From the original article on November 20, 2015. Author: The Gay Syndrome.
(I can't make a new topic, so I'm posting in this one, for reasons that will be clear very very quickly. I'm disappointed though, because I had a great thread name ready: I Miss the AIDS Down in Africa - Gonna Take Some Time To Explain Away Race for You.)
So many people wanted to hear about my time in Africa, and I want to talk about it, but I’m not really sure which angle to attack it from. You see, not only was I living there, I was a…
Peace Corps Volunteer.
Yep. The pozzed of the pozzed. Actually, it was a good experience, and it started me on the path of the shitlord by exposing me not only to Africans, but also to people so far to the left you need to pop a Truveda just to have a conversation with them. The whole thing was extremely eye opening, and I could write another entire post about international aid generally and Peace Corps specifically, but I want this one just about Africa, Africans, and the way they live.
First, a caveat. Africa is huge, and I can only speak for the little corner I was in. I was assigned to a remote village in the Sahel, basically the transition between the rainforests of central Africa and the Sahara desert, in francophone West Africa. I was in a very stable country (though we had some terrorist scares), and I would not only go back in a heartbeat, I regularly recommend that people go on vacation there. It’s a beautiful place: cheap, on the Atlantic, and open to (French speaking) foreigners. I have tons of s**t to talk about it, though, but I’ll lead with the positive.
The good:
As I mentioned in the post that spawned this one, tribal African society works for them. They’re not smart, but they have strict, specific rules that they follow and that make things sorta work. By sorta work, I mean the power is on 6-8 hours a day, there is running water sometimes, and the roads have potholes so big it’s safer to drive in the bush next to them. But in the small town/village I was in, there was basically no crime, it was very safe to walk around at night, and people got along really well with each other.
How did they achieve this? If Asians are ant-people, well adapted to SCALEd societies, Africans are the opposite. They can’t handle scale, at all. When they live in villages of 100 to 1000, though, things are “functional”. They need familial hierarchies to function, though. Blacks have no morality, they don’t feel bad for doing anything the way you or I do. Their sense of shame and moral compunction is hierarchically imposed. There were a million little niggershines going on every day, and if they got away with it, it was all good. But if an elder catches you, you’re in for a world of hurt. Literally, because all punishment is corporal. They don’t mess around with stern lectures. It’s straight to the beatings, from a young age on.
The system also puts a huge premium on family and community, and nobody there had any desire to ever leave for good. Everyone wanted to get out to get paid, but nobody wanted to emigrate permanently to France or the US. They just wanted to make money, ship it home to “support” their family, and come back to have a little empire of dirt in the bush.
They are also front-line fighters against shitlibs. They didn’t stand for that s**t, at all. If you wanted to come into their villages and build some s**t, great. If you wanted to give them lectures about how they needed to accept gays or change their ways, mobs and rocks were in your future. Luckily I worked in Agricultural development, so I mostly got to give away stuff. At the time I felt bad for the ones getting the rocks, but looking back I just laugh. Take that, striver poors!
The bad:
1. Once, a friend of another volunteer wanted to earn some money by baking bread. He got a little bit of money together and used it to buy ingredients. He built a mud stove himself, and cooked 30 loaves of “village bread” - basically misshapen, doughy baguette. He took the bread to the road, and started to sell them, until his father came by. His father said, “You have bread! The family needs bread!” and took 20 loaves for himself and the rest of the kids (this particular father had 4 wives and 8 kids per wife). Our enterprising African friend was left bankrupt. He lost his entire initial investment and never made bread again.
This is the basic story of Africa: communalism gone insane. It is completely unthinkable to refuse a demand of an elder or a family member for money or food. People hid any small money they had, because if anyone knew they had it, there would be a line around the corner asking for loans and favors, and they would be honor-bound or whatever to say yes. I told my friends over and over to say no, and each time they politely explained to me that it was impossible. The whole system is built to pull people down to the lowest common denominator.
2. Every day, I ate the same meal – a huge communal bowl of rice, with fish and some vegetables. Every day, the family I lived with spent a good amount of money (for them) to buy bitter tomatoes and okra to put in the rice, despite the fact that nobody liked bitter tomatoes or okra. I asked, why do you waste so much money on these vegetables that nobody eats? They told me, because we don’t want anyone to think we’re poor.
Africans are all about face and presentation, to the point of self-ruin. We’re talking about people for whom buying a couple vegetables has a huge impact on their bottom line, but they still do it. Saving money is basically impossible. I’m convinced that they have no conception of the future, aside from a vague idea that tomorrow will come. Cause and effect seemed to have no meaning. People who planned well, saved money and invested were not lauded or emulated, just dismissed as flukes or having received the blessing of Allah. Actually, Africans probably took to Islam like flies to s**t because in Islam, everything flows directly from God – it is a religion that gives people permission to believe that everything is out of their hands, which they believe anyway.
3. A man asked me if I could give him 10 hectares of land and a diesel-electric water pump to irrigate it. This was not uncommon. The first thing people usually asked me when I told them I was an Agriculture Development person was for tractors, cars, livestock, anything. Completely shameless begging. Men in expensive silk clothes with nice black sedans would shamelessly beg for gimmiedats when they learned what I did. Anyway, I asked this particular guy what experience he had farming or gardening. He said none. I asked, then why do you want such a large scale enterprise? Why not get a small garden from the village chief and a used gas-pump to see how it goes? Maybe you’ll even earn enough money to upgrade in a year or two. He said, well, my cousin got 10 hectares and a diesel-electric pump from the government, so he was going to wait until he could get it too.
Gimmiedats are international. It’s disgusting. Every single cent of international aid is wasted on either bloodthirsty warlords, sniveling SWLP striver salaries, or gimmiedats for the underserving. In case you had any illusions, never give money to any international charity, ever. It breeds a mentality of helplessness and “mana from heaven”, not to mention an entire caste of African hustlers whose only job is to pitch their villages for various causes. The worst thing about this story? The man was completely right to not try a small scale enterprise. He’s African, they have infinite time. One day a government project will come to his village and give him his pump and his 10 hectares. He won’t do s**t with it, but he’ll proudly show off his pump and everyone in the village will respect him for his achievement of receiving some gimmiedats.
4. During the festival of Eid al-Hada, a ram must be sacrificed because blah blah who cares. After killing and stringing the ram up into a tree for butchering, a gaggle of boys (they are always around in groups of 10-50, usually begging for presents and money because idiot white people always give it to them) rushed to the dying animal with a pair of scissors, snipped off its balls, and ran away with their prize. I asked the closest mother why, she said they’re going to grill it – the balls are a prized treat for the boys. I asked, do the girls eat it too? Of course not, she said. They would get pregnant with a goat.
Africans are dumb as s**t. Basically, they never grow up. You are dealing with 200 pound children. If you go into interactions with that mindset, things go alright, but if you expect anything adult from them, you’ll be disappointed and frustrated at every turn. They believe in everything you can list – ghosts, angels, demons, curses, charms, blessings, and magic. Oh, and magic. They love it. I was party to a number of village magic battles, where charms and counter-charms were buried at people’s doorsteps, protective wards were made, and potions were snuck into tea. It’s a huge deal, and everyone pays big money (for them) to the local shamans and witch doctors to get all these magical trinkets. Yes, even in Islamic Africa, it’s just like this. African Islam is the same as South American Christianity – totally f**ked in the head. They are pagan savages first and moon-worshiping goatfuckers second. They just slap a varnish of Islam on it – the magic charm has a Koranic verse in it! – and go about their lives happily as before.
5. A volunteer once fronted enough money for the farmer he lived with to buy fertilizer. They spread it together, and the yield was recorded. In total, it was 9 fold over the year prior. Instead of taking the money back for the loan, said volunteer forced the farmer to buy fertilizer for the next year, and save it. The next year came and they used it again, and again the yield was 10 fold over the first non-fertilizer year. This time, though, the volunteer had left the country. The farmer didn’t buy any fertilizer, and instead blew through the money he earned from his crop on frivolous crap and gifts to every extended family member who cast a shadow on his door. The next year his yields returned to the original level, and everyone went on with their lives as happy as before. The end.
This is my penultimate Africa story. There’s a bit more to it – the Peace Corps showed graphs and charts of this particular case as a successful intervention. I only found out about the little coda because I specifically asked what happened the next year; they didn’t decide to share that little fact in the larger meeting. It brings together everything - the waste, the stupidity, the lack of foresight, the inability to see cause and effect, the massive importance put on frivolous crap, and the way communities tear down their best members. Here’s the takeaway: nobody who wasn’t white on that farm saw the connection between the yields, the money they were making and the fertilizer. Nobody stopped to think hey, we should buy more of this.
That’s the insanity of Africa. 200 pound children, blowing huge stacks of cash on magic charms while they grind out a subsistence livelihood on the border of the desert.
This is already super long, and I could really go on and on about this subject. There are more stories - the myths of the African family, more stories of faux-communalism, stories about crazy African religion and politics, and so on. The long and short of it, though, is this: they’re not terrible people, they just shouldn’t be anywhere near us. Africa is no s**t the Garden of Eden. It’s no mistake that the people living there are giant children. Despite tons of diseases and ferocious animals, they want for nothing. Trees growing fruit are everywhere. Every weed is edible. Before the Western-induced population bomb, I’m not even sure they even required agriculture to feed themselves. If we’re going to live a world where complete ethnic cleansing and colonization is off the table, just let them have their little paradise and leave us alone. They have absolutely nothing to offer us nor anything to gain by interaction with the west. They’re a people frozen in time from tens of thousands of years ago, and I have no trouble leaving them like that.
Before I get into a follow up post, I need to shamefully admit that I left out my best Africa story.
From time to time I had to go out into the bush to find specific varieties of useful trees, collect a ton of seeds, and bring them back to grow and eventually give out to different farmers. My African counterpart/handler would usually come with me, and we’d work together. He’d shake the branches with a rod to make the seed pods fall and I got to crawl on my hands and knees to pick them up. Once, down in the grass, I saw a little snake, maybe 5 or 6 inches long, and I said, “Oh look, a snake”. I thought it would be a neat moment in nature or something. My counterpart flew over to me and crushed the snake underfoot. I was surprised, because I thought it was a harmless little snake, and I asked him why he did it. The answer?
“Snakes are like Jews. Even the smallest one may have venom in its belly.”
The After Empire article Real Victorian Gentleman linked to is a 180 pro-click. It’s crazy to see all the similarities between the experiences of myself in West Africa and the last colonials in South Africa/Rhodesia. Africa is deceptively huge. West Africa alone has nearly the same landmass as the continental United States, and West Africa is probably just one fifth of all of Africa. The country of Mali alone is nearly as “tall” north-to-south as America is. Why the geography lesson? We’re talking about people as far away from each other as New York is from Bogota, and yet they are so behaviorally and culturally so similar. And don’t come at me with any Milton Friedman flat world weak-sauce, we’re talking about village people who don’t have neither the access nor the inclination to indulge in any sort of larger world culture. Race exists, and Africa is the perfect place to prove it.
One story from the Dalrymple essay that jumped out at me:
(speaking about a former Zaire strongman) “He was very powerful,” he said. “He collected the best witch doctors from every part of Zaire. Of course, he could make himself invisible; that was how he knew everything about us. And he could turn himself into a leopard when he wanted.”.
I was once told by an African farmer that the African soldiers conscripted by France to fight in World War 2 won the war. He spoke at great length about the magical charms they had that would prevent guns from firing in their direction. These African shock troops, he told me, could storm positions the other Allied forces couldn’t touch thanks to their bravery and magic. Bombs would fall but not explode near them. It was the exact same batch of stores Halim Jello just posted about the Congo. This superstitiousness seems to me to be pan-African, and points to something inherent in their race.
The other data point I have to prove Pan-African race (though I realize I’m preaching to the choir here) is how they think, as revealed by their language. I actually read the article An Awakened Saxon linked to while I was in Africa, and it was hugely influential on how I processed the whole experience. (As a quick aside: most Peace Corps volunteers deal with the oceans of evidence for African inferiority in front of them by embracing cultural relativism as aggressively as possible. I heard it over and over again at meetings, bars and parties – “They’re just so different from us, but in a lot of ways they have it all figured out. Why strive and worry about things so much? You can just be happy and exist. All societies have good points and bad points.” I was always an odd duck because I never bought into all this. It was probably why I got turned on to gay bodybuilding but they didn’t.)
I actually learned to speak the local language where I was pretty well, and my experience lines up exactly with the lack of vocabulary for abstract ideas AAS’ article describes. It’s Orwellian in a way – there are no terms for anything not immediately relevant to their day to day lives, so they don’t think about anything else. But not only is speaking one of these languages like wearing a straight-jacket (I hit the books hard on my language the first year I was there, but by the start of the second I just spoke French all the time. I couldn’t take it anymore), but the people speaking it are unable to use it in novel ways. Three anecdotes:
1. When I studied French in High School, I was told that if I didn’t know a word, I should “talk around it”; that is, try to describe it so a native can guess what the hell I want to say and tell me how to say it. This strategy was an abysmal failure in Africa. It seemed as if nobody in their lives had ever asked them to guess something based on its description. Many of the descriptive words I tried to use simply couldn’t be applied the way I wanted them to be. If, for example, I forgot the word for “sheep”, and I said, “Its body looks like a cloud”, the sentence simply has no meaning (also African sheep aren’t fluffy, but that’s not the point!). You can’t compare two nouns like that. It’s too imaginative. You’re asking them to think about a cloud, pull out the rough physical idea while discarding the specific “thing”, then reapply that idea to another thing. When you sit down and think about it, it’s a deep, imaginative process to compare two distinct things. Their languages weren’t built for it.
2. Which brings me to my adventures with my African-English dictionary. It was given to me by the US Government (thanks for paying your taxes guys!), to help learn how to speak the language. It was, however, completely useless. Exactly as in the stories of AAS’ link, I ran into word after word that simply didn’t exist in the real, spoken language. One example that’s stuck with me was an entry for “idyllic”, and the translation was “just like in a song”. I thought that was a beautiful sentiment, so I ran to my African friends and asked all about this saying. They said it didn’t exist and I was being a crazy person. You can only say things are “good” or “bad”.
I later figured out these dictionaries are written by high yella naggers who are given make-work jobs in the African Studies departments of western universities. They have no connection at all with the real spoken language, and seem to exist for two reasons: one, to assuage the feelings of inferiority held by the author of the dictionary, and two, to give Africans who use these languages something to be proud of. Just like the man who will someday get a diesel pump he’ll never use, people in Africa are very proud of having the trappings of civilization, like dictionaries. It’s all very cargo-cultish. What use does a language whose written tradition dates back to 1980 have for a dictionary?
3. Early in my ““service”” (not enough quotation marks in the world for that, but it’s what they call it), I was sent to the village of another volunteer to shadow her, learn the ropes and see what life in the bush was like. She spoke the language very well, and she was showing me around town and introducing me to her friends. On the road, we were passed by a herd of sheep, with a single cow in the middle. We both thought it was odd, so we laughed and said, “hey, that cow thinks it’s a sheep”. She was pretty pleased with the joke, so she turned to an Africa woman walking next to us and, in the local language, said, “Hey, that cow thinks it’s a sheep”. The woman stopped, and said, “No. That is a cow.” She pointed to the cow. “That is a sheep.” She pointed to the sheep. My friend said, “Yes, that is a cow and that is a sheep”. The African woman got a huge smile on her face clicked her tongue (they do that when they agree with you) and said “now you get it!” She walked off happy, and we walked off confused.
In retrospect, the suggestion that a cow can think it’s anything probably struck the woman as being so absurd she assumed we were trying to say something else. Why she thought we were knuckle-drooling morons who couldn’t tell a cow from a sheep is anyone’s guess. I’d wager, though, that in her entire life, nobody had ever said something like that to her. It’s not a basic observation or an opinion about simple, day to day activities. These are what African languages are built for. Everything else has been invented out of whole cloth to match ideas brought in by westerners. And this seems to be the case across the entire continent. Depending on your point of view, that’s either an interesting coincidence, or evidence that these people aren’t like us, will never be like us, and have no place among us.
A final point on language: Shrill Kiners pointed out that Africans aren’t actually all that stupid on many metrics, and I agree. They also aren’t lazy in a lot of ways. It’s just that they don’t really set goals or care about the future. A young African man in his prime muh diking years works harder at whatever stupid little hussle he has than anything I ever have ever worked at in my life. But the work is always unfocused, inefficient and ultimately self-defeating, with no reinvestment in making sure they won’t have to work that hard again tomorrow. Anyway, when it comes to language, even most of the poorest dirt farmers in my area spoke at least 2, often as many as 5, all with very few syntactical similarities. Every tribe has their own language, even when they live in very close proximity to each other, so being a polyglot is basically assumed over there. It was held up as evidence of how separate-yet-equal they were by other volunteers.
Since I’ve moved on with my life, though, I’ve learned a number of languages, and the whole affair seems like a peculiar American fixation. Since we’re a monolinguistic culture, our elites look at Europe or Africa or Asia with it BEAUTIFUL LINGUISTIC TAPESTRY and assume we’re missing out on something. Thus, language learning becomes enshrined as something mysterious and powerful, when it reality it just means rote memorizing some sounds so you can sell your goat to the dude the next village over. There’s nothing magical or special about it, and I’m skeptical that “language ability” really points to any deeper intelligence. Memory, perhaps. But I treat people who are “just bad at languages” the same as people who are “just bad at deadlifting”. If you can’t do it, it’s because deep down you just don’t care to.
You have thinkers in the west who think that abstraction and principle-making are where we went wrong, that they're Jewish impediments which are holding back the volk (I think they're s**t-heads, but not everyone agrees).
I personally think all of Africa’s problems come down to a lack of “philosophy”, which I guess is goony short hand for abstraction and principles. I’m not sure how anyone could possibly think of these pillars of civilized thought as Jewish impediments.
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