African History – Page 2 – Historical Easter Eggs

March 20 1870 The Lion of Africa

The Lion of Africa, the German officer and conquering hero of WW1, who once told the upstart Adolf Hitler to perform an anatomically improbable act.

Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck was born into minor Prussian Nobility on this day in 1870. Joining the Corps of Cadets as a teenager, Lettow-Vorbeck worked his way up the German Imperial Army chain of command, becoming a general by 1914.

At the outset of the “Great War”, a map of Africa looked nothing like it does today. From the Belgian Congo to Italian Somaliland, most of the continent was carved into colonies of the various European powers. France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Belgium and Spain. All administered parts of the African continent.

Stationed in German East Africa and knowing that his sector would be little more than a side show in the greater war effort, Lettow-Vorbeck determined to tie up as many of his adversaries as possible.

With a force never exceeding 14,000 (3,000 Germans and 11,000 Askari warriors), “Der Löwe von Afrika” tied up as many as 300,000 British, Belgian, and Portuguese troops, who wore themselves out in the pursuit.

Like the famous Lawrence of Arabia, Lettow-Vorbeck became a master of guerrilla warfare. He never lost a single battle, though it was not unheard of for combatants to break and flee a charging elephant or rhinoceros.

To his adversaries, disease and parasites were often more dangerous than enemy soldiers. In one month (July, 1916) Allied non-battle casualties ran 31 to 1 compared with combat-related injuries.

In 1956, Brazilian scientists attempted to cross African honey bees with indigenous varieties, to produce an insect better suited to the South American tropics. Today, we call the results of these failed experiments “Africanized” or “killer” bees.

At one point in the battle for Tanga (November 7-8, 1914), a British landing force and their Sepoy allies were routed and driven back to the sea by millions of African bees, disturbed by rifle and machine gun fire. There’s a story about a British radioman, I don’t know if it’s true. This guy held his station, directing the evacuation from the beach while being stung to death by thousands of angry bees. He would be posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for “gallantry under aerial attack”.

Lettow's_surrender — Lettow-Vorbeck surrendering his forces to the British at Abercorn, as drawn by an African artist. H/T Wikipedia

Returning home after the war, Vorbeck was greeted as a conquering hero. Of all German commanders in World War One, “der Löwe von Afrika” (the Lion of Africa) alone remained undefeated in the field. The only German commander to successfully invade imperial British soil during the Great War.

Lettow-Vorbeck developed a deep distrust of the upstart Adolf Hitler. When then-Chancellor Hitler offered him an ambassadorship to the Court of St. James in 1935, Lettow-Vorbeck told Hitler to go “f**k yourself.” Describing the interview afterward, Lettow’s nephew explained “That’s right, except that I don’t think he put it that politely.”

Following such a blunt refusal, Lettow-Vorbeck was kept under continual surveillance by the Nazi regime. His home and office were searched, his person subject to constant harassment. The Lion of Africa was destitute by the end of WWII. His two sons killed in service to the Wehrmacht, his home in Bremen destroyed by Allied bombs.

For a time, Vorbeck lived on food packages from British Intelligence Officer Richard Meinertzhagen and South African Field Marshal Jan Christiaan Smuts, two of his former adversaries in the East Africa campaign. It was a token of the respect these two had, for a man who had once been their enemy.

In 1964, the year Lettow-Vorbeck died, the Bundestag voted to give back pay to former African warriors who had fought with German forces in WWI. Some 350 elderly Ascaris showed up. A few could produce certificates given them back in 1918, some had scraps of old uniforms. Precious few could prove their former service to the German Empire.

The German banker who had brought the money had an idea. As each man stepped forward, he was handed a broom and ordered to perform the German manual of arms. Not one man failed the test.

Lettow-Vorbeck formed a lifelong friendship during his time in Africa, with the Danish author Karen Blixen, best known by her pen name Isak Dinesen, author of “Out of Africa”. Years later, Blixen recalled, “He belonged to the olden days, and I have never met another German who has given me so strong an impression of what Imperial Germany was and stood for”.

A Trivial Matter

Following years of colonial, military and diplomatic interaction, romantic relationships between Germans and Africans, were inevitable. Though rare as hen’s teeth, Adolf Hitler’s Reich included the children of such relationships. One such was Hans J. Massaquoi, a self-described “kinky-haired, brown-skinned, eight-year-old boy amid a sea of blonde and blue-eyed kids filled with patriotism”. Though prohibited from joining by racial “purity” laws, the eight-year-old Hans was entirely caught up in the excitement of the Hitler Youth.

Mr. Massaquoi tells his unusual and fascinating story in Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany.

March 12, 1894 The Real Thing

Over 400,000 calls and letters came into company headquarters, complaining about the change. One note was addressed to “Chief Dodo, The Coca-Cola Company”. Another letter asked for Goizueta’s autograph, since the signature of “one of the dumbest executives in American business history”

By the 19th century, Europeans had long believed natural mineral waters held medicinal qualities, and favored the beverages over often polluted common drinking water. British chemist Joseph Priestley invented a means of carbonating water in 1772. Jacob Schweppe’s Geneva, Switzerland company was bottling the stuff by the 1780s. The first soda water manufacturer in the US was Yale University chemist Benjamin Silliman in 1807, though it was Joseph Hawkins of Baltimore who secured the first US patent, in 1809.

At first sold for their therapeutic value, consumers increasingly bought carbonated beverages for refreshment. By the time of the Civil War, “soft drinks” were flavored with ginger, vanilla, fruits, roots, herbs, and countless other flavorings. The first cola drink appeared in 1881.

In 1865, Confederate Cavalry officer John Stith Pemberton was wounded by a saber slash across his chest at the Battle of Columbus, Georgia. Like many wounded veterans, Pemberton became addicted to the morphine given him, to help ease the pain. A chemist in civil life, Pemberton experimented with painkillers to take the place of opiates, landing on a combination of the coca plant and kola nut in 1886.

Vicksburg, Mississippi pharmacist Joseph Biedenharn installed bottling equipment in the back of his soda fountain and sold the first bottles of Coca Cola on March 12, 1894.

The most famous rivalry in the soft drink business began in the 1930s, when Pepsi offered a 12oz bottle for the same 5¢ as Coca Cola’s six ounces.

The Coca Cola Company’s flagship brand had a 60% share by the end of WWII, but that declined to less than 24% by the early 80s, most of the difference lost to Pepsi and their “Pepsi challenge” blind taste test promotions of the late 70s.

By the 80s, market analysts believed that baby boomers were likely to switch to diet drinks as they aged, and any growth in the full calorie segment was going to come from younger consumers who preferred the sweeter taste of Pepsi.

Roberto Goizueta came on board as Coca Cola Company CEO in 1980, saying that there would be “no sacred cows” among their products. He meant it. The company launched the top secret “Project Kansas”, to test and perfect the flavor for a new version of Coke. The company’s marketing department fanned out holding taste tests, surveys, and focus groups.

Early results were favorable, the newer, sweeter mixture overwhelmingly beating both Pepsi and Coke itself. Most tasters said that they would buy the product, but a small minority of 10–12% were angry and alienated at the very thought of it. This small percentage was adamant. They would stop drinking Coke products altogether, and they frequently swayed other members of their focus groups.

The way things turned out, the company should have listened to this group a little more carefully.

On an April Friday in 1985, Coke let the media know that a major announcement was coming the following Tuesday. Coca Cola officials spent a busy weekend preparing the re-launch, while Pepsi Executives announced a company-wide holiday, taking out a full page New York Times ad crowing “Pepsi had Won the Cola Wars“.

Skepticism was high on the day of the Big Announcement. Reporters were fed questions by Pepsi officials, and Goizueta fumbled, refusing to state the reason for the change. He certainly wasn’t going to give Pepsi any credit for their performance in taste tests, explaining “[It’s] smoother, uh, uh, rounder yet, uh, yet bolder…a more harmonious flavor“.

The backlash was soon in coming, and closely tracked earlier focus group results. Atlanta based Coca Cola’s southern customers described the change as another surrender to the “Yankees”. Consumers filled basements with the old Coke. One man in San Antonio bought $1,000 worth.

“Protesters at a Coca-Cola event in downtown Atlanta in May carried signs with “We want the real thing” and “Our children will never know refreshment.”” – Coca-cola.com

Over 400,000 calls and letters came into company headquarters, complaining about the change. One note was addressed to “Chief Dodo, The Coca-Cola Company“. Goizueta himself said the worst part, was the letter made it to him! Another letter asked for Goizueta’s autograph, since the signature of “one of the dumbest executives in American business history” would probably be worth a fortune. Critics proclaimed the “marketing blunder of the century” while frazzled customer service representatives fielded fifteen hundred angry calls, a day. A psychiatrist hired to listen in on calls, told executives some callers sounded as if they were mourning the death of a family member.

Even Max Headroom and his “C-c-c-catch the wave!” couldn’t save the company.

Ads for “New Coke” were booed at the Houston Astrodome, while Pepsi ran ads in which smiling first-time Pepsi drinkers said “Now I know why Coke did it!”

Even Fidel Castro weighed in, calling the change a sign of capitalist decadence.

Company President Donald Keough knew it was over, on a visit to the Mediterranean Principality of Monaco. A small restaurant owner proudly said that he had “the real thing, it’s a real Coke,” offering Keough’s party a bottle of the old stuff.

The 1985 return of the old brand led two network news broadcasts, and hit the front page of nearly every newspaper, in the country. “New Coke” became “Coke II” and quietly disappeared, from store shelves. One reporter asked Keough if the whole thing had been a publicity stunt. Keough’s answer was itself, a classic. “We’re not that dumb,” he said, “and we’re not that smart”.

A Trivial Matter

Coke makes so many different beverages if you drank one per day, it would take you over 9 years to try them all. Coca-Cola’s $35.1 billion in revenue makes it the 84th largest economy in the world, just ahead of Costa Rica. H/T gkfacts.in

December 17, 1865 Horrors of the Congo

Rubber plantations took space and clear-cutting old-growth rain forest took time, so the king’s agents drove villagers from their homes, to fend for themselves. Problem solved, instant space for the most important cash crop, of the era.

President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe once orchestrated the murder of 20,000 civilians from a single province, after failing to receive a single vote. Josef Stalin deliberately starved as many as ten million Ukrainians to death, in a political “terror famine” known as the Holodomor. Pol Pot and a revolutionary socialist cadre of nine – the Ang-Ka – killed between 1.7 and 2.5 million fellow citizens of late 1970s Cambodia: about 1/5th of the entire population. Mao Tse-Tung’s policies and political purges killed between 49 and 78 million of his own citizens, between 1949 and 1976.

You’re really playing in the Big Leagues, when they can’t get your body count any closer than the nearest thirty million.

From Adolf Hitler to Idi Amin, the top ten dictators of the last 150 years account for the loss of nearly 150 million souls. We remember the names of these people, or most of them, as some of the great monsters of history.

220px-Punch_Rhodes_Colossus — December 10 1892 satirical cartoon depicts Cecil Rhodes as the New Colossus bestriding the continent, from Cape Town to Cairo. Hat tip, Punch

Yet, one man escapes notice, though his crimes rival and even exceed the worst atrocities carried out by twentieth century dictators. He is King Leopold II of Belgium. For nearly thirty years, the undisputed slave master of a personal plantation some 76-times the size of Belgium itself, and run for the personal enrichment of this one man.

As late as 1870, the European powers controlled barely ten percent of the African continent, with most of those holdings, along the coast. By the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent of European control.

From German East Africa to Italian Somaliland, most of the continent was carved into colonies of the various European powers, administered by governments in France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

Leopold II ascended to the throne to become King of the Belgians on this day in 1865. Like most of the statesmen of the era, Leopold was convinced that a nation’s greatness, lay in proportion to its overseas empire. He first cast his gaze on the Philippines, then a Spanish possession, but negotiations broke down when Queen Isabella II was deposed in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1868.

Leopold next set his sights on Africa. Henry Morton Stanley may never have ‘presumed’ to meet up with Dr. Livingstone in “Darkest Africa”, had it not been for the personal assistance of one Tippu Tip, the most powerful of Zanzibar’s Arab slave traders. This was an execrable lot, Stanley himself once lamented the lack of a heavy machine gun, on witnessing the abject misery of 2,300 unfortunates, held captive by these people: “Would to God I could see my way to set them all free and massacre the fiends guilty of the indescribable inhumanity I have seen today.‘

Leopold_ii_garter_knight — His Majesty, King Leopold II of Belgium

Leopold buttressed what was at fist a weak position with an alliance with the Arab slave trader, and later raised an army of Congolese mercenaries, to wrest control. The two year Congo-Arab war was a proxy war, fought mostly by native Congolese aligned with one side or the other, and sometimes switching sides.

Leopold emerged victorious from this Imperial double-cross, and set about reorganizing his mercenaries into a Force Publique, charged with enforcing his will across a region three-times the size of Texas and cynically called, “The Congo Free State”.

TipputipPortrait — Portrait of Tippu Tip, House of Wonders Museum, Stone Town, Zanzibar.

Leopold’s Congo was divided into districts for the purpose of extracting all the region could produce, in ivory, gold, diamonds, rubber, and more. Provincial governors were paid by commission, and press-ganged enormous numbers of Congolese into agricultural labor, or worked them to death in the mines.

Entire ecosystems were denuded of large animals, as beaters in the hundreds or thousands drove ivory-bearing elephants by raised shooting platforms, where European “hunters” awaited, armed with a dozen rifles apiece.

Rubber plantations took space and clear-cutting old-growth rain forest took time, so the King’s agents drove villagers from their homes, to fend for themselves. Problem solved, instant space for the most important cash crop, of the era.

The greed of these overseers is hard to get one’s head around. Failure to meet quotas for gold or ivory would be met with mutilation, most often taking the form of amputation of a foot, or a hand. If a man needed both hands to work or if he couldn’t be caught, hands and feet would be cut from his wife, or his children.

While the King never personally set foot on African soil, the savagery inflicted on the Congolese by Leopold’s agents has been compared with the Mongol rampage across Asia, of a thousand years prior. It’s impossible to know how many died of overwork, starvation or disease, or the infection caused by mass amputations. An estimated twenty million populated the Congo Free State in 1885. By the time of the 1924 census, that number had fallen to ten million, with no corresponding influx into neighboring regions.

The Belgian government reluctantly took over administration in 1908, but the whippings and mutilations continued in Leopold’s Congo, long past the time of Leopold himself. The wealth of the region continued to be siphoned off until Congolese independence, in 1971.

Today, the “Democratic Republic of Congo”, sometimes referred to by a former name of “Zaire”, has yet to recover. The “Great African War” swept over the region in the 1990s, killing some six million and overturning one dictator in Kinshasa, for yet another. The Tutsi genocide led by Hutu-militia in 1990s Rwanda, is familiar to the modern reader.

leopold-ii-daughters-limbs — “Nsala of Wala contemplates the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter in 1904” – H/T Allthatsinteresting.com

Today, one of the most resource-rich regions in the world remains in abject poverty, with infant mortality twelve times higher and life expectancy 23 years shorter, than that in the United States.

Leopold II, King of the Belgians and at one time the largest landowner on the planet, died peacefully on December 17, 1909, forty four years to the day, from his coronation.

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October 13, 1914 Signalman Jack

One day, a train passenger looked down and realized with horror, that a monkey was switching the tracks.

In the early days of the Great War, the formerly separate British colonies of the Cape, Natal, Transvaal and Orange River were united in the Union of South Africa, in support of the Allied war effort.

Public opinion was by no means, unanimous. “Afrikaners” were bitterly opposed to alliance with the British. The Jameson Raid and two Boer Wars were hard pills to swallow, and life-long friendships were cast asunder. As former Generals of the second Boer War, Prime Minister Louis Botha and Defense Minister Jan Smuts had once fought the British. Now, that was in the past. Like many, the two men dreamed of a unified South Africa.

Anti-British rebellion broke out on this day in 1914, but was quickly put down by loyalist South Africans. Before the war was over, some 136,000 of their countrymen would serve in the African, Middle East and Western Fronts of the Great War.

The story of World War 1 is intertwined with the history of rail. The mobilization of millions in a matter of weeks, would have been impossible without the railroads which moved them. WW1 could not have happened the way it did, without rail.

South African recruits traveled rails begun in 1859, when early construction worked its way inland from deep-water ports and harbors. James Edwin Wide came to work for the South African railroad, about twenty years later.

Co-workers on the Cape Town–Port Elizabeth Railway service called him “Jumper” for his fondness of jumping between railway cars. It was a regrettable habit, which would one day, cost him his legs.

After the accident, Wide’s railroad days seemed to be over. Then a signalman’s job opened up. Wide would work the Uitenhage train station twenty-three miles outside of Port Elizabeth, switching the tracks for oncoming trains.

Trains would toot their whistle a specified number of times, telling the signalman which tracks to change. The job suited him, pulling the levers is easy enough for a man with no legs. Not so much, the half-mile walk to work.

One day at an open-air market, the peg-legged signalman saw something that changed all that. It was a monkey, a Chacma baboon.

One of the largest of the “Old World” monkeys, a Chacma or “Cape” baboon is an intelligent animal. “Corporal Jackie” proved as much, during the “War to end all Wars”. This one was exceptionally so. This one was driving an oxcart.

Wide bought the animal and called him”Jack”, and taught him to pull his small trolley, up and down the line. Jack was a help around the house, sweeping the floors and taking out the trash. He figured out the train signal and the switch thing too. Soon, Jack was pulling on the levers, himself.

William Luff writes in The Railway Signal, that Wide “trained the baboon to such perfection that he was able to sit in his cabin stuffing birds, etc., while the animal, which was chained up outside, pulled all the levers and points.”

One day, a train passenger looked down and realized with horror, that a monkey was switching the tracks. (It must have been fun to be in the complaint department, when That one came in). Railroad managers were furious and could have fired signalman Wide, but decided to test his baboon, instead.

Railway superintendent George Howe came away, astounded. “Jack knows the signal whistle as well as I do, also every one of the levers…It was very touching to see his fondness for his master. As I drew near they were both sitting on the trolley. The baboon’s arms round his master’s neck, the other stroking Wide’s face.”

Jack passed with flying colors. Managers were so impressed they gave him the job, for real. “Signalman Jack” now had an employee number, and a salary of twenty cents per day, plus a half-bottle of beer, each week. It isn’t clear what a baboon did with the money, though one suspects it may have purchased more than a few peanuts.

Signalman Jack worked the rail until the day he died of tuberculosis, in 1890. A keyword search for railroad accidents between 1880 and ’89, the time-frame for this story, reveals a list of sixty-one serious incidents. In the nine years in which he was on the job, Signalman Jack made not one single mistake.

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March 20 1870 The Lion of Africa

With a force never exceeding 14,000 (3,000 Germans and 11,000 Askari warriors), “Der Löwe von Afrika” tied up as many as 300,000 British, Belgian and Portuguese troops, wearing them out in the pursuit.

When war broke out in 1914, a map of Africa looked nothing like it does today. From the Belgian Congo to Italian Somaliland, most of the continent was carved into colonies of the various European powers. France, Great Britain, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, Germany and Spain. All administered parts of the African continent.

Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck was born into minor Prussian Nobility on this day, in 1870. Joining the Corps of Cadets as a teenager, Lettow-Vorbeck worked his way up the German Imperial Army chain of command, becoming a general by the time of WWI.

Stationed in Deutsch-Ostafrika (German East Africa) and knowing that his sector would be little more than a side show to the greater war effort, Lettow-Vorbeck determined to tie up as many of his adversaries as possible.

Like the much better-known Lawrence of Arabia, Lettow-Vorbeck became a master of guerilla warfare. He never lost a single battle, though it was not unheard of for combatants to break and flee a charging elephant or rhinoceros.

To his adversaries, disease and parasites were often more dangerous than enemy action. In July 1916, Allied non-battle casualties ran 31 to 1, compared with battle casualties.

At one point in the Battle of Tanga (November 7-8, 1914), a British landing force and their Sepoy allies were routed and driven back to the sea by millions of African bees, disturbed by rifle and machine gun fire. There’s a story about a British radioman, I don’t know if it’s true, who held to his station, directing the beach evacuation while being stung to death by thousands of angry bees. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for “gallantry under aerial attack”.

“Der Löwe von Afrika” – the Lion of Africa – returned to Germany a conquering hero. Of all German commanders in WWI, Lettow-Vorbeck alone was undefeated in the field. The only German commander to successfully invade imperial British soil, during the Great War.

Lettow-Vorbeck developed a deep distrust of the upstart Adolf Hitler, and attempted to establish a conservative opposition to the Nazi party. When then-Chancellor Hitler offered him an ambassadorship to the Court of St. James in 1935, Lettow-Vorbeck told Hitler to “go f**k” yourself. Describing the interview afterward, Vorbeck’s nephew explained “That’s right, except that I don’t think he put it that politely.”

Such a blunt refusal was guaranteed to bring unwanted attention from the Nazi regime. Vorbeck’s home and office were searched, his person subject to constant harassment and surveillance. By the end of WWII, the Lion of Africa was destitute. Both of his sons were killed serving in the Wehrmacht, his home in Bremen destroyed by Allied bombs.

For a time, Vorbeck lived on food sent from British Intelligence Officer Richard Meinertzhagen and South African Field Marshal Jan Christiaan Smuts, two of his former adversaries in the East Africa campaign. It was a token of the respect these two had, for a man who had once been their enemy.

The old General never forgot his Ascaris, returning to East Africa in 1953, to the tears of his former warriors. Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck died in 1964, at the age of 93. A few months later, the Bundestag voted to give back pay to the African warriors who had fought with German forces in WWI. Some 350 elderly Ascaris showed up. A few could produce certificates given them back in 1918, some had scraps of old uniforms. Precious few could prove their former service to the German Empire.

The German banker who brought the money had an idea. As each man stepped forward, he was handed a broom and ordered to perform the German manual of arms. Not one man failed the test.

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February 16, 1804 The Most Daring Act of the Age

Even a former adversary couldn’t help but admire the feat. Days later, British Vice Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson called Decatur’s raid the “most bold and daring act of the age.”

Historic accounts differ as to the early success of the Islamic conquests. Contemporary Christian sources saw them as God’s punishment for the sins of fellow Christians. Early Muslim sources describe the rising empire as evidence of divine favor, reflections of the religious zeal of the conquerors.

Be that is it may, Islamic expansion enveloped the Arabian Peninsula in the last ten years of the life of Muhammad (622-632), at the expense of the Roman Byzantines and the Sassanid Empire of the Persians. Syria fell in 634, followed by Egypt, Mesopotamia and Persia. By 750, the Umayyad Caliphs had subjugated much of the Balkan states, part of the Indian sub-continent, all of North Africa, most of Spain, and parts of Southern France and Sicily. By the age of Columbus, the Mediterranean was a place where you traveled at your own risk.

Those of us of European ancestry owe our heritage, if not our existence, to the Christian warriors who defeated the Jihadist time after time. There was Pelagius, who stopped a military force of the Umayyad Caliphate at Covadonga in 722, without which there would be no Reconquista, no Ferdinand and Isabella, and we wouldn’t know the name of Christopher Columbus.

The father of Charlemagne, Charles “The Hammer” Martel, blocked the Muslim advance into Western Europe at the Battle of Tours, in 732.

If Marcantonio Bragadin is remembered at all, it is for being betrayed, tortured and skinned alive by Lala Mustafa Pasha. Yet, it is Bragadin’s stubborn defense of the eastern Mediterranean outpost of Famagusta in 1571, which gave European principalities time to assemble naval forces in numbers sufficient to defend the European coast, near a place called Lepanto.

The 1683 Siege of Vienna, at the crossroads of eastern and western Europe, was a hard fought contest which could have gone either way, until the arrival of a Polish army under King Jan Sobieski. The Ottomans were defeated and turned back from the conquest of Eastern Europe by the largest cavalry charge in all of history, 18,000 horsemen of the Polish King and the Holy Roman Emperor, thundering down the hill and into the lines of Mustafa Pasha.

Throughout the period, “Saracens” plundered everything that could be carried away: animals, provisions, fabrics, precious metals and money: especially men, women and children who could be sold for a good price at the slave markets. Redemption of captives being among the corporal works of mercy, the “Mathurins” Order of the Holy Trinity was founded in 1198 for the purpose of paying the ransom of Christians held captive by non-Christians, as a consequence of crusading and pirating along the southern European coastline.

Even Ireland, with its northern latitude, wasn’t immune to such raids. The renegade Dutchman-turned Barbary pirate Murat Reis attacked the village of Baltimore in County Cork, in 1631. With him were pirates from Algiers and armed troops of the Ottoman Empire, who captured all the villagers they could find, taking 107 away to the slave markets of North Africa. Years later, three women were ransomed and returned to Ireland. The rest lived out their lives as slaves, or locked away in harems or inside the walls of the sultan’s palace.

From-Baltimore-to-Barbary-the-1631-sack-of-Baltimore-2 — “Engraving of a Moorish slave auction from Pierre Dan’s Historie van Barbaryan en des zelfs Zee-Roovers (Amsterdam, 1684). There they were paraded, chained and nearly naked, while prospective buyers inspected the merchandise”. H/T Historyireland.com

Sidi Muhammad ibn Abdallah, Sultan of Morocco, opened his ports to trade with the fledgling United States in 1777, making Morocco the first country whose head of state publicly recognized the United States. Abdallah saw the future for his country in foreign trade, and actively sought a treaty relationship with the US, well before war ended with Great Britain. The treaty signed by Thomas Barclay and Sultan Muhammad III in 1786 and ratified by the Confederation Congress the following July is still in effect today, the longest continuous treaty relationship in United States history.

Diplomacy had succeeded with Morocco, but not with Algiers, Tunis or Tripoli, each of which demanded $660,000 in tribute.

Algeria captured the schooners Maria and Dauphin in 1785, the captured crews held in conditions of slavery for over a decade. The sum negotiated for their release exceeded $1 million, more than 1/6^th the entire budget of the United States. Eleven American ships were captured in 1793 alone, their crews and stores held for ransom.

Yusuf Karamanli, Pasha of Tripoli, demanded $225,000 in tribute on President Jefferson’s inauguration, in 1801. At this time, Federal revenues were barely over $10 million. Jefferson refused, resulting in the first Barbary War, a conflict memorialized in a line from the Marine Corps Hymn “From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli”.

USS-Enterprise-barbary-war — USS Enterprise, Barbary war

Limited to small confrontations for the first two years, more sustained combat began in June 1803 when a small American force attacked Tripoli Harbor in modern Libya.

While giving chase and firing on a pirate vessel, USS Philadelphia ran aground on an uncharted reef, two miles outside of Tripoli. Fearing the 1,240 ton, 36-gun frigate would be captured and added to the Tripolitan navy, Lieutenant Stephen Decatur led a daring expedition into Tripoli harbor to destroy the captured vessel.

On the evening of February 16, 1804, Decatur entered Tripoli Harbor with a force of 74 Marines. With them were five Sicilian volunteers, including pilot Salvador Catalano, who spoke fluent Arabic. Disguised as Maltese sailors and careful not to draw fire from shore batteries, Decatur’s force boarded the frigate, killing or capturing all but two of its Tripolitan crew. Decatur and his marines had hoped to sail Philadelphia out of harbor, but soon found she was in no condition to leave. Setting combustibles about the deck, they set the frigate ablaze. Ropes burned off, setting the Philadelphia adrift in the harbor. Loaded cannon cooked off as the blaze spread, firing random balls into the town. It must have been a sight, when gunpowder stores ignited and the entire ship exploded.

By that time Decatur and his men had slipped away, without the loss of a single man. Even a former adversary couldn’t help but admire the feat. Days later, British Vice Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson called Decatur’s raid the “most bold and daring act of the age.”

December 29, 1895 If

The younger Kipling would not survive his father. He entered the First World War, and disappeared in the Battle of Loos, in 1915. His body was never found. The elder Kipling’s gift would live on, the words of fatherly advice to an only son, in a poem he called “If”.

It was the 9th of February, 1853, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Robert William Jameson went for a walk, while his wife and mother of his 11 children, a woman with the unlikely name of Christian Pringle, labored to deliver their 12th child. Jameson slipped on a grassy embankment and into a frigid canal, where he would have drowned if not for the kindly stranger who fished him out. The man said he was an American, named Leander Starr. Before the day was over, Starr was godfather to a newborn Scottish baby boy. Leander Starr Jameson.

Forty years later and half a world away, what would one day become South Africa was divided into four entities: the two British possessions of Cape Colony and Natal, and the two Boer (Dutch) Republics of the Orange Free State and the South African Republic, better known as Transvaal. Of the four states, Natal and the two Boer Republics were mainly agricultural, populated by subsistence farmers. The Cape Colony was by far the largest, dominating the other three economically, culturally, and socially.

There was considerable friction between Dutch and English settlers, stemming largely from differing attitudes toward slavery. British authorities passed legislation back in 1828, promising equal treatment for all under the law, regardless of race. Boer farmers argued that they needed forced labor to make their farms work, and that slaveholders were too little compensated upon emancipation.

Cetshwayo,_King_of_the_Zulus_(d._1884),_Carl_Rudolph_Sohn,_1882 — Cetshwayo, King of the Zulus (d.1884), by Carl Rudolph Sohn

The situation was exacerbated in 1867, with the discovery of vast diamond deposits near modern day Kimberly, in Orange Free State territory. The Cape soon annexed the territory as its own, which I think is a fancy term for “stole”. The Boers found themselves between the proverbial rock and a hard place, pressed by the British from the south and west, and by the Zulu “Impi” (army) of King Cetshwayo kaMpande to the north. War broke out between the two sides in 1880-81, called the “First Anglo-Boer War” by one side; the “First Freedom War” by the other.

Gold was discovered near Johannesburg in 1886, massive amounts of it, drawing tens of thousands of “Uitlanders”: English, American and Australian foreigners, in search of employment and fortune.

Governor of the Cape Colony Cecil Rhodes wanted to incorporate the Transvaal and the Orange Free State into a single federation under British control, while the Transvaal government of Paul Kruger feared just that. Soon outnumbered by Uitlanders two to one, Transvaal limited the right to vote to those having many years’ residency, and imposing heavy taxes on gold mining profits.

By mid-1895, Rhodes had concocted a plan. In a scheme which could only be described as hare-brained, he would send an armed raid into Johannesburg, inciting an uprising of Uitlanders, with the aim of stepping in to take control. Back in London, the father of future Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, thought that was a swell idea, and did everything he could to encourage it.

On December 29, 1895, 400 Matabeleland Mounted Police and 200 assorted volunteers crossed from Rhodesia into Transvaal, with Leander Starr Jameson at their head.

The raid was a humiliating failure. They cut a wire fence, thinking it was a telegraph wire. Transvaal authorities were tracking them from the moment they crossed the border. Meanwhile, Chamberlain got cold feet, saying that “if this succeeds it will ruin me. I’m going up to London to crush it”. Chamberlain ordered Sir Hercules Robinson, Governor-General of the Cape Colony, to repudiate the raid, threatening Rhodes and calling on British settlers in the Transvaal not to lend any aid to the raiders.

After several sharp encounters with dug in and well-prepared defenders, what remained of the raiders entered Pretoria on January 2, in chains. The Transvaal government received almost £1 million compensation from the British South Africa Company, turning their prisoners over to be tried by the British government. Jameson was convicted of leading the raid and sentenced to 15 months in prison.

During the whole ordeal, he never revealed the degree to which British politicians supported the raid, or the way they had betrayed him in the end.

Boer cartoon: Chamberlain Tries to Avert the Jameson Raid

So impressed was the poet, Rudyard Kipling, with Jameson’s display of stoicism under adversity, that he wrote a poem about it in 1895, later giving it to his son, Lieutenant John Kipling.

The younger Kipling would not survive his father. He entered the First World War, and disappeared in the Battle of Loos, in 1915. His body was never found.

The elder Kipling’s gift would live on, the words of fatherly advice to an only son, in a poem he called “If”.

December 27, 1865 Confederados

The numbers are hazy, but port records indicate that somewhere between ten and twenty thousand former Confederates moved to Brazil in the twenty years following the Civil War. A great uncle of former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, was one.

Most of us grew up learning that 600,000+ Americans were killed in the Civil War. 618,222 to be precise, more than the combined totals of every conflict in which the United States has been involved, from the Revolution to the War on Terror. Recently, sophisticated data analysis techniques have been applied to newly digitized 19th century census figures, indicating that even that figure may be understated.

The actual number may lie somewhere between 650,000 and 850,000.

The cataclysm of the Civil War would leave in its wake animosities which would take generations to heal. “Reconstruction” would be 12 years in the making, but some never did reconcile themselves to the war’s outcome. Vicksburg, Mississippi, which fell after a long siege on July 4, 1863, would not celebrate another Independence Day for 70 years.

In 1865, Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil wanted to encourage domestic cultivation of cotton. Men like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee advised southerners against emigration, but the Brazilian Emperor offered transportation subsidies, cheap land and tax breaks to those who would move.

Descendants of American Southerners wearing Confederate-era uniforms pose for a photograph during a party to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the end of the American Civil War in Santa Barbara D'Oeste, Brazil — Descendants of American Southerners wearing Confederate-era uniforms pose for a photograph during a party to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the end of the American Civil War in Santa Barbara D’Oeste, Brazil,

Colonel William Hutchinson Norris, veteran of the Mexican American War and former member of the Alabama House of Representatives and later State Senator, was the first to make the move. Together with his son Robert and 30 families of the former Confederacy, Norris arrived in Rio de Janeiro on December 27, 1865, aboard the ship “South America”.

Some of these “Confederados” settled in the urban areas of São Paulo, most made their homes in the northern Amazon region around present-day Santa Bárbara d’Oeste and a place the locals called “Vila dos Americanos”, and the inhabitants called “Americana”. Some would return to the newly re-united states. Most would never return, and their ancestors, Portuguese speaking Brazilians all, remain there to this day.

Confederados earned a reputation for honesty and hard work, and Dom Pedro’s program was judged a success by immigrant and government alike. The settlers brought modern cultivation techniques and new food crops, all of which were quickly adopted by native Brazilian farmers.

Small wonder. Mark Twain once wrote “The true Southern watermelon is a boon apart, and not to be mentioned with common things. It is chief of this world’s luxuries, king by the grace of God over all the fruits of the earth. When one has tasted it, he knows what the angels eat. It was not a Southern watermelon that Eve took; we know it because she repented”.

That first generation kept to itself for the most part, building themselves Baptist churches and town squares, while traditional southern dishes like barbecue, buttermilk biscuits, vinegar pie and southern fried chicken did their own sort of culinary diplomacy with native populations.

Slavery remained legal in Brazil until 1888, but this nation of 51% African or mixed-race ancestry (according to the 2010 census), seems more interested in understanding and celebrating their past, than tearing their culture apart over it.

Today, descendants of those original Confederados preserve their cultural heritage through the Associação Descendência Americana (American Descendants Association), with an annual festival called the Festa Confederada. There you’ll find hoop skirts and uniforms in gray and butternut, along with the food, the music and the dances of the antebellum South.

There you will find the Confederate battle flag, as well. It seems that Brazilians have thus far resisted that peculiar urge which afflicts Isis and the American Left, to destroy the symbols of their own history.

In 2016, the New York Times reported on the May celebration of the Festa Confederada, of Santa Bárbara d’Oeste:

‘“This is a joyful event,” said Carlos Copriva, 52, a security guard who described his ancestry as a mix of Hungarian and Italian. He was wearing a Confederate kepi cap that he had bought online as he and his wife, Raquel Copriva, who is Afro-Brazilian, strolled through the bougainvillea-shaded cemetery. Smiling at her husband, Ms. Copriva, 43, who works as a maid, gazed at the graves around them. “We know there was slavery in both the United States and Brazil, but look at us now, white and black, together in this place,” she said while pointing to the tombstones. “Maybe we’re the future and they’re the past.”’

09BRAZIL-master768-v3 (1) — “A woman in a traditional hoop skirt walked past graves adorned with Confederate battle flags in Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, Brazil. An annual celebration of the area’s many Confederate settlers was held in the cemetery last month”. Hat tip to Mario Tama/Getty Images, New York times, for this image

November 25, 1841 Amistad

ICYMI – A former President and son of a Founding Father, John Quincy Adams, argued the case, in a trial beginning on George Washington’s birthday, 1841.

By 1839, the international slave trade was illegal in most countries, though the “peculiar institution” itself, was not. In April of that year, five or six hundred Africans were illegally purchased by a Portuguese slave trader, and shipped to Havana aboard the brig Tecora.

Fifty-three members of the Mende tribe, of the modern-day country of Sierra Leone, were sold to Joseph Ruiz and Pedro Montez, who planned to use them on their Cuban sugar plantation. The Mendians were given Spanish names and designated “black ladinos,” fraudulently documenting them to have always lived as slaves, in Cuba. In June, Ruiz and Montez placed the Africans on board the schooner la Amistad, (“Friendship”), and set sail down the Cuban coast to Puerto del Principe.

On the fourth night at sea, Joseph Cinqué, also known as Sengbe Pieh, led a number of captives in breaking free of their chains and seizing control of the ship. They killed two of their captors, losing two of their own in the struggle, while two others escaped in a boat. The cabin boy, who really was a black ladino, was spared and used as translator.

The Mendians forced the two remaining crew to return them to Africa, which they pretended to do by day. But they were betrayed, the two slavers would steer the ship north by night, when the position of the sun couldn’t be seen. Amistad was apprehended off Long Island by a U.S. Coastal Survey brig and taken to New London, Connecticut, where the Africans were put in prison. Connecticut was still a slave state at that time.

The Spanish Ambassador demanded that Ruiz’ and Montez’ “property” be returned and the matter settled under Spanish law. President Martin van Buren agreed, but the matter had already fallen under the jurisdiction of the courts.

The district court trial which followed in Hartford determined that the Mendians’ papers were forged, and they should be returned to Africa. The cabin boy was ruled to be a slave and ordered returned to the Cubans, however he fled to New York with the help of abolitionists. He would live out the rest of his life as a free man.

Fearing the loss of pro-slavery political support, President van Buren ordered government lawyers to appeal the case up to the United States Supreme Court. The government case depended on the anti-piracy provision of a treaty then in effect between Spain and the United States,

Joseph_Cinque — A print of Joseph Cinqué appeared in The New York Sun newspaper, August 31, 1839

A former President and son of a Founding Father, John Quincy Adams, argued the case, in a trial beginning on George Washington’s birthday, 1841.

In United States v. Schooner Amistad, SCOTUS upheld the decision of the lower court 8-1, ruling that the Africans had been detained illegally, ordering them returned to their home. John Tyler, a pro slavery Whig, was President by this time. Tyler refused to provide a ship or fund the repatriation, so abolitionists and missionaries did so, returning 35 surviving Mendians to Africa on November 25, 1841.

In arguing the case, President Adams took the position that no man, woman, or child in the United States could ever be sure of the “blessing of freedom”, if the President could hand over free men on the demand of a foreign government.

152 years later, Bill Clinton, Eric Holder and Janet Reno kidnapped six-year-old Elian Gonzalez at gunpoint, sending him back to Cuba over the body of the mother who died bringing him to freedom.

amistad replica — In 2007, a near-replica of the Amistad left its home port in Connecticut, on a 16-month, 14,000-mile voyage to Nova Scotia, Britain and Africa.

November 6, 1860 A Peculiar Institution

From the earliest years of the “new world”, every economy from Canada to Argentina was, to varying degrees, involved with slavery. Spanish and Portuguese settlers brought the first African slaves to the new world in 1501, establishing the new world’s first international slave port in Santo Domingo, modern capital city of the Dominican Republic.

Hundreds of thousands of African slaves entered the Americas through the sister ports of Veracruz, Mexico, and Portobelo, Panama, “products” of the “Asiento” system, wherein the contractor (asientista) was awarded a monopoly in the slave trade to Spanish colonies, in exchange for royalties paid to the crown.

The first such contractor was a Genoese company who agreed to supply 1,000 slaves over an 8-year period, beginning in 1517. A German company entered into such a contract eight years later, with a pledge of 4,000.

Painting by Richard Schlecht, National Geographic

By 1590, as many as 1.1 million Africans had come through the port of Cartagena, Colombia, sorted and surnamed under the “casta de nación” classification system. To this day, black residents of the Colombian interior bear names like Kulango & Fanti, indicating their origins on the Ivory Coast or Ghana: Musorongo, Loango & Congo, (Congo Region), or Matamba, Anchico & Ambuila (Angola).

In the American colonies, 17th century racial attitudes appear to have been more fluid than they would later become. The first black Africans, 19 of them, came to the Virginia Colony in 1619 not as slaves, but as indentured servants. Their passage, involuntary as it was, was paid for by a term of indenture, a sort of ‘temporary slavery’, usually lasting seven years.

John Punch ran away from his term of indenture in 1640, along with two Europeans. The trio was captured in Maryland and sentenced to extended terms of indenture. Alone among the three, Punch was punished with indenture for life, effectively making him the first ‘slave’ in the American colonies.

Born in Angola in 1600, Anthony Johnson was one of that original 19, captured by an enemy tribe and sold to an Arab slave trader. Johnson was sold to a Virginia planter at the age of 21, paying off the cost of his passage with a seven-year term of indenture. As a free man, Johnson himself became a successful planter, going on to “own” indentured servants of his own.

One of them, John Casor, sued for his freedom in 1655, claiming to have completed his indenture of “seaven or Eight years”, plus seven more. The court ruled that Casor himself was considered “property” and not his contract, making him the first person arbitrarily ruled a slave for life.

The unthinking view of history holds American slavery to have been a strictly southern-states phenomenon, but it isn’t so. As late as the eve of the Civil War, “northern” slavery was more widespread than you might expect. The 1860 census reported 236 slaves in New Jersey, 90,368 in Maryland, 2,290 in Delaware, and 3,680 in Washington, DC. There were slaves as far north as New Hampshire as late as 1840. New York wouldn’t legally emancipate its last slave until the following year.

Massachusetts became the first American colony to legalize slavery in 1641, with the passage of the ironically named “Massachusetts Body of Liberties”. Slavery was legal at one time or another, in all 13 original colonies and even before, when slavery of and by native Americans, was commonplace.

In 1637, the Pequot tribe of southeastern Connecticut was all but wiped out in a bloody war with an alliance of English colonists from the Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth and Saybrook colonies, and their native American allies of the Narragansett, Mohegan, Niantic and Montauk tribes. Surviving Pequots were forced to become slaves in English households, or shipped to Bermuda or the West Indies, and exchanged for Africans.

Indigenous and African slave populations in northern climates were small compared with the more agricultural economies of the south, which were themselves a drop in a bucket compared with the slave economies of central and south America.

An essay from the New York Public Library (nypl.org) gives a sense of scale to the transatlantic slave trade. “As a whole, the transatlantic slave trade displaced an estimated 12.5 million people, with about 10,650,000 surviving the Atlantic crossing. Thus, even though a substantial number of Africans actually reached the United States, they were only a small proportion, about 3.6 percent, of the total number of Africans who were brought to the Americas. More Africans went to Barbados (435,000), while almost three times as many went to Jamaica (1,020,000). The number of Africans arriving in North America was considerably less than those who were taken to Brazil (4,810,000)“.

The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 opened vast new territories. The fight for which would be free and which would permit slavery, would go on for years.

The philosophical underpinnings of southern secession was borne of the Hartford Convention of December 1814 – January 1815. There, delegates from Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, along with “unofficial” delegates from New Hampshire and Vermont, met to discuss New England’s secession over the War of 1812. The convention reported that New England had a “duty” to assert its authority over unconstitutional infringements on its sovereignty, putting forth a legal position very similar to the later nullification position taken by South Carolina.

Protective tariffs were instituted in the wake of the War of 1812, intending to help domestic manufacturers compete with foreign imported goods. Instead, they tended to help northern manufacturing economies, while increasing the cost of manufactured goods to the southern states, and making it more difficult to export cotton.

By this time, cotton was becoming the chief cash crop in most southern economies, and tariffs hit South Carolina particularly hard. Throughout the colonial and early national periods, the Palmetto state climate sustained a strong agricultural economy. South Carolina’s fortunes were hit hard with the panic of 1819, and slow to recover as the gulf states increasingly entered the cotton markets.

The Tariffs of 1828 – ’32 lead to a nullification crisis in South Carolina, where the state told the federal government to pound sand, and mobilized military assets to defend itself against federal enforcement measures sure to follow.

That time the crisis was averted, but a pattern had been established for events to come.

Sectional differences grew and sharpened in the years that followed. A member of Congress from Kentucky killed a fellow congressman from Maine. A Congressman from South Carolina all but beat a Massachusetts Senator to death with a cane, on the floor of the Senate. A fist fight involving at least 30 Congressman broke out on the floor of the US House of Representatives.

Southern states talked about secession as early as 1850. Senator Stephen A Douglas proposed the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, in theory allowing a territory to determine its own free or slave status. This effort to “democratize” the issue led to the brutality of the “Bleeding Kansas” period, where pro-slavery Missouri “Border Ruffians” and anti-slavery Kansas “Jayhawkers” crossed one another’s borders, primarily to murder each others civilians and burn out one another’s towns.

Abraham Lincoln delivered his “House Divided” speech on June 16, 1858, in which he said “A house divided against itself cannot stand”. A year later, John Brown was holed up at Harper’s Ferry, trying to start a slave insurrection.

After 57 ballots, the Democrat’s convention of 1859 adjourned without selecting a candidate for the Presidential election. Northern Democrats nominated Stephen A Douglas, while southern Democrats nominated John Breckenridge.

Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected 16th President of the United States on November 6, 1860, on a platform confusingly specifying “That all men are created equal”, an “abhorrence of all schemes of disunion”, and “The maintenance inviolate of the rights of the states, and especially the right of each state to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively”.

One year later, to the day, former United States Senator and Secretary of War Jefferson Davis was elected to a six-year term as the first President of the Confederate States of America.

A Trivial Matter

Mr. Massaquoi tells his unusual and fascinating story in Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany.

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Coke makes so many different beverages if you drank one per day, it would take you over 9 years to try them all. Coca-Cola’s $35.1 billion in revenue makes it the 84th largest economy in the world, just ahead of Costa Rica. H/T gkfacts.in

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