Timnit Gebru: The #TigrayGenocide With 500,000 People Dead Should Have Made Front-Page News

💭 ትምኒት ገብሩ፤ 500,000 ሰዎች የሞቱበት የትግራይ የዘር ማጥፋት ወንጀል ሰፊ ትኩረት አግኝቶ የፊት ገጽ ዜና መስራት ነበረበት

💭 Timnit Gebru Founder and Executive Director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR) at UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day Global Conference 2022.

500,000 Tigrayan Christians were Massacred or Starved to death under 500 days by The Fascist Oromo Regime of Ethiopia – but, the world is still ignoring this devastating tragedy. The coverage of Ukraine has revealed a pretty radical disparity in how human Ukrainians look and feel to western and international – including African media compared to black Ethiopians Christians. 😠😠😠 😢😢😢

💭 Timnit Gebru, a widely respected leader in AI ethics research, is known for coauthoring a groundbreaking paper that showed facial recognition to be less accurate at identifying women and people of color, which means its use can end up discriminating against them. She also cofounded the Black in AI affinity group, and champions diversity in the tech industry. The team she helped build at Google is one of the most diverse in AI and includes many leading experts in their own right. Peers in the field envied it for producing critical work that often challenged mainstream AI practices.

A series of tweets, leaked emails, and media articles showed that Gebru’s exit was the culmination of a conflict over another paper she coauthored. Jeff Dean, the head of Google AI, told colleagues in an internal email (which he has since put online) that the paper “didn’t meet our bar for publication” and that Gebru had said she would resign unless Google met a number of conditions, which it was unwilling to meet. Gebru tweeted that she had asked to negotiate “a last date” for her employment after she got back from vacation. She was cut off from her corporate email account before her return.

Online, many other leaders in the field of AI ethics are arguing that the company pushed her out because of the inconvenient truths that she was uncovering about a core line of its research—and perhaps its bottom line. More than 1,400 Google staff members and 1,900 other supporters have also signed a letter of protest.

💭 Another Firing Among Google’s A.I. Brain Trust, and More Discord

The researchers are considered a key to the company’s future. But they have had a hard time shaking infighting and controversy over a variety of issues.

Less than two years after Google dismissed two researchers who criticized the biases built into artificial intelligence systems, the company has fired a researcher who questioned a paper it published on the abilities of a specialized type of artificial intelligence used in making computer chips.

Dr. Chatterjee’s dismissal was the latest example of discord in and around Google Brain, an A.I. research group considered to be a key to the company’s future. After spending billions of dollars to hire top researchers and create new kinds of computer automation, Google has struggled with a wide variety of complaints about how it builds, uses and portrays those technologies.

Tension among Google’s A.I. researchers reflects much larger struggles across the tech industry, which faces myriad questions over new A.I. technologies and the thorny social issues that have entangled these technologies and the people who build them.

But even as Google has promoted the technology’s potential, it has encountered resistance from employees about its application. In 2018, Google employees protested a contract with the Department of Defense, concerned that the company’s A.I. could end up killing people. Google eventually pulled out of the project.

In December 2020, Google fired one of the leaders of its Ethical A.I. team, Timnit Gebru, after she criticized the company’s approach to minority hiring and pushed to publish a research paper that pointed out flaws in a new type of A.I. system for learning languages.

Before she was fired, Dr. Gebru was seeking permission to publish a research paper about how A.I.-based language systems, including technology built by Google, may end up using the biased and hateful language they learn from text in books and on websites. Dr. Gebru said she had grown exasperated over Google’s response to such complaints, including its refusal to publish the paper.

A few months later, the company fired the other head of the team, Margaret Mitchell, who publicly denounced Google’s handling of the situation with Dr. Gebru. The company said Dr. Mitchell had violated its code of conduct.

The paper in Nature, published last June, promoted a technology called reinforcement learning, which the paper said could improve the design of computer chips. The technology was hailed as a breakthrough for artificial intelligence and a vast improvement to existing approaches to chip design. Google said it used this technique to develop its own chips for artificial intelligence computing.

Source: NYtimes

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The War Against Africa: Ideological Colonialism

By Dr. Jeff Mirus (bio – articles – email) | Mar 22, 2018

I have long been convinced that those who seek political office are, as a general rule, morally unfit to rule. We could make an example of almost any historical regime to illustrate this thesis, for nearly every ruling group, whatever good it may have done, has deliberately led (not followed) those under its control and influence in ignoring one moral principle or another in pursuit of its own self-interest.

But we do not need to look to history. How else, except by the application of this general rule, can we explain why nearly every government in the world—and certainly every government in the West—spends so much time and energy undermining the very virtues which are required for a healthy social order? And at the purely theoretical level, is it not perfectly logical to assume that those who aspire to controlling others are most often uninterested in a wholesome participation in what we might call life on the ground?

If it were otherwise, they would be too busy for politics.

A new proof

Our political and social leaders, whatever their differences, are chosen from the pool of those who seek political and social advancement. This, my friends, is at best a tainted pool. Not only do the vast majority of them today consistently and deliberately undermine the natural law, but they work ceaselessly to export this contempt for sound moral values wherever wealth has enabled them to gain influence. In our time we have another monumental example: It was not enough that the European nations conspired to take political control of Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; no, even in giving up overt political control, the West insists on taking social, economic and above all moral control of all who inhabit that vast continent.

Africa, in other words, is the new proof of my depressing thesis, and of an even older axiom: Beware of political and social leaders bearing gifts. Every one of them is a Trojan Horse. Every one of them is equipped not only with strings but reins. In Africa this takes the form of a relentless push by Western governments and foundations to destroy the personal integrity and family stability which a culture must possess if it is ever to be truly independent of first world nations that “just want to help.”

Thus the West is transforming Africa with treacherous gifts—with “aid” programs and packages designed to limit the population, lure young people and women to seek personal independence through sexual license, accept abortion as liberation, normalize sexual perversion, and remain dependent on foreign aid. All of this, of course, could have been predicted as just another variation of my central thesis. But Catholic readers, at least, know from the news that it is true. If they have any doubt, they should consult a brave new book by Obianuju Ekeocha entitled Target Africa.

My Note:

Obianuju Ekeocha

A remarkable Nigerian woman, Obianuju Ekeocha holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Microbiology from the University of Nigeria and a Masters in Biomedical Science from the University of East London. She works in Canterbury, England as a Specialist Biomedical Scientist. And perhaps most important of all, she is the founder of Culture of Life Africa, an organization defending the dignity of human life through research, information and education. According to the blurb on her book jacket, she has spoken on life and women’s issues in seventeen countries and at the United Nations.

By birth, nationality, upbringing, education and sheer ability, Ekeocha is the ideal foil for everything from the United States government to the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation, which pours millions into Africa each year in a colossal effort to solve African problems by destroying Africans. In fact, a few years ago Ekeocha wrote an open letter to Melinda Gates, essentially telling her that Africans don’t need her stinkin’ money.

But the sum total of evil actors dwarfs the Gates Foundation. Ekeocha’s new book, just out from Ignatius Press with a foreword by Robert P. George, is subtitled “Ideological neocolonialism in the twenty-first century”. Following a jam-packed introduction providing the necessary background, Ekeocha offers compelling chapters on the effort to control Africa through population restrictions, the hypersexualization of youth, radical feminism, abortion rights, and the normalization of homosexuality. The final three chapters explain what it means to be a modern-day colonial master, explore the problem of “aid addiction”, and offer suggestions for decolonization. (Oh, and that remarkable letter to Gates is in the appendix.)

Compelling

Target Africa is absolutely compelling. It is a deeply-felt personal and even emotional witness coupled with more than enough data to prove the case, and all from a source whom the reader cannot help but admire.

“Africans by and large believe that sex is sacred,” Ekeocha writes,

that human life is precious from womb to tomb, that children are blessings, that motherhood is desirable, and that marriage between man and woman is life-generating. These are the basic family values that our parents and grandparents transmitted to us. They are embedded in our customs, enshrined in our laws, and even encoded in our native languages. To take them away from us amounts to invasion, occupation, annexation, and colonization of our people.

Returning to the thesis with which I began, I should point out that one of the book’s pervasive themes is the way in which African officials and bureaucrats line up to receive Western aid packages in return for implementing the purpose of these packages, which is to undermine their own people. What did I say about those who are interested in controlling the lives of others?

Before ever I wrote this review, there was Qoholeth the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem, as quoted in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Was he thinking of social engineers when he said there was nothing new under the sun? Perhaps I am vain to think my own little theory is original. But I can say this: For those who seek to direct others without first surrendering themselves to God, everything under that all-revealing sun is vanity.

Source

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How The European Union Starves Africa into Submission

For example, in 2014, the continent of Africa earned 2.8 billion US dollars from exporting coffee, mainly raw, unprocessed beans which carry the lowest tariffs. By contrast, Germany alone – where coffee doesn’t grow – earned 3.8 billion US dollars from exporting processed coffee products.

It is estimated that of all the food items imported by African countries, nearly 83 per cent comes from outside the continent. The rest comes from other African countries.

African leaders are seeking ways to feed their peoples and become players in the global economy.

In the second edition of The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa, I argue that Africa can feed itself in a generation. However, efforts to achieve such an ambitious goal continue to be frustrated by policies adopted by Africa’s historical trading partners, especially the European Union.

There are at least three ways in which EU policies affect Africa’s ability to address its agricultural and food challenges: tariff escalation; technological innovation and food export preferences.

African leaders would like to escape the colonial trap of being viewed simply as raw material exporters. But their efforts to add value to the materials continue to be frustrated by existing EU policies.

Take the example of coffee. In 2014 Africa —the home of coffee— earned nearly $2.4 billion from the crop. Germany, a leading processor, earned about $3.8 billion from coffee re-exports.

The concern is not that Germany benefits from processing coffee. It is that Africa is punished by EU tariff barriers for doing so. Non-decaffeinated green coffee is exempt from the charges. However, a 7.5 per cent charge is imposed on roasted coffee. As a result, the bulk of Africa’s export to the EU is unroasted green coffee.

The charge on cocoa is even more debilitating. It is reported that the “EU charges (a tariff) of 30 per cent for processed cocoa products like chocolate bars or cocoa powder, and 60 per cent for some other refined products containing cocoa.

The impact of such charges goes well beyond lost export opportunities. They suppress technological innovation and industrial development among African countries. The practice denies the continent the ability to acquire, adopt and diffuse technologies used in food processing. It explains to some extent the low level of investment in Africa’s food processing enterprises.

Usually, the know-how accumulated from processing exports such as coffee could be adopted for use on other crops and in other sectors. This in turn would help to stimulate industrial development and generate employment. Being defined as raw material exporters undermines technological innovation in the wider economy, not just in agriculture.

The second example where EU policy undermines African agricultural innovation is in the field of genetically modified (GM) crops. The EU exercises its right not to cultivate transgenic crops but only to import them as animal feed. However, its export of restrictive policies on GM crops has negatively affected Africa.

The adoption of restrictive policies across Africa has been pursued under the pretext of protecting the environment and human health. So far there has been little evidence to support draconian biosafety rules. It is important that the risks of new products be assessed. But the restrictions should proportionate and consistent with needs of different countries.

Africa’s needs are different from those of the EU. There are certain uniquely African problems where GM should be considered as an option. Let us look at the examples of Uganda and Nigeria.

The Xanthomonas banana wilt bacterial disease causes early ripening and discoloration of bananas, a staple crop for Uganda. This costs the Great Lakes region nearly US $500m annually in losses. There is no treatment for the disease, which continues to undermine food security.

Ugandan scientists at Kawanda Agricultural Research Institute have developed a GM approach but their efforts to further their research in the technology are hampered by opposition to it. Those opposed to the technology advocate the adoption of an EU biosafety approach that would effectively stall the adoption of the technology. In fact, some of opponents using scare tactics against the technology are EU-based non-governmental organizations.

The moth Maruca vitrata destroys about US $300 million worth of blackeyed peas in Nigeria. The country is forced to import pesticides worth US $500m annually to control the pest. Scientists at the Institute for Agricultural Research at Nigeria’s Ahmadu Bello University have developed a Maruca-resistant, GM blackeyed pea variety. Nigerian policy makers are hesitant to pursue a technology that they fear might put them on a collision course with the EU.

Pursuing EU-inspired biosafety policies denies Africa the capacity to leverage biotechnology and use it to meet its own local needs. GM technology has wider application in fields such as medicine and can be used in the development of diagnostics.

Zmapp is an example of an experimental drug for use against the Ebola virus that was developed using GM technology. In this case, EU policies on food safety may have unintended consequences of suppressing innovation in Africa not only in agriculture, but also in healthcare.

There are areas of EU-Africa agricultural trade that on the surface appear to offer hopeful signs. One of them is trade in organic produce. In fact, part of the opposition to GM technology is linked to the perception that it might compromise Africa’s export of organic produce to the EU.

The surge in demand in organic produce around the world does offer parts of Africa the opportunity to increase their food exports. Over the last two decades, Africa’s share of world food exports has dropped from 11 per cent to less than 3 per cent. Thailand exports nearly as much food as all of sub-Saharan Africa.

But boosting food exports is not going to be satisfied by dependence on niche organic markets provided by the EU. Africa needs robust efforts to upgrade its agriculture through technology adoption and not simply reliance on the exploitation of Africa’s “cheap ecology”.

One of the impacts of the policies has been to nudge Africa towards new partnerships with countries such China and Brazil that have pioneered the adoption of new agricultural technologies. This, in turn, has the long-term potential of eroding trade relations between the UK and Africa. The time has come for the EU to rethink the impact of its policies on African agriculture in general and technological transformation in particular.

Source

My Note: The whole financial system is monitored and safeguarded by the IMF, the Bank of International Settlement, the World Bank, the FBI, the CIA, the M16, the French Intelligence, US Army, and the Roman Catholic Churches and Mosques.

It is a global system of international enslavement which bounds every nation of today.

Africa is especially hated and feared so no one ever allocates any international capital for development to Africa.

That is why the cost of capital the final magic to economic activity is prohibitive and almost impossible in Africa. That is why Africa is still poor and under-managed!

In the rest of the world, capital is relatively cheap….

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Ethiopia Was Colonised

By Mastewal Taddese Terefe

We kept the imperialists at bay, but it wasn’t enough.

Like many African countries that were colonised by the British, Ethiopia’s educational system strongly privileges the English language. I learnt this first hand going through school in the capital Addis Ababa.

Along with my classmates across the vast country, I was taught in my local language from Grades 1 to 6 (ages 6 to 12). But after that, the language of instruction switched. History, maths, sciences and the rest were now taught in English, while Ethiopia’s official language Amharic became its own separate subject.

Growing up in Ethiopia, fluency in English was considered a mark of progress and elite status. At my school, we were not only encouraged to improve our proficiency, but made to feel our future depended on it. When I was in grade 4, one of my tasks as a class monitor was to note down names of classmates I heard speaking Amharic during English lessons or lunchtime. Our teacher would enforce a 5-cent penalty for every Amharic word that slipped through our lips during lessons.

At the same time, we were proudly educated in Western history and literature. I learnt to take pleasure in reading books in English. I listened to American songs. And I looked to emulate the lives of the people I saw in Hollywood films.

At primary and secondary school, we were taught about Ethiopian history too. But many aspects of the country – from its philosophy to its architecture to its unique methods of mathematics and time-keeping – were neglected. I left school feeling I lacked a coherent understanding of my country’s history. And today, like most of my classmates, I would struggle to write even a short essay in Amharic.

My experience no doubts resonates with many people across Africa, where colonialism elevated European languages and history in the education system while devaluing local languages, methods of instruction, and histories. This is what has spurred vigorous movements across the continent today calling for the academy to be decolonised.

The strange thing though is that Ethiopia was never colonised in the first place.

Native Colonialism

So how did the country’s school system come to be the way it is? According to Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes’ brilliant new book, Native Colonialism: Education and the Economy of Violence Against Traditions in Ethiopia, the answer is that Ethiopia was “self-colonised” and that education played a big part.

In the academic’s extensive study, he sets out to show “how and at what cost western knowledge became hegemonic in Ethiopia”. He suggests that the 1868 British expedition to Abyssinia, which resulted in the British looting massive national treasures and intellectual resources that Emperor Tewodros II had accumulated over time, was a turning point in Ethiopians’ perception of power. Although the Emperor’s defeat in Magdala did not result in the country’s colonisation, it brought about a new, outward-looking consciousness. “This reaction to the European gaze created the desire to acquire European weapons in order to defend the country from Europe,” writes Woldeyes.

Successive rulers maintained a contradictory relationship with Europe – between friendship and enmity – until Emperor Haile Selassie, who ruled up to 1974, initiated a period of radical westernisation post-WW2. In that process, Woldeyes explains, Haile Selassie entrusted certain elites to establish Ethiopia’s modern education system. This group was educated in Western languages and teachings. They embraced European epistemology as a singular, objective basis of knowledge, seeing it as synonymous with “modernity” and naturally superior to the local.

These elites, who Woldeyes refers to as “native colonisers”, introduced a system of education into Ethiopia that mimicked Western educational institutions. Contributions from traditional Ethiopian educators such as elders, religious leaders, and customary experts were squeezed out.

The result is that Ethiopia’s schools came to lack a meaningful connection with the culture and traditions of the communities in which they are located. Instead, they prepare students in the skill of imitation using copied curricula and foreign languages. Schooling today, argues Woldeyes, is as much a process of unlearning local tradition as it is about learning the art of foreign imitation.

This disconnect at the heart of Ethiopian teaching has many negative ramifications. An education that doesn’t speak to students’ lived experience limits their capacity to create, innovate, and deliver solutions to problems in their surrounding world. It leads young Ethiopians to feel alienated from their own culture, lowers self-esteem, and leads to a disoriented sense of identity.

Moreover, without a comprehensive understanding of their country’s history and politics, graduates lack the knowledge and skills to confront the nation’s ongoing problems.

Text Kills, Meaning Heals

In Native Colonialism, Woldeyes does not stop at diagnosing the problem. He goes on to propose remedies – namely that the education system be reconstituted on the foundations of Ethiopia’s “rich legacy of traditional philosophy and wisdom”.

He argues that: “before the rise of western knowledge as the source of scientific truth, one’s political and social status in Ethiopia was justified on the basis of traditional beliefs and practices”. In the tradition of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church, he says, education was not a means to an end, but part of “an endless journey” of knowledge-seeking. This quest was grounded in the two core values of wisdom and humility.

Woldeyes argues that we need to put these core values back at the centre of the country’s education, which should reflect indigenous beliefs, knowledges and philosophies. This does not mean foreign ideas should be rejected. Students should be exposed to a variety of teachings. But they should, he says, be disseminated through an Ethiopian frame of reference.

Woldeyes argues that this approach was the norm in Ethiopian education for centuries. Through trade and diplomatic relations, scholarship from as far as Asia and Europe has been making its way to Ethiopia for hundreds of years. But traditionally, scholars did not simply translate these works into local languages.

Instead, they used an Ethiopian interpretative paradigm called Tirguamme “to evaluate the relevance and significance of knowledge”. Woldeyes defines this as “a process that searches for meaning by focusing on the multiplicity, intention, irony and beauty of a given text”. This unique process of inquiry is based on a traditional principle that literally translates as “text kills, but meaning heals”. It is apparent in different Ethiopian cultural practices such as the multi-layered poetic practice of “wax and gold”, allegorical puzzle games, the art of judicial debating, and storytelling.

Woldeyes’s methodology offers a potential framework for reforming the current education system in Ethiopia. It envisions a system of education centred on local priorities and ways of being, whilst also incorporating ideas from around the world.

Decolonising The Academy

Woldeyes’s ground-breaking analysis demonstrates that despite the fact that no colonial power managed to conquer Ethiopia, the country did not escape being colonised in other ways.

Moreover, his study shows that decolonising education across Africa will require an investigation of how indigenous epistemologies were violently discarded. It will also entail a critical study of the modes of scholarship previously side-lined as “traditional”.

Woldeyes’s research suggests that the decolonisation movement cannot be confined to the four walls of elite educational institutions. It must reach out beyond to members of society that were previously closed out, such as traditional leaders, elders, and others.

Emperor Tewodros believed that Ethiopia needed European weapons to defend the country from Europe. Today, we may need native epistemologies to take back the country from native colonisation.

Source

My Note: If Ethiopians were teaching and using their own numerical methods and mathematical calculation, they would have created computers in the 18^th century.

— Is There Some Connection Between God & Mathematics?

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In Reality The Aid Comes From Africa to The Western World

The West Depends on Africa

“Why Is it 5.000 units of Our Currency is worth 1 unit of your Currency when we are the ones with the actual Gold reserves?” asks this brave lady.

It’s Mallence Bart Williams who speaks on the contradiction of the so-called Western ‘aid’ and ‘charity’ sent to Africa, the need of Africa’s resources that supplies the world economy and how the West changed the way it views the way it “HELPs” Africa and it’s people.

Not many are brave enough to speak up about this important issue. One of the main reasons why many African Leaders and teachers have been murdered.

The likes of Angela Merkel are allowed to run for 4^th term as German Chancellor to stay in power for 16 years, but they criticize and demonize Africans for staying ‘too long’ in power. Yeah, they don’t want to see a stable African nation, they don’t give African leaders a chance to wake up, correct their mistakes and learn from them, because they might be good for their people, they might help their nation. That’s what happened in 2012 when 4 African leaders were Simultaneously murdered in office in a single year – with the blessings of agents of Saudi Wahhabis Obama and Clinton.

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The Destabilization of Africa. A Machiavellian Intrigue of Colossal Proportions

On December 24th 2013, the United Nations Security Council voted to increase peacekeeping forces in South Sudan, whose independence from the North US-NATO powers celebrated only recently.  Democratic elections in South Sudan did not, however, lead to peace and stability.  Now, two ethnic groups, in South Sudan, the Dinka and Nuer are slaughtering each other.  UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stated:

“We have reports of horrific attacks.  Innocent civilians are being targeted because of their ethnicity.  This is a grave violation of human rights, which could fuel a spiral of civil unrest across the country.”

South Sudan, which contains vast oil reserves, borders Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Spread of its crisis would further destabilize a significant part of Africa.  Clearly, Western-style “democratic elections,” the panacea touted by Western agencies such as National Endowment for Democracy, and related Western NGOs, have not only failed to provide stability and enhanced standards of living for many countries where they have been implemented  (or imposed, militarily by US-NATO intervention, such as in Iraq and Libya and Afghanistan), but are beginning to appear to be the precursor of ethnic and social violence and disintegration in many notable instances in Africa, and not only in Africa.

On September 20, 2013, at the opulent Westgate mall in Nairobi, Kenya endured a deadly terrorist attack that slaughtered more than 40 people, including several Europeans.  The Al Qaeda affiliated Shabab, the Islamic jihadist group based in Somalia took responsibility for the attack, ostensibly in reprisal for Kenya’s participation in the African Union’s mission to combat Shabab’s domination of large areas of Somalia.

Less than two months later, in Security Council action – or more accurately described – inaction) on November 15, the Security Council failed to support a resolution submitted by the African Union, in accordance with Article 16 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, to defer, for 12 months, prosecution of Kenyan President Kenyatta and Deputy-President William Ruto.  The deferral would enable President Kenyatta to concentrate his efforts on combating the terrorism that is destabilizing Kenya, terrorism by the jihadist group who imposition of barbaric Sharia law includes the burial of young girls up to their necks in sand, and then stoning these innocent children to death.

The African Union pleaded for this deferral to prevent the serious distraction of the Kenyan President’s attention from his efforts to combat this recent upsurge of terrorism in Kenya.  The Security Council failed to adopt this resolution, thereby abdicating its primary responsibility to protect peace and security.  The Security Council’s failure to adopt this African Union resolution could also be perceived as a “double message” in the effort to eliminate terrorism.  Following the vote, in explanation, each country spoke.

Not only have democratic elections failed to enhance the quality of life and standard of living in numerous African countries – and elsewhere;  Kenya is a country in which democratic elections in December 2007 unleashed horrendous inter-ethnic slaughter and violent destabilization in a country that had hitherto been a model of stability and economic and social development for Africa and the developing world.  How can the sudden eruption of such clan and tribal warfare be explained in a country that had, for decades, not undergone such violent inter-ethnic conflict and destabilization?

Recently a highly placed diplomatic source accredited to the United Nations observed a pattern emerging in African countries where western NGOs with links to U.S. intelligence were based and operating:  previously non-existent inter-ethnic violence suddenly erupted, and this phenomenon was occurring in even the most stable countries.  One of these western NGOs, in particular, was based and operating in Kenya since 2003, a full four years before the sudden eruption of inter-ethnic warfare and violent destabilization that followed the December, 2007 democratic elections.

One can only question the “coincidental” nature of these violent inter-ethnic occurrences in many previously stable African countries. Recalling that Russian President Putin prohibited USAID and particular Western NGO’s  from operating in Russia, one can only conclude that he was trying to spare Russia from the fate observed in too many African countries, and elsewhere.

This “indirect exercise of influence on dependent foreign elites” could be the hidden trigger provoking and inciting the violent ethnic and political conflict that appears to be rapidly spreading, undermining previously functioning economies and national structures and institutions.

Who benefits?  A substantial part of China’s oil supply comes from Africa.  Chinese contracts with African nations are more equitable than those of US-NATO countries, and therefore have preferential status in many African countries, with China contributing to the construction of infrastructure, and offering considerably higher payment for oil extracted.  It is, however, very much in China’s interest that internal stability prevail in these African countries, in order to perpetuate this arrangement.  Chaos, spreading terrorism, civil conflict disrupt the functioning of these arrangements, and may ultimately serve the purpose of driving China out of Africa.

In the corridors of power at the United Nations, and elsewhere, is whispered that it is part of large-scale geopolitical engineering to to disrupt and deprive China of its oil supply in Africa, thereby implementing the first part of “hegemony of a new type.”  What follows this “new type of hegemony” is a Machiavellian intrigue of colossal proportion.

Source

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Know Your World: British Legacy

There are 196 countries in the world. Hard to believe; the Only 22 Countries in the World Britain Has Not Invaded (not shown: Sao Tome and Principe) are these:

Map by The Telegraph

Other Interesting Facts & Figures…

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The Wider Psychological Impact of the Battle of Adwa

by Haile Muluken

1. A Short Review of Racial Based Prejudices towards Black Peoples

2. Adwa for Ethiopia and the Rest of the Black Peoples

3. Adwa for Italy and the Rest of the World

The victory of Adwa is rightly understood as a lifetime heritage and a precious jewel to Africans to be proud of and defy white stereotypes. On the whole, however, assessment of the historical significance of the victory of Adwa based on the reaction of blacks to the news of the victory; the enormous coverage accorded to it by media outlets and history books; its role in the Pan-African movement; its inspirational value to other oppressed peoples and the level of panic and shockwave it sent to imperialist circles amounts pressed peoples and the level of panic and shockwave it sent to imperialist circles amounts infinitesimal to the ultimate value of the victory which perhaps would remain too tough to fully comprehend.

By the late 19th century,

Ethiopia was a newly constructed empire consisting of diverse ethnic groups with their own political and religious traditions, but also long lived interconnections a condition found to be opportune by the invaders to break Ethiopian resistance.

The victory of Adwa was made possible because Ethiopians from all corners of the country came out in solidarity and made selfless human and material sacrifice in defense of a common cause. This unity was maintained not only amidst internal misunderstandings but also in the face of strong divisive propaganda by their enemy. The cooperation that saved the nascent Ethiopian empire from colonialism was a true manifestation of Ethiopian nationalism at work: nationalism that transcends internal oppression and misunderstandings; nationalism that does not barter the nation for enemy propaganda; nationalism that values unity amidst diversity; nationalism that pays dearly for values of freedom and independence and nationalism that puts the nation before anything else.

Today divergent claims exist about the significance of Adwa to Ethiopia among scholars,not necessarily historians, motivated by the desire to provide intellectual rational for secessionist movements or centrist political programs. Being politically motivated, some of the discussions advanced about Adwa’s internal significance are simply ahistorical and senseless. As the disunity of Italian peoples was a factor for the defeat of expansionists, so was the unity and sacrifice of all Ethiopian peoples for the victory for which they were not compensated by the state by way of good governance and elimination of exploitative relationships. If history is to be consulted for any lesson, the prospect of building a united and prosperous Ethiopia lies in the ability of the present and future generations in enhancing the kind of nationalism their fathers exhibited at Adwa which was built on a sense of belongingness to one another i.e., bond of fraternity.

Continue reading…

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Out of Africa – Did the Colonial Powers Ever Really Leave?

Africa may have achieved independence, but the old colonial ties are still important as France’s decision to send troops to Mali to fight Islamist extremists shows. The old colonial powers in Africa may no longer be the rulers, but they still exert influence and have strong economic and political links. David McDonald, professor of the Global Development Studies at Queen’s University, says, “The French and the English were much more strategic in terms of recognizing that they wanted to maintain neo-colonial linkages with their former colonies. So it was shedding the direct authoritarian power at the barrel of a gun and replacing that with independence, but an independence that was, and is still to some extent, extremely dependent on the political and economic will of the former colonial masters.”

 

Continue reading…