For centuries, Europeans dominated the African continent. The white man arrogated to himself the right to rule and to be obeyed by the non-white; his mission, he claimed, was to “civilize” Africa. Under this cloak, the Europeans robbed the continent of vast riches and inflicted unimaginable suffering on the African people.
All this makes a sad story, but now we must be prepared to bury the past with its unpleasant memories and look to the future. All we ask of the former colonial powers is their goodwill and co-operation to remedy past mistakes and injustices and to grant independence to the colonies in Africa.
It is clear that we must find an African solution to our problems, and that this can only be found in African unity. Divided we are weak; united, Africa could become one of the greatest forces for good in the world.
Although most Africans are poor, our continent is potentially extremely rich. Our mineral resources, which are being exploited with foreign capital only to enrich foreign investors, range from gold and diamonds to uranium and petroleum. Our forests contain some of the finest woods to be grown anywhere. Our cash crops include cocoa, coffee, rubber, tobacco and cotton. As for power, which is an important factor in any economic development, Africa contains over 40% of the potential water power of the world, as compared with about 10% in Europe and 13% in North America. Yet so far, less than 1% has been developed. This is one of the reasons why we have in Africa the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty, and scarcity in the midst of abundance.
Never before have a people had within their grasp so great an opportunity for developing a continent endowed with so much wealth. Individually, the independent states of Africa, some of them potentially rich, others poor, can do little for their people. Together, by mutual help, they can achieve much. But the economic development of the continent must be planned and pursued as a whole. A loose confederation designed only for economic co-operation would not provide the necessary unity of purpose. Only a strong political union can bring about full and effective development of our natural resources for the benefit of our people.
The political situation in Africa today is heartening and at the same time disturbing. It is heartening to see so many new flags hoisted in place of the old; it is disturbing to see so many countries of varying sizes and at different levels of development, weak and, in some cases, almost helpless. If this terrible state of fragmentation is allowed to continue it may well be disastrous for us all.
There are at present some 28 states in Africa, excluding the Union of South Africa, and those countries not yet free. No less than nine of these states have a population of less than three million. Can we seriously believe that the colonial powers meant these countries to be independent, viable states? The example of South America, which has as much wealth, if not more than North America, and yet remains weak and dependent on outside interests, is one which every African would do well to study.
Critics of African unity often refer to the wide differences in culture, language and ideas in various parts of Africa. This is true, but the essential fact remains that we are all Africans, and have a common interest in the independence of Africa. The difficulties presented by questions of language, culture and different political systems are not insuperable. If the need for political union is agreed by us all, then the will to create it is born; and where there’s a will there’s a way.
The present leaders of Africa have already shown a remarkable willingness to consult and seek advice among themselves. Africans have, indeed, begun to think continentally. They realize that they have much in common, both in their past history, in their present problems and in their future hopes. To suggest that the time is not yet ripe for considering a political union of Africa is to evade the facts and ignore realities in Africa today.
The greatest contribution that Africa can make to the peace of the world is to avoid all the dangers inherent in disunity, by creating a political union which will also by its success, stand as an example to a divided world. A Union of African states will project more effectively the African personality. It will command respect from a world that has regard only for size and influence. The scant attention paid to African opposition to the French atomic tests in the Sahara, and the ignominious spectacle of the U.N. in the Congo quibbling about constitutional niceties while the Republic was tottering into anarchy, are evidence of the callous disregard of African Independence by the Great Powers.
We have to prove that greatness is not to be measured in stockpiles of atom bombs. I believe strongly and sincerely that with the deep-rooted wisdom and dignity, the innate respect for human lives, the intense humanity that is our heritage, the African race, united under one federal government, will emerge not as just another world bloc to flaunt its wealth and strength, but as a Great Power whose greatness is indestructible because it is built not on fear, envy and suspicion, nor won at the expense of others, but founded on hope, trust, friendship and directed to the good of all mankind.
The emergence of such a mighty stabilizing force in this strife-worn world should be regarded not as the shadowy dream of a visionary, but as a practical proposition, which the peoples of Africa can, and should, translate into reality. There is a tide in the affairs of every people when the moment strikes for political action. Such was the moment in the history of the United States of America when the Founding Fathers saw beyond the petty wranglings of the separate states and created a Union. This is our chance. We must act now. Tomorrow may be too late and the opportunity will have passed, and with it the hope of free Africa’s survival.
From Kwame Nkrumah, I Speak of Freedom: A Statement of African Ideology.
About Me
- INTELLECTUAL APINA
- Alkebu-Lan/Ethiopia is the actual name of the continent today readily misrepresented as “Africa” hence the need for scientific pan-Alkebulanism
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Friday, December 10, 2010
H.I.M. Haile Selassie address to the United Nations Oct 6, 1963
Mr. President, Distinguished Delegates:
Twenty-seven years ago, as Emperor of Ethiopia, I mounted the rostrum in Geneva, Switzerland, to address the League of Nations and to appeal for relief from the destruction which had been unleashed against my defenseless nation, by the Fascist invader.I spoke then both to and for the conscience of the world. My words went unheeded, but history testifies to the accuracy of the warning that I gave in 1936.
Today, I stand before the world organization which has succeeded to the mantle discarded by its discredited predecessor. In this body is enshrined the principle of collective security which I unsuccessfully invoked at Geneva. Here, in this Assembly, reposes the best - perhaps the last - hope for the peaceful survival of mankind.
In 1936, I declared that it was not the Covenant of the League that was at stake, but international morality. Undertakings, I said then, are of little worth if the will to keep them is lacking. The Charter of the United Nations expresses the noblest aspirations of man: abjuration of force in the settlement of disputes between states; the assurance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion; the safeguarding of international peace and security.
But these, too, as were the phrases of the Covenant, are only words; their value depends wholly on our will to observe and honor them and give them content and meaning. The preservation of peace and the guaranteeing of man's basic freedoms and rights require courage and eternal vigilance: courage to speak and act - and if necessary, to suffer and die - for truth and justice; eternal vigilance, that the least transgression of international morality shall not go undetected and unremedied. These lessons must be learned anew by each succeeding generation, and that generation is fortunate indeed which learns from other than its own bitter experience. This Organization and each of its members bear a crushing and awesome responsibility: to absorb the wisdom of history and to apply it to the problems of the present, in order that future generations may be born, and live, and die, in peace.
The record of the United Nations during the few short years of its life affords mankind a solid basis for encouragement and hope for the future. The United Nations has dared to act, when the League dared not in Palestine, in Korea, in Suez, in the Congo. There is not one among us today who does not conjecture upon the reaction of this body when motives and actions are called into question. The opinion of this Organization today acts as a powerful influence upon the decisions of its members. The spotlight of world opinion, focused by the United Nations upon the transgressions of the renegades of human society, has thus far proved an effective safeguard against unchecked aggression and unrestricted violation of human rights.
The United Nations continues to sense as the forum where nations whose interests clash may lay their cases before world opinion. It still provides the essential escape valve without which the slow build-up of pressures would have long since resulted in catastrophic explosion. Its actions and decisions have speeded the achievement of freedom by many peoples on the continents of Africa and Asia. Its efforts have contributed to the advancement of the standard of living of peoples in all corners of the world.
For this, all men must give thanks. As I stand here today, how faint, how remote are the memories of 1936.How different in 1963 are the attitudes of men. We then existed in an atmosphere of suffocating pessimism. Today, cautious yet buoyant optimism is the prevailing spirit. But each one of us here knows that what has been accomplished is not enough.
The United Nations judgments have been and continue to be subject to frustration, as individual member-states have ignored its pronouncements and disregarded its recommendations. The Organization's sinews have been weakened, as member-states have shirked their obligations to it. The authority of the Organization has been mocked, as individual member-states have proceeded, in violation of its commands, to pursue their own aims and ends. The troubles which continue to plague us virtually all arise among member states of the Organization, but the Organization remains impotent to enforce acceptable solutions. As the maker and enforcer of the international law, what the United Nations has achieved still falls regrettably short of our goal of an international community of nations.
This does not mean that the United Nations has failed. I have lived too long to cherish many illusions about the essential highmindedness of men when brought into stark confrontation with the issue of control over their security, and their property interests. Not even now, when so much is at hazard would many nations willingly entrust their destinies to other hands.
Yet, this is the ultimatum presented to us: secure the conditions whereby men will entrust their security to a larger entity, or risk annihilation; persuade men that their salvation rests in the subordination of national and local interests to the interests of humanity, or endanger man's future. These are the objectives, yesterday unobtainable, today essential, which we must labor to achieve.
Until this is accomplished, mankind's future remains hazardous and permanent peace a matter for speculation. There is no single magic formula, no one simple step, no words, whether written into the Organization's Charter or into a treaty between states, which can automatically guarantee to us what we seek. Peace is a day-to-day problem, the product of a multitude of events and judgments. Peace is not an "is", it is a "becoming." We cannot escape the dreadful possibility of catastrophe by miscalculation. But we can reach the right decisions on the myriad subordinate problems which each new day poses, and we can thereby make our contribution and perhaps the most that can be reasonably expected of us in 1963 to the preservation of peace. It is here that the United Nations has served us - not perfectly, but well. And in enhancing the possibilities that the Organization may serve us better, we serve and bring closer our most cherished goals.
I would mention briefly today two particular issues which are of deep concern to all men: disarmament and the establishment of true equality among men. Disarmament has become the urgent imperative of our time. I do not say this because I equate the absence of arms to peace, or because I believe that bringing an end to the nuclear arms race automatically guarantees the peace, or because the elimination of nuclear warheads from the arsenals of the world will bring in its wake that change in attitude requisite to the peaceful settlement of disputes between nations. Disarmament is vital today, quite simply, because of the immense destructive capacity of which men dispose.
Ethiopia supports the atmospheric nuclear test ban treaty as a step towards this goal, even though only a partial step. Nations can still perfect weapons of mass destruction by underground testing. There is no guarantee against the sudden, unannounced resumption of testing in the atmosphere.
The real significance of the treaty is that it admits of a tacit stalemate between the nations which negotiated it, a stalemate which recognizes the blunt, unavoidable fact that none would emerge from the total destruction which would be the lot of all in a nuclear war, a stalemate which affords us and the United Nations a breathing space in which to act.
Here is our opportunity and our challenge. If the nuclear powers are prepared to declare a truce, let us seize the moment to strengthen the institutions and procedures which will serve as the means for the pacific settlement of disputes among men. Conflicts between nations will continue to arise. The real issue is whether they are to be resolved by force, or by resort to peaceful methods and procedures, administered by impartial institutions. This very Organization itself is the greatest such institution, and it is in a more powerful United Nations that we seek, and it is here that we shall find, the assurance of a peaceful future.
Were a real and effective disarmament achieved and the funds now spent in the arms race devoted to the amelioration of man's state; were we to concentrate only on the peaceful uses of nuclear knowledge, how vastly and in how short a time might we change the conditions of mankind. This should be our goal.
When we talk of the equality of man, we find, also, a challenge and an opportunity; a challenge to breathe new life into the ideals enshrined in the Charter, an opportunity to bring men closer to freedom and true equality. and thus, closer to a love of peace.
The goal of the equality of man which we seek is the antithesis of the exploitation of one people by another with which the pages of history and in particular those written of the African and Asian continents, speak at such length. Exploitation, thus viewed, has many faces. But whatever guise it assumes, this evil is to be shunned where it does not exist and crushed where it does. It is the sacred duty of this Organization to ensure that the dream of equality is finally realized for all men to whom it is still denied, to guarantee that exploitation is not reincarnated in other forms in places whence it has already been banished.
As a free Africa has emerged during the past decade, a fresh attack has been launched against exploitation, wherever it still exists. And in that interaction so common to history, this in turn, has stimulated and encouraged the remaining dependent peoples to renewed efforts to throw off the yoke which has oppressed them and its claim as their birthright the twin ideals of liberty and equality. This very struggle is a struggle to establish peace, and until victory is assured, that brotherhood and understanding which nourish and give life to peace can be but partial and incomplete.
In the United States of America, the administration of President Kennedy is leading a vigorous attack to eradicate the remaining vestige of racial discrimination from this country. We know that this conflict will be won and that right will triumph. In this time of trial, these efforts should be encouraged and assisted, and we should lend our sympathy and support to the American Government today.
Last May, in Addis Ababa, I convened a meeting of Heads of African States and Governments. In three days, the thirty-two nations represented at that Conference demonstrated to the world that when the will and the determination exist, nations and peoples of diverse backgrounds can and will work together. in unity, to the achievement of common goals and the assurance of that equality and brotherhood which we desire.
On the question of racial discrimination, the Addis Ababa Conference taught, to those who will learn, this further lesson: That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned: That until there are no longer first-class and second class citizens of any nation; That until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes; That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; That until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained; And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes that hold our brothers in Angola, in Mozambique and in South Africa in subhuman bondage have been toppled and destroyed; Until bigotry and prejudice and malicious and inhuman self-interest have been replaced by understanding and tolerance and good-will; Until all Africans stand and speak as free beings, equal in the eyes of all men, as they are in the eyes of Heaven; Until that day, the African continent will not know peace. We Africans will fight, if necessary, and we know that we shall win, as we are confident in the victory of good over evil.
The United Nations has done much, both directly and indirectly to speed the disappearance of discrimination and oppression from the earth. Without the opportunity to focus world opinion on Africa and Asia which this Organization provides, the goal, for many, might still lie ahead, and the struggle would have taken far longer. For this, we are truly grateful.
But more can be done. The basis of racial discrimination and colonialism has been economic, and it is with economic weapons that these evils have been and can be overcome. In pursuance of resolutions adopted at the Addis Ababa Summit Conference, African States have undertaken certain measures in the economic field which, if adopted by all member states of the United Nations, would soon reduce intransigence to reason. I ask, today, for adherence to these measures by every nation represented here which is truly devoted to the principles enunciated in the Charter.
I do not believe that Portugal and South Africa are prepared to commit economic or physical suicide if honorable and reasonable alternatives exist. I believe that such alternatives can be found. But I also know that unless peaceful solutions are devised, counsels of moderation and temperance will avail for naught; and another blow will have been dealt to this Organization which will hamper and weaken still further its usefulness in the struggle to ensure the victory of peace and liberty over the forces of strife and oppression. Here, then, is the opportunity presented to us. We must act while we can, while the occasion exists to exert those legitimate pressures available to us, lest time run out and resort be had to less happy means.
Does this Organization today possess the authority and the will to act? And if it does not, are we prepared to clothe it with the power to create and enforce the rule of law? Or is the Charter a mere collection of words, without content and substance, because the essential spirit is lacking? The time in which to ponder these questions is all too short. The pages of history are full of instances in which the unwanted and the shunned nonetheless occurred because men waited to act until too late. We can brook no such delay.
If we are to survive, this Organization must survive. To survive, it must be strengthened. Its executive must be vested with great authority. The means for the enforcement of its decisions must be fortified, and, if they do not exist, they must be devised. Procedures must be established to protect the small and the weak when threatened by the strong and the mighty. All nations which fulfill the conditions of membership must be admitted and allowed to sit in this assemblage.
Equality of representation must be assured in each of its organs. The possibilities which exist in the United Nations to provide the medium whereby the hungry may be fed, the naked clothed, the ignorant instructed, must be seized on and exploited for the flower of peace is not sustained by poverty and want. To achieve this requires courage and confidence. The courage, I believe, we possess. The confidence must be created, and to create confidence we must act courageously.
The great nations of the world would do well to remember that in the modern age even their own fates are not wholly in their hands. Peace demands the united efforts of us all. Who can foresee what spark might ignite the fuse? It is not only the small and the weak who must scrupulously observe their obligations to the United Nations and to each other. Unless the smaller nations are accorded their proper voice in the settlement of the world's problems, unless the equality which Africa and Asia have struggled to attain is reflected in expanded membership in the institutions which make up the United Nations, confidence will come just that much harder. Unless the rights of the least of men are as assiduously protected as those of the greatest, the seeds of confidence will fall on barren soil.
The stake of each one of us is identical - life or death. We all wish to live. We all seek a world in which men are freed of the burdens of ignorance, poverty, hunger and disease. And we shall all be hard-pressed to escape the deadly rain of nuclear fall-out should catastrophe overtake us.
When I spoke at Geneva in 1936, there was no precedent for a head of state addressing the League of Nations. I am neither the first, nor will I be the last head of state to address the United Nations, but only I have addressed both the League and this Organization in this capacity. The problems which confront us today are, equally, unprecedented. They have no counterparts in human experience. Men search the pages of history for solutions, for precedents, but there are none. This, then, is the ultimate challenge. Where are we to look for our survival, for the answers to the questions which have never before been posed? We must look, first, to Almighty God, Who has raised man above the animals and endowed him with intelligence and reason. We must put our faith in Him, that He will not desert us or permit us to destroy humanity which He created in His image. And we must look into ourselves, into the depth of our souls. We must become something we have never been and for which our education and experience and environment have ill-prepared us. We must become bigger than we have been: more courageous, greater in spirit, larger in outlook. We must become members of a new race, overcoming petty prejudice, owing our ultimate allegiance not to nations but to our fellow men within the human community."
Oct. 6, 1963
Twenty-seven years ago, as Emperor of Ethiopia, I mounted the rostrum in Geneva, Switzerland, to address the League of Nations and to appeal for relief from the destruction which had been unleashed against my defenseless nation, by the Fascist invader.I spoke then both to and for the conscience of the world. My words went unheeded, but history testifies to the accuracy of the warning that I gave in 1936.
Today, I stand before the world organization which has succeeded to the mantle discarded by its discredited predecessor. In this body is enshrined the principle of collective security which I unsuccessfully invoked at Geneva. Here, in this Assembly, reposes the best - perhaps the last - hope for the peaceful survival of mankind.
In 1936, I declared that it was not the Covenant of the League that was at stake, but international morality. Undertakings, I said then, are of little worth if the will to keep them is lacking. The Charter of the United Nations expresses the noblest aspirations of man: abjuration of force in the settlement of disputes between states; the assurance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion; the safeguarding of international peace and security.
But these, too, as were the phrases of the Covenant, are only words; their value depends wholly on our will to observe and honor them and give them content and meaning. The preservation of peace and the guaranteeing of man's basic freedoms and rights require courage and eternal vigilance: courage to speak and act - and if necessary, to suffer and die - for truth and justice; eternal vigilance, that the least transgression of international morality shall not go undetected and unremedied. These lessons must be learned anew by each succeeding generation, and that generation is fortunate indeed which learns from other than its own bitter experience. This Organization and each of its members bear a crushing and awesome responsibility: to absorb the wisdom of history and to apply it to the problems of the present, in order that future generations may be born, and live, and die, in peace.
The record of the United Nations during the few short years of its life affords mankind a solid basis for encouragement and hope for the future. The United Nations has dared to act, when the League dared not in Palestine, in Korea, in Suez, in the Congo. There is not one among us today who does not conjecture upon the reaction of this body when motives and actions are called into question. The opinion of this Organization today acts as a powerful influence upon the decisions of its members. The spotlight of world opinion, focused by the United Nations upon the transgressions of the renegades of human society, has thus far proved an effective safeguard against unchecked aggression and unrestricted violation of human rights.
The United Nations continues to sense as the forum where nations whose interests clash may lay their cases before world opinion. It still provides the essential escape valve without which the slow build-up of pressures would have long since resulted in catastrophic explosion. Its actions and decisions have speeded the achievement of freedom by many peoples on the continents of Africa and Asia. Its efforts have contributed to the advancement of the standard of living of peoples in all corners of the world.
For this, all men must give thanks. As I stand here today, how faint, how remote are the memories of 1936.How different in 1963 are the attitudes of men. We then existed in an atmosphere of suffocating pessimism. Today, cautious yet buoyant optimism is the prevailing spirit. But each one of us here knows that what has been accomplished is not enough.
The United Nations judgments have been and continue to be subject to frustration, as individual member-states have ignored its pronouncements and disregarded its recommendations. The Organization's sinews have been weakened, as member-states have shirked their obligations to it. The authority of the Organization has been mocked, as individual member-states have proceeded, in violation of its commands, to pursue their own aims and ends. The troubles which continue to plague us virtually all arise among member states of the Organization, but the Organization remains impotent to enforce acceptable solutions. As the maker and enforcer of the international law, what the United Nations has achieved still falls regrettably short of our goal of an international community of nations.
This does not mean that the United Nations has failed. I have lived too long to cherish many illusions about the essential highmindedness of men when brought into stark confrontation with the issue of control over their security, and their property interests. Not even now, when so much is at hazard would many nations willingly entrust their destinies to other hands.
Yet, this is the ultimatum presented to us: secure the conditions whereby men will entrust their security to a larger entity, or risk annihilation; persuade men that their salvation rests in the subordination of national and local interests to the interests of humanity, or endanger man's future. These are the objectives, yesterday unobtainable, today essential, which we must labor to achieve.
Until this is accomplished, mankind's future remains hazardous and permanent peace a matter for speculation. There is no single magic formula, no one simple step, no words, whether written into the Organization's Charter or into a treaty between states, which can automatically guarantee to us what we seek. Peace is a day-to-day problem, the product of a multitude of events and judgments. Peace is not an "is", it is a "becoming." We cannot escape the dreadful possibility of catastrophe by miscalculation. But we can reach the right decisions on the myriad subordinate problems which each new day poses, and we can thereby make our contribution and perhaps the most that can be reasonably expected of us in 1963 to the preservation of peace. It is here that the United Nations has served us - not perfectly, but well. And in enhancing the possibilities that the Organization may serve us better, we serve and bring closer our most cherished goals.
I would mention briefly today two particular issues which are of deep concern to all men: disarmament and the establishment of true equality among men. Disarmament has become the urgent imperative of our time. I do not say this because I equate the absence of arms to peace, or because I believe that bringing an end to the nuclear arms race automatically guarantees the peace, or because the elimination of nuclear warheads from the arsenals of the world will bring in its wake that change in attitude requisite to the peaceful settlement of disputes between nations. Disarmament is vital today, quite simply, because of the immense destructive capacity of which men dispose.
Ethiopia supports the atmospheric nuclear test ban treaty as a step towards this goal, even though only a partial step. Nations can still perfect weapons of mass destruction by underground testing. There is no guarantee against the sudden, unannounced resumption of testing in the atmosphere.
The real significance of the treaty is that it admits of a tacit stalemate between the nations which negotiated it, a stalemate which recognizes the blunt, unavoidable fact that none would emerge from the total destruction which would be the lot of all in a nuclear war, a stalemate which affords us and the United Nations a breathing space in which to act.
Here is our opportunity and our challenge. If the nuclear powers are prepared to declare a truce, let us seize the moment to strengthen the institutions and procedures which will serve as the means for the pacific settlement of disputes among men. Conflicts between nations will continue to arise. The real issue is whether they are to be resolved by force, or by resort to peaceful methods and procedures, administered by impartial institutions. This very Organization itself is the greatest such institution, and it is in a more powerful United Nations that we seek, and it is here that we shall find, the assurance of a peaceful future.
Were a real and effective disarmament achieved and the funds now spent in the arms race devoted to the amelioration of man's state; were we to concentrate only on the peaceful uses of nuclear knowledge, how vastly and in how short a time might we change the conditions of mankind. This should be our goal.
When we talk of the equality of man, we find, also, a challenge and an opportunity; a challenge to breathe new life into the ideals enshrined in the Charter, an opportunity to bring men closer to freedom and true equality. and thus, closer to a love of peace.
The goal of the equality of man which we seek is the antithesis of the exploitation of one people by another with which the pages of history and in particular those written of the African and Asian continents, speak at such length. Exploitation, thus viewed, has many faces. But whatever guise it assumes, this evil is to be shunned where it does not exist and crushed where it does. It is the sacred duty of this Organization to ensure that the dream of equality is finally realized for all men to whom it is still denied, to guarantee that exploitation is not reincarnated in other forms in places whence it has already been banished.
As a free Africa has emerged during the past decade, a fresh attack has been launched against exploitation, wherever it still exists. And in that interaction so common to history, this in turn, has stimulated and encouraged the remaining dependent peoples to renewed efforts to throw off the yoke which has oppressed them and its claim as their birthright the twin ideals of liberty and equality. This very struggle is a struggle to establish peace, and until victory is assured, that brotherhood and understanding which nourish and give life to peace can be but partial and incomplete.
In the United States of America, the administration of President Kennedy is leading a vigorous attack to eradicate the remaining vestige of racial discrimination from this country. We know that this conflict will be won and that right will triumph. In this time of trial, these efforts should be encouraged and assisted, and we should lend our sympathy and support to the American Government today.
Last May, in Addis Ababa, I convened a meeting of Heads of African States and Governments. In three days, the thirty-two nations represented at that Conference demonstrated to the world that when the will and the determination exist, nations and peoples of diverse backgrounds can and will work together. in unity, to the achievement of common goals and the assurance of that equality and brotherhood which we desire.
On the question of racial discrimination, the Addis Ababa Conference taught, to those who will learn, this further lesson: That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned: That until there are no longer first-class and second class citizens of any nation; That until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes; That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; That until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained; And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes that hold our brothers in Angola, in Mozambique and in South Africa in subhuman bondage have been toppled and destroyed; Until bigotry and prejudice and malicious and inhuman self-interest have been replaced by understanding and tolerance and good-will; Until all Africans stand and speak as free beings, equal in the eyes of all men, as they are in the eyes of Heaven; Until that day, the African continent will not know peace. We Africans will fight, if necessary, and we know that we shall win, as we are confident in the victory of good over evil.
The United Nations has done much, both directly and indirectly to speed the disappearance of discrimination and oppression from the earth. Without the opportunity to focus world opinion on Africa and Asia which this Organization provides, the goal, for many, might still lie ahead, and the struggle would have taken far longer. For this, we are truly grateful.
But more can be done. The basis of racial discrimination and colonialism has been economic, and it is with economic weapons that these evils have been and can be overcome. In pursuance of resolutions adopted at the Addis Ababa Summit Conference, African States have undertaken certain measures in the economic field which, if adopted by all member states of the United Nations, would soon reduce intransigence to reason. I ask, today, for adherence to these measures by every nation represented here which is truly devoted to the principles enunciated in the Charter.
I do not believe that Portugal and South Africa are prepared to commit economic or physical suicide if honorable and reasonable alternatives exist. I believe that such alternatives can be found. But I also know that unless peaceful solutions are devised, counsels of moderation and temperance will avail for naught; and another blow will have been dealt to this Organization which will hamper and weaken still further its usefulness in the struggle to ensure the victory of peace and liberty over the forces of strife and oppression. Here, then, is the opportunity presented to us. We must act while we can, while the occasion exists to exert those legitimate pressures available to us, lest time run out and resort be had to less happy means.
Does this Organization today possess the authority and the will to act? And if it does not, are we prepared to clothe it with the power to create and enforce the rule of law? Or is the Charter a mere collection of words, without content and substance, because the essential spirit is lacking? The time in which to ponder these questions is all too short. The pages of history are full of instances in which the unwanted and the shunned nonetheless occurred because men waited to act until too late. We can brook no such delay.
If we are to survive, this Organization must survive. To survive, it must be strengthened. Its executive must be vested with great authority. The means for the enforcement of its decisions must be fortified, and, if they do not exist, they must be devised. Procedures must be established to protect the small and the weak when threatened by the strong and the mighty. All nations which fulfill the conditions of membership must be admitted and allowed to sit in this assemblage.
Equality of representation must be assured in each of its organs. The possibilities which exist in the United Nations to provide the medium whereby the hungry may be fed, the naked clothed, the ignorant instructed, must be seized on and exploited for the flower of peace is not sustained by poverty and want. To achieve this requires courage and confidence. The courage, I believe, we possess. The confidence must be created, and to create confidence we must act courageously.
The great nations of the world would do well to remember that in the modern age even their own fates are not wholly in their hands. Peace demands the united efforts of us all. Who can foresee what spark might ignite the fuse? It is not only the small and the weak who must scrupulously observe their obligations to the United Nations and to each other. Unless the smaller nations are accorded their proper voice in the settlement of the world's problems, unless the equality which Africa and Asia have struggled to attain is reflected in expanded membership in the institutions which make up the United Nations, confidence will come just that much harder. Unless the rights of the least of men are as assiduously protected as those of the greatest, the seeds of confidence will fall on barren soil.
The stake of each one of us is identical - life or death. We all wish to live. We all seek a world in which men are freed of the burdens of ignorance, poverty, hunger and disease. And we shall all be hard-pressed to escape the deadly rain of nuclear fall-out should catastrophe overtake us.
When I spoke at Geneva in 1936, there was no precedent for a head of state addressing the League of Nations. I am neither the first, nor will I be the last head of state to address the United Nations, but only I have addressed both the League and this Organization in this capacity. The problems which confront us today are, equally, unprecedented. They have no counterparts in human experience. Men search the pages of history for solutions, for precedents, but there are none. This, then, is the ultimate challenge. Where are we to look for our survival, for the answers to the questions which have never before been posed? We must look, first, to Almighty God, Who has raised man above the animals and endowed him with intelligence and reason. We must put our faith in Him, that He will not desert us or permit us to destroy humanity which He created in His image. And we must look into ourselves, into the depth of our souls. We must become something we have never been and for which our education and experience and environment have ill-prepared us. We must become bigger than we have been: more courageous, greater in spirit, larger in outlook. We must become members of a new race, overcoming petty prejudice, owing our ultimate allegiance not to nations but to our fellow men within the human community."
Oct. 6, 1963
Thursday, September 23, 2010
The Search For an African Identity
If President Nyerere's declaration at Arusha was a call for self help, it was also part of a search which he and other Africans have conducted to develop a new, modern African civilization with its own values and its own validity, just as Edward Blyden a century earlier was seeking an African identity in a world that seemed to be collapsing before European technological strength, so today the same process is to be seen--the utilization of those tools from the rest of the world which will help Africa become strong, but a selective utilization combined with revived values and institutions from traditional Africa.
The process is not easy because African civilization has been profoundly affected over the past century and a half by ideas and institutions, chiefly from the West, and this development, if anything, is accelerating. Moreover, it is difficult to be selective, to take, for example, the principle of capital accumulation without the incentive to personal profit, or the desire for material plenty while avoiding spiritual aimlessness. Finally, throughout its history Africa has contained a great variety of social and political groupings, until recently isolated and only now reaching out toward national unity, continental cooperation, and racial identity.
Nevertheless, the early years of political independence have been characterized by a determination to achieve cultural independence as well, to re-examine the moral tenets of the past, to sing again the old songs of love and hope, to regain the ancient life force of the ancestors, and to rediscover in the tested values of traditional Africa a spiritual thrust which will help propel the new societies of modern Africa. The search takes many forms. In Senegal, the philosopher-poet statesman, Lèopold Senghor, speaks of the intuitive judgment and sympathetic harmony with nature which the black man brings to human knowledge and argues that contemporary society cannot reach perfection until all the races have contributed toward what he terms the "Civilization of the Universal." In Nigeria the medical school of the University of Ibadan operates a psychiatric center in a village near Abeokuta, which makes effective use of the age-old African sense of family and arts of healing. In Tanzania, Julius Nyerere sees African socialism as an expression of genuine human equality, drawing on the ideas of mutual ownership and community sharing which evolved in traditional society and applying them to instill ujamaa, or family-hood, in the mind of the modern African striving to better his lot.
The concept of human dignity occurs again and again, as Africans seek to establish an African world presence and to gain the respect of others through the development of respect among Africans for their own way of life. This comes in many forms--the study and performance of traditional music, dance, and sculpture, the writing of African history, the search for a fresh African idiom in contemporary artistic expression, the reshaping of Western-style educational standards and values, the turning to indigenous forms of Christianity, and the continuing debate over national language. In the African universities there is a sea drift away from the curricula bequeathed by colonial administrators toward one suited to African needs. Institutes of African studies examine the old arts and experiment with the new, scholars explore past civilizations and present politics, while departments of pedagogy debate the degree and nature of schooling needed to put sinew into developing societies.
One of the most virile expressions of the new African identity is found in the creative arts and letters. Schools of art and design attached to universities are numerous, in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, and Ghana, for example, but they are supplemented by informal clubs, theaters, and ateliers whose activities are frequently more productive and original. In Ghana there is an interesting experimental theater and an excellent traditional dance group. In Nigeria the playing companies of Ogunmola and Duro Ladipo as well as the Mbari societies of Ibadan and Oshogbo have stimulated much writing, painting, and theatricals. Black Orpheus has long been an important vehicle for new African writing, while the revue, Transition, has presented original works along with literate comment on a wide range of affairs relating to Africa. Senegal played host to an immense international congress on African culture in 1966, and Abidjan offered itself as the locale for the annual meeting of the International PEN club in 1967, while a pan-African cultural festival was held in Algiers in the summer of 1969.
Africa has achieved a substantial literary production in the years since the Second World War. The work of authors like Camera Laye, David Diop, and Cheikh Hamidou Kane differ as much from each other as they do from the writing of Chinua Achebe, James Ngugi, or Ezekiel Mphahlele, but all are attempting to explain the phenomenon of Africa to themselves as well as to the world around them. One of their problems is the recurring search for a language of expression. They are torn between the desire to describe their world in its own authentic tones and to communicate what they have to say to others. Thus far virtually all African writing has been done in foreign European idiom, but if this is a limitation, it is one which seemingly can be overcome by the talent of the artist.
This matter of mode of expression arises more generally in Africa over the question of national language. There is an overwhelming desire to have a national tongue native to the land, but the practicalities appear to be insuperable. While Tanzania has established Swahili as her official language, others have been obliged to settle for French or English, in order that their people may communicate with one another and all with the world beyond. In fact, this may be a most appropriate development since the search for an African identity is made precisely so that Africa can knit herself more tightly into the world community. When the Nigerian playwright, Wole Soyinka, says he wants to be a good writer, not a good African writer, he is expressing what is in the mind of every African. For Africa has indeed become part of the modem world.
The process is not easy because African civilization has been profoundly affected over the past century and a half by ideas and institutions, chiefly from the West, and this development, if anything, is accelerating. Moreover, it is difficult to be selective, to take, for example, the principle of capital accumulation without the incentive to personal profit, or the desire for material plenty while avoiding spiritual aimlessness. Finally, throughout its history Africa has contained a great variety of social and political groupings, until recently isolated and only now reaching out toward national unity, continental cooperation, and racial identity.
Nevertheless, the early years of political independence have been characterized by a determination to achieve cultural independence as well, to re-examine the moral tenets of the past, to sing again the old songs of love and hope, to regain the ancient life force of the ancestors, and to rediscover in the tested values of traditional Africa a spiritual thrust which will help propel the new societies of modern Africa. The search takes many forms. In Senegal, the philosopher-poet statesman, Lèopold Senghor, speaks of the intuitive judgment and sympathetic harmony with nature which the black man brings to human knowledge and argues that contemporary society cannot reach perfection until all the races have contributed toward what he terms the "Civilization of the Universal." In Nigeria the medical school of the University of Ibadan operates a psychiatric center in a village near Abeokuta, which makes effective use of the age-old African sense of family and arts of healing. In Tanzania, Julius Nyerere sees African socialism as an expression of genuine human equality, drawing on the ideas of mutual ownership and community sharing which evolved in traditional society and applying them to instill ujamaa, or family-hood, in the mind of the modern African striving to better his lot.
The concept of human dignity occurs again and again, as Africans seek to establish an African world presence and to gain the respect of others through the development of respect among Africans for their own way of life. This comes in many forms--the study and performance of traditional music, dance, and sculpture, the writing of African history, the search for a fresh African idiom in contemporary artistic expression, the reshaping of Western-style educational standards and values, the turning to indigenous forms of Christianity, and the continuing debate over national language. In the African universities there is a sea drift away from the curricula bequeathed by colonial administrators toward one suited to African needs. Institutes of African studies examine the old arts and experiment with the new, scholars explore past civilizations and present politics, while departments of pedagogy debate the degree and nature of schooling needed to put sinew into developing societies.
One of the most virile expressions of the new African identity is found in the creative arts and letters. Schools of art and design attached to universities are numerous, in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, and Ghana, for example, but they are supplemented by informal clubs, theaters, and ateliers whose activities are frequently more productive and original. In Ghana there is an interesting experimental theater and an excellent traditional dance group. In Nigeria the playing companies of Ogunmola and Duro Ladipo as well as the Mbari societies of Ibadan and Oshogbo have stimulated much writing, painting, and theatricals. Black Orpheus has long been an important vehicle for new African writing, while the revue, Transition, has presented original works along with literate comment on a wide range of affairs relating to Africa. Senegal played host to an immense international congress on African culture in 1966, and Abidjan offered itself as the locale for the annual meeting of the International PEN club in 1967, while a pan-African cultural festival was held in Algiers in the summer of 1969.
Africa has achieved a substantial literary production in the years since the Second World War. The work of authors like Camera Laye, David Diop, and Cheikh Hamidou Kane differ as much from each other as they do from the writing of Chinua Achebe, James Ngugi, or Ezekiel Mphahlele, but all are attempting to explain the phenomenon of Africa to themselves as well as to the world around them. One of their problems is the recurring search for a language of expression. They are torn between the desire to describe their world in its own authentic tones and to communicate what they have to say to others. Thus far virtually all African writing has been done in foreign European idiom, but if this is a limitation, it is one which seemingly can be overcome by the talent of the artist.
This matter of mode of expression arises more generally in Africa over the question of national language. There is an overwhelming desire to have a national tongue native to the land, but the practicalities appear to be insuperable. While Tanzania has established Swahili as her official language, others have been obliged to settle for French or English, in order that their people may communicate with one another and all with the world beyond. In fact, this may be a most appropriate development since the search for an African identity is made precisely so that Africa can knit herself more tightly into the world community. When the Nigerian playwright, Wole Soyinka, says he wants to be a good writer, not a good African writer, he is expressing what is in the mind of every African. For Africa has indeed become part of the modem world.
Why Britain Should Apologise and Pay Reparations to African Peoples
British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently told The Nation (the London-based weekly publication that focuses mainly on African peoples' readership) that his country was "sorrowful" over its central role in the European World's enslavement of African peoples. This declaration is surely not good enough as Britain is the leading beneficiary of this holocaust. Blair should have apologised unreservedly to Africans across the world for Britain's role in a holocaust that remains humanity's most gruesome, most expansive, and most enduring. Blair should also have announced a comprehensive package of reparations paid to all surviving Africans in Africa, Europe, the Americas and elsewhere in the world for this crime.
It must be emphasised that within 300 years of achieving the strategic control of Africa's human and material resources, namely at the apogee of the African enslavement, Europe laid the foundation for the West's political and economic hegemony of the world as we know it presently. This is a fact - "though largely erased and ignored in Western thought," as Michel Beaud, the influential French economist, is keen to remind the European World. Britain, the first truly effective Western global power, used the gargantuan wealth it acquired during the course of its late 17th century/18th century pre-eminent role in the enslavement and mass exportation of millions of Africans to the Americas to consolidate its conquest of the Americas (especially the north and the Caribbean basin), embark on its conquest of India and other regions of Asia, embark on the subsequent pan-European (Britain, France, Portugal, Belgium, Spain, Germany and Italy) conquest and occupation of a (subsequently) weakened Africa, and lastly, but surely not least in importance, finance its 19th century industrial revolution which was the turning point in the development of Western capitalism.
Backwater
Britain's success on this score cannot be over-stressed. This was a country which, prior to the mid-17th century, was still a "cultural and scientific backwater," to borrow the graphic description made by Christopher Hill, the eminent British historian who is an authority on this period of British history. By the beginning of the 18th century, Britain had established virtual world monopoly in the seizure and transportation of millions of Africans from their homelands to the Americas after displacing the Iberian states of Portugal and Spain. It used the enormous resources that accrued to it as a result to finance its burgeoning scientific and technological enterprises. Soon, as Hill further notes, Britain became the "centre of world science." And to underline the sheer size of the wealth Britain was accumulating during the period, Charles Davenant, a late 17th century economist who studied the comparative worth of an enslaved African in the Caribbean and a worker in England concluded: "[The labour of this enslaved African] is worth six times as much as the labour of an Englishman at home."
Whilst studying the work of African labour force in the Guyanese sugar industry in the 1870s, it did not come as a shock to Joseph Beaumont, the British chief justice of Guyana, that it took two to three days of work by the "best English laborer" (in England) of the day to complete a day's work done by a typically enslaved African plantation worker. "We have [in England] no excavating work so heavy as trench digging in Demerara [Guyana]," recalled Beaumont, "and if the reader were to see a stalwart negro ... sweltering under the blazing sun throughout the day ... standing up to his knees and often to his hips in water, not only lifting (or more properly wrenching) 4000 to 5000 spits of dense clay ... throwing these twelve or sixteen feet clear on each side - not with a pleasant hammer throwing swing, but delivered straight from the loins at the end of a seven foot shovel ... I venture to think he would not only wonder at but admire ... the 'lazy nigger'" (emphasis in the original).
During the 300 years of Britain's ascendancy as the world's principal slaver-power in Africa and the Americas, leading members of its state establishment (especially in royalty, clergy, parliament, industry, academia, science and the arts) personally and collectively profited enormously from this unprecedented holocaust in human history. Cities such as London, Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow became extremely rich, showcasing the spectacular transformation that each had undergone from being key destinations of prime investment of profits accruing to the British treasury from the enslavement of the African humanity. Thereafter, Britain became the epicentre of the intellectual activity of an ever-expanding collective of European World genocidist scholars, scientists and writers who offered the "requisite" cultural/scientific/literary rationalisation for the African holocaust. Influential members of this collective would include Spencer, Petty, Darwin, Lyell, Prichard, Reade, Locke, White, Knox, Marx, Hume, Lee, Farrar, Coupland, Egerton, Trevor-Roper, Conrad, Kipling, Carey, Haggard, Burroughs, Buchan, Mitford, Monsarrat, Ballantyne, Huxley and Blixen. These practitioners, in a sentence, turned Britain into the creator, cardinal codifier, and pivotal publicist of pan-European racism as an ideology - to desperately effectuate that strategic goal of erasure that Michel Beaud referred to.
The stupendous fortune Britain earned from this holocaust and the accompanying gullies of socio-economic devastation it unleashed across Africa and African survivors in Africa itself, the Americas and elsewhere in the world, ensured that a triumphant Prime Minister Salisbury confidently insisted in a speech in London in 1898: "One can roughly divide the nations of the world into the living and the dying ... [T]he living nations will fraudulently encroach on the territory of the dying." Less than 50 years after these remarks were made, the dire consequences of pogroms and holocausts would be felt much closer home to the heart of Europe rather than just the targeted lands further afield in Africa and elsewhere. On this, Sven Lindqvist has observed solemnly:
I am fairly sure the nine-year-old Adolf Hitler was not in Albert Hall when Lord Salisbury was speaking. He had no need to. He knew it already. The air he and all other Western people in his childhood breathed was soaked in the conviction that imperialism is a biologically necessary process, which, according to the laws of nature, leads to the inevitable destruction of the lower races. It was a conviction which already cost millions of human lives before Hitler provided his highly personal application.
As should be expected, the effects on Africans and their homeland of this earlier holocaust, have been grave indeed: the active human power of millions of future African generations were uprooted and shipped off to the Americas by European slavers to work the cotton, sugar and tobacco plantations, excavate the gold and silver mines, and build new towns and cities in territories being conquered by rampaging European conqueror forces. In the process, as Cheikh Anta Diop has shown, Africa lost about 150 million of its peoples as enslaved, including those who died during the overland journey to conveyor-ships and the voyage to the Americas. Soon, Britain and the rest of the European powers (France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, Spain), who eventually occupied Africa, turned the continent into a reservoir of cheap labour for intensive and extensive agricultural and mineralogical exploitation. The African farmer was converted overnight into a "cash crop farmer", a term that at face value has a dubious meaning as it is aimed to describe a farmer who cultivates assorted crops such as cotton, cocoa, palm produce, groundnut, cloves and sisal solely for export to European markets. The farmer who cultivates other crops, but for the home market, which he or she still sells for cash, is not a "cash crop farmer"! Instead, goes the conquest-economics jargon, the latter farmer is involved in "subsistent farming". Considering that the overwhelming majority of Africans were, and are still farmers, these millions of people were, as a result of the European conquest and occupation, being culturally alienated at the crucial site of their economic activity with obvious far-reaching implications, which are still at the core of Africa's current tragedy. If the African labour was not bound for agricultural activity, "cash crop", or not, he or she was instead deployed by the occupation-state to the European mining corporations dotted all over the continent to extract various types of minerals including diamonds, gold, tin, bauxite, coal, copper, iron ore and petroleum products - again for export to the European World. All forms of taxes were imposed to expedite this European take-over of Africa, and the strategic spheres of the continent's independent pre-conquest cultural, industrial and other forms of technological creativity therein were curtailed or suppressed.
In effect, African land and property relations were abolished by the occupation to make way for the seizure of land for both plantation agriculture and mining enterprises already referred to, or for the construction of new communication infrastructure, or for the direct population settlement by European immigrants as exemplified in east Africa (Kenya), southern Africa (Mozambique, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Angola, Namibia), west Africa (Sao Tome and Principe, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde) and north Africa (Algeria). Again, Britain was the leading conqueror-state beneficiary during this phase of the direct occupation of Africa, having particularly seized lands with major population centres and vast and multiple natural resource emplacements: South Africa, Namibia (proxy control, post-1918), Zimbabwe, Botswana, Swaziland, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania (post-1918), Sudan, Nigeria, South Cameroons (post-1918), Ghana, Sierra Leone, Gambia. In each of these conquered lands as well as others, now arbitrarily carved out from hitherto existing African states, the European regime imposed its monetary system on society and also ensured that the terms for the exchange of goods and services, fundamental for the logical development of any socio-economic activity or relation, was inextricably tailored to the needs and expectations of the home market back home (in Europe). No doubt, the economies that emerged subsequently in Africa, particularly on the eve of the so-called re-establishment of the peoples' independence from the mid-1950s, were structurally bereft of local needs and priorities. Instead, these were mineralogical and agricultural redoubts to service a European home market, and, at the same time, conduits for European emigration.
In summary, three distinct consequences on the African humanity can be discerned from the British-led (i.e. post-mid 17th century) enslavement of Africans or the African holocaust. First, the seizure and exportation of 150 million Africans from Africa to the Americas and elsewhere. Second, the destruction/near destruction of local populations and the dispatch of survivors/others into labour reserves/"townships" to make way for direct European occupation (particularly east/southern Africa) as from the 19th century, and, finally, the overall control of subjugated populations and the conversion of human and material resources to serve pan-European interests (rest of Africa), which has continued virtually uninterrupted to this day.
Kakistocracy and Genocide
The concerted African drive, beginning soon after the Second World War, to free the continent of European control has yet to achieve its strategic objective: unfettered restoration-of-independence. Britain and France and Belgium and Portugal and Spain just won't let go of Africa; for these countries, the phenomenal bounties of the African conquest are yet to be fully expropriated, despite the holocaust, despite the hundreds of years of occupation, and, more importantly, despite the insistence of the post-1945 African liberating mission. Starting from 1956 in Sudan, Britain (once again!) embarked on the construction of a constellation of kakistocratic states across the continent to precisely neutralise the emergence of this new, free Africa. Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Gambia and others, as well as the Belgian and French derivatives of these monstrous constructs (Congo Democratic Republic, Rwanda, Burundi, Congo Republic, Chad, Central African Republic, Cameroon, etc., etc.) soon followed suit. In Nigeria, in 1966, Britain perfected, even further, the catastrophic tentacles of kakistocracy in Africa as I demonstrate in my new book, Biafra Revisited (African Renaissance, 2006). In concert with the Nigerian state (religious, military, police, academic, bureaucracy, media) and the leaderships of key constituent nations in the country, Britain inaugurated the quintessential genocidal state in Africa: Nigeria. Britain and its Nigerian allies murdered 3.1 million Igbo people during the course of 1966-1970 in the most horrendous genocide of Africans not seen on the continent since the mid-19th century. The mass murder of the Igbo set a grotesque precedence that would chart and characterise the central features of African politics during the subsequent 30 years: Sierra Leone, Liberia, Chad, Congo Democratic Republic, Congo Republic, Uganda, Ethiopia, Somalia, Burundi, Rwanda, Sudan. A total of 12 million Africans have been murdered in these countries since the Igbo genocide.
As Britain (and France and Belgium particularly) would surely attest, the African kakistocratic state, especially its genocidal variety in Nigeria and the Sudan for instance, pays handsomely. An examination of any index of statistical data on Anglo-Nigeria relations, or indeed Anglo-Sudan interactions, won't shock for the very obvious. As the Africans in Nigeria and the Sudan languish in perpetuity in these perditions of "homeland" of British creation, the British continue to enjoy unprecedented levels of profits from these countries, day in, day out, receive net capital inflows from these territories, including those looted by thieving leaderships and officials, and appropriate critical resources from there at will ... Britain, and the rest of the European World, couldn't ask for a more enabling environment to expropriate and expropriate the vast riches of Africa indefinitely. For Africans, the next move in the much-sought-after liberation, couldn't be clearer: (1) dismantle the extant genocide state or quickly abandon your membership therein and (2) create new state forms of civilisation that expressly serve your interests and aspirations - not those of others, including especially the notorious overlords of persons, groups and "ascribed" nations who carry out the day-to-day policing of what Peter Opara has aptly tagged "the cage".
By Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, nigeriaworld.com
December 6, 2006
It must be emphasised that within 300 years of achieving the strategic control of Africa's human and material resources, namely at the apogee of the African enslavement, Europe laid the foundation for the West's political and economic hegemony of the world as we know it presently. This is a fact - "though largely erased and ignored in Western thought," as Michel Beaud, the influential French economist, is keen to remind the European World. Britain, the first truly effective Western global power, used the gargantuan wealth it acquired during the course of its late 17th century/18th century pre-eminent role in the enslavement and mass exportation of millions of Africans to the Americas to consolidate its conquest of the Americas (especially the north and the Caribbean basin), embark on its conquest of India and other regions of Asia, embark on the subsequent pan-European (Britain, France, Portugal, Belgium, Spain, Germany and Italy) conquest and occupation of a (subsequently) weakened Africa, and lastly, but surely not least in importance, finance its 19th century industrial revolution which was the turning point in the development of Western capitalism.
Backwater
Britain's success on this score cannot be over-stressed. This was a country which, prior to the mid-17th century, was still a "cultural and scientific backwater," to borrow the graphic description made by Christopher Hill, the eminent British historian who is an authority on this period of British history. By the beginning of the 18th century, Britain had established virtual world monopoly in the seizure and transportation of millions of Africans from their homelands to the Americas after displacing the Iberian states of Portugal and Spain. It used the enormous resources that accrued to it as a result to finance its burgeoning scientific and technological enterprises. Soon, as Hill further notes, Britain became the "centre of world science." And to underline the sheer size of the wealth Britain was accumulating during the period, Charles Davenant, a late 17th century economist who studied the comparative worth of an enslaved African in the Caribbean and a worker in England concluded: "[The labour of this enslaved African] is worth six times as much as the labour of an Englishman at home."
Whilst studying the work of African labour force in the Guyanese sugar industry in the 1870s, it did not come as a shock to Joseph Beaumont, the British chief justice of Guyana, that it took two to three days of work by the "best English laborer" (in England) of the day to complete a day's work done by a typically enslaved African plantation worker. "We have [in England] no excavating work so heavy as trench digging in Demerara [Guyana]," recalled Beaumont, "and if the reader were to see a stalwart negro ... sweltering under the blazing sun throughout the day ... standing up to his knees and often to his hips in water, not only lifting (or more properly wrenching) 4000 to 5000 spits of dense clay ... throwing these twelve or sixteen feet clear on each side - not with a pleasant hammer throwing swing, but delivered straight from the loins at the end of a seven foot shovel ... I venture to think he would not only wonder at but admire ... the 'lazy nigger'" (emphasis in the original).
During the 300 years of Britain's ascendancy as the world's principal slaver-power in Africa and the Americas, leading members of its state establishment (especially in royalty, clergy, parliament, industry, academia, science and the arts) personally and collectively profited enormously from this unprecedented holocaust in human history. Cities such as London, Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow became extremely rich, showcasing the spectacular transformation that each had undergone from being key destinations of prime investment of profits accruing to the British treasury from the enslavement of the African humanity. Thereafter, Britain became the epicentre of the intellectual activity of an ever-expanding collective of European World genocidist scholars, scientists and writers who offered the "requisite" cultural/scientific/literary rationalisation for the African holocaust. Influential members of this collective would include Spencer, Petty, Darwin, Lyell, Prichard, Reade, Locke, White, Knox, Marx, Hume, Lee, Farrar, Coupland, Egerton, Trevor-Roper, Conrad, Kipling, Carey, Haggard, Burroughs, Buchan, Mitford, Monsarrat, Ballantyne, Huxley and Blixen. These practitioners, in a sentence, turned Britain into the creator, cardinal codifier, and pivotal publicist of pan-European racism as an ideology - to desperately effectuate that strategic goal of erasure that Michel Beaud referred to.
The stupendous fortune Britain earned from this holocaust and the accompanying gullies of socio-economic devastation it unleashed across Africa and African survivors in Africa itself, the Americas and elsewhere in the world, ensured that a triumphant Prime Minister Salisbury confidently insisted in a speech in London in 1898: "One can roughly divide the nations of the world into the living and the dying ... [T]he living nations will fraudulently encroach on the territory of the dying." Less than 50 years after these remarks were made, the dire consequences of pogroms and holocausts would be felt much closer home to the heart of Europe rather than just the targeted lands further afield in Africa and elsewhere. On this, Sven Lindqvist has observed solemnly:
I am fairly sure the nine-year-old Adolf Hitler was not in Albert Hall when Lord Salisbury was speaking. He had no need to. He knew it already. The air he and all other Western people in his childhood breathed was soaked in the conviction that imperialism is a biologically necessary process, which, according to the laws of nature, leads to the inevitable destruction of the lower races. It was a conviction which already cost millions of human lives before Hitler provided his highly personal application.
As should be expected, the effects on Africans and their homeland of this earlier holocaust, have been grave indeed: the active human power of millions of future African generations were uprooted and shipped off to the Americas by European slavers to work the cotton, sugar and tobacco plantations, excavate the gold and silver mines, and build new towns and cities in territories being conquered by rampaging European conqueror forces. In the process, as Cheikh Anta Diop has shown, Africa lost about 150 million of its peoples as enslaved, including those who died during the overland journey to conveyor-ships and the voyage to the Americas. Soon, Britain and the rest of the European powers (France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, Spain), who eventually occupied Africa, turned the continent into a reservoir of cheap labour for intensive and extensive agricultural and mineralogical exploitation. The African farmer was converted overnight into a "cash crop farmer", a term that at face value has a dubious meaning as it is aimed to describe a farmer who cultivates assorted crops such as cotton, cocoa, palm produce, groundnut, cloves and sisal solely for export to European markets. The farmer who cultivates other crops, but for the home market, which he or she still sells for cash, is not a "cash crop farmer"! Instead, goes the conquest-economics jargon, the latter farmer is involved in "subsistent farming". Considering that the overwhelming majority of Africans were, and are still farmers, these millions of people were, as a result of the European conquest and occupation, being culturally alienated at the crucial site of their economic activity with obvious far-reaching implications, which are still at the core of Africa's current tragedy. If the African labour was not bound for agricultural activity, "cash crop", or not, he or she was instead deployed by the occupation-state to the European mining corporations dotted all over the continent to extract various types of minerals including diamonds, gold, tin, bauxite, coal, copper, iron ore and petroleum products - again for export to the European World. All forms of taxes were imposed to expedite this European take-over of Africa, and the strategic spheres of the continent's independent pre-conquest cultural, industrial and other forms of technological creativity therein were curtailed or suppressed.
In effect, African land and property relations were abolished by the occupation to make way for the seizure of land for both plantation agriculture and mining enterprises already referred to, or for the construction of new communication infrastructure, or for the direct population settlement by European immigrants as exemplified in east Africa (Kenya), southern Africa (Mozambique, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Angola, Namibia), west Africa (Sao Tome and Principe, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde) and north Africa (Algeria). Again, Britain was the leading conqueror-state beneficiary during this phase of the direct occupation of Africa, having particularly seized lands with major population centres and vast and multiple natural resource emplacements: South Africa, Namibia (proxy control, post-1918), Zimbabwe, Botswana, Swaziland, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania (post-1918), Sudan, Nigeria, South Cameroons (post-1918), Ghana, Sierra Leone, Gambia. In each of these conquered lands as well as others, now arbitrarily carved out from hitherto existing African states, the European regime imposed its monetary system on society and also ensured that the terms for the exchange of goods and services, fundamental for the logical development of any socio-economic activity or relation, was inextricably tailored to the needs and expectations of the home market back home (in Europe). No doubt, the economies that emerged subsequently in Africa, particularly on the eve of the so-called re-establishment of the peoples' independence from the mid-1950s, were structurally bereft of local needs and priorities. Instead, these were mineralogical and agricultural redoubts to service a European home market, and, at the same time, conduits for European emigration.
In summary, three distinct consequences on the African humanity can be discerned from the British-led (i.e. post-mid 17th century) enslavement of Africans or the African holocaust. First, the seizure and exportation of 150 million Africans from Africa to the Americas and elsewhere. Second, the destruction/near destruction of local populations and the dispatch of survivors/others into labour reserves/"townships" to make way for direct European occupation (particularly east/southern Africa) as from the 19th century, and, finally, the overall control of subjugated populations and the conversion of human and material resources to serve pan-European interests (rest of Africa), which has continued virtually uninterrupted to this day.
Kakistocracy and Genocide
The concerted African drive, beginning soon after the Second World War, to free the continent of European control has yet to achieve its strategic objective: unfettered restoration-of-independence. Britain and France and Belgium and Portugal and Spain just won't let go of Africa; for these countries, the phenomenal bounties of the African conquest are yet to be fully expropriated, despite the holocaust, despite the hundreds of years of occupation, and, more importantly, despite the insistence of the post-1945 African liberating mission. Starting from 1956 in Sudan, Britain (once again!) embarked on the construction of a constellation of kakistocratic states across the continent to precisely neutralise the emergence of this new, free Africa. Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Gambia and others, as well as the Belgian and French derivatives of these monstrous constructs (Congo Democratic Republic, Rwanda, Burundi, Congo Republic, Chad, Central African Republic, Cameroon, etc., etc.) soon followed suit. In Nigeria, in 1966, Britain perfected, even further, the catastrophic tentacles of kakistocracy in Africa as I demonstrate in my new book, Biafra Revisited (African Renaissance, 2006). In concert with the Nigerian state (religious, military, police, academic, bureaucracy, media) and the leaderships of key constituent nations in the country, Britain inaugurated the quintessential genocidal state in Africa: Nigeria. Britain and its Nigerian allies murdered 3.1 million Igbo people during the course of 1966-1970 in the most horrendous genocide of Africans not seen on the continent since the mid-19th century. The mass murder of the Igbo set a grotesque precedence that would chart and characterise the central features of African politics during the subsequent 30 years: Sierra Leone, Liberia, Chad, Congo Democratic Republic, Congo Republic, Uganda, Ethiopia, Somalia, Burundi, Rwanda, Sudan. A total of 12 million Africans have been murdered in these countries since the Igbo genocide.
As Britain (and France and Belgium particularly) would surely attest, the African kakistocratic state, especially its genocidal variety in Nigeria and the Sudan for instance, pays handsomely. An examination of any index of statistical data on Anglo-Nigeria relations, or indeed Anglo-Sudan interactions, won't shock for the very obvious. As the Africans in Nigeria and the Sudan languish in perpetuity in these perditions of "homeland" of British creation, the British continue to enjoy unprecedented levels of profits from these countries, day in, day out, receive net capital inflows from these territories, including those looted by thieving leaderships and officials, and appropriate critical resources from there at will ... Britain, and the rest of the European World, couldn't ask for a more enabling environment to expropriate and expropriate the vast riches of Africa indefinitely. For Africans, the next move in the much-sought-after liberation, couldn't be clearer: (1) dismantle the extant genocide state or quickly abandon your membership therein and (2) create new state forms of civilisation that expressly serve your interests and aspirations - not those of others, including especially the notorious overlords of persons, groups and "ascribed" nations who carry out the day-to-day policing of what Peter Opara has aptly tagged "the cage".
By Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, nigeriaworld.com
December 6, 2006
I hate Africa.
I hate Africa.
The filth and pollution are truly awful. Where the people once dropped fruit skins they now leave plastic. The excrement of donkey and goat has been replaced as "enrichment" to the land by petrol and oil dripped from unregulated engines. The people have never been educated as to the problems that the ideals of "Western" living bring. I contracted C.O.P.D. (a progressive degenerative lung disease) in Africa. There is no cure. I shudder to think of what the lungs of the native residents look like. Disease in many forms has been exterminated in "The West". In Africa it is rife.
I do not agree with the politically-correct terminology used by "The West" to describe Africa. This is not a conglomeration of "Developing" countries. Africa, at least much of the land sub-Sahara, is decidedly "Third World". The ways of her people haven't changed significantly since the Middle Ages. I disagree with the indiscriminate heaping of financial aid on the heirarchy of African nations by the "Developed World", encouraged by mindless, time-expired "Pop Stars". The "Fat Cats" running each African state (into the ground?) gain a new Merc or BMW each year, but the peasant farmer sees little of such wealth. His children still die of preventable diseases.
The African Male has had it all his own way for millions of years. He has sat beneath the spreading acacia in every village, discussing World affairs and when his wives will lay out his meal before him, for long enough. Woman is slowly, but inexhorably, climbing the steep steps to power. She is changing attitudes imperceptively but surely. The children of today are the potential salvation of Africa. We can educate them with the help of Woman and the acceptance of Man. It is a task that makes Emily Pankhurst's emancipation of women appear a doddle. So many obstacles lay ahead. But it will happen one day. Africa can become the "Breadbasket of the World" once more. Insh'a'allah.
I hate Africa.
She is a cunning and conniving vamp. She is a Class A drug. Her wispy tendrils of sensual delight invade the mind, while her fingers weave their seductive way around the heart to bind that organ in a cage stronger than Titanium. She thinks she can control me. She thinks she owns me.
Yet I am stronger in my resolve, aren't I? I have the self-determination to break free from her clutches at any time, don't I? I can turn my back on Africa forever, never to return, can't I?
I am going back to Africa tomorrow.
For the children.
By, Dave
I do not agree with the politically-correct terminology used by "The West" to describe Africa. This is not a conglomeration of "Developing" countries. Africa, at least much of the land sub-Sahara, is decidedly "Third World". The ways of her people haven't changed significantly since the Middle Ages. I disagree with the indiscriminate heaping of financial aid on the heirarchy of African nations by the "Developed World", encouraged by mindless, time-expired "Pop Stars". The "Fat Cats" running each African state (into the ground?) gain a new Merc or BMW each year, but the peasant farmer sees little of such wealth. His children still die of preventable diseases.
The African Male has had it all his own way for millions of years. He has sat beneath the spreading acacia in every village, discussing World affairs and when his wives will lay out his meal before him, for long enough. Woman is slowly, but inexhorably, climbing the steep steps to power. She is changing attitudes imperceptively but surely. The children of today are the potential salvation of Africa. We can educate them with the help of Woman and the acceptance of Man. It is a task that makes Emily Pankhurst's emancipation of women appear a doddle. So many obstacles lay ahead. But it will happen one day. Africa can become the "Breadbasket of the World" once more. Insh'a'allah.
I hate Africa.
She is a cunning and conniving vamp. She is a Class A drug. Her wispy tendrils of sensual delight invade the mind, while her fingers weave their seductive way around the heart to bind that organ in a cage stronger than Titanium. She thinks she can control me. She thinks she owns me.
Yet I am stronger in my resolve, aren't I? I have the self-determination to break free from her clutches at any time, don't I? I can turn my back on Africa forever, never to return, can't I?
I am going back to Africa tomorrow.
For the children.
By, Dave
a speech by Willie Lynch-the word to lynch came from him.(kill without legal sanction)
Gentlemen:
I greet you here on the bank of the James River in the year of our lord, one thousand seven hundred and twelve. First , I shall thank you, the gentlemen of the of the colony of Virginia, for bringing me here. I am here to help you solve some of your problems with slaves. Your invitation reached me in my modest plantation in the West Indies where I have experimented with some of the newest and still the oldest method for control of slaves. Ancient Rome would envy us if my program is implemented. As our boat sailed south on the James River, named for our illustrious KING JAMES, whose BIBLE we CHERISH, I saw enough to know that our problem is not unique. While Rome used cords or wood as crosses for standing human bodies along the old highways in great numbers, you are here using the tree and the rope on occasion.
I caught the whiff of a dead slave hanging from a tree a couple of miles back. You are losing valuable stock by hangings, you are having uprisings, slaves are running away, your crops are sometimes left in the fields too long for maximum profit, you suffer occasional fires, your animals are killed, Gentleman,...You know what your problems are; I do not need to elaborate. I am not here to enumerate your problems, I am here to introduce you to a method of solving them.
In my bag, I have a fool proof method for controlling your slaves. I guarantee everyone of you that if installed it will control the slaves for at least three hundred years. My method is simple, any member of your family or any OVERSEER can use it.
I have outlined a number of differences among the slaves, and I take these differences and make them bigger. I use FEAR, DISTRUST, and ENVY for control purposes. These methods have worked on my modest plantation in the West Indies, and it will work throughout the SOUTH. Take this simple little list of differences and think about them. On the top of my list is "AGE" but it is only there because it starts with an "A"; The second is"COLOR" or shade; there is INTELLIGENCE, SIZE, SEX, SIZE OF PLANTATION, ATTITUDE of owner, whether the slaves live in the valley, on a hill, east or west, north, south, have fine or coarse hair, or is tall or short. Now that you have a list of differences, I shall give you an outline of action- but before that, I shall assure you that DISTRUST IS STRONGER THAN TRUST, AND ENVY IS STRONGER THAN ADULATION, RESPECT OR ADMIRATION.
The black slave, after receiving this indoctrination, shall carry on and will become self-refueling and self-generating for hundreds of years, maybe thousands.
Don't forget you must pitch the old black VS. the young black males, and the young black male against the old black male. You must use the dark skinned slaves VS. the light skin slaves. You must use the female VS the male, and the male VS, the female. You must always have your servants and OVERSEERS distrust all blacks, but it is necessary that your slaves trust and depend on us.
Gentlemen, these kits are your keys to control, use them. Never miss an opportunity. My plan is guaranteed, and the good thing about this plan is that if used intensely for one year the slave will remain perpetually distrustful.
-WILLIAM LYNCH-1772
The letter above is one of the major problems of the African race today. And with this knowledge we as a race can and will over come. So with this letter still in your mind I ask that you enlighten someone else and send this letter to as many brothers and sisters. We as a race must start somewhere in learning our problems what better place than the document that started the destruction of our MOST POWERFUL RACE!!!
I greet you here on the bank of the James River in the year of our lord, one thousand seven hundred and twelve. First , I shall thank you, the gentlemen of the of the colony of Virginia, for bringing me here. I am here to help you solve some of your problems with slaves. Your invitation reached me in my modest plantation in the West Indies where I have experimented with some of the newest and still the oldest method for control of slaves. Ancient Rome would envy us if my program is implemented. As our boat sailed south on the James River, named for our illustrious KING JAMES, whose BIBLE we CHERISH, I saw enough to know that our problem is not unique. While Rome used cords or wood as crosses for standing human bodies along the old highways in great numbers, you are here using the tree and the rope on occasion.
I caught the whiff of a dead slave hanging from a tree a couple of miles back. You are losing valuable stock by hangings, you are having uprisings, slaves are running away, your crops are sometimes left in the fields too long for maximum profit, you suffer occasional fires, your animals are killed, Gentleman,...You know what your problems are; I do not need to elaborate. I am not here to enumerate your problems, I am here to introduce you to a method of solving them.
In my bag, I have a fool proof method for controlling your slaves. I guarantee everyone of you that if installed it will control the slaves for at least three hundred years. My method is simple, any member of your family or any OVERSEER can use it.
I have outlined a number of differences among the slaves, and I take these differences and make them bigger. I use FEAR, DISTRUST, and ENVY for control purposes. These methods have worked on my modest plantation in the West Indies, and it will work throughout the SOUTH. Take this simple little list of differences and think about them. On the top of my list is "AGE" but it is only there because it starts with an "A"; The second is"COLOR" or shade; there is INTELLIGENCE, SIZE, SEX, SIZE OF PLANTATION, ATTITUDE of owner, whether the slaves live in the valley, on a hill, east or west, north, south, have fine or coarse hair, or is tall or short. Now that you have a list of differences, I shall give you an outline of action- but before that, I shall assure you that DISTRUST IS STRONGER THAN TRUST, AND ENVY IS STRONGER THAN ADULATION, RESPECT OR ADMIRATION.
The black slave, after receiving this indoctrination, shall carry on and will become self-refueling and self-generating for hundreds of years, maybe thousands.
Don't forget you must pitch the old black VS. the young black males, and the young black male against the old black male. You must use the dark skinned slaves VS. the light skin slaves. You must use the female VS the male, and the male VS, the female. You must always have your servants and OVERSEERS distrust all blacks, but it is necessary that your slaves trust and depend on us.
Gentlemen, these kits are your keys to control, use them. Never miss an opportunity. My plan is guaranteed, and the good thing about this plan is that if used intensely for one year the slave will remain perpetually distrustful.
-WILLIAM LYNCH-1772
The letter above is one of the major problems of the African race today. And with this knowledge we as a race can and will over come. So with this letter still in your mind I ask that you enlighten someone else and send this letter to as many brothers and sisters. We as a race must start somewhere in learning our problems what better place than the document that started the destruction of our MOST POWERFUL RACE!!!
Myths
"Revolutionaries will hear three myths which can seriously erode their morale. One is that you can never remove your enemy. Another is the assumption that a revolution cannot occur without a general consensus at the grassroots level. And the third misconception...is that revolutions must include everyone in order to be successful. The latter is the most damaging assumption of the three because it implies that the revolution cannot possibly become successful without including those of us who have a vested interest in being European, as well as those who may not want to be them but still live for their love and validation. Together, these two groups add up to the vast majority of Afrikans in this society. Since this discussion has already begun, we will deal with this last myth first. How quickly we forget, in the effort to move in any direction signaling the possibility of empowerment, that revolution has never been an option for negroes. "A domesticated dog does not know how to hunt." It only knows how to beg. In Kelly Miller's words, "the negro pays for what he wants and begs for what he needs." A nonconfrontational compliance with their oppressors is their innately fundamental political philosophy. They can only act against their own. That is the ingrained nature of the negro. Sure, they would love to talk with you about the "Black problem" under the pretense of group solidarity. But it is only to distract you from your purpose with protracted, meaningless, barren debate, thereby earning themselves invaluable brownie points from their sworn masters. When you get caught up in the issues and lives of those members of our community who absolutely do not want to change into someone better, you find yourself riding a counterrevolutionary treadmill. To blindly embrace those with a deep commitment to their self-defeating philosophy simply because it is phrased in the spirit of humanity or brings us together momentarily as a people is ludicrous if we wish to independently empower an Afrikan nation. You do not embrace those who will take you straight to hell, no matter how much blood you share with them. Some will never listen. Everyone is not able to see. And, most importantly, it is not healthy to keep the company of people who proudly wear the scars of the generations of their physical and mental rape. There are casualties in every war. The conversion of negroes is not of interest or a goal for Afrikan warrior scholars, regardless of the potential based on them being born of Afrikan lineage. Some in our community have a vested interest in not being Afrikan. So, the idea that finding meaningful, incompatible differences among Afrikans only serves to further divide and weaken us, but does not take into account the fact that there are people within our group who must be routed out in order for us to make Afrikan progress and, eventually, become one. It misses the point that this is already the case, and has been so for quite a while now. You cut the infectious animal from the herd. You don't keep it there just for numbers. Progress cannot occur by embracing enemies within. The need to include everybody in our war, especially those who boast about subsisting in the deepest states of mentacide, who hate the idea that someone might think that somewhere in them there might be anything recognizable as Afrikan, is extremely problematic. If we have to get over anything it is the idea that it is necessary to bring everybody into the fold in order to win. This is the diversity sham working its finest magic on the minds of those Afrikans seeking an easy way to peace. It is the idea that everyone of Afrikan descent must be brought into the decision making fold because we think we are a democratic family. It intentionally forces us to overlook the fact that there are those in our family who hate us. The diversity sham operates on the principle that you cannot make revolutionary progress without everyone included. It is so easy to become completely misdirected when believing that everybody must be together in order to return home."
BY Mwalimu K. Bomani Baruti
BY Mwalimu K. Bomani Baruti
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