I was based at Bauchi, Northeast State of Nigeria, and used to make my shopping in Jos, which was the nearest town with a bank, a supermarket and a garage managed by a Swiss professional. The Plateau had a better climate than the Sahel, and European colonials tended to make their holidays there. The Plateau lacked pasture lands, so the Hausa and the Fulani pastoralists had left the people there unconquered. Jos also had attracted a middle class of Ibo tradesman and ironmongers, and I collected handmade knives, cutlasses and farm tools (but my best items were from the large Onicha market on the Niger River. It was all lost in the shipping to Argentina.)
These days a ferocious ethnic extermination war is being waged in the North of Nigeria, with hundreds of people killed. Southern peoples are more intelligent and advanced, but I dont know if they can survive in the Muslim North. Politics in NIgeria was always tribal, ethnic. Like elsewhere.
The pic shows a manilla bracelet, produced by the AFricans and used as money. Later the Portuguese made them to order in Birmingham and the Low Countries for trade in West Africa. They were abundant and cheap in Onicha and I collected many of them. They were lost except one.
19 comments:
So sad to think that genocide is going on right now, today. Just as WWI was the "war to end all wars" and wasn't, after the Shoah, genocide was supposed to be unthinkable, but it isn't either. And while these people are "tribal" they are not primitives - they inhabit the same world that we do, with banks and supermarkets and garages. That's a REAL horror movie, where a familiar mundane landscape becomes a blood soaked slaughterhouse.
K
The Southerners are mostly Christians anyway. Who cares for them? Certainly not Barrack Hussein. The sad thing is that the mainline churches don't have the guts to confront the Muslims either. It is time for Christians to revive the spirit of the Crusaders.
Southern Nigerian peoples are mostly Christian and have been in contact with the West for a longer time. However I doubt that religion has much to do with the ethnic war in Nigeria, it is more a racial thing.
I guess it depends what you mean by race - tribal/ethnic as you said before is more like it.
Don't underestimate the religious component - it is much easier to slaughter people who belong to a different religion and Islam is certainly not averse to violent conquest.
Have you seen the stories lately by the son of the Hamas leader who converted to Christianity? He says that the Muslim god is an evil god and there will be no peace until the Muslims stop following his evil commandments. I'm not sure of this. While Islam has never had a full blown Reformation or Enlightenment (and could sure use one) there seem to have been times in history where Islam was not synonymous with slaughter. But Yousef knows this religion better than I.
K
There are racial differences between the Southern Nigerian agricultural peoples like Ibo, Yoruba, etc. and the Northern pastoralist - nomadic peoples like the Hausa and the Fulani. The differences are recognizible. Southern people is well muscled and shiny blueish black, Northern people are slim, tall and brownish. That is a generalization, but mostly it holds. Historically, the continuous wars between the two peoples had caused the depopulation of the mid-strip of the country, which was almost empty to recent times. Jos, because of its altitude, is included in this intermediate area, and now it is being disputed.
I understand exactly what you are saying, but in American terms (and this is true across all political and racial spectrums, except perhaps the Africans born who are well aware of the distinctions), there is only one "black" race and anyone with the smallest perceptible amount of African blood is considered a generic undifferentiated "black" or "African American", whatever tribe or nationality he originates from.
This is why Barack Obama is "one of us" to American blacks though he has about as much in common racially with the typical African American (descendant of West African slaves) as someone who is half Chinese and half Romanian has with a Frenchman. By the way, thru luck of genetics, Obama, whose father was coal black and whose mother was of course white, ended up with about the same skin tone as the average African-American (although his build and features are quite atypical).
K
Saudi Arabia has large influence in Northern Nigeria but it has never advocated slaughtering Christians. Personally I think it is wrong to set the Nigerian conflict within the framework of Muslim - Christian war, it is the encounter of two different African races.
Obama is a different kind of Homo sapiens and has little in common with the descendants of West African slaves in America. He tries consciously to adopt a different identity from his own and it seems to work.
Many famous figures consciously try to adopt a different identity - Ben Gurion, Stalin, etc. and I don't mean just a false name - these men then adopt a personality to match. The question is under what circumstances will everyone else accept the new identity? I think of your picture of early Zionists dressed as Arabs - if you dressed up this way today and went to your office, your friends and family would laugh in your face, because the circumstances have changed. But in those days, those outfits were not just Purim costumes - they were taken seriously because they resonated with the times.
In the US there was an invented holiday for black people called "Kwanzaa". It is now losing popularity but for a while it was taken seriously even though it was a totally ridiculous pastiche invented by an ignorant person (then again so was Mormonism) . But if a white person pointed out the ridiculousness of it, he would be considered a racist, so you had to have a "respectful" attitude toward something that deserved no respect. There is always an "Emperor's New Clothes" aspect to these adopted identities - there has to be some societal breakdown that allows the poseur to get away with his pose.
K
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Saudi Arabia risk losing American protection if they were to actively advocated the slaughter of Christians. Their friends George Bush Sr and James Baker would not be able to do anything about the fallout. The Saudis and their Pakistani running dogs are the worst of the lot with the Iranians somewhere behind. As a cursory examination of any Jihadi problem will show, Saudi money and dawa is the spark that sets alight the tinderbox. The Wahabis and their Sunni followers are perfectly capable of fanning disputes over grazing rights or parking lots into religious wars.
I dunno - as long as the oil holds out, the Saudis can get away with a lot. It's a one way street - you can have mosques in Rome but good luck opening a chuch in Mecca. Some of the stuff they do has always been outrageous but as long as they keep pumping that oil, we look the other way - it has been that way since the 30s. The Saudi royal family has a similar arrangement going with the fanatics - as long as the fanatics leave the royal family alone so they can whore around in London all they want, the fanatics are allowed to beat women on the street for having their hair showing or whatever. This whole corrupt pyramid has been in place for 70 years so why should it stop now?
K
When I was in India in the 80s it was easy to tell the Muslims working in Saudi Arabia from those workinged in the UAE. The UAE returnees come back hardly changed. The Saudi ones return as mini Talibananas who spend their time imposing the niqab on their women and rounding up the recalcitrant Muslims for Friday prayers.
The Wahhabis were always nuts from the beginning (18th century), but they were an obscure sect in the desert - the centers of learning in Islam was in cities such as Cairo and Bagdad and Wahhabis were marginal to mainstream Islam - most Islamic countries had a more relaxed (rational) approach to the religion. Having lots of $ made the Wahhabis influential beyond their wildest dreams - it is as if the Neturai Karta (the most fanatical Hasidim in Jerusalem) were given trillions of $ and placed in charge of all of world Judaism instead of just their little ghetto.
K
Neturai Karta can be easily flummoxed within the Jewish tradition with chapter, verse and precedence. The Wahabis are not as easily refuted. They have the Koran, hadiths and the Sunnah of their prophet behind them. This is why none of the moderate Muslims can really mount a challenge to them within the Islamic milieu. Those who have had a crack at it usually end up seeking asylum in the West. That there are moderate Muslims but no moderate Islam is a well worn cliche, but nonetheless true for all that. The problem is ultimately traceable to the fact that while he had his redeemable moments, Mohamed ended up as vicious murderer and bandit with an insatiable appetite for women. What good can come of a 'prophet' like that?
I dont think that Mohamed was a lecherous old Arab. His sex life has been recorded to its most intimate detail in the Quran, and having read it, it seem to me that most of his marriages were with elderly widows who desperately needed a legal framework in those times tribal society. Basically, Mohammed - generously - gave them a living and a social position, like we could invite an old maid relative to live with the family in that spare room. Muslim family life is conservative and decent.
What about Aisha? They were betrothed when she was 6 but Mohammed kindly waited until she was 9 to consummate the marriage - today he would be jailed as a child molestor.
And are you saying that he did not fulfill his conjugal duties toward his other wives? Is this not grounds for a get in Islam?
Family life in Islam is based on treating women like they are cattle or other property of the husband. One of the main reasons why Islamic countries have not kept up economically is that 1/2 of their potential workforce is kept locked up with their faces hidden. Were it not for oil, the Arab world would still be mired in African style poverty. It was God's little joke on the Jews and the rest of the world to put a large part of the world's oil reserves under Dar al Islam. For centuries no one wanted the sand dunes of Arabia so they were left to backward Arabs, until God sprung the punchline of his little joke on us. We're not laughing, God.
K
J, I don't know if you are being facetious or not, but some of the women were very kindly made widows by none other that Mohamed himself. This sounds similar to story of the young man, who having who having killed his parents pleads for mercy on the the grounds that he is an orphan. When King David tried the same dastardliness with Uriah, God took his son away. For a man of that era (living more than a thousand years before Mo), who expected to live through his children, that was effectively a death sentence. The God of the Bible favours no one and He treats his chosen the harshest of all, David had after all been handpicked by Him. Allah on the other is only too willing to indulge in Mo's peccadilloes. Have the hots for Zainab your daughter-in-law? Hey no problem, Allah wants you to have her man. Some captive married woman catches your fancy? Why deny yourself what 'the right hand possesses'? Allah has made it lawful for you. At this point, one may hold with Goethe that the faults of a man are of his time, while his merits are his own and excuse Mohamed a fair bit, being a desert Bedouin he knew no better.
What marks him truly as a spawn of the Devil is his bestial rape of captive women even before they were able to mourn and bury their dead. Before the blood of their fathers and brothers had run cold. Now, IIRC even during the worst excesses of the conquest of Canaan, Joshua or Aaron had instructed the Israelites to give a captured woman 30 days to mourn her kinsfolk before having her. So we have a situation where marauders living 3,400 years displayed at their worst a higher sense of morality that the prophet of Islam, the seal and preceptor of mankind. No civilised nation, in the world ever tolerated such evil. Think Antigone for instance. In fact so disturbed were some of the Arab commentators by these accounts that they blamed the usual bogeyman, the Jews, for interjecting these stories in order to discredit their prophet.
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I see that Ivan is in the same camp as Mosab Hassan Yousef, who says that Islamic people can never be made peaceful until they give up their devil god. Maybe I'm naive or overly optimistic, but I think that all religious texts are infinitely malleable so that they can be made to stand for whatever it is you want them to stand for. As J said, the rabbis could just as well use the phone directory as the basis for their teachings and they could extract the same moral lessons (J comes before K, therefore ....) The same Gospels that propelled the Crusades and the Inquisition now command us to allow homosexual ministers. The Bible is the foundation for both Calvinism and liberation theology. Etc.
I recently saw a program on Richard the Lionhearted. At one point in his conquest of the Holy Land, he was holding several thousand Muslim prisoners at Akko. He was negotiating to trade them for a piece of the "true cross" that the Muslims had. The Muslims were doing the typical middle east haggling and dragging out the talks but Richard lost patience and had all the prisoners slaughtered, in the name of Jesus, amen. Doesn't this make him as big a devil as Mohammed?
Now there has not yet been an Islamic reformation - it's still 1431 in their calendar. 70 years ago, the "palace" of the Saudi kings was a tent with goats in the desert. So give them time. Modernity is all very new to them.
And to boot it is our decadent modernity - who can blame them for being repulsed by societies that celebrate sodomy and perversion and reject family structures that are essential for human survival? So if there IS a devil, whose society makes him happier, ours where men marry men and women walk about naked in public or the Saudi society? If this is where modernity and reformation take you, then why are we surprised that they are not eager to embrace it?
K
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