Written by Ebrima Jaw Manneh

Wednesday, 31 May 2006



[align=justify]Mr Andrew Hawkins from Plymouth, the United Kingdom, who claims to be a direct descendant of England’s first slave trader, Sir John Hawkins, will don yokes and chains at the forthcoming Roots International Festival in The Gambia to apologise for the actions of his famous ancestor.[/align]

[align=justify]He will be joining the lifeline expedition team, which has been journeying around with whites wearing yokes and chains while Africans and descendants of enslaved Africans accompany them. The Africans are also ready to apologise for selling their brothers and sisters to the European traders. This action is also a means of raising awareness of ongoing slavery and racism at the present time. [/align]

[align=justify]Sir John Hawkins is well known for his part in the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1587, but it is well known that he made slaving voyages with the support of Queen Elizabeth 1 between 1562-1568, sailing in ships such as the Jesus of Lubeck and the Grace of God.[/align]

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[align=justify]The International Roots Festival commemorates the legendary Kunta Kinteh who according to a novel by Alex Haley was captured at Juffereh in The Gambia and held in the slave fort on James Island until he was transported to Annapolis in Maryland, USA, in a London slave ship, the Lord Ligonier. The lifeline expedition team aims to have representatives from the four European nations, Germany, Holland, France and England who at different times held slaves in the fort. They will kneel and make an apology in the yokes and chains in the fort.[/align]

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[align=justify]Response to Europeans chained and yoked in a coffle like slaves[/align]

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[align=justify]White people walking as penitent in chains through former slave ports such as Nantes, Bordeaux, Seville, Lisbon and Charleston South Carolina created considerable interest. They walk not as symbolic slaves; instead, the chains and yokes are the walkers’ chosen symbols of their penitence. There has been wide media coverage, but most importantly, this prophetic action has been well received by descendants of enslaved Africans. In France “Enfin!� was the most common word used. “At last, now we feel that white people are taking our story seriously. Thank you, but so much more needs to be done.� Africans walking in the procession in attitude of forgiveness point to the potential for real reconciliation in the future.[/align]
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[align=justify]Leader of the lifeline expedition, David Pott comments: “The Senegambia region is, of course, a most important region as far as the slave trade and its legacy is concerned. The roots of the system are located here because it was the closest region of Africa to Europe where substantial numbers of Africans were taken captive. The legacy of slavery is still much in evidence in terms of the ongoing poverty in Africa today. I am thankful that in spite of centuries of European oppression, Africa is not bowed down and contributes so richly in our world today. In order to heal historical wounds we must go to the roots, so I am very glad that we are able to come and take part in this significant Roots International Festival. We pray that we will be able to make our contribution in bringing healing and reconciliation. That is why we are coming here.�[/align]http://www.observer.gm/enews/index.p...&Itemid=33

The gesture will be well received, even I can admit that. However if you ask me, it's going totake a lot more than that to make up for slavery. Our people have and continue to suffer so much because of European colonization and the time to make amends is long gone. If they want to help, they should focus on getting their governments to stop the neo-colonialism that's occuring on the continent. But apparently anything that can actually help to stop the suffering of our people will be too much to ask of Europeans and their governments.

And your title is killing me with laughter. You're gonna have Le Moor rolling with rage. Lol!!!

Aryek wrote:
While I agree with you, you have to admit that quite a bit of the suffering could be ended by us....

While you are at it you might question the slaughter if studensts protesting a rape by a (black) ccop in Gambia...

My point is the Euros should and shall do their part (and this might be one of the ways buts surely it is not enough), but what good is theird if we don't ours the suffering will still be there. We need to take things in our own hands...literally and figurativley...

The current president is likly not puppet but that's does stop him and his ilk from driving the country down the drain and killing those who protest.

I love the way this story didn't even make it into the mainstream media....

About time, but for them to really appreciate slavery I'd like to see them chained up and herded in the bowels of a ship for months on end with little food and water, watching his family die next to him, or whipped for some minor infringement.

So, I'm not exactly jumping for joy at this moment. I'm also glad that the Africans have apologised for selling their family to the Bluefoots. Some Black people seem to think fellow Blacks had nothing to do with slavery!

Mansa, you are naughty. That title made me smile.

LOL...bluefoot in blue...haha...

Yet again it is all about them and what they do.

Appreciated?

No.

Will he be turning the wealth his family accumulated from us over to us then?confused3



*Besides I would appreciate it more ifthe degenerate ones among us got together, tied themselves in chains, apologised for perpetuating the crap and turned a new leaf.

"... Africans walking in the procession in attitude of forgiveness point to the potential for real reconciliation in the future ..."

"... We pray that we will be able to make our contribution in bringing healing and reconciliation ..."


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[align=center]Anyone Up For "Reconciliation"?[/align]

LOL...what a joke. And its funny that they have to mention the "Africans who sold their brothers and sisters" and people wonder why slavery is not taken as seriously as it should be.

Get off your knees!

By A.N. WILSON, Daily Mail 08:26am 23rd June 2006



The photograph is a powerful one. A European man, manacled in chains, kneels down before a crowd of Africans. He wears a T-shirt which reads 'So Sorry'. His name is Andrew Hawkins, a descendant of the famous sea-going family of the 16th century.

He is atoning for the actions of his ancestor, Sir John Hawkins, the first Englishman to ship a cargo of slaves across the Atlantic. Sir John did not set out to Africa with the aim of collecting the slaves. What happened was that on his way to Tenerife in October 1562, he put in at Sierra Leone.


There he plundered Portuguese ships of their merchandise and, regrettably, that 'merchandise' contained more than 300 Africans whom Hawkins took to the island of Dominica, where he sold 'his English wares and all his negroes'.

Is his descendant right, then, to grovel to the Gambian vice-president in shackles and say: "I recognise that it's a simple act to say sorry — but it was a handful of people who started the slave trade and the ripples of their actions caused evil throughout the continent of Africa"?

No, he very decidedly is not right.

All propagandists know that pictures speak louder than words. What does this picture say? It says that white men of today, and Englishmen in particular, should grovel in apology because of something which was done by a few old seadogs in the 16th century.

The trouble with the picture, and the words of the present-day Andrew Hawkins, is that they so distort the truth as to be, in effect, a lie. Sadly, it was not 'a handful of people who started the slave trade'. Slavery was endemic throughout the African continent, and in many African countries it still exists.

A few Europeans, especially Portuguese but later, shamefully, some Englishmen too, exploited the African slave trade. These slavers, be it understood, did not go to Africa and round up the native population.

Exploiting evil

In the case of these early European slavers in Africa, they went to bustling African slave-markets. It was Africans who had already enslaved other Africans, and the Europeans wickedly exploited this evil.No doubt by shipping these men women and children across the Atlantic to work in the cotton and sugar plantations, they were also doing evil.

But why should that be the whole story?

It is a very strange fact that, although it is blindingly obvious to us that slavery is wicked, it was completely taken for granted by all human beings on this planet until the 18th century. St Paul and Aristotle, two great moralists of the ancient world, where most of the population was held in slavery, insisted on the necessity of kindness to slaves. But they did not object to slavery itself.

The anti-slavery movement grew up in the 18th century, and it was almost entirely a British invention. Note that it was not started by men and women in the Gambia, or Senegal, or the Ivory Coast, nor by the men on the other side of Africa, in the Sudan, who went on doing a lively trade in slaves until the 20th century.


The reason that our great national song Rule Britannia contains the lines 'Britons never, never, never shall be slaves' is that we hated slavery. We fought wars throughout the 19th century to abolish it.


At the end of the Napoleonic wars, the Duke of Wellington made all the signatories of the peace treaty pledge to abolish the trade in slaves. Such robust Victorian Prime Ministers as Lord Palmerston saw it as their duty to send gunboats around the world, for example to the ports of Brazil, to bombard the slave owners and their disgusting trade.

By kneeling down in chains, kindly but stupid Andrew Hawkins is sending out the usual old lie that the British are to blame for all the ills on the face of the planet. It is certainly the case that, disgracefully, many British merchants profited mightily from slavery until its abolition, and anyone whose ancestors made money from sugar, or from West Indian plantations, will certainly have slave-owners in their family history.

But surely the important fact about this country is not that, in common with the rest of the world, it profited from slavery — surely the distinctive and very British thing is that we eventually abolished it. No word of that from Mr Hawkins.

When I was a little boy — and it is not that long ago — Sir John Hawkins was a glorious name in our history. Treasurer to the Royal Navy, he was one of the great sea captains who, together with his cousin Francis Drake, Martin Frobisher and Thomas Howard, commanded the British fleet that defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588.

He wasn't an especially nice man. "He had," says one who knew him well, "malice with dissimulation, rudeness in behaviour and was covetous in the last degree."

But the defeat of the Armada, which ensured the independence of this country from the Catholic empire of Spain, was a decisive event — the reason, among other things, that English and not Spanish is the language of North America.


History teachings

The slanted history teaching of today seems to be summed up by the — don't let's mince words — ridiculous figure of Andrew Hawkins kneeling in chains. It is the embodiment of a culture of grovelling which, far from at last coming clean and telling the truth about history, in fact distorts it utterly.


Far more slaves were sold within Africa, by Africans to other Africans, than were ever exported. One of the chief motives — and admittedly it is only one reason — why so many of the Victorians made expeditions into Africa was to stamp out slavery.


As late as 1881, a quarter of the population of Unyanyenmbe in Portuguese East Africa were slaves.

One of the great might-have-beens of African history is how the peoples of West Africa would have developed had not their most enterprising indigenous inhabitants spent so much of their energy chasing, capturing and enslaving their fellow Africans.

The true history of the British Empire is that Europeans went to Africa with an ever-increasing desire to liberate Africans from slavery.



There are hideous exceptions, the most disgusting of whom is King Leopold of Belgium, who colluded in massacre and slavery in the Congo.But on the whole, in African lands colonised by the British, slavery was all but wiped out.

The next time Andrew Hawkins goes to Africa, he might have a pict