© Numero Unoma
Monday 22 August was International Day Commemorating the Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief. Hmmm, which way Nigeria. Almost 62 years of independence, but electricity, education and healthcare are still major problems. Most glaringly of all though, religious violence defines the narrative.
Sorry about my salty intro, but we’ll get to the sugar soon, read on.
Monday was closely followed on 23 August by International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, marked every year to remind us about the tragedy of the slave trade. According to the UN, ”it provides a chance to think about the historic causes and the consequences of the slave trade” Well guess what, a major historic cause of the slave trade was, wait for it…Christianity. Oh, and Islam too, btw. This is the real tragedy, if you ask me. Here’s how they spun it back then:
It was argued, say the BBC archives “that the Transatlantic Slave Trade would enable Africans, especially the ‘Mohammedans’, to come into contact with Christianity and ‘civilisation’ in the Americas, albeit as slaves. It was even argued that the favourable trade winds from Africa to the Americas were evidence of this providential design. Once they arrived at their new locales the enslaved Africans were subjected to various processes to make them more compliant, and Christianity formed part of this.”
It is that same hypocritical Eurocentric arrogance that informs the setting of this date on 23 August, when you consider that those nations who exist precisely because of the Transatlantic Slave trade pay respects on August 1, the anniversary of the Slavery Abolition Act, an abolition that also has its origins in Christianity, btw. Then we wonder how it is that Christianity continues to confound the African narrative.
In an article on Religion and Public Life, Harvard University’s Divinity School elucidated that “missionaries understood that converting slaves to Christianity was incongruous with slaves’ treatment as chattel. Missionaries also began working in Africa, and felt that the troubles with the ‘dark continent’ were a direct result of slavery. Were slavery abolished, they believed that Christianity and civilisation would spread.” Oops, we made a mistake. We cannot just enslave these humans, what the Bible says we must do is to save them from themselves, by colonising them, coercing them into converting to Christianity, and then using Christianity to keep them obedient, compliant and acquiescent as colonies, while we plunder their resources in an unChristian manner.
What did Mary Poppins once say? A spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down. Well we never ate sugar before they enslaved us to manufacture it! Now much of the world is addicted to the poison that is sugar. When it starts to rain in the Caribbean, and I am urged to shelter myself, I retort in the way that we do in Nigeria. “I am not made of salt” to which I get the retort that I am made of sugar. Though meant as a compliment, it brings glaringly to consciousness the differing cultural perspectives of now distant cousins. In Africa, salt was a commodity once as precious as gold, whereas in the Caribbean, the sugar that Caucasians have taught the world to consume, held the same sort of value. The irony is not lost on me that neither of those things is good for us, the one causes hypertension, the other diabetes, both of which are more prevalent among the genetically pre-disposed people of African and Afro-Caribbean descent.
A Swahili proverb says that the skin of yesterday’s sugarcane is a harvest to an ant. After the sugar industry was no longer lucrative because of oops, a lack of free labour, many of the nations which black people were either taken from or taken to, have become tourist destinations for the original Takers to spend the winter months, as so-called Snowbirds, or winter visitor if you want to be politically correct, which I don’t. This lifestyle is so good for their health (they are healthier than their non-snowbird contemporaries) that many snowbirds even become sunbirds, taking up permanent residency in the countries of their winter migration.
Next month we will celebrate World Tourism Day, and from Canada and America, snowbirds often go to the Caribbean, from Europe they tend to come to Africa. The UK enjoys empire status in both those regions, taking full advantage of that. Much of the best real estate in countries like Tanzania for example, and certain Caribbean island nations, is owned by snowbirds wielding the disposable income gained from their first world economies, which would be nowhere today if they had not stolen from and extorted our own economies, or for that matter if they were made to pay reparations for their naughty behaviour. (keep scrolling) >>>>
Some argue that they have a positive impact on the economy, and while at first glance this appears to be the case, the fact is that it is akin to a neo-colonisation, whereby these people drive up the price of real estate, they patronise businesses mainly run by other Caucasians, and they flock together in apartheid-esque enclaves and cliques. The best the local economy can hope to profit from snowbirds is their need for gardeners and cleaners, and of course barmen and waitresses at the transnational establishments they patronise, where they spend most of their money.
Meanwhile when it comes to the ‘natives’, they defer to the other meaning of the word ‘to patronise’. Beware of Karens. Only this year, there was a case on the Caribbean island of Nevis, where a Russian lady felt disturbed by local primary school children practising for the athletics inter-school competition on a public (yes, public) beach adjacent to her condo. She actually went and lay down on the sand in the path of these children, who she says were “disturbing her on her beach”. Oh, and the other patronising other thing reserved for the ‘natives’ is sex tourism.
These people do not even pay any taxes for the exorbitant rents on their luxury properties, leased to fellow Caucasians, during the months that they do not spend there themselves. Between the Snowbirds and transnational companies (hotels and cruise line companies, including their affiliated tour operators) who have together cornered and commandeered the tourism sector, the World Bank conservatively estimates that economic leakage rates lie between 55% and 80% depending on the country. This means that although tourism causes things like increased demand for water, food, and energy; elevated sewage, waste, and pollution; coastal-zone urbanisation, overcrowding and traffic congestion; and not forgetting degradation of natural assets, most of the revenue it generates is leaked out of the economy and into the pockets of the same guys who once owned the slaves and then later, who owned the colonies! The sheer irony of it!
According to the IMF: “Driven by rising income levels and falling costs in aviation and accommodation, the number of international tourists rose to more than 1.5 billion by the end of 2019 from 680 million in 2000. Spending by international tourists amounted to nearly US$1.6 trillion as of the end of 2019. Somehow we are all hankering to have tourism sectors, but clearly we are clueless about the feasibility of running them.
So how do black people remain underdogs in their own tropical paradises to this day? And who will come to our aid. Oh gosh, did I really just use the dirty little A-word? Okay, well moving on swiftly from A to BB, how about we start to Buy Black, preferably via group economies that benefit us and ours in the first instance, just like Caucasians and Asians do for themselves, huh?! The only reason why it seems that we need them more than they need us, is because we haven’t yet clocked that the opposite is the case, or at least it would be if we would put internal squabbles aside, and grow our own Black monolith. We have the minerals, the workforces, the tropical paradise destinations, even the land for agriculture. We also have the human resource capacity. The only thing we lack is the will. Will we do it or not? Listen up, if it is not WILL, then it’s WON’T.
Many years ago, when I did work raising funds for the charity sector, I would put my foot down about the campaigns I was prepared to work on. As an ‘African’, I stuck to working with UNICEF, Save The Children, Oxfam and Greenpeace on humanitarian or environmental issues. I explicitly refused to participate in raising funds to help stray cats and dogs in Johannesburg. Or wherever. Yes, that is actually a thing! Just FYI, if you are that much of an animal lover, nowadays you can use ketto.org for errm, animal crowd funding, once you run out of humans in need of help.
August 26 is International Dog Day, created to recognise the number of dogs that need to be rescued each year. My thoughts are with the underdogs of the world, who refuse to rescue themselves from decades of exploitation and oppression, extending to this day through unfair trade and monetary policies such as France’s Pact for the Continuation of Colonisation from which they have profited an annual 400 billion Euros in colonial tax (owed for ‘the benefit of France’s previous colonial rule’ lol!) and first rights over all natural resources of 14 African countries and many more in the Caribbean, not to mention a requirement for these countries to bank 50% of their forex reserves with Banque de France, which Macron has suggested revising. The French, who swagger about, condescending to the rest of the world for apparently having no culture, have the biggest and most shameless (and shameful) long-throat of all the lazy, greedy thieving Europeans and Caucasians. I hear TOTAL have been implicated in the most recent Nigerian oil theft, can anybody confirm if this is true? I remember that oil was why the French feigned support for the Biafra cause back during the civil war. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
In the words of the singer Billie Holliday, “You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.”
How do Nigerian pseudo-zealots like to say? God is in control. In sha’Allah.
Odi egwu.