Mzee Ali
By Bror Urme MacDonell
Published by 30 Degrees South Publishers (Pty) Ltd (2006)
ISBN: 0-9584890-5-X

“WHEN brothers fight to death, a stranger inherits their father’s estate,” writes renowned African author Chinua Achebe.
With this in mind, when whites set foot in Africa to conquer indigenes, they adopted the ‘divide and rule’ strategy.
A united African front would derail their looting ‘business’.
Sowing seeds of hatred and fuelling rivals is what the whiteman did.
All this was done to ensure whites could plunder Africa’s resources unchallenged.
Through slavery, the continent was robbed of human and natural resources.
Slavery stripped off generations of families of their true identity.
Their identities were taken away.
This week the book under review is Mzee Ali, The biography of an African slave-raider turned askari and scout, written by Bror MacDonell.
The book is a story of Tanganyika (present day Tanzania)’s Mzee Ali Kalikilima of the Wanyenyembe tribe who sought slaves on behalf of the Arabs, Portuguese and Germans.
In his book The Lunatic Express, Charles Miller explains that from the earliest times, slaves were one of the many ‘commodities’ exported from Africa to Arabia, Persia, India and beyond.
“In the 18th Century the demand increased considerably and Arab trading caravans from Zanzibar penetrated mainland Africa in search of suitable slaves.
“In the interior, the Arab traders would often take advantage of local rivalries and encourage powerful African tribes to capture their enemies and sell them into slavery.”
Ali’s family and kin were the wealthy tribes who took advantage of weaker tribes by raiding and selling them to whites.
Ali, who grew up in the village of Kazi (present day Tabora), was ‘instructed in the art of shooting with a muzzle-loader gun at 14 by his father’.
Ali remembers his young days that made him value the sense of belonging.
Together as a society they had worked to build homes.
“The act of building such a house, the labour, staying with friends while building was underway and the excitement of finally moving in, is symbolic of setting down roots,” writes MacDonell.
“Permanent roots, unshakable by the advancement of time or the brutality of man — roots to which one will always return.”
However, it was this same sense of belonging Ali and his men denied fellow blacks from enjoying.
This was because the whiteman had got to him.
“They (slaves captured) were too young to understand what had happened that day – too young to know that they would never grow to experience the freedom and kinship of their village – too young to know that some might be sold at the Dar es Salaam slave market only to be shipped to faraway lands, perhaps never to walk on their native soil again,” writes MacDonell.
Ali, MacDonell writes, went out on his first safari at the age of 14.
Ali set out for his first safari with ‘20 guns, 18 kegs of gunpowder, 30 boxes of percussion caps for the guns, bales of cloth, rolls of wire and boxes of beads all for the purposes of bartering and buying slaves’.
MacDonell writes of how Ali and his men raided villages for its able-bodied members.
After raids, only ‘a few old men and women, hunched and painfully thin wandered around, seemingly aimlessly, scraping together a meagre existence’.
All this was done to weaken the society.
Without its youth, the society was deprived of development.
The youths were shipped to other countries where they were forced to work to develop them.
This left Africa disadvantaged.
“First the older men were paraded and graded – they would be sold as common labour to work in fields, tend livestock and perform other such menial tasks,” writes MacDonell.
“The women were similarly checked whether they’d be suitable as concubines, or whether they were only fit for use as chamber maids to look after the wives of the buyers.
“It was important to note who was related to who, so that slaves would not live together with their relatives.”
Ali recalls how they ill-treated fellow blacks during raids and on their way back home to slave markets.
Some Africans, as a result of mental colonisation, do not take pride in identifying with their true African self.
‘Aspire to be white and condemn everything black’ is the doctrine fed to blacks by whites.
Blacks like Ali looked down upon fellow blacks in order to please the whiteman.
To date there are blacks like Ali who are being used by whites to further their agenda.
They (blacks) forget that whites have no permanent friends, only permanent interests.