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By Eja, rastafarispeaks.com
We are in a race against time.
There are outside interests (working through local representatives/collaborators) whose main aim would be best served by our loss of ancestral knowledge. These are entities who know the truth in the saying "knowledge is power" and because their plans for 'full-spectrum domination' will never come to fruition for as long as they are not in control of ALL knowledge, they have been working for a while now to degrade the regard Africans have for their own ways of knowing and, for the products of those ways.
Two examples of how this has manifested are rice (a staple) and the treatment for malaria.
One time, I was walking through a market area in Lagos with an African born in amerikkka, and, on seeing how prominent amerikkkan grown rice was on the market stalls; she asked me how come amerikkka controls so much of this staple even though it has never been in the ancestral diet of Europeans. It was a good question, and as a way of answering, I pointed her to a box of 'Uncle Ben's rice' and I asked her if she had ever wondered how come a company owned by 'whites' has the picture of an elderly African on its container. She said she always thought that this was due to the fact that Black people liked rice; the product was aimed at them, so it made sense to put a picture of a Black (smiley) man on the container. I then asked: who introduced Africans to rice? Was it the indigenous people of amerikkka, Chinese immigrants or 'whites'? She thought about it and then she said it could have been any from the three.
Rice was in fact brought to amerikkka on the same ships that brought Africans into amerikkka. The pirates needed to feed their captives and so, while on the African shores, they would fill barrels up with yams (and other tubers), peppers and rice. They took these items especially because they were all food-stuffs that would keep; they would not rot in the time it would take to get the ships from Africa to amerikkka.
In time, Africans were able to get a hold of whatever was left over from voyages and that is how they started planting these things.
In time, and as usual, 'business-minded whites' saw the opportunity in this predilection.
The story of rice shows an innate weakness in our character: Originally, the people in my community who bought imported rice did not buy because it was cheaper (or tasted better) than the one produced by local farmers. They bought it because it was cleaner; when you opened a box of Uncle Ben's, you knew you would not have to pick out any stones. You simply opened the box, poured it into a pot, gave it a couple of rinses and set it on the fire. The half-hour you would have spent picking through local produce was eliminated. The challenge had been set. Did any of our big food packager's pick it up? Did we have any food packagers? No. All we had were commission seekers; people who wanted the most money for doing as little as they could; people to whom investing in better infrastructure meant buying the latest model of Mercedes Benz. People to whom researching better working practice meant looking through a list of foreign banks for the one least likely to steal the money THEY were stealing out of the 'national purse'.
In time, as amerikkkan farmers were able to lower production costs through lowered labour costs and the securement of subsidies from their government, they were able to lower the wholesale price they were charging and, as a consequence, more people became able to buy imports like uncle ben's, produce that was not only easier to work with, but was also now cheaper than the local produce, which was bad news for local rice farmers. Especially as this lower cost of importation coincidentally occurred at the same time our marketing boards were being run down, import controls eased up to a point of non-existence and the local currency devalued.
From rice to malaria: Malaria (in spite of the propaganda) was never as deadly a killer of Africans as the wastern media likes to portray. For example, I come from a big extended family and in all the time I have been on Earth, not a single person has died from malaria. No child, adult or elderly person has died from malaria. We have all had it (some several times), but we take the indigenous remedies, sweat it out and make a full recovery.
The ones that malaria has been (and continues to be) most deadly to are 'whites'. Malaria was what caused them to call West Africa the 'white man's grave'. Malaria did not permit them to settle there in large numbers like they had in East, North and Southern Africa. But, as usual, their problems are a global problem so malaria is portrayed as a top line 'killer disease'.
Now, seeing as I know that if this characterisation is true, it is only true when applied to a certain species, why should I not hail malaria (seeing as it kept my community from being over-run by leprosy)?
Malaria, like other diseases, becomes most deadly when the body it infects has a degraded immune system. So, the stories we are now hearing about the 'emergence of a deadly strain' of malaria are disingenuous; that 'deadly strain' is the poverty that has been imposed on African communities. People have been finding it hard to eat because a lot of food is now imported and priced beyond their means so it becomes easier to fall ill. Then, due to decades of been hypnotised by the 'superior' wastern medicine, we head for the hospitals where we are given weak versions of medicines that were developed from the theft of our ancestral remedies. Weak versions to which the virus causing the disease easily develops it's own immunity so that next time...
That is the deliberate cycle of ignorance, greed and short-sightedness that has led us to where we are now.
Reprinted from: www.rastafarispeaks.com/cgi-bin/forum/config.pl?read=68254
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