Johann Hari:

It's not just

Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

The IMF itself

should be on trial

Imagine a prominent figure was charged, not with raping a hotel maid, but with starving her, and her family, to death

Friday, 3 June 2011

Sometimes, the most revealing aspect of the shrieking babble of the 24/7 news agenda is the silence. Often the most important facts are hiding beneath the noise, unmentioned and undiscussed.

 

So the fact that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is facing trial for allegedly raping a maid in a New York hotel room is – rightly – big news. But imagine a prominent figure was charged not with raping a maid, but starving her to death, along with her children, her parents, and thousands of other people. That is what the IMF has done to innocent people in the recent past. That is what it will do again, unless we transform it beyond all recognition. But that is left in the silence.

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Related articles

• Strauss-Kahn affair prompts backlash against French sexism
• Search the news archive for more stories

 

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To understand this story, you have to reel back to the birth of the IMF. In 1944, the countries that were poised to win the Second World War gathered in a hotel in rural New Hampshire to divvy up the spoils. With a few honourable exceptions, like the great British economist John Maynard Keynes, the negotiators were determined to do one thing. They wanted to build a global financial system that ensured they received the lion's share of the planet's money and resources. They set up a series of institutions designed for that purpose – and so the IMF was delivered into the world.

 

The IMF’s official job sounds simple and attractive. It is supposedly there to ensure poor countries don’t fall into debt, and if they do, to lift them out with loans and economic expertise. It is presented as the poor world’s best friend and guardian. But beyond the rhetoric, the IMF was designed to be dominated by a handful of rich countries – and, more specifically, by their bankers and financial speculators. The IMF works in their interests, every step of the way.

 

Let’s look at how this plays out on the ground. In the 1990s, the small country of Malawi in south-eastern Africa was facing severe economic problems after enduring one of the worst HIV-AIDS epidemics in the world and surviving a horrific dictatorship. They had to ask the IMF for help. If the IMF has acted in its official role, it would have given loans and guided the country to develop in the same way that Britain and the US and every other successful country had developed – by protecting its infant industries, subsidising its farmers, and investing in the education and health of its people.

 

That’s what an institution that was concerned with ordinary people – and accountable to them – would look like. But the IMF did something very different. They said they would only give assistance if Malawi agreed to the ‘structural adjustments’ the IMF demanded. They ordered Malawi to sell off almost everything the state owned to private companies and speculators, and to slash spending on the population. They demanded they stop subsidising fertilizer, even though it was the only thing that made it possible for farmers – most of the population – to grow anything in the country’s feeble and depleted soil. They told them to prioritise giving money to international bankers over giving money to the Malawian people.

So when in 2001 the IMF found out the Malawian government had built up large stockpiles of grain in case there was a crop failure, they ordered them to sell it off to private companies at once. They told Malawi to get their priorities straight by using the proceeds to pay off a loan from a large bank the IMF had told them to take out in the first place, at a 56 per cent annual rate of interest. The Malawian president protested and said this was dangerous. But he had little choice. The grain was sold. The banks were paid.

 

The next year, the crops failed. The Malawian government had almost nothing to hand out. The starving population was reduced to eating the bark off the trees, and any rats they could capture. The BBC described it as Malawi’s “worst ever famine.” There had been a much worse crop failure in 1991-2, but there was no famine because then the government had grain stocks to distribute. So at least a thousand innocent people starved to death.

 

At the height of the starvation, the IMF suspended $47m in aid, because the government had ‘slowed’ in implementing the marketeering ‘reforms’ that had led to the disaster. ActionAid, the leading provider of help on the ground, conducted an autopsy into the famine. They concluded that the IMF “bears responsibility for the disaster.”

 

Then, in the starved wreckage, Malawi did something poor countries are not supposed to do. They told the IMF to get out. Suddenly free to answer to their own people rather than foreign bankers, Malawi disregarded all the IMF’s ‘advice’, and brought back subsidies for the fertiliser, along with a range of other services to ordinary people. Within two years, the country was transformed from being a beggar to being so abundant they were supplying food aid to Uganda and Zimbabwe.

 

The Malawian famine should have been a distant warning cry for you and me. Subordinating the interests of ordinary people to bankers and speculators caused starvation there. Within a few years, it had crashed the global economy for us all.

 

In the history of the IMF, this story isn’t an exception: it is the rule. The organisation takes over poor countries, promising it has medicine that will cure them – and then pours poison down their throats. Whenever I travel across the poor parts of the world I see the scars from IMF ‘structural adjustments’ everywhere, from Peru to Ethiopia. Whole countries have collapsed after being IMF-ed up – most famously Argentina and Thailand in the 1990s.

 

Look at some of the organisation’s greatest hits. In Kenya, the IMF insisted the government introduce fees to see the doctor – so the number of women seeking help or advice on STDs fell by 65 per cent, in one of the countries worst affected by AIDS in the world.

In Ghana, the IMF insisted the government introduce fees for going to school – and the number of rural families who could afford to send their kids crashed by two-thirds. In Zambia, the IMF insisted they slash health spending – and the number of babies who died doubled. Amazingly enough, it turns out that shovelling your country’s money to foreign bankers, rather than your own people, isn’t a great development strategy.

 

The Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz worked closely with the IMF for over a decade, until he quit and became a whistle-blower. He told me a few years ago: “When the IMF arrives in a country, they are interested in only one thing. How do we make sure the banks and financial institutions are paid?... It is the IMF that keeps the [financial] speculators in business. They’re not interested in development, or what helps a country to get out of poverty.”

 

Some people call the IMF “inconsistent”, because the institution supports huge state-funded bank bailouts in the rich world, while demanding an end to almost all state funding in the poor world. But that’s only an inconsistency if you are thinking about the realm of intellectual ideas, rather than raw economic interests. In every situation, the IMF does what will get more money to bankers and speculators. If rich governments will hand banks money for nothing in “bailouts”, great. If poor countries can be forced to hand banks money in extortionate “repayments”, great. It’s absolutely consistent.

 

Some people claim that Strauss-Kahn was a “reformer” who changed the IMF after he took over in 2009. Certainly, there was a shift in rhetoric – but detailed study by Dr Daniela Gabor of the University of the West of England has shown that the substance is business-as-usual.

Look, for example, at Hungary. After the 2008 crash, the IMF lauded them for keeping to their original deficit target by slashing public services. The horrified Hungarian people responded by kicking the government out, and choosing a party that promised to make the banks pay for the crisis they had created. They introduced a 0.7 per cent levy on the banks (four times higher than anywhere else). The IMF went crazy. They said this was “highly distortive” for banking activity – unlike the bailouts, of course – and shrieked that it would cause the banks to flee from the country. The IMF shut down their entire Hungary programme to intimidate them.

 

But the collapse predicted by the IMF didn’t happen. Hungary kept on pursuing sensible moderate measures, instead of punishing the population. They imposed taxes on the hugely profitable sectors of retail, energy and telecoms, and took funds from private pensions to pay the deficit. The IMF shrieked at every step, and demanded cuts for ordinary Hungarians instead. It was the same old agenda, with the same old threats. Strauss-Kahn did the same in almost all the poor countries where the IMF operated, from El Salvador to Pakistan to Ethiopia, where big cuts in subsidies for ordinary people have been imposed. Plenty have been intimidated into harming their own interests. The US-based think tank the Center for Economic and Policy Research found 31 of 41 IMF agreements require ‘pro-cyclical’ macroeconomic policies – pushing them further into recession.

 

It is not only Strauss-Kahn who should be on trial. It is the institution he has been running. There’s an inane debate in the press about who should be the next head of the IMF, as if we were discussing who should run the local Milk Board. But if we took the idea of human equality seriously, and remembered all the people who have been impoverished, starved and killed by this institution, we would be discussing the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission – and how to disband the IMF entirely and start again.

 

If Strauss-Kahn is guilty, I suspect I know how it happened. He must have mistaken the maid for a poor country in financial trouble. Heads of the IMF have, after all, been allowed to rape them with impunity for years.

Like Johann Hari on The Independent on Facebook for updates

 

* For updates on the IMF and other issues, follow Johann on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101.

* Johann presents a weekly podcast on the crucial issues of the week, which you can subscribe to here.

* The main groups monitoring and exposing the IMF are War on Want and the Bretton Woods Project

Five of the

Most Exciting Innovators

Shaking Up

Global Development

• Raj Kumar
  President, Devex

As GOOD reported this April, Devex asked thousands of global development and aid professionals, “Which of the leading organizations in development do you believe are the most innovative in the sector?” Based on the results of this poll, Devex—a hub for the international development and aid community—unveiled the Top 40 Development Innovators, a listing of the most innovative of the largest organizations in global development. But what about the scrappy startups doing great?

Here we bring you five groups that were too small for consideration in the Top 40 list, but are still making a big impact. These social enterprises and nonprofits, in fact, are emblematic of innovation itself. 

Sproxil: using text messages to make medicine safer

Counterfeit prescription drugs can be a devastating and pervasive problem in the developing world. The World Health Organization estimates that 10 percent to 30 percent of drugs in the developing world are counterfeit, compared to one percent or less in industrialized nations. 

Enter Sproxil, founded in 2008 by Dr. Ashifi Gogo, a Ph.D. at Dartmouth College and a native of Ghana. Using Sproxil’s technology, end-consumers can now scratch off a unique code from the medicine packaging and text-message it to the phone number provided, instantly receiving a confirmation of authenticity. If a drug is not authentic, the consumer is given another phone number to call, to report the counterfeit. Sproxil’s product benefits consumers, pharmaceutical companies and law enforcement officials. The only losers are the counterfeiters.

Medic Mobile (formerly FrontlineSMS:Medic): streamlining rural healthcare

Another cell phone innovation in the health arena also makes use of text messages, but in a very different way. Poor, rural communities located far from any hospital or clinic often depend on community health workers, who have basic medical training and coordinate with the nearest hospital—often many miles away. The ability for community health workers to communicate effectively with medical professionals is a key factor in improving health outcomes in rural areas.

Medic Mobile develops platforms that use text messages to transmit patient records, provide diagnostic information about patients, and coordinate care from extremely remote rural villages. During a 6-month pilot project in one Malawi hospital, the FrontlineSMS platform “saved hospital staff 1200 hours of follow up time.”

One Acre Fund: doubling poor farmers' profits.

Some of the poorest Africans live in rural areas and depend on their land to survive. According to One Acre Fund, 75 percent of East Africans are farmers. One Acre helps farmers increase their yield and their income by working closely with them throughout the farming cycle and leveraging many of the tools and practices small farmers in developed countries take for granted.

Field officers educate groups of local farmers on modern agricultural techniques and then provide them with high quality planting materials, like seeds and fertilizer. Once the crop is harvested, One Acre acts as a “bulk-selling agent,” enabling the farmers to reap higher prices than they could on their own. Part of the increased profit can then be invested in next year’s crop.

In just five years of operation, One Acre has reached 54,000 farm families (up from 12,000 in 2009). In 2011, One Acre verified that a test group of their farmers were, on average, doubling their profits.

Husk Power Systems: from rice to light

It’s not just health workers who have trouble reaching remote villages in developing countries. Electricity is often an inaccessible resource. In the poorest states in India, 80 to 90 percent of villagers are without power, according to Acumen Fund a Husk Power Systems investor. These statistics do however have far reaching implications. For example, on education outcomes—children can't study in the dark—and on environmental and health conditions—from the indoor use of kerosene and coal for light.

So Husk Power Systems searched for a solution for the millions in India without electricity and identified one resource the remote villages seemed to have plenty of: rice husks. Husks are an unused byproduct of rice production. But with HPS’s innovative technology, husks are turned into gas to power an electricity-generating turbine. In less than four years of operation, HPS has already provided 100,000 people with affordable, clean and renewable husk power. By 2014 they plan to reach one million households, create 10,000 jobs and save 72,000 tons of C02 emissions per year. (See our past coverage of Husk Power Systems here.)

VisionSpring: a model business model

Economic growth also requires vision. Literally.

VisionSpring provides hundreds of thousands of people in developing countries with affordable corrective eye-wear, and as a result, with significant gains in their productivity. VisionSpring engages “vision entrepreneurs” who sell the glasses in their communities.

These entrepreneurs are given a “business in a bag” sales kit, a few days of training, and directions on how to refer the more complex cases to others who can handle them. The organization provides a much needed, life-changing service in a sustainable way that empowers local entrepreneurs. Like many recently emerging social enterprises, this organization makes an impact by leveraging the time, talent and social ties of local community members.

Of course there are thousands of examples of small, enterprising start-ups leveraging innovative ideas to solve tough problems (GOOD readers suggested some organizations here). We invite you to share your innovative ideas in global development with us on www.devex.com.

Image: (cc) Husk Power Systems generator from Acumen Fund's Flickr stream. 

Full Documentary ~

Charles Mingus:

Triumph of the Underdog [1997]

Posted on Sat, June 11, 2011 at 12:00 AM

Charles MingusMingus said of himself "I am half black man, half yellow man, but I claim to be a Negro. I am Charles Mingus, the famed jazz musician--but not famed enough to make a living in America."

"His statement summed up the conflict that plagued this musical genius his entire life: volatility, pain, prescience, and raw rage roiled inside a complex man, composer, bass player, and trombonist who transcended labels and refused to be pigeonholed into a single musical style--and who did not achieve real fame until late in his career.

The documentary is full of well-preserved footage and contains interviews with many Mingus followers like Wynton Marsalis as well as performances by icons Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Gerry Mulligan. The film traverses past the musical legend with insight and information into Mingus's personal life, his civil rights activism, and his final triumph in the music world--just as his body began to deteriorate from Lou Gehrig's disease--to his eventual death in 1979. Mingus left a legacy composed of genius, vulnerability, brilliance, anarchy, and, as one friend noted, "the entire range of human emotion that is reflected in his music." - Paula Nechak 

 

Posted by: ivetteromero | June 10, 2011

Call for Papers: Negritud, International Conference

Negritud, the Journal of Afro-Latin American Studies [Negritud: Revista de Estudios Afro-Latinoamericanos] announces its 3rd International Conference, to be held March 22-24, 2012, in San Juan, Puerto Rico (exact venue to be announced). The deadline for submissions is January 14, 2012.

The organizers call for abstracts on any aspect of Afro-Latin American themes in literature, history, sociology, anthropology, archeology, musicology, pedagogy, and other fields of study, as well as creative writing in French, English, Portuguese, or Spanish. (Presentation time for papers is limited to 20 minutes.)

Potential participants should provide an e-mail message with a 200-word abstract and a cover letter listing the following: name (last, first); academic affiliation; title of the paper; address; telephone number; e-mail address. Please send submissions to the attention of Dr. Luis Miletti at negritudconference@yahoo.com.

[Many thanks to Don Walicek for bringing this item to our attention.]

For more information on the journal, see http://www.afrocubaweb.com/negritud.htm

Welcome to the Helium, Population Services International (PSI) and Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting’s “World population Approaches 7 Billion” contest. This is a special opportunity for anyone to write on issues related to world population. Helium members who are passionate about global health or independent international journalism are encouraged to join both of these important nonprofit organizations.

PSI and Pulitzer Center have partnered with Helium to connect writers concerned with population issues. This contest provides an opportunity for people passionate about the issue of world population to learn from each other and address concerns regarding the issue in a friendly, competitive and exciting event.

To learn more about the sponsors, visit the contest announcement page.

How the contest works:

• This contest consists of four titles with a two-week submission period. Please submit magazine-style articles between 400 and 500 words in length. The best articles will utilize and cite relevant data and statistics.
• Submission dates: Wednesday, June 8, at 00:00:01 GMT to Tuesday, June 21, at 23:59 GMT. For current GMT time, click HERE
• Awaiting calculation dates: After the submission period, an additional week is provided for article rating to reach community consensus. All titles in the contest are closed to further submissions and Leapfrogs during this time. (Your article’s rank may fluctuate wildly or hardly move.)
• Winners: The winners of the contest on this page will be displayed on the leaderboard on Wednesday, June 29. In the case of a tie in this contest, a panel will be assembled to determine the winners. Read more about winner selection and contest points on the Contest Rules page.
• Completed contest: Once the contest is closed and the results have been displayed on the leaderboard, the four top-ranked articles on each title will be reviewed by a panel of judges from PSI and Pulitzer Center. The panel will determine the winning article which will be published in the September issue of Impact, PSI’s quarterly print magazine. The top-ranked article from each title will be published on PSI’s Healthy Lives blog.
• The winning article will be announced on this page and the contest announcement page, as well as on PSI and Pulitzer’s websites.
• Titles The four titles for the contest are listed below.

 

Winners earn:

1		Apple iPad
1		Velocity Micro

How to earn points:

• 5 points - over 95th percentile
• 4 points - over 85th percentile
• 3 points - over 75th percentile
• 2 points - over 65th percentile
• 1 points - over 55th percentile
• 0 points - over 45th percentile
• -1 points - over 35th percentile
• -2 points - over 25th percentile
• -3 points - over 15th percentile
• -4 points - over 5th percentile
• -5 points - 0- 5th percentile

 

Be sure to read a copy of Helium’s Writing Standards before you enter the contest.

This week's contest titles:

• How does population growth affect gender inequality?
• How should men be involved in family planning?
• What are the best ways to engage young people in family planning?
• What role should governments play in promoting informed choice for people's desired family size?

 

Debra Wright

Greetings,

 I am excited to announce that I've received a grant from Leeway Foundation for publication of a collection of short stories and poems (see below).  

 Have you written a short story, or are you about to write a poem that might fit into my upcoming "For Women" collection?  For this collection, where you're from really does matter.  I'm looking for writing that places Black women in locales around the world--from Tennessee to Tanzania, Mississippi to Mali, Georgia to Jamaica, Brooklyn to Brixton, and everywhere in between.  Essays and poems should demonstrate a clear cultural aesthetic with particular customs relative to those locations, while addressing issues around relationships with men, children, other women, love, pain, beauty, sex, loneliness--you get the picture.   Take a moment to listen to Nina Simone's "Four Women" or Talib Kweli's "For Women" (if you haven't already done so) and read between the lines for ideas about the topical range of writing being sought for this publication. 

 Submission deadline: August 31st.  Questions: email me or call 267-334-1526.  And please pass the word if you know anyone who might be interested.  Hope to hear from you. 

 Best,

 Debra

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Neighborhood: Clifton Heights

Change Partner: Dr. Dulivanette Onema

Discipline: Literary Arts

Debra will produce a series of poems and short stories with an accompanying CD based on her essay, “Four Women-For Women: Black Women All Grown Up”, which has been published in an academic anthology. The collection will examine the imagery of black female stereotypical caricatures (i.e., Mammy, Tragic Mulatto, Jezebel, Sapphire), from the past and present, around issues such as relationships, racism, sexuality, and concepts of beauty, as addressed in the lyrics of Nina Simone’s “Four Women” and Talib Kweli’s “For Women”. In addition to expressing the perspectives of African-American, African, and Caribbean women, Debra’s poems will also be inclusive of the Black British female point of view, specifically those who are descendants of the 1948 Windrush Generation, people who migrated from Jamaica to London for promised economic opportunities. Once completed, Debra will facilitate presentations at community-based venues for the purpose of bringing together diverse groups and stimulating dialogue beyond the academic community.

A Tribe Called Quest's Drama

Finally Comes To 'Life'

D-Money  |  06/06/2011 at 1:00 PM  |  Comments (2)

Have you been keeping up with all the controversy surrounding Michael Rappaport's Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest documentary? If you haven't here's the Cliff's Notes version. All members of the group originally agreed to do the film. Q-Tip then took too his Twitter account to let it be known that he was not at all pleased with the final product. Then, at the film's Sundance premiere, a tearful Phife Dawg was the only ATCQ member to appear. This was soon followed by the remaining group members having a sit down with MTV's Sway to air their grievances (yet oddly enough still encourage fans to see the film). If the film is half as interesting as the drama surrounding it, it'll be a must see for sure. Check out the official trailer for the film below, then check here to get the dates and cities where you can catch it.

John Ernest. Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xiv + 426 pp. $27.50 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8078-5521-8; $70.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8078-2853-3.

Reviewed by Richard Newman (Department of History, Rochester Institute of Technology)
Published on H-SHEAR (June, 2005)

On January 23, 1794, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen appeared at the office of United States clerk for the district of Pennsylvania with a copy of their recently completed pamphlet, "A Narrative of the Black People during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia." The clerk duly entered their claim onto the federal register, thereby making Allen and Jones the first African-American copyright holders in American history. Not merely an historic work, Allen and Jones's pamphlet was itself deeply concerned with the notion of historical consciousness. Worried that a white printer's negative portrayal of the African-American community during Philadelphia's Yellow Fever epidemic would echo through the ages--and become firmly entrenched in white Americans' historical consciousness--Allen and Jones offered their own story of black heroism to correct the historical record.

As John Ernest argues in his illuminating and deeply engaging book Liberation Historiography, Allen and Jones were part of a vanguard of black history writers in the early Republic. Working from a range of political and ideological perspectives through time and space, African Americans nevertheless molded a coherent historical consciousness. While many scholars date formal black history writing to the works of William Wells Brown and William C. Nell in the years just before the Civil War, Ernest makes a compelling claim that African-American writers displayed a deep commitment to historical understanding from the post-revolutionary era onward. From Allen and Jones's work in the 1790s to David Walker in the 1830s to Martin Delany in the 1850s, black authors attempted to re-imagine the process of doing and telling African-American history in a Republic devoted largely to denying its existence.

Ernest has written a bold and wide-ranging study, with copious references to cultural and literary theorists, not to mention much recent work by historians of black public protest (including such luminaries as Patrick Rael and John Stauffer). Liberation Historiography also reflects Ernest's mastery of all manner of black literary history. Indeed, among the many virtues of the book is its capacious view of what constituted antebellum black historical writing. Ernest celebrates the reprinted sermon--not the antebellum slave narrative--as perhaps the most widely available black protest document prior to the Civil War, and thus one of the richest modes of conveying African-American history. He also pays considerable attention to politically minded pamphleteers, digging deep into the secondary (or less well-known) works of such figures as Martin Delany and William Wells Brown. For these reasons alone, Ernest's book is a most welcome addition to the bulging historiography of African-American writing and public protest.

But Ernest's book is compelling for another reason. For it is much less concerned with filling in gaps in our historical knowledge of antebellum black writers and more interested in probing the deeper meaning of black historical consciousness prior to the movement towards professionalism at the end of the nineteenth century, a professionalism that touched history writers across racial lines. In his epilogue, Ernest explains that after the Civil War many black writers turned from oppositional to institutional history writing, hoping that their scholarly histories of churches, black abolitionism and other issues would legitimize black achievement in, and contributions to, the American republic. Antebellum history writers, on the other hand, offered a more challenging framework for understanding the past, a discourse "in accordance with the terms and conditions of oppressed communities" (p. 331). While scholars may quibble with his readings of various writers, it is surely Ernest's meta-claims about antebellum black history writing--its oppositional style and intent--that may elicit the most interesting debate. Yet even here, Ernest's conscientious style will instruct and inform those who perhaps disagree with him.

Ernest makes three main points in Liberation Historiography. First he argues that antebellum African-American historical consciousness revolved very much around sacred themes, most prominently Biblical stories emphasizing black redemption at the hands of a just God. Second, liberation historiography--defined as the accumulated body of historical writing aimed at black redemption--sought to underscore the centrality of a communalism which not only formed the foundation of past African glories but could be recaptured to confront the daunting challenges posed by slavery and racial injustice. Third, he contends that the modes of black historical writing--characterized by, among things, fragmentary analytical styles and sampling techniques--were every bit as important as the content, for African Americans fashioned a historical consciousness that was in many ways distinct from those of mainstream culture. In five chapters and an epilogue, Ernest spins a tale that is at once broadly familiar and yet refreshing.

At the heart of Ernest's book lies the concept of sacred history. According to Ernest, African-American history writers blended sacred and secular themes in their books, essays and reprinted sermons. Where secular history meditated on temporal events, such as fighting against the domestic slave trade and colonizationist movement, sacred history transcended the here-and-now and placed African-American struggles in a Biblical context. Exodus, Ernest asserts, formed a key thread in African Americans' rendering of their past. Like the ancient Israelites, black history writers pictured African-descended people as an oppressed and wandering group, a chosen community that would be redeemed by the Lord.

Other scholars have made similar connections but Ernest digs much deeper into black writers' sacred allusions than the book of "Exodus." Black history writers, he shows, mined "Ezekiel," "Hebrews," "Isaiah," "Psalms," and several other parts of the Bible to build an expansive spiritual perspective on black oppression and redemption. Allen and Jones, he notes cogently, referred to Psalm 68 ("Ethiopia" shall "stretch out her hand to God") when thanking white reformers for aiding enslaved people in the post-Revolutionary era (p. 48). More than merely a thankful nod to abolitionist allies, whose benevolence would hopefully speed black liberation in both the North and South, Ernest claims that this allusion placed black troubles in a healing sacred context, for those reading the pamphlet understood that Allen and Jones had invoked God--and not corrupt secular authorities--as the ultimate arbiter of truth, justice, and redemptive action.

Deeply connected to liberation theology--the belief that God is on the side of the oppressed--liberation historiography thus sought to translate African-American struggles into a sacred context capable of sustaining the black community through the vicissitudes of American slavery and even freedom. Indeed, community building was a critical aspect of blacks' sacred historical consciousness. According to Ernest, black history writers from Allen and Jones in the early national period to Henry Garnet and Martin Delany in the late antebellum era sought not merely to correct misperceptions of black history and achievement but "to create the community that could serve as the visible manifestation of history" (p. 57). William C. Nell's work, to take one prime example, offered a stirring "vision of community, a biblical vision of gathering together a scattered community" (p. 137). Nell's historical visions bolstered community building activities on the ground (in the building of autonomous black churches and benevolent groups in Boston and many other northern locales). Similarly, Ernest reads Delany as not simply a prophet of black emigrationism but "African [communal] destiny" (p. 128). Remove even Africa from emigration plans (in favor of, say, central America), Delany might have said, and "African" still connoted a powerful vision of communalism. History, in short, taught black writers like Delany and Nell that the concept of "community" might have been more important than even that of an African "homeland."

These concepts of sacred history and historically informed community building, as Ernest nicely points out, joined black history writers through time and space. Part of his task as an historian of black historians, then, is to find the fundamental logic informing African-American historical discourse before the Civil War. Where did it come from? The black church was clearly one source for inculcating sacred history views among African Americans. Freemasonry, Ernest argues, offered another, perhaps still undervalued institutional well-spring of these ideas. For example, the work of both Martin Delany and Robert Benjamin Lewis--the former a well-known author, the latter less so--was deeply rooted in Masonic discourse. "Freemasonry offered Lewis and Delany alike a tradition of historical interpretations that, as they believed, extended back to the Egyptian mysteries and offered as well frameworks for understanding relations among community, historical consciousness and individual character" (p. 117) As more than a few antebellum black writers would put it, Masonry's five virtues--truth, justice, temperance, prudence, and fortitude--offered the architectural metaphors necessary for black community building in the here and now. Scholars should take seriously, then, the significance of black fraternal organizations and black Masonic discourse.

Liberation historiography involved more than allusions to a sacred past and divinely inspired destiny. Ernest argues that African-American historical writing aimed at deconstructing broader historical narratives taking shape in the early republic--those that effaced black achievement and participation. "The rise of the white republic," he writes in a chapter entitled "The Theatre of History," "involved the rise of white nationalist history--approaches to history in which developing racial ideologies played a defining role" (p. 53). Black writers recognized that American history itself was in the process of being made; they sought to create a body of work capable of countering the fables of liberty on the march. Citing work by writers as seemingly divergent as emigrationist James Theodore Holly and ex-slave turned abolitionist James W. C. Pennington, Ernest notes that early black history writers took apart "one version of history"--a myopic and racist view of the American nation as a lily-white--"so that [they] would have the materials to construct a new historical consciousness" (p. 56). That historical consciousness would emphasize black achievement, the legitimacy of black claims to citizenship, and the efficacy of African-American self-determination strategies. In short, African Americans constructed a history which validated past, present, and even future struggles and missions.

In this sense, Ernest claims that black historical writing must be understood not merely as a dialogue with dominant discourses but as an oppositional act through and through. As he provocatively puts it in "Autobiography as History," "What is white [in black historical writing] is not simply the people but the system; what is black is not simply the people but the activist response to the system. Black is a verb, a historically contextualized performance, the process of life" (p. 217). Here Ernest's argument parallels that of Joanna Brooks, who has recently argued that early black writing constituted a "counter-public," or oppositional discourse.[1] In their myriad pamphlets of protest, black authors used the printed sphere, but for a vastly different purpose than did most white writers.

As much as Ernest's thesis impresses, it begs serious questions. For sacred history could transcend the needs of liberation theology. It could also serve as a delicate bridge of inter-racial understanding among God's children. Thus Richard Allen not only warned masters that the Lord would someday smite them but reminded emancipated slaves that they were similarly compelled to listen to the Almighty's edict of living in harmony with one another. Religion, Allen believed, offered former masters and former slaves a universal language by which to communicate and live. So too did black abolitionists use sacred history as a bonding agent on antebellum lecture circuits and in slave narratives (with slave narrators, like Douglass, artfully challenging white Christians to confront the snake of slavery in the Garden of America). In addition, Ernest might consider more the problem of audience. Did African-American writers, like all historians then and since, tailor their messages to specific audiences and modes of writing? For example, was an oppositional discourse more readily found in pamphlets and reprinted essays as opposed to slave narratives--and precisely because black pamphlet writers retained more control of their documents than most slave narrators?

But these questions should in no way detract from Ernest's impressive and wide-ranging book. For Liberation Historiography must be considered an essential part of second-wave literary and historical studies of black public sphere activism. Where first generation works (by Henry Louis Gates, Frances Smith, and William Andrews, among others) established the black literary cannon and emphasized the remarkable creativity of canonical writers from Douglass to Harriet Jacobs, new generations of scholars have both expanded the canon and deepened the study of black writing as a cultural (not merely individual) exercise. For historians, too, Ernest's book is instructive. Liberation Historiography offers a way to bridge the seemingly enormous gap between "community studies" scholars (whose approach to black identity and history revolves around traditional conceptions of African communalism) and "modernists" (those like Patrick Rael, who emphasize the exceptionalism of free black northerners and the significance of printed protest). For Ernest, African-descended writers utilized print to convey a range of tactical concerns and messages, including the saliency of sacred themes and black communalism in the struggle for justice. In this sense, Ernest has created a book that touches many facets of African-American historical writing, from its dawning in the eighteenth century to the present, and it will itself endure in the historiography for years to come.

Notes

[1]. Joanna Brooks, "The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic," William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 1 (January 2005).

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.

Citation: Richard Newman. Review of Ernest, John, Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861. H-SHEAR, H-Net Reviews. June, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10666

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