Iron was smelted in what is now Nigeria five centuries before Christ.
Britain’s historic decision to ban the international slave trade in the early nineteenth century entailed a large and long-run political and military commitment in West Africa, the source of most transatlantic slave shipments.
The Islamic jihads of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created new Moslem states in West Africa, which in turn promoted enslavement on a larger scale.7′Altogether, between 1650 and 1850, at least 5 million slaves were shipped from West Africa alone.74.
The need for Nigerian clerks and other subordinates to help man the colonial administration required creating a new class of African people with education in the English language, with Westernized concepts, and with experience in Westernized ways of doing things.
Most of the slaves shipped across the Atlantic were purchased, rather than captured, by Europeans.
When the anointed say that there is a crisis this means that something must be done – and it must be done simply because the anointed want it done.
As world prices fell during the Great Depression, the poll tax imposed on Africans remained the same in money terms, which is to say, it increased in real terms. To ensure the payment of this tax, the colonial official pressured African farmers into growing larger export crops, even at the expense of food. Thus Africans had to depend on government famine relief when local food crops were disappointing.
To the Ibos, Western education was a rare opportunity to be seized.
If there is an optimistic aspect of preferential doctrines, it is that they may eventually make so many Americans so sick of hearing of group labels and percentages that the idea of judging each individual on his or her own performance may become more attractive than ever.
The greatest abuse of all-the slave trade-was ended as a direct result of the political influence of evangelical Christians in Britain, who were connected with missionary work in Africa.
More generally, confidence that an investment of labor and resources could claim its reward-whether at harvest time or when dividends were issued years later-has been crucial to the economic efforts which create national prosperity.
The President is a phrase-maker par excellence. He admires trite sayings and revels in formulating them. But when he comes to their practical application he is so vague that their worth may well be doubted. He apparently never thought out in advance where they would lead or how they would he interpreted by others.
As late as 1951, out of the 16 million people in the northern region, only one had a full university degree-and he was a convert to Christianity.
The ideological component of multiculturalism can be summarized as a cultural relativism which finds the prominence of Western civilization in the world or in the schools intolerable. Behind this attitude is often a seething hostility to the West, barely concealed even in public statements designed to attract wider political support for the multicultural agenda.
At the lower end of the social scale, as well as among the gentry, enterprise and social mobility were part of the pattern in England.
Another feature of the prevailing vision is that the anointed must try to change the fundamental character of their fellow human beings, to make them more like themselves. Thus phrases about “raising the consciousness” of others, making them “aware,” or hoping that they will “grow.” In other words, the anointed must not only design a different social world from that which exists, they must people that world with different creatures, custom-made for the purpose.
France had the intellectual foundations for modern industry without the commercial and financial complements.
Not only were the Ibos a poorer group from a less fertile region of Nigeria,” those who migrated to the northern region were treated as outsiders and forced to live in separate residential areas, and to send their children to separate schools, by order of the local.
Whether people are united by navigable waterways or cut off by rugged mountains or other geographical barriers has enormous cultural as well as economic and political significance.
The hubris of imagining that one can judge merit, as distinguished from judging behavior and performance, can be seen in attempts of educators to grade students according to how well they used their own ability, rather than how well they performed relative to some fixed standard or to other students.