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0:00
there's this idea in popular culture that upon the beginning of the triangle slave trade and also several hundred years after that so at the beginning of the colonization of sub-saharan Africa that the people of the European imperialist came into contact with were a largely primitive tribes scattered throughout the continent with little in the way of organizational capacity or technology holding them together this is a mess
0:32
this is a map of pre-colonial Africa it's not perfect nothing else but it does a good job of showing the greatest extents of the various states that occupied several regions in Africa before the Europeans took over the continent their borders overlapping if necessary due to the long range of time for historical and geographical reasons we'll get into later most of the continent was underdeveloped for a long period of time but around the period of
0:56
the 12th to the 16th century after the Muslims and later the European Christians were able to fully establish trade relations with the sub-saharan Africans many resource rich areas especially in West Africa from which the Europeans took most of the slaves grew expanded and eventually solidified themselves as some of the most prosperous wealthy and forward-looking States in the world at the time now before we speak about some examples
1:17
I'm sure that looking at that picture you're wondering why I like half of the continent is uninhabited by any large scale civilizations and to be honest this is where the myth of the black person living in the middle of the jungle with their tribe of a handful of people only to be snatched up by European soldiers and sold into slavery comes from there is not in fact much of a governmental superstructure for these areas until relatively recently in the
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same way that although Brazil technically owns the majority of the Amazon there still people living there completely unaware of the existence of a country called Brazil it's kind of like that except for the fact that these kingdoms and empires never claimed ownership of these parts of Africa to explain why these areas were like this well I'll kind of just show you Europe for the Universalis for so those of you don't know you forces hurled strategy
2:04
game when we take control of the country and just exist as the country for like a thousand years you might wonder why I'm explaining Africa's relative under development using a video game and it's a fair concern but you fort is actually quite detailed in terms of representing the geography of the world well and I'm mainly using this because I can zoom and scroll over to different places ensure its useful okay hey everyone it's me from the future I'm in you for so yeah
2:35
let's let's just get it started so I'm gonna go to Singapore whenever it loads okay let's select a in an era I have like all the expansion packs so I have a lot of errors but let's get to like around where the Golden Age of Africa would be but then again it really doesn't matter whichever I pick because one I'm just showing you the geographies is more of a geography lesson than anything by the way I'll try my best to kind of
3:06
do that I'm not like geography really is of my specialty I've got like a pretty good knowledge of how these like geographical factors kind of factored in to the historical factors we'll end up talking about in this essay and also another big reason is because uh this map is somewhat inaccurate I don't to say very inaccurate there's some good things about it but um it's questionable I think I just noticed there's a mink el Kalahari as far as I mean like I'm
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familiar with like the fact that there were some missions to East Africa or some expedition sees Africa from China as far as I know they didn't take over a significant part of southern Africa okay let's switch to the terrain mode so here you can't kind of see like the well I mean this is obviously the Sahara Desert well all people kind of don't know how much the Sahara Desert kind of plays into a sort of political realities of Africa I mean like it's kind of just
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obviously really hard to develop in like the very parched desert which is kind of places show up is kind of low development or or completely uninhabited so what you kind of end up seeing is that the real kind of large-scale civilizations end up being around the coast because the Sahara tends to take up a lot of northern Africa here the only way to kind of get around that is to kind of make your way along the sides here and
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this is what people like in Mattoon some of the people within some of the Islamic empires would do they would if they wanted to get to West Africa they would kind of go along the coast this way so that they were kind of because if you zoom in here you're gonna see a lot of green where not a lot of green but a good amount of green in that because all these places are near rivers a lot of people know Egypt for example they're near rivers and near the sea where they
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can kind of have access to ports and and obviously water and food and of course sometimes it's not drinkable but as we know rivers doing fat leads to the sea so you got to have access to supports and to rivers and stuff so people tend to set up cities you don't want to kind of like die in the desert this is kind of the best way to go around and here you can kind of see Molly Molly one of the big empires at the time so here this is kind of where it starts getting kind
6:01
of nice again over here in East Africa there's less tests with assistance and so hard this place is actually livable this place not so not so much now kind of below where a lot of the like cool activity was happening during the growth range of Africa you have the gigantic look at this ship the Congo Basin is huge you have some mountains over here I think this is the same if I remember correctly I think this is the same range where Kilimanjaro is at but I'm gonna
6:33
have to look that up later I'm not a hundred percent sure of that and that's kind of made it difficult even more difficult to kind of get further south because uh traveling through this holy shit it ain't good it's not fun so there's some more stuff over here where there's kind of more livable there's less less jungle and then you got here this around South Africa South Africa now a lot of people know Paris sucks really dry most of the
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here they even have droughts to this day kind of sucks this is around that time where most the light the African civilizations that were south of West in East Africa would have been hanging out although later on famously Zulu Empire would end up taking up a significant portion in this area here alright so uh let's go back to the video so why is it that the Europeans upon instituting the triangle trade didn't jump immediately to taking over all of Africa in getting
7:39
slaves that way well the problem is that if they did that they instantly would have been annihilated shamed and their entire project into now budding new world would have collapsed due to the lack of forced manpower since they were mainly getting their sillies from West Africa because you know it was closer than south or east africa it has to be said that the west african nations had the resources the manpower and the alliances to me the crusades look like
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resounding successes in comparison you see up until the discovery by the eastern part of the earth of the western part of the earth europe was to be frank a backwards scientifically illiterate place filled with warring tries duking it out for the limited space they had at the very least until the carolingian empire when a large part of europe instead became a backer its scientifically later placed still at war all the time but also they hated the
8:23
muslims because they were stealing their lands but after that discovery several lucky things happen to europe we'll get back to that later like I said earlier West Africa due to being incredibly research groups would be extremely wealthy but to be fair they were is still developing to you to the reasons that stated earlier the best example of this is the Mali Empire most famous for one of his heads of state mountain Musa was believed by Fat Morgan
8:47
of history calm to be the richest man ever who once wounded Egypt's economy for years during his pilgrimage to Mecca because he just kept giving out gold since he had way too much for himself which caused massive inflation people talk about Mansa Musa Law for obvious reasons I mean the amount of money he had was fuckin absurd but I think was equally if not more interesting as a society in the state of Mali at the time according to one of the only people
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actually wrote down stuff about Mali since during the time of the Empire the old tradition of historicity was in full effect even Battuta mommies decided oh sorry my progressive bent Islam parts of Middle East and other parts of Africa as the liberal gender expectations founded the local religions didn't mesh well with the strict gender roles of Islam in certain key aspects of life Mali society would have looked quite forward-looking compared to most
9:28
large-scale civilizations at the time for example women are free to not wear veils have friendships with men who were not their husband etc being a North African Berber even Battuta was shot by these cousins which is presumably why he made particularly note of them Malian Society was also heavily decentralized despite massive wealth of the Mansa believe it or not villages towns and cities elected a sort of mayor for themselves resolved local issues whereas
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at the county level the administrative head and governor we're either democratically elected or selected three inheritance whichever was the tradition of that country as a fan of decentralized governments myself I think certain aspects of this system are pretty cool besides a whole new monarchy thing considering most places at the time had almost no democracy in the power structures that existed we give power structures let's talk about
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slavery uh you didn't think I would get to that day to you ah Who am I kidding you off Cristina I was gonna bring up slavery look the fact that the West African nations including Mali used slaves sucked in fact might be wondering why the Africans would sell fear into a bunch of Europeans there are two main reasons for this the first is that the span African notion of an overarching African Ness is an extremely new phenomenon and also rather inaccurate
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wrong with you speak of it on a biological basis and not a historical one reality is that there is more genetic diversity in Africa than anywhere else on the planet Emily felt quite poorly of their enemies for tribal religious and cultural reasons the second is that even use of mid term to ascribe to happening Mali while accurate is misleading when comparing it to chat cell slavery or the triangle slave trade because the latter
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was infinitely more brutal Europeans actually started taking the slaves during that period not from Mali but from the region of upper Guinea what's the story in Aiea Kinjo been described as not having a major interest in slavery until after the arrival of Europeans whereupon it became economically advantageous for some opportunistic Africans to participate in it while we don't know what if anything the West African slavery is near by the
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treatment of the slaves by the Europeans it's unlikely they were thinking of this
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why well to demonstrate let's see a description of the Risha by T Valentine Robin's in 1866 visor of Lou coach in modern-day Nigeria so every means as continuous air found in this part of Africa belonging to a family where there was no composed oh my god there is no compulsory labor the owner and slave work together eat the like food were the light clothing in sleep in the same huts some slurs are my wives under masters it gives protection to the slaves and everything necessary for
12:01
their subsistence her legs were they a fruit man is worse off than a slave he's got equipment food from anybody to go back to Mali to go back to Mali sleaze had a much better chance of becoming free within their lifetimes we're not bought and sold as private property because that concept in capitalism in its entirety didn't exist yet we're not thought of as biologically inferior and having the same agencies animals we're not police not usually
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should talk to a completely foreign land and permanently separated from their friends and family and we're not forced to abandon through language culture or religion to this day most African countries have a European language as their official language in certain parts of West Africa including likely many places within Mali given and discovered mental structure slaves could own property including other slaves and one time afforded royal slave livery became
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emperor because the people at court were like close enough he's kind of like families with previous mounts or whatever like like could he imagine any world in which Louis the whatever-the-fuck of France dies there's a power struggle and suddenly fucking Kunta Kinte is on the throne directing niggers and everyone's like yep you have job this is completely fuckin normal look I'm not trying to excuse the slavery at the West Africans or any
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Africans but I'm just saying slavery was extremely common back then and not all forms of slavery are made equal Africans didn't become the vast majority of the slave population of the world until after the advent of the transatlantic slave trade we should acknowledge the bad aspects of Mali while also recognizing the incredible contribution they gave to is actually a lot to say here about how there's a lot of knowledge that is lost
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to history that could have been useful in making the world a better place to live in but I haven't gone to that yet all empires all civilizations really must meet an end at some point and from oli the cause of that was two logics and it's evil twin song die ok the fall of Mali was way more complicated and Songhai done did it but I just think it's funny that a entirely new country was made from the crumbling pieces of the Mali Empire spanning what ended up
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pretty much being where the Mali Empire used to be couple of that with a relatively similar structure in religion and it really starts earning that evil twin title I gave it I say evil just because the guy who founded a Sunni Ali whose name is kind of funny if you know a signature about Islam was kind of a dick not like a massive the bicker anything just not as progressive or forward thinking as a lot of the monsters were
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during or after his death though the Empire came to replace Mali which just to be clear didn't completely fall to Songhai and was still holding on to land in West Africa as the most prominent West African nation by the way quick side note I don't want to give the impression that it was just the area of Mali occupied in West Africa that was prosperous and actually left a ton of civilizations out including Ghana Benin the Ashanti and a whole bunch of others
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but my goal here is in particular to make a documentary in each of these countries but to dispel the notion that sub-saharan Africa was a destitute primitive and backwards place until Europeans came in graciously helped their living conditions with colonialism this view is obviously ridiculous Africa no way received any benefits from colonization unless you want to ignore the option of peaceful trade which the Europeans were already doing for quite
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some time I'll beat increasingly badly due to this newfangled invention called racism anyways the reason I took on this tantrum was just so I can move on to East Africa East Africa is an interesting case because it may have been the most developed part of sub-saharan Africa DJ's position rep said the lease and disability I'll beat hampered to trade in the Mediterranean while the cool boy a trade is happening in the ancient world some of the most ancient civilizations are
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found here if you up before example is formed Iran 980 BCE they were developed enough to hold out the colonist and thus never suffered under direct colonial rule except briefly by the Italian fascists and hey most of Europe also got wiped up at the fascists almost instantly so man if announces did anything right was fuckin blitzkrieg like I know it was the Italians that took everything you appear but still that shit was hella effective
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they took half pulling in five weeks the to be fair in that case stylin held to that really the thing is though East Africa especially Ethiopia but subject to his own former pseudo colonialism from the various Muslim Caliphate sand empires for a long time though nowhere near as bad is with the Europeans for example pick any of the Muslim empires ecipher dad some sort of relationship with and I can guarantee you that it did not involve long term campaigns to
16:16
eradicate the local culture in history psychopathic as is the nature of capitalism disregard for the well-being of the citizenry in favor of a program of unprecedented economic exploitation for the sole benefit of the home nation legally enforce racial hierarchies on the part of the Arabs etc their treatment by the Muslims is not even comparable to or shooted by the Europeans that being said being repeatedly attacked and exploited by gigantic empires under African proxies in the
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region see the Ottoman conquest of Sudan and Eritrea for the gigantic empires or the Abyssinian Nadal war for their proxies towards more detailed info and their effects on East Africa can be found in the description does tend to put me back a couple of stops that coupled with the fact that East Africa just isn't his research phase West Africa helps explain why the places like the various Somali kingdoms in Ethiopia were pretty good places to live around
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the golden age of Africa what historians degrees around the 14th and 15th centuries and frankly great places looked far before then these nations weren't among the most powerful or anything during that era and their wealth couldn't compared to the new West African empires to illustrate a lot the religious and cultural dynamics at play in East Africa slightly after the Golden Age let's do a quick overview of the Abyssinian adult warrior I mentioned just a bit ago for those of you don't know
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Abyssinia is just the Ethiopian Empire whereas the dollar versity adal sultanate a somewhat short-lived but powerful somali kingdom east of Abyssinia that had strong ties financial and otherwise for the ottomans you know these guys like i said having those guys be against us and what you'd call strategically optimal so when it all went to war and the ottomans did as well which almost led to the destruction of ethiopia however in thief europeans being the only christians in the region were able
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to scare the help of the portuguese empire which is rapidly developing into a world prepare itself after Europe learned of the Americas driving out the Somalis and the Turks from their lands this concludes the last time the Europeans ever did anything good in Africa had just getting bid at other nice things like yeah honestly I don't want to give the impression that this is anything but a belligerent stomping into the right
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position by the Portuguese this will come into play a lot later for obvious reasons but this was an alliance based purely on the Portuguese his desire to like the Vikings raid the coast of peace Africa without engaging in an all-out war helping to interrupt their contemporary supremacy in the Indian Ocean trade since most of their enemies were Muslim and a previous papal bull gave the kings of Spain and Portugal the full and free permission to invade
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search out capture and subjugate the Muslims and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be as well as to their kingdoms duchies countries principalities and other property and to reduce their presence of Perpetual slavery having a Christian ally in the region there's obviously the logical thing to do now at this point you're probably saying okay Satan and I get it there were tons of influential and
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powerful pre-colonial sub-saharan African civilizations and if I told you there were many even further south in Africa you'd probably believe me so because of that I'll just do a quick run-through of 50 notable examples and then we'll move on one thing after note first is that the further south we go in Africa the less development we're likely to see to oversimplify a ton what I mean is that it was less likely for large-scale civilizations to form in
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many places south of the Congo Basin just because of the geographical and economic reasons I discussed him to start at the video traits important for development really important so not being able to do that for most of ancient history we'll put you back a few bases so though they were rapidly developing just as they are now despite the theory that continues to this day so yeah just to name a few examples of the civilizations that are around in
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pre-colonial Golden Age that had their own culture and inventions and contributions to the collective human knowledge and blah blah blah you get the journal you've got Congo with dois mutapa Luba and a bunch of others a lot of those contributions are lost of time destroyed by the Europeans but we have salvaged some facts about those civilizations to name an example Lenora had a method to somehow perform near painless modernist surgery given my
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knowledge of non African screen that sounds like fucking magic to me but hey what do I know but he might have noticed that I've been alluding a lot to what happened between the Europeans and the Africans during colonialism now that affects our knowledge of Africa's history today it's actually one of the great tragedies of historiography the lost history of the people of Africa and yeah there really isn't much getting around this so let's jump into how we got to the place we're in now you know
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if I believe that Africa really was the continent fill silly with wandering tribes with no large-scale civilization anywhere I can at least understand the idea that Africa was better off after colonization because they got technology and stuff but given what we know now it should be obvious to everyone that no there were no significant advances in any area for the Africans I mean one look at where they are now should tell you what you need to know development
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went down under the Europeans their knowledge and unique contributions to the global market went down everything about their society got worse why obviously because the point was never to develop Africa the point was to extract as much as possible for the benefit of Europe and under capitalism where there is a winner there must be a loser hell even of the Africans said fuck it we're never trading with the Europeans ever again just you know the guys who
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don't think we're subhuman bags of meat to be used for the purposes of smarter Menton they would be in a much better position in every respect that you can think of come to 21st century that being said Europe's detrimental effect in Africa started relatively soon after the advent of the Atlantic slave trade there are a lot of small effects that would eventually lead to the stagnation of sub-saharan Africa's economy post the Golden Age but just to summarize most of
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the main ones the massive numbers of slaves taken from Africa which mostly comprised young healthy adults the backbone of the feudal economy led to a population stagnation and labor shortage Europe's new buff developing a pre colonial system of exploitation for most of the developing world wherein to keep up with the demand for raw cotton by Europe and the subsequent flooding of the African markets with cheap industrially produced
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cloth the African economy had to in order to have any source of foreign income now lost in over they're two groups industrially produced goods orient itself more and more around the agricultural cultivation of raw cotton creating a situation in which especially because the vast majority of African knowledge was passed down through the oral tradition technological and economic innovation was neutralized do two generations further and further
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losing the knowledge of their forefathers the political unrest that occurred as a result of these factors that being said you've probably been wondering for a while now are your people got to the point where they could have such control over global geopolitics and trade relations and you've also probably guessed the answer would be something close to what I'm about to say that it resulted from a perfect storm of environmental and
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political factors some inherence Europe as a continent but most just being happenstance and blend luck let's start with ships if you look at Europe you'll notice that there aren't a lot of nations without the border with the sea and this of course holds historically as well similar places to compare this to would be Southeast Asia where arguably greater advances of ship technology were achieved and the pre-colonial Caribbean because of a need to defend former
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aliens invasions things like that European nations have always been relatively advanced in terms of their ship designs there Carrick and caravel type substrate in particular effective that long distance traveled due to their maneuverable designs coupled with their ability to sell windward with their masks so when we're trying to analyze who was most likely to sail to the new world first time and geographical and historical perspective and its most
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likely gonna be the Europeans followed by the North Africans and further behind by the West Africans who admittedly were very unlikely to have done it due to not needing amazing ship designs at all and they did eventually get there that by one special Christian man who was a very great and impressive guy who did absolutely no genocides at all Leif Eriksson okay fine sometime after another guy arrived a very impressive person with
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many tell told about him who did absolutely no genocides at all Torah and Carl semi yeah and also 500 years later Christopher Columbus got there as we know Christopher Columbus the conquistadors arrived after and colonists after that decimated the local population began colonialism to reach their home countries there a multitude of reasons the natives got beat so easily well let's just focus on to the mean one and the kind of obvious one the
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mean one is horses while the effect of the lack of horses in the New World on Native American development has been somewhat exaggerated in recent years it is true that it was a significant hindrance horses had been essential for removing resources and labor across long distances since schemings began developing civilizations and that there are so many huge advanced cities anyway like Tenochtitlan and Machu Picchu as a testament to human ingenuity these
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civilizations however were often disconnected from each other arising relatively independently because of the difficulty of travelling long distances this made European conquest exponentially easier because if they wanted to fight for example the Aztecs those aspects couldn't just call in their other large Native American Empire buddies to send troops over to help fight the the kind of obvious one is guns and cannons both of which the Europeans 10th grade again it's obvious
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what's ready use of gunpowder in war was one of if not the biggest paradigm shift in terms of warfare in that it allowed anyone who marshaled its power effectively to bully anyone who didn't have us and bully they did taking more and more land and you know the rest expansion into the new world and the slavery sustaining it was extremely profitable for Europe obviously they would have done it if they didn't think they'd benefit they weren't enslaving
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the natives out of the good of their hearts just this would have been enough to put Europe into a whole new region of wealth especially since they had prime access to all of the cool goods from the new world but further than that there's one more boost that they received to their power capitalism let's go through a run-through of why capitalism is so much more effective at production than feudalism put it very simply and feudalism
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you sit on wealth in capitalism you make wealth even billionaires who hoard wealth today don't just let all their money sit in their bank account that is a far less efficient method of generating wealth and actually you know creating things with that wealth with private ownership of the means of production as opposed to permanent aristocratic ownership of the means of production there existed incentive to produce more than one needs or to innovate people to move between classes use the capital
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that they already have to create more wealth for themselves and by extension their states more entrenched to class with people have become within that class but less wealth they as a class are likely to generate and this goes for all classes a lack of social mobility stifles growth a difficulty in administrating feudal empires of increasingly large distances was one of the main factories that allowed capitalism to grow sudden leave the
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people who through this new system we're generating more and more wealth for themselves such as through the British or Dutch East India Company's for example began to hold more and more power for the well-being of Europe in its colonies and some of these companies even owning land like you know half of India for example all this meant that but the tongues of Europeans got to Africa considering all of the factories I outlined above they stood no chance funny Portuguese realizing this with me and
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because of this we have a problem of identification we do not know who we are that's why this gathering is a great symbolic importance because it is an act of identification we are saying that we identified with the African people of the African continent we are saying that we are an African people when we make this identification have no illusions about the fact that this is a very revolutionary initiative it is a rejection of every
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for the form of identification which society let me draw your attention which library this is a university community university lie around this land go into their libraries and check the library of congress card on the Europe for European you will find all entries listed concerning the continent of Europe you will also find entries listed about Europeans in East Africa Europeans in North Africa Europeans in Asian Australia look under the Chinese you
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will find entries listed not only for mainland China but for Malaysia and for the Chinese in in the North America but not on the Africa and the African the only entries on the African relates the continent itself there are no entries on the Africans over teeth there is no such category Africans who have been ripped from the continent mysteriously disappear and become Negroes that guy's book how Europe underdeveloped Africa was a big influence on this essay and I
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encourage everyone to read it if you want to know him worry about this topic he goes over a lot of the stuff I talked about here just more in-depth and with a bit less knowledge of the things we learn since the publication of the book in 1972 what he speaks about here too is important I won't speak of the horrors of what the Belgians did to the Congolese or what the South African colonists did or even though generally horrible things the Africans have to go
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through for this video I'm not concerned with that because I'm sure you already have some idea of what happened I just want to speak of what happened when the Europeans arrived to a smaller Kingdom called Benin in 1897 British forces planted opposed the king of Benin and to colonize the region upon discovering this the forces have been an ambush and destroyed the party that was sent to take the capital city an Admiral Sir Harry rawson upon hearing of this and
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being shocked by the defeat by the so false savages brought another party and completely annihilated Benin slaughtering tons of innocents and destroying the kingdom they burnt the whole place to the ground destroying the reportedly extremely impressive architecture in art that existed there all the homes all the weld the developments the walls of the city were said to be four times larger than the Great Wall of China and look at all
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these cool stolen artworks to a large extent things like this which were not anomalous where how the Europeans created the myth of the savage continent Africa by just destroying a lot of the stuff that made them not look like savages the banan bronzes are we sent out to search be among the best lost wax casting plaques and sculptures in existence or stolen during the massacre you can see them today if you want in London Berlin Oxford Vienna Hamburg
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Dresden New York Philadelphia San Fran Boston Dallas Leipzig Leiden Cologne and jerk that's everywhere yeah that's right not one of the Benin bronzes is in an African Museum so to recap what happened there the Europeans savaged the local African population with power gained from imperialism destroyed their cities stole their stuff colonize them and pretended they were inferior as they sucked resources out of the nation and now after a nominal independence were in
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Europe and Africa is supposedly in a non predatory relationship Europeans yet still exploit the laboring resources stolen from the Africans for your own benefit yes this is the story of Benin but more than that it is the story of Africa thanks for watching guys I appreciate any support you can give so like subscribe and share this video please the links for citations and further reading are in the description you have no idea how long I've been
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working on this several months to be exact so I'm pretty proud of this one and I hope you guys are too so yeah see you around for the next one bye
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