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.
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
Thursday, September 23, 2010
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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