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Category: Adebayo Lamikanra

  • The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (VII)

    The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (VII)

    I learnt from my exposure to history in the primary school that the abolitionists led by the Right Honourable William Wilberforce, after many years, managed to convince the British parliament to abolish the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It must be said that the bill to abolish slavery was presented to the British parliament no less than eleven times showing the determination of the abolitionists to get the bill over the line and how difficult their job was. As a result of the passage of this bill, not only was the slave trade to be brought to an end in 1807 but that a squadron of ships of the Royal Navy was to be set to patrol along the West African coast to enforce the ban and make sure that the ships of other slaving countries did not continue to carry on making money from the buying and selling of captive Africans. To prove that the ban was effective, we were told the story of Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the slave boy who was rescued by a ship of this squadron and taken to Freetown in Sierra Leone. To complete his story as history, we were also told that he translated the Bible from English into Yoruba and was also consecrated the first African Bishop by the Anglican Church and was received by Queen Victoria in her palace. That is history. It was however vividly brought to life for me when I went to school with two of his great grandchildren. Besides, my school and even class was full of Smiths, Georges, Coles and Williamses whose recent ancestors could have told them their own stories of rescue by ships of that squadron. What our teachers did not tell us was that in spite of that scouring squadron, no less than a million slaves were still taken across the Atlantic to Brazil and Cuba right up until the closing years of the nineteenth century. This period coincided with the years of the Yoruba civil wars and my people, the Ijesas, suffered disproportionately more than others in the period following 1860 when until the end of hostilities at Kiriji they were continuously at war with those ruffians from Ibadan. This is a story for another day but suffice to say that this explains why many of those who returned from slavery in Brazil were ethnic Ijesas. Many thousands of them are still in exile in Brazil and Cuba. They remain out there in the diaspora and will never return home.

    The story of the stoppage of British participation in the slave trade as well as the deployment of the squadron to stop the ships of other European nations from continuing their predatory practice of stealing Africans across the Atlantic was supposed to show the altruistic instincts of the British. Incidentally, the British were our colonial masters at the time this propaganda was being given voice to. We, as a people, were therefore supposed to be grateful to our supposed benefactors who had saved our ancestors from a fate worse than death on the cotton fields of Alabama or the sugar cane plantations of Cuba. As children, some of us would have been beguiled by those fairy tales and made into lovers of Great Britain for life. It is clear to me however that if I had been fooled by those fairy tales I would not be sitting up this early morning when I could be enjoying an early morning snooze to write these lines.

    The truth is that the story we were told as history retained an overpowering smell of good old fashioned bullshit and it did not quite go down my throat as I grew out of childhood. I have since found out that if it smells like bullshit it likely to be bullshit. In fact, it is bullshit.

    Whilst if is true that the abolitionists, together with a fair number of freed slaves fought to bring about the abolition of slavery, slavery was abolished because it was no longer needed to power the British economy as it had done for two  centuries. In other words, slavery had, to use a modern term, come to its sell by date. It had expired and had to go and that for several reasons. But before looking at any of those reasons, it is instructive to look at British involvement in the slave trade.

    The first Briton to participate actively in the slave trade was Sir John Hawkins. In 1662, he sailed down the West African coast starting from Senegal, kidnapping Africans all along the  coast. Using this method, he was able to capture three hundred people. These he took across the Atlantic and sold to the Spanish. His profit was so large that two years later, he was back for a repeat performance and in doing so launched the British involvement in the slave trade. By the time the slave trade was abolished in 1807, 3.1 million Africans had been taken from Africa in  British slave ships. Only the Portuguese had taken more. Throughout that period, the British economy was geared towards the institution of trans-Atlantic slavery. Ship building was skewed towards the building of slave ships and new port cities, notably Liverpool, Bristol and the London docks became famous as centres of the slave trade. For all that however, the slave trade had to be brought to an end because it was standing in the way of the development of something even more profitable, if not any less abhorrent than the slave trade, to wit, the rise of capitalism.

    Making money is all about following a fashion trend but it is even better if you could set the trend. The slave trade was definitely in fashion for three centuries but nothing can be fashionable forever and the British were the first to recognise the need to pivot away from buying and selling human beings as a means of building wealth. They were the first to come to the realisation that investment into using machines as a means of production was infinitely more profitable than using human beings for the same purpose. And so, the slave trade had to be brought to an end. It is instructive that although the slave trade was abolished in 1807, slavery was continued throughout the massive British empire until 1834. After that, the slaves remained bound to their masters until 1840 before they were let go to somehow fend for themselves without any help from anybody. In the meantime, the slave owners were paid reparations for the loss of the services hitherto provided by their slaves.

     The early capitalists used this period to introduce workers to the new machines which were becoming available and set up an industrial machinery which replaced slavery as the predominant means of production.

    The other reason why slavery was more trouble than it was worth was that slaves were getting out of control and the cruelty needed to check them was increasing daily. As the cruelties increased, the incentives for slaves to resist in one way or the other also increased. As the number of slaves increased through the slave trade and natural increase through breeding, the danger of slave insurrections also went up and this was no flight of fancy. What happened in Haiti was a warning to slavers. There, slaves not only rose up against their masters but set up a republic which repulsed all attempts by the French to retake the new republic. It was clear that a great deal of naked force and undisguised terror would be needed to maintain a large number of human beings in the state of slavery.

    Another factor militating against slavery was the availability of machines some of which were quite capable of doing the work of a hundred men and do it even better. Furthermore, there were machines which could be manipulated by  children whose wages were far less than what was paid to grown men which meant that greater profits could accrue to the capitalists. Everything considered therefore, it only made common sense for slavery to be abolished. Even after the American civil war had been fought and won there were a host of dinosaurs in the southern states and indeed in other places who still insisted on the continuation of slavery. So ingrained had this practice become  that Abraham Lincoln, the acclaimed Emancipator had to admit that if he could save the union without freeing a single slave, he would have done so but if he had to free all the slaves in order to save the union, that was what he was going to do. In other words, he freed the slaves because he had to.

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    By 1760, the recognised beginning of the Industrial revolution, all the stars were aligned to favour of this process. All the monies which had poured into several European countries especially Britain from the slave trade and related practices had made a cohort of people fabulously wealthy. This made it possible for them to invest in the new fangled machines which the engineers of the day were going and producing. Those machines were doing things which the ordinary man could not imagine in their wildest dreams and it was clear that they could make their owners rich beyond their wildest dreams. In today’s parlance, the industrialists controlled all the means of production.

    In pre-industrial times, artisans did all their work in their own homes or for those who were agricultural workers in the fields. What the industrialists did was to herd them into their factories where they were tied to pieces of machinery for up to sixteen hours, six days a week. The factories were poorly lit, the machines were noisy and gave off so much heat that the factories were hot as hell. Some of the moving parts on the machines were exposed and limbs were frequently caught in the machines sometimes with tragic consequences. The men and women who worked in those factories were so badly paid that they found work for their children as young as five years old to augment family income. The men were paid up to double what the women were paid, a practice that has endured right up to the present in Britain. As for the children, they were paid a pittance but whatever they were paid it was better than nothing and so, they were made to join the work force almost as soon as they could walk.

    Steam was used to power the machines in those early factories and this meant that coal had to be mined to be burnt in furnaces. Conditions inside the mines were even worse than what obtained in the factories. The mines were damp and ran with water in which the miners worked for twelve hours, six days a week for such low pay that it was a wonder that they did not starve. In mining areas, father, mother and five year old children were taken down to the coal face to dig for coal and bring it up to the surface. The people in those areas had no choice. They had to dig for coal or starve to death. The workers had nothing to add to production but their labour and whatever they produced was expropriated lock, stock and barrel by the capitalists for their own private use.

    An objective look at the conditions under which those early industrial labourers worked suggests quite strongly that they were hardly better off than the slaves toiling on the sugar cane fields of Jamaica or the cotton plantations in the deep south of the USA. True, the factory workers, unlike the slaves were free men and women, they were only nominally so. In truth they were slaves to the industrialists. A situation in which a woman is delivered of a baby on the coal face on one day and has to return to work the next day can only be described as a form of slavery. There can be no single altruistic bone in men who operate such a system. If they were as inhuman to their own people as they were, there is no earthly reason why they could have been moved by any human feelings towards black people to want to free them from slavery for any altruistic reason.

  • The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (VI)

    The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (VI)

    Having gone right round the world in the course of this series, I think it is time to return to England. After all, that is where capitalism set up shop in the middle of the eighteenth century and planted the seeds of capitalism.

    Right until the Peasants Revolt in 1381 England was a purely agrarian nation with virtually all the workers toiling on estates belonging to their lords and masters. The immediate effect of the Black Death which killed roughly half of the population was on labour relations as the number of available workers, skilled and unskilled fell drastically causing a shortage of all forms of labour. Surprisingly, this did not lead to an enhancement of wages as could be expected. The employers of labour continued to pay low wage and the workers or peasants as they were called revolted against the king and his nobles who on top of everything insisted on raising taxes to collect the funds necessary to fight against the French. Although the young king acquiesced to the demands of the peasants at first, some of his Nobles who were loath to give up any of their privileges prevailed upon the king to repudiate the agreement. The peasants returned to the fray but this time, they were subdued by superior forces and with their leader wounded and later dragged away from his hospital bed and beheaded on the orders of the Mayor of London, they were stumped. This dastardly murder brought an immediate end to the rebellion. And so, the rebellion did not bring about any significant changes to the very poor living conditions of the peasants. They continued to work in the fields for little pay and even less hope for a better life on the horizon. Although Thomas Hobbes described life in the absence of government control as being solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, these descriptions could be used to describe life in the Middle ages in England.  Ironically, it was at this time that the light of the Renaissance period began to flicker weakly at first but went on to do so quite brightly as  productive learning began to take root.

    As with virtually everything in Europe, the learning that led to the Renaissance came from the East and it is not a coincidence that it entered Europe through where we now call Italy. There was no Italian state as we know it and that region at the time was made of a series of city states, the most influential and powerful of them being Venice. The seeds of the Renaissance in Europe were laid when East and West met on the battle fields of Palestine when Christian crusaders were persuaded by Pope Urban through the offer of the remission of their sins to go to the Holy land. The injunction was clear; once there, they were enjoined to kill  go and kill as many as they could in the name of Christ and all your sins are forgiven and your place in heaven is secure. Echoes of modern day suicide bombers who are persuaded to take out as many innocent people as possible.  The aim of the crusaders was to kill as many Muslims as possible and in doing so, seize Jerusalem for Christendom. That they did not kill all the Muslims in Palestine was not for want of trying. At least they killed enough of them to lead to the capture of Jerusalem. They ruled that city which is holy to Christians, Muslims and Jews then and now for all of eighty-eight years before the city was wrested from them by a Muslim army under the leadership of the exalted Saladin known to history for his outstanding military skills and his chivalry. Following  the efforts of Saladin, Jerusalem remained in Muslim hands until British forces wrested it from the Ottomans in the closing stages of the First World War thus bringing the crusades to a close or more appropriately, open another phase of fighting in the holy land. The conquerors this time around are not Christian crusaders but Jewish Zionists who are laying claim to Palestine on the strength of some passages in the Bible. The situation in Palestine remains fluid, explosive and terribly dangerous. It is anybody’s guess as to how this situation will pan out. It is perhaps pertinent to point out that the crusades left its mark on England when there was a falling out between  the English crusaders and the king of France who kidnapped and imprisoned the English king Richard also called Lionheart. The royal kidnapper then demanded such a large ransom that England was practically bankrupted in paying it and gave rise to the expression, a king’s ransom. To pay a king’s ransom is to pay out an inordinately large sum of money for anything.

    What is immediately associated with the crusades is mayhem of gigantic proportions. On the other hand however, the crusaders came back home bearing items of knowledge in several crucial areas which shaped them and their societies profoundly for a thousand years. Without the experiences acquired in the East, it is unlikely that there would have been a Renaissance, that bust of knowledge creation which created modern Europe. The Europe which went out to inflict crushing damage on the rest of the world, especially Africa. We still have to live with the effects of that damage.

    The crusades were a dismal failure from the point of view of military adventurism but they opened the eyes of the Europeans to what was a available in the rest of the world and changed how they lived profoundly. They discovered spices which made their food, at least palatable, cotton which made it possible for them to make comfortable and yet, fashionable clothes. They could even begin the fashion of drinking coffee after picking up the habit during their foray to the East. It has to be said that these niceties were restricted to the Nobles as the peasants were still living a hand to mouth existence. Perhaps the greatest shift in the way the peasants lived was the movement from the countryside into the quick growing cities, the population of which grew phenomenally throughout the middle ages. To be sure, the cities were overcrowded and brimming with pestilence and vice, not to talk of hunger and poverty. For all that however, they were also centres of creativity with craftsmen in every conceivable trade setting up shop and struggling to make a living in the midst of numerous challenges including the harshest laws which were administered implacably. There were more than two hundred capital offences on the statute books ranging from sodomy to the theft of trivial items such as pocket handkerchiefs. Justice was not just done but in many cases, was seen to be done as executions were carried out in public with the rich paying for ring side seats whilst thousand were milling around trying to get a good view. Ironically, pickpockets had a field day at these executions making the deterrent factor of these executions a sick joke. From the beginning of the eighteenth century the option of being transported to Australia became available and it was used liberally in an attempt to provide broad range of deterrents to the common people who lived at bare subsistence level. The situation was that with all the loot which was flooding into England at the time, none of it was filtering down to the common people who had no form of social security except the workhouse within which conditions were very bad to appalling and some people were ready to die rather than to be at the mercy of the merciless parish authorities who saw poverty as a sign of moral depravity. For the poor in England of that period therefore, life was quite nasty, brutish and frequently short.

    For people who had some financially negotiable skills however, it was quite possible for them to put away an impressive stash of money. A literary example of one such person was Silas Marner in the eponymous novel by George Elliot. Silas was a skilled weaver who produced high quality materials which were  sought after by a broad spectrum of customers who were willing to pay handsomely for his products in sharp contrast to the general mass of people who had no skills whatsoever and had nothing but their labour which could not provide sustenance to the worker and a family of a couple of children. To all intents and purposes, they were only  marginally better than slaves in their condition. They lived in the richest nation on earth but could hardly stitch body and soul together. The extant conditions under which the workers toiled were intolerable.  These conditions were perfect for the earliest capitalists who needed workers to go down the mines bringing out the coal which was needed to fire the machines on which their trade goods were produced and sent to all parts of the world. They set workers to work under dangerous conditions in factories within which conditions were atrociously poor. With a worldwide empire at their beck and call British capitalists were making money hand over fist as they had access to raw materials from the colonies and had a ready market for their cheaply manufactured goods.

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    By the time that Marx and Engels were warning of the spectre of communism haunting Europe, it had become clear to the workers that they needed to free themselves from the yoke which had been clamped on them by their employers. By that time also, local capitalists were springing up in other European countries and were replicating conditions in England. Almost a hundred years after the Luddites went about destroying the mechanised looms which were to force them under the thumbs of the capitalists, the workers came together to form unions which they hoped were going to deliver them from the capitalists.

    In the early days of union struggle, the workers were fighting for the establishment of the most  basic conditions under which workers could work. They were fighting for wages from which it was possible to reproduce themselves in a dignified manner. Capitalism was rampant as it threatened to squeeze the workers to death as they produced unimaginable wealth to the capitalists a few of whom were called robbed barons in the United States. In the closing years of the nineteenth century capitalism was king of everything within its ken.

  • Cricket, lovely cricket

    Cricket, lovely cricket

    Over the last couple of months, I have caught myself going through the motions of bowling a cricket ball and reliving those sunny days of my life when cricket was at the centre of whatever life I had at the time. I have frequently wondered if I would not have opted for the life, in my imagination, the glamourous life of a professional cricketer. Being a professional cricketer would not have been a bar to my becoming the pharmacist or anything else. After all one of the most prominent cricketers of the day was Alan Sheppard who not only played cricket for England as a clergyman but had the added distinction of being enthroned the Anglican Bishop of Liverpool. Long before Sheppard, there was the case of the first Cricket super star of his days, the legendary W.C. Grace who combined a glittering Cricket career with the duties of a physician. Cricket is cricket and virtually anything else can be added into it. Playing phantom cricket in my head convinced me to turn my attention to that beautiful game, no apologies to Pele and football, which is what has sat me down this morning to write an article about cricket. I am not assuming that the majority of my readers know anything about cricket. Indeed I would be safe in assuming that most of them do not know the first thing about the game. Those who know, or more appropriately used to know about cricket have, over the years forgotten about what the game is all about. What I know however is that quite a few people will have their imagination fired to the extent that they want to know more about the game. This has happened before.

    In 2003, long before the football World cup finals was hosted by South Africa, the World cup of cricket was played in South Africa. Although the whole of South Africa was agog over this tournament, the only other countries which took any bit of notice of the event outside South Africa were Kenya and Zimbabwe which were co-hosts of the event. I was constrained to give notice of this event in the face of the studied indifference or perhaps more appropriately the ignorance of this competition in this country. Then, I wrote an article in the Guardian which I called ‘The other World cup’. I was most pleasantly surprised when a couple of people told me that although they had no knowledge of cricket before reading my piece, they were sufficiently encouraged to follow the competition on DStv. More than twenty years on, they are still passionate about the game.

    I have said on several occasions that one of my greatest accomplishments of my career was to pass the highly competitive entrance examination to Igbobi College. It is an experience that may no longer be replicated in contemporary Nigeria. There are elite schools in Nigeria today but getting into one of them is a question of cash and carry. Students can no longer walk off the street as it was possible to do in those far off days. I must confess rather shame facedly however that with my parents being accomplished teachers, I was not one of the geniuses who just strolled off the streets into Igbobi College but I can assure you that there were quite a number of such strange animals not just in the school but in my class. I won’t say anything more about such freaks because this piece is about a game and that being the case, there really is no space for nerds in this corner.

    I passed that entrance examination with some room to spare but maybe I needed some rest from the academic grind which propelled me into the school. Weeks into my first term, I was still celebrating my entrance examination success on the vast playing fields of Igbobi College, an exercise which was not exactly compatible with academic excellence. My report at the end of that first term was less than stellar and the second term results were only marginally better but still in disaster zone. There was still hope for a redeeming outcome in the third term and I was determined to get my act together, at least enough to be promoted to the next class at the end of the year.

    The third term started right enough but whatever determination I had to do well evaporated within a few days and the memory of what happened has stayed fresh in my mind all these years. Only a few days into the term, Mr. Bicknell my housemaster and Maths teacher walked into the class to inform us that afternoon prep for that day had been cancelled and instead the class was to assemble on the field in our whites and canvass shoes. We did not exactly burst into cheers but we were in a state of excitement at the prospect of not having to sit at our desk that fine afternoon. We reported to the field promptly at the appointed time as we had to do for any assembly and listened with rapt attention as Mr. Bicknell spun a yarn about a game which only one of us had played before. Had I listened with such attention to Mr. Bicknell in the maths class, as I did to what he was telling us about cricket I would have been alright. After his little speech, it was time for a practical demonstration and that day a cricket bat was put in my hands and glory be, a hard cricket bat was thrown in my direction. My reflex reaction was immediate. I took a step towards the ball and hit it with surprising power and authority. I felt that stroke in every part of my body and like a true junky after his first fix, I was hooked on the game of cricket for life as it has turned out.

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    I did not find it difficult to accept that being an Igbobian conferred an elite status because I was surrounded by unmistakable signs of that status. What I came to know later was that the game of cricket was perhaps the last sign of my elitism if only because cricket was part of the curriculum in only a handful of the top schools in the land. Several years later when I fetched up at the University of Ife, I was immediately recognised as being part of an elite group when I turned out for the university cricket team.

    Up till today, I have not been able to quite explain how I managed to pass the promotion exam at the end of that torrid first year. This is because from that first day of introduction to cricket I could think of nothing else but cricket. To make my situation worse, many of my classmates were similarly afflicted and there was no getting away from the game which occupied all our waking moments to the exclusion of virtually everything else. Cricket is a game of bat and ball and we found a way of turning all everyday objects into a bat or ball. Every stick was a potential bat and we raided every orange tree for hard unripe fruits which were transformed into cricket balls, at least in our fertile imagination but our greatest improvisation was to use empty milk tins which assumed a roundness of shape after being pounded enthusiastically with a hard stick which as far as we were concerned, was a makeshift cricket bat. Needless to say, we were transported into seventh heaven whenever we could lay our hands on proper cricket bats and balls.

    My dexterity with bat and ball was exposed very early on which meant that I was one of the first to be chosen on any team for our interminable scratch games and glory be, I was drafted into my house junior cricket team in my first year which made me a minor celebrity throughout the school because I had achieved that in spite of the limit of my small frame.

    I spent all my spare time and more playing one form of cricket or the other. My one other preoccupation was reading cricket books. How many books on football can a young boy read? Maybe the odd one or two. Not the case with cricket. The school library was full of cricket books and I contrived to read and digest them all. Apart from books about all the individual technical aspects of the game, there was a profusion of biographies of the more famous players going back to the dawn of the twentieth century. There were also books about some of the legendary cricket teams of the past. I read them all which left very little time for me to get up close and personal with my extremely full school books. Somehow I squeezed myself through my own personal door of no return and from then on, lost all fear of failure in all subsequent examinations. I reasoned that if I was able to pass that particular examination with virtually no preparation, I could assume that I could pass any examination as long as I set my mind to it.

    The game of cricket was invented in England in the darkness of the Middle ages and evolved over more than three centuries before it assumed its current form. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century before it assumed the form in which it could be recognised by players and spectators today. The first universal laws of the game were first codified by members of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) at the Lords Cricket grounds in London in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Although the governing body of cricket is now the International Cricket Council (ICC), the headquarters of cricket remains the Lords Cricket grounds or Lords for short. That is the Mecca of cricket and it is the dream of every international cricketer to walk out at Lords on at least one occasion and the gods of cricket are those who score a century on the hallowed turf at Lords or take five wickets in an innings. Such performances are faithfully recorded in history and retold countless times by ancient men and women who were privileged to have an eye witness account of those feats.

    When I made up my mind to write this article I thought quite seriously of giving it the title, “Beyond the boundary” in recognition of the title of what has been described as the finest book on cricket. The writer CLR James published the book, Beyond a boundary in 1938 and it was as fresh as a warm loaf of bread when entranced; I read it forty years later. I have an intense longing to read it again but my copy disappeared long ago and a replacement copy has eluded me. CLR James was born in Trinidad and died in London eighty-seven years later. He, at one time was the cricket correspondent of the Manchester Guardian long before it moved to London and became just the Guardian. He was a journalist, writer, playwright and a teacher who had the privilege of teaching the great Eric Williams history in the secondary school. For good measure, he was a committed socialist, political activist and life long Pan-Africanist who devoted his many talents to fighting for the freedom of Africans everywhere from all forms of bondage.  No wonder he had such passion for cricket, a game which appeals to the fairness of human nature, a game which demands  fanatical commitments to the rule of its many laws. Cricket is played in many ways, the sedateness of the English, the grit of the South Africans, the passion of the people’s of the Indian sub-continent, the panache of our cousin’s from the West Indies and the studiousness of the New Zealanders, the game is everywhere always played with decorum within the boundaries of the law.

    I came away from Igbobi College with many precious accouchements in my bag of life. Cricket is a prominent occupant of that bag. And, Congratulations to Igbobi College and all Igbobians past and present on the occasion of the celebration of the Igbobi College ninety-third Founders day today.

    Cricket, lovely cricket – calypso composed to celebrate the first test series victory of the West Indies over England.

    • The series on capitalism resumes next week.
  • The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (V)

    The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (V)

    Anyone who has been following this series faithfully would no doubt be impressed by the vast quantities of money or if you prefer, the loot which was flooding the coffers of a few countries in Western Europe in what appeared to be an unending stream. As soon as the Spaniards and Portuguese arrived in the Americas and parts of Africa respectively, they began to exploit those territories in a way which had not been seen in the history of the world.  European Empires of the day rose up quickly and fell just as quickly without leaving behind such structures as the pyramids of Egypt, the hanging gardens of Babylon, the Pantheon of Greece or even the impressive road networks of the Roman empire. The lasting legacy of this period can however be identified as the rise of capitalism in Britain, from where it spread to the rest of the world. This has changed the world in a profound manner even whilst sowing the seeds of dangerous human division. This is because capitalism has its roots in the brutal exploitation of the vast majority by a miniscule minority and is based on the unhealthy platform of unhealthy rivalry between and within states. But underneath it all is the division of humanity into the league table of race and racism, the eggs from which it was hatched. Before the arrival of capitalism, culture, traditions and religion were the bases of human division into groups. But, for capitalism to develop humanity had to be divided strictly according to exploitable human races identifiable by skin colour. I am afraid that when the history of this era is written in the future it’s lasting legacy will be the anti-human division of the human race into manufactured human sub-races resembling different species.

    The artificiality of the division of humanity into so called races is based on one simple and undeniable observation; there is only one human race known to science as Homo sapiens or to give it its descriptive English translation, Wise man (woman). It has to be said that this species was not suddenly inflicted upon the earth. It took a long time in arriving, having evolved through numerous clearly inferior races into the current version of the human race. This evolution is calculated to have taken place over a period of fifty million years, a very long time in human terms but very brief in geological time scale given that the formation of the world around us has been going on for more than four billion years. The brevity of the presence of Homo sapiens is established by the length of the earthly tenancy of our race which is no more than three hundred thousand years, only the last five thousand years or so being captured in authenticated human history. It is only since 1492 that the modern era of racial identification by skin colour began.

    I remember listening to JJ. Okocha, the extravagantly talented Nigerian footballer claim that he did not know that he was black until he arrived in Europe to ply his trade on the football fields of that continent. That is a common experience of practically all adult black people who have made that transition at some point in their lives. And really, what is the point of the skin colour graduation that now rules the world? As the great Nelson Mandela is famously reported to have retorted to a white interlocutor who pointed out that he was not black but rather a shade of brown, ‘neither are you white but rather a shade of pink’ he shot back. The colour scheme that humanity has chosen to impose on itself is wildly imprecise most probably because of its artificiality. Human skin colour tones vary over a broad spectrum. From the jet black of some people living around the equator to the nearly paper white of those who were born in arctic regions. In other words, geography more than any other factor is responsible for the spectrum of colour seen around the world and all the differences are no more than skin deep. In biological jargon, it is no more than an adaptation to the environment. People who call the equatorial regions home need protection from the harmful rays of the sun and so have dark skins which filter out the worst effects of the sun. Those who live in places where the sun does not shine for long periods on the other hand are denied the opportunity of using sunlight for the production of vitamin D which is associated with bone strength. White people who live in tropic regions are susceptible to skin cancer whilst people with dark skins are likely to develop brittle bones in the absence of adequate sunshine. It is worth pointing out that there are other adaptations brought about by geographical dictates.

    Some examples of this phenomenon are quite interesting but none of them is as well defined as skin colour.

    It has now been demonstrated that people who live at high altitude have a greater lung capacity than those who live at sea level. This is because the concentration of oxygen is reduced at higher altitudes. Football followers must be aware of the difficulty of beating Bolivian football when they play at high altitude in La Paz because visiting teams have to play against the team in front of them as well as the difficulty of getting oxygen into their blood. Another interesting adaptation associated with high altitude is a congenital lack of the fear of height among people who live at high altitude. Some indigenous people living in the Andes mountains have absolutely no fear of heights and are superbly adapted to building sky scrapers or washing windows on the upper stories of finished sky scrapers. Such people look no different from the rest of us and are therefore not easily identified as being people who are set apart by their respective talents.

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    The point to be made here is that our having been separated into different racial groups is strictly for economic reasons and that separation occurred long after the enslavement of the indigenous peoples in the Americas as well as the peoples of Africa. I feel bold to say it because Shakespeare wrote his iconic tragedy in the seventeenth century and it could only have resonated with his audience because it was still possible at that time for black men to hold important posts in Europe. In that play, Othello, the hero was not only black but was the commander of the Venetian army, leading his predominantly white forces and winning against the Turks who were in perennial conflict with the Venetians. He was commissioned to do a difficult job purely on merit and was not judged on the colour of his skin but on the contents of his character and manifest competence.

    The first Africans to land on North American soil were bought from a passing English ship in 1619 but were not treated as slaves. Like many whites working on farms at the time, they were treated as indentured servants who were free to live as full citizens after a prescribed period. After their period of servitude they were able to acquire lands like their white neighbours and could employ servants of their own. As time went on however, demand for cheap labour went up and state after state promulgated slave codes which abolished the tenured servant status for black people and created a heritable slave status on every black person. This Africans were, on the strength of the slave codes converted into chattel to be sold, bought and otherwise exchanged at the whim of their white owners. From that point onward, they had become items of trade and remained so by law until their fraudulent emancipation in 1865. Human generation time has been fixed at thirty years which means that roughly ten generations of black people were born into slavery in the United States. The last person who was born a slave died in 1972 and it has been claimed that the last children of those born into slavery are quite possibly still alive. Another five generations of direct descendants of slaves have been produced since emancipation and American slavery has not yet been completely buried under the weight of history. A little dig today will expose the bones of slavery in America. The millions of Africans who have done nothing but suffer and died whilst creating wealth and criminal gentility for people who at least constitutionally think that they are only three fifths of a human. At least, they were thought to be marginally better than mules with which they worked side by sides out in the fields.

    Once Africans became items of commerce, it became imperative that their status be recalibrated and their human status permanently revoked thereby opening the door to racism which has since become the single most important determinant of status in the world today.

    Slavery has been a factor in practically all societies all over the world for several millennia but the virulent form which was inflicted on the world in the Americas was something completely unknown. For the first time in human history, slavery became an inheritable characteristic, to be passed down to coming generations ad infinitum and it was based on the colour of one’s skin. But when the colour of one’s skin became ambiguous or indeterminate as a result of racial mixing, a great deal of which was non-consensual, there was a recourse to blood. The iron rule in the USA is that if you could be connected to one drop of African blood reaching down to any number of generations, then you were classified as black with all the attendant consequences that your classification entails. In some other parts of the Americas, there is a hierarchy bypassed on skin tone with the lightest at the top and the darkest far down at the lowest level. In short, skin colour has been weaponised with those with dark skins relegated to the bottom. This only serves the purpose of ordering a world in which capitalism reigns supreme and as long as this is the case, true emancipation from slavery can only remain a pipe dream.

  • The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (IV)

    The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (IV)

    The impetus for the voyages of discovery after the fall of Constantinople was to find a way to get to India with the solid purpose of having access to the exotic products of the East. The appetites for these luxuries had been developed when the Crusaders, in an effort to ‘deliver the Holy land’ from the Muslims whom they regarded as infidels, sent waves of Christian armies into Palestine. Over a period of four hundred years of so, or as far as many inhabitants of that region are concerned, up till the present time, armies from Europe have marched into Palestine to wreak havoc on the indigenous people of that region in the name of their Christian God. Although the crusaders seized a lot of land from Islamic forces and even captured Jerusalem and ruled from there for some time, they did not succeed in making that city wholly theirs. Their eyes were however open to all the wonders of the Orient which could not be found for love or money in any part of their partially frozen territories. One example will suffice. Before the Crusades, all European textiles were woven from flax of wool, materials which were heavy, scratchy and not amenable to fashion statements. The Crusaders were introduced to cotton in the Holy land and from then were not satisfied with their ugly woollen clothes.

    When the Ottomans finally closed the land routes to the rich markets of the East, the Europeans, desperate to continue with the tradition of dependence on the luxuries they had become used to, responded by taking to the open seas in an attempt to continue to be supplied with all the tid bits that their pampered pallets could not be deprived of.

    The situation in which the Europeans found themselves was a classical case of finding a way because they had a will. Within half a century of the fall of Constantinople, the Europeans led on the one hand by the Spanish and the Portuguese on the other had succeeded in reaching the New World and on their own the Portuguese had managed to sail all the way to India. In doing so, another vista was opened up for European exploitation.

    The first Europeans to arrive in India were the Portuguese who had to sail all the way around what they called the Cape of Good Hope and after that, up the east coast of Africa and on onto the Indian Ocean. By the time the Portuguese arrived in the Indian Ocean, in the closing years of the fifteenth century, they found that the peoples in that region had been trading with India and places further east for several centuries if not millennia. Indeed the last stage of their journey to India was with the help of an experienced pilot who was taken on board at Malindi in present day Kenya. Upon arrival in India, the Portuguese found that there was a great deal of trading between the Muslims and Indians and this led to a great deal of rivalry between the two groups.

    The real penetration of India by Europeans did not start for another hundred years and it started with the formation of the British East Indian Company which received its charter from Queen Elizabeth I in 1600. This charter permitted the company to carry on trade with India virtually on its own terms, terms which were developed along the way and at the pleasure of the share holders of the company. Their pleasure was in no short measure as the shareholders were soon reaping a 30% yearly profit on their investment. The English were not the only ones trading in the Far East as both the Dutch and the French, not to talk of the Spanish and Portuguese had a very active interest in the trade of the Orient. The Dutch were however not much interested in trade with India as their focus was primarily on Indonesia and other such places further east. It needs be said that the Dutch were as vicious in the East as they were in the West where they held Surinam in a vicious grip. Their undiluted viciousness was however reserved for their colonies in South Africa where they spoilt their name forever with their cruel system of apartheid, a system they refined and practised in the Republic of South Africa until the liberation of that country in 1994. But that is another story entirely.

    The English traders set up their stalls in the coastal cities of India and began to take in spices, textiles of many kinds but principally of cotton and jewellery. Further east, they were trading in tea with China and making humongous profits in both places. Some of their tactics were brutal as their control of trade was maintained by a huge army which at one time consisted of a quarter of a million men, larger than the British army of the time. This army was also put in the field against the French who wanted part of the action against the wishes of the British traders to maintain a monopoly of both trade and sharp practices. The British under the leadership of Robert Clive finally broke the power of both the French and powerful local empires around 1760 to set up a monopoly of violence and naked coercion over increasingly large portions of India, especially the area around the Bay of Bengal which at that time was regarded as the richest region of the world.

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    Once British hegemony was established in many parts of India, the rape of the sub-continent began in earnest. Such was the rapaciousness of British East India Company in that region that the newly independent countries of India and Pakistan had to restart their respective economies in 1947. This is sharp contrast to their economic situation in 1760 when British exploitation began. At that time, the GDP of India was calculated to 23% of global GDP. By the time the British left in 1947, the figure had been deflated to 4%. The Indian sub-continent had been systematically looted by the British. Incidentally, even the language was not spared as loot is one of the words in the English language which was stolen from India! Perhaps their most egregious item of theft was however the destruction of the extensive, innovative and rich textile culture of the people of the Bay of Bengal. Their ability to produce high quality textiles, developed over many centuries was cynically destroyed by the policies of the British East India Company which broke up their looms and made laws to prevent Indian weavers from plying their trade, the centre of which was subsequently transferred to the Northwest of England to set up the cotton mills of Manchester. The inferior but lurid textile products of Manchester and surrounding towns ruled the world for more than a century, sending millions of yards of their cheap products all over the world including Africa where the large scale local production of textiles was stopped in its tracks.

    The conduct of the British East India Company was so corrupt and brutal that her holdings in India were forcibly taken over by the British government in 1857. For the next ninety years, India was a British colony and part of the vast British empire on which the sun was said never to set. At any given time of day or night, the sun was shining on part of the empire.

    At the height of its powers, the British East India Company shifted it’s attention to China from where it was exporting tea to Britain. The Chinese insisted in being paid in silver for their tea, a commodity which the company could not provide in sufficient quantities to cover costs. This vile Company then took to smuggling opium into China to pay for the tea with which they tried to satisfy customer demand in Britain. Tea became such a key aspect of British tradition right until now so much so that the evening meal is referred to as tea. With sugar pouring into Britain from the Caribbean and tea from China, the British soon developed the (disgusting) habit of adding sugar to their tea and compounding their heresy by adding milk to the brew. Tea drinking became such an abstraction that the British were comfortable with committing despicable crimes against humanity in two global hemispheres. They forced Indian farmers to switch from growing food crops to producing opium which was smuggled into China. Thus they spread hunger in India and debilitating drug addiction in China. The situation in China was so bad that millions of people became incapable of contributing anything to the Chinese economy which went into a steep decline. The Chinese government took steps to stop this illegal trade but the British responded by declaring war against the Chinese in order to force them to continue allowing the importation of opium which was destroying the very fabric of their society. In trying to enforce her own laws, the Chinese not only banned the importation of opium but confiscated all the opium held by British traders. The opium seized was then destroyed and this led directly to a declaration of war. Using superior weapons and tactics, the British won a decisive victory forcing the Chinese to allow the entry of opium to their country in addition to paying compensation for the destruction of their opium. For good measure, the British seized Hong Kong and surrounding islands which were not returned to Chinese control until a hundred years later under what is referred to as the one nation, two systems arrangement. China must wait until 2047 to regain full control of the territory she lost in the First Opium war.

    The Treaty of Nanjing which ended the First opium war was manifestly unfair to the Chinese who out of desperation abrogated the treaty. As they had done before, they seized and destroyed the opium stocks held by foreign traders and as before, they were attacked, this time by a joint task force made of troops from Britain, France, USA and Russia. The outcome was the same this time as the Chinese were properly screwed up yet again.  Not only did they have to pay a hefty compensation for the opium destroyed but they had to open up their country to trade with virtually all countries on terms which were injurious to the Chinese. In the course of fighting, the Summer Palace was expertly looted and then burnt down to the ground by British and French troops. Some of the artefacts carted away from the palace are still classified as missing. This can be regarded as some sort of rehearsal for the sacking of the Benin palace in 1897 when thousands of irreplaceable art works were carried off, many of them never to be seen again. The Chinese found their experience so traumatic that the period of the Opium wars is still referred to in China as the century of humiliation.

    All the activities mentioned above led to an unprecedented accumulation of wealth mainly by Britain at a time when such wealth was not seen anywhere else. What more, this wealth was concentrated in private hands to be used as the owners damned well pleased. As an illustration, it has been calculated that Robert Clive arrived in India without a penny in his pocket but by the time he finally came back to Britain he was worth in contemporary terms more than £350 million, gathered within a twenty year period. This money was available for launching the Industrial revolution which lit all those fires under capitalism. This is why for more than a hundred and fifty years, Britain was far and away the most powerful nation on earth with power enough to create the entity called Nigeria, virtually on a whim.

    • To be continued  
  • The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (III)

    The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (III)

    The North American colonies were peopled predominantly by the English although the available spaces were contested with the French in the North and the Dutch in the North East. For example, the city we now know as New York was originally called New Amsterdam as it was originally a Dutch colony, the island of Manhattan having been purchased from the indigenous people for the princely sum of $24 in 1626. In time however the Dutch were supplanted by the English who developed the island into a trading centre and now the centre of global trade. These colonies were part of the emerging British empire and were ruled from London until they famously won their independence in 1776.

    Immediately eastwards of the British colonies, in the Caribbean ocean, the European powers of the day settled on the islands which dotted that area. There, they set up another form of colonies, the slave colonies on which European settlement was limited. As a matter of fact, these islands represented the limit of Columbus penetration as that explorer did not go beyond them. The original inhabitants of those islands now collectively and derogatorily referred to as Caribs and described as cannibals were quickly disposed of. It is interesting to note that the cannibals which gave Robinson Crusoe in the eponymous novel by Daniel Defoe an almighty fright were supposed to represent these unfortunate people in literature. Beginning in the sixteenth century, various European powers including the British, French and Spanish began to squabble among themselves for the mastery of those islands some of which changed hands as the Europeans made this region the centrepiece of war and diplomatic activities over several centuries. The rivalry was so fierce because it was realised quite early on that the soil of that region was particularly suited for the planting of sugar.

    Sugar cane was first domesticated in both Papua New Guinea and parts of India and gradually spread through Arab conquests to Southern Europe in areas around the Mediterranean sea, into Portugal and Spain. As with several other commodities, the use of sugar was introduced into Europe during the Crusades even though both the Greeks and the Romans had a familiarity with sugar but only as medicine.

    Sugar cane is a very demanding crop as it requires high temperature and humidity for growth. In addition, its cultivation is highly labour intensive and over the years was only profitable with the availability of slave labour. These conditions were admirably met in the West Indian islands and parts of the American mainland. All the usual European suspects starting with the Dutch got in on the act and started producing sugar in the New World with Columbus planting the first sugar seedlings on the island of Hispaniola in 1493. These sugar islands were supplied with slaves from Africa for hundreds of years and it is instructive that Cuba, the leading sugar producer in the Caribbean was also the last to abolish slavery in 1888. The lives of the slaves that had to plant, hoe sugar, harvest the cane and produce sugar was extremely brutal with the life expectancy of a slave that was landed on the island of Barbados at the height of slavery being only four years. Being transported to that island from Africa was therefore a short life sentence with extreme hard labour. When the slaves died, their dry bones were ground up and mixed with animal bones and used to whiten the sugar produced on the plantations. Slaves were not even allowed to rest in peace after their labours!

    Another aspect of slave sugar production was mechanisation. Sugar cane is very bulky and therefore very difficult to transport over long distances. This meant that sugar was produced on each plantation by the slaves who had grown the crop in the first place. All the pieces of equipment; crushers, rollers, and evaporators used in refining sugar were either moving or very hot and accidents leading to the loss of lives and limbs were frequent. Each machine had a machete within easy reach so that when a finger was caught in the machine, the band of the unfortunate slave was simply chopped off so that it was not necessary to stop the machine for the offending finger to be extricated from the machine. That mutilation was as good as a death sentence because from that point on,  the slave in question was no longer productive and had become expendable and well, slaves never retired. Those who could no longer work were surplus to requirement and were quickly disposed of. Their bones were then ground up to bleach sugar. Sugar fuelled the trans- Atlantic slave trade as no other commodity was able to do but in the end sugar also contributed to the end of the slave trade and ultimately, the emancipation of slaves on all British ruled territories in 1834.

    The central importance of slavery to the rise of capitalism is illustrated by the story of the voyage of the Zong, a British slave ship which sailed from Accra in present day Ghana with a cargo of 442 slaves bound for Jamaica in 1781. In the first place the Zong, in order to maximise profit was carrying more than double the number of slaves she was allowed to carry even by the terrible standards of the day. In addition, the substantive captain of the ship was incapacitated by illness and command fell to the ship surgeon who had no practical sailing experience. There came a time when through all manner of navigation errors, the ship faced a devastating water shortage and the response of the crew was to begin to throw the slaves overboard in an attempt to stretch the availability of water. It was reasoned that the cost of the slaves murdered in that manner was covered by insurance but that if they died of thirst, they would not be able to collect insurance of £30 for each dead slave. In the normal course of events, no less than 62 slaves had died of ‘natural causes’ during the voyage before the decision to execute other slaves by drowning was taken. All in all, 132 slaves were drowned over three days and ten others jumped into the sea of their own accord in protest at the inhumane conditions they were being subjected to. All other slaves were eventually safely delivered to Jamaica and sold on average for £36 each.  In addition, the ship owners put in a claim for the drowned slaves and won their claim. However, the insurers refused to pay up and the case ended up in court. Judgement in favour of the ship owners was predicated on the fact that the slaves were in fact items of cargo and did not deserve to be treated like human beings. The second trial ended in triumph for the insurers on the ground that the crew of the ship had been negligent and that was what led to the death of the enslaved people on board. An attempt to try the negligent crew for murder was however unsuccessful.

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    The man who brought the issue of murder on the Zong to public notice was Olaudah Equiano  a former slave of Igbo descent. He joined forces with Grenville Sharp, an abolitionist who insisted that what took place on the Zong was murder but virtually nobody agreed with them since the victims were just Africans on their way to a short life of slavery. Eventually however, the Zong incident was a catalyst for ending British participation in the slave trade some thirty years later and the emancipation of slaves more than fifty years later.

    The point to be made here is that without the humongous profit made by the enslavement of Africans in the Americas, the capital needed for fuelling the Industrial revolution would never have become available. An example will help prove this point. The home port of the Zong was Liverpool, a town which owed its economic importance to the slave trade as it was the home port to many slave ships. One of the owners of Zong was Gregson, at that time the mayor of Liverpool. It has been calculated that Gregson was personally involved over a lifetime of slave trading in the transportation of at least 58,000 Africans into slavery in the West Indies. The man built up a mountain of capital to bring about the rise and rise of capitalism. There were many others like him who built up their capital in the same way. Some of these men were, in the manner of Gregson, individuals but others were formidable institutions like the Royal African Company and its Dutch counterpart, the Dutch West Indian company which had control of the sugar plantations in Surinam which remains a Dutch colony today.

    The slave trade was a massive commercial, and even municipal enterprise as we have seen with the city of Liverpool which was once a lowly fishing village but became a city, complete with a Cathedral within a short period of her involvement in the slave trade. Today, Liverpool is one of the largest cities in Britain, her murky past in the slave trade all but forgotten completely.

    The slave trade was very profitable. Commodities were brought to Europe in ships which were loaded down with sugar, cotton, indigo, rice and other commodities which were sold at an immense profit. The ships then took on the tawdry trade goods so beloved of African slave traders and sold again at great profit. Finally, the ships were overloaded with human cargo and transported across the Atlantic for yet another round of profit taking. But things did not always work according to plan as the case of the voyage of the Zango clearly shows. These traders needed trading capital which they got from banks as well as insurance cover which insurance companies readily provided. Some of these institutions which facilitated the slave trade are still in business today. For example, Lloyds of London is still very much in business but fully 40% of her business in those days was provided by slave trading activities. Barclays bank is another institution which has survived to the present day. Like Lloyds, Barclays bank was involved in the slave trade as she provided loans to slave traders thereby facilitating their trade. It cannot be overstated that without the slave trade, capitalism could not have engineered the Industrial revolution which over the years has changed the world profoundly.

    • To be continued.
  • The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (II)

    The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (II)

    When Adam delved and Eve spun Who then was the gentleman

    The very long drawn out agricultural revolution which dovetailed into the Industrial revolution four hundred years later began in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic which has come to be known to history as the Black Death. Beginning in 1346 until 1354 the plague raged all over Europe, reducing the population of the continent by as much as 50%. The number of workers was also reduced by a similar figure leading to a marked shortage of labour, both skilled and unskilled. The consensus of opinion at the time among the workers of England was that their labour should attract higher reward. But their overlords did not agree with their workers in this regard. To make matters worse, one of the interminable wars with France was raging and the king and his counsellors decided that they had to impose additional taxes with which to pay for the war.

    By 1371, the workers had decided that the situation had become intolerable and revolt was in the air; led by an activist preacher, John Ball, who went around England rousing the peasants to revolt against the Lords of the land. His ringing rallying cry was in the form of a question which went back to the beginning of Christian time.

    When Adam gentleman delved and Eve spun

    Who then was the gentleman

    In other words, there were no Lords or Peasants at the beginning of time so how come there was then a group of people lording it over others? The situation was as intolerable as it was unnatural and had to be changed and they were determined to change it. This is what led to the Peasants Revolt during which Wat Tyler, acting on behalf of the peasants, presented all sorts of demands to the king who gave in to the demands of the peasants. However, the nobles prevailed upon the king to repudiate this agreement, a situation which caused Tyler’s death and the continued oppression of the peasants and further concentration of wealth in the hands of the ruling class. If anything, the following couple of centuries led to more trouble for the peasants. Over the years, the Lords succeeded in alienating the poor from land which was hitherto accessible to everyone. This situation forced an increasing percentage of the peasants to abandon the rural areas and congregate in urban centres which grew quite quickly as a result. These former peasants on becoming increasingly pauperised formed the recruiting group for an emerging group of persons who had no attachment to the land and could therefore be recruited into an emerging group of workers who could be herded into the factory work force which was to create wealth for the emerging capitalists of the eighteenth century and beyond.

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    The immediate consequence of the exploitation of the New World by the Spanish Conquistadors was the enrichment of the Spanish crown. The indigenous peoples of those lands in the western hemisphere were immediately enslaved and made to work extracting gold and silver from what was once their land. The toll on those people was horrendous and their population collapsed spectacularly. Hunger, overwork and imported diseases made frightful inroads into the indigenous population of the New World to the extent that within thirty years of Spanish colonisation and exploitation, genuine fears were expressed that the indigenous people were on the verge of extinction. Rather than damping down on the rate of exploitation, it was suggested by a monk that Africans be imported all the way from Africa to take up the slack created by the population collapse of the indigenous peoples. This suggestion paved the way for the most dastardly crime against humanity in the two hundred thousand years history of the existence of our species on the surface of the earth.

    As early as 1493, only a few months after Columbus arrived in the New World, a series of bulls emanating from the Vatican had effectively divided the world as it was known at the time into two spheres of influence. The western portion was given over to Spain and the eastern portion ceded to Portugal. The two Christian (Roman Catholic) countries were charged with bringing all the people in their respective spheres to the knowledge of the redeeming power of Jesus Christ. In other words, they had complete power over the millions of people residing in their respective domains. At that time, the Pope was master of the kingdom of Christ on earth until the Reformation reared its ugly head and started to make a mockery of the authority of the Pope. That story is worthy of further interrogation.

    All Spanish colonies were in the New World but the hapless souls who were to spend their lifetime slaving in those colonies lived in Africa under Portuguese authority. To solve this problem, the Spanish drew up a contract for the supply of slaves from Africa. This contract called the Asiento was issued annually to slave traders mainly from England, Denmark, Holland and of course Portugal. The nationals of these countries built forts along to the so called Slave coast and over the next three hundred and more years extracted and conveyed to the Americas, more than twelve million Africans. An unknown number of Africans also perished in the process of being captured, marched to the coast and shipped in the most atrocious conditions imaginable. What we have not yet factored into this infernal equation is the dislocation which accompanied the activities of slave catchers all over the continent of Africa. If the truth be told, Africa has not yet recovered from the depredation inflicted on her over this dark period. For all that time, slaves toiled under wicked conditions to provide unpaid labour which created wealth and the capital on which the Industrial Revolution was launched.

    The Spanish colonies in North, Central and South America were outright slave colonies which existed to produce precious natural resources which were taken to Europe for consumption. In the wake of the Reformation in Europe when the power of the Roman Catholic Church was effectively challenged a new kind of colonists fetched up on the eastern seaboard of the Atlantic in North America. What they were looking for was the freedom to practise whatever form of religion that took their fancy. The first of these groups arrived in America in 1607 in what is now Massachusetts. As expected, life in those early English colonies was precarious to say the least. Without help from the indigenous people the colonists would not have survived for more than a few months. This is the origin of the tradition of Thanksgiving which as with all things American has been commercialized out of all meaning and precious tradition. Its true meaning has collapsed under the weight of dollars thrown at it.

    It is fashionable these days to think that all that Africans have contributed to the USA is two hundred years of unpaid labour during slavery but in reality, without African input, the USA would not have developed beyond subsistence level. The journey from Africa was unquestionably traumatic but the Africans came over with a plethora of skills, farming techniques, foods, social skills in terms of music, dance and other civilising influences which enriched America in a way which no other group of immigrants has been able to do.

    The first group of Africans to be landed in America consisted of twenty odd Angolan captives who landed in Virginia in 1619. Their arrival marked a change of fortune for the colonists as their various skills especially their understanding of agriculture not only guaranteed their freedom from hunger but it was possible for them to produce commercial crops through which fortunes were built. Using slave labour, they produced tobacco, rice and finally cotton on which the economy of the Southern states were built. So much so that they were willing to go to war to preserve their way of life. The slave owners may have surrendered to superior forces in 1865 but they are still fighting a bitter rear-guard action in protection of their criminal privileges. The level of institutional racism remains so high that it is still a distinct disadvantage to be born black in the USA.

    Today, there is a North-South divide in the USA and more than anything else, it is a geographical divide. The economy of the North is distinctly industrial whereas it tends to be agricultural in the south. Whilst cotton was king in the South, finance and industry ruled the North and this being the case the industrialists must rule. The surplus necessary for industry to thrive existed in the North and naturally, capitalism took root in the North. Long before the slaves were emancipated in the USA, successive waves of immigrants were mercilessly exploited in the USA. For example, the railway which opened up the country from east to west was built by imported near slave labour from China in the east to Irish gangs in the west with blacks squeezed out of the picture. Be that as it may, one group or the other was being screwed by the capitalist machinery that was being installed by the so called robber barons who were squeezing every ounce of goodness out of the economy which they were setting up. More than anything else, what this means was that there was no free lunch or offer for any group of people other than the capitalists.

    To be continued.

    When in February 2023, Jimmy Carter elected to enter home hospice care, I wrote an appreciation of a very useful life. He was not expected to live long after that but with a burst of indomitable life wish, he lived for another twenty-two months. A man of towering intellectual and moral stature, it says a great deal about him that he accomplished more out of office than when he was the President of the USA. He has now died as the longest lived POTUS at the round old age of one hundred years old. Under the present edgy circumstances, he will be much sadly missed.

  • The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (I)

    The rise, rise and rise of capitalism (I)

    Although the consensus is that the Industrial revolution is said to have taken place in 1759, the events that led to it began at least two centuries or even more before. It is therefore more of an evolution because the processes associated with it’s grounding went on for a long time before and after that date. It can even be said that it is still going on for good or ill as the case may be.

    What separated capitalism from all that came before it is the use of machines which have become increasingly sophisticated. Before the coming of capitalism, man had succeeded in many parts of the world in creating many wonderful artefacts  which were traded round the world. These goods were produced by master craftsmen who had learnt the secrets of production over many years. These goods were perfectly fit for purpose but could not be produced in sufficiently large quantities to be made available to a large portion of any group of people. We may now think of the dazzling civilisations of Egypt, Sumeria, Babylon, Greece, Rome and others around the world. Museums are full of the wonderful things produced  by these civilisations and we cannot but marvel at them. What we forget as we marvel at these priceless artefacts is that the vast majority of those who lived in those civilisations had little or no access to those wonderful things as only those at the very top had the wherewithal to purchase those products of human ingenuity and dexterity, some of which were brought over vast distances often under difficult and or dangerous circumstances. For example the silk produced in China came to Europe through the famous Silk Road in small quantities at such a price that only the very rich could afford to buy them. The same could be said of the spices, gun powder, cotton materials and other such things which added spice to the lives of the rulers and the movers and shakers. The vast number of the members of the vast under class were strictly excluded from partaking in these riches. They lived, suffered and in time, died unsung, leaving nothing to those coming in their wake.

    The first revolution that put man on the path of development was the agricultural revolution. This is what made it possible for surpluses of food  material to be built. This is what made it possible for the class of dedicated artisans to emerge and produce materials which were designed not just to support life but enhance it through the production and utilisation of luxury items. The continued appreciation of items of sheer luxury is shown by the riches which even now, accrues to the purveyors of luxury items.

    Before we had these surpluses virtually everyone was a farmer and nothing else. In many parts of the world the agricultural revolution led to the formulation of laws which supported the growth of agriculture and human civilisation. In this period of time, life jogged on, changing only a little over the centuries. This was until human linear projection was violently shot into another orbit precisely on the twelfth of October  1492  when a small band of Europeans  led by the Italian, Christopher Columbus in three small ships blundered into an island in the group of islands we now call the Bahamas. By doing so, they changed the trajectory of human history for ever.

    It is pertinent to ask why Columbus was blundering around in that part of the world at that particular point in time. The answer is that he was looking for a way to get to India by sailing west. A few decades before, in 1453 to be exact, Constantinople, capital of the Eastern portion of what remained of the once mighty Roman empire fell at last to the Ottoman Turks who at that time had the most powerful army in that region. The capture of Constantinople was said by the Muslims to have brought the Crusades which had begun more than four centuries before to a close, at least for that era. The Turks were Muslims and were determined to prevent Christians from getting to Jerusalem, the piece of real estate that was fiercely contested by the two groups over close to four torrid centuries. In capturing Constantinople, the Muslims now had an unassailable position and could do whatever they wanted. And what they wanted at that point in time was to block  access to Jerusalem with the added bonus of cutting off access to the trade routes to the East. They duly did so thereby barring European access to all the luxurious items which the Europeans had become more or less addicted to. To go back to the subject of the Crusades. It can be said that another leg of the Crusades was brought to an end when the British captured Jerusalem to knock the Ottoman Empire out of World War I on Christmas day 1917. The aftermath of that capture is still being felt in the Middle East where the Israeli state created when in fulfilment of the Balfour declaration, part of Palestine was turned into a Jewish state with tragic consequences for Muslim Palestinians. An example of history being an unending process, albeit with numerous twists and turns.

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    After centuries of learning to sail on the rather tranquil inland sea which is the Mediterranean sea, the Europeans were at that time ready to tackle the unknown that the Atlantic ocean represented and could cast their eyes on sailing west.

    Before that time there was no compelling reason to sail west from Europe and nobody bothered to do so. But, because the overland route to the east was closed, some crazy Europeans started thinking that since the earth had been unequivocally determined to be round, it was at least theoretically  possible to get to the East by sailing west. Yes, whilst this thinking was on the face of it correct, their ignorance of just how big the earth was made sailing west to get to India a mad cap idea. Now we know that a vast continent, the largest ocean in the world and half the width of Asia separated Europe from India by sailing west, the possibility of reaching India by sailing west was incredibly stupid and never likely to happen. In this case, ignorance was certainly bliss. Columbus did not get to India even though he tenaciously held on to the belief, to the end of his life that he did but all he did was to show to the world that another world existed, the New World that was going to be ruthlessly exploited for the next five and a half centuries right down to the present. Without the opportunity that this exploitation presented to the world, it is most unlikely that there would have been an Industrial revolution, at least not in 1759.

    As soon as Columbus set foot on the New World, he set the tone for what was in store for the inhabitants of that region by stealing needed food supplies from them and kidnapping those of them who had ventured onto his ships. Those captives were described as Indians because Columbus was sure that he had indeed reached India, were taken back with their captors to Spain to begin a trend which survived for four hundred years. Unknown to everyone at the time this marked the beginning of the trans-Atlantic slave trade even though the direction was going to be overwhelmingly east to west.

    The Columbus expedition was a commercial enterprise from which a profit was not just expected but demanded. The crowned heads of the houses of Castile and Aragon whose recent amalgamation had brought about the joint kingdom of Spain had reluctantly commissioned the voyage of discovery which was to enrich the new kingdom. Subsequent voyages undertaken by various conquistadors showed that the newly discovered lands had excellent potential for exploitation. The explorers immediately set about mining the newly discovered lands of their treasures in a way that had never been seen in human history. This is because all the indigenous people inhabiting the newly discovered lands were turned into slaves in situ. The Spaniards were convinced that there was a great deal of gold and other precious minerals to be dug up from the soil of their newly discovered territories and wasted no time in tearing up the soil in their quest for gold. But first, they destroyed civilisations which were at least at par with anything that existed in Europe at the time. They achieved this objective with their far superior weaponry and their use of horses which their opponents had no knowledge of nor any experience with. But their most destructive weapons were the diseases they brought with them on their bodies. Many population studies have been conducted to try to put a figure to the number of people who lived in pre-Columbian America but estimates have varied so wildly that it is difficult to quote any of the numbers available with any degree of confidence. What is clear however is that the population of that area was reduced by as much as ninety percent. This made it possible for the Europeans to claim that the land was empty of people when they arrived to colonise it in the largest wave of migration known to human history.

    There is overwhelming evidence that before the coming of the Europeans to the Americas, the indigenous peoples had not only domesticated a wide variety of food plants but had developed the agronomic techniques to grow them extensively. Thus the whole world owes the global access to tobacco, cassava, cocoa, potato, squash, several varieties of corn, tomato, peppers and other plants which were brought over to the Old World and grown widely as commercial crops. Many of these crops are now the mainstay of food production in many parts of Africa including Nigeria where cassava has become a staple and cocoa a very significant cash crop even if we  don’t partake of the pleasures of consuming chocolate. A quick look at the above list will confirm the debt owed to the New World in terms of the food we eat and cultivate for sale in this part of the world today. The importance of this phenomenon goes far beyond food availability. Even though this is very important, the importance in the context of this article is that these crops played a vital role in triggering or at least catalysing the agricultural revolution which has been recognised as being a prerequisite to the Industrial revolution of 1759.

    • To be continued.: It’s time for a rethink
  • The rise, rise and rise of capitalism

    The rise, rise and rise of capitalism

    There is little doubt that the debate about world economy that is raging now is of vital importance as its outcome is likely to determine the trajectory of human survival for the foreseeable future. 

    When in 1849, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, his friend and benefactor published their seminal work, The Communist manifesto, one of the highlights of the book was the observation that Europe was being haunted by the spectre of socialism. This conjured up the picture of a ghostly apparition flitting around Europe spreading fear and apprehension. At that time all the countries of Europe were under the rule of their respective royal families, all of them related to each other in a web of family relationships which had been spun over several centuries. Even the French who a couple of generations before had chopped off the heads of king and queen had reinstated some form of monarchy under the house of Napoleon, the warrior who had crowned himself emperor of the French at the turn of the century. After several conquests, he then went on to place his brothers and military protégés on various thrones around Europe and Mexico, on the other side of the world. This notwithstanding, there was  general unrest throughout the continent as workers began to flex their fledging muscles and struggled to make their voices heard over the pomp and majesty of their kings.

    A century before the publication of the Communist manifesto, a quiet revolution which has since been described as the Industrial revolution took place in Britain and created a brand new world driven by wonderful new machines powered in equal measure by human ingenuity and greed. The capitalists driving this revolution were to destroy the monarchs in their castles in less than a century and rule in their place making the Industrial revolution the most profound social movement the world had ever seen.

    The population of the world is now racing towards the nine billion mark, albeit with enough resources available to sustain this large population and more. That many people living predominantly in Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia are living in poverty is not due to a global lack of resources but the failure of the equitable distribution of those resources. It is looking increasingly likely that the future of the world depends on the resolution of this problem.

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    Given the extant human condition, it is clear that humankind has been phenomenally successful, at least in strictly biological terms. She has come to control all earthly resources in a way that has not been seen since the dinosaurs were wiped out some sixty-five million years ago. So total was dinosaur domination in their time that without their having been taken out of the terrestrial equation, we certainly will not be here today as masters of all earthly creation. The dinosaurs, it should be pointed out, ruled the earth for a hundred and fifty million years. It is important to amplify this fact because the length of human domination is so far so short as to be insignificant.  Everything considered however,  it is hardly conceivable that our dominance will last for many more millennia, given the nature of the discharge our dominance. This subject is worthy of further consideration.

    The oldest human ancestor to be recognised as such so far, was a female who lived and died somewhere on the plains of East Africa just over three million years ago. She has been described as a member of the Australopithecus afarensis species, still very far in evolutionary terms from Homo sapiens our own species which now rules the world into which she was born only two hundred thousand years ago. That ancestral fossil, now irreverently named Lucy, would not be recognisable as human to anyone living today as the journey to full human status had only just begun. The precarious existence of Lucy and her tribe is shown by the manner of her death. Studies have shown that she fell out of a tree in which she had slept in order to escape the unwelcome attention of one of the big cats which constantly prowled around her neighbourhood seeking what to devour. In other words, her position on the food chain was low and she was open to predation all the time. Today, man is the apex predator and all other predators however physically powerful come a distant second to man who rules the world with an iron fist and has the power to cage any other predator.

     Man has come a long way, so long that it is now inconceivable to think that there was a time when there were fewer than a million men, women and children striving hard to extract some measure of sustenance from the unyielding earth. At that critical time, the watchword was cooperation, each person bringing something to the common table and taking up his fair share of whatever was available. In the face of ever present danger, cooperation rather than competition was the means by which the right to life was guaranteed or at least, preserved in those dark days.

    Homo sapiens arrived on the scene about 200,000 years ago but even with his large brain, he was still having to battle continuously with all manner of challenges. He still had to roam over large areas of his world chipping out a precarious existence from wherever it was possible. He had to cope with large swings in climate, seasons and other such phenomena far beyond the level of his understanding but which determined the level of comfort in which he lived. His continued existence was precarious to say the least and it was not possible for him to thrive. Those early men lived in Africa but there came a time when conditions were so harsh that some bands wandered right out of Africa, presumably through a passage through where we now call Yemen and spread through to the rest of the world. This migration or waves of migration occurred some sixty thousand years ago. Studies suggest that of the number of the several hopeful bands which left Africa at this time, only two survived the odyssey as shown by the observation that all non-Africans are descended from one of two women who got out of Africa and thereafter spread right round the world. This is an interesting observation given that no such stock mothers have been identified in Africa. Rather there were many of them and as a result of this, Africans now exhibit far greater genetic diversity than non-Africans. Should the world population be wiped out by a pandemic for example, the only survivors will be some Africans who are genetically disposed to be intrinsically resistant to the event which killed off all others. In other words if we had to start all over again future generations will be Africans, the oldest human stock and the omega outed by genetics to restart the process of human evolution should the need arise.

    Some ten thousand years ago, mankind took a giant step on the road to social evolution when quite fortuitously, the science of agriculture was revealed to man in three far flung places at the same time. It took man the better part of five thousand years before coming to terms with the demands of agriculture and start to produce excesses of agricultural products. From then on the global population grew and centers of human civilisation began to emerge all over the world. Egypt was one such node of civilization where society was stratified and class formation started to develop with attendant new and in many cases, destructive tendencies to the social cooperation without which man would not have survived in the very early days.

    Any serious study of genuine human civilisation must begin on the banks of the River Nile delta. As everyone who has gone to school knows, fertile soil is annually deposited on the banks of the Nile which when cultivated yielded abundant harvests and created the platform on which Egyptian civilisation was built. The situation was more or less duplicated in the fertile crescent between the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates, another node of human civilisation. From these regions the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians built wonderful civilisations in the form of laws which supervised all forms of human conduct and physical structures which provided comfort and justifiable pride to their builders. These magnificent structures, according to the iron law of nature have crumbled to dust. It is perhaps to be expected that religion was also invented and developed at this time, developed to such an extent that it pushed for the building of magnificent structures such as the pyramids of Egypt which are an enduring legacy to this exciting period of social development. For the sake of completeness, it must be said that all the magnificence lighting up the area we now call the Middle East was replicated and in some areas surpassed by what was going on in China at the same time. By this time, the global population had grown far beyond the one million people to hundreds of millions thereby guaranteeing the continuing existence of man. Indeed by the time Marx and Engels were exhorting the workers of the world to unite, global population passed the one billion mark and less than a hundred years later another billion was added and today there are more than eight billion human beings on earth. And all these without any biological evolution having taken place. The first Homo sapiens born two hundred thousand years ago is genetically identical with anyone born today anywhere in the world. His economic status is however miles away from what is the lot of anyone alive today. In the time that separate these two human beings, mankind has conquered the earth in a manner that is impossible for the first humans to think about. Apart from all the creature comforts now in such abundance as to be taken for granted by several billions of people, life expectancy is going up all the time. Many of those born today are confidently expected to live for ninety years, whereas our ancestors lived no longer than thirty arduous years even though like us they had the potential to live for seventy years.  They could not fulfil this potential because too many of them succumbed to the ravages of malnutrition, disease, accidents and death during child birth. Today, all those problems have more or less been solved. There are wonderful drugs to intervene in the progression of diseases, powerful vaccines to prevent diseases; all these backed by a plethora of gadgets looking out for our creature comforts. Our capacity to produce these gadgets is increasing all the time and on the face of it, man should be able to face the future with eyes undimmed by the fog of doubt. Capitalism is associated with the production of all kinds of material goods on an industrial scale such that the rise in human comfort and population must be tied to this earth shaking phenomena which continues to shape our lives and destiny.

    • TO BE CONTINUED

  • Board members

    Board members

    IN 1972, Ebenezer Obey and his band released an album, Board members which confirmed his arrival on the Nigerian music scene as a mega star. Today, more than fifty years after its release, that album retains a freshness which to put it simply, is astonishing and I for one am reminded of it whenever the word, board crops up in any conversation. What is there not to like in that album? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Everything is in it; lyrics, rhythm, throbbing percussion, beautiful singing and sheer joy of performance point to a classic. The board members who were serenaded in that piece of music were all men of power, influence and gravitas; a collection of really outstanding gentlemen who were worthy of praise and respect as befits all members of a board. A Board, any board, consists of people with a commanding presence, with the capacity to give purposeful leadership to any enterprise. This definition was firmly stamped on my mind when I found that universities were administered by a board which was the power behind the administration of the university. The Board or University Council has the power to hire and fire all members of staff and appoint the Vice Chancellor who throughout his tenure is responsible to the Board for everything taking place within the university. It can even be said that the board is the engine room of the university without which the university is no more than a collection of buildings.

    Every university, public or private has a Board. In the case of public universities, board members are appointed by the President in the case of Federal universities whilst state governors are responsible for the appointment of board members in their state owned universities. In this way, the direction in which every university is headed is decided by the quality of the people on their respective boards. This being the case, the most important thing about the Board is its composition. University Board members are, in my estimation required to be highly knowledgeable people who have what it takes to make substantial contribution to a very important institution. They are not supposed to be people who are on the board to learn, but to serve, to serve on the basis of past experience in various fields including the management of institutional finances. One of the primary functions of a University Council is to ensure that the money available to the university is spent judiciously and this includes the ability to stretch such monies to the absolute limit. This function should also include the ability to attract funds to the university but to be honest, this does not seem to be of serious consideration to university boards in Nigeria which are mostly interested in spending the money but that is outside the scope of this article. On the issue of the sensitive subject of university finances in these climes, the most pertinent requirement of a member of the board is integrity or at least should be, as this is a quality or perhaps, the quality which would determine the success or otherwise of the board.

    For the most part, university councils, work unobtrusively, sometimes covered by a thin but impenetrable cloak of invisibility which renders them almost anonymous, unless of course when they choose inadvisedly, to stick their collective nose into the nitty gritty of university business of which they are likely to have little practical knowledge. The board must be outside looking in at all times in order to be able to take in the whole picture.

    I had been a member of staff of the university for a few years before I was made aware of the reality of the university council but when I eventually did, I recognised its importance immediately. After all, the council was going to be majorly involved in the process of my progression through the ranks ultimately leading up to a professorial chair. I recommend that all new academic recruits are not just made aware of this but come to an understanding of it. Promotions are on the bases of the teaching, research and administrative activities of every member of academic staff. Fortunately, I was not only made aware of this process but was involved with it quite early in my career and this put me in good stead as that career progressed.

    When I arrived in the university all those many years ago, the smallest Faculty in the university was the Faculty of Pharmacy and because this was the case, I became involved in administrative processes quite early in my career. In addition to this, I was given the scope to learn about the inner workings of the university and became fully integrated into university administration as an active participant.

    After the Board, the next body in order of hierarchy is the university Senate, which is principally a committee of professors. The Senate makes the laws of the university and is responsible to the Board through the Vice Chancellor. The Senate is a body of professors but within it there are representatives of Congregation made up of all the graduates, academic and non-academic members of staff of the university. They are the equivalent of the Tribunes in the Roman Senate who represented the interest of the common people of Rome. In my role within senate therefore I had a well defined constituency which I tried to serve to the limit of my ability. But first, I put myself on a learning curve and took my time over the matter of contribution to debate which was usually of high standards. After all, some of the professors with whom I was rubbing shoulders with so to say had been professors when I was still working towards my school certificate. My election as Congregational representative marked the beginning of my experience of university administration outside my Faculty and allowed me to more or less rub shoulders with the professors who were providing leadership within the university. Once a month throughout the session, Senate met to consider the cases brought before it and took decisions which were ratified by Council. Debates on the floor of Senate were usually animated and sometimes quite fierce but all were carried on with a great degree of decorum according to Senate rules and regulations.

    It did not take me a long time to find my voice in senate which is why I was able to take a giant step in my academic political career when I was elected a Congregational representative on the Appointments and Promotions Committee. This is a joint committee of Council and Senate responsible for all matters concerning appointments and promotions in the university. Apart from Council itself, this is perhaps the most powerful committee in the university since everyone always has something to say about their promotion. The committee chairman was the Vice Chancellor and one of the members was a representative of Council, a Board member no less and if being a member of senate was a learning curve, being a member of this committee was an enormously steep learning curve.

    This Board member on the Appointments and Promotions Committee was a taciturn old man. I was quite young then and considered anyone above fifty old, so in strict terms, he probably was not old but he certainly was taciturn to a fault. At least he carefully avoided making any contribution to the many lively debates which went on as each case was discussed round the table. Whenever a division was necessary to decide a case however, he always voted for the candidate to be promoted and he could do this without uttering a single word. It took me a long time to come to the realisation that the honourable Board member had no clue of what the business of the committee was. I found this out quite dramatically after a year.

    Academics are assessed mainly on both the quality and number of their academic papers which had been published since their last promotion. In university parlance the first thing pointed out was about their papers. Your case was made on the basis of your papers and the more papers you had published in what were recognised as reputable journals, the higher the chances of being promoted.

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    This being the case, you could have knocked me over with a feather when the taciturn Board member in complete break with his own tradition put up his hand to ask the chairman’s permission to speak. He then took my breath away when the words on his mind came out of his mouth.

    ‘You people are always talking about papers, what are these papers and where are they published? In the Daily Times or any other newspaper?’ These words were followed by pin drop silence as members looked around in complete disbelief. It was left to the Vice Chancellor to bring the Board member up to speed. It was clear at that point that the man had been turning up for meetings for no other reason than to collect his allowances which I found out were quite handsome and worth turning up for even though he did not do anything to earn those allowances.

    It was clear that our Board member earned his seat on the university council as reward for services to the political party in power at the time. Frankly, I was shocked that government could even think of ramming such  a square peg into our round hole. The poor man was completely out of his depth and had nothing to offer but he made sure that he collected all the monetary entitlements attached to his office by turning up for every meeting, to sit down with his mouth clenched shut for hours on end.

    That was my first experience of ineptitude in high places within the university but it was by no means the last. One of the main pillars of ASUU’s struggles with successive governments over the years has been the issue of university autonomy through which universities were to be responsible for their own governance. The present arrangement in which the most powerful persons within the university are by and large political appointees leaves a great deal to be desired. This is because our political parties have not demonstrated the restraints which are necessary to appoint members of university councils and indeed other boards to government institutions on demonstrable merit. When we talk about politicians and their appointment into various offices our minds do not often stray into appointments into all the various boards which exist at the pleasure of various governments even though, there are many thousands of them at various levels. All of them provide opportunities to reward all those who ‘worked very hard for the success of the party’. All that work must be rewarded, of course to the detriment of all those institutions they are foisted upon.

    I met that taciturn Board member on the university Council forty years ago. How time flies. At that time, there were only a handful of Federal universities but even then, there were not enough men and women with the requisite qualifications to render useful service to our universities. Today, there is a shocking plurality of those institutions and with the pool of qualified personnel dwindling all the time, I shudder to think of how low the bar for the membership of our university Councils has fallen over the years. And, this is one of the reasons why the news coming out of our universities these days is uniformly bad.