Author: Nanadadzie Ghansah

Between 1400 – 1900, the continent of Africa saw four waves of slave trading that in total would diminish the continent’s population by 50% by 1800.
The Trans-Saharan slave trade saw slaves being taken from south of the Saharan desert and shipped to Northern Africa.
In the Red Sea slave trade, slaves were taken from the area around the Red Sea and transported to the Middle East and India.
The Indian Ocean slave trade, had the slaves being taken from Eastern Africa and shipped either to the Middle East, India, or the plantation islands in the Indian Ocean.
Compared to the TransAtlantic slave trade, the above three above three paled in scope. Beginning in the 15th century, men, women and even children were shipped from Western, Central and Eastern Africa to the European colonies in the Americas.
Slaves were captured through kidnappings, raids, and warfare. None of them went willingly into the slave ships. A conservative estimate is that 20 million Africans were taken away as slaves. Then are the countless men, women, and children who died during the raids, during the marches to the slave castles, in the slave castles and during the Middle Passage.

Even though the institution of slavery has existed worldwide for centuries, the fact that slavery existed in Africa turned out to be catastrophic.
Slavery as an institution is inhumane but slavery that was present in Africa was way benign and adaptable compared to what the Europeans established in the Americas. Slaves in Africa were prisoners of war, payments for family debts, criminals or as part of a dowry payment. No one went on raids to capture slaves or kidnapped others to enslave them.
Most won their freedom by the next generation, could marry and were often part of the extended family. Even though there was some viciousness towards slaves, what happened to slaves in the Americas paled in comparison to that.
When the Europeans arrived in Africa, the age-old practice morphed into a frank holocaust.

A good example of this complex dynamic is shown by what happened in the Congo after the Portuguese arrived in 1493 led by Diogo Cão. The kingdom of Congo was about 300 square miles and had been in existence over a century before the Portuguese showed up. It was ruled by a king called the ManiKongo.
Cão was soon followed by other Portuguese merchants and priests from the Catholic Church in 1491. Schools and churches were built. Copper, ivory and textiles were traded.The people of the Congo also wanted to acquire skills – the skills of masons and carpenters to build European style buildings, and education and literacy, in order to communicate directly with Europe.
In the interim, the Portuguese had discovered the worth of African labor and were interested in acquiring slaves. Initially, only war captives were traded but the Portuguese wanted more slaves for the plantations in Brazil. They started colluding with Congolese noblemen and chiefs to kidnap Congolese and sell them as slave. By 1500, the trade had hit a frenzy. Hochschild reports how “men sent out from Lisbon to be masons or teachers at Mbanza Kongo soon made far more money by herding convoys of chained Africans to the coast and selling them to the captains of slave-carrying caravels.”
Even the Catholic priests got into the act. They “abandoned their preaching, took black women as concubines, kept slaves themselves, and sold their students and converts into slavery”. Interestingly after the Reformation, these Catholic-priests-turned-slave-traders refused to sell to Protestants.
It is into this melee that Nzinga Mbemba of Affonso I became the King of the Congo or the ManiKongo in 1506. A very smart man, he was a provincial chief and in his thirties when the first Portuguese missionaries arrived in 1491. He studied with them for 10 years. In the process, he converted to Catholicism and gained a great command of the Portuguese language.
As king, he sought to modernize his kingdom by harnessing the knowledge the Portuguese had, held back prospectors who wanted gold and tried to control the slave trade which had gotten out of hand. In his despair, he even wrote to two Portuguese kings and the Pope for help.

This from a letter he wrote to King Joao III of Portugal in 1526:

“Each day the traders are kidnapping our people — children of this country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our own family… This corruption and depravity are so widespread that our land is entirely depopulated…We need in this king­dom only priests and schoolteachers, and no merchandise unless it is wine and flour for Mass. ..It is our wish that this kingdom not be a place for the trade or transport of slaves.”

Later, he would also write:

“Many of our subjects eagerly lust after Portuguese merchandise that your subjects have brought into our domains. To satisfy this inordinate appetite, they seize many of our black free subjects. . . They sell them … after having taken these prisoners [to the coast] secretly or at night…As soon as the captives are in the hands of white men they are branded with a red-hot iron.”

On the issue of the priests turned slave traders:

In this kingdom, faith is as fragile as glass because of the bad examples of the men who come to teach here, because the lusts of the world and lure of wealth have turned them away from the truth. Just as the Jews crucified the Son of God because of covet­ousness, my brother, so today He is again crucified.

If he was expecting sympathy from King Joao III, he got none. This was part of his reply to Affonso:

“You … tell me that you want no slave-trading in your domains because this trade is depopulating your country. … The Portuguese there, on the contrary, tell me how vast the Congo is, and how it is so thickly popu­lated that it seems as if no slave has ever left.”

Due to his efforts to reign in the activities of the Portuguese slave traders, an attempt was made to assassinate him. It was unsuccessful. However, when he sent 10 of his young nephews and grandsons to Lisbon to study, they were captured en route and sold off as slaves in Brazil.
In the meantime, the slave trade went on turning wide swaths of the once populous kingdom into wastelands as countless people died in war or as they marched to the slave forts or fled the advance of the raiders. One can imagine how the livelihood of millions all over sub-Saharan Africa was destroyed in this fashion.
After the death of Affonso in 1542 or 1543, the power of the Congo continued to decline until it finally became a colony of Belgium in the 1800s and furthered suffered under the atrocities of King Leopold.

Thus we see how the trade in slaves morphed from its small beginnings into a terrible institution that the locals could hardly control.

By all measures, the trade had a huge impact in reshaping the continent. Quoting from a paper by the economist Nathan Nunn from 2017:
“The evidence suggests that it (the slave trade) has affected a wide range of important outcomes, including economic prosperity, ethnic diversity, institutional quality, the prevalence of conflict, the prevalence of HIV, trust levels, female labor force participation rates, and the practice of polygyny. Thus, the slave trades appear to have played an important role in shaping the fabric of African society today.”

In spite of all the evidence a lot of people, even smart and well-meaning Africans and African-Americans, seek to discount the impact of this holocaust on our continent. Some even blame it all on Africans. Even the publisher, McGraw Hill in a World Geography book had this sentence: “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.”

The slave trade has been over for ages but Africans and blacks in the Americas and even Europe have to live with the consequences. The least that part of the world that benefited most from the trade can do is study the heinous practice and the circumstances that led to it, learn from it and seek to help those whose lives are affected by the consequence of this practice to overcome the impediments that litter their way.
By studying the slave trade widely, we Africans get to understand some of the socio-pathology that plague our societies and can find ways to combat and change them.
We need to that to understand who we are. Like Charles Siefert’s wrote in his 1938 pamphlet, “The Negro’s or Ethiopian’s Contribution to Art”:
“A Race without the knowledge of its history is like a tree without roots.”

References:

Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: a Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Pan Books, 2012.

Nunn, Nathan. “Understanding the long-run effects of Africa’s slave trades” from “The Long Economic and Political Shadow of History, Volume 2”
by Stelios Michalopoulos, Elias Papaioannou. A VoxEU eBook. 14 February 2017.

I just finished two episodes of Christiane Amanpour’s “Love and Sex Around the World” on CNN and all I can say is “Wow!”
It only further reinforces my argument that we Africans need to tell our own stories and should never let any Westerner do that for us. They hardly ever get it right. For some unknown reason, they can never reach the true essence of our story and the great Amanpour was no different.
Having the chance to see the episode she shot in Shanghai, China before watching the one she filmed in Ghana allowed me to compare and contrast how she told the stories of two very different cultures regarding love and sex.
In the Shanghai episode, she started off by explaining how the conservative and rather emotionless nature of the Chinese society greatly affects love and sex. She then went on to weave her story around that central theme and a very humanistic way. She succeeded even in making the perpetuators of these rigid cultural practices look good and acceptable.
The episode from Accra followed the Shanghai one. Ms. Amanpour opened by describing Ghana as “one of the most religious countries in the world”. While that could be true, it is not the true basis of why love and sex are seen and practiced the way they are in Ghana.
However, it is from this background that she went ahead and painted Ghanaian men as hypocrites who hide behind the religion to practice infidelity and oppress their women.

A much more fitting background would have been what a friend suggested:
“A society struggling with two opposing cultures – the monogamous dictates of Christianity and our long-lived culture of polygamy”.
Based on such a background, the words of the older businesswoman she interviewed later in the show makes sense:
“Love is love. As love means in your country, love means the same thing in our country. As the man wants to be with one wife, the love has to be shared”.
Those words are almost an ode to polygamy and the old way of life.
Without that background, then Moesha’s statement at the end of her segment carries the hour and the narrative: “I don’t think true love works in Ghana”.
It is however on this latter statement by Ms. Boudong that the whole documentary comes to rest. And thus she goes on to depict Ghanaian men as selfish, hypocritical, sex-obsessed male chauvinist neanderthals!
Truth be told, some Ghanaian men may fit that bill but there are also a lot of men trying to do right by their wives.
She even throws in the Trokosi culture to further sink us into that pit of depravity.

Ghana, like most other places, has its faults as well as strengths. The way of life of the people, like most places in Africa, is subject to a culture that often is a blend of a traditional and the colonial. These cultures are frequently not complimentary and are at loggerheads with each other. Thus the dictates of a traditional polygamous culture clash with the demands of Christianity.
In telling the Ghanaian or African story, it is always important to tease out these nuances in order to give a close-to-true representation of the reality. Failure to appreciate these nuances often leads to the rather negative depiction of the African and in Ms. Amanpour’s case, the Ghanaian.

Human behavior is a very difficult thing to change. Thus the southern states in the US still struggle with the history of slavery and the Arab nations struggle to afford women equal rights. Is it any surprise that Ghanaian men struggle to get over a long history of polygamy?

Do not get me wrong. I am in no way condoning infidelity or polygamy. All I am saying is if one wants to explore sex and love in a nation with a long culture of polygamy; a country now trying to adapt to a one of monogamy, an explanation of the background helps to tell the true story. That will also allow the story to be told of the men who have successfully made the transition and respect a monogamous liaison. That will help tell the story of women who are in such marriages and relationships and how they see love and sex. After all, they are Ghanaians too.

In that, Ms. Amanpour failed. In that, like most Western journalists, she failed to appreciate the nuances of our land and ended up doing what the western media does best – portraying us in a negative light.
In Shanghai, China, she was able to do that. Why could she not do that in Accra, Ghana? Is it because she did not take the time to understand our culture and is it because she could not appreciate our humanity?
Whatever the reason, the fact remains – we need to tell our own stories!
It is time!

May I rant?

“Sex & Love Around the World” is a documentary on love and sex by the award-winning journalist, Christiane Amanpour. It premieres this coming Saturday on CNN.
Like she said in an interview, “From Berlin to Beirut, Tokyo to New Delhi, Accra to Shanghai, everywhere I looked I found people seeking — and craving — love, intimacy and sexual fulfillment. My quest took me to women and girls, who we so often dismiss as only victims of our patriarchal, misogynistic, hypersexualized culture, who were boldly seizing every opportunity for satisfaction and personal pleasure. I also found their evil downside: sexless marriages, industrial-scale infidelity, and loneliness.”

Go to the page on the CNN website that has been created for the documentary. One sees the thumbnails and can watch clips of the different episodes she shot around the world. Now compare the themes she addressed in Ghana versus other places outside the African continent.
It is rather evident that in Ghana, she chose to address negative themes like polygamy and infidelity.
In Lebanon she addresses divorce, she looks at love and intimacy among Arab refugees, she tackles transgender issues in India, in Japan she touches on the meaning of phrases like “Thank You” and “I love you”… but in Ghana, she grabs onto infidelity.

Now, why would she do that?
It is not like Ghana is the only place in the world afflicted with the scourge of infidelity or we have the most polygamous relationships. I can think of three countries in Asia and two in Africa that are way ahead of us in that category.
I have an inkling as to why.
It is the reason “National Geographic” apologized to people of color people a few weeks ago. It is the reason why we Africans are always depicted as irrational buffoons without an iota of character wallowing in the pits of our shitholes.
It is because, in her eyes, we Africans do not know love and sex for us is just a barbaric affair of taking the opposite sex. So why would she waste her time discussing things like “The rising and confident African feminists” or “Juggling sex, family and work in Ghana”.
No! That would be too human for us apes!
What do we know about love anyway?
So in Ghana, she looked for the “…evil downside: sexless marriages, industrial-scale infidelity, and loneliness.”
I do not blame her though.

I blame a continent that cannot tell its own story and has the myths and traditions of other places foisted on it.
Yet, we have such a rich story to tell – of pain, glory, defeat, perseverance, betrayal, yes, love, sex, polygamy, and death. We have it all.

Come this weekend, Ms. Amanpour is going to show the world a young Ghanaian lady telling everyone how she sleeps with married men for money. Or the older woman talking about sharing her husband. Or the man worried about keeping his wife if he goes broke.
Ms. Amanpour will paint Ghana with the colors of infidelity, polygamy, and deceit. And the world will gasp and have their misgivings about those shitholers confirmed. She may even win awards.
Through all that, no one will hear of the three young ladies who recently made it to Ivy League schools from Ghana, the young women building their own businesses, those fighting for equality for women, those dying from childbirth, those working hard to take kids through school.
No one will hear those stories. Of their love and sex lives. Then, you see, that will make us human, give us character and defeat the narrative. Now, who wants that?
Well, we do! We Ghanaians do! We Africans do!

Yet I do not despair. Such lopsided reportages will only help harden our resolve on this dark continent that is time. Time to make and tell our story with the nuances only a life nourished by a spirit birthed from pain, joy, hope and resolve allows. Nuances that are baked in the sun that burns brightly over the Equator. It is time!

“O curse of marriage, that we can call these delicate creatures ours and not their appetites”.
– William Shakespeare, Othello Act 3, Scene 2

A Ghanaian writer who does a lot of work on all aspects of relationships recently published accounts of infidelity from a group of anonymous married men and women. Reading through the rather graphic descriptions set me thinking. It made me want to explore the topic and so I started doing some searching.
The issue of infidelity in marriages, its causes and ramifications can fill a book of thousand pages. When I sat down to write my thoughts on the topic, I resolved to let a yet unknown line of thinking guide me. Let’s see what I can tease out.

There are events in life that can incite a lot of emotional turmoil – the death of a loved one comes to mind. Another is infidelity or adultery for married folks. If you do not believe me, find a quiet corner, close your eyes and imagine your wife or husband making love to another. See?
The chaos that ensues in the life of the cheated almost mirrors that seen in patients after trauma and has garnered the description, “Post Infidelity Stress Disorder”, PISD.
Even though compared to married women married men are more prone to cheat (by a factor of about 2:1), both sexes do stray. Cultural stipulations may dampen the infidelity of women but it still does occur.

To understand why we stray, one has to look back at human ancestry.
The man historically was concerned about sowing seed and propagating his genes. His involvement in conception lasted minutes to maybe an hour so multiple sexual partners were possible and thus that sexual appetite.
Women, on the other hand, could get pregnant only twice a year, irrespective of how many sexual partners they had. Since the woman was more concerned about her offspring and their well-being, her craving for sex was not as incessant and rabid.
Yet throughout history, men’s appetite for casual sex has found some reciprocation for it to last through the ages. This means that there were women throughout history until today who have shared the desire for casual sex too.
Sexual jealousy in men, stories of infidelity from all cultures and the controversial theory of sperm competition (this occurs when the sperm from two different men inhabit a woman’s reproductive tract at the same time) may point to the fact that women are also connoisseurs of casual sex.

So whereas men are driven by a burning desire to pass on their genes, leading them to stray, women cheat for more solid reasons. These are all reasons that came about from our days as hunter-gatherers.
First is the economic benefit of liaising with a man wealthier and more powerful than one’s partner. In olden times, this could mean more meat and yams in the dry season. Today, we see this driving infidelity in poor countries and families in the lower socioeconomic bracket. Another reason is the genetic benefit. Women picked men who had traits a partner might not have. Lastly is the need for a woman to have a form of backup in case her partner was no more. Life then was short. An affair provided “partner insurance”.
Thus we see that both men and women have a propensity to stray.

That is why over the ages, the human has developed a rather powerful mechanism to protect against this insult.
This phenomenon is jealousy. Even though jealousy can ruin relationships and even lead to men battering or killing women, in its benign form, it is the one thing that helps us fight for our partners and ward off potential sexual challengers.
Interestingly, the behavior in women that evokes jealousy in men is totally different from that in men that makes women green.
Now due to internal fertilization in humans, a woman is always sure that the baby that pops out after nine months is hers. The man though cannot be sure. How can he tell that that baby was not sired by another man?
The woman, on the other hand, has a different set of worries. For her, a man’s emotional involvement is the surest sign that he is still committed. If he starts showing emotional involvement with another woman, that is a dangerous sign.
So for the woman, it is not so much the one night stand but that threatening emotional attachment to another female that is dangerous.
For the man, the thought of his wife involved in the physical sexual act with another man evokes the most jealousy. It births the fear that he could be a cuckold – a man raising a child sired by another man or even the husband of an adulteress. Being a cuckold can also be a fetish but that is a discussion for another day. For now, let’s stick with adultery.

The term “cuckold” comes from the cuckoo bird, a bird that lays its egg in the nests of other birds so they incubate, hatch, and raise the young cuckoo. It is a behavior termed “brood parasitism”.
Hence adulterous women risk turning their men into the bird that “breeds the young cuckoo”. It is this innate fear that drives the sexual jealousy in men. It is this innate fear that through the ages caused men to make female adultery a crime, sometimes punishable by death.
The plight of the cuckold is depicted beautifully in the hilarious Miller’s Tale from Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales”.
So how rampant is cuckolding really? A UK study from 2009 puts it at about 1 in 25 children. However, could this higher in other countries. I have a feeling it might be.

In most western societies, adulterous behavior can have dire economic consequences for the cheater or even the whole family including the kids, especially when it leads to divorce. This may act as a deterrent in some instances against adultery.
In societies where divorces do not carry such an economic burden for the man, it is not uncommon to see the rampant male adulterous behavior. I call this the “Sidechick Culture”, where a “sidechick” is whichever woman a man may be having an affair with at any particular time.
Besides the risk of disease, the emotional toll on the women and the neglect of the family, such behavior makes men in such cultures oblivious to the biggest fear of any man — to be a cuckold.
As an adulterous man is busy sowing his wild oats all over town, his wife may just well be finding solace in the arms of another man. Women, as we discussed earlier, are wont to do that too. The interesting bit is, an adulterous woman has the most desire to sleep with the other man when she is ovulating and with her husband at the other times.
In an interesting Uk study from 2007, strippers were asked to keep a tally of their tips for two months. They also reported the beginning and the start of their menses so the investigators could calculate their ovulation time. The strippers received an average of £42 per hour when they were near ovulation, but only £33 at all other times.
So guess who will impregnate the wife of that adulterous man who is having an affair too? And if she does get pregnant, guess who will raise that child if she stays married to the husband?
I think an active adulterous life prevents a man from picking up cues that his wife might be straying, a feat that under normal circumstances is nigh impossible.
There are several reasons given for why the Akans of Ghana have maternal inheritance. The one I subscribe to the most is because of cuckolding — a man can be sure of the fact that his sister’s son is his kin but can never be sure that his own wife’s son is really his.

So to all married men who prance around enabled by a “sidechick culture” to tick off their amorous conquests like Cassanova; to all the married men who ascribe to the belief of Verus, that “Uxor enim dignitatis nomen est, non voluptatis”, (a wife is for honor, not for pleasure)…to all of you I have this old saying:
“Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe”.

References:

Buss, David M. The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love or Sex. Bloomsbury, 2001.

Lecky, W.E.H. History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne, vol. 1 [1869]. E-Book

Anna Hodgekiss For The Daily Mail, 31 October 2016: Why the time of the month makes you TWICE as likely to CHEAT: Periods make women smarter, sexier and more tempted to stray

Wikipedia. Cuckold. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckold

Wikipedia. Adultery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adultery