The Africans (28 page)

In Uganda, Kabaka Mwanga, a Moslem king of the 1880s, murdered scores of young Christian converts and an Anglican missionary, Bishop James Hannington, for what he saw as an attempt to establish Christian hegemony. Under Idi Amin, also a Moslem, the Christian majority did not fare much better. Amin kept lists of all clergy, ordered the murder of the Anglican archbishop and often had Ugandans tortured for the simple reason that they had attended church.

“You would leave your home in the morning on God’s work and
not know if you would come home that night,” Silvanus Wani, the successor of the slain Ugandan archbishop, told me. “Each morning was one of thanksgiving. The next day you went out in faith again.”

In Ethiopia, Emperor Haile Selassie forced clergymen to recite his name as part of mass. In Guinea, Archbishop Raymond Marie Tchidmbo was arrested in the 1970s on trumped-up charges of being implicated in a coup, and despite the pleas of two popes, kept in jail for nine years. Sixty-five missionaries in Burundi were given two days’ notice to leave the country in 1979 for “preaching tribalism,” and most missionaries have been expelled from the Marxist states of Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola and Benin. Jehovah’s Witnesses have been persecuted in Kenya and jailed by the thousands in Malawi.

The president of Equatorial Guinea, Macias Nguema Biyogo, a Catholic-turned-atheist, decreed in the late 1970s that mass must end with the congregation chanting, “Forward with Macias, always with Macias, never without Macias.” He later closed all the churches in his country. When he was overthrown by the military and executed in 1979, the soldiers’ first order of business was to reopen the churches.

Church services were segregated in colonial days and names such as “Native Anglican Church” were common. But most Africans do not view Christianity as a white, imported religion. Jesus is depicted as a white man on some church murals, as a black on others. The interpretation is the artist’s to make. Nevertheless, the Catholic and Protestant churches have remained largely traditional, failing to “Africanize” either their hymns or sermons, and in the past two decades there has been a move away from the Western orientation toward breakaway Christian sects of a purely indigenous nature. By 1982 the number of separate denominations operating in Africa had passed six thousand.

Some of the new sects have fewer than a hundred members. Their church may be under a mango tree or in the corner of a city parking lot, and every Sunday, cities such as Nairobi come alive with groups of singing, chanting worshipers, swaying to the beat of drums, often dressed in white robes with caps bearing the insignia of their sects. Western Christians would find little familiar in the service, the hymns or the prayer books.

Despite the growing number of converts throughout Africa, there is reason to question whether their commitment is really as deep as
the numbers suggest. The church, I think, is primarily expanding because it represents a modern rather than primitive force, exerted at the very time Africa is preoccupied with the future. After all, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, the former president/emperor of the Central African Re/files/20/44/64/f204464/public/Empire used to swing between Christianity and Islam, depending on his current source of foreign aid. For the average African, Christianity legitimizes a belief in miracles and a respect for mystery, and that alone is sufficient to attract a following of millions.

However valuable the church has been in assisting Africa’s five million refugees, in helping during times of drought, famine and sickness, it traditionally has acted as a tool of the white establishment. The church did not play an active role in supporting the Africans’ struggle for independence, largely because white clergy in Africa were racist in attitude and approach. White missionaries did not speak in protest when barbaric governments killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Africans in places such as Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, the Central African Empire, because, they reasoned, Africans have always killed Africans. “I’d hate to think what they would have done to each other if it hadn’t been for Christianity,” an American missionary in Burundi told me. The church also has failed to follow its own doctrine in South Africa, where many of the Ten Commandments are ignored as part of national policy.

But not long ago, a large congregation gathered in Germiston, South Africa, for the funeral of Christian Smith, a white who had been assistant manager of a plastics factory. The mourners included blacks, coloreds (people of mixed blood) and Indians, some of whom had worked with Smith for as long as fifteen years. The minister, Rev. J. J. du Toit, mounted the pulpit and looked out over the congregation in his normally white-only church. His eyes narrowed and his words came slowly: there would be no service until the blacks left the church.

Robina Smith, the widow, stood and led the entire congregation, black and white, out of the church, leaving the minister alone in the pulpit. An undertaker conducted an informal gravesite service. “And just to think that we have the nerve to call ourselves Christians,” Mrs. Smith said.

The incident occurred in a church belonging to Nederduitsch Harvormde Kerk, the most conservative of South Africa’s three Dutch Reformed churches. The three have a white membership of
about 1.8 million, or 40 percent of the country’s white Christians. At a 1974 synod, the church dropped its openly racist theology and now nominally supports racial equality. But it holds that apartheid is morally acceptable, saying that “the New Testament does not regard the diversity of peoples, as such, as something sinful.” Remarkably enough, the Dutch Reformed churches in South Africa have almost a million black members, who, not allowed to sit with white congregations, have formed their own separate churches.

There is a little island called Goree off the Senegalese coast in West Africa, and here one finds more scars of the colonial heritage. Goree’s streets are sandy and narrow. They wind past rows of tidy houses, their blue shutters drawn tight against the sun’s afternoon assault, and meander up a hill where rusting cannon point out to sea. Near the cannon, at the foot of Saint Germain Street, stands a rambling weather-beaten structure built by the Dutch two hundred years ago. Its empty basement cells are filled with silence. The ocean beats against their stone foundations and from their windows you can gaze out across the Atlantic toward the New World, so far away.

For millions of West Africans—the ancestors of what would become the United States’ largest minority class—this is where freedom ended and serfdom began. It was here, in the dark, dank slave house, that Arab traders bartered and bickered with European shippers, here that the Africans spent the last weeks in their homeland, chained to a wall in underground cubicles, awaiting a buyer, a boat and, at the end of a long, harrowing voyage, a master.

In the weighing room below the trading office, the men’s muscles were examined, the women’s breasts measured, the children’s teeth checked. Those were the qualities—muscles, breasts, teeth—on which human worth was judged. The slaves were fattened like livestock up to what was considered an ideal shipping weight, 140 pounds, and those who remained sickly or fell victim to pneumonia or tuberculosis were segregated from the rest by an Arab doctor, led into a corridor whose open door overlooked the ocean and tossed out for the sharks. The selection process was similar to the one the Nazis would use two centuries later in World War II death camps.

I took the thirty-minute ferry ride one day from Dakar, the modern capital of Senegal, with a group of black American tourists. Goree, named for an island in the Netherlands and once a French
naval base, is a quiet, peaceful place with only 500 inhabitants and no cars or crime. In the streets, African children tugged at our sleeves, saying, “You need guide? I take you. I show you where you become slave.”

The slave house was turned into a museum some years ago and the Senegalese curator, Joseph Ndiaye, greeted us by the open door. The tides below smashed against the same rocks on which the visitors’ forefathers had trod onto vessels with names such as the
Five Brothers
, the
Diane
and the
Regina Cook
for the trip with no return. One of every seven Africans who took that journey died at sea, a victim of disease or maritime disaster.

Unlike Goree, most of Africa’s slavery monuments have been allowed to fall into disrepair and slip quietly into an unobserved past. The stone blocks in Zanzibar on which slaves were auctioned are now occupied by vegetable sellers. The forts used to protect trading routes along Ghana’s Gold Coast are crumbling. All that remains in Lagos, Nigeria, are a few chains and spikes pounded into buildings on Breadfruit Street. In Freetown, Sierra Leone, the immense cottonwood tree around which former slaves rallied to proclaim their freedom still stands in the main square, but no one attaches much historical significance to it anymore. African children, in fact, are given only a cursory glimpse of slavery in their history classes. It is a chapter of the past most Africans would rather forget.

The black American visitors were as respectfully silent as worshipers in a cathedral while Ndiaye led us through the slave house, talking about three centuries of trade in human cargo, dangling handcuffs and tools of torture in front of us like a courtroom prosecutor. For slaves who tried to escape there were anklets with a spike that was driven through the foot. For the verbally defiant there were oval rings through which the lips were pulled and sealed by a spike. The Yoruba tribe of Nigeria called the device an
itenu
, meaning “shut your mouth.”

“I’ll tell you,” said Geraldine Fair of New York City, “it’ll take a long time for this to sink in, before I know what 1 really feel inside. It’s a lot different, a lot more real than the half-assed way they teach it in the history books at home. Most of all, I think, seeing Goree, seeing West Africa, helps me establish my own identity, just knowing way down deep that I did have a homeland.”

Although no precise figures are available, the number of slaves transported from West Africa to the Americas from the sixteenth to
the nineteenth century is believed to have ranged between 10 million and 15 million. The trade reached its peak in the 1790s, when about 70,000 slaves were landed annually in the Americas. In East Africa, where slavery continued from 1770 to 1896, between 1.2 million and 3 million slaves were exported, mainly to the Middle East. (Some historians place the total number of slaves taken from Africa at 50 million.)

Slavery as an institution came rather late to the United States. The first shipload of slaves did not arrive in Virginia until 1619, and as late as 1681 there were only 2,000 black slaves in the colony, compared to 6,000 European indentured servants. But slaving soon boomed as the United States sought cheap labor for its tobacco, sugar and cotton plantations, and in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, the U.S. census showed 4.4 million blacks among a total population of 36 million people. Thus the percentage of blacks in the U.S. population was precisely the same in 1860 as it was in 1970, 8.1 percent. (The percentage was 11.7 in 1980.)
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The Africans themselves—as well as the Arabs—were no less guilty than the whites in making sure that places such as Goree remained well stocked with merchandise. For the most part the Arab traders did not venture far into the interior to capture slaves. That service was provided by African kings and chieftains who, unable to adjust to the new economic temptations of a changing world, subjugated and sold their people for the luxuries and essentials they had only recently been introduced to: cloth, metals, beads, spirits, tobacco, firearms. The slave trade made kings rich in the interior, and along the coast created a new class of African merchants.

African wars in those days were fought for power and wealth. Land had little economic importance, and although territorial control and natural resources were of some value, the prime measure of one’s strength was manpower. As a result, wars were waged as much to increase the size of a chieftain’s human flock as to gain new land or settle old scores. Many of the Africans sold into bondage were prisoners of war. Others were criminals, debtors and those who simply had been outcast for various reasons from the extended family system. Some were the unfortunates who had strayed unknowingly across tribal boundaries and were captured. But it was the African himself who made slavery possible: he seized and traded his people
to the Arabs, who in turn sold them to the Europeans. Everyone shared the burden of shame.

The Europeans argued that the acquisition of slaves was a natural consequence of Africa’s warfare. It was better, they said, to ship the African off to a Christian master in the civilized world than to leave him at the mercy of kings in a primitive, pagan society where he perhaps would be killed as a human sacrifice. The Christian church never condoned the morality of selling human beings—there were scattered antislavery protests in Europe as early as the 1700s—but the pillage of a continent’s human resources generally was not a topic of sustained debate.

Interestingly enough, the steps to abolish slavery were taken outside Africa, not in it. Denmark barred its citizens from slave trading in 1803, Britain followed in 1807, the United States in 1808 and France in 1818. Despite the ban, U.S. citizens continued to buy slaves, and slaving still flourished in many areas of the world because African and European merchants were unwilling to sever this lucrative economic link. Britain meanwhile had set out to enforce its abolishment decree, establishing a twenty-ship antislavery fleet that patrolled the West African coast and stopped vessels suspected of carrying slaves. Between 1825 and 1865, Britain detained 1,287 slave ships and liberated 130,000 slaves. But during that period, ships carrying 1.4 million slaves still managed to slip through the British patrols and land their cargoes in the Americas.

The decisive factor ending the trade was the U.S. Civil War and the resultant emancipation of slaves. That left only Cuba and Brazil as legal slave importers and the risk of transporting to just two markets became too great for the shippers. One sad era in Africa’s history had ended. Soon another one, a subtler form of bondage known as colonialism, would begin.