Scramble In Disguise If colonization mean anything, then it could not be better defined elsewhere than in Africa between 1880 and 1914 when almost the whole continent was carved up among the ‘Big Brothers’ of Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Between this short period of time, the whole of the continent was ransacked and enslaved, boiling with bloody confrontations, her people were oppressed to the fullest, tyranny was clearly defined, brutality was raining and regards for lives and well being was fast evaporating. Hmmm, it was the scramble for Africa! The purpose of this essay is not to unnecessarily create nostalgia in the mind of Africans and its lovers, but to accentuate the devious, enriched but yet conspicuous replicas of such a gruesome event especially as purposely and purposefully engineered by the evil-headed America and tailored by its allies. Perhaps as a naïve young fellow, I shouldn’t have agreed with the writer in this regard, what has America done to deserve such a libellous label? Was it not the same America that “willingly” agreed to the abolition of slave trade? How about her effort in the liberation of Liberia from the colonial master through diplomacy? What of her “peaceful” campaign in many countries of the world and fight against terrorism? However, as an upright and shrewd observer of the world political order, one would easily notice the hypocrisy of the so called United State of America in what it claims to stand for. Events of the 80s and bellow may be too far- fetched from the memory, perhaps those of the 90s will suffice: The everlasting one-sided support of Israel in its continued illegal occupation of Palestine, The use of torture by the CIA and US troops in Iraq (you may read an example of such at aztlan.net/abu_ghraib_revisited.htm), the plural democracy and the military intervention of the 1991 election in Algeria and that of Turkey in 1997, the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantanamo bay, the 2010 deliberate targeting of civilians by the US troops in Afghanistan. These are just drops from the ocean of vices committed by the supposed “preachers” of peace and justice. How about the several other intellectual wars? The many conspiracies of silence by the media, what happens to Anders Behring Breivik of Norway who singlehandedly massacred 77 people in a day in July 2011? What of Timothy Mcveigh who left 198 dead and 600 injured in the Oklahoma bombing of 1995? The implantation of Hosni Mubarak and his fellow “indigenous foreigners” in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and the likes to check the activities of the citizens, the many propagandas through “civilisation”, “globalization”, “orientation” and “fight against terrorism”, and then the recently conspiratorial sponsored coup in Egypt . What an irony! Today ,we celebrate the world remembrance of abolition of slave trade and yet, all the elements that characterised the world of slavery then – imposition, oppression, militarism, invasion, confrontation, domination, repression, totalitarianism, terrorism, restriction, persecution and in fact cannibalism are still much in place and much enhanced. The sardonic reason the European gave for their scrambling of Africa is to stop slave trading. May be the similar reason for America and its allies scramble for human blood is to stop . . . . . . Peaceful protest. What a paradox!
Posted on: Sat, 24 Aug 2013 09:27:10 +0000