In African community ecologies, wisdom from one generation was often passed to the next in ways that Western culture describes as musical. According to Samuel Floyd,
African life and community were rife with ritual, which was preserved and nurtured through what we in the Western world know as art. In ritual, Africans expressed their worldview and symbolized intercourse between the material and spiritual worlds through Dance, Drum, and Song (Floyd 1995: 23)
African drums were also used for communicating messages such as the proverb of the river and the path in a way that seems intimately connected to the ecology of human communities as well. Like more than half of the world’s languages and most of the languages in African and southeast Asia, the Akan language is tonal (Patel 2008: 40). So each syllable must be “sung” at the correct pitch to convey the correct meaning of each word.
The Akan and other West African tonal-language speakers developed an ecologically based fluency that enabled sending and receipt of messages over many miles using what we now call “talking drums.” Talking drums were constructed and played to produce the different tones of a language in the same cadences and rhythms that people spoke.
Ordinary people miles away could also hear and understand the drummers’ messages as if they were spoken over a cell phone. In order to send and receive such messages devoid of the consonant sounds of verbal speech, drummers and listeners needed to share a sensitivity to poetic improvisation grounded in the social and environmental ecologies of their shared human community. (Gleick 2011: 2-31).
The previously shared Akan proverb is shared below, this time in “drum speech”.
During the 16th century, however, such rivers of community ecology were crossed and even dammed in irrevocably destructive ways by ruthlessly ambitious paths, as Floyd described below:
Between 1498 on the East Coast and 1652 in the far south, amid destruction and conquest by Moroccan and European invaders, Africa was irrevocably damaged. This ruin and devastation led to societal insecurities, power conflicts, isolation, and a resulting economic, technological, and political dependency on the outside world (Davidson, 1991, 226-27). Over the course of the sixteenth century, as the Portuguese, well-armed and ruthless, took over the Indian Ocean ports, “they cut savagely across those many complex strands of commerce which centuries had woven between these myriad ports and peoples of the east; and they wrecked the whole fabric of the trade, leaving behind them when their force was spent little but ruin and disruption” (Davidson 1987, 198). “Ruin of the Indian trade and eclipse of its African terminals, overseas slaving, colonial conquest and many things besides, would obscure and hide the African past.” (202)
It would be a mistake to equate the behavior of these religious empires with the essence of compassion in the underlying religious traditions, as Brock and Parker have pointed out for Christianity (Brock and Parker 2009) and el Hamel has pointed out for Islam (el Hamel 2012). The point of this essay is that the need for reincorporating the lost compassion (which Lincoln referred to as Black Religion) was and continues to be due to the centuries old and deeply institutionalized effects of arrogant empire. Even at the time, the competing religious empires that devastated Africa also brought about what Gerald Horne described as an “apocalypse” in the lands that were to become the Americas. It has also been suggested that such an apocalypse may provide the most appropriate marker for the beginning of Anthropocene (Lewis 2018).
In a sense, as the Ottomans pressed westward, Madrid and Lisbon began to cross the Atlantic as a countermove by way of retreat or even as a way to gain leverage. But with the “discovery” of the Americas, leading to the ravages of the African slave trade, the Iberians, especially Spain, accumulated sufficient wealth and resources to confront their Islamic foes more effectively….
The deadliness of the resultant apocalypse commenced virtually from the day Columbus reached terra firma in October 1492. In the decades immediately following, an estimated 650,000 indigenes were enslaved and by 1580, in Algiers, enslaved indigenes from the Americas were to be found. In other words, it was not just European microbes that devastated indigenes, it was also a conscious strategy of naked profiteering from enslaving combined with a maniacal desire to remove the existing population, with enslaved Africans then arriving to develop the land. Thus, by 1530, 69 percent of the enslaved in Puerto Rico—now a U.S. “possession”—were African. Simultaneously, a market in Europe quickly developed involving indigenous American women and children deployed as domestic or household slaves.
…Two emerging technologies seemed to make this possible. One was the gun (Gomez 2018: 4-5). The physical power of firearms made modern Western culture carriers exceptionally good at the killing that turns humble paths into mighty roads and ultimately into super highways. It was essentially abused to commodify space by taking away land that gave substance to human community ecology. The other emerging technology was the printing press (Man 2009). The conceptual power of the printing press made it much easier to separate the acquisition of knowledge from the human community ecology that gives knowledge its contextual meaning. It was essentially abused to commodify time. Peoples whose histories, cultures, and religions were not written down were treated as if they had none (Long 1963: 11-12).
Rivers of actual religious experience were no longer necessary. They became things to dam and to pave over. The modern Western concept of religion (as taught by the book and enforced by the gun) could now commodify religious experience from a particular space and time into a virtual reality that could go out on the road and compete with other commodities, religious and otherwise. Modern Western culture seems more likely to describe the water in the river as a natural resource and the talent of a drummer as an entertainment resource. Resources (including the “human resources” currently measured in “man-hours”) may be used wisely or even reverently, but they are still resources to be used rather than ecologies of which we are composed and in which we participate. But the environmental water cycle somehow managed to cross the Atlantic with African captives to bring a community consciousness of compassion as well.
Introduction / Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7
Peace Jungle 