Page 11 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization
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early in response to a great need for labor.” Considering that this kind of labor re-
cruitment system was expensive, the settlers found a way to reduce the status of
Africans who were there and arriving in the colonies to slaves.According to Benjamin
Quarles,“By 1700 indentured servitude was no longer the preferred labor base in the
plantation colonies. It had been superseded by slavery, brought about by the rising cost
of free labor, which had become scarcer, especially after England tightened up on the
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kidnapping that had been a common practice in her seaport towns.” Although in-
dentured servitude was at the beginning practiced on Africans and poor Europeans,
the latter were never enslaved.Africans were commodities and “the average cost of a
healthy male was $60 in merchandise; a woman could be bought for $15 or less.”
Slavery was mentioned in Virginia laws in 1662, and it was legalized in Maryland,
North Carolina, South Carolina, New York, and New Jersey in 1706.
Since the founding of the thirteen colonies, African Americans have built the
United States without enjoying the fruit of their labor.“Except for the Indian [Native
American], the Negro is America’s oldest ethnic minority. Except for the settlers at
Jamestown, the Negro’s roots in the original thirteen colonies sink deeper than any
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other group from across the Atlantic.” These Africans resisted slavery by expressing
their dissatisfaction through telling stories and singing songs, suicide, killing their mas-
ters, poisoning the children of their masters, fleeing, and establishing maroon settle- 4
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ments, which in North America were unsustainable. It was estimated that by 1860
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there were 4 million African slaves and 27 million Europeans in the United States. The
American capitalist system response to the presence of African Americans was to invent
a racial caste system (slavery and later racial segregation) and to maintain it through its
institutions to prevent the advancement of African Americans as individuals and an eth-
nonational group for the benefit of White elites and society.After surviving under racial
slavery and American apartheid for more than three centuries in the United States,
African Americans effectively consolidated their struggles for social justice, self-deter-
mination, freedom, and democracy in the first half of the twentieth century.
In contrast, Oromos strengthened their national liberation struggle in the early
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1960s after suffering under settler colonialism for less than a century. Ethiopian set-
tler colonialism was practiced through five institutions: slavery, the nafxanya-gabbar sys-
tem (semislavery), garrison cities, an Oromo collaborative class, and the colonial
landholding system. During their colonial expansion, Abyssinians who later called
themselves Ethiopians enslaved some Oromos, Sidamas, Afars, Somalis, Walayitas,
Hadiyas, and others; some of these slaves were exported as commodities while others
became domestic slaves who preformed duties such as carrying firewood, fetching
water, grinding grain, cooking, cleaning, babysitting, and bearing and giving birth to
young slaves without any payment except basic food,clothing,and shelter.When Oro-
mos and other colonized peoples failed to pay taxes, their children were enslaved.The
number of the Oromo people, according to some estimates, was reduced from ten to
five million by slavery, war-induced famine, and destructive wars during the last
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decades of the nineteenth century. The nafxanya-gabbar system enabled Ethiopian sol-
diers, clergymen, and colonial administrators and their Oromo collaborators to exact
labor and agricultural products from the Oromo farmers.These farmers were divided
among these colonial settlers and forced to provide food, tribute, and tax revenues
both in cash and in kind.The colonialists built their garrison cities in different parts
of Oromia and linked themselves to the Oromo population through an Oromo col-
laborative class to control the population and extract economic resources.The Oromo