PSYCHOLOGISTS often warn that a brutalised infant will eventually become a brutal adult.
In 1637 over 700 men, women and children of the Pequot Tribe had gathered for their annual Green Corn Festival in North America.
As Indians slept they were surrounded by English mercenaries who ordered them to come outside.
Those who came out were shot or beaten to death while the terrified women and children who huddled inside were burnt alive.
The next day the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared ‘A Day of Thanksgiving’, a day celebrated in America to this day.
Africans often join the West in condemning the continent for what it is today.
Wasn’t it Liberian President William Tubman who once said his country was seriously under-developed because they did not have the ‘benefits of colonisation’?
In Namibia in, 1904 the Herero people resisted German colonialism.
A well armed army under General Lothar von Trotha defeated the Herero at the Battle of Waterberg.
The German colonial aggressors drove these Africans from their land to the desert where there was no water.
Seventy percent of the Herero population died of dehydration in the desert.
“That’s Africa, bad things happen,” the director of the Africa Centre at the Atlantic Council Peter Pham once remarked.
During colonialism, Queen Victoria’s cousin, King Leopold massacred millions in DRC.
Each village was ordered by the authorities to collect and bring in a certain amount of rubber as much as the men could bring in by neglecting all work for their own maintenance.
If they failed to bring the required amount, their women were taken away and kept as hostages in the harems of colonial government employees.
If this method failed troops were sent to the village to spread terror, if necessary by killing some of the men.
They were ordered to bring one right hand amputated from an African victim for every cartridge used which led to the reduction of the African population in the Congo from 20 million to nine million people in 15 years.
Today we are told the most vile things about the Congolese.
We are made to believe they are ‘naturally’ barbaric while the people that made them that way have statues erected in their honour and their descendants sit on thrones carrying ‘airs’ about their civilisation.
During the last 50 years, there have been a total of 67 coups in 26 countries in Africa. Sixteen of those countries are French ex-colonies, which means 61 percent of the coups happened in Francophone Africa.
France has total control over their natural resources.
More than 80 percent of the foreign reserves of these African countries are deposited in the ‘operations accounts’ controlled by the French Treasury.
The countries themselves do not know, nor are they told, how much of the pool of foreign reserves held by the French Treasury belongs to them as a group or individually.
It’s now estimated that France is holding close to 500 billion African countries money in its treasury.
In addition France has the right to intervene militarily in the countries to defend ‘its interests’.
The independent ‘colonies’ are corrupted to prioritise French interests and companies in public procurement and public bidding.
It doesn’t matter if the African countries can obtain better value for money elsewhere.
The French have the exclusive right to supply ammunition and train the soldiers.
We wonder why the West African presidents ran to comfort France after the terror attacks on Charlie Hebdo leaving their Nigerian neighbour under attack from Boko Haram? It sounds like lies!
No wonder former French President Jaqcue Chirac said, “Without Africa, France will slide down into the rank of a third (world) power.” No wonder there is simmering discontent and so much political instability in Francophone Africa.
Conquests, colonisation, the slave trade, Arabic and European cultural elements, Islam and Christianity, all these contacts have left an indelible mark on Africa.
As one writer noted: “the African was torn away from his past, propelled into a universe fashioned from outside that suppresses his values, and dumbfounded by a cultural invasion that marginalises him.
“The African today, is the deformed image of others.”
Africa is the land of the corrupt, murderous, child killers, killer diseases, bad governance, wars, famine and all sorts of evils so the world is made to believe.
Yet Africa was not always like that, infact it was once known as Azania which biblically translates to ‘he who God hears’.
When the European leaders met in Germany from December 1884 to February 1885 at the imperialist Berlin Conference Africa would never be the same.
Through the Berlin Treaty of February 26, 1885, the European imperialists sliced Africa into ‘Portuguese-Africa’, ‘British-Africa’, ‘German-Africa’, ‘Italian-Africa’, ‘Spanish-Africa’, ‘French-Africa’ and ‘Belgian Africa’.
They ignored clan and ethnic boundaries and exaggerated the conflict between the tribes as they did in Zimbabwe between the Ndebele and the Shona; the effects are still raging to this day.
Names were changed to erase all memory of the civilisation that existed before.
For example, the ‘Atlantic Ocean’ was called the ‘Ethiopian Sea’ as late as 1626 and the so-called ‘Indian Ocean’ the ‘Azanian Sea’.
Whenever the colonialists landed there was death and disease.
And people like Cecil John Rhodes were rewarded and immortalised by the colonial governments for their exploits and conquest.
Historian Prof. Walter Rodney has asked the question: “What would have been Britain’s level of development had millions of her people been put to work as slaves out of their country over a period of four centuries?”
Yet the white man continues to make us believe that the past should remain in the past.
A peoples’ history tells them who they are, where they have been, where they are now, but most importantly, where they must go.