When Europeans and Arabs came to Africa, what did they come to do? Did they come as tourists? Or, like Jan Van Rebeeck, they were just en route to India to look for spices and used Cape Town as a halfway station?

Quite the contrary, they had an elaborate plan to colonise Africa. Colonialism was not fortuitous. Cecil John Rhodes, for example, was sent to South Africa by the Rothschilds, so were the Oppenheimers. They were agents of the Rothschilds. When Alfred Milner came to South Africa he and Rhodes pretended they didn't know each other yet they were acquaintances at Oxford University. They had connections with the British Royal family.

Dr John Henrik Clarke said, "Slavery and colonialism took from African people their basic culture, their language, their concept of nationhood, their manhood and their womanhood. They mutilated and tried to destroy their traditional culture and reduced Africans to beggars at the cultural and political door of other people while neglecting the job of restoring their own culture, the main thing that could have sustained them."

In most of the African countries we are still speaking our indigenous languages but they are not elevated to the status they are supposed to and used in schools the way European languages such as English and Afrikaans are.

Furthermore, "there is a historic denial of Africa's true history in western scholarship, which was used to justify the rape and plunder of the continent and the suppression of African culture through slavery and colonial oppression."

What came to be known as western civilisation completely destroyed four to five civilisations in South Africa and the entire continent of Africa, the Caribbeans, North and South America, and the Pacific. They are still planning what to do with South Africa. Those white who worked for the apartheid government speak openly that they were not defeated. It means they have temporarily handed over the baton to their African puppets.

The apartheid official history says when white people came to South Africa starting from 1652, they didn't find anybody because the land was empty and unoccupied. There are white people who still maintain to this day that South Africa was unoccupied when Europeans first came to its shores. This bizarre version of history tries to justify illegal seizure of the African people's land. I heard a few submissions by the proponents of "expropriation of land without compensation" (how do you expropriate your own land?) who seem to have no clue how to respond to this distortion of history.

In the area now known as Eswatini (Swaziland) there are mines dated between 41,000 to 43,000 years. Who mined those mines? During those years Europe didn't exist as a concept. Perhaps these South African whites don't understand or pretend not to understand evolution. South Africa has one of the oldest hominid fossils in the world such as what's referred to as The Taung Child discovered in Taung by quarry workers in 1924 but was associated with Raymond Dart and is dated to more than 2 million years. Whether one believes in evolution or creation, that Taung Child is a reality.

Dr Clarke continued, "Africans let the conqueror interfere with their way of life or tamper with the concept and image of god as they conceived god to be. Throughout the whole of the African world most Africans who call themselves civilised, and here I have to question their definition of the term, worship a concept and image of a god assigned to them by a foreigner. Because the Japanese refused to allow their conquerors to do this to them they recovered from defeat and rose to a position in a world where their former conquerors are asking them for space in their commercial world."

South Africa is in a mess. The people have been told apartheid has been defeated and they are now free. That's the greatest fraud ever committed on a people. Anybody who believes this lie will never be liberated. Liberation is fought for, it is not pronounced by one's oppressors.

The education system socialises students not to think critically and to accept mediocrity. Africa's education must have as its mission the restoration of what slavery and colonialism took away. South Africa needs its own philosophy of education which produces the type of students we want and not those who kill teachers. This is not going to come from our conquerors or those who rule on their behalf.

If we don't understand or pretend not to understand why whites and Arabs came to Africa we will never be liberated.

By Sam Ditshego  

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