Oneys 🇦🇬🇹🇳

This is exactly how history gets twisted, castrated, and morphed into full-blown propaganda. There is nothing more insensitive and criminally offensive than blaming the poverty in Africa solely on the premise that Africans failed to learn trade, statecraft, and management techniques from their colonial masters. This analysis would only be correct if colonialism was a joint venture where the colonizers brought in their technology and superior machinery, engaged in training the locals on how to use them, and set up a robust educational system to support and sustain that development. Colonialism never assumed this shape or form. It was evidently a one-way, abusive relationship where the colonizers violently imposed their will and mandate on their colonial subjects. The only technology brought to them were the machine guns used to subjugate the people. The heavy machinery used to refine and process their agricultural crops and mineral wealth was stationed exclusively in the capital cities of the colonial empire. Even the machines that were supposed to assist or facilitate the extraction of this mineral wealth were not brought into the besieged countries, simply because it was cheaper to use bullets to force the people to work nonstop under the scorching sun with bare, medieval farming tools. The railways built in several parts of Africa and the rest of the Global South do not count as development either. They merely served as a logistical mechanism to facilitate the extraction of resources from the slave plantations to the seaports, not to connect the people or facilitate domestic trade. The schools and courtrooms erected also do not count. They were never fully-fledged learning grounds designed to build professionals who would manage the country for the greater good. Instead, they were grooming grounds for clerks and typists whose sole purpose was to manage the administrative paperwork of wealth extraction. The newly trained judges only served the function of upholding the criminal declarations of the empire whenever it was time to steal indigenous lands or unjustly imprison critics of the colonial plantation. Therefore, blaming the colonized for not learning how to build railways, skyscrapers, and modern technology from their colonial masters is nothing but a severe manifestation of historical ignorance. Furthermore, the fact that this documentary is based on the Congolese experience makes the entire narrative a total sham. The Congolese were not only exploited, subjugated, and subjected to genocide by the Belgians. The most damning reality is that the moment they truly voted and rallied behind a revolutionary leader who would work for the betterment of the Congolese people shortly after gaining independence, that leader was violently overthrown. Patrice Lumumba was couped out of office, humiliated on the streets of the Congo, gunned down by a firing squad, and his body was later dissolved in acid. All of these acts were orchestrated by a coalition of Western intelligence agencies, a fact that is now well-documented in history books. In place of Lumumba, Mobutu Sese Seko was ushered into power. He turned the Democratic Republic of Congo into a neo-colonial slave plantation for global powers to exploit as they saw fit, all while Western governments protected his brutal regime. This is not just about the Congo. We are witnessing in real time how France has carried out the exact same playbook in the Sahel, currently teaming up with proxy forces to topple revolutionary governments and return the Sahelian states back to their default settings as neo-colonial slave plantations. This is the grim reality of virtually all sovereign states in the Global South that once served as plantation farms for Western oligarchs. The sad reality is that the people who produce these documentaries, and those who amplify them on social media platforms, see, know, and understand all of this perfectly well. The Western journalists who write and depict Africans as savages unfit to govern themselves know this is not the case, but they keep pushing these propaganda pamphlets because it helps sustain the system of extraction. It ensures that the working-class citizens living within the imperial core do not see the poverty in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as the foundational sine qua non that sustains the technology, infrastructure, and industrialization they enjoy in the Global North. They have to be propagandized into seeing our poverty as a testament to our supposed laziness and lower intelligence quotients, rather than as the direct result of centuries of over-exploitation. Even though it has been meticulously proven by economists that for every $1 sent to the Global South in aid, about $14 is extracted and shipped out to subsidize the luxury of the Global North, this information is neatly wrapped up and tossed away. It does not conform to the prevailing narrative that Africa and the rest of the Global South remain grossly underdeveloped despite trillions supposedly spent on "aid." Of course, the workers of the Global North are also slaves to this exact same capitalist system. But as long as they are housed in nicer prisons and conditioned to see the rest of us working in the open fields of the Global South as "lesser" than them, the capitalist ruling class will continue to sit at the top of the food chain for the rest of human history.