Here is a comment to one of my posts. I decided to turn it into a full-blown post because of its length. So here it is. Khotso to all.

Reply:
‘Dear Tim,

“We” can’t freely move anywhere, to Darfur or elsewhere, if any survival attempt on the African’s part is clouded with taunts and suspicions of incompetence and stupidity. “We” can truly start moving when the African has got the respect (s)he deserves.

History is never over as it always has a bearing on the present. It stands to reason that what happened yesterday influences what happens today and what will happen tomorrow. America is a gun-wielding, trigger-happy nation because the Far-west happened. Many African nations are poor today because their people were stolen, their economic and political structures destroyed, their land occupied, and so on.

Tim, of course people, not peoples, do things. People enslaved the African, colonised the African, Jim-crowed the heck out of the black person. But you must admit that very few, if any, American Indians did these things. Few Canadians, few Peruvians, few Inuits, few Mexicans. Perhaps they did other ills, I don’t know. The question here is not that.

It is interesting that you might say, ‘…most of us do not want to know about the slavery, the French in the North, the English in the south,the Boer’s, The Belgians in the Congo or Germans in Southwest Africa, where the phrase ‘final solution’ was first used.‘

Why in Heaven’s name would you want to zap that? In that case, zap Lincoln, and his four-score speech. Zap Franklin and his kite. Zap the Pilgrims and that rock they landed on. The Wright brothers, the American’s struggle of independence against England, and in a few years, zap Vietnam, too, the atom bombs in Japan, zap Iraq, zap Michael Jackson and his best-selling album. Zap the hostage-taking crisis in Iran when Carter was president, Elvis and Martin Luther king Jr (?) and Malcolm X (?) and Monica Lewinsky and Reaganomics and 9/11 and all the history of the blooming world. Let’s zap the big bang, too, while we’re at it. I went to prison in South Africa for pass laws. Let’s zap that. Zap slavery and colonisation and Apartheid, as you suggest.

China. China is another question. It is messing up in Tibet and has messed up in Darfur. Does that give me the right to say, ‘Don’t talk about the fact that I pounded your face into the ground yesterday. Chun-Lee here is pounding it into the ground now.’ Perhaps Chun-Lee is doing it because I got away with it. Learning from history isn’t just a cliché, it’s something we must do. We must all be accountable. You, me, them, everybody. If we’re all equal on this planet, then no one gets away with pounding another’s face into the ground. China is beginning to have the sort of fiduciary influence on Africa that leads straight to dependence, and the notion that the money-lender can do whatever they want. That’s very bad, and Africans should not let it happen. Why they might is beyond the scope of this post.

Still, I think your comment of ‘the ignorant’ concerning the Chinese is not fair. Nowhere in your comment do you say that Caucasian people are ignorant, although they’re the ones that have done a lot of atrocities against the African (and the Australian Aborigine and the American Indian)

I’m not sure I know what you mean by the following, Tim: ‘So … why do I suppose it is that I sit here in front of a shelf full of books on African History yet I remain astounded at the ignorance about it?‘ But let me take a jab at it: What I say and other Africans say isn’t in your history books? Or, you haven’t actually read the history books on your book-shelf? In either case, what happened in the past still happened. Give you the South African example. History books never mentioned the African hero, of the African good deed, or the African innovation, or the African suffering. That was until some African scholars decided to write real history books that told it all, good and bad, and across the spectrum of southern African life.

Get back to me if you’d like, Tim. If you’d rather not post openly (and not anonymously), my e-mail address is retjoun/gmail/com. And if it is your wish, I’ll keep such correspondence private.
Cheers.
Rethabile’