Sometimes knowing history to certain extents can be burdensome. It is so much easier to just not know & let The Universe fix things. But since modern & recent history from the 1500s onwards is so well recorded often by people who had first-hand experience of the events they wrote, it's not easy to choose ignorance when everyone is so well aware of each other's history. This then leaves us with the dilemma of letting the past go only for it to continue haunting us or do something about past injustices. Doing something about past injustices can be chaotic & full of awkwardness so we always need to apply a bit of tact & "soft-handedness" to ensure that we don't alienate the present world we live in trying to relive & correct the past. Below are a few recurring topics in African history that many have probably not fully found peace with & I feel that peaceful justice is better than violent justice provided that peaceful justice deals with the problem-at-hand decisively so that violent justice becomes less an option.
Slavery
Slavery is a very old "umukhuba" (couldn't find the English equivalent but loosely "tradition") in city-states & kingdoms of Eurasia, north Africa & other parts of the world. Slavery in Mauritania was only abolished in 1981. In southeast Africa, slavery was less common than in populous city-states of the northern hemisphere & isolated self-sufficient villages were more common. Not that slavery was completely absent in southeast Africa because we know in east Africa, the Zanj were among the most enslaved people by Arabs but most enslaved Africans were from east Africa or west Africa, while southeast Africans mostly remained in their original lands. Perhaps, the Arab slave trade was where Europeans got the idea that Africans are "better slaves". Black Africans have been proven to be able to stay out in the sun longer & be generally more athletic; I assume Arabs knew this fact being around black Africans for so long & this was the main reason Europeans - who were busy colonizing the Americas - opted for African slaves over other groups from the Americas & Asia. Harder working slaves to get manual labour done faster, I assume that this was their logic. So Europeans got larger African tribes to bring people of conquered, smaller regional tribes, mainly in west Africa. One of the first African kingdoms to barter Africans as slaves for European goods (i. e. guns & manufactured goods) was the Kingdom of Kongo. The Kingdom of Kongo became one of the earliest sub-Saharan African kingdoms to obtain use of firearms from the Portuguese, ability to manufacture firearms & one of the first African kingdoms with a Christian king in Afonso I. The arrival of Europeans, medicine such as quinine to help with malaria/yellow fever & the invention of the Gatling gun led to a series of devastating wars for African tribes. With these new technological & medical developments, Europeans could get slaves directly from the African continent without subsidizing larger tribes to get slaves for them.
This information leaves descendants of the Transatlantic slave trade with a unique dilemma. Are they enemies of Africa/the tribes that sold them into slavery or are they allies of Africa due to them having a common coloniser foe? Many African tribes have the same dilemma, mind you. These colonial era tribal wars were directly & indirectly caused by European colonialists but this doesn't excuse the African nemesis who was an accomplice to European colonisers. In a natural setting; conflict often creates secession & new kingdoms or new countries are formed from the division but because of the Berlin Conference, tribal enemies were often forced together so recently after conflicts that the scars & trauma remained fresh & unhealed for extended periods of time. African secessionist movements remain commonplace in Africa until present-day. I believe African secessionist movements should be given a hearing & should be supported should their cause be just. I believe black Americans have now become accustomed to their own way of life so it would be unfair to force them into unstable African countries should they wish to be free of America & would better be given their own uninhabited land to forge their own state & a new African identity (see Hadinkanjamaa). This would allow for a centuries old wound to perhaps slowly heal.
Colonial tribal wars
Malaria & yellow fever have always been devastating diseases on the African continent. Before various medical breakthroughs, it was recorded that the life expectancy of a European in Africa was no more than a month due to disease & wild animals. After treatment for malaria & yellow fever was found in the Americas, Europeans could travel into Africa much easier. Muskets & flintlocks were not as effective as the Gatling gun at conquering African tribes. This is why the Xhosa wars & Khoisan wars against Europeans lasted years & wars fought against Africans after the Gatling gun was invented by Europeans (1861) lasted several months. Again, recent African history is much better recorded so it is easier to look up. We don't know much about early African history except conflicts of Nubia against ancient Egypt & the exploits of Changamire Dombo - this ignorance can be a hidden blessing or a curse in that not knowing your history does not leave you with the burden of knowing the worse feats of your forefathers & a curse in that you do not know what your enemies know of you. So we may as well find some justice for the injustices we know of. Recent African conflicts were mostly caused directly or indirectly by European colonialism & tribalist sentiments were further intensified by Europeans fabricating countries that did not exist before European arrival which often forced clashing tribes into one country. These new African countries were forged at the Berlin Conference of 1884.
The Berlin Conference
When European powers were in their age of creating empires & colonising lands outside Europe, they created new countries directly & indirectly. They did this by making African chiefs & kings sign deeds of land knowing African chiefs & kings could not speak their language let alone read the Latin alphabet, then claiming that they had African land. So, many African leaders were claimed to have put their mark on deeds which they didn't know the meaning of. One example of this was of the Voortrekkers who allegedly had King Dingane sign away land from the Thukela River to the Umzimvubu River. When King Dingane attacked the Boers, the Boers claimed that he went back on his word because they had the "deed for the land" when the more likely explanation would be that deeds on paper (especially ones written in Dutch & in the Latin alphabet) held no meaning in the precolonial Zulu world.
The Berlin Conference was concluded without indigenous African people being heard but also with incorrect borders. The participants of the Berlin Conference did not respect the borders of the African kingdoms of the time. Because the African way of life was so starkly opposed to European culture & indigenous people so different in phenotype to Europeans - African colonies always felt wrong, awkward, unjust & misplaced on the African continent to the disenfranchised Africans of the new European way of doing things. This, in contrast to straight-haired & lightskinned American tribes who could easily pass as European. African identities, languages & customs still exist in 2024 so precolonial tribal sentiments still thrive in some regions & these regions are still observed as territories of old kingdoms by many despite them being stretched across modern international borders. If African identities were completely erased & replaced with the new countries' fabricated identities, there would be less division but because the lands we live in are a "mixture of foreign cultures", tribalism (& racism) remains intact... so the idea of indigenous ethnic sovereignty never truly dies. This, in turn, gives modern African countries a sort of illegitimacy among disenfranchised indigenous people. The solution to this could be federated ethnic regions within present African countries to keep economies intact & in time, the option of ethnic regions divided by the Berlin Conference of 1884 & other colonial events the opportunity to reunite fragmented precolonial ethnostates & possibly secede from Berlin Conference states.
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