Just a hood nigga.
Kumasi
Joined July 2019
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Makaveli retweeted
This doesn't surprise me. Some years ago, I had a nasty fall in Times Square. I was on the ground, screaming in agony, as it would turn out, I'd broken a bone. People kept walking by. Nobody, except ironically, the homeless people on the street were the ones who helped me.
Makaveli retweeted
Chinua Achebe’s “Arrow of God” is one of the best novels ever written. But the ending of that book? The ending precisely is the best I have ever read. Chinua Achebe wrote such masterful endings to his novels. Damn.
Makaveli retweeted
Cole Palmer on Estevao:
“Every time I got the ball I tried to give it to him to show what he can do, because I know he’s been wanting to play, he’s been patient. He played well.”
[via @BBCSport]
Makaveli retweeted
Remember when I said that we are always told to let go of slavery and Colonialism so one day we are gaslighted into narratives like this one.
Africans are not a monolith today and more importantly not back then. You cannot use the african elites who participated in slavery as a representation of the entire continent. Even then, most didn't willingly participate in slavery, for most it was survival at the hands of European guns. Europeans flooded the West and east African coast with firearms, ammunition, and manufactured goods. This created an existential security dilemma known as the gun-slave cycle.
Participation in slavery was rarely a choice made in a vacuum; it was an existential necessity. Kingdoms that refused to participate such as the Kingdom of Benin in certain centuries or Queen Nzinga’s early resistance faced economic isolation, internal destabilization, or armed destruction by heavily armed rivals funded and supported by the Europeans.
Of course how loving for Europeans to document transactions and write their half baked references, without showing the underlying structural pressure they created for their slave trade.
Lastly Using Cugoano’s kidnapping to argue that "Africans were the primary culprits." is so funny. Cugoano himself explicitly condemned the entire system of european demand and African elite complicity. In his 1787 work (Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery), he clearly identified European greed and the transatlantic trade network as the root driver of internal conflicts and kidnappings in West Africa.
Africans fully participated in the slave trade at Elmina, Ghana.
Trade records from the Dutch West India Company, Royal African Company, and Danish ledgers from Elmina, Cape Coast show African rulers and merchants negotiating prices, quantities, and terms with European factors.
African brokers and rulers controlled who could trade and where.
African-authored testimony, for example, Ottobah Cugoano, a Fante man enslaved around 1770, wrote that he was kidnapped by fellow Africans and sold into slavery.
In fact the Asante expansion in modern-day Ghana involved conquering neighbours like Denkyira, Akyem, and Gonja. The prisoners taken in those wars- by Africans- supplied both the coastal trade and domestic labour.
The fort archaeology from excavations at Elmina, Cape Coast, and inland Asante sites back all of this up.
On your logic, the government of Ghana should be apologising for their involvement in slavery.
Makaveli retweeted
I really get disappointed when I see Ghanaian brothers who’ve watched basketball for years go into WNBA discourse with ‘racism’ shit. granted that is what you see from some fans, so you too dey join am? You’ve talked ball all these years to reduce your talking points to racism?
Makaveli retweeted
WNBA Champion Laeticia Amihere celebrating the championship with a Ghanaian classic🇬🇭
Makaveli retweeted
Osundare—reasonably pissed—wrote about something in this vein in 1986
Makaveli retweeted
Kemi, congratulations on leading a major British party as a Black Woman. It takes real talent to rise to where you are and deceit is what it takes to rise as a Black leader in a western Conservative Party.
It is a pity the climb did not leave room for a history book and since you chose to argue in the language of history, let us do the history. Let’s dissect your verbal diarrhea point by point.
Everyone participated." Slavery existed on every continent. So did war, and nobody calls a village feud the World War. The transatlantic trade ran for 366 years (1501 to 1866) and put about 12.5 million Africans on ships, of whom about 1.8 million died before they saw the Americas, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. It ran through joint-stock companies, chartered monopolies, Lloyd's underwriters and acts of Parliament. It was hereditary, because the law made the child of an enslaved mother property from birth. It was racial, because a whole continent was defined as chattel. No other system in history combined those features at that scale. Dissolving all of it into "people from every continent" is far worse than intellectual dishonesty.
Britain was a market leader, not a participant. British ships carried about 3.2 million Africans, second only to Portugal and Brazil. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) gave Britain the asiento, a thirty-year monopoly to supply 4,800 enslaved Africans a year to Spanish America. The Royal African Company, chartered in 1672 and headed by the Duke of York, later James II, branded its captives "DY". During Edward Colston's years in its leadership it shipped about 84,000 people, and roughly 19,000 died on the way.
You say British taxpayers should not answer for what happened before they were born. They did. In 1833 Britain borrowed £20 million to compensate slaveholders, and taxpayers serviced that loan until 2015, including the descendants of the enslaved. So the principle you invoke was not applied when the cheque went to slaveholders. It only appears when the cheque changes direction.
"Navel-gazing" is a curious charge from someone whose party spends more energy on the past (Empire nostalgia, culture war crusades) than most of those you accuse. Defend Britain if you must. But do not use your Nigerian name as the permission slip for arguments Nigerians know better than anyone.
Slavery was an evil in which people from every continent and region participated. We should be honest about the whole history, not select the parts that are politically convenient today, especially given Britain's leading role in ending the transatlantic slave trade.
If Caribbean countries are asking Britain for a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, will they also be asking the same of the descendants of African kingdoms, rulers and merchants who captured, sold and profited from the trade?
On demands for reparations, whether through cash or debt relief, we have been down this track before. Twenty-five years ago, Jubilee 2000, Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History argued that cancelling the debts of poorer countries would give them a fresh start. More than $100 billion of debt was eventually written off, but many of those countries have since built up even bigger debts. Labour are already spending too much on Britain's welfare state, now is not the time for Andy Burnham to be providing global welfare.
There is no reason British taxpayers today should be held financially responsible for things that happened generations before any of us were born. And I have even less patience for political elites in commonwealth countries who don’t know how to make their own citizens prosperous now looking for another opportunity to blame Britain.
As Prime Minister, Andy Burnham should be Britain’s greatest defender. Instead, he is writing articles saying we need to confront our history (as if we haven't done enough of that) and considering another formal historical apology. Tony Blair already expressed Britain’s deep sorrow and regret for our role in the slave trade nearly twenty years ago. There is no need to do so again.
This is all another navel-gazing distraction. The Commonwealth should be looking forward, not endlessly backwards. That means economic partnerships to make us all richer and deeper military and security cooperation against common threats. If every Commonwealth summit becomes an exercise in presenting Britain with demands for cash then we need to start asking if it is worth the effort.
Makaveli retweeted
Gabby Williams hit em with the Too Short again lmaooo
“What's my favorite word???"
Crowd: “BITCH” 😂😂😂
