Africa oppressed even on maps!
German designer and cartographer Kay Kraus observes that the map that always appears as a background in television news, on the cover of the atlas for schoolchildren, and almost everywhere we encounter the map of the world, is a distorted map that gives us wrong ideas about the real size of Africa And its objective place in this world. All these maps are based on the famous "1569" projection of Mercator.
It is not the fault here for cartographers. Any attempt to paint the globe on a flat surface will not give us a real picture of our world. Mercator himself did not make his map to learn geography, but to show us the world flat, helping seafarers navigate, Commercial and military.
In order to draw a flat map, the lines are used instead of the curves. The result is always that the areas near the poles are greatly exaggerated. Greenland, for example, appears to be in the size of South America, and many people are accustomed to seeing such maps They think the size of Africa is as close as Greenland.
Kraus designed a flat map for Africa, showing its real size, which surpasses Europe, the United States, India, China and Japan combined. Africa, according to Krauss, is bigger and bigger than any one imagines.
Before traveling through time to pre-colonial Africa
Africa, which is forcing 14 countries so far to pay huge debts to France, in exchange for the evacuation of the colony of "Syria" from her country for more than half a century, which the world treats today as a child can not walk alone, and push their governments to apply theories of economic growth forcibly imported from the West , Based on free trade ideas and the privatization of vital resources, is the same Africa that the theories of geological evolution tell us that it was the heart of this world.
This world may be in the abyss of one continent or two continents, the largest in Africa, and then the great continental mass of the African heart, to form the world as we know it today, is Africa, where evolutionary and anthropological theories tell us that it was the birthplace of the first rational person on the surface of the ground. But the home of the first rational person is now accused of naivete and childhood, and that he can not walk forward without guardianship.
In this report, we will take you to a fascinating journey from Cairo to Accra, from farmland to fine craft workshops, from the churches to the beautiful churches, a fascinating journey to see how the continent developed its own way of development before colonialism took advantage of its wealth. Its history as it wished and which justified its atrocities against it.
The moment of surprise and denial .. Benin is not less clean than Amsterdam!
Africa is the first continent in which man was guided to the beautification of the machine and the decoration of arms, and the making of marvels - the historian Albert Tayl.
The Dutch, who first visited the depths of Africa in the fifteenth century, left us a very important document to help us learn about Africa's fascinating history and development. The Dutch wrote when they entered the city of Benin, now in southern Nigeria:
The city consists of thirty main streets. It is perfectly straight, 120 feet wide. In addition, there are countless intersecting small streets. The houses are close together and arranged in a good system. They are just as clean as the Dutch. They wash their houses and clean them to make them shiny and shiny like any mirror.
Of course, it should be mentioned here that the city of Benin, which was comparable in cleanliness and in the streets of Amsterdam, was burned by British forces in 1897. Nigeria retains only a very small number of handicrafts stolen by civilized Britain.
But you may see that this is not an exemplary and perhaps exceptional example, and we can not say that Africa was charming and advanced before the colonial era, and not that brutal continent of colonial anthropology afterwards, so another trip through time to Zimbabwe might confirm it:
Africa before colonialism .. Was it filled with the slaves?
The German philosopher Hegel says that "slavery is an African characteristic. In all the known African kingdoms, slavery is a local institution and is naturally overwhelmed. Although the Europeans sell Africans as slaves in the new world, "the Americas", yet the fate of those enslaved if they remain in their native countries is more and more severe because there is absolute bondage there. "
The history of the African continent, headed by historian Walter Rodney, proved that the German philosopher was not right to justify the enslavement of Africans. In fact, slavery was not linked to the pattern of production and economy in Africa. The number of slaves was limited in the entire continent, The slaves of the continent are slaves to the new world he has discovered.
Most slaves in the continent were found in Muslim societies, many of which moved from the mode of production to a feudal production pattern. In such cases slaves and their descendants were found within the feudal structure of society as a whole.
In the societies of communism in Africa, which had not yet become feudalism, the concept of enslavement of prisoners of war was also known, but these prisoners were gradually transformed into ordinary individuals in their new society gradually, because it was difficult to have a place for absolute and permanent human enslavement. A context that did not turn into feudalism or capitalism