Maafa
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The terms Maafa, or alternatively African Holocaust or Holocaust of Enslavement, Black holocaust collectively refer to the suffering of Black people through slavery, imperialism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression throughout history.[1][2][3] [4][5][6][7][8][9]
History
Usage of the term Maafa was popularized by Professor Marimba Ani's 1994 book Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora.[10][11][12][9] It is derived from a Swahili term for "disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy",[13][14]
The term African Holocaust is preferred by some academics, such as Maulana Karenga, because it implies intention.[15] One problem noted by Karenga is that the word Maafa can also translate to "accident", and the holocaust of enslavement was clearly no accident. Ali Mazrui makes a note that the term holocaust is a 'dual plagiarism', and therefore no one can have a monopoly over the word 'holocaust' Marzui states: "This borrowing from borrowers without attribution is what I call "the dual plagiarism." But this plagiarism is defensible because the vocabulary of horrors like genocide and enslavement should not be subject to copyright-restrictions"[16]
Some Afrocentric scholars prefer the term Maafa to African Holocaust,[17] because they believe that indigenous African terminology more truly confers the events.[12] The term Maafa may serve "much the same cultural psychological purpose for Africans as the idea of the Holocaust serves to name the culturally distinct Jewish experience of genocide under German Nazism."[18] Other arguments in favor of Maafa rather than African Holocaust emphasize that the denial of the validity of the African people's humanity is an unparalleled centuries-long phenomenon: "The Maafa is a continual, constant, complete, and total system of human negation and nullification."[9]
The terms "Transatlantic Slave Trade", "Atlantic Slave Trade" and "Slave Trade" are said by some to be deeply problematic, as they serve as euphemisms for the intense violence and mass murder inflicted on African peoples, the complete appropriation of their lands and undermining of their societies. Referred to as a "trade", this prolonged period of persecution and suffering is rendered as a commercial dilemma, rather than as a moral atrocity.[19] With trade as the primary focus, the broader tragedy becomes consigned to a secondary point, as mere "collateral damage" of a commercial venture. Others, however, feel that avoidance of the term "trade" is apologetic act on behalf of capitalism, absolving capitalist structures of involvement in human catastrophe.[citation needed]
In scholarship
While Maafa can be considered an area of study within African history in which both the actual history and the legacy of that history are studied as a single discourse, it can also be taken as its own significant event in the course of global or world history.[20] When studied as African history, the paradigm emphasizes the legacy of the African Holocaust on African peoples globally. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents, in opposition to what is perceived to be the conventional Eurocentric voice; for this reason Maafa is an aspect of Pan-Africanism.
Owen 'Alik Shahadah traces a pattern of "Eurocentric" scholarship to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social and political systems. The first expressions of this academic trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday." This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery and colonialism.[21]
African scholar Maulana Karenga puts slavery in the broader context of the Maafa, suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."[15]
Further reading
- The Black Holocaust For Beginners, by S.E. Anderson
- Let The Circle Be Unbroken, by Marimba Ani
- Powell, Eve Troutt, and John O. Hunwick, ed. The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Princeton Series on the Middle East)
- van Sertima, Ivan. ed. The Journal of African Civilization.
- Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. 1974.
- World's Great Men Of Color. Vols. I and II, edited by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1972.
- The Negro Impact on Western Civilization. New York: Philosophical Library. 1970.
- Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro and the Making of the Americas.
- The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam by John Hunwick
- Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome by Dr. Joy DeGruy
See also
References
- ^ "Let the Circle be Unbroken". Marimba Ani.
- ^ "What Holocaust". "Glenn Reitz".
- ^ "The Maafa, African Holocaust". Swagga.
- ^ http://books.google.co.za/books?id=8KKeSy7AhpAC&pg=PA164&dq=African+holocaust&hl=en&sa=X&ei=BDDJT_XLKMGJhQeByqjnDw&ved=0CEMQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=African%20holocaust&f=false Black History and Black Identity: A Call for a New Historiography, William D. Wrigh
- ^ Barndt, Joseph. Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century. 2007, page 269.
- ^ Mazrui, Ali. The Global African: A Portrait of Ali A. Mazrui. Omari H. Kokole.
- ^ http://humanrights.uconn.edu/documents/papers/Howard-Hassmann_Slavetrade.pdf Reparations for the Slave Trade: Rhetoric, Law, History and Political Realities”
- ^ Ryan Michael Spitzer, "The African Holocaust: Should Europe pay reparations to Africa for Colonialism and Slavery?", Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, vol. 35, 2002, p. 1319.
- ^ a b c Jones, Lee and West, Cornel. Making It on Broken Promises: Leading African American Male Scholars Confront the Culture of Higher Education. 2002, page 178.
- ^ Barndt, Joseph. Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century. 2007, page 269.
- ^ Dove, Nah. Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture, Makers of Social Change. 1998, page 240.
- ^ a b Gunn Morris, Vivian and Morris, Curtis L. The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community. 2002, page x.
- ^ Harp, O.J. Across Time: Mystery of the Great Sphinx. 2007, page 247.
- ^ Cheeves, Denise Nicole (2004). Legacy. p. 1.
- ^ a b "Problem with Maafa". "Ron Karenga". Cite error: The named reference "Ethics on Reparations" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
- ^ http://igcs.binghamton.edu/igcs_site/mltrs/Newsletter17.pdf ANCESTRY, DESCENT AND IDENTITY
- ^ Tarpley, Natasha. Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity. 1995, page 252.
- ^ Aldridge, Delores P. and Young, Carlene. Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies. 2000, page 250.
- ^ Diouf, Sylviane Anna. Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies. 2003, page xi.
- ^ "African Holocaust: Holocaust Special". Owen 'Alik Shahadah.
- ^ "Removal of Agency from Africa". "Owen 'Alik Shahadah". Retrieved 2005.
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