Every morning in Nice, France, the fishermen set up their markets. They are always accompanied by Seagulls and Albatrosses who hover and fly about waiting for their daily share of the catch. It seems like a harmonious and reciprocal relationship of some kind.
One day, while shopping, we overheard a woman ask her companion, "I wonder what would happen, if the birds turned against the fisherman?"
I turned to laugh with the women at the ridiculous yet horrific image that formed in my mind….
No laughter…they were deadly serious.
I was an adolescent, in the early 60s, when Africa began to take its independence from the European colonialists. I noticed that it was often violent. I noticed that Africans were making it difficult for their European and Asian settlers to stay. I learned that all of these people considered themselves citizens of the countries (colonies) where they lived. This meant that the African revolution rendered these people to the status of Homeless.
Where did these people go?
I don't remember anyone discussing this.
Surely, the world didn't think that people who have been living in a place for generations would just run back to the European or Asian countries of their "origins".
Decade after decade, displaced Whites and Asians had to flee or immigrate to other parts of the world in order to start new lives.
The sixties and early seventies seem to be particularly volatile since most of the African countries seem to have acquired their independence during this period, ironically during
the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.
I wonder how many from English-speaking countries came to the United States?
Look at the size of the English-speaking Southern African nations of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and Botswana, for example. The population of Settlers would appear to be quite sizeable. It would seem natural that many of the people from those countries would choose…that is if they were able to actually chose…to live in The United States, Canada, New Zealand or Australia… who ironically are also settlements on someone else's land.
Afterall, people tend to gravitate toward that which is familiar to them.
Kind of creepy, isn't it?
Did all of the residents of those former French colonies flee back to tiny France?
And look at the number of former British territories which were settled and ruled by little bitty England. I am willing to bet that they didn't' go crowding back onto the British Isles looking for jobs or farms to buy.
Where would their children go to school?
Whatever became of these people?
Take South Africa for example who attained its independence from White minority rule in 1994:
Stats SA showed that over 612,000 white South Africans will have left the country since between 1985 and 2021 – 430,000 of which will have left in the 20-year period between 2001 and 2021 (at a rate of 21,000 a year, inline with most of the population declines).
While there are estimated to be 4.52 million white South Africans in the country in 2018, up from 4.49 million in 2017, the proportion of the population is shrinking (7.8%, down from 8.0% previously) – and is expected to continue to decline, according to another set of stats published by Solidarity The immediate post-apartheid period was marked by an exodus of skilled, White South Africans because of safety concerns. The South African Institute of Race Relations estimated in 2008 that 800,000 or more white people had emigrated since 1995, out of the approximately 4,000,000 who were in South Africa when apartheid formally ended the year before. Large white South African diasporas, both English- and Afrikaans-speaking, grew in Australia, New Zealand, North America, and especially in the UK, to which around 550,000 South Africans emigrated when they found their new homes, did they bring anger and bitterness, with them, along with their degraded economic and social status... not to mention the inevitable and various manifestations of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders?
Would they advocate that social and political institutions and practices perform the same way that they were used to in their previous country?
A person I met, who is a White native of South Africa, felt that since there was so much violence going on since the toppling of the old system, that perhaps they should "bring back apartheid" because the "races got along better back then".
Since his family was no longer living in their country, I wonder where he feels it should be practiced, now?
Being accustomed to privileges, how did they adjust to becoming refugees in strange lands?
Would these people build a power base and then, incorporate the concept of "White Privilege" in their new places of residence instead of fighting against systemic racism?
It appears to me that the decolonization of Africa meant the expulsion of those people whose ancestors were eventually perceived as invaders. People who settled the land and imposed their culture on the indigenous population in an expansionist manner.
They were invaders.
*INVADER: definition: to enter forcefully as an enemy; to enter as if to take possession; to enter and affect injuriously or destructively.
These invaders, or rather descendants of invaders are now forced to become immigrants who must integrate into a new society.
*Immigrant: definition: one that immigrates, such as a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence.
INTEGRATE: definition: verb: if someone integrates into a social group, or is integrated into it, they behave in such a way that they become part of the group or are accepted into it. Or, if you integrate one thing with another, or one thing integrates with another, the two things become closely linked or form a part of awho idea or system.
*Collins English Dictionary
What happens with all settlements is that if you continue to mistreat people …particularly the indigenous ones…you end up carrying all of your belongings in a bag attached to a stick on your shoulders looking for someplace else to live.
If you're lucky.
Now this brings me to the subject of my homeland…The United States of America.
"The New Colossus
By Emma Lazarus
Statue of Liberty Inscription
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land,
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightening and her name
Mother of Exiles From her beacon hand
Glows world-wide welcome, her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame
"Keep ancient lands your storied pomp" cries she
126
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to be free,
The wretched refuse of your teaming shore.
Send…these the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door."
Emma Lazarus' poem was mounted on a plaque. it is not actually inscribed on
the Statue of Liberty.
The only Statue of Liberty inscription can be found on the tablet in her left hand,
which says JULY IV MDCCLXXVI (July 4, 1776), the day the United States
adopted the Declaration of Independence from England.
"
.
Boy, does it take a lot of nerve and insane arrogance, in my humble opinion, to put a plaque like this on the door of someone else' house.
Nevertheless, this is how the Founding Father's operated.
To reestablish the very social order which rejected them, this teaming mass of "wretched refuse" imported captured Africans and enslaved them.
People from Europe, obviously unable to adapt to another culture which was not European, chose to commit genocide upon the indigenous population without any thought that there would be acts retribution to come.
Retribution does not necessarily have to be confrontational.
My parents taught me that the greatest and most dangerous power is that power which you cannot see.
These Europeans, in their thirsty desperation for a new place to live, decided that they could simply render the Natives invisible, insignificant and disposable.
Wow.
Eventually, the slaves, whose purpose was to help these European people to set up and maintain this wicked agenda, got their freedom.
Then, the fight for Civil Rights begins. A fight to integrate into a Eurocentric society, which has no respect for other non-white cultures, languages, or nonwhite ethnic groups. What an awful dilemma for Black Americans who were no longer African and were not exactly European, although it is obvious that a sizable amount of European blood flowed in the veins of these descendants of slaves.
As an adult, during the 70s, I learned that Americans were equating the Apartheid system in Southern Africa to the Political dynamics in the State of Israel. People started talking about divestiture of South Africa.
Disinvestment (or divestment) from South Africa was first advocated in the 1960s, in protest of South Africa's System of Apartheid, but was not implemented on a significant scale until the mid-1980s.
The disinvestment campaign, after being realized in federal legislation enacted in 1986 by the United States, is credited by some as pressuring the South African Government to embark on negotiations ultimately leading to the dismantling of the Apartheid system.
This sent chills down my spine. Obviously, the Settlement Nation of America doesn't believe in mirrors.
It seemed to me like 'the pot calling the kettle black,' as they say.
I wondered, back then, what would happen if the world had decided to divest from the United States during the period of Jim Crow because of it's treatment of Native Americans and People of Color?
How would we be able to tell if Native Americans have decided to assert their sovereignty on the United States territories? What signs would we have that they are sick and tired of new waves of Whites arriving who have this arrogant a sense of entitlement yet an inability to communicate with other cultures?
We left the United States, because it was impossible to see from which direction the Civil unrest was coming.
During the over 2 decades we have lived here, we have seen things become worse and worse.
Racial Hatred... gun violence...the Citizens have turned against themselves in every direction, full of self-hatred and a sense of helplessness.
White supremacist thought conditioning doesn't allow one to think that perhaps Native American nations have diplomatic and trade relations with other world powers. After all they have been on the continent longer than the rest of us.
All I can do is pray for my family.