> Long, long ago, the Sahara was not quite so dry as it is now. There were rivers then, which have dried up since. When there was water, food would grow, and people could keep sheep and cattle. In those days there were several large cities there. But when the water began to dry up, the ground became sandy and nothing would grow. Then, whenever the wind blew, the sand was carried along and began to cover up the houses and temples. The people had moved away because their food would not grow, and soon the sand completely covered the old cities.

I'd be worried.

I thought it might be a sort of catalogue of the British empire in Africa, but I don't think the British had much presence in the Congo.

It is hoped that this book and its companion volume dealing with non-African peoples will be the beginning of a series of simple, readable accounts for Africans of some of the various objects of general interest in the world of to-day. There are many such works published for the use of English and American children. But the native African has a totally different experience of life, and much that is taken for granted by a child of a Northern civilized land needs explanation to one used to tropical uncivilized surroundings. Again, the African knows the essential operations of everyday life in their simplest form, whereas the European knows them disguised by an elaborate industrial system. All this makes books written for English children almost unintelligible to a member of a primitive race.

Why do you call it propaganda, comprehensive propaganda no less, without having seem to have even read it very closely?

People just seem to be having this knee-jerk reaction to it in order to signal their adherence to the modern Regressive dogma.

And yeah for sure it is propaganda. It is clearly trying to tell a pretty standard colonialist narrative that "Africa is a lovely place, too bad the Africans couldn't get their act together. It's OK though, the friendly, altruistic Europeans are here to educate and civilize the locals".

Sounds exactly like Europe for the last six thousand years.

You really need to read Guns, Germs and Steel to realize how handicapped Africa has been historically speaking. Going forward they're very well situated. The economic power of sub-saharan Africa could very well eclipse Europe if it has a chance to develop.

And that's why you have the vast majority of your money invested there, right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0C4_88ub_M&t=72m45s

http://i.imgur.com/BO5YwQl.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuNYOwKlDIE

Really? More than it's fair share?

What are we basing the proportions of 'fair share' on? Land size? Population size?

Would care to name just one or two of these important achievements?

But if you can't, don't worry. We all know what you said is a ridiculous empty statement.

Another thing to consider, all peoples and species are free to exist without need of 'important historical achievements.' Nobody needs to justify their existence. But we don't need to pretend things that aren't true.

Apparently you do. I'm not sure why you need to celebrate Europe simply because it achieved industrialization before Africa did. Cultures rise and fall.

Sub-Saharan Africa alone has tremendous mineral and fossil fuel wealth, huge amounts of land ranging from desert to jungle, and a large population. With those ingredients it's only inevitable something comes of it. It's a messy process of industrializing, Europe should serve as an example of how painful that transition can be, but it's happening.

China is flooding money into Africa to be the first in line for these resources and as a supplier to that exploding economy. Even if not every single project of theirs is successful, which by the way just adds to the list of wildly unsuccessful colonial projects over the last two centuries, they'll eventually get what they want.

If you're going to judge Africa by the last hundred years of post-colonial rule, ignorant to its history, we might as well judge Europe by the Dark Ages when Spain and France were being colonized by Africans.

If it had never occurred and Africans never learned to read or write, and gained the help of western science and medicine, then the descendants of those affected by small pox would be succumbing to preventable maladies far more than they are today. Which would total a far greater poor health and suffering tally, far beyond the initial small pox problem or what have you.

But then again, maybe you're right that the world be better off if Africa had just been left entirely alone, an island unto itself.

Do you have any familiarity with the history of Africa pre-colonization, because this is a little bit counterfactual.

"Timbuktu's rapid economic growth in the 13th and 14th centuries drew many scholars from nearby Walata (today in Mauretania),[72] leading up to the city's golden age in the 15th and 16th centuries that proved fertile ground for scholarship of religions, arts and sciences. An active trade in books between Timbuktu and other parts of the Islamic world and emperor Askia Mohammed's strong support led to the writing of thousands of manuscripts.[73]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu#Centre_of_learning

See also:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_I_of_Mali

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Zimbabwe

What does the Great Zimbabwe link have to do with literacy? Other than lack of any evidence for.

Gertrude Caton-Thompson recognised that the builders were indigenous Africans, but she characterised the site as the "product of an infantile mind" built by a subjugated society.

Archaeologists generally agree that the builders probably spoke one of the Shona languages

The writing system for Shona is Latin Script, meaning it was introduced at a much later date.

The only people that think Africa was devoid of culture or civilization are those that look only at the debris that was left after the colonial powers beat everyone down into submission and stripped everything bare.

Reading about what the colonial powers did is just plain depressing. Being ignorant of this past and blaming the victims is also a pretty severe injustice.

http://www.siliconafrica.com/terra-nullius/

You're sure about that, even though there is zero evidence whatsoever for it?

Also, nowhere in this discussion has anyone said that anybody was incapable of learning to read or write. But rather that this was a skill imparted to the Africans by the Europeans.

Well, wow. Nope. Africans have been reading and writing before there even was such a thing as Europe. They had Aramaic and Arabic by way of Egypt and Ethiopia alone.

Neither were Europeans acting in a purely altruistic manner of course, nobody ever does. The Africans had a choice in matters as well, they chose to cooperate for the most part because they felt that was in their best interest. People always like to take the agency away from whoever's 'victim' story they are telling. It's demeaning.

Two entities interacting, pursuing their own interests, resulting in mutual benefit. That's called symbiotic.

Sure you can drill down and find good and bad, you can't have one without the other. What's the balance between the two?

The main point and the absurdity of these discussions is that people so often try to say that the descendants of the colonizers are somehow to blame for the present state of the descendants of the colonized, whatever that may be, when it is crystal clear that without the European intervention the descendants of the colonized would be in a far worse state today.

Do you even know anything about European intervention / influence in Africa? Europeans at first came as explorers, missionaries, enslavers and then as armed soldiers. At what point in the last 2 does choice figure?

The only part of history that fits your blissfully idealistic and ignorant narrative is European activities in East Asia / particularly Japan. Japan had a healthy amount of contact with Europeans early on in the Age of Exploration but they kicked them all out (British, Dutch, Spanish, ... etc) convinced that they were up to no good and it was only when Commodore Perry breached Japan's defenses in the mid 19th century that Japan again opened itself up to the west. But even this renewed contact was markedly different as America was under the sway of the Monroe Doctrine & was not interested in making Japan an extension of America. In Africa however, in the late 19th / early 20th century land was being grabbed en masse and native people's rights trampled as a result of European foreign policy which was influenced strongly by the stipulations spelled out in the "Berlin Conference" (1884).

Don't look at me trying to blame anyone for anything. I'm simply refusing to ignore historical fact. As far as I'm concerned what's done is done, we can move on, that the more we try and pin blame the more of a mess we'll end up in.

White-washing history and pretending it resulted in "mutual benefit" is absolutely monstrous, though. The colonial powers differed in their attitudes from country to country, from era to era, but on the whole they were belligerent, greedy, and utterly indifferent to the people they were subjugating.

If there's one reason why it's hard to paint a picture of how brutal colonial powers treated the people it's because they often erased the other side of the story. We're only just beginning to put together the pieces of the true story of what happened.