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Books by Clarence J. Munford
Production relations, class and Black liberation: A
Marxist perspective in Afro-American studies
(1978)
The Black Ordeal of Slavery and Slave Trading in the
French West Indies 1625-1715
(1991)
Race
and Reparations: A Black Perspective for the 21st
Century (1996)
Race
and Civilization: The Rebirth of Black Centrality
(2003)
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Atlantic
Slave Traffic
An Uneven Development of African Societies
By Clarence J. Munford
The slave-selling political formation accentuated the
uneven development of African societies, and uneven development, in
turn, was a fillip for the Atlantic slave traffic. Hierarchically
organized societies preponderated over less hierarchical commonweals in
battlefield discipline and tactics.
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This superiority enabled slave-catching
polities to invade and regularly prune nearby "slave raiding
warrens" inhabited by weaker, less socially-divided tribes.
The swap of human beings for firearms triggered an arms
race, stimulating the formation of yet more slave-selling
states. The character of warfare changed as victory came to
mean a successful manhunt. By ca. 1700 both kinship and the coastal
political economy had been restructured to facilitate large
scale export of captives. A huge victimized periphery took shape
in the middle of the continent, peopled with loosely organized
groups, vulnerable to attack and abduction. The sale of human
beings consolidated the social domination of aristocrats,
widening the gap between the rulers and the ruled. This was
mainly because a deliberate European policy of selection was at
work. The white customers dealt only through the local elites,
ensuring the latter a near-monopoly of European trade
commodities, particularly of the means of repression--firearms. |
For generations now publicists and the visual
media have felt the need to downplay the African ravages of the
Atlantic Slave Trade. The longest lasting genocide in the annals
of modern history has been sadly minimized. In immolating
Africa, the slave trade was a main means by which the capitalist
mode of production was implanted in the Western
Hemisphere.
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Forcibly integrated as a slave labor
reserve in the new internationalist capitalist colonial
system, the Black continent was forced to pay a kind of
surtax in blood which weakened political structures as a
prologue to the coming imperialist conquest of the
nineteenth century. The drain began the fateful lag in
socioeconomic development that is the legacy of African
countries today. Organic development of the continent
was disrupted.
The Atlantic Slave Trade generated a huge parasitical
infrastructure. The trade's pattern skewed the family
profile, sundered kinship relations, crippled monogamous
customs, dramatized upper-class polygyny, strengthened
patriarchy, and lowered the status of women in society.
It even confused the demographic picture. The
captive-selling deformation exacerbated existing class
and pre-class antagonisms. Slaving concentrated wealth
(of sorts) at one pole in Africa, and poverty and
servitude at the other. By the mid-seventeenth century
slaving had become the prime causal factor of political
life along the western shoreline.
The political gap between Europe and Africa widened to
the latter's disadvantage. Customary law and its
administration were systematically corrupted to make
enslavement the penalty for nearly every offense.
Warfare to take commodity-prisoners became a primary
socioeconomic category of African political economy. |
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The homeland of the Black man fell
prey to an every-man-for-himself psychosis. Inevitably the level
of civilization and culture declined. In the end, the
deportation of common people by the ruling classes, and the
resistance of the victims, became pre-colonial Africa's foremost
expression of social conflict.
During the Middle Passage itself, the trauma
entailed racial discrimination as the ultimate indignity of
deportation and enslavement in the New World. The African was
transformed into a thing and depersonalized by stigmatizing the
color of African skin. In answer, the urge to rebel was
internalized by the mass of captives and nurtured collectively during the Middle Passage.
Along the littoral, farm produce and
handicraft were diverted to victual slave ships, generating a
pre-colonial "spin-off economy" of sorts. Afloat, the
slaving vessel was a charnel house cum torture chamber cum
brothel. Systematic rape occurred on every slaver carrying
African female captives. On a slave ship the African woman was a
mere object of copulation. The lack of hygiene bred disease.
Middle Passage conditions also fostered the sadism of captains and crews who
derived pathological pleasure from extreme cruelty to Africans.
Source: Dr. Munford's series -- TO CHANGE
OUR WORLD FIRST UNDERSTAND OUR WORLD
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DR. Clarence J. Munford is
Professor Emeritus of Black Studies and History at the
University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, near Toronto. He was born
in Massillon, Ohio on November 18, 1935. C.J. Munford, an
African American with dual Canadian-U.S. citizenship, has taught
in universities in Nigeria, Europe and U.S., in a college
teaching career that began in 1959.
He introduced the first courses in Black
history in an Ontario university in 1969. He is the recipient of
the 1997 African Heritage Studies Association Book Award for
Race
and Reparations: A Black Perspective for the 21st
Century. Munford is active in the N’COBRA campaign for
reparations for African Americans. |
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He is a scholar and activist who has authored
numerous articles, addresses and essays, and a three-volume
autopsy of early Black enslavement in the West Indies, entitled Black Ordeal (1991). He has focused on the theory and practice of
revolutionary nationalism from a Pan-Africanist slant.
Munford is the lead discoverer of civilizational
historicism, the theory of human history from a Black
vantage point. His newest work, a volume entitled
Race
and Civilization: The Rebirth of Black Centrality,
elaborates and substantiates empirical discoveries presented in
earlier works.
Race and Civilization
was awarded the 2002 AHSA Edward Blyden Book Award. This
treatise offers civilizational historicism as the theory and
practice of World Black struggle against global white supremacy
in the 21st century. Builds on the author's
previous work,
Race and Reparations(1996) and in a
three-volume study of the Atlantic slave trade,
Black Ordeal
(1991) |
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Debt: The First 5,000 Years
By David Graeber
Before there was money, there was debt. Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems—to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it. Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors. Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it. Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history—as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy. Economist Glenn Loury /Criminalizing a Race
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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updated 12 April
2008
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