1:29BHmm.
1:29ASo, you can see how that would rule out corruption very quickly. So, another example that, um, there’s a scholar from Ghana named Joseph Casely-Hayford. He points out that in the Ghanaian culture, there was a similar tradition of a ruling body. Typically, this was made up of elders. that would not only oversee the king and ensure that the king was ruling properly, but, um, they elected the king. Because you have to realize that in many African societies, the king was elected into that position. He didn’t become king, you know, just because he decided to be king. So these people, uh, provided oversight to the king, and in situations where king abuses power or misrules or was engaged in corruption, there was a trial.
2:13AThe king would be brought to trial, and if the charges against him were proven to be true, then he’d be forced to step down from the throne and someone else would take over. And this was a system that you find throughout most of the African continent. Well, what happened is during the process of slavery and colonialism, a lot of our traditions or cultures or institutions were destroyed. So in Togo, for example, you have this dictatorship, and this dictatorship is -- the way this government is run in Togo not really connected to indigenous African tradition. This dictatorship system is entirely alien to our institutions. So the reason why I write about our history is not only to instill a sense of pride in us as African people, because for many years we’ve been robbed of our history and been given a very negative view of our history.
3:00AI’m sure you’re aware of the portrayals of Africa as being a dark continent with savages running around with spears and cannibals, and that’s the kind of image that they gave us of our history. So for me, it’s not only important to study and understand our history from the perspective of us being a people that came from kings and queens and that type of greatness, but also the institutions that we had in Africa. Governance is one of them, and it’s a very important one because, as I said, Europeans came in there, they destroyed these institutions, and what we have nowadays is very repressive and very backwards.
3:32AThat’s one of the reasons why Africa is currently in the situation that it’s in. Other institutions that I point out here in this book is education. Again, another stereotype that we’ve been -- we bought into is, you know, we’re ignorant, we’re uneducated, we don’t like to read. And I point out here in this book, in the kingdom of the city of Timbuktu, which is in West Africa, this was a city that was very wealthy in gold, but books in Timbuktu were actually of more value than gold was. So this is the type of people that we were before slavery and before colonialism. We had these societies that were based on Institutions such as checks and balances on the rulers.
4:08AEducation was very important. And history -- I point out that maintaining their history was so important that in this book I write about examples of African societies where there weren’t written languages. What they do is they would memorize the history mentally and then pass it down through oral tradition. So you’d have over 1,000 years of history being passed down orally. This wasn’t written history. This was telling their children, the children memorizing it and passing down to their children. And that’s how important preserving and passing down our history was. So as I said, we are people that not only have a great history, but we have certain institutions that I think we need to research and look into, because I feel that a lot of the challenges we face nowadays can be solved by looking at some of the institutions and some of the cultural practices that we had as a people.
4:57AAnd last week, one of the things that I mentioned was there’s a banking system that we have in the Caribbean called a susu, although it’s known by different names throughout the region. I think susu is the most common one. And this comes from the West African tradition. And what a susu was is, for example, let’s say 10 people get together. They’ll decide that all 10 of us will throw in $100 in a pool. And every week that we meet someone else, or it might not be every week, it might be every 2 weeks or whatever, timetable they set up. But everyone will come together, throw $100 into the pool, and every time they meet someone, a different person within that group gets the total amount.
5:38AAnd they’ll keep meeting until every single person in that group has received the total amount. And it’s a very interesting kind of banking system. It’s kind of a loan, but without interest or all the other things that go into taking out a loan. And One of the things I pointed out in our last meeting was a lot of West Indians have come here and used that tradition to put their children into school, to open businesses, buy houses, buy cars. So this is an African tradition that’s actually of value. You can point to different things that have been -- we’ve been able to achieve by using this tradition.
6:13ASo when I write these books and educate people on the history, it’s not only, like I said, not only from the perspective of great kings and great queens of Africa, but also What institutions do we have as a people? What traditions do we have? And what value are these traditions and this history to us today? How can we look at our history and take certain examples or certain lessons from the history and apply it to our current situation? And like I said, to bring it back to Togo, because the people right there, they’re fighting to overthrow the dictatorship. And the reason why I wear this shirt and I’ve written several articles about Togo is to help raise awareness to the struggle.
6:49AAnother thing I believe in very firmly too is Pan-Africanism. We are one African people, and Togo is a cause that’s especially close to my heart because many of our ancestors probably came from Togo during the slave trade. So another aspect too of my writings is not only the history but also how can we as African people that have been scattered throughout the world through the slave trade, how can we come together and unite and work together to solve some of the common problems that we face. So with that, I’d like to open up the conversations to questions or comments.
7:22BSo in Togo, so what colonial power, you know, ruled over them during then?
7:30ADifferent powers. First it was a German colony, and then what happened is, this is very common in Africa, after the Germans lost the First World War, then it was handed over to the French and British, and they split up between them. So it was originally German Togoland, and then what ended up happening in the split is the British territory ended up becoming absorbed into Ghana, and the French territory became the independent Togo of today. And there’s actually a map right there of Ghana, and you can see Togo next to it. So yeah, part of Ghana today was formerly part of German Togoland.
8:04BYeah.
8:04ASo that’s how the colonizers kind of came up and split Africa, these borders, which has also caused a lot of problems. In Africa as well, these artificial borders.
8:12BSo, you know, that is one of the things, is people -- I remember writing something years ago when I was still at the newspaper, about people saying, why is Africa so screwed up? And basically I pointed out that part of it was that colonization by -- and when they did it, they put together different groups of people who they never got along well. Anyway, they weren’t part of the same group.
8:34AThey might not even speak the same language.
8:35BYeah, they forced them into the same thing. And now there’s kind of a sorting out of, you know, of being forced into that. And it was much like the sorting out that you saw in the former Yugoslavia back in the 1990s. I mean, it was the same type of thing. So people act like, well, they’re doing this because they’re savages or because they’re black. And it’s part of, you know, Europe, Western Europe, Dark Ages, you know.
9:00AYes.
9:00BI mean, yeah, but everybody had to go through that. And it’s obviously painful. To to watch, you know the stuff that’s going on. But understand, this once again goes back to colonial powers getting involved and going in. What was the famous treaty where all the European countries came together and where was like Switzerland and Berlin and divided everything?
9:22AYou saw how terrible that was. They sat there and they divided Africa amongst themselves. Not a single African ruler was there. So could you imagine sitting in your country and these people all the way up in Europe are deciding the future of your country and you have no say? So that was how of little regard Africans were to the Europeans, that we could just carve up their country without any input from them.
9:43BIt was kind of funny when you mentioned, I didn’t realize where Togo was. The other night we were looking for something to watch on TV, my wife and I, and we saw, I saw The African Queen, old Humphrey Bogart thing. And my wife had no idea that the Germans ruled, I guess it was like, was it Tanzania or something like that? Among the German areas. And she was, you know, and to understand that that was part of World War I. Because those were German holdings that they, they had that they were trying to protect. But people don’t understand how much the Europeans controlled, and all the different people who were involved in controlling.
10:17AI mean, another thing a lot of people don’t understand either is when we talk about the Holocaust. That’s something that we, everyone learns in school. Before the German Holocaust of the Jews, the first genocide that the German Empire inflicted on people were It wasn’t the Jews, it was in Africa. And, um, they went in there in Namibia and the Herero people, they committed an act of genocide against those people. But part of why I write this history is because we don’t really learn about it in school. So what happens is they teach us about what happens in Europe, and we have more of an understanding about European history than our own history. And I mean, to this day, the people in Namibia are still fighting for reparations for the genocide. Germany, it’s been a struggle to even get Germany to acknowledge the genocide. But I mean, as you know, the Jews have had much more success in getting Germany to not only acknowledge that but give them reparations as well.
11:08BSo when the Germans did that, what was it for? Strategic metals? Why did they need to wipe out those people?
11:16AThey just, I mean, that was the savagery of the conquest of Africa. They had already defeated these people in combat. So It wasn’t even like they needed to do it necessarily because they already won that conflict. It was just a matter of, we’re victorious and we have power over these people, so we’ll wipe them out. The first thing that they did is, because this is a desert, so they can’t -- they trap these people within the desert. They have no food, no water. Many of them died of starvation and exhaustion. And then the second step was to open camps, labor camps, and then they brought these people into these camps.
11:48AAnd I mean, we know what the history of slavery here, but what a lot of people don’t realize as well is that during the process of colonialism, many Africans were enslaved on the African continent. So Germans brought these people into labor camps, and many of them were worked to death right there in these camps. So I mean, when we talk about emancipation of slavery here in the Western Hemisphere, it ended here, but Europeans had continued to enslave Africans on African continents. I mean, even going back to Togo, the Germans used to force the Togolese to work by using whips. and whip them as a means to force them to work.
12:21ASo, yeah, as a people, when you really get into the history of everything that we’ve had to deal with over the last 500 years, there’s a lot of trauma that we’re still dealing with today.
12:30BWell, yeah, and therein is the other rub. I mean, I had my mother despairing a couple weeks ago where I said, maybe God really is white. Because I don’t understand why he would allow us to be subject to this stuff on and on and on for what purpose? I mean, have we not suffered enough?
12:55AI don’t get it. That’s what I admire about the people of Togo, because man, they’re really suffering there, but they’re fighting. They’re not giving up. That’s what I think. One of the great things about us as a people, and you’ll find this Everywhere that we’ve been oppressed, in the United States, Caribbean islands, South America, the African continent, we’ve undergone some horrendous oppression and treatment, but we remain optimistic and we continue fighting.
13:21BWell, I mean,
