UNTIL last week, Marc Faber, that Swiss investor, was an unknown entity who, like many of those who want to become popular, invoked the good name of Zimbabwe.
Popular television station Russian Television gave an apt description of Faber who, last week, said the US would have been a ‘different’ state if it had been colonised by blacks instead of whites.
He ‘thanked’ God for allowing whites to colonise America!
To say these are racist remarks would be putting Faber on a pedestal that he does not deserve.
He is an outright foolish man.
Allow me to let him speak for himself before we get to deal decisively with this evidently deranged and bigoted man.
“I am not saying it would be better,” Faber told MarketWatch in an interview on Tuesday last week.
“I am just saying that progress would not have been the same.”
This writer is yet to grasp what this bigoted man was trying to say, so we let him speak again.
He is asked why what he calls ‘progress’ would be worse and he says something about people of his kind:
“Europeans brought science to America. They brought technical skills… I am not sure the Africans would have done that.”
Now, that is as close to what whites believe is the truth.
Still we allow him to speak.
He says to popular newsletter The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report of October 3 2017:
“And thank God white people populated America, and not the blacks. Otherwise, the US would look like Zimbabwe, which it might look like one day anyway, but at least America enjoyed 200 years in the economic and political sun under white majority.”
And he is not done with blacks.
He says: “If stating some historical facts makes me a racist, then I suppose that I am a racist.”
Here we go!
America was built by the sweat and blood of Africans Mr Doom!
A report titled How Slave Labour Made New York by Peter Harper published in 2013 says the glory that the US enjoys today was born out of the brutality that slaves were subjected to by their masters.
Below is what the report says:
“The very name ‘Wall Street’ is born of slavery, with enslaved Africans building a wall in 1653 to protect Dutch settlers from Indian raids.
This walkway and wooden fence, made up of pointed logs and running river-to-river, later was known as Wall Street, the home of world finance.
Enslaved and free Africans were largely responsible for the construction of the early city, first by clearing land, then by building a fort, mills, bridges, stone houses, the first city hall, the docks, the city prison, Dutch and English churches, the city hospital and Fraunces Tavern.
At the corner of Wall Street and Broadway, they helped erect Trinity Church.
In 1711, the city’s Common Council established a ‘Meal Market’ at Wall and Water streets for hiring slave labour and auctioning enslaved Africans who disembarked in Manhattan after their arduous trans-Atlantic journey.
The merchants used these labourers to operate the port and in such trades as ship carpentry and printing, according to the National Park Service.
Africans, according to the Park Service, also engaged in heavy transport, construction work, domestic labour, farming and milling.
Their efforts were part of the euphemistically titled ‘Triangular Trade’; Africans living on what was then called the Gold Coast – with Africans being considered black gold – were bought using New England rum; the Africans were sold in the West Indies to work the fields to create sugar and molasses; and the sugarcane products were taken to New York and New England to be made into rum.
The Buttonwood Agreement, which started what became the New York Stock Exchange, was signed in 1792 under a buttonwood tree in front of 68 Wall Street, about a block away from the slave market at the intersection of Wall and Water streets.
The agreement covered transactions and companies involved in the slave trade, including shipping, insurance and cotton. Granted, many white folks did indeed help build America – as they profited from slavery.
John Jacob Astor, who was born in Germany in 1763, became America’s first multi-millionaire, making his fortune in furs, the China trade and cotton transportation, part of the slave trade.
Astor, who died at age 84 in 1848, is the namesake of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel and neighbourhoods in New York City. Moses Taylor, who helped finance the illegal slave trade, had his offices at 55 South Street, now part of the 111 Wall Street complex.
His decades-long banking operations evolved into Citibank. He sat on the boards of firms that became Con Edison, Bethlehem Steel and AT&T, according to Alan J. Singer’s ‘New York and Slavery: Time to Teach the Truth’.
When Taylor died in 1882, at age 76, his estate was worth
US$40 million to US$50 million, or roughly US$44 billion in current calculations.
Singer also explained how Philip Livingston of Dutchess County, just north of New York City, was ‘probably the New York merchant most involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade’.
Livingston, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, endowed Yale University’s first professorship using his slave-based wealth.
He was also a founder of King’s College, which later became Columbia University, and his name is found on homes and estates, some of them now historical sites, in the Hudson Valley and on Livingston Street in Brooklyn Heights.”
There are many lessons to be learnt from Faber’s unforgivable gaffe, but these surely must not deter us from doing what is right for the country.
Let those with ears listen.