(The photographer and farmer are not credited in the article)
… white supremacy doesn’t mind waiting. It, or rather, its agents, will wait for years, decades, centuries to accomplish the goal. As a belief system, white supremacy is an unofficial religion, it’s the backbone of colonization, it’s the tune Europeans, and eventually Americans, whistled as they committed genocide for centuries.
This article, “Commercial Colonisation of Africa,” is a reminder of the tenacity of white supremacy, which is a system of beliefs, the tools of which can be deployed by non-whites, too, and the failure of the rest of us to wake up to our own complicity in the ongoing genocide against indigenous peoples all over the planet. Because the US, Russia, the UK, Canada, Japan, Italy and Germany, who blithely refer to themselves as the G8, are the same empires that have been colonizing and murdering indigenous peoples since they “discovered” the world isn’t flat. And with regard to the Pacific, all of those countries have taken turns colonizing and brutalizing the region and its peoples.
I love the photo above, which accompanies the article, because of the cracked earth in the foreground. I’m reminded of a conversation I had years ago with Gary Maunakea-Forth, one of the founding farmers of Ma’o Farms (maoorganicfarms.org), wherein he talked about the type of soil in Lualualei, a small valley on the Waianae Coast; Lualualei is militarized/occupied by the US Navy. That side of the island is very dry, and so the ground appears parched and cracked in some areas, such as Lualualei. And what Gary said went something like this:
The soil in Lualualei is a rare type of soil only found in a small percentage of the planet’s farm lands. Despite how it appears, it is actually very rich and can grow anything. The only other place this soil exists is in Africa. And what is the narrative of Lualualei and Waianae in general? That it is a place of poverty, although in reality it has some of the richest soil on earth. And what is the narrative we are told of Africa? It is the narrative of poverty, even though their soil is the richest soil on earth.
The construction of poverty narratives is intentional, it’s a deliberate lie invoked to find ways to steal the land and resources from the people they belong to. Perhaps the most inhumane aspect of white supremacy is that it uses the suffering it inflicts on indigenous peoples as an excuse to embed itself. And even worse, the country performing this ritual genocide is all the while constructing a narrative of itself as the hero of its victim.
It’s the “rape culture” logic that blames a woman for the way she dresses or behaves as an excuse for rape, claiming she wanted it to happen. It’s like when Americans get angry at Hawaiians who call for sovereignty, and say things like, “Hawaiians are lucky we took their country because if we didn’t they’d all be speaking Japanese!” Or the centuries long outright murder of indigenous peoples by Europeans and Americans who, since Ambassador Christopher Columbus showed up uninvited, created laws and policies to support their theft and genocide, enshrining a murderous mentality in a haze of so-called Christian values, like “killing the Indian to save the man.”
Okay, this isn’t just a rant. Because here’s another, really informative article that supports my position– it’s about how US & European coal burning caused a decades long massive African drought. It was published in The Atlantic magazine earlier this month and it tells the story of what researchers at the University of Washington have found. In short, scientists there have proven that American and European coal burning and pollution caused the reduction in rainfall in a largely arid region of Africa that led to local water sources drying up. The drought was blamed on bad farming practices, and the journalists and scientists who perpetrated that lie weren’t talking about industrialized, corporate farming, they blamed indigenous farmers whose knowledge of their land goes back thousands of years. Here’s what the report says:
Aerosols emanating from coal-burning factories in the United States and Europe during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s cooled the entire Northern Hemisphere, shifting tropical rain bands south. Rains no longer reached the Sahel region, a band that spans the African continent just below the Sahara desert.
The G8, made up of the countries responsible for this fairly recent drought, suffering, death and poverty, the impacts of which are still felt in Africa, is, instead of taking responsibility for their actions, carving up the continent of Africa to yet again steal its resources and wealth.
It’s literally another form of slavery, a continuation of the centuries of white supremacist enslavement of Africans. Only instead of kidnapping them and shipping them to America, the same nations, one of which is led by a man who is clearly aware of his own indigenous, African genealogy, have figured out how to enslave Africans in their own respective homelands.