Dilbert_X wrote:
If we could we'd all be one race by now.
tHiNk AbOuT iT
race is an invented construct. and we are, to a significant degree, intermixed genetically now. what's the difference between a mongol, an evenki, a native american and a peruvian? the answer is not much, because of the migrations of human populations many many thousands of years ago (i.e. asiatic people moving down into south america). (hint: nations are recently invented constructs, too, political rather than sociological, and you'll find similar confusions if you try to parse the fundamental 'difference' between, say, belgium and the netherlands; or how you could understand the role of, say, magyars in the plural identity groups of hungary, and so on.)
Dilbert_X wrote:
Africans aren't going to become civilised.
we've had this conversation before. africans have had civilization in the past, with extensive cities, palace compounds, masterpieces of art, trade and war relations, etc. all the usual characteristics of a 'civilization'. you wanted to insist that 'they only built a barn' because it was the only picture you could find on wikipedia.
In February 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, a British expeditionary force sacked the ancient city of Benin. They exiled the oba, or ruler, Ovonramwen, and carted away more than four thousand pieces of sculpture, known collectively as the Benin bronzes. The attack was prompted by the killing of several men belonging to a British expedition who had tried to enter Benin the previous year. The aim of their mission, headed by a British deputy commissioner, was ostensibly to remind the oba of his obligations under a new treaty allowing the Royal Niger Company a monopoly on trade throughout his extensive kingdom, notably in palm oil. By then, a number of punitive expeditions had already been undertaken in the ‘protectorate’ that was shortly to become southern Nigeria. Ovonramwen knew there was little point in resisting: three years earlier, the town of Ebrohimi – roughly a hundred kilometres from the city – had been razed and looted by the British because its chief, Nana Olomu, objected to the price they had offered for his palm oil. Nana was forced into exile, just as King Jaja of Opobo had been in the 1880s. Jaja, a former slave, had developed a network of palm oil trading houses along the River Niger but in a fit of overconfidence he had attempted to bypass the Royal Niger Company and sell directly to merchants in Liverpool.
The oba, a deity in the eyes of his people, ruled an area the size of Scotland, and the splendour of his court was a challenge to the colonising power. The earliest description comes from a Dutchman, Dierick Ruiters, who visited the city at the beginning of the 17th century. He was impressed by ‘a great broad street, not paved, which seemeth to be seven or eight times broader than the Warmoes street in Amsterdam’. The oba’s palace was ‘of vast Extent ... so large, that you can feel no End; for when you have walked till you are tired (throughout) you see another Gate, opening into a larger Square’. Ruiters found the people ‘sincere’ and ‘inoffensive’ and had no fears for his safety; anyone who harmed a foreigner was ‘executed, their body cut into four parts and left to the wild beasts’. The oba himself only appeared twice a year, on which occasions he displayed ‘all his Grandeur, appearing attended with above six hundred Wives, though not all are legitimate’. Another Dutchman, Olfert Dapper, who never visited the city but published a description in 1668 based on secondhand sources, claimed that Benin had ‘thirty very straight broad streets, each about 120 feet wide’, with large, handsome, single-storey houses. The royal quarters were ‘easily as big as the town of Haarlem and enclosed by a remarkable wall ... [with] beautiful long galleries about as big as the Exchange at Amsterdam’. One of these galleries, resting on wooden pillars, was ‘decorated from top to bottom with cast copper’, depicting ‘deeds of war and battle scenes’.
are you determined to be wholly ignorant when it comes to race 'science' as well as modern history? it's like you're a naughty delinquent schoolboy who wants attention from his teachers. did boarding school mark you so badly that you're still crossing your arms and puffing your cheeks when someone points you towards a book?
Last edited by uziq (2021-08-09 22:07:23)