The Foundations of Liberia
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
The sight of disability due to theoretically curable diseases like polio or forms of blindness was sadly common.
I did not find anyone who admitted to eating a human heart in the civil war, but one guy stoped talking and got a blank stare into the void and huge sweat pearls forming on his forehead, but i was not sure if it was due to war memories or because his friends tried to scam me, i preferred not to inquire further.
There was no real powergrid as the dam was still not repaired after the war so all important places had a diesel generator and usually had one or two power outages a day when there is some switchover or too late refill (i think). Especially funny in the hospital at night, when it gets pitch black and all machines turn off and the eery silence is only filled by the sound of vomiting and sounds of people in serious pain.
My Boss was an alcoholic and kind of comic savage who after a certain level of drunkenness would start hitting random guys on the ass and pointing to me when they turned around because he found it hilarious you can go to jail for being gay.
From mid-2016 to mid-2019 I drove through 35 countries in Africa. I spent a month in Congo (both), Angola, Mali, Sudan, Burundi, Nigeria, etc. etc. [1] I skipped SL and Liberia due to the relentless rain, though I bumped into plenty of other people driving around that went to both.
While it's obviously a stark contrast to Silicon Valley, from what I saw and heard, these days it's not nearly what you're describing.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waQGUz0Z97Y&list=PLNiCe5roBX...
I backpacked for a month through Liberia. It is a really interesting country. From Monrovia, one of the sleepier capitals in Western Africa, to Harbel some would call it an exploitative plantation for Firestone rubber, to Harper a former capital that is still hard to reach from the capital. Just getting to Harper took one day of shared taxi, one day of hitch-hiking with a UN guy, and a long day of mudding through logging roads in a hired truck. But we made it. I even saw the new soccer star president when he visited Buchannan.
You can feel that it is less developed than the surrounding countries and the war has ripped apart a lot of the inter community trust. Americans have been sucking resources out, and now Chinese businessmen are doing the same.
"From the mid-19th century, the City of Halifax located its least desirable facilities in the Africville area, where the people had little political power and property values were low. A prison was built there in 1853, an infectious disease hospital in 1870, as well as a slaughterhouse, and a depository for fecal waste from nearby Russellville."
Seriously. Knowing about this shit is really important for broadening your understanding of the world we're a part of.
Most Americans don't know much about Africa, let alone Liberia. Our perceptions about it are often only informed by Nicolas Cage's Lord of War and the aforementioned VICE documentary, the latter which has led General Butt Naked to become somewhat of a meme. Yet Liberia is a country that the U.S. specifically was involved in its founding and development. It's rather unfair to the country to have one of its worst villains from one of its most traumatic eras be Americans' only impression of it. An unrepresentative association that dishonors a nation.
There is genuine shock registered at how much many Africans are simply disinterested in explicitly raising questions around White privilege, how it even continues to be catered to in even typical hospitality settings.
Two articles made the frontpage of HN within the last 4 weeks whereby African writers in Britain and Africa, respectively, write to disparage the export of the Black American anti-colonial perspective, one going so far as to indicate an element of typical American cultural exceptionalism.
It seems the Black American community is alone both in its experience and response to the uniquely intensive and thoroughgoing racism of America, no matter how pervasive its cultural influence in the arts globally.
Too American to ever be (any one of the ethnicities identified as...) African, too "other" to ever be more than a second-class American, left alone with hundreds of years of cultural ressentiment at de facto segregation and disenfranchisement that has only recently found popular expression in the liberation of social discourse and media from establishment institutions.
I'm suddenly reminded of a joke a comedian whose name I can't recall told about how a white person is more comfortable with Africans from Africa than they are with the Black Americans that've been here for over 300 year, something like, to paraphrase, "You tell em your name is DeShawn, that's a wrap, but if you're 'Oluwafemi' they love you".
The Cameroonian Joel Embiid, the famous NBA player for the Philadelphia 76ers, famously recalls being able to convince students at the University of Kansas, where he played college basketball, that in Cameroon he lived near lions and had to fight with them constantly. Joel Embiid grew up in an upper middle-class suburb in his home country.
Most probably because many of them haven't seen a white person in their entire life, so we should stop making it about the "white man" only. I have a close friend who happens to be "white" and who went to teach in Burundi this start of the year and he told me that people were stopping him on the street to take photos with because they had never seen a white man in real life (or not from that close, anyway).
Any African who is intellectual enough to possibly participate in the international debate mentioned above, will almost certainly be part of a cosmopolitan class that has interacted with white people. Also, West African countries have a prominent Lebanese population that runs import–export based businesses like supermarkets, Senegal has a huge community of French retirees, and Zimbabwe and South Africa still have their white populations. So, no, Africans are not as isolated as you suggest.
Non-intellectual people can and do question white privilege stuff in the United States, saying that you have to be "intellectual enough" to have that type of conversation sounds very classist to me (am not native English speaker, maybe that's a better word for it).
That Lebanese population will most probably not be labeled as "white" in most of the Anglo world, first of all in the United States, while South Africa is only one country among many dozens of African countries (I choose to ignore white presence in Zimbabwe because Mugabe). There is indeed a sizeable French expat community in many African countries but they are afraid of physically getting out of their bubbles, usually located in a posh district in the respective country's capital city. My friend (also French) was not afraid of getting out of that bubble hence his direct interactions with people who had almost never interacted directly with a white person before.
Lebanese people are historically considered "white" in the USA, at least the Maronite Christian community. Most of the Lebanese who moved to the USA in the late 19th and early 20th century are long since assimilated to the white mainstream.
French retirees in Senegal and Cote d'Ivoire are certainly not limited to a posh neighbourhood in the capital and can be found spread out across the country. Dakar is a dismal place, and certainly retired foreigners find Senegal's small towns and villages more relaxed and peaceful.
This is not a subject where mention of "my friend said" is helpful. One needs first-hand experience with Africa (and experience outside the expat bubble that is all that some foreigner workers see).
I mantain my opinion about the Lebanese and how they’re viewed in the US, heck, the Italians were not seen as white-white until very recently while the Mexicans or the Argentinians still aren’t.
Individual countries have completely different political and economic priorities.
And as recently as, well... now... the South African government are working towards the implementation of a land ownership reform policy which appears to be remarkably similar to the one Robert Mugabe was famous for.
As anti colonial / western sentiment goes, it doesn't get much more concrete than that.
I think acephal is ill-informed on this subject. I've seen rising anti-Western (and anti-asian btw) sentiment across the continent, especially throughout sub-saharan Africa. As a matter of full disclosure, I think it's a problem. Africa was the last place in the world where ethno-nationalism hadn't swept through, and the past year or so has seen it sweep the continent with a vengeance. Even white South Africans, I think, would admit that there are serious problems in this regard. Panafricanism is a thing, to ignore it and say it doesn't exist is just sticking your head in the sand. (Pan-Africanism in the traditional sense is not bad btw. It would even be helpful. I'm talking about the brand of pan-Africanism that demands a harmful kind of ethno-exclusivity. No one has an issue with the pan-africanist tenets of strengthening links between African nations and inviting slave descendants to move to Africa. Which I support as keys to Africa's development.)
Acephal is also mistaken in thinking young Africans do not think like American blacks. Their exposure to the West, and unfortunately, to the US, has given many first hand experience in, for instance, police behavior. The ones who return to Africa to tell the tale are, if anything, more radical than American blacks.
The good news is that I think the rising ethno-nationalism in Africa is very much a reaction to the rising ethno-nationalism in the rest of the world. If it could be checked elsewhere, it may tamp down in Africa as better stories about treatment make it back to the populations of the various nations in Africa. Right now, the stories of what happens outside of Africa have turned decidedly negative. That's the issue driving sentiment in my opinion.
And Hacker News is not the place for comments like that.
As opposed to Dikembe Mutumbo, who has actually killed a lion. (It was asleep when he did, but still...)
Manute Bol did the same!
You have to blame a lot if not most of this on a lot of wholesale slaughter during colonialism of the elements who resisted it, and a lot of the elevation of particular ethnic groups into elite classes to serve as local middlemen for foreign business concerns (mostly extractive industries.) The elites of those countries are the people we see on youtube. Their families did pretty well under colonialism, and they think of the people who complain about it (in their home countries probably other ethnic groups, or non-Christians, or Sunnis) as Luddite terrorists who need to be killed.
Africa was a heavy source of anti-colonial radicalism during the cold war, and those sentiments still exist. Those are just not the elements we elevate. They, like black Americans, are usually the subject being discussed, not the people who get to be part of the conversation.
This isn't unique to Africa.
However, the political problems and impoverishment that accompanied the most drastic efforts to throw off colonial ties, did scare some other countries into not going that far. For example, after other West African countries saw Guinea become the first nation to completely end French ties, but then fall into poverty and have no one to turn to but Maoist China, they reflected that perhaps France’s role in the region was not so bad after all. At present, it is not at all unusual to hear a Senegalese person expressly point to Guinea-Bissau as an example of anti-colonialism gone wrong.
That's an unfortunate way to put things - as if there was a generic America. "White America" and "Black America" are each inextricable parts of America. If Black American culture is taken a "second class", and it often is, that is because of the continuation of white supremacy.
Edit: And blanket statements on the attitudes of African Americans generally are unfortunate. What is visible as the supposed attitude of group X is by no means the universal or even predominant attitude. Your post is interesting for describing some ironic contrasts but problematic for trying to universalize them.
Some might say well troughway you’re cherry picking anecdotes to fit a point, there are many immigrants who don’t think this way. And that’s okay too - not everyone wants to be connected to their homeland. But it’s worth noting that we are composites of our ancestors, the places they grew up, the food they ate and how it affects our physical and mental health, and host of other things that we carry with us whether we want to or not.
The point here isn't to say indigenous Africans are not woke or bear no interaction with (post-)colonialism, but that their cultural circumstances are just too distinct to provide much solace to the specific plight of Black Americans, surprised as some are when they move to or visit Africa and discover a perspective they imagined to be in more alignment with their own, as I mentioned above.
This distance is palpable in your own commentary that immigrants "remember who you are, where you come from, who your people are, and many other things from homeland." - such a sentence has little to offer to a Black American whose ancestors were physically and culturally displaced in an intractable way.
But this also has another edge to it, which the article also wishes to point out, that the "American-ness" of the Black community can lead to notions of whose perspective is more valid, again, highlighted in the substrate of YouTube commentary I've encountered.
It is true that most Black folk, just as in the article wrt Liberia, have zero interest in relocating to Africa and elect to struggle for whats owed to their ancestors' contribution to building this country, however the experience of this smaller community of Black American migrants throws light on an interesting aspect of the discussion from where I'm standing
Liberation? Establishment institutions drive social discourse, there's no need to be "liberated" from them. From the New York Times 1619 project, to Hollywood movies like 12 Years a Slave or the Watchmen series, to the various grievance studies in schools and universities.
Please don't pretend you're the plucky rebels when giant corporations cloak themselves in BLM logos.
Like who, Umkhonto we Sizwe? Patrice Lumumba? The MPLA?
> African writers in Britain and Africa, respectively, write to disparage the export of the Black American anti-colonial perspective
Is this new? The South Africans had Buthelezi to go around the world criticizing the anti-apartheid movement, and there were ones before that.
Benedict Arnold ended up not sharing the anti-colonial attitude of his fellow Americans. Nor did Vidkun Quisling of his fellow Norwegians share anti-colonial attitudes. We are not unaware these people exist.
We're talking ground-floor interactions from what I've seen that obviously do not speak to any kind of unanimity but a surprising extent nonetheless. One such video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkKi1vC_IEA
> Is this new? The South Africans had Buthelezi to go around the world criticizing the anti-apartheid movement, and there were ones before that.
The writers in question weren't criticizing the modern anti-racism movement in America, however, but the form of its response and its presumptions. Perhaps a minute difference but one nonetheless.
Yes, there Black people from Africa, from all over Africa that are still thinking about decolonization. Today.
A couple of interesting pieces:
https://abebabirhane.wordpress.com/2019/07/10/the-algorithmi...
“ Decolonization has reemerged as a compelling vision of a better future. Once again, the broader issues of colonialism, capitalism, racism, Euro- centrism, and patriarchy have been pushed onto the public agenda as the incomplete business of an ongoing decolonizing project.”
— Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni from “ African Decolonization’s Past and Present Trajectories”, 2020