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Fungi Kwaramba
Political Editor
When the bloodthirsty and wanderlust Europeans met in Berlin, many years ago, to carve among themselves the African continent, not a single black face was represented, nay, it was like playing daredevils parcelling to each other some fanciful toys.
Yet, Africa was a continent, populated by a people with a brownish skin pigmentation, who were living peacefully and blissfully in the lap of abundance that the continent could offer, and still has, despite the sustained and primitive plunder by the pinkish colonialists.
Of course, they chose to refer to themselves as white and ascribed the black description to the people inhabiting the African continent.
Black denotes, at least in their parlance the negative, ugly and evil.
Is it not in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution that the black man is ranked the lowest, a view that persists in the minds of many Europeans to the present day, muffled by feigned morality to, occasionally, find expression in racial outbursts, that belie the true psyche and mindset of the average Caucasian.
Riding on Darwinism, the whites, with their self-righteousness, depicted the blacks as uncivilised savages whom they could even enslave willy-nilly, conveniently hiding within the verses of the Bible.
Indeed, after the Berlin Conference, they trooped to the African continent and killed those who dared to resist their incursions, whether in Mali, Senegal, Somalia, or Zimbabwe. Atrocities committed in the present day are just but a continuation.
They never cringed at the sight of blood, even now they still do not believe in the sanctity of human life, as they massacre Palestinians through their Apartheid glory hunters and expansionists in the form of the Israelis.
America, the so-called cradle of democracy and human rights, cheers on the Israelis, supplying deadly weapons that have left children and women dead in their thousands.
Just for perspective, The Times of Israel reported on May 23, that the United States had approved a US$17 billion defence aid package to Israel.
Of the aid to Israel, some US$5,2 billion will go toward replenishing and expanding Israel’s missile and rocket defence system; another US$3,5 billion will go to purchasing advanced weapons systems; US$1 billion to enhance weapons production; US$4,4 billion for other defence supplies and services provided to Israel; and some US$2,4 billion to US operations in the region, a euphemism of the war, ostensibly against Hamas, but really against the innocent children and mothers of Palestine.
According to Palestinian health authorities, Israel’s ground and air campaign, which is raging on, fanned by the West, has killed more than 35 000 people, mostly civilians, and driven most of the enclave’s 2,3 million people from their homes.
The reason why innocent Palestinians are being butchered is simply that the white man’s blood matters more, the war that has resulted in thousands of deaths is being waged to avenge the death of 1 139 people who were killed by the alleged Hamas militia on October 7 last year.
Gaza deaths
People are dying in Gaza because it is only the blood of the whites that matters, never mind the tenets of natural justice that we are all equal.
Is it not that the same Bible they used to conquer Africa and justify subjugation is clear that we were all created in the image of God?
This is by no means a new phenomenon, nay, history is replete with similar massacres of innocent non-Europeans who have died at the hands of the insatiable bloody imperialists.
According to Statista, from 1501 until 1866, it is estimated that the transatlantic slave trade saw more than 12,5 million African people forcefully put on slave ships and transported to the Americas.
Of these 12,5 million, only 10,7 million disembarked on the other side of the Atlantic, meaning that approximately 1,8 million (14,5 percent) did not survive the journey, known as the Middle Passage.
They died at the hands of Europeans.
Fast forward to 1885, atrocities were also committed in the Congo Free State, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, by Belgium’s murderous King Leopold.
Between 1885 and 1905 an estimated fifteen million people died, needless to say at the hands of Europeans.
In Ethiopia, an Italian occupation force killed an estimated 30 000 Ethiopians in disproportionate revenge for an assassination attempt on Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, Marquis of Negele, Viceroy of Italian East Africa, on February 19 1937.
It was all committed by Europeans.
Back home in Southern Africa, atrocities were committed by Europeans at Nyadzoniá, Chimoio as they sought to deflate the momentum of Zimbabwe’s independence struggle.
It was the same in most parts of Africa, for example, in South Africa, a country that is hurtling towards a crucial election that will be held on May 29, anger is never or was never directed at the racist white man, who enacted segregation laws that are the root of the country’s social ills.
Indeed, global lenses are trained on South Africa — the supposedly Rainbow Nation which painfully remains a conundrum as it remains the most unequal country in the world.
But for opportunistic political parties like the Gayton McKenzie led Patriotic Allian — the black man on the streets of Johannesburg, coaxing a living on the land of his ancestors, where his fore bearers migrated from during the early 1800s, to scatter and settle on land yonder, yet hold forever same cultural practises, languages too and wears proudly the back skin — is the one to blame.
Parties like Rise Mzansi have it embedded in their manifestos that they would fix the asylum seeker system to shut out black foreigners.
The same harmful rhetoric has been vomited by parties like the Herman Mashaba-led ActionSA, and of course, Gayton MacKenzie, who says “they must go home”, but what home if one thinks hard of it, is it not the other way round, or are Africans so sleepy they will not confront the witch within?
Xenophobic discrimination
Statistics provided by Xenowatch show that from 1994 to March 2024, there were 1 069 incidents of xenophobic discrimination and violence and 669 people lost their lives as a result of these attacks.
The highest recorded incidents and resulting deaths occurred in 2008, 2022 and 2019 respectively.
Over the years, these attacks have increasingly targeted migrants, particularly those of African and Asian origin, who seek to make a living in the country’s urban informal economy.
Xenophobia in all its forms has become the norm for African migrants in South Africa, including refugees and asylum seekers, especially those of lower socio-economic status who live or run businesses in informal settlements and townships.
But is the fellow black man the author of fellow black South African man’s ill fortunes, no, not by any stretch of the imagination.
In South Africa, 84 percent of the land is still in the hands of the beneficiaries of apartheid, with only 13 percent controlled by the government on behalf of the black majority whose population is close to 60 million, and 1 percent is not accounted for.
Michael Fargher, a South African, avers that the glaring inequality in the country; “Has not arisen as the result of chance. Instead, we can identify the unjust acts under apartheid and colonisation that specifically engineered the repression and robbery of black people in our society.”
Hence, the corruption and poverty bedevilling Africa today, pertinently South Africa, are rooted in colonialism and its apparatus for pilferage and brutality.
It is not merely the fault of an enterprising Zimbabwean running a tuck-shop in Soweto.
Vestiges of apartheid
Thus, vestiges of apartheid persist in the world because the underwriters of that system are still present, never mind the diminishing influence in geo-global politics.
In South Africa they never blame the white man, but rather their kith and kin, who were either born on the other side of the Limpopo, but still speak the same language, enjoy the same African cuisine, and mostly poignantly don the same black hue.
Distinctively, African, never mind a global footprint born largely out of the Transatlantic slave trade and successive repressive systems that the now fledgling west superstructure crested.
With the election season, the anti-black hysteria is reaching a sickening crescendo, fanned by some political clowns who revel and thrive in preaching hate speech and xenophobia, but then they are missing the point, hopefully, the ANC wins the elections and continues on the painful journey to redress colonial ills.
As Jamwanda noted last week “To keep Africans busily distracted, well away from focusing — on their natural resources which the West sorely needs, chaos through wars and political turmoil should be invented”, and that is the origin of the xenophobic political parties that should be consigned to memory dustbins when South Africa votes next week.
This Africa Day, which is being held under the theme, “Educate an African Fit for the 21st Century: Building Resilient Education Systems for Increased Access to Inclusive, Lifelong, Quality, and Relevant Learning in Africa” there is need for a major mindset shift or Africans will forever be tools or fools of white man’s machinations.
Online Reporter