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Viscount
Join Date: Sep 2007
Location: Pennington, Kwazulu Natal
Posts: 1,225
Country: 
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The history of Africa
I thought that with South Africa being in the middle of a fight to win the Rugby World Cup for the second time having been finally admitted as a fully-fledged member of the world's sporting community, I would give our American friends a brief history of Europeans on the continent - I apologize if I appear to be laying a guilt trip on present-day Europe that is not my intention. You are not to blame for the stupidity of your ancestors, but perhaps my story will make present-day Europeans (and Americans) understand why Africa, that used to be Europe's bread basket, is now a basket case. Enjoy the history lesson:
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During the 15th century, Europe embarked on a program of adventurous travel, Columbus took his vessels to the west to find the route to the east and discovered America. But the Europeans were aware that there was a way to be had to the east without going via the Mediterranean and the Red Sea via the coast of Saudi Arabia to the east. Alexander had tried the reverse route in the 320 BC but died before he was successful, it was extremely dangerous and the boats could not pass into the Red Sea directly from the Mediterranean. The only way was to sail to the Levant then travel overland through the deserts, an extremely time-consuming and dangerous voyage.
So they took to the sea. Traveling south along the west coast of Africa, these intrepid sailors suffered storms, malnutrition, starvation and dysentery but in the end, a man by the name of Vasco da Gama (c1460-1524) was successful. The trip took many months but he reached India.
In traveling this way he also realized that for this trip to be successful a way had to be found for sailors to be able to obtain fresh food along the way. In came the Dutch. In 1652 a halfway station was set up at the Cape of Storms. The man who settled there to farm the land was Jan van Riebeeck, he landed on 6 April 1652.
Over the next two hundred years, they came in droves these white ants who drove the native people of the land away from their tribal lands, invaded sacred burial grounds that had been holy to the people of the land for thousands of years and put up fences. In one instance in Kenya, a group of young Englishmen decided to dig up a fig tree that was hundreds of years old, around which the elders of the village had been buried for hundreds of years, so that they could lay a polo field.
The white people kept coming to Africa. They brought their religions, their teachers their plows, their food and their diseases. Smallpox, chickenpox, measles all previously unknown in Africa began to take their toll on the indigenous people. They destroyed the herds of game in their thousands. The Prince of England, Queen Victoria's son came to the province of Natal with his guns and in one short hunting expedition, he and his party wiped out thousands of gazelles, elephants and various other animals, taking the horns, leaving these beautiful animals as food for vultures.
Then the white ants issued edicts that the lands now belonged to them, that the people who had lived in this dark continent were not the equal of the white man, they did not plant crops, they herded large herds of skinny underfed cattle that they didn't eat, and they had no writing, no wagons, no books, no religion. So they took it upon themselves to teach these people the ways of the white man.
Everybody had to have a 'white' name. The black names were unpronounceable so they were summarily discarded. Then they had to be baptized while being given these new names and they had to learn the language of the white man but the white men didn't all speak the same language so although their various dialects were understandable to the people, learning the new languages divided them, so you had Dutch-speaking people in the Cape, English-speaking people on the east coast and Portuguese speaking people on the northern east and west coasts with German, Italian and French in between. The people became even more divided. Towns sprang up, thousands of them with European style organization, not the organization of towns and settlements that the people understood but with huge buildings in the middle where the people were not allowed. The missionaries taught them the religion but they had to learn it under the trees, not in the white man's house. They were taught to read and write the white man's language but only to the extent that they white man needed them to be able to do this so that they could take over menial tasks in the white man's homes and businesses.
The white man dug up their lands, took the gold and diamonds that were not of any real use to the people, they knew they were there and that the Phoenician traders had bought them for cloth and other necessities for centuries but these white men dug huge holes in the ground further ravaging the seasonal paths of the cattle and goats and wildlife, and the rape on the wildlife continued.
These white people made war on each other they also made war on the people because the people wanted to retain their tribal grazing lands and wildlife water paths, but the white man wanted the land, so they killed the people who resisted.
Then a great war happened in the south. The white Dutch men fought the white English men and large numbers of men in red coats came and helped the English men kills the Dutch men, finally it was all settled, and the people were told they were now part of a great nation, the Union of South Africa, this was 31 May 1910.
Still the people worked as laborers, gardeners and even learned to drive the white man's new wagon that didn't have wheels. But no more, no smart school clothes for the children of the black men, as they went to church under trees, so they went to school under the trees. They didn't need much reading and writing so they didn't get any books, just slates and chalk which they could wipe clean every day to start over the next day. This was the picture of the whole of Africa from Cape Town to the borders of the areas settled by the Romans in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. Those areas now fell under Muslim rule, the Muslims were unfriendly to the white ants so they white ants didn't go there.
By the time the First World War, where hundreds (perhaps thousands) of black men fought alongside their white compatriots but did not share their billets, ended, the black men, having had enough of being driven from their ancestral homes began to agitate for freedom.
But almost 300 years of subjugation had done its work, the black people no longer knew how to build their traditional homes, some tried, some were successful but mostly the art was lost. They no longer knew how to hunt wildlife but could no longer hunt wildlife because it was behind fences in game reserves where the black man was only welcome as a servant.
The young men said that there was only one way to stop the destruction of Africa's people, that was to kill the white man. In the southern part of Africa, the more moderate young men said to rather negotiate with the white men to get them to teach them how to live like the white man, to teach them their ways of growing food and their books but the white man would not do that, he beat the black man and threw him into boxes with bars on them and fed him bad food for wanting what had belonged to his ancestors. Africa had no jails before the white men came, they had no concept of crime. If you harmed another man , you made reparation, you didn't get locked up or strung up on a tree. If you did not obey the king's laws and did not fight as a man in his army, he alone had the right to take you life.
Women were respected. A man's wives lived in his kraal and planted some crops of herbs and small vegetables, she looked after the chickens and cleaned the food, boys and girls did not associate with each other until the fathers arranged a marriage and then the daughters left to live with their husbands in the mother's kraal. But the white men took the black women, gave them mixed breed children and abandoned them, but hung up the black man up if he did the same to white women.
In East Africa, and in Central Africa, the people rioted, and meted out terrible punishment on these destroyers of their lands.
They were now after centuries of being proud herders of flocks of goats, great herds of cattle and hunters of wildlife, who lived in villages, and larger settlements, having built in some cases beautiful cities - Great Zimbabwe and Mapangubwe, are two examples of these, reduced to chattels and slaves.
The white people north of the Zambezi river fled, leaving behind their great cities and towns and houses in the hands of their servants who had no idea how to live in the houses and to operate the labor-saving devices or if they knew how to use them, they didn't know how to reproduce them, so it all fell into disrepair, but the herds and the wildlife were gone, so what were they to eat? Grow crops, how come when they planted crops, they didn't grow. The white people had ways to grow crops but they didn't show them them how.
In the south, the white people stayed, because the 'natives' were afraid. There were hundreds of thousands of white people and these white people were good to them as long as they towed the line. They went to the schools the white man built for them, they dug the mines, the brought out the diamonds, they tilled the soil their children went to school and started learning some of the white man's skills but in second-class environments. Into this society came Nelson Mandela. He was a young man with a vision. In the 1950s he asked to speak to the Nationalist government to deal with them about sharing the country, not to do all the horror that north Africa had done and were suffering because of it but to give some thought to the idea that "all men are created equal". For his trouble, he was thrown in jail for 27 years. The end of the story - you all know that, it was a happy ending - a new democracy.
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