What I was doing last night - Concert by Abaji

I went to see this guy perform last night at the Alliance Francais. The tickets were only two cedis. The concert was quite entertaining.

Meanwhile back in the Homeland

From 2005 to 2007 I lived in Arivaca, Arizona. To get to Arivaca you have to pass a Border Patrol checkpoint that is located 30 miles north of the border. There is no other road to get to Arivaca from Green Valley, Tucson, or Nogales. So every time somebody living in Arivaca wants to go into town they have to pass through a border check point even though they have not left Pima County yet alone the US. This checkpoint essentially creates a border zone separate from the rest of the US in the vicinity of Arivaca. This means that the US citizens and legal resident aliens living in Arivaca are not treated with the same respect by the US government as people living elsewhere. Instead they are viewed as suspects with regards to the laws dealing with the cross-border smuggling of migrants and drugs. Now granted having to stop and show ID at an artificial internal border while dogs sniff your vehicle every time you want to leave your home town is not the worst possible fate. But, it is a considerable annoyance. Especially since I haven't seen any evidence that harassing people in this manner has any effect at all on illegal immigration or drug importation into the US. Well, now there are some residents of Arivaca organizing to protest against the check point. There is a meeting on  22 September 2013 at the Arivaca Community Center to discuss the issue. It will be interesting to see what develops.

More Good News

The German government has now amended its laws to make it easier for ethnic Germans in the former USSR and eastern Europe to settle in Germany. In 2005 the German government imposed draconian restrictions that reduced the migration of Spaetaussiedler to only a couple  of thousand people a year. The remaining nearly 600,000 ethnic Germans in the Russian Federation and over 200,000 in Kazakhstan thus became largely ineligible to settle in Germany after 2005. The liberalization of the Bundesvertriebenengesetzes (Federal expellee law) will place a greater emphasis on family reunification and reduce the importance of the language test. These changes will allow more of the remaining ethnic Germans in Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia to settle in Germany.

Wanlov The Kubolor - For the River ft Long John

This video in addition to having some great Ghanaian Hiplife music also has some fantastic film footage of Ghana.

Ayyads to Keep Cliff Hotel

The Israeli government has withdrawn at least temporarily its attempts to seize the Cliff Hotel on the border of East Jerusalem and Abu Dis under the racist Absentee Property Law. The hotel has belonged to the Ayyad family for generations. The Israeli theft of Palestinian land is a routine measure. But, in this case I happen to be personal friends of some of the Ayyads. In particular I have had the fortune to enjoy the friendship of Abdulhaddi Ayyad, who asked me to go busking with him on the streets of London over a decade ago. The Ayyads had to fight a hard and long legal battle in Israeli courts to keep property that is indisputably theirs. But, sometimes the good guys do win and it looks like the Israelis are abandoning their efforts to seize the Cliff Hotel from the Ayyads. I think the event merits a celebration. Every so often God shows his presence on this planet with miracles just to prove to even the densest of us that he does exist and he does love us.

Independent Claims University of Ghana Students Working as Male Prostitutes

Recently the Independent ran an article claiming that a number of male students at the University of Ghana in Legon spend their nights working as rent boys. The article quotes one anonymous rent boy who claims that he uses the money he gets from johns for drugs and to pay his university fees. It also quotes one anonymous police officer. These two anonymous informants appear to be the article's only sources. The article also gives no quantification as to actually how many students from Legon are working as rent boys.  The evidence presented in the article suggests they found one person who claimed to be both a rent boy and a University of Ghana student. But, by listing Accra Mall, Kwame Nkrumah Circle, High Street, East Legon, the area near the Togolese Embassy, and Lapaz as areas where student rent boys work at night, the article gives the impression that they number in the dozens. There are currently nearly 30,000 students enrolled at the University of Ghana of which about 20,000 are male. So I don't doubt that there are a few people out of that 20,000 that are working as rent boys. But, I am guessing that the number is quite small and that the article in the Independent is just another example of the irresponsible sensationalism that tends to dominate the media in Ghana.

Taxi Cab Ethnography and African Gypsies

Hanging around the front of Accra Mall and other places such as Nkrumah Circle there are these child beggars. They are not Ghanaian. In fact they don't even look African. They look like the Gypsies you see in Europe and Central Asia. They have brown skin and South Asian features. They also act like the Gypsies in Europe and Asia. You never see any adult men, just children begging for money. I have asked a number of cab drivers about the origins of these people. Each and every one of them has a different story, but in every case they identify them as coming from the north. Some say they come from Mali, others Burkina Faso, still others Niger, some say they are from Chad, and one guy even claimed they came from Somalia. Although to be honest they don't look Somali to me. They look and act like Roma to me. Also like the indigenous peoples of Europe and Asia, the local Ghanaians do not have a very high opinion of these immigrants who seem to be composed entirely of beggars. I have read a little bit about the Roma in Europe, but even though by some accounts they supposedly entered the Balkans via Egypt, hence the name Gypsies, I have not seen any scholarly references to this ethnic group making its way to Ghana via the Sahel. Does anybody know anything about the origins of the Gypsies in the Accra area?

Dutch Government Finally Apologizes for Colonial Atrocities in Indonesia 66 Years Ago

Yesterday the Dutch government finally apologized for the brutal atrocities its army committed in Indonesia during 1945-1949 when it reoccupied the archipelago after it declared independence on 17 August 1945. About 150,000 Indonesians versus 5,000 Dutch died during the war for independence during which the Dutch military employed summary executions and torture as routine instruments in its counterinsurgency strategy. The Dutch military regularly shot unarmed men in these summary executions. In some villages such as Rawegede in Java the Dutch killed the entire adult male population. In Rawegede this amounted to 431 men. The tactics of the Dutch military had more than a passing resemblance to those used by the Nazis to suppress partisan resistance in the countries they occupied during World War II. The Dutch were particularly vicious on the island of Sulawesi. From December 1946 to March 1947, Dutch soldiers under the command of Captain Raymond Westerling summarily executed over 40,000 Indonesians in the southern part of this island. There has never been any trials of any Dutch soldiers involved in the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against the people of Indonesia.

Sources: Al Jazeera, UCA, and The Japan Times

Classes Today

Today I finally had my first full day of teaching of the semester. I taught one class in Legon and then one at City Campus in Accra. Traffic was particularly bad. There was a horrible bottleneck around the  Kanda/Nima area. We left Legon at 1:15 and arrived at City Campus at 2:15, an hour long trip that should have taken only 20 minutes if traffic had not been insane even for Accra. Coming back at 4:30 was even worse. But, the important thing is that the students at City Campus finally showed up for class. Last week I sent my TA there to give them the readings and nobody showed up.

Both classes went well. They actually asked questions that showed that they were paying attention to the lecture and thinking about the material. That is always a good sign.

Thirty Six Years Ago in South Africa

On this day in 1977, Steve Biko, an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa died of injuries he sustained due to beatings and torture by police while in custody. The police arrested him in Port Elizabeth  on 18 August 1977. They transferred him while in a coma to Pretoria on 11 September 1977. He died the next day shortly after arriving in the South African capital. He was only 30 years old.

African Food

Evidently today is Ethiopian New Year. I am not sure what people do in Ethiopia to celebrate it, but I am now wishing there was an Ethiopian restaurant nearby. I quite like Ethiopian food which I first ate in 1985 at the Blue Nile in Berkeley.

Speaking of food, it occurred to me today that a lot more could be done with ocean fish in Ghanaian cuisine. Today I had tilapia and banku for lunch. But, other than tilapia, red fish, and white fish there are never any other options to go with banku or kenkey. How come tuna, salmon, mackerel, or other ocean fish are never offered? Kenkey is a Ga dish and the Ga settlements are right on the ocean. There is even a fishing village on the beach in front of Jamestown.

Comparative Forced Labour Paper

Today I went back to writing my paper for the German conference in Ho on colonial forced labour in Africa. Originally it was supposed to be a conference on colonial forced labour in general, but the sponsors changed the topic on me. This is causing me some problems as I explain below. Although, I am not sure what the status of the conference is currently since none of the people who submitted abstracts in July have heard anything from the organizers in Berlin. My paper is a comparison of the conscription of ethnic Germans in Soviet Kazakhstan and Central Asia into the labour army and forced labour in Southern Africa during the nineteen forties. I wrote most of a first draft while I was in Kyrgyzstan this summer for two months. But, I had to wait until I came back to Africa to get access to the sources dealing with Mozambique. While I am not an expert on the colonial history of Mozambique, I have written about the cultivation of cotton before and much of the forced labour in this colony was devoted to the cultivation of this crop. Still I am having trouble specifically with the sections of the paper dealing with Mozambique. The rest of the paper is almost done.  Honestly, looking through the first draft my section on ethnic Germans from Kazakhstan and Central Asia reads to me as much stronger so far than the part on Africa. Now, if the original topic had been maintained I could have dispensed with the comparison with colonial Mozambique and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and dealt solely with Kazakhstan and Central Asia which I argue in the paper were semi-colonies in the USSR. It may, however, turn out that the conference gets cancelled in which case I will reorganize the article by removing the parts dealing with Africa.

Communism in the Gold Coast Research Project

Today I started writing an article about the communist movement in the Gold Coast in the 1930s. In particular the activities and ties to Soviet front groups of Isaac Wallace-Johnson, a radical from Sierra Leone who was engaged in communist agitation in the Gold Coast from 1933-1936. There is some secondary material available on JSTOR and there appears to be a fair bit in the PRAAD archives (I will have to go to the archives and check out these sources), but no full length history of communism in British West Africa has ever been written. Of course given that the number of communists in the Gold Coast was only a handful this is not too surprising. Their significance is also not as great as communist movements in Asia due to the success of the British colonial authorities in almost completely suppressing the movement. Nevertheless communism was an international movement during the 1930s and the role of British West Africa and the Gold Coast in particular in that movement still remains to be integrated into the larger narrative. Every piece of the jigsaw no matter how small is necessary to complete the puzzle. So I am currently working on fitting this small piece into the grand narrative of international communism during the 1930s. I got about three pages written today.

7 September 1941

On 7 September 1941 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issued a decree dividing the territory of the Volga German ASSR between Stalingrad and Saratov oblasts. This occurred in the middle of the deportation of the Volga Germans from 3-20 September 1941. The map to the right shows the territorial division of the republic between the adjacent oblasts. Below I have translated the decree from Russian into English. Note the transliteration of the canton names from German to Russian and back into Latin letters may result in some differences between my translation and the original German names. But I have tried to confirm and put the original German spellings down below whenever possible.

Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet
On the administrative construction of the  territory of the former Volga German Republic
In connection with the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR from 28 August 1941 "On resettling Germans living in the region of the Volga", it is deemed necessary to:
1. Include in the composition of Saratov Oblast the following districts of the former Volga German Republic: - Balzer, Solotoje, Kamenka, Ternowka, Kukkus, Seelmann, Krasnojar, Marxstadt, Unterwalden, Fjodorowka, Gnadenflur, Krasny-Kut, Lizenderg, Mariental, Ekheim
2. Include in the composition of Stalingrad Oblast the following districts of the former Volga German Republic: Frank, Erlenbach, Dobrinka, Pallasowka, Gmelinskaja, Old-Poltawka, Ilowatka.
Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR
M. Kalinin
Secretary of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR
A. Gorkin
Moscow, Kremlin, 7 September 1941

The Soviet government never restored the Volga German ASSR. Along with the Crimean ASSR it was only one of two national territories at the ASSR level in the USSR belonging to deported peoples that was never reconstituted. The ethnic Germans in the Russian Federation still suffer from inequality and discrimination on the basis of natsional'nost due to their lack of a national territory to protect and promote their rights.

Source: V.A. Auman and V.G. Chebatoreva, Istoriia rossiiskikh nemtsev v dokumentakh (1763-1992),(Moscow: MIGP, 1993), p. 163.

New Shirt

I don't often buy new clothes, but yesterday I purchased a new shirt. That is picture of it over in the right hand corner. It is very different from the Obama version which says, "Make Syria into Fufu through War." At any rate I have wanted to get one of these shirts for a long time, but I have not seen any place selling them until yesterday. The company that produces them had a table at the street festival in Jamestown yesterday.  So right now I am proudly wearing my "MAKE FUFU NOT WAR" shirt.

Jamestown and Usshertown

Yesterday, I went to the annual art festival along John Evans Atta Mills High Street in Jamestown (British Accra) and Usshertown (Dutch Accra). There was music, dancing, and food.  I got talked into going up to the top of the lighthouse by a colleague visiting from the US for a semester. It looks a lot taller on the inside and the way up is very narrow and treacherous. The last flight is an old wooden ladder that has a broken step. At the top the platform slopes downward rather than being even so the vertigo factor is further enhanced. The only thing I have been on in recent years that compares is the Ferris wheel at Panifilov Park in Bishkek. A Ferris wheel built during the Khrushchev era and lacking any type of safety features whatsoever to prevent you from falling to your death. At any rate I had a good time at the festival. But, as a middle aged man I wish they would turn the music down a little bit. At times I felt like I was in a giant outdoor nightclub and had difficulty carrying on any type of conversation with people.

Letter from Beria 25 August 1941

The joint decree of the Council of People's Commissars (SNK) and Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union  (CPSU) ordering the deportation of the Volga Germans became finalized on 26 August 1941. However, earlier drafts of this resolution had already been circulated to the leadership of the NKVD and the first secretaries of the Oblast committees (Obkom) of the Volga German ASSR, Saratov Oblast, and Stalingrad Oblast before this date. A letter from 25 August 1941 by Beria, the head of the NKVD, to the Central Committee of the CPSU with the numerical designation No. 2514/B explicitly refers to an earlier draft of the 26 August 1941 decree ordering the deportation of the Volga Germans. The decision to deport the Volga Germans was thus made by the Soviet government before 25 August 1941. Below I have translated Beria's letter from Russian into English

25 August 1941

This is in connection to your orders as presented in the draft of the resolution of the SNK and CC CPSU (B) on the orderly resettlement from the Volga German Republic, Saratov and Stalingrad oblasts.
The total local population subject to exile is 479,841 people, of this number from the Volga German Republic - 401,746 people, from Saratov Oblast -54,389 people, from Stalingrad Oblast 23,756 people.
Resettlement is to take place in the north-eastern oblasts of the Kazakh SSR, Krasnoiarsk and Altai krais, Omsk and Novosibirsk oblasts.
Attached is the accompanying draft resolution for the first secretaries of the obkoms of the CPSU (B): Saratov - tov. Vlasov, Stalingrad - tov. Chuianov, Volga German Republic - tov. Malov to familiarize themselves with.

Awaiting your orders,

People's Commissar of Internal Affairs for the Union of SSRs

L. Beria

 So far I have not seen any copies of the draft referred to in this letter or any archival material on the deportation of the Volga Germans dated earlier than 25 August 1941. This letter by Beria appears to be the oldest surviving document pertaining to the operation to be unearthed by scholars to date.

Source:

N. L. Pobol and P.M. Polian, (eds.), Stalinskie deportatsii 1928-1953: Dokumenty, (Moscow: MFD, Materik, 2005), doc. 3.1, p. 287.

No to US intervention in Syria

I don't claim to be an expert on the current civil war in Syria, but I see no advantage accruing to either the US or the majority of Syrians in the proposed military intervention against the Assad regime. If the Assad regime falls it could very well be replaced by something much worse. Indeed one thing that distinguished Syria under the current Assad and his father from some other Middle Eastern regimes was its secular nature. In terms of personal freedom Syria has been considerably more liberal than places like Saudi Arabia despite the dictatorial nature of the Ba'ath Party. So while the regime has been brutal I am by no means convinced that what ever replaces it will be an improvement and it could well be far worse than what existed before the start of the civil war. The main thing US military intervention will do is add to the death toll through "collateral damage" due to bombings and missile strikes. It could very well end up that the US and whatever allies we get to support us end up killing a lot of people in Syria and an Islamic regime that makes us nostalgic for the secular Arab nationalist dictatorship of old man Assad takes power. I am sure such a scenario has its own beneficiaries, but I am failing to see how either the majority of Americans or Syrians are among them.

Disaster is Averted.

Last night the VC issued the signed letter promising the remainder of our book and research allowance that the union had requested. In return the strike has been called off and we resumed teaching this morning. Since the only outstanding union demand for ending the strike was a formal letter with a time table promising to pay the remaining $800 of our book and research allowance this is a union victory. But, I would have enjoyed my weekend more if I didn't have to worry about a possible closure of the university today. Needless, to say I am greatly relieved. For those readers in the US have a Happy Labor Day. It certainly is for me.

Countdown to Potential Disaster

Tomorrow the VC will decide whether on not to shut down the University of Ghana for the whole academic year. If he does shut down the university it will be the worst disaster to strike Ghana in the last 30 years. I am fervently hoping not only for my own sake, but for the sake of all of the faculty, staff, and students here that he does not shut down the university. I enumerated some of the problems shutting down the university would cause in a previous post. There are of course a whole bunch of knock on effects that I have not enumerated or even imagined.

Excess Deaths in the USSR among Russian-Germans 1918-1948

The Soviet government killed hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans through shootings, deportations, in camps, and by hunger. Between 1918 and 1948 excess deaths among Russian-Germans in the USSR due to repression and man made famine were at least 480,000 (Krieger 2013, p. 3). This is an absolute minimum figure and is equal to around a third of their 1939 population. Below is a breakdown of a very conservative estimate of the number of Russian-German victims of the Lenin and Stalin regimes made by Viktor Krieger.

Civil War and Famine 1918-1922

Volga Region - 108,000
Black Sea Region - 50,000-60,000

Total for former Russian Empire 180,000-200,000

Holodomor 1932-1933

100,000

Great Terror 1937-1938

55,000

Deportation, Special Settlements, and the Labor Army

Labor Army - 60,000-70,000
Special Settlements 1941-1945 - 70,000-80,000
Special Settlements 1946-1947 - 15,000-20,000

Total for USSR 1941-1948 - 150,000-160,000

Total for USSR 1918-1948 - 480,000-515,000

Source:

Viktor Krieger, Bundesburger russlanddeutscher Herkunft: Historische Schlusselerfahrungen und kollektives Gedachtnis (Munster: Lit Verlag, 2013), pp. 240-242.

Heinz Rudolf Kunze - Ich bin auch ein Vertriebener

This is the only rock song I know of to deal with the brutal expulsion of ethnic Germans from East Central Europe at the end of WWII. For those of my readers that understand German take a good listen to the lyrics of this song.

Labor Situation Update at the University of Ghana

Yesterday, the VC  refused to put anything in writing regarding the oral agreement to pay the remaining $800 of our book and research allowance from last year. Instead he is threatening to shut down the university on Monday in contrast to the assurances he gave to the Ghanaian press earlier in the week that he would not nullify the academic year. If the university is shut down on Monday it appears that our salaries might very well also be suspended for a year. The university would also by my calculation owe US study abroad programs about $6 million dollars in refunds due immediately. Money that is very unlikely to ever be generated again as I suspect many US programs will permanently cancel their existing agreements with the University of Ghana if the VC shuts down the university. The 1000 or so US exchange students would lose a year of university credit and for many of them that would also mean they would lose their financial aid. Shutting down the university would cause incredible damage to the reputation of the University of Ghana and by extension the Republic of Ghana. It will take many decades to overcome this damage if the VC goes ahead and nullifies the academic year.

Another UTAG Meeting

Today we had another emergency UTAG meeting. It turns out that the government and university have taken steps to pay $700 out of the $1500 owed each of us for our research and book allowance from last year. But, the promise to pay the remaining $800 given to the union only exists in an oral form at present. So the union's position is that we will remain on strike until such time as there is a written promise and time table by the VC to pay the remaining $800 to faculty and a similar written agreement by the government to reimburse the university. Unfortunately, there is a good chance that the government will refuse to put anything in writing which will mean there will be no evidence of its promise to pay this money. In that case the union will probably remain on strike. If the strike continues on past Monday then the VC will have the option of shutting down the campus and nullifying the semester. I am not sure if the impasse will be resolved by then or not. But, right now it doesn't look like I will be teaching Friday morning. I will be checking throughout tomorrow to make sure.

Syria

At least the most recent country targeted for bombing by Obama is not in Africa. It is still a colossally bad idea, however. In addition to doing nothing to bring back the innocent victims of Assad's regime it is going to add a considerable number more in the form of collateral damage. Really, US "progressives" need to stop thinking that emulating the policies of France and Israel of randomly bombing countries is somehow an acceptable substitute for an actual foreign policy. Between these three "progressive" governments they have managed to bomb Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Libya, Mali, Ivory Coast, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since I arrived in Africa less than three years ago. Notably all of these countries are either African or Asian. Although it is not as if there are no European regions like the Caucasus with Islamic extremists, terrorism, ethnic separatists, civil war, and mass human rights violations. Russia just happens to be politically powerful enough to prevent any US military intervention in the region while Africa, the Levant, and South West Asia are not.

28 August 1941

The twenty eighth of August marks the official day of commemoration of the deportation of the Russian-Germans. On 28 August 1941, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet ordered the deportation of the Germans living in the Volga German ASSR, Stalingrad Oblast, and Saratov Oblast. This decree received the numerical designation Ukaz 21-160. Clicking on the link will bring you to an English language translation of the decree. The decree was published two days later on 30 August 1941 in both the German and Russian language newspapers of the Volga German ASSR. In the top right corner you can see a photocopy of the German translation published in Nachrichten and right below it you can see a photocopy of the original Russian as it appeared in Bolshevik. Ukaz 21-160 was the only deportation order dealing with the Russian-Germans that was published at the time it was issued. The few previous and many subsequent deportation orders ethnically cleansing the Soviet Union west of the Urals of almost all of its citizens of German ancestry did not see the light of day until decades later.

"Third World", "Tri-Continental Bloc", or just Asia, Africa, and Latin America?

I was talking to a Visiting Scholar in our department from the US yesterday who is an expert on Latin America about this. But, the term "Third World" really seems to be problematic since the disintegration of the second world. Absent a political unity in refusing to align with either the US or the USSR during the Cold War or a revolutionary commitment to anti-imperialism there is almost nothing that ties the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America together anymore. Indeed the term Third World was popularized as a specifically political stance of decolonizing countries in Asia and Africa at the Bandung Conference in 1955 to assert their independence from the US, Europe, and USSR. This idea received concrete organization in the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement. The idea of the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America forming a distinctly revolutionary bloc opposed to colonialism, neo-colonialism, and racism reached its peak at the Tri-Continental Conference in Havana in 1966. Prior to the Havana conference Latin America had not been fully integrated into the organizations agitating for such a bloc, most notably the Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organization (AAPSO). While including Asian members, the Cairo based organization held all of its conferences prior to the Tri-Continental Conference in Africa. The first one was in Cairo in 1957 followed by Conarky in Guinea in 1960, Moshi in Tanzania in 1963, and Winneba in Ghana in 1965. AAPSO much more so than the early Non-Aligned Movement stressed revolutionary opposition to the First World rather than a position independent of  both the US and USSR. Indeed delegates from the USSR participated in the activities of AAPSO from the beginning in 1957. The idea of Africa, Asia, and Latin America forming either a third non-aligned bloc or a revolutionary anti-imperialist bloc today, however, seems far fetched. The collapse of the USSR made this first option impossible and the second one highly improbable.

Love your mama not MAMA

Robert Young has a great acronym in his book White Mythologies. It is MAMA (Male Anglo-Saxon Marxist Academia) which is an English translation of 'le marxisme analytique anglo-saxon' (Young, p. 3). It should of course not be confused with mama as in mother including Mother Africa, especially since MAMA almost completely ignore the contributions made by Africans to world history (Young, pp. 4-7).  You should love your mama, see the image to the right, but MAMA is a pathology that unfortunately dominates the US and a number of other countries. The extreme Eurocentrism of white English speaking Marxists even in places where they should know better such as South Africa is pretty glaring (Young, p. 8). Young is not the only scholar to note the unjustified exclusion of Africa and other parts of the world outside Europe and North America in the dominant academic discourse, a discourse largely controlled by MAMA. Reiland Rabaka has also commented on this phenomenon although unfortunately he does not use the acronym MAMA like Young does (Rabaka, pp. x-xi). As he points out the "conventional" critical theorists are predominantly "white, unmistakably Marxist and male" (Rabaka, p. xi). They are thus the MAMA that Young points out "defend the ideas of Marxist historicism without generally acknowledging the Eurocentrism of that narrative..." (Young, p. 3). He goes on to note that "a particular problem in Marxism hitherto almost invisible in Europe and North America, namely its implacable whiteness, its Eurocentrism, an orientation most clearly evident in the accounts of history offered in its name..." (Young, p. 4). One of course also sees this orientation replicated on the Internet with almost all Left wing academic blogs. The major ones all focus almost exclusively on issues relating to Europe and North America to the almost complete exclusion of Africa.

Sources:

Reiland Rabaka, Africana Critical Theory: Reconstructing the Black Radical Tradition, From W.E.B. Dubois and C.L.R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, (Lanham, MD; Lexington Books, 2009).

Robert J.C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, second edition, (London: Routledge, 2004).

Strike Update

Apparently there is a meeting between the UTAG leadership and VC today to discuss the strike. It appears that the union may suspend the strike for a day in order to prevent 21 consecutive days of industrial action from accumulating. That would deprive the VC of the option of shutting down the university. We are supposed to know what the status of the strike is by Thursday. If it is suspended that would mean I would go and teach this Friday. But, it would also mean that the following week that the strike would resume. If this happens I am going to try and cram as much information into my two hour lecture on main campus as humanely possible. It might be possible to cover all ten weeks of lectures in one day if I really put my mind to it. However, currently I don't have any reliable information on what exactly is going to happen this week and next week regarding the ongoing strike. UTAG's stated position is that it will continue to withhold teaching of lectures until such time as all the money currently owed to its constituent members is actually paid into their bank accounts. The arrears from last year have now been paid. But, the book and research allowance is still outstanding. I have heard rumors that the government wants to eliminate the automatic payment of the allowance and make people apply for all research grants so that they can give the money to their political allies and friends. Such a position of course is completely unacceptable to the union and if the government actually goes through with it could keep us on strike indefinitely.

Decree No. 2056-93ss

The official commemoration of the deportation of the Volga Germans takes place every year on August 28th. That is the day in 1941 that the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issued Ukaz no. 21-160. This decree which was published on 30 August 1941  falsely and unconstitutionally accused the ethnic Germans of the Volga German ASSR, Saratov Oblast, and Stalingrad Oblast of mass treason. This decree, however, was crafted to provide a justification for the decision made two days earlier by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Council of People's Commissars. This earlier decree (No. 2056-93ss) which is the actual decision states no reasons for the mass deportation of the Volga Germans. Instead it merely orders that they all be resettled to Siberia and Kazakhstan. The first page of the decree is reproduced in the original Russian language in the image in the right hand corner. An English translation is available here. This decree formed the administrative basis for the massive ethnic cleansing of the Volga Germans from 3 to 20 September 1941. Ukaz no. 21-160 issued two days later by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet was a post-facto attempt by the Soviet government to legalize a blatantly unconstitutional decision. But, the 28 August 1941 decree was published at the time whereas the 26 August 1941 one remained secret for many decades. So the official day of commemoration for this crime against humanity is on the 28th rather than the 26th. Personally I think both days should be observed as well as the 27th which is the day Beria issued NKVD Prikaz 001158 instructing the NKVD on the proper measures to undertake this mass uprooting of humanity. Over the next couple of days I will have more posts relating to the 72nd anniversary of the deportation of the Volga and groups of Russian-Germans.

Pan-Africanism and the Arabs of Africa

Recently I have been listening to a lot of Algerian rai music. I think Algeria has my favorite music of any African country although I like Malian music a lot as well. This brings me to the point that the Arabs and Berbers despite being White are African peoples and African is a continental, not a racial identity. More Arabs live in Africa than live in Asia and Arabic is the most widely spoken language on the African continent. One of the great Pan-African leaders of the 1950s and 1960s was Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. The Pan-Africanist Casablanca group formed in 1961 originally included Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Algeria (Algeria won its independence only in 1962) as well as Ghana, Guinea, and Mali. Thus out of its seven members four were predominantly Arab. Pan-Africanists like Frantz Fanon have always stressed that there is a single African continent and that both Black Africans in the south and White Africans in the north belong to it. Indeed Algeria along with Congo was one of the two great issues that occupied the Casablanca group and its constituent members. The Casablanca group went so far as to give membership to the provisional government formed by the Algerian independence movement. Both Black African and Arab African states have shown solidarity in their opposition to European colonialism, South African apartheid, and the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. I have written quite a bit recently here on Western Sahara which is an Arab inhabited territory whose liberation has been championed mainly by African states. In fact the provisional revolutionary government of the territory, the SADR (Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic) is a full member of the African Union. A future united Africa can not exclude its northernmost states. The Arabs and Berbers are an integral part of the African continent and the fate of countries like Egypt and Tunisia is just as important to real Pan-Africanists as Togo or Gabon.

Thank You UTAG

This morning I noticed that I had been paid about 3,000 cedis ($1,500). My understanding and it is hard to follow the exactly how the payment system here works is that this is the money that was in arrears from the 2012 market premium. That means that the book and research allowance which is supposed to be doubled from 1,800 cedis ($900) to 3,600 cedis ($1,800) is still outstanding. I got the impression from last Monday's emergency union meeting that the strike would continue until all the money owed to us was paid into our bank accounts. So I think the strike is still on. But, I will try to confirm this on Monday. I will definitely find out before Friday when I am scheduled to teach whether I am to go to class and lecture or not. At any rate I am pretty happy that at least this payment has landed in my bank account this fast. I did not expect to see this money until some time next week. I hope I get the rest of what is owed me soon. But, it is always a good start to a Saturday to find out you have a lot more money than you thought you had in your bank account.

Update: I have confirmed today with my coworkers that the 3,000 Ghana I received is the arrears I was owed, but that the book and research allowance still has not been paid. The UTAG strike will continue until we receive that payment as well. So I am still on strike until I hear otherwise.

74 Years Since the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

Today is the 74th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This "nonaggression" pact was actually an alliance between the USSR and Nazi Germany from 1939-1941. Its secret protocols divided the countries in between these two states into spheres of influence. In the Soviet sphere of influence fell Finland, eastern Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Bessarabia. The Nazi sphere of influence consisted of most of western and central Poland. The alliance between the USSR and Nazi Germany led to the invasion and annexation of eastern Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Bessarabia by the USSR. The Stalin regime instituted a brutal reign of terror in these countries. On 14 June 1941, the Soviet NKVD deported over 40,000 men, women, and children from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to Siberia and northern Russia. Here is an account from an Estonian who survived the harrowing exile to Siberia. She was one of the lucky ones. Many of the deportees from the Baltic states, Bessarabia, and the areas annexed from Poland did not survive. In fact about half of them died in  a little over four years from the poor material conditions imposed upon them by the Stalin regime. The Soviet government also illegally and forcibly conscripted some 40,000 Estonian men into the Red Army of which it transferred 17,000, almost half, to forced labor detachments in Arkhangelsk Oblast. The alliance between Nazi Germany and the USSR signed 74 years ago made this brutality and many other crimes by the Soviet and Nazi regimes against the people of the Baltic states, Poland, and Bessarabia possible. As a result this day is observed as Black Ribbon Day to commemorate the victims that resulted from this pact of evil.

Today's Emergency Union Meeting (UTAG)

Today I went to a UTAG (University Teachers Association of Ghana) emergency meeting. It appears that we are on strike until such time as the government pays all of our arrears and our book and research allowance. So I won't be teaching class tomorrow morning. The union is not always very good at informing its members of when it goes on strike and when strikes end. But, now they are going to start collecting the names of faculty who continue to teach. So the union is actually serious about enforcing the strike this time. Officially the strike has been going on since the start of the semester. That means that in the first week of September that the Vice Chancellor can shut down the campus for the academic year. Currently faculty and senior staff are on strike and junior staff are set to strike in a couple of weeks if their demands are not met. I don't think that the Vice Chancellor will shut down the university. On the other hand until all of our money is actually in our bank accounts we are not going to be teaching. Already the foreign students, particularly those from the US on expensive one semester programs, have started complaining about not receiving the lectures they paid thousands of dollars for. If the strike continues or the university is shut down there is no solution for what to do with the foreign students. The university does not have the money to refund their payments or to pay faculty extra to just teach them as it did during the strike last semester. The best outcome would be for the government to pay us in full as soon as possible so we can go back to work. Otherwise it may be a real easy semester as far as teaching is concerned.

Possible Research Project Update

It turns out there has been a fair amount amount of research already on communism in the Gold Coast and other British West African colonies during the 1920s and 1930s, much of it based on archives housed at PRAAD (Public Records and Archives Department) in Accra. I have found a number of journal articles dealing with the subject through JSTOR. So this is indeed a possible research project I could pursue here.

Africa not Moscow, Havana, or Beijing

Western Sahara is the last unresolved colonial conflict in Africa. In 1975 when Spain withdrew from the territory it became occupied by Morocco in opposition to the wishes of the vast majority of the indigenous population (Zunes, p. 35). The Moroccans took over the colonial role of Spain in Western Sahara much as Indonesia did for Portugal in East Timor around the same time. Despite their small numbers the Sahrawis were able to launch and sustain an impressive military and diplomatic resistance to Moroccan rule during the 1970s and 1980s. The Moroccan occupation forces have been quite brutal in their suppression of opposition to their rule.

Both the military and diplomatic resistance of the Sahrawis to Moroccan rule has been quite different politically from most national liberation movements in Africa and the greater Arab world. The political-military movement to liberate Western Sahara from Morocco is known as the Polisario (The Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el Hamra and Rio de Oro). The government established by the Polisario in the liberated areas of Western Sahara is the SADR (Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic) (Zunes, p. 34). The Polisario has very little ideology apart from a desire to liberate the land of the Sahrawi people, a commitment to participatory democracy, and a "Third World" orientation particularly towards Africa and to a lesser extent towards other Arab states (Zunes, pp. 37-42). Unlike almost all other national liberation movements of the 1970s and 1980s in Africa such as the MPLA, FRELIMO, ZAPU, ANC, and SWAPO they did not closely ally themselves with the socialist bloc. In fact the Polisario never directly received any arms from the USSR, the Warsaw Pact states, Cuba, or even China (Zunes, pp. 43-44). The only European states to recognize the SADR were Yugoslavia in 1984 and Albania in 1987. (Pazzanita, p. 272).  The Soviet bloc in contrast maintained good relations with Morocco, the Soviet Union being in the 1980s Morocco's largest trade partner and Romania providing weapons to Rabat (Zunes, p. 43). Other suppliers of arms to Morocco have included the US, UK, France, Israel, apartheid South Africa, and Saudi Arabia (Bhatia, p. 292). The pro-Soviet Moroccan Communist Party was always a strong supporter of Morocco's conquest of the Western Sahara (Zunes, p. 44). Instead the Polisario and SADR found their strongest support among African states. The SADR gained membership in the OAU  (Organization of African Unity) in 1984 and had achieved diplomatic recognition from 74 states by 1990 (Pazzanita, pp. 271-272). These states included 27 in Africa and 14 in Latin America (Zunes, p. 42). Arms and logistical military support for the Polisario came mostly from Algeria with some support in the 1980s from Libya (Bhatia, p. 292). Thus the Polisario and SADR had a clear orientation towards non-aligned African and Arab states rather than the USSR and its allies in East Central Europe and Cuba.

The lack of attention paid to the plight of the Sahrawis and their national liberation front in North America and Europe is in part due to their lack of a Marxist-Leninist ideology and alliance with the USSR. Their African rather than Soviet orientation did not connect them with the global left in the industrialized North and instead left them isolated from the type of support groups like the ANC could mobilize on their behalf. At the same time their lack of connections with the USSR did nothing practical to help them in the eyes of the US which strongly backed Morocco in Western Sahara despite the fact that Moscow showed absolutely no interest in supporting the struggle of the Polisario. Nonetheless, the Pan-Africanism of the Polisario did garner them the support of most of the membership of the OAU showing that African states could act independently of the superpowers.

Non-Internet Sources Cited:

Michael Bhatia, "The Western Sahara under Polisario Control," Review of African Political Economy, vol. 28, no. 88, (June 2001), pp. 291-298.

Anthony G. Pazzanita, "Morocco vs. Polisario: A Political Interpretation," The Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 32, no. 2, (June 1994), pp. 265-278.

Stephen Zunes, "Nationalism and Non-Alignment: The Non-Ideology of the Polisario," Africa Today, vol. 34, no. 3 (1987), pp. 33-46.

The Deportation of the Volga Germans

On 26 August 1941 the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Council of People's Commissariats of the Soviet Union issued Decree No. 2056-933ss ordering the deportation of all Germans from the Volga German ASSR and the neighboring Saratov and Stalingrad oblasts. This order came suddenly without warning and blatantly violated the Soviet and Russian constitutions. This first decree gave no reasons for the mass deportations and remained secret until after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  The next day, 27 August 1941, Beria issued NKVD Prikaz 001158 detailing the measures and instructions for executing this mass ethnic cleansing (Bugai, docs. 9-10, pp. 41-47). The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issued a second deportation decree on 28 August 1941, Ukaz 21-160, which was published in Nachrichten and Bolshevik in the Volga German ASSR two days later. This second decree falsely accused the entire ethnic German population of the Volga German ASSR, Saratov Oblast, and Stalingrad Oblast of treason without any evidence. This false accusation served as the basis for brutally punishing hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, and children. The NKVD ruthlessly carried out the deportation of 451,986 Volga Germans to Siberia and Kazakhstan of which 365,764 came from the Volga German ASSR. The names of 2,979 of these exiles have been collected so far. The deportation of the Volga Germans was followed up by the deportation of almost all of the ethnic Germans in the USSR west of the Urals still under Soviet control. Their fate was particularly grim. The Soviet government abandoned them in the extreme climate of Siberia and northern Kazakhstan with insufficient food, housing, and medical facilities with the result that a very large number of them perished prematurely from malnutrition, exposure, and epidemic diseases during 1941-1948.

Non-Internet sources cited

N.F. Bugai, (ed.), Iosif Stalin-Lavrentiiu Berii: "Ikh nado deportirovat' ": Dokumenty, fakty, kommentarii, (Moscow: Druzhba Narodov, 1992).

The US Embassy Warning

I see that the US embassy here has issued a warning about potential violence after 29 August 2013. Thereby further demonstrating that the Obama administration and its State Department  is completely ignorant about Ghana. But, given its policies in other African states I am not surprised.

First Class of the Semester, Fall 2013

Today I had my first class of the semester. After waiting for over 30 minutes, one international student finally showed up. No Ghanaian students bothered to show up. I am hoping next week there is a greater turn out.

Possible New Research Project

Now that I know that PRAAD has nothing available after 6 March 1957, I need to formulate a new research project since obviously I can not look at the relevant Ghanaian documents dealing with the 18 December 1963 African student demonstration in Moscow. I am thinking of looking to see if there is anything in the British colonial records regarding alleged subversion by the Comintern in the 1920s and 30s. Even though the USSR really had no policy at all towards Africa until the 1950s, I am thinking that British perceptions might have been different.

African Archives

Today I had to go to Accra City Campus to pick up a check. Since it was still morning after I finished I decided to go to the PRAAD (Public Records and Archives Department) formerly NAG (National Archives of Ghana) around the corner to see what the national government archives of the Republic of Ghana had on the African student demonstration in Moscow in December 1963. It turns out that all of the national government archives in Ghana from independence in 1957 forward are still classified and are not likely to be declassified any time soon. Indeed the existing government policy seems to be that all archives of the independent state of Ghana are to be permanently classified. Only archives from the era of British colonial rule and a bit before are available.  I am wondering if any other African governments have similar policies of keeping all of their archives since independence secret and only declassifying those archives dealing with the colonial era and before. If it is in fact a wide spread policy then it is a huge obstacle to researching modern African history. The documents I wanted to look at are almost 50 years old, a time long before my birth when my parents were young, yet they are still classified along with every other central government archival document written after 6 March 1957. If anybody knows about the archival classification policies of African states other than Ghana, please leave a comment.

Bloodlands and other Readings for Hist 435

This semester I am teaching Aspects of World History, 1914-1945 again. As in semesters past I am assigning Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (London: Vintage Books, 2008) as the main text for the class. In addition I am also assigning Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London: Vintage Books, 2011) to more fully cover the history of the territory between Moscow and Berlin. I am also assigning six journal articles up from four last year on various aspects of Stalinist repression to fill out the outline presented by Gellately and Snyder. I think together Gellately and Snyder do an adequate job dealing with the Holocaust and other aspects of the history of Nazi Germany, so I don't have any additional journal articles to assign dealing with that part of the class.

I am adding the Snyder text to the class in response to suggestions I received a couple of years ago when I first started teaching the course. Because it covers a greater chronological and thematic expanse I opted instead to assign the Gellatley text. This year, however, I have decided to assign both texts which will bring the reading load for students up to about 100 pages a week. I am told this is a normal amount of reading for a 400 level class.

The six additional articles I am assigning to the class are listed below.

Elza-Bair Guchinova, "Deportation of the Kalmyks (1943-1956): Stigmatized Ethnicity" in Uyama Tomohiko, ed., Empire, Islam, and Politics in Central Eurasia, Slavic Eurasian Studies, no. 14 (Sapporo, Japan: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2007), pp. 187-221.

Katherine R. Jolluck, "'You Can't Even Call Them Women': Poles and 'Others' in Soviet Exile during the Second World War," Contemporary European History, vol. 10, no. 3, (Nov. 2001), pp. 463-480.

James Morris, "The Polish Terror: Spy Mania and Ethnic Cleansing in the Great Terror," Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 56, no. 5, (July 2004), pp. 751-766.

J. Otto Pohl, "Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Water: Russian-Germans in the Labour Army," The Eurasian Studies Society Journal, vol. 2, no. 1, (Feb. 2013), pp. 1-17.

J. Otto Pohl, Eric J. Schmaltz, and Ronald J. Vossler, "'In Our Hearts we Felt the Sentence of Death': Ethnic German Recollections of Mass Violence in the USSR, 1928-1948," Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 11, nos. 2-3, (June-Sep. 2009), pp. 323-354.

Lynne Viola, "The Other Archipelago: Kulak Deportations to the North in 1930," Slavic Review, vol. 60, no. 4 (Winter 2001), pp. 730-755.

African Slavery in the Islamic World

Slavery in Islamic Africa has been a fascinating subject to which many scholars have referred, but of which no detailed monograph has emerged. If the subject of Islamic slavery in Africa has failed to arouse the interest which has attended the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the New World, it must be said it compares with the latter in scale and scope, and outdistances the more popular subject in its length of duration. Indeed, so pervasive is the subject of slavery in African societies, that one cannot appreciate fully the social, economic or political dimensions of the African past and present without some reference to it. Moreover, slaves of African origin formed a vital thread in the living lines of economic production in the Near and Middle East and formed the cord of economic activity in Islamic Africa itself.

Quotation from the preface of John Ralph Willis, (ed.), Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa, volume II, The Servile Estate, (London: Frank Cass: 1985), p. vii.

Today's Walk

This morning after my morning koko and koose I took a tro-tro down to Nkrumah Circle and walked down Nkrumah Blvd. through Makola Market. I then cut through Makola Square and walked past the post office and cut through Ussher Town. I emerged across the street from Fort Ussher. Fort Ussher was a slave fort founded by the Dutch and later taken over by the English. It is one of three slave forts in Accra all of them on the same street, the others being Fort James founded by the English which I also walked past and Fort Christensborg  founded by the Danish and taken over later by the English. After exiting Ussher Town I walked along the recently renamed John Evans Attah Mills High Street parallel to the coast which is where all the slave forts are located. Every president of Ghana since the establishment of the Fourth Republic has been named John. I walked past the James Town Palace and crossed the street at the light house. From the street I had a good view of the fishing village on the beach and the Gulf of Guinea. I then walked past Fort James and Tabon Hall (Brazil House) which is "The Cradle of Tabon People." One of our graduate students is doing an MPhil on the Tabon who were Blacks who came to Accra from Brazil. Despite the importance of the Tabon to the Black Atlantic there has not been a lot of scholarship on the group. Then my left foot which I smacked in a drainage ditch yesterday started to hurt again. So I took a cab back home for 12 cedis.

More numbers on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

I came across a good table which provides a breakdown of the importation of slaves to the Americas from 1519-1867. I have compressed and summarized the data below. The overwhelming emphasis by American Left-wing academics on the US role in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade to the almost total exclusion of much larger importers like Brazil is completely unjustified. It would be far more justified to concentrate on tiny Barbados to the exclusion of the rest of the hemisphere than to make the US the focus of teaching and research on the Trans-Atlantic slave trade as is currently the case. At 3.7% the US role merits a footnote, but not the overwhelming majority of attention that it currently receives from American Left-wing university professors to the detriment of understanding the institution as a whole with its much larger Caribbean and Brazilian components.

British Mainland North America - 360,400 or 3.7%
Jamaica - 1,077,100 or 11.2% (three times as many as the US)
Barbados - 491,000 or 5.1% (more than the US)
British Leewards - 304,200 or 3.2%
British Windwards and Trinidad and Tobago - 362,000 or 3.7% (more than the US)
Guianas - 403,400 or 4.2% (more than the US)
French Windwards - 304,200 or 3.1%
St. Domingue (Haiti) - 787,400 or 8.2% (more than twice as many as the US)
Spanish America - 427,200 or 4.4% (more than the US)
Spanish Caribbean - 791,900 or 8.2% (more than twice as many as the US)
Dutch Caribbean - 128,700 or 1.3%
North East Brazil - 898,800 or 9.3% (more than twice as many as the US)
Bahia - 1,036,100 or 10.7% (more than twice as many as the US)
South East Brazil - 2,042,300 or 21.1% (more five times as many as the US)
(Sub-Total for Brazil  - 3,977,200 or 41.1% [more than ten times as many as the US])
Other Americas - 110,400 or 1.1%
Africa - 131,200 or 1.4%
Total - 9,657,100 or 100%

Source:

David Eltis and David Richardson, "Prices of African Slaves Newly Arrived in the Americas, 1673-1865: New Evidence on Long-Run Trends and Regional Differentials," in David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis, and Kenneth L. Sokoloff,  (eds.), Slavery in the Development of the Americas  (Cambridge University Press, 2004), table 2, pp. 188-189.

The Unconstitutionality of the Deportation of the Volga Germans and the Liquidation of the Volga German ASSR

A large number of prominent scholars vehemently deny that the USSR was guilty of racial discrimination or genocide in part because the 1948 Genocide Convention and the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination did not exist yet during World War II. They therefore claim it is anachronistic to hold the Soviet government accountable to these international legal standards. People like Francine Hirsch have argued that we should seek to understand what the Soviet government "thought" it was doing within its own officially stated ideological conceptions and terms and not what the objective results of its actions were as measured against later scholarly and legal understandings of the concept of racial discrimination (Hirsch, pp. 40-41). Of course nobody makes such excuses for Nazi Germany or South Africa under apartheid. It is only the USSR that is still blessed with such stalwart defenders in the western academy against the charges of racism.

There, however, can be no doubt that the Soviet deportation of the Volga Germans and the liquidation of the Volga German ASSR was illegal under Soviet constitutional law as established by the 1936 USSR, 1937 RSFSR, and 1937 Volga German ASSR constitutions regardless of the underdeveloped nature of international law at the time. Collective punishment was clearly illegal under article 102 of the 1936 constitution which assigned sole responsibility for determining the guilt of an individual to the Soviet courts rather than administrative decree. Thus Soviet constitutional law required individual charges and trials in order to make any finding of guilt regarding violations of Soviet law and the meting out of punishment. This prohibition on arbitrary administrative punishment was even more forcibly articulated in article 93 of the constitution of the Volga German ASSR which required that all punishments be sanctioned by the appropriate courts and procurators. There were no trials or individual charges brought by any procurator against the vast majority of the more than 370,000 men, women, and children forcibly expelled from the Volga German ASSR and dispersed across Siberia and Kazakhstan. Assigning collective guilt to whole nationalities as the 28 August 1941 decree by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (Ukaz 21-160) did also violated article 123 of the all union constitution which prohibited all forms of discrimination both direct and indirect on the basis of race or natsional'nost. The deportation itself with its massive confiscation of personal property clearly did not accord with article 10 of the USSR constitution which guaranteed the protection of "the right of personal ownership by citizens of the proceeds of their labor and savings, personal homes and auxiliary holdings, and objects and amenities of personal consumption." This right is reinforced in article 94 of the Volga German ASSR constitution. The special settlement restrictions contravened articles 21 and 123 of the 1936 Soviet constitution (articles 18 and 127 of the 1937 RSFSR constitution) establishing a single Soviet citizenship for all Soviet citizens in which all of them enjoyed the same civil rights regardless of geographic location or nationality. The liquidation of the Volga German ASSR on 7 September 1941 by decree from the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in Moscow had no legal basis under Soviet constitutional law. Article 16 of the 1937 RSFSR constitution required that all territorial changes within it be first approved by its highest organs. Likewise article 15 of the Volga German ASSR constitution also required approval from its own organs before any changes could be made to its borders (Shadt, pp. 287-296 and Skuchaev, p. 94).

There has long been a school of thought that the systematic and blatant violations of the 1936 Soviet constitution were so great that discussion of the matter in legal terms was superfluous since the document was violated far more than it was observed. There is validity to this opinion. But,  a number of scholars argue that Stalin's mass crimes against various citizens of the USSR had not yet been outlawed by international law and were therefore legal. This argument can not be allowed to stand. Crimes such as the deportation of the Volga Germans were illegal under existing Soviet law. The position of Stephen Wheatcroft that Stalinist repression unlike Nazi killings was "legal" completely falls apart upon even the most superficial reading of the 1936 Soviet, 1937 RSFSR, and 1937 Volga German ASSR constitutions (Wheatcroft, p. 1321, p. 1335, and p. 1348). It is clear that Stalinist repression including the deportation of the Volga Germans violated a great number of articles of the 1936 Soviet and 1937 RSFSR constitutions and can in no way be deemed to have been "legal" under the fundamental laws of the USSR. If it were not for people like Wheatcroft minimizing Stalin's crimes by claiming they were "legal" we could dispense with noting the legal protections provided on paper by the Soviet, RSFSR, and Volga German ASSR constitutions were explicitly and repeatedly violated by the Soviet government. After all the moral wrongness of mass deportations, theft, denial of national self-determination, racial discrimination, and genocide do not depend on what is written in any particular document.

Sources:

Constitution (Fundamental Law) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 1936 (Moscow: CO-Operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers, 1936).

Francine Hirsch, "Race without the Practice of Racial Politics," Slavic Review, vol. 61, no.1 (spring 2002), pp. 30-43.

Konstitutsiia [Osnovnoi Zakon] Avtonomnoi Sovetskoi Sotsialicheskoi Respubliki Nemtsev Povolzh'ia 1937 reproduced in V. Auman and V. Chebatoreva, Istoriia rossiiskikh nemtsev v dokumentakh (1763-1992 gg.) (Moscow: MIGUP, 1993), pp. 141-156.

A. Shadt, "Pravoi status rossiiskikh nemtsev v SSSR (1940-1950-e), in A. German, Nemtsy v SSSR v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny: Poslevoennoe desiatletie, 1941-1955 gg. (Moscow: Gotika, 2001), pp. 287-312.

O. Skuchaev, "K voprosu o prichinakh i pravovykh osnovaniiakh deportatsii nemtskogo naseleniia iz Povolzh'ia," in A. German (ed.), Grazhdanskaia identichnost' nemtsev v gody Velikoi Otchestvennoi Voiny i v istoricheskoi pamiati potomkov (Moscow: Gotika, 2001), pp. 88-97.

Stephen Wheatcroft, "The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repressions and Mass Killings, 1930-45," Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 48, no. 8, (Dec. 1996), 1319-1353.

Putting things in perspective

In the big scheme of things the sins of the US against the peoples of Africa pale before those of Europe. People in Africa and of African descent in the Caribbean know this. It is only Western Leftists that like to pretend that the US importation of 400,000 African slaves in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade is a greater sin than the European importation of 8 million slaves from Africa into Brazil and the Caribbean where many of them were worked to death growing sugar cane. It is only Western Leftists who think that asymmetrical political relations between the US and various African countries are morally identical to what the Portuguese did in Angola and Mozambique, the French did in Algeria, the Belgians did in Congo, and the British did in Kenya. The CIA's murder of Lumumba and overthrow of Nkrumah were bad, but they are not on the same moral plane as tiny Belgium's murder of 10 million people in Congo. The perverse desire of American Leftists to paint the US as the source of all evil to the exclusion of all other sources is an inverse form of chauvinism. For them the US has to be the sole focus of everything evil even when as in the case of the international slave trade  it had a  very tiny role.

More on the African Slave Trades of which 1.3% went to the US

I have discussed this with a number of Africans and citizens of Caribbean nations and the complete "hijacking" as one Ghanaian graduate student put it of the discourse on the slave trade by Americans is something they greatly resent. Over 30 million Africans were shipped out of Africa as slaves to the Middle East, Europe, the Americas, and other destinations. Out of that 30 million only 400,000 ended up in the US. That is a total of 1.3%. That means 98.7% of the slaves forcibly transported out of Africa went to other countries. Yet reading the blogs of American academics you would think that 100% of the slaves shipped out of Africa were sent to the US. Ten times as many slaves were sent to Brazil as the US and a far higher percentage of them died from maltreatment. Yet you would never know this fact from reading US academic blogs. You would instead be left with the impression that no slaves were ever shipped out of Africa to any place other than the US. In reality of course less than 2% went to the US about the same number as went to Barbados and far less than went to Brazil, Jamaica, or Cuba.

An African Fall?

Recently in three authoritarian African states the ruling party has won a majority of over two thirds in parliamentary or senate elections. These three states are Togo, Burkina Faso, and Zimbabwe. The same family has been in power in Togo since 1967. Zimbabwe has been ruled by Robert Mugabe and ZANU since 1980. Burkina Faso has been under the rule of Blaise Compoare since 1987 when he came to power in a coup that involved the assassination of Thomas Sankara, one of Africa's most visionary leaders. The consolidation of power by the current ruling authoritarian establishments in these elections is a clear move away from greater political liberalism and tolerance in these countries. Already there have been protests and at least 50 arrests in connection with the elections in Burkina Faso. Political repression of opponents of the existing regimes in Togo, Burkina Faso, and Zimbabwe will no doubt now increase as a result of the recent election results.

Sixto Rodriguez- Cold Fact

 I saw the documentary Searching for Sugar Man on my Emirates flight from Accra to Dubai on my way to Bishkek this June. Like most Americans I had never heard of Sixto Rodriguez whose musical career was a total failure in the US despite his brilliant song writing. What makes the story so interesting is that Rodriguez became a huge hit in South Africa where his albums sold hundreds of thousands of copies without him ever having an inkling as to his popularity in that country. The South African distributors of his albums never bothered to send him any royalty checks during the 1970s and 1980s. Among many Afrikaner youth Rodriguez was considered a musical icon on the same level as Elvis or the Beatles. At any rate I really like his music. You can check it out for yourself. I have embedded his first album from 1970 here.

Back in Africa, History Department Renovations, and Another Strike

I arrived back in Legon several days ago, but the History Department was undergoing renovation. So I could not get access to my office. After a year they have finally installed sockets for the Internet in our offices. They have also put blinds in our offices. They are also supposed to give us a Polytank so that we will at long last have water in the washroom.

We are also on strike again. The government did not pay us, although they fully paid faculty at every other university in the country, all of our back pay. They paid the first two installments before I left and then stopped paying us after we had all gone on vacation and could no longer do anything. We were also supposed to get our annual research grants before August first. Last year we did not get them until December. I hear the research grant has doubled and that would be a very good thing. So until we get our arrears and our research grant we are not teaching classes again which officially begin next week. The predictions are that the government will pay us and classes will start by August twelfth.