MORE THAN JUST A THOUGHT - HISTORY CAN BE WHAT YOU WANT IT TO BE! PART 3.

All of this, irrespective of the fact that, except for their overwhelmingly darker shades of colour, and comparative differences in their societies, Africans would have looked very much like Europeans. 

A situation, you could now argue, which could have been applied to the principle that, 'if it looks like a duck, and it quacks, then most probably it is a duck', but was not. 

That dictum was not applied because the then elites had already decided that they wanted to enslaved Africans and use their labour to create wealth in the colonisation of the new worlds. 

In doing so, they gave rise to the psedo-scientific theory which postulates that Africans were inferior to Europeans, and that that, some how, justified European elites enslaving them. 

Now, we know that the Europeans ventured into the new worlds in 15th century, several centuries before the 'age of enlightenment' in Europe. 

Similarly, we also know that the enslavement of a people by another people or nation, long predated the enslavement of Africans by Europeans. 

What was different between the two versions of enslavement, was that the latter was predicated on one people being enslaved by the elites of the other, based on the European's theorists peculiar interpretation of the  essential African-ness of the African. 

A pseudo-scientific theory which Hitler and his similarly infected supporters would use in the 20th Century to murderously apply to people of Jewish origins, primarily, it seems, before applying to other people, including, yes, those of African origins.

However, for the purpose of this post, it is not my intention to go into a detailed analysis of the origins of the enslavement of the African masses of the past by the European elites of the past. 

Instead, I simply want to provide some understanding of how the past and events occurring in it, can continue to reach into and poison the present and the future. 

This we can clearly see from the on-going negative effects which racism of the past is continuing to have upon the relationships between Europeans and people of colour today. 

How it is hindering the prospects of people of different ethnic communities living together in peace and working together for the common good.

With, in terms of Africans and the African diaspora and Europeans, the former might be tempted to too often look back on a past which was repleted with great misery and, probably for a minority, power and opulence, but is now no more than a memory, and a painful one. 


To be continued.