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Sewers could be a step backward in terms of sanitationThe Dutch city of Leiden and the English city of London both experienced high and low points for the same reason but at different times. Lets call it a tale of two cities.LeidenLeiden is one of the older cities in Holland and for a long time the second largest city after Amsterdam.It was founded on the banks of the Old Rhine which, as the name suggests, was the the route the Rhine had towards the sea before it changed course southward.The Romans had a fort called Matilo as part of the Limes on the spot where Leiden would arise.In the Middle Ages a settlement reappeared on the spot as a possession of the Bishop of Utrecht by the name of Leithon.By early 15th century the city cannot have had more than 5000 inhabitants but it would experience a boom in population. Just prior to the siege of Leiden in the late 16th century it had 16.000 inhabitants and by the 1660s this had risen to 62.000 people.Above: The population for the cities of Leiden and Haarlem, note that Amsterdam experienced a similar burst of expansion between 1560 and 1630 due to the influx of skilled workers from the Southern Netherlands.It is home to the oldest university of the Netherlands which was granted by William of Orange for the valiant defence during the Siege of Leiden. The city also used to be one of the big textile producing cities of the 17th century. It was where the Pilgrim moved to before heading to the New World.As William Bradford (governor) would write:For these & other reasons they removed to Leyden, a fair & bewtifull citie, and of a sweete situation, but made more famous by ye universitie wherwith it is adorned, in which of late had been so many learned man. But wanting that traffike by sea which Amerstdam injoyes, it was not so beneficiall for their outward means of living & estats. But being now hear pitchet they fell to such trads & imployments as they best could; valewing peace & their spirituall comforte above any other riches whatsoever. And at length they came to raise a competente & comforteable living, but with hard and continuall labor. - Of Plymouth PlantationAbove: Leiden in the year 1649 after some rapid expansion of the city had taken place.It was probably a good thing the Pilgrim left for Plymouth when they did because shortly after they left Leiden turned to shit.Quite literally.Leiden was founded on the banks of the old Rhine which provided the city not only with an easy means of transport (thanks to all the canals) but also with a source of relatively clean drinking water. As such the people in charge of Medieval Leiden had drawn up quite a list of ‘common sense’ rules to make sure the cities water was clean. In fact a lot of building codes were also quite stringent.For example wooden buildings and thatched roofs were forbidden. Houses had to be constructed with brick or stone and roofed with slate or tile in an effort to prevent city fires.Houses were built on regular plots of land from the 14th century onward and archaeological evidence suggests nearly all excavated plots possessed a private cesspit, most of them high quality brick lined ones.Not unsurprising since a Leiden bylaw of 1463 mandates ‘every house [including those] that are rented must have a privy at its disposal’. Crucially the law also stipulated that “the privy should be a stand-alone facility, meaning that an overflow or sewer that drained into the nearest canal was prohibited.”The ‘cesspit law’ passed in Leiden reveals that in the late mediaeval period there were three stakeholders, each with different interests when it came to sanitation management: the local government, tenants, and housing developers or landlords. Whenever municipal legislators spoke out in favour of this ordinance, all arguments referred to the public interest of having high-quality water in the town’s canals and to its importance for the social and economic infrastructure. The accumulation of dirt and sludge in canals, which were the main transport routes, was considered harmful to the local economy. Moreover, the blocked waterways hampered the drawing of water from the canals for extinguishing fires (Hamaker, 1873: 148–49; Huizinga, 1911: 316).This was not solely a local concern: along with stench and contamination, the by-laws of other towns in north-western Europe also frequently mention ‘traffic hindrance’ as a reason for similar laws (Jørgensen, 2010b: 37). Apart from these practical considerations, draining human waste into the canals was also believed to harm the common good (Jørgensen, 2010a). Polluting and clogging the town’s arteries (i.e. waterways) would threaten the urban body or body social (Rawcliffe, 2013). The emergence of cesspits and the policy of the city fathers in the water-rich towns of the Dutch coastal provinces can be regarded as material evidence of a utilitarian principle being applied. This principle of the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few was expressed in the form of policies and statutes employing such terms as res publica and bonum commune communitatis (Stein et al., 2010).…Landlords were responsible for providing cesspits for all of their housing, regardless of the rental rate, and the ordinance stated that if landlords failed to fulfil their obligation, tenants should notify the city fathers. More specifically, the law stated that any tenant who moved after 1 May into a house that had a privy draining directly into a canal should report this within a month.Cesspits which did not drain into the canals kept the quality of the surface water at an acceptable level. Furthermore if properly built with a brick lining they should not pollute the groundwater at great distances. People made sure to built wells at some distance from cesspits.However when you look at their estimated date of usage it appears people stopped using cesspits around or about the time the population boomed.The reason for this trend is quite simple to explain.Capitalism and the needs of the few outweighed the needs of the many. The migration of skilled workers from the Southern Netherlands to the North boosted the textile production of Leiden. At the same time the landlords who were supposed to pay for the emptying of cesspits found the cost associated onerous.Already quite early the Textile barons had managed to suppress wages of the workers.By 1500 wealth inequality in Leiden (and to a lesser degree in Haarlem) was considerable by international standards (Van Zanden, 1998: 38). The close collaboration between the richest textile entrepreneurs (drapers) and the city council in implementing a repressive pay policy was typical for Leiden at that time; it meant that fullers, tuckers, dyers, and weavers had an extremely low earning potential in contrast to the wealthy textile barons at the top (Brand, 2008: 100–03). The Armenrapport (Poverty Report), written in 1577 by Leiden’s talented stadssecretaris (town clerk) Jan van Hout (1542–1609), reveals that the extreme poverty in Leiden was caused by textile entrepreneurs who were solely motivated by becoming ‘rich, powerful, and great and never cared about paying their craftworkers a fair wage but forced their workers into a position of slavery’ (Kaptein, 1998: 150; see Van Maanen, 2010 for the background to the Poverty Report).But with the huge influx of skilled workers from the South the housing situation became more pressing.The unprecedented, large, and rapid demographic rise affected everyday life for Leiden’s inhabitants, most notably in the continuous shortage of housing (Noordam, 2003: 43–45; Van Maanen, 2009: 54–57; Van Oerle, 1975: 430–34). Dwellings were being constructed — in Leiden the housing stock rose by 182 per cent within twenty-five years (1581–1606) — but the demand for cheap housing continued to outpace supply (Daelemans, 1975: 187). Many families lived in shared accommodation (Posthumus, 1939: 161). The few available records of rental rates for houses in Leiden suggest that between 1581 and 1619 average rents rose by 240 per cent (Posthumus, 1939: 208).Textile barons wanted to harness the large influx of skilled labour for their enterprise and needed to have the workers housed. The landlords struggled to accommodate this flood of immigrants in part due to extensive building codes. Building houses in brick and tile is more expensive than wood. Furthermore brick lined cesspits needed to be emptied out every couple of years which cost the equivalent of a month or three worth of rent, not something the landlords were eager to cough up.Above: a brick lined and domed cesspit in the NetherlandsIt seems these two powerful interest groups got the city government to ease building regulations.Shortly before the year 1600 cesspits were increasingly discarded and replaced by brick sewers. Unlike cesspits these did not need to be periodically emptied since they drained straight into the canals, for landlords this meant less money spend on sanitation. Needless to say I find the modern notion that sewers were the superior option or somehow the hallmark of modernity an odd one.The building codes also went out of the window along with the requirement that work be done by certified professionals.The local government of Leiden, consisting mainly of textile entrepreneurs, were ready to welcome as many skilled textile workers from the southern Netherlands as possible. Leiden did not want them to go elsewhere, to Amsterdam or Haarlem (Posthumus, 1939: 159). Prior to the extension of the town boundaries in 1611, the town council of Leiden had repeatedly called for expanding the town; indeed they regretted that too few workers (arbeytsluyden) were settling locally, ‘owing to a lack of appropriate housing’ (‘door gebreck van bequame huysinge’; Van Oerle, 1975: 350). In the seventeenth century the top textile entrepreneurs constantly pressed for an expansion of the town to provide housing for their workers (Posthumus, 1939: 977).Eventually, obstructive regulations governing house construction were lifted, and contrary to mediaeval regulations, the building of timber dwellings was permitted (Daelemans, 1975: 200). The town council gave free rein to the housing industry to remedy the shortage as soon as possible.By 1640 the shortage was still severe. So many inhabitants lived intra muros ‘that no dwellings were unoccupied and there were no vacant areas where anyone might live properly’ (‘datter geen huysen off plaetsen ledich staen, waer yemandt bequamelick soude mogen wonen’; Posthumus, 1939: 976). Large dwellings were demolished to be replaced by ‘small hovels’ (‘kleine krotties’; Posthumus, 1939: 977). The town council even took the exceptional measure of removing the builders’ monopoly. It was no longer necessary for bricklayers, carpenters, and other craftsmen to be members of a guild to ply their trade. The town council assumed that foreign artisans and ‘cobblers’ would work with greater speed than guild members (Posthumus, 1939: 977–78).Many of the new plots were bought by carpenter/mason housing developers who started building sewers en masse. In short the industrialists governing the city of Leiden turned it into a slum. A reeking slum at that.The shit and piss of some 62.000 citizens was deposited in the nearly stagnant canals of Leiden. In 1633 Jan Pietersz Dou was send to research the problem of the limited flow of the canals and attributed it largely to all the sewers draining into the canals. In 1670 Adam Thomasz Verduyn wrote that fish had completely disappeared from the river and canals owing to the incredible pollution.He called the city a ‘stinck-gat’ (stink-hole) and said the entire city reeked like a ‘gemeen privaet’ (common privy).Solutions to this self induced problem were already suggested in the 1590s with windmill operated pumps to pump out the dirty water being one of them. Closing the sewers up again was suggested but not implemented. Only in the 1680s did a provision come into effect which had the outlet of the sewers discharge below the lowest water level in the canals in an effort to improve the smell.However literally shitting up the city was not just something which killed all the fish or made the city smell like a reeking privy, it brought some serious health consequences with it.As Adam Thomasz Verduyn, calling himself a friend of the people, wrote in 1670 the cities brewers continued to draw water from the extremely polluted canals because they couldn’t be bothered to source fresh water beyond the city limits. As he so elegantly put it in 17th century Dutch they [the brewers of Leiden]:‘Geven zij den luyden haer vuyle pis, met dreck en water gemenght, te drincken’‘Give the people their dirty piss, mixed with shit and water to drink’Needless to say these malty piss and shit cocktails weren’t too healthy. In 1669 between June and December some 40.000 of the cities 62.000 people fell ill and 1900 died. This disease was:‘ontstaen door het brack, stinckent water en bier daeruyt gebrouwen’‘caused by the smelly brackish water and the beer brewed from it’The likely culprit based on symptoms shown by the inhabitants was Cholera, though the European rather than the Asiatic form of the disease. The situation wasn’t adequately resolved until the 19th century when better water supplies, the closing of sewers and filling of canals was pushed through by the sanitation movement.Interestingly enough the city of Haarlem only 27 kilometers north of Leiden managed to avoid a similar fate. While Haarlem did have a textile industry the most important industry was brewing. Beer from Haarlem was exported to other cities in the Netherlands but also to other European countries. Given its chief position and economic importance the Brewers managed to successfully petition the city government to ban and persecute any who tried to built sewers. Furthermore they fought other industrial groups such as linnen bleachers who they reckoned polluted the water in the city canals. As such Haarlem remained a much cleaner and healthier city until the 19th century.All of the above information and citation is from Roos van Oosten’s paper ‘The Dutch Great Stink: The End of the Cesspit Era in the Pre-Industrial Towns of Leiden and Haarlem’. Additionally she published a much more extensive book called ‘De stad, het vuil en de beerput : De opkomst, verbreiding en neergang van de beerput in stedelijke context ’. Both of them are interesting reads although I can imagine they might be covering something of a niche interest————————-LondonIt is often said history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. This is more or less what happened in London as they followed Leiden down the path of pollution and Cholera. London has a history that goes back way further than Leiden but in terms of sanitation it is frighteningly similar.It sits at a convenient crossing point of the Thames and was developed into a proper city by the Romans.Medieval London had several public toilets one of which I believe was on or about London Bridge. The more usual way of disposing waste however were cesspits like in Leiden. Judging by the Nuisance Law these could be lined or unlined, the lined cesspits being allowed to be constructed closer to neighbouring properties.Though a favourite of Medieval depictions of the city neither polluting the river or the street was permissible. To give an example:Thomas Sherman and John le Soutere…were committed to prison for casting mud and rushes into the Thames (1365), and ―If the wardens found anyone casting rubbish, gravel or dung out of their doors into the said streets…they were to levy from each offender the sum of 2s…(1367).Note that 2 shilling in the 14th century was the equivalent of several weeks of wages, not a trivial sum.Water came from multiple sources. The brewers used water from the Thames and when the tide was particularly strong it is said the ale could taste salty. London was also famed for some springs and wells built to tap into them, in the 15th century one writer particularly lauds some wells just outside the city limit in the north. These wells continued to supply large parts of London well into the 19th century.The shallow wells of London were an ancient and a popular institution. Although the value of these well-waters was said to be popularly estimated by the brilliancy with which they sparkled, their flavour was also important in their popularity. The notorious Broad Street pump, for example, was so much to one lady's taste that she regularly had its water brought to her home in Hampstead.In 1245 the city government also started work on the Great Conduit which was a series of pipes that brought in water from the Tyburn spring 4.3 kilometers away to Cheapside inside the city. For a generous sum people could also get a private line from this great conduit to their homes. The diameter of those pipes not being allowed to be very thick for fear that the pressure would drop too much.In 1582 a Dutchman or German by the name of Peter Morice constructed one of the first pumps within the city limits. A waterwheel set in the strong current under London Bridge powered pumps which pumped up the water and piped it to customers.Above: A slightly newer version (circa 1700) but using the same principle as the Morice pump.The Great Fire of London destroyed this device but Peter’s Grandson built a replacement. It was described as follows:The three waterwheels worked a total of 52 water pumps; the wheels could turn in either direction and so be driven by the flowing and ebbing tide; and the pumps were designed to force 132,120 gallons an hour to a height of 120 feet.…Just prior to the demolition [in 1822], the waterworks, supplied 10,417 houses with 26,322,705 hogsheads per annum, at a rental cost of £12,266.Similar pumping stations were erected by a number of water companies in the course of the 17th and 18th century. By the late 18th century around four fifth of Londoners had water piped straight into their homes. In addition an aquaduct called the New River (England) was constructed to provide London with fresh water. It is believed the Thames was as clean as it is today well into the late 18th century which explains why piped water was so popular. The piped water however was not continuous but only operated during several hours each day and not on Sundays. This meant that people had to resort to storage cisterns in their homes or public wells when the taps weren’t on.Unlike Leiden which has a huge network of canals London had an issue with drainage. The Northern part is a relatively low lying area which had many smaller rivers drain into it.When more and more houses started being built along with paved roads the ability of rainwater to permeate into the ground was also hampered. All of this necessitated a sewer system to drain the excess water.Let it be known though that it was absolutely verboten for people to hook up their cesspits or latrines to this set of sewers. A certain 14th century Alice Wade being fined for doing exactly that. Like in Leiden it wasn’t considered good for the public to drain latrines into surface water.Unfortunately for the Londoners this happy situation was about to change.For one London like Leiden experienced a veritable population boom. It was just under a million in 1800 but rose to 2.3 million by the 1850s. This population boom of course went hand in hand with the increasing prevalence of slums, I don’t suppose Victorian slums need much of an introduction.One way to deal with the increase in waste was to built ‘better’ cesspitsAs more houses and tenements were built, and as population densities became higher in the early years of the nineteenth century, more cesspools were sunk, and were sunk deeper. By the 1840s, cesspools were being deepened to the first stratum of sand, that is 6 to 10 feet. At this level, the cutting generally carried the cesspool into a spring, which relieved it of liquid refuse. This, of course, was very economical, since the cesspool did not need emptying so frequently, and, as one observer pointed out, instead of having a wagon to carry liquid refuse away, one could make do with a cart because the refuse was solid.However, the new cesspool techniques often had serious consequences for local water supplies, since the permeation of springs by cesspool matter became swifter and greater. In Paradise Row, Rotherhithe-inaptly named, since it was unsewered-a new cesspool was put in about 1840. It was made as deep as possible-"to suit the present levels"-and before long there was trouble. The first effect was to drain the wells, but then, some time later, as the cesspool began to fill, discoloured and foul-tasting water flowed back into the wells. Similarly, in Battersea, the cesspools of a new estate of six houses permeated the wells within a matter of days. In both cases, the residents turned to the local company for water. By 1844, throughout south London, it was said, ancient and celebrated springs were being abandoned by the inhabitants. The pumps, however, remained, and were used by poor passers-by, who did not know their reputation.In some Dutch cities there were laws against digging cesspits to the water table for exactly this reason. Semi-permeable brick cesspits also being banned in some cases. It is unlikely that people in London did not realise digging deeper cesspits could pollute well water so to it seems more like an economical decision. The new cesspits were cheaper to operate since the fluids drained and if it polluted local wells then the locals would just have an extra incentive to switch to piped water.But it wasn’t just cesspits that ruined the wells. A new invention, laudable as it may have been, turned the Thames in an open sewer.While a modern sounding Flush toilet was invented in 1596 the design wasn’t entirely practical yet. Back then most houses didn’t have piped water and furthermore the connection to a drain was open leaving bad smells and noxious fumes to rise up out of the toilet. This was only remedied in 1775 when Alexander Cumming patented the S-trapAbove: the S-Trap now found on most household drainsSo by the late 18th century London possessed both piped water and the possibility to install adequately built flush toilets. Of course the question is where you’re gonna send all that sewerage too. Initially the toilets were hooked up to the existing cesspits but they proved to be unable to cope with the vast volumes of water flushed down along with the message. Awful smelling liquid would saturate gardens plots and penetrate into adjoining basements. Rather than blaming the flush toilet for their ills though they blamed the cesspits.The solution to this conundrum seems to have been childishly obvious.In 1815 the law which banned people from connecting their household drains to the sewer system (which as mentioned earlier was to facilitate the drainage of rainwater) was repealed. From then on people could hook up their newfangled flush toilets to the existing sewer system which duly emptied millions of gallons of raw sewage straight into the Thames.The evidence points to a deterioration in the condition of the Thames between about 1815 and 1830, which became more rapid between 1830 and 1850. Leslie Wood, in his study of the history of the river's pollution, is of the opinion that the quality of the Thames water in the later eighteenth century was not very different from what it is today, but that by 1850 the river had become "putrid, noisome and dead".…In 1828, it was calculated that between 139 and 145 sewers were discharging effluent into the Thames, mostly within a limited area: all the city's major outfalls entered the river between the King's Pond sewer at Vauxhall Bridge and the Black Ditch at Limehouse. From about 1830 on, things got progressively worse, as the water-closet became an accepted facility. By the 1840s, the London water companies were commonly providing "high service"-that is, to the upper floors of houses-which was used principally for the flushing of closets, and closets were widely used in wealthy and newly-built districts.The smell of that giant open sewer called the Thames could get very bad during the summers and in a time when the miasma theory was widely accepted it was thought to be dangerous to health.The scientist Michael Faraday described the situation in a letter to The Times in July 1855: shocked at the state of the Thames, he dropped pieces of white paper into the river to "test the degree of opacity". His conclusion was that "Near the bridges the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface, even in water of this kind. ... The smell was very bad, and common to the whole of the water; it was the same as that which now comes up from the gully-holes in the streets; the whole river was for the time a real sewer."Efforts to clean up the river were attempted just as the people of Leiden tried to clean the canals but not to the best effect. In 1857 the smell got so bad the government poured chalk lime, chloride of lime and carbolic acid into the Thames to make the smell more bearable.The following year it got even worse. The stink was so bad it Westminster nearly shut down.The stench from the river had become so bad that business in Parliament was affected, and the curtains on the river side of the building were soaked in lime chloride to overcome the smell. The measure was not successful, and discussions were held about possibly moving the business of government to Oxford or St Albans. The Examiner reported that Disraeli, on attending one of the committee rooms, left shortly afterwards with the other members of the committee, "with a mass of papers in one hand, and with his pocket handkerchief applied to his nose" because the smell was so bad.The disruption to its legislative work led to questions being raised in the House of Commons. According to Hansard, the Member of Parliament (MP) John Brady informed Manners that members were unable to use either the Committee Rooms or the Library because of the stench, and asked the minister "if the noble Lord has taken any measures for mitigating the effluvium and discontinuing the nuisance". Manners replied that the Thames was not under his jurisdiction.Four days later a second MP said to Manners that "By a perverse ingenuity, one of the noblest of rivers has been changed into a cesspool, and I wish to ask whether Her Majesty's Government intend to take any steps to remedy the evil?" Manners pointed out "that Her Majesty's Government have nothing whatever to do with the state of the Thames". The satirical magazine Punch commented that "The one absorbing topic in both Houses of Parliament ... was the Conspiracy to Poison question. Of the guilt of that old offender, Father Thames, there was the most ample evidence".At the height of the stink, between 200–250 long tons (220–280 short tons) of lime were being used near the mouths of the sewers that discharged into the Thames, and men were employed spreading lime onto the Thames foreshore at low tide; the cost was £1,500 per week.But it gets worse.Remember how we noted that the bulk of London households had access to piped water? That water was provided by eight water companies, four of which were exclusively supplied by water from the Thames drawn up within the city limits with the rest using a mix of water from the Thames, Lea and Ravensbourne, all of them likewise polluted.The companies didn’t use filters either until the 1850s.In effect these companies were serving the Londoners their own sewage. Not that people were unaware of this. As a complaint against one of these companies from 1828 attests they served:through iron tubes, unto the habitation of seven thousand families, to be used daily at the breakfast table; in the composition of bread, pastry, soups, broths; and in the boiling of meats, poultry, pulses-a fluid, saturated with the impurities of fifty thousand homes-a dilute solution of animal and vegetable substances in a state of putrefaction-alike offensive to the sight, disgusting to the imagination, and destructive to the health.Above: A satirical impression of the state of the water in London. A women drops her tea cup as she espies the microbes in her water with a microscope (circa 1828)In 1848 John Snow tried to establish the link between the Cholera outbreaks that ravaged London and the filthy water supply which added to the general sentiment that something ought to be done against all this. However this was not effected before recurring cholera outbreaks killed tens of thousands of Londoners.Only during the second half of the 19th century were these issues resolved. Water companies had to move their water intake further upriver outside of city limits. Private cesspits were banned, public wells were closed but perhaps the most important thing was the construction of the first Modern sewer by Joseph Bazalgette.Much of the information and quotations are from PARISH PUMP TO PRIVATE PIPES: LONDON'S WATER SUPPLY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Anne Hardy, like the other article mentioned it is an excellent read.That’s one of the key things I went people to remember. Often when we read about ancient or more recent civilisations possessing sewers we think of them as modern sewers rather than the historical sewers they actually were.We like to think of London and Leiden switching from cesspits to sewers as a step ahead in the right direction, a sign of modernity and improved sanitation. I hope this answer has convinced you that was not actually the case.History is not an inexorable march of progress or linear improvement. Sometimes newfangled inventions or profit seeking landlords literally shit up the environment and cause health problems. Sometimes a decent but not perfect situation deteriorates and as shown above people might not take action until they’re pretty far up shit creek.It might be worthwhile to make a comparison between the early sewers of London and Leiden and those of antiquity but unfortunately I know a lot less about the Roman sewage system. Though the fact that the Cloaca Maxima, like the London sewers, was initially designed to drain water and only later hooked up to latrines does not give me the impression the Tiber smelled much better than the Thames.

Trotsky saw are free, open, transparent Communist government. This was not Stalin’s vision. He saw a dark, oppressive, dominating government.“On the afternoon of August 20, 1940, Ramón Mercader, a young Spaniard in the hire of the GPU, Joseph Stalin’s secret police, seized the moment. Under the alias of Canadian businessman “Frank Jacson,” he had infiltrated Leon Trotsky’s household in Coyoácan, a borough of Mexico City, several months earlier. As Trotsky leaned over his desk, Mercader viciously struck him on the right side of the head with a pickax, its handle cut down to hide it more easily under a raincoat. The wound inflicted was three inches deep. Reeling, the old revolutionary found the strength to fight back against the assassin. Trotsky prevented Mercader from inflicting another, fatal blow and battled for his life until his bodyguards arrived. With Mercader beaten unconscious and the police called, he collapsed into the arms of his wife, Natalia Sedova. The next day, Trotsky succumbed to his wounds, dead at the age of 60. ““With his nemesis murdered and Mercader, the murderer, denying any Soviet involvement (he would eventually serve 20 years in a Mexican prison), Stalin could feel a deep satisfaction. The individual, who, more than any other, symbolized opposition to Stalinism, had been eliminated. Mercader’s vile act closed the long, bitter conflict between the two men. From the fictionalized version in Unforgiving Years, the excellent novel by Victor Serge, his one-time comrade, to the 1972 movie, The Assassination of Trotsky, where Richard Burton portrayed him, the lurid details of Trotsky’s death have often commanded more attention than his extraordinary life. Trotsky’s struggle against Stalin and Stalinism, the subject of this article, was a crucial part of his life’s final decade.”“ Born Leon Davidovich Bronstein to a family of Jewish farmers in Ukraine in 1879, Trotsky came of age among the revolutionary movements operating in the ultra-repressive atmosphere of the Russian Empire. At the age of eighteen, he enthusiastically embraced Marxism. The remainder of his life, one can say, without exaggeration, was based around a single, ultimate goal: worldwide workers’ revolution. During his early involvement in Russian socialist politics, Trotsky clashed with Vladimir Lenin over how a revolutionary party should be organized (such clashes would later serve Stalin well when he depicted Trotsky as hostile to Lenin’s ideas). During the 1905 Revolution, after the formation of the first soviets (radical councils representing the working masses), Trotsky, only twenty-six at the time, served briefly as Chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet. A long period of exile following Tsar Nicholas II’s crackdown on left-wing radicals ended when he returned in May 1917 to a Russia aflame with revolution. Joining the Bolsheviks a few months later, Trotsky worked closely with Lenin. Together, they prepared the overthrow of the ruling Provisional Government which kept the country in the disastrous world war. Henceforth, throngs of people uttered their names together—“Lenin and Trotsky.” As a member of the Bolshevik-led Military Revolutionary Committee, Trotsky played a decisive role in the insurrection in Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg), events he would later chronicle in his famed History of the Russian Revolution. The following March, he negotiated the punitive Treaty of Brest-Litovsk forced on the Bolsheviks by Imperial Germany. In the Russian Civil War (1918-1921), he organized and led the Red Army to an impressive victory over counterrevolutionary forces.““Trotsky also witnessed the tremendous setbacks of the early 1920s to revolutionary hopes. Under the New Economic Policy (NEP) set in motion by Lenin in 1921, the Bolsheviks had to concentrate on economic recovery after the severe wartime measures. The working class had been ravaged by three years of civil war. Many workers who survived the conflict had moved into administrative positions in the Soviet government or relocated to the countryside. Internationally, the USSR stood alone. The proletarian revolution Trotsky had expected to spread and take hold elsewhere had been stymied. The radical Left underwent terrible defeats in 1919 in Germany and Hungary. There was the “Red Scare” in the United States in the same period. Benito Mussolini, a former socialist, acquired power in Rome in 1922 and his Fascist dictatorship became a fierce enemy of the Bolsheviks. More defeats soon followed in Germany, Estonia, and Bulgaria in 1923-25.““After Lenin died in January 1924, the question arose immediately about who would be the next leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Trotsky was one of the most recognizable figures associated with the October Revolution—admired, hated, and emulated within and outside the USSR. Although history rightly remembers Joseph Stalin as Trotsky’s chief rival and later mortal enemy, in the early 1920s Stalin passed unnoticed by many observers. He had been a “barely perceptible shadow,” as Trotsky put it. One of the classic histories of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, written by the American radical, John Reed, hardly mentions Stalin. Gregori Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, not Stalin, emerged as Trotsky’s principal opponents in the immediate aftermath of Lenin’s death. These two men, who had been with Lenin for years, felt threatened by Trotsky’s popularity and his military record. A mistake, fateful for all three, though, had already been made. In 1922, Lenin, appreciating his organizational talents, chose Stalin for the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party. This gave him authority over party membership and appointments. Stalin quickly accrued enormous power and influence in the party over the next few years. Once Lenin, who, in his last months, sorely regretted his choice of Stalin, was no longer in the picture, Stalin sided with Zinoviev and Kamenev in their opposition to Trotsky.““As Trotsky later recognized, Stalin took advantage of the situation not only to appoint his own people but also to advance his own ideas about the future of the USSR. In 1924, he introduced the notion of “socialism in one country.” A socialist society could be built, Stalin contended, in the Soviet Union alone, regardless of the international context. The concept appealed to many Bolsheviks confronting the isolation of the globe’s only Marxist state. Stalin went on to directly counter this idea to Trotsky’s emphasis on world revolution. Thanks to Stalin, “Trotskyism” soon became a term of opprobrium for elitism, factionalism, and a lack of connectedness to the masses of workers and peasants.““During the mid-1920s, Trotsky responded to these developments by calling for a restoration of workers’ democracy within the Communist Party. While he had advocated centralization during the Civil War, he had done so out of necessity. As the de facto leader of what became known as the Left Opposition, Trotsky assailed the growing bureaucratization of political life, the retreat from the old ideal of revolutionary internationalism, and the transformation of Marxism into “Marxism-Leninism,” a dogma not to be questioned. He gathered many supporters such as Karl Radek, Christian Rakovsky, and Victor Serge. Further support came from unexpected quarters. After Stalin maneuvered them out of positions of authority, Kamenev and Zinoviev threw in their lot with Trotsky in 1926. This Joint Opposition, never the most robust alliance, did not hold. Young “activists” violently broke up Opposition meetings with methods reminiscent of Mussolini’s Fascist squads. Stalin, wielding his power like a club, expelled Trotsky and his followers from the party in late 1927. Prophetically, Trotsky denounced Stalin as the “gravedigger of the Revolution.” Sent into “internal exile” in Kazakhstan for a year, he was then deported to Turkey in February 1929. ““In Prinkipo, a suburb of Istanbul, Trotsky wrote his autobiography, My Life. In that book is this remarkable description of Stalin, by then the sole ruler of the Soviet Union.“He is gifted with practicality, a strong will, and persistence in carrying out his aims. His political horizon is restricted, his theoretical equipment primitive. His work of compilation, The Foundations of Leninism, in which he made an attempt to pay tribute to the theoretical traditions of the party, is full of sophomoric errors. His ignorance of foreign languages compels him to follow the political life of other countries at second-hand. His mind is stubbornly empirical and devoid of creative imagination. To the leading group of the party (in the wide circles he was not known at all) he always seemed a man destined to play second and third fiddle. And the fact that today he is playing first is not so much a summing up of the man as it is of this transitional period of political backsliding in the country.““This period was not to be nearly as “transitional” as Trotsky believed. With his opponents removed, Stalin enacted the collectivization of agriculture and state-directed industrialization, programs once championed by the Left Opposition, but now brutally implemented with a staggering toll of lives. He was not yet ready, though, to implement, to quote Trotsky, the “physical liquidation of the old revolutionaries, known to the whole world.” Stalin would bide his time for a number of years. And he could do so while watching his enemy live a refugee’s existence. ““Trotsky did not hesitate to label the Stalin dictatorship “totalitarian,” a concept still relatively new in political thought. Thus, Stalinism, the counterrevolutionary system and ideology Stalin represented, preoccupied him. In this form of totalitarianism, a bureaucracy, a privileged caste, at the top of which Stalin perched like an absolute monarch, lorded it over the working class. Trotsky likened Stalinist domination to “Thermidor,” the term used to denote the end of the radical phase of the French Revolution and the shift to reactionary politics. As late as 1933, he thought, however, the Soviet system could be reformed by working through the structures of the Communist Party. The Left Opposition might dislodge Stalin from within without directly challenging state power. Trotsky held to this position until Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933. Germany was a country with a modern urban, industrial society he had long regarded as vital to the prospects for socialism. Trotsky decried the impact of Stalin’s policies in this catastrophe. The Soviet leadership had tied the hands of the German Communist Party and hindered a united front against the Nazi Party by construing moderate socialists as the real threat. Subsequently, Hitler crushed the mighty German workers’ movement with hardly a fight. This disaster forced a profound shift in Trotsky’s thinking.““After Hitler took power, Trotsky concluded that reform of the Stalin regime had to be abandoned. Ousting Stalin by working through the channels of the Communist Party was no longer possible. This much more radical perspective culminated in his 1936 The Revolution Betrayed. Proletarian revolt would have to topple Stalin and the bureaucracy. This revolution, Trotsky made clear, would resemble the European upheavals of 1830 and 1848 more than the October Revolution. It would be a political revolution, not a social one. Collective ownership and control of the means of production (e.g. land, factories, mines, shipyards, oilfields), railways, and banks, as well as the planned economy, would remain. Trotsky’s designation of the USSR as a “degenerated workers’ state” highlighted his conviction that Stalin had betrayed and degraded the original, liberatory aspects of the Bolshevik Revolution. Still, much could be salvaged from the damage done by Stalinism.”“The vision Trotsky held of political institutions in a liberated, post-Stalin USSR may surprise some. He called for free elections, freedom of criticism, and freedom of the press. While the Communist Party would benefit most from this open atmosphere, it would no longer possess a monopoly on power. As long as political parties did not try to restore capitalism, they could operate, recruit, and compete for power. Stalin’s downfall would also signal new life for the trade unions. Trotsky imagined a restored involvement of workers in economic policy. Science and the arts might flourish once more. The state, no longer bound to the calamitous Stalinist policies, could return to the satisfaction of workers’ needs, like housing. Stratification would yield to the reinvigorated aim of “socialist equality.” Youth, in whom Trotsky placed so much hope, “will receive the opportunity to breathe freely, criticize, make mistakes, and grow up.”“These thoughts Trotsky put to paper only months before he would be compelled to move again. For eight years, Trotsky traversed what he called a “planet without a visa,” a planet torn apart by the worst economic crisis in the history of capitalism. Since Stalin expelled him and Natalia from the USSR, the beleaguered revolutionaries had found temporary sanctuary in Turkey, France, and Norway. Granted refuge by the leftist Cardénas government of Mexico, their arrival in Coyoácan in January 1937 was greeted with derision and menace by the country’s pro-Stalin Communist Party.““Stalin not only hunted Trotsky but anyone close to him from country to country. In Barcelona, in June 1937, his assassins abducted Trotsky’s former collaborator, Andrés Nin, a leader in the POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unity), the organization of militants made famous by George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Nin disappeared at a critical moment in the Spanish revolutionaries’ struggle against Francisco Franco, never to been seen again. Thirteen months later, in Paris, Rudolf Klement, who had once worked as Trotsky’s secretary, sat down for breakfast. Klement was kidnapped, presumably by GPU agents. They seized him and left his food on the table untouched. A few weeks after he vanished, a body, missing its head and legs, washed up on the Seine. It was not enough to just kill Klement; decapitation and dismemberment were required to incite extra terror.”“Stalin’s agents also infiltrated the circle around Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov. Despite a difficult relationship with his father, Leon worked tirelessly for him in Paris. He communicated with Left Oppositionists still holding on inside Russia, edited the Bulletin of the Opposition, the most significant forum for Trotsky’s analyses of the contemporary world, and wrote an exposé of the Show Trials then taking place in the USSR. Mark Zborowski, Ukrainian-born and known to Trotsky’s supporters under the false name “Étienne,” soon worked his way into Sedov’s circle. Zborowski became Sedov’s personal assistant, helping with his correspondence and eventually taking care of the publication of the Bulletin. Thanks to “Étienne,” the GPU could count on seeing many of the articles from the latter before they even appeared in print. And Zborowski delivered to them vital information about Sedov’s health. When Sedov checked himself into a private clinic in Paris run by Russian emigres complaining of an appendicitis, the Soviets knew. He died there under mysterious circumstances in February 1938, five months before Klement disappeared. To this day, the cause of death has not been conclusively determined. In a moving tribute to his son, Trotsky told of the terrible grief he and Natalia felt. “Together with our boy has died everything that still remained young within us.” Their other son, Sergei Sedov, had remained in Russia after his parents’ expulsion and always kept politics at arm’s length. That did not save him. He vanished and, it is believed, was shot in October 1937. ““This systematic killing overlapped with the monstrosity of Stalin’s Show Trials. These abhorrent mockeries of justice had their roots in the murder of Sergey Kirov, Stalin’s party boss in Leningrad. Kirov was gunned down in December 1934. Likely, Stalin himself was responsible for the assassination. The murder gave him the pretext for systematically and publicly purging the Communist Party. As the most visible aspect of the Purges, the Show Trials started with the Trial of the Sixteen in August 1936. Old Bolsheviks, such as Zinoviev and Kamenev, stood accused of conspiring against the Soviet government. Shockingly, they confessed, confessed to submitting to Trotsky’s demands to assassinate Stalin and several of his subordinates. Following their death sentences, several successor trials ensued through 1938. The “physical liquidation of old revolutionaries, known to the whole world” was at hand. Trotsky knew that a combination of torture, threats to family members, and promises of freedom, if confessions were given, allowed the travesties to occur. When he read the infamous sentence uttered by Stalin’s Prosecutor-General, Andrey Vyshinsky—“I demand that these dogs gone mad should be shot—every one of them!”—Trotsky knew this was no idle threat.”“Vyshinsky’s words became murderous reality in the USSR in the late 1930s and '40s. The violence swept away both supporters and opponents of Stalin and Stalinism. Radek and Rakovsky, former allies of Trotsky who later submitted to Stalin, were killed. So, too, was Nikolai Bukharin, one of Bolshevism’s leading theoreticians, a sharp critic of Trotsky and the Left Opposition, and a onetime backer of Stalin. Others were murdered in labor camps, the infamous Gulags, or in prisons. Among the thousands of victims were the Marxist economic thinker, Isaak Ilich Rubin, and the great historian of the Left and former director of The Marx-Engels Institute, David Ryazanov. Isaac Babel, whom Trotsky once termed the “most talented of our younger writers,” confessed to working as a spy and terrorist mastermind for Trotsky. The secret police put him to death in January 1940. In this period, the Soviet Union was perhaps the most dangerous place in the world for independent-thinking Marxists, an astounding thing to say, given the records of the fascist regimes. For their contributions to the butchery, Stalin rewarded Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov, chiefs of the GPU during these years, by having them shot.““From the Show Trials, ever more outlandish tales about Trotsky were spun. The stories relayed by the accused placed him at the center of a massive, worldwide anti-Soviet conspiracy. Turning his calls for an anti-Stalin revolution against him, Vyshinsky pilloried Trotsky, the inveterate adversary of fascism, as the master fascist, as the string-puller and puppet-master. Besides links to the Gestapo, Soviet investigators claimed to have uncovered Trotsky’s connections to Mussolini, the government of Imperial Japan, and the capitalist democracies. Reminiscent of Nazi anti-Semitic theories, “Trotskyism” metamorphosed into a truly demonic apparition during the Show Trials. Yet Trotsky fought back vigorously.”“Countering the way Stalin’s handpicked historians distorted the Soviet past, Trotsky had already authored The Stalin School of Falsification. His adherents, many of whom by this point referred to him, with affection, as the “Old Man,” founded the Fourth International outside of Paris in September 1938. Its aim was to provide a revolutionary alternative to the Moscow-led Third or Communist International (Comintern). This Fourth International would bolster radical, anti-Stalinist working-class parties and unions around the world. When it came to repudiating the preposterous charges raised in the Show Trials, he received considerable help. Frida Kahlo, with whom Trotsky had an affair in 1937, and Diego Rivera were his tireless defenders in Mexico City. In the United States, a Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky formed. Similar organizations were founded elsewhere. The American Committee set up a Commission of Inquiry, chaired by John Dewey, the famous Pragmatist philosopher. Only one of the members, Alfred Rosmer, a syndicalist and early supporter of the October Revolution, could be described as a Trotsky supporter. Traveling to the Mexican capital, the Commission held thirteen sessions in April 1937. Trotsky, speaking in his quite imperfect English, responded to every accusation leveled by the Stalinists. He cast a powerful impression on those present, including the liberal Dewey, no admirer of his politics. In September 1937, the Commission issued its findings, clearing Trotsky of all the charges. ““The following years were dark, awful times for Trotsky, Natalia, and their inner circle. Losing two sons and innumerable comrades and friends to Stalin did not break his spirit, but the losses threw a shadow over everything he had done. With the Japanese in China, Hitler moving into Austria, and threatening Czechoslovakia, and Mussolini dreaming of a Roman Empire in the Mediterranean, the prospect of a new world war soon overtook him. Almost a year before it started, Trotsky spoke of an impending Second World War as a “new slaughter which is about to drown our whole planet in blood.”“Trotsky had good reason to utter such things. And he knew that Stalin’s response to German expansion in Eastern Europe would be critical. Following the Munich Agreement of September 1938, Trotsky expected the Soviet government to seek an agreement with Hitler. Stalin’s 1937-38 purge of the Red Army, including some of its most capable commanders, like Mikhail Tukhachevsky, had so seriously weakened the USSR that a military confrontation with Nazi Germany had to be avoided at all costs. Whatever anti-Nazi sentiments issued from the Kremlin, Trotsky thought, were not worth the paper they were written on. In the aftermath of the Show Trials, he believed an even more important reason would drive Stalin to come to an agreement with Berlin: survival. The Stalin regime was too despotic and unpopular to weather the storm of total war. According to Trotsky, a settlement with Nazi Germany might secure some stability for the dictatorship. ““When Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, his German counterpart, signed a Non-Aggression Pact between the two nations on August 23, 1939, Trotsky was scarcely surprised. Earlier that year, he had declared that Stalin’s name will be a “byword for the uttermost limits of human baseness.” This damning statement received confirmation with Stalin’s next move—dividing up Poland with Hitler.“Standing: Joseph Stalin with Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; Seated: Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov-at the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. Credit: Hulton Archive/Toronto Star.““Trotsky’s struggle against Stalin entered a new and final phase with the start of World War II just a week later. In a steady stream of articles and interviews, he condemned the role of the Soviet Union, a state that, at least in its rhetoric, had sided with the colonized against imperialism. The betrayal of the principles of Red October had reached a new level of treachery. Perhaps Stalin, Trotsky surmised, now seemed content with partitioning Eastern Europe with the German fascists. Whatever the motives, he dubbed Stalin Hitler’s “quartermaster,” a lackey who reacted to his senior partner’s moves. ““The Soviet attack on Finland in November 1939, the beginning of the Winter War, made him wonder how far Stalin was willing to go to create a sphere of interest for himself. While he again damned Soviet aggression, Trotsky, at the same time, despised Marshal Mannerheim, the right-wing Finnish leader rallying his people. Still, Trotsky, true to his Marxism, hoped that “sovietization” in Poland and Finland might free workers and peasants in both countries from the dominance of capitalists and landlords. Yet socialism, he realized, ultimately could not be built on the tips of the Red Army’s bayonets.““This was a huge dilemma for Trotsky. How could one support social revolution in areas under Soviet control without giving any ground on his anti-Stalinism? An even bigger problem posed itself. What if Hitler repudiated the pact and attacked the USSR? Trotsky had no doubt Hitler would do so at the earliest opportunity. His answer was absolutely unequivocal. Socialists and workers everywhere must rally to the defense of the Soviet Union. The achievements of the Bolshevik Revolution had to be defended.““This position, which alienated many of his adherents, coexisted with another claim—the new world war would mean the end of the Stalin regime. Trotsky predicted that the workers and peasants of the USSR, their revolutionary energies revitalized, would put an end to the Stalinist bureaucracy. The revolution he outlined in The Revolution Betrayed would itself form part of a gigantic wave of revolutionism engulfing the Axis powers and the capitalist democracies. Like Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini would meet the severe justice of the proletariat. Trotsky argued that capitalism, stricken for a decade by mass unemployment, immigration quotas, tariff wars, and the constriction of trade, had entered its “death agony” as well. Defiantly, he announced, “from the capitalist prisons and the concentration camps will come most of the leaders of tomorrow’s Europe and the world!” One outcome Trotsky envisioned resulting from this world revolution would be a Socialist United States of Europe. The latter, in turn, would form part of a World Federation of Socialist Republics. This would have amounted to the greatest geopolitical revolution in human history with socialism becoming a truly global societal form.”“Trotsky held to this radical perspective even as Stalin signed a commercial agreement with Hitler in February 1940, then seized Bessarabia and Bukovina from Romania, and annexed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. He clung to it as his own health deteriorated and, as he had long feared, Stalin’s assassins closed in on him. At the end of February, Trotsky wrote a final testament, fearing death was near. “Life is beautiful,” he said. “Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.” Three months later, radical evil appeared very much alive and on the move.““On May 1, a day long associated with the Left and labor militancy, 20,000 Mexican Communists marched in the capital and shouted: “Out with Trotsky!” Trotsky and Natalia had already assumed their lives were in jeopardy. With its electrified wires, alarms, and enforced doors, their house in Coyoácan looked more like a fortress than a home. As Trotsky tried from afar to keep pace with Hitler’s invasion of France and the Low Countries, launched on May 10, a plot to kill him took shape. It was led by the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, once a friend of Rivera, but now a convinced Stalinist. On the night of May 23, Siqueiros’s men broke into the home and fired over 200 shots. Miraculously, Trotsky and Natalia survived. So did their grandson, Esteban Volkov, who had been living with them.““Trotsky proclaimed in defiance, “in the annals of history Stalin’s name will forever be recorded with the infamous mark of Cain.” When the May attempt failed, the GPU decided to go with Mercader. In August, after delays and missteps, he fulfilled his deadly mission. Among the papers next to where Trotsky struggled against his assassin was a long, unfinished manuscript, a biography of Stalin he penned to expose his enemy. The blood spilled in the study confirmed what was etched in ink on the book’s pages. Indeed, with Trotsky’s murder, Stalin demonstrated his most terrifying talent. He was a hangman whose noose could reach across oceans.““In retrospect, it is astonishing just how confident were Trotsky and his supporters like Victor Serge, Isaac Deutscher, and James Cannon in a coming proletarian revolution that would sweep away the Stalin regime. Trotsky’s expectation that World War II would lead to the toppling of Stalin and the restoration of a true workers’ state in the U.S.S.R. never, of course, materialized. In fact, the victory of the Red Army during the “Great Patriotic War” against the Axis states only solidified Stalin’s rule. For many, Marxism became irrevocably defined by and identified with Stalinism. Victory did not mean in this case, though, validity for the system Stalin molded. Trotsky’s critiques of Stalin the person and Stalinism the phenomenon remind us of that.”Trotsky’s Struggle against Stalin | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans

Eurocentrists, the followers of Eurocentrism, the ideological project of white supremacy, will say on slave ships from the Slave Coast of Africa along the Gulf of Guinea in West- Central Africa.The “discovery” of America is a Euro-imperialist myth. America was not “discovered” but conquered.The conquest of America was part and parcel of a naval and religious crusade against the Moors and their West African allies, the Mandinga of Mali. The Mandinga had settled in the America long before Columbus to such an extent that there are Native Americans called the Mandinga Indians. The legendary Welsh explorer and pirate Lionel Wafer spent some time among them in the 1686–7. Mandinga Indians are also called Mandingo or San Blas Indians.Palden Jenkins in his article “ The Columbus myth” wrote the following :The black Carib and Arawaki peoples of the south Caribbean and Panama, who lived there long before the slave trade from Africa started, leave a big question as to their origin, together with the 'Mandinga' language of minorities from Venezuela to Nicaragua. In addition, the use of American maize and cassava in west Africa before Europeans arrived needs some explaining.It is an open secret that the discovery of the America was a direct consequence of the wars that Christian Europe had waged against Muslims.The obsession with the hunt for the Moor drove the earliest European explorers (the Portuguese, the Spaniards etc.]. The final defeat of the Moors in 1492; the discovery of the America in 1492. It sounds like a historical coincidence. It is not. It is all part of myth making. The Americas appear on maps predating the so-called discovery of the America.3 The Europeans set sail with accurate maps that showed their destinations· The Pacific from Vancouver to “the Straits of Magellan” appeared on the Waldseemueller (1507) before Balboa “discovered” the Pacific.· The Amazon appeared on the Piri Reis (1513[1501]) before Orellana “discovered” the river.· The Atlantic coastline of South America appeared on the Andrea Bianco map of 1448 before Columbus “discovered the continent.James W. Loewen in his best selling book “Lies my Teacher Told me” wrote the following : From contacts in West Africa, the Portuguese heard that African traders were visiting Brazil in the mid-1400s; this knowledge may have influenced Portugal to insist on moving the pope's “line of demarcation” further west in the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494)”John Henrik Clarke in (What Columbus did not discover) wrotethat: “Columbus was informed by some men, when he stopped at one of the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa, that Africans had been known to set out into the Atlantic from the Guinea coast in canoes loaded with merchandise and steering towards the west.It is an open secret that Portuguese marines encountered with groups of African vessels in the Ethiopic Ocean, renamed the South Atlantic Ocean after the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. In his journals the Portuguese explorer Alvise da Cadamosto described a group of about 17 large boats carrying a total of 150 men bearing down on them. Another Portuguese sea captain Pereira wrote that the Kongo from West-Central Africa had established trade and diplomatic relationships with Native Americans in Brazil before the 15th.Columbus spent years trading commodities and slaves along the West African coast. He learned from his Portuguese partners and in-laws about West African crossing during one of his stays in Cape Verde and the Elmina fortress in present day Ghana. It is not really suprising to learn that Columbus used the African route. He launched his historic voyage from a West African seaport, with African crew and African men as his chief pilots. Peter the Black, Pedro El Negro, a black man was one of his chief pilotsNiño, Pedro Alonso (c. 1468-c. 1505)Pedro Alonso Niño was a Spanish explorer known as el Negro. A native of Moguer, Spain, Niño acted as pilot of the Santa María during the first voyage of Christopher Columbus.Christopher Columbus Institute for Discovery and Exploration™Africa: A Place in the Discovery of the AmericasGuinea, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone . . . Did ChristopherColumbus visit these African countries? Was Africa his trainingground?Historians have suggested that the coastline of West Africawas where Columbus honed and developed his navigational skills;where his venture into the unknown prepared him for his voyageand discovery of the Americas.The Christopher Columbus-Africa connection is exposed andmost telling in his log of the first voyage to the Americas.………….I have wondered for years why the “the Aethiopian Sea” or the Ethiopic Ocean was officially renamed South Atlantic Ocean by imperial cartographers in the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference, which sealed the Scramble for Africa.Aethiopian Sea - WikipediaAethiopian, Æthiopian,Æthiopic or Ethiopian Sea or Ocean (Latin: Æthiopicum Mare or Oceanus Æthiopicus; Arabic: البحر الأثيوبي‎) was the name given to the southern half of the Atlantic Ocean in classical geographical works. The name appeared in maps from ancient times up to the turn of the 19th century.Ethiopic Ocean |I got the answer.Professor Leo Weiner wrote a three volume work, Africa and the Discovery of America. He provided convincing evidence that Africans were in the Americans long before Columbus was even born.Professor Weiner stated that the evidence was derived from the following :African words in American Indian languages.Vases and pipe-bowls found in the ruins of the Mound-Builders, showing Negro faces on their surfaces.The presence of African foods in America, such the peanut and the yam.The totemic organization of the Amerindians tribes, very similar to African totemic. (Totemic is a sort of primitive theory of evolution.There is irrefutable genetic evidence of West Africans in the America before Columbus.Lisker et al, noted that “The variation of Indian ancestry among the studied Indians shows in general a higher proportion in the more isolated groups, except for the Cora, who are as isolated as the Huichol and have not only a lower frequency but also a certain degree of black admixture. The black admixture is difficult to explain because the Cora reside in a mountainous region away from the west coast”.Green et al (2000) also found Indians with African genes in North Central Mexico, including the L1 and L2 clusters. Green et al (2000) observed that the discovery of a proportion of African haplotypes roughly equivalent to the proportion of European haplotypes [among North Central Mexican Indians] cannot be explained by recent admixture of African Americans for the United States. This is especially the case for the Ojinaga area, which presently is, and historically has been largely isolated from U.S. African Americans. In the Ojinaga sample set, the frequency of African haplotypes was higher than that of European hyplotypes”.Forgotten or Unknown: Virgin Islands Hull Bay Skeletons Dated 1250 AD? | Sola ReyTwo skeletons of Negro males have been recovered from a grave in Hull Bay near the Danish Virgin Islands.………..The whole history of the Kongo “Maroon State” of Palmares in Brazil is a typical case of historical deception.Deception is facts omitted, arranged in a way or mixed with lies that create a false impression.Delusional Eurocentrists have used historical deception in order to minimize the presence and role of Blacks and Africans in America (including pre-colonial America) and many other places in the world.Duarte Pacheco Pereira, a Portuguese sea captain wrote in his Journal that the Kongos had established trade and diplomatic relations with the Native Americans in Brazil before the 15th.But somehow, Palmares is presented as a Maroon state founded by escaped slaves.It is an obvious lie.The dates of the creation of the Maroon state do not add up with the official story. In the official story, Palmares was founded after the Battle of Mbwila in 1665 but its existence is recorded as early as 1582. At the same time, a Kongo emissary was sent to Dutch Brazil in 1640. He is immortalized in a very famous painting.In addition, the slave king, Ganga Zumba lived in a palace with his courtiers and had a very abundant farm. He had a wife of Portuguese origin. There is documented evidence that he also built a chapel in his Maroon state. He also had a powerful army. At the time of its destruction, there were houses, streets and other smaller palaces. There were 220 buildings, four smithies, and a council house. It was also recorded that Ganga Zumba (great lord) of Palmares was very active in trade between Palmares and coast settlers. People of Palmares traded with their Portuguese neighbours, exchanging food- stuffs and crafts for arms, munitions, and salt. Portuguese settlers and governors addressed him with his royal titles.How can a fugitive slave achieve all that?https://www.cairn.info/revue-tumultes-2006-2-page-53.htmCourtesy of Google TranslateThe Municipality of Palmares: Benjamin Peret and the revolt of the slaves of colonial BrazilIn the following century, the German historian Heinrich Handelmann, in his Histoire du Brésil de 1860, analyzed the facts from the point of view of "white colonization": "We should regret the sad fate of the Palmares, but its destruction was a necessity . A complete Africanization of Alagôas, an African colony in the midst of European slave states, was something that could not be tolerated at all without seriously endangering the existence of white Brazilian colonization; the duty of his own conservation forced him to exterminate itThe main question is : how did it all happen?https://www.ocr.org.uk/Images/208299-african-kingdoms-ebook-.pdfThe Kingdom of Kongo was long one of the most famous West African kingdoms in the world. From the moment that the Portuguese navigators led by Diogo Cão arrived at the estuary of the Congo river in 1482, the Kongo kingdom embarked on a prolonged engagement with American and European peoples that would endure for centuries. Kongo ambassadors would be despatched to the Vatican to plea for more Catholic missionaries, to Portugal, and to Brazil.The first Bishop of Útica, Dom Henrique, was appointed by the Vatican in 1521, was the son of the king of Kongo, known as the manikongo. For all these reasons, and many others, Kongo was in many ways Atlantic Africa’s first truly globalised kingdom.In the 17th century, Kongo expanded its diplomatic initiatives with ambassadors at the Vatican and at the Dutch court in north-eastern Brazil in the 1630s and 1640s, and frequent exchanges of correspondence with the States-General Assembly of the Netherlands throughout the first half of the century.1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created: Mann, Charles C.: 9780307278241: Amazon.com: BooksAt its height in the 1650s, according to the Harvard historian John K. Thornton, the maroon state of Palmares “ruled over a vast area in the coastal mountains of Brazil, constituting a rival power unlike any other group outside Europe.” It had close to as many inhabitants at the time as all of English North America.It was as if an African army had been scooped up and deposited in the Americas to control an area of more than ten thousand square miles. Palmares’s capital was Macaco, Aqualtune’s springside resting place. Spread along a wide street half a mile long, it had a church, a council house, four small-scale iron foundries, and several hundred homes, the whole surrounded by irrigated fields. The head of state was Aqualtune’s son, Ganga Zumba, who lived in what one European visitor described as a “palace,” complete with an entourage of flattering courtiers.Other members of the royal family ruled other villages. Ganga Zumba may have been a title, rather than a name; nganga a nzumbi was a priestly rank in many Angolan societies. In any case, the visitor reported, he was treated with the deference due a king. His subjects had to approach him on their knees, clapping their hands in an African gesture of obeisance.Knowing that his people were always subject to attack, Ganga Zumba organized the towns more like military camps than farming villages—strict discipline, constant guard duty, frequent drill sessions. Each major settlement was ringed by a double-walled wooden palisade with high walkways along the top and watchtowers at the corners.In turn the palisades were surrounded by protective snarls of timber, hidden deadfalls, pits lined with poisoned stakes, and (fields of caltrops (antipersonnel weapons made from iron spikes welded together in such a way that one always points upward, ready to injure anyone who steps on it). Every single person who had fled slavery to live there had risked life and limb for liberty in a way that is difficult to imagine today. Palmares fairly bristled with determination to maintain command over its own destiny.Portuguese officials feared that Palmares would do the same in Brazil. The rebel confederacy was a direct military and political challenge to the colonial enterprise. Not only did its troops raid Portuguese settlements, its strategic location atop hills like the Serra da Barriga blocked further European expansion into that part of the interior. If such rebellions spread to other ports of Brazil, Lisbon feared that its colonists would become a kind of marine froth on the coast, while the interior turned into a mosaic of Afro-Indian state.