The Birth of a Nation, The Black Wars of the United States

To my brothers in Blackness,

Jonathan Richardson & Crystal Kornickey

To understand the United States, one would have to dismiss the narrative of a white country with a racial problem; which maintaining the perspective on social injustice, persists in the subordination of its reality to the liberal tradition of the West. It's not that that's right or wrong, in a sense of moral legitimacy, but that it's historically wrong; so not allowing a full understanding of reality, even less will admit an effective solution of their problems.

The United States is thus not one but at least two countries, converging and overlapping, each with their own contradictions; still aggravated, because these respective contradictions will also contradict each other, creating new synergies. This gives a new dimension to the postulate of W.E.B. Du Bois, in his discourse of a nation within a nation; reduced, by the Manichaeism in which dialectic has come, as a proposal of self-segregation; that although positive, only maintain —and even feed— the initial contradictions that gave rise to the rupture.

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As firsts, these contradictions would respond to the complex formation of the present United States; which is taken as concluded, when it would respond even to the same evolutionary problems of the West; that far from being a process already completed, would only channel the transition from the peak of modernity (ss. XVII-XVIII) to its posterior stage. Therefore, the history of the United States would compress previous processes, even the distant passages from the high to the low Middle Ages; scarcely surpassing, with its barely four hundred years, the first half of its development, no more convulsive than the early Germanic movements in Europe.

In this sense, American blackness acquires its true foundational scope with the eastern colonies; which differing in the way in which one they were constituted, will give rise to the controversial space of the new Africa. It will not be a question of translation, of an original African culture to the United States, but of a syncretic reconstitution; so profound, that it includes the process of its own wars of conquest, as an alternative space in expansion and development.

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In this same sense, the American black wars would not be a reason for political fiction of protest; but a concrete historical fact, begun with the rebellion of Stono, as early as the year 1739. As Cuba itself was the exception that allowed the religious reorganization of Ifá in America, Stono would function politically; because it involved a slavery not originated in the mere hunting and usual trade, but in the Congolese civil war.

In this regard, when we talk about the origin of slave trafficking in African, we ignore its peculiar reality and development; as a trade that, being relatively internal, did not produce existentially traumatic changes. It is the irruption of European demand that unbalances the local slave market, producing political disruption; whose scope will be not only existential and punctual, but also anthropological and systematic[1].

In addition, the specifically Congolese case —which originated Stono's rebellion— was not strictly commercial; it was the product of a civil war, selling soldiers and not civilians as captives, thereby producing a specific type of slave. It is this type of slave that causes a major disruption in the culture of the Eastern Islands, already isolated by their own geo-environmental conditions; and where it contrasted with a pre-existing population of slaves, mostly civilians, engaged in a specialized farm works.

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Of course, as in the case of Cuba, the semi-anarchy of the slave trade favors this type of exceptionality; already treated by Antonio Benítez Rojo in The repeating island, as a natural product of chaos theory, to which we should add the effect of critical mass and the principle of exodus[2]. In any case, the introduction as slaves of the Congolese warrior class coincides in these Islands with the malaria epidemic; promoting the incubation, within an already neo-African climate[3] in itself, of a foundational and nativist postulation.

That’s what the Stono rebellion means, and it would explain the otherwise incomprehensible claim of the Gullah as a nation; not in the geo-political sense of the Western tradition, but in the uniqueness of the recognition of the Indians by the U.S. government. It should be remembered that the recognition of indigenous nations, while systematic, was a long and complex process; which was resolved in successive treaties, followed by bloody wars, with their consequent defections and changes of sides.

The Gullahs —from Florida to the Carolinas— can thus claim their miscegenation with the Indians, as black Seminoles; even coming to prominence in the Second Seminole War, which in this way would be the first war properly Gullah[4]. Also then, they can or must treat it as their own process of exceptional foundation because their own critical mass in historic terms; which has not only produced a specific political and economic fabric, but also generated from this the genesis of a complete and singular anthropological phenomenon.

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[1] . The same phenomenon will be seen and in parallel, with the slave market revolution between English settlers and Native American, resulting in the redesign of the political map, for the indigenous of the southeastern United States.

[2] . The exodus’s principle is a reference to the dynamics by which at a certain stage, and because the asynchronous nature of developments, these stagnate; until an exodus movement allows the exit of the very new elements, reorganized into a new structure, with its own origin already in this higher stage. The most typical case would be that of the evolution from polytheism to monotheism, stuck in henotheistic practices by the monitoring of conventional substructures; but it would also occur with other types of development, such as the evolution from religious to philosophical thought. As examples of the first case, there would be the biblical exodus, from Abrahamic monotheism to that of Moses; as well as the Christian diaspora with St. Paul —versus Peter's conventionalism— and the Muslim hegira to Medina —Versus the presbyterianism of Mecca—; while an example of the second case would be the development of philosophy in the Greek Cassic period, in contradiction and as an overcoming of the conventions of religious thought.

[3] . It is understood as neo-African, by sor syncretic synthesis from various African and Caribbean sources. In the relatively isolated climate of what will be the Gullah Geechee corridor.

[4] . In fact in letter to Andrew Jackson, the general Thomas Gesup, would specify What this was a black war and not India”; the original text Pray What "Throughout my operations, I found the Negroes the most active and determined warriors; and during my conference with the Indian chiefs, I ascertained that they exercised an almost controlling influence over them. This, you may be assured, is a Negro and not an Indian war; and if it be not speedily put down, the South will feel the effects of it before next season".