Confronting the Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism in Africa Keynote Address

by Professor J F Ade Ajayi
Reproduced from: www.africacentre.org.uk

Introduction

The summary of my argument is that development remains elusive in Africa, not merely because of the misrule and warped personalities of many African leaders, but because Africa had been damaged severely, first by the slave trade, then by the colonialism, which grew out of the slave trade. Further, that Africa cannot rejoin the development train in the world until the damage is repaired as much as possible. When that is done, it will be of immense benefit not only to Africa, but also to the whole world.

A lot has been written about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, mostly about the economic benefits it conferred on Europe and North America, and the injustice of the lives of the slaves in America. Little attention has so far been given to the devastative effect of the damage done to African peoples. African historians have themselves been reluctant to focus much attention on this period of African history. The attitude generally has been that slavery is a universal phenomenon. Other peoples have transcended their periods of slavery and oppression. Why can’t Africans forget about theirs, turn their faces forward and get on with their lives? Because of this refusal to confront the slave trade and come to terms with it, both Africans and non-Africans surround the subject with various myths. The story is told of a Harvard Professor of African descent who was visiting Africa and confronted an Asante lady with the accusation that her ancestors had sold his ancestors into slavery. The issue of possible guilt feeling has only compounded the African malaise. There is a Yoruba saying that ‘my child is dead is better than my child is missing’. When dead, the child is buried; an account is given to the ancestors, and the living can get on with their lives. Consider how many such bodies are unaccounted for in every single community in Africa. Collective amnesia and deafening silence in the oral traditions have not enabled Africans to forget. A Nigerian writer has suggested the need for rituals to release the ghosts of the missing presumed dead. This conference may make its own contribution towards that ritual of purification.

The Uniqueness of the Atlantic Slave Trade

There are university courses on slavery as a universal phenomenon. Usually, such courses stress that there was slavery in Africa before the coming of the Portuguese. There was slavery, but not slaves as a commercial commodity. Then came the trans-Saharan slave trade, which introduced a commercial element into African slavery. But the scale of the trade was such that the slaves wee able to continue to be treated as human beings. Under strict Islamic law, a converted slave became a free fellow Muslim. The children of a slave concubine or wife were free members of the household. Various features of the trans-Atlantic trade made it very different from any other type of slave trade or slavery in history. It was capital intensive and competitive among several European nations. The factor of international competition perhaps did more than anything else to reduce the slaves from fellow human beings to purely commercial cargo. Laws were passed to deny the humanity of the slaves. Their eye-witness accounts were not admissible in court as evidence. They could not own any property. Their children belonged to their masters and not to themselves. On the Middle Passage, they were packed like lifeless cargo in ways in which dogs and horses would not be packed today.

There were two further consequences of this. One was that, in all that period, from the late fifteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, the trans-Atlantic slave trade was inflicted on such a large scale on black Africans alone, with the result that by the 18th century, slave had become synonymous with black, and black with slavery. No one remembered that the Romans had Greek slaves or that the Turks and Arabs had enslaved many Europeans. Because of the kind of slavery they endured, black slaves were no longer accepted as normal human beings. The whole of Christendom, with all the religious fervour unleashed by the Protestant revolution of the 16th 17th centuries, clung to the argument that slavery is not condemned in the Bible as a sin. Because of the Apostle Paul’s letter to ask the master of Onesimus to forgive him and his plea that slaves should be loyal to their masters, it was concluded that the Bible condoned the heinous crimes of the Middle Passage and the gross injustice of the life of slaves on the American plantations. Some writers even tried to justify the Atlantic trade with the argument that it took black slaves from heathen lands into Christendom, thus opening up the possibility of converting them and saving their souls. All the teachings of Jesus that we should regard others as our neighbours, especially the weak and the oppressed, and do unto others as we would want them to do unto us, were glossed over. When eventually the Evangelical re-awakening of the 18th and early 19th centuries triggered off the anti-slavery movement, it stopped short of declaring the Atlantic slave trade as a sin and a heinous crime against humanity. The anti-slavery movement was the first to perfect the organisation of mass rallies to force a change of policy on government and it did a marvellous job. But because of this failure to accept that the Atlantic slave trade was not compatible with the Biblical notion of neighbourly love, it was able to come to a compromise with the powerful West Indian planters in Parliament. Parliament voted 23 million pounds in 1834, now worth at least 23 billion to compensate the slave owners, but not one penny to compensate the slaves. Yet, slave owner and former slave were then to become fellow citizens competing in the same market place. Obviously, the anti-slavery movement left the business of emancipation as unfinished business. It has even been said that, what with apprenticeship schemes and all that, the slaves were not emancipated but ransomed. The passing of the Emancipation Act did not involve any change of heart in Europe or America about the evils of the Atlantic trade or the human qualities and capabilities of the black peoples involved. The Oxford Professor of Classics who examined Samuel Ajayi Crowther as he was being tested for ordination said he would like to show his papers to his colleagues who maintained that black people were not capable of logical thought.

The Anti-Slavery Movement and Domestic Slavery

The anti-slavery movement focused its attention on stopping the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It was not designed as such to repair the ravages done to Africa by the slave trade. We could say that the missionary movement that grew out of the anti-slavery movement did attempt some reparation in its policy of combining Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation. But the effectiveness of the missionary movement was greatly compromised by its failure to accept the slave trade as a sin incompatible with the teachings of the Bible. The missionaries were, therefore, willing to compromise with slave owners once again. When they discovered that they needed to promote internal slavery and slave trade in order to promote agricultural production for European industries, they did not hesitate to make the compromise. From the 1840′s to the 1880′s, they promoted what they called legitimate trade by encouraging a wide expansion of the use of so-called domestic slaves for the production and transportation of palm produce and other commodities to exchange for imported ammunition to continue the wars that continued to yield the slaves. To legitimize this compromise, the missionaries argued that slavery was not the sin, but the custom of plurality of wives which had no doubt been heightened by the years of the slave trade which usually removed more men than women. The Church Missionary Society (CMS) authorities ruled that in the Bible, slave owning was a social evil that could be tolerated until changes in the economic situation led to its amelioration, but that polygamy was explicitly rebuked in the New Testament in spite of its widespread practice by the patriarchs in the Old Testament. The argument of Bishop Crowther that monogamy should be treated the way Paul treated circumcision as not an essential qualification for salvation, was firmly rejected. You may wish to contrast how some people in the same Anglican Church are today, in the name of showing love, are trying to find a way round the explicit statements in the Bible condemning homosexuality, the sin of Sodom, as unnatural and not acceptable. Archdeacon Crowther, the Bishop’s son, took the argument against polygamy to its logical conclusion when he said that he was not worried about the fate of the wives of polygamists who were divorced so that their husbands could become monogamists and acceptable for baptism. The archdeacon said that he regarded the status of such ‘wives’ as comparable with slavery. Even when Lagos became a British colony, slavery continued to be tolerated. The majority of the congregations in the CMS churches of the Niger Delta were slaves. The missions on the Niger River could not have been established without the support of the commerce in palm produce, shea butter and other slaveproduced and slave-transported commodities in exchange for ammunition. For most of the 1870′s Bishop Crowther established a formal alliance with the rulers of the Nupe kingdom as the southern outpost of the Sokoto Caliphate which was ostensibly being erected on the basis of a slave economy. Yet, the abolition of slavery was used at the Berlin and Brussels conferences as the defining mark of civilisation, on the basis of which African states were excluded from the comity of nations who congregated to share African territories without the participation of the Africans. Abolition of slavery was to be the major definition of the civilisation that the Partition Powers were to confer on Africans as soon as they could make good the claims that they were in control. The armies they used consisted largely of freed slaves. Slave raiding was the commonest casus belli declared against African rulers they marked out for attack.

All Were Victims, not Beneficiaries

Inter-ethnic relations in Africa will for long continue to be affected by perceptions as to who collaborated with the slavers and who suffered most. This is largely a futile argument because in the end all Africans and peoples of African descent were victims, not beneficiaries of the slave trade. The technology, capital and competition that characterised the European participation in the Atlantic trade meant that no African peoples could afford to stay aloof from it. Those who could, obtained whatever ammunition was available, so as to protect themselves. The chiefs who participated in the trade were victims at least of unequal exchange, They exported man and woman productive and reproductive power in return for ammunition, cheap gin, textiles, mirrors and others which the late Dr Dike called ‘meretricious’ goods. No black African could escape from the racist burden of being black. Consider also the opportunity cost of the trade that of necessity compelled you to be perpetually at war with your neighbours instead of trading with them. Consider the specific case of Benin. It is reckoned that in terms of what may be called the civilized arts and perhaps even technology over a wide range of issues, life in Benin was comparable with life in Portugal when the Portuguese arrived to trade at the end of the 15th century, and there was some mutual exchange to start with. When the Portuguese showed that their interest was thenceforth to consist solely in slaves, the Benin monarch expelled the traders and missionaries from his court. The Portuguese just moved down the river to Itshekiriland. Benin could of course not keep away from the trade for too long. They had to trade, if not with the Portuguese, then with the Dutch and the French. Imagine what Benin could have become by the 19th century if they had enjoyed an export trade in commodities other than slaves. Consider also the Yoruba. The Old Oyo empire, with a cavalry force, built up some hegemonic power in the southern sudan belt in the 17-18th centuries. The Oyo ruled over Nupe, Bussa and others. They opened a corridor to the coast so as to participate in the Atlantic slave trade through Badagri, Porto Novo and Dahomey. Can we say the Oyo were collaborators and beneficiaries of the trade? See what happened to them in the 19th century. The old centre of the Oyo empire is today a forest reserve. The domino effect of the refugee problem involved triggered off the Yoruba Wars, which went on unabated till the British were able to impose peace in 1893. The wars continue to echo in Yoruba politics even today. Notice how in the Yoruba wars, the Oyo of Ibadan destroyed the Oyo of Ijaye in the struggle to survive. Notice from the account of many rescued slaves in Freetown how some Egba villages Joined Ibadan and Ife warlords to destroy other Egba settlements. Crowther, an Oyo, was enslaved in 1821 by Oyo Muslim warlords. Who, then, were the beneficiaries and collaborators? All were victims of the Atlantic slave trade.

From Anti-Slavery to Racist Colonialism

In promoting Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation as anti-slave trade measures and not for the reparation of the damage done to Africa, not only was the task of emancipation left unfinished. The anti-slavery movement also unwittingly laid the foundations of colonial rule. It was as if the missionaries saw the legacy of the Atlantic trade on Africa, felt that they could not tackle it alone, and invited the colonial powers after them. At the time, they regarded colonial conquest and colonial rule as essential for African development.

It is important to emphasize that colonialism in Africa arose out of the unique features of the slave trade that we referred to above, and it was therefore unlike colonialism in other places. It is what may be called racist colonialism in which a people set out to rule and civilise other people whose humanity continued to be questioned in so many ways. Whatever may now be said about the motives of the colonial powers, they did not have normal human regard for the Africans they ruled. They came to Africa so that they could continue to exploit African labour, which stopped flowing to the Americas at the end of the Atlantic slave trade. It was not always clear whether African land or African labour was the priority. We have examples in which people were evicted from their land specifically to create a landless people who would have no choice but to work for cheap wages on European farms or mines. Remember Leopold’s Congo in which the punishment for failure to produce enough rubber was to cut off the hands. How that was meant to stimulate productivity still beats the imagination, There were examples of policies of extermination as in the German Herero War, such that it seemed some of the colonial powers would have been happy to see the Africans die off like the American Indians. Every teacher would know that you cannot train a student with whom you do not communicate and to whom you do not concede even a fellow human feeling. The idea of a Dual Mandate in colonialism was an afterthought and meant largely for propaganda. The clear evidence suggests that colonial powers had no enduring commitment to the development of Africa. Compare the legacy of Roman rule in Britain: Hadrian’s wall, the road system, the baths and water resources, and administrative centres. The Romans stimulated productivity and exchange. Compare even the British legacy in India: the railways, the universities, the Indian Civil Service, and such monuments as the Victoria Railway Terminal in Bombay said to have been based on St Pancras in London which itself was based on the Salisbury Cathedral. The British went to India to trade and they had to stimulate existing trade. They may not have liked aspects of Hindu culture, but they did not harbour against the Indians the kind of contempt they showed for the Africans. The colonial powers in Africa did not hesitate to destroy existing trade, if only to divert attention to the production and export of crops for European industries and the importation of European manufactures. Dr William Baikie as Consul at Lokoja was impressed by the textiles he found in neighbouring markets, and which were said to have been widely distributed, as far as Kano. He sent samples of the textiles home to the British Museum. It is said that productivity declined when the producers found it more lucrative to turn to slave trading even before British manufacturers copied the designs and brought cheap imitations from India or Manchester to compete.

Those who are busy trying to rewrite the history of colonial rule in Africa, so as to paint a more attractive picture of colonialism rarely mention the enforced contribution of African colonies in manpower during the two World Wars. The number of French Africans involved in World War 1 was over half a million. This is another example of colonialism being an extension of the slave trade because many of those who went perished in the trenches, and suffered almost as much inhuman treatment. That was besides the contribution of money and the production of commodities.

Decolonisation: Unfinished Business

Eventually, as in the case of slavery, the international community woke up to the evils of racist colonialism as practised in Africa. The Germans were relieved of their colonies in 1918, and these were shared out between Britain, France and Belgium to some extent. The anti-colonial movements, at the Pan-African level and at the level of individual countries began to be noticed, especially after World War II. Within a more conducive international environment, Britain and France agreed to move towards negotiating conditions for political independence, except in areas of European settlements. The decade 1950-1960 has thus been called the decade of decolonisation.

Notice that there was no possibility or intention to restore independence to the pre-colonial states. The Partition boundaries which had been criticised as often arbitrary became the title deeds of the new countries that began to emerge in the 1960s as independent states. These were colonial states, colonial creations. It was during the decade 1950s-1960s that the rudiments of state institutions in terms of the executive, legislative and Judicial patterned after the metropolitan institutions and suitably adapted began to be hurriedly put In place so that the outgoing colonial rulers could have new political elites to whom to hand over power. University institutions as campuses or colleges of metropolitan universities also began to be established. Thus, far from trying to decolonise, colonial powers deliberately created colonial states which were soon conferred with political autonomy. France had ruled two enormous territories of AOF and AEF in West and Equatorial Africa, but chose to decolonise them into 11 independent territories, some of which are not really viable, and with boundaries cutting across lines frequented by migrants. The French suggested to the British to follow their example and break up Nigeria, but the British rejected the idea. Boundaries fixed at the whims and caprices of colonial powers has produced the phenomenon in which the founding President of Zambia, lost election after ruling for 12 years and suddenly found his right to Zambian citizenship being questioned. There is the similar case in Côte d’Ivoire where it was the leader of Opposition who was denied the right to contest for the Presidency on the grounds that he did not qualify as a citizen.

The main point we are making is that political independence came without any real effort at decolonisation. Political scientists were at pains to whitewash autocratic rulers claiming that oneparty states were democratic and in accordance with African traditions by which pre-colonial monarchies did not recognise opposition parties. Such political scientists have since been recanting and admitting that One Party states simply bred autocracy and misrule by refusing to tolerate criticism and dissent. We are still witnessing the outcome of such misrule in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Kenya and other places. An African nationalist, Amilcar Cabral of Cape Verde once said:

The colonialists have a habit of telling us that when they arrived, they put us into history. You are well aware that it is the opposite. When they arrived, they took us out of our own history. Liberation for us is to take back our destiny and our history.

Such liberation or decolonisation, enabling the people to regain control over their own destiny and history remains unfinished business. Without decolonisation, we moved from colonialism to neo-colonialism.

Neo-Colonialism

The concept of neo-colonialism is often treated as a ‘oke because the word is used with such looseness as if it has no real meaning. We therefore need to clarify what we are talking about here. The slogan of Pan-African nationalists like Nkrumah was to “seek ye first the political kingdom and all else will be added unto thee”. Neocolonialism is the situation of dependence created by colonial rule, in which you-are granted political independence only to discover that you do not have control over your economy and cannot implement your own policies but must consult various powerful outsiders who directly or indirectly control the policies. Therefore, following the attainment of the political kingdom, nothing else was forthcoming to add to it and, usually, the political kingdom began to fall apart as peoples’ expectations were frustrated. The nationalist leaders tried to get the best terms they could. Zimbabwe rejected the deal the British wanted to do with Muzorewa and waited for Mugabe. Urged on by students and younger partisans, the Nigerian leaders were forced to repudiate the Anglo-Nigerian Defence Pact. But these were not enough. The economies of the different countries were already integrated into the economies of the metropolitan countries during the colonial period and under colonial exploitative terms, and the colonial powers were unwilling to surrender their advantageous positions. Agents of the World Bank and the IMF began to replace former Residents and District Commissioners as supervisors of the dependent economies in the former colonial territories. Globalisation meant that the World Bank and the IMF could impose drastic devaluation of the currency and other measures of Structural Adjustment Programmes that impoverished the people and brought no visible economic returns. In pursuit of such policies, countries were encouraged to amass huge debts, and managing the Debt then became another weapon of control to compel continued compliance with policies of the World Bank and IMF. But it needs to be emphasized here that the debt of African countries is only a pittance compared with what the international communities owe to Africa, and debt relief is only the beginning, and not the end of the Reparation we seek.

The most notable examples of neo-colonialism are to be seen in Cold War politics where because of neo-colonial dependence, the US found it so easy to control and maniplate the economics of most African countries against the interests of the peoples of those countries in the name of containing the spread of communism. Take the example of Ethiopia and Somaliland. Decolonisation exacerbated border disputes between the two countries over the control of Ogaden. The dispute was exacerbated as it facilitated control from outside. Under Emperor Haile Sellaisle, Ethiopian development was based on US aid and Somaliland therefore turned to the Soviet Union for assistance. When the Emperor was overthrown, and the Derge chose to embrace a socialist programme, the Soviet Union stepped into American shoes and the US became the new power over Somali development plans. Both neo-colonial powers exploited their position to extort substantial rewards and each was more interested to sell arms and to encourage the futile border wars than to improve the capability of their dependent peoples to control their economic development. Consider also the Congo, and the blatant murder of Patrice Lumumba, and the secession of Moise Tshombe, followed by the setting up of Sgt., turned General Mobutu Sese Seko as the agent of the US and NATO. All the iniquities of Mobutu against the peoples of Zaire were aided and assisted by the US in the name of containing the spread of communism. It is said that the US was privy to the fall of Nkrumah. Take the case of Nigeria, The discovery of crude oil was a major factor in the Nigera/Biafra civil war. Because of its existing economic links, Nigeria had to resist the temptation during the war to turn to the Soviet Union for assistance. The Western powers then had the policy to recognise Nigeria and provide support, but never enough to bring the war to a quick end. Indeed, both Nigeria and Biafra continued for the 30 months to get military supplies from essentially the same markets.

Consider also the cases of Angola and Mozambique. Faced with the armies of the Portuguese Fascist dictator, Salazar, the nationalist movements in Angola and Mozambique received military assistance from Cuba, the Soviet Union and China at a price. This turned them into the enemies of the US and NATO. As a result of their resistance, the Fascist regime became bankrupt and was overthrown. Democracy was born in Portugal, which became a more worthy member of NATO, but the countries that paid the price were not allowed to enjoy their liberation. Dissident groups and civil wars have continued to be encouraged in the name of containing the spread of communism. Even when he Cold War came to an end, and Mobutu and the apartheid regime of South Africa no longer had the US Mandate to foment war in the beleaguered countries, Jonas Savimbi continues to control diamond resources enough to continue the civil war. The cost of these neo-colonial wars to the people concerned are unimaginable. Yet before independence, both Angola and Mozambique found that their conomies were already so integrated with the Portuguese economy that they had to end the Wars of Liberation by sitting at the table to negotiate independence with their former masters.

Conclusion: The Meaning of Apartheid

Because of the long and intense campaign that had to be waged, the international community is well aware of some of the features of that evil system, perhaps more than any other in colonial African history. It may be helpful therefore if, in conclusion, we use Apartheid and South Africa to highlight some of the points we have been trying to make. The crucial factor is that it illustrates well the kind of exploitation to which Africa has been subjected by the Atlantic trade followed by racist colonialism. Unique as was the Apartheid regime, there was no feature of that evil system that could not be duplicated in the experience of other parts of black Africa. It was the racist colonial system that we have been discussing in other parts that made it possible for a few settlers protected by the force of the colonial power to erect such a system and operate it under neo-colonialism for so long because the Western world chose to regard white South Africa as their bulwark against the spread of communism. Another point to note is that the evil system arose out of the contempt bred by the Atlantic slave trade. The theology of the Dutch Reformed Church used to Justify and sustain apartheid arose from the Unfinished business of the antislavery movement, and the failure to declare the Atlantic trade and racist colonialism as a sin incompatible with the Biblical notion of neighbourly love.

Notice also that, in spite of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, the eradication of Apartheid mentality remains an unfinished business. We have in the constitution affirmative clauses to allay the fears of the privileged minority fearful of the possible revenge of the majority, but no concrete programmes to repair the damage done to the majority peoples by all the injustice and the unjust enrichment of not only the settlers but their capitalist supporters also. Without such a concrete plan to redress some of the wrongs that could be redressed, we have to wonder what would happen when the expectations of the people remain unfulfilled and the saintly figures of Mandela and Desmond Tutu may no longer be around.

We are sometimes asked how Reparation is to be distributed if received. It is, of course, bad strategy to start sharing what we have not yet received. But 1 need to give some preview of the kind of thing we have in mind. Africa needs a kind of Marshall Plan that enabled war-tom Europe and Japan to recover so quickly from the devastative effects of the war. Consider what adequate resources at the disposal of an All Africa Railway Authority to plan, construct and manage a railway system could do to provide necessary infrastructure for development. Consider what misery and waste of resources an adequate system of public transportation would remove from the lives of people in the municipality of Lagos. What about a telecommunication system that will make it possible to call Accra from Lagos without going through London? What about resources to develop and maintain a network of first class universities and research institutes that could provide facilities in Africa that will stem the current drain of high level manpower from Africa? What about a few specialist referral hospitals so that we do not need to send every senior government official abroad for treatment? Not all the damage of the Atlantic trade and racist colonialism can now be undone. But the world owes Africa the resources to build the infrastructure so as to level the ground somewhat to make competition within the global economy a little fairer.

My concluding point is that it is such Reparation, not charity and aid, that Africa needs to jump start its development effort. And such Reparation will benefit not only Africa and peoples of African descent, but the whole world. Let me add that if the world can firmly confront the evil of racism, it will remove a burden not only from the back of black peoples, but also from the head and heart of white peoples as well.

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The Mysterious Origins of J. Edgar Hoover

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by Edward Spannaus

Printed in the American Almanac, August, 2000.

One of the most virulent racists to hold a top government position in this country in the 20th Century was J. Edgar Hoover, the long-time director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hoover was notorious for his targetting of blacks: civil rights leaders, elected officials, newspaper publishers, or even artists such as the great singer Paul Robeson.

But yet, during Hoover’s tenure as head of the FBI, which lasted from 1924 until his death in 1972, there were persistent rumors–both inside and outside the FBI–that Hoover himself was descended from African-Americans.

The recent publication of a book by a descendant of Mississippi slaves, who believes that her family is related to J. Edgar Hoover, has re-opened the issue, and investigations by EIRNS, and other researchers, is shedding new light on the subject of Hoover’s racial origins.

Both as a matter of historical record–and more importantly, because the racist legacy of Hoover still lives on in sections of the United States Department of Justice and the FBI–we hereby publish the results of this ongoing investigation.

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Hoover’s Racist Legacy

On January 27, 1988, Rep. Mervyn Dymally, then the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, put into the Congressional Record a sworn affidavit from former FBI special agent Hirsch Friedman, exposing an FBI program called “Operation Fruehmenschen” (German for “primitive” or “early man.”) Friedman’s affidavit, originally filed in Federal court in Atlanta, and provided to the relevant committees of the House of Representatives, declared:

“The purpose of this policy was the routine investigation without probable cause of prominent elected and appointed black officials in major metropolitan areas throughout the United States. I learned from my conversations with special agents of the FBI that the basis for this policy was the assumption by the FBI that black officials were intellectually and socially incapable of governing major governmental organizations and institutions.”

During Ad Hoc Democratic Platform Hearings June 22, that were facilitated by Lyndon LaRouche’s Presidential campaign committee, former Tennessee judge and legislator Ira Murphy testified about Operation Fruehmenschen, which he has studied extensively. Judge Murphy stated that he and others believe that the operation began “under the late Richard Nixon, and J. Edgar Hoover, and it has continued since that time.” Judge Murphy said that some of the investigations of Fruehmenschen show that over 300 black and minority officials have been investigated by the FBI and the Justice Department.

Hoover’s obsession with blacks was well-known. In 1956, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decisions, Hoover fought with Attorney General Brownell over Brownell’s proposals for new civil rights laws and enforcement provisions. Hoover declared that “the specter of racial intermarriage” was behind the tensions over “mixed schooling,” and he attacked the NAACP and other civil rights organizations, while defending and praising the White Citizens Councils in the South. It was also in 1956 that Hoover launched the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program) which targetted civil rights groups and leaders, among others.

During the Kennedy Administration, and especially when Robert Kennedy, as Attorney General, took over the Justice Department and became Hoover’s nominal boss, tensions over the racism which pervaded Hoover’s FBI, came to the fore under pressure from the new Administration. Agents would mock Robert Kennedy: “Boys, if you don’t work with vigah, you’ll be replaced by a niggah.” In the early ’60s, one agent reported, “in about 90% of the situations in which Bureau personnel referred to Negroes, the word `nigger’ was used and always in a very derogatory manner.”[fn1]

As would be expected under the climate set by Hoover, there were absolutely no African-American FBI agents during this time. At the time of Hoover’s death in 1972, blacks still constituted less than 1% of FBI special agents.

Hoover’s infamous campaign to destroy Dr. Martin Luther King was not the first time he had undertaken such an effort. Author Richard Gid Powers points out the parallel to the campaign, which Hoover coordinated, against Marcus Garvey and the black nationalist movement, from 1919 to 1923.

As early as 1957, Hoover ordered his agents to monitor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, when the SCLC began a campaign to register eligible black voters in the South. By the beginning of the 1960s, the FBI was routinely carrying out illegal break-ins of SCLC offices, and wiretapping Rev. King’s telephones.

Hoover’s obsession with destroying King–or, in Bureau-speak, “neutralizing” him–became notorious. In 1964, Hoover sent out a memo to field offices urging them to gather “information concerning King’s personal proclivities … in order that we may consider using this information at an opportune time in a counterintelligence move to discredit him.” Hoover also urged agents to use their media contacts to defame King. And FBI Headquarters sent out derogatory reports on King to the White House, the news media, universities, and religious organizations–especially to discourage the latter two groups of institutions from granting any honors or awards to King.

The most outrageous, proven action undertaken by Hoover’s FBI against Dr. King was the late-1964 letter to King, purporting to be from a black leader, urging King to kill himself under the blackmail threat that compromising tape recordings of himself would be made public.

Thus, it is no surprise that jubilant cries of “They got the SOB!” reverberated through the Atlanta FBI office when the news first came over the radio that Dr. King had been shot in Memphis on April 4, 1968. One former FBI agent recalled another agent shouting “We finally got the son of a bitch!”[fn2]

On March 4, 1968, FBI Headquarters issued a memorandum expanding its COINTELPRO activities against “Black Nationalist–Hate Groups,” and warning that Dr. King, among others, could emerge as a “|`messiah’ who could unify and electrify the black nationalist movement.” The memorandum called for the use of “imaginative” techniques, and required a report on accomplishments within 30 days. Exactly 30 days later, on April 4, Dr. King was assassinated. Hoover’s cooperation with military intelligence units conducting surveillance and more deadly operations against King has been documented in Dr. William Pepper’s book Orders to Kill.

(Such COINTELPRO operations–including efforts to foment violence and assassinations–didn’t stop in 1971, as the FBI claims, nor did they stop with Hoover’s death in 1972. In late 1973, an FBI memorandum from its New York office called for the “elimination” of Lyndon LaRouche, by means of orchestrating FBI assets inside the Communist Party USA; the FBI memorandum opined that, without LaRouche’s leadership, the association he had founded “would fall apart with strife and conflict.”)

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`Black Like Me’

Hoover’s obsessive hostility and hatred toward African-Americans was well-known throughout his career, especially in later years. What is less well-known is that rumors about J. Edgar Hoover’s possible black ancestry were also widespread during his reign, both inside and outside of the Bureau. There are reports that Hoover deployed his agents to track down rumors of his black ancestry, just as he did regarding rumors and reports about his homosexuality.

Author Anthony Summers, in researching his book Official and Confidential, interviewed writer Gore Vidal, who grew up in Washington, D.C. in the 1930s. “Hoover was becoming famous,” Vidal told Summers, “and it was always said of him–in my family and around the city–that he was mulatto. People said he came from a family that had `passed.’ It was the word they used for people of black origin who, after generations of inbreeding, have enough white blood to pass themselves off as white. That’s what was always said about Hoover.”

Summers also cited a New York Post reporter, who, while researching an article on Hoover, found that blacks referred to Hoover as “some kind of spook” and even “soul brother,” and realized that in African-American communities in the East, it was generally believed that Edgar had black roots.

Many former FBI agents recall that rumors about Hoover’s ancestry were prevalent within the Bureau.

Wesley Swearingen, a former FBI Special Agent (from 1951 to 1977), and author of the 1995 book FBI Secrets: An Agent’s Exposé, told EIRNS that it was always a bit of a mystery among FBI agents why Hoover didn’t have a better-documented heritage. “Because for all the FBI agents, they’d go back and check everything about your family, your relatives, and everything else, to make sure they’re squeaky clean,” Swearingen said. “And here, [he's] the Director, and nobody knows really where he came from.”

The paucity of information on Hoover’s background was noted in the opening chapter of Ovid Demaris’s book The Director, first published in 1975. Demaris opened with about a 500-word summary of Hoover’s early life, and then reported that this summary–taken from a 1937 profile in the New Yorker magazine written by one Jack Alexander–contained almost everything that was known about Hoover’s early years. Demaris commented that Alexander might have been “the most plagiarized writer in America” because so many later writers had relied on his skimpy profile.

With respect to Hoover’s early childhood, we might add, this recycling of Alexander’s profile has continued up to the present day.

Now, back to Swearingen’s account. He says that the questions about Hoover’s background wouldn’t be discussed inside the FBI office, because if a supervisor or a Hoover “hatchetman” overheard such talk, that could be the end of an agent’s career. But outside the office–at least in Chicago in the 1950s–it was different.

“Agents would get into topics like that where they on a surveillance or something, when they finished the crossword puzzle, and had nothing else to do, and they’d start talking about Hoover,” Swearingen recalls. They would discuss how Hoover couldn’t document his background. “All the agents would get onto the subject of his real tight hair, his tight, wirey hair, and speculation that maybe there was a little hanky-panky in his family. And then his facial characteristics were really unusual.|…”

“In later years,” Swearingen continued, when Hoover became so hostile to Martin Luther King, “agents always knew he was a racist. It just didn’t seem to fit, why he would be so anti-black. And agents would discuss that. I never heard Presidents at that time speak out against black people the way Hoover did.”

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The Mississippi Hoovers

So, as we see, the rumors about Hoover’s ancestry have been known for years.

But now, out of Mississippi, comes another story, which has spurred a new round of genealogical research into J. Edgar Hoover’s family background.

In the late 1950s, a ten-year-old black girl came home from school, where her class had been studying history and the role of J. Edgar Hoover had come up. The girl had heard stories from her grandfather about their own white ancestors named Hoover; her family was descended from slaves on a plantation in Pike County, Mississippi, which had been owned by a Hoover family.

As Millie McGhee, now 52, tells the story in her book Secrets Uncovered, and also in interviews with EIRNS, her grandfather, whom she called “Big Daddy,” asked her how J. Edgar Hoover’s name had come up.

“In my history class I learned that he is the director of the FBI,” young Millie answered. “Someone said he has even more power than the President of the United States.”

“Well, that could be true,” her grandfather responded. “He does have a lot of power.” He then shrugged, and went on: “That old goat is related to me, he is my second cousin.”

Her grandfather warned her not to tell anyone. “This is a family secret,” the girl was told. Her grandfather said that Hoover was “passing,” and that he could have them all killed, that they could be burned in their beds as they sleep. “He doesn’t want the secret out, and he is a powerful man!” the trembling young girl was told.

When the young girl asked her grandfather if there wouldn’t be records, such as a birth certificate, which would show him to be related to the family of former slaves, her grandfather told her: “J. Edgar Hoover has a lot of power. He can destroy files, and he’s already done it.”

According to McGhee’s account, she was so frightened that she suppressed the memory, which only gradually came back while she was writing a fantasy-story of her family’s history as slaves. After inquiring of her mother, she was told that, indeed, Hoover was a cousin. One thing led to another, and soon she was consulting a professional genealogist,

In November 1998, Millie McGhee, by now an educator in California, retained George Ott of Heritage Consulting in Salt Lake City, Utah, to assist her in attempting to document her family history, and to see if there were any links to the family of J. Edgar Hoover.

Through his research, with some assistance from others researching the Hoover family, Ott found that some aspects of Millie’s story bore a remarkable correspondence to the documentary record, but that other aspects could not be documented or corroborated.

According to McGhee’s account, a composite of the family’s oral history, reconstructed memories, and fantasy, the Washington, D.C. Hoovers, a mixture of black and white, were related to the Mississippi Hoovers. The part of the family’s oral history which was very specific, and oft-repeated, was that she and her family are descended from the union of a slave-woman and her master, which resulted in the birth of a daughter in 1814 in Virginia, named Elizabeth Allan.

Elizabeth, according to the oral history, was taken to Maryland by a Hoover man. Her first born was Emily, very light-skinned, who was taken away from her, and brought to Mississippi, where she became the mistress of a plantation owner, William Hoover, and bore many children by him. Meanwhile, according to the oral tradition, Elizabeth, still in the Maryland/D.C. area, married another William Hoover, and passed for white, and had seven Hoover children.

But, there were other stories Millie had heard through her family. One was that J. Edgar himself was not the son of Dickerson N. Hoover of Washington, as officially reported, but that he was actually the son of one Ivy (Ivery) Hoover, and was born in the South, probably New Orleans, and then taken to Washington, D.C. at a very young age, and raised by the Hoovers in Washington.

This spring, McGhee published her recollections and her preliminary findings in a book called Secrets Uncovered: J. Edgar Hoover–Passing for White?.[fn3] A second, revised edition has just been published, which contains the results of additional research, plus some material supplied by this author and other researchers.

Ott, the genealogist, found that some records coincided quite well with Millie’s oral history. For example, the 1860 census for Washington, D.C. shows a William Hoover, born 1804 in Maryland, married to Elizabeth A., born 1814 in Virginia. The next entry in the census is for a John T. Hoover, who has a son named Dickerson N. Hoover; this is certainly the Dickerson N. Hoover considered to be the father of J. Edgar Hoover.

In subsequent research, conducted since the publication of the first edition of McGhee’s book, Ott has found census records for Mississippi that also correspond to the family oral tradition regarding “Emily,” and he has recently found records which appear to link the Maryland and the Mississippi Hoover families. Ott also found strange–and highly unusual–alterations and erasures in some of the census records pertaining to other Hoovers in Washington.

Neither McGhee or Ott have yet been able to provably document the stories that Ivery or “Ivy” Hoover was the actual father of J. Edgar Hoover–although McGhee has additional material suggesting that this may be the case.

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Who Was J. Edgar?

With his interest piqued by McGhee’s account, this writer has confirmed that there are substantial discrepancies and oddities concerning J. Edgar Hoover’s early biography.

Strikingly, there does not appear to be {any} contemporaneous record of Edgar’s birth in Washington. Hoover’s own autobiographical account–on which virtually all biographers have relied–states that he was born January 1, 1895, at his parents’ home on Seward Square, in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C., with a physician, Dr. Mallan, in attendance.

However, despite the fact that it was legally required to report a birth to the District of Columbia Health Department, and that this had been done for the first two children born in the family (Dickerson, Jr. and Lillian), there was no certificate of birth filed for Edgar by Dr. Mallan.

The entry for John Edgar Hoover in the Washington D.C. index of births was clearly added at a much later date, and the certificate number contains the suffix “D”–signifying a delayed filing.

This writer obtained a certified copy of Edgar’s actual birth certificate–which was not filed until 1938, when Hoover was 43 years old! The verification of birth is provided by an affidavit executed by Edgar’s older brother Dickerson N. Hoover, Jr., who states that he was present when Edgar was born, and that he himself was 15 years old at the time. Oddly, Dickerson’s affidavit does not mention a doctor being present, in contrast to Edgar’s own account.

(Curiously, Hoover never applied for a birth certificate until after his mother’s death in February 1938. It seems obvious that his mother–if she in fact was his mother–would have been by far the best witness, rather than a 15-year-old boy.)

John Edgar Hoover was baptized at age 13, during the time he was under the tutelage of his brother Dickerson, who took him from one church to another, looking for the most prestigious congregation. The church baptismal record, obtained by this writer, lists his date of birth as June (not January) 1, 1895.

A question also might be raised as to why Edgar was not baptized until age 13, since the various churches with which his family was associated (Catholic, Lutheran, and Presbyterian), all practice infant baptism.

About the same time that Hoover’s birth certificate was filed, in September 1938, he also obtained a letter from the church, certifying his baptismal record. The letter also gives Edgar’s date of birth as June 1, 1895, with “Jan.” written over “June” in an obviously different hand than the signature of the church’s then-current pastor.

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Photographic Evidence

A second area of discrepancy involves photographs. The most famous photograph purporting to show Edgar as a young child, is the oval “family photograph,” published in most biographies of Hoover. But there is strong evidence suggesting that this is not Edgar, but his brother Dickerson.

Around 1989, the curators of the exhibit in the J. Edgar Hoover Room at the Scottish Rite Masonic Temple in Washington–Hoover loyalists from the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation–changed the identification of the child from Edgar, to Dickerson, and is how it is now so-labelled in the exhibit in the J. Edgar Hoover Room.

This writer has located a photograph showing both Edgar and Dickerson, taken in 1935. This photograph, published here apparently for the first time, not only displays the sharply differing appearances of the two brothers, but it also supports the notion that the famous “family photograph” portrays Dickerson rather than Edgar.

By most accounts, Hoover’s family life–if it was his actual family–was less than ideal. Writer Anthony Summers, among others, describes Hoover as “the offspring of a disturbed father and an ambitious mother.”

Edgar’s relationship to his father, Dickerson Naylor Hoover, was virtually non-existent. According to even his closest friends and associates, he never discussed his father. In 1913, his father was placed in a sanitorium for what was described as a “nervous breakdown.” He was released after a few months, but his condition steadily deterioriated, and in 1917, he was forced to resign his job with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. He went back to the sanitorium numerous times, and died in 1921. The causes of death were listed as “melancholia” and “inanation,” i.e., depression and the loss of the will to live.

By contrast, Edgar’s relationship with his mother was one of extreme dependency. As a child, he was described as high-strung, sickly, and “excessively fearful” by relatives. That fearfulness apparently included a terror of separation from his mother: Edgar lived with her, in the same house on Seward Square, until her death in 1938.

(Of course, were it the case that Edgar had already been separated from his real mother at an early age, and Annie Hoover was actually his adoptive or surrogate mother, this psychological profile would be entirely consistent with such a scenario.)

The two sides of Hoover’s family seem to play distinct roles in our story. It seems likely that Hoover’s black ancestry would have come through the Hoover side of the family–either perhaps through his great-grandmother, or possibly directly from his parents, if the hypothesis about his being born elsewhere turns out to be correct.

There are also indications that his Dickerson and Naylor ancestors (through Hoover’s paternal grandmother) were involved in a post-Civil War “underground railroad” which was used to assist light-skinned blacks to make the transition from black society to white society. (An academic study cited in McGhee’s book, reports that more than three-quarters of African-Americans have some white ancestry, and that at least 23% of white Americans have an African-American element in their background.)

In the search of census records undertaken by McGhee and the genealogist retained by her, both Hoover and Naylor families were living in areas of Washington D.C.–a mostly segregated city–where blacks and whites were listed as living in close proximity. Some of the white Hoover families had blacks living with them, not as servants, but blacks being of the same occupation, such as “butcher” or “clerk.” There are also alterations and other oddities in a number of the Hoover family census records, and also in the racial listings which were then included in census records.

His mother’s side of the family seems to have played the major role in Edgar’s rapid rise to power. There is also more documentation of Hoover’s ancestry on the mother’s side of the family than the father’s.

Annie Scheitlin Hoover was regarded by her family and others as having married “beneath her station” when she married Dickerson Hoover in 1879. Annie’s mother, Margaret Hitz Scheitlin, was the daughter of a Swiss-born mining engineer, John (Hans) Hitz, who came to the United States around 1820, and who also became the Swiss Counsel to the United States in 1853. Upon his death, his son (and Margaret’s brother) John Hitz then became the Swiss Counsel. Margaret’s mother (and Annie’s grandmother) Anna Hitz was known as “Mother Hitz” during the Civil War, when she provided nursing services, food, and other comforts of life to Union soldiers quartered on Capitol Hill.

Although one cousin on the Hoover side–John E. Hoover–was a Justice Department lawyer and may have aided Edgar’s rise to power, the most significant assistance clearly came from the Hitz branch of the family.

Annie’s cousin William Hitz held the position of special assistant to the Attorney General in 1916, when he was appointed a judge for the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. William Hitz was well-connected, and it is almost certain that it was he who got Edgar his first job in the Justice Department.

Harold Hitz Burton, later a Supreme Court justice, was also a distant cousin of Hoover’s–as well as being a 33rd-degree Mason, as was Edgar in later life.

Egdar attended night school at George Washington University and obtained a law degree in 1917, the same year he passed the D.C. bar.

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The `Southern Fraternity’

While at GWU, he became active in what is politely called the “Southern Fraternity,” the Kappa Alpha Order; others have likened it to the college auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan. Annie Hoover was the honorary “housemother” for Kappa Alpha at GWU, and Hoover remained active in it for the rest of his life. Many of his closest associates at the FBI were also Kappa Alpha members.

In July 1917, while other young men were being drafted to fight and die in World War|I, Hoover got himself appointed to a clerkship in the Justice Department. (In a typical J. Edgar Hoover re-write of history, later accounts said he had been declared “essential” by the Attorney General and thus couldn’t enlist in the Army; the problem with this is that the U.S. entered the war more than three months {before} Edgar went to work at the Justice Department.)

Within six months, Hoover had been twice promoted, and he was put in charge of the Enemy Aliens Registration Section. This position was secured for him by John Lord O’Brian, the special assistant to the Attorney General for war work. It also seems that O’Brian obtained for Hoover the designation of “Special Agent” in 1917–earlier than many accounts indicate.

O’Brian appears to be the key figure in Hoover’s early career and his rapid advancement. A prominent lawyer and progressive Republican from Buffalo, New York, O’Brian was a close friend of William Hitz and a fellow member of the Cosmos Club, one of Washington’s leading establishment social clubs. O’Brian was also a law partner and mentor of William Donovan, who later headed the OSS (the wartime Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA), and became a bitter rival of Hoover.

Despite his “progressive” and liberal political profile, O’Brian was one of the key promoters of the anti-radical hysteria which dominated the Justice Department at the time. He prosecuted Socialist Party leader and Presidential candidate Eugene Debs, and it was O’Brian who urged Attorney General Thomas Gregory to deputize the vigilante American Protective League for the round-ups of labor radicals and draft-age men, and later for the notorious “Palmer Raids,” in which perhaps 10,000 suspected radicals were rounded up in coordinated raids in 33 American cities.

Like almost everything else in Hoover’s early life, there is also some mystery about Hoover’s duties in the Justice Department during the First World War. A 1930s account of the early history of the FBI–suppressed by Hoover–was used by former Attorney General Homer Cummings in the writing of his 1937 book Federal Justice. In writing about the creation of the General Intelligence Division in 1919, Cummings says that it was organized “under the direct administration of J. Edgar Hoover, since 1917, in charge of counter-radical activities as special assistant to the attorney general.”

As author Curt Gentry points out in his 1991 book J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and his Secrets, this means that Hoover was involved in anti-radical activities as early as 1917–two years before the official FBI histories say he was involved. It also means that Hoover was involved in anti-radical actitivies {prior} to the 1919-20 Palmer or “Red” Raids.

A word about the formation of the FBI. First known as the “Bureau of Investigtion,” or BI, it was created over the opposition of the U.S. Congress, through an executive order, by President Theodore Roosevelt and his Attorney General, Charles Bonaparte (a nephew of Napoleon III). When Congress objected and launched an investigation, which included allegations that members of Congress were being surveilled and their mail opened, Teddy Roosevelt denied it–but he admitted that sometimes, through the “accidental breaking of such [a mail] package, the contents are exposed.” To emphasize the point, TR then proceeded to publish the private correspondence of Sen. Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina, an outspoken critic of Roosevelt’s Administration.

In 1919, at the height of the Red Scare, the General Intelligence Division (GID) was created within the Justice Department to collect and collate information on radicals supplied by the BI, military intelligence agencies, other government agencies, local police, and the private sector. Hoover was named chief of the GID. Within three to four months, the GID had assembled files on 60,000 suspected radicals; soon the GID’s files contained over 200,000 names.

In 1921, Hoover was named assistant chief of the Bureau of Investigation, and in 1924–at 29 years of age–Hoover was made head of the Bureau by Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone, who had been named by President Calvin Coolidge to replace Mitchell Palmer, notorious author of the Palmer Raids. This was the position that Hoover was to hold for 48 years, until his death in 1972.

(In 1935, Congress renamed the Bureau of Investigation the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the name implied an independent agency status, although it nominally remained part of the Department of Justice.)

Hoover was supposedly brought in to clean up the BI; as part of this, the GID–tainted by the Palmer Raids–was disbanded. In another example of the rewriting of history, Hoover and his spokesman would later try to disassociate the Director from the GID and the Palmer Raids.

But in 1936, the intelligence function of the FBI was revived, and in 1939 President Franklin Roosevelt ordered that all domestic intelligence concerning subversion, espionage, sabotage, etc. to be referred to the FBI by military intelligence agencies. It was certainly at this time, if not earlier, that Hoover formalized his alliance with Military Intelligence (Army) and with Naval Intelligence, which persisted for decades.

At the same time, Hoover revived the GID as Division Five of the FBI, first renamed the Security Division, then the Domestic Intelligence Division, and then the Intelligence Division, with jurisdiction over counterintelligence and internal security. As part of this arrangement, Hoover established a close working relationship with British Intelligence’s Special Operations Executive headed by Sir William Stephenson–although that relationship cooled from time to time, because of Hoover’s competitive and adversarial attitude toward the OSS and its director William Donovan, as well as toward the OSS’s successor, the Central Intelligence Agency.

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`All of Us Negroes’

Hoover’s remarkable career path would undoubtedly never have been possible, had Hoover been known to have been partly black in his family background. In the decade of his birth, Jim Crow laws were re-instituted through the South. Under the infamous Democratic Presidency of Woodrow Wilson (when Hoover began his career in the Justice Department), segregation was reinstituted throughout the Federal civil service, which had been exempted from Jim Crow laws.

And under the prevailing “one drop” rule, any amount of Negro blood or ancestry would exclude a person from most positions or careers–and certainly from high government positions.

Was Hoover’s legendary enmity toward blacks, a form of self-hatred, or self-protection, against his knowledge or suspicion that he himself was partially black?

And consider, in this light, the FBI’s “suicide” letter sent to Dr. King in 1964, drafted by William Sullivan at the personal direction of Hoover:

“King, look into your heart. You know, you are a complete fraud and a greater liability to all of us Negroes…. King, like all frauds your end is approaching. You could have been our greatest leader…. King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is…. There is just one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

The FBI-authored letter was accompanied by a tape purporting to consist of sounds of King’s bedroom activities.

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Not Ancient History

Determining the truth about J. Edgar Hoover’s ancestry is not merely a matter of historical interest, or simply a question of setting the record straight. As we noted at the beginning of this article, to this day, the Justice Department and the FBI have continued the targetting of African-American elected officials which began under Hoover’s reign.

It is not unrelated, that the senior career official in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, who oversees the targetting and prosecution of public officials, is John Keeney–a man who got his start working in the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division in 1951, working hand-in-glove with Hoover’s FBI. Think of it: Keeney spent the 1930s first two {decades} of his career working side-by-side with J. Edgar Hoover; Hoover has been dead for almost 30 years, but Jack Keeney is still a top official in Justice Department headquarters.

A significant number of investigators and journalists are now pursuing the story of J. Edgar Hoover’s ancestry, and it is quite likely that over the coming months, more and more of the truth will emerge.

Meanwhile, there is no reason to wait, to undertake the task of eradicating the last vestiges of Hoover’s hateful legacy from today’s FBI and Justice Department.

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Notes

1. Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover, 1987, p. 367.
2. Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets, 1991, p. 606; Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, 1993, p. 364
3. Millie L. McGhee Secrets Uncovered: J. Edgar Hoover–Passing for White?, Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., Allen-Morris, 2000
4. Source of article



Does the archeological record show us the step-by-step process by which early man in Africa nearly 2 million years ago began the process which lead to the world we live in today? A world with daily essentials such as the use of fire, settled communities and use of farm animals with such bovids as the cow? And can we trace the evolution of a world with amenities such as tamed animals serving as a modes of transportation, such as the horse, and means of entertainment that even the giraffe, elephant, and wild feline provide? Ladies and Gentlemen, step right up for The Greatest Show on Earth!

An insightful look at Haiti through the eyes of Fidel Castro.

The Lesson of Haiti By Fidel Castro Ruz

Fidel…
January 17, 2010 – Granma

TWO days ago, at almost six o’clock in the evening Cuban time and when, given its geographical location, night had already fallen in Haiti, television stations began to broadcast the news that a violent earthquake – measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale – had severely struck Port-au-Prince. The seismic phenomenon originated from a tectonic fault located in the sea just 15 kilometers from the Haitian capital, a city where 80% of the population inhabit fragile homes built of adobe and mud.

The news continued almost without interruption for hours. There was no footage, but it was confirmed that many public buildings, hospitals, schools and more solidly-constructed facilities were reported collapsed. I have read that an earthquake of the magnitude of 7.3 is equivalent to the energy released by an explosion of 400,000 tons of TNT.

Tragic descriptions were transmitted. Wounded people in the streets were crying out for medical help, surrounded by ruins under which their relatives were buried. No one, however, was able to broadcast a single image for several hours.

The news took all of us by surprise. Many of us have frequently heard about hurricanes and severe flooding in Haiti, but were not aware of the fact that this neighboring country ran the risk of a massive earthquake. It has come to light on this occasion that 200 years ago, a massive earthquake similarly affected this city, which would have been the home of just a few thousand inhabitants at that time.

At midnight, there was still no mention of an approximate figure in terms of victims. High-ranking United Nations officials and several heads of government discussed the moving events and announced that they would send emergency brigades to help. Given that MINUSTAH (United Stabilization Mission in Haiti) troops are deployed there – UN forces from various countries – some defense ministers were talking about possible casualties among their personnel.

It was only yesterday, Wednesday morning, when the sad news began to arrive of enormous human losses among the population, and even institutions such as the United Nations mentioned that some of their buildings in that country had collapsed, a word that does not say anything in itself but could mean a lot.

For hours, increasingly more traumatic news continued to arrive about the situation in this sister nation. Figures related to the number of fatal victims were discussed, which fluctuated, according to various versions, between 30,000 and 100,000. The images are devastating; it is evident that the catastrophic event has been given widespread coverage around the world, and many governments, sincerely moved by the disaster, are making efforts to cooperate according to their resources.

The tragedy has genuinely moved a significant number of people, particularly those in which that quality is innate. But perhaps very few of them have stopped to consider why Haiti is such a poor country. Why does almost 50% of its population depend on family remittances sent from abroad? Why not analyze the realities that led Haiti to its current situation and this enormous suffering as well?

The most curious aspect of this story is that no one has said a single word to recall the fact that Haiti was the first country in which 400,000 Africans, enslaved and trafficked by Europeans, rose up against 30,000 white slave masters on the sugar and coffee plantations, thus undertaking the first great social revolution in our hemisphere. Pages of insurmountable glory were written there. Napoleon’s most eminent general was defeated there. Haiti is the net product of colonialism and imperialism, of more than one century of the employment of its human resources in the toughest forms of work, of military interventions and the extraction of its natural resources.

This historic oversight would not be so serious if it were not for the real fact that Haiti constitutes the disgrace of our era, in a world where the exploitation and pillage of the vast majority of the planet’s inhabitants prevails.

Billions of people in Latin American, Africa and Asia are suffering similar shortages although perhaps not to such a degree as in the case of Haiti.

Situations like that of that country should not exist in any part of the planet, where tens of thousands of cities and towns abound in similar or worse conditions, by virtue of an unjust international economic and political order imposed on the world. The world population is not only threatened by natural disasters such as that of Haiti, which is a just a pallid shadow of what could take place in the planet as a result of climate change, which really was the object of ridicule, derision, and deception in Copenhagen.

It is only just to say to all the countries and institutions that have lost citizens or personnel because of the natural disaster in Haiti: we do not doubt that in this case, the greatest effort will be made to save human lives and alleviate the pain of this long-suffering people. We cannot blame them for the natural phenomenon that has taken place there, even if we do not agree with the policy adopted with Haiti.

But I have to express the opinion that it is now time to look for real and lasting solutions for that sister nation.

In the field of healthcare and other areas, Cuba – despite being a poor and blockaded country – has been cooperating with the Haitian people for many years. Around 400 doctors and healthcare experts are offering their services free of charge to the Haitian people. Our doctors are working every day in 227 of the country’s 337 communes. On the other hand, at least 400 young Haitians have trained as doctors in our homeland. They will now work with the reinforcement brigade which traveled there yesterday to save lives in this critical situation. Thus, without any special effort being made, up to 1,000 doctors and healthcare experts can be mobilized, almost all of whom are already there willing to cooperate with any other state that wishes to save the lives of the Haitian people and rehabilitate the injured.

Another significant number of young Haitians are currently studying medicine in Cuba.

We are also cooperating with the Haitian people in other areas within our reach. However, there can be no other form of cooperation worthy of being described as such than fighting in the field of ideas and political action in order to put an end to the limitless tragedy suffered by a large number of nations such as Haiti.

The head of our medical brigade reported: “The situation is difficult, but we have already started saving lives.” He made that statement in a succinct message hours after his arrival yesterday in Port-au-Prince with additional medical reinforcements.

Later that night, he reported that Cuban doctors and ELAM’s Haitian graduates were being deployed throughout the country. They had already seen more than 1,000 patients in Port-au-Prince, immediately establishing and putting into operation a hospital that had not collapsed and using field hospitals where necessary. They were preparing to swiftly set up other centers for emergency care.

We feel a wholesome pride for the cooperation that, in these tragic instances, Cuba doctors and young Haitian doctors who trained in Cuba are offering our brothers and sisters in Haiti!

Fidel Castro Ruz
January 14, 2009
8:25 p.m.

Translated by Granma International

For the last 2000 yrs Hebrews through their Holy books have perpetuated the myth that they built the pyramids for the Egyptians under the duress of slavery. History has proven time and again it is not true. First: Archeologists have found the grave-site of the  people (Egyptians) who built the pyramids. They were conscripted workers well compensated for their work. Pyramid projects were similar to public works projects we see in the modern era like road repair or building of govt complexes. etc.  Second: No pyramids in Egypt were EVER built of mudbrick and straw like the Hebrews claimed. They were all built of solid stone.

In truth the Hebrews came into Kmt as conquerors known as the Heka Khasut (aka Hyksos or Rulers of Foreign Lands) during the Second Intermediate period and ruled lower Egypt as colonizers for almost 200yrs.  they were brutal and also made miscegenation of the indigenous population the rule by way of their activities (those who did not wish to be displaced stayed and dealt with their new colonizers and those who didn’t want anything to do with the colonizers went south to Nubia and West eventually ending up in W. Africa) and had a reputation as brutal and repressive rulers. They tended to worship Set who was similar to their own indigenous deity Yahweh and they brought the use of the chariot into Kmt. They were eventually chased out of Kmt by Ahmose not Ramose/ Rameses as the Bible claims but that is another story. See the article below to find out who truly built the pyramids.

Who Built the Pyramids?

Not slaves. Archeaologist Mark Lehner, digging deeper, discovers a city of privileged workers.

by Jonathan Shaw

The pyramids and the Great Sphinx rise inexplicably from the desert at Giza, relics of a vanished culture. They dwarf the approaching sprawl of modern Cairo, a city of 16 million. The largest pyramid, built for the Pharaoh Khufu around 2530 B.C. and intended to last an eternity, was until early in the twentieth century the biggest building on the planet. To raise it, laborers moved into position six and a half million tons of stone—some in blocks as large as nine tons—with nothing but wood and rope. During the last 4,500 years, the pyramids have drawn every kind of admiration and interest, ranging in ancient times from religious worship to grave robbery, and, in the modern era, from New-Age claims for healing “pyramid power” to pseudoscientific searches by “fantastic archaeologists” seeking hidden chambers or signs of alien visitations to Earth. As feats of engineering or testaments to the decades-long labor of tens of thousands, they have awed even the most sober observers.

The question of who labored to build them, and why, has long been part of their fascination. Rooted firmly in the popular imagination is the idea that the pyramids were built by slaves serving a merciless pharaoh. This notion of a vast slave class in Egypt originated in Judeo-Christian tradition and has been popularized by Hollywood productions like Cecil B. De Mille’s The Ten Commandments, in which a captive people labor in the scorching sun beneath the whips of pharaoh’s overseers. But graffiti from inside the Giza monuments themselves have long suggested something very different.

Until recently, however, the fabulous art and gold treasures of pharaohs like Tutankhamen have overshadowed the efforts of scientific archaeologists to understand how human forces—perhaps all levels of Egyptian society—were mobilized to enable the construction of the pyramids. Now, drawing on diverse strands of evidence, from geological history to analysis of living arrangements, bread-making technology, and animal remains, Egyptologist Mark Lehner, an associate of Harvard’s Semitic Museum, is beginning to fashion an answer. He has found the city of the pyramid builders. They were not slaves.

“I first went to Egypt as a year-abroad student in 1973,” he says, “…and ended up staying for 13 years.” His way was paid by a foundation that believed a hall of records would be found beneath the paws of the Sphinx. Young Lehner, a minister’s son from North Dakota, hoped to discover if that was true. But the more time he spent actually studying the Sphinx, the more he became convinced that the quest was misguided, and he exchanged its fantasies for a life grounded in archaeological study of the Giza plateau and its monuments.

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Actually, he became, in the words of one employer, an “archaeological bum” who soon found work all over Egypt with German, French, Egyptian, British, and American expeditions. “At the end of these digs, there were lots of maps and drawings left to be done,” he adds—steady work once the short dig season was over. Lehner discovered he had a knack for drafting, and got his first lessons in mapping and technical drawing from a German expert. “I fell in love with it,” he confesses.

His first big break came in 1977, when the Stanford Research Institute conducted a remote sensing project at the Sphinx and the pyramids— a search for cavities using non-invasive technologies. The Sphinx is carved directly from the sedimentary rock at Giza, and sits below the surface of the surrounding plateau. Lehner was put in charge of a group of men cleaning out the U-shaped, cut-rock ditch that surrounds the monument, so that the sensing equipment could be brought in. In order to plot the locations of any anomalies, the largest existing surface maps of the Sphinx—about the length of an index finger—were enlarged and found to be extremely inaccurate.

By then a seasoned mapper, Lehner asked the director of the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE, a consortium of institutions including museums and universities such as Harvard) if they would sponsor his effort to map the Sphinx. But Lehner, despite his experience in the field, didn’t have a Ph.D. Running his own “dig” appeared to be out of the question until ARCE assistant director James Allen, an Egyptologist from the University of Chicago, essentially adopted Lehner professionally, took him under the wing of his own Ph.D., and designed a mapping project. The German Archaeological Institute loaned photogrammetric equipment, the sort used by highway departments for taking highly accurate stereoscopic photographs from the air, and Lehner soon produced the first scale drawings of the Sphinx, which are now on display at the Semitic Museum.

During the mapping, Lehner’s close scrutiny of the Sphinx’s worn and patched surface led him to wonder what archaeological secrets it might divulge. “There are layers of restoration masonry going back all the way to pharaonic times,” he says, indicating that even then, “the Sphinx was severely weathered.” What Lehner saw, in essence, was an archaeological site, in plain view, that had never been described.

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To better understand the differential weathering in the natural layers of rock from which the Sphinx is cut, Lehner initially consulted a geologist with expertise in stone conservation. Then his interest in the geological forces that created the Giza plateau brought him into contact with a young geologist, Thomas Aigner, of the University of Tübingen, who was studying the local cycles of sedimentation. The layers in the lower slope of the plateau, where the Sphinx lies, tend to alternate between soft and hard rock. The softer layers of rock were deposited during geological eras when the area was a backwater lagoon protected by a coastal reef; they are highly vulnerable to erosion. Aigner pointed out to Lehner that the “hard-soft” sequence of layers in this part of the plateau would have made it easy for ancient stonecutters to extract blocks of stone for building. His analysis revealed that the stones used to build the temples in front of the Sphinx had been quarried from the ditch that surrounds it on three sides. Many of these huge blocks, some of them weighing in at hundreds of tons, are so big that they have two or three different geological layers running through them, and they are loaded with forminifera. Detailed logs of the fossils—gastropods, bivalves, sponges, and corals—in each block and layer allowed Lehner and Aigner to actually trace the stones back to the quarry. “We began to unbuild these temples in our minds,” Lehner explains, “and realized that the same could be done for the pyramids themselves and for the whole Giza plateau.”

Lehner had often imagined what Khufu’s architect must have envisioned when he looked down from the Maadi formation knoll high above the southeast slope of the plateau and planned the very first pyramid: quarries, a port for bringing in exotic materials like granite and gypsum mortar, a place for the workers to live, provisions for their food, a delivery route from the port to the construction sites. The ancient Egyptians, having already quarried materials for other pyramids for generations, “probably were good geologists in their own right,” says Lehner. They knew how to line up all three of the massive examples at Giza precisely on the strike of the plateau’s slope (if you can walk around a hill without going either up or down the slope, you are on the strike). In consequence, all the pyramids—which align on their southeast corners—begin at nearly the same elevation. Most modern scholars think they were built with ramps: the crumbling stone chips from the Mokattam formation quarries were close by and may well have provided the secondary material for the ramps. “This was one of the many insights given us by the geologists,” Lehner says. Yet almost nothing of the infrastructure needed to build a pyramid, with the exception of the quarries, had ever been located. Lehner went back to the ARCE. Why not map the whole plateau, he asked, to see what the land itself could tell about how ancient Egyptian society organized itself around the task of large-scale pyramid building?

Studying the geology of an archaeological site is standard practice today, but it had barely been done for Giza, Lehner says, because “Egyptology grew up in the study of inscriptions.” When Jean-François Champollion deciphered hieroglyphics in 1822, “suddenly huge temple façades and tombs everywhere started ‘talking’ to explorers.” Then came the overwhelming abundance of “fabulous art objects—fabulous in their own right,” he says, “but less useful out of context than they would have been if properly documented. Egyptology grew up largely as a philological and art historical discipline. Archaeology as a standard practice was late to come to Egypt.”

	Figures from the Fifth Dynasty tomb (found at Saqqara) of an official named Ty illustrate scenes in a bakery. First the dough is mixed in vats. Then the lids are stacked over an open hearth. The dough is placed in the pots, covered with the lids, and baked in hot coals. After cooling, the bread is removed. Lehner and his team used the scenes to create a working, modern reconstruction of an ancient Egyptian bakery complex. Drawings Courtesy of the Koch-Ludwig Expedition and the Harvard Semitic Museum

Over several seasons, Lehner surveyed the plateau to an accuracy of within a millimeter, and began to see with greater certainty how the pyramid builders had arranged themselves across the landscape. An ancient wadi—a desert streambed that flows with water only during the occasional downpour—would have made a perfect harbor, he surmised. The locations of the stone quarries, down the slope from the pyramids themselves, were known, and he thought he knew where a city of pyramid builders might fit into this pattern.

What began to interest Lehner more than the question of how the Egyptians built the pyramids was, he says, “how the pyramids built Egypt.” Construction of the immense Giza monuments, thought to have been built for three successive pharaohs in a kind of experimental gigantism, must have required a lot of “free-wheeling” on the existing social apparatus. Influenced by Cambridge University’s Barry Kemp, who wrote Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, Lehner came to believe that the colossal marshaling of resources required to build the three pyramids at Giza—which dwarf all other pyramids before or since—must have shaped the civilization itself.

By now, Lehner was in his early thirties and realized that continuing his career hinged on getting a Ph.D. From 1986 to 1990, he suspended fieldwork to study at Yale under William Kelly Simpson. In his final year, with an offer of funding for what, he says, “had been jelling in my mind” for some time, he designed his “dream project”: to find and excavate the settlement of workers who had built the pyramids. His studies had given him an idea of what he should be looking for—a city of about 20,000 people, on a scale with the earliest major urban centers of Mesopotamia, such as Ur and Uruk. In other words, he was looking for one of the most important cities of the third millennium B.C.

Lehner let the geology of the plateau guide his search. Guessing at the location of the harbor, he surmised where the delivery route to the pyramids must have run. Logically, the settlement for workers should be to the south-southeast, he thought, and in fact, at precisely that location, at the mouth of the wadi that divides the plateau, a towering stone wall, called in Arabic “the wall of the crow,” loomed above the sand. In Lehner’s home state of North Dakota, he says, the ancient masonry would have drawn attention and eventually been designated a national monument. But in Egypt, with its hieroglyphics, “gold bowls, and mummies,” the wall was virtually ignored.

But not completely. Harvard professor of Egyptology George Reisner, an early promoter of stratigraphic digging in Egypt, had noted the massive stone blocks in this wall almost in passing in the early twentieth century; he even stated that there was probably a “pyramid city” beyond it. But Lehner thinks that even the methodical Reisner, who unearthed much of the extraordinary Egyptian collection at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, was burdened by the magnitude of material coming out of the excavations he had undertaken. The manner of the discovery of the tomb of Queen Hetepheres is a perfect illustration. Reisner was actually in the United States when his photographer, setting up the legs of his tripod, inadvertently punched through the desert sand into a buried shaft leading to a hidden chamber filled with grave goods. The contents of the chamber had been disassembled in antiquity, and Reisner painstakingly reconstructed them: a golden chair, a golden bed with a headrest—furniture from the boudoir of the queen.

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Lehner found himself facing a different kind of obstacle altogether. Now that he had his Ph.D., his nascent career as a scholar began to limit his time for fieldwork. He had accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, just when a massive modern sewage project for Greater Cairo had begun to expose the very area where Lehner planned to search for his ancient city.

For several seasons, Lehner worked as most professor/archaeologists do, digging for two or three months and teaching the rest of the year. The rapid pace of encroaching development kept him and his crew “working like firemen,” he says, but led to some important discoveries, including the oldest bakery ever found in Egypt—right in the area where the workers’ city should be. A backhoe narrowly missed one of two large mixing vats along the bakery’s back wall. Inside, Lehner and his team found a cache of bread pots, easily recognizable from tomb scenes that document the bread-making process. Analysis of the plant remains at the site by paleobotanist Wilma Wetterstrom, an associate in botany in the Harvard University Herbaria, showed that Egyptian bakers used barley and emmer wheat for their bread. (Emmer has very little of the gluten that makes modern bread “spongy and gives it a nice crust,” says Lehner, so it is grown today only in experimental agricultural stations.)

For the most part, the bakeries duplicate, many times over, the same process by which bread was made in any Egyptian household of the time. Egyptologists might be mistaken, says Lehner, to think of pyramid building as analogous to a 1930s WPA project. “You don’t just cross this threshold around 3000 B.C.” and have state projects with economies of scale, he argues. That would take another 1,500 years to develop. Instead, he says, the bakeries—and by extension, probably these “first skyscrapers”—”were built by replicating a household mode of production.” But some evidence found at the bakery site did suggest that a cultural evolution might have begun: the pots, or bedja, would have made a conical loaf more than a foot long. Lehner says the Egyptians appear to have been reaching, even at this early phase in the process of state formation, for some economies of scale.

An adjacent chamber turned out to be a hypostyle, or pillared hall, the oldest ever discovered in Egypt, filled with low benches. Speculation about how it was used suggested a dining hall, but its likely purpose remained a mystery for several years.

Lehner, in the meantime, gave up his professorship at Chicago to dedicate himself to the excavation of the pyramid city. In October 1999, with funding from philanthropists Ann Lurie, Peter Norton, David Koch, and others, he launched a “millennium project” to uncover the pyramid city through a consolidated effort of excavating eight months a year for each of the subsequent three years. Lehner believes the city was intentionally razed and erosion then swept away the rubble before the sand blew in. Today, all across the site, the ruins stand only ankle to waist high.

Lehner brought in trucks and front-end loaders to remove the overburden of sand that had preserved the site. “We now have an exposure of about five hectares, and have mapped the city over the whole area,” he says. His international team of 30 archaeologists has excavated 10 percent—or 5,000 square meters—intensively, a huge undertaking when using modern stratigraphic standards. With more than 100 workers in total, they have amassed the largest collection of material culture from any dig anywhere in Egypt.

They have found not one town, but two, side by side. The first is laid out in an organic fashion, as though it grew slowly over time. Lehner speculates that this was the settlement for permanent workers. The other town, laid out in blocks of long galleries separated by streets, on a formal, grid-like system, is bounded to the northwest by the great wall that both Lehner, and Reisner before him, had noted. This “wall of the crow” turned out to be massive indeed, 30 feet high, with a gateway soaring to 21 feet, one of the largest in the ancient world. The main street leading through the complex is hard-packed limestone, paved with mud, with a gravel-lined drain running down the center—engineered, says Lehner, “almost like a modern street.” His team has partially excavated a royal building filled with hundreds of seals dating from the time of Khufu’s son, Khafre, and his grandson, Menkaure. And they have found a royal storehouse with circular grain bins just like those depicted in De Mille’s The Ten Commandments.

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But there was something missing. There were not enough houses for all the people. Generations of scholars have painstakingly calculated how many laborers would have been needed to quarry, transport, and position the stones of the great pyramids. Estimates have ranged widely—from the 100,000 cited by Herodotus to just the few thousand posited by recent assessments that allow for decades of construction time. Yet Lehner and his team were not finding enough houses to accommodate even the low-end estimates. “Where are all the people?” he wondered. His graduate studies had taught him how other scholars of Middle Eastern settlement patterns had analyzed sites in order to come up with estimates of population size. Lehner was approaching the problem from the opposite perspective. He had a sense of how many people were needed to build a pyramid, and so could infer the size of the city he would find. But there were too few dwellings. The city seemed a ghost town.

Everywhere, Lehner and his team turned up institutional-looking buildings. One was used for working copper—the hardest metal known to the ancient Egyptians, and critical for quarrying and dressing stones. On the floor of another, the excavators found what at first looked like ears of wheat, suggesting another bakery. But these turned out to be fish gills. The site was littered with them, and with fish fins and cranial parts; it turned out to be a place for processing or consuming fish. For a city with few residents, someone seemed to be eating a lot of loaves and fishes.

Because there were just 40 galleries in four large blocks in the entire area, Lehner was sufficiently disturbed that he called in his friend Barry Kemp, the world’s foremost authority on ancient Egyptian urbanism, to have a look. “Looks alien,” teased Kemp, when Lehner asked him what he made of the large, sprawling galleries. In fact, Kemp believed and Lehner agreed that each gallery included the elements of a typical Egyptian house—a pillared, more public area, a domicile, and a rear cooking area—stretched out and replicated on a massive scale.

The surprises were just beginning. Faunal analyst Richard Redding, of the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, identified tremendous quantities of cattle, sheep, and goat bone, “enough to feed several thousand people, even if they ate meat every day,” Lehner adds. Redding, who has worked at archaeological sites all over the Middle East, “was astounded by the amount of cattle bone he was finding,” says Lehner. He could identify much of it as “young, under two years of age, and it tended to be male.” Here was evidence of many people—presumably not slaves or common laborers, but skilled workers—feasting on prime beef, the best meat available.

Redding and Wilma Wetterstrom had worked at another site in Egypt where cattle appeared to have been raised on a kind of estate. Wetterstrom had found tremendous quantities of clover plant remains that had been eaten by cattle, yet Redding “had found very little cattle bone,” Lehner notes. “We know from historical sources that the Egyptians were trying to colonize their hinterland during this very period,” and Redding had hypothesized that cattle were raised at the estate and shipped to somewhere near the capital or near the pyramids at Giza. At Giza, the amount of cattle bone that Redding found suggested that the city site uncovered by Lehner and his team was “downtown Egypt,” and that farms and ranches along the frontier could have been feeding the pyramid builders at the society’s core.

Redding’s faunal evidence dealt a serious blow to the Hollywood version of pyramid building, with Charlton Heston as Moses intoning, “Pharaoh, let my people go!” There were slaves in Egypt, says Lehner, but the discovery that pyramid workers were fed like royalty buttresses other evidence that they were not slaves at all, at least in the modern sense of the word. Harvard’s George Reisner found workers’ graffiti early in the twentieth century that revealed that the pyramid builders were organized into labor units with names like “Friends of Khufu” or “Drunkards of Menkaure.” Within these units were five divisions (their roles still unknown)—the same groupings, according to papyrus scrolls of a later period, that served in the pyramid temples. We do know, Lehner says, that service in these temples was rendered by a special class of people on a rotating basis determined by those five divisions. Many Egyptologists therefore subscribe to the hypothesis that the pyramids were also built by a rotating labor force in a modular, team-based kind of organization.

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If not slaves, then who were these workers? Lehner’s friend Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, who has been excavating a “workers’ cemetery” just above Lehner’s city on the plateau, sees forensic evidence in the remains of those buried there that pyramid building was hazardous business. Why would anyone choose to perform such hard labor? The answer, says Lehner, lies in understanding obligatory labor in the premodern world. “People were not atomized, separate, individuals with the political and economic freedom that we take for granted. Obligatory labor ranges from slavery all the way to, say, the Amish, where you have elders and a strong sense of community obligations, and a barn raising is a religious event and a feasting event. If you are a young man in a traditional setting like that, you may not have a choice.” Plug that into the pyramid context, says Lehner, “and you have to say, ‘This is a hell of a barn!’”

Lehner currently thinks Egyptian society was organized somewhat like a feudal system, in which almost everyone owed service to a lord. The Egyptians called this “bak.” Everybody owed bak of some kind to people above them in the social hierarchy. “But it doesn’t really work as a word for slavery,” he says. “Even the highest officials owed bak.”

Slaves or not, as the last season of his dig began, Lehner still did not know where all the workers slept. With his household model in mind, he had been looking for large “manor houses” where lords could board their laborers for the pharoah. Instead, he had found whole blocks, 170 meters long, of “precocious, sleek, modern-looking nondomestic galleries, albeit with elements of a typical Egyptian home.” Gradually, his team has developed a hypothesis for how these facilities were used. “We now see the enigmatic rows of long galleries…,” wrote Lehner at the end of the 2002 season, “as barracks housing for a rotating labor force, perhaps as large as 1,600 to 2,000 workers.” This is why there are scores of bakeries flanking the galleries, as well as an abundance of bone.

If the next few years of documentation, publication, and peer review bear him out, Lehner’s findings will suggest that the ancient Egyptians were even more advanced in their social organization at this period than previously supposed. Perhaps the Old Kingdom’s pharaohs did indeed preside over something more like a nation than a fiefdom. What was arguably humanity’s first great civilization may have been even greater, at an earlier date, than we have ever supposed.

The 48 Laws of Power

by Robert Greene and Joost Elffers

click image for the the 48 laws.

As predicted by many the media has now abandoned the issue of Haiti as a news-maker. Coverage on what is going on is getting light. Again we don’t get the necessary updates to overstand the details of how much help and what type of help Haiti is in desperate need of. Please click the links below to get up to date information of how we can continue to help Haiti. Click picture for Updates on the situation in Ayiti.

http://www.africaspeaks.com/haiti/

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2010/haiti.quake/

Me Big Chief

By Bukka Rennie

Haiti, the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere, paid reparations to France to the tune of 150 million in “gold francs”. Imagine paying reparations for having won your independence in one of the bloodiest episodes in modern history. The oppressed compensating the oppressor for their freedom.

That was a shock to many in the audience at the recently-held CLR James conference who may not have been so informed previously.

Haiti is what it is today because of the numerous compounded negative effects it faced, such as the deliberate political and economic non-recognition by all the then major nations of the world, coupled, of course, with the geometric effect of having to pay such severe reparations.

That is a historic fact. But why the surprise? The white planters in the English-speaking Caribbean were the ones compensated to the tune of some £200 million for the loss of slave labour. The ex-slaves got nothing. Similarly, the rice and cotton planters of the southern states of America were likewise compensated after slavery was abolished.

The Euro-centrics have always sought reparation and compensation for their “kith and kin” wherever they may be and whatever may have been the disaster suffered. Similarity of treatment to those of us who are not of their kith and kin has never been their agenda.

The First Peoples of the Americas, the so-called Red Indians, culturally were of an entirely different view of the world to that of the British and Europeans with whom they clashed. The First Peoples had no concept of private ownership of the physical and natural environment.

“How can you own the rivers and the trees and the animals around? Can you own the air we breathe and all these things so necessary for living?”

Questions to that effect were posed by Chief Seattle and Chief Crazy Horse. And they were not afraid to die for their cause. They lost eventually and paid the ultimate price. Genocide and disappearance of their civilisation.

Reparations in any form to the minority groups of them still existing have never been considered. What is fundamental though is that they exist in an environment today in which there are mechanisms for sustainable development.

The people of Haiti were also not afraid to die, they embraced the modern concepts of “liberty, fraternity and equality” and fought the French Europeans to establish these principles. They won and yet they were made to pay and are still paying in different ways as they work out the essential mechanisms.

The USA’s role in all of this is documented history even as she grew up and matured as a country projected as the bastion of freedom and democracy. But how could such a country at this time, in today’s world, have the audacity to walk out of the Durban Conference on the question of reparations for the descendants of slavery that existed on their shores for well over 300 years? The simple answer is that black people are not considered their “kith and kin”.

The point being made in the two previous columns is that America needs to review its foreign policies and its positions in relation to the rest of the world. And not only because of the events of October 11 when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked. The necessity existed all along.

Real enlightened, visionary leadership would have seen to that since the ’60s when for the first time every aspect and facet of world civilisation, Eastern as well as Western, was put to question by conscious youth and progressive working-class forces everywhere.

In many instances, it was the skewed tenets of American foreign policy that served, inadvertently or not, to prop up all kinds of crazy, backward regimes such as that of fundamentalist “mullahs” with their anachronistic feudal political structures reminiscent of the Middle Ages, or even that of modern brutal dictatorships as existed in Chile and Panama and the Philippines.

What is ironic is that some of these very backward regimes would in the long run turn against America and foster popular hostilities against her when it seemed to be in their narrow economic interests to do so, eg the Taliban and Iraqi regimes.

While all this is happening the masses of people therein are deliberately kept hungry and trapped in some twilight time zone mouthing and screaming emotional epithets, and at the same time their progressive strata are effectively isolated and quietly but brutally liquidated.

Look, we have been saying over and over that America has a particular responsibility. Precisely because she is now the only super-power and that power must be exercised and be wielded with a firm sense of morality. The “person” or “nation” placed for whatever reason on a pedestal has to bear the greatest moral burden before the rest of the world.

Borges, the Argentine writer, claims that America is a country that has assigned to herself the name of an entire continent. If such is the case, is she to look or to continue to look upon the rest of the continent as her personal “backyard”?

We said in the column “War of the flea”, that America “represents a benchmark in humanity’s long march and the point is that no one wants to be left out…” A “benchmark” is a stage that measures or denotes significant and fundamental accomplishment and achievement.

America is the country that has taken the present prevalent mode of production, distribution and consumption to its highest levels. She manages and controls the global market and she is the one that profits the most from globalisation. It is a mode that warrants all the basic freedoms, including the freedom of choice and the right to the pursuit of knowledge and happiness.

In relative terms it is the mode of production that has extended the democratic process the furthest. All the known modes of the past, eg tribalism, communalism, feudalism, slavery, early capitalism and all its degenerate totalitarian variants, ie state capitalism/socialism, fascism, etc, have to one extent or another been hindrances to the democratic processes and been major blots on humanity’s long march towards universal freedom.

America, just as she has assigned the name of a whole continent to herself, has likewise assigned to herself and her system, “Democracy” (with a capital “D”), as if to suggest that she is equivalent to the be-all and end-all of humanity’s quest for complete fulfilment.

Nothing is further from the truth. Yet she is today a benchmark of modernity and what is supposed to accompany that is a moral burden and a moral responsibility; mess that up and the hostility towards America will intensify. Just as happens when any big chief anywhere betrays the moral trust.

There is this standing joke in our favoured “watering hole” in Tunapuna: Put two airplanes on the tarmac in any underdeveloped country in the world and say that one is bound for “America” and the other to anywhere else and see which of the two airplanes would be filled to capacity.

No one wants, nor is it possible, to destroy this benchmark of humanity’s collective travail. All and sundry want to be part of it though on mutually beneficial terms and all wish to be respected for whatever unique particularity they may bring to the common agenda.