Now that we know that African people were brought to the West exclusively to work and serve whites, and not to “live in peace and harmony” with them, where did the rationale behind the education of black children come from?
After Europeans had succeeded in making our ancestors almost as ignorant as the animals they said they were after years of chattel slavery, some of them began to realize that in order to further their commercial interests, it was better for the ‘negroes’ to have at least a minimal amount of education. A few continued to believe that “negroes should continue to be worked like beasts of burden and be kept in total ignorance,” however they finally agreed that it was in their best interest to educate our ancestors.
In their original plans Europeans had had no intentions of educating African people. The education of the black child in the western educational system therefore was never designed to develop the individual personality or the intellect of African children and to help them reach their fullest potential. The decision to educate was strictly based on the economic requirements of the day which needed a number of educated Africans in order for the West to achieve its goals.
We would still be uneducated today if Europeans had not deemed it a necessary requirement.
In fact, one of the reasons that African children are doing so badly in the educational system is precisely because their education continues to depend on the needs of the western economic system. If you listen to propaganda however you may easily believe it is because they are intellectually inferior and lazy. The stark reality is that the business world is linked to education and therefore whatever happens in the economic sphere will have an impact on education. The educational system works like a bottleneck to control the flow of students entering the workforce. So, if the economy is experiencing a boom, more students will graduate from college and university in order to enter the work force and if there is a recession, it will do the complete opposite. i.e. fewer students will graduate and thus fewer will enter the workforce.
The western economy has not been doing well for several years now because the new technology has not been able to provide the large numbers of jobs which the old industries like steel and coal did, years ago. This has led economists to conclude that long term unemployment will now be a permanent fixture of the western economy. As a result, universities and colleges have been forced to reduce the number of people entering the workforce. It is obvious that if the economy is suffering this will have an adverse effect on African people since our education since the days of slavery has been intricately linked to the state of the Western economy. This is the real reason why there is very little investment in black education because there is an economic imperative to considerably reduce the flow of African children graduating and entering the workforce, since there are no available jobs for them and thus it is pointless to waste money educating them.
Might I remind you that 400 years ago, black unemployment was totally unheard of in the West since every African man, woman and child was fully employed from sunrise to sunset. In fact, Europeans couldn’t build ships fast enough to go to Africa to kidnap Africans and bring them to the West to work. Isn’t it ironic that curbing immigration from Africa is the biggest issue in the West today where quotas and fluency in Western languages are requirements for emigrating to the West? In France they are even planning to test the DNA of relatives who simply want to rejoin their families. How unfortunate that Europeans did not enforce these practices 500 years ago because they would have saved Africans a tremendous amount of pain.
If we accept that in the western system an individual’s importance depends on their financial worth, then it is clear why African children have become a liability rather than an asset and are underachieving in school. Knowing the kind of social disruption that able bodied, young men of working age unable to find a job can create in society, the West has decided to channel them into prisons as a solution in order to prevent the kind of revolts that occurred in the French suburbs 2 years ago.
This is why ‘tolerance zero’ was introduced and why a 15 year old African American youth who stole a simple chocolate bar would receive a 15 year jail sentence from a US court. To deaden the pain of those who have lost all hope of a better future, they inject drugs into our communities and pray for a quick demise either by a drug overdose or a bullet to the brain as our young men pretend to be mafia bosses fighting over turf.
After the Europeans had finally decided to educate African children, they had to deal with the problem of the content of their education. What were they to teach these ‘negroes?’ All of the aberrations and self destructive behavioural patterns that we see in our community can be traced right back to this moment when Europeans had to make a decision about the kind of information they were going to transmit to African people. When African children entered the western school system for the first time, there was great fear among the slaveholders that if Africans were taught ‘the wrong’ information, (the truth) they would lose complete control over them especially since our ancestors numerically outnumbered whites in the new world at that time.( African people have since become the minority.)
To understand why Europeans were so afraid of the content of African education we must go further back into our past. Before they had even set foot in Africa, Europeans had heard about its glory and its extraordinary civilization. Philip of Macedonia, like the typical warmongering European megalomaniac, decided that as he was the most powerful person in the West he had to conquer Egypt, the most advanced African civilization at the time and own it for himself. Fortunately, he was killed while waging another one of his numerous wars. Unfortunately, his son Alexander, who only a twisted mind could call great, decided to fulfil his father’s dream and did eventually conquer Egypt. When Europeans entered Africa for the first time and saw the tremendous civilization our ancestors had methodically collected, stored and preserved from millennia they were mesmerized. They were overwhelmed by its organisation, its opulence, its style, its architecture, its creativity, its intelligence, in short, everything but most particularly, its tremendous wealth.
Today in the western media we are inundated with propaganda of “a poverty stricken Africa” but Europeans knew then and still know now how tremendously wealthy Africa is. In fact, it is precisely because of Africa’s genius and its tremendous wealth why African people were enslaved in the first place. Europeans were envious and wanted to have Africa all for themselves but they also felt ashamed and it was at this moment that the crime which they would carry out later in the 15th century when they discovered the New World, began to take shape in their minds. One of the things that struck me as I studied Ancient Egyptian civilization was the number of times the word ‘shame’ appeared in the writings of many of the European travellers to Egypt. It’s a leitmotiv in their writings. Even Jean Francois Champoleon who deciphered the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone felt shame when he visited the tombs of the Pharaohs in the Valley of Kings and saw the different races depicted there. This is what he said.
“We also found Egyptians and other Africans depicted in the same way, which could not be otherwise: but there were some important and strange differences between the namou ( the Asians) and the tamhou ( the Europeans) ….. Finally (and I am ashamed to say this because our race was the last and most savage of all in those ancient times) but we must be honest and admit that we did not paint a very pretty figure in those days. Here I am referring to all the people with blonde hair and white skin, living not only in Europe, but in Asia, their place of origin. ” (Asia here means people from the Middle East and not from China ) This forces us to ask the following question, “Why did Europeans feel shame when they came into contact with Africa? Where did their shame stem from? It is this shame which is behind our enslavement and oppression.
To be continued
OBLONG MEDIA GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE 
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