On Trump’s racist comment

Sales operations in the United States and management of the 14 (Unilever) plants are directed from Lever House on New York’s fashionable Park Avenue. You look at this tall, striking, glass-and-steel structure and you wonder how many hours of underpaid black labour and how thousands of tons of underpriced palm oil and peanuts and cocoa it cost to build it –  W. Altheus Hunton.

The above scenario is true for plenty of the huge business corporations and multinational companies. They are what they are today after having exploited and sucked in huge proportions from Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia.

Donald Trump has only said what plenty whites discuss in hush tones in the streets and under the ceiling in their houses. It is only a manifestation of what many whites stand for. Before the slave trade and subsequent colonial epoch, Africa was growing at their pace and several parts of the continent were on their own peculiar path to greatness. Slavery and colonization truncated all that.

Walter Rodney in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa said that what looked like a slight difference when the Portuguese sailed to West Africa in 1444 was a huge gap by the time European robber statesmen sat down in Berlin 440 years later to decide who should steal which parts of Africa.

Someone should help me tell Trump that they created the holes. The Western capitalist nations created the holes and made astronomical fortunes in the process. Even after Independence, the Western capitalists continued to milk the former colonies. While this is not to take responsibility away from African leaders and Africans themselves and lay all the blame at the door step of the Western capitalist nations, comprehensive research shows they actively laid the foundations of this underdevelopment and actively sustained it.

The failing of the majority of African leaders and indeed Africans is that they have failed to destroy this foundation and build a whole new masterpiece. Take a trip around Africa and you see ravaging poverty and backwardness. The majority of African leaders post-colonialism have only helped entrench the continents underdevelopments. We have some African countries who have done very well, countries who have shrugged off their history of slavery and colonialism. This is also true in Asia. The other counties need to take a cue from these progressive nations. The continent is rich in immense agricultural, mineral and human resources. Responsible leadership and good governance will change the narration.

We cannot change history. But we can make use of the present in shaping the future.

Adeyemi Ahmed,

Ilorin