A paper presented to a group of Afrocentric Scholars on 1 August 2026
I am puzzled but hopeful about my colleagues and recent developments. There is a question I want to ask but I need to portray the context with care. For this question I can start in 1870 ( you all know I am quite happy to start any discussion at 5,000 BC)
How do we sit in 1870?
The British had provoked a final war with the Zulus in order to demonstrate the power of the Gatling Gun and the era of automatic weapons. These weapons had never before been used so neither Indian, Chinese nor South Americans had faced these new weapons of mass destruction. I cite History Rise. “the Use of Maxim Guns in the Zulu War and lessons on Asymmetric Warfare’, simply because it is easily available and not behind a paywall. : ( https://historyrise.com/article/the-use-of-maxim-guns-in-the-zulu-war-and-lessons-on-asymmetric-warfare/#isandlwana-the-catastrophic-failure-of-technology )
Rorke’s Drift (Jan 1879) : here 150 British soldiers held off 3-4,000 Zulu soldiers, ‘ the defenders relied almost entirely on the Martini-Henry rifle, a single-shot breech-loader that could fire approximately 10-12 rounds per minute in the hands of a trained soldier’.
At Isandlwana the British deployed their new Gatling Guns but tactical doctrine had not evolved and 20,000 Zulus defeated 1,800 British soldiers.
Ulundi (July 1879): here the appropriate use of machine guns had been found.
‘The final battle of the war at Ulundi on July 4, 1879, saw the British implement a radically different approach. Lord Chelmsford formed his force into a large square formation, with infantry on all four sides, artillery and Gatling guns at the corners, and cavalry and supply wagons in the center. The Zulu impi charged the square and was met by massed rifle and Gatling fire. The Gatling guns, now properly sited and supplied, tore gaps in the Zulu ranks. The Zulus suffered approximately 500-1,000 killed, while British casualties were fewer than 20.
Ulundi provided the template for colonial warfare that would dominate the next two decades. The combination of square formation, massed rifle fire, and mechanical machine guns proved devastatingly effective against frontal assaults by indigenous forces. When the Maxim gun entered service in the late 1880s, it simply made this doctrine more lethal. At the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, Anglo-Egyptian forces armed with Maxims killed approximately 10,000 Mahdist fighters while suffering fewer than 50 deaths.’
Consider: 10,000 enemy killed only 50 of your own killed. How many of the 50 are friendly fire or accidents of war? This was a complete massacre!!!
What was this new technology”
‘The State of Machine Gun Technology in 1879
To understand the weaponry available during the Zulu War, it is necessary to distinguish between the various early automatic and semi-automatic weapons deployed by British forces. The Gatling gun, invented by Dr. Richard Gatling in 1861, was a hand-cranked, multi-barrel weapon that could achieve rates of fire up to 200 rounds per minute. The Gardner gun, developed in the 1870s, used a single or double barrel system operated by a hand crank and was considered more reliable than the Gatling in some conditions. Neither weapon was truly automatic — they required continuous manual cranking to fire. The Maxim gun, by contrast, used the recoil energy of each shot to eject the spent cartridge and load the next round, making it the first fully automatic machine gun.’
Clearly the psychological impact of such disasters would have been traumatising. Courage and fighting technique is no match for a fully automatic weapon. Such news travels fast and this was the context for Ethiopia faced with a threatened invasion by Italy. Without the supply of automatic weapons and relevant tactical expertise etc by Russia, Ethiopia would have been doomed.
Clearly the purpose of the Berlin Conference was to prevent the distribution of these weapons to Africa.
The British also understood that the psychological effects were even more important and powerful than the physical. Prior to the introduction of automatic weapons the British were regularly defeated in Africa. Now they presented themselves as simply invincible: ‘resistance is futile’.
We have now arrived at 1900 where these automatic weapons are not available to Africa. The dynamics of any embargo is that historically it is known that all embargoes will eventually be broken. It was essential that the opportunity presented by the embargo of automatic weapons on Africa be exploited as soon as possible before these people could gain access to automatic weapons.This haste became known as ‘the scramble for Africa’. It should all make cold blooded sense to you now.
History moves on. This global embargo is broken by a single event: 1917. The Communist Revolution created a Soviet government that had an ideological and strategic interest in developing anti-colonial resistance throughout the world. From a Soviet point of view the colonies were the sources of super surplus from the super exploitation of colonial people and support for colonial struggles was a measure to break the planned isolation and encirclement by the capitalist West.. It was from this surplus that the capitalists would draw resources to invade and attack the Soviet Union. From this Marxist view, the colonial wars were pre-wars against the Soviet Union.
Ironically the people who felt the effects of the new weapons most were the Europeans themselves in WW1. It was between 15 -22 million dead and another 21 million casualties making a total of approximately 40 million on the battlefields of Europe. Without automatic weapons this would not have been possible.
Resistance and Rebellion
What is astonishing is that the year 1900 was the high point of European military and psychological superiority but it was also the year of the First Pan African Conference! In the eyes of leading African and diaspora intellectuals this European superiority was temporary. ‘It will pass.’
Our fundamental African belief that what has no justice and is based on evil is not ‘real’ and so cannot last was the foundation of the resistance.
1991
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Neo-Liberalism as a world dominant ideology had sensational consequences for Black academics in Africa and the US. This collapse put the catastrophic defeat of SADF – apartheid/white supremacy forces in South Africa – away from people’s historical attention.The income sources of African intellectuals (particularly left wing or Pan African) collapsed. The academic institutions in Africa collapsed. In Africa there was a flight to the US and in the US for Black Americans there was a period of total subordination: resistance is futile! While anti-police resistance was regularly and deliberately provoked and broken ( this is described in Fanon where he showed that this was a psychological tactic of colonialism) actual intellectual resistance largely collapsed. Black intellectuals began to preach their own doom and called it ‘Afropessimism’ – the total absorption of subordination and lack of hope – resistance is futile.
These scholars made statements like: ‘Since the dawn of modernity, Black people have been progressively, singularly positioned—materially and symbolically—as the “slave race” around the globe.’ ( p.15 Antiblackness’ Moon-Kie Jung) whereas during this period of transatlantic slave trade 2 million whites were sold into slavery in North Africa, including Cervantes. (‘The Forgotten Slave Trade : the White European Slaves of Islam: by Simon Webb and ‘Christian Slaves , African Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean Coast’ by Robert Davis, ‘White Slaves, African Masters..’ by Paul Baepler )
Wilderson assumes membership of a liberation movement army is an honour to be displayed like a medal rather than an obligation.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_B._Wilderson_III )
At the same time that these scholars paddled the absence of hope they themselves were awarded prizes and rewards. It says so in the Bible: the servant is worthy of his pay.
Where are we today?
Merely to see how we got here is a form of liberation.
In 1900 the domination of the globe by the Europeans was total. In 1960 the world was divided between a dominant US and a counterweight in the Soviet Union. By 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there emerged a global, military and ideological, dominance of the world by the US. African intellectuals no longer even dream of Africa leading the world – ‘what are you smoking?’ Early Pan Africanists were imbued with a desire that Africa should ‘regain’ its global leadership role that it once had. Teaching texts in schools show Pan Africanists seeking to become integrated into the Western world, almost as civil rights activists. For a young scholar today or their parents , given this misreading of the past struggles, given this mis-portrayed acceptance of the modern world by Fanon, Cesaire Nkrumah et al: resistance is futile!
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
What is to be done to free African intellectuals and Black intellectuals from the spider’s web of intellectual subordination. They assume their grandparents had this subordination because the school textbooks imply it, but in fact they are the first generation to actually abandon hope and true struggle. It is only the post-1991 generation that ever believed ‘resistance is futile’.They are the first generation that could ask in public ‘are we inferior genetically’. WHAT IS TO BE DONE?