Kwame Speaks: What Goes Around...

any students watched in utter disbelief as major financial services firms went bankrupt, merged with other firms, or were bailed out by the government last week. Much heralded investment banking firms and insurance giants such as Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and AIG became casualties of the now insidious credit crunch. Their over-exposed assets, poor valuation, and outright greed became their demise. The plight of these firms and the resulting effects on the economy were seen by many as the “end of the world.” However if we listen to the wisdom of our ancestors and elders, these events could have easily been predicted.

Ma’at in ancient Kemet signifies truth, justice, order, balance, harmony, righteousness and reciprocity. The Ki-Kongo people of central Africa had a worldview that saw life, experience, and challenges as cyclical rather than linear. In other words as the title of this article suggests, “What goes around…comes around.”

The previously mentioned corporations are part of a larger capitalist system that was built upon the enslavement and forced labor of African people. This system was enhanced by the rape of the resources and further colonial subjugation of the people of continental Africa and the Caribbean as well as the labor exploitation of African people in America. So to have a worldview that says “as you sow, that shall you also reap” logically means the casualties of Wall Street were (in)directly caused by the ill-gotten gains from slavery and colonialism that provided the fundamental base from which these corporations operate.

In Former Howard Professor and 1st Trinidadian Prime Minister Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery, the theory that the foundation of capitalism and the Modern World System were in large part due to the enslavement of Africans is explained in great detail. In essence, the system by which Lehman Brothers and others rose and fell were vestiges of an ideology and system that was envisioned through the eyes of the same people who saw African people as chattel and unhman. In very literal terms, the traumatic experiences of our ancestors and its permutations in our lives today was necessary for the maintenance of a system that allows the CEO of Goldman Sachs to receive a 19 million dollar bonus while the masses of African descendants to remain in poverty.

The struggle on the continent in Africa near the end of the 19th century is thoroughly examined in Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. In it he explained the socio-economic implications that came to characterize capitalist exploitation on the continent and its global effects. In Kwame Nkrumah’s Neo-Colonialism, he not only names the corporations, but shows their relationship to the ongoing exploitation in Africa. The companies he names are the companies we interview for to fill their diversity quota today.

As slavery had already begun to set the foundation of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, cotton merchants Henry and Emanuel Lehman set out to capitalize on the high market value of the commodity. Lehman Brothers was founded and the rest is history, literally. It is no mystery who provided the labor that allowed them to have cotton to trade on the New York Cotton Exchange. Many of the other firms on the “Street” have similar histories. So when you feel sympathy for these firms, also understand that it has finally come around.