Who's Your God: The Wave, Wind, Sun?

by clairmont chung

WHO'S YOUR GOD: A brief look at climate change, hurricanes and Africa's history

The Corruption Index: naturally, The darker you are the more corrupt

(C)Transparency International

It is not true that hurricanes begin off the coast of West Africa. Hurricanes begin deep in the landmass of Africa itself. We are talking about those tropical cyclones that sweep through and destroy the things and sometimes the lives of people in the Caribbean and the eastern coasts of the Americas; mainly Central and North America. The temperature differences in two streams of overland winds create energy when they collide near the West African coast after their journey across North Africa, the Sahel, and to Guinea. When they hit the Atlantic they are already locked in a whirling dance, transformed, in full communion.

These conditions do not disappear and reappear; they are always present and at work like gods. It is only when the annual conditions are right, aligned, that the signal is received. The ocean currents moisturize and drive the cooler air into the vacuum left by the rising, spinning, air, warmed by the Sun god and now in full reverie, enthranced. The same simple equation repeated again and again sets out towards the new world in a rage.

There was a time when these winds and currents played more important roles in the global economy. Gone are the days when men transported captured Africans across that same path; in ships powered by these same winds and currents; renewable energies. Those dark bodies, like the winds themselves, came from the far reaches of Africa, collided forcibly at its coast for a journey across the unknown. 

Artist rendering of the mutiny by Africans on the Tryal in 1805 off the coast of Chile

At that time, that trip would not be possible any other way except by the power of wind and water. The purpose was to provide unpaid labor to the plantation system that drove the industrial revolution and increased the wealth of a few. The industrial revolution and now the technological revolution came to provide more options and made almost obsolete the regular day jobs of these ancient forces; relegated to a lesser form of energy, lower in the power hierarchy, replaced by fossil fuels and machines with artificial intelligence. 

Hurricane Irma in Cuba 2017

They had to go back to the old now difficult task of turning a few fish into thousands and watering vineyards for wine. These winds and currents brought sands from the feet of the pyramids, the Sudan, and the plains of Adowa to its cousins that fed the giant trees of the Amazon with wet messages and compared science notes with the Mayan sands and those on Miami Beach as well: All tasks made difficult and ordinary by the insurgent gods with their desire to mine the depths of oceans as they did the depths of Africa and everywhere else. For ore they destroy mountains that act as brakes for the powerful winds and waves, exposing secrets buried for another time. The new gods are attempting to create their own rain, thunder and lightning too, imagine. All with the aim to be less dependent on, and not subject to, the whimsical methods of ageing gods and more in control of their paper agents, green with envy, and all the time preparing a red hell. 

Africans resisted captivity, during the trip, on arrival, and do now. Instead of submission to the abuses, some would sacrifice themselves to the very gods; sun, wind and wave. The slavers built nets around the ships to avoid self-sacrifice.  Sometimes the whole ship would be lost in the storms and which often served as cover for a mutiny. Slavers themselves would throw the dead or mutinous overboard as sacrifice to bankers and insurers. That went on for more than four hundred years. It did not stop but morphed into new forms. Browns and Yellows; Asians were used to replace this now costly practice and under a new guise of a contract that replaced the canon and the cannon. Their lands too are under siege in this war of the gods; fossils against the elements.

The industrial revolution floated on the backs of sunburned human bodies and some against their will, replaced this unfree source of renewable energy with fossil fuels. It is now studied science that fossil fuels are heating the planet. The dessert winds are warmer as is the currents off Africa and the conditions more frequent for a time to dance. More and More, it seems the old gods want to remind us of what they can do and how important they were once or are still.

No wall of lesser gods can keep them out, stop the communion or survive. Instead, walls trap and intensify the hell.

Like the winds, Africans have become surplus labor in this system. They are not alone in this respect. All humanity is at risk. The monetization of humans began then and has not stopped. Africans faced the brunt of it as chattel, but the system of monopoly capital that made that possible respects no people and respects less their gods and even less their trees and animals. It replaced those gods. And even its own gods have been quoted out of context to ensure exploitation continues and tithes roll in.

An oil refinery in background and Gas station in foreground
tells part of the cycle (c) Clairmont Chung

So now, a new battle looms, that these new gods begin to heat the planet and the discarded gods find conditions conducive to dance and whistle and for sacrifice. Our dances too reflect this history: Winding and grinding on each other while DJs call on us to get something and wave. The hurricanes are coming with increased frequency, might, and reach, crashing down the structures built and owned by the banks and insurance companies that built and owned the early ships and claimed to own people too. It is terror; that collateral damage and the proverbial innocent have no special place. No one is innocent, really, because we have all at some level acquiesced: yes! Some coerced into something we know to be wrong and unworkable. Nowhere this plan works for the majority of humans and other living things: to forcibly command and squeeze energy out of other humans and into capital. 

   

(c) pnuma.org

Even today, Africans and others are forced out of their homes by conditions created by that earlier period of human trafficking from which Africa never recovered. The land is dry; food and work scarce. We are drowning again; in the Mediterranean Sea this time. Forced to leave home because Africa never recovered from the last human traffickers. They flee in rickety boats through a new network of human traffickers in hope the new gods will smile on them. History makes for a bad future. But Western Europe has seen the light and has begun to build monuments to wind, sun and wave energy, again, but the conversion may not be complete and only a path to personal survival without humanity as was its invasion of Africa and the Americas.   

As each storm approaches, I watch long lines of cars snake across the highways, built with petroleum, fleeing the wraths of the old gods, on petroleum, thirsty, with only a scarce drink of oil, between it, its human cargo, higher ground and their end. They cross lands stolen and gentrified a long time ago. Know that unless we return and bow to the feet of the sun, the wind and the wave as our energy and our life, no ground would be high enough to save us.

(c) Washington Post

  

    

References:

Williams, Eric, Capitalism and Slavery, University North Carolina Press, 1942, Reprint Perigee Books

UN International Panel on Climate Change, Report

Than, Ker, Stanford scientists see climate change intensifying African weather systems Stanford Report, August 29, 2014
Walter Vergara, Joergen V. Fenhann, Marco C.Schletz, Carbono Cero América Latina:
Una Vía para la Descarbonización Neta de la Economía Regional para Mediados de este Siglo
Documento de visión, Abril 2016

WHO'S YOUR GOD: A brief look at climate change hurricanes and Africa's history