The Nation Newspaper

Category: Adebayo Lamikanra

  • The British vote for change

    The British vote for change

    Although I did not think that I was coming to an enchanted country, I was not prepared for the ordinariness of my surroundings when I arrived in Britain, Manchester to be precise, to start a postgraduate course in late September 1973. My first impressions about my destination were definitely far from flattering. I arrived at Manchester airport in the late evening of a Saturday when I could not get to town and decided to stay in a nearby hotel until Monday morning. I took a taxi, telling the driver to take me to the nearest hotel. Like taxi drivers all over the world, he saw me for what I was, a stranger and took me on a merry go round in the dark by which time I had run up quite a bill. I suspected that I was being fiddled but was more relieved than anything else when I was deposited at what turned out to be a decent hotel. I had left a hot and steamy Lagos only half a day before to be confronted with a typically chilly late summer Mancunian evening for which I was  prepared neither physically nor psychologically and thus I was introduced to the discomfort of being dumped into a rather efficient refrigerator with winds blowing around my head with sadistic intent. The cold sliced through me like a scalpel in the hands of a confident surgeon and did as much damage as a steak knife wielded by a competent chef. My discomfiture was accentuated by the fact that, the hotel management, ignoring the evidence of any honest thermometer, clung to the fiction that we were still in summer and did not think it fit to provide any heating. The frigidity of my otherwise comfortable room convinced me that my very survival was at stake so I got into bed fully clothed, but found very little comfort even under the thick duvet that was provided to keep out the cold. As I shivered under that duvet, my mind went back twenty-four hours to the warmth of my own bed which was lying unused and uselessly warm far away in Lagos.

    Manchester University was and is still is one of the best universities not just in Britain but in the world and so I was proud to have been admitted to such a reputable institution. My first impressions of the university were however rather muted. I had arrived there from a brand new, modern and purpose built university campus at Ife and there simply was no comparison between where I was coming from and where I had arrived at with so much excitement. I had arrived on the premises of the university on Oxford Street early on the Monday morning to find that the university, famous as it was, was just a collection of rather nondescript buildings which appeared to have been flung haphazardly on either side of a short stretch Oxford Street. The Department of Pharmacy which was to be home to me was housed in a building within which John Dalton had worked some one hundred and fifty years before my inauspicious arrival on the same premises. The place screamed history but for elegance, you had to look elsewhere. Inside the old building however, some serious scientific work was going on as I soon found out and joined in. But that morning, I could not help but wonder what I was in for as some friendly young man, knowing how thoroughly confused the disposition of the place  must have been to me, intervened and took me round a maze of twisted corridors, before finally bringing me to the presence of my supervisor who had been expecting me to show up. Looking at my elegant but flimsy suit, my supervisor did nothing more than shake hands with me before sending me with careful instructions to go out shopping for appropriate clothing. For this, he placed me in the company of the only Nigerian student on the premises, the future Vice Chancellor of the University of Nigeria who knowing the importance of that commission earned my undying gratitude by dropping everything he was doing and took me shopping. That was the first day. On the second day, now suitably clothed, I was in the laboratory to start the work for which I had come more than five thousand kilometres to do.

    With the help of friends I had known from Lagos, I settled down quite quickly to life in Manchester and began to take stock of my environment. This was home to those demi-gods who had come all the way to Nigeria and other places all over the world to lay down their law and force feed us with the tenets of their adopted God. For them to have been able to do this, they had to have been special, or so I reasoned at first. Seeing them close up however immediately disabused my mind of any such fanciful notion. Even those of them who were in the university did not show overt signs of mental competence and I wondered how they had managed to do with us what they had done all round the world over several centuries. To tell the truth, I am still wondering how people who were so outstanding in their ordinariness could have held the rest of the world to ransom for such a long time.

    The Britain I arrived in in 1973 was a country in crisis. The Conservative government of Edward Heath was locked in bitter struggle with the trade unions for the very soul of the country. War had broken out in the Middle East and the winds of inflation were gathering strength all over the world so that the people found that they did not have money with which to purchase the bare necessities of life. That winter has been described as a winter of discontent as it was characterised by the three day working week, electricity cuts, rubbish piled up in the streets, dustmen having walked out on strike, all accompanied by various other discomforts and annoyances.  No surprise at all that the elections called early in the following year were won handsomely by the Labour Party which was confidently expected to clear up the mess left behind by the retreating Conservatives.

    The Conservative Party, the oldest political party in Britain is first and foremost the party of the privileged and in a class ridden society, the natural party of government. Most of its leaders were members of the establishment, determined to protect the interest of the rich who owned all the means of production. They owned large farms, mines, commercial institutions such as banks and insurance companies. In short, they had influence far beyond their number and it was in their interest to restrict the number of people, strictly men of course since women could not be trusted to use any vote conceded to them wisely who could be allowed to vote. Men who did not have property were emasculated and their vote taken from them. In modern parlance, the old Conservative Party firmly occupied space on the political right leaving the Liberal Party to hold on to the centre, with the left conspicuously unoccupied.  In truth however, the Conservatives did not have things all their own way. Over on the continent of Europe beginning from France in 1789, the peasants were serving up bloody stews in the name of revolution, shaking all the ancient regimes to their foundations. In France, the unspeakable happened when king and queen were hurled out and publicly deprived of their royal heads. Except for a brief Napoleonic interlude, France has remained a republic since then.  It was clear to the British ruling class that the waters of the English Channel could not protect them from the revolutionary contagion which was sweeping through Europe and this being the case, they cut their poor some slack so as to protect themselves from the fury of the majority who were constantly on the verge of starvation or in danger of some savage punishment for slight infarctions such as stealing apples, for which they could be banished (transported) to Australia or publicly hanged for stealing a sheep. To put it simply, it was a crime to be poor in Britain some two hundred years ago even though that was the lot of the majority of the people. The first political victory for the poor, if it can be so called, was the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Before then the poor had no access to the cheaper grains which were available elsewhere because of heavy taxes levied on imported grains. This led to a reduction in food prices allowing the poor to breathe a little. There had been opposition to the repeal of the Corn Laws because they protected the interest of the rich landowners on whose farms the grains were produced. It was in their interest that grain prices remained high, as high as possible to ensure the enhancement of their profits.

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    Although the repeal of the Corn Laws brought some relief to the poor, their plight was still on the wrong side of desperate but because they had no representatives in parliament, nothing or at least very little could be done for them. The poor and abandoned majority sometimes tried to redress their grievances by taking to the streets but the resultant riots that erupted were easily put down by the police who ironically were recruited from the same social class as the rioters. In the meantime, the land owners and the employers of labour continued to pay their workers starvation wages on which they could not bring up their children but nobody in authority spared any thought for the poor workers, not to talk of their unfortunate offspring. It is against this background that Marx and Engels published their iconic Communist Manifesto in 1849 in which they called on the workers of the world to unite to free themselves from the oppression of the rich. It was an appropriate time to make this clarion call because as pointed out by Marx, the spectre of communism was at that time haunting Europe and it seemed that the stage was set for the liberation of the poor from the chains of their poverty.

    It was around this time that it became apparent to the workers that they had to unite in order to liberate themselves from the fierce and unfeeling clutches of the rich and began to form unions through which they could fight for their rights to live as human beings. By this time, the Industrial Revolution was well on its way and factories producing all kinds of manufactured goods were springing up all over the place. The driving force behind the revolution was coal, as steam power drove everything before it. All over the country, principally in Scotland, Wales, Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, mining communities sprang up and many thousand men were united in their effort to dig up coal from deep mines to bring the black stuff to the surface to be burnt in furnaces and provide power to thousands of those wonderful and powerful machines which drove the revolution which had the world in its grip. Those men were not just moles digging for coal but sentient men who could fight for their right to be treated as human beings. They came together to form unions which were the vehicles for this fight and in time, those unions coalesced under the leadership of Keir Hardy, almost inevitably a Scottish miner, to form the Labour Party. One hundred and fifty odd years on, another Keir, this one surnamed Starmer has emerged to lead the Labour Party to a land slide victory over the Conservatives. He has inflicted such a crushing defeat on the Conservatives that two weeks later, there is talk of an extinction event having overtaken the British Conservative Party, for so long, the party of government in Britain.

    To be continued.

  • Land (VIII)

    Land (VIII)

    I had no idea where this subject was going to lead when that famous Mark Twain quote popped unbidden into my head and quite impetuously, I decided to amplify it. Now, the land motif is running strongly, dragging me helplessly in its wake. I can only hope that this series has struck a chord with those who have taken the trouble to keep track of my ruminations over these two months or so.

    The central theme of these articles is that no new land is being made. Indeed, given the rather careless, if not reckless management of land all over the world, useable land is actually shrinking and in response to this its value is going up everywhere almost exponentially. Now more than ever, it makes sense to invest in land wherever it is available also because land holds immeasurable potential for utilisation and when it is managed prudently returns on investment is usually quite high. In addition, land can be passed down many generations so that descendants right down the line can still enjoy the financial benefits of investments made twenty generations before they were born. The reigning King of England is still benefitting from the proceeds of the investment in land which his grandfather twenty-six times removed left to him. Never mind that all  these lands were acquired at sword point in the manner of a brigand. It is this combination of circumstances that makes land so massively contentious especially in places where the rule of law does not sit firmly or comfortably. Looking through history and literature you will find numerous examples of deadly combat over pieces of desirable real estate, big and small. In Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God, the protagonist, Ezeulu incurs the implacable wrath of his people because he supported the claims of a rival village to a disputed piece of land. The situation was further loaded against him because his mother came from the opposition village but the real bone of contention was that piece of land over which a war was fought and lives lost. That there were instances of marriage between people from the squabbling villages only added spice to the dish being served as the piece of land in question trumped everything including familial relationships of the closest kind.

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     On a much larger scale, global conflicts have been precipitated by desire for land. The premium example of this is the Second World War. It was the dream of occupying the vast wheat producing lands in Eastern Europe that prodded Hitler to unleash his armed forces on Poland to set off a war which engulfed the whole world and introduced mankind to the horrors of atomic warfare; an event which more than any other has shaped the world in its present image. True, there were other sub-plots to that story such as the attempted extermination of the Jews but that was as a result of the initial success of the German army in creating a zone in which the Germans had complete control over the land as well as all the people who lived on it. The ultimate war aim as designed by the Germans was to create space within which their cherished Reich  (Empire) would reign supreme for a thousand years. In doing this the indigenous people of Eastern Europe were to be enslaved by the ‘superior’ Germans in the same way in which the indigenous peoples of America and Africa had been enslaved and are still being enslaved by Western Europeans. The outrage which this generated in Europe was because the victims of German aggression were also Europeans who under no circumstances could be allowed to be treated as slaves. That status was and is reserved strictly so for people with dark skins wherever they are found anywhere on the globe. And when talking about people who have been muscled out of their land, we must mention the indigenous peoples of Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, Indonesia and numerous countries in South East Asia as well as the Indian sub-continent. An ironic twist to the issue of people being deprived of their land is being played out right now in the Middle East where the Jews, prime victims of German aggression in the Second World War since the end of that war have step by step driven out and are still in the process of driving away the Palestinians from lands which they have called home over many generations. Right now, the Jews are building new settlements on the West Bank in violation of United Nations resolutions. It is not their business to lose any sleep over the fate of the Palestinians who used to live in those places where Jewish settlements are now going up. This situation has made a tinderbox of the entire Middle East region raising the fear that the possibility of a global and terminal conflagration can no longer be ruled out. The Jews claim in a book written by Jews several thousand years ago that God, having decided to adopt them as his chosen people had granted them the disputed territory of Palestine in perpetuity. That they voluntarily vacated their Promised land some two thousand years ago does not seem to have invalidated their claim because strongly behind them is a phalanx of Western countries with the Americans leading them and confirming the inalienable right of the Jews to occupy all of Palestine. In other words, what we are dealing with here is a power grab.

    It has to be said that land grabbing is not restricted to Europeans. In the period leading up to the Second World War, the Japanese had invaded and occupied vast areas in China and the whole of the Korean peninsula and during the war, they drove the British out of Singapore and the Dutch out of Indonesia. The occupation of India was next on the list. They did this because they reasoned that they had the military capacity to get away with a land grab in that region.

    The stark reality is that land confers power and authority on whoever owns it. That power increases with the value of the land. The converse is of course true in that people who have access to power often dispossess people who are less endowed of whatever land that belongs to them. And the value of land is determined either by it’s sheer size, location, potential for yielding crops or whatever valuable material on which the land sits.

    As far as the Europeans were concerned, all the land on the vast continent of Africa was up for grabs when they were finally able to move into various parts of the continent in the closing years of the nineteenth century. In most parts of West Africa where we call home, there was very little movement of European settlers in those colonies which were initially carved out principally by trading companies. The prime example of this phenomenon is Nigeria which was created almost single- handed by Tubman Goldie and for this reason at least is known to history as the Cecil Rhodes of West Africa. When Goldie arrived on the Lower Niger, there were many French, German and British trading companies in fierce competition with each other for local trade with the various communities found in that area. Goldie realised that British interests could only be enhanced through the consolidation of all the British companies into one so that they could be united against their French and German competitors. Thus it was that the United African Company was formed. Under the control of Goldie, the company went around concluding treaties with the local authorities but was not averse to using some force as a means of persuading reluctant rulers to come round to see Goldie’s point of view. By this process the United African Company more or less built up a presence in the Niger delta and places outside the delta. This area formed a large part of the Southern Protectorate. This process was repeated in the areas around the  confluence of Rivers Niger and Benue but going as far north as Sokoto and the area around Lake Chad, thereby creating what has come down to us as the Northern Protectorate and as everyone knows, these territories were amalgamated to form Nigeria in 1914. Up until the turn of the nineteenth century the two protectorates were governed by the company that Goldie built until the administration of that huge territory proved too difficult for the Royal Niger Company, the successor company to the United African Company to administer effectively. Their franchise was then sold to the British government for a sum just short of a million Pounds. That is how much the whole land mass of Nigeria was worth at the time.

    When Goldie was going round signing all those spurious treaties with anyone who appeared to have some form of authority, he was acting under the misapprehension that those authorities were the bona fide owners of the land they were battering away. In reality however, they were indeed not the owners of those lands but mere custodians as all those lands were communally owned.  Nobody owned the land in the sense that they could do whatever they wanted with it. The notion of private land ownership was therefore out of tune with local practice. And come to think of it, what gives anybody the right to own land? That concept, given the enormity and spiritual immensity of land was beyond the grasp of the people that Goldie was dealing with. Given that England, the whole country was owned lock, stock and barrel by William the Bastard and his nobles, it was logical for the British to assume that people here actually owned the land which had been placed in their care. Those lands were then registered in the names of the chiefs who were in charge of those lands at a particular material time and they became certified land owners. Surely another example of a land grab which created a class of people who now boast of having land and their descendants have made a career of selling what was placed in their care in the first place.

    Frankly, how can anyone own land in the same way as a loin cloth or a walking stick? The weight of the crimes committed over the private ownership of land all over the world is too large for the earth to carry. That is perhaps the real original sin which is making life on earth so uncomfortable for the vast majority of us.

    The end.

  • Land (VII)

    Land (VII)

    The situation in respect of land in South Africa is so complex that it almost defies journalistic treatment. Indeed it does but it should still be interrogated, if only because it exists. A good look at it will expose one to the possibility of a mental breakdown in most people, especially those who are overburdened with conscience or empathy. The story of the black people of South Africa is the story, the continuing story of ruthless exploitation of the majority of the owners of land but who have not only been dispossessed of the land in which their ancestors back to several generations are buried but have been enslaved in situ by strangers who form a minority.

    Not only have the omo onílè been deprived of their land, they have been robbed of their spirituality, the property that connects them to the land which they have lost. Dispossessed of everything conferred on them by the land of their birth, they have thus become rootless in that land on which they cannot now make any demand, reasonable or not.

    The Boer war, marked as it was by prodigious bloodletting was long and uncommonly bitter especially among the  Boers who lost wives, children, property and a great deal of self-esteem but retained the colour of their skin and that has turned out to be the most important aspect of this complex equation. When the fighting stopped and the former combatants got together for peace talks, it turned out to be a conclave of hyenas which tore the absent original owners of the land to pieces which were small enough to be comfortably swallowed. The Boer Republics were incorporated into a contraption which together with the Cape colonies became known as the Union of South Africa which was absorbed into the British Empire as a self governing territory which like Canada, Australia and New Zealand were said to have Dominion status within the British Empire. What they had in common was the whiteness of the outer covering of their rulers. The Boers, because of the superiority in number among the accredited voters within the Union retained political relevance, whilst the British were hoisted to the top of the extremely lucrative commanding heights of the economy, controlling banking and mining sectors. This made it possible for them to seize control of the modern industrial sector responsible for wealth creation within the Union. The blacks, who were terrorised in the conduct of the war and suffered a great deal of hardship were denied any form of acknowledgement as a human presence even though they could not have been absent in the consciousness of their tormentors. After all, capitalism must have it’s labourers, those whose productivity is needed to drive the machinery of exploitable production. In the end, they were only recognised as units of labour on the farms, down the mines and in their domestic establishments as care givers and cleaners. They were grudgingly allowed to be seen but never heard. Whatever potential they had for anything else was not recognised let alone allowed to develop to any significant extent. Whatever talent they had was allowed to wither and die because they were not even recognised as being human.

    My primary school contemporaries will no doubt remember that one of the most eminent historical figures we were introduced to all those many years ago was Cecil Rhodes. We were told of his exploits in the field of commerce and politics and those qualities were backed up by the incontrovertible fact of having not one but two African countries named after him. The truth however is that he was a rapacious robber baron who wilfully stole African lands in his capacity as the controller of a commercial enterprise which ruthlessly built up a monopoly in the trading of gold and diamonds. His company, the British South African Company, had influence beyond South Africa. Early on in its career, the company took its search for precious metals across the Limpopo River into Matebeleland, signing spurious treaties with local chieftains all throughout what became known as Southern Rhodesia and further on into the copper belt which became Northern Rhodesia.

    The main difference between North and South Rhodesia was that white colonisation was minimal in the North, whereas a gang of adventurers calling themselves the Pioneers who moved up from South Africa in those internal occupied drawn wagons moved into and occupied Southern Rhodesia, seized land from the indigenous people and proceeded to enslave them on the commercial farms which they had set up. It is the descendants of these notorious land grabbers that were invited a while ago by some historically ignorant governor to set up farms in Kwara State. For all I know they are still on their farms but I have no news of their exploits in Nigeria.

    The land available to those interlopers in Rhodesia was very rich, labour cost very little and profits were high, so high that by the sixties, the whites in Southern Rhodesia enjoyed the highest standard of living of any group of people anywhere in the whole wide world. In their intoxicated state of satiation, the whites, determined to hang on to their criminal perquisites for ever, announced what they called a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain because the agitation for majority rule was getting too loud to be ignored. They had come to the conclusion that they had to consolidate their hold on the country that that had stolen. Only a few years before, the British Prime Minister on an African tour had warned of a wind of change which was blowing through Africa and threatening to blow the whites off the continent. The leader of that rebellion in Rhodesia, Ian Smith, at the height of the war of black liberation which followed the declaration of independence stated matter of factly that he did not believe in majority rule, that as far as he was concerned there would no majority rule in Southern Rhodesia for another thousand years which can be interpreted as no majority rule forever. Even as he spoke however, African freedom fighters were waging a bitter war against his lilly white government, the result of which led to the independence of Zimbabwe from white minority rule, much earlier than a thousand years, indeed, very much within his lifetime.

    As a monopoly capitalist and founder of the British African company as well as De Beers, the largest diamond trading company in the world, Cecil Rhodes took very vast tracts of African land and swallowed them whole. As the leader of government of the Cape colony for six years until 1902, Cecil Rhodes systematically disenfranchised Africans depriving them of any rights to vote, a right which some of them had been exploring for some fifty years. By 1902 when the Boer War ended, there were no black voters in the newly formed Union of South Africa. From that point on the country was ruled exclusively by the white minority and the blacks lost not only their vote but also their voice. They were not even ascribed any fraction as was the case when the American constitution was written more than a hundred years before when the consensus was that Africans were three-fifths of their white counterparts. The Africans however did not relent in their effort to participate in the government of their nation but without access to land and other forms of power, their efforts were doomed to failure and they duly failed. This is why they founded the African National Congress as long ago as 1912 to be the vehicle of their fight for political relevance. They made little or no headway in this direction for close to one hundred years but undaunted they fought on until they formed the government of a new South Africa as that wind of change which Macmillan warned the whites about finally swept them away in 1994.

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    The political situation in South Africa worsened for the blacks over the next fifty years or so until 1948 when the heavens collapsed on them and buried them completely. That year the National Party, the political arm of the Boer nation, won the general election and formed a new government. One which was determined to push through what they described as a system of apartheid. Conceived by professors in the Department of Philosophy of Stellenbosch University and enthusiastically endorsed by the elders of the Dutch Reformed Church, apartheid was designed to pull all the constituent races apart in every sense and force the black majority into less than ten percent of available land in sterile areas which they called Bantustans. Black people were only allowed in white areas as workers who were working in white establishments and had to carry a pass on them at all times to testify to their identity as well as their place of work. The pass laws applied to males but they were soon extended to women who protested vehemently and publicly. In the township of Sharpville in March 1960, a demonstration against the pass laws which started peacefully got out of hand and the inexperienced policemen present fired into the crowd killing 69 people on the spot, some of them were shot in the back as they ran away from the scene. This incident opened the eyes of the world to the evil of apartheid but it took another thirty-four years for this evil to be exorcised. Even though Sharpville drew sharp and unfavourable attention to South Africa, it did not deter the Boers from driving on relentlessly with their agenda. It was at this time that Mandela was put on trial for treason and locked up in the notorious Robben island prison. He did not breathe the air of freedom for more than twenty-seven years.

    The real issue in South Africa was land and the use of it for economic purposes. It was even more so when the land was found to yield large quantities of gold and diamonds. These minerals helped to turn a slow, agricultural society into a searing hot industrial society in need of large numbers of compliant workers who have no share in the wealth that they were creating for a minority within the society. In South Africa as it was or actually it still is in the United States, the people who tend to get locked out have a dark skin, more as a means of identification than anything else. It has been argued that before Africans became trade goods to be bought and sold like chattel and owned body and soul, the issue of racial inferiority was not taken seriously. As soon as blacks came on the market as slaves, everything changed and men began to look for ways and means of explaining why other men can and should be used as slaves. The white people desperately looked around for the justification for African slavery and claimed to have found it in their Bible. First, the so called God’s people were slaves in Egypt so, it should be alright if black people are made to go through the same ordeal to improve the race. Then of course, there is that contorted story of Ham, the progenitor of all black people who was cursed by God to serve others. It is even claimed that it is the wish of God that some people are born for the sole purpose of being slaves. The reason why this should be taken as true is not clear but such issues are never clear. They have to be accepted as articles of faith.

    Looking for and putting on my science cap for once, I can say with all confidence that those reasons given are all spurious nonsense. There is only one human race and anyone who says otherwise is not only ignorant but is also a fool and a liar. After all, their beliefs are based on a lie. All those Stellenbosch professors were windbags whose sole purpose on earth was to mislead their fellow men and goad them into committing awful crimes against humanity. As for those stuffed up priests of the Dutch Reformed Church, they spread a doctrine of greed and earthly comforts which gave comfort to their flock; the nervous policeman who opens fire on crowds of black people, the mine owner who denied his worker a living wage, the stern judge who passed the death sentence on people without sin against man or God, the politicians who wilfully withheld education from generations of competent black people, the hangman who pulled the lever which sent men into execution pits dangling from a long piece of oiled hemp rope and even those who stood by and enjoyed unearned privileges just because they have a white skin and precious little else. Under the National Party, the whole of South Africa was a giant crime scene and an affront to humanity in the country and everywhere else. And so, the struggle continues.

  • Land (V)

    Land (V)

    In 1807, the British parliament passed a bill to put an end to the trans-Atlantic slave trade to stop the trafficking of Africans to the Americas. To enforce this law on all slaving nations, the British sent squadrons of ships of the Royal Navy on patrol off the coast of West Africa with the authority to arrest ships of all nations contravening the law. Although many ships still managed to smuggle slaves out of Africa, more and more slavers became wary of continuing with the trade and the  number of slaves landing in America was reduced by a considerable extent especially because the Americans followed the lead provided by the British by banning the slave trade out of Africa only a year after the British announced their own ban. This was at a time when cotton had become prominent and the demand for slaves needed to cultivate it was at its peak. Since the unfettered supply of fresh slaves from Africa could no longer be guaranteed, slave owners began to breed slaves on their respective plantations in the same way that they bred dogs and horses. In order to achieve  this objective, some slaves who looked likely to act the part were designated studs whose duty was to impregnate as many females as possible within a short period of time. Failure to be prolific within the framework of their assignment meant an instant demotion to backbreaking field work. Given this background, they turned to their work with a will, even if the woman they were servicing was their own mother hence the epithet ‘motherfucker’, still bandied around as an insult, was hurled at those studs. The turmoil raised in their breast as a result of the opprobrium that was their lot is better left to the imagination. Since all the children produced by female slaves were also slaves no matter who fathered them, plantation owners did their best to boost the number of slaves on their plantations by doing the job themselves, following the example of Thomas Jefferson who fathered no less than six children with one particular slave, even if the slave was three quarters white. Those children were therefore, in a manner of speaking, whiter than their mother. Again, the anguish which had to be borne by the so called lawfully wedded wives on those plantations must register very high on the emotional Richter scale. But spare a thought for the female slaves who worked from sunup to sundown on the outfield and were then raped in the infield at any time of day or night. They gave birth to babies that were not really theirs and who they dared not to love, given the source of the seeds planted in them and their milk was sucked out of their overworked breasts to nurse babies born by their white mistresses who were considered too high and mighty to suckle their own children. Theirs was an impossible row to hoe.

     Many of the fair skinned African Americans you see today are descendants of the slave owners who resorted to self help in the matter of boosting the number of slaves on their plantations. No matter how fair they are however, they are classified as black as long as they are recognised as having one drop of African blood in their veins, no matter how long that drop has been in circulation within them.

    As time went on, the conflict between the North and South over slavery deepened to such an extent that a civil war was with the potential capacity to settle the matter one way or the other was threatening to become inevitable. The inevitable shifted to grim reality as soon as Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as President in January 1861. The gathering clouds showed clearly that the point of no return had been passed when even before the inauguration of  President Lincoln several slave owning states had seceded from the Union to form what they called the Confederate States with the capital in Richmond, Virginia and Jefferson Davies as President. Lincoln who was determined to maintain the integrity of the Union at all cost if need be,  began to prepare for a civil war which broke out when Confederate troops fired on Union positions in Fort Sumter which they claimed was on their territory four months later to announce the commencement of four years of war. That conflict has been described as the first modern war, a precursor to the slaughter which was so distressingly characteristic of the First World War in Europe fifty years later. With the availability of a wide variety of lethal weapons made available in prodigious quantities by newly invented technology, the massive slaughter which was a feature of this war was inevitable and this became obvious as soon as the war started.

    It seemed apparent at the beginning of the war that the South was better prepared for the fight as they outmanoeuvred the North in the opening battles. They were even able to carry the fight up North; so for example, the battle of Bull run was fought so close to Washington DC that Senators could watch the battle from their seats in the capital. Two years later however, the last battle of the war on northern territory, arguably the bloodiest battle of the war was fought at Gettysburg. It was at the dedication of the Arlington Cemetery where the dead from this battle were interred that Lincoln gave his brief but eternally memorable speech in which he described democracy as ‘government of the people by the people and for the people’. It was such soul stirring stuff. Still, the war was not concluded until two bloody years after Gettysburg.

    What mattered most to Abe Lincoln was to keep the USA as one federated country but it was soon clear that there was no chance that the institution of slavery was going to survive that war. For a start, so many black men, as many as 200,000 of them rallied to the Federal side and fought in the Union army, not to talk of the many thousands who were active behind enemy lines in the South. All of them were fighting for their freedom and it was most unlikely that they could be forced back into their status as slaves after the war. In any case, what would have been the point of fighting the war if slavery survived it? No human mind, no matter how diabolical could have found a way out of sustaining the institution of slavery after a war in which military casualties on both sides exceeded six hundred and fifty thousand lives.

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    The South lost the war but can be said to have won the uneasy peace that followed it. During the war, the Federal government promised forty acres of land and a mule to every freed slave but this promise was never kept and the former slaves were left to their own limited devices and open to become prey to their erstwhile owners who were smarting from losing the war. Had the promise of land made to the former slaves been kept, the trajectory of the lives of the freedmen would have been completely different. As land owners they would have had a stake in the future of their country, taking pride to develop that small patch of land which they could call their own. In addition, the value of the land available to them would have gone up year after year, increasing their personal prosperity. Unfortunately, the opportunity to integrate the former slaves into a new multiracial society in which everyone had their own recognisable space failed miserably. Nearly two hundred years after the end of slavery, the descendants of those former slaves are still outside looking in at the American dream of freedom, wealth and the pursuit of happiness. It is apparent that even now, Mark Twain’s advice to buy land is hardly applicable to black people. Yes, they certainly are not making any more land but that is of hardly any consequence to deprived black folk living in the USA.

    When the Europeans began arriving in the New World, they were astonished at the sheer size of what they thought was their inheritance. This is because there was land everywhere they looked and as far as they could judge,  nobody owned a square inch of all that land! Unlike what obtained in Europe where land was the most private of available property, the indigenous people jointly owned all the land which their community held in trust for themselves as well as their descendants in the same way that their ancestors had done for countless generations. The thought that anyone could own land must have shocked them to their bone marrow and would have dismissed the very thought of it happening with a negligent wave of the hand. To them land was imbued with holiness, to be treated with respect bordering on awe. The Europeans in their own mind were convinced that land was a commodity, just like any other, to be exploited for immediate profit and given the European intention towards land, it was clear that the two sides could not find accommodation within the same space. And they did not. In the one-sided armed conflicts which followed, the indigenous people were soon driven off their land at the earliest opportunity so that the Europeans could do whatever they wanted with the land which they subjected to brutal exploitation in the same way that they had raped their own continent in their search for immediate gratification. Today, there are no expansive forests or pristine bodies of water anywhere in Europe and as for animals, their children are now taken to petting zoos, there to catch sight of chickens, goats and pigs which they would have never seen live. Europeans now come to Africa to hunt all the big animals that they have hunted to extinction on their own continent.

    Whilst the Americas were being mercilessly exploited by the Europeans, many parts of Africa were protected from a similar fate by the humble mosquito whose bite  added to that of the deadly tsetse fly meant death to unwary visitors to the continent. But then, individual Europeans did not need to set foot in Africa for them to eat Africa to their satiation. The prime example of this being Leopold, king of the Belgians.

    When the so called scramble for Africa began in Europe around 1875, many European countries mainly Britain, France, Portugal and later on, the newly minted kingdom of Germany began to create what they called areas of interest all over the continent. They went around signing dubious if not out rightly fraudulent treaties which they later on turned to colonial enclaves on which, backed by machine guns, cannon and advanced military knowledge, they seized from indigenous rulers who thereafter, were turned into toothless puppets.

    In the now infamous conference held in Berlin under the auspices of Otto von Bismarck, the Europeans met to put some order into the scramble for Africa which before then had threatened to deteriorate into a dangerous melee. It was at this conference that the greatest atrocity to Africans in Africa was allowed to happen.

    The delegates to this conference were from fourteen countries with one of the participants, King Leopold II of Belgium representing the International Congo Society, a body which he formed ostensibly to end slavery in that part of the world and bring Christian civilization to the people. To sweeten the pot, he promised not to tax trade within the territory he was cobbling together in the heart of Africa. This territory covered over two thousand square metres of prime African land containing more than seven million Africans. It was called the Congo Free State  and was the personal estate of Leopold, king of the Belgians to do with it whatever he wanted.

    To be continued.

  • Land (IV)

    Land (IV)

    The first, but by no means the most egregious crime against humanity committed in the Mississippi delta in the name of cotton was the callous displacement of hundred of thousands of indigenous people from their homelands. This was done by Europeans who believed in what they regarded as their manifest destiny. This is wrapped up in their warped belief that they had a right to all the natural resources on earth, to exploit or develop them in any way they saw fit even if it was at the expense of other non-white human beings who could expect no more than grudging tolerance from their self-appointed masters. As far as they were concerned, it was part of the execution of their manifest destiny to uproot the indigenous people domiciled within the swathe of pristine land which they had allocated to cotton and replace them with hapless black men, women and children who had nothing but a lifetime of brutal labour to contribute to the creation of wealth and creature comfort for their white overlords.

    Cotton or King Cotton as it came to be known in the antebellum states of Southern USA created a hell on earth for the slaves who were brought in to plant, hoe, harvest and bale the raw cotton they had coaxed out of the rich soil of land dedicated to cotton for export. It was brutal, back breaking work from which only death provided a release, mercifully within only a few years and for many of those slaves, not more than two or three. To be ‘sold down the river’ as the saying was in those days was to be condemned to death; death by a thousand indignities perpetrated on millions of absolutely hopeless human beings. Those of them who against all the odds ranged against the enterprise, attempted to flee from their wretched environment were mercilessly hunted down and when apprehended were subjected to extremely savage punishment, to discourage them from any future temptation to steal away and as a deterrent to others who may be harbouring similar temptation in their tortured breast. There was absolutely no consideration for their humanity as they were only rated as being marginally humanly better endowed than the mules with which they worked side by side on the cotton fields. As a compromise, slaves were actually described being only three fifths of a man and recognised as such in the American independence Constitution.

    At first, all the labour associated with cotton production was manual. At the turn of the nineteenth century however, a machine,  the cotton gin was invented and this was the event that took experience on the cotton fields beyond the pits of hell as it multiplied both the discomfiture of the slaves as well as the wealth which accrued to their masters. If cotton was king before, it was now God. When those masters looked at their slaves, they saw nothing but gold coins and worked them even harder. And it was cheaper to go out to replace an overworked and underfed slave who has died in harness than to treat them humanely to prolong their miserable lives. Before the gin was invented, the seeds which were embedded in the cotton bolls had to be manually removed one by one, a maddeningly slow and laborious process which reduced the amount of cotton that could be produced within a given time. With the arrival of the gin, all impediments to cotton production were off and slave owners were transported to a financial heaven. But, there are no roses without thorns and a storm with enough power to blow the ship of cotton right out of the water was, unknown to the slave owners, already brewing. It took a couple of decades to gather strength but when it became fully loaded wreaked a great deal of havoc to a system which many were willing to defend with their lives.

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    Another crop worthy of mention with regard to slavery was an Old World crop which crossed the Atlantic directly from Africa. A close look at the map of the world will show that a very long time ago Africa was joined to America and there was a continuity between the Sene-gambian region in West Africa and parts of South East United States. The geography of those regions continued on as if there was never a break between them, so conditions on both sides of the ocean were identical to all intents and purposes. On the African side, rice is grown and has been grown over centuries and so, the slaves brought over from the rice growing region simply continued with what they and their ancestors were used to and introduced rice growing practices to America. The transfer was so successful that rice was adopted as a commercial crop and slave plantations devoted to growing rice were soon set up and running. Many parts of the land were however so unhealthy because of their swampy nature that most of the slave owners were absentee landlords who nevertheless, had devised ways and means of supervising their unpaid labourers remotely. This situation led to two consequences. The heavy workload coupled with the unhealthy conditions of the environment led to even greater casualties among the slaves than was usual in other places. And their isolation also meant that many of the social characteristics they brought with them to America were retained. When Joseph Momoh the then president of Sierra Leone visited the USA some thirty years ago, he was welcomed to parts of the American South where Geeche culture which Momoh recognised as being identical with his own Gullah culture back home in Sierra Leone had been kept alive by the descendants of those slaves that had been purposely imported to sustain the rice growing economy of parts of Southern United States.

    Up above the Mason – Dixon line to the north, the Industrial Revolution had arrived and as was the case with sugar, it was soon apparent that industrial capitalist production was the antithesis of slavery and there was no way that the two systems could coexist. In the North, the agrarian culture which had sustained the region for more than two centuries was being replaced by an industrial culture and was attracting immigrants from all over Europe. These immigrants were replacing the slaves who had toiled without any reward on farms belonging to everyone including grandees like George Washington, the acclaimed father of the country as well as Thomas Jefferson, the man responsible for drafting the Construction of the United States. He not only owned slaves but fathered some, those children that he had with Sally Hemming, cousin and slave to his wife. Those children were both his children and his slaves who were only liberated as a result of an agreement between him and Sally before she consented to sharing his bed at the age of only fourteen years. Apart from other considerations, the man was also a paedophile. The stories of Washington  and Jefferson shows how utterly pervasive slavery was in the English colonies of North America since slaves were first landed on American shores in 1619. Any sizeable wealth created in North America over nearly three hundred years owed its origins to the unpaid labour of Africans for whom every inch of land in America was a bitter curse and that famous injunction to buy land even today hardly includes the descendants of those millions of captive Africans for whom that country, so called the land of the brave remains a hill of trials and tribulations.

    Machines came along to free the slaves in the tyranny of the land but down south, King Cotton continued to chain Africans to the soil which they could not lay the claim of ownership to. For them the more the land available, the greater the misery they had to live with and the people in the northern states whose prosperity was threatened by the continuation of slavery became increasingly determined to rid their country of this multiply evil system, not because it was evil but because it limited their economic growth. All the same, it must be said that there were some white people who immersed themselves in the abolitionist cause in an attempt to free the slaves who they recognised as being human beings such as they were themselves. For example, the Quakers, as a group stood against slavery but on second thoughts this may be because they were also great capitalists and it was in their interest to oppose slavery. There also were other whites who stood up against slavery, none more than John Brown who held out against slavery so fiercely that he was hanged after he led nineteen other men to attack and seize weapons from an army post. His intention was for slaves to whom the weapons were to be given were expected to use them in a revolt, the slave owners’ worst  nightmare. I remember singing the ditty

    John Brown’ s body lies a-mouldering in the grave  x3   

    But his soul goes marching on etc in primary school. His was a whole hearted commitment to a cause from which he could never derive any benefit.

    • To be continued
  • Land (III)

    Land (III)

    The sheer area of land available to the kingdom of Spain after their conquest of parts of the American continent and some Caribbean islands including Cuba and Jamaica was truly mind boggling. So much so that it must have paralysed their mind but not so much that they forgot to make Christians of the remnants of the indigenous people within their vast territories. The people were thus doubly deprived of both their land and their spirituality. In any case, land and the spirituality of a people are intertwined so intricately that you cannot separate one from the other. The Spaniards conquered America in very sense of the word but did not seem to have any plans for the systematic exploitation of their new territories beyond tearing up the soil in their ceaseless search for previous metals, especially gold and silver.

    Today, South America is so overwhelmingly Spanish that one may be forgiven for thinking that their pernicious influence was limited to that area but nothing could be further from the truth. Look up north and you will find Spanish place names to confirm that the Spaniards were there and had been there for a very long time. But for the gold rush which in 1849 brought California to the attention of American gold diggers, that portion of the USA may still have remained Spanish. Before then, large portions of Southern USA including Texas, which was to become by far, the largest state of the union was a Spanish colony and even today, Florida on the east coast is more Spanish than American.

    It has to be said that although the Spanish were the first to try to exploit the rich as well as the imagined bounties of the New World, several European countries were not far behind even though the activities of these interlopers were restricted to North America. At first their activities were restricted to the crude exploitation of the abundant natural resources which were available in obvious profusion such as the furs of wild animals, timber and of course, mineral resources which were not so easily accessible.

    Land itself was widely and wildly accessible but land by itself is merely a potential source of wealth. It must be cultivated, which means that a lot of skilful work has to be done if a useful harvest is to be achieved.

    Central America is one of the three places where agricultural science first developed and many crops were first domesticated in that region. Many of these crops; cocoa, maize, tomatoes, potatoes, tobbaco, cassava and various peppers have become staples even in this part of the world leaving us to wonder what our agricultural resources would have been like without the importation of those crops from the New World.

    Crop movement was however not in one direction as some crops crossed the ocean in the opposite direction and with their arrival in the western hemisphere caused such an upheaval that the history of the world was placed on a tragic trajectory, the results of which are still playing out all over the world, especially  in Africa. Chief among these crops was sugar cane, an Old World crop from which sugar is produced. The Portuguese had been growing modest quantities of sugar in the Atlantic islands of Principe and Sao Tome using African slave labour before the Americas were discovered but sugar cane planting really came into its own when this enterprise was transferred across the Atlantic into the Portuguese colony of Brazil. Sugar cane is a labour intensive crop and to sustain it as well as the even more labour intensive production of sugar, millions of Africans were enslaved and transported to Brazil and other places in the New World under the most appalling conditions giving rise to the largest enforced migration of people that the world has ever seen; the legacy of which there is likely to be no end. The Portuguese have the distinction of taking out of Africa more than six million slaves over a period of close to four hundred years, a time during which Africa was in continuous turmoil as slave raiders disrupted peaceful intercourse all over the continent. Close to two centuries after the end of this destructive phenomenon, Africa is still to come to terms with its after-shocks and there are indications that it has not yet ended but only gone underground or has re-emerged in new forms. That in itself is worthy of  separate interrogation. But certainly, the continuing fratricide in many parts of Africa suggests that those pernicious seeds planted in African soil since around 1480 are still alive even if they have lost some of their vigour.

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    Over the years since the eighteenth century, Europeans developed a bad and increasing taste for the sweetness of sugar and this meant bad news for Africa and Africans as more and more of them were shipped mainly to Brazil and the Caribbean islands to provide the unpaid labour through which sugar was produced to assuage the raging appetite for sugar in Europe. Again this subject needs a separate discussion and fortunately, the work of Eric Williams, the world renowned historian who led Trinidad and Tobago to independence is available for consultation. His book, Capitalism and slavery which could not find any British publisher for more than sixty years after it was first published in the USA contends or rather, exposes the nexus between capitalism and slavery. Williams insisted that for capitalism to advance to the next level slavery had to go and the emancipation of slaves in the British possessions in the Caribbean islands in 1833 was not as a result of any form of benevolence but was the result of cynical  calculations which enhanced the growth of capitalism. The British stubbornly refused to accept this rebuke but the stand adopted by Williams has been vindicated many times over by contemporary evidence.

    Cotton is another crop which came to define the relationship between Africa and Europe during those dark centuries of slavery. Now cotton, unlike sugar cane was also a New World crop and did not have to cross the sea to find fresh lands to conquer. Quite interestingly however, it has become evident that cotton was first domesticated in an area along the Nile in what is present day Sudan so that going back far enough we find that this crop which came to blight the existence of millions of Africans a few millennia down the line was first introduced to the world by Africans! Much later, the centre of cotton cultivation moved through the Middle East (the word cotton has an Arabic root) to India where it became the most important commodity for many centuries and made India the centre of textile production for several centuries during which time the Indians produced and sold all kinds of textiles to the world. This was at  a time when Indians took textile production to the level of high art and through it made it possible for India to be responsible for roughly 25% of world trade by value. At that time India did not need any items of European manufacture and the Indians were paid for their textile exports with gold and silver extracted from lands in the Americas, proof again that globalisation has a long history which is now only enhanced by modern technology.

    The Indians owed their pre-eminence in the textile trade to their ability to produce different coloured cotton fabrics, a technology they had mastered long before the Europeans had any inkling how to do this. When the Portuguese arrived in India in 1500, they straight away began the business of converting the Indians to Christianity and it was one of such converts who taught their newly acquired Christian brothers the secret of dyeing cotton to produce all the exquisite colours exhibited by Indian textiles. Another example of the use of the name of Jesus as a shortcut to gather political and economic benefits. Clearly,  Christianity has a lot to answer for before the Ecclesiastical courts up in heaven above on that day of judgement with which the  Christians have been threatening the world for more than two millennia.

    Armed with this knowledge,  the Europeans started looking around for the means of producing raw cotton in the vast  New World they had conquered which is how large scale cotton production was established in the Western hemisphere. No sooner was this achieved than the British who had by this time colonised the vast Indian sub-continent began to forcibly dismantle the Indian textiles industry. In doing this, the centre of the global textile industry was transferred to Britain, to the dark satanic mills of Lancashire from where millions of yards of cheap textiles were sent round the  world every year, to undermine the textile industries located anywhere on earth including parts of Africa from where textiles were once exported to other parts of the world.

    As pointed out by Eric Williams, slavery and capitalism found themselves on a collision course almost as soon as the Industrial Revolution was launched around 1750. What the Industrial Revolution brought to the party was the use of machines each of which could do the work of a thousand slaves in less than half the time taken by the slaves to complete the same amount of work. Machines had arrived primarily to take jobs away from unpaid slaves. In other words, slaves were no longer needed and had to be got rid of. There were too many of them to be killed off in any systematic manner and there simply was no way that slaves could be trusted to operate expensive equipment designed to produce vast quantities of trade goods they had no chance in hell of ever acquiring. In essence, they had to go. They had to be set free to fend for themselves as best they could hence the movement towards the emancipation of slaves.

    Many of my contemporaries would at this point remember the pap we were fed in school concerning William Wilberforce, Grenville Sharp and other abolitionists who fought to bring the slave trade to an end in 1807. The stark reality is that those gentlemen may have been pushed by altruism to bring an evil enterprise to an end but they were only successful because the slave trade had become unprofitable and had to be stopped by all means necessary. They were simply pushing against an open door. By this time, Britain had become the largest slave trading nation in the world and had by far, the most powerful navy with which to enforce her decision that Africans must be forced to stay in Africa to produce the raw materials which the  British needed in their dismal factories to produce all those manufactured products which they were hawking all round the world including Africa. Slaves were of course in no position to buy a thing however cheap they were and so, the slave trade had to be abrogated so that Africans could be dragged into the markets created by industrialists in Europe, mainly  Britain in the early stages. But, nothing about human affairs is ever straightforward and the affair with cotton has to be discussed to prove this point.

    In 1803, French territories in North America which when taken together formed more than 20% of present-day USA was sold by Napoleon  Bonaparte, the self crowned Emperor of France to the government of the USA under the presidency of Thomas Jefferson for the grand price of $15 million or three cents to the acre. This has to be the cheapest price for prime estate anywhere in the world as it doubled the size of the USA at that time. The most important thing at least as far as cotton was concerned is that it gave the Americans access to 25 million acres of prime cotton growing land. In other words, fresh land had been created and made available.The only impediment was that these lands were occupied by Indian tribes, the members of which were uprooted from their ancestral lands and forced to march thousands of miles away to strange lands under atrocious conditions on the western shore of the Mississippi river. As many as four thousand souls are estimated to have perished along what has come to be known to history as the Trail of tears.

    • To be continued.
  • Land (II)

    Land (II)

    According to Mark Twain, the principal property of land is that more of it is not being made and this guarantees the increasing value of this commodity. In 1492 however, a lot more land suddenly became available to the Europeans with what they have continued to describe as the discovery of the lands which makes up the American continent.

    In 1453, Constantinople, capital of the Eastern portion of what remained of the once mighty Roman Empire fell to the forces of the then rampant Islamic Ottoman Empire which gave the Turks control of the routes through which spices came to Europe from the East. Following their ascendancy, the Turks quite naturally, blocked the routes along which spices were brought into Europe thereby disrupting the trade of the mainly Christian states around them, making them infinitely poorer and weaker. Without those spices, the use of which they had become accustomed to, Europeans became deprived of the joys of eating since their meals, without the burst of fragrant herbal sunshine from the lands of the rising sun became intolerably unpalatable. From that time on, the race was set to find a reliable route to the spice lands of the East epitomised by the lands of the Indian subcontinent. Since the Turks were sitting astride the lucrative land routes to the spice lands, there was no alternative but to find a sea route. It was obvious that anyone who could command such a route would be sitting on a lot of gold which could then be translated into power.

    Whilst the Portuguese began to explore the possibility of sailing down the West coast of Africa and in doing so go round the Cape of Good Hope which they were sure existed, then sailing up the East African coast to get to India, some half mad Italian now known to history as Christopher Columbus reasoned that since the globe was round he could eventually get to India in the east by sailing west. What he did not know and could not have known was that a whole continent and an ocean stood between Europe and those much coveted spice producing lands. Not surprisingly, he found it hard to find a sponsor for this apparently mad cap idea until he was somehow able to convince the joint husband and wife rulers of Castile and Aragon, the newly amalgamated territories which formed the kingdom of Spain, to sponsor the expedition in the expectation that any new lands discovered in the course of his voyage would be ceded to Spain, or more appropriately to the kingdom of Castile ruled over at the time by Queen Isabella.

    Having secured the necessary funds required for the adventure, three small ships of the caravel class set sail across the Atlantic in a westerly direction from Spain in August 1492 and on October 12 1492, the weary and increasingly agitated mariners sighted land and in doing so, changed the history of the world permanently. Convinced that they had arrived in India, they declared that the people they met on the island on  which they landed were Indians, condemning all the indigenous peoples that lived in the Western hemisphere to be called Indians right down to this day. This is also why we have absurdity of having people, mainly black people referred to as West Indians today.

    Columbus, a common ruffian who immediately enslaved the people who had welcomed him into their home has throughout history been credited with the discovery of the Americas when in actual fact, he barely set foot on that continent on any of his four voyages to the New World. In any case, his voyages opened the eyes of Europeans to the existence of America and in doing so, precipitated the greatest tragedy that has ever been inflicted on the world in the history of man on this planet. The tragedy that unfolded was acute and frequently unbearable but so long lived that five centuries later, it’s grip remains as vicious as it was at the beginning.

    Suddenly, land many times the size of Europe became available for European exploitation and how they exploited it throughout the length and breadth of the American continent. Incidentally, that name is derived from that of another  Italian trader and explorer, Amerigo Vespucci also in Spanish employment. It was he who brought the existence of the American land mass to the attention of the world and forever lends his name to the American continent. Columbus on his own, continued to refer to the New World as the Indies, confirming in his mind his error of having arrived in India by sailing west into the setting sun.

    Over on the other side of the world, the Portuguese were coming upon and quickly colonising African lands all the way till they got to India. The main man in this enterprise was Vasco  da Gama who finally arrived in India with the help of an African pilot on the last leg of his journey from Portugal. As with the discovery of America, the coming of white men to Africa has been by and large, an unmitigated and prolonged disaster.

    The New World to which the West arrived in 1492 was by no means uninhabited. Studies so far suggest that more than twenty thousand years ago, people had crossed over to America from Siberia on the land bridge which at that time had connected the two land masses of Europe and America. The jury is still out on when exactly the crossing over occurred but that date has been pushed back by recent discoveries to more than twenty thousand years. In recent years, there has been debate over the identity of the first people to have crossed the sea into America after the original colonisers had crossed over from Siberia. There are claims that Polynesians successfully landed in America from the Pacific coast before Columbus even thought of venturing across the Atlantic in search of the spice lands. Convincing evidence in strong support of these claims are however not available at this time.

    There is however growing evidence to support the claim that Columbus was not the first European to set foot in the New World. Four centuries before Columbus fetched up in the New World, some Vikins led by Leif Ericsson had landed on the shores of mainland America at a place they called Vinland on account of the grapes which grew abundantly there. Their attempt to settle down there was however not successful because of hostility from the indigenous people of that region and their settlement was quickly abandoned.

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    Columbus had much better luck because he was not only warmly welcomed, the natives of that area of the New World where he landed were not even familiar with weapons and cut themselves on the knives and swords to which they were introduced by their visitors. The Spaniards responded to their welcome by enslaving some of them and seizing whatever they fancied. The rape of the New World had begun and up till now there is no end in sight to their despoliation. Here was land in such quantity that it turned land starved Europeans into wild animals who could not be satiated. They had been brought up to think that nobody was making any more land but here they were with land stretching before them in all directions and it seemed there was no one to deny them access to the land to do with it whatever it was they pleased. But, there were people, millions of them who like the Aztecs, Mayans and Incas had built dazzling civilisations and had produced beautiful ornaments of jade, silver and gold in such profusion that the Spaniards began to fantasize about the whereabouts of Eldorado, city of gold. It was obvious that the land was fertile, not only in terms of producing sustenance for the body but minerals of incalculable value to please the mind. The sight of these metallic wonders drove the thought of spices out of their minds and they only wanted to lay their hands on the gold.

    The thought of conquest took over the minds of the Spaniards and under the command of men such as Cortes and Pissarro, destroyed indigenous kingdoms and quite systematically looted their treasures and packed them in large galleons for onward transmission into the coffers of the kingdom of Castile. But more heinous than the harvest of gold ornaments was the harvest of souls. Together with their insatiable thirst for gold, the Spaniards inflicted on their reluctant hosts several exotic and deadly diseases to which the people of the New World succumbed like flies. As much as eighty percent of them lost their lives to the infections transmitted to them by the Spaniards and it has now come to be appreciated that the spectacular military success achieved by the Spaniards was due as much to the deaths caused by Spanish arms as by infections like small pox, influenza, measles and malaria which the Spaniards brought with them on their bodies. The indigenous people, never having come in contact with these infections did not have an iota of natural resistance and were overwhelmed. They were replaced by immigrants from Spain who continued to dominate the demography of all the countries in Latin America.

    Apart from the new diseases to which they were exposed, the indigenous population, those of them that survived the plague brought upon them by the strange creatures from Europe were set to back breaking work extracting gold and silver from underground. Under the atrocious conditions of their new life, they were dying out at an alarming rate within a single generation. What was happening in those newly discovered lands was genocide, pure and simple and it is a miracle that any of them survived. It was at this point that attention was switched back across the Atlantic, back to the Old World, to the cradle of human civilization, Africa. The people of Africa were immune to European diseases and were used to hard work. What other solution to the problem of labour shortage could be better than to import Africans into the New World to work the earth and make it profitable for the new conquerors? The only problem embedded in this solution was that the Pope, the de facto ruler of the world at that time had divided the world into two, one half in the New World, excluding the territory now encompassing Brazil, was placed under the rule of the Catholic country of Spain whilst the other half including Africa was ceded to the Catholic kingdom of Portugal. To import human cargo from Africa, the Spaniards had to devise an import license scheme which they called the Asiento. Those who wished to import African slaves into any part of the Spanish territory in America had to pay for the licence to obtain slaves from the Portuguese controlled territories in Africa and export the number of human beings stipulated in their licence. Initially, this system favoured the Portuguese who under the new dispensation owned Africa. But quite soon, the required number of slaves grew to such an enormous number that other European countries notably England, Denmark and Holland quickly developed a slaving industry and together with the Portuguese supplied more than twelve million African slaves to the Americas over the next three hundred years.

    Slaves were imported to work in the land and those that owned them kept them on the land in such close proximity that they were part of the land, with no hope of owning a square metre of land anywhere. Mark Twain was not speaking to any of them when he gave out the advice to buy land. They formed part of the land and could not be separated from it through any form of ownership.

    • To be continued.
  • Land

    Land

    One of the most interesting historical figures I know about is Mark Twain even if that is not his given name as he  was named Samuel Clemens at birth. He however decided to become known as Mark Twain when he took his licence as a river boat pilot on the mighty Mississippi river. He spent two difficult and expensive years studying towards his licence, a certificate he cherished so much that he changed his name to fit this significant proficiency. The Twain in his new name refers to two fathoms, the least depth that would permit the movement of his boat all along the length of the river. Why he chose to be called Mark, I really don’t know except that today Mark Twain sounds grander than Samuel Clemens, I think. Still on the subject of this change of name, it should perhaps not be totally unexpected because river boat pilots of Twain’s era were glamorous figures who not only had a difficult and demanding job but were paid handsomely for doing it. This is also apart from the fact that boat pilots were popular throughout the one thousand, two hundred mile length of the Mississippi river.

    As proud of his accomplishment as he was, Twain spent only a short time on the Mississippi did not exceed two years before the American civil war shut down trade on the river and put an end to steam boating on the Mississippi. Twain left the river and became known for sundry other things including an unfortunate proclivity for making bad investments. This paved his way into insolvency and bankruptcy but he survived in every sense of the word including paying up all his debts even after declaring bankruptcy.

    Before anything else, Mark Twain had embarked on a journalistic affair and later on, whatever else he tried his hand at, he became a writer of such influence and quality that long after that career ended,  he was garlanded with the title of ‘father of American literature’ by no less a personage than William Faulkner, winner of the Nobel prize for literature and an outstanding American writer in his own right. Mark Twain left such a distinguished mark on literature that if you have not yet read any of his books you are advised quite strongly to get up close and personal with Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as soon as you can.

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    Twain was a great writer both of fiction and nonfiction but what stands out in all his writing is his unfailing good humour. There was always something humorous lurking in every page written by Mark Twain and although he died all of one hundred and twenty years ago, his humour is as fresh today as it was when he was alive. It is fitting that to celebrate his literary achievements the Mark Twain prize has been instituted for American comedy. This prize, coveted by all American comedians is held in great reverence and esteem by them in the same way that the Oscar is held by the Hollywood crowd.

    I have chosen to start this conversation with Mark Twain, not because he is the primary subject of discussion but because I want to borrow one of his witticisms to anchor my musings about land. This quote is short and to the point.

    ‘Buy land. They are not making it any more.’

    This is very good advice from a man who had the unfortunate tendency of making a series of patently unsound financial investments. From this point of view, this is a prime example of doing what I say, not what I do. This may be so, but in this case, there is no arguing with the soundness of this advice which is anchored on truth.

    Land, even in these days of airy fairy money making schemes is the solid anchor to wealth and this is because there is nothing you want to build that will not require the acquisition of some portion of land and because nobody is making more land, its value can only go up and continue to go up until man is able to colonise some faraway planet and in doing so, make a lot more land available. In the present however, as the value of land goes up the scramble for it also goes up and up until you get to the Japanese situation in which it is said that no matter what you build on a piece of land in that country, the value of that structure will always be less than the value of the land on which it is standing. That may be an extreme example but that is the direction in which the world is going. After all, they have stopped making more land. And that is a big problem, one that defies human ingenuity. The problem of land is a universal one, bigger in certain parts than others but a problem everywhere.

    It may be very difficult for most people reading this to conceive the reality which man faced before the fortuitous discovery of the science of agriculture some ten thousand years ago. This discovery was made simultaneously in three parts of the world; the aptly named fertile crescent in the Middle East as well as parts of Northern China and Central America. This discovery was to tie down human populations to certain  areas where they could settle down to grow and harvest their crops. Before then, man, like most other animals had no option but move from place to place in small bands gathering food, mainly vegetables, nuts, fruits and the occasion small animal when they were lucky.

    They are now referred to as hunters and gatherers but in reality, they did a lot more gathering than hunting. After all, the animals which they hunted were themselves adept hunters and were better equipped for much of that time to prey on humans rather than the other way round.

    The number of people alive in the pre-agricultural world did not exceed a few million souls and they could roam around the world not necessarily at their at their pleasure, but at least not having to worry about the availability of land. After all, they planted no crops, erected no shelters and therefore could not in their wildest imagination entertain the thought of land hunger or shortage. The ownership of land was definitely not one for them  to even think about.

    The arrival of agricultural practice opened all eyes to the value that could be attached to land, any land at all because of its potential to yield crops which could be used to sustain life. With a steady supply of food available, world population began to increase rapidly laying the ground for arable land to increase in value. The amount of land available did not increase as no new land appeared on the market. Nobody was making any more land on which crops could be grown. Even from very early on, land was perceived to be a resource, actually the ultimate resource, the completion for land in its own right became acute, depending on how much land was available. Before long, it was realised that on the surface land was just that, a tract of dirt on which crops could be raised but in reality some portions of land were richer than other parts and those tracts of land which supported the growth of crops were premium and much sought after. People, at least in certain parts of the world, notably in Europe, Asia and the Middle East settled on choice portions of land and were able to generate greater food surpluses than their less able or unfortunate neighbours leading to the development of class distinctions and the separation of rich from poor, a separation which grew ever wider until some people had too much and most others had little or nothing. Under such circumstances the poor people had nothing but the power of their muscles and this they put to use on the portions of land which belonged to the lord in his castle in exchange for some reward which never rose above subsistence level. In doing this, they generated even more wealth for their employers causing class differences to widen further.

    The importance of arable land to human civilization is shown by historical experience in Egypt where no new land was formed but available land was renewed every year as the River Nile flooded it’s banks leaving thick deposits of rich soil on which a stupendous surplus of food could be produced. It is no coincidence that perhaps the greatest civilisation up till now that the world has seen, developed and flourished furiously along the banks of the Nile.

    The value that has come to be attached to land has led to the greatest crimes against humanity in many parts of the world. The original crime in this respect was the initiation of human classification which led to a situation in which men who had little or at least a restricted access to land became servants of even slaves to other men whose only distinction was that they had access to some land. The consequences of such a situation still colours human relations and with our planet needing to supply the increasing populations whose individual needs are becoming increasingly sophisticated, the problem of inequality is not only huge but growing exponentially with expanding human populations.

    As part of the growth of civilisation, mankind soon realised that the importance of land went deeper than simply growing crops. Under the visible surface of the earth, there were many useful commodities which enhanced the growth of civilisation mainly because of their utilitarian value; salt, iron ore, copper, coal, copper and tin, to mention the most common. In addition there were other minerals such as gold, silver and precious stones which because of their intrinsic properties and rarity could be used as a store of values which translated as wealth and could be used as payment for all kinds of services from people who had such services to offer. The owners of portions of land harbouring such precious minerals had the wherewithal to buy other men and used them for whatever took their fancy. Under our feet, at least in parts of Nigeria, what lie quiescent are natural gas and crude oil which have been there for millions of years until their presence was discovered nearly seventy years ago. The consequences of the discovery and subsequent exploitation of these hydrocarbon resources have determined the trajectory of the growth or the lack of it of Nigeria. More than that it has helped to create a new Nigeria in which a comfortable future cannot be guaranteed. In the meantime, a considerable portion of the lands surrounding the oil fields have been put out of commission in respect of the primary function of land, that is the production of crops. This means that not only is it that new land is not being made but some of the available land has been taken off the market by the gross pollution which accompanied the exploitation of the oil fields thereby raising the value of any available land in that region. The advice here must be, ‘don’t sell your land. People are reducing the amount of available land.’ Definitely not as punchy as the original Twain quote but it will have to do. At least for now.

    ● To be continued.

  • Insurection

    Insurection

    When a couple of weeks ago I received the video recording of a man and another one of a woman announcing the birth of a new Pan-Yoruba nation, my one word answer to the video content was ‘clowns’ and that with apologies to clowns some of whom have made a mark for being  reasonable and responsible both in speech and action. Of course, there is nothing reasonable or responsible about what happened in Ibadan when a rag tag group of people, armed with a motley collection of mouldy weapons stormed the seat of government of Oyo State in the name of an insurrection to liberate the Yoruba people from bondage. That is if the word storm could be used to describe that thoroughly bizarre event at Agodi. Those people, some of them wearing army camouflage fatigues, perhaps to convey their determination to kill or be killed, ran a random flag up a convenient flag pole and proclaimed  the arrival of a brand new nation for and on behalf of people of Yoruba extraction who were described by their would be liberators as living under intolerable conditions within the confines of the Nigerian nation state. These wannabe liberators were under the grand illusion that they had a mandate from the United Nations to seize power on behalf of their kith and kin who now occupy the South west zone of Nigeria as well as other contiguous parts of neighbouring states. One can only wonder if their supposed mandate could be extended to cover other countries in the region; Benin, Togo, Ghana and onward into Sierra Leone,  thereby creating  a modern day Yoruba Empire along the West coast of Africa. In the light of togetherness those who lay very strong claims to Yoruba heritage and ancestry across the Atlantic Ocean in Brazil, Cuba, Venezuela, Trinidad and sundry other places may be reached out to so that they can stake their claims to the largess available to them from their father or, is it their motherland? In the new world of political correctness, it may be expedient to talk of a father-motherland complex in this case.

    As expected, their insurrection, if what happened can be described as such was speedily put down by a small contingent of state sponsored  managers of violence who fired a few shots, mostly into the air and arrested the merry band of nationalist agitators who could have been shot dead out of hand for daring to usurp the powers of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. In cases of this nature corpses are usually what are seen on television in the aftermath of their action when announcements of such misadventures are announced on government media. This is certainly what would have been the case if this stunt had been contemplated to the knowledge of the over- muscular government of Sani Abacha but we now live in more enlightened times and any display of corpses on television would have outraged our sensibility. This incidence has all fizzled out as a bad joke even if the arrested freedom fighters have paid and are still paying a heavy price for their astonishing  audacity. Everything considered, they are or, should be relieved to find themselves still alive.

    The Agodi incident may have ended up as predictable farce but it gives us the opportunity to take another look at the state of our union, the Federal Republic of Nigeria if only because it is now a hundred and ten years since Lord Lugard conjured up its existence under the authority of the then rampant British Empire. One hundred and ten years is a pretty long time in the life of an individual. Indeed it is a very long time, so long that even in the face of increased human longevity only the odd man or woman (more likely to be woman) has survived to live so long. In the life of institutions however, the country has not advanced beyond very early infancy and should it die now, its demise could be regarded as an abortion even though she has survived a civil war which claimed more than two million lives as part of her labour pains.

    Most Nigerians know for a fact that their country is a multi-ethnic state in which there is any number of languages spoken and Gods worshipped. Indeed it is a veritable Babel which in the opinion of many, obviously including the members of that band that inflicted itself on Agodi are convinced that the only way forward is for the country to be fractured along ethnic and even perhaps, religious lines. That there may be no end to the number of mini states that will succeed the demise of Nigeria does not seem to bother those people who are hell bent on forcibly pulling a large chunk of the country out of the Federation in the hope that having done so, they would have created a paradise fit for the Yoruba people who according to them, are copping hell in Nigeria at the moment. It sounds altogether rather crazy but that is the level of discourse in the country at the moment.

    Before going much further, it has to be said that there are not many people who are taking the Agodi militants seriously, at least not in public. That is the extent of how their ham fisted attempt at secession has been received. However, it is not to be assumed that they are utterly alone in their delusion. Had they mounted a serious enough challenge, it is not unlikely that quite a number of people, some would even say, a large number of people would have at least cheered them to the echo but nobody likes to be associated with failure as that which was laid bare to the world on that Saturday morning in Agodi. This does not mean that the idea which they espoused has no currency. Actually, across Nigeria, there are perhaps millions of people who subscribe to this idea and have very serious guns to back their proposition. In some parts of the South East, they have real authority and in their natural habitat nobody in their right mind would question their agenda without fear of serious, if not mortal consequences. It is quite clear that everything considered, the agitation for secession is alive and well. This being the case, it has got to be a subject of serious discussion in Nigeria. More than this, It has probably become necessary to craft a credible response to the challenge posed by people who think that their allegiance to Nigeria cannot be guaranteed for any number of reasons. They cannot be wished away especially at a time when all that can be equitably shared in this country is poverty coupled with extreme physical and psychological discomfort.

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    There are certain ethnic groups, namely Yoruba and Igbo who perhaps on the basis of the conviction of their respective exceptionalism are convinced that they are not getting a fair shake in Nigeria. Among these groups of people there is the feeling that other groups especially those from the far North are lording it over everyone else and are indeed the de facto rulers of Nigeria. The people referred to here are those indigenous to the states which were summarily excised from Nigeria by Orka and his henchmen in the process of their failed coup as long ago as 1990. Incidentally, those areas of the country are currently so troubled by violence and poverty, not to talk of religious bigotry and intolerance that political concerns cannot be a priority for the truly beleaguered  people of that region. Actually , it is apparent that what ails Nigeria cannot be cured by any form of political intervention.

    It is clear or at least it should be clear to anyone with a functional brain that the mountain barring the way to any form of happiness in this country is dressed in economic garments. There is extreme poverty in the land even as people perceive that there should be enough money to go round with more than a little to spare. Rather than develop our resources in order for us to overcome our wants, corruption that stinks to high heavens ensures that only an infinitesimal proportion of Nigerians have the wherewithal to confront hunger and other natural wants with any modicum of success. The fat cows in our midst are getting fatter even as most cows are fading away from lack of food. Those emaciated cows are in fair danger of being swallowed up by those fat cows which have appropriated all available resources for their own very private consumption. Those who have been appointed to stand guard over our monetary resources have not understood their brief and think that all monies in their care belong to them, to do with it whatever takes their fancy. The amount of money stolen from our treasury, at least by the calculation of EFCC is truly mind shattering and is enough make us a lot more comfortable than we are. But a lot of the money has been taken out of circulation;  buried in false soakaway pits,  sequestered behind concrete walls, sent overseas on one way journeys or craftily used to pay school fees which are not required to be paid until fifteen or more years into the future. The ingenuity of people dealing with an over supply of American dollars in Nigeria is nothing short of astonishing.

    The golden eggs which the various groups active in secessionist  mode are fighting over is crude oil, extracted in large quantities from the subsoil of the lands of the Niger delta. There was a time when the people who lived in that region were clamorous in their demand for compensation for what the rest of the country was harvesting from their backyard. They screamed very loudly for resource control but all they got was a derivation arrangement which diverted more money into their purse. Not satisfied with this, they have resorted to self-help and today a lot of the oil extracted is being diverted into artfully dug bunkers and on into huge cooking pots breaking down crude into useable petroleum products. The process is dirty and incredibly dangerous which is why it is the preserve of thin cows. The fat cows make off with oil tanker loads of crude oil and reap stupendous reward from the comfort of their palatial homes. The price of crude oil is the highest it has been in years and with drones and missiles of every description ruling the skies over the Middle East, prices are set to climb even higher. With Nigerian crude boiling in the creeks and sloshing around in the insatiable bellies of the fat cows, the nation does not stand to benefit from any increase in the price of crude oil for the simple reason that a large percentage of the oil taken out of  the ground cannot be accounted for. Under our circumstances the only other thing growing within our beleaguered polity is our collective dissatisfaction with our lot.

    Dishonesty has brought us here and dishonesty cannot be abandoned at this time. Now that we are marooned in shit creek without a paddle we see each other as different ethnic and even subethnic groups and have taken to blaming other groups apart from the one we belong to for the mess we are in. The bitter truth is that in the matter of destroying our dreams as a nation all the diverse groups that make up Nigeria have blood on their hands. People point their bloody fingers at people in other groups out of the dishonesty which rules our collective hearts and minds. This will not do!

    The truth of our matter is that the many different groups that make up Nigeria are in their different ways suffering from extreme forms of collective psychosis. They are each determined to get hold of as much of the shareable assets available to every Nigerian without a complimentary thought of how they can contribute their respective quota towards creating the wealth available to be shared. Each of the disparate groups that make up this country is inevitably infected by the virus of superiority over every other group. This is the form of racism which will throttle our collective future. Those people, like the mentally challenged creatures who disturbed the peace of Agodi  the other day are an ever present danger to the future of Nigeria. Their aims are bound in frank dishonesty and they and their ilk must not be allowed to dictate our collective agenda.

  • Class Formation (III)

    Class Formation (III)

    From what is known about the British, their societal structure is arguably best described as a multi-layered cake, with each layer being also multi-layered. Each of the major layers is itself divided into sub-layers because of the divergent nature of the members of each class.

    At the top of the cake we have the upper class or as the famous British comedian, Mike Yarwood once  described it, the upper crust. It is made up of the ruling class, at the top of which is the Royal family. Even within this paper thin layer, you have, major Royals; those that are mentioned in the Succession list now headed by William, Prince of Wales who is waiting to occupy the throne when his father, the reigning king, joins his ancestors wherever it is they are waiting to meet up with him. His three children follow him on the list and in turn are followed by his brother, the reluctant prince, now on a rather extended and open ended sabbatical in faraway California. It is worth noting that both Prince William and his brother have trampled on centuries old royal traditions and are married to ladies outside the royal list. This is perhaps a sign of the deterioration of royal traditions or a sign of the times which has led to the royals everywhere including the archetype conservative stronghold of Japan marrying commoners. Prince Harry has not just married a commoner but married an American divorcee to boot and has dropped his royal status, at least for now, to be with her in her own world. When his great great-uncle, King Edward VIII tried to pull the same stunt in the antediluvian period of 1936, he was kicked off the throne in the twinkling of an eye. That the prince has been able to retain his royal position in spite of his marital adventures shows that the situation has changed so drastically since then, indicating that in reality, anything can happen from now on and the world should be bracing up for a seismic shift in royal relations. To be honest, the very idea of royalty, blue blood and all such pretentions are now being subjected to close scrutiny all over the world which shows that there is no guarantee that even the British royals, as solid as their current position appears to be,  may not be able to hang on to their exalted status very much longer.

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    Under the royal big hitters on the Succession list there are minor royals reaching down to those who are hanging on to royalty by the skin of their capped teeth. They also have a variety of blue blood running in their veins but their direct ancestors have somewhere along the line been bumped to the periphery, not totally out of sight but are not sure of being invited as of right to official royal occasions. All in all however, there are only a small number of people sitting comfortably in the upper crust. What really separates them from the rest is their tremendous financial clout, inherited over a thousand years from their Norman ancestors.

    After the royals come the members of the nobility; dukes, earls, viscounts and other descendants of those terrifying men that crossed over the English Channel to conquer England all those many years ago. They are not part of the royal establishment but the blueness of their blood is rich enough for them to furnish the royals with brides as was the case with Diana Spencer better known to the world as Diana, Princess of Wales and mother to both Princes William and Harry. Her overall tragic story is so well known that it bears no retelling here.

    Under the few thousand royals and other natural members of the ruling class, there are members of the middle classes, divided into three clear strata; the upper middle class which is separated from the lower middle middle class by yet another stratum . This stratum is separated from lower middle class, the members of which are sometimes indistinguishable from those in the working class, only a shade below them on the social register.

    The middle classes have evolved over several centuries, the  process gathering pace after the divine rights of the king were quite definitively abrogated by the execution of King Charles I by Parliament in 1649. The king, pumped up by the heady air of royal prerogative had challenged parliament to a fight and not only lost the argument but lost his royal head as well. The kingdom was thus set on the path of constitutional monarchy which stripped king and his descendants of the divine right which had dictated their actions since they began their occupation of the throne of England in 1066. The  bloody coup which led to this situation was carried out mainly by those members of the ruling class who had over a few centuries dropped out of the ruling class through the workings of the tradition of primogeniture which was prevalent and unbreakable at the time. Only the oldest living son could inherit their father’s estate no matter how vast they were. This meant that all other sons had to go out into the wicked world to fend for themselves as best they could. Many of them ended up in the emerging middle class with a great deal of the privileges they were born with but with little money. This middle class came fully into her own in the period after the Industrial Revolution when people flocked into the cities after fleeing, some of them precipitously from the countryside which had become a wasteland of opportunities to make any kind of living. This situation also gave rise to the arrival of the urban working class which needed to be serviced by professionals; builders, industrialists, commercial tailors and dressmakers, engineers, tradesmen, manufacturers of various goods, doctors, teachers, entertainers, printers, entrepreneurs including bankers and other such people with acquired skills with which to minister to the various needs of the great multitude of workers infesting the urban spaces. In the countryside, these people had some form of access to materials from which they could produce some of the materials, many of them quite basic, with which they could build a kind of life. This was not possible in the visibly expanding cities where it was everyman for himself and the devil waiting to consume most of the others at his leisure. Life for the vast majority of those who had no special skills was between bleak and unsupportable, to the extent that without some form of societal support, they would have been totally crushed under the heel of poverty.

    The poor had always had a pretty torrid time in England. Apart from the fact that wages they received for their labour were very low, they were subject to heavy taxes most of which were raised to pay for the expenses incurred by successive English kings whose faces were for a hundred years fixed on different parts of France to which the they laid fanciful claims. Quite unlike their ancestors who had crossed over from France to plunder England, they could not manage the reverse feat of taking over French territory but persisted in their folly, to the detriment of their subjects who were consequently, constantly mired in debilitating poverty which they passed on to many succeeding generations.

    Without the expertise which resided in the British middle classes, it is very unlikely that the Industrial Revolution would have occurred. All those people from Harvey to Bacon, Newton, right down to Davy, Faraday and Darwin created, or supported the foundation on which the modern world has come to be built and they were all paid up members of a solid British middle class. Not a single one of these men has left a legacy of stupendous wealth behind and have set the tone for what is expected of members of this class. Right down until now,  the members of this class are expected to be, and are frequently found to be honest, hard working, studious, dedicated to service, patriotic and not given to scandalous behaviour. Not for them is the amorally of the upper crust and the immorality associated with too many members of the working class to whom it has to be said, not much has been given. The distance between the lower middle class and the working class is not about money or the lack of it but about taste and ambitions. Perhaps the clearest distinguishing feature between these two groups is education which is taken very seriously by people in the middle classes. The members of the working class, at least since the end of the Second World War have come to realise the importance of an education which would take them out of the working class. Still, you will find out that the movers and shakers, especially in British politics are descended from people who have been bona fide members of the middle class for more than a generation. There are many members of the working class who are comfortably richer than those above them in the middle but lack the social graces which promote them into the middle class. This may have blurred the distinction between the lower reaches of the middle class and the working class but those distinctions still exist. This is because many working class wages match those in the middle class but where they fall down is in the quality of their life style. That cannot be bought at any price. Perhaps the last word that needs to be said on the subject of the members of the middle class is that although they may not be wealthy, they are, with only a few exceptions, financially secure, with adequate salaries, a substantial portion of which can be saved to give them a comfortable retirement. Any country without a financially secure middle class is a sorry caricature of a modern state. This is because without the wall of financial security around the middle classes their much vaunted   morality will collapse like a house of cards.

    To be continue