The history of Africa - Political Forum

Agrippina · #1 (**permalink**) 10-20-2007, 04:06 PM

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.

africanhope · #2 (**permalink**) 10-21-2007, 03:49 AM

I agree woth much what you said, but you give a very subjective view of it all, and leave out some important parts, and in other parts the truth is a bit, shall we say, gray. I unfortunatly do not have a lot of time right now, so will only be able to give a few comments:
1. You refrain from painting the good side of the white setlers. Not all of them where evil murderers and thiefs. Some good did come from their coming here.
2. You paint a bt of a naive ideal picture of how life was before the arival of the Europeans. I agree that a lot of bad came from it, do not get me wrong, but there where wars, and murders etc. in Africa before Europe came and brought deadlier weapons. Shaka, king of the Zulu, had the 9I think the word is Miflikatze) where the four inlad privences of SA was almost ttally depopulated by his armies, and in which genocide was on the order of the day. He also had some very severe punishments for people who disagreed with him, and more so his brother Dingaan. Some crimes had some horrible punishment.
3. Just a historical fact. The great war you refer to I take to mean the Second Anglo-Boer War, also called the South African War. The english did not come with red coats then, that was the first war, a huge disastor, as anyone who has ever been to the interior of SA, where everything tendsto be shades of brown, would know. In the second war they came in kaki, witch is why English are still sometimes called Kakies.
4. I adore former President Mandela. I think he did sooooo much good for this country. But again you give an onesided view of his history. He was co-founder of the very militant ANC youth league, who was against negotiations. He was co-founder of Mkonto Isiswe, the military wing of the ANC, and he orderd bombs to be planted, with the aim to kill epople. It was whilst in jail that he realised that on the path of violence, the two sides in SA willdescend into war, and mutual destruction was assured, so he started looking for a peacefull settelemtn, and luckily FW de Klerk, who realised the same thing, became President, and the negotiations started.

Do not get me wrong. I hate Apartheid, with every fibre of my being. Almost as much as a despise the system our curent president is trying to enforce in our great country. But the facts remain important, and we can not ignore the good parts of the history, just because it does not suite us.

I am white. My fathers family has been in this country since 1784. Some of them did some horrible things, some did some great things for this country. My mother came here when she was 4, with her father (well, first Zimbabwe, then here). She lovesthis country with all her heart. (she, and my grandfather who had his 80th birthday yesterday, both suported the Springboks loudly last night).

I am African. 100% African. PResidents Mebki speach of the same name is the most wonderfull speech (the only good one actually) ever given by our unimaginative leader, and in it he speaks my heart.

I am African. Horrible things happen, and we must not forget, lest we make the same mistakes again, but let us then remember the truth, and live for the future.

AH

Agrippina · #3 (**permalink**) 10-21-2007, 06:10 AM

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africanhope;95965]I agree woth much what you said, but you give a very subjective view of it all, and leave out some important parts, and in other parts the truth is a bit, shall we say, gray. I unfortunatly do not have a lot of time right now, so will only be able to give a few comments:

Great, that is exactly what I wanted. The world believes that Africa was this dark black uncivilized continent full of killing fields, starving children and barbarians, when history shows that this is not true.

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1. You refrain from painting the good side of the white setlers. Not all of them where evil murderers and thiefs. Some good did come from their coming here.

You are right, no excuse for not doing that, however, the space is limited so I left what I was doing to watch my team become the world champions, then planned to return this morning. Having your comments helps me to focus.

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2. You paint a bt of a naive ideal picture of how life was before the arival of the Europeans.

Perhaps my picture is naive - I didn't intend to paint the picture of the 'noble savage'. There were, as in any society the best people and the worst.

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I agree that a lot of bad came from it, do not get me wrong, but there where wars, and murders etc. in Africa before Europe came and brought deadlier weapons. Shaka, king of the Zulu, had the 9I think the word is Miflikatze) where the four inlad privences of SA was almost ttally depopulated by his armies, and in which genocide was on the order of the day.

Shaka was born circa 1787, son of a minor Zulu chief, but his mother was an unranked woman, and Shaka was a humiliated and discredited child. Taking refuge with his mother in the court of the Zulu leader of the day, he grew up to become a great military leader. When the Zulu leader was murdered by a rival clan, Shaka assumed the throne.

Tragedy on a vast scale struck Southern Africa in the early 1800's. This event was named the "Mfecane" ('the crushing of people') by the Nguni, and the "Difaqane" ('the scattering of tribes') by the Sotho and Tswana. The Afrikaners and the British called the catastrophe "the Wars of Calamity". By 1825, two and half million starving, homeless people wandered about southern Africa looking for respite.

The causes of the Mfecane were many. Introduced from the Americas, corn (maize) flourished in the mild seasons of southern Africa. Not carefully managed, corn depleted the soil of nutrients. As the local population increased, they competed for more land to cultivate corn and to graze livestock. Starting in 1800, a long drought then made southern Africa inhospitable. Peoples moved in search of food, and fought for meager supplies. The Mfengu called the drought, "madlatule" ('eat what you can and say nothing').

During this period Shaka reorganized the Zulu into a military clan, and he soon made them into a force unchallenged in Southern African kingdoms. He introduced the shorter 'stabbing' spear that replaced the traditional long and awkward 'throwing' spear. On the battlefield, he developed the now-famous "horns of the bull" formation (a two-pronged attack). Conquering tribe after tribe, he assimilated all his conquests into the Zulu nation, making it swell with numbers and power, but also causing the displacement of thousands. His actions were partly responsible for spreading the Southern African tribes as far away as Mozambique.

Although he maintained a good relationship with the Europeans in Africa, including the Colonial authorities, he was disliked by other Africans, including his own people, who suffered under his long, cruel and debilitating rule of constant war.

After 10 years of unrelenting warfare that placed incredible strains on the Zulu nation, Shaka, always psychologically unstable and obsessively worried about being replaced by an heir, finally snapped into derangement after the death of his mother in 1828. He imposed a year of celibacy on his people and executed anyone who did not show enough grief at the death of his mother. He was murdered within the year by his half-brother, Dingane, who succeeded him as ruler.

Even though he created brutal conditions for his subjects, it was his legacy that created the powerful Zulu Kingdom and consolidated a nation and its pride.

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He also had some very severe punishments for people who disagreed with him, and more so his brother Dingaan. Some crimes had some horrible punishment.

Refer to the above.

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3. Just a historical fact. The great war you refer to I take to mean the Second Anglo-Boer War, also called the South African War. The english did not come with red coats then, that was the first war, a huge disastor, as anyone who has ever been to the interior of SA, where everything tendsto be shades of brown, would know. In the second war they came in kaki, witch is why English are still sometimes called Kakies.

Yes, they were called Khakis but the English did come here in uniforms with read coats, we have the red coats in Johannesburg's war museum. I'm not too up to date on the history of the two Anglo Boer Wars mine was merely a summary, perhaps you can fill that in the with the causes and results and explain why the Boers accused the English of using ground glass to kill them when they were using Epsom salts to fix the dysentery problem?

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4. I adore former President Mandela. I think he did sooooo much good for this country. But again you give an onesided view of his history. He was co-founder of the very militant ANC youth league, who was against negotiations. He was co-founder of Mkonto Isiswe, the military wing of the ANC, and he orderd bombs to be planted, with the aim to kill epople. It was whilst in jail that he realised that on the path of violence, the two sides in SA willdescend into war, and mutual destruction was assured, so he started looking for a peacefull settelemtn, and luckily FW de Klerk, who realised the same thing, became President, and the negotiations started.

Yes Mandela was the leader of Umkhonto wesizwe you are right. He also advocated civil unrest but he did not encourage the acts that were perpetrated by some of the people we have around today, who's names shall not be mentioned. I have read his book and I quote:

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If we had any hope or illusions about the National Party before they came into office, we were disabused of them quickly. Their threat to put the kaffir in his place was not an idle one... race became the sine qu non of South Africa society, the arbitrary and meaningless tests to decide black formColoured or Coloured from white often resulted in tragic cases where members of the same family were classified differently...Laws stripping people of their rights were inevitably described as laws restoring those rights... in my new role (as president of the Youth League) I urged that the campaign should be exclusively Africa... The ANC drafted a letter to the prime minister advising him of [our] resolutions and the deadline for repealing the laws. On my way to Thaba 'Nchu [to present the paper] I was driving up a hill and saw two white boys ahead of be on bicylces...I came too close ... and we collided... The boy was not badly hurt...the truck driver took him to the police station...the local police officer [on finding he could speak English and hearing his name] pulled out a copy of the left-wing weekly, The Guardian...cried. 'My word, we've caught a communist" [communism was another danger South Africa feared 'die rooi gevaar' - the red danger]"

After this incident at the police station he went to present the paper and was thrown out.

"The was never a full-time organizer for the ANC; the organization had only one and that was Thomas Titus Nkobi. The work I did had to be arranged around my schedule as an attorney"

Nelson Mandela's autobiography is a book worth reading for anyone who would understand South Africa's dark times of Apartheid and I recommend too for anyone who wants to learn about true faith and hope for a better tomorrow. He never lost the belief that he would be free on day that the land he loved would become healed.

The rest of AH's post can be read above; I don't want to follow up on that. I want to say that although I have painted a bleak picture of white behavior towards Africa, it is not untrue. Europeans came to Africa in the belief that it was a dark, empty continent with a few uncivilized tribes, Herodotus called them pygmies, the Romans believed that the gorillas they discovered were another 'race' of people.

But when the Europeans arrived, they were surprised to find villages and groups of people living together with tribal leaders, kings, great cities and trade with outsiders already ongoing. But their arrogance and religion led them to believe that these were 'lesser' people who needed to be saved and converted into the European ideal, when they would not be assimilated into given up their traditions, they were dismissed as the 'sons of Ham' and transformed into lowly paid slaves. People like Mandela (and there were lots of them) rose above their disadvantages and poor education, made the effort to become better educated and took advantage of every learning opportunity that was presented to them. Million upon millions of others, however, in their despair, allowed it to flow over them and engulf them. They would not in their collective despair give in, but they would also not fight until the fight started on a small scale and led to mass exterminations of everything that begin European stood for. This is why we have Rwanda, Darfur and the Liberia and Nigeria. If the Cape had remained a trading post or if the settlers had negotiated instead of overrun, who knows how different the history might have been.

africanhope · #4 (**permalink**) 10-22-2007, 02:49 AM

Well, I can only repeat - yes, there will be red coats in the museum, because they wore it in the first war. They learned from their mistake, and wore kaki in the second one.

On the concentration camps, which is what I think you are reffering to, in which 128 000 women and children died (and considering how few Afrikaners there were at that time, this is close to genocide), the ground glass thing is quite widely proven, also by English sources, so it is not a rumour, but relativly well proven fact.

AH

Agrippina · #5 (**permalink**) 10-22-2007, 03:00 AM

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africanhope;96358]Well, I can only repeat - yes, there will be red coats in the museum, because they wore it in the first war. They learned from their mistake, and wore kaki in the second one.

On the concentration camps, which is what I think you are reffering to, in which 128 000 women and children died (and considering how few Afrikaners there were at that time, this is close to genocide), the ground glass thing is quite widely proven, also by English sources, so it is not a rumour, but relativly well proven fact.

OK we were told at school that it was Epsom salts, but I bow to your superior knowledge. I dropped History as a major and went for Ancient History because it concentrated too much on South Africa, which I had lived and knew enough about to write my own thesis.

That was a terrible time to be a rebellious English-speaking anti-religious woman. I remember having an enormous row with a civil servant who came to my house to check my maid's pass book which was in order. He spotted her kids sitting at the table with mine in the kitchen and threatened to have us both arrested for allowing the races to mix but officially for having the kids there. When I said that she was still breastfeeding he told me she had to go to the homelands to do that then and I would have to employ someone else, so I thre him out and told him he was a Nazi. He said that Hitler had a good idea about the Jews which you can imagine really pissed me off. I was a very angry 'k....r-boetie' that day, my family were terrified that I would be arrested but he probably told them to leave me alone, i was too scary to be messed with. probably thought I would start a war with a legion of impis or something.

Something wrong here. It won't post - tells me it must be longer than 3 characters. ????

africanhope · #6 (**permalink**) 10-22-2007, 03:07 AM

I was beat up at school quiete often for my 'liberal' ideas, and my dad just shook his head everytime. And Iwas expelled from a more posh school for painting the huge portrait of PW Botha with black PVA, after the headmaster refused my request to remove the painting from the school hall.

But this is nothing to the suffering of the millions of black south Africans. And I can tell you being an anti-apartheid Afrikaans speaker was not easy too!! Ask someone like the GREAt Bran Fischer, or Breyten Breytenbach.

AH

Agrippina · #7 (**permalink**) 10-22-2007, 03:17 AM

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Originally Posted by africanhope

I was beat up at school quiete often for my 'liberal' ideas, and my dad just shook his head everytime. And Iwas expelled from a more posh school for painting the huge portrait of PW Botha with black PVA, after the headmaster refused my request to remove the painting from the school hall.

But this is nothing to the suffering of the millions of black south Africans. And I can tell you being an anti-apartheid Afrikaans speaker was not easy too!! Ask someone like the GREAt Bran Fischer, or Breyten Breytenbach.

AH

Yes of course and all the other people who died because they spoke out - Steve Biko springs to mind what was the name of the guy - Daved??? he was gunned down in the street. I am so bad with names, can't remember them - must be getting old.