This article explores the life and work of Carter G. Woodson, often called the "father of black history," and delves into the fascinating history and organization of African markets, particularly in West Africa.
Carter G. Woodson
Carter G. Woodson: The Father of Black History
Carter Godwin Woodson (December 19, 1875 - April 3, 1950) was an American historian, author, journalist, and the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). He was one of the first scholars to study the history of the Black African diaspora in the United States. Largely excluded from the uniformly-white academic history profession, Woodson realized the need to make the structures which support scholarship in black history, and black historians.
Born in New Canton, Virginia, to former slaves Anne Eliza (Riddle) and James Henry Woodson, Carter G. Woodson had to put off schooling while he worked in the coal mines of West Virginia. Although his father was illiterate, Carter's mother, Anna, had been taught to read by her mistress. His father, James, during the Civil War, had helped Union soldiers near Richmond, after escaping from his owner, by leading them to Confederate supply stations and warehouses to raid army supplies. Thereafter, and until the war ended, James had scouted for the Union Army.
At the age of seventeen, Woodson followed his older brother Robert Henry to Huntington, West Virginia, where he hoped to attend Douglass High School, a secondary school for African Americans founded there. At the age of twenty in 1895, Woodson was finally able to enter Douglass High School full-time and received his diploma in 1897.
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Between 1901 and 1903, Woodson took classes at Berea College in Kentucky, eventually earning his bachelor's degree in literature in 1903. Woodson later attended the University of Chicago, where he was awarded an A.B. in 1908. He completed his PhD in history at Harvard University in 1912, where he was the second African American (after W. E. B. Du Bois) to earn a doctorate. His doctoral dissertation, The Disruption of Virginia, was based on research he did at the Library of Congress while teaching high school in Washington, D.C.
Convinced that the role of his own people in American history and in the history of other cultures was being ignored or misrepresented among scholars, Woodson realized the need for research into the neglected past of African Americans. Along with William D. Hartgrove, George Cleveland Hall, Alexander L. Jackson, and James E. Woodson believed that education and increasing social and professional contacts among Black and white people could reduce racism, and he promoted the organized study of African-American history partly for that purpose.
In January 1916, Woodson began publication of the scholarly Journal of Negro History. It has never missed an issue, despite the Great Depression, loss of support from foundations, and two World Wars. In 2002, it was renamed the Journal of African American History and continues to be published by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). Woodson published The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861.
By 1922, Woodson's experience of academic politics and intrigue had left him so disenchanted with university life that he vowed never to work in academia again. He continued to write publish and lecture nationwide. Woodson became affiliated with the Washington, D.C., branch of the NAACP and its chairman Archibald Grimké.
He wrote: "[W]hile the Association welcomes the cooperation of white scholars in certain projects...it proceeds also on the basis that its important objectives can be attained through Negro investigators who are in a position to develop certain aspects of the life and history of the race which cannot otherwise be treated. In the final analysis, this work must be done by Negroes.... The point here is rather that Negroes have the advantage of being able to think black."
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In 1926, Woodson pioneered the celebration of "Negro History Week," designated for the second week in February, to coincide with marking the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Woodson wrote of the purpose of Negro History Week as: It is not so much a Negro History Week as it is a History Week. We should emphasise not Negro History, but the Negro in History.
Woodson believed in self-reliance and racial respect, values he shared with Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican activist who worked in New York. Woodson became a regular columnist for Garvey's weekly Negro World. Woodson's political activism placed him at the center of a circle of many Black intellectuals and activists from the 1920s to the 1940s.
Woodson died suddenly from a heart attack in the office within his home in the Shaw, Washington, D.C., neighborhood on April 3, 1950, at the age of 74. The time that schools have set aside each year to focus on African-American history is Woodson's most visible legacy. His determination to further the recognition of the Black race in American and world history, however, inspired countless other scholars.
Woodson's other far-reaching activities included the founding in 1920 of The Associated Publishers in Washington, D.C. This enabled the publication of books concerning Black people that might not have been supported in the rest of the market. He created the Negro History Bulletin, developed for teachers in elementary and high school grades, and published continuously since 1937. Woodson also influenced the Association's direction and subsidizing of research in African-American history.
In 1992, the Library of Congress held an exhibition entitled Moving Back Barriers: The Legacy of Carter G. Woodson. A statue of Woodson at Carter G Woodson Memorial Park in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C. His Washington, D.C. home has been preserved and designated the Carter G.
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The Life & Legacy of Carter G. Woodson - Dr. Greg Kimathi Carr
Traditional Market Authority and Market Periodicity in West Africa
Notes on traditional market authority and market periodicity in West Africa are intended to draw attention to the neglect of a fascinating historico-anthropological field. Given the lack of any satisfactory typology of West African markets, generalizations about all types of market must be avoided-and certain erroneous assumptions relating to the traditional relationship of chief and market are called in question.
Everywhere in West Africa there is a standard ‘market-week’ such that all the periodic markets in the locality are based on the same cycle. Although this has been well-known for centuries, few writers in English have been interested in mapping these weeks, or examining the relationship between them. After summarizing existing geographical material, which clearly establishes an association between 4- and 8-day market weeks (which are extraordinarily widespread in the forest zone), as well as some connexion between the 3- and 6-day market weeks, it is concluded that there are effectively only four common market weeks, viz. 3- (or 6-) day, 4- (or 8-) day, 5-day and 7-day.
The 7-day market week prevails throughout Hausaland and many other Islamized savanna districts. The fact that it has existed for centuries throughout the Akan areas of southern Ghana and Ashanti (though hardly anywhere else in the forest zone) has not attracted the attention it deserves-the same applying to other questions, here posed though not answered, such as why the 4-day market week cuts right across some ethnic boundaries and not others.
The article concludes with brief notes on the two traditional types of market taxation in West Africa, tolls and stall-rents, emphasis being laid on the traditional lack of market taxation in Eastern Nigeria.
Thus the early history should be seen in terms both of the development of trade routes and their associated markets (where they existed) and of the establishment of markets to serve the local community. In East Africa, by contrast, long-distance trade was rare before the nineteenth century and local markets hardly existed before the colonial period.
Map of West Africa
The literature abounds with references to extra-settlement markets, two of the most notable sources being Meillassoux, C., Anthropologie Economique des Gouro de Côte d'Ivoire, 286,Google Scholar and Hodder, B. W., a well-known authority on Yoruba markets, who in ‘Distribution of markets in Yorubaland’, Scottish Geographical Magazine (April 1965), 51, asserts that ‘the distribution of periodic markets shows little correspondence either with the distribution of population or with the distribution, size or hierarchy of rural or urban settlements…; many of the more important settlements have no periodic markets’.
Although markets are such ancient institutions in many regions, marketless areas also exist. Hodder (‘Distribution of markets in Yorubaland’, 50, states that in Yorubaland there is a critical density of population of about fifty persons to the square mile, above which ‘there is a regular pattern of periodic markets and below which there are very few indeed’.
But, as Bovill noted in 1922 (Bovill, E. W., ‘Jega Market’, Journal of the African Society, 10 1922, 54), seven of ‘the most noted markets of the Western Sudan’, viz. Bamako, Ouagadougou, Fada-n-Gourma, Gaya, Jega, Kano and Dikwa, ‘were all situated within a day's march of the twelfth parallel of north latitude’, in the intermediate zone separating ‘the oil palms of the forests from the borassus and hyphoene palms of the Sudan’ and all of them, save Kano, which also and largely served the local population, were basically entrepôts linking savanna and forest.
Night markets, such as occur in Yorubaland, may perhaps be regarded as a species of periodic market, the point about the daily market being that it is in constant session during the working day; daily (or twice-daily) cattle markets may also be regarded as periodic, for they are always of brief duration. In Ghana, for instance, there may have been no more than about half a dozen such markets in the nineteenth century, compared with perhaps about a dozen today.
The final preparation of the food for marketing, or eating, is often the end of a long process which begins with the harvesting of the crop (if not earlicr), so that the activities of farming and food processing are not necessarily distinguishable. (The women traders of rural Yorubaland are perhaps more apt to be trading specialists than any other rurally based women in West Africa.)
Chief Sir Godwin E. Chikeluba and G.M.O Group of Companies
After two years of independent business activities, Chikeluba became one of the three partners who formed the conglomerate G.M.O Group of Companies in 1957. The other partners were Michael Arinze and Okoye Igwe. The name of the conglomerate was an amalgamation of the first letters of each of their first names. Apart from importation of items from overseas, this indigenous conglomerate encompassed diverse branches including footwear, exercise books, bicycles, roofing sheets, plastic containers, and nail production.
In the 1980s the conglomerate was partly responsible for the production of the uniforms utilized in the NYSC camps of that period. The Group also developed friendly relations outside of Nigeria. There were trade relations between groups and individuals from India, China, and Europe. The group faced its most difficult period after the Biafran war in the early 1970s. Chikeluba served as Vicar’s Warden and was involved in church development projects.
His philanthropic gestures ranged from providing housing for widows to sponsoring education for students at various levels. He received the Knighthood of St. On April 11, 1990, Chikeluba was assassinated in his home in Lagos, under obscure circumstances. In remembrance of his philanthropy, his hometown of Awka-Etiti erected a statue in his honor, in the Eke-Market square in Iruowelle village.
| Market Week Length | Prevalence |
|---|---|
| 3-day (or 6-day) | Some connection |
| 4-day (or 8-day) | Extraordinarily widespread in the forest zone |
| 5-day | Common |
| 7-day | Throughout Hausaland and many other Islamized savanna districts |
Common Market Weeks in West Africa
