Reacting to "Sex, Race and IQ: Off Limit"

Viban Viban NGO, PhD


I cannot say how much I enjoyed reading the appended article on this interminable IQ subject matter that often makes African Americans and continental Africans sad and some Caucasians happy for nature having apparently endowed American Caucasians with such “advantage” over others! If the Caucasians’ IQ is higher than those of Africans Americans as alleged, is it something to celebrate today? Could we insinuate that there is some celebration here as Caucasians made good use of it in the past by enslaving those considered inferior or having low IQ? If you believe in the economic performances of peoples differently, based on their race and IQ disparity, do you have a solution for this or should it be used as justification each time African Americans are at the trough of economic developments and those responsible do not want to accept that they are that way because they are discriminated against? The fact remains that if everyone, irrespective of his or her race could have the same IQ, the global productivity could be increased phenomenally. Then, we have to make sure that what is responsible for this are the discrepancies in scores of such a thing called IQ? Could that be possible? From my perspective, the IQ question often brought by Caucasian pseudo scientists is their rationale for their subtle discrimination based on race as you cannot have objective scientific results from IQ tests designed to test different ethnic groups with different backgrounds. The subjects have to be under the same conditions if objected results are to be obtained. That is what I feel we need to address for us and for the next generations of an apparently global village that is attempting to break its racial barriers.


In the past when Africans were generally referred to in Western literature as primitive, some Caucasians actually believed in the survival of the fittest doctrine as promoted by Charles Darwin and phrenologists (1840s) who put the Caucasian as the prototype to be emulated. Who told them that the Caucasian was the role model? Was it Jesus Christ most Westerners follow? No!Why did they not believe that the pygmy in the Ituri Forest in the Congo or the Chinese could have been the role model? I did not or do not see any advantage in such studies other than them stirring fragmentation of our apparently disjointed world for their advantage. Such studies were Caucasians of the past ways of justifying slavery and slave trade that southern USA Caucasians, Europeans, Persians and Arabs enormously befitted from. Some equated Africans to uncouth animals. If a full-blooded African was equated to an animal as the English slave owner from the Caribbean known as Jamie Lynch preached, it was easier to treat him (African) as such and consider him as commodity. Coupled with this, those false scientists had to employ psychological tactics to underpin their pseudo analyzes or theories.


What I believe in is environmental determinism. What would make a man growing up in the tropics to invent simple winter jackets people in the north hemisphere take for granted? What would make a Tuaregs in the Sahara think of building a submarine or even build a well insulated house that would keep him comfortable in winter when in a thousand years he had never experienced winter and had never seen a sea? Don’t you see that if winter comes and you do not have a good home in Siberia or Canada you will not live to meet another winter? What do we learn? Persons living under these hash environments would have to think harder and as such we have more inventions coming from the Northern hemisphere of extreme climatic conditions where Caucasians inhabited than say in the tropics.


Further, when it is winter you are forced to be in sedentry and that gives you reasons to think and do things people in the warm climates do not bother considering. Would it surprise you that we have more books published in the temperate lands that from the tropics? Tropical inhabitants of the past often live off the land and went about stack naked and could survive year in year out. They could still do so as some inhabitants of the rain forests in the Amazon and central Africa. You cannot do that in Siberia or Alaska.


If Africans do follow that life style fashioned by their weather would you really consider then inferior to you and their IQ lower than yours? Is it by virtue of that that the Caucasians appear better than mahogany skinned tropical inhabitants? Do you think they are better people intellectually than Africans and their recent descendants? I do not think so. Also if they are setting their IQ to make them feel comfortable over their achievements, they set them based on what they have in their localities and what they have been used to. Even if they include African Americans or Africans, they are new comers whose history and ways of lives had been thwarted by Caucasian slaver owners of the past. It will take time for them to adjust. Remember that in the Sixties Africans were still discriminated against by the whites when the whites where having the whole world for themselves and had no economic or other racial barriers. Why would Caucasians not excel when marks are compared with those scored by Africans and African American or even Latinos?


If the Latinos and East Indians or Chinese do better in that IQ set by Caucasians who had all and excluded Africans or other so called races in the past, it is because these groups were never ever enslaved and have no 'slavery paradigm' in their genes that is still affecting them hitherto. The environments have catapulted Europeans, Caucasians to their lofty position in the world. They will do well in their IQ tests for the fact that they were the ones who designed all for their benefits first without taking into consideration other so call races, whom I call their brothers and sisters. Therefore, they will do well in their environments, and IQ tests set by them for their good than for those they had suppressed as the Egyptians suppressed the Jews, the Chosen People in Egypt for donkey years. When are we going to have a true comprehensive IQ test for all? It can only be when African and African Americans will be included in the new inclusive paradigm of the future and that is a long way to come so long are racial discrimination is still practiced.


Leave Africans in that Caucasian environments and they will do as well and even excel if you do not confine them there as slaves and feel nervous all the time that their false sex drive is going to bring about the debasement of the white population as Hitler did for the Jews. That fear made mad Caucasians like Adolf Hitler thought before setting to massacre millions of Jews. The race phobia has done plenty of irreparable damages in the world. That race fear made the Hutus to massacre the Tutsis as recently as 1994. That fear made the Caucasians in South Africa to suppress Africans who had allowed them to come back to mother Africa and settle as lost brothers and sisters with apartheid. They started this in 1910 and they brought in this apartheid that hurt so many Africans until 1994 when Nelson Mandela their leader was released from having served 27 years in prison just to let Caucasians and Africans share the wealth of their nation state. Now the problem of race is that of the Caucasians and not of the other races they derogatorily or mistakenly call colored peoples. When you see the authors of controversial race treatises or scientific research, they are mostly whites who want to justify their dark past of slavery and discrimination. Why?


Personally, we have to be very careful when talking of IQ among the African Americans as the paradigm of slavery of syndrome is still with them and it might take a while to be erased. Modern Caucasians have to be sympathetic and not live on the shadow of old beliefs when their apparently pure sciences were still inchoate.


There are some Americans who believe that President Barack Obama the 44th president of the USA is a maverick and that was why he was doing well. Do you buy this? I do not. He is doing well, if not better because he had been given opportunities that were denied many of his kinds in the past. If racial barriers, I talk of in my forth coming book are dismantled, the USA and the entire world would be better off for doors would be opened to educate Africans and African Americans and others just as Caucasians. If Africans Americans attain a better standard of education as they are assured of jobs after their graduation, get better jobs, you will not have thousands of them languishing in prisons all over the USA but they will be in factories, offices or setting up their businesses and stop depending on whites as they were programmed to do in the past.


It is the shame of Caucasians of the past and a few today for they are responsible for African Americans being in prisons in droves because of their belief in their low IQ hence when it come to looking for jobs generally owned by Caucasians who were blessed in the past, they are dismissed without even considering their CVs just because they are swarthy or just from their names. Now, what would happen when their children will never be educated or have the same amenities because their parents cannot afford owing to the institutionalized racism? If these trends continue unaddressed, America would be banking their problems for the future and America will not make strikes in many fields if they continue to secretly exclude African Americans and African or Latinos and other ethnic minorities from having sound education, good jobs and mingling with whites so to say.


Continental Africans and African American in the USA, who are directors, medical doctors, computer programmers, nurses, economists, university professors, researchers, etc, are not mavericks. They are truly intelligent people from minority groups as Caucasians and IQ tests that are mostly designed by the whites for the whites in the white environments should not be used as the sole criteria for the determination of intelligence of men of all races and colors. In this case unique case studies has to come in.


The article below has rightly put it that males and females have the same IQ and if there were differences in the past they were due to where subjects were raised and the fact that they were not raised under the same conditions. Remember that boys are given boys' toys and girls given girls' toys. I remember in England mothers would openly tell the boys did not to cry as it was not manly to do so. The reverse was true of the girls. They allowed girls to cry because the society deems if fitting for them to do so but would not even allow these very girls to climb trees or take part in certain sports or jobs as they thought that they were exclusively for boys. When the Second World War came and there was shortage of manpower in those industries in Europe and North America that in the past were exclusively for men, what did women do who were employed? They supported war machinery as never before and some worked even harder. What happened when African Americans were employed in the armed forces who were grudgingly employed in the days of Jim Crow in the south? They did so well and even better. They had proved to be a formidable force during the American civil war and could not be left behind indefinitely for spurious reasons. Where were the inferiority of woman and African Americans during this the World War (1939-1945)?

I remember in my high school days, girls did not take up physics, mathematics, elementary mechanical engineering and chemistry as they sincerely believed that they were boys' subjects. Has such a unfounded statement got a place in the 21st century? You will see that where natural sciences were opened to all as in the former USSR women proved men awry. There are more female scientists in Russia to day than we have in North America. The myth about girls not doing well in those pure sciences was dismissed and girls proved that given opportunities, they could do well and if not better than men. African men and women have similarly demonstrated that they could do as well as Caucasians. Do not try to bring in the sports where African Americans cannot be excluded by any other tactics. Back on sciences, I will tell you that there are 30,000 Nigerians medical doctors in record in the USA. Are they there because they are mavericks? Are some Caucasians not envious of them because they could command better salaries?


The writer Sharon, will not tell me that an elephant is better biologically than a rat or that a Caucasian is better as phrenologists in 1840s once wanted to prove by comparing the physical differences of a Caucasian who was their prototype and then dismissing the African who did not look like a white as trash. Were they right? If a Caucasian had a flatter derriere and an African had a protruding derriere, those pseudo scientists concluded that a Caucasians were more or a person than an African. A crippled born Caucasian was therefore not a person according them? Will you accept that today? Remember when some used to put sand grains in the skulls of dead Africans and measure it to draw their conclusion. If a skull contained more sand, it was not a normal person. Can you buy that today? Go to you major libraries and read journals old anthropologists published on these silly studies. What sort of science was that? That was one of their laboratory study from which they drew their conclusions. Would you buy that today even if you were drunk? But that was what was used to suppress African Americans and Africans. You know that it was all bunkum and no one with his right frame of mind buys that.


Then, the irony is that Caucasian scientists all agree that the first man on earth lived in Africa. If that were the case, as it is accepted now by archeologists and historians, then all of us emanated from the Africans. You with your translucent (rosy) red skin and I with my mahogany skinned complexion is your brother. Owing to the fact that we drifted away for reasons we do not want to dwell into, we were shaped by different factors to look different just as most dogs look different but they all have one parentage. If the German shepherd dog is more alert than others, does it make it a better dog than the others? I see that African sisters who had lived in the northern hemisphere turn fair skinned in winter and swarthier in summer. That is nature’s way of keeping her alive as it makes the original African who wondered to the north to have a lighter skin to get in more sun shine that he was deprived for months in the winter months for uncountable years. I have looked at the ptarmigan and some foxes that literally change their colors in winter to white as their protective coloration and know what it means for a Caucasians who had to change to live in the tropics. I will take you to the sub Indian continent. He gets swarthier than his cousin in the Tundra. Have we ever seen a blond born in the Mediterranean but we have many from the Scandinavians. Why? The environmental factors we alluded to above are responsible.


When we look at the great Wold Wars having been caused principally by differences in the color of the skin and shapes and lots of African brothers and sisters being left out because of the color they are born with, the flat noses and protruding derrieres not of their making but those of the environment and the IQ nonsense of Dr. James Watson that we debated a year ago, I feel that we better just transfer this subject matter to our footnotes and laugh with scorn at the idiocy of our past that caused and still cause so much pains the moment it is exhumed. If Caucasians are remorseful, they better in honestly consider doing something about slavery reparations. I believe many would not like to start the debate for they feel that it was their grand parents who benefited from slave trade and slavery and not them. Are they sure when financial institutions that abated them are still burgeoning? Who gave them those financial bases? Slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. What became of the money those parents banked with their banks and other investments they still benefit from hitherto?

Check my forthcoming WHO IS AFRICAN AMERICAN? CROSSING RACIAL BARRIERS with Bianco@belnet.ca publishing house for a comprehensive discussion of this sticky subject matter.

Dr. Viban Viban NGO is the author of Before you Leave For Europe and North America: A Rough Companion Guide For (African) Students; Shadows of Fire, etc.



SEX, RACE, AND IQ: Off Limit

by Sharon Begley


Granted, the study of racial and sex differences in intelligence has not exactly covered itself in glory. There was that unfortunate incident in the mid-20th century, when British psychologist Cyril Burt apparently made up data to "prove" that genes make blacks and the poor innately less intelligent than whites and the wealthy. Later studies reaching similar conclusions were based on statistics that would have done Mark Twain ("lies, damned lies …") proud. But does this sorry record warrant the scientific equivalent of the death penalty for such research? That's what some scientists are arguing. In a heated debate that began in the journal Nature and spread online, they are calling for an end to research on possible links between race, gender and intelligence. "Stupid science" and "evil science" are the more polite terms being hurled. But the arguments for and against the research are not what you'd expect.

Political correctness—as in, it's offensive and destructive to even ask if women as a group, say, are less intelligent than men—doesn't merit more than a brief nod, thank goodness. Instead, argues neuroscientist Steven Rose of Britain's Open University, the problem is that both race and IQ are slippery concepts. Standard measures of intelligence are ridiculously flexible. In the 1930s and 1940s, for instance, when girls kept outscoring boys, IQ tests were repeatedly adjusted to make the results turn out "right." That calls into question what studies of intelligence actually measure, and whether it's too easy to choose and massage data to produce desired results. Worse, "race" in the sense of Caucasian, Asian and African is too broad to capture anything biological, including genetic differences. Only smaller groupings based on geographic ancestry (Basque, !Kung, Inuit …) do. Since each "race" is a hodgepodge of ancestries, it's as hard to draw meaningful conclusions about how it relates to intelligence as it is to draw meaningful conclusions about food and allergies by studying a stew with 27 ingredients.

As for sex, there are indeed structural and biochemical differences between male and female brains. But since boys and girls, and men and women, live very different lives and are treated differently first by parents and then by society, it's impossible to attribute those differences to innate biology rather than experience. That is especially true now that discoveries in neuroplasticity have shown that brains of any age can change their structure and function in response to experience. Even the visual cortex, which you'd think is pretty hard-wired, can switch from processing sight to processing touch if you are blindfolded for just five days.

Kudos to defenders of studies of how intelligence varies by race or sex for basing their case on something other than the obvious grounds of academic freedom. Instead, they argue, the studies must continue because of the wealth of important knowledge they produce. In the 1960s, for instance, psychologist Arthur Jensen presented evidence that African-Americans are inferior in intellect due to inherited genes. That prompted psychologist James Flynn of the University of Otago, New Zealand, to examine decades of IQ data from dozens of countries, something he never would have done without Jensen's work to goad him. He discovered what is now called the Flynn effect. One of the most fascinating phenomena in psychology, the Flynn effect is the increase in IQ scores over the last 70 or so years. The increase, of about .3 points per year and as much as 25 points in some countries, reflects generational improvements in abstract problem solving, a product of a more complex, mentally stimulating modern world. The Flynn effect "shows that substantial increases in IQ can and have occurred over a short period of time," says psychologist Wendy Williams of Cornell University. "Genetics cannot explain such changes. Thus we look to environment … As experiences [for blacks] improve, so can and does IQ." That has already happened: one quarter of the IQ gap between black and white Americans has been erased in 30 years (it's now 10 to 15 points). Cultural effects are more powerful than we thought, says Williams, a conclusion that would have remained undiscovered if race and IQ were off limits.

There has been a parallel increase in understanding sex differences in IQ. Boys outnumbered girls 13 to 1 in the top .01 percent of U.S. math scores 30 years ago; now that's down to 2.8 to 1, providing more evidence for culture's effect on intelligence, in this case evolving beliefs about what girls can be good at. The fact that experience shapes the brain, and that girls' and boys' experiences are different so their brain differences might be the result of different experiences, seems less like an argument against studying sex and IQ than a fascinating research project: how do sex-specific experiences leave a footprint in the folds of the cortex?

If race-IQ studies are viewed as the third rail of psychology, many scientists who might answer questions like that will stay away from them. That will leave the field to those whose agenda is to prove women and blacks intellectually inferior. If that happens, warns Flynn, they will win the debate "because the rest of us have all adopted a policy of unilateral disarmament." On this fraught issue, science must not give up without a fight.


FORWARDED ON 12/04/09

SOS CULTURAL CLASHES IN THE NSO' KINGDOM, WEST AFRICA

S.O.S CULTURAL CLASHES IN NSO' KINGDOM, WESTERN AFRICA

I was sleeping to get up and find this wild fire, call it Cultural Clashes of Westernism versus Africanism ignited again. The good thing is that it is not the first time and will not be the last as people do not learn. Traditional and Western values had existed side by side since the days of the German Fathers in the Cameroons, Mill Hill in the British Cameroons and local Fathers and independent governments of Cameroon Republic. These authorities just let the local go on with their traditions and that is what UNESCO advocates. The German Fathers (1884-1915) took delight in them and studied all. They found out that there were similarities with Christianity and that formed the bases of their evangelization. The displays of jujus are part and parcel of Nso' traditional religion in Western Africa as elsewhere in Africa, call it beliefs. Other aliens used to call it paganism. On a closer observation, Father John Emonts, SCJ (1910s) remarked that the Nso’ elements were worshiping one supreme God but that they had personal gods, akin to guardian angels in Western global religion, Christianity.

Neither Fr. Emonts nor the German officials who were sometimes hawkish went after the Nso'people to abandon their beliefs. They invited the supreme ruler of Nso', King Ngah to OLD NKAR, we now call Shisong a corruption of (Mission Station) and paid him return visits. They exchanged gifts and recruited princes and princesses to attend Western Schools and enrolled with the Catholic Church to learn doctrine. The German fathers accepted the King's role as the leader of the religious beliefs of Nso' Kingdom. There was peace from the 1910s until hitherto when an Senior Divisional Officer (SDO) who hails from Bamum in the Western Region representing Cameroon Republic government challenged the displays of masqueraders at one of the wards of Kumbo town, the capital of Nso' Kingdom called the Squares. The inhabitants did not take it lightly and have not stopped protesting on the Internet and local media.

On cultural clashes, who can say it better than Kenjo wan Jumbam in his novel The White Man of God when the Rev. Father, one of the characters unmasked the masquerader and found out that it was his Catechist who had assumed it. Father got the shock of his life and fainted. Did he fire the Catechist from his post in the Church when he recovered? You may now draw your conclusions.

When we look at the Old Testament, there are no differences from what Nso' religion of the past was and perhaps is still though modified to move abreast with modernism. When I make this statement I do not want to go down in history as being one who stated that Africans should abandon Christianity or whatever alien religious belief they feel like following. It should be complementary and relevant parts of them that could be adapted and adopted. As adults, Africans have their rights to pursue the beliefs they like. That is the free will. Let no one stand on any podium to say that his was better that that or that. That is what cause wars where Arabs and Africans met because Islam wants to tell others that their religious beliefs are supreme. Are they? If they are, who gave them that sort of information? I am a Catholic and I feel that is it the best but I am not going to impose it on my fellow Nsonites (Nso') nor condemn what others follow, Nsotology, Nso' religious beliefs which is, and will be as God was not sleeping when He created it and its believers.

Let me now come to what the SDO who hails from Bamum to the south of Bui County has done out of what others may think as naivety. For those of us reading for the first time, this debacle started when the SDO, the authority representing the Cameroon Republic in the former British Cameroons, variously called now The Southern Cameroons (Ambazonia) asked for a ban of displaying of masqueraders at a place called the Squares in Nso' Kingdom in that region. It is the government of occupation’s attempt to strip The Southern Cameroons of its roots so as to easily assimilate them as they have been doing since 1961. From the passion of the people of this area that I know at close quarters, his life could be made a living hell in Nso' or those of his cohorts if he does not withdraw his statement or pack his bag and baggage and go home to Yaunde, the head office of the Cameroon Republic. Traditional beliefs are more than a passion particular when the season for their reenactment in April is approaching. It is their religious belief and to challenge it is to challenge the Nso' soldiers and their ruler who to them is above the Western government that is alien in the region. I am seeing the Brazilian and the UK governments banning annual carnivals that are tourist attractions in impoverished areas. They generate so much revenue that the stoic government of the day underestimates. What industries are there in these regions and what do they of Yaunde want to replace Nso’ carnival with? French dances? Good for assimilation so as to continue to set on Southern Cameroons as hyenas after their preys.

Even Father James Nielen, a Dutch Mill Hill accepted Kikum masqueraders at St. Augustine's College in the 1960s. Was he not a Catholic Priest and is St. Augustine's College that has turned our nuns and priests not Roman Catholic? Did he see the need to ban traditional beliefs because they were pagan things? No. This was a learned man of God with a doctorate degree and did what he had to do after careful consideration and not out of sentiments.

I saw that after the death of Papa Somo, Fai wo Koffi, a senator in that Kingdom, there was the kikum that led the procession after the requiem mass from the church to Banka compound. What was happening? I saw the Holy Mass being Ngonsonized by late Father Losha and Father James Neilen we saw above and many others. Rome was not against it as it had given its blessing to traditional masses. It was no longer the Latin services that made Christians to recite prayers in Latin and did not know what they were saying was done the traditional way copying the traditional ways of worshiping. All was gradually being vernacularized and see where we are today. The Christian worshiping is not as boring as it used to be and masqueraders dance at the offertories in Catholic Churches in Nso'. Where is the problem? Who told anyone that God who gave the Nso' that tradition will not accept their worship?


THERE ARE THREE CODE OF LAWS IN NSO' KINGDOM

Let me not go too far away from the SDO. There are three laws in Southern Cameroons, namely, the English laws, the traditional laws and the “enforced” French laws. The rulers from Yaunde are aware of all these. You can now see where the SDO whose name we did not get as we went to the press is going wrong. The UNESCO can never agree with this man of the Government of Cameroon interfering in the traditional beliefs of Nso' or any other tribe for the spurious reason that they impede the flow of traffic. Has he and his cohorts ever seen the Nothinghill Canival in London, UK, the Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, the Kankoran in Mbour, Senegal when young men are being taken away from the Secret Forest. Portions of the area where they are held come to a stand still, not only for one day but for days and sometimes for weeks. The Nso’ traditional displays had been before Cameroun Republic and there is no question of banning it for whatever reason. They create jobs, entertain the public and are peaceful. To the UNESCO, these traditional displays are as relevant as Westernism that the SDO, the man of the Government is representing. The government official may look at it arrogantly as decadence. D.O. Sule who held from Fumban from could not dream of issuing such a statement for he knew that he would be touching the cultural roots of the Nso People and consequently that of Southern Cameroons that is being assimilated. He shook the wasps' nest for no other reason other than pride and attempt to skin Nso' of its beliefs as they have done of the region's politics and economic development. What do they want?

You could be arrested and imprisoned for infringing any of the three laws mentioned above. If some one could prove that you are killing him with your witchcraft, you could be tried in the traditional court and imprisoned or fined. We still have litigation or cases being held in palaces around and some defaulters are whipped mercilessly or imprisoned as stipulated by the traditional laws. People have trust in traditional laws and beliefs than in most Western courts of law. Because men like the SDO in question, his police and gendarmes take bribes and there is nothing called justice in their courts. Hence people have more faith in traditional beliefs and laws than in what some see as Western chicaneries.

The naive SDO who hails from Bamum forgot that he is perhaps the 50th DO in Nso'. Even the German SDOs, British that used to come all the way from Bamenda dared not touch the Nso' laws or traditional beliefs. If an Ngwerong (police personae) is walking along and you do not do what every Nso' man is supposed to do, you could be bull whipped by the Ngwerong. There will be no court in the Southern Cameroons that is being ruled by Cameroon Republic represented by officials of this SDO genre that will prosecute a Ngwerong who is a Nso' official regulator. Why? It is because a traditional law has been infringed. Similarly, if a masquerade is displaying at Buea or Mamfe, Santa, Otu, We, Wum or Ndian and an Nso' man does not do as the locals or natives there do, they have the right to punish him or her. Do not play the game of naivety by saying that you do not know. Be in Chicago, London or Abudja and commit a crime. Will you expect to go free because you did not know the rules, by-laws or laws of the state or country? Remember when you are in Rome you must do what the Romans do. Mr. SDO, Nso' is no exception.
Thanks for reading.

Dr. Viban Viban Ngo.

PS: Now go to the commentary section and write for us the situation in your kingdom, tribe or country. Let us keep the debate alive. If we are stripped of our tradition, what else do we have?

COMMENTING ON ARAB-AFRICAN RELATIONSHIP

By Viban Viban Ngo, PhD

I never read an article twice but I did read the appended article, "Arabs in Africa" by an augural writer Naiwu Osahon, not only once but thrice. Ideally, one is supposed to read seven times if one has to be in terms with the writer. Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of time and patience and want to read once and put on a period. I will urge all and sundry to read this at least once as it will make us learn something of the rocky relationship of full-blooded Africans and African Arabs and perhaps ponder upon what could be done to improve it.

Africa is the original home of man. Those who migrated to temperate climes from Africa and assume light complexions do for various reasons have feelings that they are different from their mothers and fathers who are strictly speaking full-blooded Africans. They do so for lack of scientific knowledge and unfounded doctrines inculcated on them in the past by pseudo Europeans scientists. The differences those scientists of hate toyed to articulate were erroneously fanned by pseudo scientists like Charles Darwin and many others who indirectly triggered racism [interested readers will read all in my forthcoming work, WHO IS AFRICAN AMERICAN?] This was subsequently followed by overt slavery and slave trade, colonialism and tragically today by the sticky neocolonialism that is helping to further under-develop Africa as compared with other continents.

My readers are urged to read this article so as to understand the naivety of some of their light-skinned brothers and sisters who sometimes think that they have different sort of blood in their bodies and those of full-blooded Africans are of inferior qualities. Some believe that they have different souls from Africans and perhaps a different heaven to go there when they will say adieu to this world. Is that true? This is an impertinent error. Call it bogus metaphysics!! You will know that it is not the truth. The truth is what is scientific and their theories or ruses can never be accepted by true scientists or pure believers in God. The outcome of their theories on race that can never be defended is racial discrimination that hurts feelings of the discriminated. It poisons the discriminated and their relationship with the super intelligentsia, the discriminators. That is not good for the world after us. Do we cut the bridge after traversing a turbulent river?

This discrimination had been the source of evil around the world. and this is not a modern day issue. The American fought revolutionary wars among themselves to stamp out the cancerous racism and the two World Wars have been essentially caused by racial discrimination. Then why does man allow this monster to linger on? Racial discrimination has triggered internecine conflicts that have been going on in the Sudan since the 1960s with ugly phrases as in Darfur, and the southern Sudan, "Equatoria " and else where. The case of the Sudan is because light skinned Arabs use color of one's skin as once did Europeans since the 14th Century as a pivot of discrimination for their economic domination of full-blooded Africans. We cannot fail to mention the Rwandan pogrom against the light-skinned Tutsis and the darker skinned Bantu Africans, Hutus. Color had something to do. Europeans who colonized the zone favored the Tutsis who sat on the Hutus for decades without remorse. Color or race was the remote cause of the massacre in this central African paradise in 1994 and perhaps not the fact that they had a military Hutu dictator President Juvenel Habyarimana [1973-1994] backed by the French government of Francois Mitterrand against the incumbent President Paul Kagame alleged to be a military genius.

Sadly, racism is subtly going on by assuming various guises even in those areas where millions died because of it before. Racial discrimination has been practiced by Arabs against full-blooded Africans as their economic stratagems to covet all the wealth from full-blooded Africans who are supposed to be at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. Are they? Who created this racial hierarchy of man when he is from one parentage? It was fabricated by proponents of "race" of mankind. If man emanated from one man and one woman, why should their relationship be talked of in terms of race? If your brother is light skinned and you are dark skinned does that make you to be of a different race or better race than his or hers? Who set criteria for the definition of race or races?

With wars caused by the alleged differences in races taking priority instead of pursuing economic developments, African states whose borders abut those of Arab Africans are ever pushed backwards because they divert their economic resources towards the defense of their countries. This is further acerbated by religious conflicts we need not dwell into them today. Owing to the fact that full-blooded Africans are considered by undisclosed Arab criteria as lower in the racial echelon, they are considered backward and cannot be given lucrative jobs even if they are qualified. This leads to bitter feelings and the only way out of the melee is to fight. It is for this reason that there is ever tension in Mauritania, Chad, and the Sudan and others mentioned in the aforementioned article where these two ethic communities live side by side.

Could the Arab accept the fact that the color of the skin is just for the protection of man and it has nothing to do with the quality of man and his or her intellectual capacities? Has anyone ever asked why blond blue-eyed persons are not born in the heart of the tropics but in the temperate lands? Have they ever asked why the swarthy skinned are concentrated in the tropical zones of the world and not in the temperate or tundra zones? Do they sincerely believe that the Creator, God or let those non-believers call it evolution made it possible for stupid men to only concentrate in the tropics or Africa?

Have they ever heard of African inventors and geniuses? I guess they will call that mavericks! Why does the chameleon change its color to suit its immediate environment? Why the ptarmigan does changes its color to blend with the white snow in winter and revert to brownish complexion in summer? Why do must tree snakes that live on birds assume green as that of green leaves colors instead of the brown as most desert snakes or ground snakes? Why do blacks or swarthy skinned persons turn light skinned in the temperate zone in winter? Why do pinkish persons or "whites" turn darkish upon their exposure to the direct rays of the sun? [Why are Africans in the open Savannah or Sahel swarthier and those in the forested zones where they are protected from the sun rays light-skinned? ] What happens if they are living in the sunny zones not only for thousands of years but for millions of years? Would their genes not fashion them to assume darkish complexion so as to protect them from skin cancers and other skin diseases? Why do albinos born in the tropics easily die from skin cancer?

Have you learned anything from a barrage of questions I have posed? The persons who believes that all men stemmed from one person whose original home was Africa will know why but those who do not even believe and have no scientific backings will still say that a light skinned person is more of a human being than a darkish skinned individual.

The Arabs who have in the past assimilated many African slaves and some Caucasians who still feel that a black person was inferior to them because of his dark skin will fall into this category of false scientists. Are they right? Of course they are wrong. There are no scientific underpinnings even though from time to time in order to feel good some pseudo scientist would come up with bogus theories that Caucasians are better intellectually than Africans or dark-skinned peoples. Are they? Of course not. People who insist on this allegation yearn for a third world war that will wipe out the entire earth and there will be no bones left like those of dinosaurs. Therefore, no reasoning person should ever think of race and discrimination of one based on color of the skin. Tomorrow they will stand up to say that all dark-skinned dogs be destroyed as they were inferior to white or brown skinned ones. Is that not what Adolf Hitler did before your very eyes? Can you link it with apartheid in South Africa and what is happening now between the Jews State of Israel and the Arab world? It is the evil of racial discrimination that started all that we are seeing today in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza strip, Palestine. It should be the concern of all who believe in posterity to stamp out racial discrimination where it exists for whatever reasons.

Finally, I want to see an Arab who will put up his or her hand to tell me that he has not got a drop of full-blooded African blood in him or her system? I want him or her to throw the first stone on his brother or sister he audaciously calls an untouchable "black" man who can only be denigrated in his house as a servant and at worst a slave. From my perspective, the article should have been entitled "Arabs at Home" and not Arabs in Africa for reasons I have underlined.

Dr. Viban Viban Ngo.

ARABS IN AFRICA

By NAIWU OSAHON

Egypt is still so intimidated by its glorious Black African past that its Arab government would not allow thorough research into Egypt’s past. President Gamal Abdel Nasser falsified Egyptian history when he declared Egypt an Arab Republic. Egyptian authorities refused to allow American film makers to make a film on the life of Anwar Sadat in Egypt on the ground that the actor chosen for Sadat’s role was black. When Morocco left the OAU in 1984, it aspired to become a member of the European Union.

In Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, Mauritania and the rest of the Arab world, Africans are treated as the scum of the earth.. They are second-class citizens at the very best in their own countries. Blacks in these countries cannot aspire to positions of respect or aut hority. There are hardly Africans in high government positions in Arab governed African countries. Like Brazil, which is just as racially cruel against their black natives, there is no legislation favouring slavery (except in Mauritania). It is simply a way of life that’s all. Blacks do not really exist or at best are not humans.

Mauritania left the Economic Community of West African States to join the union formed by the Arab North African States. A few years ago, Mauritania sacked all black natives from their civil service positions. Black Mauritanians protest their plight to the African Union (AU) without receiving attention, because AU black leaders fear offending their Arab colleagues in the AU. In Mauritania, they have had to declare an end to slavery six times in this century alone, and still nothing has changed for the captive majority African natives. African slavery is still in their statute books. African slavery in Mauritania is what the on going quarrel between Mauritania and Senegal is about. The quarrel forced black African refugees to pour across the border from Mauritania into Senegal.

In Algeria, Arabs throw stones at black people, including diplomats, in markets and other public places. To quote Prof. Clarke, “Arabs always act as though they are not in Africa. Once when I was visiting Egypt, I told my Egyptian Arab host to get a cab ready for the next morning that I was going to Kenya. ‘So you are going to Africa to visit your people? We got no diseases here, why are you leaving us?” the host asked. Even across the Red Sea, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, blacks are treated worse than animals, after using their life’s savings to go there on pilgrimage.

Hundreds of blacks who have lived all their lives in Saudi Arabia are being repatriated daily right now, after loosing an arm or leg for some minor or trumped up offense and without regard for their comfort, welfare or rights. Racism towards black Moslems in Saudi Arabia is so strong it makes one wonder if making pilgrimage to Mecca should be one of the five pillars of the Muslim faith, and why blacks bother to be Muslim.

Col. Gadhafi saw vicious white racism in the tragic death in August 1997, of Princess Diana of Wales, the mother of a future king of England, and her Arab lover. What no one remembered to ask Gadhafi was whether he himself was disposed to allowing any daughter of his to marry even the richest black man in the world let alone a black Libyan. If one were to ask Gadhafi why Africans are not high up in his government, he might balk that all Libyans are Africans. In that case, one should go and find out the truth for oneself in the poor sections of town. One would be shocked by the plight of our African kith and kin that constitute the bulk of the population in oil rich Libya and other Northern African countries similarly afflicted with Arab racism. While pretending to champion pan-African interest, he is busy getting rid of black immigrants from Li bya.

On 9 May, 1997, in flagrant defiance of a UN embargo on flights in and out of Libya, Col. Gadhafi invaded Nigeria with his planes carrying 1,000 members of his rag-tag army, plus 500 journalists. They strategically occupied the Kano airport and his other reception facilities, with the connivance of the Nigerian Muslim dictator host. The purpose was to launch a jihad in supposedly religiously secular Nigeria, or at least precipitate a serious schism between the predominantly Moslem north of the country and the Christian and animist south. Right now the Moslem world is trying to use ‘Sharia’ to dismember Nigeria. Pakistan, Libya and Saudi Arabia, to name a few, have pumped substantial funds into Zamfara, the first of Nigeria’s Sharia states, to start the process of Islamizing, (or at least trigger mayhem and civil war), in Nigeria as in Sudan.

No nation in Africa has suffered more in the hands of the Arabs than Ethiopia. It has been going on since Arabs first invaded Africa in the 7th century CE. Recently, with Libya supporting the people of Eritrea, they destroyed the basic structure of Ethiopia, to cut her from the sea and weaken this section of Africa, and eventually all of Africa, for further Arabization. They did this mercilessly with religion.

In the last 38 years, Gadhafi at one time or the other, tried to force Libya’s unification with Egypt, Algeria etc, and has continued the effort since with Sudan. He forcibly annexed the Auzon Strip from Chad,=2 0and sponsored destabilization in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Mali, Cote d’ Ivoire, Niger, etc in pursuance of his Arabization of Africa policy, laced with inordinate imperial personal ambition. In 1998, his strategy got a fillip with the founding of his community of Sahel-Savannah States (CEN – SAD), which he was hoping to use to control the envisaged African Union (AU). The CEN – SAD, at the moment, ropes in 25 African states from West, East, and Central Africa, and includes Senegal, Cote d “Ivoire, Chad, Sudan, Somalia, Comoro Islands etc. Most of these unsuspecting African countries were stable until they joined CEN – SAD.

Col. Muammar Gadhafi pushed desperately for a United States of Africa government to be approved, set up, and launched right there and then, at the 9th ordinary Session of the Assembly of the heads of states of the African Union (AU), held in July 2007, in Accra, Ghana..

He has heightened his Arabization policy pursuit at the AU level since 2001, pretending to be promoting the Pan-African agenda of Kwame Nkrumah. Chinweizu, the renowned scholar, described Gadhafi’s Arab-Black Africa government plan at the time, “as unification of nigger monkey with python.” Arabs themselves divide Africa into North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa to instigate a division and as long as the invaders continue to occupy our land and treat us as slaves in North Africa, the two segments of the continent cannot cohabit.

In a paper pr esented at the meeting of the Arab league in Amman, Jordan, in 2001, Muammar Gadhafi spelt out the Arabization agenda against Africa in language reminiscent of Adolph Hitler’s Lebensraum, (Hitler’s sick obsession to secure a living space for political and economic expansion in Europe) for the Germans, (the superior race). Gadhafi in his address during the Amman’s Arab conference invited his Arab brothers outside of Africa to come to Africa in the following words. “The third of the Arab community living outside Africa should move in with the two-thirds (about 250 million) on the continent, and join the African Union, which is the only space we have.”

Gadhafi’s unbridled urge in modern times to enlarge Arabia inside Africa, is a continuation of the Arab war against Africans and the Arabization of African lands that started in the 7th century CE. Arabs have since settled on one-third of Africa, pushing continuously southwards towards the Atlantic Ocean. Arabs’ racial war against black Africa started with their occupation and colonization of Egypt between 637 and 642 CE, decimating the Coptic or black population.

Between 642 and 670 CE, more Arab invaders poured into Africa and occupied areas known today as Tunisa, Libya, Algeria and Morocco, where they physically eliminated most of the native (Berber) inhabitants. The Berbers that escaped death ran westwards and southwards towards the Sahara. In the 11th century CE, fresh Arab migrants of nomadic origin, migrate d into North Africa to displace and drive the remaining pastoral Berbers deeper into the Sahara desert. With Arab consolidation and backing in Northern Africa, new waves of Arab invaders and migrants pushed deeper into the Nile banks, inhabited then by the Nilotic Shiluk, and continued all the way down to where Dueim stands today, belonging then to the Dinka and Furnawi autochthons. The entire territory was known at the time as Bilad as-Sudan (the Arabic for land of the Blacks), and currently includes the Republic of Sudan. Continuing with their Arabization of African land policy through elimination, displacement, separation, marginalization and suppression, the Arab invaders of Bilad as-Sudan, over the passage of time, decimated the population of (the Nilotic Shiluk, Dinka and Furnawi autochthons) , owners of the land, and pushed to restrict the rest waiting for elimination to Darfur area and the South of the country, which the Arab invaders are now intent on taking from the native Black Africans. This is the genesis of the war in Sudan. It is a racial war. The Arabs want the Republic of Sudan, which by land mass is the largest country in Africa, to be an entirely Arab state, by exterminating the Black native population gradually to the last person.

The war in Sudan is our modern day Haiti war in terms of black liberation, and our recent fight against apartheid. Arabs are carrying out ethnic cleansing right now in Southern Sudan, with the financial support of the Arab world, particularly Libya and Saud i Arabia. China is backing them against Africa. The Janjaweed, with Sudanese and Arab governments’ backing, are trying to wipe out the black population so as to expropriate their lands, but Africans, including Nigerians, do not know where their interests should reside. The Arabs succeeded in doing the same thing in Northern Africa where the original Nubian African owners of the land have almost all been wiped out and the rest marginalized (enslaved) by their Arab invaders/settlers since 642 CE.

Islamization is not the problem in Sudan because the majority Furnawi people of Darfur are Moslems. Arabs do not consider Black Moslems authentic or of consequence. At best, they concede to blacks, the role of ordained slaves or animals, to be used as beasts of burden by the “superior Arab race.” The rule applies to all blacks, whether Moslems or non-Moslems and whether of Nigerian (Hausa/Fulani or Yoruba extractions) , Tanzanians, Ugandans, Malians or African-Americans.

A traveller in Sudan observed in 1930 that “In the eyes of the Arab rulers of Sudan, the black slaves were simply animals given by Allah to make life of Arabs comfortable.” Osama Bin Laden, in a discussion with the Sudanese-American novelist, Kola Boof, in Morocco in 1996 said, “when next you meet an Arab, you should ask what is the Arabic word for slave, you’ll discover that the words are the same “abeed.” Which is why, when an Arab looks at a black African, what he sees is a sla ve.”

In 1962, the Arab Sudanese General, Hassan Beshir Nasr, while flagging off his troops to the war front against black Africans in South Sudan, declared: “We don’t want these black slaves…….what we want is their land.” Arabs’ attitude to blacks derives from Genesis’ racist fiction of the three sons of Noah – Ham, Japheth and Shem. Arabs claim that “the accursed Ham was the progenitor of the black race; that Japheth begat the full-faced, small eyes Europeans, and that Shem fathered the handsome of face with beautiful hair Arabs,” of course.

A coalition of 50 charities in Darfur, Sudan, published a study in mid December, 2008, confirming what the world already knew that the Janjaweed and the Sudanese army, with the backing of their government, during joint or individual attacks, raped, tortured and killed Sudanese Africans and razed their villages to repopulate them with Arab nomads. They rounded up and abducted escapees from hide-outs in the bush, and at other times raided refugee camps to kidnap Africans as sex and labour slaves, working them to the bones as domestic and farm labour. The army flew their captives in planes to Khartoum at night and shared them among soldiers, like you allocate bags of commodities, and used them as sex and domestic servants. Kidnapped victims interviewed, said their captors told them that ‘they were not human beings and that they were there to serve them.’

In the five years b etween 2003 and 2008, over 300,000 Sudanese Africans were killed, 100,000 abducted and 2.7 million rendered homeless refugees, with their land appropriated by Arabs. The Khatoum government admitted 14,000 kidnaps. You can imagine what happened when the world turned a blind eye on Sudan, in the twenty years between 1983 when the conflict began, and 2003. You have to ask yourself what African leaders are doing in AU with Arabs. Arabs are Africans’ mortal foes.

Al Qaeda’s bombing of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, left 260 black civilians that included 12 Americans, dead. Over 4,000 Kenyans and Tanzanians were wounded. A remorseless top Arab journalist justified the attack by quoting Stalin: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

Ibn Sina (Avicenna 980–1037), Arab’s most famous and influential philosopher/ scientist in Islam, described blacks as “people who are by their very nature slaves.” He wrote: “All African women are prostitutes, and the whole race of African men are abeed (slave) stock.” He equated black people with “rats plaguing the earth.”

Ibn Khaldum, an Arab historian stated that “Blacks are characterized by levity and excitability and great emotionalism,” adding that “they are every where described as stupid.”

al-Dimashqi, an Arab pseudo scientist wrote, “the Equator is inhabited by communities of blacks who may be numbere d among the savage beasts. Their complexion and hair are burnt and they are physically and morally abnormal. Their brains almost boil from the sun’s heat…..”

Ibn al-Faqih al-Hamadhani painted this no less horrid picture of black people, “…..the zanj (the blacks) are overdone until they are burned, so that the child comes out between black, murky, malodorous, stinking, and crinkly-haired, with uneven limbs, deficient minds, and depraved passions…..”

NAIWU OSAHON Hon. Khu Mkuu (Leader, Pan-African Movement world-wide); Ameer Spiritual (Spiritual Prince) of the African race; MSc. (Salford); Dip.M.S; G.I.P.M; Dip. I.A (Liv.); D. Inst. M; G. Inst. M; G.I.W.M; A.M.N.I.M.

Awarded: Key to the City of Memphis, Tennessee, USA; Honourary Councilmanship, Memphis City Council; Honourary Citizenship, County of Shelby; Honourary Commissionership, County of Shelby, Tennessee and a silver trophy from Morehouse College, Atlanta, USA

Choice of Map Projections for World Charts by European Cartographers was not a deliberate attempt to falsify the actual size of Africa

What stirred this article was the allegation that Robinson Global Map Projection deliberately falsified the actual size of the Continent of Africa and its Islands. Writing this is my attempt to explain in lay terms the scientific analysis and to calm down what could stem from naivety to further strain an already apparently strained relationship of Europe and North America and Africans. A good number of Africanists and African intellectuals do feel that Africa could have been better off had it not been plundered by colonialists employing various stratagems. This is better explicated by Dr. Walter Rodney in his work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. It is true. Nevertheless, a school of thought that is for the fact that Africa was portrayed to look smaller than is apparently is as still European institutionalized attempt to perpetually put Africa in its backward position against other continents is disputed as gross exaggeration that cannot be scientifically backed.


The forum's missive appended below has raised a couple of issues
1. The place of Europe on the Robinson Projection World Chart and
2. The cardinal roles Europeans played or are playing in the domination of the rest of the world.
3. Your analysis is that ideally, Africa should have been playing such a dominant role by virtue of the large size of Africa on the globe.

There are approximately nine cardinal map projections that are used to drawn maps, charts and other representation of part or the entire world on two dimensional formats. A projection is a convenient way to present the entire world or part of the world on two dimensional or even three dimensional formats for the ease of reading the information that is put on the map or chart by the map maker who is generally called a cartographer. It is called a projection for it is assumed that a light source at the center of the globe projects a shadow on to a flat surface. The picture thus projected is drawn to scale. The choice of the projection and scale will depend upon the purpose of the map and the global location of the area, the size and shape of the region or country to be projected.


Many other projections have come up and there are no shortages of more in the pipeline. With the proliferation of computer technology and our ability to carry out mathematical calculations that could not be done with ease in the past, more projections are added or some existing once are modified for various purposes. At the present we have some 144 map projections. This topic is vast and is covered by entire text books. (Interested readers may surf the net to read some of them and their uses). I believe that browsing them is crucial if we are not to return to this topic sometimes in the future because we are not conversant with their use and even their origin. Instead of sounding false alarms that once more Africans and other continents are being cheated by Caucasians we should rather praise, commend, copy and customize the ingenuity of Europeans who came out with these devices that are vitally important in spatial development.


Sadly Africans nation states’ governments do not take scientific mapping seriously and mapping since the departure of Europeans after their independence collapsed in a good number of African countries. The old topographic maps badly need revamping. With the past bitter experience of colonialism and sadly neocolonialism, I am not certain that Africans still want to wait for Europeans and Americans, now the Chinese and Indians to come and help then in this regard. Africans better know that if they do not take the initiatives to work for themselves those they invite will not necessarily do what they expect to be done.


Some African governments are still of the conviction that spatial planning can be done without serious scientific topographic maps or plans. Others are complaisant that with the Google earth maps they assume could solve their problems of planning and development. From personal experience not all areas are covered in high resolutions and conventional mapping are still required as never before. At least they are able to see how badly planned their cities are from these pictures if at all they have time to look at these beautiful satellite covers without politicking.


Neglecting mapping has its repercussion. Politicians who have power to implement geographic projects are incubating planning problems for the next generations. Africans got to accept that they have to marry some European scientific ways of doing things or perpetually remain behind and cry wolf whenever there are economic debacles or when they are getting frustrated. They have to attempt to leave colonial history behind after learning from it as throughout the history of the world no nation had ever lived without being invaded or colonized.


Choice


The choice of the projection to be used will depend on what the map is intended to do or used for. The projection you are interested in is Robinson. That can be seen on the following site http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/world_maps/world_rel_803005ai_2003.jpg. If you have time to examine all the suggested 144 projections carefully you will discover that there are some that have portrayed Africa more favorably than Europe. If it is for navigation, it may use the Mercator projection which is cylindrical. Why? It is because it is better in the portrayal of the seascapes unlike say landscapes. This tends to emphasize on the lower and middle latitudes where most of the world main seas or naval activities are concentrated. Therefore sailors ask for this projection to plot in their routes their ocean liners will follow. Since the northern and southern polar zones are not used as such, these zones tend to be exaggerated. It is for this reason that the British Isles tend to look bigger on this projection than say India which is several times bigger than the Isles. When you even look at Greenland on this projection, it is apparently larger than the continent of Africa. In the true specification, Greenland is almost of the same size as the Island of Madagascar to the south east of the continent of Africa. I hope my explanation has started making sense to many of us? If not I will continue further.


You will see from the list of projections that there are principally, there are three types of projection surfaces: the plane, cone and cylinder. With the plane you have to imagine and orange that is placed on a rectangular surface. Now peel the part that is torching the center of a rectangle so that you are able to straighten the peel to lie flat on the flat rectangle. The area that touches the orange when you had not peel it will be the equal area of the orange. As you move from that center to the top or bottom after opening the peel, the peel will not give the true picture of the original orange. Why? It is because it does not take the original shape since it has been straightened. The area from the center to the bottom or top of the orange will give an exaggerated size of the original orange but the area at the center will constantly given you the exact surface of the orange before it was peeled. This is the basis for the Mercator’s Projection. This projection is necessary and good for navigation because at the equatorial zone or the area of the 35 degree north and south of the Equator were the areas mostly used by the ship in the past and even today. They needed the exact measurement in this zone and that is why this is ideal for navigation.


The next is the cone. Under conic shaped ones we have eleven projections to chose from. I will continue to use my citrus fruit for illustration. Imagine that your orange is capped by a cone and it is sitting on your dinning table. If you peel that orange now from the lower end torching the table to the sharp or conical end and attempt to place it on the ground flat, you will see that the areas at the topmost end will be smaller and from there going down to the table it will expand until it is so broad. Which area will produce the exact size of the orange as it appears in reality? It will be the area that is lies between latitudes 40 and say 60. Climbing up to the topmost end, the North Pole will give a highly squeezed or reduced size than the original size. Conversely, if you descend from latitude 40 degree above the Equator to the bottom, you will have very exaggerated areas. Those areas here will be bigger than those in the north of the Equator.


Now imagine your citrus fruit now to be a proper flexible globe. The area to the north of latitude 40 degree will be European land. Why would Europeans need this sort of projection? It is necessary to portray the exact sizes of their landscape. If they take the Mercator, it will exaggerate their landscape and that could not be used for navigation, be it used as air or navigational sea charts. Therefore Europeans would need this for producing special maps of their regions and this will not be necessary for say Africa or regions lying to the south of the Equator.


The last and not the least is the cylindrical projection. We have up to seventy of these types and must of them are under pseudo-cylindrical. That means they are not necessarily exact. You are still going to imagine our orange harvested say from Calabar and is put in a cylindrical transparent plastic jar. Imagine that you have place that orange at the center of the jar. The areas of say the equator will be the area that will touch the circular side of the cylinder. It will be like our first case of the orange touching only one side of a rectangle. In this case it will touch all the sides of the cylinder. Carefully open it up and spread it to touch all parts available of the cylinder. This type is equatorial. There areas around our imaginary equator of the orange will touch the jar and we will not need to cut it or straighten it to take shape. However, as soon as we move away from that zone and either move up or down, the areas being shown does not show the exact size as on the orange shell. The farther away we go from our imaginary equator either to the south or north, the larger the areas will become. Therefore, we will not have the true picture of the area the original shell of the orange portrayed when it was still attached to the orange shell. This was the basis for the Mercator projection. In that case, it was not the northern area that was only exaggerated it was also the south. Remember that it is still the same shell of the same orange that was peeled. If this was the basis for the Mercator that we see in our Atlases and on our wall or sea charts many of us had never seen unless we had to go to the admiralty offices of our country or the naval offices. This will give to untutored eyes the picture of Europe, northern Asia, that is, Russia and Northern America, that is Canada exaggerated areas.

Armed with this information , the question we like to ask Africans and Africanists who have the feeling that Europeans exaggerated there countries so as to show Africans that they were coming from bigger countries and were therefore more important than Africans has not scientific underpinning.


Peter’s Projection was not indicated on our list above. This was a projection that was published in 1984 by a German scientist purporting to show the third world countries properly and it caused a sensation in Europe and other cartographic centers. It alleges that it was the only one to portray the true pictures of third world countries unlike the Mercator projection that had exaggerated Europe and North America and denied Africans and other third world countries their proper dimensions. The producer of this was also naïve and had no clue of what cartographic projections were all about. If for instance Nigerian Government used that projection, it was to distort the states. The best for the tropical regions would be the Mercator that woul gave approximately equal areas of the lands


The only true size of the world is the globe. That gives the right size of Africa vis a vis other continents of the world. Therefore, we are better advised to look at the globe in our libraries or the actual pictures of the world that have been corrected. Why do I state so? It is because there are some distortions of the pictures that are taken using cameras mounted on satellites that circulate around the earth and take pictures that are used by scientists for further mapping, remote sensing, Landsat imagery and many more. Others are taken by aircraft that has special cameras that take aerial photographs. These are employed in the production of topographical maps or thematic maps. Others are modified and used directed as in desert areas where details are not required. These are called orthophotomaps. Thematic maps are special purpose maps that are used for several spatial analyses. Among these are populations’ distributions, transport net works, agriculture, and other land uses that require maps for their studies. Topographic map bases are used and some of these details are superimposed.


Africans did map too before European Came

We have just seen that Europeans used maps for their spatial activities and why there are different projections. If Africans did not use them, it was not because they did not like to use them or could not produce them. They had maps in their heads and could navigate on land and in the coastal areas without maps of European makes. The sorts of maps they used were called or are still called mental maps. These were used for their developmental purposes. It does not mean that Africans did not draw maps. There was a King in the Cameroon Republic called King Njoya who actually drew a map or maps of his kingdom without the influence of Europeans. One of his maps was discovered by a German missionary in 1908 and it was sensationally. Prior to this, a good number of European scientists were of the opinion that Africans were incapable of drawing maps. The maps of King Njoya whose kingdom eventually became part of German Cameroons as it was written in those days are still available. The author of this article has documented the stories of the production of his maps and could be read in the following academic journals: The Bulletin of Society of Cartograhers Vol. 32, Part 1 1998, pp11-31; Also vide: Association des Cartotheques et Archieves Cartographiques du Canada Bulletin, Numero 98/Hiver 1997, pp.1-42.


One of the reasons why Africans did not draw maps and charts or were motivated to draw maps and charts as Europeans was that they were not seafarers and were not megalomaniac. They were not interested in having other lands when Africa was still full of empty species Europeans did not know and were longing to have. To start with Europeans population grew by leaps and bounds with industrial revolution stepping in. With stability, and medical advances, it means lower infant mortality and a sudden growth in population. They suddenly had more mouths to feed and needed land and houses to put the swarming population. There was high crime rate and their prisons could not even accommodate all the defaulters. Land had to be sought else where where surplus population was exported. This led to the founding of colonies.


As for the case of Great Britain, it was decided that they send those excess populations to the new territories that they had discovered. There territories were not all that empty. They were occupied by natives whose views of lands were different from those of Europeans. They were not exploiting their lands as Europeans did and did not value land. To many of them land was free for all and they did not see or dream of one having land indefinitely as Europeans. So they easily allowed European to come and settle as friends or long lost cousins who had left Africa before and were coming back.


The same sentiments were expressed by the natives of Australia, North and South Americas, African, Australia, Tasmania, India and some parts of Asia. Where Europeans were not allowed to settle amicably, they used force and settled. Europeans had had industrial advances and could produce sophisticated weapons as muskets, flint locks, powerful crossbows, maxim guns, cannons and others that Africans did not have. When they got engaged in warfare, Africans were easily defeated. This became easy as Africans were inherently fragmented as sadly they are still today. One tribe numbered some 2000 strong sitting next to one that was over a million. If there were alien attacked the one million did not bother coming to help the smaller tribe because they had not had signed treaties of friendship. Europeans invaders exploited this loose relationship that existed in Africa to penetrate and exploit with ease Africa.


Africans had no choice but yielded. Europeans were not only armed with military superiority. They were armed with psychology. Men like Charles Darwin had written books based on pseudo scientific research in which he defended the theses that there was evolution of species. This was dangerous in those days as it dismissed the religious or biblical statement that all creatures were made by God. Therefore evolution was out of question and was heretical. Darwin advanced in his book Origin of Species published in 1859 that all creatures started from being primitive and after which they evolved to superior creatures. He continued that their very survival was based on how best they cope with their environments and other creatures that were fighting for the same habitats with them. Those that were weaker were competed away or completely wiped out. Now imagine this being applied to areas outside Europe by Europeans.


Darwin's doctrine did not find a fertile ground in Western Europe that was predominantly Christian where men like Galileo were excommunicated for saying that the earth was revolving round the sun and not the sun revolving round the earth. The earth was then considered as the center of the universe and a place like Jerusalem was looked upon as its capital. Darwin wrote his Origin of Species and he had the conviction that the book that was defending his theses was going to be published by his wife when he had long died. We conjecture that he was contemplating suicide. He was not prepared to see the backlash that was to be spurred by his publication of such a these.


However for reasons we shall not dwell into, he did not die and his wife went on to publish his book the Origin of Species whose ideas had negative effect on colonialism and imperialism. It became a number one best seller not because of it controversial doctrines. The point as is still today is that some scholars literally translated his doctrine of survival of the fittest to human beings. Europeans were far advanced scientifically. They had got the scientific theories and practices from the Romans and the Romans had got them from the Greek and the Greek from Egyptian who were Africans. The only difference is that Europeans perfected some of it as IT is being perfected by Americans although it had its birth in Europe. Also look at the car industry. The Japanese copied from the European and North Americans and are literally dominating the industries because they could modify and customized and moved with time. There were things Americans had failed to do because they had not foreseen the invasion of the Japanese automobile industries. Let us not digress.


Europeans felt that they were by virtue of their advanced knowledge superior to those they considered inferior races. Therefore they could exploit them for their advantage. Remember this was necessary for survival of their species that was supposed to be superior to those of others in other continents. With "superior" intelligence, they invented things, and perfected others that were already being used. They claimed to have been invented by them and did not even give credit to those who had invented them in the first place. These were Africans the first human beings to inhabit the earth and others were by animals. They perfected navigation and having conquered the seas, they were able to come to Africa and other continents. We learned that when not as friends, they waged wars and conquered the "primitive" races. Africans were once their fathers or fore parents, became primitive inferior races.


The color of Africans did not go well with them after this "false" doctrine of superiority of other races. According to them, a man was to be light-skinned and if he were not so, he was next to an evolved animal. Were they right? In that case he could be treated like an animal. That was not frightening. The moment Africans were not treated as people Europeans were supposed to be but next to animals, it meant that they could be maltreated and killed without remorse. They were equated to animals and 8 Africans were supposed to equal to one white. White was on top of the hierarchy and the colors that were below white in the color scale of man was supposed to be inferior. Europeans who had come to Africa to buy spices called Guineas stumbled on a large population of humble Africans. They had also go to America and stumble upon the aborigines there whom they called West Indians.


Remember Christopher Columbus was looking for the route for East India before he stumbled on East Indians. Why did he have to cross the Atlantic instead of the overland route that was used to bring in spices form East India? The Italians and Arabs who controlled that route were asking so many tributes for the use of their territories to take spices across. These species were used for the preservation of meat that was the favorite dish of the rich in Europe. Remember that there were no fridges. If there were fridges to store meat, spices could not have been sought and perhaps Europeans could not have seen Africans before slavery started. The history of the world could have been different.


One thing that was in demand was sugar that was needed for the production of rum and drinking of tea and coffee. All these emanated from the Far East as well as the spices that came from India. Sugar production was labor intensive and when the Europeans arrived in the Caribbean they needed the labor of the natives and those Europeans who were driven away from Europe because there was no space to accommodate them. These included prisoners who could work in sugar plantations and mines to buy their freedom. Then working in the tropics was exhausting for Europeans who came from the tropical lands. A certain Bishop Las Casas suggested that Africans who were very strong, far stronger than Europeans and Indians who were dying like flies from European diseases could be imported to replace native Indians. His suggestion was out of sympathy but he did not know that it was to lead to transatlantic slave trade and change the history of the world. Whereas Arabs were taking slaves from the interior of Africa, Europeans were taking them from the coastal regions of Africa. It was a lucrative business that started from the 15th century to the 19th century when abolitionists like William Wilberforce of Hull in England stepped out to campaign for the abolition of slavery and slave trade.


As navigation was improved, there was no land that was not known by Europeans. When slavery and slave trade was abolished, Europeans were getting into mass production of goods. They needed territories to feed their gargantuan industries in Europe, and eventually they needed markets. Africa and other new territories they had forcibly obtained by deception of using the Darwinian doctrine of the survival of the fittest were employed. Since the colonized were inferior, theoretically, their languages were inferior; their cultures were inferior, and even their foods and colors were inferior. (We earlier saw that these were psychological tactics employed by Europeans colonialists and it did wonders for them. Armed with this tiny Europe could control the rest of the world).


Therefore in order to be human like the European, the colonized had to shade all his colors, food, culture, everything and become a European in his own land. That was difficult. Why did European colonizers have to adopt these tactics? By doing so, it was easier for them to inculcate in Africans that they were the "chosen" peoples and Africans and Indians and the rest were inferior peoples next to animals. (Were they? Of course not. They knew the answer and what they were doing?) With that attitude a few British were able to conquer and rule with Indirect Rule a mass continent like India and vast territories in Africa.


It was only a far seeing man, Indira Gandhi who had been schooled in South African injustice of the Whites apartheid against Africans that he started to fight for the liberation of India and that continent eventually became independent in 1949. That was to spur men like Dr. Kwame Nkrumah who was castigated by the colonialists who did not want Africans to stand on their feet as a communist. Was he really a communist? Many present independent African nations and other Asian and American nations followed those footsteps of India and what the USA had done to drive away the British (who only remained in Canada) to achieve political independence most of them now know today.


The maps that were often used in geography and history studies were the Mercator and Robinson projections. These portrayed Europe and even bigger than Africa. As said, it gave the true picture of the lower and middle latitudes than other projections. Therefore, when one looked at it, Britain was even bigger than Ghana and Germany was even bigger than the present day Namibia that was their colony in the 1912. As earlier indicated, when you look at India as portrayed by the Mercator projection, two Indians can easily fit into Greenland. That is the fact being distorted to a person reading this chart as equidistant. The fact is that Greenland is smaller than India by far and this is gross exaggeration to a lay person. Iceland is bigger than Guinea Conakry and that is false. Guinea Conakry is bay far larger than Iceland. The point is that towards the poles, the longitudes are exaggerated or elongated thus giving the land areas that false reading.


Conclusions


This is a very long topic but I have tried to demonstrate that the choice of Robinson Projection was not necessarily the intention of Europeans to exaggerate their continent, Europe as being bigger than it is in real life. The present day Democratic Republic of Congo is about the size of Europe. The chosen projections were a matter of scientific convenient. Recall that what is scientific is the truth and not pseudo science or some mumbo-jumbo. If we are not to use the sea for our operation, say navigation, fishing, mining, oil extraction, oceanography, and were interested in mainland Africa there will be no point using the Mercator projection that will serve our maritime activities better than those depicting lands. Let us take for instance Nigeria. Owing to its shape and size, it will not be recommended to take a projection that Argentina or Chile will take to portray their land use activities or for the production of their topographic maps. It is true that in the past Europeans were megalomaniac and wanted to paint a picture to foreigners who were considered as still inferior to them as them being super humans, maps would have been the last gadgets that they would have used for their propaganda. You will remember too that there were not many Africans who could read and write and mapped as Europeans and Chinese. However there was a maverick case of King Njoya of Mum Kingdom, Western Africa we referred readers to that fascinated early Europeans even hitherto. When it comes to scientific presentation, there are no possibilities of falsifying data. As said, if you are familiar with the caboodle of projections we have outlined, you have to simply choose the ones that are right for your purpose. In that case we will be wrong to assume that the choice of Robinson in the portrayal of the continent of Africa was a way to lie and show European superiority. The crystal clear fact is that pure science is pure science and its application is universal, be it in America, Europe or Africa. It is not politics, ethics, logic or metaphysics. It is the fact of natural philosophy and should not and cannot be falsified. Having said so, human errors do arise and it should not be generalized as the convention..


Dr. Viban Viban Ngo



The author would like to apologize for the publication of the original draft prior to its subsequent modification. Comments and constructive criticisms are welcomed. March 12, 2009

AFRICAN LANGUAGES IN GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE

Dear Readers,
I found the attached a worthwhile proposition that should be vigorously pursued by all and sundry. African scholars or linguists, I believe this is the moment for you to make your contributions. It may be an opportunity for those African communities that have their scripts to see how they could be represented. Remember many African languages are literally dying with modernism. One way to rescue them is to communicate in them by African literati. I read the cited and became excited and want to highlight here for my readers who may be interested:


"Recently, two major organizations have become interested in this project: UNESCO and Google. UNESCO will be highlighting the 100 African Locales initiative as a part of the International Mother Tongue Day, which is February 20. Will your favorite African language be ready to be included in that day? If you would like your language to be recognized by UNESCO (part of the United Nations), please write to

"The other exciting news is that Google has been encouraging us to complete the data as soon as possible, and has volunteered their staff to help on the technical end. Why? Because they want to create search interfaces for more African languages, and they want to be able to recognize the language that a document is written in so that they can provide customized services for African users. This is just one indication of the possibilities that a completed locale will open up for your language.

"Now is the moment when we can prepare a lot of African languages to be part of the information technology age. It's up to us. Can you help?"

What do you think? There are no longer outsiders telling your children that vernaculars are abomination. They all understand that one language dying or dead is a lost to the global heritage. So, let us make our contribution.
Dr. Viban Viban Ngo.

Amazing details of the Google satellite map of Africa and the rest of the world.
Even Kumbo and Nso proper could be seen and cars discerned on the streets. Look at BBH, St. Theresia's Cathedrale and semi-prep school, the former Empire Stadium at Shisong (Mission Station), River of the Bui meandering. Gorgeous verdure and detailed land use. Some maps could be produced using this base. However, I am not sure of copyright? Are users allowed to use part of it for review or private purposes? I will be interested if any staff of Google or any other person with expertise in this field enlighten my readers.



Dr. Viban Viban Ngo.