Gettin' Crazy With Curricula.

As I sat down to craft my unit plan for this final project, I wanted to focus on an issue in African history/society/literature that we didn't get into much in this class. One perspective that we didn't get from the books we read was that of the white African experience. With that in mind, the novel I chose to use in my unit plan is The Syringa Tree, written by Pamela Gien, a white South African native now living in the United States. It tells the story of a young girl named Lizzie whose affluent family clandestinely works against apartheid, at great risk to themselves.

It's easy to demonize all white people in Africa as carpetbagging imperialists or missionizing fanatics. And during the colonial period, this was too often exactly the case. However, there are many people of European descent who are native Africans, and I wanted my unit plan to show instances of different ethnicities working together for issues of social and political justice. To that end, in addition to The Syringa Tree, I also used journalist Donald Woods' nonfiction book Biko, about his friend, murdered anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko. After Biko was killed in police custody, Woods was forced to go into exile after his anti-aparthied stance and support of Biko's cause made it too dangerous to stay in South Africa.

Every good unit plan or lesson encourages students to think for themselves. I hope that by challenging preconceived notions of race and racial conflict in Africa, my unit would, if used in a classroom, do just that.

Jubilee

Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubilee to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land.

And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.

A jubilee shall that fiftieth year be unto you: ye shall not sow, neither reap that which groweth of itself in it, nor gather the grapes in it of thy vine undressed.

For it is the jubilee; it shall be holy unto you: ye shall eat the increase thereof out of the field.

In the year of this jubilee ye shall return every man unto his possession. (Leviticus 25:9-13)

Every fiftieth year in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the ancient Israelites observed a celebratory year in which indentured servants were freed, the land was allowed to lie fallow, and all debts were forgiven. During the years leading up to the 21st century, a loose coalition of groups from over forty countries formed to work toward the cancellation of third world debt. Called Jubilee 2000, this organization was supported by many famous people whom you have heard of and possibly respect, such as Bono, Quincy Jones, and Muhammad Ali.

After the year 2000, Jubilee 2000 split into various regional and national organizations devoted to third world debt relief; Jubilee USA is the branch in the United States. According to their website, the group is composed of "more than 80 religious denominations and faith communities, human rights, environmental, labor, and community groups working for the definitive cancellation of crushing debts to fight poverty and injustice in Asia, Africa, and Latin America." Sounds alright to me! There are comparable NGOs all over the world, including the Drop The Debt campaign in America's overseas doppelganger, the United Kingdom, and Jubilee South, composed of coalitions from many African, Asian, and Latin American nations.

Side Note: A friend of mine was married to a woman from Australia who once said, after seeing U2 perform, that Australians have a wonderful slang term for people like Bono: "tossbag." I don't know exactly what it means, but I have several unpleasant guesses. Anyway, say what you want about Bono, The Edge, and whoever those other two guys in U2 are, and I'll often agree with you. But he's passionate about social and economic justice around the world, and that's important and honorable. However, in this photograph he looks as if he's auditioning for a supporting role in a low budget vampire movie.

Kids at War -or- How Can We Make Sense of the World When It Doesn't Have Any?

As noted in my previous post, children participating in military action is neither a new or specifically African occurrence. Children are not usually present as official enlisted (or conscripted) soldiers. Rather, they are found more often as members of militias and guerrilla groups.

In the example of German youths defending Berlin against Russian troops in Spring, 1945, fervent members of the Hitler Youth were readily available to take the place of the Wehrmacht's disintegrating forces. The Hitler Youth functioned as a highly militarized version of the Boy Scouts, meant to instill complete allegiance to the Third Reich and prepare youth of both sexes for a life of dedication to Germany. While the United States did not draft or enlist anyone under 18, many younger men lied about their age and joined the cause, anyway. Kurt Vonnegut's classic novel Slaughterhouse Five is subtitled "The Children's Crusade" because of the young age of the men who were called upon to fight and die for their country.

During World War I, as well, many German students and recent high school graduates enlisted in the army to defend the Fatherland. As much as we like to demonize Germany, it was not just they who used child soldiers during the "Great War." All participants needed as many willing men (and women) as they could get; World War I required soldiers like no conflict had in history to that point. Interestingly, Crownprince Leopold of Belgium, nephew of our friend King Leopold, served in the Belgian Army during the First World War. He enlisted at age thirteen.

The malleablity and suggestibility of young people is perfect for those who would direct their enthusiasm and yearning for responsibility toward immoral ends. Child soldiers are denied what we in the United States so often take for granted: a childhood.

Johnny B. Bad -or- Allen Webb, Why Do You Assign Books That Make My Soul Hurt?

Well, in the first ten pages of Johnny Mad Dog we are introduced to a character who can only achieve orgasm after watching the twitching naked buttocks of women whose eyes he has just rubbed with ground red pepper. And the charming rogue General Giap isn't alone. This book is full of children living adult lives, committing adult atrocities, and being saddled with adult responsibility. In class, I compared the child soldiers in the film Blood Diamond to Lampwick and the others who turn into donkeys in Pinocchio. The characters in Johnny Mad Dog are no different. I may not have offered such a glib analogy if I had already read Johnny Mad Dog; Lampwick never raped a television news anchor.

How can this happen? How do humans to this to others? It is not merely an African phenomenon, of course. During the Battle of Berlin in 1945, children represented a large proportion of the German defense against the Russians. Often, they fought remarkably fiercely; having known no other way of life, their allegiance to the Fuhrer and the Reich was absolute. In our own country, a fifteen year old boy named John Cook won the Medal of Honor for his actions at the Battle of Antietam during the Civil War. War touches everyone in society; its scope can never be restricted to an "appropriate" population.

Deserts Aren't Much Fun, Just Ask Tom Joad.

The United Nations declared 2006 the International Year of Deserts and Desertification. So this is no small issue (be aware, 2008 is the United Nations International Year of the Potato, and 2009 will be the International Year of Natural Fibres; in addition, the years 2005-2015 are the officially recognized United Nations Water for Life Decade).

Desertification, while annoyingly unwieldy to say aloud, is a major environmental issue. It is the process by which topsoil uses moisture, thereby turning fertile land into arid, barren desert. The kind of place that T.E. Lawrence liked to hang out, but that doesn't have a lot of use in terms of providing food and water to humans and animals. As this map shows, large parts of North Africa are considered true desert. However, large portions of the continent are either at moderate or great risk of being turned into dry and dusty wasteland:
Desertification is caused by a variety of factors, among them drought and unhealthy grazing and farming practices. In the United States, the most famous instance of desertification occured during the 1930s, as the Great Plains became known as the Dust Bowl. Millions of people were forced to leave their farms and homesteads because the land was no longer arable. John Steinbeck wrote books about it, and Woody Guthrie sang songs about it. This same process is ocurring all over Africa and the world, with similarly tragic results.

The effect that desertification has and can have on communities and nations across the planet is potentially disastrous. But don't trust everything you read on this blog, see what Kofi Annan has to say about it. He positions the problem of desertification beyond that of an ecological disaster, and relates it to broader social problems. Specifically, Annan states that "desertification is both a cause and a consequence of poverty."


Through ecologically-conscious farming and grazing techniques, as well as soil conservation efforts, desertification can be halted and even reversed. The United Nations has recognized desertification as a global issue, and 191 countries have signed the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). However, the problem is not solved as easily as signing a treaty. It takes time, effort, and money to stop desertification, as well as personal involvement and a sense of social and environmental responsibility.

The Moufflon Sleeps Tonight..

Throughout the novel The Bleeding of the Stone, I wondered what exactly a moufflon, looks like. Well, I found out. I'm not a hunter, so venturing out into the harsh, inhospitable wilderness in order to shoot one doesn't appeal to me. Particularly in the Libyan Desert, where the novel takes place, one of the most arid places on earth.

The stark simplicity of the novel appeals to me, especially when contrasted with the complexity of the conflicts involved. Asouf not only must resolve the conflicts that he experiences with the simple-minded hunters, but the conflicts between him and nature, and within himself. Of the classic narrative conflicts, that's man vs. man, man vs. nature, and man vs. self in one short novel (with elements of man vs. society thrown in for good measure)!

Xala Back Girl

I may be speaking only for myself, but I found it refreshing to read something that didn't make me want to go home and listen to Morrissey until I fell asleep with tears glistening on my cheeks. Not that Xala fails to engage in serious ideas or confront important issues in African history and culture. It certainly doesn't. But the novel breathes with a vibrancy and knowledge of humanity that, without artifice, that distinguishes it from some of the other things we have been reading.

Of course, the end of the novel justifiably deserves comment. The questions it raises, about liberty, about revolution, about class and justice, are ones that we still grapple with all over the world today. Xala gives us no easy answers; it refuses even to give us recognizable heroes and villains.

This adorable dog's name is Xala. It has nothing to do with the novel Xala.

The End of Apartheid: Thank You, Music Superstars!

Apartheid, the forced legal segregation of blacks and whites in South Africa, did not officially and completely end until 1993. The legacy of this cruel system has shaped the cultural and political structures of South African society, and still does, in profound ways.

Segregation was nothing new in the African colonies. Most European colonial governments, either officially or unofficially, promoted the domestic separation of ethnic groups. In South Africa, however, these policies were taken to an extreme not seen elsewhere. They were institutionalized and enforced; the practice became known as apartheid.

Apartheid was one of the most important factors that influenced South Africa to leave the British Commonwealth in 1961 and become a sovereign nation. The Commonwealth did not condone the policies of forced legal segregation, which were supported by most white inhabitants in South Africa. After the formation of South Africa as an independent republic, apartheid was codified into law, becoming broader and encompassing more aspects of everyday life. The capital, Johannesburg, functioned as a "whites only" city, with blacks being unable to stay in the city at night without special permits. Blacks were restricted to "suburbs" such as Soweto, the infamous South African slum, or "homelands:" areas with much fewer resources and utilities than areas occupied by whites. The horrors of apartheid are well-documented, and need not be covered in depth for the purposes of this blog. Here, we are more concerned with how apartheid finally crumbled.

The end of apartheid came about, in large part, because of significant opposition to the South African regime, both from internal foes and a large international movement. A widespread boycott prevented sports teams and entertainers from competing or performing in South Africa.

"It is only direct action on the part of the people, your own perception of what is possible, that can produce change."

Walter Rodney was murdered by the C.I.A. He was deemed dangerous enough to America's national interests abroad that he was killed with a bomb disguised as a two-way radio, which was planted by a C.I.A. operative. We can see part of what made people so vehemently opposed to his working class radicalism in the excerpts we read from his 1973 book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

Rodney is correct to point out that the powers of European colonialism had no vested interest in developing African territories. Educated, empowered, and pragmatic people are less likely to passively submit to exploitation and oppression than fearful, technologically disadvantaged "primitives." However, Walter Rodney was not considered such a threat simply because he supported the rights of dispossessed laborers. The real reason can be discerned from statements such as this:

To complete the moral of the Rockefeller success story, it would be necessary to fill in the details on all the millions of people who had to be exploited in order for one man to become a multi-millionaire. The acquisition of wealth is not due to hard work alone, or the Africans working as slaves in America and the West Indies would have been the wealthiest group in the world. The individualism of the capitalist must be seen against the hard and unrewarded work of the masses.

For the most part, the C.I.A. did not give a shit about Africa, working Africans, starving African children, or African sovereignty. They cared about suppressing and defeating communism. Rodney's "far out" ideas that societies and governments owe a debt to the countless multitude who make possible the tremendous wealth of captains of industry was a shade too "red" for our liking. So somebody blew him up, widowing his wife and leaving his children fatherless. The reason that the C.I.A. is so secretive is because a lot of its history is as shameful as this.

The Rumble in the Jungle: Achebe vs. Conrad

In his essay An Image of Africa, Chinua Achebe has such a way of cutting to the essence of a matter that I've decided to refer to him in my mind as "The Katana." For example:

If there is something in these utterances more than youthful inexperience, more than a lack of factual knowledge, what is it? Quite simply it is the desire -- one might indeed say the need -- in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.

TKO! Put this way, the problems inherent in Conrad's approach to Africa and Africans become clear. The Congo that Conrad creates exists to serve his rhetorical objectives, not to present a fair and balanced ethnography. Simply because Conrad opposes the gross mistreatment of the native Africans does not mean that he embraces an egalitarian, progressive view of race relations.

In this context, Heart of Darkness can be seen as one chapter in Europe's internal struggle over morality. Africa itself remained an impenetrable, savage place: the dark counterpart to Europe's luminous civility. Achebe, again:

As I said earlier Conrad did not originate the image of Africa which we find in his book. It was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it. For reasons which can certainly use close psychological inquiry the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa.

Conrad got slashed. "The Katana" strikes again...

$1 US = $10 trillion ZW

I found this interesting and unsettling link at the New York Times website (registration may be required): Life in Zimbabwe: Wait for Useless Money. Now whenever I see anything about Africa, my brain perks up. Thanks a lot, Allen Webb!

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning."

In King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild points out that when Francis Ford Coppola desired to make a film showing the brutal insanity of the Vietnam War, he turned to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and adapted it into the film Apocalypse Now. After reading the book and watching the film, it seems to me that the most important themes are of mystery and fear: fear of the mysterious and the moral lapses into violence that result from that fear. Conrad's is a tale of tragic inevitability in which the clashing cultures are both compelled and repelled by one another.

Marlow's journey up the Congo to find the missing Kurtz (shades of Stanley and Livingstone!) initiates a serious-minded meditation on the moral degradation that Conrad witnessed in the Belgian Congo, although several scenes in the novella can be read as darkly comic in the twisted reality they present. The native Africans were neither understood nor regarded as fully human, and therefore the wanton destruction of their lives was legitimized.

Of course, the practice in warfare of viewing an enemy as inherently "other" is a well established and effective one. The primary concern becomes one not of universal humanity or even ideals, but simple "pacification." Capt. Kilgore's famous speech in Apocalypse Now illustrates the process of transforming human lives into obstacles to achieving an objective:

You smell that? Do you smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one we had a hill bombed for twelve hours. When it was all over I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell, you know, that gasoline smell, the whole hill. It smelled like...victory.

In this same way, Conrad shows us how the rush (or "scramble," if you will) for resources, labor, and profit in Africa facilitated the degradation of civilized morality, both of the Europeans and the Africans. The moral restraints were weakened, and Kurtz is the culmination of that process. His assumption of control over a tribe of Africans and his depraved behavior is manifest evidence of the nadir of a society, and the slowing of "progress" to a standstill, if not a reversal of its course.

Rapacity + Depravity = Humanity

Sometimes, I wish that every history book I read didn't reinforce my natural predilection for cynicism, or, worse yet, manage to enhance it. C'est la vie, as the French were saying as they subjugated the indigenous people of their own colony, in what is now the Republic of the Congo.

I feel like it's hard to be shocked by the events described in King Leopold's Ghost. Appalled, saddened, and angered, but not shocked. How can a world that's witnessed, even secondhand, the dual horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki be shocked by anything, ever? Belsen in the 1940s, My Lai and East Timor in the 1970s, El Salvador in the 1980s, Kurdistan and Bosnia in the 1990s, Sudan and Abu Ghraib in the 2000s. While differing in severity and scale, infamous episodes such as these have proved that the 20th and 21st centuries can hold their own in terms of man's inhumanity to man.

The thing that disturbs me the most about the systematic slaughter in the Congo is that it took place not because of ideologies, however radical or twisted, but because of simple avarice. For the luxurious profit of a few, some of the worst sufferings imaginable were perpetrated on millions, destroying lives and ways of life. And the sun still came up the next day, as it has every day since. People move on, societies move on , movements moves on.

The world moves on.

But let us not think that all it took to salve the wounds left by Leopold and his like was for the imperialist troops and rubber exporters to abandon their holdings and cede control back to the natives. The legacy of brutality and authoritarian oppression left in Africa by the "civilized" nations of Europe is one that has still not been resolved today.

Mauritania has had at least 10 coups or attempted coups since 1960, the year they achieved independence from the French. The most recent, a successful one, took place on August 6, 2008. No less than 25 African nations have been ruled by a military dictatorship at some point in the post-colonial period (Libya and Zimbabwe are currently ruled by one). Others, such as Gabon, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Ugunda, the Republic of the Congo, Ethiopa, and the Central African Republic have been or are currently governed by good old fashioned Stalinist dictatorships, with or without the reactionary feel-goodery of a military junta. What European colonization bestowed upon Africa was not the glory of Christian democratic civilization, but decades of bloodshed, political destabilization, and oppression. Nice work, guys!

The people of Africa, like oppressed and powerless people the world over, have consistently paid the price for the fact that humanity's darkest nature, that which needs it the most, is the one that we are the least willing to confront.


Postscript: Don't make the same mistake I made. The film Congo is not a moving and powerful indictment of Leopold's colonial dreams and nightmares. In fact, it mostly concerns vicious, supersmart gorillas.

"What do you mean, you can't repeat the past? Of course you can. "

Reading King Leopold's Ghost, I was struck by how little the great European powers seemed to have progressed between Columbus's initial expeditions to the New World. starting in 1492, and Stanley's trips for Belgium in the 1880's. They still viewed unfamiliar societies as "primitive" and "savage," much like they had during the colonization craze in North and South America. As Hochschild points out:

The very word treaty is a euphemism, for many chiefs had no idea what they were signing. Few had seen the written word before, and they were being asked to mark their X's to documents in a foreign language and in legalese.

Sounds familiar. In the Americas, European explorers and colonizers neglected the dazzling variety of cultures, customs, and beliefs of indigenous peoples in favor of lumping them all together into one big bowl of heathen stew. And what else do you do with a bowl of stew, but trick it out of its land and try to kill it? On a side note, the original caption for this photograph reads, "A typical Native American." Somehow I doubt that serenading woodland creatures with flute music was or is on the list of daily activities for most of them.

It's just sad to see that it took humans so long to even start recognizing that we are more similar than we are different. And sadder still to see how far from our ideals we still are today. Unfortunately, the story of what happened in the Congo seems to be a sad one, told many times. Rather than battling (both figuratively and literally) over religion, ideology, and culture, humans should probably spend some time focusing on being better than we have been, and better than we are.

Yep, that's more like it.

Stanley/Livingstone

Stanley and Livingstone were arguably the best-loved vaudeville act in the history of Victorian London, in addition to being disguised space aliens sent to colonize earth....wait, bear with me for a minute. Okay, someone hacked this Wikipedia page. Please ignore the previous sentence.

Stanley and Livingstone were intrepid travelers who did, in fact help to colonize part of the earth: the part called Africa. Both men impacted the course of African history in ways good and bad (mostly bad, if you were an African).

David Livingstone (1813-1873) was a famous, indeed almost mythical, British national hero. His roles as Christian missionary, geographic explorer, and anti-slave trade abolitionist granted him great fame in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. He is well-known today for "discovering" Victoria Falls and being the subject of one of the most famous phrases in Western culture. He tried to find the source of the Nile River, but didn't.

Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904) lived one hell of a life. A journalist and explorer, he was born in Wales, but moved at a young age to America. He reluctantly served in the American Civil War, eventually having the distinction of deserting both the Confederate and Union forces. After that nifty trick, he became a journalist. In 1869, while a correspondent for the New York Herald, Stanley was recruited to mount an expedition into Africa to find Livingstone, who had not been heard from for six years. And find him he did.

Stanley's 700 mile, eight month expedition into present-day Tanzania, including around 200 porters, culminated on November 10, 1871 near Lake Tanganyika. Upon finally coming face-to-face with his quarry, Stanley uttered one of the most famous greetings in history: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

Or maybe he didn't. Let's just say he might have. Livingstone's account doesn't mention what would seem to be a singular way of addressing someone you've just met. And Stanley himself tore out the pages of his diary that recount the meeting. At any rate, it made for great reading in the papers. Stanley's books, including How I Found Livingstone and Through the Dark Continent, made him a renowned and successful explorer, and financed his other trips to Africa.

Livingstone stayed in Africa after his famous meet-and-greet with Stanley. Eventually he got sick and died of malaria and internal bleeding. He had spent so much time in Africa that his six children grew up fatherless, and his wife also died of malaria trying to journey to Africa to meet him. Livingstone's heart was buried under a tree, and his body was taken to England by his two loyal servants, Chuma and Susi.

Stanley tinkered around in Africa for awhile, eventually signing on to help King Leopold II of Belguim to claim lands and introduce "civilization" and Christianity to the Congo. We will read much more about that in King Leopold's Ghost, so suffice to say that Stanley spent a lot of time in his twilight years defending himself against charges that his expeditions in Africa were needlessly cruel and brutal, plagued by savage beatings and exploitation. Predictably, he was also knighted.

Here's a link to a video made by a bunch of twerps for a class project: Dr. Livingstone's African Journey.

Welcome to beautiful downtown Umuofia! Condos coming soon!

Sometimes, a picture can represent a moment that in retrospect seems inescapable in the history of humankind. It compels us to consider history not as a neat progression of grand events, but instead as a rough-edged confluence of disparate lives lived in small moments. This photograph does just that. The coming of Christianity to the African continent altered, as it did in the Americas, India, Australia, and elsewhere, the way that both European and native societies viewed themselves and their world. This image says to us, "There can be no going back from this. What was can be no more. Everything is changing."

The picture shows a Christian missionary church that's been built in the middle of an Igbo village. Livestock hang around outside, unaware of the social and political significance of the building next to them. To some people involved, the church is a brave outpost, bringing the promise of salvation to a primitive people at the edge of civilization. To others, it is a puzzling new addition to an ancient way of life, full of both mystery and danger. It is important to recognize that native peoples who came into contact with colonizing powers were not pure victims; they were full participants in an inevitable cultural exchange.

I try to imagine what it would have felt like to be Igbo at the time this photograph was taken. A strange new religion appears, essentially out of nowhere, brought by exotic people with unfamiliar attitudes and behaviors. The old ways are being replaced with the new. What is it like to witness the coming of a new world? And to watch your world die?

Surely some revelation is at hand...

This is my second time reading Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Both times, the thing that struck me the most about the novel is the power and obscenity of the final chapter, the last paragraph in particular. Okonkwo's entire life, faults and virtues alike, indeed his humanity itself, is reduced to a single paragraph in a book being written by the District Commissioner called The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. His experience is no more than an anecdote in an imperialist history book.

This is the most meaningful element of the novel, in my mind. The British who colonize Umuofia, imposing their religious and political institutions, give no thought to the people who have called the region home for centuries. They are merely savages to be subdued and "civilized." Achebe, purposefully, spends 207 pages detailing the tragic demise of a man and his society, and then two pages showing us what all that suffering and loss meant to the Western world: nothing.

I find the characterization of Okonkwo interesting, as well. It would be easy for Achebe to show him as an innocent, gentle soul, one who never hurt anybody and was always kind to people. Instead, the novel's protagonist is a severe, angry (even cruel) man with staggeringly destructive daddy issues. Achebe doesn't position Okonkwo as the clan's everyman, either; he clearly displays some traits that perplex and frustrate his peers. The author makes it difficult for us to sympathize with him; but sympathize we must. We know that Okonkwo is behaving how he feels he should, and Achebe is careful to tell us good things about him as well. In the end, we mourn for Okonkwo because we recognize what is universal in his life and his humanity, not because we feel great affection for him personally.

On a final note, it's significant that the novel's title comes from a line in W.B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," written in 1919 during the aftermath of the First World War. The poem's religious, foreboding imagery laments the decline of European aristocratic values and presumes that Western Civilization is about to be ruined and reborn. The lifted title suits Achebe's novel well; for Okonkwo and the Ibo, things do, indeed, fall apart.

P.S. Embedding is disabled for this video, but it's creative and kind of funny.

The Roman Empire in Africa

Rome, 264 BCE. The powerful civilization of Carthage, on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa, has become an itch that the Roman Empire just has to scratch. Tired of competing for economic and military influence in the region, these two great powers are about to engage in three separate Punic Wars, the resolution of which will in 146 BCE leave Carthage in ruins, its history and culture destroyed, and Rome as the undisputed ruler of the region.

The Roman Empire set the standards and benchmarks for the imperialistic European nation-states that would colonize the world during the Age of Exploration and beyond. The primary reason for establishing influence in Africa (or any province, for that matter) was to exploit the area's resources and labor. The Roman Provinces of Africa (present-day Tunisia), Numidia (present-day Algeria and Tunisia), and Mauretania (present-day Algeria) supplied the empire with, according to one estimate, around 250,000 thousand tons of grain annually, in addition to olives, grapes, livestock, marble, wine, lumber, fruit, textiles, wool, and human slaves.

Egypt also figures prominently in the history of Rome in Africa. In 30 BCE, Rome established rule over Egypt, which would last for six centuries until the fall of the Byzantine empire. The fertile Nile River valley provided the empire with massive supplies of grain and other crops. This exploitation of natural resources was similar to that done by the previous Ptolemaic dynasty (themselves a foreign ruling family from Hellenistic Macedonia), the difference being that under Roman rule the proceeds solely benefitted the Roman patricians and merchants who exported the goods; the products (as well as the taxes they generated) did not stay in Egypt.

The period of Roman rule in North Africa foreshadowed the tragic exploitation of resources, both human and natural, that would characterize the relationships between Africa and the colonial powers in centuries to come. Even the love stories were sad.

Introducing...

My name is Darius Goebel, and I am an English major at Western Michigan University. I plan on becoming a secondary school teacher in the (hopefully) near future.

Besides reading, writing, and teaching, my primary interest is rock and roll music, as well as its related American (specifically African-American) antecedents. When I was eleven I heard Nirvana's album Nevermind and it wrapped its subversive tentacles around my head and my heart. Music has been consistently important to me ever since, as I've worked backward through rock's chronology. Three years after Nevermind I discovered The Sex Pistols and The Clash, and two years after that it was The Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan, and then Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. Music, to me, is more than a fun diversion; it is a vital expression of human experience (much like literature).

I haven't read much writing from Africa, aside from Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. I'm looking forward to getting a sense of the spirit and character of African literature, and therefore Africa itself, during this course. Hakuna Matata!