babies stop education from continuing. The parents never objected to what I was teaching them. In fact, many thanked me.
In England and Ireland, because the Irish were an under class, they had that mentality. Their children didn't go on to higher education. Many of their children were taken by the Church, so they remain an underclass. These becomes a state of mind for the community, and becomes very hard to change the mindset.
For instance, the condition of black families. Slavery destroyed the family unit . 300 years later, some of that has been fixed
Mr. Sowell has the statistics to back up his contention.
“The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state.”
What is the present day stats on single parent household for African Americans in 2018? How does that compare with your statement?
Nearly a hundred years of the supposed “legacy of slavery” found most black children [78%] being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent [66%]. Public housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before admissions standards for public housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions. And it was before the toxic message of victimhood was spread by liberals. We all know what hell holes public housing has become in our times. The same toxic message produced similar social results among lower-income people in England, despite an absence of a “legacy of slavery” there.
If we are to go by evidence of social retrogression, liberals have wreaked more havoc on blacks than the supposed “legacy of slavery” they talk about.
Facts, not feelings.
Facts, not feelings.
That's a little condescending. Facts are facts when they are really facts. Different sources different facts. Your stats would have creedence if it wasn't it wasn't an overall trend, but it is. Single motherhood is an across board disease since the 1960's for all races. And while it is worse in the black community, there is obviously something else going on.
Now according to the conservative publication, The Daily Signal, this is what they have concluded:
It was not meant that way. That is a saying of Mr. Sowell. Sorry, it took so long to respond.
Here is a source from the left I agree with.
IT ONCE WAS fashionable to suppose that slavery had made the conventional family difficult to sustain because of spouses so often being sold away from one another and children being separated from their parents. A natural conclusion was that, after slavery, the old patterns persisted, especially given how difficult conditions continued to be for black people, and that this was an understandable precursor to the fatherless norm in inner-city black communities after the 1960s. There is, indeed, sociological literature showing that it was hardly unknown for black people to be raised by single mothers during slavery and afterward. In fact, over the last 150 years, there have always been proportionately more single-parent black homes than white ones.
However, as classic work by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman has shown, despite the horrors of slavery, overall, during the pre-emancipation era, about two-thirds of enslaved families had two parents—far more than today. More recent revisionist work has stressed that, while forced separations were always an important part of the picture, the two-thirds figure remained dominant (Wilma Dunaway is especially handy on this). And this tendency continued into the Jim Crow era, contrary to a false sense one might have of daily life in a black ghetto of the 1930s and ’40s—think Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices or Claude Brown’s Manchild in a Promised Land. Namely, it is wrong to suppose that, amid the misery of those neighborhoods, all but a sliver of children grew up without a dad. That is a modern phenomenon, whose current extent—fewer than one in three black children are raised by two parents—would shock even the poorest black folk 100 or even 50 years ago.
A standard reference on the subject by University of Minnesota historian Steven Ruggles in 1994 is most often taken as evidence of the uninteresting—that, gosh, in the old days poor black people didn’t find single parenthood unusual. What is actually more important in its findings is that, from 1880 to 1960, fewer than one in three black children nationwide didn’t grow up with two parents. Another key statistic, from Barbara Agresti in 1978, is that, just past emancipation, in 1870 in Walton County, Florida, about 57 percent of black children lived with two parents; just 15 years later, 89 percent did. Or, as St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton told us in Black Metropolis, in Chicago in the 1920s, it was considered a problem that just one in seven black children were born to single mothers. What’s more, that number went down during the Depression, not up.
Data like this are important because they show that the reason so few black children grow up without fathers today is not a mere matter of economics or, more graphically, because black men without college degrees find it so hard to get decent work that they abandon their children. After all, black people living under the vicious racism of 100 years ago nevertheless tended, very strongly, to form two-parent families.
ps
Did you ever find out what happened to my Islam group?
In my opinion, Kanye West is one of the most vulgar, foul mouthed, nothing musician out there. He is all hype and no class. Just like the trash he is married to. He and Trump really are two of a kind. I guess that is why they get along so well. They both tend to run their mouths when they should keep it shut and wind up making fools of themselves.
I agree somewhat, but I know people have a tendency to overlook foul mouths when they are in agreement with those who espouse such language. I don't care for Kanye either and I haven't been keeping up with every detail of this whole thing, but from the first time I heard anything about it and heard him make the comment, I knew what he meant. I think he even said something the next day to clear it up, but he had already given those who want those votes an opening to twist it into something it wasn't meant to be. Heck, I can't blame them though. If people step on the plantation, they make become individuals and then they can vote any way they want to vote and not have to be worrying about the extreme viciousness they'll receive from their plantation owners.
I am speaking on an overall level. Most of his 'songs' are laced with very vulgar expletives and sexual innuendos. I guess that is how he defines himself. Like Trump, he is prone to sudden melt downs that are often manic. And like Trump, he's good at sticking his foot in his mouth, and can't seem to complete a whole sentence with one thought, suddenly drifting off on some tangent.
I mean, what's not to like? /s
Kanye is a "hip-hop" Rap artist, in that context he is mild, middle of the road.
I still remember Grandmaster flash and when it first started showing up on jute-boxes in white" rock and roll bars.
That has lead to the latest phenome with 5 hits on the billboard charts at this time.
Now, either I'm too old,(a distinct possibility) or this is OFFENSIVE with no redeeming quality. I find it rasist, sexist, and promoting violent anti-social activities. Said the cranky old man. LOL
Kanye is definitely an asshole, but when the lady used all those words at the Washington Party last Saturday or quite a few others wanting to blow up the White House, all the vulgarity we heard from them didn't bother the Left one bit. If Kanye had criticized Trump to the hilt with all the curse words and vulgarity in his vocabulary, the Left would have praised the hell out of him. I admit he is an asshole. I don't care for him. I don't like a lot of things Trump does. You see, that's the difference. I admit these things, but the Left goes after anyone regardless or race or gender if he or she doesn't walk the line or decides to suggest people wake up and become individuals.
Why is it necessary to bring politics into the conversation? Are you so politically obsessed that you can't address the comment that I made without bringing politics into the conversation? I am not, Left, nor Right, nor anything else. I made a comment about the person and all you can think of doing is making it political. What, it is not possible to have a conversation here without the politically obsessed turning it into a a political hate fest?
Sheesh!!!
I am glad you find him "mild", "middle of he road". But, his words do noting but promote hate and divisiveness among people. It makes them think that using vulgar language and making sexual innuendos toward women is A-OK. It's sickening.
And his manic melt-downs at anything that does not go his way or does not agree with his thinking, sets a very bad example for the younger crowd that worships him. ]
He may be worth a lot of money, but, his that does not buy him class, or credibility.
Just my own opinion.
After what he did to Taylor Swift, he should be super glued to his seat at any award event he attends.
In hearing Kanye say that, I felt like he was just too stupid to actually get his real point across, which was probably "Free your mind and the rest will follow". But, since he is a complete idiot, he wasn't capable of making his point, and what he actually ended up saying as a result was pretty heinous.
Which really illustrates why you shouldn't put a mic in front of Kanye. He is too ignorant and stupid to be worth anybody's time, outside of the whole watching a trainwreck syndrome.
"But, but, but,,,he's an Icon"
An uneducated one.
"But, but, but,,,he's an Icon"
Sudden changes in the Cultural Zeitgeist is delicious sometimes, but it can leave a bitter aftertaste. As the regressive left learns in the age of Trump.
(ps) I read Kanye is meeting with Thomas Sowell. Can't wait to see what comes next.
Here is a video further explaining that comment.
Sorry, it took so long to respond. I believe you misunderstood the reasoning for my choice, of KKKanye. I support him one hundred percent. It was meant to mock the left!
As it was the left that tossed the derogatory comments toward MR. West, in the first place. I did that to make a point. Just how stupid the idea is . Not a single person had looked at his words in a reasonable manner in any MSM source I read or watched.
"400 years of slavery was a choice"
First off, slavery is thousands of years old. It was the condition of humans since before recorded history. Affecting all people and cultures, it did not begin 400 years ago. The Atlantic slave trade to Colonial America started in 1619 in Jamestown Virginia.
400 hundred years past that date (1619) is 2019, so if that was what Kanye meant, slavery in America would be an ongoing enterprise. It is clearly not. So that could not be what he was talking about, could it? No, of course not. Little known, is that the first slave owner in Virginia, recognized fully in colonial American law was a man of color himself, Anthony Johnson in 1623. I have read within many books, that clearly states, that was the date of the beginning of slavery in America, as it was recognized in colonial American/ English crown jurisprudence as legal to own another human being as "property". It is a most difficult and touchy matter to debate. So I present both.
This is clearly a complicated subject, perhaps TMZ was not the place to have it? Especially since no one in the room with him seemed to be informed in any meaningful way regarding the history of slavery or just what he was getting at. He was never given a chance to fully explain himself, he was attacked personally. (Ad hominid) one of the logical fallacies is never a good starting point for a serious discussion. I wrote this after reading the Nigerian dude suggesting he would teach Kanye the truth and it pissed me off.
I thought Kanye was referencing "Killmonger" from Black Panther at first, I'm not sure what he meant, and won't unless he clarifies his meaning. That is the thing no one knows, what was in his head when he said it. But that did not stop the attacks. I only meant to mock the ad-hominid form of argument. Here are two reasonable, articulate, well thought out counterpoints from African Americans on the subject. I subscribe to both channels.