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“The second European invasion, as shown earlier, spread a new dust of familiar disasters upon Africa: social dislocation, depopulation, uprooting of peoples, and enslavement of Africans, this time in Africa, comparable to those disasters of the holocaust years. An outstanding example was the devastation and depopulation of the Congo, Belgian as well as French, that halved the population of the area and enslaved the other half to farm rubber for Europe. And thus it came to pass that not until the beginning of the twentieth century did some measure of peace return to Africa, a full three and one-half centuries after her violent disintegration began in the sixteenth century.”
“But it was the peace of the European conquerors, not an autonomous African peace. And this alien peace came to an Africa that had nowhere recovered its sixteenth-century standard of living, quality of civilization, economic autonomy or cultural initiative. With the European triumph, Africa’s reviving political, economic, military and cultural initiatives were again extinguished. Economic satellization became total economic colonization—and without disguise. Under the new economic dispensation even the ancient trans-Sahara trade that had partially revived in the nineteenth century would finally be liquidated as everything was brought under direct European administration. In imposing their peace and order upon Africa, what our conquerors and colonizers from Europe did was
(1) To build colonial polities tributary to Europe upon the graves of our sovereign nineteenth-century polities;
(2) To construct a new, but colonized, economy in our land;
(3) To foist a colonial version of their culture upon us; and
(4) To proclaim their superiority on the battlefield a superiority in every aspect of life, and therefore to inflict a sense of general inadequacy as well as an assortment of colonial complexes upon our psyches. All of these have combined to produce a distortion in our self-image and a loss of our sense of dignity.
“During the Dark Age of the slaving holocaust, our political initiative had either succumbed to stupor or had been exercised in the building of ruin-spreading carrion-states; but it was not lost. Now, with conquest, it was trampled down. Political sovereignty was finally lost. In short, through this conquest, Africa was finally moved from a state of economic satellization to one of open and undisguised political, economic and cultural subordination.”Chinweizu
“The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers and the African Elite”
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