LEGAL ISSUES EFFECTING BALANTA AS A RESULT OF CONTACT WITH THE ENGLISH

Excerpts from Balanta B’urassa, My Sons: Those Who Resist Remain Volume 3

West Africa: Quest For Gold and God 1475-1578 by John W. Blake recalls,

“Until 1553, the part played by Englishmen in West Africa was negligible. The major threat to Portuguese supremacy came from the French. These twenty-three years may be regarded, then, as a period when the Portuguese monopoly was subjected to a French challenge. Unlike the earlier challenge from Castile, the second did not end in a Portuguese victory. On the contrary, the volume of French interloping trade began to multiply after 1553, while English traders henceforth made regular voyages to Guinea. Again, the new challenge was not a territorial struggle between relative equals, in which each submitted similar claims. The Castilo-Portuguese conflict had resolved itself, in a sense, into a race for possessions and trade, starting from scratch. But there was no race about the rivalry after 1530. The later struggles were the outcome of acts of pure aggression, perpetrated by groups of enterprising merchants and sailors in England and in France, against imperial Portugal. Dynamic interlopers assailed a static empire. . . .

The Englishman, William Hawkins, seems to have sent three expeditions between 1530 and 1532. . . . Hawkins purchased ivory at the Rio dos Sestos on his second voyage . . . . but this promising traffic did not survive the ensuing decade. For a time, English commercial and maritime energies were diverted to other, and more fruitful channels. But Englishmen ventured to Guinea once more after 1553, and the international struggle in West Africa assumed hitherto unrivaled proportions. It was magnified because French interlopers did not abandon their operations in Guinea. . . . Taken as a whole, a sordid fight for trade resulted in which little mercy was given and none expected, while the interests of the negroes were entirely subordinated to those of the whites. Thus, the reappearance of the English in 1553 inaugurated an era of triple rivalry in West Africa.

The West African monopoly of Portugal was further undermined after 1559 by certain important changes in Europe . . . . The situation in England, where Protestantism was finally accepted and guaranteed by the state, inspired more vigorous efforts to break down the monopoly. London merchants and Plymouth sailors now advanced religious arguments, as well as the argument of force, to support their clandestine operations in Guinea. Indeed, their operations ceased to be clandestine when Queen Elizabeth took the crown which Mary had worn so uneasily. They openly attacked the papal division of the world and declared a holy war for the liberation of the seas. . . . The catholic states in Europe were drawn together and their imperial policies coordinated.

England, as was perhaps natural for the paramount protestant state, took the lead in Guinea enterprises from 1559 to 1571; while Huguenots played the role of chief Guinea interloper from 1571 to the end of our period. . . . It is obvious that after 1559 a close connection existed between religious strife in Europe and white enterprise in West Africa. One of the salient features of this interaction was the association of those in high places with many of the illegal voyages to Guinea. . . . An examination of the personnel of those associated with the English voyages to Guinea reveals many highly-placed officials, and demonstrates that the English government was, more than the French, definitely and openly sympathetic towards these enterprises. . . . Even the queen and the cautious Sir William Cecil, the chief secretary of state, were favorably inclined towards the adventures to Guinea. Whatever she might pretend, Queen Elizabeth cared little for nice legal points. Her primary criterion was the welfare of her country, and from the beginning, therefore, she questioned the monopolistic claims of Portugal and Spain. . . . During the ten years after 1561 our evidence suggests a greater volume of English than of French traffic to Guinea. . . . The scope of English enterprise was threefold: first, there was direct traffic between England and Guinea; secondly, John Hawkins inaugurated the transatlantic slave trade; and thirdly, several attempts were made to establish a permanent station as a base for trade and military operations in West Africa. . . .

English participation in the slave trade was spoiling peaceful commerce. . . . We do not know the identity of the English interloper, who thus roused a hornet’s nest for the unlucky captain Fenner, but it has been suggested that captain Lovell was responsible. With the backing of John Hawkins, a fleet of four ships under Lovell’s command set out from Plymouth in November 1566 to trade to Guinea, and three of the four ships subsequently made their way to the West Indies. Lovell was later accused of piracy by the Portuguese, and the case was tried before the High Court of Admiralty in 1568. The captain was charged with having seized a number of Portuguese ships with their cargoes. Near Santiago he captured two large ships, loaded with negroes, and two other ships were taken at the islands of Fogo and Maio. His object, then, was evidently to load as many blacks as possible before sailing to the West Indies. But he did not merely plunder Portuguese vessels, for, as we saw, he organized at least one raid for slaves upon the mainland.

Hawkins association with the enterprise of John Lovell helps to explain its character. It was John Hawkins who first put into operation the idea of English participation in the Africo-Caribbean slave trade, when he made the celebrated voyages of 1562-3 and 1564-5. His inspiration was behind the slaving voyage of captain Lovell, and he probably inspired other voyages about which today we know nothing. We hear of at least one other English ship which loaded 125 negroes at Cape Verde in the winter of 1564-5 and, what would appear more significant, its commander was Bartholomew Bayao, a Portuguese renegade. Bayao was well known to the Portuguese, who invoked the help of the tribe of the Sapes in Sierra Leone to expel him from the coast. Was this man one of the Portuguese who regularly aided the English in their interloping activities? And did he suggest the slaving voyage to John Hawkins? Unfortunately, the voyage of 1564-5 is the earliest notice of him, so that these questions cannot be answered. Yet Bayao was a clever cosmographer, well acquainted with the African navigation, and he was engaged in more than one enterprise for England. It would seem that his voyage to Cape Verde and the Spanish Indies ended disastrously, for in 1570 he was a prisoner at Seville. In this year he escaped and fled back to England, where he was welcomed by the merchants and some of the councilors, because ‘no one could have come more apt for their designs’. A scheme was immediately set on foot for a plantation in South America from which the traffic of Guinea, the Spanish Indies and the Pacific might be controlled. Bayao was to lead the necessary expedition. It so alarmed the Spanish authorities that the ambassador, Gueraa de Spes, tried to bribe Bartholomew Bayao to enter the service of King Philip II. But Bartholomew was a difficult man with whom to deal and perhaps set his price too high, for he remained in England. Nothing came of the colonization, but Bayao returned to the slave trade. In the spring of 1571 he equipped three ships and a pinnace for the Senegal, from whence he intended to carry slaves to Hispaniola. . . .

The character of English enterprise in Guinea thus began to change. During the early years of English traffic to West Africa, gold, pepper and ivory were the primary attractions for the syndicate of merchants who adventured in it. However, as trading beyond Cape Palmas grew more dangerous, so did the gold trade tend to decline. John Hawkins then projected a new type of commerce, wherein the Guinea voyage itself ceased to form a complete cycle. This new trade did not necessitate facing the guns or the galleys of Portugal on the Mina coast, for plenty of negro slaves were procurable between the Senegal and Sierra Leone. Nor did it involve the greater risk of fever, which attached to the farther voyage. It did not even mean that the other commodities of Guinea, apart from slaves, need be ignored. Hawkins found it convenient in 1563, when about to leave Sierra Leone for the West Indies, to send one of his ships straight back to England with the pepper and ivory, which he had purchased. His plan was copied by those who came after him. Captain Lovell seems to have sent one of his ships back from Guinea in the spring of 1567, and we have reliable evidence that one of a fleet of three ships, owned by William Winter and sent to Guinea to participate in the transatlantic slave trade, returned to England without visiting the Caribbean (1570). The slave trade was thus gradually preferred, particularly after the failure of the expedition of captain Fenner. Nearly all the ships sent to Guinea during the Anglo-Portuguese crisis of 1569-71 were potential slavers.

The men who were interested in Guinea clearly saw that trade, whatever its character, could be greatly facilitated by a permanent station in West Africa. We have noted in the preceding chapter that this idea had already been considered between 1554 and 1558. A keener interest in trade now led to correspondingly more thorough efforts to plant settlements, but no greater success was achieved than before 1559. The preeminence of Englishmen among the interlopers in the period from 1559 to 1571 is indicated by the fact that nearly all the contemporary projects of colonization in Guinea were of English origin.”

Concerning John Hawkins, Nick Hazlewood, in The Queen’s Slave Trader: John Hawkyns, writes,

“John Hawkyns had tasted blood at a very early age. His killing of a barber in his hometown is recorded in the Calendar of Patent Rolls for July 1552. . . . At the time of the royal pardon Hawkyns was barely twenty years old. . . . Whether Hawkyns’s innocence is really established by the pardon is neither here nor there – such pieces of paper could by purchased by rich and powerful families. What it does illustrate, however, is that even as a young man from a wealthy background, John Hawkyns was very much a product of the brutal time, place, and family that he was born into. . . .

John Hawkins was born into one of the two or three wealthiest merchant families in the important seaport of Plymouth, a family that boasted a rich West Country pedigree and that would imbue him with a craving for luxury and intrigue, and quite possible the lust for power that was to characterize all aspects of his life. . . . . His mother, Joan Trelawney, was a daughter of William Trelawney of Cornwall. His father, William, was the offspring of a powerful Tavistock merchant and the heiress of King Edwards IV’s sergeant -in-law, William Amadas of Launceston. . . .

[The family] lived together in a smart town house in a narrow lane at the end of Kinterbury Street, in the southwest quarter of Plymouth’s old town. . . . from their small back garden they could look down at the indisputable evidence of their familial power, the wharves and warehouses of Plymouth’s inner harbor, Sutton Pool, where they ruled the roost over the bustle and business of the docks. . . .

Shipping and mercantile activities were the cornerstones of William Hawkyns’s life. As an energetic and successful businessman, he was a part of a thrusting, ambitious class that was pushing its way to the surface as England finally emerged from the dark ages of the Hundred Years War and the internecine conflict and regicide of the Wars of the Roses. This aspiring new middle class consisted of men who were to benefit from the centralization of government, the broken stranglehold of Roman Catholicism, the spread of Protestantism, and a growing sense of national unity.”

And returning to West Africa: Quest For Gold and God 1475-1578 by John W. Blake,

“John Hawkins, whose men in January 1568 actually burned down the Portuguese trading house on the river Cacheu. This disaster calls for comment. Hawkins had on his two previous voyages seized Portuguese ships in the waters of Sierra Leone. On this occasion, however, he took armed vessels up the Rio de S. Domingo (Cacheu river) and attacked the whites in their trading house on its (north?) bank. Witnesses in a Portuguese court of law alleged that Hawkins and his men, armed to the teeth, landed at Cacheu, slew many Portuguese residents, seized 30,000 ducats, and burned down the factory there. We know, from other evidence, that the white traders had a ‘factory of Sao Domingos’ on the Cacheu river in 1535 and another further south in Biafada country at Guinala on the Ria Grande de Buba in 1558 (Rodney, P. 76). It would seem that in 1568 Hawkins destroyed the ‘factory of Sao Domingos’. Witnesses are specific: this trading house was the place where ‘the royal dues and taxes are levied and collected by the servants and factors of Antonio Goncalves de Guzman and Duarte Leo, [the farmers or contractors of the trade of Cape Verde and the Rivers of Guinea]’. But one witness also insisted that on the Rio de S. Domingo ‘there are two settlements of Portuguese: one is in Cacheu port and the other is in Buguendo. Did Hawkins burn Cacheu? Or did he burn Buguendo?”

HISTORY OF GUINEA, LAND OF THE BALANTA FROM THE TIME OF JOHN HAWKINS

1560’s Expansion of English slaving on the West Coast of Africa

1562 John Hawkins loots six Portuguese ships and deepens the English challenge to the Portuguese claims to the Guinea coast.

1563-1564 John Hawkins and Francis Drake ship African slaves.

1565 Drake loots eleven ships in Portuguese waters.

1566 John Lovell, Francis Drake, and John Hawkins sailing for England loot fourteen Portuguese ships in Guinean and Cape Verdean waters. French pirates attack Portuguese in Madeiras.

1567 John Lovell loots Portuguese slavers at sea. John Hawkins raids Cacheu River and makes overland attack on Papels of Cacanda.

1570’s - 1600 An annual average of 3,000 African captives are shipped largely from Guinala in Guinea-Bissau by the lancados and Tangomaos; about half of the slaves are sent to Brazil.

1580’s Cacheu is reported to have 700-800 Christians “between white and black”

1580-1640 King Henrique is toppled. Portugal comes under the rule of the Spanish Hapsburg Kings, but Cape Verde continues as a major slave entrepot, under Portuguese and lancado control, threatened by the Dutch, French, and English.

1581 Andre Donelha visits Guinala noting eight slave ships from Sao Tiago and at least ten others owned by Tangomaos.

1582 The population of Fogo and Sao Tiago includes 13,700 slaves and 600 whites.

1588 the feitor of Cacheu, Lopes Cardoso (A Portuguese born in Cape Verde) convinces Cacanda Papels to accept the construction of a casa forte, which allows lancado independence from Papels and the start of a capitania system subordinate to Cape Verde.

1590 Papels attack the Cacheu fort but are repelled by the lancados, who celebrate their victory by renaming the casa forte, “Nossa Senhoa do Vencimento”.

1590’s Dutch intensify trade efforts along Guinea coast.

1591 The Songhai army is defeated by the Moroccans at Tondibi.

1594 Earliest account of the Balantas (by name) in written records, Andre Alvares Almada, Trato breve dos rios de Guine, trans. P.E.H. Hair - “The Creek of the Balantas penetrates inland at the furthest point of the land of the Buramos [Brame]. The Balantas are fairly savage blacks.”

1600-1650 About 4,000 slaves from Upper Guinea coast were exported annually to Brazil and elsewhere (about 200,000 for this period).

1601 The Crown gives Portuguese Jews the right to settle and trade on the Guinea coast.

1611 19 November King Felipe writes to Father Barreira noting that Guineans “need” to be conquered.

1614 Joao Tavares de Sousa appointed as first feitor at Cacheu and Sao Domingos River in Guinea.

1615, Manuel Alvares commented, ‘They [Balantas] have no principle king. Whoever has more power is king, and every quarter of a league there are many of this kind.’

1617 More than 2,000 African captives shipped from Cacheu.

1618 English Company of Adventurers is chartered for trade in gold and slaves. The company builds a fort on James Island in the River Gambia to rival the Portuguese in Casamance and Guinea.

1619 Slave traders allowed to pay crown tax directly at Cacheu and bypass the slave tax paid in the Cape Verde Islands.

1620 Royal order sends Portuguese women degredados to Cape Verde to “extinguish the mulattoe race.”

1627, Alonso de Sandoval wrote that Balanta were ‘a cruel people, [a] race without a king.’

1628-42 Jesuit mission moves its mission to the Guinea coast.

1636 First African slaves exported to Rhode Island by Portuguese and especially English slave traders.

1637 Dutch West India Company seizes Al-Mina from Portuguese, ending their control of 155 years.

1638 Portuguese lose trade center at Arguim to Dutch. French become established on the Senegal River.

1640’s New World sugar production demands more slaves.

1650 Joao Carreiro Fidalgo appointed as capitao-mor of Cacheu. He arrives with two caravelas of fifty men each as well as canons and arms with the intention to intimidate the local population and build a fort, but this is not successful.

1650 Tarikh as-Sudan written in Timbuktu, by Mahmoud Kati, the Chronicler for Askia the Great.

1650-70’s About 7,500 slaves exported to Brazil each year or about 150,000 for this period. Sugar production and the slave economy of Madeira decline. The Wolof and Bambara are in cycles of regional warfare to produce slaves or defend themselves from attacks by slavers.

1669-92 Economic depression in Portugal

1672 Formation of the English Royal African Company

1676 Formation of Companhia de Cacheu, Rios e Comercio da Guine to provide taxes and slaves for the Portuguese Crown, and approve the capitao-mor, who is Antonio de Barros Bezerra and the main shareholder of the company, which failed in 1682.

1677 French take Goree from Dutch.

1679 Regulos near Cacheu revolt against lancado trader.

1680 Formation of Companhia Africano do Cabe Verde e Cacheu.

1684 Revolt at Cacheu led by mestica trader Bibiana Vaz and her “seditious group” which holds capitao-mor de Oliveira as a captive in Farim for fourteen months until he escapes.

1684 Francisco de Lemos Coelho says that much of the territory of the Balanta ‘has not been navigated, nor does it have kings of consideration.’ . . .

1689-93 French slave traders active in Cacheu and Casamance under De La Courbe

1690 Formation of Companhia do Cacheu e Cabo Verde to control regional trade in slaves and ivory. This company failed in 1696. Bishop Portuense of Ribeira Grande stages raids on his priests who are sleeping with their slave concubines, a widespread practice which added to the Crioulo population.

1694-95 Bishop Portuense visits Cacheu, Bissau, Farim, and Geba. While in Bissau he baptizes the King, Bacompol Co, as “Dom Pedro,” whose eldest son, Batonto is sent to Lisbon to be baptized with the King of Portugal as his godfather.

1697 Widespread Papel revolt is organized by Incinha Te against the Portuguese. Mandinkas of Farim also revolt.

1698 Capitao-mor Jose Pinheiro is arrested by Incinha Te, King of Bissau. Pinheiro dies in custody.

1698-99 French slave traders seek protected commerce in Bissau.

1698-1708 Rhode Islanders build 103 ships largely for the Triangle Trade. The New England colonies are importers of Caribbean molasses to produce rum for barter for slaves from Guinea.

1701 The capitania fort at Bissau is abandoned because of African resistance.

1707-1708 King Joao V orders the fort at Bissau to be destroyed and its artillery sent to Cacheu.

1725 Fula Islamic revival begins in Futa Toro and Futa Jallon and brings the Denianke dynasty to an end. The Fula spirit of regional jihad encourages the Fula of Guinea-Bissau to resist the authority of the Mandinka kingdom of Kaabu.

1747 The Portuguese baptize the King of Bissau to regain control.

1750’s Merchants of Grao Para and Maranhao (Brazil) call for an increase in its slave imports from Guinea for sugar, cotton, rice and cacao production and are authorized by the Crown to form a slave trading and commercial company.

1776 The American Revolutionary War begins, and Americans increase imports of rice and cotton from Maranhao, which requires more slaves from Guinea. Slaves are generated as the revivalist Fula Muslims complete the formation of the Imamate of Futa Toro and bring an end to the Denianke lineage in Futa Toro.

During this period from the 1570’s to 1776, Walter Rodney writes in A History of The Upper Guinea Coast 1545 to 1800,

“These were slaving by piracy, by warlike alliances, and by more or less peaceful partnership. In the first of his stages, he [Basil Davidson] recognizes the very brief phase of direct attaks by the Portuguese on the Africans in the mid fifteenth century; while the activities of John Hawkins are cited as typical of the second stage. But what Hawkins represents is an aberration and an anachronism. Ever since Cadamosta sailed in 1456, organized trading had already taken the place of the earlier manhunts, and it was because of the possibilities of peaceful commerce that Fernao Gomes was given his grant in 1469. Hawkins’ methods were typical of the first phase which the Portuguese had long left behind. He made direct attacks on unsuspecting villagers, and he seized slaves whom the Portuguese had purchased. Only on his second trip, when he found that the Africans were prepared and that violence on his own initiative was not paying dividends, did he enter into an alliance with the local kings (Manes), who were waging war. The Mane warfare was coincidental, and otherwise Hawkins, like other European captains, would have had to do business with the African ruling class through the intermediary of the Lancados . . . . Apart from Sierra Leone, only Cacheu and Guinala were made use of in the sixteenth century. Consequently, commerce on the Upper Guinea Coast settled down into a pattern dominated by the lancados. . . .

The lancado was almost invariably a Portuguese, but he is best regarded as a phenomenon – the private European trader living among African tribesmen – and as such he could be of any nationality. Allied to the lancado was the grumete, another Portuguese term best left untranslated, being loosely applied to a large category of African helpers of European traders. Some were purchased as slaves, some were paid what amounted to a wage, and others were virtually affined relatives of the white merchants. The grumete were at all times a significant part of the resident trading community led by the lancados. The main business of the lancados and grumetes was slaving. . . .

The lancados were not evenly dispersed, because the idea of commerce with the Europeans and the acceptance of the European presence did not find a universal and simultaneous welcome. Indeed, some tribes displayed chronic hostility towards the Europeans; The Djolas were in this latter category. . . . Another group, the Balantas, were so hostile that the belief was widespread among the Europeans on the coast that the Balantas killed all white men that they caught. This reputation of ferocity was shared by the Bijagos Islanders. . . .

Other tribes fitted in between the two extremes, and certain common patterns of behavior were to be found throughout the regions where the lancados were welcomed by the Africans. . . .

The Europeans always dealt with the kings, chiefs, and nobles of the Upper Guinea Coast. . . . Each resident trader placed himself under the protection of an African ruler; and there was an understanding on mutual rights and obligations. . . .

The strongest personage in the vicinity of the Portuguese settlement of Cacheu was the king of Mata, with the chief of Mompata falling under his jurisdiction. Apparently the most powerful Papel leader was to be found at Bassarel in the vicinity of the river Calequisse, south of the Cacheu. . . .”

According to John Horhn’s They Had No King: Ella Baker and the Politics of Decentralized Organization Among African Descended Populations,

“Intermarriage did occur between the Balanta and these foreign groups, especially with the intention of fostering trade relationships. However, at no time was the concentration of wealth in the hands of members of the b’alante b’ndang (or any other group) ever so pronounced that it led to the crystallization of an elite class. Furthermore, the Balanta were extremely mistrusting of outsiders not from their own lineage or tabancas. This was true even when applied to members of their own ethnic group and resulted in a culture that held loyalty to the tabancas above all else. Therefore, it was impossible for outside forces to gain influence over Balanta culture without direct conquest and the commitment of military resources. The fact that the Balanta possessed very little material culture and existed in dispersed settlement pattern would have discourage the notion of any such conquest.”

in Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400-1900, Walter Hawthorne writes,

“As late as 1732, European sailors were loath to venture up the Rio Geba for fear of coming in contact with Balanta age-grade warriors. . . . Spanish Capuchins specifically mentioned that Balanta ‘play a certain instrument that they call in their language bombolon’ to ‘announce the attack.’

Having assembled in what the Capuchins called ‘a great number,’ Balanta warriors struck their stranded victims quickly and with overwhelming force. ‘Upon approaching a boat,’ the Capuchins said, ‘they attack with fury, they kill, rob, capture and make off with everything.’ Such attacks happened with a great deal of regularity and struck fear in the hearts of merchants and missionaries alike. Others also commented on the frequency of Balanta raids on river vessels. On March 24, 1694, Bispo Portuense feared that he would fall victim to the Balanta when his boat, guided by grumetes, ran aground on a sandbar, probably on the Canal do Impernal, ‘very close to the territory of those barbarians.’ . . . .

Faced with an impediment to the flow of trade to their ports, the Portuguese tried to bring an end to Balanta raids. But they were outclassed militarily by skilled Balanta age-grade fighters.

Portuguese adjutant Amaro Rodrigues and his crew certainly discovered this. In 1696, he and a group of fourteen soldiers from a Portuguese post on Bissau anchored their craft somewhere near a Balanta village close to where Bissau’s Captain Jose Pinheiro had ordered the men to stage an attack. However, the Portuguese strategy was ill conceived. A sizable group of Balanta struck a blow against the crew before they had even left their boat. The Balanta killed Rodrigues and two Portuguese soldiers and took twelve people captive.

Returning to Hawthorne’s Strategies of the Decentralized,

“In 1777, Portuguese commander Ignacio Bayao reported from Bissau that he was furious that Balanta had been adversely affecting the regional flow of slaves and other goods carried by boats along Guinea-Bissau’s rivers. It was ‘not possible,’ he wrote, ‘to navigate boats for those [Balanta] parts without some fear of the continuous robbing that they have done, making captive those who navigate in the aforementioned boats.’ In response, Bayao sent infantrymen in two vessels ‘armed for war’ into Balanta territories. After these men had anchored, disembarked, and ventured some distance inland, they ‘destroyed some men, burning nine villages’ and then made a hasty retreat back to the river. Finding their vessels rendered ‘disorderly,’ the infantrymen were quickly surrounded by well-armed Balanta. Bayao lamented that ‘twenty men from two infantry companies’ were taken captive or killed. Having sent out more patrols to subdue the ‘savage Balanta’ and having attempted a ‘war’ against this decentralized people, the Portuguese found that conditions on Guinea- Bissau’s rivers did not improve.’”

Historic Pictoric Map, 1732 Negroland and Guinea : with the European settlements explaining what belongs to England, Holland, Denmark

Thus, the English entered Guinea, the land of the Balantas, as violent (“Protestant”) interlopers conducting acts of pure aggression that violated the natural law of the Balanta and the ecclesiastical/canon law of the Catholic Church which conceded dominion to the Balanta, recognizing their sovereign African existence as extra ecclesiam that preceded the human calculus transforming subjects into captives and slaves and acknowledging the theoretical and practical recognition that Guinea did not represent terra nullius (land that is legally deemed to be unoccupied or uninhabited). The Pope claimed that his jurisdiction extended de jure over infidels, and thus he alone could call for a Christian invasion of an infidel’s domain. Even then, however, Pope Innocent maintained that only a violation of natural law could precipitate such an attack. Neither the Portuguese nor the English or any European used any supposed violation of natural law as a justification to invade the Balanta.

The English also violated the ius gentium which formed the basis of the law of nations. The ius gentium was not a legal code, and any force it had depended on "reasoned compliance with standards of international conduct.” Thus, the law of nations was neither natural law, which existed in nature and governed animals as well as humans, nor civil law, which was the body of laws specific to a people. Under the law of nations, slavery was held to be a practice common to all nations, who might then have specific civil laws pertaining to slaves. This was derived from ancient warfare, where the victor had the right under the ius gentium to enslave a defeated population; however, if a settlement had been reached through diplomatic negotiations or formal surrender, the people were by custom to be spared violence and enslavement. However, as has already been well documented, slavery was not a practice of the Balanta. From their earliest documented conflict with the Mesintu in 3200 BC, throughout the ENTIRE written record, the Balanta have been identified as a people that NEVER practiced slavery and ALWAYS SUCCESSFULLY RESISTED IT. As such the ius gentium or law of nations could not be applied as a legal justification for the English conduct in Guinea against the Balanta since such justification must necessarily rest on reasoned compliance with standards of international conduct which can not be achieved between Balanta and English competing legal codes. Further, the English would have been required to conclude treaties with each head of household since the Balantas had no king, chief or leader and sovereign judicial and political authority rested with the head of the household. Additionally, the English behavior WAS DEEMED ILLEGAL by the community of European nations at the time which could use the ius gentium or law of nations amongst each other since they had been engaged in the practice of slavery for centuries. Specifically, the English violated the Treaty of Tordesillas and were deemed “pirates” and “interlopers” by European sovereigns. At the start of the sixteenth century the Portuguese declared that to trade in Guinea without a license is a capital offense. This is the reason why London merchants and Plymouth sailors had to advance religious arguments, as well as the argument of force, to support their clandestine operations in Guinea. Ultimately, the English openly attacked the papal division of the world and declared a holy war for the liberation of the seas. In substance, the law of nations is a mechanism for “might makes right” and the “rule of force”.

Thus, in order to justify it’s illegal activities and imperial ambitions, the English, like the Portuguese began distinguishing between sovereign ‘Moorish’ subjects and those ‘Moors,’ ‘Negros,’ and ‘black’ that they could legitimately enslave. Based on phenotype and and other natural and political characteristics, the English used the terms such as ‘Black Moors’ ‘blacks,’ “Ethiops,’ ‘Guineas,’ and ‘Negroes,’ or the descriptive terms to which a religious signifier was appended such as ‘Moors. . . [who] were Gentiles’ and ‘pagans’, which gradually constituted the rootless and “sovereignless.” This became the basis to delineate who could be ‘legitimately’ enslaved and establish juridical status. The English then used such juridical status to identify territory that could be invaded and raided for slaves. That territory became known as “Negroland” and appeared on English maps.

The Europeans made partnerships with the Mandinka, the Casanga, the Papel and the Bijago. The Mandinka, the Kaabu Empire and the Cassanga Kings demanded tribute from the Banhuns, Buramos, , Jabundos, Falupos, Arriatas and Balantas . When the Balantas refused to pay taxes they would be attacked. The main purpose of the raids was to obtain captives for sale to Europeans. Mandinka rulers regarded this as a means of disciplining recalcitrant subjects who refused to pay tribute or to recognize Mandinka supremacy. The Cassanga king also produced slaves through judicial proceedings. The slave trade provided the Cas Mansa’s rulers with a way to eliminate rivals and unwanted or unruly commoners by condemning them to captivity and sale for whatever ‘crimes’ they may have committed.According to the fiscal arrangement, the Iberian monarch had a one-third interest in the sale price of these slaves. Various taxes were created at each level of transaction.

The sale of slaves brought wealth directly in the form of revenue streams or indirectly as taxes or gits to the rulers of the kingdom. Much of the wealth derived from the slave trade was used to equip the armies that took captives from decentralized groups on the frontier of Casa Mansa; some may have been redistributed to regional leaders or others in return for their support; and some was appropriated by the king, who ‘enjoyed royal state, and was served with pomp – [he possessed] a table, silk carpets, chairs, a gilded bed, curtains and canopies of silk, and a whole inner service in silver.’ The wealth that the king derived from the slave trade certainly elevated him well above the masses, giving him untold power over many institutions – judicial, military, and economic.

Hawthorne notes that

“by 1755 the unregulated trade in slaves from Bissau was booming. That year, Portuguese officials in Cacheu reported that Portuguese and French ships were leaving the island with ‘substantial cargoes of captives.’ The Company of Grao Para e Maranhao, which was accorded monopoly trading privileges for the Guinea -Bissau region beginning in 1755. The company had been created to supply the Brazilian states of Par and Maranhao with slave laborers. By 1775 the company had completed a fort, the Praca de Jose de Bissau. The fort had strong 40-foot-high stone walls that formed a square, at the corners of which were four bulwarks. Trenches surrounded all of this. And the company had an enormous holding pen for slaves. Like the Portuguese government had on many occasions before, the Company of Grao Para e Maranhao sought to undercut the power of Luso African traders who lived in the region. The company was especially keen on defending its monopoly trading rights, and it feared Luso Africans would not recognize these. With British vessels regularly purchasing slaves in Bissau and Geba from ‘Portuguese’ in the 1760’s, the company’s fears were well grounded.”

Thus, when the English began to establish new colonies in the Americas, they used the corporation, a new form of personhood with its own rights and obligations, established by English civil law called “common law” to govern civil and criminal matters. Balanta people were redefined as “Negro” and given the juridical status as “slave” and property of the corporation, in violation of natural law, canon law, and the law of nations. As corporate-less beings that lacked the protective shield of a culturally sanctioned corporate status, much like the Jews and Moors in 15th century Portugal, the history of the Balantas taken to the English colonies in the America’s would, for the next 400 years, simply be the accounting records of the various English corporations.

Timeline of American History And The Birth of White Supremacy and White Privilege in America

LEGAL ISSUES EFFECTING BALANTA AS A RESULT OF CONTACT WITH EUROPEAN CHRISTIANS

Excerpts from Balanta B’urassa, My Sons: Those Who Resist Remain Volume 3

By the time of the arrival of the Portuguese, the first Europeans to make contact with Balanta people, Balanta culture was firmly based in an the Great Belief which mitigated against social hierarchies, state formation, and the resultant inequality that such systems of organization produce. As historian Walter Rodney pointed out,

“It is only the Balantas who can be cited as lacking the institution of kingship. At any rate there seemed to have been little or no differentiation within Balanta society on the basis of who held property, authority and coercive power. Some sources affirmed that the Balantas had no kings, while an early sixteenth-century statement that the Balanta ‘kings’ were no different from their subjects must be taken as referring simply to the heads of the village and family settlements. . . .as in the case of the Balantas, the family is the sole effective social and political unit. . . .”

This is of crucial significance for understanding the legal relationship that existed upon the first meeting of the Portuguese and Balanta as well as for resolving the current legal problems of the descendants of the Balanta people who were captured from their homeland, brought to the United States of America, and enslaved.

When the Portuguese first arrived on the shores of the Rio Cacheu and Rio Geba near where our Balanta ancestors were living, it was in no small part due to the Catholic Church, which played an authoritative role in the capture and enslavement of Balanta people. According to Wikipedia, Catholicism was introduced to what is now Portugal under the Roman Empire in the first half of the first millennium AD. The modern Portuguese state was founded in 1139 AD by Afonso Henriques during the Reconquista, in which the Catholic kingdoms of the northern Iberian Peninsula reconquered the South from the Islamic Moors. Crusaders from other Catholic realms aided the reconquest, which Portugal finished in 1249.

The 12th century saw the founding of eight new monastic orders, many of them functioning as Military Knights of the Crusades. Cistern monk Bernard of Clairvaux exerted great influence over the new orders and produced reforms to ensure purity of purpose. His influence led Pope Alexander III to begin reforms that would lead to the establishment of canon law.

John I of Portugal acceded in 1390 and ruled in peace, pursuing the economic development of his realm. The only significant military action was the siege and conquest of the city of Ceuta in 1415. By this step he aimed to control navigation of the African coast. But in the broader perspective, this was the first step opening the Arab world to medieval Europe, which in fact led to the Age of Discovery with Portuguese explorers sailing across the whole world.

A growing sense of church-state conflicts marked the 14th century. It is stated in the Introduction to The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea Volume II that,

“Here, by the capture of Ceuta (area north of Fez on the African side of the Straight of Gibraltar south of Spain), Prince Henry gained a starting-point for his work; here he is said (probably with truth) to have gained his earliest knowledge of the interior of Africa; here especially he was brought in contact with those Sudan and Saharan caravans which, coming down to the Mediterranean coast, brought news, to those who sought it, of the Senegal and Niger, of the Negro kingdoms beyond the desert, and particularly of the Gold land of ‘Guinea.’ Here also, from a knowledge thus acquired, he was able to form a more correct judgment of the course needed for the rounding or circumnavigation of Africa, of the time, expense, and toil necessary for that task, and of the probable support or hindrance his mariners were to look for on their route. . . .

[T]he ‘Arabs and Moors’ of the early fifteenth century could give the Infant detailed and correct information, not only about the Barbary states and the trade-routes of the Sahara, but also about many of the Western and Central Sudan countries, and about the general course and direction of the ‘Guinea coast’ both to the west and south of the great African hump. Especially could they describe the kingdom of Guinea, centering around the town of Jenne on the Upper Niger, which was the chief market of their Negro trade in slaves, gold and ivory. This kingdom, then, reached almost to the Atlantic on the lower valley of the Senegal, where in earlier times a place called Ulil had been marked by Edrisis and other Arab geographers, as independent of Ghana but important for traffic. Also, the Moors were acquainted with the country of Tokrur, which may be supposed to occupy the upper valley of the Senegal, becoming perhaps in Prince Henty’s time, merely a province of Guinea. Further, they could give much information about the States of Timbuktu and Mali, to the east of Guinea, on the Middle Niger, about the gold land of Wangara, in the great bend to the south of that river, and about the Songhay, afterwards so powerful, whose capital was at Gao, at the extreme N.E. angle of the Negro Nile, or Joliba.”

Under king Edward, the colony at Ceuta rapidly became a drain on the Portuguese treasury, and it was realized that without the city of Tangier, possession of Ceuta was worthless. In 1437, Duarte's brothers Henry and Ferdinand persuaded him to launch an attack on the Marinid sultanate of Morocco. The resulting attack on Tangier, led by Henry, was a debacle. Failing to take the city in a series of assaults, the Portuguese siege camp was soon itself surrounded and starved into submission by a Moroccan relief army. In the resulting treaty, Henry promised to deliver Ceuta back to the Marinids in return for allowing the Portuguese army to depart unmolested. The Portuguese needed to find a new source of wealth.

The Papal Bull Dum Diversas issued by Pope Nicholas V, June 18, 1452, stated,

“we grant to you full and free power, through the Apostolic authority by this edict, to invade, conquer, fight, subjugate the Saracens and pagans, and other infidels and other enemies of Christ, and wherever established their Kingdoms, Duchies, Royal Palaces, Principalities and other dominions, lands, places, estates, camps and any other possessions, mobile and immobile goods found in all these places and held in whatever name, and held and possessed by the same Saracens, Pagans, infidels, and the enemies of Christ, also realms, duchies, royal palaces, principalities and other dominions, lands, places, estates, camps, possessions of the king or prince or of the kings or princes, and to lead their persons in perpetual servitude, and to apply and appropriate realms, duchies, royal palaces, principalities and other dominions, possessions and goods of this kind to you and your use and your successors the Kings of Portugal.”

Gomes Eannes de Azurara,, the royal chronicler of the King Don Affonso the Fifth of Portugal, gives the official purpose of the Portuguese exploration of the west coast of Africa:

“HERE beginneth the Chronicle in which are set down all the notable deeds that were achieved in the Conquest of Guinea, written by command of the most high and revered Prince and most virtuous Lord the Infant Don Henry, Duke of Viseu and Lord of Covilham, Ruler and Governor of the Chivalry of the Order of Jesus Christ. The which Chronicle was collected into this volume by command of the most high and excellent Prince, and most powerful Lord the King Don Affonso the Fifth of Portugal. . . .

And our Lord the King, considering that it was not convenient for the process of one only Conquest* that it should be recounted in many ways, although they all contribute to one result, ordered me to work at the writing and ordering of the history in this volume so that those who read might have the more perfect knowledge. . . .

We imagine that we know a matter when we are acquainted with the doer of it and the end for which he did it. And since in former chapters we have set forth the Lord Infant as the chief actor in these things, giving as clear an understanding of him as we could, it is meet that in this present chapter we should know his purpose in doing them. And you should note well that the noble spirit of this Prince, by a sort of natural constraint, was ever urging him both to begin and to carry out very great deeds. For which reason, after the taking of Ceuta (from the Moors in Morocco) he always kept ships well-armed against the Infidel, both for war, and because he had also a wish to know the land that lay beyond the isles of Canary and that Cape called Bojador, for that up to his time, neither by writings, nor by the memory of man, was known with any certainty the nature of the land beyond that Cape. Some said indeed that Saint Brandan had passed that way; and there was another tale of two galleys rounding the Cape, which never returned. But this doth not appear at all likely to be true, for it is not to be presumed that if the said galleys went there, some other ships would not have endeavored to learn what voyage they had made. And because the said Lord Infant wished to know the truth of this—since it seemed to him that if he or some other lord did not endeavor to gain that knowledge, no mariners or merchants would ever dare to attempt it — (for it is clear that none of them ever trouble themselves to sail to a place where there is not a sure and certain hope of profit)—and seeing also that no other prince took any pains in this matter, he sent out his own ships against those parts, to have manifest certainty of them all. And to this he was stirred up by his zeal for the service of God and of the King Edward his Lord and brother, who then reigned. And this was the first reason of his action.

The second reason was that if there chanced to be in those lands some population of Christians, or some havens, into which it would be possible to sail without peril, many kinds of merchandise might be brought to this realm, which would find a ready market, and reasonably so, because no other people of these parts traded with them, nor yet people of any other that were known; and also the products of this realm might be taken there, which traffic would bring great profit to our countrymen.

The third reason was that, as it was said that the power of the Moors in that land of Africa was very much greater than was commonly supposed, and that there were no Christians among them, nor any other race of men; and because every wise man is obliged by natural prudence to wish for a knowledge of the power of his enemy ; therefore the said Lord Infant exerted himself to cause this to be fully discovered, and to make it known determinately how far the power of those infidels extended.

The fourth reason was because during the one and thirty years that he had warred against the Moors, he had never found a Christian king, nor a lord outside this land, who for the love of our Lord Jesus Christ would aid him in the said war. Therefore, he sought to know if there were in those parts any Christian princes, in whom the charity and the love of Christ was so ingrained that they would aid him against those enemies of the faith.

The fifth reason was his great desire to make increase in the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ and to bring to him all the souls that should be saved,—understanding that all the mystery of the Incarnation, Death, and Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ was for this sole end—namely the salvation of lost souls—whom the said Lord Infant by his travail and spending would fain bring into the true path. For he perceived that no better offering could be made unto the Lord than this; for if God promised to return one hundred goods for one, we may justly believe that for such great benefits, that is to say for so many souls as were saved by the efforts of this Lord, he will have so many hundreds of guerdons in the kingdom of God, by which his spirit may be glorified after this life in the celestial realm. For I that wrote this history saw so many men and women of those parts turned to the holy faith, that even if the Infant had been a heathen, their prayers would have been enough to have obtained his salvation. And not only did I see the first captives, but their children and grandchildren as true Christians as if the Divine grace breathed in them and imparted to them a clear knowledge of itself.

But over and above these five reasons I have a sixth that would seem to be the root from which all the others proceeded: and this is the inclination of the heavenly wheels. For, as I wrote not many days ago in a letter I sent to the Lord King, that although it be written that the wise man shall be Lord of the stars, and that the courses of the planets (according to the true estimate of the holy doctors) cannot cause the good man to stumble; yet it is manifest that they are bodies ordained in the secret counsels of our Lord God and run by a fixed measure, appointed to different ends, which are revealed to men by his grace, through whose influence bodies of the lower order are inclined to certain passions. And if it be a fact, speaking as a Catholic, that the contrary predestinations of the wheels of heaven can be avoided by natural judgment with the aid of a certain divine grace, much more does it stand to reason that those who are predestined to good fortune, by the help of this same grace, will not only follow their course but even add a far greater increase to themselves. But here I wish to tell you how by the constraint of the influence of nature this glorious Prince was inclined to those actions of his. And that was because his ascendant was Aries, which is the house of Mars and exaltation of the sun, and his lord in the Xlth house, in company of the sun. And because the said Mars was in Aquarius, which is the house of Saturn, and in the mansion of hope, it signified that this Lord should toil at high and mighty conquests, especially in seeking out things that were hidden from other men and secret, according to the nature of Saturn, in whose house he is. And the fact of his being accompanied by the sun, as I said, and the sun being in the house of Jupiter, signified that all his traffic and his conquests would be loyally carried out, according to the good pleasure of his king and lord.”

 - Gomes Eannes de Azurara, The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea

4,624 years AFTER our ancestors migrated from Ta-Nihisi just prior to Menes’ conquest of Ta-Nihisi and Ta-Meri, starting in the year 1424 AD, Henry the Navigator of Portugal sent 15 expeditions to explore the west coast of Africa. None reach any further than Cape Bojador, just south of the Canary Islands. In 1435, Gomes Eannes de Azurara traveled down the west African coast almost to the Tropic of Cancer.

Here is Gomes Eannes de Azurara’s account of the Portuguese’s first arrival in the land of Guinea:

“Gomez Pirez, who was there in that caravel of the King as chief captain, being a man of valour and authority, began to speak of his purpose . . . . ‘But as for you others, honorable sirs and friends, you know right well the will of the lord Infant; how much store he setteth on knowing somewhat of the land of the Negroes, and especially of the river of Nile, for which reason I am resolved to make my voyage to that land, toiling as much as I can to get at it . . . .”

And so those six caravels having set out, pursued their way along the coast, and pressed on so far that they passed the land of Sahara belonging to those Moors which are called Azanegues, the which land is very easy to distinguish from the other by reason of the extensive sands that are there, and after it by the verdue which is not to be seen in it on account of the gret dearth of water there, which causeth an exceeding dryness of the soil. . . .

Now these caravels having passed by the land of Sahara, as hath been said, came in sight of the two palm trees that Dinis Diaz had met with before, by which they understood that they were at the beginning of the land of the Negroes. And at this sight they were glad indeed, and would have landed at once, but they found the sea so rough upon that coast that by no manner of means could they accomplish their purpose. And some of those who were present said afterwards that it was clear from the smell that came off the land how good must be the fruits of that country, for it was so delicious that from the point they reached, though they were on the sea, it seemed to them that they stood in some gracious fruit garden ordained for the sole end of their delight. And if our men showed on their side a great desire of gaining the land, no less did the natives of it show their eagerness to receive them into it; but of the reception they offered I do not care to speak, for according to the signs they made to our men from the first, they did not intend to abandon the beach without very great loss to one side or the other. Now the people of this green land are wholly black, and hence this is called the Land of the Negroes, or Land of Guinea. Wherefore also the men and women thereof are called ‘Guineas,’ as if one were to say ‘Black Men.’ . . . And when the men in the caravels saw the first palms and lofty trees as we have related, they understood right well that they were close to the river of Nile, at the point where it floweth not the western sea, the which river is there called the Senegal (Canaga). For the Infant had told them that in little more than 20 leagues after the sighting of those tress they should look out for the same river, for so he had learnt from several of his Asanegue prisoners. . . .

And when they were close to its mouth, they let down their anchors on the seaward side, and the crew of the caravel of Vicene Diaz launched their boat, and into it jumped as many as eight men, and among them was that Esquire of Lagos called Stevam Affonso, of whom we have already spoken . . . .

And as all the eight were going in the boat, one of them, looking out towards the mouth of the river, espied the door of a hut, and said to his companions: ‘I know not how the huts of this land are built, but judging by the fashion of those I have seen before, that should be a hut that I see before me, and I presume it belongs to fishing folk who have come to fish in this stream. And if you think well, it seemeth to me that we ought to go and land beyond that point, in such wise that we may not be discovered from the door of the hut; and let some land, and approach from behind those sandbanks, and if any natives are lying in the hut, it may be that they will take them before they are perceived.’ Now it appeared to the others that this was good advice, and so they began to put it into execution. And as soon as they reached the land, Stevam Affonso leapt out and five others with him, and they proceeded in the manner that the other had suggested. And while they were going thus concealed even until they neared the hut, they saw come out of it a negro boy, stark naked, with a spear in his hand. Him they seized at once, and coming up close to the hut, they lighted upon a girl, his sister, who was about eight years old. This boy the Infant afterwards caused to be taught to read and write, with all other knowledge that a Christian should have; . . . so that some said of this youth that the Infant had bidden train him for a priest with the purpose of sending him back to his native land, there to preach the faith of Jesus Christ.  But I believe that afterwards he died without ever reaching man’s estate. So those men entered into the hut, where they found a black shield made of hide, quite round in shape, a little larger than those used in that country, the which had in the middle of it a boss of the same hide as the shield itself, to wit, of an elephant’s ear, as was afterwards learnt from certain Guineas who saw it. . . . and when they had captured those young prisoners and articles of plunder, they took them forthwith to their boat. ‘Well were it, said Stevam Affonso to the others, ‘if we were to go through this country near here, to see if we can find the father and mother of these children, for judging by their age and disposition, it cannot be that the parents would leave them and go far off.’ The others said that he should go, with good luck, wherever he pleased, for there was nothing to prevent them following him. And after they had journeyed a short way Stevam Affonso began to hear the blows of an axe or some other iron instrument, with which some one was carpentering upon a piece of timber, and he stopped a little to assure himself of what he had heard, and put the others into the same attention. And then they all recognized that they were near what they sought. ‘Now,’ said he, ‘do you come behind and allow to go in front, because, if we all move forward in company, however softly we walk, we shall be discovered without fail, so that ere we come at him, whosoever he be, if alone, he must needs fly and put himself in safety; but if I go softly and crouching down, I shall be able to capture him by a sudden surprise without his perceiving me; but do not be so slow of pace that you will come late to my aid, where perhaps I may be in such danger as to need you.’

And they agreeing to this, Stevam Affonso began to move forward; and what with the careful guard that he kept in stepping quietly, and the intentness with which the Guinea labored at his work, he never perceived the approach of his enemy till the latter leapt upon him. And I say leapt, since Stevam Affonso was of small frame and slender, while the Guinea was of quite different build; and so he seized him lustily by the hair, so that when the Guinea raised himself erect, Stevam Affonso remained hanging in the air with his feet off the ground. The Guinea was a brave and powerful man, and he thought it a reproach that he should thus be subjected by so small a thing. Also he wondered within himself what this thing could be; but though he struggled very hard, he was never able to free himself, and so strongly had his enemy entwined himself in his hair, that the efforts of those two men could be compared to nothing else than a rash and fearless hound who has fixed on the some mighty bull. . . . But while those two were in their struggle, Affonso’s companions came upon them, and seized the Guinea by his arms and neck in order to bind him. And Stevam Affonso, thinking that he was now taken into custody and in the hands of the other, let go of his hair; whereupon, the Guinea, seeing that his head was free, shook off from his arms, them away on either side, and began to flee. And it was of little avail to the others to pursue him, for his agility gave him a great advantage over his pursuers in running, and in his course he took refuge in a wood full of thick undergrowth and while the others thought they had him, and sought to find him, he was already in his hut, with the intention of saving his children and taking his arms, which he had left with them. But all his former toil was nothing in comparison of the great grief which came upon him at the absence of his children whom he found gone – but as there yet remained for him a ray of hope, and he thought that perchance they were hidden somewhere, he began to look towards every side to see if he could catch any glimpse of them. And at this appeared Vicente Diaz, that trader who was the chief captain of that caravel to which the boat belonged wherein the others had come on land. And it appears that he, thinking that he was only coming out to walk along the shore, as he was wont to do in Lagos town, had not troubled to bring with him any arms you may well imagine, made for him with right good will.

An although Vicente Diaz saw him coming on with such fury, and understood that for his own defense it were well he had somewhat better arms, yet thinking that flight would not profit him, but rather do him harm in many ways, he awaited his enemy without shewing him any sign of fear. And the Guinea rushing boldly upon him, gave him forthwith a wound in the face with his assegai, with the which he cut open the whole of one of his jaws; in return for this the Guinea received another wound, though not so fell a one  as that which he had just bestowed. And because their weapons were not sufficient for such a struggle, they threw them aside and wrestled; and so, for a short space they were rolling one over the other, each one striving for victory. And while this was proceeding, Vicente Diaz saw another Guinea one who was passing from youth to manhood; and he came to aid his countryman; and although the first Guinea was so strenuous and brave and inclined to fight with such good will as we have described, he could not have escaped being made prisoner if the second man had not come up; and for fear of him he now had to loose his hold of the first. And at this moment came up the other Portuguese, but the Guinea, being now once again free from his enemy’s hands, began to put himself in safety with his companion, like men accustomed to running, little fearing the enemy who attempted to pursue them. And at last our men turned back to their caravels, with the small booty they had already stored in their boats. . . .

And this  may truthfully be affirmed according to the matters which at the beginning of this book I have related concerning the passage of Cape Bojador, and also from the astonishment which the natives of that land showed when they saw the first ships, for they went to them imagining they were fish, or some other natural product of the sea. But now returning to our history, after that deed was thus concluded, it was the wish of all the three captains to endeavor to make an honorable booty, adventuring their bodies in whatsoever peril might be necessary; but it appeareth that the wind veered sharply round to the south, wherefore it was  convenient to set sail at once.  And as they were cruising up and down in order to see what the weather purposed to do, the wind turned to the north, and with this they made their way towards Cape Verde, where Dinis Diaz had been the other year. And they went on as par as was possible for all the caravels to join them . . . .

We have already told of how Rodrigueannes and Dinis Diaz sailed in company, but this is the fitting place where it behoveth us to declare certainly all that happened to them. And it was so, that they, sailing in company after the manner we have already told, which we believe was after the scuttling of the pinnace, came to Cape Verde; and thence they went to the islands, and took in water, and knew for sure by the tracks all over them that other ships had already passed by that way. From there they began to make proof of the Guineas, in search of whom they had come there, but they found them so well prepared, that though they essayed to get on shore many a time, they always encountered such a bold defense that they dared not come to close quarters. ‘It may be,’ said Dinis Diaz, ‘that these men will not be so brave in the nighttime as by day; therefore, I wish to try what their courage is, and I can readily know it this next night.’ And this is in fact was put in practice, for as soon as the sun had quite hidden its light, he went on shore, taking with him two men, and came upon two inhabited places which seemed to him so large that he thought it best to leave them, for his expedition was not in order to adventure anything, but only that he might advise his other comrades of what they should do. Then he returned to the ship and there described to Rodrigueannes and the others all that he had found. ‘We,’ said he, ‘should be acting with small judgment, were we wishful to adventure a conflict like this, for I discovered a village divided into two large parts full of habitations you know that the people of this land are not so easily captured as we desire, for they are very strong men, very wary and very well prepared in their combats. . . . ”

Consider now that if Prince Henry’s purpose was the saving of souls, why would his men capture and enslave the first boy and girl they met instead of coming in peace and establishing a friendly relationship? How does literally kidnapping two children become pleasing to God, and why would such victims want to praise and worship such a God and terrible people?

The question at hand, however, is were the actions of the Portuguese lawful or legal? What right, by what authority, did the Portuguese presume to be operating?

The Sovereign Claim of Guinea Against Slavery

Herman L. Bennett, in African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic, writes,

“In always already conflating African with slave and then condensing the slave’s relationship to the Western legal corpus down to the domain of property, slavery scholars – by projecting the cultural logic of an eighteenth-century market society onto earlier manifestations of bondage – ascribe unwarranted hegemony to Roman law. . . .

The fifteenth-century European legal corpus, by conceding dominium to infidels and pagans, implicitly recognized a sovereign African existence that preceded the human calculus transforming subjects into captives and slaves. Based on an established corpus of thought, law, and theology configuring Christian institutional relations with non-Christians, African polities wielded legal tender in the Christian imaginary. . . .

Even as extra ecclesiam, Guinea’s inhabitants, both infidels and pagans, had natural rights. In asserting its authority over the extra ecclesiam, who, in turn, acquired additional obligations and rights, the Church complicated matters.

At the most elemental level, natural law acknowledged native (African) sovereignty even as Christian thought, theology, and law sanctioned the enslavement of Africans. . . .

In contending with Portugal’s encounter with Guinea’s inhabitants and subsequently adjudicating over Portuguese and Castilian territorial claims in the Atlantic, successive fifteenth-century popes drew on a canonical tradition dating from Innocent IV’s thirteenth-century commentary. Before his election as Pope Innocent IV in 1243, Sinibaldo Fieschi was an influential canonist. As Pope (1241-1254), the erstwhile canonist took an active interest in Christian-Moslem relations since the Christian Crusades, the Reconquista (Spanish and Portuguese for ‘reconquest’ is a name used in English to describe the period in the history of the Iberian Peninsula of about 780 years between the Umayyad conquest of Hispania in 711 and the fall of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada to the expanding Christian kingdoms in 1492), and Christian territorial expansion lacked a firm legal basis in canon law. In his influential commentary, Innocent IV raised the question, ‘Is it licit to invade the lands that infidels possess, and if it is licit, why is it licit?’ According to one leading scholar, ‘Innocent was not . . . interested in justifying the crusades; the general theory of the just war did that. What interested him was the problem of whether or not Christians could legitimately seize land, other than the Holy Land, that the Moslems occupied. Did . . . Christians have a general right to dispossess infidels everywhere?’ Innocent acknowledged that the law of nations had supplanted natural law in regulating human interaction, such as trade, conflict, and social hierarchies. Similarly, the prince replaced the father, as the ‘lawful authority in society’ through God’s provenance, manifesting his dominium in the monopoly over justice and sanctioned violence.

In outlining his opinion, Innocent delineated a temporal domain that was simultaneously autonomous yet subordinate to the Church. Laws of nations pertained to secular matters, a domain in which a significant tendency in the Church, known as ‘dualism,’ showed increasingly less interest. But in spiritual matters, the pope’s authority prevailed, since all humans were of Christ, though not with the Church. ‘As a result,’ the medievalist James Muldoon notes, ‘the pope’s pastoral responsibilities consisted of jurisdiction over two distinct flocks, one consisting of Christians and one comprising everyone else.’ Since the pope’s jurisdiction extended de jure over infidels, he alone could call for a Christian invasion of an infidel’s domain. Even then, however, Innocent maintained that only a violation of natural law could precipitate such an attack. By adhering to the beliefs of their gods, infidels and pagans did not violate natural law. Thus, such beliefs did not provide justification for Christians to simply invade non-Christian polities, dispossess its inhabitants of their territory and freedom, or force them to convert. Innocent IV’s theological contribution resided in the fact that he accorded pagans and infidels dominium and therefore the right to live beyond the state of grace. . . .

‘by the end of the fourteenth century Innocent IV’s commentary . . .  had become the communis opinion of the canonists.’

A half century later, the imperial activities of Christian rulers again raised the issue about the infidel’s dominium. . . . Despite the shifting alliance characterizing Church-state relations in the late Middle Ages, temporal authorities in Christian Europe legitimized their rule and defined their actions on scriptural grounds. Christianity represented their ontological myth, the source of their traditions, and the banner under which they marched against the infidels. Initially, the Christian princes manifested some reluctance to distance themselves from this founding ideology, since to discard Christianity would mean that their dominium merely rested on the might of one particular lineage over another. Moreover, by abandoning the pretense to just war against the infidels, Christian sovereigns risked revealing that profit motivated their desire for expansion. In the context of the late Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period, commercial considerations stood in opposition to a Christian sovereign’s purported interests in honor and justice. In the early modern period, Christianity still served multiple purposes: it legitimized the ascendancy of a particular noble house while sanctioning elite dominium over the nonelite. In the face of powerful noble lineage, the position of the nascent absolutist rulers remained tenuous at best, and the prince was reluctant to dispense with the protective veneer that even diminished papal authority accorded. Still, the ambitious Iberian sovereigns manifested a willingness to interpret canon law in a manner that furthered their claims over infidels and Christians. . . .

Developments in Christendom also brought the dominium of the extra ecclesiam under renewed scrutiny. Since the Church defined all nonbelievers, including Saracens (a widely used term for infidels or those who willfully rejected the faith) and pagans (individuals who existed in ignorance of the faith) as the extra ecclesiam, it used the same laws and traditions in their treatment. In effect, the Church did not distinguish between the non-Christian minority in Europe and the extra ecclesiam residing beyond its de facto jurisdiction. Therefore, laws and practices shaping Church-state relations with nonbelievers in Europe set the precedent for Christian interaction with non-Christians in the wider Atlantic world. Beginning in the thirteenth century and in the context of the Reconquista, some Christian lords on the Iberian Peninsula started undermining the corporate bodies of Jews and Saracens by ordering those populations to adhere to Christian legal precepts and Iberian customary laws. While indicative of the Christians’ victory over the Moors, such practices represented a departure from Reconquista ethics. Throughout much of the Reconquista, victorious Christians and Moors often allowed their adversaries who remained under their territorial jurisdiction to adhere to their own beliefs and traditions. By the thirteenth century, when the tide favored Christians, the victorious rulers displayed less willingness to respect Moorish and Jewish corporate institutions and practices. This intransigence flourished at the very moment that Castilian scholars rediscovered Roman civil law, which they codified along with their customary practices in the Siete Partidas. Following this legal transformation, the Christian monarchs continued restricting the judicial autonomy of their Jewish and Moorish subjects. In 1412, this culminated in the most draconian legislation to date when it ‘forbade Jews and Moslems alike to have their own judges. Thenceforth, their cases, civil and criminal, were to be tried before ordinary judges of the districts where they lived. Criminal cases were to be decided according to Christians custom. . . .’

Though inimical to Innocent IV’s commentary granting the extra ecclesian dominium, the practice of curtailing Jewish and Moorish traditions reflected the ascendant hegemony of Hispania’s Christian rulers. These sovereigns, though zealous Christians, saw all corporate privileges as a threat to their centralizing aspirations. In their opinion, the inhabitants of their territory represented their subjects. Jews and Moors were not an exception. By their actions, Hispania’s Christian rulers contrived new forms of personhood. In a world defined by corporations with their accompanying rights and obligations, Jews and Moors embodied corporate-less beings that Christian authorities compelled to adhere to Christian laws and customary norms thereby forsaking their own legal traditions and customs. By undermining Jewish and Moorish courts, the Christian rulers redefined more than their relations to Jews and Moors.  As they dismantled the courts that had once enabled Jews and Moors to reproduce their distinctive juridical status, the Catholic sovereigns actually reconstituted the meaning of being a Jew or a Moor. Standing before Christian courts and officials whose rulings owed much to Christian ethics, the various diasporic populations – Jews, Moors, and Africans- lacked the protective shield of a culturally sanctioned corporate status. As such, they embodied one of the distinguishing features of the early modern period – individualism.

Understanding Portugal’s initial encounter with Guinea’s inhabitants requires juxtaposing the Church’s historical provenance over the extra ecclesiam against the secular state’s ascendancy. Despite the precedent established by Innocent IV’s commentary, temporal authorities drastically transformed their institutional interaction with the non-Christian minority, which carried over into their relationship with the peoples of Guinea. As the Church’s hegemony receded, the monarch’s power expanded, but dogma continued to affect the secular authorities’ practices and nascent traditions. Much of the imperial activity in the fifteenth century represented secular expansion that the papacy approved after the fact. Despite the secular nature of the Infante’s imperial activity Henrique (Prince Henry) continued to rely on the Reconquista rhetoric of just war and Christian conversion. But the motives informing Gomes Eannes de Zurara’s text and the language through which the Portuguese represented the ‘conquest of Guinea’ also underscores a discursive shift . . . . Irrespective of the transformations in Europe, which signaled a shift in the relationship between Christians and the extra ecclesiam, secular expansion, for reasons of legitimacy, had to contend with a tradition that acknowledged the infidels’ and pagans’ dominium and right to live as sinners. Grace, in other words, did not form the basis on which the rule of law rested. Non-Christian princes did, therefore, wield legitimate authority and constitute sovereign temporal authorities. As the Portuguese and subsequently the Castilians ventured farther south into the ‘land of the blacks,’ they constantly had to contend with theoretical and practical recognition that Guinea did not represent terra nullius (land that is legally deemed to be unoccupied or uninhabited).

Here is the first “legal” question – when Innocent IV concluded that “the law of nations had supplanted natural law in regulating human interaction “ and “the prince replaced the father, as the ‘lawful authority in society’ through God’s provenance, manifesting his dominium in the monopoly over justice and sanctioned violence,” how did that apply to our Balanta ancestors to whom, by natural law and customary law, “the family is the sole effective social and political unit”?

Wikipedia states:

“In his Institutiones (161 AD), the Roman jurist Gaius wrote that:

[Slavery is] the state that is recognized by the ius gentium in which someone is subject to the dominion of another person contrary to nature.

— Gaius, Institutiones 1.3.2

The 1st century BC Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus indicates that the Roman institution of slavery began with the legendary founder Romulus giving Roman fathers the right to sell their own children into slavery, and kept growing with the expansion of the Roman state. Slave ownership was most widespread throughout the Roman citizenry from the Second Punic War (218–201 BC) to the 4th century AD. The Greek geographer Strabo  (1st Century AD) records how an enormous slave trade resulted from the collapse of the Seleucid Empire (100–63 BC).

The Twelve Tables, Rome's oldest legal code, has brief references to slavery, indicating that the institution was of long standing. In the tripartite division of law by the jurist Ulpian (2nd century AD), slavery was an aspect of the ius gentium, the customary international law held in common among all peoples (gentes). The "law of nations" was neither natural law, which existed in nature and governed animals as well as humans, nor civil law, which was the body of laws specific to a people.  All human beings are born free (liberi) under natural law, but slavery was held to be a practice common to all nations, who might then have specific civil laws pertaining to slaves. In ancient warfare, the victor had the right under the ius gentium to enslave a defeated population; however, if a settlement had been reached through diplomatic negotiations or formal surrender, the people were by custom to be spared violence and enslavement. The ius gentium was not a legal code, and any force it had depended on "reasoned compliance with standards of international conduct."

Slavery violated our Balanta ancestors’ Great Belief and egalitarian society. We intentionally did not form centralized state societies because of the inequality it produced. Thus, our Balanta ancestors could not have been a party to any ius gentium, the customary international law held in common among all peoples pertaining to slavery because it violated our customs. Therefore, there could be no “reasoned compliance with standards of international conduct”. Not only was slavery “illegal”, it was unfathomable to our Balanta ancestors.

It is customary, however, for Balanta to settle conflict by means of the moranca (household) or tabanca (group of households) and it was customary, as Bennet shows, for the Europeans to respect sovereign claims. Balanta sovereign claims reside at the level of the moranca (household), and this is inconceivable to the European mind.

In discussing this first encounter between our Balanta ancestors and the Portuguese Christians, Herman Bennet writes,

“With this auspicious inauguration, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, the House of Avis’s royal chronicler and archivist, introduced one of Portugal’s foundational texts: The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea. Commissioned by the House of Avis, Zurara knew only too well that historical writing represented a construction- a process whereby patrons determined the primacy of certain narratives over others. . . . In this narratives production, the trope of Reconquista – the ideological myth of unwavering Christian opposition to Muslim domination of the Iberian Peninsula – was so pervasive that it conflated Islamic Moors and pagan Africans [Siphiwe note: and our “Saracentic” Balanta ancestors], a representational gesture that precluded first the Portuguese and subsequently Castilians from marveling at their novel encounter with Guinea’s inhabitants. . . .The contrast with ‘Indians’ or even Europeans did not, however, elicit images of a homogenous ‘black’ subject. The discourse of Reconquista, but especially canon law, wrought juridical differences among ‘Africa’s’ inhabitants – differences manifested in the language of sovereignty or the lack thereof. . . .

In the context of the Reconquista – the Christian-Moorish conflict over the possession of the Iberian Peninsula that began in the eighth century – conquista represented a Christian sovereign’s dominium extending from a permanently settled village, town or city to the immediate hinterland and its inhabitants. But as The Chronicle unfolds, the Portuguese do not act in accordance to existing definitions of conquest. During their initial voyages along Guinea’s coast, the Portuguese not only eschew establishing a settlement, either peacefully or by force; they also make no effort to contract a treaty so as to acquire a territorial claim to ‘the land of blacks.’ With several noteworthy exceptions, the initial Portuguese encounter with Guinea constituted chattel raids. Such raids underscore the commercial imperatives of those ‘notable deeds’ and of Portugal’s conquests. With Christian ascendancy over the Moors largely ensured, the Portuguese and subsequently the Castilian temporal authorities attached new meanings to the term conquista. In the Reconquista’s waning decades, commerce and the possession of bodies, not territory, signified the ‘notable deeds. . . . achieved in the Conquest of Guinea.’ Despite their increasing temporal preoccupations, the princes and their chroniclers employed the conquest rhetoric so as to invoke images of Christian Crusades, just wars, and the conversion of infidels. For Portugal’s princes, Christian zeal played a connected yet secondary role to profit and strategic knowledge about commercial opportunities. . . .

Prompted southward by profit, the Portuguese charted Guinea’s physical and human landscape in accordance with their commercial sensibility. While the quest for profits propelled the Portuguese encounter with Guinea’s inhabitants, long-standing practices scripted the interaction between Christians and non-Christians and led Zurara to depict the Portuguese expeditions as a Reconquista. During the Reconquista, Christians enslaved infidels under the pretext of a just war, yet irrespective of these religious imperatives, ransom still represented a viable option. But when blackamoors, as opposed to Moors, became the victims of the Portuguese raids, the practice of accepting ransom for religious captives ended – since they quickly became slaves for life. This transformation underscores developments in the emergent Atlantic economy and the concomitant evolution of an early modern commercial sensibility that gradually untangled itself from its Christian foundations. . . . Consequently, the Church continued to accord infidels and pagans the right to have an existence beyond the state of grace, while consenting that those who had been legitimately enslaved could be reduced to chattel. Yet even among chattel, the Church maintained some dominion – especially over their souls – and in an effort to affect the Christian republica’s spiritual well-being imposed itself between masters and their property. . . .

As the Portuguese shifted their gaze southward under Henrique’s influence, their motive was commerce not conversion. Henrique wanted ‘to know the land’ so that ‘many kinds of merchandise might be brought to this realm, which would find a ready market.’ At this historic moment, however, commerce could not enter posterity as the sole motive behind a noble’s behavior. Thus, in listing five reasons why the Infante manifested an interest in ‘the land beyond,’ Zurara wrote that Henrique’s final reason represented a ‘great desire to make increase in the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ.’

In 1434, under the Infante’s encouragement ‘to gain . . . honour and profit,’ the squire Gil Eanes finally reached ‘the land beyond’ when he rounded the Cape of Bojador. . . and tcAccording to Zurara, they ‘saw a country very different from that former one – for that was sandy and untilled, and quite treeless, like a country where there was no water – while this other land they saw to be covered with palms and other green and beautiful trees.’ Eventually the Portuguese rendered geographical dissimilarities into customary and ultimately juridical distinctions, separating Moors from blackamoors. The quest ‘to know’ and the concomitant desire for profit encouraged the Portuguese penchant for specificity. In his quest to offer the ‘more perfect knowledge’, Zurara revised his earlier observations that Guinea included the ‘land of the Moors’. . . .

In 1441, twenty-six years after the conquest of Ceuta, the Portuguese expedition under Antao Goncalves landed near Cabo Blanco in present-day Mauritania. Following a brief skirmish ‘in the land of Guinea’ with a ‘naked man following a camel’, the Portuguese enslaved their first Moor. . . . By their actions, the Portuguese launched the transatlantic slave trade in whose wake the early modern African diaspora emerged and in which the ‘slave’ constituted the charter subject. Through the capture of the “Mooress’, but in particular by marking her as distinct from the Moors on the basis of juridical status and phenotype, the Portuguese introduced a taxonomy that distinguished Moors from blackamoors, infidels from pagans, and Africans from blacks, sovereign from sovereignless subjects, and free persons from slaves. Shortly thereafter, the Portuguese employed this human measure, formulated via a black woman’s body, so as to delineate who could be ‘legitimately’ enslaved.

Though the Portuguese discerned a difference between the Moors and the blackamoors, this initially did not preclude the enslavement of the former. Arriving in Goncalves’s wake, Nuno Tristao ‘brought with him an armed caravel’ intent on capturing ‘some of the people of the country.’ On learning of his compatriots’ deeds, the zealous Nuno Tristao insisted that ‘what is still better. . . [is] for us to carry many more; for . . . profit.’ According to Zurara, Tristao led a nocturnal raid against the Moors who Goncalves had previously sighted. In the ensuing raid, the Portuguese took an additional ten ‘prisoners’, including a noble named Adahu. . . .

In Sagres, Zurara’s concern shifted from the profit obtained through raiding to the captives’ spiritual salvation. Zurara insisted that ‘the greater benefit was theirs, for though their bodies were now brought into some subjection, that was a small matter in comparison of their souls, which would now possess true freedom for evermore.’ After recounting the intricacies of the captives’ partition, Zurara directed his attention to the noble Adahu. ‘As you know,’ Zurara stated, ‘every prisoner desireth to be free, which desire is all the stronger in a man of higher reason or nobility.’ ‘Seeing himself held in captivity,’ Adahu offered Goncalves ‘five or six Black Moors’ in return for his freedom and promised a similar ransom for two youths that were also held captive. Tempted by his desire to ‘serve the Infante his lord’ who was intent on know[ing] part of that land,’ Goncalves immediately committed himself to another expedition that included Adahu and the two youths. ‘For as the Moor told’ him, ‘the least they would give for them would be ten Moors.’ According to Zurara, ‘It was better to save ten souls than three – for though they were black, yet had they souls like the others, and all the more as these blacks were not of the lineage of the Moors but were Gentiles, and so the better to bring into the path of salvation.’ In addition to the quantity of souls, Adahu promised ‘the blacks could give. . . .news of the land further distant.’

Prompted by profit, souls and strategic curiosity, the Portuguese expedition under Goncalves landed near the Rio d’ Ouro (River of Gold) where they met two Moors who instructed them to wait. The Moors returned with an entourage numbering a hundred ‘male and female,’ thus revealing ‘that those youth were in great honour among them.’ Goncalves exchanged his two captives for ‘ten blacks, male and females, from various countries.’  . . .

The episode underscored Portuguese awareness of differences among Africans. Accordingly, it was the Moor, who, because of his superior status, valued freedom more than blacks. The Portuguese quickly equated status with sovereignty and the lack thereof with the legitimate enslavement of certain individuals. Though the Portuguese captured both Moors and the ‘black Mooress,’ they had already started distinguishing between sovereign ‘Moorish’ subjects and those ‘Moors,’ ‘Negros,’ and ‘black’ that they could legitimately enslave. Zurara observed that the ‘black Mooress,’ unlike the valiant yet vanquished ‘Moor,’ represented the ‘legitimately’ unfree. . . . As the Portuguese encountered more of Guinea’s inhabitants the terms ‘Black Moors’ ‘blacks,’ “Ethiops,’ ‘Guineas,’ and ‘Negroes,’ or the descriptive terms to which a religious signifier was appended such as ‘Moors. . . [who] were Gentiles’ and ‘pagans’ gradually constituted the rootless and sovereignless – and in many cases, simply ‘slaves’.

As the Portuguese perceived distinctions among the peoples they encountered and began acting in accordance with these perceptions, Infante Henrique sought to cultivate papal approval for his subjects’ deeds. By linking Portugal’s activities in Guinea with the conquest of Ceuta, the Infante stressed how spiritual imperatives motivated exploration along the Atlantic littoral. In his diplomatic entreaty, Infante Henrique minimized the commercial incentive and fashioned the ‘toils of that conquest’ into a ‘just war’ under the banner of a Christian Crusade. In his response a papal bull – Eugenius IV unwittingly underscored the extent of the Infante’s misrepresentation and the Church’s willingness to perpetuate this fiction. Romanus pontifex  (1433), the first in a series of papal bulls issued during the fifteenth century that regulated Christian expansion, sanctioned the Infante’s request and Portugal’s alleged mission in Guinea since  ‘we strive for those things that may destroy the errors and wickedness of the infidels and  . . . our beloved son and noble baron Henry . . . .purposeth to go in person, with his men at arms, to those lands, that are held by them and guide his army against them.’ For Pope Eugenius, the Infante’s alleged ‘war’ constituted a Christian counteroffensive, which if successful would undermine the ‘Turks’ military presence in the Mediterranean. . . . Though Pope Eugenius claimed that his ‘beloved son’ and ‘Governor of the Order of Christ’ intended to ‘make war under the banner of the said order against. . . Moors and other enemies of the faith,’ Henrique’s and his subjects’ motives did not resonate in the ‘aforesaid war.’ The territorial charter granted by Portugal’s regent prince, Infante Pedro to his brother Henrique, included exclusive jurisdiction over Guinea and thus underscores the Infante’s true interests and commercial acumen. Desiring legitimacy for his commercial imperatives and wanting to prevent other princes from encroaching on Portugal’s ‘conquests,’ Infante Henrique invoked the rhetoric of a just war so as to solicit papal patronage. In order to receive the charter from Portugal’s regent and his brother, Infante Pedro, Henrique did not need to mask his intentions in the trope of the Reconquista. Through tactical representation, Henrique acquired an exclusive character to mediate between Christians and Guinea’s inhabitants.

In soliciting papal approval, Henrique manifested the ways in which the early modern prince – a temporal authority with decidedly secular interests – continued to rely on Christian legitimization. Henrique, by his actions, acknowledged the Church’s imagined jurisdiction beyond Christendom’s borders and over the extra ecclesiam. . . .”

West Africa: Quest For Gold and God 1475-1578 by John W. Blake recalls,

“The main purpose of the Portuguese crown was always to exploit the Guinea trades to the highest royal advantage, but its methods varied, for different schemes were tried, according to the particular preference of the reigning king. . . . Nevertheless, through all the superficial fluctuations of economic policy, we may discern a constant effort to make profit by the creation of monopolies. . . . Private merchants, the subjects of soverigns who have no legal claim to Guinea, will equip ships to make the traffic in spite of papal prohibitions, Portuguese protests and threats, and the lurking dangers of the Ocean. . . .

The events of the war with Castile had shown that, if the Guinea monopoly was to be upheld, steps must be taken to protect it. Moreover, there were signs of unwelcome activity in the ports of Flanders and England, and indications that Florentine, Genoese, English and Flemish merchants wanted to share in the gold trade. These reasons, combined with vague fears of what the future might have in store, drove the Portuguese, immediately after the return of Columbus from his first voyage of discovery to the west, to seek a confirmation of their monopoly. Their efforts were rewarded in 1493-4 by papal bulls and the Treaty of Tordesillas. . . .

The two powers ceased, after 1494, to compete in West Africa. Nevertheless, a bilateral treaty was insufficient to deter the governments of France and England from encouraging their mariners to venture in the Guinea Traffic. . . .

Fifty years of quiet consolidation in Guinea came to an abrupt end in 1530. . . . Portuguese merchants, thus left alone, seized the opportunity to build up a profitable trade, and Portuguese missionaries undertook the evangelization of many of the negro tribes. . . .

Until 1553, the part played by Englishmen in West Africa was negligible.

LEGAL ISSUES EFFECTING BALANTA AS A RESULT OF CONTACT WITH THE ENGLISH

DEVELOPMENT OF LEGAL ISSUES DURING THE BALANTA MIGRATION PERIOD

Excerpts from Balanta B’urassa, My Sons: Those Who Resist Remain Volumes 2-3

The ORIGIN OF LEGAL ISSUES CONCERNING BALANTA PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES has already been documented. When people violated our ancestor’s Great Belief, set up kings and governments, imposed authority, and forced them to pay taxes, our ancestors either rebelled or migrated.

Balanta B’urassa, My Sons: Those Who Resist Remain Volume 2 documents how the descendants of Baba Amuntu Abansundu (human beings who are black) who had violated the Great Belief, foreign descendants of Baba Amuntu Abamhlope (human beings who are white), and their mixed breed mulatto offspring ALL engaged in enslaving Anu peoples that did not migrate with our ancestors and instead, chose to stay behind in Ta-Meri and Ta-Nihisi (Lower and Upper Egypt). The persecution and enslavement intensified with the rise of Islam and their jihads (conquests) starting in 641 AD and spread across Northern and Western Africa. Our Balanta ancestors avoided war, capture and enslavement by migrating west to escape the invasion from the east and keeping to the southern Sahel corridor to avoid the invasion from the north.

The Destruction of Black Civilization, p. 97 by Chancellor Williams

In this way Balanta maintained their freedom for over 4,300 years and did not violate their Great Belief against successive persecutions from the Mesinu (followers of Horus at Edfu), Themehu (Libyans), the Shashu and Habiru (Hyksos), Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Christians, Moslems, Magumi of Duguwa (Kanem) and Tumagera, Ma-Ba-U (Hausa), Soninke of Wagadu (Ghana), Tuareg (Berbers), Almoravids in Wagadu (Ghana), Keita Clan (Mali), the Sunni Dynasty (Songhay), the Askia Dynasty (Songhay), the Moors, Fulbe (Fulani coming from the west), and lastly, by the twelfth century, the Manding of the Kaabu Kingdom. It was the Christian jihad, started in 1424, which would prove to be the undoing for the Balanta that were captured and taken to the Americas.

Balanta Migration

All throughout their migrations, the Balanta suffered persecution from people that wanted to impose their foreign religious beliefs and impose taxes. This is illustrated, for example, in the relationship of the Balanta people and the Soninke people and the Empires of Wagadu (Ghana), Mali, and Songhay. In Exiled Egyptian: The Heart of Africa, Moustafa Gadalla writes,

Ginne

Jenne is the Arabic pronunciation of Ginne/Guinea . . . . which is an ancient Egyptian term meaning ancestor spirit.

The mound, which represents the first site of Ginne (Jenne) has demonstrated the existence of a town of some 80 acres, flourishing from about the mid-8th century to about 1100, and reached its greatest size late in about 850 CE. Genne was founded by Soninke merchants and served as a trading post between the traders from the western and central Soudan and those from Guinea and was directly linked to the important trading city of Timbuktu, located 250 miles (400 km) downstream on the Niger River.

Ancient Ginne (Jenne) thrived until at least 1000 CE. It was a large, heterogenous community of no fewer than 10,000 souls that included specialists providing services to an integrated hinterland. Then, a slow decline in occupation and early abandonment of hinterland villages anticipated final desertion of Ginne (Jenne) about 1400. This was all related to Islamic jihads, by the Keita clan of ancient Mali, and the later expansionist Islamic rulers of Songhai. . . .

The people of Ginne had the same exact founding story as that of Wagadu (ancient Ghana), for both were clearly founded by the Soninke/Sa-u.”

Whenever the Soninke moved west along the Nile river, they found indigenous people already living there. Like the Gow and Do people, our Balanta ancestors also migrated along the river prior to the Soninke and comprised the “integrated hinterland” Gadalla refers to. Why isn’t this known?

Consider what Philip Curtin writes in Chapter 3, Africa North of the Forest in the Early Islamic Age, in African History: From Earliest Times to Independence:

“No simple hypothesis can account for all these cultural patterns [in the Sahel] . . . and no true explanation is likely to be simple. The horizon of written and oral history combined hardly goes back more than a thousand years anywhere along the Sahel, except in the Nile Valley. Add another 3,000 years for the Nile Valley itself and we still cover only a tiny fraction of human experience. Within the time period we know about, however, we have evidence of dramatic changes over a few centuries. . . . .

One striking difference between African and Western history is that Western history is almost always set within the framework of the state. Even during the disturbances after the fall of Rome, the state remained the aspiration, whatever the reality. Partly for this reason, when Europeans first began to consider African history, they took the existence of states as a mark of political achievement – the bigger the state, the bigger the achievement. Recent authorities, however, suggest that this view is far from accurate. At some levels of technology, state administration may only draw off part of the social product for officials and courtiers who contributed little or nothing to create it in the first place. Many Africans apparently reached this conclusion: states and stateless societies have existed side by side over nearly two millennia, without the stateless peoples feeling a need to copy the institutions of their more organized neighbors. Whether statelessness should have been preferable or not, it was clearly preferred.

This fact has left some difficult gaps for historians of Africa. Stateless societies leave few records. Their political operations are far too subtle and complex to be described accurately by early travelers from abroad, whether Arab or European. Oral traditions find no ‘great men’ to celebrate. Genealogies are crucial to the operations of these societies, but people tend to remember everybody’s genealogy for two to five generations rather than that of the ruling family for thirty. As a result, our only information on the way stateless societies changed is that gathered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet as many as a quarter of all the people in West Africa belonged to stateless societies at the beginning of the colonial period. Historians of earlier periods simply have to leave them out. The only remedy is to look at statelessness in the recent past for hints as to what it might have been like earlier.

Thus, we can understand something about our Balanta ancestors by studying the states with whom they lived adjacent and whom they rejected or resisted becoming a part of in order to maintain their own racial identity, dignity and religion.

Wagadu Commonwealth (Ghana)

“Right after the end of Egypto-Nubian Antiquity,” writes Diop,

“the Empire of Ghana soared like a meteor from the mouth of the Niger to the Senegal River, circa the third century A.D. Viewed in this perspective, African history proceeded without interruption. The first Nubian dynasties were prolonged by the Egyptian dynasties until the occupation of Egypt by the Indo-Europeans, starting in the fifth century B.C. Nubia remained the sole source of culture and civilization until about the sixth century A.D., and then Ghana seized the torch from the sixth century until 1240, when its capital was destroyed by Sundiata Keita. This heralded the launching of the Mandingo Empire (capital: Mali). . . . Next came the Empire of Gao, the Empire of Yatenga (or Mossi), the kingdoms of Djoloff and Cayor (in Senegal), destroyed by Faidherbe under Napoleon III. In listing this chronology, we have simply wanted to show that there was no interruption in African history. It is evident that, if starting from Nubia and Egypt, we had followed a continental geographical direction, such as Nubia- Gulf of Benin, Nubia-Congo, Nubia-Mozambique, the course of African history would still have appeared to be uninterrupted. This is the perspective in which the African past should be viewed. So long as it is avoided, the most learned speculations will be headed for lamentable failure, for there are no fruitful speculations outside of reality.”

Gadalla informs us:

“The new settlers, led by the Soninke, in this most westerly location, formed a confederation that covered much of today’s Mali, parts of Senegal and Mauritania. The Soninke called their new homeland, Wagadu. It is commonly known as the Ghana Kingdom. . . .

Al-Fazari wrote in the 9th century, that Wagadu was known in Morocco as The Land of Gold, suggesting that both Ghana and its trade links with North Africa were well established by the time of his writing. Wagadu was known to pay for trade items, such as salt and luxury items, with gold.

The Soninke also sold food products to desert nomads. Trade routes branched out into a network of intercontinental trade. According to Soninke traditions passed down by word of mouth from one generation to the next, the beginning of their confederation dates back to abut 700 CE. . . .

The Soninke were not the only people who lived in ancient Ghana, but they occupied controlling positions in the political, economic, and other aspects of life. . . . Oral traditions state that the Soninke came from the east, along the Sahel. Oral traditions stress that the locals were ruled by ‘white people’ i.e. light color skin or dark skin with fine features, before Islam arrived.

In 1067-8 CE, the Cordoban geographer al-Bakri put together a fairly comprehensive account of Wagadu, its cities and its trade activities. Al-Bakri remarked that properly Ghana is the title of the king. The name may thus derive from the Malinke word gana or kana meaning chief. The name al-Bakri gives for the king reigning in his day is Tunka Manin, and tunka/timka/dinga means chief in Soninke. . . . “

Soninke oral traditions tell of a time when all Soninke lived together in a place they remember as ‘Wagadu’, but the displeasure of the gods stopped the rain for seven full years. ‘Wagadu’ turned to desert, and the people had to flee to the south.

However, it is important to remember that the Soninke in Wagadu were not friends with Balanta. John Jackson reminds us in Introduction to African Civilizations,

“The Soninke rulers built up an empire by subduing neighboring tribes. This was comparatively easy, since the Ghanaians had fine weapons and tools of iron, and their neighbors did not. Besides iron, Ghana possessed another source of wealth that made it a power to be reckoned with, namely a seemingly inexhaustible supply of gold. . . .

Gadalla continues:

“The Empire of Ghana started out as a kingdom, then annexed other kingdoms, and, like many other kingdoms of the past, evolved into an empire. . . . The Soninkes spoke the Mande language, and in that tongue, Ghana meant ‘warrior king’, and was adopted as one of the titles of the King of Wagadu. Another title of the king was Kaya Magha (‘king of gold’), in allusion to the vast gold treasures of the country. As the fame of the Soninke warrior kings, or Ghanas, spread over North Africa, the people there referred to both the king and the nation over which he ruled as ‘Ghana’. Early Islamic merchants, most of them from Syria, followed the soldiers and administrators into northern Africa. Later, as stability was assured and wealth increased, traders were drawn to the regions of sub-Sahara Africa. Interior trade routes were utilized, and the camel, which had been in general use in North Africa since before the 3rd century, provided the means for traversing the desert. . . . By the 10th century, a number of major trans-Saharan routes had been developed.

Exiled Egyptians: The Heart of Africa by Moustafa Gadalla, p.173

The Arab conquest of North Africa, by the early 8th century CE, concluded with lightning success. In a matter of months, a strip of territory, 100-200 miles deep, was under Arab control – all the way from the borders of Egypt to the Atlantic coast.

The North African and Arabian slave trade was vigorous, and the demand for slaves was high. Islamic law forbade the enslavement of free Moslems but tolerated the continued enslavement of peoples who converted after their capture. In the years of Islamic conquest, the pastoral Berber people had provided the bulk of these slaves. The larger part of the population north of the Atlas Mountains became converts to Islam and therefore could not legally be enslaved.

Starting in the 10th century CE, in order to keep the supply up to the demand, the Arab traders conspired with the nomad Berbers to organize raids, under the guise of Islamic jihads, into neighboring provinces where traditional African religions were practiced. These raids, more than anything, caused many people to declare conversion to Islam prior to being captured, to avoid the horrible raids of killing, kidnapping, enslaving and family break-ups. . . .

Because traditional ancient Egyptian and African religions don’t have a doctrine and are not mobilized in a cult-type camp with rules and regulations, they accept everyone’s right to believe in any way they wish. The Arabs/Moslems enjoyed this right when they settled among the peaceful people. However, the native people became a victim of their own charity.

In order to penetrate the society, Moslem clerics preached ‘social injustice’, a slogan intended to start a class warfare. . . . The preachers of ‘social injustice’ were behind the largest human enslavement in the history of mankind.

Another tactic was for the Moslem/Arab traders to help one side or the other in local disputes, i.e. to get a foothold, and then betray. Divide and conquer.

Though many Moslems lived in Wagadu (ancient Ghana), worked there, and even served the King, the tolerant people treated them fairly and in a friendly way. By 1050, a powerful new force swept through West Africa. A Moslem preacher named Ibn Yacin founded his Almoravid sect, a fanatic group of Moslems. The Almoravids, however, did not return the Ghanaian’s religious freedom in kind.

One of the Almoravids’ targets was Wagadu, whose Kings had repeatedly refused to convert to Islam.

Jihad

The Islamic doctrine calls on Moslems to spread Islam, even by force if necessary. As a result, any Moslem with a superior arm can force his religion by killing others. The unarmed people have no choice but to convert to Islam or die. This self-righteous Moslem may choose instead to enslave any and all members of a non-Moslem family. Spreading Islam by ALL means is not an option, but a duty required by the Islamic doctrine.

There were also sanctions for pursuing the jihad, or holy war, against those who had not been converted. Those who die in battle against non-Moslems, would die in a holy cause.

Each of these Islamic jihads had the same process. Just like any terror campaign, they required financing and hiring of mercenaries. All these terror campaigns started at the beginning point of Islam, i.e. Mecca. The story is the same all along the 2000-mile (3200 km) Sahel. For about 1000 years – a Moslem cleric, or leader, living in Africa, goes to Mecca, gets financial support, and is assigned as a ‘Moslem deputy caliph’ in his African region. He returns to declare Islamic jihad and supplies his masters with more slaves.

It always started with the usual intimidation, a (Moslem) gang will deliver a message to the leader of the peaceful non-Moslem group, to embrace Islam. Once people refuse and/or ignore this unsolicited intimidation, then as shamelessly stated in the Tarikh es Soudan (Soudan Chronicles), the Gangsters declared that it is:

‘Their duty is to fight them and straightaway, the Moslem fighters launched war against them, killing a number of their men, devastating their fields, plundering their habitations, and taking their children into captivity. All of the men and women who were taken away as captives were made the object of divine benediction [converted to Islam].’

Almoravids in Wagadu

In the deserts north of the Wagadu (Ghana) Commonwealth, a Berber group of gangsters, called the Almoravids, started attacking peaceful settlements and villages.

The traditional story of the beginnings of the Almoravids is that Yahia ibn Ibrahim, made a pilgrimage to Mecca. On his return journey, he met Ibn Yacin, whom he persuaded to accompany him to Audaghost, where they preached the practice of Islam. The preaching of Ibn Yacin, however, irritated the people of the area. After the death of Yahia, his protector, Ibn Yacin was forced to retire with his followers to an island in the Senegal River.

Since he couldn’t convince the people to convert to Islam by choice, Yacin followed the Islamic doctrine, to force it by the sword. He proclaimed a jihad, and in 1054 CE, Audaghost fell to the Almoravids. Over a period of five years, between 1054 and 1059, the Almoravid terrorists captured the Moroccan city of Sijilmasa, a hub in the trans-Saharan trade route, and from there commanded ceaseless attacks against the main center of Wagadu (ancient Ghana).

After Ibn Yacin’s death in 1057, a follower nabbed Abu Bakr assumed leadership of the Almoravid terrorist forces in the southern Sahara. In 1062, he began attacking Wagadu. By 1067, the Almoravid terrorists were hammering at the gates of Koumbi, believed to be the main city in Wagadu.

Under King Bassi and his successor, King Tunka Manin, Wagadu resisted heroically for almost a decade. But in 1076 or 1077, the Almoravids were able to destroy the cities and slew many of the citizens and seized their property.

On the death of Abu Bakr in 1087, Almoravid power south of the Sahara simply fell apart. The Almoravids’ stay in Wagadu had been relatively short, but it proved disruptive.

Keita Clan

While the Soninke lived just south of the Sahara Desert, in the Wagadu Confederation, the Malinke occupied mostly the middle and southern parts of the savannah, near the forest belt. There was peaceful coexistence between both the Soninke and the Malinke (Mandinka). Actually, they both belong to the Mande people.

The Keita Clan was one of many groups near the forest belt. They were originally centered in Kangaba, on the Niger River, which was about 250 miles south of Koumbi.

Exiled Egyptians: The Heart of Africa by Moustafa Gadalla, p.173

In 1230, Sundiata was declared the chief of Kangaba. . .

Sundiata Kangaba began to expand his authority by force, in the name of Islam. His forces began the ugly slave raiding and trade, with their Moslem masters. So, Sundiata became the first main sub-Sahara supplier of slaves.

In order for the aggressive Keita gangsters to justify attacking their northern neighbors, they came up with the story that they were threatened by the Soninke. The Almoravid Berbers who couldn’t destroy the Soninke, got Sundiata to attack them.

In 1235, at the battle of Kirina, Sundiata defeated the Soninke army. Five years later, all of Wagadu was incorporated into his domains, destroying a peaceful civilization. Sundiata shifted his place of residence from Jeriba in Kangaba to a new city, Niani, further down the Niger.

The term Mali, meaning where the king lives, came to be applied to the new Mandingo State created by Sundiata’s Keita Clan.”

Mali

Gadalla continues:

“After Sundiata, the rulers of the Islamic empire assumed the title of Mansa, which means emperor or sultan.

Since Sundiata was not in very good health, his immediate successor-son, Uli (c. 1255-1270), began the tradition among the ruling Keita Clan of following the wishes of their Moslem masters, by making a haj, a pilgrimage to the Moslem capital at Mecca, on the Arabian Peninsula. He came back infused with Mecca’s authority to attack his neighbors, in yet more Islamic jihads. Immediately thereafter, the Keita Clan of Kangaba conquered territories, stretching from mid-Senegal to the border of Niger.

The oral history of the Malinke from the 1200s onward stresses the connection of the Malinke to Islam so as to appease their Moslem masters. An outlandish link of Sundiata’s ancestor with Arabia is believed to be an example of this ‘connection.’

The Keita Clan emerged as a dominant power in sub-Sahara Africa, and controlled the trans-Saharan trades from about 1200 to 1500CE. In the days of the Keita Islamic rule, a major trading rout across the Sahara to Tunis and to Cairo, was utilized often, because Moslem rulers needed slaves that the Keita Clan was obliged to provide. The Keita Clan betrayed their own kind, to make riches. Gradually the northeast trade route became the main one.

The new illegitimate dictatorial Islamic rule eliminated the matrilineal succession system. As a consequence, in the thirty years following the death of Sundiata, the Keita Islamic rule had five rulers.

There were three main periods of bloody disorder in the Keita’s rule, created by disputed claims to the throne. The first showed Sundiata succeeded by three sons, Uli, Wali, and Khalifa. The last son, Khalifa, was overthrown in a bloody coup by the adherents of Abu Bakr, considered to be the rightful heir, as the son of one of Sundiata’s daughters. Abu Bakr then took power.

Sakura, a freed slave of the royal family, managed to secure control of the army, and overthrew Abu Bakr’s reign in another bloody coup. Sakura was also overthrown in yet another bloody coup.

The third emperor of the 14th century, a descendant of a brother of Sundiata, was (Kankan) Mousa, who went to the Islamic-besieged Cairo and Mecca, in 1324, where he was infused with authority to attack more neighbors and abduct more slaves, in the name of Islamic jihads.

On his return from Mecca, he conquered Gao and took two of its princes as hostages, along with other children of neighboring communities. These children acted as shields, preventing the Gao people from attacking Mousa’s court.

After Mansa Mousa’s death, probably in 1337, a brief struggle for power ensued before Sulayman, Mousa’s brother, came to the throne in 1341. After his death in 1360, various factions of the Keita Clan began to compete with each other for power, and their hold on power disintegrated.

In short, the empire was maintained by the exercise of dominion of a quasi-Islamic ruling class, by force (al-Umari writes of an army of 100,000, with 10,00 cavalry), for their own profit. As far as the Mande/Malinke subjects were concerned, they have never accepted this illegitimate exercise of power, and were never converted to Islam by their Moslem overlords. They maintained their indigenous traditions.”

Neither were the Balanta ancestors accepting of the illegitimate power, nor did they convert to Islam. Here then, is the ACTUAL point of connection between our most ancient Balanta ancestors, the Anu living in Ta-Nihisi (Nubia, Sudan) and the Balanta living today in Guinea Bissau. Walter Hawthorne writes in Strategies of the Decentralized, in the book Fighting The Slave Trade: West African Strategies by Sylviane A. Diouf:

“The Balanta claim that the region between the Rios Mansoa and Geba – an area they call Nhacra, which is part of the broader region of Oio – is their homeland. The Balanta say that they migrated there ‘in times long past’ from somewhere in the east. In addition, Balanta migration myths have two other common threads: the Balanta left the east because of conflicts with either state-based Mandinka or Fula, and these conflicts resulted from a Balanta propensity for stealing from their more prosperous neighbors or desire to avoid enslavement. For example, elder Estanislau Correia Landim told me, ‘The origin of the Balanta was in Mali. For reasons involving Balanta thefts, Malianos revolted against the Balanta. For this reason, Balanta left there. That is, some Balanta were stealing some things. When a thief was discovered, he resolved to kill the person who had discovered him. For this reason, Malianos chased after the Balanta. . . . When the Balanta left Mali, they went to Nhacra and then to Mansoa.”

After Mansa Musa

John Jackson writes,

“Under [Mansa] Musa I, the Mali Empire embraced an area just about equal to that of western Europe. . . . [T]he lifeblood of the empire was trade; and taxes were the paramount source of income for the government. . . . foreign merchants who traded in Mali marveled at the prosperity of the region and noticed that even the common people were not oppressed by poverty. . . .

When Musa I died in 1332, he was succeeded by his son Maghan. Mansa Maghan was neither as wise nor able as his father, and during this reign Mali went into a decline. First, the city of Timbuktu was lost to enemy forces. . . . Secondly, Mansa Maghan was not alert enough to prevent the escape of the two Songhay princes whom his father had been holding as hostages. The escaped princes returned to Gao, where they established a new Songhay dynasty. Maghan died after a four-year reign, and was succeeded by his uncle, Sulayman – a brother of Mans Musa I. Mansa Sulayman was a sovereign of high competence, and he ably presided over the destinies of Mali until his death in 1359.

The great age of Mali was now at an end; for the later rulers were undistinguished men, under whom the empire disintegrated. About the year 1475, the Songhay Empire, with its capital at Gao, rose to supremacy in the west Sudan, as Mali continued to decline. In 1481 Portuguese sailors landed on the Atlantic coast of Mali. The Mali government attempted to hire these Portuguese as mercenaries to fight the rising power of Songhay, but the proposed alliance was never effected. Mali lingered on for nearly two centuries, but its day of greatness had passed into history, and if finally expired from innocuous desuetude. . . .

Songhay

We have told of the escape of the Songhay princes, Ali Kolon and Sulayman Nar, from their captivity in Mali. Ali Kolon, as legitimate heir to the Songhay throne, followed the last ruler of the Dia dynasty, and established a new line of monarchs called the ‘Sunni’, which means ‘replacement’. During the greater part of the fourteenth century and first half of the fifteenth century, the Sunni dynasty of Songhay gradually extended its sway of the territory of the declining empire of Mali. When in the year 1464, Sunni Ali the Great succeeded to the Songhay throne, an age of great achievements began. The new age was heralded by the capture of Timbuktu, a center of both commerce and culture. It was a place where the river people and the nomads of the desert met for trading purposes; and it was also the seat of the celebrated University of Sankore, which attracted scholars and students from many near and distant lands.

Another great metropolis coveted by Songhay rulers was Jenne, a city established in the thirteenth century by the Soninkes of Ghana. This city was situated in the backwaters of the Benue River (a tributary of the Niger), about three hundred miles southwest of Timbuktu. The Mali had made ninety-nine attempts to capture Jenne during the days of their supremacy in the western Sudan, and finally gave up. But Sunni Ali of Songhay was able to add that city to his expanding domains. After bringing Timbuktu into the fold, he decided that Jenne should be next on his agenda of conquest.  The capitulation of Jenne was no pushover, for the siege of the city lasted for seven years, seven months and seven days. . . .

Sunni Ali the Great incorporated much of the territory of the old Mali Empire into his own realm, and before his death in 1492 he had become one of the most famous rulers of his day. In North Africa he was regarded as the greatest sovereign south of the Sahara, and in the annals of Europe we find him mentioned as Sunni Heli, King of Timbuktu, whose empire extended to the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. The son of Sunni Ali inherited the throne and, though nominally a Moslem, he was, like his late father a pagan at heart. Some of his Moslem subjects attempted to convert him to what they regarded as the true faith, but the new sovereign rejected these overtures, taking the position that his personal religious convictions were none of the business of his subjects. The Moslem group staged a revolution, dethroned the incumbent ruler, and elevated Askia Mohammed I, a devout Moslem, to the supreme leadership of the Songhay Empire.

The first sovereign of the Askia dynasty enjoyed much popularity among his Moslem subjects. He relished the society of lawyers, doctors, and students of the Islamic persuasion. . . . Like every good Moslem, he was eager to make the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina; and, in the year 1495, he proceeded to do so, accompanied by an army of 1,000 infantry and a cavalry detachment of 500 horsemen. Some 300,000 pieces of gold were allotted for the financing of this trip. . . . While in Egypt, Askia Mohammed was honored in a special ceremony by the Caliph of Cairo, who appointed him as his personal representative in the Songhay Empire.

Since many neighboring countries were inhabited by pagans, Askia Mohammed considered it his duty as a Moslem potentate to launch a series of jihads (holy wars), in order to bring these infidels into the fold. For example, he annexed the territory of the Mossi, on his southern border, and seized a large number of Mossi children, whom he reared as Moslems and trained for service in his army. In or near the year 1513, the Askia led the armed forces of Songhay into the Hausa States, a complex of kingdoms between Lake Chad and the Niger River. In time all the Hausa States except Kano capitulated. After a siege of one year, the king of Kano sued for peace. . . . After consolidating his Hausa conquests, the Askia subdued the nomad Tuaregs of Air, and settled a Songhay colony in that region. The military record of the Askia was not crowned with complete success, for one kingdom proved itself invincible, Kebbi, a small kingdom, wedged between the Hausa states and the Niger River, was ruled by King Kanta. This ruler, protected by the strong walls of his capital city, was able to maintain the independence of his nation.

Askia Mohammed must be credited with the creation of a strongly centralized government in the Songhay Empire . . . . The most important ministerial posts were the Chief Tax Collector . . . . In the principal cities of West Africa, such as Gao, Jenne, and Timbuktu, universities and other educational institutions were established, and their level of scholarship was of a high caliber. In the schools, colleges, and universities of the Songhay Empire, courses were given in astronomy, mathematics, ethnography, medicine, hygiene, philosophy, logic, prosody, diction, elocution, rhetoric, and music. . . .

When Askia Mohammed ended his career on earth on March 2, 1538, at the age of ninety-seven, he was followed on the throne by his sons, and under their misrule the empire began to fall apart. Daoud, the last son of Askia Mohammed to rule the empire, maintained a stable government from 1549 to 1582. But the great days of Songhay power were now fast approaching an end. In 1585 the salt mines of Taghaza passed into the hands of the sultan of Morocco. This was a disaster to the Songhay Empire, and they were too disorganized to prevent it. Five years later Songhay was invaded by a Moorish army led by Judar Pasha, a Spaniard, captured by the Moors in infancy, and reared in the precincts of the royal palace. This army numbered only five thousand men, but about half of them were armed with firearms imported from England. The superior numbers of the Songhay army were no match for the gunpowder of the Moors. In 1591, both Gao and Timbuktu fell to the invaders from the north. The Moorish forces settled down as an army of occupation and quartered themselves in the Songhay cities for another century and a half. This period completed the decline and fall of the Songhay Empire. ‘From that moment on’, we hear from a contemporary Sudanese scholar, ‘everything changed. Danger took the place of security; poverty of wealth. Peace gave way to distress, disasters and violence.’ At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Golden Age of the western Sudan had reached its nadir.

After the passing of the Songhay Empire, West Sudanic culture moved eastward to the Central Sudan, to Kanem-Bornu and the Hausa States; but none of these nations ever rose to the levels attained by Ghana, Mali, and Songhay in their Golden Age. . . .

The penetration of Islam into the Medieval Sudan was not an unmixed blessing. A judicial appraisal of this question is given in a recent authoritative work dealing with West African history, as follows:

‘The appearance of Islam in the Western Sudan was important for more than religious reasons. It opened many West African states to the influence of Muslims from North Africa and Egypt, and from still further afield, who introduced the arts of writing and scholarship. It insured good trading relations between the Western Sudan and the lands beyond the Sahara, so that contact between Kanem-Bornu and Egypt, Tunisia and Tripoli became valuable and constant. These were clear gains. On the other side it also opened the way for many bitter conflicts between those who accepted Islam and those who did not. Later history has much to say of these religious conflicts. . . .[A History of West Africa to the Nineteenth Century, pp. 84-86, by Basil Davidson].

According to Boubacar Barry in Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade,

“From the twelfth century onward, after the fall of Ghana, the entire Senegambian zone fell increasingly into the direct orbit of the Mali Empirte, which exerted a decisive influence until the fifteenth century and even beyond. It was Mali’s impact that catalyzed the transformation of the regions’ kinship-based societies into states. . . . .At the height of its power, Mali undertook nothing less than a westward colonizing mission, thrusting past the Futa Jallon plateau, then following the river Gambia and the upper valleys of the Casamance, the Rio Cacheu, and the Rio Geba. In the process, the Manding founded the Kaabu Kingdom in the south, along with the principalities of Noomi, Badibu, Niani, Wuli and Kantora, on both banks of the Gambia River. They did this by displacing or absorbing indigenous populations from the Bajar group, together with Jola, Beafada, Papel, Balanta, Bainuk, Baba, Nalu, Landuma, and others, whose descendants today live in the Southern Rivers area between Gambia and Sierra Leone.

In this area without large-scale political units, the level of the people’s adaptation to their natural environment was remarkably high. These peasant societies were egalitarian in outlook. The village was their basic unit, but the collective consciousness was reinforced by the importance of religion. Socialization worked through a system of initiation. . . . it created potent social bonds as well as precious links between humans and nature.

The outstanding feature of life here, however, was undoubtedly the creation of a rice-centered civilization by these populations. For they perfected rice farming techniques on flood plains, using the kayando, a long spade marvelously effective for working wet soils.

The scarcity of documents makes it hard to outline the dynamics of political, social and economic life in Senegambia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. At that time the region was coming into direct contact with Europe by way of the Atlantic. Senegambian societies shared a common civilization in which political and social systems were closely knit, and both were based on an autonomous subsistence economy.

Politically, societies here were initially organized along kinship lines. Later they shifted to a monarchical system based on violence and inequality. The caste system which supported the hierarchical ordering of social life served to rationalize this inequality. . . .

Senegambia had two types of societies. The first, egalitarian in outlook, derived political power from lineage. The second, hierarchical in outlook, imposed monarchical power upon the lineage-based system. . . .

The monarchical system was the logical outcome of the hierarchical ordering of Senegambian societies that began with the rule of the laman or the kafu. Senegambian societies were quintessentially non-egalitarian. The epitome of inequality was the caste system, on which rode a system of subsidiary social divisions, or orders. . . . In all cases, the caste system based on a division of labor, was perpetuated through a biological and racial ideology that imposed hereditary rules and endogamous practices. . . . The Soninke called free men hooro; slaves komo. The Manding called them fooro and joon. The Peul and the Tukulor called free men rimbe and slaves maccube. . . .

Slavery was an ancient institution in the domestic economy of Senegambia, with the exception of the egalitarian Southern Rivers societies. The practice legitimized the division between free persons and slaves. But slavery does not seem to have played a key role in the mode of production, which remained tributary even within the monarchical context. Still, for centuries, slaves were sent in small numbers to the northern markets for sale. Slaves were used as currency in arms deals. During the time of the trans-Saharan trade, they were also used to buy salt, horses and luxury goods – the aristocratic status symbols of the day. Aristocrats sold some slaves, obtained through inter-state warfare, in the inter-regional trading system. Others were turned into domestic slaves, kept to work on family farms or to produce handicraft goods. House slaves were more or less integrated into their masters’ families after one, two, or three generations. There is little evidence for the argument that slavery was the dominant mode of production in Senegambian societies during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.”

Concerning our Balanta ancestors at this time and a little later, Walter Rodney writes,

“The Balantas had quantities of prime yams…. The best farmers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries- the Balantas, the Banhuns, and the Djolas- all had cattle and goats …. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Andre Dornelas pointed out that Balanta territory was free from heavy vegetation. It was these very Balantas who reared the most livestock in the area, and it was they who provided supplies of foodstuffs for their neighbors….That peoples who were far superior producers of food than the Mande and Fula are consistently dubbed ‘Primitives’ is due solely to the contention that they did not erect a superstructure of states. . . .

It is only the Balantas who can be cited as lacking the institution of kingship. At any rate there seemed to have been little or no differentiation within Balanta society on the basis of who held property, authority and coercive power. Some sources affirmed that the Balantas had no kings, while an early sixteenth-century statement that the Balanta ‘kings’ were no different from their subjects must be taken as referring simply to the heads of the village and family settlements. . . .as in the case of the Balantas, the family is the sole effective social and political unit. . . .

Among the Balantas, who are to be classed as a ‘stateless society’, the system of land tenure is different. The Balantas are all small landowners, working their lands on the principle of voluntary reciprocal labor. Thus, when the Balantas clear new areas of swamp for rice cultivation, each one of the working force benefits by receiving a portion of the land reclaimed. Not so with the Papels, however, for they have a well-developed hierarchy of nobles, chiefs and kings who own the land. In their case, land development can only be achieved through the initiative of a rich individual, who can hire the necessary labor; and, since the workers have no stake in the final product, it is not surprising that they have no incentive to undertake the strenuous and demanding job of clearing the swamps. These two contrasting examples indicate that the existence of a superstructure of states was associated with the presence of a land-owning nobility. As with the ownership of the land, so with the distribution of the products – there was manifest inequality.”

THUS, BALANTA MANAGED TO PRESERVE THEIR EGALITARIAN CULTURE BASED ON NATURAL LAW AGAINST SUCCESSIVE ATTEMPTS BY STATE SOCIETIES TO IMPOSE EARLY FORMS OF STATUTORY LAW BASED ON VIOLATIONS OF THE GREAT BELIEF AND NATURAL LAW.

LEGAL ISSUES EFFECTING BALANTA AS A RESULT OF CONTACT WITH EUROPEAN CHRISTIANS

ORIGIN OF LEGAL ISSUES CONCERNING BALANTA PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES

Excerpts from Balanta B’urassa, My Sons: Those Who Resist Remain Volumes 1

All humans are born equal, with complete freedom of choice and action. When the ancient Balanta ancestors grew in number and began to live in the same place with other people, a few restrictions were accepted by common consent, over time. These restrictions were based on their Great Belief and they are few in number and very easy to understand. They are:

1. You must not injure or kill anyone.

2. You must not steal or damage things owned by someone else.

3. You must be honest in your dealings and not swindle anyone.

These are the only limitations on every human being that is born. Today, these restrictions are called “Natural Law.”

This ancient time in our ancestor’s history, going back to the emergence of the haplogroup E-V38 42,000 years ago, has been described by historian John Henrik Clarke:

“This was one of the greatest ages of spirituality known in the history of the world. It was probably one of the highest moral ages known to man. And man did not use the word ‘god’ at all. I am not talking about a godless age, I am talking about an age when man accepted a spiritual force of the universe so all-conclusive that it included everything, and man did not say, ‘Only man has a soul’, he said, ‘all living things has a soul, including the cockroach.’ And he wouldn’t step on a cockroach because the cockroach has a soul. And he wouldn’t cut down a tree without having a ceremony because a tree has life and a tree has a soul.  Western man began the stupid concept that only human beings has soul. Western man, in his soulless-ness, began the concept that only certain people with certain faces with certain color, has soul.

Now, three or four thousand years before (the white man) wore a shoe or lived in a house that had a window, …. You hadn’t come in contact with him at all …. When you had your own spirituality in tact … you, meaning African people, had created a spirituality that said every living thing has a soul…. And this form of spirituality included everything, and included a law, the law of opposites, which to simplify it, was the law of complementarity, that you complimented everything. That if you had a female, you had to have a male, or vice versa…. What I am saying is that (our ancestors) laid the basis for basic humanity and the basic laws of the universe.”

Credo Mutwa, the the last living sangoma, or traditional Bantu healer, to undergo the thwasa (sangoma training and initiation), and who wrote a book called Indaba, My Children also describes this period in our ancient history:

“The Ba-Ntu, or the Ba-Tu, were the founders of our culture and our religion. And being a solid, uniform nation they were at peace for thousands of years. They were not ruled by chiefs, but by a High Council of the Mothers of the People – that is, all the Witches and Sybils over the age of forty. At this time the Strange Ones, the Phoenicians, or Ma-Iti, who came some five to six hundred BC, and the slave-raiding Arabs were things of the distant future.

The Ba-Tu were at peace among themselves and because a High Curse was laid upon any person who stole as much as a single grain of corn from his neighbor, crime was totally unknown. There were warriors-elect who stationed themselves along trading routes at regular intervals, to protect travelers and traders against attack, not by human beings, but by wild animals. Man, in Africa at least, had not yet thought of offending a fellow man, physically or otherwise.

The ruling Council of the Mothers of the People used magic and naked intimidation to exercise control over all the people. These people had no fear of death; they knew it as something inevitable which had to come sooner or later, and capital punishment had no meaning whatsoever. The Mothers of the People also knew that corporal punishment infuriates, challenges and hardens the average criminally inclined human being and encourages him to become more cunning. Thus, they kept war and crime away from their land with the one medium that impresses the average human being – witchcraft.

Tribal historians today still sigh for those days when there was only one race of man and the Spirit of Peace walked the land – when every man woman and child, yea, every beast felt the soothing protection of the soft-eyed, infinitely wise Mothers of the People.

This was the first and last instance in the whole record of the Black People of Africa when pure witchcraft and black magic were used, not to terrorize people, but to keep peace in the land. For hundreds of years peace reigned in the land of the Ba-Ntu and in this atmosphere of peace the Great Belief was born.”

By the time our ancient Balanta ancestors migrated down the Hapi (Nile) River into Ta-Nihisi (also called Nubia and Upper Kemet/Egypt), they were living besides other groups of people. Conflict emerged between the ancient Balanta ancestors called “Anu” and a group called “Mesintu”. When the Mesintu created weapons from iron, they created a secret society and a religion based on this knowledge, and they became known as the “Followers of Horus at Edfu”. For the first time in our history, not everyone was considered equal. This new “ruling” class created a culture based on a monopoly of “power” that violated the Great Belief. Ultimately, this conflict resulted in an invasion by Menes (also called Narmer), which established complete authority and formalized the new society, the first dynasty in Egypt, based on force.

Limestone head, thought by Petrie to be Narmer in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, London

Narmer’s Palette depicting the conquest in 3100 BC.

Over the next 1,500 years, the system of rule by force developed in Egypt and spanned seventeen dynasties. Historian Cheikh Anta Diop explains,

“It is important to first show that by the sixteenth century B.C., the XVIITH Egyptian Dynasty, under Thutmose III (1504-1450 B.C.) in particular, had effectively conquered the whole eastern Mediterranean (Crete, Cyprus, the Cyclades, etc.) and all of western Asia (Hatti, or the Hittite country, Mittanni, Amourrou, Kadesh, Syria, the country of Akkad, and Babylonia).

In total, according to Thutmose III’s Hymn of Triumph, written in verse and engraved on the ‘poetic stela’ at Karnak, facing Thebes in Upper Egypt, 110 foreign states were conquered and integrated to different degrees into the Egyptian empire. In one year, under Thutmose II, the Egyptian treasury collected 3,500 kilos of gold (electrum), of which nine-tenths came from the tributes paid by vassals. Western Asia was divided into administrative districts placed under the authority of Egyptian governors, charged with collecting the tributes, or annual taxes, that all these defeated and vassal states had to pay to the Egyptian treasury.”

Here, it is important to understand, that our Balanta ancestors, the Anu now called the “Nehesu” who came down from the Mountains of the Moon and settled in Wadi Kubbaniya and then established settlements down the river into what became known as Nubia in the land of Ta-Nihisi and then further down the river into Ta-Meri, had by this time become the defeated subjects of the “Rheth” people (as they called themselves). The Rheth people used our knowledge against us, particularly the followers of Horus at Edfu, people known as Mesnitu, and who used metal-working technologies to create weapons and eventually a system of domination based upon force. Though some people see the establishment of the Egyptian Dynasties as a great triumph of achievement, to our Balanta ancestors, it represents the destruction and fall of our people. This is how our peaceful life ended. We resisted the imposition of authority and the obligation to pay taxes to a leader we did not support. Diop continues,

“Fourteen hundred years before Rome, Egypt created the first centralized empire in the world. . . . One can hardly imagine, today, the degree of centralization in the Egyptian empire and the efficacy of its administration.

‘Royal messengers” went through the different regions of the empire delivering messages from the Pharaoh. The generals were in charge of regularly making inspection tours in the conquered territory. ‘A royal postal service circulates over roads created by the Egyptian administration, staked out with military stations and water tanks for resupply.’ The king maintained personal relations with his vassals and each year made inspection trips throughout the whole empire: the children of vassal princes were taken ‘hostages’ and educated in Egyptian style, at the court of the Egyptian emperor, in order to teach them Egyptian manners and tastes and to assimilate them to Pharaonic culture and civilization.

In addition to the compulsory annual tribute representing the collective tax of the whole conquered nation, evaluated according to its wealth, the vassal owed other types of ‘help’: gifts to the royal messengers, sending  slaves (generally women) to the Egyptian king each time the vassal addressed the Pharaoh to ask a favor of him. The Pharaoh could at any moment require money, chariots, horses, compulsory war service; the vassal was constantly under the orders of the Egyptian generals. The Pharaoh judged and arbitrated conflicts between vassals; he could order one of them to arrest a disloyal peer. The vassals enjoyed only internal autonomy; in fact, they had lost their international sovereignty: they could not directly deal with foreign lands. If his territory were invaded, the vassal had to report without delay to his lord, his sun, his god, the Pharaoh. He was declared a felon and beheaded if he separately made peace with an enemy of the Pharaoh. The felonious or supposedly guilty vassal was called to appear before Pharaoh’s court to justify himself, failing which Pharaoh sent a faithful vassal to bring back the guilty one with his entire family in chains.

The Pharaoh, being the incarnation of the divine KA, legitimately (?) exercised the power that he received from the God Amon-Ra, creator of the universe, in order to maintain justice, peace and law among mortals. The theory of individual will as a source of authority never existed in Egypt. All the peoples had to obey Pharaoh Thutmose III, according to the divine will of Amon-Ra, who was not only the national Egyptian God, but God of the whole universe, his creation: that is what is affirmed by the Karnak stela, on which the 110 conquered states are enumerated:

‘I have given you power and victory over all the nations you have conquered the rebel hordes as I commanded, the Earth in its length and its breadth, the peoples of the West and of the East are your subjects, no one was subjected to your majesty without myself having been your guide, so that you would succeed. All the peoples come, bringing tribute to you on their backs, bowing before you as I have ordained.’

This was the philosophy of power that Thutmose III invented in order to create the first true empire in history: ‘The king in the righteousness of his heart, reigns, accomplishing the divine will.’

According to a theory similar to that of the kings of the XVII Dynasty who succeeded in unifying the monarchy at the national level, the Egyptian solar cosmogony was imposed on all the conquered peoples of the empire. . . . Thus, the cult of Amon-Ra, the sun-king became universal and heralded the religious revolution of Amenophis IV (Akhenaton).”

Now here is what Thutmose III’s Hymn of Triumph, written in verse and engraved on the ‘poetic stela’ at Karnak, facing Thebes in Upper Egypt, has to say specifically about the ancestors of the Balanta, the Nehesu living in Ta-Nihisi, Nubia, at the time:

“I have come, I am allowing you to crush all of the barbarians of Nubia; all the way to the people of Put, all is in your hand; I am making them behold your majesty similar to that of your two brothers, Horus and Seth, whom I have joined hands to insure your power.”

Victory Stela of Thutmose III, Dynasty XVII 1479 to 1429 BC, from Nubia (Sudan) Gebel Barakal, temple B 500

Here, then begins the start of the “legal” issues facing Balanta people. Now, for the first time, there are TWO systems of law competing against each other: NATURAL LAW and STATUTORY LAW. Our ancestors left their homeland and headed west to Guinea Bissau some five thousand to three thousand five hundred years ago.

When people violated our Great Belief, set up kings and governments, imposed authority, and forced us to pay taxes, our ancestors either rebelled or migrated.

DEVELOPMENT OF LEGAL ISSUES DURING THE BALANTA MIGRATION PERIOD

HOW THE AFRICAN UNION WAS ESTABLISHED TO INCLUDE THE AFRICAN DIASPORA

On February 3-4, 2003, the first Extra-Ordinary Summit of the Assembly of the African Union meeting in Addis Ababa, Ehtiopia, adopted the historic Article 3(q) that officially, “invite(s) and encourage(s) the full participation of Africans in the Diaspora in the building of the African Union in its capacity as an important part of our Continent.” From this decision, the African Diaspora would become designated as the 6th Region of the African Union.” A Balanta activist, Ras Nathaniel, was the only African American journalist present in the room at the time. In order to inform the African Union 6th Region of the history of this development, Ras Nathaniel published an 80-page paper for the African Caribbean Self-Help Foundation entitled “Towards Rastafari Repatriation By The Ethiopian Millennium II: Working Within the African Union 6th Region Diaspora Initiative”. Below is the excerpt, “HOW THE AFRICAN UNION WAS ESTABLISHED TO INCLUDE THE AFRICAN DIASPORA.” This is the definitive history of the AU 6th Region Diaspora Initiative up until that time, as written by the only eyewitness member of the AU 6th region from the United States.

HOW THE AFRICAN UNION WAS ESTABLISHED TO INCLUDE THE AFRICAN DIASPORA

Excerpts from the five-volume set, Come Out of Her, My People! 21st Century Black Prophetic Faith and Pan African Diplomacy.

At the 4th Extraordinary Summit of the OAU in September 1999, the Assembly of Heads of State and Government in Sirte, Libya met to amend the OAU Charter to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the OAU. This Summit concluded on 9 September 1999 with the Sirte Declaration that "Establish(ed) an African Union in conformity with the ultimate objectives of the Charter of our Continental Organization and the provisions of the Treaty establishing the African Economic Community (AEC)."

At the Addis Ababa Council of Ministers in March 2000 they decided to implement their Sirte Decision. Meeting at the Lome Summit in July 2000, they made decisions regarding the African Union and the Pan African Parliament and the AU Constitutive Act was signed on July 11, 2000. In March of 2001 they convened a Sirte Extra-Ordinary Summit to finalize their plans for implementation and drafted the Pan African Parliament Protocol. At the Lusaka Summit in July 2001 the Secretary General was mandated to work out the modalities and guidelines for the launching of the organs of the African Union, including the preparation of the Draft Rules of Procedure of such organs and to also ensure the effective exercising of authority and discharging of their responsibilities. The priority organs are the Assembly, the Executive Council, the Commission and the Permanent Representative Committee. At their meeting in Durban, South Africa in July 2002 they drafted the Protocol Relating to the Establishment of the Peace and Security Council of the African Union. They were now ready to establish the African Union in its headquarters in Addis Ababa, which they did in February, 2003.

THE AFRICAN UNION 6TH REGION DIASPORA INITIATIVE

Of crucial importance in the establishment of the organs of the Union was/is the challenge to move away from the overly state-centric character of the OAU and its concomitant lack of civil participation. The cooperation of African NGOs, civil societies, labour unions, business organizations are essential in the process of cooperation and implementation. Recognizing this, the OAU/AU held to major OAU/AU Civil Society Conferences on June 11-14, 2001 and June 11-15, 2002.

The Lusaka Summit (meeting after the first conference) decided that NGOs, Professional Associations and Civil Society Organizations should be involved in the formulation and implementation of the Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC) Programmes. This provided a very marginal role for members of the African Diaspora.

The second Conference in 2002, included representatives of the Diaspora. That conference also elected a Provisional Working Group, with a two-year tenure, to work with the African Union Commission on a continuous basis in between larger assemblies, which are held on a bi-annual basis. The Diaspora was given two representatives on this working Group - one for Europe and one for the Western Hemisphere including the US and other parts of the Americas.

The African Union then convened the First AU-Western Hemisphere Diaspora Forum in Washington, DC December 17-19, 2002. Though Rastafari People had an extensive history for engaging the OAU, they were not organized and centralized, and therefore had (and still has) no representation at the Forum which established the Western Hemisphere African Diaspora Network (WHADN) to interface with the African Union Commission. The WHADN put forward proposals for effective collaboration between the African Diaspora and the African Union which were refined by the AU Commission. One of those proposals, the Trade & Economic Development Committee proposed the following framework for recommendations as prerequisites to effective and meaningful participation in African trade and development by Africans in the western hemisphere Diaspora:

The African Union should consider the African Diaspora as Business partner, and

-                   Establish official programs to identify and qualify Diaspora businesses

-                   Issue a common visa, or eliminate business travel visas for Diaspora businesses.

The African Growth & Opportunity Act The AU should:

-                   Identify and prioritize products that can be traded (imported/exported) between Africa and Africans in the Diaspora to promote intra-Diaspora opportunities

-                   Enhance opportunities for Africans in the Diaspora to provide appropriate equipment and technical services to enable African countries to meet AGOA standards

Commodity Markets and Commodity Pricing The AU should

-                   Create a mechanism to promote trade and investment between Africa and Africans in the Western Hemisphere Diaspora

-                   Encourage the technological transfer of organic product cultivation.

Reparations

The AU should

-                   Include in its agenda the 'crime against humanity' concept and work with Diaspora organizations to suggest a process for reparations.

-                   Review, educate and sponsor open discussion to get insight into slavery In turn, the African Diaspora should:

-                   Establish a Western Hemisphere Diaspora Trade and Economic Development Committee to coordinate and facilitate the follow-up process to these recommendations with the AU

-                   Set up a Western Hemisphere Diaspora secretariat in Africa

-                   Encourage the establishment of a voluntary $5 per year US tax deductible contribution to the AU Trade and Economic Development Fund for the US Diaspora.

-                   Promote the development of joint ventures and partnerships between the Western Hemisphere Diaspora and African business communities.

-                   Ensure establishment of an industry specific Western Hemisphere Diaspora data base endorsed by the appropriate Diaspora representatives.

At the First Extra-ordinary Summit of the Assembly of Heads of States and Governments held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on February 3, 2003, Senegal proposed an amendment to formally integrate the Diaspora in the policy framework of the African Union. After much debate that still continues over the definition of the "African Diaspora"2, the proposed amendment was refined and adopted by the Summit in a new Article 3 (q) that "invites and encourages the full participation of the African Diaspora as an important part of our continent, in the building of the African Union."

In May, 2003, the Executive Council of the African Union met at the Third Extraordinary Session in Sun City, South Africa and issued the "Decision on the Development of the Diaspora Initiative in the African Union" This decision stated in point 4 that it

"Supports the initiative of the Commission to convene a technical workshop, as soon as possible, to develop a concept paper to generate proposals on the relations between the AU and the Diaspora. The proposed workshop would also address the following issues:

-                   the definition of the Diaspora;

-                   the role of the Diaspora in reversing African brain drain in line with the NEPAD recommendations;

-                   the modalities of the creation of a Diaspora fund for investment and development in Africa;

-                   the modalities for the development of scientific and technical networks to channel the repatriation of scientific knowledge from the Diaspora to Africa, and the establishment of cooperation between those abroad and at home;

-                   the establishment of a Diaspora database to promote and facilitate networking and collaboration between experts in their respective countries of origin and those in the Diaspora.

The Decision also stated:

"b. What can the African Union offer the Diaspora?

Discussions during the Washington Forum also offers a picture of some of what the Diaspora may expect - a measure of credible involvement in the policy making processes, some corresponding level of representation, symbolic identification, requirements of dual or honorary citizenship of some sort, moral and political support of Diaspora initiatives in their respective regions, preferential treatment in access to African economic undertakings including consultancies, trade preferences and benefits for entrepreneurs, vis a vis non - Africans, social and political recognition as evident in invitation to Summits and important meetings etc. These deliberations must also focus on possibilities, criteria and qualification for Diaspora representation in the Economic, Cultural and Social Council (ECOSOC), the Pan-African Parliament, etc.

c.  What can the Diaspora bring to the AU?

These include technical support for programs of the African Union, public education and sensitization of the wider public in their respective regions, lobbying, provision of a domestic political constituency for AU goals and objectives, advocacy, fund raising, resource mobilization and resource support through such measures as creation of Endowments amongst others."3

The main responsibility for mainstreaming the African Diaspora in the African Union fell upon the Conference on Security, Stability, Development and Cooperation in Africa (CSSDCA) which was initiated in a meeting on Security, Stability, Development and Cooperation attended by OAU Heads of State in Kampala in May 1991. The result of the meeting was the Kampala Document, which encapsulated both the 1990 OAU Heads of State Declaration on the Political and Socio-Economic Situation in Africa and the Fundamental Changes Taking Place in the World and the 1990 African Charter for Popular Participation in Development. The Kampala Document also proposed a Conference on Security, Stability, Development and Cooperation in Africa (CSSDCA). The Document was presented to the OAU Summit in Abuja, Nigeria in June 1991 for adoption; however, it was only noted and referred to the Council of Ministers.

Subsequent OAU Summits in June 1992 in Dakar, Senegal and in June 1993 in Cairo, Egypt could not adopt the Kampala Document in the absence of inputs from member States.

During the OAU Summit in July 1999 in Algiers, Algeria, President Obasanjo called for the refocusing on the Kampala Document in the light of contemporary developments in Africa, and offered to take responsibility for setting in motion the process of re-launching the CSSDCA. President Obasanjo also proposed that the year 2000 be declared as the Year of Peace, Security and Solidarity in Africa.

At the Extraordinary OAU Summit held in Sirte, Libya in September 1999, the Heads of State decided to convene an African Ministerial Conference on Security, Stability, Development and Cooperation in the Continent as soon as possible. As such the CSSDCA initiative was fully endorsed by the policy-making organs of the OAU. This First Ministerial CSSDCA Meeting was held in Abuja from 8 to 9 May 20004

At the AFSTRAG Roundtable in New York, February 26-27,2004, Dr. Jinmi Adisa, Senior Coordinator of the CSSDCA Bureau of the Chairperson of the African Union Commission, stated

"The CSSDCA has four main functions. First, it is the main framework for civil society engagement and thus serves as the pillar for the creation of effective partnerships that would facilitate and sustain the 'people- centered' orientation of the African Union. Second, in this capacity, it coordinates the activities of the nascent Economic, Social and Cultural Council, the Civil Society Parliament, and important advisory organs of the Union. Third, the CSSDCA is also the monitoring and evaluation mechanism of the Union that assesses the extent to which member states have complied with their obligations to implement the decisions they have agreed upon and adopted. The purpose here is to stimulate greater efficiency and all segments of the Union are associated with this endeavor. Fourth, and finally, the CSSDCA has responsibility for advancing the Diaspora initiative as part of its agenda for active and total mobilization of all segments of the African community.

It should be noted, however, that the main inspiration for CSSDCA activities is the Chairperson of the African Union himself, and in this respect, we have been very fortunate to have His Excellency, Mr. Alpha Konare, at the helm of affairs since September 2003.... Under his leadership, the CSSDCA was inspired to give prominence to the representation of the Diaspora in the Draft Statutes of the Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOC), which will be considered in mid- March 2004 at the 4th Ordinary meeting of the Executive Council of the Union. ECOSOC will enable active interface between organs of the Union and CSOs, women, youth and the African Diaspora ....  When ECOSOC becomes fully operational (and we are working to ensure that this is the case by the last quarter of the year) it will necessarily imply the engagement of the African Diaspora in all spheres of activity of the African Union."5

Dr. Jinmi Adisa also gave the Opening Statement to the African Union Technical Workshop on the Relationship With The Diaspora held in the Port of Spain, Trinidad, June 2-5 2004. In that statement, Dr. Adisa stated,

"[T]o help transform the history of our separation during the period of Slave Trade into a beacon of hope and promise. This is the essence of the Diaspora Initiative of the African Union.... The African Union, therefore, seeks to enlist the Diaspora, as an integral part of its asset base, to energize the demand for development and to promote and sustain its unique and dynamic global identity. . . . At the Washington Forum of December 2002 which initiated the process of institutional development and active mobilization of the African Diaspora, the then Interim Chairperson of the African Union, stressed that the character of the relationship that was envisaged is designed to be reciprocal. The implication was that the benefit of this process must be complimentary so that the African continent gives something concrete to the Diaspora and vice versa. The challenge of the Diaspora initiative was how to determine precisely the content of such reciprocal relationship Finally, there is a need to re-affirm our spiritual bond as a support system for collaboration and mutual purpose. Organization of the Diaspora for participation in the Africa Day celebrations on May 25 each year would cement and project this identity.... [This] Workshop is also expected to look into modalities for networking and the creation of effective partnerships to underwrite 'quality dialogues' and concrete projects and programmes. . . .

However, investment of efforts will be only useful in a framework that sets clear, achievable goals, well defined paradigms and appropriate structures and mechanisms that will facilitate success in the pursuit of our common endeavor."6

Indeed, the African Union Technical Workshop On the Relationship With the Diaspora General Report stated:

"The AU sees the Diaspora Initiative as a partnership, which could bring benefits to both sides - i.e to Africans living in the Diaspora as well as those living on the continent. Not all these benefits to the African Diaspora, and vice-versa The AU's Diaspora Initiative urges Africans throughout the world to transform their collective legacy of colonial heritage and common suffering into bonds of spiritual kinship as well as a common reference point for combining efforts, forging a dynamic global identity.... "7

Point 29 of the General Report stated that,

"The [Afro-Neth conference held in The Netherlands in December 2003] noted the need to shift from a focus in conceptual issues, to the identification of concrete practical steps to engage the African Diaspora in Africa's Development. The Conference addressed 4 main issues, two of which were:

a)            The need for collective Diaspora Voice in policy discussions; and

b)            Mobilization of resources

The conference also considered the need for an African Diaspora Fund that could engage in the development of Africa and Africans in the Diaspora."

Point 37 and 38 of the General Report stated that,

"[Mr Oladeinde of the Western Hemisphere African Diaspora Network WHADN] noted that the conference, held in Washington, D.C. from 17-19 December 2002, defined the mission of WHADN as the encouragement and facilitation of the use of the collective talents and resources of the African Diaspora in North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America, to support economic development and sustained growth on the continent."

Point 40 of the General Report stated that,

"a. Technology transfer, and the contribution of the Diaspora to this transfer, has a crucial role to play in development.

b.  It is important to expand research and use the Diaspora in research institutions to exploit their research for Africa's development.

c. For the Diaspora to maintain its engagement with Africa, there is need to provide incentives and a relationship of mutual reciprocity."

Point 44 and 46 of the General Report stated that,

"44. Dr. Adisa gave a short briefing on the AU Commission's interest in having Africa Day, 25 May, celebrated throughout the Diaspora. . . .

46.  After considerable debate, the following recommendations were adopted on Global Observance Days:

a)    The workshop should convey to the Chairperson of the Commission the need to raise the profile of Africa Day within Africa as well as in the Diaspora.

b)    The AU should consider changing "Africa Day" into "Pan-Africa Day".

Point 48 of the General Report stated that,

48. After much debate, the following recommendations were adopted on the Conference of Intellectuals:

b.   There exist a sharp cleavage between researchers in Africa and researchers in the Diaspora; researchers need to focus greater attention on the areas of medicine, governance, democracy and the rule of law as one way of bridging this cleavage.

c.   The AU should facilitate linkages between African researchers and researchers in the Diaspora.

The Technical Workshop then included the following Recommendations:

52.  To these ends, the working group recommends that the African Union consider:

i.              That the operationalization of the secretariat for the Western Hemisphere and the establishment of networks in other Diaspora regions (in Europe and Asia- Pacific, etc) be immediately undertaken, and the creation of their secretariats be facilitated. This would enable the AU and the African Diaspora to capitalize on the momentum being created . . . .

ii.            That the African Diaspora in their respective regions organize, in cooperation with their regional secretariats, conferences, workshops, and other modes of interaction. This would enable the development of concrete strategies for projects, programmes and policy proposals.

iii.           That encouragement, promotion and support be provided for continued multidisciplinary, focused research on the topics of African Diaspora and its linkages to Africa.

vii.       That African Diaspora Legal scholars, who are experts in international law as it relates to the African Diaspora, should be included in the process of translating this policy document into legal text. This would allow the new scholarship on critical law theory pertaining to Africa and its Diaspora to be embedded in the formulation of legislation and policy.

53.  The Group put forward recommendations on the role of the Diaspora in human resource development in three key area:

-          Resources (Skills Bank)

-          Reversing the Brain Drain

-          Development of Scientific and Technical Networks

55.  For the Diaspora to meaningfully contribute to the attainment of the goals of human development in Africa the following policy recommendations were suggested:

a)    Resources/Skills Bank:

56.  The Resources Bank should serve as the integrating platform upon which all other aspects of the Diaspora development and mobilization of its resources, both organic and virtual knowledge, could be shared and expanded.

Recommendations:

i.              The AU should facilitate the development of a template for identifying resource needs at both regional and national levels. Such an initiative would allow for effective organization of data, and make the database user-friendly. The AU may consider using consultants or experts in developing this.

ii.            The AU should conduct an inventory of existing human resource databases of the Diaspora. The AU should consider using existing organizations both within and outside Africa. The AU should encourage Member States to commission country-specific inventories of existing databases as these relate to Member States . Results of the inventories should be made Publicly available, via the Internet, print media and other electronic means.

iii.           The AU should organize the data thus collected into a Central Diaspora Skills Resource Bank. This database should support information for both individuals and corporations. The AU may consider adopting an existing database platform within the Diaspora.

iv.           In considering the magnitude of establishing and managing the database, the AU should consider it as a separate entity with a separate group to govern it. The AU may consider creating a new entity or strengthening any one of its existing organizational structures to support it.

v.            The AU should ensure that information in the database is publicly accessible.

vi.           Long-term sustainability of the Resource Database should be evaluated in recognition of the cost of hosting, ongoing maintenance and other support services. AU may consider an affordable fee based access for certain retrieval services users.

vii.          Information within the database should be protected and secure.

b)   Brain-drain: Recommendations:

i.              Brain Drain reversal should not be reduced to the physical return of people who have migrated from the continent, but should include access and effective utilization of their skills and knowledge regardless of geographical location.

ii.            The AU should facilitate the development of a range of policies, at national and regional levels, to encourage the relocation (both temporarily and permanently) of skilled people from the historical Diaspora. The AU may wish to consider a continent-wide entry card for the Diaspora.

iii.           The Au should promote, among Member States, a commitment to creating an enabling environment to stem the continuous outflow of people.

iv.           The AU should encourage Member States to design programmes, including a range of incentives to attract skilled persons who have migrated, to return to their country of birth or to any other country on the continent on varying lengths of contracts, depending on needs and availability, or to return permanently.

v.            The AU should design programmes to effectively utilize the skills and knowledge of Africans in the Diaspora.

vi.           The AU should take the lead in a campaign to extend the concept of the Brain Drain Compensation Fund . . . .

Working Group 3: Modalities and resource support including the creation of A Diaspora Trust Fund for investment in Africa

58. The Group reviewed the four assets of the Diaspora: land, labour, capital and entrepreneurship, in defining the modalities for resource support for institutions whose establishment and operations would benefit both the African continent and the African Diaspora.

In Support of the Diaspora Outreach Project, the following recommendations were made:

Recommendations

a)    Support for Diaspora Projects

60.  The Diaspora should establish organizational networks to execute its projects and programmes through:

i.              Membership dues;

ii.            Fundraising activities such as concerts, seminars, congresses, Heads of State and celebrity dinners, corporate and philanthropic sponsorships and government grants;

iii.           Publications: magazines, books, newsletters and web sites;

iv.           Service fees: match-making, trade missions, event management;

b)   Diaspora Charitable Trust Fund

61.  It is recommended that the initial trust fund be established under the auspices of WHADN based in the USA. Over time, additional trust funds would be established in the other jurisdictions. The Trust Fund is conceptualized as a series of endowments beginning with health, education, housing and orphans.

The endowments would be funded in the following ways:

i.              Each African adult both within the Diaspora and on the continent to contribute a minimum of 1 US $ or its equivalent per year.

ii.            African governments, corporate citizens and NGOs both within the continent and in the Diaspora be encouraged to contribute generously to the fund.

Other Recommendations:

62.  The working group encourages the AU to convey to its Member States the need to create an enabling environment and policy framework to facilitate investment vehicles which support investments in the Diaspora and in Africa. We recommend the following investment vehicles:

Pan African Mutual Fund

Investment in the mutual fund should be encouraged across the board of public and private sector participation with the requisite legislation to prevent control by any one group.

Pan African Bank

This institution is to be established in strategic locations in the Diaspora to facilitate remittances

-          as a depository of assets of Africans in the Diaspora

-          as a lending agency

Pan African Venture Capital

This vehicle would make equity capital available in Africa and in the Diaspora for investment in a range of viable businesses. It would be funded by private sectors, institutions and governments. Governments are to be encouraged to launch a campaign to educate their communities within Africa and in the Diaspora with respect to the several financial instruments available.

Working Group 4: Modalities for enhancing effective partnerships between the African Union and the African Diaspora and Diaspora participation in ECOSOC

Recommendations

v.         In coordination with regional Diaspora Secretariats, the AUC should promote the organization of summits, conferences, workshops, and other publics which bring together NGOs and/or professional associations and networks, civil rights movements, and state ministries, representing specific major public policy issues which cut across one or more Diaspora Regions and/or Diaspora communities or populations and the continent of Africa or one or more AU member nations.

ix         The AU Diaspora Initiative should establish criteria for selecting NGOs, private industries, universities, professional associations, and primary and secondary educational systems for partnership in the AU Diaspora Initiative. Regarding NGOs, this refers to the development or selection and evaluation criteria for the twenty NGO positions allotted in ECOSOCC NGOs. Coalitions of NGOs interested in ECOSOCC representation, and which are recommended by regional secretariats to the AUC, must demonstrate capacity to design, implement, and evaluate services, projects, and programmes which (a) improve the quality of life of African and African Diaspora nations, communities, populations, and institutional sectors; or/and (b) promote education and awareness about African and African Diaspora history and other issues; and (c) establish collaborative partnerships with other NGOs, private industries, cultural organizations, Black social movements, and educational institutions. It is recommended that African Diaspora NGOs and coalitions of NGOs interested in being regional consultative partners with the African Union register with their respective regional secretariats; all NGOs and coalitions of NGOs in the Western Hemisphere desiring to participate in the African Union Development of the Diaspora Initiative should register with WHADN as the first step of membership in this movement.

x.            To enable the most effective internet communication in the AU Diaspora Initiative such as the AU/ECOSOCC and other partnership arrangements, the AU should work with WHADN and other partnership regional secretaries to establish an independent, secure, and autonomous internet node in Africa, e.g. Addis Ababa at AU Headquarters. This entails a financial and technical feasibility study examining issues such as touting, common carrier, billing, and security concerns.

xi.           In order for the AU to develop effectively African/Diaspora networks and partnerships in a variety of areas, especially in the Western Hemisphere, it would be necessary to develop a more efficient Africa/Diaspora air transportation capacity in order to provide regular and reliable direct air linkages between Africa and Diaspora areas. This would involve the AU promoting airline transportation-related partnerships with nations, African and African Diaspora businesspersons to develop such airline transportation capacity.

xii.          The AU should mandate Regional Diaspora Secretariats to coordinate and mobilize when needed Diaspora regional associations, organizations, and institutional sectors and to develop programmes to ensure their capacity to engage in partnerships with each other and with associations, organizations, and institutional sectors on the African continent.

xvi.        The AU should consider offering Diaspora federal citizenship options and recommend that the AU establish a task force of distinguished scholars and policy makers to comprehensively study this question and offer policy recommendations to the AU Assembly.

In addition, the Report of the First Conference of Intellectuals of Africa and The Diaspora, October 6-9, 2004 in Dakar, Senegal, stated:

"59. The question on how to structure the Diaspora to make it as the 6th region was raised. To that effect:

-          There is need to establish a representative body including the major regions of the world.

-          20 Diaspora organizations will be part of ECOSOCC, the advisory body of the African Union.

Recommendations

a)    Setting up of an African experts group to serve as a 'think tank' to the AU.

e)     Development of databases of associations to promote networking.

f)      To promote the concept of African citizenship and the establishment of an African Passport.

87.  Dr. Molefi Asante put forward five recommendations for the integration of the Diaspora and the continent. These include

i.              the provision of curricula information from the African Diaspora in African schools,

ii.            assigning responsibility to people in the ministries of African states to interface with the Diaspora

iii.           operations from a perspective of strength rather than weakness,

iv.           the need for African leaders to have precise knowledge of Diaspora communities as a basis for strengthening relations, and

v.            the acceptance of the right of return for the African Diaspora.

Key issues and Recommendations

89.  Five key issues were subject of recommendation. Preliminary discussions were held regarding the modalities for their implementation.

a.    Creation of a specific structure of coordination as a follow up mechanism

i.              The African Union should establish a Secretariat as a follow-up mechanism to engage in advocacy and to promote a permanent policy dialogue between intellectuals and policy makers in Africa and the Diaspora.

ii.            The African Union should set up or adopt existing institutions to serve as 'Africa Houses' within strategic global and African locations to promote African interests abroad, improve awareness and knowledge about Africa, and support commercial and other links between the Diaspora and Africa

Modalities for Implementation

90.  The Secretariat and Africa should:

-          Utilize the experience and resources of existing specialized organizations, institutions and individuals;

-          Create publications to disseminate information;

-          Host follow-p meetings with heads of African Diaspora intellectual organizations to determine their roles in the Secretariat and intellectual programmes of the African Union;

-          Promote access to the media for wider distribution of information by creating media and public relations divisions;

-          Create strategies to fund the implementation of this initiative;

-          Strengthen and publicize data-banks of African and Diaspora intellectuals

b.    Creation of a new curriculum for Africa and the Diaspora

-     In order to promote an awareness of the historical and contemporary cultures and contributions of peoples of Africa and the African Diaspora, the African Union should create a curriculum council to develop and disseminate print visual and electronic educational materials for all educational levels for Africa and the Diaspora

c.    Promotion of an African Citizenship Initiative

-     In recognition of the importance of identity as a mobilizing factor for development, the African Union should develop a framework for a wider African Citizenship Initiative."8

Modalities for Implementation

91.  The African Union Commission should:

-     Develop, in consultation with the Diaspora, proposals for a Bill of Citizenship that establishes rights, entitlements, and duties of African Citizens on the continent and in the Diaspora, including the responsibility of Member States and the African Union, and submit this to the Executive Council and Summit for consideration and approval.

c)    Establishing The Diaspora as The Sixth Region of The African Union

-                   The Diaspora should initiate and, wherever it already exists should, broaden a process of consultation and regular meetings culminating in the establishment of transparent representative organs, to engage with the African Union.

-                   The African Union Mission, Vision, and Strategy document should be disseminated widely within Africa and its Diaspora, and used as a basis for ongoing discussion and engagement with the African Union.

Regarding the federal citizenship issue, on July 6, 2005, The Post (Lusaka) reported that

"The African Union (AU) is pondering the possibility of Africa citizens to move freely around the continent as it pursues the idea of issuing what it calls an African passport to all African citizens.

This was highlighted by AU Commission chairperson Alpha Konare during his official statement at the opening of this year's heads of stat assembly here. The proposal is also contained in the draft report which was expected to be endorsed by African leaders yesterday.

The draft recommendations call upon AU member states to facilitate and pursue free movement in Africa gradually considering the interdependence of social, economic, security and human rights dimensions of the movement of persons within the African Union.... The Au states that it accepts the concept of an African passport in principle and therefore recommends that further consultations be carried out at national, sub-regional, regional and continental levels to address all pertinent issues including constitutional, legal, social, economic, security and human rights aspects. The AU is also in agreement with the proposal for the issuance of African diplomatic passports and recommends that consultations should be done before the exercise is undertaken.

The AU Commission has since been requested in consultation with member states to consider establishing a committee of experts, charged with providing guidance to the Commission on matters relating to free movement of persons to carry the process forward."

The African Union 6th Region Diaspora Initiative has also included two other components highlighting language and the celebration of "Africa Day" every May 25 as an official AU observance (already mentioned above). Regarding Language,

Point 105. 4 of the Report of the First Conference of Intellectuals of Africa and the Diaspora stated:

"Language is critically important since it is one of the first symbols of identity that we learn. Therefore mastery of one of the African languages by those in the Diaspora becomes a visible symbol of their great attachment to the motherland."

Finally, Africa's Civil Society gathered at the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from March 27-30, 2005 for the launching of the Economic, Social and Cultural Council of the African Union (ECOSOCC). According to the Statutes of ECOSOCC,

"Article 3: Composition

 

1. ECOSOCC shall be an advisory organ of the African Union composed of different social and professional groups of the Member States of the African Union . . .

3.    ECOSOCC shall also include social and professional groups in the African Diaspora organizations in accordance with the definition approved by the Executive Council."9

The definition of the African Diaspora as determined by the Meeting of Experts on the Definition of the African Diaspora, April 11-12, 2005 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, is as follows:

"The African Diaspora consists of peoples of African origin living outside the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality and who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union."10

[IRIE note: this definition is severely flawed in light of the "Out of Africa" DNA studies. What is to stop a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Swede desiring to contribute to the development of Africa, for example, from claiming status as a member of the African Diaspora since current science states that his or her ancestors (and all human beings) originated in Africa?]

IRIE recommends the following definition:

"The African Diaspora consists of peoples of African origin, descent and heritage living outside the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality and who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union."

[Under this definition, the Swede would be excluded on grounds that he or she did not possess an African heritage.]

ECOSOCC Statutes also state, "Article 4: Membership

1.    ECOSOCC shall be composed of one hundred and fifty (150) CSO's which shall include different social and professional groups in Member States of the Union and the African Diaspora, in conformity with Article 5 of these Statutes:

a)    Two (2) CSO's from each Member State of the Union (106 total)

b)    Ten (10) CSO's operating at regional level and eight (8) at continental level

c)    Twenty (20) CSO's from the African Diaspora as defined by the Executive Council, covering the various continents of the world

d)    Six (6) CSO's in ex-officio capacity, nominated by the Commission based on special considerations, in consultation with Member States

Article 5: Election of Members

2.    African Diaspora organizations shall establish an appropriate process for determining modalities for elections and elect twenty (20) CSO's to the ECOSOCC General Assembly

Article 6: Eligibility Requirements for Membership

The requirements to be fulfilled by CSOs seeking membership are as follows:

1.    Be national, regional , continental or African Diaspora CSO, without restriction to undertake regional or international activities.

2.    Have objectives and principles that are consistent with the principles and objectives of the Union as set out in Articles 3 and 4 of the Constitutive Act.

3.    Registration and status:

a)    Be registered in a Member State of the Union and/or;

b)    Meet the general conditions of eligibility for the granting of Observer Status to non-governmental organizations;

c)    Show a minimum of three (3) years proof of registration as either an African or an African Diaspora CSO prior to the date of submission of application, including proof of operations for those years.

4.    Provide annual audit statements by an independent auditing company.

5.    Show proof that the ownership and management of the CSO is made up of not less than fifty (50%), of Africans or of African Diaspora

6.    The basic resources of such an Organization shall substantially, at least fifty (50%), be derived from contributions of the members of the Organization. Where external voluntary contributions have been received, their amounts and donors shall be faithfully revealed in the application for membership. Any financial or other support or contribution, direct or indirect, from a government to the Organization shall be declared and fully recorded in the financial records of the Organization.

7.    Provide information on funding sources in the preceding three (3) years.

8.    For regional and continental CSOs, show proof of activities that engage or are operative in at least three (3) Member States of the Union.

9.    CSOs that discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, tribe, ethnic, racial or political basis shall be barred from representation to ECOSOCC.

10. Adherence to a Code of Ethics and Conduct for civil society organizations affiliated to or working with the Union."

This, then represents THE AFRICAN UNION 6TH REGION DIASPORA INITIATIVE and its progress up to the present.

It should be noted that, according to Ras Nathaniel’s March 3, 2003 report from Addis Ababa at the time,

“According to the REPORT OF THE AD HOC MINISTERIAL COMMITTEE MEETING ON THE PROPOSED AMENDMENTS TO THE CONSTITUTIVE ACT OF THE AFRICAN UNION:

"9. Prior to detailed consideration of this item, the Chairperson gave the floor successively to the Commission and the Senegalese delegation for clarifications on this subject.

10. The representative of the Commission indicated that six proposed amendments had been referred to the Ad Hoc Ministerial Committee but that the one relating to the African Diaspora had been inadvertently omitted from the Items listed on the Agenda of the Meeting. He added that the item had not been examined by the Executive Council Session in Tripoli, because it had not been submitted in time. He then read out the amendment as contained in paragraph 40 of the Report of the First Extraordinary Session of the Executive Council as follows:

'Invite and encourage the full participation of Africans in the Diaspora in the building of the African Union in its capacity as an important part of our Continent.'

11. At the Chairperson's request for more clarification on the categories of Africans that come under the term 'African Diaspora', the delegation of Senegal, the proposer of the amendment, informed the Meeting that the issue could be addressed from two perspectives, namely;

a) a narrow sense, whereby the Diaspora includes all Africans currently residing any where outside the Continent of Africa;

b) a broad and historic sense, whereby the Diaspora comprises all Africans who had left Africa by force and still consider themselves Africans."

12. It was decided at the end of the debate that the overall principle underlying the amendment should be retained and incorporated in the Constitutive Act as proposed. The amendment would read as follows:

Article 3 (0): 'Invite and encourage the full participation of Africans in the Diaspora in the building of the African Union in its capacity as an important part of our Continent."

13. On the question as to how this amendment would be implemented, it was proposed that this matter be examined at a collective brainstorming session of the Committee before the end of the Meeting to come up with proposals for submission to the Executive Council, as it was at the implementation level that all aspects of bilateral cooperation between the two entities would be addressed with greater clarity. It was also proposed that the matter be further considered subsequently at experts' and Executive Council levels for further inputs.

14. Subsequently, at the end of the consideration of all the Agenda Items, the Committee devoted some time to collective brainstorming on the issue of 'the Diaspora' particularly its definition and the modalities for implementing effective collaboration with the African Union.

15. During the discussions, a number of proposals were made, such as the need to convene a forum between the AU and the Diaspora and the setting up of a coordinating mechanism within the Commission to deal with issues relating to the Diaspora. A proposal was also made that the Diaspora could be involved in the work of ECOSOC.

16. At the end of the deliberations, the need was recognized to convene a session of the Executive Council entirely devoted to 'the Diaspora' to further examine all the proposals made as well as others to enable all Member States to have the same understanding of the subject. It was recommended that the work done by the Commission regarding the civil society and the Diaspora should continue and be enriched by the proposed session."

A CRITIQUE OF THE DIASPORA INITIATIVE

Finally, in a paper submitted to THE CODESRIA 30th ANNNIVERSARY PROGRAM, East Africa Sub Regional Conference, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia October 30-31 2003, Ras Nathaniel observed:

“Reconnecting with the Diaspora

"Yet the key link in the African unity project is the linkage of Africa with its Diaspora." [Bankie 2003]

"A united Africa, based on principles articulated within the framework of the African Renaaissance, must make provisions to welcome home Diasporic Africans." [Yawney 2001]

This is so, undoubtedly, for moral, political, economic and social reasons, all leading to accelerated development. However, while a few countries have recently emphasized the "spiritual" element, primarily Ghana and its "enstooling" ceremony with the Diasporan group Fihankra (representing Black middle-class wealth in America), and more recently, Benin Ambassador to the US Cyril Oguin's mission to Louisiana and other US states to apologize for their ancestors' role in the slave trade, most of the current debate focuses on the economic reasons. Tanzania, for instance, is courting African Americans to set up "retirement communities." [Mwamunyame 2003] The African Forum for Envisioning Africa: Focus on NEPAD stated, " . . .wooing capital from the African Diaspora can be instrumental in addressing the challenge of Africa positioning itself in the global trade arena." [AFEAFN 2002] And, the African Foundation for Development stated in a paper to the African Development Forum III that its purpose is to "draw on the perspectives and experiences of the London-based African Foundation for Development to sketch out ways in which the African Diaspora can support efforts towards increased regional integration in Africa." It then noted that Ugandans send home $400m each year, more than the country was earning form its biggest export-earning crop, coffee, and that Ghanians abroad send home between $350m and $400m each year. [AFFORD 2002]

Indeed, the potential of Diasporan resources to "save" Africa is enormous. Paul Henze, a policy analyst specializing in East Africa at the RAND Corporation notes,

“Eritrea is a blank in World Bank and IMF reports. Eritrea appears to be living almost entirely off remittances and donations supplied by its Diaspora in the Middle East and America. [Eritrea's Prime Minister] Isaias's travels during 1999 have been primarily motivated by the need to keep money from the Diaspora flowing." [Henze 2000]”

Thus, much of this kind of literature on the African Diaspora is aimed at harnessing the financial and potential capital inflows and human resources of Africans who voluntarily joined the Diasporan communities after World War II, who have created what is commonly referred to as Africa's "Brain Drain" [Gedamu 2002, Njubi 2002, Shinn 2002, Zeleza 2002, Kalyegira 2003], and not on an spiritual, wholistic, or moral right of return and Repatriation within the framework of African development.

Defining Diaspora

"The average Afro-American citizen of the United States has lost absolute touch with the past of his race, and is helplessly and hopelessly groping in the dark for affinities that are not natural, and for effects for which there are neither national nor natural causes. That being so, the African in America is in a worse plight thatn the Hebrew in Egypt. The one preserved his language, his manners and sutoms, his religion and household gods; the other has committed national suicide." [ Prah 2002]

Marginalization of "old" Diaspora

"As we all know, the historic African Diaspora in the United States is the result of the European Slave Trade that resulted in millions of people being taken from the African continent. Often, the causes, problems and solutions to the African brain drain leave out this population with most of the emphasis and research on the contemporary African Diaspora." [Venney 2002]

For example, in the African Foundation for Development (AFFORD) paper "Supporting Africa's Regional Integration: The African diaspora-prototype pan-Africanist or parochial village-aiders?" presented to the African Development Forum III (ADFIII): "Defining Priorities for Regional Integration", the authors state its purpose is to "draw on the perspectives and experiences of the London-based African Foundation for Development to sketch out ways in which the African Diaspora can support efforts towards increased regional integration in Africa . . . . But who do we mean when we speak of the African diaspora today? We might crudely think of two 'diasporas'; the old and the new. The old diaspora refers to the African Diaspora produced by the Atlantic slave trade-African-Americans, Brazilians of African Descent, people of Caribbean Origin now living in the UK, etc. The new Diaspora refers to those Africans who have left Africa in the post-second World War or even late post-colonial period to settle in the North. . . . . this paper focuses primarily on the newer sections of the African Diaspora." [emphasis added]

Indeed, according to the Ad Hoc Ministerial Committee meeting on the proposed amendments to the Constitutive Act of the African Union Report of the Executive Council 2nd Extraordinary Session, 1 Feb 2003 Addis Ababa, under the section "Recognition of the Diaspora," the report stated,

"At the chairperson's request for more clarification on the categories of Africans that come under the term 'African Diaspora', the delegation of Senegal, the proposer of the amendment, informed the Meeting that the issue could be addressed from two perspectives, namely:

- a narrow sense, whereby the Diaspora includes all Africans currently residing anywhere outside the Continent of Africa [ "new contemporary diaspora"]

- a broad and historic sense, whereby the Diaspora comprises all Africans who had left Africa by force and still consider themselves Africans

Point 14 of the report states, "Subsequently, at the end of the consideration of all the Agenda items, the Committee devoted some time to collective brainstorming on the issue of 'the Diaspora', particularly its definition and the modalities for implementing effective collaboration with the African Union . . . . "

At the end of the deliberations, the need was recognized to convene a session of the Executive Council entirely devoted to "the Diaspora" to further examine all proposals made as well as enable all Member States to have the same understanding of the subject." [Ad Hoc 2003}

Although this author submitted on February 25th recommendations to this special session, he did not receive any response nor confirmation that the special session was held. Nevertheless, the New African, June 2003 reported that:

"Meanwhile, a very positive development has been the attempt to make the African Diaspora a permanent feature of the AU. It will take concrete form in Maputo. On 18 April, the AU in conjunction with the Washington-based Foundation for Democracy in Action (FDA) and members of the Western Hemisphere African Diaspora Network (WHADN), announced plans for implementing recommendation from the first AU-WHADN forum held in Washington DC last December.

The AU delegates discussed the efforts of the Union towards establishing 'technical definitions' of the Diaspora and the process of effectively integrating the Diaspora into the organs and programmes of the AU, notably the Economic, Social and Cultural Council. According to the president of the FDA, Fred Oladeinde:

'The AU has demonstrated its commitment to developing mutually beneficial and functional linkages with its Diaspora by amending its Constitutive Act to include the involvement of the African Diaspora. The significant structural change to the organization provides the legislative framework that the Washington forum recommended."

Examination of the Amendment, Article "q" to the Constitutive Act of the African Union reveals, however, that no such "significant structural change" has occurred. Article 3 (q) reads: 'Invite and encourage the full participation of Africans in the Diaspora in the building of the African Union in its capacity as an important part of our Continent." There is nothing substantive in this. According to the Report Of The Ad Hoc Ministerial Committee Meeting On The Proposed Amendments To The Constitutive Act Of The African Union, Section 15, "During the discussions, a number of proposals were made, such as the need to convene a forum between the AU and the Diasopora and the setting up of a coordinating mechanism within the CoMmission to deal with issues relating to the Diaspora. A proposal was also made that the Diaspora could be involved in the work of ECOSOC." Thus, no such significant structural change has been placed on the table or is being discussed.

Participation of the Diaspora in the Pan-African Parliament, for example, has been blocked. Accordingly, as Bankie notes just as during the building of the OAU, "These Africans were excluded from its deliberations, even though everybody knows the fate of all Africans is dependent to an extent, on the progress of the continent. States populated by a majority of Africans [like Jamaica] could not join the body; diasporans were excluded from the secretariat." [Bankie 2002], so, too, he notes, that "neither the OAU nor the AU make any pretense to include the African Diaspora in their deliberations or administration." [Bankie 2003] [Ras note: see Nabudere 2002, New African 2003 for NEPAD/AU structure outline. Any formal role for Diasporans?] Bankie does provide one answer to why there is such debate and exclusion when it comes to the African Diaspora:

"The January-April 2001 issue of the newsletter of the African Association of Political Science (AAPS) includes the report, reference CAB/LEG/23.15/6/Vol/IV of a meeting of legal experts and parliamentarians on the establishment of the African Union and the Pan-African Parliament held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia 17-20 April 2000. Paragraph 48 reads -

'On the issue of composition, it was proposed that the prospective members should represent not only the peoples of Africa and those who have naturalized, but peoples of African descent as well. However, other delegations were of the view that only African peoples should be represented in the Parliament . . . .'

At paragraph 55 appearing under the same rubric as paragraph 48 (i.e. Consideration Protocol relating to the Pan-African Parliament) in the section referring to Articles 2 and 3 ‘Establishment and Relationship with the OAU’, it is reported ….

After effecting certain amendments to paragraphs 1 and 2 of Article 3, the reference to members of Parliament representing all people of ‘African descent’ was deleted.’

Africans from outside the continent were excluded from the deliberations of both the OAU and the AU and from working in their Secretariats, even though it should be well understood that the fate of all Africans is interconnected. States peopled by a majority of Africans could not join either body (e.g. Haiti).

Thus, the African diaspora has been excluded from the Pan-African Parliament [Ras note: no outcry was heard from the Diaspora]. It does not take much imagination to determine who those 'other delegations' were who wanted those of African descent excluded from the Pan African Parliament. The hands of that particular lobby are seen as dominant throughout the Rapporteur's Report on the formation of the African Union."‘

Excerpts from the five-volume set, Come Out of Her, My People! 21st Century Black Prophetic Faith and Pan African Diplomacy.

• April 2025
  • Apr 3, 2025 ARCHIVE Apr 3, 2025
  • Apr 1, 2025 The Military Order of Jesus Christ in Portugal Started the Misnamed TransAtlantic Slave Trade Apr 1, 2025
• March 2025
  • Mar 24, 2025 THE PAN AFRICAN, REPATRIATION, BACK-TO-AFRICA HISTORY THAT YOU WERE NOT TOLD Mar 24, 2025
  • Mar 21, 2025 Malcom X Speaks on Reparations Mar 21, 2025
• January 2025
  • Jan 22, 2025 AFRICAN DIASPORA REPATRIATION & CITIZENSHIP DATA Jan 22, 2025
  • Jan 9, 2025 ANU SPIRITUALITY: SALVATION AND RESSURECTION THROUGH UTCHAU METU - THE JUDGEMENT DURING THE WINTER SOLSTICE AND AT DEATH Jan 9, 2025
• October 2024
  • Oct 22, 2024 THE TRUE STORY OF THE 9TH PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS - ALL THE BACKGROUND Oct 22, 2024
• September 2024
  • Sep 7, 2024 Dr. John Henrik Clarke - African Americans the lonely nation away from home Sep 7, 2024
• August 2024
  • Aug 31, 2024 AN ANSWER TO THOSE WHO SHIFT THE BLAME TO AFRICANS FOR SELLING THEIR OWN PEOPLE INTO CHATTEL SLAVERY IN THE AMERICAS Aug 31, 2024
  • Aug 18, 2024 IMARI OBADELE ON MALCOLM X AND REPARATIONS Aug 18, 2024
  • Aug 17, 2024 𝐏𝐆𝐑𝐍𝐀 𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐢𝐠𝐧 𝐀𝐟𝐟𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐬 𝐇𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲 - Queen Mother Audley Moore's Speech to the Summit Meeting of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in Kampala, Uganda - July 28, 1975 Aug 17, 2024
  • Aug 15, 2024 THE ABSENCE OF THE BLACK NATIONALISTS IN TODAY’S REPARATIONS MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES: A FAILURE TO LEARN THE LESSONS OF HISTORY Aug 15, 2024
  • Aug 13, 2024 CULTURAL CARRYOVERS, EPIGENETICS AND CONNECTING THE DOTS: BALANTA, PALMERES AND THE REPUBLIC OF NEW AFRIKA - A TRADITION OF LIBERATION, INDEPENDENCE AND REPARATIONS Aug 13, 2024
• June 2024
  • Jun 28, 2024 THE UNITED STATES AND ITS COLONIAL EMPIRE Jun 28, 2024
• June 2023
  • Jun 15, 2023 THE BALANTA WHO REVITALIZED THE ETHIOPIAN WORLD FEDERATION (EWF), CREATED A CITIZENSHIP POLICY FOR REPATRIATES AND TRIED TO SAVE THE SHASHEMANE LAND GRANT GIVEN BY EMPEROR H.I.M. HAILE SELASSIE I Jun 15, 2023
• March 2023
  • Mar 14, 2023 Outcome of the 4th Preparatory Meeting for the 8th Pan African Congress Part 1: Pan African TV and Radio Mar 14, 2023
  • Mar 14, 2023 Council of Pan African Diaspora Elders Letter of Support to President Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa of The Republic of Zimbabwe for the 8PAC1 Mar 14, 2023
  • Mar 9, 2023 Outcome of the 3rd Preparatory Meeting for the 8th Pan African Congress Part 1: Diaspora Pan African Capital Fund Mar 9, 2023
  • Mar 3, 2023 TOWARDS THE 8TH PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS PART 1: LESSONS FROM THE 6TH PAC AND 7TH PAC Mar 3, 2023
  • Mar 2, 2023 Divide and Conquer Diplomacy of Lisbon and Washington 1973: Coopting the PAIGC and the Balanta People Mar 2, 2023
• February 2023
  • Feb 28, 2023 The African Union and the African Diaspora - Tracking the AU 6th Region Initiative and the Right to Return Citizenship: A Resource for the 8th Pan African Congress Part 1 in Harare, Zimbabwe Feb 28, 2023
  • Feb 27, 2023 PREPARING FOR THE AFRO DESCENDANT/NEW AFRIKAN PLEBISCITE FOR SELF DETERMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES: UNDERSTANDING THE BERLIN CONFERENCE OF 1884 Feb 27, 2023
  • Feb 27, 2023 PREPARING FOR THE AFRO DESCENDANT/NEW AFRIKAN PLEBISCITE FOR SELF DETERMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES: UNDERSTANDING DECOLONIZATION Feb 27, 2023
  • Feb 27, 2023 PLEBISCITES IN WORLD HISTORY Feb 27, 2023
  • Feb 27, 2023 African Liberation and the Use of Plebiscites Feb 27, 2023
  • Feb 25, 2023 OUTCOME OF SECOND PREPARATORY MEETING FOR THE 8TH PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS PART 1 IN HARARE, ZIMBABWE Feb 25, 2023
  • Feb 20, 2023 Outcome of the First Preparatory Meeting for the 8th Pan African Congress Part 1 in Harare, Zimbabwe Feb 20, 2023
  • Feb 19, 2023 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MODERN RIGHT TO RETURN CITIZENSHIP MOVEMENT SINCE THE BERLIN CONFERENCE 1884: A PRESENTATION TO THE 8TH PAC PART 1 PREPARATORY MEETING DISCUSSING PATHWAYS TO CITIZENSHIP Feb 19, 2023
  • Feb 14, 2023 Defining the Afro Descendants' Right to Return (RTR) to their Ancestral Homelands on the African Continent for the 8PAC Part 1 Feb 14, 2023
• December 2022
  • Dec 25, 2022 The African American Case for Independence at the International Court of Justice Dec 25, 2022
• November 2022
  • Nov 3, 2022 Secrets of the Forest People: Learning the Bantu Culture in Cameroon Nov 3, 2022
• October 2022
  • Oct 19, 2022 Celebrating the 50 Year Anniversary of Amilcar Cabral's Meeting With African Americans, October 20, 1972 Oct 19, 2022
• September 2022
  • Sep 7, 2022 THE POTENTIAL OF A MINORITY REVOLUTION IN THE USA - The Crusader, August 1965 Sep 7, 2022
  • Sep 7, 2022 THE AFRICAN LIBERATION READER Sep 7, 2022
• August 2022
  • Aug 31, 2022 CELEBRATING THE INTERNATIONAL DAY FOR PEOPLE OF AFRICAN DESCENT AND THE 102nd ANNIVERSARY OF THE UNIA'S "DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF THE NEGRO PEOPLES OF THE WORLD" Aug 31, 2022
  • Aug 30, 2022 MARTIN DELANY ON THE QUESTION OF ORIGINAL AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN 1854 Aug 30, 2022
• July 2022
  • Jul 20, 2022 DESCENDENTES DE BALANTA LIDERAM MOVIMENTO DE REPARAÇÃO NO VATICANO: RESPONSABILIZAM OS REPRESENTANTES DE JESUS ​​CRISTO PELA ESCRAVAÇÃO DOS POVOS AFRICANO Jul 20, 2022
  • Jul 20, 2022 BALANTA DESCENDANTS LEAD REPARATIONS MOVEMENT AT THE VATICAN: HOLD THE REPRESENTATIVES OF JESUS CHRIST RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ENSLAVEMENT OF AFRICAN PEOPLE Jul 20, 2022
• June 2022
  • Jun 13, 2022 THE DECADE OF RETURN INITIATIVE IN GUINEA BISSAU CELEBRATES THE 100 YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE ETHIOPIAN GOVERNMENT’S OFFER OF REPATRIATION AND CITIZENSHIP Jun 13, 2022
• January 2022
  • Jan 21, 2022 Interim President of the Guinea Bissau Swimming Federation, Siphiwe Baleka Gives Motivational Talk To Girls Futbol Team Members in Enterremento, Bissau Jan 21, 2022
  • Jan 14, 2022 250 Years Later, I Returned to the Village of My 5G Grandfather Jan 14, 2022
• September 2021
  • Sep 23, 2021 Lessons From Amilcar Cabral and Siphiwe Baleka: The Dum Diversas War and the Incomplete Independence of Guinea Bissau Sep 23, 2021
  • Sep 2, 2021 BRIEF NOTES ON BALANTA HISTORY BEFORE AND AFTER GUINEA BISSAU INDEPENDENCE Sep 2, 2021
• August 2021
  • Aug 25, 2021 BRIEF NOTES ON BALANTA MIGRATION IN GUINEA BISSAU Aug 25, 2021
  • Aug 19, 2021 Jornada de Quintino Medi para descobrir a Mãe Fula de Amílcar Cabral na Guiné-Bissau Aug 19, 2021
  • Aug 19, 2021 Quintino Medi's Journey to Discover Amilcar Cabral's Fula Mother in Guinea Bissau Aug 19, 2021
  • Aug 8, 2021 Space and Time in the African Worldview: Excerpt from Remembering the Dismembered Continent by Ayi Kwei Armah Aug 8, 2021
• May 2021
  • May 30, 2021 Historic Moment in Guinea Bissau: Denita Madyun-Baskerville is the First Balanta Woman to Return to Her Ancestral Homeland Since the Slave Trade May 30, 2021
  • May 27, 2021 Sketches of the History of Balanta People in America: Anthology Series 1 now available! May 27, 2021
  • May 5, 2021 MAY 5TH - THE MOST IMPORTANT DAY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND EVIDENCE THAT THE ANCESTORS OF AFRICAN PEOPLE COMMUNICATE TO THEIR DESCENDANTS ON EARTH AND SHAPE WORLD EVENTS May 5, 2021
• April 2021
  • Apr 6, 2021 CLARIFYING THE POLITICAL AND LEGAL STATUS OF 1,108 GENERATIONS OF MY FAMILY Apr 6, 2021
• March 2021
  • Mar 23, 2021 Balanta Marriage Customs: KWÂSSI, B-BÂSTI and MHÂH M-NANHI Mar 23, 2021
• February 2021
  • Feb 15, 2021 THE POWER OF THE LINEAGE RESTORATION MOVEMENT: LEARNING SPIRITUALITY AND CULTURE FROM LANGUAGE - A BALANTA CASE STUDY OF SINHA KREETCH (CELEBRATING THE DEATH OF SOMEONE) Feb 15, 2021
  • Feb 13, 2021 NOTES ON THE WEST AFRICAN SLAVERY CONTEXT IN WHICH BALANTA RESISTED Feb 13, 2021
• November 2020
  • Nov 24, 2020 Oligarchy: The Spiritual and International Legal Wars Against the Balanta Nov 24, 2020
• October 2020
  • Oct 25, 2020 The Civil, Political and Legal Illiteracy of African Americans: Failure to Apply the Framework of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Oct 25, 2020
  • Oct 11, 2020 Notes on Hugo Grotius' Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty (1604) Oct 11, 2020
  • Oct 10, 2020 The Spiritual Protective Function of the Balanta Placenta Tradition, The United States Birth Certificate and the Spiritual Damage of Slavery Oct 10, 2020
  • Oct 6, 2020 B’KINDEU & RANSOM: BALANTA PEOPLE REFUSED TO PARTICIPATE IN THE CRIMINAL EUROPEAN TRANS ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE Oct 6, 2020
  • Oct 1, 2020 From Nhacra to North Carolina: The Story of Brassa Nchabra and The Blake Family, 1760 to 1890 Oct 1, 2020
• September 2020
  • Sep 7, 2020 BALANTA AND THE POISON ORDEAL Sep 7, 2020
• August 2020
  • Aug 20, 2020 THE IMPORTANCE OF NARRATIVES: MORE FROM W.E.B. DUBOIS' BLACK RECONSTRUCTION IN AMERICA: 1860-1880, PRESIDENT ANDREW JOHNSON & FREDERICK DOUGLASS CO-OPT THE BLACK LIBERATION MOVEMENT Aug 20, 2020
  • Aug 1, 2020 First Balanta B'urassa Founders' Day Presentation Aug 1, 2020
• July 2020
  • Jul 4, 2020 KNOW YOUR AMERICAN HISTORY: A BALANTA FAMILY ON JULY 4 1776 Jul 4, 2020
  • Jul 3, 2020 LAND HAS ALWAYS BEEN CENTRAL TO THE SOLUTION OF AMERICA'S RACE PROBLEM Jul 3, 2020
• June 2020
  • Jun 24, 2020 The Black Liberation Movement (BLM), Balanta, Rastafari, and America's Drug War: Chicago Police Attacks on January 27, 1997 and August 6, 1999 Jun 24, 2020
  • Jun 22, 2020 Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) Reader Jun 22, 2020
  • Jun 21, 2020 A BALANTA PANTHER: STEPHEN HOBBS AND THE CHICAGO BLACK PANTHER PARTY Jun 21, 2020
  • Jun 9, 2020 REVISITING THE BATTLE PLAN: THE STRATEGY OF THE REPUBLIC OF NEW AFRIKA TO LIBERATE BLACK AMERICANS Jun 9, 2020
  • Jun 8, 2020 JUNE 8, 1954: THE MOST IMPORTANT DAY IN 20TH CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY Jun 8, 2020
  • Jun 2, 2020 Marcus Garvey Message to the People: Lesson 16 Propaganda (and War), The Course of African Philosophy Jun 2, 2020
• May 2020
  • May 17, 2020 THE BALANTA STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE AND EQUALITY: BRIEF SKETCHES OF ONE STRONG FAMILY'S ROLE IN AMERICAN HISTORY May 17, 2020
  • May 9, 2020 KNOW YOURSELF, KNOW YOUR ENEMY: UNDERSTANDING EUROPEAN HISTORY PRIOR TO THEIR ARRIVAL IN WEST AFRICA May 9, 2020
  • May 9, 2020 THE BOOK AFRICAN AMERICANS SHOULD BE READING: NOTES ON THE ORIGINS OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN INTERESTS IN INTERNATIONAL LAW May 9, 2020
  • May 8, 2020 The B'rassa Fight Against the Befera: Learning from the Revolutionaries from India May 8, 2020
• April 2020
  • Apr 10, 2020 Black Bodies of Knowledge: Information Gangsters, Guerrillas and Notes on an Effective History by John Fiske Apr 10, 2020
  • Apr 2, 2020 CREDO MUTWA ON THE RACE THAT DIED: A TALE OF TECHNOLOGY AND A WARNING TO THE FUTURE Apr 2, 2020
• March 2020
  • Mar 16, 2020 THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: WHO CREATED CHRISTIANITY, WHO WROTE THE GOSPELS FEATURING JESUS CHRIST, AND HOW DID CHRISTIANITY START IN AFRICA? Mar 16, 2020
• February 2020
  • Feb 19, 2020 MISSING MIDDLE PASSAGE DOCUMENTS: THE CONSEQUENCE FOR BALANTA, MENDE, TEMNE AND OTHER SENEGAMBIAN PEOPLES BROUGHT TO THE UNITED STATES Feb 19, 2020
  • Feb 3, 2020 THE MALI KINGDOM AND MANSA MUSA WERE IMPERIALIST SLAVE TRADERS: REVISITING AFRICAN HISTORY FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE PEOPLE WHO WERE OPPRESSED Feb 3, 2020
• December 2019
  • Dec 29, 2019 AFRICAN HISTORIANS SPEAK ON BLACK-WHITE RELATIONSHIPS AND THEIR MIXED RACE OFFSPRING Dec 29, 2019
  • Dec 3, 2019 Homosexuality Contemplated From African Spirituality Dec 3, 2019
  • Dec 1, 2019 Befera: The White Christian Witches of the Balanta Worldview Dec 1, 2019
• November 2019
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  • Nov 6, 2019 SUMMARY OF LEGAL ISSUES CONCERNING BALANTA PEOPLE Nov 6, 2019
  • Nov 6, 2019 DEVELOPMENT OF LEGAL ISSUES CONCERNING BALANTA PEOPLE Nov 6, 2019
  • Nov 4, 2019 Timeline of American History And The Birth of White Supremacy and White Privilege in America Nov 4, 2019
• October 2019
  • Oct 29, 2019 LEGAL ISSUES EFFECTING BALANTA AS A RESULT OF CONTACT WITH THE ENGLISH Oct 29, 2019
  • Oct 29, 2019 LEGAL ISSUES EFFECTING BALANTA AS A RESULT OF CONTACT WITH EUROPEAN CHRISTIANS Oct 29, 2019
  • Oct 28, 2019 DEVELOPMENT OF LEGAL ISSUES DURING THE BALANTA MIGRATION PERIOD Oct 28, 2019
  • Oct 28, 2019 ORIGIN OF LEGAL ISSUES CONCERNING BALANTA PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES Oct 28, 2019
  • Oct 25, 2019 HOW THE AFRICAN UNION WAS ESTABLISHED TO INCLUDE THE AFRICAN DIASPORA Oct 25, 2019
  • Oct 22, 2019 THE BALANTA FOUNDER OF THE AFRICAN UNION 6TH REGION CAMPAIGN Oct 22, 2019
  • Oct 18, 2019 Amilcar Cabral Describes Balanta People Oct 18, 2019
  • Oct 16, 2019 AN ANSWER TO THOSE WHO CLAIM THAT AFRICAN AMERICANS ARE HEBREW OR “LOST JEWS” Oct 16, 2019
  • Oct 9, 2019 26 Principles of the Great Belief of the Balanta Ancient Ancestors Oct 9, 2019
• September 2019
  • Sep 19, 2019 Reviewing the Sudanic/TaNihisi Origins of the Balanta Sep 19, 2019

THE BALANTA FOUNDER OF THE AFRICAN UNION 6TH REGION CAMPAIGN

There has been a lot of appropriate outrage over the dismissal of Dr Arikana Chihombori Quao from her post as the African Union (AU) Permanent Ambassador in the United States. However, most people do not know that it was an American of Balanta origin that was the first to launch the African Union 6th Region Campaign in the United States.

After arriving in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in late December 2002, Ras Nathaniel (born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago) registered with the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia Ministry of Information & Culture Press and Information Department as a journalist for the Rastafari Speaks newspaper.

With official media credentials, Ras Nathaniel now had access to the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), the African Union (AU) and the United Nations (UN). On February 3-4, 2003, Ras Nathaniel attended the 1st Extra-Ordinary Summit of the Assembly of the African Union in Addis Ababa and began issuing reports to the African Diaspora via the internet.  He was the only African American journalist in the room when the historic Article 3(q) was adopted that officially “invite(s) and encourage(s) the full participation of Africans in the Diaspora in the building of the African Union in its capacity as an important part of our Continent.” From this decision, the African Diaspora would become designated as the 6th Region of the African Union. Aware that Malcom X had also been an observer at the AU’s predecessor, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), Ras Nathaniel now felt an awesome responsibility to the African Diaspora, and particularly to the Rastafari community, to keep them informed of all things related to the African Union. At the final press briefing of the First Extraordinary Summit of the Assembly of the African Union, Ras Nathaniel asked South African President and AU Chairperson Thabo Mbeki to “comment on the kinds of proposals that were discussed in the brainstorming session concerning the inclusion of the African Diaspora in the African Union”. After meeting with the Rastafari community in Shashemane, Ras Nathaniel was mandated to draft the African Diaspora and Recommendations for the African Union letter. On February 25, 2003 it was delivered to President Thabo Mbeki and IRIE began conducting a Repatriation Census in the African Diaspora, a task that was originally given to Malcom X at the OAU. According to Malcolm X,

“One of the things I saw the OAAU doing from the very start was collecting the names of all the people of African descent who have professional skills, no matter where they are. Then we could have a central register that we could share with independent countries in Africa and elsewhere. Do you know, I started collecting names, and then I gave the list to someone who I thought was a trusted friend, but both this so-called friend and the list disappeared. So, I’ve got to start all over again.” (Jan Carew, Ghosts In Our Blood, p. 61)

“The 22,000,000 so-called Negroes should be separated completely from America and should be permitted to go back home to our African homeland which is a long-range program; so the short-range program is that we must eat while we’re still here, we must have a place to sleep, we have clothes to wear, we must have better jobs, we must have better education; so that although our long-range political philosophy is to migrate back to our African homeland, our short-range program must involve that which is necessary to enable us to live a better life while we are still here.” (Interview with Malcolm X, by A.B. Spellman, Monthly Review, Vol. 16, no.1 May 1964).

Thus, Malcolm X, along with John Henrik Clarke, wrote the following into the Organization of Afro- American Unity (OAAU) Basic Unity Program

i. Restoration: “In order to free ourselves from the oppression of our enslavers then, it is absolutely necessary for the Afro-American to restore communication with Africa . . . .

ii. Reorientation: “ . . . We can learn much about Africa by reading informative books . . . “

iii. Education: “ . . . The Organization of Afro-American Unity will devise original educational methods and procedures which will liberate the minds of our children . . . We will . . . encourage qualified Afro-Americans to write and publish the textbooks needed to liberate our minds . . . . educating them  [our children] at home.”

iv. Economic Security: “ . . . After the Emancipation Proclamation . . . it was realized that the Afro-American constituted the largest homogeneous ethnic group with a common origin and common group experience in the United States and, if allowed to exercise economic or political freedom, would in a short period of time own this country. WE MUST ESTABLISH A TECHNICIAN BANK. WE MUST DO THIS SO THAT THE NEWLY INDEPENDENT NATIONS OF AFRICA CAN TURN TO US WHO ARE THEIR BROTHERS FOR THE TECHNICIANSTHEY WILL NEED NOW AND IN THE FUTURE.

From that moment on Ras Nathaniel focused his efforts on conducting the Repatriation Census and became the unelected, grassroots representative of the African Diaspora, devoting himself to the fulfilment of the five-year plan for Ethiopian Millennium Repatriation.

On December 23, 2005, Ras Nathaniel and IRIE signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Western Hemisphere African Diaspora Network (WHADN) creating the AU 6th Region Education Campaign. On April 18, 2003, the African Union in conjunction with the Foundation for Democracy in Africa (FDA) and members of WHADN, announced plans for establishing technical definitions of the Diaspora and the process of effectively integrating the Diaspora into the organs and programs of the African Union, notably the Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOC). Members of WHADN and the AU delegation agreed that participants should become actively involved in this process by forwarding proposals thru the WHADN Secretariat to the AU Commission for consideration and taking ownership of the outcomes of adopted projects. It was stressed that WHADN is a network in which Diaspora organizations could freely mobilize and coordinate their interaction with the African Union on an equal basis, WHADN to serve as the “functional interface mechanism with the AU.” Among the first groups to submit a proposal to WHADN for consideration by the AU Commission was The Issembly for Rastafari Iniversal Education (IRIE). Recognizing that WHADN was “a functional interface mechanism with the AU” and “the first step of membership” in the AU 6th Region Diaspora Initiative mandated to coordinate events in 2006 to popularize the AU, Ras Nathaniel, seeking funding and more immediate and effective means towards Repatriation to Africa, sought to utilize this new mechanism to present to the African Union the Rastafari Repatriation Census Proposal for the Start of the Ethiopian Millennium (September 11,2007).

According to the proposal, “Based on results already obtained in three Repatriation Census Workshops, IRIE estimates that there is a minimum of 100 cities or locations with 100 people with various skill sets, representing a minimum of $300,000 per city plus equipment. That translates into Brain Gain of 10,000 persons and US $30 million in financial resources plus equipment available for repatriation. . . . By conducting a Repatriation Census, the African Union will immediately benefit from having a central skills technician resource database from which they could fill skills shortages in various sectors of the African Continent’s economy. . . . This proposal seeks to combine the mandate for African Union Educational Workshops with the mandate to develop a Central Diaspora Skills Resource Bank with the existing Repatriation Census Workshops being conducted by the Issembly for Rastafari Iniversal Education.” The proposal was approved and thus was born the African Union 6th Region 2006 Education Campaign with Ras Nathaniel as its Director.

Immediately after signing the MOU, from January 4 to 10, 2006, Ras Nathaniel traveled to Jamaica to strategize with the Rastafari community on that island. A plan was eventually approved to host a Rastafari Global Unity Conference in South Africa (Azania). On November 8th, Ras Nathaniel arrived in Azania and a group of Rastafari Elders gave him the name, “Siphiwe Baleka”.  On November 9, Ras Nathaniel, along with Ras Tekla Haymanot, Sister Yaa Ashantewaa, and Ras Gareth Prince, appeared on South African Broadcasting Company (SABC) TV Africa Live program to explain the Rastafari position.

Immediately after returning from Azania, Ras Nathaniel traveled to Honduras in November for the Central American Black Organization (CABO) 12th Assembly in La Ceiba Honduras as a member of the Pan African Organizing Committee (PAOC). In Honduras, Ras Nathaniel was a roommate of elder Dr. Pauulu Kamarakafego, CEO of the Pan-African Movement to the United Nations. Dr. Kamarakafego has served as a counselor, consultant, official and friend to Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyere, CLR James, Walter Rodney and various African liberation movements. Dr. Kamarakafego was responsible for organizing the 6th Pan African Congress in Tanzania in 1969. With Dr. David Horne of the PAOC, Ras Nathaniel made a presentation on the AU 6th Region Diaspora Initiative and the process for electing the twenty representatives to the AU’s Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC).

On January 6, 2007, at the request of the Pan African Community Coalition (PACC) and the Pan Afrikan Organizing Committee (PAOC), Ras Nathaniel was invited to the New York Town Hall Meeting to discuss and supervise the election of New York’s Diaspora Representatives to the African Union (AU). After his presentation, the town hall discussed the formation of the Community Council of Elders (CCE) that conducted the election on January 27th. 

March 31, 2007 Election Results for the African Union 6th Region for New York State http://nkwanta.tripod.com/id10.html?fbclid=IwAR1iDPhno6E_rauS7yslYJ1ihaNiwPL8PM9_bjXxxMUEVlMqDW2CLUqCIlY

With African Diaspora elections underway and spreading throughout the Diaspora, Ras Nathaniel then attended the African Union Grand Debate in Ghana in July as Coordinator for IRIE and Director of the AU 6th Region Campaign. At this event, there were many other representatives and observers from the African Diaspora. Ras Nathaniel’s main focus was on the AU 6th Region Diaspora Initiative, the elections for its representatives to ECOSOC, and the issue of citizenship for members of the 6th Region.

Ras Nathaniel was a vocal supporter of a continental passport and setting up passport bureaus in African airports that could efficiently issue a Pan African passport to AU 6th Region members upon arrival anywhere on the continent. 

Finally, Ras Nathaniel, working with his friend, Ras Ikael Tafari, who was the Commissioner of Pan African Affairs for the Government of Barbados, helped to set the agenda for the Africa Diaspora Global Conference facilitated by the Republic of South Africa on behalf of the African Union, and jointly organized by the AU, CARICOM and the Government of Barbados, August 27-28, 2007. The context of the event was the Bicentennial Global Dialogue on “Slave Trade, Reconciliation and Social Justice.” Ras Nathaniel submitted his last-ditch proposal for $10 million funding from the governments in attendance, including Venezuela, Brazil and China, for the Ethiopian Millennium Repatriation and an emergency airlift of everyone that had completed Repatriation Census forms in a fashion similar to Operation Solomon, which, on Africa Day, May 25, 1991, airlifted 10,000 Ethiopian Falasha Jews to Israel, an effort kept secret by the military and organized by the American Association of Ethiopian Jews. To Ras Nathaniel, Rastafarians had every right to be repatriated to their spiritual mecca, Ethiopia.

The proposal was rejected, September 11, 2007 came and went, and with his Five-Year Plan now ending in failure, Ras Nathaniel disappeared. Fortunately, his effort, activities and documents have been documented and preserved in the 1,500-page, five volume set, Come Out of Her My People! 21st Century Black Prophetic Faith and Pan African Diplomacy.

On May 12, 2008, Ras Nathaniel legally changed his name to Siphiwe Baleka in order to honor his ancestors.

Today, Siphiwe has continued his educational ministry and focus on the OAAU Basic Unity point iii. Education: to “devise original educational methods and procedures which will liberate the minds of our children . . . to write and publish the textbooks needed to liberate our minds . . . . educating them  [our children] at home.” After receiving genetic testing results through African Ancestry on September 28, 2010, Siphiwe learned that his paternal DNA is a 100% match with the Balanta and his maternal DNA is a 99.2% match with Yoruba. For the past 9 years, Siphiwe began to study his paternal Balanta history, but struggled since Balanta has, from their origin, intentionally remained a stateless society without kings, chiefs, or leaders. As a result, most of their history has not been written down or studied. After collecting all the scattered references to the Balanta people in various European travel diaries, and re-reading African history through the eyes of the Balanta worldview, Siphiwe completed the first Balanta world history textbook, in three volumes, entitled Balanta B’Urassa, My Sons: Those Who Resist Remain. Using haplogroup migration studies and books by Cheik Anta Diop, Yoseph Ben Jochannan, John Henrik Clark, Credo Mutwa, Chancellor Williams and many other great African historians, scientists and intellects, Siphiwe was able to trace his and Balanta ancestral history from their earliest migrations down the Nile, to Wadi Kubbaniya from 42,000 BC to 18,500 BC, their further migration from modern day Sudan down the Nile into Nubia, Upper and Lower Kemet, and their migration across the continent from the Nile Valley across to their current homeland in Guinea Bissau. Using this history, Siphiwe then re-interprets world history from the viewpoint of Balanta at its center. Now, Siphiwe is working with other leaders in the genetic ancestry movement to develop a New Pan African Movement in the Diaspora that is based on the new knowledge of ancestry that had been denied the descendants of people captured, kidnapped and enslaved during the trans-Atlantic trade in African peoples. At the forefront of this movement is the House of Ancestry on which Siphiwe is a board member.

Siphiwe Baleka is an example of what one person with a Pan African education and Pan African vision can achieve. Whether it is his personal life, his business life, his athletic career, his publishing and media career, or his career as an artist ( he has sold many paintings), Siphiwe Baleka has internalized and manifested both excellence and the desire to uplift “his” people by any means necessary.

For the complete story of the untold history of this Balanta’s efforts at the African Union, purchase the five volumes of Come Out of Her, My People! 21st Century Black Prophetic Faith and Pan African Diplomacy

• April 2025
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• March 2025
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  • Mar 21, 2025 Malcom X Speaks on Reparations Mar 21, 2025
• January 2025
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  • Jan 9, 2025 ANU SPIRITUALITY: SALVATION AND RESSURECTION THROUGH UTCHAU METU - THE JUDGEMENT DURING THE WINTER SOLSTICE AND AT DEATH Jan 9, 2025
• October 2024
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• September 2024
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• August 2024
  • Aug 31, 2024 AN ANSWER TO THOSE WHO SHIFT THE BLAME TO AFRICANS FOR SELLING THEIR OWN PEOPLE INTO CHATTEL SLAVERY IN THE AMERICAS Aug 31, 2024
  • Aug 18, 2024 IMARI OBADELE ON MALCOLM X AND REPARATIONS Aug 18, 2024
  • Aug 17, 2024 𝐏𝐆𝐑𝐍𝐀 𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐢𝐠𝐧 𝐀𝐟𝐟𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐬 𝐇𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲 - Queen Mother Audley Moore's Speech to the Summit Meeting of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in Kampala, Uganda - July 28, 1975 Aug 17, 2024
  • Aug 15, 2024 THE ABSENCE OF THE BLACK NATIONALISTS IN TODAY’S REPARATIONS MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES: A FAILURE TO LEARN THE LESSONS OF HISTORY Aug 15, 2024
  • Aug 13, 2024 CULTURAL CARRYOVERS, EPIGENETICS AND CONNECTING THE DOTS: BALANTA, PALMERES AND THE REPUBLIC OF NEW AFRIKA - A TRADITION OF LIBERATION, INDEPENDENCE AND REPARATIONS Aug 13, 2024
• June 2024
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• June 2023
  • Jun 15, 2023 THE BALANTA WHO REVITALIZED THE ETHIOPIAN WORLD FEDERATION (EWF), CREATED A CITIZENSHIP POLICY FOR REPATRIATES AND TRIED TO SAVE THE SHASHEMANE LAND GRANT GIVEN BY EMPEROR H.I.M. HAILE SELASSIE I Jun 15, 2023
• March 2023
  • Mar 14, 2023 Outcome of the 4th Preparatory Meeting for the 8th Pan African Congress Part 1: Pan African TV and Radio Mar 14, 2023
  • Mar 14, 2023 Council of Pan African Diaspora Elders Letter of Support to President Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa of The Republic of Zimbabwe for the 8PAC1 Mar 14, 2023
  • Mar 9, 2023 Outcome of the 3rd Preparatory Meeting for the 8th Pan African Congress Part 1: Diaspora Pan African Capital Fund Mar 9, 2023
  • Mar 3, 2023 TOWARDS THE 8TH PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS PART 1: LESSONS FROM THE 6TH PAC AND 7TH PAC Mar 3, 2023
  • Mar 2, 2023 Divide and Conquer Diplomacy of Lisbon and Washington 1973: Coopting the PAIGC and the Balanta People Mar 2, 2023
• February 2023
  • Feb 28, 2023 The African Union and the African Diaspora - Tracking the AU 6th Region Initiative and the Right to Return Citizenship: A Resource for the 8th Pan African Congress Part 1 in Harare, Zimbabwe Feb 28, 2023
  • Feb 27, 2023 PREPARING FOR THE AFRO DESCENDANT/NEW AFRIKAN PLEBISCITE FOR SELF DETERMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES: UNDERSTANDING THE BERLIN CONFERENCE OF 1884 Feb 27, 2023
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  • Feb 27, 2023 PLEBISCITES IN WORLD HISTORY Feb 27, 2023
  • Feb 27, 2023 African Liberation and the Use of Plebiscites Feb 27, 2023
  • Feb 25, 2023 OUTCOME OF SECOND PREPARATORY MEETING FOR THE 8TH PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS PART 1 IN HARARE, ZIMBABWE Feb 25, 2023
  • Feb 20, 2023 Outcome of the First Preparatory Meeting for the 8th Pan African Congress Part 1 in Harare, Zimbabwe Feb 20, 2023
  • Feb 19, 2023 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MODERN RIGHT TO RETURN CITIZENSHIP MOVEMENT SINCE THE BERLIN CONFERENCE 1884: A PRESENTATION TO THE 8TH PAC PART 1 PREPARATORY MEETING DISCUSSING PATHWAYS TO CITIZENSHIP Feb 19, 2023
  • Feb 14, 2023 Defining the Afro Descendants' Right to Return (RTR) to their Ancestral Homelands on the African Continent for the 8PAC Part 1 Feb 14, 2023
• December 2022
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• November 2022
  • Nov 3, 2022 Secrets of the Forest People: Learning the Bantu Culture in Cameroon Nov 3, 2022
• October 2022
  • Oct 19, 2022 Celebrating the 50 Year Anniversary of Amilcar Cabral's Meeting With African Americans, October 20, 1972 Oct 19, 2022
• September 2022
  • Sep 7, 2022 THE POTENTIAL OF A MINORITY REVOLUTION IN THE USA - The Crusader, August 1965 Sep 7, 2022
  • Sep 7, 2022 THE AFRICAN LIBERATION READER Sep 7, 2022
• August 2022
  • Aug 31, 2022 CELEBRATING THE INTERNATIONAL DAY FOR PEOPLE OF AFRICAN DESCENT AND THE 102nd ANNIVERSARY OF THE UNIA'S "DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF THE NEGRO PEOPLES OF THE WORLD" Aug 31, 2022
  • Aug 30, 2022 MARTIN DELANY ON THE QUESTION OF ORIGINAL AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN 1854 Aug 30, 2022
• July 2022
  • Jul 20, 2022 DESCENDENTES DE BALANTA LIDERAM MOVIMENTO DE REPARAÇÃO NO VATICANO: RESPONSABILIZAM OS REPRESENTANTES DE JESUS ​​CRISTO PELA ESCRAVAÇÃO DOS POVOS AFRICANO Jul 20, 2022
  • Jul 20, 2022 BALANTA DESCENDANTS LEAD REPARATIONS MOVEMENT AT THE VATICAN: HOLD THE REPRESENTATIVES OF JESUS CHRIST RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ENSLAVEMENT OF AFRICAN PEOPLE Jul 20, 2022
• June 2022
  • Jun 13, 2022 THE DECADE OF RETURN INITIATIVE IN GUINEA BISSAU CELEBRATES THE 100 YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE ETHIOPIAN GOVERNMENT’S OFFER OF REPATRIATION AND CITIZENSHIP Jun 13, 2022
• January 2022
  • Jan 21, 2022 Interim President of the Guinea Bissau Swimming Federation, Siphiwe Baleka Gives Motivational Talk To Girls Futbol Team Members in Enterremento, Bissau Jan 21, 2022
  • Jan 14, 2022 250 Years Later, I Returned to the Village of My 5G Grandfather Jan 14, 2022
• September 2021
  • Sep 23, 2021 Lessons From Amilcar Cabral and Siphiwe Baleka: The Dum Diversas War and the Incomplete Independence of Guinea Bissau Sep 23, 2021
  • Sep 2, 2021 BRIEF NOTES ON BALANTA HISTORY BEFORE AND AFTER GUINEA BISSAU INDEPENDENCE Sep 2, 2021
• August 2021
  • Aug 25, 2021 BRIEF NOTES ON BALANTA MIGRATION IN GUINEA BISSAU Aug 25, 2021
  • Aug 19, 2021 Jornada de Quintino Medi para descobrir a Mãe Fula de Amílcar Cabral na Guiné-Bissau Aug 19, 2021
  • Aug 19, 2021 Quintino Medi's Journey to Discover Amilcar Cabral's Fula Mother in Guinea Bissau Aug 19, 2021
  • Aug 8, 2021 Space and Time in the African Worldview: Excerpt from Remembering the Dismembered Continent by Ayi Kwei Armah Aug 8, 2021
• May 2021
  • May 30, 2021 Historic Moment in Guinea Bissau: Denita Madyun-Baskerville is the First Balanta Woman to Return to Her Ancestral Homeland Since the Slave Trade May 30, 2021
  • May 27, 2021 Sketches of the History of Balanta People in America: Anthology Series 1 now available! May 27, 2021
  • May 5, 2021 MAY 5TH - THE MOST IMPORTANT DAY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND EVIDENCE THAT THE ANCESTORS OF AFRICAN PEOPLE COMMUNICATE TO THEIR DESCENDANTS ON EARTH AND SHAPE WORLD EVENTS May 5, 2021
• April 2021
  • Apr 6, 2021 CLARIFYING THE POLITICAL AND LEGAL STATUS OF 1,108 GENERATIONS OF MY FAMILY Apr 6, 2021
• March 2021
  • Mar 23, 2021 Balanta Marriage Customs: KWÂSSI, B-BÂSTI and MHÂH M-NANHI Mar 23, 2021
• February 2021
  • Feb 15, 2021 THE POWER OF THE LINEAGE RESTORATION MOVEMENT: LEARNING SPIRITUALITY AND CULTURE FROM LANGUAGE - A BALANTA CASE STUDY OF SINHA KREETCH (CELEBRATING THE DEATH OF SOMEONE) Feb 15, 2021
  • Feb 13, 2021 NOTES ON THE WEST AFRICAN SLAVERY CONTEXT IN WHICH BALANTA RESISTED Feb 13, 2021
• November 2020
  • Nov 24, 2020 Oligarchy: The Spiritual and International Legal Wars Against the Balanta Nov 24, 2020
• October 2020
  • Oct 25, 2020 The Civil, Political and Legal Illiteracy of African Americans: Failure to Apply the Framework of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Oct 25, 2020
  • Oct 11, 2020 Notes on Hugo Grotius' Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty (1604) Oct 11, 2020
  • Oct 10, 2020 The Spiritual Protective Function of the Balanta Placenta Tradition, The United States Birth Certificate and the Spiritual Damage of Slavery Oct 10, 2020
  • Oct 6, 2020 B’KINDEU & RANSOM: BALANTA PEOPLE REFUSED TO PARTICIPATE IN THE CRIMINAL EUROPEAN TRANS ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE Oct 6, 2020
  • Oct 1, 2020 From Nhacra to North Carolina: The Story of Brassa Nchabra and The Blake Family, 1760 to 1890 Oct 1, 2020
• September 2020
  • Sep 7, 2020 BALANTA AND THE POISON ORDEAL Sep 7, 2020
• August 2020
  • Aug 20, 2020 THE IMPORTANCE OF NARRATIVES: MORE FROM W.E.B. DUBOIS' BLACK RECONSTRUCTION IN AMERICA: 1860-1880, PRESIDENT ANDREW JOHNSON & FREDERICK DOUGLASS CO-OPT THE BLACK LIBERATION MOVEMENT Aug 20, 2020
  • Aug 1, 2020 First Balanta B'urassa Founders' Day Presentation Aug 1, 2020
• July 2020
  • Jul 4, 2020 KNOW YOUR AMERICAN HISTORY: A BALANTA FAMILY ON JULY 4 1776 Jul 4, 2020
  • Jul 3, 2020 LAND HAS ALWAYS BEEN CENTRAL TO THE SOLUTION OF AMERICA'S RACE PROBLEM Jul 3, 2020
• June 2020
  • Jun 24, 2020 The Black Liberation Movement (BLM), Balanta, Rastafari, and America's Drug War: Chicago Police Attacks on January 27, 1997 and August 6, 1999 Jun 24, 2020
  • Jun 22, 2020 Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) Reader Jun 22, 2020
  • Jun 21, 2020 A BALANTA PANTHER: STEPHEN HOBBS AND THE CHICAGO BLACK PANTHER PARTY Jun 21, 2020
  • Jun 9, 2020 REVISITING THE BATTLE PLAN: THE STRATEGY OF THE REPUBLIC OF NEW AFRIKA TO LIBERATE BLACK AMERICANS Jun 9, 2020
  • Jun 8, 2020 JUNE 8, 1954: THE MOST IMPORTANT DAY IN 20TH CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY Jun 8, 2020
  • Jun 2, 2020 Marcus Garvey Message to the People: Lesson 16 Propaganda (and War), The Course of African Philosophy Jun 2, 2020
• May 2020
  • May 17, 2020 THE BALANTA STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE AND EQUALITY: BRIEF SKETCHES OF ONE STRONG FAMILY'S ROLE IN AMERICAN HISTORY May 17, 2020
  • May 9, 2020 KNOW YOURSELF, KNOW YOUR ENEMY: UNDERSTANDING EUROPEAN HISTORY PRIOR TO THEIR ARRIVAL IN WEST AFRICA May 9, 2020
  • May 9, 2020 THE BOOK AFRICAN AMERICANS SHOULD BE READING: NOTES ON THE ORIGINS OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN INTERESTS IN INTERNATIONAL LAW May 9, 2020
  • May 8, 2020 The B'rassa Fight Against the Befera: Learning from the Revolutionaries from India May 8, 2020
• April 2020
  • Apr 10, 2020 Black Bodies of Knowledge: Information Gangsters, Guerrillas and Notes on an Effective History by John Fiske Apr 10, 2020
  • Apr 2, 2020 CREDO MUTWA ON THE RACE THAT DIED: A TALE OF TECHNOLOGY AND A WARNING TO THE FUTURE Apr 2, 2020
• March 2020
  • Mar 16, 2020 THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: WHO CREATED CHRISTIANITY, WHO WROTE THE GOSPELS FEATURING JESUS CHRIST, AND HOW DID CHRISTIANITY START IN AFRICA? Mar 16, 2020
• February 2020
  • Feb 19, 2020 MISSING MIDDLE PASSAGE DOCUMENTS: THE CONSEQUENCE FOR BALANTA, MENDE, TEMNE AND OTHER SENEGAMBIAN PEOPLES BROUGHT TO THE UNITED STATES Feb 19, 2020
  • Feb 3, 2020 THE MALI KINGDOM AND MANSA MUSA WERE IMPERIALIST SLAVE TRADERS: REVISITING AFRICAN HISTORY FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE PEOPLE WHO WERE OPPRESSED Feb 3, 2020
• December 2019
  • Dec 29, 2019 AFRICAN HISTORIANS SPEAK ON BLACK-WHITE RELATIONSHIPS AND THEIR MIXED RACE OFFSPRING Dec 29, 2019
  • Dec 3, 2019 Homosexuality Contemplated From African Spirituality Dec 3, 2019
  • Dec 1, 2019 Befera: The White Christian Witches of the Balanta Worldview Dec 1, 2019
• November 2019
  • Nov 16, 2019 Balanta and the Banking System: A Case Study of the Criminal Application of Fictitious Corporate Statutory Law Nov 16, 2019
  • Nov 6, 2019 SUMMARY OF LEGAL ISSUES CONCERNING BALANTA PEOPLE Nov 6, 2019
  • Nov 6, 2019 DEVELOPMENT OF LEGAL ISSUES CONCERNING BALANTA PEOPLE Nov 6, 2019
  • Nov 4, 2019 Timeline of American History And The Birth of White Supremacy and White Privilege in America Nov 4, 2019
• October 2019
  • Oct 29, 2019 LEGAL ISSUES EFFECTING BALANTA AS A RESULT OF CONTACT WITH THE ENGLISH Oct 29, 2019
  • Oct 29, 2019 LEGAL ISSUES EFFECTING BALANTA AS A RESULT OF CONTACT WITH EUROPEAN CHRISTIANS Oct 29, 2019
  • Oct 28, 2019 DEVELOPMENT OF LEGAL ISSUES DURING THE BALANTA MIGRATION PERIOD Oct 28, 2019
  • Oct 28, 2019 ORIGIN OF LEGAL ISSUES CONCERNING BALANTA PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES Oct 28, 2019
  • Oct 25, 2019 HOW THE AFRICAN UNION WAS ESTABLISHED TO INCLUDE THE AFRICAN DIASPORA Oct 25, 2019
  • Oct 22, 2019 THE BALANTA FOUNDER OF THE AFRICAN UNION 6TH REGION CAMPAIGN Oct 22, 2019
  • Oct 18, 2019 Amilcar Cabral Describes Balanta People Oct 18, 2019
  • Oct 16, 2019 AN ANSWER TO THOSE WHO CLAIM THAT AFRICAN AMERICANS ARE HEBREW OR “LOST JEWS” Oct 16, 2019
  • Oct 9, 2019 26 Principles of the Great Belief of the Balanta Ancient Ancestors Oct 9, 2019
• September 2019
  • Sep 19, 2019 Reviewing the Sudanic/TaNihisi Origins of the Balanta Sep 19, 2019

Amilcar Cabral Describes Balanta People

“In fact in the tragic history of revolutionary Africa, so many of whose leaders have left only a faint memory, three great figures stand out indisputably: Kwame Nkrumah, the visionary; Patrice Lumumba, the martyr; Amilcar Cabral, the unifier. As a unifier and mobilizer, he was both a theoretician and a man of action indefatigably in pursuit of reality, by revealing the deep roots, fundamental causes, so often blurred in the tumult of revolutionary action. For Guineans and Cape Verddians, he is the founder of the nation and the guide . . . .”

- Mario de Andrade, Biographical notes, Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amilcar Cabral

“These long and difficult campaign for anti-colonial and post-colonial liberation and development in the African empire of the Portuguese - in Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Sao Tome - produced a number of outstanding revolutionary thinkers who proved able to live their thought in their practice, and who, in doing that, have displayed a rare and often decisive talent for explanation in writing and the spoken word. Among these thinkers, and even at the head of them, was Amilcar Cabral, the author of the writing in this book. Murdered by the agents of Portuguese Fascism in 1973, his work lives after him and is there for inspection. A supreme educator in the widest sense of the word, Cabral can be recognized even now as being among the great figures of our time. We need not wait for history’s judgement to tell us that.. . . . Suffice it to say that he was loved as well as followed, and he was both because he was large hearted, entirely committed, devoted to his people’s progress. . . . He raised an army, led and taught it how to fight, gave it detailed orders, supervised its every major action; but he did all this, by the habit of his practice, through a process of collective political discussion. . . . Cabral gave his life for the liberation that he served, and he had to give it long before his time and when he was still in the full zest and vigour of his work..”

- Basil Davidson, Introduction, Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amilcar Cabral

AMILCAR CABRAL DESCRIBES BINHAM B’URASSA (BALANTA PEOPLE)

Excerpt from Part 1 The Weapon of Theory, Party Principles and Political Practice

“The Balanta have what is called a horizontal society, meaning that they do not have classes one above the other. The Balanta do not have great chiefs; it was the Portuguese who made chiefs for them. Each family, each compound is autonomous and if there is any difficulty, it is a council of elders which settles it. There is no State, no authority which rules everybody. If there has been in our times, you are young; it was imposed by the Portuguese. There are Mandinga imposed as chiefs of the Balanta, or former African policemen turned into chiefs. The Balanta cannot resist, and they accept, but they are only play-acting towards the chief. Each one rules in his own house and there is understanding among them. They join together to work in the fields, etc.. and there is not much talk. And it can even happen in the Balanta group that there are two family compounds close to each other and they do not get on with each other because of a land dispute or some other quarrel from the past. They do not want anything to do with each other. But these are ancient customs whose origin one would need to explain, if we had time. Old stories, of blood, of marriage, of beliefs, etc. Balanta society is like this: the more land you work, the richer you are, but the wealth is not to be hoarded, it is to be spent, for one individual cannot be much more than another. That is the principle of Balanta society, as of other societies in our land. Whereas the Fula and Manjaco have chiefs, but they were not imposed by the Portuguese; it is part of the evolution of their history. Obviously we must tell you that in Guine the Fula and Mandinga at least are folk who came from abroad. The majority of Fula and Mandinga in our land were original inhabitants who became Fula and Mandinga. It is good to know this well so as to understand certain aspects. Because if we compare the life style of Fula in our land with that of the true Fula in other regions of Africa, there is a slight difference; even in the Futa-Djalon there is a difference. In our land many became Fula; former Mandinga became Fula. Even the Mandigna, who came and conquered as far as the Mansoa region ‘Mandingized’ persons and changed them into Mandinga. The Balanta refused and many people say that the very word ‘balanta’ means those who refuse. The Balanta is someone who is not convinced, who denies. But they did not refuse so much, because we find the Balanta-Mane, the Mansoaner. There were always some who accepted, and who were gradually growing in number, as they accepted becoming Moslems.

Balanta, Pepel, Mancanha, etc., were all folk from the interior of Africa whom the Mandinga drove towards the sea. The Sussu of the Republic of Guinea, for example, come from Futa-Djalon, from where the Mandinga and the Fula drove them, The Mandinga drove them and later came the Fula who in turn drove the Mandinga. As we have said, the Fula society, for example, or the Manjaco society are societies which have classes from the bottom to the top. With the Balanta it is not like that: anyone who holds his head very high is not respected any more, already wants to become a white man, etc. For example, if someone has grown a great deal of rice, he must hold a great feast, to use it up. Whereas the Fula and Manjaco have other rules, with some higher then others. This means that the Manjaco and Fula have what are called vertical societies. At the top there is the chief, then follow the religious leaders, the important religious figures, who with the chiefs form a class. Then come others of various professions (cobblers, blacksmiths, goldsmiths) who, in any society, do not have equal rights with those at the top. By tradition, anyone who was a goldsmith was even ashamed of it - all the more if he were a ‘griot’ (minstrel). So we have a series of professions in a hierarchy, in a ladder, one below the other. The blacksmith is not the same as the cobbler, the cobbler is not the same as the goldsmith, etc.; each one has his distinct profession. Then come the great mass of folk who till the ground. They till to eat and live, they till the ground for the chiegs, according to custom. This is Fula and Manjaco society, with all the theories this implies such as that a given chief is linked to God. Among the Manjaco, for example, if someone is a tiller, he cannot till the ground without the chief’s order, for the chief carries the word of God to him. Everyone is free to believe what he wishes. But why is the whole cycle created? So that those who are on top can maintain the certainty that those who are below will not rise up against them. But in our land it has sometimes occurred, among the Fula, for example, that those who were below rose up and struggled against those at the top. There have sometimes been major peasants’ revolts. We have, for example, the case of Mussa Molo who overthrew the king and took his place. But as soon as he had taken the place, he adopted the same ancient law, because that was what suited him. Everything remained the same, because like that he was well off. And he soon forgot his origin. That, unhappily, is what many folk want.

In this bush society, a great number of Balanta adhered to the struggle, and this is not by accident, nor is it because Balanta are better than others. It is because of their type of society, a horizontal (level) society, but of free men, who want to be free, who do not have oppression at the top, except the oppression of the Portuguese. The Balanta is his own man and the Portuguese is over him, because he knows that the chief there, Mamadu, is in no way his chief, but is a creature of the Portuguese. So he is the more interested in putting an end to this so as to remain totally free. And that is also why, when some Party element makes a mistake with the Balanta, they do not like it and become angered quickly, more quickly than any other group.

Among the Fula and Manjaco it is not like this. The broad mass who suffer in fact are at the bottom, tillers of the soil (peasants). But there are many folk between them and the Portuguese. They are used to suffering, to suffering at the hands of their own folk, from the behaviour of their own folk. Someone who tills the soil has to work for all the chiefs, who are numerous, and for the district officers. So we have found the following: once they had really understood, a large proportion of the peasants adhered to the struggle, except one or other group with whom we had not worked well. . . .

In the societies with a horizontal structure, like the Balanta society, for example,the distribution of cultural levels is more or less uniform, variations being linked solely to individual characteristics and to age groups. In the societies with a vertical structure, like that of the Fula for example, there are important variations from the top to the bottom of the social pyramid. This shows once more the close connexion between the cultural factor and the economic factor, and also explains the difference in the overall or sectoral behavior of these two ethnic groups towards the liberation movement.“

Excerpt from Agricultural Census of Guine (1953)

“The Balanta tribe (30.07%), Fula (28.61%), Mandinga (15.69%) and Manjaco (12.62%) have the largest share of cultivated area, making up 86.99% of the overall total. . . . In other words: there are in Guine about twenty-five different tribes (1950 Population Census), of whom only a quarter have almost the whole of the cultivated area, with four peoples particularly prominent (Balanta, Fula, Mandinga and Manjaco). . . .

The largest cultivated areas correspond generally to the largest multiple cropped areas. The Fula people who have the largest area under crops do not, however, cultivate the largest true area (the Balanta people do this), as the former practise intenesive multiple-cropping (31, 811 hectares). . . .

Taking into consideration only the main crops (rice, cereals and groundnuts), it is seen that the Balanta people provide about half the area for floodplain rice (47.16%) the Manjaco people (14.30 %), Fula (12.27%) and Mandinga (10.53%) follow. . . .

The Balanta people supply 61.01% of the total production of floodplain rice. They are followed by the Manjaco people (12.06%), Fula (7.06%), Mandinga (6.9%) and Pepel (5.01%). . . . The highest average yields are those attained by the Balanta people, Pepel and Manjaco.

The Fula people supply nearly half the groundnuts production (43.61%), followed by the Mandinga people (22.71%), Balanta (17.92%), Manjaco (7.58%), Mancanha (3.80%) and Balanta-Mane (1.24%). . . .

For floodplain rice the highest averages (1800 kilograms) are found in the catio region and are attained by the Balanta people. . . .

In relation to trees bearing fruit, the Mandinga people (27.40%), Fula (20.74%), Balanta (16.88%) and Manjaco (12.11%) show the highest number of bushes. . . .

The Balanta people have the highest number of mangoes (fruit bearing, 33.26%; not bearing, 37.65%) . . . .

The Balanta and Mancanha peoples have the highest number of cashews.”

Some of the videos below are in Portuguese. Click “CC” and change the settings to “Auto-translate - English” to get English Subtitles. Click here for more on Amilcar Cabral and the Revolutionary War.

• April 2025
  • Apr 3, 2025 ARCHIVE Apr 3, 2025
  • Apr 1, 2025 The Military Order of Jesus Christ in Portugal Started the Misnamed TransAtlantic Slave Trade Apr 1, 2025
• March 2025
  • Mar 24, 2025 THE PAN AFRICAN, REPATRIATION, BACK-TO-AFRICA HISTORY THAT YOU WERE NOT TOLD Mar 24, 2025
  • Mar 21, 2025 Malcom X Speaks on Reparations Mar 21, 2025
• January 2025
  • Jan 22, 2025 AFRICAN DIASPORA REPATRIATION & CITIZENSHIP DATA Jan 22, 2025
  • Jan 9, 2025 ANU SPIRITUALITY: SALVATION AND RESSURECTION THROUGH UTCHAU METU - THE JUDGEMENT DURING THE WINTER SOLSTICE AND AT DEATH Jan 9, 2025
• October 2024
  • Oct 22, 2024 THE TRUE STORY OF THE 9TH PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS - ALL THE BACKGROUND Oct 22, 2024
• September 2024
  • Sep 7, 2024 Dr. John Henrik Clarke - African Americans the lonely nation away from home Sep 7, 2024
• August 2024
  • Aug 31, 2024 AN ANSWER TO THOSE WHO SHIFT THE BLAME TO AFRICANS FOR SELLING THEIR OWN PEOPLE INTO CHATTEL SLAVERY IN THE AMERICAS Aug 31, 2024
  • Aug 18, 2024 IMARI OBADELE ON MALCOLM X AND REPARATIONS Aug 18, 2024
  • Aug 17, 2024 𝐏𝐆𝐑𝐍𝐀 𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐢𝐠𝐧 𝐀𝐟𝐟𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐬 𝐇𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲 - Queen Mother Audley Moore's Speech to the Summit Meeting of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in Kampala, Uganda - July 28, 1975 Aug 17, 2024
  • Aug 15, 2024 THE ABSENCE OF THE BLACK NATIONALISTS IN TODAY’S REPARATIONS MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES: A FAILURE TO LEARN THE LESSONS OF HISTORY Aug 15, 2024
  • Aug 13, 2024 CULTURAL CARRYOVERS, EPIGENETICS AND CONNECTING THE DOTS: BALANTA, PALMERES AND THE REPUBLIC OF NEW AFRIKA - A TRADITION OF LIBERATION, INDEPENDENCE AND REPARATIONS Aug 13, 2024
• June 2024
  • Jun 28, 2024 THE UNITED STATES AND ITS COLONIAL EMPIRE Jun 28, 2024
• June 2023
  • Jun 15, 2023 THE BALANTA WHO REVITALIZED THE ETHIOPIAN WORLD FEDERATION (EWF), CREATED A CITIZENSHIP POLICY FOR REPATRIATES AND TRIED TO SAVE THE SHASHEMANE LAND GRANT GIVEN BY EMPEROR H.I.M. HAILE SELASSIE I Jun 15, 2023
• March 2023
  • Mar 14, 2023 Outcome of the 4th Preparatory Meeting for the 8th Pan African Congress Part 1: Pan African TV and Radio Mar 14, 2023
  • Mar 14, 2023 Council of Pan African Diaspora Elders Letter of Support to President Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa of The Republic of Zimbabwe for the 8PAC1 Mar 14, 2023
  • Mar 9, 2023 Outcome of the 3rd Preparatory Meeting for the 8th Pan African Congress Part 1: Diaspora Pan African Capital Fund Mar 9, 2023
  • Mar 3, 2023 TOWARDS THE 8TH PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS PART 1: LESSONS FROM THE 6TH PAC AND 7TH PAC Mar 3, 2023
  • Mar 2, 2023 Divide and Conquer Diplomacy of Lisbon and Washington 1973: Coopting the PAIGC and the Balanta People Mar 2, 2023
• February 2023
  • Feb 28, 2023 The African Union and the African Diaspora - Tracking the AU 6th Region Initiative and the Right to Return Citizenship: A Resource for the 8th Pan African Congress Part 1 in Harare, Zimbabwe Feb 28, 2023
  • Feb 27, 2023 PREPARING FOR THE AFRO DESCENDANT/NEW AFRIKAN PLEBISCITE FOR SELF DETERMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES: UNDERSTANDING THE BERLIN CONFERENCE OF 1884 Feb 27, 2023
  • Feb 27, 2023 PREPARING FOR THE AFRO DESCENDANT/NEW AFRIKAN PLEBISCITE FOR SELF DETERMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES: UNDERSTANDING DECOLONIZATION Feb 27, 2023
  • Feb 27, 2023 PLEBISCITES IN WORLD HISTORY Feb 27, 2023
  • Feb 27, 2023 African Liberation and the Use of Plebiscites Feb 27, 2023
  • Feb 25, 2023 OUTCOME OF SECOND PREPARATORY MEETING FOR THE 8TH PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS PART 1 IN HARARE, ZIMBABWE Feb 25, 2023
  • Feb 20, 2023 Outcome of the First Preparatory Meeting for the 8th Pan African Congress Part 1 in Harare, Zimbabwe Feb 20, 2023
  • Feb 19, 2023 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MODERN RIGHT TO RETURN CITIZENSHIP MOVEMENT SINCE THE BERLIN CONFERENCE 1884: A PRESENTATION TO THE 8TH PAC PART 1 PREPARATORY MEETING DISCUSSING PATHWAYS TO CITIZENSHIP Feb 19, 2023
  • Feb 14, 2023 Defining the Afro Descendants' Right to Return (RTR) to their Ancestral Homelands on the African Continent for the 8PAC Part 1 Feb 14, 2023
• December 2022
  • Dec 25, 2022 The African American Case for Independence at the International Court of Justice Dec 25, 2022
• November 2022
  • Nov 3, 2022 Secrets of the Forest People: Learning the Bantu Culture in Cameroon Nov 3, 2022
• October 2022
  • Oct 19, 2022 Celebrating the 50 Year Anniversary of Amilcar Cabral's Meeting With African Americans, October 20, 1972 Oct 19, 2022
• September 2022
  • Sep 7, 2022 THE POTENTIAL OF A MINORITY REVOLUTION IN THE USA - The Crusader, August 1965 Sep 7, 2022
  • Sep 7, 2022 THE AFRICAN LIBERATION READER Sep 7, 2022
• August 2022
  • Aug 31, 2022 CELEBRATING THE INTERNATIONAL DAY FOR PEOPLE OF AFRICAN DESCENT AND THE 102nd ANNIVERSARY OF THE UNIA'S "DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF THE NEGRO PEOPLES OF THE WORLD" Aug 31, 2022
  • Aug 30, 2022 MARTIN DELANY ON THE QUESTION OF ORIGINAL AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN 1854 Aug 30, 2022
• July 2022
  • Jul 20, 2022 DESCENDENTES DE BALANTA LIDERAM MOVIMENTO DE REPARAÇÃO NO VATICANO: RESPONSABILIZAM OS REPRESENTANTES DE JESUS ​​CRISTO PELA ESCRAVAÇÃO DOS POVOS AFRICANO Jul 20, 2022
  • Jul 20, 2022 BALANTA DESCENDANTS LEAD REPARATIONS MOVEMENT AT THE VATICAN: HOLD THE REPRESENTATIVES OF JESUS CHRIST RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ENSLAVEMENT OF AFRICAN PEOPLE Jul 20, 2022
• June 2022
  • Jun 13, 2022 THE DECADE OF RETURN INITIATIVE IN GUINEA BISSAU CELEBRATES THE 100 YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE ETHIOPIAN GOVERNMENT’S OFFER OF REPATRIATION AND CITIZENSHIP Jun 13, 2022
• January 2022
  • Jan 21, 2022 Interim President of the Guinea Bissau Swimming Federation, Siphiwe Baleka Gives Motivational Talk To Girls Futbol Team Members in Enterremento, Bissau Jan 21, 2022
  • Jan 14, 2022 250 Years Later, I Returned to the Village of My 5G Grandfather Jan 14, 2022
• September 2021
  • Sep 23, 2021 Lessons From Amilcar Cabral and Siphiwe Baleka: The Dum Diversas War and the Incomplete Independence of Guinea Bissau Sep 23, 2021
  • Sep 2, 2021 BRIEF NOTES ON BALANTA HISTORY BEFORE AND AFTER GUINEA BISSAU INDEPENDENCE Sep 2, 2021
• August 2021
  • Aug 25, 2021 BRIEF NOTES ON BALANTA MIGRATION IN GUINEA BISSAU Aug 25, 2021
  • Aug 19, 2021 Jornada de Quintino Medi para descobrir a Mãe Fula de Amílcar Cabral na Guiné-Bissau Aug 19, 2021
  • Aug 19, 2021 Quintino Medi's Journey to Discover Amilcar Cabral's Fula Mother in Guinea Bissau Aug 19, 2021
  • Aug 8, 2021 Space and Time in the African Worldview: Excerpt from Remembering the Dismembered Continent by Ayi Kwei Armah Aug 8, 2021
• May 2021
  • May 30, 2021 Historic Moment in Guinea Bissau: Denita Madyun-Baskerville is the First Balanta Woman to Return to Her Ancestral Homeland Since the Slave Trade May 30, 2021
  • May 27, 2021 Sketches of the History of Balanta People in America: Anthology Series 1 now available! May 27, 2021
  • May 5, 2021 MAY 5TH - THE MOST IMPORTANT DAY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND EVIDENCE THAT THE ANCESTORS OF AFRICAN PEOPLE COMMUNICATE TO THEIR DESCENDANTS ON EARTH AND SHAPE WORLD EVENTS May 5, 2021
• April 2021
  • Apr 6, 2021 CLARIFYING THE POLITICAL AND LEGAL STATUS OF 1,108 GENERATIONS OF MY FAMILY Apr 6, 2021
• March 2021
  • Mar 23, 2021 Balanta Marriage Customs: KWÂSSI, B-BÂSTI and MHÂH M-NANHI Mar 23, 2021
• February 2021
  • Feb 15, 2021 THE POWER OF THE LINEAGE RESTORATION MOVEMENT: LEARNING SPIRITUALITY AND CULTURE FROM LANGUAGE - A BALANTA CASE STUDY OF SINHA KREETCH (CELEBRATING THE DEATH OF SOMEONE) Feb 15, 2021
  • Feb 13, 2021 NOTES ON THE WEST AFRICAN SLAVERY CONTEXT IN WHICH BALANTA RESISTED Feb 13, 2021
• November 2020
  • Nov 24, 2020 Oligarchy: The Spiritual and International Legal Wars Against the Balanta Nov 24, 2020
• October 2020
  • Oct 25, 2020 The Civil, Political and Legal Illiteracy of African Americans: Failure to Apply the Framework of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Oct 25, 2020
  • Oct 11, 2020 Notes on Hugo Grotius' Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty (1604) Oct 11, 2020
  • Oct 10, 2020 The Spiritual Protective Function of the Balanta Placenta Tradition, The United States Birth Certificate and the Spiritual Damage of Slavery Oct 10, 2020
  • Oct 6, 2020 B’KINDEU & RANSOM: BALANTA PEOPLE REFUSED TO PARTICIPATE IN THE CRIMINAL EUROPEAN TRANS ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE Oct 6, 2020
  • Oct 1, 2020 From Nhacra to North Carolina: The Story of Brassa Nchabra and The Blake Family, 1760 to 1890 Oct 1, 2020
• September 2020
  • Sep 7, 2020 BALANTA AND THE POISON ORDEAL Sep 7, 2020
• August 2020
  • Aug 20, 2020 THE IMPORTANCE OF NARRATIVES: MORE FROM W.E.B. DUBOIS' BLACK RECONSTRUCTION IN AMERICA: 1860-1880, PRESIDENT ANDREW JOHNSON & FREDERICK DOUGLASS CO-OPT THE BLACK LIBERATION MOVEMENT Aug 20, 2020
  • Aug 1, 2020 First Balanta B'urassa Founders' Day Presentation Aug 1, 2020
• July 2020
  • Jul 4, 2020 KNOW YOUR AMERICAN HISTORY: A BALANTA FAMILY ON JULY 4 1776 Jul 4, 2020
  • Jul 3, 2020 LAND HAS ALWAYS BEEN CENTRAL TO THE SOLUTION OF AMERICA'S RACE PROBLEM Jul 3, 2020
• June 2020
  • Jun 24, 2020 The Black Liberation Movement (BLM), Balanta, Rastafari, and America's Drug War: Chicago Police Attacks on January 27, 1997 and August 6, 1999 Jun 24, 2020
  • Jun 22, 2020 Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) Reader Jun 22, 2020
  • Jun 21, 2020 A BALANTA PANTHER: STEPHEN HOBBS AND THE CHICAGO BLACK PANTHER PARTY Jun 21, 2020
  • Jun 9, 2020 REVISITING THE BATTLE PLAN: THE STRATEGY OF THE REPUBLIC OF NEW AFRIKA TO LIBERATE BLACK AMERICANS Jun 9, 2020
  • Jun 8, 2020 JUNE 8, 1954: THE MOST IMPORTANT DAY IN 20TH CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY Jun 8, 2020
  • Jun 2, 2020 Marcus Garvey Message to the People: Lesson 16 Propaganda (and War), The Course of African Philosophy Jun 2, 2020
• May 2020
  • May 17, 2020 THE BALANTA STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE AND EQUALITY: BRIEF SKETCHES OF ONE STRONG FAMILY'S ROLE IN AMERICAN HISTORY May 17, 2020
  • May 9, 2020 KNOW YOURSELF, KNOW YOUR ENEMY: UNDERSTANDING EUROPEAN HISTORY PRIOR TO THEIR ARRIVAL IN WEST AFRICA May 9, 2020
  • May 9, 2020 THE BOOK AFRICAN AMERICANS SHOULD BE READING: NOTES ON THE ORIGINS OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN INTERESTS IN INTERNATIONAL LAW May 9, 2020
  • May 8, 2020 The B'rassa Fight Against the Befera: Learning from the Revolutionaries from India May 8, 2020
• April 2020
  • Apr 10, 2020 Black Bodies of Knowledge: Information Gangsters, Guerrillas and Notes on an Effective History by John Fiske Apr 10, 2020
  • Apr 2, 2020 CREDO MUTWA ON THE RACE THAT DIED: A TALE OF TECHNOLOGY AND A WARNING TO THE FUTURE Apr 2, 2020
• March 2020
  • Mar 16, 2020 THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: WHO CREATED CHRISTIANITY, WHO WROTE THE GOSPELS FEATURING JESUS CHRIST, AND HOW DID CHRISTIANITY START IN AFRICA? Mar 16, 2020
• February 2020
  • Feb 19, 2020 MISSING MIDDLE PASSAGE DOCUMENTS: THE CONSEQUENCE FOR BALANTA, MENDE, TEMNE AND OTHER SENEGAMBIAN PEOPLES BROUGHT TO THE UNITED STATES Feb 19, 2020
  • Feb 3, 2020 THE MALI KINGDOM AND MANSA MUSA WERE IMPERIALIST SLAVE TRADERS: REVISITING AFRICAN HISTORY FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE PEOPLE WHO WERE OPPRESSED Feb 3, 2020
• December 2019
  • Dec 29, 2019 AFRICAN HISTORIANS SPEAK ON BLACK-WHITE RELATIONSHIPS AND THEIR MIXED RACE OFFSPRING Dec 29, 2019
  • Dec 3, 2019 Homosexuality Contemplated From African Spirituality Dec 3, 2019
  • Dec 1, 2019 Befera: The White Christian Witches of the Balanta Worldview Dec 1, 2019
• November 2019
  • Nov 16, 2019 Balanta and the Banking System: A Case Study of the Criminal Application of Fictitious Corporate Statutory Law Nov 16, 2019
  • Nov 6, 2019 SUMMARY OF LEGAL ISSUES CONCERNING BALANTA PEOPLE Nov 6, 2019
  • Nov 6, 2019 DEVELOPMENT OF LEGAL ISSUES CONCERNING BALANTA PEOPLE Nov 6, 2019
  • Nov 4, 2019 Timeline of American History And The Birth of White Supremacy and White Privilege in America Nov 4, 2019
• October 2019
  • Oct 29, 2019 LEGAL ISSUES EFFECTING BALANTA AS A RESULT OF CONTACT WITH THE ENGLISH Oct 29, 2019
  • Oct 29, 2019 LEGAL ISSUES EFFECTING BALANTA AS A RESULT OF CONTACT WITH EUROPEAN CHRISTIANS Oct 29, 2019
  • Oct 28, 2019 DEVELOPMENT OF LEGAL ISSUES DURING THE BALANTA MIGRATION PERIOD Oct 28, 2019
  • Oct 28, 2019 ORIGIN OF LEGAL ISSUES CONCERNING BALANTA PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES Oct 28, 2019
  • Oct 25, 2019 HOW THE AFRICAN UNION WAS ESTABLISHED TO INCLUDE THE AFRICAN DIASPORA Oct 25, 2019
  • Oct 22, 2019 THE BALANTA FOUNDER OF THE AFRICAN UNION 6TH REGION CAMPAIGN Oct 22, 2019
  • Oct 18, 2019 Amilcar Cabral Describes Balanta People Oct 18, 2019
  • Oct 16, 2019 AN ANSWER TO THOSE WHO CLAIM THAT AFRICAN AMERICANS ARE HEBREW OR “LOST JEWS” Oct 16, 2019
  • Oct 9, 2019 26 Principles of the Great Belief of the Balanta Ancient Ancestors Oct 9, 2019
• September 2019
  • Sep 19, 2019 Reviewing the Sudanic/TaNihisi Origins of the Balanta Sep 19, 2019

AN ANSWER TO THOSE WHO CLAIM THAT AFRICAN AMERICANS ARE HEBREW OR “LOST JEWS”

BLACK JEWS: A HALAKHIC PERSPECTIVE J. David Bleich

WHAT FOLLOWS IS A DISCUSSION OF THE ACTUAL HISTORICAL DOCUMENTATION OF THE HEBREW AND ISRAELITE ORIGIN

1.       The existence of Balanta ancient ancestors and their genetic record has already been documented, and in particular, those people of the haplogroup E-V38 which originated in the Horn of Africa about 42,300 years before the present. See: Reviewing the Sudanic/TaNihisi Origins of the Balanta.

2.       The spiritual principles of Balanta ancient ancestors from that time up until establishment of the first dynasty in Kemet, and 1,500 years before any mention of “Hebrews” and “Jews” and “Israelite” has also been documented. See: 26 Principles of the Great Belief of the Balanta Ancient Ancestors.

Excerpts from Balanta B’urassa, My Sons: Those Who Resist Remain Volume II

From Cheik Anta Diop: The African Origin of Civilization

Cheik Anta Diop, Civilization or Barbarism

Mesopotamia

According to Wikipedia, “the Halaf culture is a prehistoric period which lasted between about 6100 BC and 5100 BC. Halaf culture ended by 5000 BC after entering the so-called Halaf-Ubaid Transitional period. Spreading from Eridu, the Ubaid culture extended from the Middle of the Tigris and Euphrates to the shores of the Persian Gulf, and then spread down past Bahrain to the copper deposits at Oman. The archaeological record shows that Arabian Bifacial/Ubaid period came to an abrupt end in eastern Arabia and the Oman peninsula at 3800 BC, just after the phase of lake lowering and onset of dune reactivation. At this time, increased aridity led to an end in semi-desert nomadism, and there is no evidence of human presence in the area for approximately 1,000 years, the so-called "Dark Millennium".

Sumer, Akkad and Elam

Wikipedia also states that “the term Sumerian is the common name given to the ancient non-Semitic-speaking inhabitants of Mesopotamia by the East Semitic-speaking Akkadians. The Sumerians referred to themselves as ùĝ saĝ gíg ga (cuneiform: ), phonetically /uŋ saŋ ɡi ɡa/, or sang-ngiga, literally meaning "the black-headed people", and to their land as ki-en-gi(-r)(cuneiform: ) ('place' + 'lords' + 'noble'), meaning "place of the noble lords". The Akkadians also called the Sumerians "black-headed people", or tsalmat-qaqqadi, in the Semitic Akkadian language. The Ubaidians, though never mentioned by the Sumerians themselves, are assumed by modern-day scholars to have been the first civilizing force in Sumer. They drained the marshes for agriculture, developed trade, and established industries, including weaving, leatherwork, metalwork, masonry, and pottery.

Sumerian civilization took form in the Uruk period (4th millennium BC), continuing into the Jemdet Nasr and Early Dynastic periods.

The earliest positively proven historical attestation of any Semitic people comes from 30th century BC Mesopotamia, with the East Semitic-speaking peoples of the Kish civilization, entering the region originally dominated by the people of Sumer (who spoke a language isolate).

Approaching Chaos: Could an Ancient Archetype Save C21st Civilization? By Lucy Wyatt

African historian J.A. Rogers states in “100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof”:

“Elam, a mighty Negro civilization of Persia, flourished about 2900 B.C. and is perhaps older than Egypt or Ethiopia. One of its later Negro kings, Kudur Nakunta, conquered Chaldea and Babylon and brought back to his capital Susa, rich treasures among which was the famous statue of the goddess Nana. Later it became the capital of Cyrus the Great and Darius.”

During the 3rd millennium BC, a close cultural symbiosis developed between the Sumerians, who spoke a language isolate, and Akkadians, which gave rise to widespread bilingualism . . . . Sumer was conquered by the Semitic-speaking kings of the Akkadian Empire around 2270 BC (short chronology), but Sumerian continued as a sacred language. Native Sumerian rule re-emerged for about a century in the Third Dynasty of Ur at approximately 2100–2000 BC. . . . The Sumerian city of Eridu, on the coast of the Persian Gulf, is considered to have been one of the oldest cities, where three separate cultures may have fused:

that of peasant Ubaidians farmers, living in mud-brick huts and practicing irrigation;

that of mobile nomadic Semitic pastoralists living in black tents and following herds of sheep and goats;

and that of fisher folk, living in reed huts in the marshlands, who may have been the ancestors of the Sumerians.

Following an Elamite invasion and sack of Ur during the rule of Ibbi-Sin (c. 1940 BC), Sumer came under Amorites rule (taken to introduce the Middle Bronze Age). The independent Amorite states of the 20th to 18th centuries are summarized as the "Dynasty of Isin" in the Sumerian king list, ending with the rise of Babylonia under Hammurabi c. 1700 BC. The Sumerians were eventually absorbed into the Akkadian (Assyro-Babylonian) population.”

According to the Great Senegale Scientist Cheik Anta Diop,

“The Ancients remained silent about the alleged Mesopotamian culture prior to the Chaldeans. They considered the latter a caste of Egyptian astronomer-priests, that is to say, Negroes. According to the Egyptians, Diodorus reports, the Chaldeans were ‘a colony of their priests that Belus had transported on the Euphrates and organized on the model of the mother-caste, and this colony continues to cultivate the knowledge of the stars, knowledge that it brought from the homeland.’ So it is that ‘Chaldean’ formed the root of the Greek word for astrologer. The Tower of Babel, a step pyramid similar to the tower of Saqqara, also known as ‘Birs-Nimroud’ and ‘Temple of Baal,’ was probably the astronomical observatory of the Chaldeans.

This fits in, for Nimrod, son of Kush, grandson of Ham, the Biblical ancestor of the Blacks, is the symbol of worldly power: ‘He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. Hence the saying, ‘Like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the Lord.’ The beginning of his kingdom was Babylon, Arach and Akkad, all of them in the land of Sennar. From that region Assur went forth.’ . . .

NOTE: Not true. According to List of Ethiopian Kings by H.I.H. Tafari Makonnen,  June 19, 1922, published in: “In The Country of The Blue Nile” by C.F. Rey, F.R.G.S., Commander of the Order of the Star of Ethiopia, Negro University Press, New York -

Nimroud is NOT the grandson of Ham. Nimroud is, in fact, the 12th Sovereign in the line of King Ori, reiging in 3776 BC and before the Biblical Flood. Kam (Ham) and Kout (Kush) appear about 1,000 years later…. Now who is going to know Ethiopian history better than the 334th King of Ethiopia in the line of the Original King Ori?

Amorites and Hurrians

The introduction of “bronze” in the Early Bronze Age (3000-2000 B.C.) brought about a cultural revolution marked by the development of metallurgy, and a decline in pottery. By the Middle Bronze Age (2000-1550 B.C.), Amorites who were originally nomads from the dessert regions to the east, and southern Anatolia (modern Turkey), had penetrated Canaan and were inhabiting the hilly areas around the cities. From these hills, they launched raids and harassment attacks against the cities.

In addition to the Amorites, other invaders included the Hurrians (the Horites of the Old Testament), also came to Canaan from the north. The Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 B.C.) was marked by incursions of new Amorite marauders, these were Amorites displaced by the fall of the Hammurabian dynasty in Babylon. As it were, over time, the nomadic Amorites were joined by Amorites who had previously been in Mesopotamia. So that by now, the total of these Amorites had become the dominant element of the population in Canaan.

Many of these Amorites, such as the Biblical Abraham, continued on to Egypt.

Genesis 11:27-32

Now these are the generations of Terah: Terah begat Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran begat Lot. And Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees (Sumer). And Abram and Nahor took them wives: the name of Abram's wife was Sarai; and the name of Nahor's wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran, the father of Milcah, and the father of Iscah. But Sarai was barren; she had no child. And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son's son, and Sarai his daughter in law, his son Abram's wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran (Anatolian city), and dwelt there. And the days of Terah were two hundred and five years: and Terah died in Haran. Genesis 12:9-10 And Abram journeyed, going on still toward the south. And there was a famine in the land: and Abram went down into Egypt to sojourn there; for the famine was grievous in the land.

According to Diop, “After many ups and downs, the Canaanites and the white tribes, symbolized by Abraham and his descendants (Isaac’s lineage), blended to become the Jewish people of today:

So Hemor and his son Sichem went to the gate of their city and spoke to their fellow citizens. ‘These men,’ they said, ‘are friendly: let them dwell with us and trade in the land, since there is ample room for them. Let us marry their daughters and give them our daughters to marry.’

Those few lines, which seem to be a ruse, nonetheless reveal the economic imperatives which at that time were to govern relations between white invaders and black Canaanites. Phoenician history is therefore incomprehensible only if we ignore the Biblical data according to which the Phoenicians, in other words, the Canaanites, were originally Negroes, already civilized, with whom nomadic, uncultured white tribes later mixed. . . . . This is how the lasting alliance between Egyptians and Phoenicians can be explained. Even throughout the most troubled periods of great misfortune, Egypt could count on the Phoenicians as one can more or less count on a brother. . . . To be sure, we should not minimize the role of economic relations between Egypt and Phoenicia in explaining the loyalty which seems to have existed. One can also understand that Phoenician religion and beliefs are to some extent mere replicas of Egypt’s. . . . .”

In Egypt these Amorites become known as Habiru or Hapiru (one who sells his services), whether these ‘services’ were as mercenaries or tradesman is unknown. In time, the number of Amorites in northern Egypt was sufficient to overthrow Egyptian rule and establish an independent region of Egypt ruled by Amorites, since known as the Hyksos (foreign kings or Shepherd Kings). The Egyptian historian Manetho, and the traitor Hebrew, Josephus Flavius, both wrote of the Amorite coup as an invasion.

Cheikh Ana Diop explains in The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality:

“In the Bible, when the first white races reached the place, they found a black race there, the Canaanites, descendants of Canaan, brother of Mesraim, the Egyptian, and Kush, the Ethiopian, sons of Ham.

The Lord said to Abram: ‘Leave your country, your kinsfolk and your father’s house, for the land which I will show you . . .” Abram went away as the Lord had commanded him, and Lot went with him. . . . Abram took Sarai his wife, Lot his brother’s son, all the property they had acquired and the persons they had got in Haran and they departed for the land of Canaan. When they came to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the sacred place at Sichem, near the plain of More. At that time the Canaanites were in the land.’”

“Shasu and Habiru

Wikipedia states that “The Shasu (from Egyptian š3sw, probably pronounced Shaswe) were Semitic-speaking cattle nomads in the Levant (Canaan) from the late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age or the Third Intermediate Period of Egypt. They were organized in clans under a tribal chieftain, and were described as brigands active from the Jezreel Valley to Ashkelon and the Sinai.

Some scholars link the Israelites and YHWH with the Shasu.

The earliest known reference to the Shasu occurs in a 15th-century BCE list of peoples in the Transjordan region. The name appears in a list of Egypt's enemies inscribed on column bases at the temple of Soleb built by Amenhotep III. Copied later in the 13th century BCE either by Seti I or by Ramesses II at Amarah-West, the list mentions six groups of Shasu: the Shasu of S'rr, the Shasu of Rbn, the Shasu of Sm't, the Shasu of Wrbr, the Shasu of Yhw, and the Shasu of Pysps. Two Egyptian texts, one dated to the period of Amenhotep III (14th century BCE), the other to the age of Ramesses II (13th century BCE), refer to 'Yahu in the land of the Šosū-nomads' (t3 š3św yhw), in which yhw[3]/Yahu is a toponym. Regarding the name yhw3, Michael Astour observed that the "hieroglyphic rendering corresponds very precisely to the Hebrew tetragrammaton YHWH, or Yahweh, and antedates the hitherto oldest occurrence of that divine name – on the Moabite Stone – by over five hundred years." K. Van Der Toorn concludes: "By the 14th century BC, before the cult of Yahweh had reached Israel, groups of Edomites and Midianites worshipped Yahweh as their god."

Donald B. Redford has argued that the earliest Israelites, semi-nomadic highlanders in central Palestine mentioned on the Merneptah Stele at the end of the 13th century BCE, are to be identified as a Shasu enclave. Since later Biblical tradition portrays Yahweh "coming forth from Seʿir", the Shasu, originally from Moab and northern Edom/Seʿir, went on to form one major element in the amalgam that would constitute the "Israel" which later established the Kingdom of Israel. Per his own analysis of the el-Amarna letters, Anson Rainey concluded that the description of the Shasu best fits that of the early Israelites. If this identification is correct, these Israelites/Shasu would have settled in the uplands in small villages with buildings similar to contemporary Canaanite structures towards the end of the 13th century BCE.

Habiru (sometimes written as Hapiru, and more accurately as ʿApiru) is a term used in 2nd-millennium BCE texts throughout the Fertile Crescent (Canaan) for people variously described as rebels, outlaws, raiders, mercenaries, bowmen, servants, slaves, and laborers. The word Habiru, more properly 'Apiru, occurs in hundreds of 2nd millennium BCE documents covering a 600-year period from the 18th to the 12th centuries BCE and found at sites ranging from Egypt, Canaan and Syria, to Nuzi (near Kirkuk in northern Iraq) and Anatolia (Turkey), frequently used interchangeably with the Sumerian SA.GAZ, a phonetic equivalent to the Akkadian (Mesopotamian) word saggasu ("murderer, destroyer").

Not all Habiru were murderers and robbers: one 'Apiru, Idrimi of Alalakh, was the son of a deposed king, and formed a band of 'Apiru to make himself king of Alalakh. What Idrimi shared with the other 'Apiru was membership of an inferior social class of outlaws, mercenaries, and slaves leading a marginal and sometimes lawless existence on the fringes of settled society. 'Apiru had no common ethnic affiliations and no common language, their personal names being most frequently West Semitic, but many East Semitic, Hurrian or Indo-European.

In the 18th century a north Syrian king named Irkabtum (c. 1740 BC) "made peace with [the warlord] Shemuba and his Habiru."

 In the Amarna tablets from 14th century BCE, the petty kings of Canaan describe them sometimes as outlaws, sometimes as mercenaries, sometimes as day-labourers and servants. Usually they are socially marginal, but Rib-Hadda of Byblos calls Abdi-Ashirta of Amurru (modern Lebanon) and his son 'Apiru, with the implication that they have rebelled against their common overlord, the Pharaoh. The biblical word "Hebrew", like Habiru, denotes a social category, not an ethnic group. Since the discovery of the 2nd millennium BCE inscriptions mentioning the Habiru, there have been many theories linking these to the Hebrews of the Bible, but modern scholars see the 'Apiru/Habiru as only one element in an early Israel composed of many different peoples, including nomadic Shasu, the biblical Midianites, Kenites, and Amalekites, displaced peasants and pastoralists.

WHAT ABOUT ETHIOPIAN FALASHA JEWS?

First, tradition holds that the word Ethiopia comes from the Greeks. Wikipedia states:

“Etymology

The Greek name Αἰθιοπία (from Αἰθίοψ, Aithiops, "an Ethiopian") is a compound word, derived from the two Greek words, from αἴθω + ὤψ (aitho "I burn" + ops "face"). According to the Perseus Digital Library, the designation properly translates as Burnt-face in noun form and red-brown in adjectival form.[37] The historian Herodotus used the appellation to denote those parts of Africa South of the Sahara that were then known within the Ecumene (inhabitable world).[38] 

However, the Greek formation may be a folk etymology for the Ancient Egyptian term athtiu-abu, which means 'robbers of hearts'.[39] 

This Greek name was borrowed into Amharic as ኢትዮጵያ, ʾĪtyōṗṗyā.

In Greco-Roman epigraphs, Aethiopia was a specific toponym for ancient Nubia.[40] 

At least as early as c. 850,[41] the name Aethiopia also occurs in many translations of the Old Testament in allusion to Nubia. The ancient Hebrew texts identify Nubia instead as Kush.[42] However, in the New Testament, the Greek term Aithiops does occur, referring to a servant of the Kandake, the queen of Kush.[43]

Following the Hellenic and Biblical traditions, the Monumentum Adulitanum, a third century inscription belonging to the Aksumite Empire, indicates that

Aksum's then ruler governed an area which was flanked to the west by the territory of Ethiopia and Sasu. The Aksumite King Ezana would eventually conquer Nubia the following century, and the Aksumites thereafter appropriated the designation "Ethiopians" for their own kingdom.

In the Ge'ez version of the Ezana inscription, Aἰθιόποι is equated with the unvocalized Ḥbšt and Ḥbśt (Ḥabashat), and denotes for the first time the highland inhabitants of Aksum. This new demonym would subsequently be rendered as 'ḥbs ('Aḥbāsh) in Sabaic and as Ḥabasha in Arabic.[40]

In the 15th-century Ge'ez Book of Aksum, the name is ascribed to a legendary individual called Ityopp'is. He was an extra-Biblical son of Cush, son of Ham, said to have founded the city of Axum.[44]

In English, and generally outside of Ethiopia, the country was once historically known as Abyssinia. This toponym was derived from the Latinized form of the ancient Habash.[45]”

List of Ethiopian Kings by H.I.H. Tafari Makonnen, June 19, 1922, published in: “In The Country of The Blue Nile” by C.F. Rey, F.R.G.S., Commander of the Order of the Star of Ethiopia, Negro University Press, New York

Map of the Nile Valley using indigenous names by Dr. Ben Jochannan, Black Man of the Nile and His Family.

So, understand, there are different people living in this territory which is regularly and simultaneously referred to as Cush, Nubia, Ethiopia, and Abyssinia. Within this territory at various times, you have different “kingdoms” ruled by different peoples. Just like there is no single “African” identity and culture, but rather a vast mix of diverse cultures, there’s no single “Ethiopian” people, either, and the word “Ethiopia” was not first used by the Greeks, who did not enter into Egypt, let alone further south, until the 7th century BC.

How could “Ethiopia” be a Greek word meaning “burnt faces” when “Itiypus” was used as the name of an indigenous ruler one thousand years prior to the arrival of the Greeks???????

Now, when the Semitic people described above, mixed race nomads, wandered into “Ethiopia”, they mixed and converted some of the people to their religion called Judaism. This began with the “Jewish” rule of Egypt 500 years before the Assyrian invasion. The genetic record shows that Falasha’s have DNA originating from “Arabia” and the “Orient” that distinguishes them from the other indigenous people living in the area.

JOURNAL ARTICLE Origins of Falasha Jews Studied by Haplotypes of the Y Chromosome GÉRARD LUCOTTE and PIERRE SMETS Human Biology Vol. 71, No. 6 (December 1999), pp. 989-993 (5 pages)

WHAT HAPPENED AFTER THE 500 YEAR JEWISH RULE IN KEMET

The Greeks ruled Egypt for almost 300 years before the expansion of the Roman Empire into Egypt ended their dominion in 30 B.C. This was our ‘flashback point of departure, but before returning to the Ethiopian churches, the significance of what we have been reviewing as flashbacks should again be emphasized as a great issue. For we have been reviewing the last phase of the processes of Caucasianization in Egypt that were so thoroughgoing that both the Blacks and their history were erased from our memory: the Jewish rule, 500 years; the Assyrian interludes; the Persians, 185 years; the Greeks 274 years; the Romans, 700 years; the Arabs, 1,327 years – the long, long struggle to take from the Blacks whatever they had of human worth, their land and all their wealth therein; their bodies their souls, and their minds, was a process of steady depersonalization, dehumanization.

The Asians and Mulattoes held Northern Abyssinia, with the center of power in the strategic kingdom of Axum. From Axum the Arabs prepared their forces for the destruction of a now weakening Ethiopian empire. The weakness, as usual, came from separatist movements struggling for power. It was the old-time factional fights among leaders who felt they must ‘rule or ruin’ . . . . But it was the situation for which the Axumite Arabs and their colored and Jewish allies were waiting. In 350 A.D., their armies destroyed Meroe, and an epoch in history ended.

Ethiopia was now split into three major states: Nobadae, bordering Egypt at the First Cataract; Makuria, the more powerful kingdom in the middle with its capital at Dongola; and Alwa (Alodia), another strong state south of Makuria or between Makuria and Axum. After the collapse of the central black empire in the fourth century, the Christian churches spread more rapidly through the now independent kingdoms. Even in the division of Ethiopia into smaller states, the process of ethnic transformation was obvious as it pressed southward from Egypt, Greek and Roman presence had been heavy and marked in Nobadae. Since no one now questioned that Nobadae (Nubia) was Ethiopian, the mixed breed could not be called Egyptian as was the previous case of first Cataract. The population in this kingdom bordering Caucasianized Egypt was now predominantly Afro-European and Afro-Asian.

In the fourth century A.D., the areas of black power had been pushed out of Egypt down to where the kingdom of Makuria formed its borders with Nobadae. Here the concentration of Blacks began, just as though a southward movement of the race was a decree of providence. Here, once again, they took their stand; here again, even in the lands which were officially Christian, black battle lines had to be formed again for defense. The Axumite Coloured ‘Solomonids’ and Arabs had retired after the destruction of the black empire. The more immediate danger was still Egypt.

Which Migration of the Balanta?

We have already seen that there were several migrations of people from Ta-Meri and Ta-Nihisi prior to the First Dynasty in Khem, and throughout the next thirty-three dynasties. Our great 20th Century historians – Cheikh Anta Diop, Yosef ben-Jochannan, John Henrik Clarke, Chancellor Williams, and after them, Moustafa Gadalla, have all detailed how the Anu and others always retreated from Ta-Meri and went south into Ta-Nihisi, Kush and beyond, whenever foreigners invaded. We now know that during this time that there were well-established trade routes that led south and west from Ta-Nihisi to Lake Chad and to Kano in Nigeria. With so many migrations, how can we determine when and where our ancestors left?

Another clue is provided by Moustafa Gadalla, who writes in his book Exiled Egyptians,

“During the second half of the first millennium CE, the Central Soudan – that 2,000-mile (3,200 km) area stretching from the Senegal region to Dar-Fur – saw a population explosion and the emergence and consolidation of a number of substantial organized, de-centralized, wealthy states. They were all developed in the Sahel – a region running across Africa, south of the Sahara and north of Lake Chad. The Sahel is a hot, dry savannah that can support human agriculture and settlement. . . .

All sources and evidence agree to the following characteristics of this population explosion:

1.       The sudden increase in population in the region resulted from the migration of highly civilized, well-organized, mostly agricultural people.

2.       The original sparsely negroid population speak of highly civilized people who settled and governed them peacefully.

3.       The newcomers were light-skinned.

4.       The newcomers had the technological and financial resources to build irrigation, waterworks, and land reclamation projects, in order to provide the food needed to sustain such large populations.

5.       The newcomers had the knowledge and experience of a well-organized society: politically and socially.

6.       They were knowledgeable and experienced in city planning and infrastructure, as evident in the numerous settlements that they built.

7.       Significant polities started emerging after 500 CE.

8.       They had advanced knowledge of metal-working.”

Given that the Balanta were not light skinned, did not support large populations nor develop sophisticated social and political systems, preferring to be leaderless, and did not carry with them Egyptian religious deities but instead carried with them the Great Belief and their traditional spiritual customs, then we can rule out any of the above such migrations.

It is likely that our Balanta ancestors constituted “the original sparsely negroid population” that Gadalla speaks of. Remember, descendants of Baba Amuntu Abansundu were already living in this area as early as 17,000 BC and there was a tremendous amount of genetic diversity which means DIFFERENT BLACK PEOPLE WITHIN AFRICA.

The rest of the Balanta migration story from the Nile Valley to present day Guinea Bissau is documented in Balanta B’urassa, My Sons: Those Who Resist Remain Volumes I and II

Clearly, the Balanta people had nothing to do with Shashu, Habiru, Hebrew or Jewish people.

Consequently, those Balanta that were captured, brought to and enslaved in the Americas during the European Trans Atlantic were not and could not have been descendants of “Hebrews”, “Jews” or “Israelites”.

Although some African Americans may be descended from “Hebrews”, “Jews” or “Israelites” who migrated from the Nile to West Africa, those who make such blanket claims for ALL African Americans do so as a consequence of having their actual ancestry erased from their memory, as a consequence of the terrorism and trauma inflicted on their ancestors who were brought to the Americas and enslaved. THIS IS CALLED ETHNOCIDE.

After two or three generations of not speaking their original ancestors’ language and practicing their original ancestors’ culture, their actual identity was lost. In an effort to reclaim those identities, many African Americans turned to the only source of information available to them - the Bible, and sought to identify with peoples described therein. However, the Bible, as a source of “truth” for revealing African identity was extremely flawed at best, even though it contained some history of African people.

Today, genetic testing and a re-reading of history enables African Americans to both identify their actual ancestors and understand their actual history, without having to make faith-based claims of identity that are just based on that - faith - and not actual truth. We do not have to look to the Bible for answers when we have the actual record written in stone from our ancestors and genetic science as a new tool to establish lineage and for interpretation.

26 Principles of the Great Belief of the Balanta Ancient Ancestors

According to the DNA marker E3a*-M2 (also called E1b1a) found in the Mandinka and Balanta people, our Balanta ancestors shared a common origin with all Bantu people at the end of the Pleistocene around 9,500 BC.

Excerpt from the book Bantu Philosophy by Placide Tempels as quoted in Balanta B’urassa, My Sons: Those Who Resist Remain Volume I

1.       “It is today generally admitted that, among Bantu peoples, it is the oldest of all who have maintained the most pure form of the concept of the Supreme Being, Creator, and Disposer of the Universe. The faith of Bantu people in the Supreme Being lies at the root of all the religious conceptions current among them: animism, dynamism, fetishism and magic.”

2.       “Bantu behavior is centered in a single value: vital force. The Bantu say, in respect of a number of strange practices in which we see neither rhyme nor reason, that their purpose is to acquire life, strength or vital force, to live strongly, that they are to make life stronger, or to assure that force shall remain perpetually in one’s posterity.”

3.       “Force, the potent life, vital energy are the object of prayers and invocations to God, to the spirits and to the dead, as well as of all that is usually called magic, sorcery or magical remedies. The Bantu will tell you that they go to a diviner to learn the words of life, so that he can teach them the way of making life stronger.”

4.       “The spirits of the first ancestors, highly exalted in the superhuman world, possess extraordinary force inasmuch as they are the founders of the human race and propagators of the divine inheritance of vital human strength. The other dead are esteemed only to the extent to which they increase and perpetuate their vital force in their progeny.”

5.       “In the minds of Bantu, all beings in the universe possess vital force of their own: human, animal, vegetable, or inanimate. Each being has been endowed by God with a certain force, capable of strengthening the vital energy of the strongest being of all creation: man.”

6.       “Supreme happiness, the only kind of blessing, is, to the Bantu, to possess the greatest vital force: the worst misfortune and, in very truth, the only misfortune, is, he thinks, the diminution of this power.”

7.       “Every illness, wound or disappointment, all suffering, depression or fatigue, every injustice and every failure: all these are held to be, and are spoken of by the Bantu, as a diminution of vital force.”

8.       “Illness and death do not have their source in our own vital power, but result from some external agent who weakens us through his greater force. It is only by fortifying our vital energy, through the use of magical recipes, that we acquire resistance to malevolent external forces.”

9.       “Those who think that, according to the Bantu, one being can entirely annihilate another, to the point that he ceases to exist, conceive a false idea. Doubtless one force that is greater than another can paralyze it, diminish it, or even cause its operation totally to cease, but for all that the force does not cease to exist. Existence which comes from God cannot be taken from a creature by any created force.”

10.   “This concept of separate beings, of substance (to use the Scholastic term again) which find themselves side by side, entirely independent one of another, is foreign to Bantu thought. Bantu hold that created beings preserve a bond one with another, an intimate ontological relationship, comparable with the causal tie which binds creature and Creator. For the Bantu there is interaction of being with being, that is to say, of force with force. Transcending the mechanical, chemical and psychological interactions, they see a relationship of forces which we should call ontological.”

11.   “One force will reinforce or weaken another. This causality is in no way supernatural in the sense of going beyond the proper attributes of created nature. It is, on the contrary, a metaphysical causal action which flows out of the very nature of a created being. General knowledge of these activities belongs to the realm of natural knowledge and constitutes philosophy properly so called. The observation of the action of these forces in their specific and concrete applications would constitute Bantu natural science.”

12.   “In what Europeans call ‘primitive’ magic there is, to Bantu eyes, no operation of supernatural, indeterminate forces, but simply the interaction between natural forces, as they were created by God and as they were put by him at the disposal of men.”

13.   “Above all force is God, Spirit and Creator, the mwine bukomo bwandi. It is he who has force, power, in himself. He gives existence, power of survival and of increase, to other forces. In relation to other forces, he is “He who increases force”. After him come the first fathers of men, founders of the different clans. These archipatriarchs were the first to whom God communicated his vital force, with the power of exercising their influences on all posterity. They constitute the most important chain binding men to God. They occupy so exalted a rank in Bantu thought that they are not regarded merely as ordinary dead. They are no longer named among the manes: and by the Baluba they are called bavidye, spiritualized beings, beings belonging to a higher hierarchy, participating to a certain degree in the divine Force.”

14.   “After these first parents come the dead of the tribe, following their order of primogeniture. They form a chain, through the links of which the forces of the elders exercise their vitalizing influence on the living generation. Those living on earth rank, in fact, after the dead. The living belong in turn to a hierarchy, not simply following legal status, but as ordered by their own being in accordance with primogeniture and their vital rank: that is to say, according to their vital power.”

15.   “But man is not suspended in thin air. He lives on his land, where he finds himself to be the sovereign vital force, ruling the land and all that lives on it: man, animal or plant. The eldest of a group or of a clan is, for Bantu, by Divine law the sustaining link of life, binding ancestors and their descendants. It is he who ‘reinforces’ the life of his people and of all inferior forces, animal, vegetable and inorganic, that exist, grow, or live on the foundation which he provides for the welfare of his people. The true chief, then, following the original conception and political set up of clan peoples, is the father, the master, the king; he is the source of all zestful living; he is as God himself. This explains what the Bantu mean when they protest against the nomination of a chief, by government intervention, who is not able, by reason of his vital rank or vital force, to be the link binding dead and living. ‘Such a one cannot be chief. It is impossible. Nothing would grow in our soil; our women would bear no children and everything would be struck sterile.’”

16.   “The quality of ‘mfumu’ (chief) is added to the commonality of an individual neither by external nomination, nor by singling him out. He becomes and is ’mfumu’ by endowment therewith; he is a new higher vital force capable of strengthening and maintaining everything which falls ontologically within his cure. A man does not become chief of the clan and patriarch by natural succession through the deaths of other elders who had precedence and because he has become the oldest surviving member of the clan, but because primogeniture inherently supposes an inner secretion of vital power, raising the ‘muntu’ of the elder to the rank of intermediary and channel of forces between the clan ancestors on the one hand and posterity with all its clan patrimony on the other hand. It never takes one long to observe the transformation on becoming chief of a man whom one has formerly known as an ordinary member of the community. The qualitative change is made evident by an awakening of his being, by an immanent inspiration or even, sometimes, by a kind of ‘possession’. The ‘muntu’, in fact, becomes aware of, and is informed by, his whole conception of the world around, through all his modes of knowledge, that he is now a true ‘muntu’, endowed with a new power which did not belong to his former human status. He is no longer what he was. He has been changed in his very quality of being.”

17.   “Can one, then, be surprised that each accession of essential life is indicated by the gift of a new name? Such is required to indicate that the ‘muntu’ has been renewed and strengthened.”

18.   “The name expresses the individual character of the being. The name is not a simple external courtesy, it is the very reality of the individual. . . . The ‘muntu’ may have several names. Among the Baluba, there are generally three kinds of names – the inner name, the life name, or the name of the being. This name is never lost. A second name is the one given on the occasion of an accession of force, such as the name at circumcision, the name of the chief, or the name received by a sorcerer on initiation, investiture, or on the occasion when a man becomes possessed by a spirit. Finally, there are names that one chooses oneself, a name which serves only to indicate the person, without having any profound relationship to the person or to his individuality. . . . Such are the ‘majina a kizungu’. European names, as, for example . . . Is it not fitting, indeed, that the ‘muntu wa bazunga’ (the White’s man) who is putting himself under the living, dominating influence of white people, should have also an European name?”

19.   “In the mind of the Bantu, the dead also live; but theirs is a diminished life, with reduced vital energy. This seems to be the conception of the Bantu when they speak of the dead in general, superficially and in regard to the external things of life. When they consider the inner reality of being, they admit that deceased ancestors have not lost their superior reinforcing influence; and that the dead in general have acquired a greater knowledge of life and of vital or natural force. Such deeper knowledge as they have in fact been able to learn concerning vital and natural forces they use only to strengthen the life of man on earth.  The same is true of their superior force by reason of primogeniture, which can be employed only to reinforce their living posterity. The dead forbear who can no longer maintain active relationships with those on earth is ‘completely dead’, as Africans say. They mean that this individual vital force, already diminished by decease, has reached a zero diminution of energy, which becomes completely static through lack of faculty to employ its vital influence on behalf of the living. This is held to be the worst of disasters for the dead themselves. The spirits of the dead (”manes’) seek to enter into contact with the living and to continue living function upon earth.

20.   “Inferior forces, on the other hand (animal, plant, mineral) exist only, and by the will of God, to increase the vital force of men while they are on earth. Higher and lower forces, therefore, are thought of by the Bantu in relation to living human forces.

21.   Another law says that the living being exercises a vital influence on everything that is subordinated to him and on all that belongs to him. . . . The fact that a thing has belonged to anyone, that it has been in strict relationship with a person, leads the Bantu to conclude that this thing shares the vital influence of its owner. It is what ethnologists like to call ‘contagious magic, sympathetic magic”; but it is neither contact nor ‘sympathy’ that are the active elements, but solely the vital force of the owner, which acts, as one knows, because it persists in the being of the thing possessed or used by him.”

22.   The ‘kilumu’ or ‘nganga’, that is to say the man who possesses a clearer than usual vision of natural forces and their interaction, the man who has the power of selecting these forces and of directing them towards a determinist usage in particular cases, becomes what he is only because he has been ‘seized’ by the living influence of a deceased ancestor or of a spirit, or even because he has been ‘initiated’ by another ‘kilumbu’ or ‘nganga’. The general principles of Bantu ontology carry the corollary that every man can be influenced by a wiser one.”

23.   “Study and the personal search for knowledge does not give wisdom. One can learn to read, to write, to count: to manage a motor car, or learn a trade: but all that has nothing in common with ‘wisdom’. It gives no ontological knowledge of the nature of beings. There are many talents and clever skills that remain far short of wisdom. That is how the Bantu speak of their traditional wisdom.”

24.   “Bantu conscience: The moral conscience of Bantu, their consciousness of being good or bad, of acting rightly or wrongly, likewise conforms to their philosophical views, to their wisdom. The idea of a universal moral order, of the ordering of forces, of a vital hierarchy, is very clear to all Bantu. They are aware that, by divine decree, this order of forces, this mechanism of interaction among beings, ought to be respected. They know that the action of forces follows immanent laws, that these rules are not to be played with, that the influences of forces cannot be employed arbitrarily. They distinguish use from abuse. They have a notion of what we may call immanent justice, which they would translate to mean that to violate nature incurs her vengeance and that misfortune springs from her. They know that he who does not respect the laws of nature becomes ‘wa malwa’, as the Baluba would express it; that is to say, he is a man whose inmost being is pregnant with misfortune and whose vital power is vitiated as a result, while his influence on others is therefore equally injurious. This ethical conscience of theirs is at once philosophical, moral and juridical.

25.   “The notion of duty: The individual knows what his moral and legal obligations are and that they are to be honored on pain of losing his vital force. He knows that to carry out his duty will enhance the quality of his being. As a member of the clan, the ‘muntu’ knows that by living in accordance with his vital rank in the clan, he can and should contribute to the maintenance and increase of the clan by the normal exercise of his favorable vital influence. He knows his clan duties He knows, too, his duties towards other clans. However hostile in practice intertribal relations may be, Bantu know and say that it is forbidden to kill an outsider without a reason. Outsiders, in fact, are equally God’s people and their vital force has a right to be respected. The diminution and destruction of an outsider’s life involves  disturbance of the ontological order and will be visited upon him who disturbs it.”

26.   “The ‘muntus’ obligations increase in accordance with his vital rank. The elder, the Chief, the King know very well that their doings do not involve their own personal vital force only. They and their subjects fully realize that their deeds will have repercussions upon the whole community subject to them. From that proceeds the scrupulous care that can be observed among all primitive peoples to protect the Chief, the strengthener of life, against every injury to his vital force, by means of a bundle of vetoes and prohibitions. These are designed to maintain intact his ontological power, his vital force, the source of the inviolability of all his subjects.”

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• April 2020
  • Apr 10, 2020 Black Bodies of Knowledge: Information Gangsters, Guerrillas and Notes on an Effective History by John Fiske Apr 10, 2020
  • Apr 2, 2020 CREDO MUTWA ON THE RACE THAT DIED: A TALE OF TECHNOLOGY AND A WARNING TO THE FUTURE Apr 2, 2020
• March 2020
  • Mar 16, 2020 THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: WHO CREATED CHRISTIANITY, WHO WROTE THE GOSPELS FEATURING JESUS CHRIST, AND HOW DID CHRISTIANITY START IN AFRICA? Mar 16, 2020
• February 2020
  • Feb 19, 2020 MISSING MIDDLE PASSAGE DOCUMENTS: THE CONSEQUENCE FOR BALANTA, MENDE, TEMNE AND OTHER SENEGAMBIAN PEOPLES BROUGHT TO THE UNITED STATES Feb 19, 2020
  • Feb 3, 2020 THE MALI KINGDOM AND MANSA MUSA WERE IMPERIALIST SLAVE TRADERS: REVISITING AFRICAN HISTORY FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE PEOPLE WHO WERE OPPRESSED Feb 3, 2020
• December 2019
  • Dec 29, 2019 AFRICAN HISTORIANS SPEAK ON BLACK-WHITE RELATIONSHIPS AND THEIR MIXED RACE OFFSPRING Dec 29, 2019
  • Dec 3, 2019 Homosexuality Contemplated From African Spirituality Dec 3, 2019
  • Dec 1, 2019 Befera: The White Christian Witches of the Balanta Worldview Dec 1, 2019
• November 2019
  • Nov 16, 2019 Balanta and the Banking System: A Case Study of the Criminal Application of Fictitious Corporate Statutory Law Nov 16, 2019
  • Nov 6, 2019 SUMMARY OF LEGAL ISSUES CONCERNING BALANTA PEOPLE Nov 6, 2019
  • Nov 6, 2019 DEVELOPMENT OF LEGAL ISSUES CONCERNING BALANTA PEOPLE Nov 6, 2019
  • Nov 4, 2019 Timeline of American History And The Birth of White Supremacy and White Privilege in America Nov 4, 2019
• October 2019
  • Oct 29, 2019 LEGAL ISSUES EFFECTING BALANTA AS A RESULT OF CONTACT WITH THE ENGLISH Oct 29, 2019
  • Oct 29, 2019 LEGAL ISSUES EFFECTING BALANTA AS A RESULT OF CONTACT WITH EUROPEAN CHRISTIANS Oct 29, 2019
  • Oct 28, 2019 DEVELOPMENT OF LEGAL ISSUES DURING THE BALANTA MIGRATION PERIOD Oct 28, 2019
  • Oct 28, 2019 ORIGIN OF LEGAL ISSUES CONCERNING BALANTA PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES Oct 28, 2019
  • Oct 25, 2019 HOW THE AFRICAN UNION WAS ESTABLISHED TO INCLUDE THE AFRICAN DIASPORA Oct 25, 2019
  • Oct 22, 2019 THE BALANTA FOUNDER OF THE AFRICAN UNION 6TH REGION CAMPAIGN Oct 22, 2019
  • Oct 18, 2019 Amilcar Cabral Describes Balanta People Oct 18, 2019
  • Oct 16, 2019 AN ANSWER TO THOSE WHO CLAIM THAT AFRICAN AMERICANS ARE HEBREW OR “LOST JEWS” Oct 16, 2019
  • Oct 9, 2019 26 Principles of the Great Belief of the Balanta Ancient Ancestors Oct 9, 2019
• September 2019
  • Sep 19, 2019 Reviewing the Sudanic/TaNihisi Origins of the Balanta Sep 19, 2019