Also, don’t look at it from the standpoint of mineral wealth being in just this or that African country, look at from the standpoint of a region. In this case, Central Africa.
This wasn’t the vid I was looking for, but this goes into it pretty good.
If it wasn’t recorded, how would you know?
And perhaps you could come up with a cite that some African can give accurate history for “many thousands of years”. And that his history does not include any massacres of other tribes or ethnicities.
I realize it is difficult to prove a negative, but now that you have made the claim, not that there is no evidence but that it didn’t ever happen, I am going to want to see your proof.
Regards,
Shodan
Again, I never said there weren’t massacres of other tribes. Shaka, for one, was famous for it if the opposing tribe didn’t submit to his rule. What I said is there is no history of Africans committing genocides against one another, simply because of ethnic differences, prior to the coming of Europeans. I’ve studied my own history, so I know we had our internal differences and I know what they were about.
Our wars revolved around trade, territory, etc., just like every other race of people.
How are “massacres of other tribes” different than “genocides against one another simply because of ethnic differences?” I’m not sure the difference you’re trying to identify here.
I’m dubious that there were no wars and extermination campaigns based on ethnic differences, and I need a citation before I can believe that.
So, did the Jutes and Angles commit genocide against the Celts? Or did they simply decide to push them out of the next valley, one valley at a time, because the village in this one was getting overcrowded? That was the stuff of ancient migrations. The Mongols, IIRC, only slaughtered the entire population if the town had the temerity to try and hold out against them - standard warfare tactics, used over and over in medieval Europe too without any suggestion of genocide.
It seems to me genocide requires an overwhelming advantage by one side over the other - better weapons, seriously outnumbered, etc. (IIRC the ratio was about 3 to 1 in Rwanda?)
Plus genocide is the stated intention to exterminate a people, not the simple act of war and displacement that humans have done for millennia - “Nice land you have here… we’ll take it. Go away or else.”
Seems to me by this definition genocide can only happen with dense populations, where there’s no way for the ethnic minority to migrate away. If there’s unpopulated land nearby, there’s a displacement like so many in history. But if all the nearby territories are claimed by unfriendly groups, or the majority doesn’t allow emigration, only then can there be a genocide.
Thus, no genocide before the 20th (or 19th?) century.
I agree with** Hector_St_Clare** - you are making a distinction without a difference between tribal massacres and ethnic genocide.
And again - how do you know that something that you would agree was ethnic genocide happened before the white man came and was simply not recorded? If you are going to make a flat assertion that it never happened, then you need to produce evidence to demonstrate that it didn’t.
Regards,
Shodan
I gave the example of Shaka in Southern Africa. He would wipe out an entire tribe, but not simply because they were a different tribe. He was consolidating power under the Zulu banner in South Africa. Of course there were massacres, but it wasn’t because we’re the Tutsi and they’re Hutu “so we’re gonna kill em all.”
md2000 gave a good example of the difference. the same type of example I gave. I don’t get what’s so difficult about that.
Because in all the history I’ve studied, in all the conversations I’ve had with people whose knowledge of African history runs much deeper than mine, I can say there hasn’t been a recorded instance of one ethnic group committing genocide against another simply over ethnicity. Wars in Africa were fought over the same things every group of people within a nation has fought over.
There are plenty of books that touch on the subject. Walter Rodney’s ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’ is a good one. Chancellor Williams ‘The Destruction of Black Civilization’ is another.
Hell, I don’t use wikipedia as a source, but even it says that the focus on race in Rwanda (though it should’ve said ethnicity) didn’t begin until the coming of the Belgians.
Re: md2000 gave a good example of the difference. the same type of example I gave
By that definition, there was no such thing as genocide anywhere in the world until the modern state was invented, and most twentieth century ‘genocides’ wouldn’t count either.
Regardless, African history is certainly full of one ethnic group violently conquering another and enslaving them, taking their land, etc. same as anywhere else. There were also religiously inspired wars, though I’m not aware of any attempt to exterminate unbelievers (unlike what Muslims and Christians elsewhere sometimes did).
Re: While there has been a substantial amount of intermarriage between Hutu and Tutsi over the centuries, they are still largely physically and genetically distinct groups. The Hutu are Bantu, and look it. The Tutsi are a mixture of Nilotic and Afro-Asiatic, and look it.
I’m a fan of Razib Khan’s stuff in general, but that post is just silly. No, a sample of 1 is not really any better than a sample of 0. (Well, maybe it has some evidentiary value, but extremely little). The Tutsi and Hutu may or may not ethnically distinct, but he certainly doesn’t demonstrate it. Also, Nilotic, Afro-Asiatic and Bantu are linguistic terms, not racial/ethnic ones. The Fulani have more Eurasian/Middle Eastern ancestry than the Hausa, for example, in spite of the fact that Hausa groups linguistically with Hebrew and Arabic (Afroasiatic family) and Fulani groups with the Niger-Congo languages.
In other words, you don’t know if it happened and was not recorded.
Still waiting for that cite about how Africans can recite an accurate history going back many thousands of years.
Regards,
Shodan
what cite do you need telling you about the African oral tradition? paragraph, page and book?
hit google man, i don’t need to come on here and lie.
just like i don’t need to lie about Africans committing genocide strictly because of ethnicity or religion pre-coming of the European.
i know why you don’t want to believe it, though.
The fact is that you have no factual evidence of your assertions. Oral traditions are worth the paper they are written on.
I need a cite that shows that an African oral tradition goes back “many thousands of years”, and has been verified as accurate.
I don’t want to believe things for which there is no evidence. You have provided no evidence. This is GQ.
Regards,
Shodan