Travels With Herodotus

The meditation memoir on Herodotus the man and the historian and the traveler, of noted Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski. Herodotus's Histories was his companion on his first travels outside of Poland as a very young journalist, during the era of Stalin. Herodotus went with him on many other of his assignments as well, including Africa. His reports from Africa, particularly the war(s) in Angola against the apartheid South Africa and the other U.S. backed forces may be what he's most well-known for.

This comes from close the end of this, his final book, pp. 245-246. These are thoughts he was having while staying on the Isle of Goree, one of the most infamous of the African Atlantic coast slave castles, from which so many Africans were transported on the Middle Passage to death in the New World.

[ How often do we consider the fact that the treasures and riches of the world were created from time immemorial by slaves? From the irrigation systems of Mesopotamia, the Great Wall(s) of China, the pyramids of Egypt, and acropolis of Athens, to the plantations of sugar on Cuba and of cotton in Louisiana and Arkansas, the coal mines of Kolyma and Germany's highways? And wars! From the dawn of history they were waged in order to capture slaves. Seize them, chain them, whip them, rape them, feel satisfaction at having another human being as one's property. The acquisition of slaves was an important, and frequently sole cause of wars, their powerful and even undisguised prime motivation.

Those who managed to survive the transatlantic journey (it was said that theships carried 'black cargo') brought with them their own Afro-Egyptian culture, the same one that had fascinated Herodotus and which he had described so tirelessly ion his book long before that culture reached the Western hemisphere.

And what of Herodotus himself, what sort of slaves did he have? How many? How did he treat them? .... What happened to them after Herodotus's death? Were they put up for sale in the marketplace? .... ]

I finished the Kapuscinski volume a few days ago. Currently I am reading a most painful work of history on the Reconstruction. Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War by Nicholas Lemann, has just been published. It is another account of that period about which hardly anyone knows anything these days, and counters with real history that little which is "known," which is almost entirely lies. Though Lemann is not the first to write this, and indeed, during the period it was well known for what it was -- the Civil War was not finished with surrender by the Confederacy. The war continued, but this time directly against the former slaves, in order to have what Kapuscinski stated above:

[ "And wars! From the dawn of history they were waged in order to capture slaves. Seize them, chain them, whip them, rape them, feel satisfaction at having another human being as one's property. The acquisition of slaves was an important, and frequently sole cause of wars, their powerful and even undisguised prime motivation." ]

There is no disguising that this next movement of the Civil War was motivated by this -- that the Civil War was about this and nothing else. The accounts from the archives and collections that Lemann brings forth proves this without doubt. It was also a further war against the Union. Which backs up our sense here that this nation is NOT a nation, which came into bold conviction post the failure of the levees, which the North and Grant, in the more consuming interests of the vast plutocratic fortunes being made, and the federal government -- bolstered with many a legislator returned by foul means from the South (sound familiar?) allowed this to happen.

The nearest we ever came to being a united nation was with the New Deal and WWII -- when government worked! After that the same reactionary forces that came to the fore prior, during and post the Civil War, have waged relentless warfare upon the government, to make it not work, to make it be the enemy, just as it was perceived all along by the states that became the confederacy.

This is a terrible book. I sometimes skip entire pages because of they are contemporary newspaper reports of the terrorism the southern gentlemen carried out on the bodies of the former slaves: men, women and children. Holocaust of torture, burnings, rape and murder against entire communities, relentless and continual.

As for the stories of the carpetbaggers? Propaganda, lies, created by the sons of the confederacy, deliberately. They were helping set up schools and banks and advising the former slaves on how to build their own farms. Since such evil was being carried out against black people who cared ultimately, once the "carpetbaggers" were forced out by terror and torture and murder?

The slavers won.

What we've got today is the consequence.