There is a great PBS Frontline documentary called ‘Firestone and the Warlord’ about the Liberian Civil War in the 80’s and 90’s and the role that the Firestone Tire company had in legitimizing Charles Taylor (who was convicted of war crimes and is now in jail). I had no idea about Liberia let alone that they had a civil war, which was mainly about the dominance in Liberian society of black Americans.
This is one of the things that is so insidious about the colonial culture of Western powers during the latter half of the last millennium: how easily it reproduces in subjugated lands. See also: Japan in the run-up to WWII. They just took the oppressive status quo that they'd learned from the US and replicated it, with the "white/colored" dichotomy replaced with a regional variant.
So, for example, before exposure to the West, Japan was mostly egalitarian? Or China? Or India? Or the Aztecs? No significant oppression was going on there?
They weren't expansionist. It should be noted that these tendencies were predicated on the West's unwillingness to perceive them as equals, with full respect for their sovereignty.
"Although the varnas and jatis have pre-modern origins, the caste system as it exists today is the result of developments during the post-Mughal period and the British colonial regime, which made caste organisation a central mechanism of administration."
"The British colonial era census caste tables, states Susan Bayly, "ranked, standardised and cross-referenced jati listings for Indians on principles similar to zoology and botanical classifications, aiming to establish who was superior to whom by virtue of their supposed purity, occupational origins and collective moral worth"."
>Aztecs
You wiped them out. They're the quintessential example of the oppressive and destructive nature of colonialism, with its effect on their society impossible to ascertain because that society collapsed when the genocide happened.
However, if you consider Mexico a successor state, then yeah, the Spanish imported a race- and skin color-based caste system that replicated white/Western supremacy by putting full-blooded indigenous people on the bottom.
Sorry, "we" didn't have time to get any colonies - go find a Spaniard to blame. We were too busy getting raided by Ottomans, having our children kidnapped, trained as slave soldiers, and then used for more raids against us. Or sold into harems. But I won't hold my breath waiting on any sympathy or condemnation of that.
And elevating the expansionist, slave-owning, human-sacrificing-on-unprecedented-scale Aztec empire to some pedestal of egalitarian virtue, just because they were later destroyed by the Spanish, could not be more ridiculous. How do you imagine China reached its size before it stopped being expansionist? What do you think "subdue" means in the following passage?
Though the unified reign of the First Qin Emperor lasted only 12 years, he managed to subdue great parts of what constitutes the core of the Han Chinese homeland [1]
But I want to draw specific attention to your comments about India, since it's a very common type of argument. From that same wikipedia page:
History: Vedic period (1500–1000 BCE): The dasas were frequent allies of the Aryan tribes, and they were probably assimilated into the Aryan society, giving rise to a class distinction. Many dasas were however in a servile position, giving rise to the eventual meaning of dasa as servant or slave.
Already they had a class system and oppression, yet the British Raj was still three thousand years away. But you are correct, contact with the British did change them. Contact of any two civilizations ends up changing them. So everything bad that is to follow, we can blame on the British.
Just like everything bad the Spanish did, we can blame on the Moors that invaded them. I'm sure if we dig further, we'll find someone that attacked the Moors, so they aren't at fault either. We just have to follow this chain of aggression, until one day, we'll find the civilization that first attacked another, that first oppressed a class of people, and we can blame everything bad on them.
Or do you only apply this logic to Europe, and hold everyone else blameless?
Is European global dominance and accident of timing and history? I'd like to think so, but there are plenty of people who would argue quite vehemently in the negative on that point. Alright, so let's go down the rabbit hole, and be very clear about why the 19th and 20th centuries played out as they did.
I apply this logic singularly to Europe because the colonial history of Europe is singular in its direct influence on states it came into contact with. You cannot talk about modern China's global ambitions without speaking about the humiliating and existentially-dire experiences they had at the hands of the British and Japanese, especially since so much of their contemporary rhetoric specifically mentions these injuries in championing a proud "China of the future." You cannot talk about the perpetuation of caste-based oppression (expanding in particularly European ways) in India, even after the introduction of Enlightenment ideals, without talking about how Western ideas about race and hierarchy (not simply role) helped to justify that perpetuation. And you really, really shouldn't be conjuring the ur-racist canard of Aztec "human sacrifice on an 'unprecedented scale'" without acknowledging the massive (dwarfing) death toll of the Mexican conquest - let alone those associated with witch hunts, inquisitions, and crusades (i.e., similarly religiously-driven mass homicide), or with the other abominations akin to mass human sacrifice cause primarily caused by European hubris (several genocides, including the one in the Congo, as well as both world wars).
The reductive nature of your "it's answered aggressions all the way down" approach belies the agency nations and states and rulers and philosophers have in structuring their doctrine and action. However, if you see any truth in it, you must then acknowledge the inevitable influence a de facto vassal state must receive from its oppressor. Combining the two, you're left with either a chronicle of amoral coinflips, or what's more realistic to me: a few thousand years of power dictating as it will, and often to devastating and immoral ends. Maybe the world would suck less if colonial Europe hadn't been such a d••k. Do you disagree with that?
>Sorry, "we" didn't have time to get any colonies - go find a Spaniard to blame. We were too busy getting raided by Ottomans, having our children kidnapped, trained as slave soldiers, and then used for more raids against us. Or sold into harems. But I won't hold my breath waiting on any sympathy or condemnation of that.
You came out swinging for European innocence, so kindly enjoy your culpability.
Your claim that Japan was not expansionist simply shows a lack of familiarity with Japanese history and archaeology. There used to be Ainu populations even on Honshu, but the early Japanese (who had to a large degree come over from Korea and begun settling the Japanese isles in spite of an indigenous population there) kept pushing them further and further north until they were all gone; only on Hokkaido could the Ainu survive.
Comparing the Yamato expansion across Honshu to the European expansion across the Western and Southern Hemispheres is a difference of degree so great as to breach into a difference of quality. I'm sure the Ainu weren't particularly happy about their circumstances, but I figure that China, Korea, the Philippines, and much of Polynesia would beg to differ with the notion that Western influence did not substantially change the expanionist sentiments of "Nippon damashii".
This guy is the living proof of why the west is the best. Civilization is not something you should take for granted.
"He said that the Krahn tribe selects leaders based upon physical prowess rather than birthright. The selection process takes place through an annual fight:
The traditional fight was a no-holds-barred affair. The eventual victor was allowed to kill and maim to show his strength and bravery. The strongest or last man standing after the bloody contest will take over the birthright and the headship of the tribe."[8]"
General Butt Naked is a contemporary figure. The featured article is about the founding of the Liberian state, which began almost 200 years ago. If your comment had connected the unusual General Butt Naked to that, it would have been interesting, but just linking to some crazy guy's Wikipedia article because he's from the same country isn't, really.
No it’s like responding to an article about the founding fathers with an article discussing General Mattis. Not relevant but not that irrelevant plus an interesting piece of recent history.
Let's compromise and say it's like an article about Eddie Gallagher. Blahyi is a particularly sensationalistic and appalling character who gained infamy in the West thanks to one of VICE News' earliest documentaries. An interesting story, yes, but also tabloidized by VICE's characteristic edginess, and not really a major leader in the Liberian Civil War.
Most Americans don't know much about Africa, let alone Liberia. Our perceptions about it are often only informed by Nicolas Cage's Lord of War and the aforementioned VICE documentary, the latter which has led General Butt Naked to become somewhat of a meme. Yet Liberia is a country that the U.S. specifically was involved in its founding and development. It's rather unfair to the country to have one of its worst villains from one of its most traumatic eras be Americans' only impression of it. An unrepresentative association that dishonors a nation.
In fairness, no one else' comments are connected to what happened 200 years ago. We're all discussing contemporary Liberia. Some of us are not even discussing Liberia, but Africa in general. And Africa as a whole, is not like Liberia at all, it's extremely diverse and different from itself. Eswatini, Libya, Ethiopia, and Liberia couldn't be more different from each other. They're nothing alike.
Only if Charles Manson was still roaming free around the US and it's neighbours like if nothing had ever happened and nobody cared that he was an insane sadistic psycopath. General Butt Naked's story is an amazing glimpse in to what is Liberia, and Africa as a whole to some extent, today. To me that is very interesting.
Most countries have experienced strange miscarriages of justice, from Issei Sagawa in Japan, to any controversial figure from O.J. Simpson to George Zimmerman in the U.S., and if you want to get political, any number of elected, military, or intelligence leaders responsible for any number of violent conflicts in the past few decades.
We see this intersection between the American Black community and Africa again today in the growing sentiment amongst certain Black Americans to not only visit Africa, but consider moving there as well. Many youtube videos you can look at on this, but the biggest issue that comes up is how Africans in Africa share little of the fervent anti-colonial attitude prominent in the American Black community here.
There is genuine shock registered at how much many Africans are simply disinterested in explicitly raising questions around White privilege, how it even continues to be catered to in even typical hospitality settings.
Two articles made the frontpage of HN within the last 4 weeks whereby African writers in Britain and Africa, respectively, write to disparage the export of the Black American anti-colonial perspective, one going so far as to indicate an element of typical American cultural exceptionalism.
It seems the Black American community is alone both in its experience and response to the uniquely intensive and thoroughgoing racism of America, no matter how pervasive its cultural influence in the arts globally.
Too American to ever be (any one of the ethnicities identified as...) African, too "other" to ever be more than a second-class American, left alone with hundreds of years of cultural ressentiment at de facto segregation and disenfranchisement that has only recently found popular expression in the liberation of social discourse and media from establishment institutions.
I'm suddenly reminded of a joke a comedian whose name I can't recall told about how a white person is more comfortable with Africans from Africa than they are with the Black Americans that've been here for over 300 year, something like, to paraphrase, "You tell em your name is DeShawn, that's a wrap, but if you're 'Oluwafemi' they love you".
The Cameroonian Joel Embiid, the famous NBA player for the Philadelphia 76ers, famously recalls being able to convince students at the University of Kansas, where he played college basketball, that in Cameroon he lived near lions and had to fight with them constantly. Joel Embiid grew up in an upper middle-class suburb in his home country.
In speaking to Africans in the West, in general they share a very traditional view of the situation as many other immigrants do. Namely, to remember who you are, where you come from, who your people are, and many other things from homeland.
Some might say well troughway you’re cherry picking anecdotes to fit a point, there are many immigrants who don’t think this way. And that’s okay too - not everyone wants to be connected to their homeland. But it’s worth noting that we are composites of our ancestors, the places they grew up, the food they ate and how it affects our physical and mental health, and host of other things that we carry with us whether we want to or not.
> In speaking to Africans in the West, in general they share a very traditional view of the situation as many other immigrants do. Namely, to remember who you are, where you come from, who your people are, and many other things from homeland.
The point here isn't to say indigenous Africans are not woke or bear no interaction with (post-)colonialism, but that their cultural circumstances are just too distinct to provide much solace to the specific plight of Black Americans, surprised as some are when they move to or visit Africa and discover a perspective they imagined to be in more alignment with their own, as I mentioned above.
This distance is palpable in your own commentary that immigrants "remember who you are, where you come from, who your people are, and many other things from homeland." - such a sentence has little to offer to a Black American whose ancestors were physically and culturally displaced in an intractable way.
But this also has another edge to it, which the article also wishes to point out, that the "American-ness" of the Black community can lead to notions of whose perspective is more valid, again, highlighted in the substrate of YouTube commentary I've encountered.
It is true that most Black folk, just as in the article wrt Liberia, have zero interest in relocating to Africa and elect to struggle for whats owed to their ancestors' contribution to building this country, however the experience of this smaller community of Black American migrants throws light on an interesting aspect of the discussion from where I'm standing
> Africans in Africa share little of the fervent anti-colonial attitude prominent in the American Black community here.
Like who, Umkhonto we Sizwe?
Patrice Lumumba? The MPLA?
> African writers in Britain and Africa, respectively, write to disparage the export of the Black American anti-colonial perspective
Is this new? The South Africans had Buthelezi to go around the world criticizing the anti-apartheid movement, and there were ones before that.
Benedict Arnold ended up not sharing the anti-colonial attitude of his fellow Americans. Nor did Vidkun Quisling of his fellow Norwegians share anti-colonial attitudes. We are not unaware these people exist.
Also, if anti-colonial feelings in Africa are a black American export, I guess that means the 1879 victory of the Zulus over two British columns in the battle of Isandlwana were a black American export.
There is strong anti-colonialist sentiment still in Africa today. Again, I believe ignoring it and putting our heads in the sand is not the right way to go. You have to face down ethno-nationalists, or you end up in a very bad place. Just as you have to challenge ethno-nationalists in the US, you need to challenge them in Africa. In the end, they are bad for societies they operate in.
>Like who, Umkhonto we Sizwe? Patrice Lumumba? The MPLA?
We're talking ground-floor interactions from what I've seen that obviously do not speak to any kind of unanimity but a surprising extent nonetheless. One such video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkKi1vC_IEA
> Is this new? The South Africans had Buthelezi to go around the world criticizing the anti-apartheid movement, and there were ones before that.
The writers in question weren't criticizing the modern anti-racism movement in America, however, but the form of its response and its presumptions. Perhaps a minute difference but one nonetheless.
> are simply disinterested in explicitly raising questions around White privilege
Most probably because many of them haven't seen a white person in their entire life, so we should stop making it about the "white man" only. I have a close friend who happens to be "white" and who went to teach in Burundi this start of the year and he told me that people were stopping him on the street to take photos with because they had never seen a white man in real life (or not from that close, anyway).
> Most probably because many of them haven't seen a white person in their entire life.
Any African who is intellectual enough to possibly participate in the international debate mentioned above, will almost certainly be part of a cosmopolitan class that has interacted with white people. Also, West African countries have a prominent Lebanese population that runs import–export based businesses like supermarkets, Senegal has a huge community of French retirees, and Zimbabwe and South Africa still have their white populations. So, no, Africans are not as isolated as you suggest.
> intellectual enough to possibly participate in the international debate mentioned above
Non-intellectual people can and do question white privilege stuff in the United States, saying that you have to be "intellectual enough" to have that type of conversation sounds very classist to me (am not native English speaker, maybe that's a better word for it).
That Lebanese population will most probably not be labeled as "white" in most of the Anglo world, first of all in the United States, while South Africa is only one country among many dozens of African countries (I choose to ignore white presence in Zimbabwe because Mugabe). There is indeed a sizeable French expat community in many African countries but they are afraid of physically getting out of their bubbles, usually located in a posh district in the respective country's capital city. My friend (also French) was not afraid of getting out of that bubble hence his direct interactions with people who had almost never interacted directly with a white person before.
Being involved in an international debate like the OP mentioned necessarily means having access to written English or French as a medium of communication and to telecommunications. Those Africans who can do so, as I said, are likely to be of a class that has interacted with whites at least occasionally in their lives.
Lebanese people are historically considered "white" in the USA, at least the Maronite Christian community. Most of the Lebanese who moved to the USA in the late 19th and early 20th century are long since assimilated to the white mainstream.
French retirees in Senegal and Cote d'Ivoire are certainly not limited to a posh neighbourhood in the capital and can be found spread out across the country. Dakar is a dismal place, and certainly retired foreigners find Senegal's small towns and villages more relaxed and peaceful.
This is not a subject where mention of "my friend said" is helpful. One needs first-hand experience with Africa (and experience outside the expat bubble that is all that some foreigner workers see).
My friend lived through that, and he showed me photos to prove it, I couldn’t see any other white person in the remote places from which he was sending those photos. Not that Bujumbura was full with white people. Maybe Senegal is the exception that proves the rule reguarding Western Africa, but another friend who lived in Abidjan (still does, lost contact with her) had the same expat in a bubble experience. Again, this was not a matter of “my friend said”, as we were Skyping in late 2010 after some elections there and as bullets were flying around even in the posh area (one of her EU colleagues got killed by a stray bullet as she was staying inside her apartment, by the window).
I mantain my opinion about the Lebanese and how they’re viewed in the US, heck, the Italians were not seen as white-white until very recently while the Mexicans or the Argentinians still aren’t.
I don't know if I can entirely agree with this point. The truth is, Africa is a continent, and not a country.
Individual countries have completely different political and economic priorities.
And as recently as, well... now... the South African government are working towards the implementation of a land ownership reform policy which appears to be remarkably similar to the one Robert Mugabe was famous for.
As anti colonial / western sentiment goes, it doesn't get much more concrete than that.
I think acephal is ill-informed on this subject. I've seen rising anti-Western (and anti-asian btw) sentiment across the continent, especially throughout sub-saharan Africa. As a matter of full disclosure, I think it's a problem. Africa was the last place in the world where ethno-nationalism hadn't swept through, and the past year or so has seen it sweep the continent with a vengeance. Even white South Africans, I think, would admit that there are serious problems in this regard. Panafricanism is a thing, to ignore it and say it doesn't exist is just sticking your head in the sand. (Pan-Africanism in the traditional sense is not bad btw. It would even be helpful. I'm talking about the brand of pan-Africanism that demands a harmful kind of ethno-exclusivity. No one has an issue with the pan-africanist tenets of strengthening links between African nations and inviting slave descendants to move to Africa. Which I support as keys to Africa's development.)
Acephal is also mistaken in thinking young Africans do not think like American blacks. Their exposure to the West, and unfortunately, to the US, has given many first hand experience in, for instance, police behavior. The ones who return to Africa to tell the tale are, if anything, more radical than American blacks.
The good news is that I think the rising ethno-nationalism in Africa is very much a reaction to the rising ethno-nationalism in the rest of the world. If it could be checked elsewhere, it may tamp down in Africa as better stories about treatment make it back to the populations of the various nations in Africa. Right now, the stories of what happens outside of Africa have turned decidedly negative. That's the issue driving sentiment in my opinion.
If you look at what happened to popular anticolonialist African leaders you should get a clearer picture of why the surviving options seem to be either ambivalence to the topic, or paranoid totalitarianism.
> The Cameroonian Joel Embiid, the famous NBA player for the Philadelphia 76ers, famously recalls being able to convince students at the University of Kansas, where he played college basketball, that in Cameroon he lived near lions and had to fight with them constantly. Joel Embiid grew up in an upper middle-class suburb in his home country.
As opposed to Dikembe Mutumbo, who has actually killed a lion. (It was asleep when he did, but still...)
> the liberation of social discourse and media from establishment institutions.
Liberation? Establishment institutions drive social discourse, there's no need to be "liberated" from them. From the New York Times 1619 project, to Hollywood movies like 12 Years a Slave or the Watchmen series, to the various grievance studies in schools and universities.
Please don't pretend you're the plucky rebels when giant corporations cloak themselves in BLM logos.
The level of cognitive dissonance on the left today is amazing, they really still think they are the anti-establishment guys. Add HackerNews to that. Any comment on the right side of Mao is downvoted to oblivion around here.
Too American to ever be (any one of the ethnicities identified as...) African, too "other" to ever be more than a second-class American,
That's an unfortunate way to put things - as if there was a generic America. "White America" and "Black America" are each inextricable parts of America. If Black American culture is taken a "second class", and it often is, that is because of the continuation of white supremacy.
Edit: And blanket statements on the attitudes of African Americans generally are unfortunate. What is visible as the supposed attitude of group X is by no means the universal or even predominant attitude. Your post is interesting for describing some ironic contrasts but problematic for trying to universalize them.
> Many youtube videos you can look at on this, but the biggest issue that comes up is how Africans in Africa share little of the fervent anti-colonial attitude prominent in the American Black community here.
You have to blame a lot if not most of this on a lot of wholesale slaughter during colonialism of the elements who resisted it, and a lot of the elevation of particular ethnic groups into elite classes to serve as local middlemen for foreign business concerns (mostly extractive industries.) The elites of those countries are the people we see on youtube. Their families did pretty well under colonialism, and they think of the people who complain about it (in their home countries probably other ethnic groups, or non-Christians, or Sunnis) as Luddite terrorists who need to be killed.
Africa was a heavy source of anti-colonial radicalism during the cold war, and those sentiments still exist. Those are just not the elements we elevate. They, like black Americans, are usually the subject being discussed, not the people who get to be part of the conversation.
> Africa was a heavy source of anti-colonial radicalism during the cold war.
However, the political problems and impoverishment that accompanied the most drastic efforts to throw off colonial ties, did scare some other countries into not going that far. For example, after other West African countries saw Guinea become the first nation to completely end French ties, but then fall into poverty and have no one to turn to but Maoist China, they reflected that perhaps France’s role in the region was not so bad after all. At present, it is not at all unusual to hear a Senegalese person expressly point to Guinea-Bissau as an example of anti-colonialism gone wrong.
“ Decolonization has reemerged as a compelling vision of a better future. Once again, the broader issues of colonialism, capitalism, racism, Euro- centrism, and patriarchy have been pushed onto the public agenda as the incomplete business of an ongoing decolonizing project.”
— Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni from “ African Decolonization’s Past
and Present Trajectories”, 2020
I worked a month in Liberia to try building a disease dashboard for the ministry of health. It was maybe the most surreal place i have been. You could buy strong opiates over the counter at the pharmacy so i was high af all the time, wich helped ease anxiety and boredom from not being able to leave the secured flat i was assigned most of the time, but did not exactly make the experience less surreal. The whole country has like one ambulance and one Hotel for diplomats with a "western" restaurant and coffee place, i was allowed to go there between 1000 and 1700, but only taking the biggest road and if it got close to 17 you could already feel the mood swing and your hair stand up.
The sight of disability due to theoretically curable diseases like polio or forms of blindness was sadly common.
I did not find anyone who admitted to eating a human heart in the civil war, but one guy stoped talking and got a blank stare into the void and huge sweat pearls forming on his forehead, but i was not sure if it was due to war memories or because his friends tried to scam me, i preferred not to inquire further.
There was no real powergrid as the dam was still not repaired after the war so all important places had a diesel generator and usually had one or two power outages a day when there is some switchover or too late refill (i think). Especially funny in the hospital at night, when it gets pitch black and all machines turn off and the eery silence is only filled by the sound of vomiting and sounds of people in serious pain.
My Boss was an alcoholic and kind of comic savage who after a certain level of drunkenness would start hitting random guys on the ass and pointing to me when they turned around because he found it hilarious you can go to jail for being gay.
Obviously not directly, the matters developed quite complex. The early forms of slavery and "freed slave ruling class" co-evolved and mixed with existing clan systems into a system of so called "secret societies" that are active until today. There is still a strong correlation of some of these societies with access to wealth and power (I guess this is what your question pointed to...). However the civil war with its war lord groups and the main political fighting fronts stirred this up further and created new inter-twined power-structures. Things are further complicated by a general fear to talk about them or investigate the exact situation (hence the name "secret" society). It was not uncommon to find someone who investigated and asked too many questions without a head in front of a government building. If I remember correctly, I even had to sign a contract before being deployed to never mention secret societies or ask or talk to anyone about them. The main criticism apart from inequality to access of opportunity and intransparency were that some groups still practice genital mutilation of girls and enforce strong extremely conservative initiation and gender roles as well as problematic medical practices and superstition.
From mid-2016 to mid-2019 I drove through 35 countries in Africa. I spent a month in Congo (both), Angola, Mali, Sudan, Burundi, Nigeria, etc. etc. [1] I skipped SL and Liberia due to the relentless rain, though I bumped into plenty of other people driving around that went to both.
While it's obviously a stark contrast to Silicon Valley, from what I saw and heard, these days it's not nearly what you're describing.
I arrived 4 weeks after the last case of the ebola epidemic so probably around May 2016. Liberia is (as far as i heard) not really comparable to SL, Nigeria or most other "more civilised" african countries. Even black colleagues from Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Kenia who were deployed at the same time experienced a culture shock (though not quite as extreme), so neither "africa in general" nor the racial background can explain the experience, i think it was really a uniquely weird place on earth. But the country life is probably quite different to Monrovia so there may be a huge gap in experience of people you met that just drove through some nature and village. As i had to work all the time anyways i did not mind the rain too much and it was usually on time like a clockwork and maybe one or 2 hours a day max. As far as my understanding goes, there was no such thing as real tourism, you could not just book a flight to Liberia without family ties or an invitation by an NGO or Government with a reason, but that may have been due to lockdown from ebola.
I worked for an NGO at the time. The main work started remotely during the ebola epidemic and focused on building anything that helped getting it under control. Funding came mainly from CDC and bill and melinda gates foundation. After the epidemic was under control the Idea was to take as much of the momentum from the ebola response and channel it into a) polio eradication, b) malaria control/outbreak insights and c) preparing for the next ebola or ebola like epidemic that would surely come. It became apparent that remote work would not work out without more hands on experience, we also wanted to train local developers to be on the project and also it was impossible to really understand the mixture of local politics and frontline situation of the endusers in hospitals/villages and the ministry. I was asked to go to help get a health dashboard project on track and show our commitment to build a local team. It was also a matter of team dynamics as the Lead Dev there was slowly loosing his mind (after 2 years there) feeling rather isolated and overwhelmed with all the work. As the situation in north Africa was really worrying me after around 12 or so of our frontline workers were killed by boko haram, i was really happy to be asked to Liberia instead, where i could show commitment but also be free from that form of terrorism.
The malaria medication was also really weird and drove some of us totally nuts because it induced the most horrific and lucid nightmares imaginable. Imagine dreaming to drown/ being chased/ killed or falling down holes every night until waking up in sweat without orientation. My boss welcomed me from the airport by telling me he was just that day released from hospital after having malaria because he could not take the nightmares anymore and stopped taking the meds. They did not tell me so I would not worry during my preparations... Apparently the hospital refused to release him at first and wanted to evacuate him because his liver was so fucked up they thought it was destroyed by malaria. He then said no thats because he is an alcoholic and its his normal fucked up liver so they let him go and he started working immediately and still somehow had more energy than me.
When working for NGOs the put you in really weird situations that don't allow you close to people and make lots of money for their security arms.
I backpacked for a month through Liberia. It is a really interesting country. From Monrovia, one of the sleepier capitals in Western Africa, to Harbel some would call it an exploitative plantation for Firestone rubber, to Harper a former capital that is still hard to reach from the capital. Just getting to Harper took one day of shared taxi, one day of hitch-hiking with a UN guy, and a long day of mudding through logging roads in a hired truck. But we made it. I even saw the new soccer star president when he visited Buchannan.
You can feel that it is less developed than the surrounding countries and the war has ripped apart a lot of the inter community trust. Americans have been sucking resources out, and now Chinese businessmen are doing the same.
related: Africville was a colony founded in Nova Scotia, Canada. It was slowly destroyed by the municipal government.
"From the mid-19th century, the City of Halifax located its least desirable facilities in the Africville area, where the people had little political power and property values were low. A prison was built there in 1853, an infectious disease hospital in 1870, as well as a slaughterhouse, and a depository for fecal waste from nearby Russellville."
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] thread>Japan, China
They weren't expansionist. It should be noted that these tendencies were predicated on the West's unwillingness to perceive them as equals, with full respect for their sovereignty.
>India
From the Wikipedia article on the caste system (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India):
"Although the varnas and jatis have pre-modern origins, the caste system as it exists today is the result of developments during the post-Mughal period and the British colonial regime, which made caste organisation a central mechanism of administration."
"The British colonial era census caste tables, states Susan Bayly, "ranked, standardised and cross-referenced jati listings for Indians on principles similar to zoology and botanical classifications, aiming to establish who was superior to whom by virtue of their supposed purity, occupational origins and collective moral worth"."
>Aztecs
You wiped them out. They're the quintessential example of the oppressive and destructive nature of colonialism, with its effect on their society impossible to ascertain because that society collapsed when the genocide happened.
However, if you consider Mexico a successor state, then yeah, the Spanish imported a race- and skin color-based caste system that replicated white/Western supremacy by putting full-blooded indigenous people on the bottom.
Sorry, "we" didn't have time to get any colonies - go find a Spaniard to blame. We were too busy getting raided by Ottomans, having our children kidnapped, trained as slave soldiers, and then used for more raids against us. Or sold into harems. But I won't hold my breath waiting on any sympathy or condemnation of that.
And elevating the expansionist, slave-owning, human-sacrificing-on-unprecedented-scale Aztec empire to some pedestal of egalitarian virtue, just because they were later destroyed by the Spanish, could not be more ridiculous. How do you imagine China reached its size before it stopped being expansionist? What do you think "subdue" means in the following passage?
Though the unified reign of the First Qin Emperor lasted only 12 years, he managed to subdue great parts of what constitutes the core of the Han Chinese homeland [1]
But I want to draw specific attention to your comments about India, since it's a very common type of argument. From that same wikipedia page:
History: Vedic period (1500–1000 BCE): The dasas were frequent allies of the Aryan tribes, and they were probably assimilated into the Aryan society, giving rise to a class distinction. Many dasas were however in a servile position, giving rise to the eventual meaning of dasa as servant or slave.
Already they had a class system and oppression, yet the British Raj was still three thousand years away. But you are correct, contact with the British did change them. Contact of any two civilizations ends up changing them. So everything bad that is to follow, we can blame on the British.
Just like everything bad the Spanish did, we can blame on the Moors that invaded them. I'm sure if we dig further, we'll find someone that attacked the Moors, so they aren't at fault either. We just have to follow this chain of aggression, until one day, we'll find the civilization that first attacked another, that first oppressed a class of people, and we can blame everything bad on them.
Or do you only apply this logic to Europe, and hold everyone else blameless?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_China#Imperial_Chin...
I apply this logic singularly to Europe because the colonial history of Europe is singular in its direct influence on states it came into contact with. You cannot talk about modern China's global ambitions without speaking about the humiliating and existentially-dire experiences they had at the hands of the British and Japanese, especially since so much of their contemporary rhetoric specifically mentions these injuries in championing a proud "China of the future." You cannot talk about the perpetuation of caste-based oppression (expanding in particularly European ways) in India, even after the introduction of Enlightenment ideals, without talking about how Western ideas about race and hierarchy (not simply role) helped to justify that perpetuation. And you really, really shouldn't be conjuring the ur-racist canard of Aztec "human sacrifice on an 'unprecedented scale'" without acknowledging the massive (dwarfing) death toll of the Mexican conquest - let alone those associated with witch hunts, inquisitions, and crusades (i.e., similarly religiously-driven mass homicide), or with the other abominations akin to mass human sacrifice cause primarily caused by European hubris (several genocides, including the one in the Congo, as well as both world wars).
The reductive nature of your "it's answered aggressions all the way down" approach belies the agency nations and states and rulers and philosophers have in structuring their doctrine and action. However, if you see any truth in it, you must then acknowledge the inevitable influence a de facto vassal state must receive from its oppressor. Combining the two, you're left with either a chronicle of amoral coinflips, or what's more realistic to me: a few thousand years of power dictating as it will, and often to devastating and immoral ends. Maybe the world would suck less if colonial Europe hadn't been such a d••k. Do you disagree with that?
>Sorry, "we" didn't have time to get any colonies - go find a Spaniard to blame. We were too busy getting raided by Ottomans, having our children kidnapped, trained as slave soldiers, and then used for more raids against us. Or sold into harems. But I won't hold my breath waiting on any sympathy or condemnation of that.
You came out swinging for European innocence, so kindly enjoy your culpability.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Butt_Naked
"He said that the Krahn tribe selects leaders based upon physical prowess rather than birthright. The selection process takes place through an annual fight:
The traditional fight was a no-holds-barred affair. The eventual victor was allowed to kill and maim to show his strength and bravery. The strongest or last man standing after the bloody contest will take over the birthright and the headship of the tribe."[8]"
So Black Panther was right all along...
Seriously. Knowing about this shit is really important for broadening your understanding of the world we're a part of.
Most Americans don't know much about Africa, let alone Liberia. Our perceptions about it are often only informed by Nicolas Cage's Lord of War and the aforementioned VICE documentary, the latter which has led General Butt Naked to become somewhat of a meme. Yet Liberia is a country that the U.S. specifically was involved in its founding and development. It's rather unfair to the country to have one of its worst villains from one of its most traumatic eras be Americans' only impression of it. An unrepresentative association that dishonors a nation.
There is genuine shock registered at how much many Africans are simply disinterested in explicitly raising questions around White privilege, how it even continues to be catered to in even typical hospitality settings.
Two articles made the frontpage of HN within the last 4 weeks whereby African writers in Britain and Africa, respectively, write to disparage the export of the Black American anti-colonial perspective, one going so far as to indicate an element of typical American cultural exceptionalism.
It seems the Black American community is alone both in its experience and response to the uniquely intensive and thoroughgoing racism of America, no matter how pervasive its cultural influence in the arts globally.
Too American to ever be (any one of the ethnicities identified as...) African, too "other" to ever be more than a second-class American, left alone with hundreds of years of cultural ressentiment at de facto segregation and disenfranchisement that has only recently found popular expression in the liberation of social discourse and media from establishment institutions.
I'm suddenly reminded of a joke a comedian whose name I can't recall told about how a white person is more comfortable with Africans from Africa than they are with the Black Americans that've been here for over 300 year, something like, to paraphrase, "You tell em your name is DeShawn, that's a wrap, but if you're 'Oluwafemi' they love you".
The Cameroonian Joel Embiid, the famous NBA player for the Philadelphia 76ers, famously recalls being able to convince students at the University of Kansas, where he played college basketball, that in Cameroon he lived near lions and had to fight with them constantly. Joel Embiid grew up in an upper middle-class suburb in his home country.
Some might say well troughway you’re cherry picking anecdotes to fit a point, there are many immigrants who don’t think this way. And that’s okay too - not everyone wants to be connected to their homeland. But it’s worth noting that we are composites of our ancestors, the places they grew up, the food they ate and how it affects our physical and mental health, and host of other things that we carry with us whether we want to or not.
The point here isn't to say indigenous Africans are not woke or bear no interaction with (post-)colonialism, but that their cultural circumstances are just too distinct to provide much solace to the specific plight of Black Americans, surprised as some are when they move to or visit Africa and discover a perspective they imagined to be in more alignment with their own, as I mentioned above.
This distance is palpable in your own commentary that immigrants "remember who you are, where you come from, who your people are, and many other things from homeland." - such a sentence has little to offer to a Black American whose ancestors were physically and culturally displaced in an intractable way.
But this also has another edge to it, which the article also wishes to point out, that the "American-ness" of the Black community can lead to notions of whose perspective is more valid, again, highlighted in the substrate of YouTube commentary I've encountered.
It is true that most Black folk, just as in the article wrt Liberia, have zero interest in relocating to Africa and elect to struggle for whats owed to their ancestors' contribution to building this country, however the experience of this smaller community of Black American migrants throws light on an interesting aspect of the discussion from where I'm standing
Like who, Umkhonto we Sizwe? Patrice Lumumba? The MPLA?
> African writers in Britain and Africa, respectively, write to disparage the export of the Black American anti-colonial perspective
Is this new? The South Africans had Buthelezi to go around the world criticizing the anti-apartheid movement, and there were ones before that.
Benedict Arnold ended up not sharing the anti-colonial attitude of his fellow Americans. Nor did Vidkun Quisling of his fellow Norwegians share anti-colonial attitudes. We are not unaware these people exist.
We're talking ground-floor interactions from what I've seen that obviously do not speak to any kind of unanimity but a surprising extent nonetheless. One such video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkKi1vC_IEA
> Is this new? The South Africans had Buthelezi to go around the world criticizing the anti-apartheid movement, and there were ones before that.
The writers in question weren't criticizing the modern anti-racism movement in America, however, but the form of its response and its presumptions. Perhaps a minute difference but one nonetheless.
Most probably because many of them haven't seen a white person in their entire life, so we should stop making it about the "white man" only. I have a close friend who happens to be "white" and who went to teach in Burundi this start of the year and he told me that people were stopping him on the street to take photos with because they had never seen a white man in real life (or not from that close, anyway).
Any African who is intellectual enough to possibly participate in the international debate mentioned above, will almost certainly be part of a cosmopolitan class that has interacted with white people. Also, West African countries have a prominent Lebanese population that runs import–export based businesses like supermarkets, Senegal has a huge community of French retirees, and Zimbabwe and South Africa still have their white populations. So, no, Africans are not as isolated as you suggest.
Non-intellectual people can and do question white privilege stuff in the United States, saying that you have to be "intellectual enough" to have that type of conversation sounds very classist to me (am not native English speaker, maybe that's a better word for it).
That Lebanese population will most probably not be labeled as "white" in most of the Anglo world, first of all in the United States, while South Africa is only one country among many dozens of African countries (I choose to ignore white presence in Zimbabwe because Mugabe). There is indeed a sizeable French expat community in many African countries but they are afraid of physically getting out of their bubbles, usually located in a posh district in the respective country's capital city. My friend (also French) was not afraid of getting out of that bubble hence his direct interactions with people who had almost never interacted directly with a white person before.
Lebanese people are historically considered "white" in the USA, at least the Maronite Christian community. Most of the Lebanese who moved to the USA in the late 19th and early 20th century are long since assimilated to the white mainstream.
French retirees in Senegal and Cote d'Ivoire are certainly not limited to a posh neighbourhood in the capital and can be found spread out across the country. Dakar is a dismal place, and certainly retired foreigners find Senegal's small towns and villages more relaxed and peaceful.
This is not a subject where mention of "my friend said" is helpful. One needs first-hand experience with Africa (and experience outside the expat bubble that is all that some foreigner workers see).
I mantain my opinion about the Lebanese and how they’re viewed in the US, heck, the Italians were not seen as white-white until very recently while the Mexicans or the Argentinians still aren’t.
Individual countries have completely different political and economic priorities.
And as recently as, well... now... the South African government are working towards the implementation of a land ownership reform policy which appears to be remarkably similar to the one Robert Mugabe was famous for.
As anti colonial / western sentiment goes, it doesn't get much more concrete than that.
I think acephal is ill-informed on this subject. I've seen rising anti-Western (and anti-asian btw) sentiment across the continent, especially throughout sub-saharan Africa. As a matter of full disclosure, I think it's a problem. Africa was the last place in the world where ethno-nationalism hadn't swept through, and the past year or so has seen it sweep the continent with a vengeance. Even white South Africans, I think, would admit that there are serious problems in this regard. Panafricanism is a thing, to ignore it and say it doesn't exist is just sticking your head in the sand. (Pan-Africanism in the traditional sense is not bad btw. It would even be helpful. I'm talking about the brand of pan-Africanism that demands a harmful kind of ethno-exclusivity. No one has an issue with the pan-africanist tenets of strengthening links between African nations and inviting slave descendants to move to Africa. Which I support as keys to Africa's development.)
Acephal is also mistaken in thinking young Africans do not think like American blacks. Their exposure to the West, and unfortunately, to the US, has given many first hand experience in, for instance, police behavior. The ones who return to Africa to tell the tale are, if anything, more radical than American blacks.
The good news is that I think the rising ethno-nationalism in Africa is very much a reaction to the rising ethno-nationalism in the rest of the world. If it could be checked elsewhere, it may tamp down in Africa as better stories about treatment make it back to the populations of the various nations in Africa. Right now, the stories of what happens outside of Africa have turned decidedly negative. That's the issue driving sentiment in my opinion.
And Hacker News is not the place for comments like that.
As opposed to Dikembe Mutumbo, who has actually killed a lion. (It was asleep when he did, but still...)
Manute Bol did the same!
Liberation? Establishment institutions drive social discourse, there's no need to be "liberated" from them. From the New York Times 1619 project, to Hollywood movies like 12 Years a Slave or the Watchmen series, to the various grievance studies in schools and universities.
Please don't pretend you're the plucky rebels when giant corporations cloak themselves in BLM logos.
That's an unfortunate way to put things - as if there was a generic America. "White America" and "Black America" are each inextricable parts of America. If Black American culture is taken a "second class", and it often is, that is because of the continuation of white supremacy.
Edit: And blanket statements on the attitudes of African Americans generally are unfortunate. What is visible as the supposed attitude of group X is by no means the universal or even predominant attitude. Your post is interesting for describing some ironic contrasts but problematic for trying to universalize them.
You have to blame a lot if not most of this on a lot of wholesale slaughter during colonialism of the elements who resisted it, and a lot of the elevation of particular ethnic groups into elite classes to serve as local middlemen for foreign business concerns (mostly extractive industries.) The elites of those countries are the people we see on youtube. Their families did pretty well under colonialism, and they think of the people who complain about it (in their home countries probably other ethnic groups, or non-Christians, or Sunnis) as Luddite terrorists who need to be killed.
Africa was a heavy source of anti-colonial radicalism during the cold war, and those sentiments still exist. Those are just not the elements we elevate. They, like black Americans, are usually the subject being discussed, not the people who get to be part of the conversation.
This isn't unique to Africa.
However, the political problems and impoverishment that accompanied the most drastic efforts to throw off colonial ties, did scare some other countries into not going that far. For example, after other West African countries saw Guinea become the first nation to completely end French ties, but then fall into poverty and have no one to turn to but Maoist China, they reflected that perhaps France’s role in the region was not so bad after all. At present, it is not at all unusual to hear a Senegalese person expressly point to Guinea-Bissau as an example of anti-colonialism gone wrong.
Yes, there Black people from Africa, from all over Africa that are still thinking about decolonization. Today.
A couple of interesting pieces:
https://abebabirhane.wordpress.com/2019/07/10/the-algorithmi...
“ Decolonization has reemerged as a compelling vision of a better future. Once again, the broader issues of colonialism, capitalism, racism, Euro- centrism, and patriarchy have been pushed onto the public agenda as the incomplete business of an ongoing decolonizing project.”
— Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni from “ African Decolonization’s Past and Present Trajectories”, 2020
The sight of disability due to theoretically curable diseases like polio or forms of blindness was sadly common.
I did not find anyone who admitted to eating a human heart in the civil war, but one guy stoped talking and got a blank stare into the void and huge sweat pearls forming on his forehead, but i was not sure if it was due to war memories or because his friends tried to scam me, i preferred not to inquire further.
There was no real powergrid as the dam was still not repaired after the war so all important places had a diesel generator and usually had one or two power outages a day when there is some switchover or too late refill (i think). Especially funny in the hospital at night, when it gets pitch black and all machines turn off and the eery silence is only filled by the sound of vomiting and sounds of people in serious pain.
My Boss was an alcoholic and kind of comic savage who after a certain level of drunkenness would start hitting random guys on the ass and pointing to me when they turned around because he found it hilarious you can go to jail for being gay.
From mid-2016 to mid-2019 I drove through 35 countries in Africa. I spent a month in Congo (both), Angola, Mali, Sudan, Burundi, Nigeria, etc. etc. [1] I skipped SL and Liberia due to the relentless rain, though I bumped into plenty of other people driving around that went to both.
While it's obviously a stark contrast to Silicon Valley, from what I saw and heard, these days it's not nearly what you're describing.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waQGUz0Z97Y&list=PLNiCe5roBX...
I backpacked for a month through Liberia. It is a really interesting country. From Monrovia, one of the sleepier capitals in Western Africa, to Harbel some would call it an exploitative plantation for Firestone rubber, to Harper a former capital that is still hard to reach from the capital. Just getting to Harper took one day of shared taxi, one day of hitch-hiking with a UN guy, and a long day of mudding through logging roads in a hired truck. But we made it. I even saw the new soccer star president when he visited Buchannan.
You can feel that it is less developed than the surrounding countries and the war has ripped apart a lot of the inter community trust. Americans have been sucking resources out, and now Chinese businessmen are doing the same.
"From the mid-19th century, the City of Halifax located its least desirable facilities in the Africville area, where the people had little political power and property values were low. A prison was built there in 1853, an infectious disease hospital in 1870, as well as a slaughterhouse, and a depository for fecal waste from nearby Russellville."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africville