Howard W. French
speaker
832 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 20 Dec
Howard W. French’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 2.
Appearances
I think most peoples do this, but I'm most familiar with our own experience of this, of idealization.
And we elevate the founding fathers, quote unquote, and we associate our history with the dream of liberty and a commitment to freedom, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right?
But Black people didn't really become full citizens themselves.
until quite recently.
So just hold that thought in your mind just for a moment while I explore the other piece of this equation, which is that enslavement, commerce in human beings from Africa ends at the time which I indicated just a moment ago.
But then Africa becomes the subject of imperial conquest and domination.
And this period of imperial conquest and domination actually lasts itself quite a long time, practically a century, right?
And
During this period of time, Africans were anything but free peoples.
And so the second emancipation really is about how a greater semblance of freedom was achieved
by Africans and by the African diaspora over this second sort of lapse of time after the end of formal enslavement.
And I just want to buckle this by saying that to some people, this will seem like an exaggeration, perhaps.
Like, okay, you know, freedom from slavery is a very clear thing, but what do you mean, you know, an emancipation after imperial rule?
The best way to answer that really is to say that Europeans were exploiting Africans even in the early post-war period for things like forced labor, meaning the rounding up of Africans and the compulsion at gunpoint sometimes, using corporal punishment in places like the Belgian Congo, for example.
to extract labor from them.
And this was not labor that was compensated in any ordinary way that we would recognize.
And so emancipation doesn't just mean that in 1957 with Ghana or in 1958 with Guinea or in 1960 with a whole host of other African countries, etc., etc., that Africans got their flags and got their anthems and had their own presidents and could have elections and could be formally independent.
It also means that the beginnings of emancipation
A sovereign, and it's only the beginnings really, but the beginnings of a sovereign economic life began for Africans, right?
And so finally, I know I've been long here, but finally, this book is really a story at bottom of how intertwined these two struggles were.
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