underdevelopment

kan country and parts of Zimbabwe and Mozambique sustained flourishing socio-political systems up to the nineteenth century, largely because of gold production.

merely represented the extent of foreign penetration, thereby stifling local trades.

when Europeans became middlemen in local trade networks, they did so mainly to facilitate the extraction of captives, and thereby subordinated the whole economy to the European slave trade.

urpose was obviously to make both areas separate economic entities exclusively tied to Europe

distorted

technology

response

slaves

production

the trading groups could make no contribution to technological improvement because their role and preoccupation took their minds and energies away from production.

they were agents for distributing European imports.

The connection between Africa and Europe from the fifteenth century onwards served to block this spirit of technological innovation both directly and indirectly.

regression

utting an end to the ex- pansion of African cloth manufacture.

countries

fricans are to be told that the European slave trade developed us by bringing us maize and cassava.

rubbish

out

totally irrational from the viewpoint of African development.

disruptive

ost of those areas were also relatively highly developed within the African context. They were leading forces inside Africa, whose energies would otherwise have gone towards their own self-improvement and the betterment of the continent as a whole.

uncertainty

no causative factor other than the trade in slaves to which attention can be drawn.

masters

diseases

Europeans

it is essential to realize that one is measuring the effect of social violence rather than trade in any normal sense of the word.

humanity

only less grave than to make it fundamental.

Oppression follows logically from exploitation, so as to guarantee the latte

There were no other alternatives:

acism of Europe was a set of generalizations and assump- tions, which had no scientific basis, but were rationalized in every sphere from theology to biology.

o people can enslave another for centuries without coming out with a notion of super- iority, and when the color and other physical traits of those peoples were quite different it was inevitable that the prejudice should take a racist form.

the slave relations in the South had by the second half of the nineteenth century come into conflict with the further expansion of the productive base inside the U.S.A.

capitalism

lso to real development in the sense of increased capacity for further growth and independence.

factory

keys

growth

small size of African states and the numerous political divisions made it so much easier for Europe to make the decisions as to Africa’s role in world production and trade.

had to agree to the resumption of slave trading in 1730,

economy

t was so easy to set one off against another that Europeans called it a “‘slave trader’s paradise

uropean society was leaving feudalism and was moving towards capitalism; African society was then entering a phase comparable to feudalism.

captives

one can say that Europe allocated to Africa the role of supplier of human captives to be used as slaves in various parts of the world.

needs

metropole

whole

ut the extension overseas of European interests.

for the book she would write called Pacifying with Bullets: A Reclaimed History of Southern Nigeria.

had sung, on Empire Day,‘‘God bless our Gracious King.

catechist’s

ponderousness

Do we thereby pledge ourselves to Keep a sanatarium there, if the result should not answer our expectation?

Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.

twenty

t that time almost every- thing that was worth reading was contained in the writings of ‘the ancient Greeks and Romans.

here are no books on any subject which deserve to be compared to our own;

hether we look at the intrinsic value of our TReratures or at the particular situation of this country, we shall see the strongest reasoirto thinkthat, of all foreign tongues, the English longue is that_which would be the most useful to our native subjeci

Whoever knows that which all ike wisest nations of thé earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations.

He has not asked in a couple of years. She starts to undress.

he tries, but she cannot visualize the shower in the house in Lagos. A lot of gold trimmings—but she might be confusing it with a hotel bathroom.

n the early years, she would shower with him, sink down to her knees and take him in her mouth, excited by him and by the steam enclosing them. But now, things are different. She has softened like his belly, become pli- able, accepting. She watches him walk into the bathroom.

he tries to remember the married men she had dated. Had they ripe bellies like Obiora? She can’t recall. Suddenly, she can’t remember anything, can’t remember where her life has gone.

short, ordinary light-skinned man wearing an expensive sports jacket and a purple shirt.

glasses

he'd said, amid Amiaechi’s too-loud laughter.

this new houseboy that Obiora for- got to mention to her? Is the girl with the curly hair there?

lice potatoes, watches the thin skin descend in a translucent brown spiral.

he had her siblings

ecause despite her perfect face she still mixed up her English tenses; because she was still, essentially, a Bush Girl.

Adanna and Okey Awanu?” he asks

smiles

ou have nobody to talk to, really, except for your toddlers, so you turn to your housegirl. And before you know it, she is your friend. Your equal.

Nobody says “Sir! Sir!” to them in America. Nobody rushes to dust their seats before they sit down

She watches the hair float down, like brown cot- ton wisps falling on the white sink. She cuts more.

ut Obiora’s calling her eyes mermaid eyes used to make her feel newly beautiful,

into a thin line, the way Obiora likes.

Nkem sighs, runs her hand through her hair. It feels too thick, too old.

they reduced an enormous system of traffic in human commodities to a concise chronicle of quantitative “facts.”

effaced

ledger

littoral

ip of mutual obligation. Departure at this juncture would mean the captain had not managed to procure a “complete” cargo.

Allampo

voyage

nd to foster an illusory sensation of warmth against the damp and chill of the sea.

demurrage period,

t became increas- ingly common to “complete” cargoes by pooling captives from the Akan- and Ga-speaking communities of the Gold Coast together with large contingents of Ewe-speaking people obtained from com- munities that funneled slaves toward the Bight of Benin ports.

ives and agricultural laborers, they could be released at a mo- ment’s notice when lucrative opportunity arose.

the cargoes assembled on the African coast regularly fell short of that standard.

ket for captives on the African coast that was markedly indiscrimi- nate.

the woman with blemish-free skin drew a higher price than one whose body was marked by smallpox scars,

roduction not of bonded laborers but of hu- man commodities

escarpment

polities

nly when the human cargo was thought to be large enough to raise the probability of death and the attendant loss of property could the slave ship be deemed “full,” its complement of captives “complete.

Slaves became, for the purpose of transatlantic shipment, mere physical units that could be arranged and molded at will—whether folded together spoonlike in rows or flattened side by side in a plane.

qualify

hammered

But as Kirsten Fischer argues, the connection between slaves and live- stock was always predicated not on the belief that Africans were animals but rather in the evocation of a degraded but fully present humanity.!”” In other words, an enslaved person was branded “like” an animal in order to humiliate, not because she was an animal and was insensate.

If she actually cared for Toney, Phebe’s gratitude for Goodbe’s recognition of that emotional bond must have been shaded by the tacit understanding that the private life she shared with Toney sup- ported the public life of the man who owned her.

the particular primacy of place enslaved women held in the conscience and daily lives of South Carolina’s slaveowners.

It is impor- tant to note that the manipulation of fertility here, as elsewhere, was per- ceived to be located in the body of the fruitful or fruitless woman, whose multiple husbands bore no reproductive responsibility.

The act of bequeathing couples or women “with their produce” allowed the slaveowner surrounded by the increasingly inhumane rhythms of monoculture export to momentarily replace the image of female workers stooped over rows of ground with that of black mothers enriching the gen- teel lives of his children.

bargain

As they softened their refusal through a multiva- lent gesture, one that both paternalistically acknowledged the “human” needs of enslaved men and contributed to an emerging stereotype of black males who showed strong sexual needs and threatened unspeakable vio- lence when their appetites were denied, they avoided expressing a more selfish motive.

refer- ring to the enslaved as “Husbands” and “Wives,” Carolina legislators made it clear that they perceived virtually all adult slave women in the colony as coupled to men and acknowledged a certain dependency on the social net- works of the enslaved. In the process, they revealed their precarious control of the young colony,

Black women’s value lay not only in the work of their hands but also in their potent ability to render volatile black men passive and restrained.

women

Customary slavery is rooted in the bodies of women. If one is a slave because one has been a slave, becoming a slave takes place in the act of birth.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that he “consider[ed] a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm, what she pro- duces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere con- sumption.”®

pregnancies

ike slaveowners in Barbados, those in Carolina relied on women and their children, as well as men, to produce commodities and to serve the economic needs of the planter-settler;

There is a degree to which the intimate lives of the enslaved simply will not emerge from the colonial archive,

Fifteen slaveowners in the 1660s (18 percent of those who identified women in their bequests) explicitly paired individual men and women in their bequests.

he metaphor of “shepe”’ also suggests the overlapping impulses of travelers and slaveowners to connect women’s reproductive lives to that of livestock.

enslaved

processes

attention

it

sanction

he combination of low white female population figures and the urge to domes- ticate the landscape of the Americas caused colonial pamphleteers to pro- mote these colonies as especially conducive to motherhood to lure white women to American shores.

he 1662 Virginia act that defined all chil- dren born of the bodies of black women as slaves, even if their fathers were free and white, simply cemented things further.

unishing white women for giving birth to black babies ren- ders the apprehensions of the colony’s slaveowners transparent, for even as racial categories came into focus for white settlers, interracial sexual and social contact belied the fixity of their own whiteness.

laveown- ers understood the value of portable property for daughters and the fact that ownership of land meant nothing without workers to cultivate it.

them

colonies

it is a lamentable but certain fact, that Africa has hitherto been sacrificed to our West India colonies. Her commerce has been confined to a trade which seemed to preclude all advancement in civilization. Her cultivators have been sold to labour on lands not their own, while all endeavours to promote cultivation and improvement in agriculture have been discouraged by the Government of this country, lest her products should interfere with those of our more favoured colonies

In this circumstance, so long as African slave labour was available, the Americas remained far more attractive to European production factors. The buying and shipping of the slaves to the Americas, the exploitation of the American resources, and the shipping and marketing of the American com- modities internationally, absorbed so many production factors from Europe and Africa that little or nothing was left for the development of trade in the products of the African soil.

method would definitely have been slow in producing a trade

explanation for the European merchants’ attitude is that the devel- opment of trade in products of the African soil would have been a slow process compared with the development of trade in commodities produced in the Am- ericas with African slave labour,

trade

The firearms did much to fasten power- ful rulers, as well as weak ones, into a trading system which required the sale of captives,

The conflict between these nascent empires over the control of slave supply on the one hand, and the need for self-defence against their activities by their victims or potential victims on the other hand, created a slave-gun circle.

nother consideration is the fact that the population of Afro-Americans in 1863 was produced with the input of some white fathers

trade

European demand for products from the Americas was therefore highly price elastic, so that a manifold increase in the prices of those products in the absence of slave labour would have greatly reduced their consumption in Europe and therefore the volume of trade based on them.

hether the employment of non-slave labour would not have considerably advanced the cost of production and therefore have raised the prices of the products in Europe to a level that would have considerably reduced their consumption and therefore the quantity imported into Europe.

his regional specialization based originally on the production of cotton in the south for export that made economic the establishment of large-scale industries in the United States between 1790 and 1860.

markets

created

But the British industry whose development was most critically influenced by the slave trade was the cotton textile industry.

Americas

his was particularly so for the West Indian islands. This, together with the character of the functions performed, left little or no room for a self- sustained internal development to accompany the growth of activities in pro- duction for an international market.

Its function was limited to the acquisition and sale of slave labour.

Africa

As

In a world where we're seen as both the most loathed and the most alluring of creatures, we remain the most co-optable and erasable of cultures too.

Eminem

tackle the all- American fascination with Blackness in the realms of music, literature, sports, fashion and beauty, comedy, political activism, modern art, science- fiction cinema, hero worship, machismo.

hat that wealth has not been able to transform, however, is the social reality of substandard housing, medical care, and ed- ucation that afflicts over half of all African-American children

f hip-hop had done nothing but put more money in the hands of Black artists and business managers than ever before, it would mark a milestone in American cultural history.

The increased opportunities for Black ownership and profiting from Black entertainment have largely made moot the once vociferous arguments against white profiting from Black culture.

is more sophisticated brethren have spent most of the last century trying to translate their Black/white baggage into remedies for Western culture's spiritual malaise.

uch-maligned “wigga” figure mimics the surface forms of African-American culture

Though the cork-grease appliqué has faded away, the sight of white perform- ers attempting to replicate Black features still generates among African- American spectators a host of responses—from joy to horror to sarcasm to indifference.

his thing we call hip-hop is not only a billion-dollar subset of the music industry but one whose taste-making influence makes billions more for every other lifestyle-and-entertainment business under the sun: from soft drinks, liquor, leisure wear, haute couture, automobiles, to sports events, electronics, shoes, cigars, jewelry, homes.

Camps and divisions within Black culture became more pronounced and hysterical as time went on

platitudinous

Post-Soul is how George describes the African-American culture that emerged out of the novel social, economic, and political circumstances the sixties Black movements produced in their wake.

Because while Everything but the Burden is largely devoted to scrutinizing the need by white Americans to acquire Blackness by any means necessary, it is also about the fascination that desire has provoked in a contemporary generation of African-American artists and intellectuals who hold compli- cated ideas about “Whose Black culture is it anyway?”

capitalism's original commodity fetish was the Africans auctioned here as slaves, whose reduction from sub- jects to abstracted objects has made them seem larger than life and less than human at the same time.

he African-American presence in this country has produced a fearsome, seductive, and circumspect body of myths about Black intellectual capacity, athletic ability, sexual appetite, work ethic, family values, and propensity for violence and drug addiction.

It was also a century in which much of what America sold to the world as uniquely American in character—music, dance, fashion, hu- mor, spirituality, grassroots politics, slang, literature, and sports—was uniquely African-American in origin, conception, and inspiration.

profile

carceral

assing is patodied and this parody becomes a site where interracial desire is interrogated.

is performance of illicit desire for the “bad” object, the toxic force, should be considered as an active disidentification with strictures against cross-racial

avis's political drag is about [coe an uneasiness, an uneasiness in desire, which works to confound and subvert ithe social fabric.

hey resort to drag, song, mime, dance, etc., not as different ways of illustrating a theme, to “change the ideas” of spectators, but in order to trouble them, to stir up uncertain desire-zones that they always more or

the erosion of gay civil rights is simultaneous with the advenr of higher degrees of queer visibility in-the mainstream media.

The ultramilitant phase that Davis describes is typically a powerful counteridentification with the dominant culture.

snow melts in the hands of the subject who attempts to acquire privilege through associations

snow period” Davis describes corresponds to the assimilationist option that minoritarian subjects often choose.

et me imagine myself as something other than queer or racialized.

densities-in-difference

majoritarian

arga’s disidentification with these damaged stereotypes recycled them as powerful and seductive sites of self- creation.