President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s recent engagement with the US ambassador in Nigeria provides avenue to be optimistic that Africa and indeed the entire black race worldwide may be getting an astute defender after all. The deft diplomatic language used ‘scolds’ America’s stand on her policy of near zero investment in our economy. Yet they would not want us to allow China’s inroad into our economy. Rather, they want us to rely on aids and loan from World Bank and agencies like UNDP both of which are under their firm control.
However, the object of this article is the attempt of new players like China and Russia to win over Africa from older players like France, United Kingdom, and in some capacity US; either by subterfuge, loan power, force and indoctrination.
Indoctrination is perhaps the most dangerous weapon that has been used over the years against the African man and woman. Starting with words like “black”, “third world” and lately “global south” we should also briefly look at blackmail, assassination threats, visa ban and systemic discrimination.
First, how did the word “third world came to be?
Research shows that on August 14, 1952, a French demographer named Alfred Sauvy published an article in the French magazine L’Observateur using the term “Third World” for the first time to refer to countries that were ‘not aligned’ with either Western bloc regard as the “First World” or the Eastern bloc termed “Second World” during the cold war era.
In actual fact, Sauvy’s use of the term was a reference to the Third Estate (tiers etat) the commoners of France who, before and during the French revolution openly opposed the clergy, and the nobles who composed the First Estate and the Second Estate respectively.
In other words, Alfred Sauvy saw the Africans tagged the “Third World” as being exploited by the ‘First World and the “Second World” countries and he called for them to unite and fight for their own interest.
Meanwhile, the word “Third World” quickly stuck by design as journalists, academics and politicians worldwide including Africans began to refer or used it to describe people of Africa in the main. People like Late Nkrumah and Late Chief Obafemi Awolowo and many other scholars in Africa and abroad pushed back. The word soon became offensive and outdated and grossly inadequate leading to it being swapped with the word “Developing World”.
But the ‘developing world’ concoction could not do what the categorization of Africans as the people of the third world could do to their psyche as a race. When your culture had been destroyed religious wise, and your language taken away and described as “vernacular” and banned in the primary schools in your own towns, then you know that its calculated effort of psychological subjugation.
Ironically, an American writer known as an activist of the new left, Carl Ogelsby coined the term “Global South” in 1969 apparently to ‘expose’ what he called the ‘North’s’ dominance of the “Global South’, by force of arms and indoctrination promoting and using key words like “Third World”.
Again, the concept of the word “Global South” was hijacked by some interested parties who thinks such a word would be sellable to elites in Africa, Asia and the Latin America at time when many of them were calling for a new International Order.
By the 1980, the Brandt Report put together by an International Commission headed by Willy Brandt; the former West German Chancellor put a seal on the word “Global South”.
The kernel of the document was to distinguish between countries with comparatively higher GDP per capita and the poorer ones. In other words, the countries with higher GDP fell into the Northern Hemisphere while the poorer ones fell into the Southern Hemisphere and in their own wisdom, hence “The Brandt Line”.
The problem here is that the imagination boundary line akin to 1844 Berlin Conference lines ran from Rio Grande in Brazil into the Gulf of Mexico, goes all the way across the Atlantic Ocean through the Mediterranean Sea and over the central Asia into the Pacific Ocean. The drawn line became problematic in that India designated as part of the Global South lie in whole in the Northern Hemisphere.
On the other hand, Australia and New Zealand are both located below the Equator but the Brandt Document says they are part of the rich “North”.
Nomenclature or codification or even classification is very key to putting a people or a race down. Such is “black”.
According to dictionary account; the word black means “lacking hue and brightness, absorbing light without any of the rays composing it. It is also characterized by absence of light; enveloped in darkness. What this means is that the word was deliberately chosen and well sold even to the black man himself. Evil, death, grief, mourning, the occult, mystery, bleakness, heaviness, depression rebellion and fear are words associated with the word “Black”.
On the other side, everything possible had been done from just before the slave trade to teach children of the white man that they are superior to the black race. Lies like “tails are hidden under their clothes were told and that we are a rung above the monkey was widely believed. These as you know are also the indoctrination of the white children and their parents. For example, what is painted in the mind of Americans, white, red, black or yellow is the famous phrase “I cannot tell a lie” by the first President of America, George Washington.
This was a deliberate tale promoted to impress people about Washington’s honesty and moral compass.
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But George Washington repeatedly lied about his work in hunting down escaped slaves and evils that befell them especially the fact that Washington’s denture were made in part from teeth pulled from living slaves. Same was with Thomas Jefferson whose descendants continually denied the relationship between the enslaved Sally Hemings.
A century later, the revelation that came from DNA evidence forced them to acknowledge the relationship but insisting it’s not rape but consensual.
Actually, Sally Hemings was raped by Thomas Jefferson. Her mother, Betty was also raped by Jefferson’s father-in-law and her grandmother was by one of their friends as well.
Think back how Africans were held in the hold of the slave-ship, thrown aboard at the slightest fever perceived to be contagious and how their lips were drilled and padlocked in order to prevent them from eating crops on their farms.
On top of all these, consider the background of Florida guideline furor that broke last month in declaring that black people benefited from enslavement.
For 200 years, Florida was a slave state and the legacies of white supremacy continue to guide and shape the state’s culture and institutions.
How can a guideline in 2023 make several claims about the benefit of slavery for black people; as in “it provided a way for Africans to come to America” and that “it helped teach black people valuable skills, a more diverse America and a strong community for blacks in the US.
These claims are not supported by historical evidence; instead slavery should be seen for what it was- a brutal and dehumanizing system that caused immense suffering for black people.
As a matter of fact, slaves were often beaten, raped and murdered and were denied basic human rights. They were made or forced at gun point to work long hours in dangerous conditions without pay or care.
I have taken you back in time in view of what is happening in recent times. Unless we see the history of slavery for what it is and teach our children every stage of slavery, colonization, neo-colonization and economic exploitation, it will be hard for us to see the subtle attempt to retake, re-colonize Africa for what it is.
In my next column Sunday, I will continue with the way leaders were imposed on us by foreign powers.
How they are blackmailed and why stubborn ones are assassinated by hired black corporations or private armies.
How is it that about 2,700 tons of Uranium is produced in Niger Republic every year and France is paying 80 cents per kilogram of Uranium for years when it sells on the world market for $215dollars per kilogram?
Now that the military rulers have told France to pay $215dollars per kilo without any options; what gives?
