State Rep. Kimberly Daniels of Jacksonville PHOTO COURTESY OF MYFLORIDAHOUSE.GOV

The lie that slavery benefited the enslaved reflects the centuries-old propaganda that, along with colonialism, it was a civilizing experience to be reduced to chattel or property. It must be painful for their descendants to hear it now, especially from a few fellow African Americans because of Africa’s history.

A charitable explanation would be that they are toeing the party line. Five of the six new appointees to the African American History Standards Workgroup which endorsed the lie “are either directly affiliated with the Republican Party or have previously been appointed to positions by Governor Ron DeSantis,” Action News Jax reported.

But not all. State Rep. Kimberly Daniels of Jacksonville, a Democrat, in a sermon at Solid Rock Church in Monroe, Ohio, 15 years ago, proclaimed, “I thank God for slavery. I thank God for the crack house. If it weren’t for the crack house, God wouldn’t have never been able to use me how he can use me now and, if it wasn’t for slavery, I might be somewhere in Africa worshiping a tree.” Therefore, Africans had to be enslaved to acquire skills and find religion. Not so.

Africa is the world’s second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia, covering 11.7 million square miles, with 1.4 billion people and 1,250 to 3,000 native languages and a GDP of $3 trillion. It is the birthplace of the human race, going back to hominids – the earliest human ancestors. Remains of the earliest homo sapiens, from whom today’s humans descended, were found in Ethiopia, South Africa and Morocco dating back about 233,000, 250,000 and 300,000 years ago, respectively, Wikipedia notes.

Africans were the first humans to domesticate cattle, around 6000 BC. They began harvesting wild millet around 8000 to 9000 BC and grew sorghum starting around 4000 BC. Oil palm was domesticated, then raffia palm and black-eyed peas. They began cultivating rice after climate change around 1000 BC affected wild crops.

They made stone axes which they used to clear forests so they could grow crops. They made bone-tipped harpoons for fishing. They began making pottery between 10,000 and 9000 BC and erected stone settlements. They started ironworks around 1000 BC, mined copper and used it to make objects from around 3300 BC.

As to religion, Africans practiced a variety of faiths, Encyclopedia Britannica notes, and the known ones included “the notion of a high or creator God, remote from humans and beyond their comprehension or control. That God typically is not attributed a gender but in some cases is male or female; often God is given an immanent and visible aspect as well.” As for tree-hugging, “The most important ‘spiritual’ powers are usually associated with things or beings with which people have day-to-day contact or that they know from the past. Thus, there may be many kinds and levels of spirits of the air, of the earth, of rivers, and so on.”

Whether it is tree-hugging or worshiping in a church, it is religion to the believer.

The exploitation did not end with the abolition of slavery. It was replaced by another form of exploitation during the so-called “Scramble for Africa,” the era of “invasion, annexation, division involving Western countries such as Belgium, Britain, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain,” as Wikipedia puts it. They invaded and occupied 10 percent of the continent by 1870, expanding to 90 percent less than 50 years later.

Today, Africa contains 54 independent nations – the highest number — but their borders were drawn mostly by those colonizers. One legacy was that “an overwhelming majority of Africans lived in extreme poverty,” Wikipedia notes. “The continent suffered from the lack of infrastructural or industrial development under colonial rule, along with political instability.” As a result of “increasingly frequent and severe violence, military rule was widely accepted by the population of many countries as a means to maintain order and, during the 1970s and 1980s, a majority of African countries were controlled by military dictatorships. Territorial disputes between nations and rebellions by groups seeking independence were also common in independent African states.”

That trend continues, leading The New York Times to report on Saturday that a “coup belt spans the continent: a line of six countries crossing 3,500 miles, from coast to coast, that has become the longest corridor of military rule on Earth.” A recent apparent coup in Niger “toppled the final domino in a band across the girth of Africa, from Guinea in the west to Sudan in the east, now controlled by juntas that came to power in a coup — all but one in the past two years,” The Times said.

Underlying this instability is foreign competition to win the hearts and minds, as the saying goes, of the people, involving the United States and Russia, as well as China. Now it is rivalry not for captive human beings to provide free labor but for Africa’s “very large share of the world’s mineral resources,” Britannica notes. The resources include “coal, petroleum, natural gas, uranium, radium, lowcost thorium, iron ores, chromium, cobalt, copper, lead, zinc, tin, bauxite, titanium, antimony, gold, platinum, tantalum, germanium, lithium, phosphates, and diamonds.” Africa also possesses large coal, chromium, iron ore, nickel, manganese and lead deposits.

Some of the minerals include many “rare earths” which, the Italian Institute for International Political Studies said in 2021, “play a major role in the calculations and strategies of various nations. In many ways, rare earths are the vitamins of industrial society in the 21st century: they are vital to key products from hi-tech items (smartphones and monitors) to energy conversion systems (wind turbines, photovoltaic panels and electrical machinery) and even military equipment (lasers and radar). The difficulties involved in replacing them with alternative materials make rare earths uniquely strategic resources.” Russia has an advantage in this new race to exploit Africa, having established itself, during its former iteration as the Soviet Union, as a staunch ally of the continent’s the freedom fighters, especially in South Africa at a time when the United States and other Western nations were coddling the racist apartheid regime. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is now playing up that relationship as he woos African leaders not only to support his invasion of Ukraine but also hoping his charm offensive will grant him access to their natural resources. And, just in case, he is using the Wagner Group mercenaries as the sharp end of his campaign and they began wreaking havoc in several countries long before they joined the invasion of Ukraine.

On the other hand, United States policy toward Africa reflects a preoccupation with fighting its “war on terror” on the continent, with American troops stationed in several countries to stem the advance of al Qaeda and the Islamic State. But American interference in the affairs of the continent dates back to at least the 1950s when its focus was on preventing “communist” leaders and regimes from gaining power as colonialism was ending. The U.S. spearhead was, of course, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as the Facetofaceafrica news outlet reported in a 2018 story citing various sources. That interference robbed the continent of some of its brightest young progressive leaders such as Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Nelson Mandela, with his 27-year imprisonment, and unleashing the brutal dictator Hissene Habre on the people of Chad.

But it must be noted also that the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) launched by President George W. Bush in 2003 is credited with saving millions of lives in Africa over the past 20 years, with funding increasing from $1.9 billion to $6.9 billion.

The question now is whether the U.S. will be able to catch up with Russia and be able to overcome the slander which President Donald Trump made when he referred to the continent as having “sh.t hole” countries not worthy of attention and not a good source of immigrants. African Americans, numbering 40 million and forming the base of the Democratic Party, can do much more to put the continent on the front-burner of United States foreign policy, this time in a good way.