“ … But there is no way in which such differences as do exist could satisfactorily explain the profound perception of alienness which Africa has come to represent for Europe.
This perception problem is not in its origin the result of ignorance, as we are sometimes inclined to think. At least, it is not ignorance entirely, or even primarily. It was in general a deliberate invention devised to facilitate two gigantic historical events: the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of Africa by Europe, the second event following closely on the heels of the first, and the two together stretching across almost half a millennium from about A.D. 1500. In an important and authoritative study of this invention, two American scholars, Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow, show how a dramatic change in the content of British writing about Africa coincided with an increase in the volume of the slave trade to its highest level in the eighteenth century. That content
“shifted from almost indifferent and matter-of-fact reports of what the voyagers had seen to judgmental evaluation of the Africans… The shift to such pejorative comment was due in large measure to the effects of the slave trade. A vested interest in the slave trade produced a literature of devaluation, …”
“The vast arsenal of derogatory images of Africa amassed to defend the slave trade and, later, colonization gave the world a literary tradition that is now, happily, defunct, but also a particular way of looking (or, rather, not looking) at Africa and Africans that endures, alas, into our own day. ”
Excerpt From: Chinua Achebe. “The Education of a British-Protected Child”
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In my case - from what I already perceive:
- My sexual orientation,
- My health - possible physical deformation/modification, my sanity or the lack of it,
- The size/shape of my penis (oh yeah!)
BTW: Your obsession with me supposedly forgetting things is getting funnier (no, it does not irk me!)
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