The Ebo or Igbo are a proud people, but then aren’t we all? They hail from modern Nigeria more or less, speaking a language you may have heard a time or two. You recognize it as if you try to duplicate its phonemes you will need a partner to perform helpful Heimlich maneuvers on you and manipulate your nostrils. Even then you will have a terrible accent. The Igbo are known as endemic traders. Yes, this included the slave trade which is about the only presentable explanation for their treatment by the Black Power Structure of Atlanta.

Like any town of any size, Atlanta has a thriving street trade. Or it did until lately. These noisy hawkers of soda pop and bootlegged purses arrived every morning to the streetcorners and plazas two hundred feet below my address. A bevy of smoky, laden vans made an early round, discharging thin men of a variety of ages with card tables, bales of t-shirts and plastic coolers the size of sarcophagi. Conspicuously they would chat and call to each other, sometimes in greeting but often in derisive competition. The clicks and gutteral pops of an otherworldly language would often be heard as would french and BBC-style english. Why the tribes and nations of West Africa should re-accrete at the Five Points in bazaar fashion, I could not say. But so they did (as they seem to dominate the taxi biz), making our downtown look and function more like Bladerunner’s LA than the pasty suburbs from which our few, precious tourists have come.

This set someone’s teeth on edge somewhere as my commercial neighbors from the Ivory Coast and Liberia have been frankly run off; their trade ruined, their ancient practices rendered illegal and their very voices silenced. I am sad to say that the principal actor here is our much loved former Mayor Shirley Franklin. It was near the end of her term that the city’s vendor policies were torn up. In place of a not-inexpensive license we would have

a private vending management program that would control all public vending, whether downtown, at Centennial Olympic Park, or at Turner Field. A revenue booster for the city, we were told!

The public space now would be rented to the citizens for a high price; the management company would build big-box vending kiosks (that coincidentally didn’t hold much merchandise) covered with advertising and give 5 percent of the ad revenues to the city; and all citizens wishing to vend on public property would be chosen by the private company and told what to sell from the kiosks. Coincidentally, for the first time since public vending had been codified in 1924, it was opened to corporate franchises.

Luckily for Shirley Franklin, she is an African-American woman. You can tell by the blond hair and green eyes (contacts). The obvious rhetorical questions are moldy cliches but still it must be asked: can you imagine the uproar if a white politician had done this?

Yes we can because we see Jesse Sharpton and his numberless bastardi on TV every day. They rail against White Privilege wherever they can find it which is far more places than it exists. But this is no such thing. This is Black Privilege or Black Power which is to say Power wielded by blacks. Which is to say it is merely Power; and Power seeks control, lucre and deference as its right. Not infrequently one will hear loud complaints that this is a White Man’s World. This is arguable but not profitably so. In Atlanta the white man has a quick rejoinder in that it may well be a White Man’s World but there is no question that this is a Black Man’s Town! We have not had a white Mayor for decades I decline to count. Last election when a palid Mary Norwood threatened to earn a ballot or two for that post it was taken as the next thing to Night Riders in your garden! In the end this last assault from the Klan was unavailing, delivering instead the fine and incorruptible Mohammed Kasim Reed to that office though the Black Power Structure is  regretting that now as Reed battles them with all the guile and firmness of Mandinka.

Nothing has changed for the vendors, however. Indeed the corporatist subversion of frank street trade threatens to engulf its last bastion; the stadium on game day. Appeals to the virtues of order, uniformity and quality control were the pretexts that drove off the free-wheelers and replaced them with gunsafes dropped from orbit and one would think these arguments would carry little weight where faces are painted and rebel yells are commonly heard. And they do. But what was driving this from the start was something much simpler and less civic-minded. The street vendors were making money. It couldn’t have been too much but still it was too much to ignore. Longtime local profiteer General Growth Properties was given the contract to replace the Bartertown pirates with honest corporate conformity and it has delivered in spades while the city asks but 5% of their ad revenue…. just the ad revenue! … in recompense (and of course expects their sales taxes). All the charm of Perimeter Mall has been air-lifted in to the domain of street preachers and street people. It can be reliably assumed that GGP LLC acts on the will of local Big Business generally and, as the excerpt notes, they are given full reign to decide who can sell on “public property” and amazingly, also what they may sell.

The what has not been all that surprising, except perhaps to the storefront newsies who already existed. Fake Gucci shades are out. Likewise swapmeet quality Louis Vitton bags and bling. No more home-made rap records, oils or tar soaps. The wares in these ghetto TARDISes consist largely of reading material, something the old Igbo traders never carried except for some obscure hip-hop mags and religious pamphlets.  The inventory seems skewed to a black audience but one thoroughly vetted by beige market analysis. BET, Jet and Black Hairstylist top the list with the ordinary crap you can find on the way to your departure gate. Five-hour Energy, Goody’s Powder and a few novelty pens; the usual dross at the Circle-K fills out the dry goods. As for comestibles, the armored kiosks seem to carry only Coke products for beverages and Frito-Lay products for foodstuff. Without indulging our tendency to conspiracy theorizing, is it too much to think that some Coca-cola bigwig in a seersucker suit saw the chaos of his hometown, polyglot marketplace and was outraged to find Pepsi products on open sale? PEPSI!?!?!? Coca-cola is to Atlanta what GM is to Detroit, in case you didn’t know. And the commercial blasphemy of the Igbo traders did not end there. Among the stalls and bleating merchants of two years past one could find exotic asian and african treats with no english on the packaging. If one had a mid-day craving for rhino testicles I think it likely these gentlemen could satisfy it, somehow. At someprice. But generally the prices were modest even on exotic snacks from Latin America. Jamaican ginger-pop bore only a slight premium to Dr Pepper. Above all our departed hawkers had t-shirts, t-shirts and yet more t-shirts. It is true these sometimes had bawdy sayings on them. Often they drew attention to the charms of the wearer that might otherwise go un-noted. Atlanta herself came in for lampooning and also straight boosting! Obscure slang and ebonics could become a part of your wardrobe’s vocabulary. And naked race pride could be celebrated for a few dollars. My favorite was a faux hazard sign which read CAUTION: Educated Black Man! My lethal weapon is my mind. I thought you knew? For years in passing my eye was drawn to this favorite but I never had the stones to buy one. And now, like Freaknic, it is gone. Gone with the Wind.

The who has likewise been diminished and undiversified. In the place of real Africans, many displaced by horrors of violence and destitution, we have African-Americans who will openly despise their predecessors as Shaka-zulu or Kunte-kinte. Oh, these are a joyous lot. Unlike the card-tables of yore the city-approved stalls have electricity. And cable. The “vendors” mostly sit on a bar stool either within or without their countertops and watch mundane daytime television. They are as ignorant of their wares as they are apathetic to their customers. Doubtless the language barrier was feared to be off-putting between our Dixi-fied tourist class and the old sellers spouting tutsi, portugese and percussion sounds indifferently but as a long time resident of the south I can tell you that downhome ebonics is further from english than any of those foreign tongues. I often believe it is intentionally so. But these lads and ladies are drawn from a peculiar class. These are TRUE African-Americans, meaning they are the unemployable cousins of some smiling brother in a suit who has ferreted access to the kiosk contract holders (and drawn his commission). No doubt they are paid a Living Wage, like $12 or something, and it is rock-steady no matter how much they sell, or lose to theft, or steal themselves. So that is real progress.

Where the caravan traders have gone, none can say. Yes, they still appear at big events especially sports but as the article above notes, this too is now threatened and in any case, no one can raise their families by working weekends. Even a non-sportsfan like myself regrets the change on the aesthetics of competence. At least these refugees from jungle slums knew enough to have the t-shirts of the opposing teams on offer! Enforced monopoly, enforced conformity and, needless to say, the spiked prices associated with such strong-arming will wring MORE money from tourists nutty enough to patronize the City Too Busy To Hate, and deliver less fun; a poorly understood commodity. As for the nomadic merchants; bereft, foreign-born and black as night: they have been driven off and robbed to their skins before. It is their endlessly sad history. They risked the long and expensive trip across the water because it was supposed to be different in America. If they had wanted to be fleeced by fellow blacks, they could just have stayed at home. Good luck, friends and farewell. Maybe Macon…

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