I visited Gorée Island, just off the coast of Senegal, in September 2005.
The island was one of the centres created for the departure of Africans who were captured on the African continent and taken into slavery.
On Gorée Island, you will see a huge building that has luxurious apartments upstairs, where the rich slave masters stayed, and hovels on the ground floor, replete with chains, where the captured African men and women were kept.
There is a courtyard where on auction days, the slaves would be paraded and the slave masters would make bids until they were sold.
Once bought, the slave would be taken straight through what is called the door of no return, onto a ship anchored right next to the coast of the island.
Some of us might have seen those films relating to the Trans-Atlantic slave ships, where Africans were crammed like sardines at the bottom of the ships, mostly naked and hungry.
Those who died before arrival in America or Europe were simply tossed over into the sea to be feasted upon by sharks and other animals of their ilk.
We would have seen how those who made it to the Americas were owned and made to work for their white owners for no pay, especially in the sugar and cotton plantations; how they were whipped by their white masters or even lynched if their masters deemed it necessary.
The lives of these African slaves were worth nothing.
The world over, Africans were considered sub-human and devoid of any dignity. Even the church as a whole regarded them as such, and some of their religious gurus described the African as a creature without a soul.
The prevailing notion was that the African body was something to be exploited, abused and brutalised.
As we watch on television images of African men surfacing from abandoned mines in Stilfontein and Sabie in Mpumalanga – dirty, hungry, starved, brutalised, exploited and stripped of any dignity – we have to pinch ourselves to believe that this is real.
Slavery was abolished in the 19th century, and we are now in the 21st century and living in South Africa, with what is touted as the best constitution in the world.
How come we could be witnessing African images like these, which we beam throughout the world? I saw these images on at least two international television networks.
We are once more projecting the African body as an object to be exploited and abused.
We, Africans and our continent, cannot have dignity if some among us are stripped of dignity and humanity in the manner depicted by Stilfontein and Sabie.
And the rest of the world would treat us as such, as nothing.
European soccer fans can pour scorn on footballers of African origin with abandon and their politicians, businesspeople, banks and other institutions can treat us as sub-humans because that’s the way we view and treat ourselves.
Trump can call us what he likes.
Sabie and Stilfontein should so enrage us that we would do everything to root it out. We should be completely intolerant of anything like it.
What we are witnessing is no better than slavery. The painful thing is that it is being perpetrated by us Africans against ourselves.
It is hard to understand why the governments in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Mozambique cannot be so enraged by this phenomenon that they would come together to stamp it out with vigour and finality.
Maybe the African leaders in these countries are not enraged. Maybe they don’t think the image, humanity, dignity and pride of an African are worth protecting. Maybe they have internalised the lie that the African has no dignity.
Dignity is indivisible. None of us can have dignity if other Africans don’t
have it.
African leaders cannot expect to be treated with respect worldwide when the African body is a thing to be despised, exploited, brutalised and abused.
• Mangena is a former minister of science and technology and ex-president of Azapo
