“It saddens me”, he says,” to
see the white man beating his breast over and over, too emasculated to
put up any resistance to people who’ve come to threaten him on his own
doorstep”. He believes that a toxic mix of guilt, “human rightsism”, political naivety and crass ignorance of History have a debilitating effect on Europeans’ capacity to fight the invasion.
He
accuses the corrupt African leaders of destroying the lives of hundreds
of millions of human beings in all impunity but is equally critical of
the ideologues who are paving the way for them. They should stop blaming
it all – slavery, the slave trade, colonialism, neocolonialism, and
racism – on a forever repentant Europe, which now has to carry the
burden of this mass immigration to atone for its supposed sins against
Africa.
This in particular:
Regarding slavery, Tigori explains that in 1324, almost 150 years before the first European caravel arrived on the African Atlantic coast, Malian king Kankan Moussa made a pilgrimage to Mecca with almost 10 tons of gold and thousands of slaves that he sold to the Maghreb, Egypt and Arabia.
Even earlier, the sale of slaves through the desert caravans made Ghana prosper until the 11th century AD.
Something else that is not always known, insists Tigori, is that at the time of the great discoveries of the 15th century, contacts between Europe and black Africa were very peaceful. To wit, diplomatic relations were established between Portugal and the Kongo kingdom; the latter got Christianized and sent its children to study in Lisbon beginning in the 16th century.
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Tigori?
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