An Africa We Lost And Forgot- Pre colonial Africa

[Lekan]

Click here for entire glossary-
http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/return.php?categorynum=2&categoryName=Pre-Colonial%20Africa:%20Society,%20Polity,%20Culture

Dutch Ambassadors Greeting the King of Kongo, late 17th cent.



Canoes, Senegal, 1780s
Shows canoes putting out to sea; both have oarsmen, one has sails; background, walled/fenced village.



Burial of a King


Ashanti



17th Century Great Benin City



Benin City
http://nigerianwiki.com/wiki/Benin
From accounts of members of the British army that invaded Benin City in 1897, we learn that the floors, lintels, and rafters of the council chambers and the king's residence in the palace were lined with sheets of repoussé, decorated brass covered with royal geometric designs and figures of men and leopards. Ornamental ivory locks sealed the doors and carved ivory figurines surmounted anterior. A brass snake, observed for the first time by a European in the early eighteenth century, was still to be seen on the roof of the council chamber house.

British Invasion
"According to the testimony of this captain, Great Benin where the king resides is larger
than Lisbon, all the streets run straight and as far as the eyes can see. The houses are large, especially that of the king which is richly decorated and has fine columns. The city is wealthy and industrious. It is so well governed that theft is unknown and the people live in such security that they have no door to their houses"




Procession of the Serpent, Whydah (Ouidah), Dahomey, April 1725



Court of King of Sestro, 1681

[Lekan]

The Long-Term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades

Nunn, Nathan (2007): The Long-Term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades. Forthcoming in: Quarterly Journal of Economics

Abstract

Can part of Africa’s current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa’s slave trades. I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from a country and current economic performance. To better understand if the relationship is causal, I examine the historical evidence on selection into the slave trades, and use instrumental variables. Together the evidence suggests that the slave trades have had an adverse effect on economic development.











VI. Possible Channels of Causality
I now turn to the channels through which the slave trades may have
affected economic development. I view this analysis as preliminary and ex-
ploratory. With only 52 observations it is not possible to pin down the pre-
cise channels and mechanism underlying the relationships with any reason-
able degree of certainty. My strategy here is to simply investigate whether
the data are consistent with the historic events described Section II.
An important consequence of the slave trades was that they tended to
weaken ties between villages, thus discouraging the formation of larger com-
munities and broader ethnic identities. I explore whether the data are consis-
tent with this channel by examining the relationship between slave exports
and a measure of current ethnic fractionalization from Alesina et al. [2003].
As shown in Figure VI, there is a strong positive relationship between the
two variables.18 This is consistent with the historic accounts of the slave
trades impeding the formation of broader ethnic identities.
This consequence of the slave trades is important because of the increas-
ing evidence showing that ethnic fractionalization is an important deter-
minant of a variety of factors necessary for economic development. Since
the seminal article documenting the link between ethnic diversity and eco-
nomic growth by Easterly and Levine [1997], subsequent research by La
Porta et al. [1999], Alesina et al. [2003], Aghion et al. [2004], and Easterly
et al. [2006] looks more deeply into why ethnic fractionalization is important
for development. These studies find that ethnic diversity is important for
social cohesion, domestic institutions, domestic polices, and the quality of
government. As well, Alesina et al. [1999], Miguel and Gugerty [2005], and
Banerjee and Somanathan [2006] find that ethnic fractionalization reduces
the provision of public goods, such as education, health facilities, access
to water, and transportation infrastructure, all of which are important for
economic development.

A second, and closely related, consequence of the slave trades was the
weakening and underdevelopment of states. To examine whether the data
are consistent with this channel, I consider the relationship between slave ex-
ports and the level of state development following the slave trades. To do this
I use a measure of pre-colonial state development from Gennaioli and Rainer
[2006]. The measure is constructed using ethnographic data from Murdock
[1967] on the indigenous political complexity of ethnic groups, measured by





the number of jurisdictional hierarchies beyond the local community. The
original measure ranges from 0 to 4, with 0 indicating “stateless” societies
and 4 indicating societies with “large states” [Murdock, 1967, p. 52]. Using
this data, Gennaioli and Rainer [2006] construct a measure of the proportion
of a country’s indigenous population that belongs to an ethnic group that
falls into category 2, 3, or 4.
The relationship between slave exports and 19th century state devel-
opment is shown in Figure VII. The negative relationship between slave
exports and state centralization shown in the figure is consistent with the
historic accounts of the slave trades causing long-term political instability,
which resulted in weakened and fragmented states.
Recent empirical research shows that a country’s history of state de-
velopment is an important determinant of current economic performance.
Bockstette et al. [2002] and Chanda and Putterman [2005] find that ‘state
antiquity’, measured using an index of the depth of experience with state-
level institutions, is positively correlated with real per capita GDP growth
between 1960 and 1995. Looking within Africa, Gennaioli and Rainer [2006]
find that countries with ethnicities that had centralized pre-colonial state
institutions today provide more public goods, such as education, health, and infrastructure.





Herbst [1997, 2000] also focuses on the importance of state development
for economic success, arguing that Africa’s poor economic performance is a
result of post-colonial state failure, the roots of which lie in the underde-
velopment and instability of pre-colonial polities. Herbst [2000, chpt. 2–4]
argues that because of a lack of significant political development during
colonial rule, the limited pre-colonial political structures continued to exist
after independence.19 As a result, Africa’s post-independence leaders inher-
ited nation states that did not have the infrastructure necessary to extend
authority and control over the whole country. Many states were, and still
are, unable to collect taxes from its citizens, and as a result they are also
unable to provide a minimum level of public goods and services.
A corollary of Herbst’s argument is that the impact of the slave trades
may have been felt most strongly after colonial independence. This is be-
cause this is when pre-colonial political structures suddenly increased in im-
portance, as they became central determinants of the success of the newly
formed state. Using Figure VIII, I examine whether the evolution of in-
comes since 1950 is consistent with this hypothesis. The figure shows av-
erage per capita GDP between 1950 and 2000 for two groups of African
countries.20 One group consists of the 26 countries with the lowest mea-
sures of ln(exports/area) and the other is the 26 countries with the highest
measures of ln(exports/area). As shown in the figure, throughout the pe-
riod low slave export countries are richer on average than high slave export
countries. Also interesting, however, is the difference in the evolution of
income between the two groups of countries. Although the low slave export
countries were richer in the early 1950s when most countries were still under
colonial rule, the income gap between the two groups increased significantly
over time, and became most pronounced after the late 1960s and early 1970s
when most countries had gained independence.21 This pattern is consistent
with the slave trades affecting early state development, which may have
mattered during colonial rule, but mattered much more after independence.
Because those parts of Africa that were most severely impacted by the slave
trades tended to have the least developed political systems, after indepen-
dence these countries continued to have weak and unstable states, as well
as slower economic growth.


VII. Conclusions
Combining data from shipping records and data from historical docu-
ments reporting slave ethnicities, I have constructed estimates of the num-
ber of slaves exported from each country in Africa during Africa’s four slave
trades. I found a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves
taken from a country and its subsequent economic development.
I pursued a number of strategies to better understand if the relation-
ship is causal or spurious. If countries that were initially underdeveloped
selected into the slave trades, and if these countries continue to be under-
developed today, then this may explain the observed relationship between
slave exports and current income. I first reviewed the historical evidence on
the characteristics of African societies that were most affected by the slave
trades. The qualitative and quantitative evidence show that it was actually
the most developed parts of Africa, not the least developed, that tended
to select into the slave trades. I also used the distances from each country
to the locations of the demand for slaves as instruments to estimate the
causal effect of the slave trades on economic development. The IV estimates
confirmed the OLS results, suggesting that increased extraction during the
slave trades resulted in worse economic performance.
I then examined the channels of causality underlying the relationship
between slave exports and economic development. I showed that the data are
consistent with historic accounts suggesting that the slave trades impeded
the formation of broader ethnic groups, leading to ethnic fractionalization,
and that the slave trades resulted in a weakening and underdevelopment of
political structures.

http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/4134/1/MPRA_paper_4134.pdf

[Guru]

Congo Free State - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Leopold's rule
Clearing tropical forests ate away at profit margins. However, ample plots of cleared land were already available. Above, a Congolese farming village (Baringa, Equateur) is emptied and levelled to make way for a rubber plantation.

Meanwhile the quest for income was unrelenting. District officials' salaries were reduced to a bare minimum, and made up with a commission payment based on the profit that their area returned to Leopold. After widespread criticism, this "primes system" was substituted for the allocation de retraite in which a large part of the payment was granted, at the end of the service, only to those territorial agents and magistrates whose conduct was judged "satisfactory" by their superiors. This meant in practice that nothing changed. Native communities in the Domaine Privé were not merely forbidden by law to sell items to anyone but the State: they were required to provide State officials with set quotas of rubber and ivory at a fixed, government-mandated price and to provide food to the local post.[5]

The rubber came from wild vines in the jungle, unlike the rubber from Brazil, which was tapped from trees. To extract the rubber, instead of tapping the vines, the natives would slash them and lather their bodies with the rubber latex. When the latex hardened, it would be scraped off the skin in a painful manner, as it took off the natives' hair with it. This killing of the vines made it even harder to locate sources of rubber as time went on, but the government was relentless in raising the quotas.[6]

The Force Publique (FP) was called in to enforce the rubber quotas. The officers were white agents of the State. Of the black soldiers, many were from tribes of the upper Congo while others had been kidnapped during the raids on villages in their childhood and brought to Roman Catholic missions, where they received a military training in conditions close to slavery. Armed with modern weapons and the chicotte — a bull whip made of hippopotamus hide — the Force Publique routinely took and tortured hostages (mostly women), flogged, and raped the natives. They also burned recalcitrant villages, and above all, took human hands as trophies on the orders of white officers to show that bullets hadn't been wasted. (As officers were concerned that their subordinates might waste their ammunition on hunting animals for sport, they required soldiers to submit one hand for every bullet spent.)[6]

Humanitarian Disaster

Severed hands
Native labourers who failed to meet rubber collection quotas were often punished by having their hands cut off.

Villages who failed to meet the rubber collection quotas were required to pay the remaining amount in cut hands, where each hand would prove a kill. Sometimes the hands were collected by the soldiers of the Force Publique, sometimes by the villages themselves. There were even small wars where villages attacked neighboring villages to gather hands, since their rubber quotas were too unrealistic to fill.

One junior white officer described a raid to punish a village that had protested. The white officer in command "ordered us to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the village palisades ,  and to hang the women and the children on the palisade in the form of a cross."[7] After seeing a native killed for the first time, a Danish missionary wrote: "The soldier said 'Don't take this to heart so much. They kill us if we don't bring the rubber. The Commissioner has promised us if we have plenty of hands he will shorten our service.'"[8] In Forbath's words:

    The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. ,  The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber,  They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace,  the people who were demanded for the forced labour gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.

In theory, each right hand proved a killing. In practice, soldiers sometimes "cheated" by simply cutting off the hand and leaving the victim to live or die. More than a few survivors later said that they had lived through a massacre by acting dead, not moving even when their hands were severed, and waiting till the soldiers left before seeking help. In some instances a soldier could shorten his service term by bringing more hands than the other soldiers, which led to widespread mutilations and dismemberment.

Death toll

Estimates of the total death toll vary considerably. The reduction of the population of the Congo was noted by all who have compared the country at the beginning of the colonial rule and the beginning of the 20th century. Estimates of observers of the time, as well as modern scholars (most authoritatively Jan Vansina, professor emeritus of history and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin), show that the population halved during this period.[9]

According to British diplomat Roger Casement, this depopulation had four main causes: "indiscriminate war", starvation, reduction of births and diseases.[10] Sleeping sickness ravaged the country and was used by the regime to account for demographic decrease. Opponents of King Leopold's rule stated, however, that the administration itself was to be considered responsible for the spreading of this dreadful epidemic.[11] One of the greatest specialists on sleeping sickness, P.G. Janssens, Professor at the Ghent University, wrote:[citation needed]

    It seems reasonable to admit the existence on the territories of the Congo Free State, of French Congo and Angola of a certain number of permanent sources that have been put again in activity by the brutal changement of ancestral conditions and ways of life that has accompanied the accelerated occupation of the territories.

In the absence of a census (the first was taken in 1924),[12] it is even more difficult to quantify the population loss of the period. Forbath said it was at least 5 million[13]; Adam Hochschild, and Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem, 10 million[14][15]; the Encyclopædia Britannica[citation needed] and Fredric Wertham's 1966 book "A Sign For Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence"[16] estimate that the population of the Congo dropped from 30 million to 8 and 8.5 million, respectively, in that period. Similarly, the New York Times reports that "Under the reign of terror instituted by King Leopold II of Belgium (who ran the Congo Free State as his personal fief from 1885 to 1908), the population of the Congo was reduced by half -- as many as 8 million Africans." [17]

In 1900 Africa had between 90 million (African Studies Review 49.1 (2006) 179-181) and 133 million people (World Population Prospects: The 2006 Revision).

[Guru]

More on King/devil Lepolds Ghost-











http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3516965.stm

While the Great Powers competed for territory elsewhere, the king of one of Europe's smallest countries carved his own private colony out of 100km2 of Central African rainforest.

He claimed he was doing it to protect the "natives" from Arab slavers, and to open the heart of Africa to Christian missionaries, and Western capitalists.

Instead, as the makers of BBC Four documentary White King, Red Rubber, Black Death powerfully argue, the king unleashed new horrors on the African continent.

Torment and rape

He turned his "Congo Free State" into a massive labour camp, made a fortune for himself from the harvest of its wild rubber, and contributed in a large way to the death of perhaps 10 million innocent people.


What is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo has clearly never recovered.

"Legalized robbery enforced by violence", as Leopold's reign was described at the time, has remained, more or less, the template by which Congo's rulers have governed ever since.

Meanwhile Congo's soldiers have never moved away from the role allocated to them by Leopold - as a force to coerce, torment and rape an unarmed civilian population.

Chopping hands

As the BBC's reporter in DR Congo, I covered stories that were loud echoes of what was happening 100 years earlier.

Congolese men going to harvest rubber
Men who failed to bring enough rubber for agents were killed
The film opens with the shocking images of some of Leopold's victims - children and adults whose right hands had been hacked off by his agents.

They needed these to prove to their superiors that they had not been "wasting" their bullets on animals.

This rule was seldom observed as soldiers kept shooting monkeys and then later chopping off human hands to provide their alibis.

'Foreign correspondents'

Director Peter Bate uses documented accounts of such atrocities to present an imaginary court case against the monarch who he compares to a subsequent European tyrant, Adolf Hitler.

He has an actor play the bearded, heavily-set Leopold, fidgeting nervously as damning testimonies are read out, compiled by the foreign correspondents of the day, the missionaries.

John Harris of Baringa, for example, was so shocked by what he had come across that he felt moved to write a letter to Leopold's chief agent in the Congo.

"I have just returned from a journey inland to the village of Insongo Mboyo. The abject misery and utter abandon is positively indescribable. I was so moved, Your Excellency, by the people's stories that I took the liberty of promising them that in future you will only kill them for crimes they commit."

I MEAN! The White man destroyed Africa. No wonder why they keep cutting hands in these places! Psychological PTSD, it was imbibed in him, same way in Nigeria we burn thieves because the white man used to burn us alive in our villages! This is the rubber story, I dread the diamond story I am about to digest.

[Guru]

More reading:

http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/africancode.htm

Code of African Organisations (Draft 06/09/05)

 

Forewords

African history is the most suppressed history in the world. Of the history that we do have access to, much has been mutilated and manipulated to eliminate the story of Africa 's many great ancient civilisations. This deliberate distortion was designed to fit in with a western perception of Africa that continues to cultivate disunity by perpetuating a view of Africa and African people as unorganised, uncivil, unoriginal and sub-human. To this end, history, culture and education are critical tools for the global progression of African children and the re-education of African adults who have often been force fed a falsity that contributes to the repression of our true self.

Notions of Africaness come into question as these terms have no practical definitions which are agreed upon. In some cases to be African is more definable by our common history of oppression as opposed to our common cultural identity. Whether this existed in antiquity is another matter but today in our reality we come in all textures of culture and morality. Such a wide canon leaves the question of unity in the air. False notions of race based solely on skin color are immature and impractical. Clearly the only thing that truly defines us as a group is shared ideology, in this case of the proposed code; shared cultural core ideologies as practised by the diverse people who share the African racial family label with honour.

 

Why a Code

With slave egos we all fight for king of the ant hill, disunited with our silly politics of me's over we's. If we are to turn over a new page we need to change the way we inter-relate as businesses and organizations. We must become accountable outside of our little organizations. We must put community before personal glory. We must realize that even the most successful ones of us are merely ants in the broader sense of the world.

We continue as a collective to fight battles in silence and from a strategic disadvantage. We employ secondary resistance as oppose to primary resistance. We thus seek solutions for our problems from the European cultural template. We talk about Africa but it is just a trendy phrase as very few actually put our money where our mouth is when it comes to adopting cultural solutions from the continent.

We have the legacy of traditional Islamic African shariah to draw from, the legacy of the Youraba tradition, Abyssinian Christian tradition, the Nguzo Saba principles,

Also as a people, we expect to create nations by disregarding human history. We expect to unify without observing common truths as it relates to humanity. The code is a constitution that enhances our unity and improves our individual companies/organizations without in any way changing the individual direction or soverignity.

 

The Code

The African Code is a broad ethos which governs progressive African organizations; united through diversity, collating resources, strategies, and knowledge. The African Code is the fundamental intersection of our most cherished ideas and ideals, which serve as the bases of global African organizational unity for progressive action in the vein of self-determination.

Today African unity is more definable by a common history of oppression as opposed to common cultural identity. The institutionalization of our most cherish beliefs has never been done as a collective, leaving a wide ungrounded canon with no basis for unity. False notions of unity based solely on skin color are immature and impractical. Clearly the only thing that truly defines us as a group is shared ideology. The African Code is drawn from our diversity as a racial family, so whether we are Muslim, Igbo, Christian, Jew, Spiritual, Caribbean , Arabian, American we can unite on our intersecting commonalities.

To be effective in uniting its members, the code seeks to reflect the complete diversity of African people irrespective of nation, faith or creed. Members speak to different areas of our population; some the children, some religious groups, etc. All are critical and therefore the code supports a complete compliment of organisations servicing our community. Each member is called upon to contribute from their own cultural experience to all areas we collectively agree upon. The most critical purpose of the code is common agreement and hence our unity by representing the areas where our circles of beliefs intersect. Members are part of a family where each makes a commitment to the other to honour the principles of honesty, respect and trust. The code should never be a source of disagreement because the purpose of the code is areas of exclusive agreement based on inclusion rather than exclusion of organisations. The code see ks also to infuse in members a shining example of morality and dedication, which by pure example leads a disunited people.

Just like a computer code, the African Code must be set up to protect itself from its biggest enemy—human nature. It must be robust and tested, debugged and tweaked from all angles to ensure its sustainability and efficiency within the real working world. It is for this purpose that the institutionalization of the African code must be written on solid foundations with parameters, which protect it from its founders. The code organizes and puts an end to the haphazard chaotic way in which we try to unify project by project and sets a cemented formal protocol of effectively working for cohesion and unity among our diverse organizations.

 

PRIME LAW

The prime law constitutes the foundation language of the code, which is responsible for its existence hence any violation of this violates and nullifies the purpose of the code, and hence such items posing this threat are with extreme prejudice rejected. The prime law governs the agreement and loyalty to unity, which has the weight of being a prime law. The prime law concept is an unbreakable truth, which is set. If two countries disagreed the prime law could be used to make a law that says war cannot happen. So no matter what path to peace is taken the act of warfare has been removed as an option, and this prime law becomes dearer than life itself as its prime purpose is to set an unbreakable agreement which serves to safeguard humanity. The prime law as it relates to the African code is that of Unity and intolerance items, which divide and isolate each other, such as religious intolerance.

Our word is our bond is a critical aspect of the code, which is treated as sacred, and any violations will be dispensed to the public domain and meet with the most severe of treatment. These fundamentals are guarded with extreme prejudice for they are the bedrock of the code and thus if not secured invalidate the code.

 

•  Justice (Maat)

•  Self-determination (Kujichagulia)

•  Unity (Umoja)

•  Culture (Mila)

•  Education (Kulea)

•  Family (Jamii)

•  Economics (Ujamaa)

 
JUSTICE

God, truth and justice above everything else. (MAAT). The highest principles of religion/spirituality are the highest principle of the Code. The African Code is fundamentally opposed to violence/war as a solution to humanities differences. The African Code extends justice and peace to all oppressed people on the planet and is prepared to work collectively as a human family to bring and end to oppression whenever and wherever it occurs.
SELF-DETERMINATION

Self-determination is the basic human right in which human beings have collective control over their cultural property, establishes terms and labels which empower, control and produce media which is in their best interest; independent of any other group. A self-determined people also articulate solutions rooted in their cultural foundation. They ultimately espouse terminologies, which serve their own self-interest and have a world view that orientates exclusively to their own cultural reality.

Labels: The African Code employs linguistic terms which empower African people and rejects shallow color labels which do not articulate the African geopolitical reality.
UNITY

The only way anything progressive can happen is through unity. The African Code members thus encourage and are willing to work with any progressive African organization who understands the aims and objectives for African Global liberation and empowerment. There is absolutely no way African people can achieve anything in isolation. Thus a measure of success is reflected in the quantity, quality and diversity of African organizations that are unified under the ethos of the African Code.

Why African: The African Code isolates the African race for unity because as a racial family there is, first and foremost, a common cultural ethos and secondly a legacy of oppression which has placed African people all over the World as the most impoverished and oppressed group--even in countries where Africans are the majority. Thus the African Code responds and speaks specifically to this reality by institutionalizing a strategy for these systems of oppression (historical exclusion, cultural disownership, health crisis, economic exploitation, etc) to be challenged and replaced with justice and equality for the profit of all humanity. The models espoused by the African Code can be adopted by all oppressed people globally as a template for self-determination.

Diversity: We are a diverse people, and have always been. Unity thus must endorse absolute tolerance and respect towards all religions and ethnicities: Islam, Candomble, Orisha, Judaism, Voodoo, Yoruba, Fulani, Amhara, etc. This unity in perfection will be the template for the wider human race. The African Code does not tolerant any form of aimless hate or oppression this is because our fight is not for racial dominance; only justice across the board for all humanity.

Each one teach one: One famous Biblical story is where Jesus (Esa) said instead of giving a hungry man a fish, teach him to fish. The African Code extends to members this principle and takes it one-step further that those who are taught go out and teach, thus the skill level of the African World rises. Computer literacy, technological utilization, emerging technologies (WiFi, etc) need to be integrated and used for the collective benefit. Those that have a skill and share knowledge and skills for the profit of all members.

 
CULTURE

All work must be in the tradition of African culture, in all its diversity. Culture in the fullest sense embraces marriage, rights of passage, mental frame-works, language, dress, manners, etc.

Language: The African Code officially recognizes Swahili as the official Pan-African language and Amharic (Ge'ez) as the official script of African people. The African Code will seek all means to introduce Swahili and Amharic into all learning outlets for African people, especially children. The ultimate goal within the next 20 years to make sure at least 30% of all African people globally can speak Swahili and write in Amharic. Those wishing to enter languages will be encouraged to seek and preserve minority languages by documenting and institutionalizing these languages before they go instinct.

Documentation: Cultures practised by African people must be documented and preserved via books , African owned Museums, and all other mediums, which will preserve all aspects of African culture for future generations.

 
EDUCATION

Scholarship: To promote and encourage new scholarship as it relates to our history and culture and to facilitate the succession of leadership across the generations and ensure that all vital roles of scholarship are filled with the necessary knowledge via fostering and sponsoring education.

Common knowledge: To educate and raise the bar of common knowledge within our global communities with factual driven academia based on empirical research and scholarship. To thus ultimately normalize an African sense of self worth and legacy into our common cultural knowledge. And to export this knowledge to fight the negative World view of Africans and Africa.

Institutionalization: All writings, films, music must be institutionalized into our cultural and historical archive for future generations. Institutionalization means accurate documentation and processing of ideas and concepts, which will out live the creators and personalities that founded them. The ethos of this and other organizations must raise the standard of scholarship and adhere to an institution-building objective, which is regulated and governed. We hope that a new “Open university” of knowledge will build onto the extensive historical legacy of our ancestors. Our aim is that we and those who come after us will embody this information as birthrights and build on these foundations. Thus, every generation advances the body of historical knowledge by standing on the shoulders of their ancestors.
FAMILY

Promote and protect the African family unit via the African ritual of marriage. To return the African family unit to accountability, mutual respect and love. In the community and other Relationships and the next generation are the peak of wealth so we must guard them well.To act for the good of the collective family over everything else thus any substances/item/media that harms our community is outlawed
ECONOMICS

Economics is the blood of a society and touches every aspect of life, it washes and sustains civilizations and thus is a critical aspect of all activities under the African Code unity banner. Economics as a tool of self-determination and political voice/leverage is a fundamental aspect of the code. Thus in all activities the economic criteria must be satisfied making sure that where possible money is not allowed to leave the African circle. The economic policy of the code means that members first loyalty is to other members of the African Code, then to the progressive African community and as a last resort the non-African community who sustain and support those issues most critical to our community.

Sustainable economics: All work must be sustainable financially and have an economic component, which will create jobs and sustain the work independent of external support. These economic policies must also extend into the Global African community and fund development for the benefit of all. The African Code recognizes the system of quantum merit, where those who risk and/or invest the most reap the most.The exploitation or profiteering from systems, which have no sustainable value, are condemned.

Economic inclusion: Economics as it relates to self-determination insist that in all external relationships and campaigns relating to African people must support economic inclusion of African business and talent. In this respect all charities, for example, addressing the poverty crisis in Africa must be made accountable and demonstrate that a percentage of African businesses have been solicited in all projects as a first priority, thus putting an end to the economic exploitation of Africa generated by European businesses who make millions from Africa's poverty.

Emerging economics: Recognition of intellectual property right is to be observed by all members and thus absolutely no violation of copyright is allowed especially where such violation diminishes the income of an African person. All other emerging economic opportunities which generate income by service or other means are to be respected and treated in the same regard as traditional systems.

[SuperEgo]

@ wirinet,

[I was debating with wirinet on nairaland before they banned me, but here's my response to his/her latest question]

Why should I let it go? When they haven't let it go yet! they still do not see us as human enough to apologize and make amends, they still see us as less than human and so they still haven't let it go, so why should I? Why, it is still written in the US constitution, even if abrogated, that a Black is 3/5ths a white, on par with animals, so if they don't deem it fit to delete that history, then why should I?

Like I said earlier, we have no right to simply delete this reality. It's not our choice to make. let them first delete it, and then let them acknowledge what they have done to us and our ancestors, then we may have the right to just delete it. Till then, like Jesus said, we can only spend the type of currency we have and we do not have this currency to delete the un-repented for crimes against humanity of the Black kind.
 

[SuperEgo]

NewsRescue!  Commentary- Does Pope Benedict XVI Forget The Congo Holocaust- 30 Million Murdered!