There is something about Africans that makes us easy to transport, to carry away, to render to destinations — both physical and mental — that may or may not be compatible with our real needs or safety.

Nowhere in the known chronicles of history is it suggested that any other race was ever uprooted from its moorings and transferred in such large numbers and to such far flung locations as Africans were in the Slave Trade.

Of course, those who were thus translated did not go of their own volition, but in many cases those who caused them to be such mobile commodities were their own brethren, eager to turn a profit or as retribution for some infraction or other.

The slavers who visited our coasts seldom went inland to the catchment areas of the slaves. They would dock at the coast and make their presence known and their intention to treat obvious, and then the merchandise would be driven down to the sea in long caravans yoked together and herded by fellow Africans.

We all know — and we should stop pretending that we don’t — that it is that interface that made us the tools of Europe’s development while at the same time depleting our human capital and shattering our confidence and self-esteem for ever. We have never recovered.

The docility and malleability of the Africans, and the ease with which they could be made to capture, or to be captured by their likes and hand them, or be handed over, to foreigners as chattels, got the white man to start seeing Africans as somehow subhuman, and therefore interesting subjects for another type of use when slavery was no longer in economic vogue: Colonial exploitation.

Second phase

The Berlin Conference was another mode of transportation, physically and mentally moving our pieces of territory — complete with our ancestors’ graves and ancient shrines — from our control and placing them in the hands of the white man, who then made us serve him in that desecration.

The end of colonialism did not change anything fundamental in our relationship, but only made it more subtle and more insidious, more dangerous.

Having been transformed into other peoples’ caricatures, having lost all amour-propre and all sense of identity, having been made to insult our own gods and to rent new ones, our alienation has been completed by our rulers’ utter inability to deliver socio-economic progress, and they have entrusted all our salvation to the same people the encounter with whom we have never recovered from.

And we are being transferred once again, en masse, from our countries, not severally, but in bundles of Africans, to go to foreign lands so that we can be told, en masse, what role we are going to play in the current competition among themselves.

So, African ministers are bundled together to go to Japan, China, India, Turkey, Brazil and whoever else cares to have a piece of this Africa that seems to have lost its owner, once again.

It’s like we are having Berlin all over again, only this time in our rulers’ presence, so that they know, a priori, what their peoples’ fate is likely to be in the new Scramble for Africa. This way there is a semblance of participation, even if the African peoples are none the wiser about what games are afoot.

Now, the other countries have been bundling together ministers and other middling players; the Americans have pulled off a big one by trawling together all those heads of state to DC, just to show who is boss. Those pictures tell the story of school pupils waiting for a kind-hearted headmaster bringing candies.

Between those Africans who went in chains and these Gucci-suited ones who went in private jets, which group is to envy the other, I wonder?

They are very similar, I dare say, though the former would have been wearing frowns while these latter have obviously been having a swell time.

The only victor here is the host, who came neither on a slave-ship nor a private jet; his father went on a scholar-ship, which is a slightly different type of vessel.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]