I have never read utter non sense like today pple that I had respected hia are talking like Uncle Ruckus of the boondocks. This are the same pple that will sell the Africanism that still remains to get a microwave thinking that’s civilization.
@Ingia and crew should go back to school and learn the true meaning of cicivilization. If to you civilization means industrialization I potty your paroz coz they wasted their money taking you to school. I feel bad when pple use the word ‘tribe’ we dnt have tribes but ethnic communities and ethnicity.
Western education has programed the African that they can survive with out the Europeans or westerners. We are not independent but in post Colonization called neo Colonization. Guys I how I hope pple would master their history and shouldn’t be ever too willing to accept the white man way aare superior superior.
Are you in what someone called “Patriotic brigade”?
Firstly, learn how to percieve matters without reference to what was fed to you at school. The truth is that the african was backward because his technology and weaponry, and methods of scientific inquiry were inferior. Thats why he was colonised and his wealth was stolen. We will ever achieve an equal standing when we acquire matching, technology, weaponry, infrastructure etc. If we didnt embrace the little modernisation we have done, you wouldnt be busy on computer whining about neocolonialism, you would be somewhere on a settler’s farm calling him “baas” or “bwana” while feeding his dogs, which you would be also calling “bwana”. Freedom is nothing people will let you have for free, you have to fight for it, or you have to keep intimidating people from attempting to take it.
We are talking of modern civilisation. Now you think that Africans would have stayed their traditional way without modernising? You cannot afford to be left behind. When the Natives of america pretended that they could live in their own confines with their own civilisations they were exterminated. Few pure native americans exist today. You cannot pretend to be special in a world where people are learning to make modern weapons, inventing means of movement such as ships, aeroplanes, automobiles, inventing communication technologies everyday. If you dont acquire the same, they will come and kill you, your children, your chief, your soldiers, and enslave the rest and take your women.
So imagining that there is a way the african would have avoided adopting the ways of the white man, you are wrong. Nobody has avoided it except for some tribes in amazon who havent contacted the modern society. But people are invading Amazon, they will soon have to adopt modern ways. They only things we didnt need were the white man’s religion, and some aspects of his culture. However, some aspects of his culture such as collectivism, big man syndrome, hierarchical structure of authority, and a few others are necessary for political and military mobilisation at the expense of individual freedom.
About africans living longer without technology: Yes Europeans brought some diseases, but brought solutions to many, even today. You would probably be dead from measles,cholera, malaria, aids, or something similar were it not for white man’s medicine. If it were not for white people’s medicine and disease control methods, Africans would be slowly wiped out by HIV. The survival rate in traditional african societies was very low. Today you can have one or two children and be assured that you will raise them to adulthood provided they wont encounter accidents. Western countries have life expectancies in the 70s while we are still at 40s and 50s. Africans never lived for a long time in their traditional set up, and thats why one man would have several wives and thirty+ children. Diseases would sweep through communities taking with them large numbers. African solution would be to offer animal and human sacrifices.
There was no allowing. It was by force and coercion. Africans knew nothing and could only defend themselves with sticks, stones, spears and primitive knives
the white man is a product of his environment precisely,read iceman inheritance, u notice that most of the developed peoples are from the northern parts of the world,why is this? the cold northern weather has made them be more aggressive to survive and it has also led them to invent so many things so as to survive. The African had no necessity to invent these things since his life was very favorable and almost all diseases he had, he had a cure to. Do u knw there is a disease that killed almost all white people in the 12th century or thereabout? These are some of the challenges they faced before the fruits of science worked miracles in their lives and mind you these sciences were age-old wisdom passed from various ancient civilizations like the egyptian civilisation,Nubian civilisation, greek civilisation etc. Therefore, Africans are not inherently inferior since if u take an African to those schools they will also be as good or even better than their white counterparts. I believe where we have failed as Africans is failure to discern between cultural domination and actual progress, case in point; The Japanese or most of the orientals were relatively behind in technology compared to the whiteman but they caught up due to preserving their original culture in important aspects us religion,language etc but they sought to learn maths and sciences from the western world and they are now at par. For us Africans we got to learn mainly religion and language from the whiteman and when it came to the technology, we were only consumers of it and not producers. This is the major anomaly, a fact which keeps us perpetually poor since we took the tastes and religions of the whiteman without knowing how to satisfy them, so providing a ready market for exploitation. What we need to reverse this is by salvaging our histories and our spirituality of yore, use our languages to disseminate knowledge in the arts and sciences and by so doing we will always feel we own wat we have since most of us are psychologically distanced from the sciences since we have not localised these knowledge like we have localised religion et al
This is largely true. however, it is important to note that the oriental people were already technology oriented. They knew writing, maths, relatively modern architecture etc. For example, the oriental people(east asians), are known to be the first people to use the concept of a gun and gunpowder, before the white people refined the technology. Majority of subsaharan africans didnt know even an idea of basic writing, with the exception of some ethiopians. Everything here was so basic. I dont know why, but were were so backward that no one really understands why. Researchers have tried to evaluate culture, environmental conditions, genetic make up, brain structure, etc, but no definitive answer has been found. Culture gets most support although it cant be said to be the definitive reason.
We are generally a very communal society as opposed to other societies that are more individualistic. We seek answers in the community while white people seek answers in logic and technology. For example, while the white people would largely plan on how to build their homes individually, we africans would always delegate the task to the community(simple and no worries). Creativity and critical thinking is always suppresed by communal reasoning which always follows certain dogmas. Individual architecture will come up with things like baroque, classical, use of stone, use of wood, use of metal, etc, from different people(including some competition). Communal architecture is implementing what forefathers have done from stone age, and which must not be distorted at all(some sticks and some mud or cowdung). We still seem to have a problem accepting technology, and we often want to adopt the non technical part. Most African technicians, incuding professors, are just paper professors. 99% of electrical engineers here cannot make you a simple basic radio reciever from the blue print upwards in this information age. They love theories and copy pasted calculations.
I respect your opinion but there are so many fallacies in your arguments. First of all, you seem to be prejudiced that lack of scientific technology and methods equates to inferiority. Nothing can be further from he truth, the fact is that Africa due to its vastness and thousands of cultures could not have developed in the same way just like the are many parts in Europe and Asia that are far behind their peers. There were areas in Africa that had taken up writing and scholarly work before the advent of the white man like the Mali empire which had one of the earliest universities in the world in a place called Timbuktu, where Europeans went to gain knowledge in the arts and sciences. There are many examples of African ingenuity that seems to get lost in racist recording of history by European scholars. You don’t need to go far and see the advancements in Ethiopia, ancient Egypt,Nubia, Songhai empire etc. There was a french explorer called Volney who accompanied Napoleon to Egypt in the year 1785 and he stated, "When I visited the sphinx…on seeing that head, typically Negro in all its features, I remembered…Herodotus says: "…the Egyptians…are black with woolly hair…''the French soldiers knocked off its nose to disguise the Negroid features since they did not believe that such a majestic civilization could have been achieved by a man of color and primarily black for that matter. Another example is the conquering of Andalusia or Spain and parts of Portugal by Berbers and Arabs and there was a clear influence of Africans in passing civilization through the 400 years or so reign which made this part the marvel of Europe. In short, black people have had civilizations that were advanced but you and I know history is written by the conqueror and to justify things like slavery and colonialism the white scholars deliberately painted us as savages who needed to be saved. Our main problem currently is inferiority complex due to centuries of domination through slavery and colonialism and the fact that we abandoned many aspects of culture that are important to a people like spirituality and language. Sometimes I ask myself why Nigerians seem to be the most influential Africans and I think the answer is that they seem to be more culturally authentic than most of us thus exuding more confidence and originality. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel since we are slowly discovering ourselves and in generations to come we will regain our stature in the world.
Firstly I know that conquerors write history, but even african writings do not reveal anything white people left out in regards to technology. I have not said that there is any inferiority in africans. In any case, intelligence and technology does not indicate inferiority or superiority. After all inferiority is a subjective issue. For example, if the environment changed so that only the physically strongest survive, humans wouldnt do better than elephants, and would therefore be inferior to the latter. Talking of sub saharan Africa, it had very primitive technology and writing was alien to them. I have read about europeans damaging the nose of the sphinx and I understand the whole story. I have an earlier post on this in case you came late: http://www.kenyatalk.com/index.php?threads/crazy-history.2140/ . That shows you am not biased, but am only admitting that there is a problem, especially in subsaharan africa(The real black man’s Africa). While I dont appreciate deliberate whitening of egypt by europeans, I dont know why subsaharan afrians want to cling to the country. It simply doesnt belong down here. Similarly berbers and the likes arent subsaharan africans, and they arent even negroid.
I dont know why you think Nigeria is a good example for other african countries. It is still poor, has very many people in abject poverty, politically unstable, very poor military organization, famous for exporting criminal behavior, is unable to use its huge oil resources to help its citizens, and sucking up to european/american oil extracting companies and the yankee kingdom(US).
Again were are not talking about cultural pride here, but we are talking about our ability to provide food, shelter, mobility, healthcare, security, information etc to our people. Being proud and trying to point out at insignificant achievements dont help anyone.
when you insist sub-saharan Africans does that mean they were no black people north of Sahara? In my opinion,Egypt was a black civilization since a typical Egyptian back THEN would have been forced to sit behind in a bus, in the Jim Crow era. Apart from that, the world has always been about adapting to changes, when you say the African did not write, do you know he still passed information from one generation to another through oral literature. The onus was for the educated Africans to go back to their roots and document all these info but due to the eurocentric education that we are still having up to today, we have not quite done that. If I were to be asked, education should be conducted in African languages so as to domesticate knowledge just like other peoples of the world have done. The fact that we still use European languages as a tool of disseminating knowledge is holding us back psychologically since these education doesnt go to our souls and hearts but only to our brains so its not tied to other aspects of our lives. For example, Tanzania has embarked on instructing using Swahili from nursery to university and I appreciate their efforts very much since they will ultimately pride themselves generations to come. You should always connect culture with technology, these two should not be inseperable since technology comes to make ways of life i.e culture much easier. Our problem is that we try to make them inseparable that is why we have very good texts on farming but we don’t translate this into practice in our rural farms.Therefore, don’t be worried by the fact that most Sub-saharan communities did not write, they had other forms of disseminating info. The underlying fact is that the Whiteman has shaped the narrative of the human race for almost haif a century and we should adopt to these to remain competitive. Im sure if we were the first to manufacture guns, ships and all the otrher instruments of domination, you would be talking of black supremacy now. There is an interesting book by Ngugi wa Thiongo, DECOLONISING THE MIND and this book espouses the link of technology,culture and spirituality through indigenous languages, we should only learn foreign languages as secondary. However, this move though the best would face a lot of opposition due to strong eurocentrism among AFRICANS.
You have a problem with taking time to read. Clearly, you are in the patriotic brigade that wont acccept any criticism. I have told you that my opinion of the egyptian people and did a post much earlier that you did on the same. I am talking of subsaharan africans who clearly had not been influenced by other people such as eruopeans, arabs, middle easterners as egyptians were. Oral tradition has been everywhere and that is not a distinction for africans. Its primitive(meaning that it is at the very basic level of communication technologies), and serves an inferior role in facilitating technology. For instance, how do you document the detailed calculations and other requirements for building a permanent cantilever bridge using oral tradition.
As for language, almost all modern technological work has been done by people speaking German, English, Russian, Italian and French and it is documented in that state. English is being adopted by all because it is easier to learn, broad, and has a description of most things(it is a mature language). Using your local language to document and communicate on technology would mean expanding the language ten-fold, and thats a sisyphean task considering how many languages we have. For most of us Swahili is just as borrowed as English. We simply are not in a position to use our own langauages for some tasks considering the state of competition. We are yet to develop grammar for them as opposed to English and some others that have grammar dating millenia back.
So you now propose that east africans adopt swahili, west africans yoruba or ibo or whatever, then southerners san khoikhoi languange and such? An for nilotes who find swahili to be a problem to adopt their own stuff. Thats lame. Again tanzania isnt an example we should follow and there is no reason to think they are going in the right direction now. After all, how far has their love for swahili taken them. How can you compare yourself to sufferer mwenzako. Infact, people who are lagging behind you? Are you proposing that instead of adopting modern technology and investing in research with the languages that are already mature and entrenched we should now concetrate our efforts in copying paupers and dwell in ethnic pursuits?
“Technology is there to perpetuate culture”: Thats a lame argument(where have you seen that?). In this world there are two distinctions my friend: RICH AND POOR. All other categories such as race, color, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation, are baits for political mobilisation, and are of little value to you or anyone.