apky's World:The World of a Blue-Blooded African in Europe

2009-08-24T06:23:00.000-07:00

Africa’s Friendly Fire and Collateral Damages

It is the second largest continent on the planet. A continent that is treated in the so-called developed world as a single land, yes even a single village, housing humankind’s poorest of the poor. Dictionaries detail this magical trisyllable continent’s size, population, greatest lakes, longest rivers and highest mountains. In such reference books, the people are categorised under “Arab” (e.g. Sudan’s al-Bashir) and “Negroid” (e.g. Kenyan me) even in the 21st century. But Africa is even today home to every branch of humankind. What is never listed in the references is the staggering wealth of the continent. A wealth that miraculously only causes poverty and “tribal wars” by proxy, corruption that has nothing to do with anybody else but Africans, diseases, some of which could be cured with little more than clean drinking water, mind boggling capital that always flies out of the continent – if it ever set foot there in the first place. Africa, the rich world maintains, is not a “normal” continent.

I agree with the rich world. But in a different context. Africa is the first home of modern humankind, it has the gene pool whose contents are more varied than elsewhere on the planet (my DNA sequencing as a Nilotic Kenyan of Luo descent will confirm that comparison of human genomes would probably show me to be more closely “related” to a Dane – not the canis familiaris variety! – than to another Kenyan), it is the continent where men hardly able to spell their own names declare themselves President For Life and get away with it, it is where a vice president of a nation straddling both developed and developing worlds rapes an HIV woman victim and, for lack of a more moronic excuse, states that he took a shower following his deadly deed – and the VP still gets elected as Thabo Mbeki’s successor.

No, Africa is a pretty “abnormal” continent. Winston Churchill once said, "The truth is incontrovertible; malice may attack it, ignorance my deride it, but in the end, there it is." What Churchill may not have known is the fact that time would pick up a murderous commercial momentum while voices like mine unwillingly remain pariahs in the publishing world.
In my recent book, Darkest Europe and Africa’s Nightmare: A Critical Observation of Neighbouring Continents, I do my best to delineate Africa’s “abnormality” whose roots are both internal and external. If all humankind are a chip off the same block – and we are – then a few things have gone terribly wrong in Africa. But are they irreparably wrong? Not if Africans shed what I term their elements inhuman as well as their collective psychic damage. And not if the West also sheds their own elements inhuman, unbridled greed and collective hegemonic delusions, for here is a clear case where the perpetrator blames his victim.

In trying to define the source of inequality in present-day human fortunes, arguing that they cannot be assigned to human ethnic groups or their physical characteristics, the American scholar and winner of the Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize, Jared Diamond, disputes “the hypothesis that intellectual differences underlie technological differences,” and says that “tests of cognitive ability (like IQ tests) tend to measure cultural learning and not pure innate intelligence, whatever that is. Because of those undoubted effects of childhood environment and learned knowledge on IQ test results, the psychologist’s efforts to date have not succeeded in convincingly establishing the postulated genetic deficiency in IQs of nonwhite peoples.”[1]
Nearly all Africans, openly or secretly, collectively believe that they are naturally brainless. In some of my reading tours in Europe, I meet Africans who argue along the lines of technology never having been Africa’s strongest point. When I mention that modern technology is there now for anybody to acquire, not invent, they turn to the fact that their continent is too poor. When I delineate the wealth of Africa that could be put to good use for technology and any other sciences, they point out (correctly) to corrupt leaders who are “too smart” to let the majority of the citizens receive education. Mention of Christianity sprouting in the Horn of Africa before it got anywhere near Western Europe, only reaps me the equivalence of a So what, we’re still “only” Africans. And poor.

The height of fatalism and resignation. The collective psychic damage.

But how did Africans assimilate these negative qualities and made them inborn? As I argue in Darkest Europe and Africa’s Nightmare – DEAN for short – underpinning these notions are the systematic endeavours of many centuries from within and without the continent.

Ever since the 16th century, it is Africans who have assisted and made it possible for the West to accumulate its incredible wealth. And this under the cruellest and most dehumanising conditions. It was Africans who shed their blood and lost their lives, it is still the Africans paying with their lives to keep up this wealth accumulation that has completely run amok. What’s wrong with the African citizenry? Why are Africans letting themselves be dehumanised once again and this time “willingly”? This cannot be “the normal African trait” even by the benchmarks of the most benign of Gods. All members of humankind are born with innate pride, dignity, self-worth, self-esteem, protection for the self and those of one’s family when there is a common enemy. And the will to fight to the death to maintain these virtues, however poor one is. So why this abject submission by the majority of Africans? After all, they are the only massively colonised continent, yet the only “natives” who managed to drive Euroancestrals out and retain their continent for themselves. Now, many parts of Africa are as good as absolute despotisms with the civil law merely an elaborate jurisprudence system inherited from colonialism. The ordinary citizen has no legal defence worth the description, no redress against oppression by the government and officialdom in general.

Africans are not all lazy at all, but they have had role models in the last four or five decades who, combined with the ever increasing fatalism, have taught them that hard work does not pay. If you set up shop this morning, you should be a millionaire by this evening.

At least hard work does not pay in their own countries, unless one has connections. Connections is actually an ingrained human trait in all societies since time immemorial. Even deities have connections to link them with their worshippers. But in African states the connection is too blatant, crass and disproportionate. There are other factors contributing to the psychological injuries that now seem to be the heart and soul of Africans, the very essence upon which they judge themselves and accept others to judge them, and it is dovetailed to the way their interaction with the outside world has affected their mental well-being. It is a vicious circle. Below is a passage from DEAN:

On the one hand most Africans tend to accuse the Western media of intentionally perpetuating the bad image of the continent. This is not without some truth. The London-based Royal African Society supports this argument. The argument is that after all the West are the corruptors, the plunderers of Africa’s precious natural resources from timber and oil to gold and diamonds, from bauxite to coltran etcetera, and the manufacturers and sellers of the weapons Africans are using to kill each other. All the capital flight from the corrupt leaders and the elite land in Western banks to promote not Africa’s but Western economies. The West is to blame for the under-nourishment, poverty, epidemics, the AIDS pandemic and a variety of evils.

Raymond Baker in an oral testimony to the AAPPG (All Africa Party Parliamentary Group) as far back as January 2001 said, “We have been putting some $25 billion a year of foreign aid into Africa in the most recent years. Compare that with my estimate of the amount of money that goes illegally out of Africa and ultimately into Western coffers, $100-200 billion. In other words, for every $1 of foreign aid that we are generously handing out across the top of the table, we are taking back some $4-$8 in dirty money under the table.”[2]

On the other hand Africans should well ask themselves who is responsible for the child soldiers, expulsion, displaced persons, the dreadful living standards and short lifespan of their people. They should question their own apathy in the running of their political life. Why is the world moving rapidly ahead while Africa is retreating towards archaic forms of living? Africans are the only human beings whose longevity continues to drop while all other human beings are living longer and healthier than ever before, thanks to better nourishment, advanced technology and medical science.

Despite all that has been said or preached, I see the core of problems in Africa as the African people themselves. Most of them are not even aware that they are their own problems. Africans are the psychologically lost branch of humankind. Not without good reason. No other group has been as physically and psychologically brutalised, and this brutalisation lasted all of 500 years. Worse still, the end is not even on the horizon. The practice of keeping a fellow human being as a slave has been implemented throughout human history and goes on even now, also between homogeneous groups of people.

But for Africa and the Africans, after the trans-Atlantic slave trade came the colonisation. This was an experience that was more traumatising than the slave trade. Here was a strange people who appeared out of nowhere to take the land of the African ancestors and there was no stopping them; a handful of them could kill ten thousand warriors in a matter of hours. The now corrupted social Darwinism was not survival of the physically fittest but survival of the militarily mightiest. It took a long time for Africans to recover from the paralysing daze and think up new forms of war strategies and tactics against the victors’ military might. Then, just as independence dawned on African nations, the people of Africa were latched into the toughest chains ever: dictators appointed by the ex-colonialists especially those dictators who lacked any meritocracy, imperialist and kleptocratic rulers who did not shy away from using violence of the most inhuman forms to achieve their goals. All these processes were inconsistent, abrupt, capricious, arbitrary, unpredictable and so intense that the “injuries” Africans sustained are severe and will be irreversible without concerted efforts being made to “heal” the “injuries.”
Finally, globalisation is now forcing not just Africa but the entire planet to its knees, creating new ruthless forms of ethnic and gender discrimination.

In the sociological sense, Africans have emerged through all this with a collective inferiority complex affecting their entire spectrum of thousands of cultures. This is known as the cultural cringe. They (the kleptocratic dictators, political leaders and the elite) feel inferior to nearly all other cultures and peoples and are afflicted with a pathological desire to overcompensate by spectacularly achieving or by adopting extremely antisocial behaviour. It assists nobody to deny the fact that Africans tend to have negative feelings of self-esteem and self-worth that fluctuates between over-evaluation (or idealisation) and devaluation, both of themselves and of others. Particularly African politicians and persons in responsible positions seem unable to realistically accept that, like any other human beings, they have self-limitations. These Africans see insults and slights where even radar could not detect them. They cannot deal with criticism, failures, disillusionment, setbacks and disappointments, but base their sense of self-esteem and self-worth substantially on outside events like subordination, absolutism, Swiss bank accounts, Armani suits, villas in Malibu or Florida, vast domains in England and castles all over Europe.
Three good examples of African elites who suffered from “acquired narcissism” were Dr. Felix Houphoüet-Boigny, General Field Marshal el Haj Idi Amin and Emperor Jean Bedel Bokassa The First. Their likes — and quite a few hundred million non-elite Africans as well — are like children in the formative years trying to shield themselves from what psychologists term “the inevitable hurt and fears involved in the phase of personal development.” This phase is normally evident in children aged 6 months to 6 years. By the time these subject “toddlers” above arrive at “adolescence” and “adulthood,” they are drowned in infatuation and obsession with themselves to the exclusion of others. They display a chronic pursuit of personal gratification and attention, infantile verbal abuse and insulting of each other in the media and during parliamentary debates, bragging, social dominance and personal ambition, lack of empathy, insensitivity to other fellow Africans whom they devalue or annihilate senselessly, circumventing hindrances or any sense of responsibility in their daily livelihood and thoughts. Rather than progressing to maturity, they regress to the infantile-narcissistic phase. They feel omnipotent, underestimate challenges facing them and believe themselves to be almighty, misjudge their powers and the powers of their opposition. When the opposition — whether innocent citizens voicing their grievances, organizations and the civil society fighting for a humanitarian cause or political rivals gaining popularity — they simply “get rid of” such opposition. CIA could not do better, cloaked in hegemonic delusions, if but more clandestinely. The ability of such Africans to appreciate the feelings and needs of others as well as to empathise with them rapidly deteriorates. They turn arrogant and haughty, paranoid and sadistic. The dissonance breeds the desire to keep on living in the world of fantasy, grandiosity and entitlement.

Above all else they are in a perpetual feverish search for unconditional admiration which they do not deserve in the first place. Their preoccupation is their fantasy world and daydreams. And, at last, in this mode, they exploit others or pathologically envy them and become quite literally explosive. Whatever they say or do is said and done from a position of omnipotence. Hence the urge to try to Europeanise themselves and to amass castles, villas and Western bank accounts with sums of money that would feed, educate and provide adequate medical services for the entire African continent. The real world keeps on frustrating them and the frustration is acute to the point of being unbearable. Theirs is a world in which everything is either all virtue or all evil.
The African psyche is their worst ailment. But how did they catch the contagion?

More than four hundred years of slavery brought the Africans to culture a mentality of self-negation. It taught them, even in the Bible once their majority were converted to Christianity, that the colour of their skin destined them to slavery and slavery was the prerequisite for their skin colour. They saw their monarchs, their nobility, rulers, leaders, religious and military dignitaries overwhelmed by a military superiority they were powerless against. A military superiority that ordered these monarchs, aristocrats, military nobility, and religious dignitaries to be publicly chained, whipped and dragged to the bowels of ships — by mere menials or other African slaves. These pillars of their society could now protect neither their people nor themselves. And they were taken away, never to be seen again.

When it was not their monarchs and dignitaries it was their daughters, wives, mothers, husbands, sons, fathers, sisters and brothers. Those who were left behind were either weak, sick, crippled or hardly out of infancy. They did not know how long they themselves would remain free, left with no spiritual, medicinal, political or military organizations worth relying on. Those who were hauled to the Americas or the Caribbean were even more helpless and lost than those left behind to blindly roam around their vast continent in an attempt to survive. Most continental Africans thus embarked on building temporary settlements and practicing a life of mere subsistence. Not only the stranger who crossed your path but also your general merchant, your neighbour or your ruler was a potential enemy and was not to be trusted. They could lure and sell you or any member of your family to slavers. Those who had cultured a settled life with central organizations before this bizarre dilemma, were forced into a nomadic life, always penetrating inland and away from the coastal areas in order to survive. They mutilated their bodies or the bodies of their children in order to look unattractive or weak to the slavers. Personalities could not thrive where mistrust had such vast grazing pasture. And the worst inter-human relationships took root and became a giant obstructing oak: the defeated African always met the victor European in an attitude of self-negation, subservience, self-effacing and inferiority. To this minute, when African leaders sit with Euroancestral leaders on conference tables or play host to international conferences where the pink face is inevitable, the African self-doubt is a screaming aura around the Africans, thick enough to feel and visible enough to see. Most Africans’ eyes and voices are instinctively lowered as if they have to take pains not to assault the “civilised” sensitive eyes and ears of the Euroancestrals (compared to when they are debating among themselves), their gaits become faltering, their composure laboured and their carriage cramped. The word civilisation rings alarming bells in their psyche, reminding them that their own civilisation had not been good enough to thrust forward, so why bother with it. They exude an all-round air of being ill-at-ease, like schoolboys fearing a reprimand before the headmaster. In the presence of Euroancestrals, the explosions of cannon balls, bombs falling and guns smoking to wipe out fellow African brave warriors wielding spears, arrows, war axes and colonial rifles, shredding these warriors to bits of flying human flesh, from some incredible distance, is branded in the African collective memory and is ever-present — as soon as the pink skin is in the vicinity. The Cultural Cringe. It is the parental as well as an entire ethnic group’s protection and survival strategies passed on from one generation to the next in more than five centuries: Extreme caution. Don’t, if you can’t stop it instantly, even sneeze wrongly before the pink people. Do as has been taught and demanded by them or otherwise face the fatal consequences. Tread only where allowed to tread or else meet the decimation of yourself and yours. Say what is expected of you or else it will be the last time you open your mouth to utter any opinions of your own. Echo the convictions of your mentor, the pink ones, or you will never have the tongue to utter any convictions at all.

In other words, the Africans are generally not at ease in the psychological sense. And it happens involuntarily because it is buried deep in their souls. The fates of Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Omar Torrijos and Saddam Hussein are constant warning threats, the Royal House of Saud a constant example of how to remain safe.

The triumphant European, on the other hand, always met the defeated African with an attitude of self-assertion, self-esteem, lordliness and superiority. Euroancestrals were always the superhuman and the Africans were forever mere objects or at best subhuman. Heathen, and without their own history. Civilised Afro-Orient Christian values, helplessly squeezed in the stranglehold of the new Euroancestral fist, had no room for an alternative in other hands. In the embryonic Christendom that had to function with a militarily-crafted strait jacket, faith had to be juggled around with a flexible morality conducive to human greed. As long as might remained in militarism, it mattered not at all that no European religion ever made it to a world religion. With military might, religion could be misappropriated. Psychopaths or sociopaths tend to be unusually adept at manipulating others, and even the legal, political and spiritual systems, to their advantage. Euroancestrals never came up with a world religion, yet they absconded with Christianity and turned Christ into a native of Scandinavia.

Scientists today say that if all of the world population consumed as much as the wealthy West does, humankind would need five Planet Earths. It is a thin line between the cunning, manipulative socio- and psychopathic behaviour, and the narcissistic. To the Euroancestrals, the Age of Enlightenment was a positive Jekyll and Hyde milestone, with Hyde being the real McCoy. They classified everything from thin air over every creature they knew or could think of, placing themselves at the crown of creation and labelling their pink complexion white (Whatever happened to pink? Even when it is browned to a “beautiful and healthy looking” shade under the sun or at the solarium, the label remains “white”!). Then the downgrading over yellow, red, brown and black. Humankind has inborn negative associations with the colour black. It is reminiscent of the primordial days of dark caves harbouring serpents and scorpions, moonless nights with prowling maneaters, reminiscent of silent, inexplicable dark death. Many citizens of India, Sri Lanka and East Asia are darker-skinned than many Africans. But Asiancestralsä do not refer to themselves as skin colors. Only two human branches stick to being pigmentations.This was and is a psychological booby-trap set up centuries ago to keep on ensnaring Afroancestrals with a constant confirmation of their “inferiority.” While no one is better at setting up such psychological booby-traps than the Euroancestrals, no one is better at the servility required to adopt and haul around with them such a subtly corrosive, damaging notion than Afroancestrals. They have been religiously passing on this corrosive notion to their progenies over at least the last three and a half centuries. One embryonic branch of humankind’s divisive, disordered, dysfunctional behaviour has now permeated the entire species like a terminal virus, but a virus only the Euroancestrals can survive longest.

"All cruelty springs from weakness," said Seneca, (BC4-AD65).

He no doubt did not mean physical weakness.

[1] Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, Vintage, London, 1998, p. 20

[2] “The Other Side Of The Coin” http://www.africaappg.org.uk/download/other%20side%20of%20the%20coin%20PDF.pdf Accessed: 9.12.05

How To Make a Girl Fall in Loe With You

2009-04-18T07:18:00.000-07:00

Source: Vlad Karl in ArticlesBase.com

Let's get started. Getting a girl of your dreams is much like getting the car of your dream. But unlike a car which you can always bargain for, there is nothing like a 20 percent discount in courting the girl of your dreams, she's so sweet a thing to be discounted, you dearly are in love with her and your feelings for her can only be communicated not by the words of the mouth, but by the words of the heart. Getting the girl actually depends on how big your heart is - faint heart, never won fair lady.

The first dating idea for any man is to make a good impression. In your doing so, you don't have to talk, dress or do the common things that all the Toms do to get a decent girl's attention. Be unique, that's all you need. Be a man of his own style. Dress decently - indecency can make one be mistaken for arrogance; watch your language - obscene language gives the impression of immaturity, being uncultured and cheap; be a man of good habits - don't drink or smoke like any other loser.

How to make her fall in love with you? Take your time. Add some romance to your dating style. When in College I had a crush on the most beautiful lady in our first year lot. Though all senior guys were out to get that girl, I managed to divert her attention from the other guys. I wrote her three letters without disclosing my identity and slid into her room secretly; all I said was 'Yours Secret Admirer.' The first letter contained the meaning of her name, this I got by playing around with the initials of her name to make meaning. The second was a funny message that could only be read backwards and it was all about her physique and her smartness. In the third letter I told the girl to be ready to receive a rose flower from her admirer, but only if she could be kind enough to phone him using a number that I had included in the letter. The girl did phone me that very night, and her first words to me were, "Hallo Secret Admirer." So, the story of our love affair came to be. Later she told me that was so creative of me, no one had approached her in that manner. I made her fall in love with me and made a date in the romantic manner.

Befriending and understanding the girl you are out to get is the next important thing. This is what I also did. You have to understand that as a lady, she loves to be loved, adores to be adored and needs to be needed. This will move you closer to the girl and you'll get to know what she's into, what she likes and dislikes, and what her style is. Love is built upon friendship and it always leaves individuals better off having known each other should they break up. I and my College steady were to break some time later but to date, we are the best of buddies. Be sure that bringing out the selflessness friend in you will make her create room for you in her heart.

A shoulder to lean on and some good friend that she can always turn to is all that a lady wants. Please don't hesitate to be helpful and supportive. Be that friend who rekindles her zeal of hardworking and restoring hope back into her life when she looses hope. This above all other things will make you her daily vitamin simply because you bring out the best in her in terms of personality and character. In you, she'll have found that friend whom she can open up to, share with and advice each other on the rights and wrongs, the dos and don'ts of life. Don't forget to always be there to celebrate the good times, and to lend an ear when the girl needs you to listen as a friend.

Make the girl feel special; because she's someone's friend - your friend, and let her know that she too has touched your life in a unique way like no one else could. Compliment her for her company and for being there when you needed her, when you felt sad and all alone. Show appreciations for the comfort the girl offers you and for making you smile.

In your day to day talks, share your dreams, your world, and every aspect of your life with your girl. Always dream with her, build with her, and always cheer her on and encourage her. Tell your girl how you always think about her even when you try not to think about her. Let the girl know that she's your first thing in the morning and the last thing when you go to bed at night.

Her knowing that you were thinking of her when you slipped beneath the softness of your blanket and gave in to the bliss of sweet dreams, will make her go 'my my' and her heart will sing your name all the year round.

You have to be creative and constructive to keep girl's interest in you so full of life. I remember one time I told my girlfriend to be to imagine we are both deaf and dump. We then sat opposite each other on the table and started sharing our feelings for each other using eyes and hand signs. It turned out to be some fun. There was also this time that we were in the library and we decided we are not going to speak to each other verbal, so I wrote a love note on a paper and passed it across the table to her, she replied and on and on we carried on our love on paper conversation till we almost exhausted a whole rim of paper. At sometime, I noticed that some guys sited with us on the table were enjoying our ordeal than their studies. Such are the things that made the girl embrace my world. I remember her suggesting that we play deaf and dump two years after we broke up, can you imagine that?

Never fail to phone her, even when she least expects it. I once called some girl that I was interested in at four o'clock in the morning. When inquiring of what I was doing up so early, I told her I was in thirteenth heaven, where people think of their loved ones when they can't sleep. Wow! First thing early the next morning, she was at my door with a king-sized hug for me. No matter how many dates you take her, don't make any elbow - exceeding moves after any date, just drop her home and with a friendly handshake, wish her good night. Don't kiss her when she expects you to. Your respect as a gentleman will be earned on how patient you are with her when it comes to such matters as kissing her and accessing her inner graces.

The writing is on the wall that you want her, but you can't have her just yet. Increase your demand. Try to show her that men are also hard to get at times. Make her realize that when she feels a little dizzy, a little tired, a little sad, a little sick, a lot bored and very much cold, she's actually missing vitamin you. By this time, she'll be so much into you and since love is truthful and is characterized by open and honest communication, honestly promise her your everlasting devotion, loyalty, respect, and your unconditional love for a lifetime. Prove to her that you'll always be there for her, to listen and to hold her hand, and that you'll always do your best to make her happy, and feel loved. Remember, patience is the key to her heart; be like that gardener watching a fruit as it hangs on the tree, day after day admiring it, but, exercising tremendous self-discipline, neither feeling the fruit, nor pinching it, nor testing it to see if it is ready. And then, one day he holds out his hand and the fruit simply drops into it, ripe, warm and eager to be eaten.

The patience and self-control which you practice will make you more attractive and charming. This will qualify you as her daily vitamin and win you that heart hers.

I wish you to meet the girl of your dreams ASAP, make her fall in love with you, and make her feel the happiest girl in the world!

Of Humans and Hegemonic Delusions

2009-01-13T08:26:00.000-08:00

An Essay

„Are Franconians a tribe?“
„Of course not.“
“What about – just to keep the F in things – Frisians?”
“For heaven’s sake, of course not!”

This was a dialogue between me and a participant in one of my communication and intercultural training courses. We had just done a classroom global tour of non-verbal communication and were together doing a little test with multiple choice answers (for example tapping the side of one’s own head with a forefinger to another person, means: you’re an intelligent one but in German it means you’re an idiot or raving mad. Nodding the head in Greece means No and shaking the head from side to side means Yes . And, if a German speaker, you have definitely at one time or another become confused or raised the eyebrows when a Greek picks up the phone and says the sound of NEE! which to the Greek speakers means YES, to the German NO – of course).

I had just explained that Malawians do not look at each other directly in the eyes as a sign of politeness, not because they are congenital liars or are forbidden to look at the so-called “white” people in the eye.

The participant above wanted to know whether my “tribe” - the Luos of Lake Victoria - also consider looking at another person straight in the eyes as bad manners and rude. Taking some small cultural nuances like gender, age and social position into account, they do. But I didn’t tell the participant this straight away. Instead I tried a backdoor approach and asked, “Are Franconians a tribe?”
Of course not.
Frisians?
Of course not

“Okay, let’s take a leap over to… say, the Monegasques? The people of Monaco, the smallest sovereign state (after the Vatican) with a population of 31,900 and an area of 189 hectares. Smaller than the smallest farm of a Kenyan rancher. Are the Monegasques a tribe?”

This time it was the participant who instead of giving me an answer asked in reply, “Monaco?”

I nodded. “In the South West of Europe. An enclave in the South East of France on the Mediterranean.”

“They’re Europeans!” explained the perplexed participant.

“Precisely,” I nodded again. And wondered if this participant would be equally perplexed if I mentioned that the Inuits are Danish and therefore Europeans. Instead I told him that my group of people in Kenya, the Luos, number over six million people, the world is in the 21st century and tribes seem to have been imported from the Stone Age.

“But they live in Africa. Tribes live in Africa,” he insisted. Like: crocodiles live in water and any fool knows that, for heaven’s sake.

Isn’t this a familiar one, I thought to myself, along the lines of: I have nothing against blacks? But I was no Freud or Jung and perfectly unable to sort out psychological damages handed over from generation to generation of the pink ethnic groups going back several hundred years. I was here to lecture on intercultural communication.

In situations like this – which are far too often here in Germany – I sometimes can’t help feeling like a Herero facing a von Trotha who is more than determined to rob me of both land, cattle and soul, come what may.

I too have caught myself being subconsciously enmeshed in my own native culture and upbringing. To give but a few examples: despite having been educated in Europe from a young age I still have qualms about pathologists – they are my untouchables. If my child one day tells me he wants to be a pathologist I wouldn’t stop him. But I would definitely feel uncomfortable mentioning his profession to others. I simply feel that cutting up the dead is sacrilegious.
I wouldn’t go to a male gynaecologist unless my life absolutely depended on it.
I got upset with my German girlfriend when she sold her old car to her own eighteen-year-old son, explaining to me that the child has to learn that “nothing comes from nothing”. In my Luo community she would be a pariah. My friends are puzzled about my insistent on having a separate bedroom from that of my husband, a thing which to me is as normal as breathing. I’m still flabbergasted about the fact that prisoners here are allowed weekends “off” and then actually walk straight back in to jail after the weekend!

When I first took my husband to Kenya for a holiday, we rented a self-drive in Nairobi from a well-known international car hire firm. It even bears the name of Europe. The rental car manager, a Kenyan of British descent, wished us all the best with the car and hoped we wouldn’t get into a fracas with “a bad policeman” in Kenya but reassured us that all Kenyan policemen were “good” anyway. This was no surprise to me. But when I explained to my agitato wide-eyed husband what a good policeman meant, he opened his mouth but found no words to say back. A good policeman is one with whom you can sort out differences with a bit of chai – baksheesh, bribe, call it what you fancy. A bad policeman is that rare fellow who will book you in if you try to bribe him or her in order to get out of your differences. The latter is a rare breed indeed in Kenya.

“Don’t worry, my love,” I said to my husband. “Once the bad one books us in we’ll meet tons of the good ones in there and sort things out all the same.”

I still cringe when I witness children who ignore parental requests and utter swear words back which effectively render the parents powerless:
Clean your bedroom, please.
Not now, I have something to attend to.
What’s so important then?
My own business, gaddamnit! Don’t start giving me stress!
It was only a question! Come back here! Come back he…

Some years ago a European crown prince married a media-touted “party girl”. Not only that. The party girl had an out-of-marriage son. A cousin of mine studying in Washington called me to say that my family were now (yet again!) very glum about the fact that they knew and had told me I was marrying into an inhuman and decadent race on their way to human disintegration. “Kelleb,” I told my cousin in cold anger, “you’re married to an American woman too, remember? And you’re a man – a family cornerstone instead of the chaff on the roof that I traditionally am.”
“An African-American woman, dear Coz. She brought her cooking pots to me, you took yours to the Uncultured Skinless Ones! But give me a choice between Schiffer and Sabatini and I’m dropping dead for Sabatini.” "You missed the one about what gentlemen prefer, Kelleb!"
I thought to myself, so the barbed wire is not so much the country of origin but the colour of the skin, whichever turf one comes from. Every time Europeans fail to live up to the standards of my Luoland people and their Luoland rulers and aristocracy, I get a little jab in the ribs from the family, to put it mildly. Kelleb is my favourite cousin and I knew he was not gloating. In the eyes of my family I had married into a subhuman race and they could in the end prove this to me to boot, thank CNN. To this day I remain a royal K’Orinda-Yimbo, because of the “pure” blood of my parents in my veins which has to be honoured. But neither my husband nor our mutual children will ever be considered K’Orinda-Yimbos. Neither my husband nor my children will ever inherit the titles of princes or princesses.

But coming back to the beginning of my essay. This is one of the phenomena I’ve come to call Megignoarrogance Complex. Mega ignorance coupled with mega arrogance. It is practically inborn. I’m often asked about my “tribe” although the Luos number about six million people. When I’m in Luoland, thank the globalisation of the media, I’m being queried about the “animalistic” sexual practises of the “Skinless Ones” and their growing taste for ordering fellow human beings (preferably the minors) through the ‘Net, murdering each other, cutting up the bodies and keeping them in their freezers for later dinner party stews. This is regarded a “normal” Western aberration among my people.

Policemen in Germany arrest “Schwarz Afrikaner und ein Marokkaner ”. A black African and a Moroccan. A ZDF television newsreader states (about the Sudanese refugees in the ship Cap Anamur): „Sogar die Afrikaner kann man das nicht antun“. Even Africans shouldn’t have that done to them. It is so „normal“ to the newsreader that he does not consciously realise what he is actually saying. Almost like the “Kinder-statt-Inder” – children instead of (IT programmers) Indians – slip of the tongue. That one about the Cap Anamur Sudanese would never be dared here in Germany had it been about natives of the Golan Heights.

The race for the new Pope was heating up. On Sunday afternoon, 17th April 2005, in a programme on ZDF titled “Ein Leben für den Frieden” – A Life for Peace – the commentator got to the part where he was talking about possible successors of Pope John Paul II. He mentioned all the prospective candidates by name and country, giving a brief account of their biographies. Then he concluded: “Es könnte auch ein Schwarzer sein.” It could also be a black. Period. No name, no country, no brief biography, but a pigmentation. This is something that no other country in the West but Germany can get away with in the public media, consequently no other country dares to be so grossly and publicly disdainful of Africans. It is as if we are all Christians but the pink-coloureds are more Christian than others – even if Christianity sprouted at the tip of Africa and Europeans never came up with a world religion. It makes me wonder whether, when we finally all stand at the gates of heaven, St Peter would announce: Oh you good Black Children of the Lord, please line up at the back and let the good Pink Children of God come in first – it looks like a storm is brewing and the Pink Children could get wet!

My colleagues ask me what dialect my so-called "tribe" speaks. I say they speak a language known as Dholuo. Is that „afrikanisch?” they ask. I tell them it certainly is not „europäisch“.

Many of my seminarees can’t unknot the fact that a woman from Africa (even if a German citizen) is teaching them about communication and culture in their own good old Europe – particularly the so-called re-settlers of German stock from the former Soviet Union. To such people I’m the living proof of why German culture is deteriorating. To them I’m rummaging about in the family silver cupboard where I have no business poking my brown nose (excuse the pun). Stuck in traffic jams driving my own car, loud remarks have been callously hurled at me about what else of his, apart from the car, my pimp puts at my service.

I’ve calculated strategies, where I send my staff to negotiate business deals on my behalf until the final signing of the contract. And it gives me great pleasure when I finally put my signature down on the contract with the remarks, “You have been negotiating with magnificent generals – I’m their commander-in-chief.” And my “generals” and I have good laughs over this.

The Megignoarrogance Complex has tons of 19th century baggage. My favourite news report is the Weltspiegel in ARD on Sundays. There, viewers get morsels like “the Mau-Mau tribe of Kenya”. A ritual filmed in Lesotho (size: 0,0377% of the African continent) is cloaked with the words “It’s a widely spread African tradition”. Is the Oktoberfest a widely spread European tradition from Vladivostok to Dublin? Is the RAF a tribe of Germany? A Kenyan TV newsreader would never make such a blunder about Europe or Asia or any other part of the world outside and within Africa. Yet the Western world with its unlimited sources and resources for optimum education and information, from the minute one is conceived to the day they are buried, are not even alarmed at being so arrogantly ignorant about a continent that dominates the global map flickering on their TV sets hundreds of times a day. It’s a complex complex. It has the elements of both enormous fear and guilt. My stumbling stone of wisdom here is the famous journalistic 5 Questions. The WHO WHAT WHEN WHERE and HOW. When all is said and done, "racial" (all humankind are of one single "race") arrogance and ignorance are an integral part of the human factor. Only some have the ways and means to spread the contagion more disastrously and faster than a virus on its own fertile environment. www.akinyi.princess.de
***

The African Bestseller - If You're...Pink

2008-10-20T11:34:00.000-07:00

Writing African Bestsellers

APKY

Euroancestral reporters and novelists in Africa (including Keith B. Richburg, the African-American who wrote Out of Africa and is glad to be a descendant of slaves rather than of continental Africans) are a breed out of heaven knows where. Especially to the Africans. Let’s take Kiragwe Nzili of Botswana. After seeing him on Weltspiegel, a German weekly television reportage of news around the globe, eating dust on a plastic plate with his son outside his miserable little hut, I made up my mind to find him the next time I’m in Africa. The journalist in me was angry about this because I believe that journalists must not degrade another human being this much just for the sake of money. It degrades the profession. It degrades the entire humankind’s achievement in civilisation.

It took me two days to locate Mr Nzili. In the lounge of my hotel I interviewed him about the dust dinner. He told me the journalist and his camera crew had interviewed him about the hunger situation in his country, where the people had been told not to eat the genetically manipulated maize that had been donated from the USA. After telling the journalists that he and his son often go hungry for days “eating only dust”, which is a euphemism in his language, Setswana, and means “eating nothing at all”, the German team offered him five dollars for the “eating dust” filming. Five dollars is a lot of money for a poor man in Botswana who has no job but a son to feed. You can on the other hand imagine how much money the journalists earned with their “sensation”.

I think this kind of journalism is a disgrace to all decent journalists.

Yet this is the kind of voyeurism the West wants to project of and into Africa – so that they can feel – what – truly superior? Or just good civilized Christians? Take the bestseller lists of books about Africa and Africans. Excision. Cannibalism. Modern slavery. Child soldiers. Forced marriages. The famous “sexploitation” material – are “they” as biblically good in bed as is rumoured? And the good old ghosts, spirits and the witchdoctor. But in their intoxication with their hegemony, Euroancestrals forget that Africans may be poor, but they have long since learnt how to get those dollars or euros out of the pockets of such hegemony- drunk Western journalists, ethnologists, the lot. The thicker you lay it on – the needy African has learnt – the more dollars/euros you reap. The more bizarre the more extra hard currency. If decadence is what they prize as journalistic or ethnological material, they can have it and a lot more as spices.
The same with the novelists and “Africa experts”. Here, I’ll give you more tips, Western voracious writer with the hegemonic delusion.

To write about Africa, start with, say, a breathtaking sunrise as you climb into your chauffeured four-wheel-drive. Describe the sunset in details for at least one page. Don’t forget your driver – sorry – your black, or better still, pitch black driver. Whatever your good eyes tell you, the African’s skin colour is black. Give him three or four sentences which must dwell only on his characteristics that differ from Euroancestral characteristics. The complexion is very important especially if you’re a Scholl-Latour-type writer, because it is the one thing that uplifts him from the rest of humankind: the tall black man had bronze skin, a fine European-like nose, whereas his bride had flat, navel-region-long breasts…. etcetera, etcetera. The whiteness (hallelujah!) of his very big, widely-spaced teeth with that ear-to-ear broad smile of his is so very worthy of praise. Especially because he smiles all the time. The Ohoven-like lips and the hair texture – very relevant. The curiously pink palms of the hand and soles of the feet – a phenomena where nature had surely freaked out.

Then off to the safari. But, better still, off to meet a corrupt dictator. If you write about his government later in your prospective bestseller, don’t – absolutely don’t – forget to refer to it as a black government. Governments in Africa are for some reason or other black, even if half of the cabinet ministers are pink or olive. But let’s keep to the shooting safari.

Have your driver be drunk at the end of the day and wonder why. Then remember that he had been disappearing behind a bush every now and then, when he was not holding the zoom lens or a film role for you, while you had been working hard all day taking shots of the Big Five (but no shooting them because playing Hemingway or Holden is not politically correct anymore, and the animals have their own very powerful two-legged Weighty Watchers lobbyists. Your bestseller would be a flop). This being the state of your driver, a state he denies vehemently, you have to drive back to the hotel yourself, you treasure your life. The driver is snoring in the back seat before you even turn the ignition key. Say how you ignore that and concentrate on the magical beauty of Africa. This time it is the marvellous sunset covering the savannah like a thin sheet of molten gold. Give it all you’re worth in descriptive imagery. Don’t even think of mentioning the chirping birds and the crickets. This is Africa at her most dangerous, malicious, threatening self! The heart of darkness! Lions roaring, buffaloes stampeding, a fifty-plus aunt elephant herd with dozens of calves roaming, mosquitoes on the rampage with all the most resistant viruses and bacteria hovering in their flimsy proboscis – here, worry at length about whether your malaria protection was in time. The hyenas are laughing like maniacs, the leopards dropping down from acacia branches (at least three of which should drop on the roof or bonnet of your 4WD), the gazelles and antelopes galloping across the excuse-for-a-road you’re driving on threatening to make you a killer – but you give them no chance. You swerve dangerously into a ditch just to let them cross the road. Here you must give details of your Paris-Dakar-like style of driving. Hit your head a few times on the roof of the 4WD, then (as your head throbs with pain), that huge, beautiful, golden African sunset on the horizon more than makes up for the pain and fear. But from one nanosecond to the next, the huge orb is gone.

Time for phase two of darkest Africa. Pitch darkness except for your headlights and the occasional firefly, and then it happens. You plunge into an entire crater on the road that defies being referred to as a road. The 4WD flips over belly up. Both front tyres are busted. You are unconscious for you don’t know how long. The black driver is draped over the seat, bleeding from various cuts but still snoring. Be very amazed at the robust nature of the African. Crawl out, your body all but mangled, then retrieve your expensive camera and laptop equipment. And, belonging to human beings who plan ahead, you also pull out your portable tent and sleeping bag, glad that you had rightly brought these with you. Don’t forget all this while to constantly mention the dangerous Africa around you, roaring, stampeding and so on. You realise that now you don’t even have the safety of your 4WD. And Africa starts attacking with her long, long thin as a bicycle pump or thick as the outline of your toilet s-bend crawling creatures. At this very moment the headlights of the 4WD go out in a slow yellowing and flickering way. The battery is out. Your robust African is still snoring away despite his wounds. He must be alright. But you’re a plan-ahead kind of person so you pull out your powerful battery operated torch from your gear. Directing the torchlight at your Doc Marten boots your heart misses many beats – you’re wearing shorts! Those long, long thin or thick things crawl, and the mosquito is on the rampage with God knows what virus and African ants are a legend as torture machines!
Now is the time for you to attack Africa. Describe your anger and fear. Damn this horrible darkest Africa, the stone- aged Africans who can neither build roads nor remain sober to drive a decent person to a photo shooting safari and back again. Pull the bloody idiot out, but here worry first about whether you have gloves – damn, you don’t! He’s bleeding all over, you see. Check whether you have any wounds on your hands or arm – you don’t, thank God. The idiot has cuts because he had not fastened his seatbelt. With these black Africans you always have to think for them.

Damn and curse Africa a bit more under your breath as you check the wounds or cuts without actually touching them. Get out the first aid kit and do your very best, you’re the thinker and protector of poor, childlike, unable Africa. He’s awake now but seems to take things as normal as if he had only had a nap before a picnic and now he could join the picnickers. All the same ask him how he feels. The ear-to-ear smile as an answer. Tell him to change the tyres. The snoring seems to have made him almost completely sober again. He fiddles around the boot of the car, you check the engine and discover it is seriously damaged and hanging at an odd angle because it had been fastened in place with metal coat hangers. No wonder the headlights gave up the ghost. But Africa, this strange village, is very generous with dilemmas. Amid all the threatening animals and mosquitoes and God knows what else, she offers you yet another: there are no spare tyres, the black driver says, smiling ear-to-ear. But I especially sent you off to go and pick up not one, not two but four spare parts I had paid for at the dealer’s! you scream with anger, disbelieve, desperation, fear – the lot.

Here is where the child-African comes in. The driver hungs his head like a reprimanded child, says he was indeed on his way to pick up the spare tyres yesterday, when he spotted his “very close brother” and stopped to shake hands. Then he learnt from his “very close brother” that the mother, who is by all means also the driver’s “very close mother”, was sick and needed to be taken to a doctor. So he made a quick little detour with this close brother, picked up the close mother, took her to the cheapest but very good doctor where there was a very long queue. By the time the close mother had been checked and treated and driven back, the tyre dealer had closed his workshop. And this morning, he and you left for the safari shooting so early that the dealer had not opened his shop yet. But instead of tyres, he says, he has a fetish in his pocket which he got from his grandmother a long, long time ago and the grandmother had got it from her grandmother a much, much longer time ago. This fetish is going to protect the two of you even better than the tyres and then tomorrow…

You tell him to shut up in the most disparaging tone of voice. The idiot tells you this now, the dirty Ni… this stupid black fool! Tells you this now when you’re caught in Africa’s dangerous darkest fangs like a canary in the fangs of a large cat! You want to whip him to death on the spot but memories of Carl Peters, von Trotha and the Hereros probing your guilty conscious stop you. All this while, inject in tarrying scenes of the danger around you, the live jungle and whistling mosquitoes…

But planners have no time to waste especially when threatened. The black nincompoop is not yet that steady on his feet – fetish or no fetish – and that’s why you hitch the tent and sleeping bag on his back, not the expensive camera and laptop equipment. Explain that it is not that you want to imitate David Livingston and use the native as a beast of burden, it is just because you want no damage done to your expensive tools of trade. Describe how you are the one who guides the two of you in a long night match – unless he is a pygmy. Short African natives wearing bark loincloths are always brave and innovative. Otherwise Africans have no sense of orientation, you had read in a book by professor this and that, that’s why before colonisation they roamed around their continent without establishing any proper borders. Of course you had never read any such book but his kind of genial invention makes your book sound authoritative, well researched. The invented professors need not have names. An English Professor or a German Ethnologist will do very well. Everybody will believe you because anything written about Africa by anybody with a pink skin is the Gospel Truth, nobody will check the facts, and the natives who know the truth will never read your bestseller, let alone afford to buy a copy.

By pure chance you reach a tiny village ten miles from your site of accident. But before this, have the torch run out of power and snuff out after the first two miles, and your mobile phone useless – not because the battery has run low but because … well, this is Africa. They haven’t got around to transmitters yet.

Have the villagers welcome you in the middle of the pitch black night with the abandoned noisiness of little children. They grab you all over. They dance around you and clap, God has arrived amid them. Eat only your biscuits and drink only your bottled mineral water. Be careful to give the impression that you only have one biscuit and very little bottled water – the way you learnt in your survival course before you set off for Africa. You’re not mean, only realistic. Planners are also observers and note-takers especially among “primitive tribes”. So notice everything. Notice that everybody here goes to “bed” on mats spread out around the open fireplace which is in a corner of the tiny round hut with no windows but a lot of foul-smelling smoke. Each mat is shared by the whole family. There are no blankets but mention that this is in fact a very ecological and environmental-friendly tradition of keeping the whole family warm. Mention that the village chief has a bed made of one-foot-high stilts driven into the mud floor and spanned with branches, twigs and leaves. You just know he is the chief from your information gathered in the books written by Euroancestral sociologists. No, ethnologists. Sociologists are strictly for European societies. Don’t forget to put in details of the chief also sharing his bed with wife Number X and their three children, one of which is an infant. The infant’s limbs are half hanging out over the open fireplace. Through your cultured instinct you have a funny feeling about this.

Get into your sleeping bag in your zipped up tent but don’t sleep a wink all night – the lions are still roaring, the elephants trumpeting, the black mambas calculating how to chew their way into your tent. Also mention that you have to watch over your expensive equipment which the natives, you had noticed, had taken a bewildering interest in – peering at the camera from the wrong end of the lenses and so on. The laptop, as you were sending off an Email to your five-year-old son, had made even the black chief jump and run away. Until you had explained to everybody that the images flickering on the laptop are not a population of ghosts who can steel their souls. Your half-sober black driver, acting now as your translator, had told the natives just how much, in dollars, your equipment is worth, how it could fetch one up to – how many dollars? – oh, very, very many dollars in the city. And the city is only about fifty miles away, a distance the native could cover in a couple of hours of steady jogging with your equipment worth the immeasurable sum of dollars tucked under the arm. Here, mention how you try to get such thoughts out of your mind.

As you try to get the frightening thoughts out of your mind you suddenly remember the books you read about armies of red safari aunts matching into tents in a trillion zillion, and stinging the occupiers all over, even getting into their underclothes. And if these ants were migrating from a spot in the jungle where they had adequately fed themselves on the carcass of a dead monkey, and if the monkey had died of Ebola or AIDS… You cannot sleep. Africa is scaring you to death again. All because you had been stupid enough not to bring that aunt-terminator chemical from Bayer – the latest – which one only needed to spray outside the tent in a circumference six inches away for the tent walls! Curse Africa with all the devils known to you. In this damned continent one had to equip oneself like a visitor to Chernobyl! This godforsaken continent – you’re never going to set foot on it again. Never ever. Well, perhaps you will, but only when your sponsors insert a new clause in your contract allowing you to hire convoys of 4WDs plus a light aircraft with a European (but no Russian or Ukrainian) pilot, just in case one or two 4WDs land in a crater in the middle of these no-roads in the jungle surrounded by Africa’s darkest, wildest, most evil dangers-to-civilised-humankind…

Africa tears you away from your morbid thoughts and tired bones. It warmly caresses you like a smitten lover. It sends your heart racing. It intoxicates you. You slowly crawl out of your tent without being conscious of the fact because it has sent you into a trance. You stand outside with your eyes glued on its divine beauty. Glued on Ra, the ancient Egyptian sun god. The African sunrise in all its gloriously divine enchantment. You had never quite understood the books about Africa’s intoxicating splendour until this moment. Africa the schizophrenic. Africa the biblical myth. Africa of the mysteriously divine magic. Africa of the prehistoric beauty. Africa the innocent. Mention that you’re clicking your camera with tears running down your cheeks as Ra rises majestically on the horizon to set the entire savannah glowing orange-red.
Keep this up for about five pages.

And now is the time to give yourself a thorough mea culpa flagellation in penance for having cursed and damned Africa and her people and her animals, insects etcetera. Africa has got you cradled safely in her warm bosom. You shouldn’t have screamed at your driver just because Africans are always there for each other and disregard time with finality. You should have remembered to tell him to fasten his seatbelts, dear God, he has never driven in Europe! And didn’t the villagers welcome you, A Strange Stranger Out Of The Dark, in their middle and offered you something to eat and to drink? It was sensible to refuse eating their food and drinking their drinks, but your tin of biscuits and bottles of mineral water should have been shared around or, better still, given to the children. These children with sad old eyes too big for their heads and visible Shakespearean ribs supporting their global bellies. Why, a single night of a bit of hunger and thirst wouldn’t have killed you…etcetera, etcetera.

Continue the mea culpa flagellation while folding up your tent and sleeping bag. The sleeping bag – give it as a present to the chief, you can easily buy another later when you get to the city. Oh, and the rest of your biscuits and mineral water are for the children’s breakfast. Definitely. Well, maybe you should keep a bottle of water for yourself because the day ahead will be long and hot. This is only sensible.

Carrying your sleeping bag for the chief, tin of biscuits and bottles of water for the babies and children with Shakespearean ribs, let Africa slap you resoundingly in the face. With a scene from the Palaeolithic era.

About a couple of dozen half naked people are squatting in the dust in a circle outside the chief’s hut. In the centre of the circle is something charred black placed on a few leaves on the ground. You’re not sure but you think you know what it is. Locate your now-sober-driver-cum-translator. He explains things to you. You are right. Your cultured instincts of last night and a while ago had served you correctly. It is the chief’s dear infant. He fell off the bed some time in the night. Straight into glowing coals in the open fireplace. The coals are actually dried dung of any and all animals roaming the savannah. The best suppliers, almost with a monopoly, are elephants. Sober Driver – what was his name again? Ask him. Make note of it but later in your manuscript give him the name of Babugu Wugaduba because this sounds so authentically African to your readers of exotic places with exotic people and exotic names. Babugu Wugaduba explains all this to you and you feel an anger engulf you, an anger that is larger than the wrath of God. Couldn’t these primitive fools think even half logically and know that the helpless infant should at least sleep in the middle of their family contraptions? Well, it would be better not to give the chief the sleeping bag after all – he could burn down the whole village with it in the middle of the night! And just as you are giving Babugu Wugaduba the biscuits and water for the children, you see the chief hacking away at the little charred head. Here you have to dwell on the movements of his machete, his grunts, the sounds the bones make etcetera etcetera, before you run to behind a bush to vomit your guts out.

But now more than ever you know you have the best bestseller.

You come back, not to stop the horror, but to motivate Babugu Wugaduba with a five-dollar bonus if he translates in every detail and answers your questions or nods yes or no to your statements. A five-dollar motivation seems to send Babugu Wugaduba’s imagination and fantasies to ecstatic domains, you suspect, but the domains are the very fodder your readers have been hungering for. Boy, this is IT!

Charred Infant’s head complete with eyes, ears and brain go to the chief because this was his first and only son with Wife Number X. Whereas Wife X is entitled to the lungs because lungs are too airy for male consumption, the chief also gets the heart , liver and gall bladder – an organ considered too bitter for a woman to eat because it could ruin all her ovulation functions. The chief gets all the inner organs for his potency, Babugu Wugaduba explains to you. Really, Babugu? (this is where you start addressing him with his first name but without letting him know yours). True, true (mention that he has the habit of always repeating certain words like many, many and very, very and true, true and today, today). True, true. From tonight on the chief is not only going to sire twin sons across the landscape of his wives each single night, no, no. Tonight and for the next full six months he is going to sire twin sons right across the landscape of his subjects’ wives and daughters, true, true.

Here you mention that you give Babugu a little smile with a condescending pat on his back because Africans appreciate condescension. Say that the only small problem is that Babugu’s t-shirt is not the cleanest and is soaked with his sweat. But you will continue patting Babugu’s sweaty back in several occasions just to show the man that you’re not General von Trotha. Let the readers know that Babugu’s T-shirt has Mr Natural Viagra sprawled on it back and front. I suppose the chief doesn’t need viagra either, suggest with a smile because you’re now Babugu’s other side of Carl Peters – the side that liked native things. Do a little paragraph of how amazing it is that Africans (it is a village, don’t forget this) seem to catch on on the latest Western trends they have never even seen. Mention the teenaged boy in the street yesterday who was wearing a t-shirt announcing: The Cannibal of Rothenberg. But get back to the breakfast scene again quickly before the reader gets bored. The bit about all girl children born this month being turned into delicacies or offered to ancestors so that the ancestors do their duty of protecting the people and their children properly. The ancestors are guilty of not having protected Chief’s Dear Male Infant. This seems too outlandish to be true, but you remember that colleague of yours who commented on the credibility of such titbits from their translator, saying these were most likely simply made up stories for a few dollars more. Poor chap had his publisher demanding the advance payment back and no editor even reads his Emails or faxes. You’re right here in the thick of things: a million sold copies in three months with translations into fifty languages including Japanese. Film rights in eight months…

Babugu now explains that the femurs, tibias, skull, ribcage bones and so on are all going to be used as jewellery on scooped out earlobes, pierced nostrils and lips. Make sure you have at least five chapters on The Charred Infant Breakfast – interviews with the chief, the women, the older children etcetera. It is a bit late to take photos of the Charred Infant now but in your manuscript you still have the chance to run off and get your camera instead of running off to vomit your guts out. But take photos of the rest of the events and interviews, Shakespearean ribcages supporting global bellies suspended above small male genitals. Also see to it that you take close-ups of eyes and noses covered with labouring flies. Look around, you will definitely find some great, big gush of a wound oozing greenish-yellow pus mixed with blood. Photograph this from all sorts of angles.

But – what’s that? It’s Wife Number X. And she is holding her infant baby son on her hip! You recognise the child immediately because last night you had held his black little fingers as he played them on the keyboard of you laptop! Babugu Wugaduba has cheated you! But don’t confront him with this. Pay him the bonus dollars you promised him. You are going to write your best bestseller, by God, and he will be your alibi. He told you it was the chief’s infant son, didn’t he? Well then, your conscious is clean. And monkeys are near enough to human beings to legitimise this breakfast as cannibalism.

End the book with that ambivalent umbilical cord about Africa. It leaves you the big chance to come back for the sequel/s and your publisher will notice this need at once. Yes you will come back to this disgusting and intoxicating “land” Africa. Because once Africa seduces you “successfully” so to speak or simply emotionally, you’re hers to do whatever she likes with, for the rest of your life. You already know that you will come back. Soon.

With the film crew.

Ever Had a Dim Sum

2008-09-05T06:15:00.000-07:00

I don’t know how often I’ve eaten dim sum, even in Thai or Korean restaurants. Lori Allen of AWAI Travel Division explains that dim sum is actually Cantonese and literally means "heart's delight." Well it's mine, especially when it's freezing cold. Beats steaming Spagetti Bolognaise any day.

Dim sum is a variety of Chinese snacks like steamed pork buns, dumplings, shrimpballs, noodles, and more which come in small portions and may include meat, noodles, vegetables, as well as desserts. In the States, Chinese dim sum is usually served in the morningbefore noon or at specialty dim sum restaurants all day. There are two types of restaurants that serve it:

** 1. Restaurants that offer dishes a la carte, which is fun
** 2. Restaurants with servers who walk the aisles pushing carts of steaming dim sum, stopping at every table to peddle their wares which is even more fun.

I had the pleasure while travelling by train from Shanghai to Zhoujou. Especially as it was a cold winter day. The very best dim sum is still in China, where each region has a different specialty. In Shanghai, for example, the soup dumpling - served steaming in bamboo baskets, each dumpling filled with a delicious savoury soup, is the most popular item on the dim sum menu. Crowds of people line up at the world-renowned Nanxiang Mantou Dian restaurant to slurp up the piping hot dumplings, where you can get 16 for a dollar. More details here: http://www.akinyi-princess.de

CNN Doing What's It's Good At

2008-07-25T08:47:00.000-07:00

The MAIN MAN had a whopping quarter of a million audience riveted on him yesterday at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate – a politically sacred place in the city. And somebody is mad. Very many somebodies actually are stark staring bonkers. Let’s take CNN (unfortunately I don’t have the means to watch Fox in Germany). CNN’s “by-line” was: Obama wins the hearts, but not the minds, of Germans. See it? Or did CNN mean that Germans are chronic dimwits anyway? Afroancestrals are always the Heart People and not the Mind People - most Euroancestrals would have the world believe. Now, when all humankind could be that, be Heart People, I couldn’t think of a better world. Minds are autocratic and should be left well alone to think their thoughts, only checked in their stride when the thoughts are tantamount to destroying nature, humanity very much included. But hearts have that natural (read Godly, for it’s not for nothing that the Christian Faith teaches us that God “made us in His image”) soft spot where they finely pick between good and bad – no grey zones in the human heart, unless warped by our own malfunctioning environment. So Barack Obama won Biiiig in Berlin and (pink) conservative America have their knickers in a gorgeous twist about it. The righteous first shall be the first, says my bible – and don’t you forget that Christianity is Afro-Orient. Euroancestrals have never in history come up with a world religion. Open your eyes people. I said it yesterday – pink people know how to steal a good thing and make it theirs. Otherwise Odin, Thor or Wotan would have been theirs to spread around as gods – whether as Celts, Visigoths or Germanics. So why didn’t they? Because somebody else in Africa and the Orient had a more powerful spirituality with an extremely volatile conviction to toss to the world. Pinkie grabbed it and made it theirs. Like the American continent. Or Australia. Or the technology that sprouted from the Islamic world and was mainly stolen and kept secret by the Vatican. Keep track - that's how it's done.

Stay glued, I’ll be back - because we have an exciting week here in Europe. That 50% Luo genius who spoke for over an hour without any written speech to look at, is meeting Sarkozy in Paris next – Sakorzy a lover of a nude-skin kind of woman. Not our Michelle at all. But then, Barack Obama remains the sole spectator of a clad-skin Michelle. A true Luo honourable! Sorry – short of about 5% German and 37% English (what's the opposite of prudery?)!

Barack Obama is German

2008-07-24T10:02:00.000-07:00

click below to view fotogallery
http://magazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrichten/bildergalerien/6328824,f=slimg,image=1.html

Sit tight, this is a knock-offer! Pink people never see a good thing and keep their hands off it. Or, in this regard, off him. The Democrat Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is 4.6875% German, the German renowned weekly, Die Zeit, claims in their today’s 24th July 2008) issue. A poll has found out that 72% of Germans wish him to be the next President of the USA. In the capital city of Berlin, Barack Obama had a reception today that tops the one once given to John F Kennedy in the same city. In cafés, bars and pubs the Big Question is: Why don’t we have one such as him? reports Die Zeit.

http://magazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrichten/bildergalarien/6328824,f=slimg,image=2.html

http://magazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrichten/bildergalerien/6328824,f=slimg,image=3.html

They’ve dug up his entire Germanness from one Christian Gutknecht, born in 1722 in the town of Bischweiler. At the age of 24 he married one Maria Magdalena Gruenholtz and three years later they migrated to the USA, arriving on 13th September 1749. Christian anglicised his name first to Goodknight – the German word Knecht actually means manservant, farm hand or slave. But the good manservant Christian wanted a nobler surname. He soon took out the “k” altogether and became Goodnight. Maria Magdalena and Christian had a son, Samuel Goodnight (born around 1760 in Pennsylvania). Samuel married Magdalena Berkheimer (born 1764), and they had a daughter Catherine Goodnight born in 1794 in Pennsylvania. Catherine married Jacob Dunham, born in 1795 in Virginia. Their son Jacob Mackey Dunham (*1824, Virginia) married Louise Eliza Stroup (*1837, Ohio). Louise and Jacob Mackey had a son, Jacob William Dunham (1863 in Indiana), who married Mary Ann Kearney (*1869 in Indiana). Jacob William and Mary Ann begat Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham in Kansas in 1894. Ralph Waldo entered holy matrimony with Ruth Lucille Armour (*1900 in Illinois) and the marriage produced another son in 1918 in Kansas named Stanley Armour Dunham. Stanley married Madelyn Lee Payne who was born in Kansas in 1922. Which led to the birth of Stanley Ann Dunham (*1942 in Kansas) who married Barack Hussein Obama (*1936 in Kenya). This last couple are the parents of Barack Hussein Obama Jr, born in 1961 in Hawaii.

http://magazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrichten/bildergalerien/6328824,f=slimg,image=4.html

http://magazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrichten/bildergalerien/6328824,f=slimg,image=5.html

According to the weekly, another German lineage was traced by the genealogist Williams Addams Reitwiesner – www.fivethirtyeight.com - to the German city of Heilbronn in 1616. The genealogist came up with the maths:

Luo 50.0%
English 37.3%
German 4.6875%

Another researcher claims that Obama’s success lies in his embracing German values which he absorbed further in his state of Illinois, an enclave of descendants of German migrants. These “Protestant German values” are: impartiality, environmental consciousness (I’m a Luo and you should have heard me laughing!), transparency, innovation, education and peaceful solution of conflicts.

Wait a minute, who started (and lost) the two Great Wars?

http://magazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrichten/bildergalerien/6328824,f=slimg,image=6.html

http://magazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrichten/bildergalarien/6328824,f=slimg,image=7.html

A couple of months ago when H R Clinton was still getting a good run for her money, this same weekly, Die Zeit had another glaring front page headlines with head photos of Obama and Clinton, asking the readership who the next US president would be: FRAU ODER SCHWARZ? At the time Obama was nothing but a pigmentation possibly from Pluto. At least Clinton had a gender. And now, with 72% for Barack Obama? He’s their main man!!

http://nagazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrchten/bildergalerien/6328824,f=slimg,image=8.html

The Rich Aryan Myth

2008-06-24T10:55:00.000-07:00

One supposedly humanitarian and devoted League of Nations supporter, Gilbert
Murray, proclaimed:

There is in the world a hierarchy of races...those nations which eat more, claim more, and get higher wages, will direct and rule the others, and the lower work of the world will tend in the long-run to be done by lower breeds of men. This much we of the ruling colour will no doubt accept as obvious.

And they do accept it as obvious indeed. Perhaps in this third millennium nobody, I should hope, would dare publicly utter, let alone put into print, such words. But that’s what is engraved in the pink psyche from infancy. The words remain branded in all our psyches - the one psyche nodding agreement and basking in it while the other - especially that of Afroancestralsä, wherever they are - nodding in silent agreement and thus “accepting” our “predestined” place in the ladder of human hierarchy.

In all my writing, I completely avoid the B and W words, especially when I remember the impact they had on me in my young years in an English boarding school. I then realised what these words had on small children. What does an Afroancestralä child feel and experience the moment he learns or discovers that his complexion is not “beautiful”, nor is his hair, mouth, nose – the lot – and furthermore, that these facts relegates him and his entire people to an all-round lowest rung of the human ladder physically, economically, intellectually, morally and even aethetically? Added to this later, comes the cultural and spiritual/religious confusion and the naked poverty! The entire psyche of Afroancestralsä would seem to be one heap of disjecta membra! This child has a great deal of his self-worth ruined for him and might easily develop acute complexes and resign himself to them. Many citizens of India, Sri Lanka and East Asia are darker-skinned than many Africans and Afroancestralsä but nobody refers to them as “blacks”, least of all they themselves. Asiancestralsä do not refer to themselves as skin colours. But out of whatever irreparable collective psychological damage regarding an artificial term they adopted from Euroancestralsä, Africans and Afroancestralsä religiously refer to themselves as “blacks”. They are wonderfully doing the job of perpetrating the notion that somebody else must then, therefore, be “white”.

The Euroancestralä or Asiancestralä child also encounter the same processes and experiences. But on a different rung. The Euroancestralä child discovers that he and his people are the rulers of the current world (or any other world that has ever been, for all the child learns in his society and cares for), and he carries this complex into his adult life. He is part of the rulers by virtue of his complexion and characteristics. All the way to economic, militarily, morally and technologically. He grows up “elevated” by the fact that he and his people are not at the bottom of this human ladder and never have been. He is further cushioned by his people’s apparent cultural and religious clout. The worst that can happen to him is that he grows up with superiority complexes harmful not only to the others but also to himself as well. These are what I call Megignoarrogance complexes – mega ignorance and mega arrogance combined, which is so characteristic of Euroancestrals.
Especially the “I have nothing against other races” type.

The Asiancentral child is possibly “comforted” by the fact that he and his people are not at the bottom rung of the ladder. Not even in complexion, if perhaps in characteristics. Moreover, the Asiancestralsä have religions – however conceived as against African religions – and cultures that have endured or even repelled the impact of the Euroancestralä all-round hegemony.
I do not use the artificial complexion notions, because they simply are false and are not a restitution of the truth. The colour black is threatening even to animals of the jungle. It represents evil, invisible danger, dark powers, treacherous beings, the colour of death itself. Certain films, whether deliberate or coincidental, are so ridiculously colour-polarized that the Afroancestralsä acquire the colour of black river stones and the Euroancestralsä the colour of the ash of a cigarette that has burnt without being smoked.

Euroancestralsä, since the 17th century, have always been so bent on putting down Afroancestralsä that they would stop at nothing including maintaining that physical features and shade of skin influence everything. Writers like Peter Scholl-Latour to this day find a plethora of “cannibalistic” Africans with untold ugliness right across the continent. Anything positive in Africa since time immemorial is always attributed by Euroancestralsä to non-Africans. Such writers attribute organisational talent, orderliness, beauty and intelligence to physical features such as the breadth of one’s nose, the width of the mouth, the thickness of the lips and the (lighter) shade of the skin, even when it comes to Rwanda, with the Tutsis who since the colonial days were promptly labeled Europaeden and therefore perched over the Hutus who were judged as being Negroiden. Which begs the question of why these “Europaeiden” Africans are the worst lost cases in Africa. Chad is a dictatorship with special dungeons right under the presidential palace for torturing and murdering the nation’s citizens. Sudan is a nightmare for humankind and beasts. Rwanda was horrendously biblical in its slaughter of humankind, killing nearly a million in less than a hundred days. Somali is not even an existing state. Eritrea and Ethiopia are at each others’ throats in the most archaiv presentation of wars.
But the Euroancestralä writers are fixed in the 18th and 19th century classification system. The difference, as far as what I am writing about is concerned, is that I have the decency and maturity to try to see things with “Euroancestralä eyes”. But Euroancestralsä have forgotten that other people too should be seen with their own eyes, not the Euroancestralä ones, and have the right to be measured by their own “yardsticks”. The rest of us have to eat too to help us do the “lowest jobs” allegedly assigned us by divine providence. The Euroancestralä “lifestyle” one should keep off me. I wish every African all the wealth they long for, but I would not want them to lose their humane and open nature, their love of companionship and togetherness, their acceptance of sharing as an obvious human trait, their innate elegance and proud humbleness. I pray that no African female pop or film star would attain sensationalism and send fans shrieking and tearing their hair out because she knows how to get out of the limousine smiling at photographers and cameramen and leaving no doubts in their minds that she does not only wear no panties but can also never get a bra on the planet that fits her.

But once Western scholars came up with the concept of “race”, it was only compatible with the nature of human behaviour – and possibly forgivable – that Euroancestralsä used their “might” to give them the right to elevate their own to the top, make themselves the pièce de résistance. To this day humankind (even scholars and authors who ought to know better at long last) keeps on confusing ethnic groups, languages and nations with this fictitious “race” syndrom. History was segmented into successive ladders of “races”, with each “race” in a sort of relay race, each wielding power for a period of time before passing on the crown to a more “superior” variant. And now this segment we are in has this Western variant who is inundated with the terror of ever passing on this power to a new “superior” variant. So they eat more, arm themselves to above the teeth, acquire more material wealth, have gadgets in their homes to cash in real-time wasted in cooking, dishwashing, doing the laundry. They watch the telly while walking to the greengrocers and simultaneously talking to the same multi-tasking screen with the old peoples home to find out whether grandma is keeping up her hunger strike in rebellion to good family advise not to leave all her fortunes to her dog Pucci. Gadgets for raising the footrests of the comfy chair in the sitting room, or bed positions to watch the bedroom television. Gadgets that tell them that the baby, several rooms away is awake, or the Christmas turkey should be put into/taken out of the oven. Gadgets that peep to remind them that the visit to the GP is at ten-thirty this morning… All that and more, but they FOREVER HAVE NO TIME! Not even for each other. They are so short of time that anybody out there who wants to make trillions should start working on an adult high-tech nappy-toilet so that no time is wasted for calls of nature.

But back to “the ruling colour.” In this hurdles race, an assortment of scientist cabals were in a mad classification and systematisation frenzy, from archaeologists, palaeontologists, Indologists, historians, linguists and philologists – and all the other -ologists, -ogists and -uists in between, all the way to Pluto and back, sabre-rattling at each other. All the way to the use of fabrications of medieval monks who had done their holiest best to interpret the Book of Genesis literally. I quote Dr J.P. Mallory: “When the Greek word for oak is the same as the Germanic word for beech and the Russian word for elder, on what grounds does one ascribe an original Proto-Indo-European meaning to the word?” (In Search of the Indo-European, 1989, Thames & Hudson Ltd, London. p.112)

Back in Eurasia of some 6,000 years ago an ancestor was found who spoke the languages of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. But especially in Europe, there was a near-universal desperate longing for an illustrious ancestry all their own, according to Dr J.P. Mallory. To begin with, Troy gave the Romans their illustrious past. Come the Middle Ages and the Spanish aristocracy, and only the Spanish aristocracy, mind, had their ancestral blood dripping directly into their veins from the veins of the superior Visigoths. Caught between hell and a furnace that gave them chronic schizophrenia, the French didn’t know whether they should head off towards the pedigree of Vercingetorix and his Gauls/Celts or make a run for Charlemagne and his Franks (Germans). The Germans were careening all over the entire European landscape anyway. I quote again from J.P. Mallory:
“The Germans, on the other hand, saw their own history begin with those expansions that provided the Visigoths, Franks and Saxons – the illustrious ancestors – of their neighbours. When Tacitus maintained that the Germans were pure of blood, unmixed with other races and autochthonous, there was little reason to deny that their origins lay in Northern Europe. If the Church required a Biblical link, then Ashkenaz, a grandson of the prolific Japheth, could be found to trek his way to Northern Europe and establish the German people.” (In Search of the Indo-Europeans, p. 266).

The English were your regular (so to speak) Europe’s Mestizos, octoroons and quadroons and whatever other “-roons” they themselves were so meticulously fussy about in the New World. The English were the dandy mixture of Anglo-Saxons, Britons, Normans, Vikings and Whoever. When you’re hit this hard, they must have thought to themselves, just reach out to the Promised Land. And so the English brought, from across the seas, some lost tribe of Israel just to make their ancestry even more ancient. Notice the oscillation between the pseudo-sciences and the Bible. An answer must always be found, an explanation given even if it means boarding the Discovery with a Bible, mind-boggling scientific formulae and equipment that makes a mockery of the Christian faith.

With the roaring intellectual salons of those days in Berlin, Vienna, London – and the busy seaports of Germany, England, Scandinavia and Holland – the Caucasians were furiously concocting theories into facts. They indeed magnanimously recovered from their inferiority complexes against the sophisticated and richly endowed “Mussulmans and Ethiopians”. By the 19th century, physical anthropologists measured “racial” superiority or inferiority by using the cephalic index. Dolichocephalic (long-headed) Nordics and their brachycephalic (broad-headed) southern neighbours. With this new patchwork of Dolichocephalic Nordics, simply look up the customs of the ancient Egyptians who, from birth, artificially formed their babies’ heads to acquire the long-headed shape, add to it the sort of anthropological excavations and grave-robberies of the 18th and 19th centuries, salt that with the splendours of the Indian Maharajas who now “belonged” to The Empire, etcetera etcetera, and you hit the jackpot. The blond blue-eyed fellow who had previously been relegated to the caricature of the dreamy romantic was flipped over.
Around 1870, he became the stereotype of the virile Nordic Garth types.
Again to quote from J.P. Mallory:

A superior Nordic physical type had been discovered by science; it remained for the philologists to provide him with an ancient and illustrious ethnic identity. The discovery of the Indo-European language family did more than simply elucidate the historical relationship between many Europeans and Asian languages. It severed once and for all the fantasy of deriving all languages from Hebrew, and by extension, Adam. The indivisibility of the human race was being destroyed not only by those who profited from exploiting different peoples, but by science itself. Following the West’s discovery of the wealth of Indic and Iranian literature, European scholars looked beyond Eden to seek their own more illustrious forebears in Central Asia, Iran and India. Although Indo-European and Indo-Germanic had both been coined early in the nineteenth century, Max Müller, and other linguists, encouraged the use of Aryan to describe the ancient Indo-European. Naturally, if these early Aryans were the ancestors of the Europeans, then they too must have been part of the superior white race (p.267).

Having climbed so high, you had to climb higher before things would fall apart. And things were falling apart – in the New World – and in fact more rapidly than it rose to the heights. But with a hell of a lot of clowns in the circus. Superiority of physical type, culture and language aside, other elements were missing for full-blooded Aryanism. Although the word-based language of the Chinese had been found “simple” and dropped to the bottom of the ladder, Asia was too far from Europe and quite frankly not pink enough or not at all pink. The intellectual environment of 19th and early 20th century Aryan “fitted with mental endowments” and “promoters of true progress” (V. Gordon Childe) was pulled away from the Hindu Kush or Himalayas and slotted in by Canon I. Taylor as “an improved race of Finns”. Theodor Poesche was of the grand opinion that if one could locate a spot in Europe with the highest cases of albinism, they would hit smack bang on the centre of the Aryan “race”. Then a European homeland was found by the Aryanists in the Pripet marshes of Eastern Europe. Come 1883 and one Karl Penka is ruling out any possibility of the “powerful, energetic blond race” ever developing from the unhealthy environment of a swamp. After rummaging through archaeology, mythology, etymology, linguistics and anthropology, the good fellow had it: Aryans originated in southern Scandinavia and could not be derived from elsewhere, no, sir, definitely not. Soon the entire European round tables were of a single conviction: Aryans had from the very fist cell been “blond Dolichocephalics”. It was, by Jove, “Aryan eyes”, “Aryan hair”, “Aryan blood…” The Indologist Max Müller got so nettled over the madness of the monster he had created that he slammed back that it was as if a linguist would speak of “a Dolichocephalic dictionary or a Brachycephalic grammar.”
“But it was too late. The Indo-Europeans and racism had become inseparable in the minds of many scholars… the superiority of the ancient Aryan Nordic race had entered popular political culture,” concludes Mallory on the subject of the search of the “Master Race”.

Well then, off to the Caribbean for another few shiploads of sugar, or to the Guinea Coast for loads of heathen prime sub-humans – the choice is yours, Christian. British colonisers, the only ones I and my family and people ever had to deal with, displaced and expelled and then seized the land for themselves. It was a long-established tradition. Like the horrors of the Celtic Irish in 1565. Everybody was a savage whose culture was useful or not useful enough, whose culture was not to be recognised and accepted, or so good that it had to be misappropriated.

The genes responsible for the colour of the skin are not responsible
for the colour of eyes or hair. This is why Africans often have green eyes, less often blue eyes.

Many Afroancestrals (at first under the power of the gun, later quite voluntarily through conditioned thinking) had gradually turned to eating lamb at Easter and turkey at Christmas, to replace the white cock at births or the brown cow at harvesting. The black-and-white bull at funerals gave way to the Lord's Prayer, by the same processes. But still the Afroancestralsä were treated with contempt or with the angry tolerance one would accord a retarded but harmless child. The cross with a naked man in a loincloth, even if made of wood or crude leather, was better than the ancestral carvings and figurines in bone and ivory and wood, better than the lion claw – for hanging around the neck as the fetish of fashion. An invisible God, in a non-existent heaven was better than the invisible but evident Gods deep in the earth, in trees, roaming the air, dwelling in the sun and the moon and so on, and sometimes even manifesting themselves in human, animal or other forms including thunder, lightning and eclipses. Has anybody ever seen the Holy Ghost? Is it not superstition? So why do Christians believe in this ghost? A voice to Moses in the wilderness or to Abraham about to slaughter his son, is the true religion! Is this where the West got acquainted with the idea of cannibalism as a religious ritual? The ancestors, the very ones who created you and whose blood runs in your veins and in the veins of your children and children’s children – to hold them for Gods is animism! To hang a lion’s tooth pendant around the neck is fetishism, but not hanging the cross around the neck whether the cross is in gold, ivory or in leather thongs holding a wooden cross! Only one very important fact was conveniently forgotten: Euroancestralsä have never come up with a religion that became a world religion. Christ is from our corner of the world, not from Reykjavik. We know him since the 3rd century AD, in both Eastern Africa and Egypt. And Africans have a world religion – Candomblé. It is not only practised in Africa and Europe but also in the entire Americas and the Caribbeans.

Meanwhile these so-called primitive carvings and figurines and other symbolisms of ancient Africa – the “primitive art” – are sitting pretty in European museums (Chirac just opened himself a brand new one in Paris, for Africa and Oceania) or private homes, as increasingly precious curiosities called collections, and worth enough to feed, heal, prevent diseases, educate and house the entire African continent for at least a few decades.

I often wonder what the current coin would look like if, for the sake of perspectives, the Afroancestralsä were the worshippers of a crucified man stripped down to a loincloth, with a thorny crown around his head? If the Afroancestralsä were the ones with the weekly rituals of drinking the blood and eating the flesh of this crucified man, and so on? If the Afroancestralsä were the ones making the sign of the cross on the front of their bodies or waving smoking containers or practising institutionalised exorcism or sprinkling water over their infants’ heads to welcome them into a faith they are still far from even fathoming? And then, on the other hand, have the Euroancestralsä as the worshippers of nature and their ancestors! I can see them converting the world into their religion with convincing arguments like: Nature and the ancestors are the true Gods – you stand in a direct line of ancestry with them not with some imaginary white-bearded fellow in an imaginary heaven with a practically naked “son” crucified on a cross wearing a crown of thorns! Stop this practise of the remaining stocks of your cannibalistic days when you ate human flesh and drank human blood! Turn to your True Creators whose blood is in your veins!

With the sword and the gun, I don’t doubt that not just the Japanese Shintoists but the majority of the world too, would turn to Ancestor-Worship, with Nature as God’s Messenger. And the planet would sigh with everlasting gratitude and equity, for everybody

Human Rights Award to Daughters of Africa

2008-06-19T07:43:00.000-07:00

Africa’s Daughters Are Gems

“Place Africa in the hands of the African womenand the continent would leave the rest of the world way behind.” APKY in DARKEST EUROPE AND AFRICA’S NIGHTMARE: A CRITICAL OBSERVATION OF NEIGHBORING CONTINENTS

Eugénie Musayidire receiving the Nuremberg International Human Rights Award 2007 from the Lord Mayor of Nuremberg Dr Ulrich Maly at the Nuremberg Opera House

The whole world knows about them – the mighty daughters of Africa such as Wangari Maathai, the environmentalist and political activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. Two other daughters of Africa have won the Nuremberg International Human Rights Award which is a biennial event that was started by the city of Nuremberg in 1995, attended by an international audience and by invitation only. On each occasion when my sisters were awardees, I clapped my hands in the Opera House until my palms were ready to produce sparks, shouting Bravo! Bravo! for the duration of the standing ovations, the veins snaking down my neck, as I’ve been informed. Since the founding of the award, there have been nine awardees, five men (two of them jointly for their engagement in fostering a better understanding between Israelis and Arabs) and four women. Two of the women are daughters of Africa – Fatimata M’Baye from Mauritania in 1999 and the 2007 award went to Rwandan Eugénie Musayidire.

Inspired by the message contained in the "Way of Human Rights", the city of Nuremberg established the "Nuremberg International Human Rights Award" endowed with Euro 15,000 (19,000 dollars). The first award was presented on September 17, 1995 to the Russian human rights activist Sergej Kovalev, almost exactly 60 years after the passing of the National Socialist – Nazi – racial laws and 50 years after the end of World War II. It is a response to the human rights violations of those years and intended "to symbolise that any messages emanating from Nuremberg in the present and in the future will be symbols of peace reconciliation and human understanding". This award, to quote from its statutes, “is intended to contribute towards the observance and implementation of Human Rights as a universal and indivisible principle ... It honours individuals or groups who have, in an exemplary manner, committed themselves to the respect of Human Rights, sometimes at considerable personal risk. "The Nuremberg International Human Rights Awards is also to be seen as a call for individual commitment and is hoped to contribute to a spirit of responsibility towards human rights. The decision on the award is made by an international jury.

Eugénie tells her own story thus:

“I grew up in the village of Nyanza [in Rwanda] and have happy memories of my childhood there. My father was a doctor and was killed in 1959, but my mother didn't marry again, and I grew up with my mother and brother. In 1973 when I was in my 20s, I found my name on a list of Tutsis who were going to be arrested. I escaped overnight to Burundi. Four years later I sought asylum in Germany, where I raised a small family. My mother used to come and visit me every year for three or four months. Her last visit was from May-September 1993. I should have kept her with me. My mother thought that nothing would happen to her in Rwanda - she was an old lady, the oldest in the village, the lively and cheerful granny of orphan children. Who would dare to harm her? She was mistaken.

“My mother died on 22 April 1994, in Nyanza where all the Tutsi were killed on that day. In all, 29 members of my family were killed then: my mother, my brother, his four children and his wife, my aunts, uncles, cousins, godchildren and friends. The only members of my family who survived were already living in Europe before 1994. Now I have nobody living in Rwanda. My trauma and pain in experiencing the genocide from Germany were indescribable. I would watch the television news, searching for the faces of my mother, brother and friends, hoping against hope to recognise my loved ones amidst the mass of refugees. But they were nowhere to be seen. My anguish was doubled by the fact that I knew my mother's murderer. He was one of our Hutu neighbours, long known to the family. He and I had played together as children. My mother taught his wife to sew, prepared his daughter for her wedding, looked after the two little ones when they were young. She used to take his family presents from Germany: soap, lotion, chocolate, biscuits, exercise books and pencils for the children. How was it that he gathered up those innocent people and marched them for an hour to prepared mass graves?

“I went back to Rwanda in January 2001 to meet my mother's murderer. His sister didn't understand what her brother had done. His mother felt the same. She took me in her arms and we cried and cried together. It's difficult to explain my feelings about meeting the person who killed my mother. I can't pardon him. I don't want vengeance, but I need time and distance from him. I could possibly forgive him but he has refused to admit his responsibility for the genocide and for my mother's death. He doesn't show remorse. Forgiveness is a two-way process. I am the victim and I feel sadness and mourn, but the killer must show remorse and sadness for what he or she has done.”

The 1999 awardee, Lawyer Fatimata M’Baye from Mauritania

The 54-year-old Eugénie returned to Rwanda in 2001 of her own free will and founded the association Izere (Hope), which looks after orphaned young people, some of whom are still today suffering awfully from the horrible experiences of the 1994 genocide. Izere is an encounter and therapy centre. The young people receive expert help. Some of them live there permanently because they lost all their family members during the genocide. Eugénie is also tackling the task of reconciliation which is still far from being accomplished. At first she was herself shattered and in need of therapy and received psychotherapeutic assistance for a long time before she could gradually stand on firm grounds again. During the therapy she started writing to get all her grief, rage and despair off her chest. The result of this arduous process was her book “Mein Stein spricht” (My Stone Talks) published in 1999. But for this determined daughter of Africa, writing was not the end. So after returning to Rwanda in 2001 she visited the man who killed her mother with two strokes of the axe on the mother’s head, in a Nyanza prison where he is serving a life sentence. A TV documentary “My Mother’s Murderer” was produced which covered the terrible journey Eugénie made. The documentary won the Grimme Media Prize in 2003. The murderer talked with Eugénie and admitted killing people including the mother of Eugénie, but refused to apologise, claiming that he had been forced to act like he did, that he had bowed to outside pressure, followed others. With these excuses the man tried to justify himself to Eugénie.
Dealing with the causes and, most of all, the repercussions of genocide is now one of the tasks Eugénie is tackling in Izere, the place of security and comfort for the traumatised young people, both Hutu and Tutsi. She focuses on caring for young people who are traumatised, some of them severely, because of the 1994 genocide. She is now making plans to build a small school with her prize money, where her protégés can catch up on their qualifications, for example in the tailor’s workshop in Izere. And of course the psychotherapeutic assistance.

Fatimata M’Baye was born in 1957 in Mauritania. She is a lawyer and has been fighting with admirable courage and at high personal risks for the rights of her Afroancestral ethnic group in Mauritania. This group is still being discriminated against by the country’s Moorish majority and elite. Fatimata is fighting for the rights of women and children and against slavery which is still in existence in the country. She has been imprisoned time and again but always picks up her struggles the minute she steps out of the prison gates. She has become a symbolic figure fighting for respect for human rights in Africa. In awarding her the prize in 1999, the Nuremberg jury acknowledged her exemplary and courageous commitment to human rights. Fatimata initiated projects in Mauritania which are intended to support the Afroancestral population, among them the foundation of an association fighting for legal reappraisal of human rights violations and offering new perspectives for the future of the victims’ families.

Power to, and God bless, the Daughters of Africa!

HELENA'S SECRET

2008-06-13T06:44:00.000-07:00

Chapter 1

Barcelona, Saturday 31st of July 2004

“My ears always go funny on board,” Helena told Enrique, settling in her seat in the private jet again. She had just had a shower with him in the small bathroom. “My first flight was somewhat illegal. It was in an RAF plane and I was scared stiff. Then Grandpa, an RAF commander, told me to hold my nose and gulp. Always works especially at takeoff.”

“I prefer the sweets.” He leaned back on his seat, eyes closed and hands cradling the back of his head. Unlike her he had not got back into his clothes. A towel was wrapped around his hips.

She was so excited about the coming prospects. She was going to meet her future family. She had just left her lifelong family in Cyprus, worried. They were not as confident in her relationship with Enrique as she herself was. She had just been made love to in the air – a first for her. He was the love of her life, she was convinced. They had known each other for over two months. And she would tell him all about her before this night was over. The secret wedged between them was an imperfection that had to be removed by surgical words. This was the only unpleasant prospect for her to deal with tonight when they finally arrived in Barcelona. Tomorrow would be too late. Be honest with him, darling, before you meet his family, Mummy had said – for the umpteenth time.

Helena watched Paphos diminish in the widening blue mouth of the Mediterranean Sea. Cyprus the golden, like an autumn leaf tossed onto the sea by a careless Divinity, rocking on a glittering endless blue hammock.

Earlier today in Limassol, she had called Ramón and asked him to meet them at the airport but Ramón had rejected her request. She couldn’t blame him. There was only so much selflessness a man could afford. Still, if Ramón had met them, she had planned to tell him her story first and ask him how he thought Enrique would react to it. It was ever so easy to talk to Ramón about anything and everything. Almost easier than talking to Uncle Alex who, before Ramón, was her number one tell-all, let-me-hear-the-dirt confidante. On the other hand something about Enrique made her want to really be nothing other than perfect, his Star of Cyprus. No warts on the cheeks, no growths in the heart. She shared in his idolized “sexiest star advocate in the international business community” image, and revelled in having bulbs flashing and cameras whirring wherever and whenever they were part of the public life, as he called it. Helenrique! Helenrique! Whoever had coined that, Enrique or the media? But her new world was all so intoxicating. On the screen Enrique became so present, so crackling with energy, the perpetually stray black strand of hair hugging his eyebrow, his forget-me-not blue eyes so intense – everything about him so three dimensional that he almost blasted into the room through the screen.

“A penny for your thoughts, Corazón?”

“Enrique.” She blushed furiously, taking her eyes away from the porthole and her thoughts. She felt as if Enrique had caught her thinking about Ramón through an aria in the Mathew Passion. “Are you sure you should be walking around like that?” He still had only the towel around his hips.

“Nobody’s complaining but you. Awhile ago you didn’t mind me naked with you all over me. Does the towel make me more naked?”

“You’re impossible. But anybody could walk in now, perhaps. The crew and your media people, I mean. When will we be in Barcelona?”

When they boarded the jet, she had not known that the media people were waiting inside to welcome them. She quickly got over the surprise and found herself wishing that Mummy and Daddy would know about the media. Just to demonstrate to them how much he cared for her, how much he was proud of her, wanted to show her to the world. She could handle the media by now and Enrique said she was such a natural any day anywhere with the paparazzi. But her parents had not gone farther than the VIP lounge at Paphos International Airport.

“Eight, eight-thirty. Don’t mind supper on board, d’you?”

She shook her head. “More reason you should put something on.”

“The crew may burst in here after a discreet knock or throat-clearing. The media – never, unless invited to, okay?” She nodded. “Beautiful.” He placed a hand on her bare shoulder. “You’re so beautiful, Helena. After next week, let’s just lock ourselves up somewhere and never come out till the holidays are over.”

She remembered the Saturday afternoon in May, when he burst into her scene with Ramón like a sudden whirlwind, standing between them and squeezing a male and a female shoulder in each hand. That moment when two opposing forces battled in her, making her knees threaten to buckle under her. She was wearing this same flimsy white cotton dress with the tight bodice, spaghetti straps and knee-length skirt gathered at the waist for the petticoat look, and the belt cinching in her waist. Enrique was always a solid gale when he entered a room or even a hall.

“A great idea, darling. Filise me…” she added in Greek, tugging at the towel.

Three hours later, they were under the shower again, this time in a bathroom that was large enough to be an executive office. The whole duplex apartment made her too enthralled to find the right words for it. When they came in she had simply let him take her hand, like a trusting child, and show her the rooms and the several remote control and safety gadgets. Even in the shower where they were now, all one had to do was to press buttons for “shower”, “temperature” and “start”. She personally thought it all a bit too much, unless one was an invalid or something, but she enjoyed the pleasures he enjoyed, was proud of the same things he took pride in.

They trailed from the bathroom past the dressing room, wrapped in heated towels, into the huge bedroom dominated by an enormous bed. He lowered her onto the bed and then touched switches and there were soft lights and music and an electric fireplace – simply a visual effect in summer. There was a bottle of chilled champagne in a bucket and two crystal goblets. He poured the champagne and they drank it from each other’s mouths. He poured some on her navel and sucked on it, making her tingle.

“I have to learn Spanish,” she murmured. "The music sounds so erotic, but the words!”

“I’ll translate…sort…of… in…between…Corazón…”

It was much, much later, taking another short break, sipping champagne and listening to endless music from some invisible central source, that she felt relaxed and confident enough to tell him. She had gone over the HOW many times in her mind and had long decided that the best way to do it was the way Mummy had told it to her. From the beginning. From when Daddy had confessed to Mummy, and the two ended up sharing “our secret” and are still happy and in love with each other, despite the secret.

“Darling…” she raised her shoulders off the bed and looked at him in the eyes. With the soft lighting, his eyes were ink blue and glistening in their deep sockets.

“Corazón…?”

“There’s a family story I have to tell you. I want you to know it before we meet your family tomorrow and…”

“Today, beautiful. It’s already past midnight.” He put an arm around her and pulled her closer to him, punching the pillows on the headboard for comfort. “What is it, then?”

Her heartbeats accelerated. She drained her glass and placed it on the night table next to the bucket with the champagne bottle. She was shaking badly.

“Corazón?”

She pushed her loose hair to one side of her using both hands. “I’m all right. But, err, … oh God…! It’s about Daddy. About me and Daddy…”

“What?”

“Please don’t interrupt me or my courage will fail me, Enrique,” she said with renewed determination.

Then she told him. Everything from the days in Timberlake Priory in Yorkshire to moving over to Cyprus. She quickly ploughed on and on and on, leaving nothing out. She didn’t look at him anymore. But she felt his reactions as she told him the story. His arm slid away from under her. His body continuously inched away from her. Was it shock? Was it empathy? Was it pity? Or did he feel disgust?

She didn’t look at him until the end of her story. Then she did.

He had jumped out of bed and was pacing up and down making strange noises. He came back to her and stood close, a little bent from the waist. On her side of the bed. At first it was shock that she saw etched in his handsome features. His mouth kept opening and closing before whatever he wanted to say could be said. But slowly, disgust replaced the shock. He said perdón rapidly several times, giving the word no time to breath between the repetitions, the word an ugly protrusion prodding his tongue and consciousness. Then the rest of the words thundered out of him.

He screamed them at her. She had never seen him so sentient.

She closed her eyes in order not to see his face, so contorted with disgust at her. He kept on screaming at her. As if it was all her fault. As if she had had any say, any choice in the whole thing. As if she had happily rolled herself around in the mud like a baby elephant.

She curled up and hoped to disappear from the face of the earth, too hurt to even cry.

“Wait a minute;” he said and walked to one of his gadgets and flicked the light on from soft to a stark white to illuminate her better. Her golden skin refused to own up, remaining innocent, perfect and beautiful. As innocent as an infant’s. Untouched by anything but a mother’s loving hands. He pulled the sheets off her. She made herself into a ball and the humiliation began to set in. What did he expect to discover, that she grew horns at night or turned into a vampire? She began to tremble like a leaf and did her best not to sob. She endeavoured to marshal her whirling thoughts and senses, willing herself to remain as calm as she could.

But his words crashed inside her head over and over again. Sliced her flesh into strips. Plunged deep in her vital organs like a dagger handled by powerful hands. Over and over again. Nasty and cheap words she never expected from him. They broke her bones to splinters, dismembered her. She began to sob relentlessly. She sobbed even harder thinking about her father.

Enrique’s mind spun out of its natural revolutions. His disgust acquired other tinges. For himself, being the self-centred trailblazer that he was. Deep black tinges. An abyss. Losses instead of gains in prestige. The media, all these several weeks. How was he going to undo all that? And how was he going to explain all this to the family? Well, the family will understand. That he nearly made her his wife! The mother of his children, for God’s sake!

His rage and vexation soared and roared to an inferno, like a building on fire whose windows shatter to let in the oxygen. He turned to her. On her.

“You bitch! How could you have done this to me, huh?”

If she had told him the truth from the very beginning, everything would have been slotted in their correct compartments. He would have enjoyed being with her, sleeping with her, buying her expensive presents. But not going so far as to get engaged with a…

“All right, Helena. Now we can fuck.” The voice solid like reinforced concrete.

She saw the madness in his eyes, began crying in pleas. She was no longer on a silk-gilded bed with a man who could take her to heaven and back. This was the beast her father had warned her against, not the noble savage of her fantasies with Mummy. But even Mummy had warned her against this particular beast, that she might find herself out on a limb with Enrique. Her mind was running marathons but in a circle. The pain, the fear, the disgust and revulsion as he tried to pin her down. He pried her thighs apart with his strong legs as his hands pinned her wrists to the headboard. She screamed and fought him.

“Shut up! You’ll love it rough, won’t you?”

He was too strong for her but still she combined pleas with fighting back. “Enrique, please! I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before… I was scared of your… Please don’t do this to me! Don’t…! It’s still me, Enrique, your Star of Cyp…!”

They had been making love for half the day and night. He penetrated her painfully but effortlessly. Only her wild struggles disconnected them, throwing him off before he would thrust into her anew. He decided to do something in order to achieve his intentions. He released her right hand in order to use his own hand to guide himself into her and hold her pressed to him.

It was her chance.

She used her released hand to whip the champagne bottle out, knocking the bucket almost noiselessly to the fluffy floor. He was so busy in his mad endeavours that he didn’t notice her grab the bottle. She raised it in the air and brought it down, with all her might, on the side of his head. The bottle broke, shooting off a stream of champagne. A noise caught in his throat and he slumped. She pushed him off her and made for the dressing room. But he was so still that she stopped to look at him. He lay lifeless across the bed.

“Enrique?” What to do… what to do… what…to…do? Was he dead? The police…
Too many things bowling around her head. “Enrique?”

She rushed back to him, holding the top half of the broken bottle as a weapon. She tilted her rumbling head to one side like an intelligent dog. Enrique said nothing and the room was full of it. Before she could think she prodded him with the broken bottle on his naked side. He remained still. His head was lying in a pool of blood, the pool widening. More fresh blood welled out from his side. She stiffened.

Think! Call an ambulance! The mobile! Where’s the mobile…my handbag…the dressing…no – the bathroom!

She ran into the office-sized bathroom and found her bag on a dressing table. With one hand she opened it and shook the contents out as she ran back to the bedroom. The mobile thudded to the floor in the dressing room and she picked it up, dropping the handbag. She had only one free hand. The hand with her weapon, she poised ready for any eventualities. Her head was spinning and droning. She reached the bedroom.

Enrique was gone.

God almighty, he’s not dead! He had moved! Where to? “Enrique?”

There was a weak groan from the other side of the bed, then bloodied fingers clawed on the bed sheets. The dark half dome of his head matted with blood, glistening as it caught the light, appeared. She screamed involuntarily before worrying about her safety.
He’s dangerous! Call the police! Bring yourself to safety! Explain to the police! You didn’t mean to kill him! Bring yourself to safety and call the police!

“BUT HOW!” she screamed out aloud. “HELP! HELP! HELP ME!”

His shoulders appeared from the opposite side of the bed.

THINK!

“You b-b-bi—tch!”

The gadgets. What had he said, showing off his gadgets to her? When you don’t want the servants to surprise you in the bedroom, dressing room or bathroom, this button makes it impossible for anyone to come in from the outside…

The bathroom!

He was clawing halfway across the huge bed towards her. She bolted to the bathroom, locking the dressing room. Oh shit! Simply a sliding glass screen between the bedroom and the dressing room. No lockable door. Oh God! She had dropped the remote control and bent to recover it, mobile phone in the same hand. Through the glass door to the bedroom she saw him still creeping across the bloodied bed sheets towards the dressing room, calling her dreadful names. She bolted out of the dressing room, collecting her dropped things and the half empty handbag. She ran into the bathroom and, feverishly reading and deciding on the codes on the display, she bolted all the doors leading to the bathroom, grateful for the English language. Stop. Start. On. Off. Lock. Unlock. She heard him pounding on the dressing room door to the bathroom. What if there was another reserve gadget? She wanted to cry but told herself she had to think. She had put herself in this situation. She had to get herself out of it.

The police. He wasn’t dead after all. They would understand a foreign girl panicking. She had acted in self defence. But how did one dial the Spanish police…?

Enrique was getting louder both in voice and the pounding. Was he nearer? Outside the bathroom door perhaps? Which one of the doors? How long before he worked that or any other door open? Flinching with each pounding outside, she punched the speed-dial for Mummy. Then she remembered she was in Spain and it was in the middle of the night anyway. Her mother and father would more likely die of a heart attack than arrive in time to rescue her. Uncle Alex! Maybe he knew at least the Spanish police or fire brigade number. But what time was it in Tokyo? Was he on stage? Tokyo code?

“You fucking bitch, open the door! Open up…!”

For a moment she broke down crying. That was Enrique out there calling her names. She had loved him. He had loved her. What happened to it all? She wept bitterly but the banging and abuses and insults propped up her mental spine. She had NOT loved him, she had loved a fake. Just as he had never loved her, Helena. He had loved his own dreams.
“I’ll kill you if you don’t open this door at once!”

He couldn’t get in. That threat says he can’t get in!

She felt much better. Her head cleared. Well, fuck you too mate. She rummaged in the cupboards. A boiler? Anything where some kind of telephone number was written even if it belonged to a plumber or the electricity company. But everything was high tech to a fault. It was like being in a luxury clinical ward of a spaceship.

And then his name hit her memory with a force that made her stop searching and sit on the floor in her nakedness. Her hands were shaking as she punched his speed-dial. Her tears began to flow again – with relief. The number started ringing.
The banging and insults outside the bathroom door jarred her nerves.
Please, Ramón! Have the phone on! Wake up! I need you desperately!
Oh God, he was a Ruíz de Alarcón too! Would he want to have anything to do with her after this? After knowing? In panic, she disconnected the number. Her fear mingled with a sudden sense of doom. Both hovered above her like a dark starless sky about to drop and squash her on her last leg to hell. But the banging from the door was getting incessant.

“I need the fucking first aid kit, you bitch!”

Dear God. Her brain was doing everything to detach itself from her body and she had to summon something to assist her in not reinforcing such a situation. She crept as far away from the doors as possible and crouched in a corner, bitterly sobbing. Twenty-two years, a first lover eleven years older, out in a foreign country, and now this.

But maybe Enrique was bleeding to death! For him Ramón would come. And if he came for his cousin she would also get out of here. She punched Ramón’s speed-dial again and was determined to wait. If it was the mailbox, she was ready to leave a mess…

“Mi vida? Is anything wrong?”

And all else broke in her anew, slithering into her like the moment of birth but in reverse. Between bitter sobs she managed, “Ramón, please come and help me…Please come and help me, Ramón… Enrique…hates me… Help me…or send…the police…to…help me…Ramón… Please…please…Ramón…help…me…”

On the other end of the line, Ramón shook himself wide awake. He could hear her desperation. “Helena? Please calm down, mi amor…what’s…?”

“Send me….some…help…Ramón…”

“Hey, calm down. I’m on my way. Tell me what happened, Helena.” He was already frantically stepping into his clothes. What on earth has Enrique done? “Helena?”

“Help me…please…Ramón…I’ll never…ask you…for anything…again…”

“Why should I send the police?” Then he heard the banging and gabbled voice in the background. Jesus! What was going on?

His words sent her into fresh paroxysms. “Please, Ramón…get…me…out of…here…!” Dear God, please make him come to me. Or send the police.

“Helena, don’t disconnect the line, okay? Where’s Enrique? Are you hurt ?”

“Outside the door…I’m…in the…bath…roooom…!”

“Okay, I’ll be there in a moment, mi vida. Stay where you are and don’t disconnect.” Relieved and much stronger inside, she curled up on the floor under the sink, her mobile pressed to her ears, listening to his soothing words until they were more like a lulling mantra repeated again and again. Her mind drifted back to the day she had first met the cousins and made the biggest mistake in her life.

HELENA'S SECRET - Synopsis

2008-06-13T06:12:00.000-07:00

Helena, twenty-two years old, is a Greek Cypriot endowed with the beauty of her ancient Greek namesake. A successful marketing executive at the Limassol Palace Hotel, her career is on the rise. Until she wins two cousins from an old Spanish family – who are also in the hospitality business – as clients for her hotel. It’s love at first sight. But in a triangle. And Helena has a secret buried deep inside her that she wanted to keep away even from herself. When she finally reveals it to the man she loves, he rewards her with an experience that is every woman’s nightmare. To end a lifelong of inner torment, she decides to find out the source of her secret. Accompanied by Ramón, the man who loves her selflessly, the search takes Helena to a Benedictine monastery in Kenya, where assassins are waiting to kill her. Because the revelation of Helena’s secret threatens high profile political and religious powers in the African country, who conspire to have her murdered before she gets to the root of her secret.

Prussian Blind Love

2008-06-13T05:26:00.000-07:00

EXOTIC: Emil Doerstling’s painting, „Preußisches Liebesglück (Prussian Happy Love) from 1890 showing Gustav Sabac el Cher and his fiancée Gertrud Perlig. They married in 1901.

A Walk Through the German Historical Museum in Berlin. Berlin has a lot of artwork and treasures from Africa. The original head of the Egyptian Queen Nofretete, for example, this wife of King Akhenaton who introduced humankind to monotheism.

Axel Sabac el Cher lives today in the city of Stuttgart, the capital of the southwest German state of Baden-Württemberg neighbouring Bavaria. From his name and from the skin colour of his father who died in 1962, Axel knew that his ancestors had lived in Germany for generations. One day in 1999, a scientist from the Historical Military Museum in Dresden appeared at his door with an oil painting from 1890. The painting depicted an obviously loving couple happily and peacefully in each other’s arms. She had pale pink skin and reddish blonde hair. He was as dark as the Nubian he was, leaving no doubt that he was an African. But in the uniform of a Prussian Guard.
Gustav Sabac el Cher in a Prussian Military uniform ca. 1900
(German Historical Museum)

The German Historical Museum in Berlin had bought the painting from an arts dealer in Munich. The dealer’s father had supposedly acquired it during the war in his hometown of Königsberg. The father had no idea who was depicted in the painting but he knew that the famous 19th century painter Emil Doerstling had signed it and wrote down the time he finished painting it: 1890. That was the year when Emperor Wilhelm II drove Chancellor Bismarck out of office, the year when Germany’s pearl in East Africa, Zanzibar, was given over to the British in exchange for Helgoland, since then a German island in the Baltic Sea. The time Vincent van Gogh himself was painting a lot of self-portraits.

But how did it come about that an African was, in the 1800s, wearing the uniform of the imperial army. The Museum turned to the historian Gorch Pieken for expert advice, and the scientist took a dive into Prussian military history, starting from the world of royal and imperial military music. And he came out with a find that has been filmed for the TV channel Arte in a documentary form as well as a book taking its title from the painting – Preussisches Liebesglück (Prussian Happy Love). The story of the African in a Prussian uniform. The research began about this African in the imperial jacket, red collar, golden buttons and the white belt. The research took the historian to Königsberg, to be exact to the music corps of the 1st Prussian Grenadiers Regiment. Pieke found the lists of orchestras of the time and soon came upon the name Gustav Sabac el Cher. But who was he really? He started checking out lists of military music corps, christening certificates, private diaries of sojourners to Africa in the 19th century and many other documents. When he finally sorted out all the information he had come up with the story about the painting and Gustav Sabac el Cher. The puzzle was solved.

In the beginning there was murder. In the 1840s in Prince Albrecht’s palace in Berlin. The marriage of the Prussian Prince Albrecht was on the rocks. He wanted to push his wife into a chamber. A sentry soldier screamed out of fear to be involved in an embarrassing situation. Albrecht, furious, stabbed the soldier. But a Prussian prince could not be sent to prison in those days. Under such circumstances the blue-blooded offender was sent out of the country for a while. Albrecht was sent to Egypt, a country very much in vogue in Europe at the time. Tons of antique treasures were being excavated and shipped off to Europe. Europeans had rediscovered a longing for the Orient, Cairo and the Nile. And the children of Africa as companions for good or evil, or merely as mementos. Mehmed Ali, the Viceroy of Egypt, gave Albrecht a little boy as a gift.

Back in Europe, the “little Nubian boy” was first of all called by Prince Albrecht “Sabac el Cher” which translates into “Good morning”. It became the boy’s surname. He lived in the attic with other European servants and was taught the language and religion of his new land by Prussian teachers. At the age of sixteen, the memento was renamed August Albrecht Sabac el Cher in a christening ceremony where he became a Protestant. All this happened without anybody worrying about how the boy himself felt. In his birth certificate he is supposed to have been born in Cordovan, a Sudanese province.

August remained with the prince even when the prince married his second wife Rosalie, living primarily in Albrechtsberg Castle near Dresden and accompanying the prince on military expeditions to North Caucasus and Moscow where they visited Prince Albrecht’s nephew, the Tsar Alexander II. The Tsarina even gave August a golden watch as a present. This watch is still the property of the family. In the Battle of Königgraz against Austria in 1866, young Sabac el Cher fought side by side with the Prussian prince. He married quite young - in 1867. The bride was a twenty-four-year-old Berlin young woman called Anna Maria Jung, whom he married in the Trinity Church, the church that today finds itself in the street called Mohrenstrasse (Moor Street), supposed to remind everybody of the first African in Berlin, these Africans who came in the 1600s from West Africa – the scene of slave trade “adventurers” from Brandenburg (read article: Pink Declines Whiteness). The records of the church notifications testify that the marriage had to be hurried, but mentions nothing about racism or prejudice. Three months later, Gustav was born, the musician in the painting and grandfather of Axel in Stuttgart.. A year after that the daughter Elise was born. Love is forever fruitful where it can be.

There is now, next to Alex, Angela Sabac el Cher. She speaks freely of what difficulties she had as a child with such a surname. “It was very foreign and I didn’t know exactly where it came from. I came to terms with it at the age of fourteen or fifteen – that this name was mine. Then I swore to myself never to reject it.” This dark-haired woman, I remind myself, is Gustav’s great-great-granddaughter. The dark skin tone that the painter exaggerated in Gustav is long since gone. Apart from the colour of her hair, Angela is as pink as they come. She is forty-two, studied economy and is the managing director of a company producing recycled cooling equipments. She had never known about her family history and now takes it with surprise and estrangement. Up to now she only knew from her father a goodnight story about the “little Nubian boy” that was so enriched and told of a stolen son of a desert sheikh who had a huge army. “He’s supposed to have come from somewhere near Aswan,” Angela recalls the story. The story has also taken different angles and tinges owing to the division of Germany into East and West, historically. In Senzig in Brandenburg, south of Berlin, there are memories and relics of the family. Gustav is buried there on the side of his wife Gertrude. On the gravestone: “Former bandmaster/conductor, Grenadier in the Regiment of Crown Prince No. 1”
As a musician and conductor, Gustav was a star even after retiring from the military.

Formerly Axel was a textile salesman but is now in pension, but from time to time he teaches diving in the Indian Ocean. Ever since the historian knocked on his door with the painting of his grandparents, Axel has joined the team of researchers digging for more details about his ancestors. He now knows that his grandfather Gustav was born in Prince Albrecht’s palace. Gustav was a musician only up to the First World War, and after that he was a highly successful bandmaster and conductor in the first radio orchestra at the beginning of the 1920s. Later he and his wife Gertrud Perlig run a garden café in König Wusterhausen. The unbelievable bits are for example that this man, photographed in a newspaper (where he of course does not look as “black” as in the painting – as usual!) is quoted during Hitler’s coming into power, that he thought the political change to Hitler was a good thing. But soon he and his wife had to close their “Negerlokal” – nigger café in König Wusterhausen. They went right ahead and opened a new one in Berlin but it didn’t help much. Gustav died in 1934.

The research has also uncovered a condolence written from the Netherlands to the widow Gertrud on the death of her husband by no less a person than Emperor Wilhelm, who himself died shortly afterwards. According to Pieke both sons of the couple, Horst and Herbert were even darker-skinned than their father but served in Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Horst fell but Herbert, Axel’s father, became a violinist after the Frist World War at the Mannheim National Theatre.
The story of Africans towed over to Germany is long and goes back to the greatest of princes. The rulers in Germany and Europe as a whole saw possession of an African as a status symbol that put them above mere mortal citizens and brought great respect among fellow aristocrats. But Gustav Sabac el Cher is the only Afroancestral celebrated conductor in the Prussian army.