IN 1796, only 20 years after it declared independence from Britain, which led to a war of unreconstructed savagery—suspected spies were hanged out of hand—the United States of America submitted to the authority of the ruler of Tripoli. A United States envoy wrote and signed a humiliating treaty with the ruler of Tripoli, who lived opulently on the proceeds of piracy. The treaty was to stop pirate attacks on American ships in the Mediterranean.

The United States made the astonishing denial that it was a Christian country. The Mayflower pilgrims must have gone to America to learn a new way of making pudding and piety had nothing to do with it. Article XI of the Treaty of Tripoli states: ‘The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion.’

The United States agreed with indecent eagerness to pay tribute to the ruler of Tripoli: ‘The money and presents demanded by the Bey of Tripoli, as a full and satisfactory consideration on his part and on the part of his subjects, for this treaty of perpetual peace and friendship, are acknowledged to have been received by him previous to his signing the same.’

The treaty was unanimously ratified by the United States Congress!

But the treaty did not stop the attacks on American ships, as an earlier approach to an official of Tripoli had also failed to do. In 1785, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the American Declaration of Independence and a future president of the United States, travelled from France, where he was ambassador, to London to meet the ambassador of Tripoli to Britain. Jefferson was in the company of John Adams, another future president of the United States, who was the American ambassador in London.

The two high-ranking Americans asked the ambassador of Tripoli to persuade his ruler to order the pirates to stop boarding American ships. The ambassador of Tripoli told them that it was the duty of Muslims to appropriate the property of non-Muslims.

The tribute the United States paid to the Arabs accounted for about 20 per cent of its annual budget. The new nation’s frustrating situation was embarrassingly familiar to many European countries.

The Arabs of Algiers, Morocco, Tripoli and Tunis had for centuries attacked European shipping in the Mediterranean and sometimes in the Atlantic. The Europeans ransomed some of their captured nationals, but tried to prevent attacks by paying tribute to the rulers of the Arabs. The Arabs also raided villages and towns in places like Portugal, Spain, Italy, France and Ireland.

In 1631, the Arabs attacked Baltimore in Ireland and it was no more. They seized most of the inhabitants of Baltimore and enslaved them in North Africa. The Arabs enslaved hundreds of thousands of Europeans, used some of the men as galley slaves and many of the women as sex slaves.

Edith Wharton, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist (The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, etc) saw ‘the reality of Christian slavery in Africa’ in Algiers during her visit to North Africa in 1888. The ‘reality’  was a jetty  ‘which 30, 000 Christian captives toiled to build.’ She writes: ‘It seems incredible that such things [the enslavement of white people by Arabs] should have been within the memory of living man.’

The enslavement of white people by Arabs is not the only humiliation the West has not been able to live down. Arabs conquered European territories and were masters in a large part of Spain for centuries. They won victories in France and Portugal. And the Crusades were ultimately a calamitous failure.

Arabs must have taken some pride, though they were also victims, in the conquests of the Ottoman Turks. The Turks were, after all, Muslims and they had seized the lands of Christians. The greatest prize was undoubtedly Constantinople, a magnificent Christian city which the Turks took in 1453. Emperor Constantine XI, unlike Muammar Gaddafi, did not flee but died in the defence of his city.

The capture of Constantinople by the Turks was the death of the Roman Empire. The Turks renamed Constantinople and it became Istanbul.

The West struck back and the Arabs of North Africa were subdued. The United States built a strong navy and destroyed ships in Arab ports.  France colonised Algeria in 1830 and then Tunisia. France allowed Spain a morsel in Morocco and Italy seized Libya.

T. E. Lawrence helped free the Arabian Peninsula from centuries of coerced Ottoman suzerainty, the British redrew borders and created Jordan. The West was firmly in the ascendancy over the Arabs. Independence has not made the Arabs stronger, though they frightened the West with their oil weapon in the 1970s. Some of the Arab states are manipulated by the West.

Saddam Hussein, a reckless warmonger, invaded Kuwait, giving the West a pretext to target him. His troops were expelled from Kuwait and Iraq itself later became the victim of an invasion. The United States claimed Saddam had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction.

The United States, the leader of the West, pioneered such weapons and is the only country to have used them; it dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities in 1945. Tens of thousands of people were incinerated. The Japanese must have seen it as poetic justice that the American ship, the cruiser USS Indianapolis, that delivered the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima was sunk by a Japanese submarine on its return journey to the United States from the Tinian airbase in the Pacific. Hundreds of sailors died.

The United States dropped napalm on villagers, including women and children, in Vietnam. Napalm causes terrible pain and victims welcome death. The United States will do virtually anything to try to win a war.

The United States was not much involved in the West’s war to topple Gaddafi. France and Britain conducted the aerial war that shattered Gaddafi’s tanks and also shattered the bodies of women and children. The United States had won its own aerial victory against Gaddafi when American fighters shot down two Libyan jets over the Gulf of Sirte in 1989. One American magazine headlined it ‘USA 2 Gaddafi 0.’ Gaddafi, a horrid man, according to many Libyans, gave the West a torrid time.

Libyans may soon discover, as Iraqis did almost from the beginning, that foreign meddling in their internal affairs can only create more problems for them. All American troops will be withdrawn from Iraq at the end of the year. British troops decamped from Basra in disgrace four years ago. Iraqis have been given the difficult task of successfully defusing the political bomb—far more lethal than the roadside bombs that killed many American soldiers—the United States is leaving behind.

The West has won two victories in a decade over the Arabs. But the Arabs, who have a history of pitiless fanaticism, do not surrender easily. There is still the little matter of a Palestinian state.

It is only black Africans, whose rulers are corrupt, who are defenceless. They were enslaved by both whites and Arabs. The Arabs treated their millions of black slaves with fiendish cruelty. Black Africans have the vulnerability of a veneer—thin and exposed. A single French bomb ended the power struggle in Cote d’ Ivoire. The French were crushed by the Vietnamese in 1954.

Black Africa’s ‘independence’ from European colonisers may not last another 50 years. Weak and bungling black Africa may again be carved up by the West and even by the Arabs.

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Your view

Re: Siege mentality in Ibadan

The siege is getting too much. Premier Hotel, Ibadan, has joined. The gate leading to the Secretariat is being locked  the public whose money was used to build the road at 7 p.m. This is unfair. It is truly ‘arrogant lawlessness.’ Government should take action.

Banji Alamu, Ibadan

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Nosa, as usual, you have given your readers a very fine diet. But we may not blame Arapaja residents for locking the gate. Robbers are in control of our security system. Maybe the next solution is Psalm 23: ‘The Lord is my shepherd...’

Overseer E. A. Rotimi, Olorunda, Ketu, Lagos

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‘Were you out of your senses while writing the article?,’ asked a man who sounded elderly, in a very brief call from 07043056660

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