HUMAN SACRIFICES

Dear Moses,

I never read comments twice in the forum but I did this for your reply per human sacrifices. Many travelogues on Africa in the past were written with exaggerations out of all proportion so as to cause sensations and woo naive readers to buy those books. Also some men of God did that when they wanted to gain sympathy and supports for their adventures in Africa.  That was how they raised cash for their missions. Today some NGOs and even Unesco Unicef.. still do this to play on the sentiment of humankind and raise the needed cash. Remember the 'Dark Continent' of Henry Stanley the British born naturalized American journalist in central Africa employed then to work for King Leopold of the Belgian peoples? He popularized the phrase.  Was the continent really 'dark' literary? His dark stood for lack of information about Africa (see my work: http://vibanflagbooksinternatinal.blogspot.ca/2013/05/origins-of-africa-place-names-newly.html.) 

Remember the Dark Ages of Europe? It was too dark because there was no information about Europe to the rest of the world. 'Dark' had nothing to do with the color of African population, soil, flora or fauna as applied in the past to some parts of Africa. (Also, read my work entitled Origins of African Place Names (2009). Now we know but some jejune journalists still use that term today as their way to derogate Africa [as to some, what is light colored is better than what is black]. I will cite from Morel's Black Man's Burden (1923: 9) to further elucidate this point:

"The figure on my canvas [he meant his frontispiece with Africans carrying rocks on their heads-my italic] is the African, the man of sorrows in the human family....And the reason he alone is represented there is that the question of 'native races' and their treatment by the white races, centres henceforth upon the Black man, as the African is called, although few Africans are wholly black. The statement needs amplifying, perhaps." I have succinctly done this for you (supra). 

I would like to tell you that there is not a single community on earth that never practiced human sacrifices at one stage of their existence. It is even happening as you are reading this commentary! If you dig into the etymology of 'Britain' you will see that the Greek gave that name because of their savage sacrifices of humans. It was bloody, brutal, and merciless in those days. 

You will also see that in the past when some anthropologists or ethnographers were not putting sand in skulls of Africans and measuring the sizes of their craniums to determine their idiocies, they were coming forward with all sorts of bogus theories to substantiate their primitiveness. This is not fiction but go to their old journals and you will be shocked reading their 'scientific' findings. That was racism of naivety.  Do you know the reason? It was because they were neurotic and ever wanted to get something to prove that they were on top when everybody was the same. It was a common practice in the past when looking for reasons to  substantiate racial superiority of one group of persons over another that never was and will never be. 

If you are white it is because nature so loved you that it gave you that color to survive in the cold or temperate zones. If you are black it is also the love of Mother Nature, call it God that gave you that to enable you to survive in the very hot open air climes of the tropics. Your color or your shape has nothing to do with your intellectual vivacity or status as a biological being. We will be awry to confine this to these our brothers, some of whom have no clue as to the origin of man on earth and how all of us are related to one another and emanated from Mother Africa. 

When it comes to economy and survival, some persons on earth could put others down so as to have the lion's share of the cake. There are men who have put women down in the past and even as your are reading this so as to ride them like donkeys,lackeys. Many still do at the time of writing in the Middle East, Africa and in other communities even in North America. Why do women not get the same salaries as men even when some of them work harder than men? It is sexual discrimination just for some men to sit on top as they had done before. 

Do you know that apartheid masters preached that you blacks were so inferior and cannot even govern yourselves. I remember Mr. Ian Smith the UDI Prime Minister of Rhodesia, now Dzimbabwe (correct spelling) called Zimbabwe said that in a 1000 years no African would rule that country. It might have been his attitude that framed the mind of old President Robert Mugabe to have the feeling that if he gives up power the Northerners will return to dominate Africans, Southerners again as in the past.  To Mr. Smith, they were not fit as they were inferior. Are you all that inferior? How long did it take the Greeks to figure out the democratic government? Who were the first teachers of Greek philosophers whose doctrine influenced the Western thinking? Africans! How long did it take Europe to wipe out imperial dictatorship vestiges of which are still extant?

Some sacrifices still take place today we call mercy killing, euthanasia. It is sometimes sacrifices as the offering of people on gods' alters in the past some of which we read in the Holy Bible. Many of you did not long ago when tasting the first yams harvested in SE Nigeria and there are still isolated killing of albinos or others for their parts to be sacrificed to gods to achieve certain things in life in Tanzania, East Africa. These peoples have made the earth their heaven and are not convinced by any counselling or religious doctrines as Thou shall not kill of the Ten Commandments. 

I once read a story of mercy killing that most of you do today called euthanasia or abortion. It was the killing of a sick aged Indian, you now call "First Nation People". The father of these two Indians in Hudson Bay was ill and the men dug his grave and put him in it and strangled him to death with the use of rawhide pulled from opposite directions. When he died they covered his dead body with dirt. Past stories of this genre from SE Asia, Africa and South America will make you consider the killing today of those they consider as not sympathetic with them by the infamous ISIS, Boko Haram, Al Shabaab, Al Qaeda as a child's play. What of your Nazi killing during the Second World War in attempt to weed the world of inferior peoples: Jews, homosexuals, the intellectuals, the physically and mentally impaired, etc.. and have a super Aryan race. Many were gazed or destroyed by other conceivable ways many of you know if not read the well researched and Britten work of Roberts Weistrich: Hitler and the Holocaust (2001) with the only critique being that he did not compare the sacrifices of the Jewry with those of  Africans during the Slave Trade and Slavery. Those were human sacrificed

In the modern killing we euphemistically call euthanasia, injections or tablets are given to accelerate the death of a person who rather than commit suicide themselves, die naturally opt for a rotten medical person to perform that act for them. In another case that happens every minute on earth a live fetus is killed as weed or parasite from parents, women who do not want to bring such children up for all sorts of reasons. We call this abortion. Literally millions are killed that way year in year out for economic, health, family planning and other reasons beyond the scope of this missive. The defenseless fetus is sacrificed so that the mother can be free from economic hardship or responsibilities or remain youthful and still have dalliance, voluptuous bliss. She is applauded by some family planners who defend her that her body belongs to her and she could do anything she wants with it. That is their definition of human right. Others applaud as abortion helps to reduce what they see as overpopulation of the world with less food, water and wealth to go round, an archaic doctrine of Malthus when technology of food production and others were still at their infancy. To them, reduction of global population by such vice which they do not accept as vice, evil gives man quality life. Remember that to them, the world is Heaven and after life on earth there is nothing else but worthless speculations. Agnostics even subscribe money to trumpet this message on your ears on international media. That is freedom, human sacrifice of those who believe that after their death life ends and that there is no Heaven or even God. They are soulless peoples, they believe.

Still in the case of the Hudson Bay tribe referred to above, they would  also eat their babies rather than to starve to death as reported in a book called Le Voyageur Francais in 1748. Let me not go far, in 1884, two sailors Dudley and Stephens were shipwrecked off the British coast because their ship was blown away from their trajectory and were away for 24 days and they ran short of provision. They were eventually rescued by another passing boat. They had had with them a little skipper boy whom they decided to kill him to eat rather than to starve to death. When they were rescued they gave their account of the missing chap and were arrested and prosecuted to be hung. There were outcries from the British public to release the men. The case landed on the desk of  Sir William Vernon Harcourt Esq, a Cambridge trained no-nonsense public lawyer who was then the Home Secretary of the UK Government. He would not yield but owing to formidable pressure the men were not hung and lived to die a normal death but in prison. To kill another innocent persons so as to save your life is what the two sailors did and what many do today to fetuses they do not consider as living things. Are we allowed to kill others so as to live? That my 'amicus' was and is human sacrifice. 

You will see that biologically a rat is the same as a man and an elephant but would a man stand on a rostrum to tell those creatures that he is better than them? That is what some Caucasians  did in the past. Remember before they actually believed that if you were fair-skinned you were more of a human and better off than a dark-skinned person. Were they right? It did help them to exploit mercilessly dark-skinned peoples as slaves who gave some the wealth they are luxuriating in today. It is now history and we do not want to exhume the bitter past if not when the dark-skinned person would have their turn no one would be safe on earth. The hatchet has been buried and sealed with concrete.  Now that we know that color of the skin is nature's way of protecting us based on the latitude we are in, do we still believe that our color is superior to that of the person next door or in the other continent? Hope you have been reading Dr. Thomas Ozoji's write ups, you will learn more particularly the piece he wrote to refute Dr. Watson's allegation that Africans' (black people's) IQ was low. Such a person will say that President Barack Obama's IQ is that of a maverick. Thanks for the good piece.
 Viban Viban Ngo.



Date: Friday, 23 January 2009
From: Moses Ebe Ochonu


I am a little confused. Are we discussing human sacrifice as actual acts of ritual or power or as a discursive category of othering? I fear that we are not approaching the issue methodologically and raising questions about how and why human sacrifice was/is an appealing rhetoric of othering--operationalized by both Europeans and Africans. Does the fact that human sacrifice make cameo appearances in art, colonial discourse, and local legend answer our inquiries on the subject or should it raise new methodological concerns about how this rhetoric is deployed and why and for whom discourses of human sacrifice function.

I am not suggesting that human sacrifice qua human sacrifice is not a historical or anthropological reality. But how do we separate the prevalent discourses on it, found everywhere in the colonial library and in colonized African legends, from actual acts of ritual sacrifice that perhaps deserve a separate analytical examination.

I have encountered several colonial accounts and claims of head hunting and its supposed association with certain African groups. But on close examination, most of these tales emerge as familiar, convenient ethnographic renderings of that mysterious, unsearchable zone of African symbolic life, the aim of which is to simplify African universes and render them in a lexicon that suits European cultural palates and legitimizes colonial social actions. Indeed, the colonial ethnographic desire to "know" everything about African colonial peoples produced and helped fabricate social practices and universes that would appear strange even to Africans that are purportedly associated with them.

At the same time, I have confronted African tales and legends--collected, of course, by the etymologically hegemonic colonial ethnographer--that advance fantastic tales of head hunting and human sacrifice. The Africans who told these stories were often using them to curry favor from colonial anthropologists by confirming prepackaged Eurocentric perspectives on them and their group. They also advanced these legends to pad and burnish their masculine resumes, hoping that that would position them well in a colonial system obsessed about working with strong African men. For their part, the colonial ethnographers they had what they wanted--a reaffirmation of standard narratives of African otherness.

Everyone went home happy, so to say, and we contemporary scholars are left to clean up and sort out the methodological mess, trying to sift through strategic colonial social communications and the realities that they purport to describe or analyze.

I urge that we guard against being seduced by the mere existence or prevalence of sources--secondary or primary--on human sacrifice in Africa so that we can ask the right methodological questions of this corpus of human sacrifice writings.