Ota Benga Alliance For Peace, Healing and Dignity

Dearest Friends,
I am still trying to understand the logic behind the destruction, the killings. One of the things which stands out is that what is happening in South Africa against the poorest of the poorest (PoPs) is also happening everywhere, not just in Africa. It is a new form of enslavement, updated, but still enslavement. No longer under a slave owner, but under an anonymous system. As under Atlantic, capitalist slavery, the slave (read the PoPs) must keep quiet, must not complain, must pretend that he/she is not a person, but a piece of property. Under capitalism, everyone is supposed to be free, but at a very high cost.

Under slavery, the French went out of their way (under Louis XIV) to actually pass a law, known as The Black Code. It functioned from 1685 through 1848. It had 60 articles which explained, in detail, how the slave must be treated. Article 43 read as follows: Call on our officers to sue criminally the masters or commanders who will have killed a slave under their power or their direct control, and to punish the murder according to the atrocity of the circumstances…. Louis Sala-Molins (the author of Le Code Noir ou le calvaire de Canaan) comments the article by pointing out how this article was completely ignored, and how the masters’ imagination for punishment could go to extremes. He provides detailed descriptions by the slave owners themselves who resorted to torture to death as a way of punishing the slaves, so as to terrorize the others into silent submission.

These details are usually not known by the public at large, but if every single African were to have Le Code Noir as a bed side book, maybe people might begin to understand that slavery was indeed a Crime Against Humanity. Maybe people will then begin to see the connections between the PoPs of today and the PoPs (slaves) of the past; and that from that past to this present, the most predatory system ever invented, has used all the weapons at its disposal to create a mindset which accepts it as the most effective (read profitable to very few) way of organizing human relations. If everyone were to read Le Code Noir as a sacred book, sacred because it contains information which, most of the time, is kept out of reach of the average person, and is distilled in certain environments by intellectual experts (priests).

Article 42 specifically prohibited the slave owners from torturing or mutilating the slaves… But the reality as Sala-Molins shows was different. The judicial liberalism toward masters who might have tortured their slaves, later evolved into the economic liberalism of today. In the process it generated poverty on an unimaginable scale; because the managers of the system under which slavery was born never saw any reason to change their ways along the path to globalization.

The masters of the PoPs are behaving today like the slave masters of the past. They want the poor to keep quiet and accept the way in which the masters are planning to cope with poverty and the PoPs. As with “discovery” so with the end of slavery: “abolition”. Things/people can only be discovered, and/or abolished by the Richest of the Richest (RoRs), according to their will and timing. The masters did not like what the Africans did in Santo Domingo, when for 13 years (1791-1804) they fought for an end of what the slaves knew to be a Crime Against Humanity. The descendants have been made to suffer the consequences of an emancipatory act which went way beyond the 1789 French Revolution. They went too far, so said the former slave masters of the narrative which must always be dominant.

As with slavery, so with poverty, eradication of poverty can only be carried out by those who know what it means to be poor. As in Santo Domingo/Haiti, so in Durban. Then the Africans said enough is enough. The PoPs of Durban are saying to poverty and those who get rich by its maintenance: enough is enough. Those who have considered themselves in charge of history have never liked it when the poor, the slaves, the colonized, the marginalized, the Wretched of the Earth, say and do away with what they see, know as the source of their unbearable suffering. The minimum one can do is to support them.

(To be continued)

Jacques Depelchin
6-Oct-2009