Arabs and Africans - the myths

Sub saharan Africa is still going through the realities of the scramble for Africa. Every region looks up to the present colonial master. They speak the language and practise the customs of the colonial master.

There's a lack of cooperation with one another because of this inability to communicate. Many sub saharan Africans are proud to be told how 'westernised' they are and would be proud to show how good they are at speaking portuguese, english, french or spanish, but don't know Swahili or Arabic, the languages that their ancestors spoke before slavery and colonisation.

With the immense mineral resources in sub saharan Africa, European colonialists are not keen to let go. Any other culture that comes near Africa is denounced in snide remarks as racist. When the Chinese started to get involved in Africa, stories appeared in various media claiming Chinese are racist towards Africans. Though the success of Africans in China shows this to be a grand lie.

More disturbingly, with Arabs, who are geographically closest with Africans, we've been fed this rubbish about how the word for African is Abid, which means slave. You check deeper and find that Abid means worshipper and servant (in relation to god), so Abdillah or Abdullah means servant of God. The supposedly perjorative meaning that Abid is a bad name for Africans in the middle east and north Africa came from an individual called Meyer, who works for the State Department. One can guess at his origins from his name.

This narrative has fitted in with the neo-con imposed world view of how a certain ethnic group, ie, Arabs, we out to destroy everyone on earth, and it was the duty of all subscribers to a Judeo-Christian world view to keep the world safe.

Now with the Libya crisis, with greedy mercenaries from sub saharan Africa killing Libyans, the western media is trying to portray a racist problem between Arabs and Africans. From my experience, this isn't true.

If anything, whereas Christianity encourages tribalism and disunity, Islam actually makes people blind to ethnicity. The solidarity between all of Africa, north, south, east and west, would have brought all dictators in Africa tumbling down before now. But thanks to the false narrative of a supposed hatred between Africans and Arabs, we are all controlled by evil, greedy men and their families, while all of our resources go to the enjoyment of foreigners.

The revolution is yet to spread south ward as sub saharan Africans have yet to get off their knees and break off their shackles.

One of the great outcomes of the revolution spreading through the middle east and north Africa is that the courage we have witnessed come down to sub saharan Africa, people stop listening to colonial myths, cooperate with their nearest neighbours and use natural resources for the good of the area and the people within it, instead of benefitting slave master American/European colonialists and their hair-dyed dictator friends in Africa.