THE CHARLES NICOLS LETTER

February 09, 2007

 

 

This is a brief essay sent in to my e-mail by Charles Nicols in January of 2003.  Without affirmation, I will risk the posting for those interested in perspectives.  It is an example of history used to deflate many myths regarding culture and modernity.  Nonetheless, he retains an optimistic tone about the future.  Further discovery is possible on the Basil Davidson Webpage.  Mind you, there is the general question whether this school of thought is inherently negative and depressing when placed outside the confines of music; a former teacher (if such sabbaticals do exist), I believe younger people or those grappling with such responses might find this quite helpful.

 

Mr. Gbujama:

It may have been Davidson's The African Slave Trade: Pre-colonial History 1450-1850, Little, Brown and Co., 1961?  But indeed, before Rambo-scious Hollywood and even before the Falcón Hurst fantasies of the Old South, the term nigger had long held its arresting place in the English language.

In the British view of the world, for example, the Irish occupied a position way below themselves, but just above the Africans.  The two were often compared, as in these verses from the British magazine Punch in 1848:

 

Six Foot Paddy are you no bigger?

You who cozening friars dish

Mentally than the poorest nigger

Groveling before fetish

You to Sambo I compare

Under superstitions rule

Prostrate like an abject fool

 

In 1849, British historian Thomas Carlyle published Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question. Dr. Eric Williams, former Prime Minister of Trinidad, and a historian, called it the most offensive document in the entire world literature on slavery and the West Indies .

Carlyle argued that the recently emancipated slaves should be forced to work for the whites: Decidedly you will have to be servants to those who are born wiser than you, that are born lords of you; servants to the Whites, if they are (as what mortal can doubt they are?) born wiser than you. (15.)

But, Sir, there are more encouraging lessons to be learned from the prehistory of racism.

Basil Davidson says this: What did Europeans think about black people before the rise of racism? How did they estimate the values of black humanity? There are countless indications in the pictorial arts. Think only of the noble portraits of the black monarch among the three kings who journeyed to salute the birth of Christ. Think of the work of the great masters of the Renaissance who painted black persons. Think of Rembrandt, Velasquez, many more. Each of them, without exception, painted black persons from the same standpoint as they painted white persons, whether either of these, white or black, were kings or merchants or ambassadors or servants'

Davidson makes these observations in the context of favorably reviewing Black Athena: The Afro-asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization by Martin Bernal (1987), in which the author draws on a wide range of classes of evidence to show that the very notion of Aryan purity contained in the western idea of the classical Greeks was a social construct, created by late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century scholars to provide a pedigree for their notions of European racial superiority.

In fact, he argues, ancient Greek society was contributed to by numerous African and Asiatic strains and was far from 'pure'.

The bloody human fuel that The Industrial Revolution and corollary, global Colonial Era, drew from sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the non-Western world was rationalized by many stereotypes and paradigms.

The cyber revolution will hopefully see a return to some balance, some set of bench-marks less damaging and soul destroying to vast sections of the human race.

CN