The 400-year-old Malian history of Richmond, Virginia
The President of Virginia Friends of Mali in 2020 is Ms Lydie Alapini Sakponou, a teacher with French and Beninois nationality. Her predecessor was Ms Ana Edwards, an artist and social activist whose interest in the links between Mali and Virginia is personal as well as philosophical. Ana’s father is Mel Edwards, one of America’s most famous African-American sculptors; her mother is a blond Norwegian – so the racial politics of Virginia is a part of Ana’s life story (even though she was raised in California). Her family history runs deep into America’s history of slavery and racial exploitation, and therefore into Richmond’s relationship with the Mali Empire.
“I know that two of my great- great- great-grandmothers were sold out of Richmond in the 1840s”
“I know that two of my great- great- great-grandmothers were sold out of Richmond in the 1840s,” she says, referring to the slave trade that flourished in the city, especially in the east-side neighborhood of Shockoe Bottom, beside the James River. That is a statement that would bring any interviewer to a stop. What can you say after that?
“From 1830 through 1865, Richmond’s Shockoe Bottom was the nation’s second-largest slave-trading center after New Orleans,” Ana continues, ”so it would have been full of slave-trading houses, and all the many supporting businesses. If you were a grocer or if you were a dry-goods person, if you were a seamstress or if you were the blacksmith (and there were going to be lots of those), then you were involved with slavery.”
Ana is also the President of the Sacred Ground project: a community struggle to obtain recognition for the African Cemetery at Broad St and 15th where historical researchers found Virginia’s African ancestors of the 1700s lying in a forgotten burial ground. The African cemetery is partly covered by Interstate I-95 and it lies partly under a parking lot where VCU medical staff parked their cars. After much debate and several years of argument, VCU and the city were persuaded to remove the asphalt from the parking lot, and to grass it over. Now at least the ancestral burial ground is decent. One is bound to wonder why anyone of any color or religion would not immediately wish to respect a cemetery as Sacred Ground?
I offered a petition to my Richmond Third Age Students at the Shepherd Center Open University, where people like me generously donate their time and energy to provide free teaching to entertain retired – mostly white - Richmonders. I was teaching a weekly course about the Mali Empire, in a classroom at First Presbyterian Church. What most excited the elderly ladies in my class each week, were the spectacular Malian costumes I wore to bring atmosphere to my subject. I dressed in bogolan brown mud cloth when teaching about Ségou, and I wore desert robes and a Tuareg turban when taking them to discover the wonders of Timbuktu.
I explained to these wealthy, middle-class ladies (and a few men) the links between Mali and Virginia, and I offered my petition: the “Negro Burial Ground” (as an old map of Richmond described it) had been rediscovered quite recently on an old map of Richmond, and that we were collecting signatures to ask the Mayor remove the parking lot and restore the Sacred Ground, out of respect for the Ancestors. To my amazement, one old white woman said that “No, I do not want to sign that petition” …. I could tell from her body language that she would not (could not) bring herself to support the emancipation of Blacks, even in death. Even after 250 years, she would deny African-Americans their human status. Actually they were Africans: “America” did not yet exist in the early 1700s.
The statue of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, dominated Richmond’s Monument Avenue as an deliberate racist reminder of White Supremacy in Virginia.
The problem of race in Richmond is greatly accentuated by memories of the American Civil War – rather as Ségou is still struggling with the aftermath of French colonial rule. When I first arrived in Virginia, I was told by friends: “Richmond is still fighting the Civil War, and Richmonders are still not convinced that they lost that war.” Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy. The war was vicious. Improved rifle technology and out-dated infantry tactics caused terrible slaughter – Malian society suffered a similar brutal impact from the arrival of Moroccan firearms in 1591, and then from modern rifles during the French conquest of Mali in the late 19th century. Professor David J. Hacker believes that at least 750,000 died between 1861-65 during the American Civil War, more than the total of 673,000 who died all other American wars [these numbers are American deaths, ignoring the 20 million people America has killed in its overseas wars.]
When Robert E. Lee retreated from Richmond in face of superior Union forces on April 3rd 1865, his troops burned the city – a destructive gesture I have never been able to understand, since he surrendered six days later. Southerners may tell you the Civil War was fought about power, economics, State Rights, Freedom, even Celtic Identity and other things. As a Celt, I feel insulted! In order to find out what really happened, I have read, in original sources, many of the statements and declarations made by the secessionist States. No one should make any mistake about this: the underlying question over which the Civil War was fought, was Slavery.
Jefferson Davis no longer presides over Richmond. His statue went up on June 3, 1907, falling on June 10, 2020: the third of many statues removed, starting with Columbus.
The very first black people reached Virginia in 1619: twenty Africans ripped from their homes in Angola, forcibly baptized on the shores of Africa and then shipped to the West Indies. Somehow this group found themselves in a vessel captured at sea, and they landed at Jamestown where today the excellent historical museum faithfully renders a version of their Angolan homes and lifestyle. The Angolan village in Jamestown looks exactly like rural Mali or Senegambia. These first Africans in Virginia, Christians in name at least, became indentured servants in Jamestown. The Virginia colony lacked a legal framework for slavery until 40 years later. The great expansion of slavery did not start until 1700. http://www.virginiaplaces.org/population/
We know from the shipping records that most of the Africans who came to Virginia during the first century of English settlement (and until around 1720) came from the lands of the Mali Empire: from the slave exporters of Gorée Island off Dakar, and James Island in the mouth of the Gambia River. While Portuguese slavers may have exported slaves from Angola and Elmina (Ghana) to Brazil as early as 1482, the American trade in slaves from Ghana, Dahomey and Nigeria became dominant only during the second half of the eighteenth century.
Slavery is a very painful, complex and controversial subject. The Bible shows it has existed in human society for at least four thousand years. The Arab lands have used slaves for millennia, and some still do. We cannot do the subject justice in this text, but I find this comment helpful: “During the heyday of early European competition, slavery was an accepted social institution, and the slave trade overshadowed all other commercial activities on the West African coast. To be sure, slavery and slave trading were already firmly entrenched in many African societies before their contact with Europe. In most situations, men as well as women captured in local warfare became slaves. In general, however, slaves in African communities were treated as junior members of the society with specific rights, and many were ultimately absorbed into their masters' families as full members. Given traditional methods of agricultural production in Africa, slavery in Africa was quite different from that which existed in the commercial plantation environments of the New World.” http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/history/slave-trade.php
In 1800 it was a group of South African slaves who planned the famous slave rebellion against Richmond, known as Gabriel’s rebellion. Gabriel was a blacksmith, skilled by trade and able to travel around the State earning money for his white owner, a certain Prosser whose plantation lay just north of Richmond (at Brook Run, beside Brook Rd = Route 1, a historical marker reminds travelers about Gabriel and his rebellion). Gabriel was the son of a South African chief. He rejected captivity and slavery; and he was able to organize his rebellion using a network of South African slaves who were distributed across the Virginian plantations of the tobacco King Carter. His rebellion was thwarted by a freak thunder storm that prevented his troops reaching Richmond, and then by betrayal. He and his co-leaders were hanged in Richmond at the Negro Burial Ground and they are remembered on a second historical marker at Broad St and 15th. Every year on October 10th, the anniversary of Gabriel’s death, a memorial service is held at the Sacred Ground in Richmond.
Richmond’s memory of that place today
https://evblog.virginiahumanities.org/2012/08/spotlight-gabriels-conspiracy/
At his trial (or rather, the “kangaroo court” of his lynch mob) Gabriel explained his quest for individual rights and freedom, quoting words used by George Washington and Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson when justifying rebellion against King George III. Gabriel was equally as much a freedom fighter as was George Washington. If George Washington has lost his war, he might well have been hanged by the British as a traitor. Africans, as well as Americans, value peace and democracy. Nelson Mandela, Nobel Peace Laureate and the world’s greatest peacemaker, was once condemned by white politicians and jailed for 27 years as a “terrorist” …. simply because he demanded One Man One Vote.
The descendants of Malian slaves – including distinguished Richmond women like Ana Edwards whose ancestors were sold in Richmond, and Delegate Delores McQuinn whose ancestors were Mende (part of the Malian diaspora living in Sierra Leone), and Viola Baskerville who leads the Girls Scouts of Virginia – are still fighting the battle for equality: equality of opportunity for women, and equality of opportunity for Black Americans who (in Richmond as much as anywhere else) struggle to get out of the poverty trap because so many suffer from low incomes and low self-esteem, from poor schools and poor nutrition, from low expectations, dim horizons and a degraded sense of culture. If they knew that they are descended from the Lion King – rather than from slaves – Richmond’s black population would feel better about their inheritance; they might have greater ambitions for their children, and feel that the acts of voting and participation in the political process are more worthwhile. Like President Obama, they might believe that “Yes, we can!”
That is one huge benefit from the Ségou Sister City relationship that we hope for Richmonders: to realize that they are descended from noble Africans who were free; that they themselves can break free of poverty and depression. Yes, they can!