GUARDIAN

Sunday, January 30, 2000

Forward To A Millennium Past

By G.G  Darah

SUDDENLY, everyone of the six billion inhabitants of our marvellous  planet
Earth has grown younger by 30 days, yet we all feel as if it was only
yesterday. But in the cyber chambers of our imagination, we still see and
hear these resplendent lights of laughter and atomic bangs of explosives
with which we awakened ourselves to the paradise of the millennium to be
regained. As the late Nigerian poet, Christopher Okigbo rendered it in
verse, that is what life is: a coming and going  that goes on  forever.

  Nevertheless, things have changed and the world with them. Midstream into
the first 30 days, more wonders in electronic transformation occurred. Bill
Gates, the iconic idol of this wired civilisation stepped aside as the
chairman of Microsoft, the  most stupendous success story of this ceaseless
striving to play the divine. Time Warner and AOL, two other dinosaurs of the
industry agreed to be transfigured into siamese twins of the economy of
scale.

  Vlademir Putin, the political enfant terrible of year 2000 lost  his
smiles to the smokes of Chechnya. The Germans who once tempted God with
pogrom to obliterate humanity are mired in treacherous terraces of their own
success in nationhood. Helmut Khol, their Goliath for 16 years, got seduced
by the Liliputian David of untransparent husbandry of party funds. This is
the disease of affluent societies: when they have no Mobutus or Abachas to
persecute, they go for saints stained  with the ink of their selfless
service to country. The Americans who, for lucre, seduced all of us to
accept 2000 as millennium birthday are no longer at ease. A few days ago,
they started the electoral trials of aspirants to their presidential throne.
That is after they, like the Germany, had scapegoated William Jefferson
Clinton, the only American President in 50 years who presided over a booming
economy.

  What of Africans, the first inhabitants to tread on our vast earth? We are
still not far from the picture of us presented by the Nigerian ex-slave
pioneer novelist, Oludah Equiano when he said: ours is a nation of singers
and dancers. We are the first of the five continents on earth to stage a
football fiesta in Year 2000. In the three weeks of the tournament, Africans
will abandon the killing fields for the fields of play and ecstasy. Even if
Bola Ige, Nigeria's Power and Steel minister swallows all the electricity
like Sango, the Yoruba god of fire and iron, we will light our stadia with
laughter. Let the intractable militias of our restless cities besiege our
bedrooms,  we will play soccer. Should President Olusegun Obasanjo now
visiting India decides to bring gurus from Hindu temples in Bombay and
Calcutta, we will dance reggae with football. In the beginning was the world
peopled by black Africans and, in spite of everything, we are still the
world.

  Therefore let the truth be told: the splendid achievements of the past 500
years belong essentially to Europe, east and west. The embers of that era
smouldered for ages in the hearths of medieval and feudal Europe before they
sparked in inventions and machines at about the close of the 15th century.
The trees of the spectacular transition were watered by the blood of
martyred visionaries and heretics who challenged the fatalistic orthodoxies
of the early Church. Millions of peasants and gentry were slaughtered  to
appease the gods of the Crusades waged by the Church. Then  came the
intellectual ferment of the  Renaissance at about 1490. With the likes of
Galileo, the halo of superstition and ignorance were torn asunder. As the
fruits of science and relentless inquiry matured, Western European scholars,
merchants, adventurers and seekers of fortune ventured abroad to explore the
world and its infinite plenitude. One epochal event was the "discovery" of
the Americas by the Spaniard, Christopher Columbus in 1492. After this, the
world never remained the same again.

  The consequent expansion of learning, inventions, manufacture and
political power turned the western hemisphere to nursery of a new global
economy. There had been other globalism in human history, some of them
centred around Africa's achievements. The triumphs of the European
civilization are the theme song of the current epic of the second
millennium, Anno Domini.

  But like all epic narratives, the fragments and rhetorical formulae came
from different climes and endeavours. However, Europe 500 years ago had the
auspicious environment to harvest the strands and weave them into an
enthralling and grouping story.

  Where was Africa in 1500 A.D? Probably in decline and distress. The black
Egyptian civilization which inaugurated the current track of scientific and
technological breakthroughs was already 6,500 years old. Through African
Queen of Sheba, Ethiopia had  been connected to the Jews several thousand
years before Jesus. That pioneering Egyptian civilization invented
mathematics, astronomy (now in its spacecraft, interplanetary phase), all
varieties of engineering medicine and democratic systems of government. Our
black ancestors of Egypt invented the modern calendar 2,600 years before
Jesus Christ was born. (In fact, the young Jesus had his learning in mystics
in Egypt for some years! Black Egyptian civil engineers built the first
skyscrapers (pyramids which are still in solid state). The Egyptians
invented the science of writing (hieroglylics) later improved upon by
others. These same Africans established the first universities where the
likes of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and Pythagoras obtained their degrees.
They took this knowledge to  Persia, Babylonia, China, India, Greece, Rome
and Western Europe. The British who drank of the knowledge after Julius
Caesar's conquest of the British Isles in 55 BC later recycled it to U.S. At
its peak, Egypt had 101 colonies, and was more formidable than current
United States of America.

  By 1500, the civilization in Zimbabwe had attained its height and
declined. Carthage in North Africa had had its day, having nurtured Generals
Like Hannibal who overran most parts of Southern Europe in 15 years with
military tanks in the form of elephants. Other African generals like Othello
had awed Europe with conquests and military rule, leaving behind most  of
the folk festivals and belief systems that are dominant in the traditions of
southern Spain, Portugal, France, Germany and Italy. By 1500, too, three
blacks had been Popes of the Roman Catholic Church. St. Augustine, one of
the leading theology scholars was black. Archbishop Francis Arinze now in
the race to succeed Pope John Paul II is following in their footsteps.

  When the European Renaissance was opening in the early 15th century, West
Africa had had universities for many years, including those of Timbuctu and
Sankore to the north of Kano. In fact, Kano itself had already enjoyed 500
years of global limelight as a flourishing cosmopolitan centre with
industry, commerce and learning that took its fame across the Sahara Desert
to Libya and the Mediterranean sea board. Step back another 700 years and
you will encounter the NOK culture of how Middle Belt states of Nigeria
which started 200 years ago before Jesus. At the time Kano was in boom, the
Kanuri of Borno had assimilated Islamic religion and made some advance in
literacy and scholarship.

  In what is now Nigeria, Benin, Ife, Igbo-Ukwu, Oyo and Idah had had
sprawling empires by 1500. When the first Portuguese explorers reached Benin
City in the 1470s, they were awestruck by the exquisite art and advanced
town planning in the place. They committed their fundings to writing and so
more  Europeans came in search of  Great Benin. In 1500, the Benin Empire
had spread its intimidating wings to Lagos and Port Novo and Whydah in what
is now Benin Republic (Mark the name). At the time Benin attained its
summit, nationalities like Ijaw and Urhobo of the lower Niger had had a
history spaning several centuries.

  The closing decades of the 16th century were a turning point in Africa's
destiny. In 1492, Columbus had discovered the Americas, opening up a phase
of exponential expansion for Europe but provoking a tragedy in Africa. The
birth of the New World necessitated the trans-Atlantic slave trade which, in
300 years cost Africa nearly 250 million people. The same 16th century saw
wars of Islamic expansion in West Africa which captured kingdoms and
kinships and export of millions of slaves from Africa. The new centuries of
political power did more. With the instruments of theocracy and warfare, the
newcomers, also known as Almoravids, conquered the tropical kingdoms of the
Western Sudan - Mali, Songhai and Ghana. As a result of military conquest
from the north (Sahara) and the slave trade from the South (Atlantic), West
Africa declined precipitously until the later 19th century when European
colonizers took over. Professor Peter Ekeh has attempted an original
theoretical exegesis  of this perpetual tussle between the Sahara Desert and
the Atlantic Ocean in the making and domination of tropical rainforest
nations.

  All through West Africa, this North-South divide still drives the struggle
for power.

  What was happening elsewhere in the world during the 30 years of Africa's
despoliation and stagnation? Perhaps, we should retreat further to the  dawn
of  the 600 years after the Christian era. Whilst most of Europe was in a
barbarian state, the Chinese were already advanced in the manufacture of
porcelain and silk. For the first 300 years, Chinese maritime power was
unrivalled like that of the Phoenicians on the Mediterranean centuries
earlier. During the Ming dynasty, the  Chinese Admiral Zheng undertook a
naval expedition to  East Africa in the 1410s which mobilised 62 ships, 225
support vessels and 28,000 men. The Chinese also invented gun powder in that
century and, by it, revolutionised the technology of warfare forever. But
the Chinese emperors, like their Egyptian counterparts 400 years earlier,
failed to popularise the knowledge as the Greek pedagogists (Plato,
Aristotle, Socrates) did and thus fertilised chains of civilisations across
Europe and the rest of the world.

  In the rest of Asia, the Indians, Mongols, Japanese and Koreans made great
strides in science and manufacture. The millennium special edition of THE
ECONOMIST that reviewed world history from 1000 to 1999 reports on page 82
that by 1625, Francis Xavier, a Portuguese Jesuit missionary, had coverted
500,000 Japanese to Christianity. It was their revolt against the Tohugawa
military dictatorship in 1637 and its ruthless suppression that first
brought Western Europe into hostility with Japan. The feud lasted  till the
Second War when the United States of America exploded the atomic bomb in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Before Marco Polo and Vasco Da Gama visited  between
the 14th and 16th centuries, India had  had a flourishing textile industry.
In the 1450s, the Koreans invented their own writing and  began a properly
documented march into modernity.

  To recap, the events that changed and /or chained Africa came from the
Middle East via Islamic religion in the 7th century. The religion created
new state systems, redrew the maps of power and made Arabic language the
chosen tongue of politics and power. The strongest influence come from the
Horn of Africa and the Nile Valley. As Professor Ali Mazrui observes in
chapter 4 of the The Africans: A Tripple Heritage (1986), the Islamic
"religion captured Saharan Africa and parts of the Nile Valley before  it
captured West Africa. It penetrated parts of eastern Africa and trickled
further inland and further south." (P.95). After nearly 800 years of Islam
in Africa, Christianity arrived. Thus began the crosscurrent of the Crescent
and the Cross, between sharia and secularism. The resurgence of that
conflict in post-military Nigeria reflects this increasing tension. Caught
in this vortex, African indigenous religions and thoughts have been fighting
for survival for half a millennium.

  As the armies of the Islamised conquerors of Africa were tearing down
indigenous state and value systems, Western Europe discovered the Americas.
From 1519, the Spaniards begun the massacre of the Indian population with
guns and smallpox biological warfare. Other European migrants into North
America did the same. The need to replace the labour wasted in these
genocides led to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade of three centuries. These
were the 300 years of Africa's stagnation and regression. In 1632, the
Dutch, following Vasco Da Gama's ocean track, set foot in South Africa's
Cape of Good Hope and inaugurated a racial enclave that took 300 years to
dismantle.

  During this period, science and inventions made strides in Western
Europe. This was the age of Galileo's telescope, Isaac Newton's physics,
Hooke's air pump, Huygen's  pendulum clock, Michael Faraday's electricity,
James Watt's steam engine, Nicolas Appert's food preservation machines. At
the beginning of this half a millennium, the German Johannes Gutenberg's
cast-metal printing machine had improved what the Chinese invented and used
700 years earlier. As the edition of THE ECONOMIST already referred to put
it, the era (1500-1900) was one in which technology was driven by scientific
knowledge, adding that "knowledge is cumulative: once it exists, it does not
cease to exist. So this process of accumulation, with discovery building on
discovery, is strongly self-reinforcing with a built-in tendency to
accelerate. When a certain critical mass of knowledge exists, the pace of
future accumulation can increase very sharply, as previously unsuspected
connections between different branches of knowledge are exploited, each
breakthrough creating new opportunities." (P.10).

  By the late 19th century when Africa re-encountered Western Europe, a new
imperialism and colonialism had started. In 1884/85, the Berlin Conference
of European imperial powers took place. Thenceforth, all Africa was to be
chopped up into colonial territories like an elephant killed in a hunt. Even
the Nile Valley and East Africa already vanquished  by the Arabs fell under
Western European colonial yoke. Some of the knowledge processes described in
the paragraph above re-entered Africa via formal education and the school
system. After 100 years, the process has not been internalised enough to
trigger a truly African version of the civilisation of technology. In the
concluding part next Sunday, I will examine this past 100 years from the
prism of the Nigerian enigma.

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