It is probably more profitable for reconstruction purposes to think of slavery, colonialism and imperialism in universal human terms rather than with a racial focus. It certainly serves contemporary African realities better. Africa is more multiracial than it ever was, and all of its peoples are part of the African Dream. Many diasporic and expatriate Africans now have complex family histories involving other racial ancestries and relationships. The troubles of Africa, for all their peculiarities, are part of a universal conflict. In that conflict, no one is born free. Individually and collectively, we are freed or enslaved more or less by what we do or fail to do to create and perpetuate our freedoms or enslavements. And there are no uncontested territories. It really is about ownership. If you fail own to yourself, someone or something will take you over. If you will not own your home, something from the street will want to control it. If you loosen your grip on your mate too much, he or she will find or be found by someone or something else. And if you are not watchful over your land, others will rule over it.

It is not so much a question of power, which can be ineffectual when misapplied, as it is a question of ownership, the ability to use even minimal power appropriately in service to and control of ones fortunes. Regarding the survival of Africa – and we do not now even talk of its prosperity – there is that important issue of ownership to be resolved. Africa does not own Africa. Much of the wealth and labour of Africa is really in service of other lands, so most Africans merely tenant Africa. The life of Africa is daily bargained out to others, not just to the usual occidental suspects, but now also to the others of the ravenous global economic system, especially to the Chinese in Zambia, Congo land, the Sudan and other prostrate African places. Since the coming of foreign explorers, invaders, slavers, colonizers, contemporary imperial agents, and the punitive history left in their wake, there has not even been an authorized version of the African story. Africa is a tale retold severally in abridged versions by foreigners for the foreign reader. This is possible because the story of Africa, the making of modern Africa, is mostly recorded and filed in foreign storage.

There are levels of violence. Self-violation is the purest violence of all. Those who might have loved and led Africa have been violating her. This must be part of the rage of Citizen Agbetu. As in the plantation days of slavery and under the colonial project the bonding of Africa continues, supervised by local African whiphands, who, misled by the comforts of office, consider themselves independent. But no one may truly self-own who is not self-aware. African ownership of Africa’s slave history should include ownership of African complicity in the Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Saharan Trades. But it can be just as easy to live in denial of this as it would be to make more of it than we ought to. Trusting African rulers, uneducated on the full story of the human trade, divided and frequently manipulated or threatened to think themselves somehow protected and prospered by their economic and military association with the foreign slavers, were surely not on equal footing with these foreign slavers in the making of the tragedy that was slavery in Africa. Conquering slavers and oppressors everywhere in history always found some willing and coerced local collaborators. In Nazi action against the Jews of the German mainland and concentration camps, and against the nationals of France and the other occupied European places there were always these forced and friendly collaborators. The French, for all the embarrassing history of their Vichy government collaboration, know who the real aggressor of the occupation was. And that historical fact of local collaboration in German occupied-Europe, or some Jewish complicity in Nazi action against German Jews, did not act to invalidate the claims and complaints of these oppressed peoples regarding their experience. There were some Nazi sympathizers too even in free Britain. But the aggressor, the villain, was never in doubt. So must be the case with African complicity in the enslavement of Africans.

This is not to make light of what is a continuing trend in the relationship of Africa with powerful foreign exploiters of African wealth and labour. It is the case that most of those who rule Africa are still intellectually unconscious, without a commitment to ending the continuing imbalance in relationship between Africa and others. It is still the case that they are too focused on the comforts of office and the symbolic power or imagined independent authority they have in their local territories. And there is still the issue of weapons flowing in from abroad, encouraging Africans to wage war on each other, and providing the African ruling elite with a sense of security and special protective relationship with their arms providers. In parts of Africa, especially in the long sectarian conflicts of West Africa, East Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Sudan, African dictators and warlords have used these weapons to kill other Africans or commit them to slave labour in mines, providing the wealth with which the weapons are paid for. These are exactly the same divisive methods of corruption, coercion and collaboration used during the periods of colonialism and plantation slavery.

The kind of leaders at home and traders from abroad who sold and enslaved the past of Africa are still the same kind of collaborators working together to sell and enslave its present. If no one stops them there will be no African future, not as we know it, not in an increasingly disputed world of resource scarcities, global imperial hungers and new theories of preventive warfare. Fully displaced and dispossessed, all hired out to others, that desperate African future in which the humanity and different culture of the African will again be doubted, that second slavery, the unspoken fear in the rage of Citizen Agbetu. On yet another historic moment, iconic for all the wrong reasons, someone may finally convince the world there is no longer any need for Africa, there being no lasting progress and so much beggary, its land and resources no longer its own, its peoples long surrendered to others as wage slaves or worse. And then as now there will be Africans abroad who will deny Africa, thinking themselves exempt from her misery. This Bicentenary anniversary of the 1807 Abolition Act is even more about looking at Africa now than it is about engaging the African past. And this is how to rebuild a ravaged land: First you must own the land and its truth. Abolish play, abolish the postcolonial laughter of false societies built for exploitation by others. Abolish trust, and let the era of proof begin. In these ill-governed lands let the unled now lead their leaders. Africa is wealthiest of all in people, and, as in the earlier days of the independent struggles, its success still depends on its own people of ideas. Ideas are the principal bricks.