Avenging the Black Ghost of Empire
Reflections for Black History Month
I am the offspring of the Third Scramble for Africa and the Fourth Wave of white Euro-American settlement. My parents, Lacustrine Bantu migrants from Tanzania, arrived in the United States via the United Kingdom during the 1980s, fleeing a continent ensnared in debt traps and ravaged by resource curses. My father’s entry was brokered by academic institutions that saw him as a valuable human resource to be refined and exploited. My mother’s access was tied to profits from the unequal trade of minerals and ivory in Central Africa. Their trajectories, and the circumstances of my birth, reflect the enduring reality of global apartheid: Africa’s wealth continues to be siphoned away, leaving its people to bear the weight of systemic underdevelopment.
I grew up and came of age between the financial centers and rust belts of the Settler States—territories deeply inscribed with histories of conquest and exploitation. Over the past decade, I have lived along the Pacific Coast of these same Settler States, where Manifest Destiny reached its brutal conclusion. The legacies of genocide, slavery, forced assimilation, and migrant labor shaped my surroundings.
From an early age, I was taught that survival required performing distinction: academic posturing, mannerisms of “professionalism” and “respectability,” and speech patterns designed to distance myself from stereotypes of uncultured, uncouth, and uncivilized Blackness. My parents, shaped by their own displacement and exclusion, enforced these standards as a defense against the dehumanizing gaze that renders Black boys and men objects of suspicion and violence. As an adult, I have conformed to these standards and other such impositions to avoid the fate of becoming “just another Black man in America”—vulnerable to regimes of organized abandonment, managed neglect, and murder by commission and omission; subject to increased risk of premature death as a consequence of routine disciplinary action, normalized accident, or the collateral damage of the pursuit of social optimization.
This dispatch, a pastiche of previous works revisited and remixed in the context of Black History Month in the U.S., explores the interconnected struggles of African peoples—on the continent and throughout the diaspora—centering what Kris Manjapra terms the “Black Ghost of Empire,” a spectral force that calls upon Africans across the diaspora to resist Empire’s systems of domination. It examines how the Scrambles for Africa and successive waves of Euro-American settlement have operated in tandem to sustain global racial hierarchies and economic exploitation. These cycles of extraction, control, and resistance remain embedded in both daily life and global power structures.
Central to this analysis is the recognition that the three Scrambles for Africa are not isolated historical events but phases of a protracted global campaign to dispossess and underdevelop communities of African peoples. These Scrambles are inextricably linked to the larger U.S. settler-colonial project, which has shaped racialized hierarchies and economic systems worldwide in pursuit of dominance. As this settler-colonial project achieved global hegemony in the twentieth century, it globalized patterns of exploitation and resistance that continue to define the experiences of African and diasporic peoples today.
Haunted by the violences endured by our ancestors—violences embedded in the foundations of Empire—African peoples are uniquely called to resist Empire’s ongoing domination and to bring about its ruination. This calling is both a gift and a curse: a gift for those who heed it, for it compels them to pursue forms of “freedom-in-relation” that would otherwise be inconceivable; a curse for those who ignore it, as the Black Ghost of Empire haunts them with the persistent knowledge that they are enduring forms of enslavement that others experience and regard as freedom. Édouard Glissant captures the paradox of this inheritance when he writes in the Poetics of Relation:
Peoples who have been to the abyss do not brag of being chosen. They do not believe they are giving birth to any modern force. They live Relation and clear the way for it, to the extent that the oblivion of the abyss comes to them and that, consequently, their memory intensifies.
For though this experience made you, original victim floating toward the sea's abysses, an exception, it became something shared and made us, the descendants, one people among others. Peoples do not live on exception. Relation is not made up of things that are foreign but of shared knowledge. This experience of the abyss can now be said to be the best element of exchange.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, Amorites on Safari,” (1982).
Scrambles for Africa
The First Scramble for Africa, “The Slave Trade,” was the proto-colonial competition to convert Africa into “a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins”—to kidnap and export the most enslaved Africans to the New World. Over this period, according to UNESCO estimates, 25 to 30 million Africans were kidnapped, deported, and subjected to slavery and social death in distant lands. When accounting for those killed during slave raids, in holding camps, on death marches to coastal ports, and during the Middle Passage, the total number of lives stolen from Africa may exceed one hundred million. This genocidal enterprise underpinned the settler empires of the Americas but was ultimately undermined by the resistance of enslaved Africans and their descendants. The Haitian Revolution and the General Strike of the enslaved that decided the U.S. Civil War demonstrated how African rebellion transformed slavery from a profitable venture into a Trojan horse that destabilized New World settler empires from within.
The Second Scramble for Africa, “The Land Grabs,” began in the wake of the “non-event of emancipation” and the closing of the frontiers of the New World. It marked the full-blown colonial campaign to conquer, exploit, and dominate the African continent through extreme violence. Europeans overthrew local rulers they had previously empowered as intermediaries and declared themselves the continent’s new “enlightened” governors. Despite claims of having abolished slavery, they reconstituted its horrors in the interior of Africa. The Congo Free State became the most infamous example of this reconstitution, operating as a vast plantation-state where forced labor and terror killed an estimated ten million Congolese people in less than 25 years. This Scramble, however, was met with relentless resistance from Africans, who rendered once-profitable colonies costly liabilities, thereby disrupting the colonial project from within.
The Third Scramble for Africa, “The Debt Trap & Resource Curse,” is the ongoing neo-colonial campaign to underdevelop and overburden postcolonial African states. Through extractive mechanisms such as debt repayments, natural resource exploitation, skilled labor migration, and political subservience to global economic blocs, neo-colonial powers maintain the continent’s subjugation. This Scramble recalls the dynamics of the First: instead of imposing direct rule, neo-colonizers bribe, corrupt, and terrorize postcolonial elites into sabotaging their nations’ futures. These elites, often functioning as warlords or technocrats, act as agents of systemic underdevelopment, reminiscent of early modern African rulers coerced into selling their most vulnerable subjects and neighbors into chattel slavery. Today, Africa—home to 34 of the world’s 50 poorest nations—loses more through capital flight, unequal trade, and brain drain than it gains through aid, foreign investment, or remittances. Were the material and symbolic infrastructures of the global economy not rigged in favor of imperial powers, Africa would be a “net creditor” to the rest of the world
Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Self-Portrait Looking at Captain America,” (1980).
Waves of Euro-American Settlement
Parallel to these Scrambles, the white Euro-American project of settlement in what became the United States shaped global racial and economic domination. During the First Wave of Euro-American Settlement—“Native Genocide and Negro Slavery”—settlers conquered and occupied lands between the Atlantic coast and the Mississippi River, seeking to either enslave or exterminate the Indigenous peoples whose territories they seized. Extermination often took precedence over enslavement, prompting settlers to import and breed enslaved Africans, racialized as “Negroes.” These enslaved laborers developed stolen lands, working in chain gangs, forced labor camps, and extractive industries, especially in the American South, where their exploitation became central to the plantation economy.
The Second Wave of Settlement, known as “Manifest Destiny,” saw white Euro-Americans expand westward from the Mississippi to the Pacific Coast, displacing Indigenous peoples and Mexican settlers. To develop these newly conquered territories, settlers imported indentured laborers—primarily Chinese “Coolies”—whose work on colonial infrastructure projects like ports and railroads supplemented that of enslaved Africans on plantations and displaced Mexican mestizos working as ranch hands and manual laborers.
The Third Wave of Settlement, “Industrial Empire,” followed the closing of the frontier. White Euro-Americans accelerated the importation and assimilation of impoverished European working-class and peasant populations to:
repopulate and “develop” lands being emptied through ethnic cleansing and genocidal terror campaigns against non-Europeans;
labor in the rapidly expanding U.S. industrial economy, following the victory of Northern bankers and industrialists over Southern planters and slavers in the U.S. Civil War; and
serve in the military as settlers pursued overseas colonial expansion, emulating and competing with the British and other European empires.
The ongoing Fourth Wave of Settlement, “Global Hegemony,” emerged in the aftermath of the World Wars (1914–1945). In this phase, white Euro-Americans have leveraged global dominance to:
promote segments of the European settler working class to soft-labor regimes, sustaining their allegiance through easy access to consumer credit and favorable housing and small business loans;
export degrading hard-labor regimes to neo-colonies, client states, and treaty ports (“Special Economic Zones”) in the Global South; and
import migrant laborers from the Global South to perform the remaining hard-labor tasks within Settler State borders. These migrant workers are kept under precarious conditions that heighten their vulnerability to expulsion, making them more easily exploited than established “national minorities” with citizenship status and hard-won civil rights (the Native Americans, African Americans, Chicanos, and Asian Americans who survived earlier waves of settlement).
In this Fourth Wave, white Euro-Americans have also implemented counter-insurgency strategies to fracture resistance within national minority and migrant communities. A key tactic involves promoting talented tenths from these populations, granting them “near white” and “honorary white” status. These talented tenths are afforded relative luxury and positioned within Empire’s elite institutions—the Ivory Towers, Executive Suites, White Cubes, and Arenas of Sport and Entertainment—to manufacture consent for systems of unequal integration and global apartheid.
Globally, the United States has constructed an international apartheid regime where nationality serves as a proxy for race, reproducing domestic racial hierarchies on a planetary scale. Indigenous peoples without recognized nation-states are rendered invisible and expendable. Nations predominantly inhabited by those racialized as “Negro”—such as Black Africans and the most impoverished Caribbean populations (e.g., Haiti)—occupy the lowest rung, perpetually framed as zones of racial and economic deficiency.
Above these nations are the “Coolie” nations of Asia—China and India chief amongst them—whose populations were racialized post-emancipation as a more “dependable” labor force than free Africans. Competing alongside them are Latin American settler-colonial nations, whose populations—composed of “alloyed whites” and visibly mixed-race groups—are denigrated for their supposed “racial impurities.”
Eastern Europe, Western Asia, Southern Europe, and Northern Africa form transitional zones within this hierarchy, their populations simultaneously othered and partially assimilated into whiteness. These regions occupy a liminal space between full inclusion and exclusion.
This global racial order systematically privileges the Global North while marginalizing the Darker Nations of the Global South, justifying interventions under the guise of peacekeeping, development, or humanitarian aid. In Africa, peacekeeping forces and philanthropic organizations wield unchecked authority, perpetuating militarized paternalism that echoes the policing of Black communities in the United States. This paternalism reveals a shared logic between emancipation and decolonization, both of which may be described as “non-events.”
Jean-Michel Basquiat, “God, Law,” (1981).
Unpayable Debts
As Saidiya Hartman explains in Scenes of Subjection, emancipation in the United States did not signify true liberation but rather restructured domination through a regime of indebtedness. The newly freed were subjected to a moral economy of submission and servitude, compelled to “repay” the so-called investment in their freedom. This indebtedness took shape through coercive labor contracts, systemic poverty, and a present mortgaged to a deferred future that would never fully arrive. Suspended in this liminal state, the emancipated remained enmeshed in the circuits of racial capitalism, subject to forms of neo-slavery and social death. Debt, both material and symbolic, compounded their bondage, pushing many toward peonage and indentured servitude. As Kris Manjapra emphasizes in Black Ghost of Empire, this was no accident. Emancipations everywhere—not only in the U.S.—were designed to preserve racial hierarchies. Across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European and American elites enacted policies that incarcerated, indebted, deported, and imperiled the freedoms of African peoples under the guise of emancipation.
This systemic betrayal of freedom finds a direct parallel in the “non-event” of decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean. Just as emancipation burdened the freed person with racialized debt, decolonization bound newly independent states to an exploitative global order. Sovereignty was granted on the condition that postcolonial nations inherit the burdensome and constrictive administrative and financial machinery of their colonizers—without any of their accumulated gains. These obligations, deliberately designed to be unpayable, ensured the continued dependency of former colonies on imperial financial institutions, thereby cementing neocolonial control.
The parallels between emancipation and decolonization lie in their shared structure of indebtedness, both material and symbolic. Emancipation and decolonization each imposed an economic and moral calculus that demanded repayment for the conditions of freedom. The emancipated were forced into exploitative forms of unequal integration that reproduced servitude, while postcolonial nations were compelled to enter global markets and the “international community” on similarly unequal terms. In both cases, material and symbolic debts served as tools of subordination, ensnaring individuals and nations alike in cycles of extraction, austerity, and coercion.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, “To Repel Ghosts” (1986).
Wake Work
Instead of repaying the debts imposed by colonizers and enslavers—debts designed to perpetuate our servitude and sustain their dominion—the descendants of the enslaved and colonized, those of us who declare ourselves the Avengers of the Black Ghosts of Empire, understand that true freedom heeds a different obligation. We are bound to ensure and fulfill the debts owed to our ancestors—debts not of compliance but of rebellion. What is owed to them is the ruination of Empire, the overturning of racial capitalism and patriarchal imperialism. Without this act of vindication—without confronting the ghosts of genocides, ethnocides, and ecocides—we will remain ensnared in the symbolic and material debts that continue to enslave both the emancipated and the decolonized
Our ancestors were never truly freed. They were bound by regimes of coercion that compelled them to repay the so-called “investment” in their emancipation. From coerced labor contracts to systemic poverty, from unpayable national debts to austerity and exploitation, the “freedom” of the formerly enslaved and colonized was rendered an impossible promise. Inherited debt to our oppressors was—and remains—Empire’s weapon for preserving racial hierarchies and global apartheid. As Kris Manjapra reminds us, this was no accident. These debts were designed to endure, haunting each generation in new forms.
“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” Marx wrote, yet our struggle is not merely against the burdens of memory. It is against a system that denies both the living and the dead their due. As Walter Benjamin warned, “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” The ongoing violence of Empire depends on erasing the dead, reducing them to those who have lived and died, their suffering dismissed as a closed chapter. Empire thrives on this erasure by disrupting the ancient interdependence between the living and the dead, isolating survivors from the fullness of their histories. As John Berger writes, “By themselves the living were incomplete. Thus living and dead were interdependent. Always. Only a uniquely modern form of egoism has broken this interdependence. With disastrous results for the living, who now think of the dead as the eliminated.”
Ours is wake work. Wake work, as Christina Sharpe defines it, requires vigilance in tending to this broken interdependence between the living and the dead. It insists on remembering and revering the dead as active participants in our struggle. Afro-diasporic traditions of ancestral reverence offer us guidance in this work, rejecting the necropolitical logic that frames Black death as elimination. We commune with our ancestors not to idolize them but to create the conditions for repair and in-/re-surgence. These practices—dismissed as “superstition” by Colonial Science—affirm the truth that the dead are still with us, their presence disrupting the temporal and spatial boundaries imposed by Empire.
Berger urges us to think of the dead not as isolated figures but as part of a vast, transhistorical collective. Our obligation is to this collective—to all those who fought, endured, and dreamed of liberation, to their failures and faults as well as their achievements. This debt cannot be paid through transactional reparations alone. We do not seek payouts that launder our grief; we demand the dissolution of Empire. Only by confronting and avenging the Black Ghost of Empire in this way can we escape the nightmares that continue to ensnare the living.
This act of vindication is not mere retribution. It is a reclamation of both life and death, a refusal to remain bound by the debts of conquest and enslavement. In fulfilling our obligation to the dead, we transform the material and symbolic debts imposed on us into a demand for systemic upheaval. We reject the framework of “non-events”—the false emancipations and hollow decolonizations that mask ongoing domination. Instead, we listen to the ancestors who compel us to complete the work they began: the work of breaking through and breaking free from the hold of racial capitalism and patriarchal imperialism.
The Black Ghost of Empire haunts every member of the African diaspora who disavows its call. To deny the Ghost is to risk enslavement to despair, whether through addiction, self-betrayal, or other subtle and spectacular forms of self-destruction. This haunting surfaces in acts of internalized violence—including coonery, the exaggerated performance of fetishizing colonial pornotropes, fratricidal street warfare, and civil strife—driven by the psychic weight of unresolved trauma. Yet these nightmares are not a fate we must accept. By avenging the Black Ghost of Empire, by honoring those whose lives were stolen and histories denied, we create the conditions for collective healing and in-/re-surgence.
