Africa Continent Quotes

You can no longer see or identify yourself solely as a member of a tribe, but as a citizen of a nation of one people working toward a common purpose.

No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill.

Most people write me off when they see me. They do not know my story. They say I am just an African. They judge me before they get to know me. What they do not know is The pride I have in the blood that runs through my veins; The pride I have in my rich culture and the history of my people; The pride I have in my strong family ties and the deep connection to my community; The pride I have in the African music, African art, and African dance; The pride I have in my name and the meaning behind it. Just as my name has meaning, I too will live my life with meaning. So you think I am nothing? Don’t worry about what I am now, For what I will be, I am gradually becoming. I will raise my head high wherever I go Because of my African pride, And nobody will take that away from me.

Everyone knows that Africa is not reasonable place but if we can get
across that neither are we, we strengthen the bond with the continent.
People are not conscious beings, just ask any marketer. Irrationality
of the early explorers, irrationality of the new ones, irrationality
of the place we go into. What a great canvas we have to paint on...

Why did Africa let Europe cart away millions of Africa's souls from the continent to the four corners of the wind? How could Europe lord it over a continent ten times its size? Why does needy Africa continue to let its wealth meet the needs of those outside its borders and then follow behind with hands outstretched for a loan of the very wealth it let go? How did we arrive at this, that the best leader is the one that knows how to beg for a share of what he has already given away at the price of a broken tool? Where is the future of Africa?

In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography—in particular, to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate.

So, is there hope for a truly democratic Africa? Long answer: Only if continent-wide improvements in education, human rights and public health are coupled with an aggressive and far-sighted debt-relief program that breaks the cycle of subsistence farming and urban squalor. Short answer: No.

On the plane leaving Africa, I had a vision of Mama Africa, a powerful and proud African woman carrying the abundant fruits of Africa in a basket. She accompanied me as I gazed down on the continent I was leaving. She would be with me in my new country, Mama Africa assured me, and I would forever be a child of Africa.

The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say 'Africa'. In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist.

African leaders should not turn the continent into a giant collector of donations and loans from wealthy nations—they must find other plausible means to help establish their economic security so as to minimize poverty. This incoherent blunder on the mainland must be scrutinized.

If more Africans had eaten missionaries, the continent would be in better shape.

You're still carrying Africa, but it's eroding at the edges. Great. We're destroying the Dark Continent.

You know that there are no black people in Africa,” she said. Most Americans, weaned on the myth of drawable lines between human beings, have to sit with that statement. It sounds nonsensical to our ears. Of course there are black people in Africa. There is a whole continent of black people in Africa. How could anyone not see that? “Africans are not black,” she said. “They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are.

….So much crueller than any British colony, they say, so much more brutal towards the local Africans, so much more manipulative after begrudgingly granting independence. But the history of British colonialism in Africa, from Sierra Leone to Zimbabwe, Kenya to Botswana and else-where, is not fundamentally different from what Belgium did in the Congo. You can argue about degree, but both systems were predicated on the same assumption: that white outsiders knew best and Africans were to be treated not as partners, but as underlings. What the British did in Kenya to suppress the pro-independence mau-mau uprising in the 1950s, using murder, torture and mass imprisonment, was no more excusable than the mass arrests and political assassinations committed by Belgium when it was trying to cling on to the Congo. And the outside world's tolerance of a dictator in the Congo like Mobutu, whose corruption and venality were overlooked for strategic expedience, was no different from what happened in Zimbabwe, where the dictator Robert Mugabe was allowed to run his country and its people into the ground because Western powers gullibly accepted the way he presented himself as the only leader able to guarantee stability and an end to civil strife. Those sniffy British colonial types might not like to admit it, but the Congo represents the quintessence of the entire continent’s colonial experience. It might be extreme and it might be shocking, but what happened in the Congo is nothing but colonialism in its purest, basest form.

Africans must change their mind and actions. The keys to building your continent depends on your will-power, persistent effort and action towards self liberation.

Taking the continent as a whole, this religious tension may be responsible for the revival of the commonest racial feeling. Africa is divided into Black and White, and the names that are substituted- Africa south of the Sahara, Africa north of the Sahara- do not manage to hide this latent racism. Here, it is affirmed that White Africa has a thousand-year-old tradition of culture; that she is Mediterranean, that she is a continuation of Europe and that she shares in Graeco-Latin civilization. Black Africa is looked on as a region that is inert, brutal, uncivilized - in a word, savage.

Africa! Africa! Africa! Africa my motherland! Africa, your people cries for you! Africans must educate their citizens. Africans must reach out to it's people and empower them to build the nation. Africans you are the only people who can liberated your citizens from poverty through education. Africans must pay the price to rebuild the continent.

From the colonial era, the major legacy Europe left to Africa was not democracy as it is practiced today in countries like England, France, and Belgium; it was authoritarian rule and plunder. On the whole continent, perhaps no nation has had a harder time than the Congo in emerging from the shadow of its past.

The present predicaments of Africa are often not a matter of personal choice: they arise from a historical situation. Their solutions are not so much a matter of personal decision as that of a fundamental social transformation of the structures of our societies starting with a real break with imperialism and its internal ruling allies. Imperialism and its comprador alliances in Africa can never develop the continent.

There are several other sources of enjoyment in a long voyage, which are of a more reasonable nature. The map of the world ceases to be a blank; it becomes a picture full of the most varied and animated figures. Each part assumes its proper dimensions: continents are not looked at in the light of islands, or islands considered as mere specks, which are, in truth, larger than many kingdoms of Europe. Africa, or North and South America, are well-sounding names, and easily pronounced; but it is not until having sailed for weeks along small portions of their shores, that one is thoroughly convinced what vast spaces on our immense world these names imply.

They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I took mine and fell flat on my face. As a young woman, I dreamed of changing the world. In my twenties, I went to africa to try and save the continent, only to learn that Africans neither wanted nor needed saving. Indeed, when I was there, I saw some of the worst that good intentions, traditional charity, and aid can produce... I concluded that if I could only nudge the world a little bit, maybe that would be enough. But nudging isn't enough.

Some people talk of Africa being a continent cursed not blessed with minerals, but the real curse is the leaders and politicians of Africa

Not everyone is allowed a complex identity. Throughout history, individuals and entire communities have been systematically stripped of their personhood and idiosyncrasies, often to make them easier to demean, denigrate and subjugate - and in some cases, eradicate. Being able to define yourself openly and fully is a privilege; it is a grace many take for granted.

The wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth too. On the universal plane this affirmation, you may be sure, should on no account be taken to signify that we feel ourselves affected by the creations of Western arts or techniques. For in a very concrete way Europe has stuffed herself inordinately with the gold and raw materials of the colonial countries: Latin America, China, and Africa. From all these continents, under whose eyes Europe today raises up her tower of opulence, there has flowed out for centuries toward that same Europe diamonds and oil, silk and cotton, wood and exotic products. Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples. The ports of Holland, the docks of Bordeaux and Liverpool were specialized in the Negro slave trade, and owe their renown to millions of deported slaves. So when we hear the head of a European state declare with his hand on his heart that he must come to the aid of the poor underdeveloped peoples, we do not tremble with gratitude. Quite the contrary; we say to ourselves: "It's a just reparation which will be paid to us.

We know that there are many animals on this continent not found in the Old World. These must have been carried from here to the ark, and then brought back afterwards. Were the peccary, armadillo, ant-eater, sloth, agouti, vampire-bat, marmoset, howling and prehensile-tailed monkey, the raccoon and muskrat carried by the angels from America to Asia? How did they get there? Did the polar bear leave his field of ice and journey toward the tropics? How did he know where the ark was? Did the kangaroo swim or jump from Australia to Asia? Did the giraffe, hippopotamus, antelope and orang-outang journey from Africa in search of the ark? Can absurdities go farther than this?

From Kinshasa to Lagos to Addis Ababa, there are a multitude of business opportunities to invest in throughout the continent.

I sketched North America onto my crude and now crowded map, and Hao was astounded to learn that it was not a piece of Europe, as he had always assumed.

Stanley’s Congo expedition fired the starting gun for the Scramble for Africa. Before his trip, white outsiders had spent hundreds of years nibbling at Africa’s edges, claiming land around the coastline, but rarely venturing inland. Disease, hostile tribes and the lack of any clear commercial potential in Africa meant that hundreds of years after white explorers first circumnavigated its coastline, it was still referred to in mysterious terms as the Dark Continent, a source of slaves, ivory and other goods, but not a place white men thought worthy of colonisation. It was Leopold’s jostling for the Congo that forced other European powers to stake claims to Africa’s interior, and within two decades the entire continent had effectively been carved up by the white man. The modern history of Africa – decades of colonial exploitation and post-independence chaos – was begun by a Telegraph reporter battling down the Congo River.

Man was first a hunter, and an artist: his early vestiges tell us that alone. But he must always have dreamed, and recognized and guessed and supposed, all the skills of the imagination. Language itself is a continuously imaginative act. Rational discourse outside our familiar territory of Greek logic sounds to our ears like the wildest imagination. The Dogon, a people of West Africa, will tell you that a white fox named Ogo frequently weaves himself a hat of string bean hulls, puts it on his impudent head, and dances in the okra to insult and infuriate God Almighty, and that there's nothing we can do about it except abide him in faith and patience. This is not folklore, or quaint custom, but as serious a matter to the Dogon as a filling station to us Americans. The imagination; that is, the way we shape and use the world, indeed the way we see the world, has geographical boundaries like islands, continents, and countries. These boundaries can be crossed. That Dogon fox and his impudent dance came to live with us, but in a different body, and to serve a different mode of the imagination. We call him Brer Rabbit.

In light of recent events—genocide in East Africa, the collapse of democracy throughout the continent, the isolation of Cuba, the overthrow of progressive movements throughout the so-called third world—some might argue that the moment of truth has already passed, that Césaire and Fanon’s predictions proved false. We’re facing an era where fools are calling for a renewal of colonialism, where descriptions of violence and instability draw on the very colonial language of “barbarism” and “backwardness” that Césaire critiques in these pages. But this is all a mystification; the fact is, while colonialism in its formal sense might have been dismantled, the colonial state has not. Many of the problems of democracy are products of the old colonial state whose primary difference is the presence of black faces. It has to do with the rise of a new ruling class—the class Fanon warned us about—who are content with mimicking the colonial masters,

Your voice at times a fist Tight in your throat Jabs ceaselessly at phantoms In the room, Your hand a carved and Skimming boat Goes down the Nile To point out Pharaoh's tomb. You're Africa to me At brightest dawn. The Congo's green and Copper's brackish hue, A continent to build With Black Man's brawn. I sit at home and see it all Through you.

Britain has no ‘white history’. British history is the multiracial, interracial story of a nation interdependent on trade, cultural influence and immigration from Africa, India, Central and East Asia, and other regions and continents populated by people who are not white, and before that, invasion by successive waves of European tribes most of whom, had the concept of whiteness existed at the time, would not have fitted into it either.

Australia stands out from all the other continents: the differences between Eurasia, Africa, North America, and South America fade into insignificance compared with the differences between Australia and any of those other landmasses. Australia is by far the driest, smallest, flattest, most infertile, climatically most unpredictable, and biologically most impoverished continent.

As we’ve seen, the Chinese are everywhere, they mean business and they are now every bit as involved across the continent as the Europeans and Americans. About a third of China’s oil imports come from Africa, which – along with the precious metals to be found in many African countries – means they have arrived, and will stay. European and American oil companies and big multinationals are still far more heavily involved in Africa, but China is quickly catching up.

To give you an idea of the size of the Earth, I will tell you that before the invention of electricity it was necessary to maintain, over the whole of six continents, a veritable army of 462, 511 lamplighters for the street lamps. Seen from a slight distance that would make a splendid spectacle. the movements of this army would be regulated like those of the ballet in the opera. First would come the turn of the lamplighters of New Zealand and Australia. Having set their lamps alight, these would go off to sleep. Next, the lamplighters of China and Siberia would enter for their steps in the dance, and then they too would be waved back into the wings. After that would come the turn of the lamplighters of Russia and the Indies; then those of Africa and Europe; then those of South America; then those of North America. And never would they make a mistake in the order of their entry upon the stage. It would be magnificent.

Colonialism and its attitudes die hard, like the attitudes of slavery, whose hangover still dominates behaviour in certain parts of the Western hemisphere. Before slavery was practised in the New World, there was no special denigration of Africans. Travellers to this continent described the inhabitants in their records with natural curiosity and examination to be expected of individuals coming from different environments. It was when slave trade and slavery began to develop ghastly proportions that made them the base of that capital accumulation which assisted the rise of Western industrialism, that a new attitude towards Africans emerged. 'Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the man of colour. A racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism, rather racism was the consequence of slavery.' With this racial twist was invented the myth of colour inferiority. This myth supported the the subsequent rape of our continent with its despoliation and continuing exploitation under the advanced forms of colonialism and imperialism.

It is not a secret that my continent, mama Africa, has been divided for many decade and the most shocking thing is that no one is fighting or willing to unite her.

It’s part of my confession to be given that chance to bring change and unity within my country as well in my continent.

The African continent has always been more queer than generally acknowledged.

for this continent would never suffer itself to be drained of inhabitants, to support the British arms in either Asia, Africa, or Europe.

It is only by our hands that we can build this continent to the standard that we envy and admire in the advanced countries.

Assume any mention of the actions of an ethnic group refers to the leadership of that group at that time and does not reflect the majority beliefs of the entire community.

To Nine’s way of thinking, the problems surrounding the exploitation of coltan in the DRC epitomized the problems the entire African continent faced in capitalizing on the huge untapped wealth that lay beneath its surface. Corruption, political unrest and outside interference from non-African countries ensured the continent that should be the world’s wealthiest remained the poorest.

In families one can’t choose one’s siblings. Within regions one doesn’t choose one’s neighbors. And if you are one of the world’s leading producers of a critical industrial resource like copper, in the end you can’t really choose your customers. China and Zambia will just have to get along.

Imagine for a moment that 10 million children were going to lose their lives next year due to the earth's overheating. A state of emergency would be declared and you would be reading about little else. Well, next year, more than 10 million children's lives will be lost unnecessarily to extreme poverty and you'll hear very little about it. Nearly half will be on the continent of Africa, where HIV/AIDS is killing teachers faster than you can train them and where you can witness entire villages in which chilren are the parents... Will American Christians stand by as an entire country dies? --Bono

Long before the Europeans arrived in Africa, the blacks were enslaving each other. They still do,” said Valmorain. “Just as whites are enslaving each other, monsieur,” the physician countered. “Not all Negroes are slaves, nor all slaves black. Africa is a continent of free people. Millions of Africans are subjected to slavery but many more are free. Slavery is not their destiny, just as is also the case with thousands of whites who are slaves.

From the standpoint of the world’s biota, global travel represents a radically new phenomenon and, at the same time, a replay of the very old. The drifting apart of the continents that Wegener deduced from the fossil record is now being reversed—another way in which humans are running geologic history backward and at high speed. Think of it as a souped-up version of plate tectonics, minus the plates. By transporting Asian species to North America, and North American species to Australia, and Australian species to Africa, and European species to Antarctica, we are, in effect, reassembling the world into one enormous supercontinent—what biologists sometimes refer to as the New Pangaea.

Everywhere I went in Africa it was the same story. Foreign-funded NGOs, supported mainly by donors in Europe, were delaying or blocking the development not just of biotechnology but of modern agriculture generally across the continent.

To be able to influence Tanzanian literature and African literature, and sell our books in Tanzania as well as in our continent, we need to be committed to what we do. And what we do is writing. Write as much as you can. Read as much as you can. Use the library and the internet carefully for research and talk to people, about things that matter. To make a living from writing, and make people read again in Tanzania and Africa; we must write very well, very good stories.

Africa occupied a relatively blank space in the minds of most Americans, and when they stopped to think about it, aided by old and deeply ingrained habits of press coverage, all they could imagine was volcano, occupation, disease, and horror.

Despite widespread misconceptions in the United States today that the institution of slavery was based on race, for most of the thousands of years in which slavery existed around the world, it was based on whoever was vulnerable to enslavement and within striking distance. Thus Europeans enslaved other Europeans, just as Asians enslaved other Asians and Africans enslaved other Africans, while Polynesians enslaved other Polynesians and the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere enslaved other indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. The very word “slave" derived from the word for Slavs, who were enslaved by fellow Europeans for centuries before Africans began to be brought in chains to the Western Hemisphere. Africans were not singled out by a race for ownership by Europeans, they were resorted to after the rise of nation-states with armies and navies in other parts of the world which reduced the number of places that could be raided for slaves without great costs and risks. Slave-raiding continued in Africa, primarily by Africans enslaving other Africans and then, in West Africa, selling some of their slaves to whites to take to the Western Hemisphere. Meanwhile, the growing range of ships and the growing wealth of nations eventually made economically feasible the transportation of vast numbers of slaves from one continent to another, creating racial differences between the enslaved and their owners as a dominant pattern in the Western Hemisphere. Such a pattern was by no means limited to Europeans owning non-Europeans, however. There were many examples of the reverse, quite aside from vast regions of the earth where neither the slaves nor their owners were either black or white.

Things don't always look as they seem. Some stars, for example, look like bright pinholes, but when you get them pegged under a microscope you find you're looking at a globular cluster—a million stars that, to us, presents as a single entity. On a less dramatic note there are triples, like Alpha Centauri, which up close turns out to be a double star and a red dwarf in close proximity. There's an indigenous tribe in Africa that tells of life coming from the second star in Alpha Centauri, the one no one can see without a high-powered observatory telescope. come to think of it, the Greeks, the Aboriginals, and the Plains Indians all lived continents apart and all, independently, looked at the same septuplet knot of the Pleiades and believed them to be seven young girls running away from something that threatened to hurt them. Make of it what you will.

Whenever elephants met men, elephants fared badly. Syria's final elephants were exterminated by twenty-five hundred years ago. Elephants were gone from much of China literally before the year 1 and much of Africa by the year 1000. Meanwhile, in India and southern Asia, elephants became the mounts of kings; tanks against forts, prisoners' executioners, and pincushions of arrows, driven mad in battle; elephants became logging trucks and bulldozers, and, as with other slaves, their forced labor requires beatings and abuse. Since Roman times, humans have reduced Africa's elephant population by perhaps 99 percent. African elephants are gone from 90 percent of the lands they roamed as recently as 1800, when, despite earlier losses, an estimated twenty-six million elephants still trod the continent. Now they number perhaps four hundred thousand. (The diminishment of Asian elephants over historic times is far worse.) The planet's menagerie has become like shards of broken glass; we're grinding the shards smaller and smaller.

I have noticed over the past three years that most African Christians depend on their pastor or preachers for directions in life than their lecturers, politicians and nurses. That tells why most people refuse certain medical priorities with regards to their pastor's messages. I think if every pastor should have entrepreneurial knowledge coupled with spiritual integrity, Africa will shake!

Mermaid lore spanned several ancient cultures, in fact, thought to have no connection at all. Ancient Assyrians, ancient Greeks, Celts, Babylonians – we are talking almost every culture and continent. Native Americans. Russia, parts of Africa, Australia – you name it.

What they were doing was illegal, and they all knew it. However hard they dressed it up as a humanitarian or Christian attempt to rid African natives of their so-called inherent backwardness, it was, by the standards of then – and now – grossly illegal and ethically indecent.

That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned: That until there are no longer first-class and second class citizens of any nation; That until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes; That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; That until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained; And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes that hold our brothers in Angola, in Mozambique and in South Africa in subhuman bondage have been toppled and destroyed; Until bigotry and prejudice and malicious and inhuman self-interest have been replaced by understanding and tolerance and good-will; Until all Africans stand and speak as free beings, equal in the eyes of all men, as they are in the eyes of Heaven; Until that day, the African continent will not know peace. We Africans will fight, if necessary, and we know that we shall win, as we are confident in the victory of good over evil.

In reality, Africa is a rich mosaic of experience, of diverse communities and histories, and not a singular monolith of predetermined destinies. We sound different, laugh differently, craft the mundane in uniquely mundane ways, and our moral compasses do not always point in the same direction.

You know that there are no black people in Africa,” she said. Most Americans, weaned on the myth of drawable lines between human beings, have to sit with that statement. It sounds nonsensical to our ears. Of course there are black people in Africa. There is a whole continent of black people in Africa. How could anyone not see that? “Africans are not black,” she said. “They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are.” What we take as gospel in American culture is alien to them, she said. “They don’t become black until they go to America or come to the U.K.,” she said. “It is then that they become black.

The US empire rests on a grisly foundation: the massacre of millions of indigenous people, the stealing of their lands and, following this, the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of black people from Africa to work that land. Thousands died on the seas while they were being shipped like caged cattle between continents. 'Stolen from Africa, brought to America' - Bob Marley's 'Buffalo Soldier' contains a whole universe of unspeakable sadness.

In his book The Africans, Ali Mazrui began his study of the triple heritage of the African people by pointing out that the ills of the continent of Africa nowadays are the result of the anger of the ancestors in the face of the general desecration brought about by modernism. He indicates that throwing away one’s culture for another is an insult to the dead, and can result, as in the case of Africa, in a lot of unresolved ills. In a way, Mr. Mazrui is not just speaking about mechanized Africa, where the worship of the ancestors is being gradually replaced with the worship of machines. He is also speaking to the developed countries, where the antlike frenzy of life, characterized by a work-obsessed culture, is symptomatic of an illness that is perhaps too large to face. Thus

Making wine and drinking wine is not new to African Americans and others in the Diaspora. South Africa has a three-century history in growing, harvesting and distilling grapes as wine. The entire continent of Africa has a history in wine-making. In this country, slaves cultivated the vineyards owned by Thomas Jefferson and other vintners.

Hao tried flagging down a couple of trucks that rumbled by. There was much cursing, and amid his frustration he ordered John to pursue one of the trucks with the pickup and cut it off. John simply sat there, nodding to the music that was playing loudly in the cab. He had either not understood the command or he had coolly decided to ignore it.

I didn’t want to argue with my hosts. I wanted them to talk. But I felt like reminding Li that perhaps forty million Chinese people had died of starvation a half century earlier because they followed their government’s orders. It was the largest famine in history. A snapshot taken then would have given a very different picture of the supposedly essential character of Chinese people, and it would have entirely missed the point. Governments matter. Markets matter. History matters. International circumstances matter.

Africa will always be the Africa of the Victorian atlas, the blank unexplored continent the shape of the human heart.

Africa is not a dirty continent, it is just filled with disorganized government figures.

The continent is filled with the smell of selfishness, which is capitalism at its highest form.

The Middle East is the only place in the world where three continents come together. It is a crossroads that links Asia, Africa, and Europe. Life at a crossroads can be dangerous.

The African continent has so many stories to tell, it's about time they are told, by them - not us.

The only continent not in equilibrium is Africa, where a substantial share of capital is owned by foreigners.

Current estimates are that 38,000 elephants are being slaughtered each year in Africa. At this rate, elephants on that continent will all be gone in less than twenty years.

Come to Africa and help! Wherever you may be in the world, there is something you can give back to the continent that gave you a name and an identity, at least.

He looked around the church, at the altar, the tabernacle, the brass candles, and the European saints, pale like albinos in the dark continent.

The African discussion has been colonized as surely as the African continent was a century ago.

Don't keep your nation-changing thoughts to yourself. Else it won't actually change the nation. Impact!

Africa is in fact a more Christian continent than Europe. There are now, for example, more Anglicans in Nigeria than in England.

We don't need to learn about European History in African Schools around the continent, for the media reminds us that every day is EUROPEAN HISTORY.

for centuries much of the world's international trade was carried in ships that sailed past West Africa on their way between Europe and Asia around the southern tip of the continent.

Seeing yourself accurately represented, however, is a reminder that you and yours are not a side plot to a grander narrative. You are the narrative, the main characters for whom the sun rises.

It was economics that Europe should invest in Africa and control the continent's raw materials and labour. It was racism which confirmed the decision that form of control should be direct colonial rule.

Kindness, as far as its ordinary meaning is concerned, is free and anonymous. If it can’t be free and silent, it is not kindness; it is something else. Blackmail is the closest it becomes" - Joyce Banda

They devised the General Act of the Berlin Conference – a document that codified the end of Africa’s right to self-determination, and accelerated the rush to gorge on the continent until it was picked clean.

The labours which we are about to undertake to regulate and develop the commercial relations of our countrymen with that Continent, and to render a service alike to the cause of peace and humanity. (Berlin Conference)

On much of the continent, it seems to me, solidarity, generosity, and resistance to every kind of personal confrontation, combined with a sense of being economically disinherited, all work together in financial matters

I wanted to throw up. But I would have had to get out of bed to run to the bathroom. And I felt like I never wanted to leave that bed again. I love animals. I've been raised all my life around them. I love nature. But what did I really know about it? I have been more animals than many people ever see in a lifetime. I have flown with the wings of an osprey. I've raced through the ocean in the body of a dolphin. I've seen the world through the eyes of an owl at night, and smelled the wind with all the keen senses of a wolf. I've flown upside down and backward in the body of a fly. Sometimes I go out into the far fields at night and become a horse and run through the grass. And everything I've been, every animal, is either killer or killed. In a million, million battles all around the world, on every continent, in every square inch of space, there was killing. From the great cats in Africa that cold-bloodedly search out the young and weak gazelles, to the terrible wars that are fought out in anthills and termite colonies. All of nature was at war. And, at the top of all that destruction, humans killed each other as well as other species, and now those same people have been enslaved and destroyed by the Yeerks. Nature at its finest. Cute, cuddly animals who slaughtered to live. The color of nature wasn't green. It was red. Blood-red.

I said earlier, with more than 10 per cent of the African population being well educated, this type of excuse will do a great disservice to our continent, as well as to future generations of Africans, who will ask how we stood by with our eyes wide open and let another ‘Scramble for Africa’ take place. I remember sounding the same type of alarm in my keynote address to the Black Management Forum on 13 October 2005, when I stated, ‘Finally, I must sound this note of warning to Africa: there is a new kind of slavery marching through Africa – it is the economic giant called China. Yes, it is stimulating and exciting seeing the competition the Chinese are giving to the Western world in Africa. But we are again abandoning our independence for a quick solution to our economic woes. Africa needs to suffer a little if we are going to build a solid economic base for the generation of Africans to come.

When the same narratives are repeatedly regurgitated, we internalize them, make assumptions and pass judgements based on the thinnest shreds of evidence, which would dissolve if only we subjected them to the lightest of truths.

Time is not on anyone’s side. Africa has the fastest demographic rate in the world. Between now and 2050 the population of the continent is expected to double from about 1.2 billion to 2.4 billion, and the Sahel is no different.

I had lived through four revolutions on three continents. Whether in Iran, West Africa, or Haiti, all shared common characteristics, and all taught me lessons about dictators and authoritarians and their hunger to consolidate power and obtain, or at least convey legitimacy. That quest for legitimacy played out in a host of ways. One was the desire to manipulate, control, or discredit media. A relentless distortion of reality numbs a country’s populace to outrage and weakens its ability to discern truth from fiction. Another way dictators sought to secure power and legitimacy was by co-opting the power of the state, its military, law enforcement, and judicial systems, to carry out personal goals and vendettas rather than the nation’s needs. Still, another was by undermining dissent, questioning the validity of opposition, and refusing to honor public will, up to and including threatening or preventing the peaceful transfer of power.

When black people are given a chance to tell their history. They only speak of their weakness, weak moments and defeat. When they are given a chance on Media. They only do stories, series, movies, or write articles about their bad qualities , bad people in the community. They make sure they humiliate them, but whites never do that. Whites tell of their heroes, They tell of great moments, victories and they will never tell of their losses, weakness, bad characters, criminals activities. That is why people don't respect black people or Africa even thou is a great strong continent. It is because they don't know what our heroes have done. This is information is even hidden to our children and generation to come.

The industrialized Order hasn’t simply enabled us to increase the total calories grown by a factor of seven since 1945; it has enabled vast swaths of the planet to have large populations when geography alone wouldn’t previously support them. Populations in North Africa are up by over a factor of five since 1950, Iran over six, while Saudi Arabia and Yemen have increased by over a factor of ten. Bulk food shipments originating a continent (or more) away are now a commonality.

If only my love was a net that could keep the flies out. If only my love was a net full of food for all the hungry bellies. I understand why so many people have given up on Africa - no one wants to say we are leaving a continent of people behind to tough it out in a hundreds-of-years-old war of survival, but we are, and the reason is because the level of change it would take to make a difference, to heal past wounds and chart a new path is mammoth, gargantuan, almost unimaginable.

Was this for real? Andrew had forgotten how to be happy! He suspected that it involved unwarranted feelings of fondness for other people, too much self-esteem, a sort of long-term delusion that manifested as charisma, and a blocking out of certain things, like lonely people, depressed people, desperate people, homeless people, people you've hurt, people you like who don't like you, politics, the nature of being and existence, the continent of Africa, the meat industry, McDonald's, MTV, Hollywood, and most or all of human history, especially anything having to do with the Western Hemisphere between 1400 and 1900, plus or minus 200 years -- but he wasn't sure. Why did it involve so many things? Maybe it was just too hard.

What does Africa — what does the West stand for? Is not our own interior white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the coast, when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or the Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage around this continent, that we would find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the Mungo Park,the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher,of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes — with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition,with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.

Why should I be afraid of you?' He was still laughing. He said 'Maybe you think I'll think you are a missionary and I'll eat you.' I said 'I don't think that anyway. If more Africans had eaten more missionaries, the continent would be in better shape.

As the seemingly well-intentioned French journalist spoke about Africa’s scarcity and its limited resources, Nine smiled to himself almost condescendingly. He considered such statements an absolute joke. Africa did not, nor did it ever have, limited resources. Nine knew something the journalist obviously didn’t: Africa was the most abundantly resourced continent on the planet bar none. Like the despots who ruled much of the region, and the foreign governments who propped them up, he knew there was more than enough wealth in Africa’s mineral resources such as gold, diamonds and oil – not to mention the land that nurtured these resources – for every man, woman and child. He thought it unfortunate Africa had never been able to compete on a level playing field. The continent’s almost unlimited resources were the very reason foreigners had meddled in African affairs for the past century or more. Nine knew it was Omega’s plan, and that of other greedy organizations, to siphon as much wealth as they could out of vulnerable Third World countries, especially in Africa. The same organizations had the formula down pat: they indirectly started civil wars in mineral-rich regions by providing arms to opposing local factions, and sometimes even helped to create famines, in order to destabilize African countries. This made the targeted countries highly vulnerable to international control. Once the outside organizations had divided and conquered, they were then able to plunder the country’s resources.

Imperialism vaunts its exploitation of the wealth of Africa for the benefit of civilisation. In reality, from the very nature of its system of production for profit it strangles the real wealth of the continent -the creative capacity of the African people.

We have seen that psychology has accustomed us to the fact there is more to ourselves than we suspect. Like the eighteenth century European view of the earth, our minds have their own darkest Africas, their unmapped Borneos, their Amazonian basins. Their bulk continues to await exploration. Hinduism sees the mind’s hidden continents as stretching to infinity. Infinite in being, infinite in awareness, there is nothing beyond them that remains unknown. Infinite in joy, too, for there is nothing alien in them to mar their beatitude.

There are simply no doctors and nurses left on that continent. It’s an absolute tragedy! African doctors should stay in Africa.” “Why shouldn’t they want to practice where there is regular electricity and regular pay?” Mark asked, his tone flat. Obinze sensed that he did not like Alexa at all. “I’m from Grimsby and I certainly don’t want to work in a district hospital there.” “But it isn’t quite the same thing, is it? We’re speaking of some of the world’s poorest people. The doctors have a responsibility as Africans,” Alexa said. “Life isn’t fair, really. If they have the privilege of that medical degree then it comes with a responsibility to help their people.” “I see. I don’t suppose any of us should have that responsibility for the blighted towns in the north of England?” Mark said. Alexa’s face reddened. In

Her first husband (poor child, such a grief to her) was reported dead in Africa. A mysterious country - Africa." "A mysterious continent," Poirot corrected her. "Possibly. What part -" She swept on. "Central Africa. The home of voodoo, of the zhombie -" "The zhombie is in the West Indies." Mrs Cloade swept on: "- of black magic - of strange and secret practices - a country where a man could disappear and never be heard of again." "Possibly, possibly," said Poirot. "But the same is true of Piccadilly Circus." Mrs Cloade waved away Piccadilly Circus.

Too many of us still tend to regard Africa as a country. It may come as a brutal shock to realize that the African landmass is three times the size of Europe and four times that of the United States. Madagascar, which is a part of Africa, is the fourth-largest island in the world. Too many folk still talk about people speaking African, ignoring the fact that over 1,000 different languages are spoken on this continent that comprises many worlds...It is a continent with many doors, many different points of entry into a world that is wondrous and strange.

A huge advertisement in the unmistakably bright red tones of Vodacom, the global mobile phone giant, looked on this tawdry scene. It read to me like a distilled message about the only values that remained in this country, whose leaders were once committed Marxists: money and power.

The speaker was good, I liked what he had to say. I had expected a dry recitation on how women should change their gender if they expected to advance in a man's world, since I wasn't about to grow a cock and balls this man gave me hope and inspiration. Women dominated the audience, not surprising since the average African man wouldn’t support a speaker preaching gender equality. Africa was a continent with generational precedent for the alpha male, it was part of their culture, learned at an early age. This led to abuse on many levels. Women were expected to do the physical work, produce male babies and satisfy the sexual urgings of men. Urgings that in other societies would be called rape but in Africa were accepted as common practice. I understood this better than most. Pictures of the Kony boy-soldiers and their adult commander were burned into my memory.

much of tropical Africa consists of high plateaus-almost the entire continent is more than 1.000 feet above sea-level and half the continent is more than 2,500 feet above sea-level"-African rivers must plunge greater vertical distances to reach the sea, making them less navigable en route.

Afro-Americans. Which is but a wedding, however, of two confusions, an arbitrary linking of two undefined and currently undefinable proper nouns. I mean that, in the case of Africa, Africa is still chained to Europe, and exploited by Europe, and Europe and America are chained together; and as long as this is so, it is hard to speak of Africa except as a cradle and a potential. Not until the many millions of people on the continent of Africa control their land and their resources will the African personality flower or genuinely African institutions flourish and reveal Africa as she is.

Clinton directed available funds away from countries like Afghanistan and toward the neediest cases in Africa, a dying continent that Lake and the new AID director, Brian Atwood, felt had been neglected for too long by Republican administrations. “Nobody wanted to return to the hot spots of the Reagan-Bush years,” such as Afghanistan, recalled one member of Clinton’s team at the aid agency. “They just wanted them to go away.” South Asia was “just one of those black holes out there.” Atwood faced hostility from Republicans in Congress who argued that American development aid was being wasted in poor, chaotic countries

Ebola, that little bastard of a bug, had popped up earlier in the summer in Sierra Leone in the worst outbreak in history. Was it possible that global warming had changed something important about the ecological balance in Africa and turned it into an optimal, continent-sized petri dish for breeding that virus?

This epic is a humble appeal to this great continent, Africa: May we reclaim our rich and resplendent narrative; our foundation, our voice, our magnitude, our honour, our pride, our wisdom, our traditions, our past, our exceptional uniqueness, our failings, our triumphs and finally when all is said and done, our glory.

The Middle Ages in Europe are traditionally seen as the time of Crusades, chivalry and the growing power of the papacy, but all this was little more than a sideshow to the titanic struggles taking place further east. The tribal system had led the Mongols to the brink of global domination, having conquered almost the whole continent of Asia. Europe and North Africa yawned open; it was striking then that the Mongol leadership focused not on the former but on the latter. Put simply, Europe was not the best prize on offer. All that stood in the way of Mongol control of the Nile, of Egypt’s rich agricultural output and its crucial position as a junction on the trade routes in all directions was an army commanded by men who were drawn from the very same steppes: this was not just a struggle for supremacy, it was the triumph of a political, cultural and social system. The battle for the medieval world was being fought between nomads from Central and eastern Asia.

BY THE END OF the fourteenth century only tiny remnants of Christianity remained here and there in the East and North Africa, having been almost completely wiped out by Muslim persecution. Thus, as Philip Jenkins put it, Christianity became a European faith because Europe was the only “continent where it was not destroyed.

One day, putting my finger on a spot in the very middle of the then white heart of Africa, I declared that some day I would go there ... It is a fact that, about eighteen years afterwards, a wretched little stern-wheel steamboat I commanded lay moored to the bank of an African river. Everything was dark under the stars. Every other white man on board was asleep. I was glad to be alone on deck, smoking the pipe of peace after an anxious day. The subdued thundering mutter of the Stanley Falls hung in the heavy night air of the last navigable reach of the Upper Congo ... Away in the middle of the stream, on a little island nestling all black in the foam of the broken water, a solitary little light glimmered feebly, and I said to myself with awe, 'This is the very spot of my boyish boast.' A great melancholy descended on me. Yes, this was the very spot. But there was no shadowy friend to stand by my side in the night of the enormous wilderness, no great haunting memory, but only the ... distasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration. What an end to the idealised realities of a boy's daydreams!... Still, the fact remains that I have smoked a pipe of peace at midnight in the very heart of the African continent, and felt very lonely there.

The youth. The youth of Africa. The youth of this world. Are we harnessing the potential of the youth enough? Are the young ones… giving off their best to the continent, the nation, the universe that is giving us so much? Why do we think we can only contribute something after age forty? Are we not causing wealth loss to our generation?

Contrary to the “myths to live by” created by Alex Haley and others, Africans were by no means the innocents portrayed in Roots, baffled as to why white men were coming in and taking their people away in chains. On the contrary, the region of West Africa from which Kunte Kinte supposedly came was one of the great slave-trading regions of the continent—before, during, and after the white man arrived. It was the Africans who enslaved their fellow Africans, selling some of these slaves to Europeans or to Arabs and keeping others for themselves. Even at the peak of the Atlantic slave trade, Africans retained more slaves for themselves than they sent to the Western Hemisphere.

By the end of the conference, the fourteen assembled interests wanted a future for the continent that allowed far-off strange nations to freely fuel their pleasures with Africa’s most lucrative resources, all while keeping the local people happy by developing their perceived undeveloped minds with a copy of the Bible, a smile and weapons.

You know that there are no black people in Africa,” she said. Most Americans, we have to sit with that statement. It sounds nonsensical to our ears. Of course there are black people in Africa. There is a whole continent of black people in Africa. How could anyone not see that? “Africans are not black,” she said. “They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are.” What we take as gospel in American culture is alien to them, she said. “They don’t become black until they go to America or come to the U.K.,” she said. “It is then that they become black.

It is said that in ancient times all lands where one, and it seems that the continents themselves profess nostalgia for that state of affairs, just as there are people who say that they belong not to their nation but to the world, demanding an international passport and universal right of residence. Thus India pushes northwards, ploughing up the Himalayas, determined not to be an island but to press its tropical and humid lust on Asia. The Arabian peninsula wrecks a sly revenge on the Ottomans by leaning against Turkey casually in the hope of causing it to fall into the Black Sea. Africa, tired of white folk who think of it as musky, perilous, unknowable and romantic, squeezes northward in the determination that Europe shall look it in the face for once, and admit after all that its civilization was conceived in Egypt. Only the Americans hurry away westwards, so determined to be isolated and superior that they have forgotten that the world is round and that one day perforce they will find themselves glued prodigiously to China.

Throughout history, malaria has been our greatest enemy. It’s thought that up to half of all the humans who have ever lived have died of malaria. Millions of Africans are still infected each year and thousands of children on the continent die every single day from the disease. The mosquito-borne virus is one of the great curses of the tropics, a disease found almost entirely between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer. We might have forgotten about it in the temperate West, but in Africa especially it can still dominate life. I have been in some areas of Africa where the incidence of malaria is more than 200 per cent. How is that possible? People are infected more than once a year. How can

After years studying informality in Nigeria, Dutch architect and planner Rem Koolhaas reach the same conclusion. In the West, he writes, “there’s a sense of infinite choice, but a very conventional set of options from which to choose.” By contrast, “in Lagos, there is no choice, but there are countless ways to articulate the condition of no choice.

Americans made beautiful, principled speeches and imposed countless conditions on all manner of things. But in the end, in Africa they seemed to move the ball very slowly. They regarded Africa not as a terrain of opportunity, or even as a morally compelling challenge to humanity, but as a burden, and largely as one to be evaded as much as possible.

Africans carried more genetic diversity within their genomes than non-Africans, as a simple result of the fact that humanity had originated on that continent and spread outward. Non-African races had been founded by isolated groups of adventurers. Breeding among themselves, they had created gene pools that were necessarily limited to what they had brought with them: only a subset of what was to be found in Africa. This idea had been used to explain, for example, why Africa contained both the tallest and the most diminutive people in the world, and why so many top athletes were African. It wasn’t because they were naturally better athletes but because the bell-shaped curve of random genetic variation was wider.

I am a new generation of Africans. We believe in the future role of that continent. We are convinced it has a destiny and a contribution to make the world community. It has long languished, slept, misunderstood, exploited, pushed around, and spoken for. Now it is Africa's hour to do and speak to the world. In the African scale of values, freedom ranks quite high.

The Ganges, though flowing from the foot of Vishnu and through Siva's hair, is not an ancient stream. Geology, looking further than religion, knows of a time when neither the river nor the Himalayas that nourished it existed, and an ocean flowed over the holy places of Hindustan. The mountains rose, their debris silted up the ocean, the gods took their seats on them and contrived the river, and the India we call immemorial came into being. But India is really far older. In the days of the prehistoric ocean the southern part of the peninsula already existed, and the high places of Dravidia have been land since land began, and have seen on the one side the sinking of a continent that joined them to Africa, and on the other the upheaval of the Himalayas from a sea. They are older than anything in the world. No water has ever covered them, and the sun who has watched them for countless aeons may still discern in their outlines forms that were his before our globe was torn from his bosom. If flesh of the sun's flesh is to be touched anywhere, it is here, among the incredible antiquity of these hills.

Be in no doubt that the transatlantic slavery of Africans was racial genocide and racial exploitation. It distorted Africa’s economic growth as a continent making it wholly reliant on its colonial masters, who were exploiting it. It displaced millions of Africans, with many dying on the way to new lands and at the hands of ruthless White slave masters upon destination.

The interior structure of modern Africa was built on greed rather than an informed reality. It's the same strategy my eleven year old nephew uses in negotiations: ignore the well-established rules and parameters, and demand a fairy-tale outcome that brings short-term joy, with the long-term consequences relegated to a problem for a future version of yourself to deal with.

Canadian mining companies have been the main beneficiaries of the World Bank’s push to promote capitalist mineral extraction in Africa. But in their quest for profits Canadian businesses have squeezed out domestic miners and solidified the colonial economic pattern whereby foreigners export the continent’s raw materials while African countries import value added products.

There are three major genetic observations that have been made about the diversity of people living on the African continent. First, Africa shows more genetic diversity than the other continents. Second, most of the genetic variation outside of Africa is a subset of the variation found within Africa. Finally, genetic diversity decreases with increasing distance from Africa.

In a sudden and soundless eruption, as if he has fallen into a waking dream, a stream of images pours down, images of women he has known on two continents, some from so far away in time that he barely recognizes them. Like leaves blown on the wind, pell-mell, they pass before him. A fair field full of folk: hundreds of lives all tangled with his. He holds his breath, willing the vision to continue. What has happened to them, all those women, all those lives? Are there moments when they too, or some of them, are plunged without warning into the ocean of memory? The German girl: is it possible that at this very instant she is remembering the man who picked her up on the roadside in Africa and spent the night with her? Enriched: that was the word the newspapers picked on to jeer at. A stupid word to let slip, under the circumstances, yet now, at this moment, he would stand by it. By Melanie, by the girl in Touws River; by Rosalind, Bev Shaw, Soraya: by each of them he was enriched, and by the others too, even the least of them, even the failures. Like a flower blooming in his breast, his heart floods with thankfulness.

In Africa, Asia, Amerindia, Oceania, Europe came and established its order of Analysis and Death. What it could not use, it killed or altered. In time the death-colonies grew strong enough to break away. But the impulse to empire, the mission to propagate death, the structure of it, kept on. Now we are in the last phase. American Death has come to occupy Europe. It has learned empire from its old metropolis. But now we have only the structure left us, none of the great rainbow plumes, no fittings of gold, no epic marches over alkali seas. The savages of other continents, corrupted but still resisting in the name of life, have gone on despite everything... while Death and Europe are separate as ever, their love still unconsummated. Death only rules here.

I still worry about Africa, we are slaves to western and Eastern Brands and we do not cherish and love our own. We are not even in charge of our economies because we depend heavily on what happens in the East or West, Worse-off we still judge each other based on skin color because those from Northern Africa and even some in East Africa believe that they are not Africans and they do not integrate with the darker Africans. For centuries we are still being victimized by other races from other continents, because they despise our dark skin and think that we are lesser than them.. Xenophobia still lingers and some have the cold heart to kill their black African brothers and sisters and yet the people who owe them reparation and economic freedom are originally from the western countries. We still are held captive by our governments , who abuse our resources only to feed their pockets at the expense our crumbling nations. Why should we continue to suffer when we can apply Pan Africanism and Rise above the Western and Eastern Countries, but sadly we do not because we are not united.. Africa must unite to solve its problems, Happy Africa Day

In the spring of 236 B.C. Hamilcar and his forces crossed from North Africa into Europe. This was a momentous occasion: the invasion of the European continent by a Semitic and African army. Foreshadowing the great Arab invasions of many centuries later, it gave warning that the countries on the northern rim of the Mediterranean basin were no longer safe from any enemy to the south.

In the year 800, traditional estimates say that about 90 percent of our species lived in the temperate belt of Africa and Eurasia, somewhere north of the equator, and another 6 percent lived in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly along the perimeter of the continent. The Americas supposedly had about 3 percent of the world’s population, although that number is pretty speculative and much disputed.

Similarly, lightning occurs more often in Africa than in Europe and Asia put together, even though Asia alone is larger than Africa or any other continent.58 Thunderstorms have prerequisites, and those prerequisites all come together more often in some geographic settings than in others. In the United States, thunderstorms are 20 times as frequent in southern Florida as in coastal California.

India is often said to be the most diverse country on Earth. And diversity worked so well there that its eastern and western provinces split off into Pakistan and Bangladesh amid oceans of blood. According to the map in a Daily Mail article titled ‘Worlds Apart,’ Africa is the most ethnically diverse continent on Earth, yet it continues to eat itself alive due to ongoing tribal conflicts that may have been exploited by colonialists but that existed long before Europeans ever set foot in Africa and have persisted—and even escalated—once the colonialists began their slow retreat. European history is replete with homicidal group conflicts that may on their surface appear to have been rooted in religion or ideology but were more deeply entwined with things such as cultural, linguistic, and phenotypical differences.

American diplomats had been slow to understand the scope of the change being driven by Chinese migration to Africa. The phenomenon had been flagged in State Department cables as early as 2005, with diplomats identifying the budding, large-scale movement of people from China to Africa as part of a campaign to expand Beijing’s political influence and simultaneously advance China’s business interests and overall clout. These early, classified warnings also spoke of the spread, via emigration, of Chinese organized crime, particularly in smuggling and human trafficking. For the most part, however, it seemed that American diplomats were still in search of the right voice, the right message. All too often, Washington struck a paternalistic tone that came across as: Listen up children, you must be careful about these tricky Chinese.

varied, polyglot continent, far bigger than you think and far more complex than the simple media narrative of poverty, war, corruption and disease. I often get the impression that Westerners pity Africans and think we need saving. I am here to tell you otherwise. We do not need aid, and we don’t deserve, or want, pity. We want partnerships. We want to do business with you, and we believe you will benefit from these business

For the middle majority of us all, knowledge of Negroes firsthand is probably limited—limited to the colored cleaning woman, who comes twice a week, limited to the colored baseball player who saves or loses a home game, limited to the garage mechanic, or dime-store clerk, or blues singer seen and heard on a Saturday night. To this white majority, the black man is as unknown as once was the heart of the Dark Continent of Africa.

In the days of the British Empire, controlling South Africa meant controlling the Cape of Good Hope and thus the sea lanes between the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Modern navies can venture much further out from the southern African coastline if they wish to pass by, but the Cape is still a commanding piece of real estate on the world map and South Africa is a commanding presence in the whole of the bottom third of the continent.

South Africa is China’s largest trading partner in Africa. The two countries have a long political and economic history and are well placed to work together. Hundreds of Chinese companies, both state owned and private, now operate in Durban, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. South Africa’s economy is ranked second-biggest on the continent behind Nigeria. It is certainly the powerhouse in the south in terms of its economy

The Americas span a much greater distance north–south (9,000 miles) than east–west: only 3,000 miles at the widest, narrowing to a mere 40 miles at the Isthmus of Panama. That is, the major axis of the Americas is north–south. The same is also true, though to a less extreme degree, for Africa. In contrast, the major axis of Eurasia is east–west. What effect, if any, did those differences in the orientation of the continents’ axes have on human history?

Note, moreover, that the demographic growth anticipated for the second half of the twenty-first century (0.2 percent in the period 2050–2100) is entirely due to the continent of Africa (with annual growth of 1 percent). On the three other continents, the population will probably either stagnate (0.0 percent in America) or decrease (−0.1 percent in Europe and −0.2 percent in Asia). Such a prolonged period of negative demographic growth in peacetime would be unprecedented (see Table 2.3).

This war was presented to us as a crusade against the evil doctrines of Hitler, against racialism, etc., yet the whole of that enormous land-mass, about half the total area of Africa, was conducted on precisely Hitler’s assumption—that some human beings are better than others because of their race. The mass of the Africans up and down the continent were sardonically amused at the sight of their white masters crusading off to fight the racialist devil—those Africans with any education at all. They

Initially, his theory was inspired by the observation that the shapes of continents like South America and Africa could be fitted together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Continental drift then became more certain as fossils accumulated and paleontologists found that the distribution of ancient species suggested that the continents were once joined. Later, “plate tectonics” was suggested as a mechanism for continental movement, just as natural selection was suggested as the mechanism for evolution:

Stone Age ancestors spread from East Africa to the four corners of the earth, they changed the flora and fauna of every continent and island on which they settled. They drove to extinction all the other human species of the world, 90 per cent of the large animals of Australia, 75 per cent of the large mammals of America and about 50 per cent of all the large land mammals of the planet – and all before they planted the first wheat field, shaped the first metal tool, wrote the first text or struck the first coin.

Africa’s coastline? great beaches, really, really lovely beaches, but terrible natural harbours. Rivers? Amazing rivers, but most of them are rubbish for actually transporting anything, given that every few miles you go over a waterfall. These are just two in a long list of problems which help explain why Africa isn’t technologically or politically as successful as Western Europe or North America. There are lots of places that are unsuccessful, but few have been as unsuccessful as Africa, and that despite having a head start as the place where Homo sapiens originated about 200,000 years ago. As that most lucid of writers, Jared Diamond, put it in a brilliant National Geographic article in 2005, ‘It’s the opposite of what one would expect from the runner first off the block.’ However, the first runners became separated from everyone else by the Sahara Desert and the Indian and Atlantic oceans. Almost the entire continent developed in isolation from the Eurasian land mass, where ideas and technology were exchanged from east to west, and west to east, but not north to south.

Senegal had always boasted one of Africa’s most vibrant merchant cultures. The country’s boubou-wearing traders had long colonized street corners in New York and many a European city, where they sold clothing, gadgetry, and assorted tourist fare. But in 2004, Dakar’s traders woke up suddenly to the alarming notion that they were in turn being colonized by Chinese who seemed to be taking over the retail sector. Large protests followed in Dakar, with the striking Senegalese traders demanding government action to protect them from the Chinese newcomers. From

The phenomenon of laborers staying on at the end of their contracts with big public works companies is likely the biggest single source of Chinese migration to Africa. Workers would arrive from a given locality in China and discover there was good money to be made in some corner of an Africa they had never before imagined viable. Soon, they were sending word back home about the fortunes to be made there, or the hospitality of the locals, or the wonders of the environment, or the joys of a free and relatively pressureless life. In short order, others would follow. Li

Columbus stuck to this error for the rest of his life. The idea that he had discovered a completely unknown continent was inconceivable for him and for many of his generation. For thousands of years, not only the greatest thinkers and scholars but also the infallible Scriptures had known only Europe, Africa and Asia. Could they all have been wrong? Could the Bible have missed half the world? It would be as if in 1969, on its way to the moon, Apollo 11 had crashed into a hitherto unknown moon circling the earth, which all previous observations had somehow failed to spot.

The Chinese work in a very peculiar manner. They prefer to deal directly with the president and to make a spectacular gesture, and that is that. They don’t go for any public discussion, and they won’t give importance to many international norms, or to civil society, or to principles like democracy. That is the backdrop to some of their big deals in this country—not just iron, but also for oil and for timber.” Despite these misgivings, Rahall said that the arrival of Chinese money had given countries like his new options, and hence more breathing space, meaning unaccustomed freedom for once from the West.

But the Anthropocene isn’t a novel phenomenon of the last few centuries. Already tens of thousands of years ago, when our Stone Age ancestors spread from East Africa to the four corners of the earth, they changed the flora and fauna of every continent and island on which they settled. They drove to extinction all the other human species of the world, 90 per cent of the large animals of Australia, 75 per cent of the large mammals of America and about 50 per cent of all the large land mammals of the planet – and all before they planted the first wheat field, shaped the first metal tool, wrote the first text or struck the first coin.

One author, in writing of the Bible’s uniqueness, put it this way: Here is a book: 1. written over a 1500 year span; 2. written over 40 generations; 3. written by more than 40 authors, from every walk of life— including kings, peasants, philosophers, fishermen, poets, statesmen, scholars, etc.: Moses, a political leader, trained in the universities of Egypt Peter, a fisherman Amos, a herdsman Joshua, a military general Nehemiah, a cupbearer Daniel, a prime minister Luke, a doctor Solomon, a king Matthew, a tax collector Paul, a rabbi 4. written in different places: Moses in the wilderness Jeremiah in a dungeon Daniel on a hillside and in a palace Paul inside a prison Luke while traveling John on the isle of Patmos others in the rigors of a military campaign 5. written at different times: David in times of war Solomon in times of peace 6. written during different moods: some writing from the heights of joy and others from the depths of sorrow and despair 7. written on three continents: Asia, Africa, and Europe 8. written in three languages: Hebrew… , Aramaic… , and Greek… 9. Finally, its subject matter includes hundreds of controversial topics. Yet, the biblical authors spoke with harmony and continuity from Genesis to Revelation. There is one unfolding story…

The figures are staggering. The United States is single-handedly responsible for no less than 40% of global overshoot emissions. The European Union is responsible for 29%. Together with the rest of Europe, plus Canada, Japan and Australia, the nations of the global North (which represent only 19% of the global population) have contributed 92% of overshoot emissions. That means they are responsible for 92% of the damage caused by climate breakdown. By contrast, the entire continents of Latin America, Africa and the Middle East have contributed a combined total of only 8%. And that comes from only a small number of countries within those regions.

But in order to change a situation one has first to see it for what it is: in the present case, to accept the fact, whatever one does with it thereafter, that the Negro has been formed by this nation, for better or for worse, and does not belong to any other—not to Africa, and certainly not to Islam. The paradox—and a fearful paradox it is—is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere, on any continent, as long as he is unwilling to accept his past. To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

Extroversion is in our DNA—literally, according to some psychologists. The trait has been found to be less prevalent in Asia and Africa than in Europe and America, whose populations descend largely from the migrants of the world. It makes sense, say these researchers, that world travelers were more extroverted than those who stayed home—and that they passed on their traits to their children and their children’s children. “As personality traits are genetically transmitted,” writes the psychologist Kenneth Olson, “each succeeding wave of emigrants to a new continent would give rise over time to a population of more engaged individuals than reside in the emigrants’ continent of origin.

She seemed nice, but she was most likely one of those American women whose knowledge of Africa was based largely on movies and National Geographic and thirdhand information from someone who knew someone who had been to somewhere on the continent, usually Kenya or South Africa. Whenever Jende met such women (at Liomi’s school; at Marcus Garvey Park; in the livery cab he used to drive), they often said something like, oh my God, I saw this really crazy show about such-and-such in Africa. Or, my cousin/friend/neighbor used to date an African man, and he was a really nice guy. Or, even worse, if they asked him where in Africa he was from and he said Cameroon, they proceeded to tell him that a friend’s daughter once went to Tanzania or Uganda. This comment used to irk him until Winston gave him the perfect response: Tell them your friend’s uncle lives in Toronto. Which was what he now did every time someone mentioned some other African country in response to him saying he was from Cameroon. Oh yeah, he would say in response to something said about Senegal, I watched a show the other day about San Antonio. Or, one day I hope to visit Montreal. Or, I hear Miami is a nice city. And every time he did this, he cracked up inside as the Americans’ faces scrunched up in confusion because they couldn’t understand what Toronto/San Antonio/Montreal/Miami had to do with New York.

The idea of the simple linear development of society from the culture of the paleolithic (Old Stone Age) through the successive stages of the neolithic (New Stone Age), Bronze, and Iron Ages must be given up. Today we find primitive cultures co-existing with advanced modern society on all the continents-the Bushmen of Australia, the Bushmen of South Africa, truly primitive peoples in South America, and in New Guinea; some tribal peoples in the United States. We shall now assume that, some 20,000 or more years ago, while paleolithic peoples held out in Europe, more advanced cultures existed elsewhere on the earth, and that we have inherited a part of what they once possessed, passed down from people to people.

No, we are not going to keep adding bodies until the world is groaning at the weight of eleven billion of us and more; nine billion is probably closer to the truth, before the population starts to decline. No, fertility rates are not astronomically high in developing countries; many of them are at or below replacement rate. No, Africa is not a chronically impoverished continent doomed to forever grow its population while lacking the resources to sustain it; the continent is dynamic, its economies are in flux, and birth rates are falling rapidly. No, African Americans and Latino Americans are not overwhelming white America with their higher fertility rates. The fertility rates of all three groups have essentially converged.

We like to think of the old-fashioned American classics as children's books. Just childishness, on our part. The old American art-speech contains an alien quality, which belongs to the American continent and to nowhere else. But, of course, so long as we insist on reading the books as children's tales, we miss all that. One wonders what the proper high-brow Romans of the third and fourth or later centuries read into the strange utterances of Lucretius or Apuleius or Tertullian, Augustine or Athanasius. The uncanny voice of Iberian Spain, the weirdness of old Carthage, the passion of Libya and North Africa; you may bet the proper old Romans never heard these at all. They read old Latin inference over the top of it, as we read old European inference over the top of Poe or Hawthorne. It is hard to hear a new voice, as hard as it is to listen to an unknown language. We just don't listen. There is a new voice in the old American classics. The world has declined to hear it, and has blabbed about children's stories. Why?—Out of fear. The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences. And it is like trying to use muscles that have perhaps never been used, or that have been going stiff for ages. It hurts horribly. The world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeon-hole any idea. But it can't pigeon-hole a real new experience. It can only dodge. The world is a great dodger, and the Americans the greatest. Because they dodge their own very selves.

When the death toll among British troops was added to that of the carriers the official ‘butcher’s bill’ in the East Africa campaign exceeded 100,000 souls. The true figure was undoubtedly much higher: as many a British official admitted, ‘the full tale of the mortality among [the] native carriers will never be told’.2 Even 100,000 deaths is a sobering enough figure. It is almost double the number of Australian or Canadian or Indian troops who gave their lives in the Great War; indeed it is equivalent to the combined casualties - the dead and wounded - sustained by Indian troops. It is as if the entire African workforce employed at the time in the mines of South Africa had been wiped out. Yet the East Africa campaign remains, by and large, a forgotten theatre of war.

When I first met Hao, I thought of him as unusual and discounted the possibility that the sorts of ideas he espoused and incarnated could be representative of much of anything beyond his own gruff and often cynical persona. But I would learn that his brand of free-spoken disaffection from the system back home was widespread among China’s new emigrants. To be sure, a desire for better economic opportunities was the biggest driver behind their exodus. Still, contributing to the decision for many to take a great leap into the unknown and move to Africa was a weariness with omnipresent official corruption back home, fear of the impact of a badly polluted environment on their health, and a variety of constraints on freedoms, including religion and speech. Many migrants also invoked a sheer lack of space.

Although our American friends, some of whose generals visited us, took a more alarmist view of our position, and the world at large regarded the invasion of Britain as probable, we ourselves felt free to send overseas all the troops our available shipping could carry and to wage offensive war in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Here was the hinge on which our ultimate victory turned, and it was in 1941 that the first significant events began. In war armies must fight. Africa was the only continent in which we could meet our foes on land. The defence of Egypt and of Malta were duties compulsive upon us, and the destruction of the Italian Empire the first prize we could gain. The British resistance in the Middle East to the triumphant Axis Powers and our attempt to rally the Balkans and Turkey against them are the theme and thread of our story now.

One can hardly fault China for seizing on a great bargain, but for Zambia, the auctioning off of its most lucrative economic resources at fire-sale prices constituted another big stroke of bad national luck. Copper prices were still depressed and the government’s state of near bankruptcy at the time meant that Zambia had little negotiating power. Edith Nawakwi, who was the Zambian finance minister at the time of the sale, said that the country was pressured by its more traditional partners to accept this pittance. “We were told by advisers, who included the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, that … for the next twenty years, Zambian copper would not make a profit. [Conversely, if we privatized] we would be able to access debt relief, and this was a huge carrot in front of us—like waving medicine in front of a dying woman. We had no option [but to go ahead].” The

The “United States” does not exist as a nation, because the ruling class of the U.S./Europe exploits the world without regard to borders and nationality.  For instance, multinational or global corporations rule the world.  They make their own laws by buying politicians– Democrats and Republicans, and white politicians in England and in the rest of Europe.  We are ruled by a European power which disregards even the hypocritical U.S. Constitution.  If it doesn’t like the laws of the U.S., as they are created, interpreted and enforced, the European power simply moves its base of management and labor to some other part of the world.   Today the European power most often rules through neocolonial regimes in the so-called “Third World.”  Through political leaders who are loyal only to the European power, not to their people and the interests of their nation, the European power sets up shop in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  By further exploiting the people and stealing the resources of these nations on every continent outside Europe, the European power enhances its domination.  Every institution and organization within the European power has the purpose of adding to its global domination: NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, the military, and the police.   The European power lies to the people within each “nation” about national pride or patriotism.  We foolishly stand with our hands over our hearts during the “National Anthem” at football games while the somber servicemen in their uniforms hold the red, white and blue flag, then a military jet flies over and we cheer.  This show obscures the real purpose of the military, which is to increase European power through intimidation and the ongoing invasion of the globe.  We are cheering for imperialist forces.  We are standing on Native land celebrating the symbols of de-humanizing terrorism.  Why would we do this unless we were being lied to?   The European imperialist power lies to us about its imperialism.  It’s safe to say, most “Americans” do not recognize that we are part of an empire.  When we think of an empire we think of ancient Rome or the British Empire.  Yet the ongoing attack against the Native peoples of “North America” is imperialism.  When we made the “Louisiana Purchase” (somehow the French thought Native land was theirs to sell, and the U.S. thought it was ours to buy) this was imperialism.  When we stole the land from Mexico, this was imperialism (the Mexican people having been previously invaded by the European imperialist power).  Imperialism is everywhere.  Only the lies of capitalism could so effectively lead us to believe that we are not part of an empire.

All Europe was watching Spain. The left-wing government elected last February had suffered an attempted military coup backed by Fascists and conservatives. The rebel general Franco had won support from the Catholic Church. The news had struck the rest of the continent like an earthquake. After Germany and Italy would Spain, too, fall under the curse of Fascism? “The revolt was botched, as you probably know, and it almost failed,” Billy went on. “But Hitler and Mussolini came to the rescue, and saved the insurrection by airlifting thousands of rebel troops from North Africa as reinforcements.” Lenny put in: “And the unions saved the government!” “That’s true,” Billy said. “The government was slow to react, but the trade unions led the way in organizing workers and arming them with weapons they seized from military arsenals, ships, gun shops, and anywhere else they could find them.

pump,” Marshall added. Brooke had spotted a whimbrel, a yellow wagtail, and five small owls. He had also seen this American argument winging around Anfa many times by now. Out came the red leather folders. “The Germans have forty-four divisions in France,” he said in a monotone that implied exasperation. “That is sufficient strength to overwhelm us on the ground and perhaps hem us in with wire or concrete…. Since we cannot go into the Continent in force until Germany weakens, we should try to make the Germans disperse their forces as much as possible.” There it was, and there it remained. The Americans, whose delegation included but a single logistician frantically thumbing through three loose-leaf notebooks, tended toward observation and generality. British statements bulged with facts and statistics from Bulolo’s humming war room. The Americans had an inclination; the British had a plan.

Though I was there only a short time, one thing about the Relay Station did impress me very strongly. Everywhere else I’d been, one could look “down” at the earth and watch it turning on its axis, bringing new continents into view with the passing hours. But here there was no such change. The earth kept the same face turned forever toward the station. It was true that night and day passed across the planet beneath, but with every dawn and sunset, the station was still in exactly the same place. It was poised eternally above a spot in Uganda, two hundred miles from Lake Victoria. Because of this, it was hard to believe that the station was moving at all, though actually it was traveling round the earth at over six thousand miles an hour. But because it took exactly one day to make the circuit, it would remain hanging over Africa forever—just as the other two stations hung above the opposite coasts of the Pacific.

Teacher, where will I come to if I start walking that way?" ... and I pointed. He laughed. "Little man," he said, "that way is North. If you start walking that way and just keep on walking, and your legs don't give in, you will see all of Africa! Yes, Africa, little man! You will see the great rivers of the continent: The Vaal, the Zambezi, the Limpopo, the Congo, and then the mighty Nile. You will see the mountains: the Drakensburg, Kilimanjaro, Kenya, and the Ruwenzori. And you will meet all our brothers: the little Pygmies of the forests, the proud Masai, the Watusi ... tallest of the tall, and the Kikuyu standing on one leg like herons in a pond waiting for a frog. " "Has teacher seen all that?" I asked, "No," he said. "Then how does teacher know it's there?" "Because it is all in the books and I have read the books and if you work hard in school, little man, you can do the same without worrying about your legs giving in.

To my eyes, the presence of a few families like these only brought into sharper relief the ambiguous morality of the evacuation. The marines were doing their job with typical efficiency and even dignity, but there was no escaping the ugly fact that America was swooping into this country once again to conduct a triage, neglecting precisely those who were least able to fend for themselves. Ordinary Liberians were being relegated to a category of subhuman existence whose intimate workings I had first learned about as a young reporter covering police headquarters in New York. There, I quickly deduced how certain murders were automatically classified as nickel-and-dime cases—‘jobs’ that required little follow-up by detectives, and by inference, by the press as well. It was another insidious form of triage, and it took only a few days on the assignment to understand that the ‘garbage’ cases almost invariably involved people of color

Why Westerners are so obsessed with "saving" Africa, and why this obsession so often goes awry? Western countries should understand that Africa’s development chances and social possibilities remain heavily hindered due to its overall mediocre governance. Africa rising is still possible -- but first Africans need to understand that the power lies not just with the government, but the people. I do believe, that young Africans have the will to "CHANGE" Africa. They must engage their government in a positive manner on issues that matters -- I also realize that too many of the continent’s people are subject to the kinds of governments that favor ruling elites rather than ordinary villagers and townspeople. These kind of behavior trickles down growth. In Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe is the problem. In South Africa the Apartheid did some damage. The country still wrestles with significant racial issues that sometimes leads to the murder of its citizens. In Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya the world’s worst food crisis is being felt. In Libya the West sends a mixed messages that make the future for Libyans uncertain. In Nigeria oil is the biggest curse. In Liberia corruption had make it very hard for the country to even develop. Westerners should understand that their funding cannot fix the problems in Africa. African problems can be fixed by Africans. Charity gives but does not really transform. Transformation should come from the root, "African leadership." We have a PHD, Bachelors and even Master degree holders but still can't transform knowledge. Knowledge in any society should be the power of transformation. Africa does not need a savior and western funds, what Africa needs is a drive towards ownership of one's destiny. By creating a positive structural system that works for the majority. There should be needs in dealing with corruption, leadership and accountability.

Years later, in a high-school biology class, Samuel heard a story about a certain kind of African turtle that swam across the ocean to lay its eggs in South America. Scientists could find no reason for the enormous trip. Why did the turtles do it? The leading theory was that they began doing eons ago, when South America and Africa were still locked together. Back then, only a river might have separated the continents, and the turtles laid their eggs on the river's far bank. But then the continents began drifting apart, and the river widened by about an inch per year, which would have been invisible to the turtles. So they kept going to the same spot, the far bank of the river, each generation swimming a tiny bit farther than the last one, and after a hundred million years of this, the river had become an ocean, and yet the turtles never noticed. This, Samuel decided, was the manner of his mother's departure. This was how she moved away - imperceptibly, slowly, bit by bit.

A National Transportation Safety Board review of the accident said it crashed because it was flying in stronger winds than it was built to handle. The website the Verge showed this report to an aviation expert who criticized the fact that Mark was there for the maiden voyage, saying it put pressure on the engineers to fly despite the high winds. “I never would have approved flying in those conditions—and certainly not having the CEO coming in to witness it.” Three months later, on September 1, Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket explodes on the launchpad, completely destroying the Internet.org satellite it’s supposed to be putting in orbit. Mark posted, As I’m here in Africa, I’m deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent. Fortunately, we have developed other technologies like Aquila that will connect people as well. Aquila, of course, was the drone that crashed on its maiden flight.

You could see the future right away here,” Hu Renzhong, a pig and poultry producer, told me. “Food was expensive and people didn’t have enough meat to eat. They couldn’t afford it. The land was good, though, and back then it was still cheap.” Hu received me one morning at his mansion farmhouse on the outskirts of Lusaka, offering me a seat in the marble chill of his enormous living room, before taking me on a long walking tour of his acres and acres of hog-breeding pens and sprawling, temperature-controlled chicken hatcheries, all impressively modern and minutely organized. He had come to Zambia from China’s Jiangxi province in 1995 as a twenty-two-year-old simple laborer, but soon got into business for himself, raising chickens at first with another Chinese immigrant. It wasn’t long before the two had struck it rich, buying land and building ever-bigger houses. “Things had started developing really fast back home, and a lot of people tried to tell me I’d made a mistake,” he said. “But I’ve never really looked back.” I

The road north out of central Lusaka quickly transitions from a world of impressively broad avenues and fancy new commercial districts to a stop-and-start tour of desolate, overcrowded slums. There, half-dressed young men sit around glumly, seemingly lacking the motivation in the face of persistently high unemployment to even bother looking for work. When at last one reaches the highway that leads north to the Copper Belt it is the oncoming traffic that makes the strongest impression. It consists mostly of van after jam-packed van full of poor Zambians. They are overwhelmingly young and desperate to get off the land and they arrive in the capital with dreams of remaking their lives in the big city. When most people think about China’s relationship with Africa they reduce it to a single proposition: securing access to natural resources, of which Africa is the world’s greatest storehouse. As one of the top copper-producing nations, Zambia, a landlocked country in southern Africa, is doubtlessly a very big part of that story.

Acting on Gama’s intelligence, Cabral had discovered two notable African ports that his predecessor had bypassed—Sofala, the conduit for much of West Africa’s gold, and Kilwa, the island capital of a dynasty of sultans that had long dominated the Swahili Coast. He had been welcomed with marked friendliness by the chastened ruler of Mozambique, and the sultan of Malindi had been his usual hospitable self. He had made contact with Cannanore and Cochin, two busy Indian ports whose kings were on bad terms with the Zamorin. He had loaded his ships with spices in both cities, and he had left a party of men at Cochin to establish a factory. The vessel that had disappeared in the Indian Ocean finally resurfaced with the news that it had stumbled across Madagascar. Not least, the island Cabral had thought he had discovered on his outward journey turned out to be Brazil, and moreover, the coast was well to the east of the demarcation line established at Tordesillas. By complete accident Cabral had pulled off a historic first: his ships had touched four continents.

Acting on Gama’s intelligence, Cabral had discovered two notable African ports that his predecessor had bypassed—Sofala, the conduit for much of West Africa’s gold, and Kilwa, the island capital of a dynasty of sultans that had long dominated the Swahili Coast. He had been welcomed with marked friendliness by the chastened ruler of Mozambique, and the sultan of Malindi had been his usual hospitable self. He had made contact with Cannanore and Cochin, two busy Indian ports whose kings were on bad terms with the Zamorin. He had loaded his ships with spices in both cities, and he had left a party of men at Cochin to establish a factory. The vessel that had disappeared in the Indian Ocean finally resurfaced with the news that it had stumbled across Madagascar. Not least, the island Cabral had thought he had discovered on his outward journey turned out to be Brazil, and moreover, the coast was well to the east of the demarcation line established at Tordesillas. By complete accident Cabral had pulled off a historic first: his ships had touched four continents.

Like Barry before him, Diop complained that Chinese projects were negotiated with a total lack of transparency. “If we are paying for big projects we want them to include real transfer of technology and of expertise, but the Chinese bring all their own workers, and the few Guineans are reduced to the role of task boys. In one case we had here, a Chinese company was hired to build a bridge and they did most of their work at night, and they wouldn’t let anyone onto their site. Between the groundbreaking and inauguration ceremonies, they give out no information at all, nothing.” Diop said that his group and others in the civil society coalition had repeatedly tried to speak with Chinese contractors and Chinese diplomats to impress upon them the need to reconsider their approach to things in Guinea, but had been either patronized or turned away. “You go to see them and they say go see your minister, or go see your president, he’s the one who approved these arrangements.” I heard very similar language from disgruntled civil society figures virtually everywhere I traveled.

Among the Founders, Thomas Jefferson wrote about race at greatest length. He thought blacks were mentally inferior to whites and biologically distinct: “[They] secrete less by the kidnies [sic], and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a strong and disagreeable odor.” He hoped slavery would be abolished, but he did not want free blacks to remain in America: “When freed, [the Negro] is to be removed from beyond the reach of mixture.” Jefferson was one of the first and most influential advocates of “colonization,” or returning blacks to Africa. He also believed in the destiny of whites as a racially distinct people. In 1786 he wrote, “Our Confederacy [the United States] must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled.” In 1801 he looked forward to the day “when our rapid multiplication will expand itself . . . over the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface.

What can be done to resurrect and implement the pan-African project? Cameron Duodu too, has looked back and asked what went wrong. As a Ghanian rookie reporter he witnessed the celebrations of freedom on 6 March 1957 a few years later he reported on Ghana from the crisis in the Congo. For him the Congo’s tragedy illustrates Africa's problem with the western world, whereby the Congo is still not stable and able to relieve the poverty of its people. Lamumba, writes Duodo, sadly lost power, he lost his country and in the end, his very life. The amazing thing, he adds, is that Lamumba had done absolutely nothing against the combination of forces that wanted him dead. They just saw him as a threat to their interests. Interest narrowly defined to mean “His country has got resources. We want them. He might not give them to us so let us go get him.” All this was done, Duodu observes, to achieve the selfish end of continuing to control the Congo’s rich mineral resources, but it wasn't only the Congo they wished to control they wanted to gulp down the entire African continent, Duodu add, and some so still do.

The story of European imperialism is dramatic and traumatic, etched deep into the psyches of both victors and victims, and it has tended to dominate discussion of European expansion. Yet, in much of Asia and Africa substantive European empire arrived very late and did not last very long. The British did not comprehensively dominate India until the suppression of the 'Mutiny' in 1859, and they were gone ninety years later. Outside Java, the Dutch East Indies was largely a myth on a map until about 1900 - an understanding that, if any power was to have a real empire in this region, it would be the Dutch. European empire in most of Africa was not even a myth on a map until the 'Scramble' of the 1880s, and often not substantive before 1900. 'Before 1890 the Portuguese controlled less than ten per cent of the area of Angola and scarcely one per cent of Mozambique.' 'Even in South Africa . . . a real white supremacy was delayed until the 1880s.' For many Asians and Africans, real European empire lasted about fifty years. A recent study notes that 125 of the world's 188 present states were once European colonies. But empire lasted less than a century in over half of these. With all due respect to the rich scholarship on European imperialism, in the very long view most of these European empires in Asia and Africa were a flash in the pan. Settlement, the third form of European expansion, emphasized the creation of new societies, not the control of old ones. It had no moral superiority over empire. Indeed, it tended to displace, marginalize, and occasionally even exterminate indigenous peoples rather than simply exploit them. But it did reach further and last longer than empire. It left Asia largely untouched, with the substantial exception of Siberia, and affected only the northern and southern ends of Africa. It specialized, instead, in the Americas and Australasia. European empire dominated one and a half continents for a century or so. European settlement came to dominate three-and-a-third continents, including Siberia. It still does. It was settlement, not empire, that had the spread and staying power in the history of European expansion, and it is time that historians of that expansion turned their attention to it.

Each scenario is about fifteen million years into the future, and each assumes that the Pacific Plate will continue to move northwest at about 2.0 inches per year relative to the interior of North America. In scenario 1, the San Andreas fault is the sole locus of motion. Baja California and coastal California shear away from the rest of the continent to form a long, skinny island. A short ferry ride across the San Andreas Strait connects LA to San Francisco. In scenario 2, all of California west of the Sierra Nevada, together with Baja California, shears away to the northwest. The Gulf of California becomes the Reno Sea, which divides California from Nevada. The scene is reminiscent of how the Arabian Peninsula split from Africa to open the Red Sea some 5 million years ago. In scenario 3, central Nevada splits open through the middle of the Basin and Range province. The widening Gulf of Nevada divides the continent form a large island composed of Washington, Oregon, California, Baja California, and western Nevada. The scene is akin to Madagascar’s origin when it split form eastern Africa to open the Mozambique Channel.

All Europe was watching Spain. The left-wing government elected last February had suffered an attempted military coup backed by Fascists and conservatives. The rebel general Franco had won support from the Catholic Church. The news had struck the rest of the continent like an earthquake. After Germany and Italy would Spain, too, fall under the curse of Fascism? “The revolt was botched, as you probably know, and it almost failed,” Billy went on. “But Hitler and Mussolini came to the rescue, and saved the insurrection by airlifting thousands of rebel troops from North Africa as reinforcements.” Lenny put in: “And the unions saved the government!” “That’s true,” Billy said. “The government was slow to react, but the trade unions led the way in organizing workers and arming them with weapons they seized from military arsenals, ships, gun shops, and anywhere else they could find them.” Granda said: “At least someone is fighting back. Until now the Fascists have had it all their own way. In the Rhineland and Abyssinia, they just walked in and took what they wanted. Thank God for the Spanish people, I say. They’ve got the guts to say no.

Imagine the upside-down triangle formed by the Anatolian plateau in the west, the Mesopotamian plain in the east, and the Egyptian valley in the south. Squeeze the sides of that triangle between the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian desert, and there in the Levantine narrows is tiny Israel. It was the hinge of the three then-known continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa. It was the corridor, cockpit, and cauldron of imperial competition. With warring superpowers first to the north and south, then to the west and east, invasion for Israel was inescapable and defeat inevitable—despite Deuteronomy 28. If Israel had spent all of its life on its knees praying, the only change in its history would have been to have died—on its knees praying. It is a crime against both humanity and divinity to tell a people so located that a military defeat is a punishment from God. This holds also, but for different reasons, on disease and drought, famine and even earthquake. No wonder, therefore, that Israel’s Psalter is filled with cries for forgiveness and pleas for mercy. External invasions, internal famines, and any other disasters were not divine punishments for how the people of Israel lived its covenantal life with God, but human consequences of where the nation of Israel lived it.

The importance of Jung’s discovery bears considering. Since the seventeenth century, we’ve been taught that what is “in our heads” is only “subjective,” that we are all island universes, separate worlds, and that everything in those worlds has been furnished with material taken from outside, from the senses, as if our minds began as empty rooms, waiting for the mental equivalent of a trip to Ikea. Yet anyone, like myself, who has had precognitive dreams or experienced synchronicities or telepathy or other “paranormal” phenomena knows this isn’t quite true. Jung knew this and is saying that there are things in our heads that have nothing to do with us or our senses. In his book Heaven and Hell Aldous Huxley made the same point. “Like the earth of a hundred years ago,” Huxley wrote, “our mind still has its darkest Africas, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian basins.” And while the creatures that inhabit these “far continents” of the mind seem “improbable,” they are nevertheless “facts of observation,” which argues for their “complete autonomy” and “self-sufficiency.”18 Huxley borrowed the title of his book from another extraordinary inner explorer, the Swedish sage Emanuel Swedenborg, who was a powerful influence on Jung, and who, like Jung, was a practiced hypnagogist and developed a method of entering similar inner worlds.

America WAS the edge of the World. A message for Europe, continent-sized, inescapable. Europe had found the site for its Kingdom of Death, that special Death the West had invented. Savages had their waste regions, Kalaharis, lakes so misty they could not see the other side. But Europe had gone deeper--into obsession, addiction, away from all the savage innocences. America was a gift from the invisible powers, a way of returning. But Europe refused it. It wasn't Europe's Original Sin--the latest name for that is Modern Analysis--but it happens that Subsequent Sin is harder to account for. In Africa, Asia, Amerindia, Oceania, Europe came and established its order of Analysis and Death. What it could not use, it killed or altered. In time the death-colonies grew strong enough to break away. But the impulse to empire, the mission to propagate death, the structure of it, kept on. Now we are in the last phase. American Death has come to occupy Europe. It has learned empire from its old metropolis. But now we have ONLY the structure left us, none of the great rainbow plumes, no fittings of gold, no epic marches over alkali seas. The savages of other continents, corrupted but still resisting in the name of life, have gone on despite everything...while Death and Europe are separate as ever, their love still unconsummated. Death only rules here. It has never, in love, become ONE WITH...

The first human footprint on a sandy Australian beach was immediately washed away by the waves. Yet when the invaders advanced inland, they left behind a different footprint, one that would never be expunged. As they pushed on, they encountered a strange universe of unknown creatures that included a 200-kilogram, two-metre kangaroo, and a marsupial lion, as massive as a modern tiger, that was the continent’s largest predator. Koalas far too big to be cuddly and cute rustled in the trees and flightless birds twice the size of ostriches sprinted on the plains. Dragon-like lizards and snakes five metres long slithered through the undergrowth. The giant diprotodon, a two-and-a-half-ton wombat, roamed the forests. Except for the birds and reptiles, all these animals were marsupials – like kangaroos, they gave birth to tiny, helpless, fetus-like young which they then nurtured with milk in abdominal pouches. Marsupial mammals were almost unknown in Africa and Asia, but in Australia they reigned supreme. Within a few thousand years, virtually all of these giants vanished. Of the twenty-four Australian animal species weighing fifty kilograms or more, twenty-three became extinct.2 A large number of smaller species also disappeared. Food chains throughout the entire Australian ecosystem were broken and rearranged. It was the most important transformation of the Australian ecosystem for millions of years. Was it all the fault of Homo sapiens? Guilty

A Favorite start to a book [sorry it's long!]: "In yesterday’s Sunday Times, a report from Francistown in Botswana. Sometime last week, in the middle of the night, a car, a white American model, drove up to a house in a residential area. Men wearing balaclavas jumped out, kicked down the front door, and began shooting. When they had done with shooting they set fire to the house and drove off. From the embers the neighbors dragged seven charred bodies: two men, three women, two children. Th killers appeared to be black, but one of the neighbors heard them speaking Afrikaans among themselves. And was convinced they were whites in blackface. The dead were South Africans, refugees who had moved into the house mere weeks ago. Approached for comment, the SA Minister of Foreign Affairs, through a spokesman, calls the report ‘unverified’. Inquiries will be undertaken, he says, to determine whether the deceased were indeed SA citizens. As for the military, an unnamed source denies that the SA Defence Force had anything to do with the matter. The killings are probably an internal ANC matter, he suggests, reflecting ‘ongoing tensions between factions. So they come out, week after week, these tales from the borderlands, murders followed by bland denials. He reads the reports and feels soiled. So this is what he has come back to! Yet where in the world can one hide where one will not feel soiled? Would he feel any cleaner in the snows of Sweden, reading at a distance about his people and their latest pranks? How to escape the filth: not a new question. An old rat-question that will not let go, that leaves its nasty, suppurating wound. Agenbite of inwit. ‘I see the Defense Force is up to its old tricks again,’ he remarks to his father. ‘In Botswana this time.’ But his father is too wary to rise to the bait. When his father picks up the newspaper, he cares to skip straight to the sports pages, missing out the politics—the politics and the killings. His father has nothing but disdain for the continent to the north of them. Buffoons is the word he uses to dismiss the leaders of African states: petty tyrants who can barely spell their own names, chauffeured from one banquet to another in their Rolls-Royces, wearing Ruritanian uniforms festooned with medals they have awarded themselves. Africa: a place of starving masses with homicidal buffoons lording over them. ‘They broke into a house in Francistown and killed everyone,’ he presses on nonetheless. ‘Executed them .Including the children. Look. Read the report. It’s on the front page.’ His father shrugs. His father can find no form of words spacious enough to cover his distaste for, on one hand, thugs who slaughter defenceless women and children and, on the other, terrorists who wage war from havens across the border. He resolves the problem by immersing himself in the cricket scores. As a response to moral dilemma it is feeble; yet is his own response—fits of anger and despair—any better?" Summertime, Coetzee

George W. Bush’s initiative to fight AIDS around the world, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), saved millions of lives in Africa and elsewhere. From the program’s launch in 2003 to the time Bush left office, the number of HIV-infected people in Africa getting proper treatment went from fewer than fifty thousand to two million. 19 His efforts didn’t go unnoticed by the people of the African continent. When President Bush took a farewell tour of Africa near the end of his second term, massive crowds of grateful Africans cheered for him. 20 Despite massive spending increases spearheaded by Obama, he cut funding for PEPFAR21 and deprived hundreds of thousands of people around of treatment. This inexplicable decision had a devastating effect on Africa, where most AIDS deaths occur. 22 The AIDS Healthcare Foundation was highly critical of Obama’s cuts, which came after he had promised to expand the fight against AIDS months earlier: “This latest action merely confirms what people with HIV/ AIDS and their advocates have long suspected—the President simply is not committed to fighting global AIDS. Coming on the heels of the President’s flowery rhetoric last December, the cynicism is simply breathtaking,” said Michael Weinstein, President of AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which provides free HIV/ AIDS medical care to over 125,000 people in 26 countries abroad. 23 The lesson for Africans: American friendship was fickle and patronizing and they couldn’t trust our promises. And we wonder why ISIS propaganda was so attractive to North Africans.

He nodded yes. I acquiesced. Immediately, I was “sucked” out of my body and was taken up in the spirit. When I came into the presence of Jesus, He was smiling and happy to see me again, but no more than I. The Lord began to show me the ways that He would confirm and release me to activate the angel of provision He had assigned to me earlier. Somehow I understood that the time was fast approaching for me to begin to employ this angel in a greater degree. When this encounter was over, I returned to my tiny prayer room with a sovereign knowledge that some things were about to drastically change in my life. I had an understanding that the angel of provision would become very important to these upcoming events. In hindsight, I understand that the Lord was preparing me to take the next step of our journey and move me toward my personal metamorphosis. He was preparing me to go to the next level pertaining to angelic ministry and understanding how to work with God’s angels. The Lord is in the midst of releasing many angels of provision into the realm of earth at this hour. I believe that many people will be assigned angels of provision. These angels will work with you to release finances that will allow you to complete the things that are on your heart. For some it will be evangelism. For others it will be ministering to widows and orphans. Whatever God has placed upon your heart, He can empower angelic ministry to release the provision to accomplish the task. You can access this area of angelic ministry. You do not need to be a superstar or person of great faith. These angels are going to be released to ordinary people. Let’s shift our focus to Africa, and look at how Jesus is actually releasing angels to impact the earth on the African continent.

The Sumerian pantheon was headed by an "Olympian Circle" of twelve, for each of these supreme gods had to have a celestial counterpart, one of the twelve members of the Solar System. Indeed, the names of the gods and their planets were one and the same (except when a variety of epithets were used to describe the planet or the god's attributes). Heading the pantheon was the ruler of Nibiru, ANU whose name was synonymous with "Heaven," for he resided on Nibiru. His spouse, also a member of the Twelve, was called ANTU. Included in this group were the two principal sons of ANU: E.A ("Whose House Is Water"), Anu's Firstborn but not by Antu; and EN.LIL ("Lord of the Command") who was the Heir Apparent because his mother was Antu, a half sister of Anu. Ea was also called in Sumerian texts EN.KI ("Lord Earth"), for he had led the first mission of the Anunnaki from Nibiru to Earth and established on Earth their first colonies in the E.DIN ("Home of the Righteous Ones")—the biblical Eden. His mission was to obtain gold, for which Earth was a unique source. Not for ornamentation or because of vanity, but as away to save the atmosphere of Nibiru by suspending gold dust in that planet's stratosphere. As recorded in the Sumerian texts (and related by us in The 12th Planet and subsequent books of The Earth Chronicles), Enlil was sent to Earth to take over the command when the initial extraction methods used by Enki proved unsatisfactory. This laid the groundwork for an ongoing feud between the two half brothers and their descendants, a feud that led to Wars of the Gods; it ended with a peace treaty worked out by their sister Ninti (thereafter renamed Ninharsag). The inhabited Earth was divided between the warring clans. The three sons of Enlil—Ninurta, Sin, Adad—together with Sin's twin children, Shamash (the Sun) and Ishtar (Venus), were given the lands of Shem and Japhet, the lands of the Semites and Indo-Europeans: Sin (the Moon) lowland Mesopotamia; Ninurta, ("Enlil's Warrior," Mars) the highlands of Elam and Assyria; Adad ("The Thunderer," Mercury) Asia Minor (the land of the Hittites) and Lebanon. Ishtar was granted dominion as the goddess of the Indus Valley civilization; Shamash was given command of the spaceport in the Sinai peninsula. This division, which did not go uncontested, gave Enki and his sons the lands of Ham—the brown/black people—of Africa: the civilization of the Nile Valley and the gold mines of southern and western Africa—a vital and cherished prize. A great scientist and metallurgist, Enki's Egyptian name was Ptah ("The Developer"; a title that translated into Hephaestus by the Greeks and Vulcan by the Romans). He shared the continent with his sons; among them was the firstborn MAR.DUK ("Son of the Bright Mound") whom the Egyptians called Ra, and NIN.GISH.ZI.DA ("Lord of the Tree of Life") whom the Egyptians called Thoth (Hermes to the Greeks)—a god of secret knowledge including astronomy, mathematics, and the building of pyramids. It was the knowledge imparted by this pantheon, the needs of the gods who had come to Earth, and the leadership of Thoth, that directed the African Olmecs and the bearded Near Easterners to the other side of the world. And having arrived in Mesoamerica on the Gulf coast—just as the Spaniards, aided by the same sea currents, did millennia later—they cut across the Mesoamerican isthmus at its narrowest neck and—just like the Spaniards due to the same geography—sailed down from the Pacific coast of Mesoamerica southward, to the lands of Central America and beyond. For that is where the gold was, in Spanish times and before.

robbery by European nations of each other's territories has never been a sin, is not a sin to-day. To the several cabinets the several political establishments of the world are clotheslines; and a large part of the official duty of these cabinets is to keep an eye on each other's wash and grab what they can of it as opportunity offers. All the territorial possessions of all the political establishments in the earth—including America, of course—consist of pilferings from other people's wash. No tribe, howsoever insignificant, and no nation, howsoever mighty, occupies a foot of land that was not stolen. When the English, the French, and the Spaniards reached America, the Indian tribes had been raiding each other's territorial clothes-lines for ages, and every acre of ground in the continent had been stolen and re-stolen 500 times. The English, the French, and the Spaniards went to work and stole it all over again; and when that was satisfactorily accomplished they went diligently to work and stole it from each other. In Europe and Asia and Africa every acre of ground has been stolen several millions of times. A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law. Christian governments are as frank to-day, as open and above-board, in discussing projects for raiding each other's clothes-lines as ever they were before the Golden Rule came smiling into this inhospitable world and couldn't get a night's lodging anywhere. In 150 years England has beneficently retired garment after garment from the Indian lines, until there is hardly a rag of the original wash left dangling anywhere. In 800 years an obscure tribe of Muscovite savages has risen to the dazzling position of Land-Robber-in-Chief; she found a quarter of the world hanging out to dry on a hundred parallels of latitude, and she scooped in the whole wash. She keeps a sharp eye on a multitude of little lines that stretch along the northern boundaries of India, and every now and then she snatches a hip-rag or a pair of pyjamas. It is England's prospective property, and Russia knows it; but Russia cares nothing for that. In fact, in our day land-robbery, claim-jumping, is become a European governmental frenzy. Some have been hard at it in the borders of China, in Burma, in Siam, and the islands of the sea; and all have been at it in Africa. Africa has been as coolly divided up and portioned out among the gang as if they had bought it and paid for it. And now straightway they are beginning the old game again—to steal each other's grabbings. Germany found a vast slice of Central Africa with the English flag and the English missionary and the English trader scattered all over it, but with certain formalities neglected—no signs up, "Keep off the grass," "Trespassers-forbidden," etc.—and she stepped in with a cold calm smile and put up the signs herself, and swept those English pioneers promptly out of the country. There is a tremendous point there. It can be put into the form of a maxim: Get your formalities right—never mind about the moralities. It was an impudent thing; but England had to put up with it. Now, in the case of Madagascar, the formalities had originally been observed, but by neglect they had fallen into desuetude ages ago. England should have snatched Madagascar from the French clothes-line. Without an effort she could have saved those harmless natives from the calamity of French civilization, and she did not do it. Now it is too late. The signs of the times show plainly enough what is going to happen. All the savage lands in the world are going to be brought under subjection to the Christian governments of Europe. I am

Undoubtedly, my dear Dick. Just note the progress of events: consider the migrations of races, and you will arrive at the same conclusion assuredly. Asia was the first nurse of the world, was she not? For about four thousand years she travailed, she grew pregnant, she produced, and then, when stones began to cover the soil where the golden harvests sung by Homer had flourished, her children abandoned her exhausted and barren bosom. You next see them precipitating themselves upon young and vigorous Europe, which has nourished them for the last two thousand years. But already her fertility is beginning to die out; her productive powers are diminishing every day. Those new diseases that annually attack the products of the soil, those defective crops, those insufficient resources, are all signs of a vitality that is rapidly wearing out and of an approaching exhaustion. Thus, we already see the millions rushing to the luxuriant bosom of America, as a source of help, not inexhaustible indeed, but not yet exhausted. In its turn, that new continent will grow old; its virgin forests will fall before the axe of industry, and its soil will become weak through having too fully produced what had been demanded of it. Where two harvests bloomed every year, hardly one will be gathered from a soil completely drained of its strength. Then, Africa will be there to offer to new races the treasures that for centuries have been accumulating in her breast. Those climates now so fatal to strangers will be purified by cultivation and by drainage of the soil, and those scattered water supplies will be gathered into one common bed to form an artery of navigation. Then this country over which we are now passing, more fertile, richer, and fuller of vitality than the rest, will become some grand realm where more astonishing discoveries than steam and electricity will be brought to light.

Ce se întîmplă cu tine, băiete? mă întrebă. Vorbea destul de aspru pentru felul lui de a fi. Cîte materii ai urmat în trimestrul ăsta? ― Cinci, domnule profesor. ― Cinci? Şi la cîte ai căzut? ― La patru. Îmi amorţise fundul stînd pe pat. În viaţa mea nu stătusem pe un pat atît de tare. ― La engleză am trecut, i-am spus, fiindcă poveştile cu Beowulf şi cu Lord Randal, fiul meu le-am învăţat încă de pe vremea cînd eram la Whooton. Şi, de fapt, la engleză nu trebuia să fac mai nimic, decît să scriu din cînd în cînd cîte o compunere. Bătrînul nici nu mă asculta. N-asculta niciodată cînd îi vorbeai. ― Eu unul te-am trîntit la istorie fiindcă n-ai ştiut absolut nimic. ― Ştiu, domnule profesor, vă înţeleg. Ce era să faceţi? ― Absolut nimic, repetă el. Tare mă înfurie cînd oamenii repetă de două ori un lucru pe care tu l-ai recunoscut de prima dată. Şi pe urmă a mai spus-o şi a treia oară. ― Dar absolut nimic. Ai deschis cartea măcar o dată, în trimestrul ăsta? Eu mă îndoiesc. Spune drept! ― Păi, ştiţi, am răsfoit-o... de vreo două ori, am spus. Nu voiam să-l jignesc. Îi plăcea istoria la nebunie! ― A, ai răsfoit-o! spuse el foarte ironic. Uite, hm, teza ta e acolo sus pe raft, deasupra teancului de caiete. Ad-o, te rog, încoace. Era o figură urîtă din partea lui. Dar n-am avut încotro, m-am dus şi i-am adus-o. Pe urmă, m-am aşezat din nou pe patul lui de ciment. Mamă, nici nu ştiţi ce rău începuse să-mi pară că venisem să-mi iau rămas bun. Ţinea lucrarea mea de parc-ar fi fost o bucată de rahat sau mai ştiu eu ce. ― Am studiat cu voi egiptenii de la 4 noiembrie la 2 de¬cembrie, îmi zise. Singur ai ales să scrii despre ei la lucrarea facultativă de control. Vrei să auzi ce-ai scris? ― Nu, domnule profesor, nu face, i-am răspuns. Cu toate astea, începu să citească. Nu poţi opri niciodată un profesor să facă un anumit lucru, dacă s-a hotărît să-l facă. Oricum, face tot ce vrea el! Egiptenii sînt o rasă veche de caucazieni care locuiesc într-una din regiunile din nordul Africii. Africa, după cum ştim cu toţii, e cel mai mare continent în emisfera răsăriteană. Şi eu eram obligat să stau şi s-ascult toate tîmpeniile astea! Zău că era urît din partea lui. Pe noi, astăzi, egiptenii ne interesează din mai multe motive. Ştiinţa modernă n-a descoperit nici pînă azi ce substanţe misterioase întrebuinţau cînd îmbălsămau morţii, pentru ca feţele lor să nu putrezească secole la rînd. Această enigmă interesantă continuă să constituie o sfidare pentru ştiinţa modernă a secolului XX. Se opri şi puse jos lucrarea. Începusem să-l urăsc! ― Eseul tău, ca să-i zicem aşa, se opreşte aici, spuse cît se poate de ironic. N-ai crede că un tip atît de bătrîn poate fi atît de ironic şi aşa mai departe. Apoi adăugă: Şi în josul paginii mi-ai scris şi mie cîteva cuvinte. ― Ştiu, ştiu, i-am răspuns precipitat, ca să-l opresc înainte de a-ncepe să citească. Dar parcă mai putea cineva să-l oprească?! Ardea ca un fitil de dinamită. Dragă domnule Spencer (citi el cu glas tare), asta e tot ce ştiu eu despre egipteni. Nu reuşesc să mă intereseze, cu toate că dumneavoastră predaţi foarte frumos. Să ştiţi totuşi că nu mă supăr dacă mă trîntiţi ― că în afară de engleză tot am picat la toate materiile. Cu stimă, al dumnea¬voastră, Holden Caulfield. În sfîrşit, a pus jos lucrarea mea nenorocită şi mi-a arun¬cat o privire de parcă m-ar fi bătut măr la ping-pong sau mai ştiu eu ce. Cît oi trăi nu cred c-am să-l iert c-a citit cu glas tare toate rahaturile alea. Dacă le-ar fi scris el, eu unul nu i le-aş fi citit niciodată. Zău că nu. Şi, de fapt, nu-i scrisesem notiţa aia nenorocită decît ca să nu-i pară prea rău că mă trînteşte. ― Mă condamni că te-am trîntit, băiete? m-a întrebat el. ― Nu, domnule profesor, zău că nu! i-am răspuns eu. Numai de-ar fi încetat naibii să-mi mai zică "băiete"!

Whereas the slave cargoes gathered on the African coast reconfigured the normative boundaries of social life, the slave communities in the Americas exploded those boundaries beyond recognition. If an Akan-speaking migrant lived to complete a year on a west Indian sugar estate, he or she was likely by the end of that time to have come into close contact with unrelated Akan strangers as well as with Ga, Guan, or Adangbe speakers in the holding station on the African littoral, with Ewe speakers on the slave ship, and with Angolans, Biafrans, and Senegambians on the plantation. This was the composite we call diasporic Africa—an Africa that constituted not the continent on European maps, but rather the plurality of remembered places immigrant slaves carried with them. Like any geographic entity, diasporic Africa varies according to the perspective from which it is surveyed. Viewed from a cartographic standpoint (in essence, the view of early modern Europeans), diasporic Africa is a constellation of discrete ethnic and language groups; if one adopts this perspective, the defining question becomes whether or not the various constituent groups in the slave community shared a culture. Only by approaching these questions from the vantage point of Africans as migrants, however, can we hope to understand how Africans themselves experienced and negotiated their American worlds. If in the regime of the market Africans’ most socially relevant feature was their exchangeability, for Africans as immigrants the most socially relevant feature was their isolation, their desperate need to restore some measure of social life to counterbalance the alienation engendered by their social death. Without some means of achieving that vital equilibrium thanks to which even the socially dead could expect to occupy a viable place in society, slaves could foresee only further descent into an endless purgatory.

The modern educational system provides numerous other examples of reality bowing down to written records. When measuring the width of my desk, the yardstick I am using matters little. My desk remains the same width regardless of whether I say it is 200 centimetres or 78.74 inches. However, when bureaucracies measure people, the yardsticks they choose make all the difference. When schools began assessing people according to precise marks, the lives of millions of students and teachers changed dramatically. Marks are a relatively new invention. Hunter-gatherers were never marked for their achievements, and even thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution, few educational establishments used precise marks. A medieval apprentice cobbler did not receive at the end of the year a piece of paper saying he has got an A on shoelaces but a C minus on buckles. An undergraduate in Shakespeare’s day left Oxford with one of only two possible results – with a degree, or without one. Nobody thought of giving one student a final mark of 74 and another student 88.6 Credit 1.24 24. A European map of Africa from the mid-nineteenth century. The Europeans knew very little about the African interior, which did not prevent them from dividing the continent and drawing its borders. Only the mass educational systems of the industrial age began using precise marks on a regular basis. Since both factories and government ministries became accustomed to thinking in the language of numbers, schools followed suit. They started to gauge the worth of each student according to his or her average mark, whereas the worth of each teacher and principal was judged according to the school’s overall average. Once bureaucrats adopted this yardstick, reality was transformed. Originally, schools were supposed to focus on enlightening and educating students, and marks were merely a means of measuring success. But naturally enough, schools soon began focusing on getting high marks. As every child, teacher and inspector knows, the skills required to get high marks in an exam are not the same as a true understanding of literature, biology or mathematics. Every child, teacher and inspector also knows that when forced to choose between the two, most schools will go for the marks.

During these uninterrupted peregrinations of mine from place to place, and almost continuous and intense reflection about this, I at last formed a preliminary plan in my mind.   Liquidating all my affairs and mobilizing all my material and other possibilities, I began to collect all kinds of written literature and oral information, still surviving among certain Asiatic peoples, about that branch of science, which was highly developed in ancient times and called " Mehkeness ", a name signifying the " taking away-of-responsibility ", and of which contemporary civilisation knows but an insignificant portion under the name of " hypnotism ", while all the literature extant upon the subject was already as familiar to me as my own five fingers.   Collecting all I could, I went to a certain Dervish monastery, situated likewise in Central Asia and where I had already stayed before, and, settling down there, I devoted myself wholly to the study of the material in my possession.   After two years of thorough theoretical study of this branch of science, when it became necessary to verify practically certain indispensable details, not as yet sufficiently elucidated by me in theory, of the mechanism of the functioning of man's subconscious sphere, I began to give myself out to be a " healer " of all kinds of vices and to apply the results of my theoretical studies to them, affording them at the same time, of course, real relief.   This continued to be my exclusive preoccupation and manifestation for four or five years in accordance with the essential oath imposed by my task, which consisted in rendering conscientious aid to sufferers, in never using my knowledge and practical power in that domain of science except for the sake of my investigations, and never for personal or egotistical ends, I not only arrived at unprecedented practical results without equal in our day, but also elucidated almost everything necessary for me.   In a short time, I discovered many details which might contribute to the solution of the same cardinal question, as well as many secondary facts, the existence of which I had scarcely suspected.   At the same time, I also became convinced that the greater number of minor details necessary for the final elucidation of this question must be sought not only in the sphere of man's subconscious mentation, but in various aspects of the manifestations in his state of waking consciousness.   After establishing this definitely, thoughts again began from time to time to " swarm " in my mind, as they had done years ago, sometimes automatically, sometimes directed by my consciousness,—thoughts as to the means of adapting myself now to the conditions of ordinary life about me with a view to elucidating finally and infallibly this question, which obviously had become a lasting and inseparable part of my Being.   This time my reflections, which recurred periodically during the two years of my wanderings on the continents of Asia, Europe and Africa, resulted in a decision to make use of my exceptional, for the modern man, knowledge of the so-called " supernatural sciences ", as well as of my skill in producing different " tricks " in the domain of these so-called " sciences ", and to give myself out to be, in these pseudo-scientific domains, a so-called " professor-instructor ".

we have to look back over the past 100,000 years of life on Earth. For almost all of that time—as early humans trekked out of Africa and blazed a trail across continents—Earth’s average temperature spiked up and down. But during just the last 12,000 years or so, it has been warmer, and far more stable too. This recent period of Earth’s history is known as the Holocene.

But another glacial age soon set in, cooling and drying the continent dramatically. Nearly all of Africa north of the equator became a desert, making much of the continent uninhabitable. Most tribes of Homo sapiens perished, and our species neared extinction; only a cluster of humans, including a few hundred women of childbearing age, survived.

he said something that surprised me, and took some of the edge off his earlier race talk. “I don’t believe in the idea that some nationalities automatically work harder than others. It’s all about making money work for you, and everyone is different. What I can say is that if you pay them well, even blacks can eat bitter just as much as any Chinese. If you don’t give a Chinese enough food to eat and you give him no incentive, there’s no way he’ll work hard. That’s what makes any country develop.

I have grown so accustomed to a certain strain of Chinese discourse that emphasizes how distinct from others they are, and usually by clear inference this means how superior they feel, this struck me as a rare response. “I reject this,” Li said, commenting about Chinese notions of superiority. “I know that lots of Chinese people feel this way, but that’s because they haven’t experienced anything. Being outside of the country, coming in contact with different people all the time has allowed me to understand.

That’s one of our government’s bad points, you know, propaganda; it’s always trying to put a good face on everything.

Many Chinese have grumbled to me about the unbearable stresses and tensions of daily life back home, and about the lack of rights, the deficiencies in the rule of law, and injustices of every kind. A few even spoke to me with deep skepticism about the soundness of China’s booming economy and its implicit promise of future prosperity. But very few questioned China’s actions in geopolitical terms, easily buying into the state’s line about the country being a new kind of nonhegemonic power, unlike the West; a genuine and sincere partner of the “developing world.