Nigeria and the Curse of Slavery
“The fraught debate on slavery is largely absent in Africa, even though Africans were deeply involved in the slave trade. Africans raided for slaves often in connivance with local chiefs and then acted as middlemen with European and Arab purchasers”.
In sheer exasperation at the tragic enormity of it all, this subject matter grew out of a conversation I recently had with some friends. We wondered aloud why Nigeria and Africa appear stuck in the mud of underdevelopment with no discernable prospects of a silver lining in the dark horizon. Yet it is not the case that Nigeria has never experienced capacity for sustained development. The trio of Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe and Ahmadu Bello were, without any equivocation, an advertisement for development oriented and utilitarian leadership.
To put it in the horse’s mouth, here was Awolowo at his frank and assertive best (in 1955) “the British did not have the true interests of the country at heart. In fourteen months, under the present government, we have done more for Nigeria than the British did in 120 years.” In the defunct Eastern region, “after the implementation of Arthur D Little’s
recommended growth plan, the East’s economy grew at more than 9.2%, starting from 1958 till 1967 when the war tragically interrupted the sterling momentum…At over 9%, the Eastern Region in this period, had the fastest growing economy on earth consistently for 9 years”.
Yet, here we are, several decades along, wondering whether the Hamitic hypothesis of the congenital servitude of the black race was true after all. How do we account for the prevalent vicious cycle of the comprehensive development failure of Nigeria and Africa from which there seems to be no way out?. What follows (essentially speculative) is an attempt to reexamine the nexus between this failure and the phenomenon of slavery from an entirely new perspective.
It is a metatheoretical perspective that borrows from the philosophy of post modernism which rejects ‘concepts of rationality, objectivity, and universal truth and emphasizes the diversity of human experience and multiplicity of perspectives’. At the convocation ceremony of the University of Lagos Professor Toyin Falola demonstrated an aptitude for this tradition with his advocacy ‘that the Yoruba knowledge and divination system, Ifa, as well as witchcraft be more vigorously studied in Nigerian universities, taking better advantage of systems of knowledge developed by Africans’.
Integral to the unholy trinity of slavery, imperialism and racism, it is trite to restate the truism that the injury dealt to Africa by slavery is monumental, colossal and unparalleled. To bring back the subject matter to focus, we will do well to refresh our memory with the recall of a number of apt iconic recollections.
In a recent review of Walter Rodney’s classic “how Europe Underdeveloped Africa”, George Apata restated Rodney’s position on slavery: “Slavery was not only one of the greatest forced migrations of people in human history, but it was also possibly the greatest evacuation of manpower from one part of the world to another. The estimated 10-12 million Africans that were removed from the continent over a period of five centuries had a great impact on African underdevelopment. The consequence of this forced migration not only depleted but deprived Africa of its ablest young men and women, the very manpower that was required for development”.
Peter Ekeh had this to say “African states in the pre-slave trade era decidedly attained greater cultural heights than the states operating under the aegis of the violence of the slave trade. In this respect, a condition of cultural creativity .. . is most unlikely to belong to the kind of state that owes its existence or its greatness to slavery or the slave trade. [It is remarkable] that the acknowledged masterpieces of the Benin and Ife artists were produced before