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There Are No Successful Black Nations
BY CHIGOZIE OBIOMA
Extremely interesting article written by a black African. I don't agree with everything he says, but it's nice to hear from a fresh perspective.
In the wake of fresh deaths at the hands of police officers in the world’s greatest nation, we, the people of the black race, are once again the object of renewed worldwide attention.
Questions of injustice in the United States have been duly raised and protested. And, once again, the black cultural elites in America have seized various platforms to air their grievances and are mostly — and rightly — talking about racism, discrimination, racial profiling, and hate, among other issues. But one issue that has hardly been talked about is the core reason why black people have remained synonymous with the denigrating experience of racism. It is, I dare say, because of the worldwide indignity of the black race.
Racism is not limited to the Unites States. There is no nonblack nation, even among the most liberal ones, where the black man is dignified. History dealt us an unforgiving blow in the incursion of foreigners into black lands. The Arabs enslaved tribes and nations and then colonized and evangelized them. Then came the Europeans, who, persuaded the Africans were of an inferior race, divided up the continent over lunch in Berlin in 1884. They carted off a large population of its people — sometimes leaving entire villages almost empty — and brought those who remained on the continent under their rule. So complete was the transformation that no black nation retained its ancestral nationhood, national language, or national identity. And today we often hear of how China or India or some other nation is “taking over” Africa economically. There is almost no nation whose majority is of a different race that has not spat on the face of the black person, at one time or the other.
Be assured, the indignity will continue. Black elites and activists across the world have adopted a culture of verbal tyranny in which they shut down any effort to reason or criticize us or black-majority nations by labeling such attempts as “racism” or “hate speech.” Thus, one can be certain that any suggestions that our race may indeed need to do something to remedy our situation will not be aired — not by the terrified people of other races. And anyone within our race who makes such a suggestion will be deemed weak and pandering or a sellout, as U.S. President Barack Obama has been repeatedly called.
Thus, no one will talk about the painful fact that most African and Caribbean nations have either failed or are about to collapse.http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/09/...an-africanism/Early African-American intellectuals and cultural elites saw that the future of their race could not be advanced by endless protests or marches of “equality” or “justice.” It could only be done through the restoration of the trampled dignity of the black man. Great men like Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Malcolm X all knew that a people is only respected when it has a nation worthy of respect. A man who lives in a shack cannot expect to be treated with respect at a palace. They knew that for us to reclaim power we must first reclaim dignity and that this comes through the construction of a solid black state with a demonstrable level of development and prosperity — and which can stand as a powerful advocate for the global black.
Today, no such state exists.
Nigeria, the most populous black nation on Earth, is on the brink of collapse. The machineries that make a nation exist, let alone succeed, have all eroded. One might argue that the nation’s creation by self-seeking white imperialists engendered its failure from the beginning, as I did in my recent novel. But this is only a part of the cause. A culture of incompetence, endemic corruption, dignified ineptitude, and, chief among all, destructive selfishness and greed has played a major role in its unravelling. The same, sadly, can be said for most other African nations. States like Zimbabwe, Cameroon, and Equatorial Guinea are farcical democracies ruled by men who exclusively cater to their interests and those of their clipped circles.
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Originally Posted by Arslan
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