Wednesday 7 July 2010

British Genuinely Blacks, Politically Blacks and Race Mongering

I should never have found time to write anything not particularly pressing now due to the many challenges I am currently facing , but I just felt I cannot go to bed without commenting on what I have just read on today’s London Evening Standard (07 July 2010).
At page 24 is a story with a title: “£100,000 appeal to stop portrait of freed slave going abroad”. Of course, this title caught my attention right away, but I soon noticed that the portrait which is pictured bedside the story appeared too civilised and too Arabic to have been a genuinely freed African slave as both the title and the first line of the story suggest.
Without reading further than the first few lines, my stomach was already turning as I found it hard to bear the pain of the falsehood. I took a closer look at the picture and wondered how an African slave (assuming the man was pure Black African (Negro)) could have been able to practice Islam to the extent that he wore a Koran on his neck. However, I encouraged myself to read on.
Before reading beyond the first few lines, I pondered in agony how gullible supposedly enlightened Black opinion leaders have become in Britain as Kwame Kwei-Armah, a prominent Black British man is pictured as one of the supporters of the portrait alongside one Arab African, Zeinab Badawi. The fact that the erudite Kwame who ought to know more than most others about the history of Trans-Atlantic slave Trade can be so easily swayed to dance at the image of an Arab African as the first portrait of a freed African slave worried me to revulsion.
I felt frustrated about how to immediately educate Kwame that the image he is worshiping could have been more of a slave master than a slave.
After calming down a bit, I continued reading the story and unsurprisingly it confirmed that the so-called freed African Slave was in fact a Slave dealer who incidentally was somehow paid back in his own coins. Probably he offended his European slave trading partners and they thought him a lesson or his fellow slave hunters/traders for some reasons conspired and sold him.
How could a person of Kwame’s intellectual standing be so naïve to celebrate a portrait of an Arab slave dealer as a portrait of a freed African slave? I can understand the case of some politically black British men and women queuing to moan black this black that as usual, for selfish ends( when it suits them), but cannot understand why a supposedly enlightened Black man like Kwame who ought to know his history, could be so gullible!
For the avoidance of any doubt, I do not have any grudge against Arab Africans and certainly do not say that the alleged freed slave, Suleiman Diallo of The Gambia was not a Black African. All I say is that he was not a pure Ne-gro Black African susceptible to trans-Atlantic slavery because he was a civilised Arab African who was naturally a slave trader (or middleman to European slave masters) rather than a victim. He never fell within the population of potential or actual slave subjects and as such could not have qualified as an African slave in the sense we know.
All I say is that Black people should be informed that our more civilized Arab brothers (including Arab Africans like this man) were principal actors in the transatlantic slave trade. It must also be noted some Black Africans also sold their flesh and blood into slavery and that the wickedness /primitiveness which caused Arab Africans and Black Africans to sell their own people into slavery are still with us!

No comments: