Freedmen's Bureau; Harper's Weekly 1868
This article is intended to persuade knowledgeable readers to consider establishing a Bureau of African American Affairs, as an effective and viable means to restitution, or Reparations to Black Americans, in the United States. This Bureau will resurrect the 1872 charter of the late great, Freedmen's Bureau, as a new US Government Agency, or given specific establishment under the Department of the Treasury, Interior, or a government Department of like responsibilities. The outstanding and long term effects of the peculiar institutions of slavery, in the United States requires a proper supervision to address the myriad of systematic repair to the African American, finally ensuring the stamp of United States citizenship protection in action, and not just words & gestures. According to the Bureau of Internal Statistics, Black Americans spend .95 cents of every $1.00, outside of their community. To write historically African Americans, a predetermined sum check for Reparations, would ultimately be given back to outside communities. Thus, an Institution, which can initiate the Legal, Economic, Banking, Insurance, Housing, Health, Labor, Education, Farming, Commercial, Entrepreneur, Medical, and other industries directly engaged for the commerce or restitution of African Americans, can effectively administer a holistic policy of longstanding restoration. In addition to a predetermined sum check, these actions would address the inter-generational socioeconomic post Bellem trauma, specifically inflicted & experienced by everyday historically, Black Americans.
The Okie Doke
Since 1989, a bill establishing a United States Federal Commission to study the legacy of slavery, its ongoing harm, and to develop proposals for redress and repair, including reparations, has been introduced every year, but died on the vine towards legislation in the US Congress. Outside of the United States, most former colonial nations in the Americas such as territories formerly held by The British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, & Netherlands Kingdoms, all have sought redress and repair, from the five centuries of colonial subjugation through enslavement & its surviving tentacles, "peculiar institutions (Stampp 1958)," present today. Many African Americans in the United States, fail to connect their experience to fellow Afro Americans, across the various nations of the Americas, suffering from similar systems of oppression and seeking similar systems of redress and repair. This unfortunate ignorance explains how successful and profitable the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was and continues to be presently. The various Spanish, Portuguese, French, English or Dutch colonies and their capitalist economic goods built an entire local, regional, national, and international European hegemonic Empire on foreign lands, renamed, the Americas. A similar larger trade of Africans occurred among the Islamic Empires during the same era, or, the Rape of Africa, and it too has effectively, hidden the success and profitability of its trade into the modern day, Middle East region. Descendants of Africans in Saudi Arabia or Qatar, rarely question how they arrived into their current situation due to aggressive Islamic assimilation. Thus, it is essential to comprehend what has captured the African in the American Diaspora and to whom is responsible for the act, especially because various parties, Kingdoms, financial houses, Churches, Companies or Corporations, and individuals have established themselves by these means and continue to reap the benefits of the system, through its derivatives. Explicitly expressed, the Africans in Diaspora are still in bondage, physically and therefore, legally. African Americans in the United States paid over $1.9 Trillion in taxes in 2022 and have been one of the largest contributors to American wealth since the nation's inception. To ask for redress and repair, when one has not secured one's liberty is to embark on an endless legal endeavor. The tragedy, is the inter generational trust and hope instilled by the propaganda of the dominant system, which keeps the descendants of Africans in the Diaspora, in a perpetual cycle of asking for reparations to an oppressive system or government in which, he or she, is still inflicted, by their very presence in the Americas, with no intention of letting go.
What Has Captured Africans?
According to the Quadrennial African Diaspora Census Report 2022-2023, the population of Africans in the American Diaspora is estimated to be over 89,898,803 people as of July 2022. The official estimate of the number of Africans force-ably transmuted across the Atlantic Ocean ranges from 14 million to 25 million by the year 1900. A population this size under normal conditions would easily blossom to the hundreds of millions to the billions within several centuries (1500s-1965), or a decent length of time. Thus, it is unimaginable the amount of death, the victims, survivors, and scholars of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade have speculated to have occurred due to harsh living or labor conditions, brutal codes of enslavement, medical experimentation, war, and all the spheres of the Western Capital System. Thus, it is imperative for Africans in the Diaspora and on the continent to understand what has captured them? To answer the question, it is important to understand who benefits and what changes in the world during the trade. What is traded? The Khemetians and the continent, were well established before the arrival of Europeans, why were these people selected as the builders of the American Empire? What institutions greatly benefited from the commandeering of Native lands and the enslavement of Natives & Africans?
We Were Captured by Christians
When Pope Nicolas V declared the Papal Bull Dum Diversas in 1452, Europe was already in 700 years of Holy War between Islamic Moors from Northwest Africa and the various Christian Kingdoms. Hordes of North and West African horsemen, poured into Europe through the Straits of Gibraltar to create a North African Emirate on European soil. In response, Christians launched the Crusades. At the time, the Christian faith became militarized by the Roman Catholic Pope, to raise armies and navies to physically uproot and expel Islamic Jihadists and their expanding empires from Europe through Al-Andalus (Moors) and Anatolia (Seljuk/Ottoman Turks). The Reconquista, was the Crusade to reclaim the Iberian peninsula for Christianity, and being a protracted military campaign for seven centuries ended with the fall of the Kingdom of Granada (Southern Espana) in 1492. Jews and Moors were forced to either convert to Catholicism, flee, or be put to death. In the aftermath of the success of the Reconquista, a new military offensive resumed, which would take the Holy Crusades sphere of war, out of the ravished southern Europe and thrust back to the shores of north Africa. Under Dum Diversas, militant Christian Kingdoms such as the Kingdom of Portugal and Castile, would commandeer new regions in North Africa, in the name of the Christian faith, and those who refused to surrender, would suffer the penalty of death or enslavement. In European History, the era is known as the Age of Exploration, which begins with Afonso V of Portugal and in Spain, the discoveries of the Americas by Don Christobal Colon in 1492. Dum Diversas and Romanus Pontifex justifies the military invasion and conquest of New Lands in Africa by the Portuguese. The foreign lands unknown to the Europeans were claimed under canon law by the various Christian Kingdoms and renamed the Americas (Amerigo Vespucci is the Italian navigator of Don Christobal Colon).
"to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit -Dum Diversas Pope Nicholas V 1452."
With the subjugation of native principalities, the lands, and the people (African or Native) captured by war were reduced to property of the Kingdom, hence enslavement or conversion became preferable to death, for the profit of the Kingdom. Thus, as goods, profits, land, and people continued to grow & enrich Christian Kingdoms as they invaded areas unknown to Christianity or Islam, competition for the same lands, forced the various European Kingdoms to enter into a Holy Alliance or pact. In 1493, Pope Alexander VI, establishes Inter Caetera, the modern European legal framework for the Law of Nations, forbidding Christian Kingdoms from conquering regions already claimed by other European Christian Kingdoms and setting the foundation for European militant Christian hegemonic empires on conquered lands. The Doctrines of Discovery (Dum Diversa, Romanus Pontifex, & Inter Caetera) initiate the expansion of militant Christian Kingdoms into Africa and the Americas for land, pillage, rape, & profit under the guise of Christianity, trade, & exploration.
Feudalism, Mercantilism & Capital
When Christian Armies captured large groups of people, those people entered into a world driven by European customs. The first custom is social and feudalism is the socioeconomics of European life, then and today. European Kingdoms were militarized with the central commander, or Commander in Chief of the armed forces declared King. Under the King, existed a social structure of his vassals, or loyal knights who ruled in the King's name, over their own appointed territory. The territory came with villages and lands where people called serfs, were tied to the land, by forms of taxation like rent or sharecropping. Terms like landlord, Mayor, Count, County are derived from this feudal system and this was the system used to accommodate the Africans & Native people, now thrust into the possession of the Christian European Kingdoms. However, unlike serfs, or peasants, Christian Kingdoms were granted permission by the law to reduce persons to "perpetual slavery," so cruel & unusual treatment, including death, was legal.
Now, within Feudalism, Europeans are producing and consuming goods and services. Those goods and services continued to be produced during the Age of Exploration, but the new type of goods being commandeered and discovered for the first time by Europeans, which were widely known by other cultures fueled the capital wealth of nations and the expansion of new military campaigns. For example, coffee, was introduced into Europe by the Ottoman Turks, who were trading coffee out of Ethiopia with local Saracens. When coffee became a popular product in the Italy, France, & the British Kingdoms, plantations & factories were established in newly conquered lands of the Americas to supply coffee to Europeans and colonist. The scale of the industry and the profits made by coffee merchants built a new Europe and established money capital as currency within the various Kingdoms. The same scenerio can be applied to sugar, rice, tobacco, tea, pepper, indigo-dye, medicinal plants, various fruits & vegetables, and the entire European capitalist system was built on the profits from these ventures which became huge enterprises.
Thus, in plain speech, local Natives in the conquered territories of the Americas could not fathom what had captured them or why these White Men continued to arrive on their shores. When a slave rebellion of Africans succeeded in defeating a Encomienda or plantation owner, they could not fathom why they were still in jeopardy of losing their freedom, due to pursuing armies. What captured the Natives and Africans was not just Christianity, but an entire system of goods & services, plantations & factories, armies & navies, horses & ships,distribution routes, currencies, Corporations and Sovereigns. Natives & Africans had been captured by behemoth operations often to complex to understand, especially if one originated from a small village. What Christianity does is supply the legal and moral framework for the perpetual enslavement of the principalities, regions, and people, from the tundra of Canada to the southern islands of Argentina. Those who have converted are able to participate in the spoils of war.
Who Are the Africans?
Europe is no stranger to Africans. Greece & Rome are empires whose histories are inextricably interwoven and rooted in Mediterranean culture dominated by the civilization of Khemet & its vassal, the Canaanites (Phoenicians), since modern Europe did not exist then, as it does today, as the latest group to ascend to the table of high human civilization. Lords of Renown are listed in the annuls of European History from the Conqueror of Brittanica, Roman Emperor Septimius Servern, the namesake of the month of September. Or the Umayyad conquest of the German Visiogothic Kingdoms of Hispania by Moor Commander Tariq Ibn Ziyad who began in 711 CE, seven hundred years of rule by Moors in the Iberian Peninsula. There is a long knowledge of Africans and African culture in Europe. But the continent of Africa was colonized as Africa in the 1880s, it was known by a variety of names including the most ancient and renown, Khemet, Punt, Libya, Axum, Abyssinia, and various other names according to Nation, tribe, or clan in control of the extensively massive amounts of territory. The entire Western comprehension of the continent is upside down, as geographically, to the scholarly inhabitants, North is South and South is North. In plain English, this means that South Africa is actually North Africa and the nations along the Mediterranean are considered the southern edges of the continent. Thus, the misunderstanding of the continent has been purported by outsiders, who know little of the aboriginal knowledge of the continent, yet convene like expert scholars on Africa. The continent is at the center of the world and to the people who evolved on the continent, are the most ancient and last of the Homo Sapien species to inhabit the Earth. Six or more Human species have migrated out of Africa (Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus, Homo Ergaster, Homo Florensis, Homo Neanderthal, & Homo Sapien) to populate the world. The continent is so massive, historically other than the Romans (Africas), only the Ancient Khemetians held a name to describe it, commissioned and mapped the entire continent by two different Pharaohs, Pharaoh Sobekhotep V in 1720 BCE and Pharaoh Necho II in 600 BCE, as well as the infamous Carthagian Mariner, Hanno, who famously sailed the western coast returning to Carthage with the skin of three female Gorillas. The travels of Hanno a North Carthagean, signified the immense distance between the North and West, including the lack of cross knowledge of two significantly different cultures within the continent. In Anthropology, it is widely known that all human species begin in the continent of Khemet, then migrate out of the continent. Thus, it is important to draw the connection between The Out of Khemet Theory (Out of Africa Theory Oppenheimer 2000), all of the first fruits of civilization including agriculture, architecture, technology, warfare, religion, science (Chemistry), mathematics, writing and the people. Africa is the Roman designation of the Northern coast of the continent, after the defeat of the Carthage Empire in 146 CE. Romans stationed their legion and renamed the territory after one of the seven Roman gods of the wind, Africas. Still, the continent extended into regions much more ancient and unknown to the Romans. There have been hundreds to thousands of civilizations on the continent of Khemet including Khemet, Abyssinia, Punt, Axum, the Great Zimbabwe Civilization, Ghana, Mali, Songhai and many more. Ultimately, the people who were stripped from the Motherland, were denied their traditions, histories, language, and cults, and assimilated into the various Western European cults, whether Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, or English, all tied together legally by the Roman Catholic Christian Canon. The African today, whether on the continent or in the Diaspora, is in a serious state of warfare, which requires all seriousness and attention, should we survive into the 22nd Century as the largest population in the world, once again, and all that this status bestows.
The Proposal
The most effective restitution or attempt to enact a genuine gesture of reparations for Black Americans in the United States, is to create an institution or Federal Department, legally authorized to oversee the implementation of restitution policy concerning the over 45 million African Americans living in the United States. The institution could be called The Bureau of African American Affairs. This bureaucracy or agency, would establish the legal framework, legal defense, and legal practice of legal restoration of the African Americans in every sphere of American life. After establishing the legal mandate and framework, it is important to understand that several historical industries within the United States, are vetted in predatory practices towards African Americans including the United States government itself. These industries will naturally resist any effort at effectively protecting the citizenry rights of African Americans because their wealth was created and is founded on the violation of African American liberties. For example, the United States prison system, US medical system, US financial system, the federal housing system, the US political system, the US labor system, the education system, and the United States legal system itself. All these federal agencies would be subject to legal query, and contest based on the manner of how the African American has been historical violated and broken by Americanism. There is no wonder or delusion why the original Freedmen's Bureau was abandoned by the United States government because so many industries, families, and individuals depended on the affliction of African Americans. The very existence of the country had become predatory and parasitic towards the African American and to suddenly stop or develop a conscience, a moral compass, has been a redeeming characteristic that has escaped Criollo Americans, as Christians, and even other countries within the sphere of Dum Diversas & Western European expansion into the foreign lands, now referred to as the Americas. A Bureau of African American Affairs in every country in the Western Hemisphere would effectively address the reparations dilemma. Thus, after the legal reversal of Dum Diversa and the 3/5 rule, the Bureau could set itself to properly defend abuses of Black Americans, then begin to address the other issues such as the economic plight, the Black financial crisis, the Black Housing Crisis, Black real estate & agricultural farms, Black education, and its mission would be the protection of Black African Americans in the United States.
Few have proposed a successful holistic approach to the restitution for African Americans in the United States, such as Booker T Washington, Dr. Amos Wilson (Blueprint for Black Power Wilson 1995), and Dr. Claude Anderson (Powernomics Anderson 2004). The most sincere advocates for Africans in America created a Bureau for Refugees, Freedmen, & Abandoned Lands after the United States Civil War in 1865. The bureau created under the Administration of President Abraham Lincoln with the advise of Frederick Douglas and declared by the Radical Reconstruction Congress, was also known as the Freedmen's Bureau. The aim was to assist and provide additional rights to ex-slaves including the distribution of land, the legal advocates in State & Federal Courts, and...
"any of the civil rights or immunities belonging to white persons, including the right to.....inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property, and to have full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and estate, including the constitutional right of bearing arms."
The sheer magnitude of its mission, the financial & political power of its opponents, and the semi effectiveness of the Freedmen's Bureau lead to its failure. The failure exposed the manner in which the American Capitalist Patriarchy Militant Supremacy Machine encompasses, surrounds, then begins to attack African Americans leaving them as the victims and stepping stone for American prosperity. For example, one of the first roles of the agency was to represent ex-slaves in contracts with employers, also to become legal representatives in family courts to find their relatives, and the distribution of land. In those three industries, Labor, Legal, and Housing, you find three separate arenas where White Capitalists were actively predatory towards Africans in America. The same predatory scheme can be found today in every American city and African Americans have the same need today, as they did in 1865. Thus, when it became politically advantageous to defund the Freedmen's Bureau in the name of reconciliation after the Civil War, the United States under President Andrew Johnson, a Southern Democrat, effectively destroyed it. What the successor of Lincoln did not accomplish, the Ku Klux Klan would by violently beating, lynching, and burning Blacks & the White supporters. The Post Bellem America could not rise to the occasion to complete the work of the Civil War. Thus, race, remains a poisonous shadow in American History.
The Conclusion
Can the United States survive another Seminole (largest slave rebellion in US History) or Civil War? Should race still be an issue? And why won't the United States government abandon, dismiss, or abolish its National Security Policy towards African Americans? Negroes, Coloured People, Blacks, or, today's African Americans have made the United States the most powerful nation in the world. The reward of such a contribution to the once wealthiest nation on Earth is not jubilee, but more labor and injustice to feed its economic engine. The descendants of the Former Slaves deserve better and have tried everything decent to plead their case, and others, have flung themselves into a crash course with American society. The stonewall approach to Black American justice is dangerously unnecessary. A dog backed into a corner is most vicious, but why not treat the dog well anyway? The United States society has crushed or destroyed the very people, who built the nation's wealth and the people are damaged by trauma. The Native American once had a similar plea of mercy to the United States government. African Americans are making the same plea because the illegitimate & ubiquitous warfare against Black Men, Women, and their children has taken its toll. The African American family, suffering from inter-generational systematic injustice and post-traumatic slave syndrome is finally going insane, losing their traditions and values which defined our contribution to everything American from music, diet, to science and agriculture. The fall of many civilizations, such as Rome, Greece, Persia, and others, precipitates from not knowing when to free their captives & enslaved. The United States does not have to make this same mistake being a young nation and less than half the age of Persia at its peak. Though the United States is a great contribution to civilization, it is no Persia, Zhou, Khemet, or Olmec Empire leaving a better world to its posterity. Restitution at least gives the nation a chance to show growth and character, lest it lose it mandate from Heaven, as the Chinese will say. In sheer magnitude, restitution will be a short term fallout to many industries, but like fixing a leaky engine or setting a train back on track, the long term economic investment could possibly sustain multiple golden eras to come. African Americans are a productive people and still contribute trillions to Quadrillions of dollars to the United States coffers. A Bureau of African American Affairs could save the United States of America.
(currently updating)
written by Cowan Amaye-Obu 5/2/2023
The American Mastodon Publication
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