Prof. Ali Mazrui
Last week in this space I posed a challenge to the United States of America: Will it realise its potential of becoming humankind’s post-racial garden of Eden, completing the odyssey from Africa as the first Garden of Eden? Or will the country waste that opportunity through bigotry, prejudice, and conflict?
This week we raise the question: What are the migrations that initiated the linkage between the first Garden of Eden and the second Garden of Eden? The garden of birth was Africa; the garden of potential post-raciality is the United States. Will the human race need the Edenisation of America towards the post-racial age?
The story of Adam and Eve occurs in three of the great world religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Only two of the three Abrahamic religions have featured prominently in the belief systems of the African peoples – Christianity and Islam. Christianity and Islam have cast a shadow on the migrations of African peoples from the continent of the First Eden to the shores of the Second.
Central to the transfer of the African peoples from Africa to America was of course the role of Europe. If Africa invented the human race, Europe perfected racism. Europeans then inaugurated the most extensive trade in slaves ever attempted in human history. Both European racism and European slave trade helped to set the stage for creating a multi-racial ‘New World.’ The final Eden was slowly in the making.
It is common knowledge that one of the ways by which Europeans legitimised the slave trade was by portraying Africans as heathens and cannibals. What is not often realised is that African resistance to European enslavement was in turn partly inspired by African fears that those white-skinned people were the ones who were cannibals.
As a Dutch contemporary Willem Bosman summed it up, “Sometimes we deal with slaves from deep in the interior, who convince each other that the reason why we buy and transport them is to fatten them and sell them again for an appetising meal.”
What was happening was the forceful transfer of citizens of the world’s first Garden of Eden (Africa) to the shores of what may well turn out to be the world’s final Garden of Eden- the USA. That part of the population of the United States that was of African descent was historically destined to play decisive roles in the evolution of the second Eden towards its historic destiny.
The anti-slavery spirit of resistance among Africans was inspired by many factors, including love for freedom and a determination to remain on the soil of their ancestors. But a perception of the white man as a cannibal, as the ultimate serpent who might eat up the African, aggravated African anxieties.
In 1752 one European captain in the harbour of Paramaribo, Suriname, was worried about whether his enslaved Africans on his ship Prins Willem V would jump overboard because “they feared they would be eaten” on arrival at their destination.
And an 18th century European handbook for slave traders urged the slavers to “assure the slaves, after they have been purchased, that they should not be afraid- that white people were not cannibals…” In our terms, the serpent was historically deadly, but was not a man-eater in the literal sense.
Back in Africa, indigenous rulers differed in their attitude to the slave trade. John Thornton reminds us that Queen Nzinga Nbande of Matamba in Angola tried to mobilise and coordinate opposition to the Portuguese slave traders in the 1630s and 1640s. But the Portuguese fought back and unfortunately got African allies in opposition to Queen Nzinga.
In the 18th century, Tomba, the leader of the Baga on the Guinean Coast, also tried to stop the slave trade but was opposed by resident Europeans, Mulattoes and African collaborators.
Agaji Trudo was one of the greatest kings of Dahomey. He was hostile to the slave trade, and invaded coastal Aja kingdoms partly in a bid to stop the trade. His successes were short lived. Racist Europe persevered.
Our essay here poses the issue of whether there is a secular historical and collective version of the biblical story of Genesis. Should we look at Africa as the first Garden of Eden – the original habitat of the human species, fallible, mortal and therefore profoundly human? Should we look at the United States as potentially the second Eden, the future vanguard of a post-racial world?
In 1978 William Julius Wilson alerted us about The Declining Relevance of Race. Prof Wilson might have been prophetic rather than descriptive.
America as the second Garden of Eden must first get its racial house in order. Between now and the end of the 21st century, America has to learn how to cope with race and ethnicity, with an increasingly aging population, and with the gender gaps of privilege in its population.
America must learn how to accommodate its impatient youth, how to re-define its moral values, and how to become the final burying ground of sectarian hatreds and racial strife on the world scene.
Here is the Tale of Two Edens – Africa where the human species began, and America where the human species stands a chance of attaining its optimum post-racial fulfillment, guided by African Americans as sons and daughters of the first Eden.
That Africa was the first Garden of Eden is a fact of history and paleontology. There was light in the Dark Continent before there was light anywhere else. That America is the second Garden of Eden is still a matter of hope and aspiration. Let there be divine light on America too.
Thus is it written: There was made the first man, the African living soul.
Then, the last ideal, the American life-giving post-racial spirit.
Millennia after Adam there arose an Obama. It is now conceivable, nay credible, that our great grandchildren, of all ethnicities and all faiths, of all colours and all national origins, may witness such a miracle of a post-racial dawn before the end of this century.
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