Google Speech-to-Text API Automatic Transcription (Chirp). Treat it as a searchable index of what was broadcast, not a quotation record.
00:00:39Gentlemen, I confess myself increasingly disconcerted by the Russians
00:00:43rather alarming advances in Asia.
00:00:47of Indeed, word has reached us that they have, of late, dispatched their first
00:00:51steam ship to Bombay.
00:00:54India must remain
00:00:56hours.
00:01:03"the fears came true, the Russians really did come to
00:01:06India, but not as colonizers and we quickly
00:01:10found a common
00:01:11language.
00:01:30here at the kibenda t estate in Cambo
00:01:34County in Kenya in the continent of
00:01:38a Africa and we continue our conversation
00:01:42regarding things around and about the
00:01:45continent and we talk about childhood
00:01:49with the advent of
00:01:51colonization and
00:01:54of one must discuss this subject from a
00:01:57historical context. and I prefer
00:02:01to look at it from much more recent history,
00:02:05because recent history teaches us and
00:02:09when we talk reasont is not very
00:02:10reason, that
00:02:13of Africa was
00:02:15functioning, and there was
00:02:18trade between Africa and the rest
00:02:21of the world on the eastern
00:02:24coast, on the northern coast, in the
00:02:28western coast and and there is a particular
00:02:31historical incident that is a marker for me, the year is
00:02:351482, and the person is
00:02:39a Portuguese explorer called Don Diego
00:02:43of Diazambunja, he visits what is now Elmina castle
00:02:47in Ghana, and he meets a king called Ansa
00:02:51and tells him, we want to build a post here,
00:02:55and they go into negotiation, because this is an organized
00:02:59system. Ultimately, of course, Ansa agrees that they
00:03:03build a permanent post, which is the elmina
00:03:06castle, because he says it
00:03:09a is
00:03:10of convenient, and is also because
00:03:11of the military might. Later, of
00:03:14course, the whole process of slavery
00:03:18begins, it had begune a little earlier
00:03:22on the eastern part, then the whole
00:03:26process
00:03:27of the missionar. is coming to the continent
00:03:31of
00:03:32of Africa, the Muslims are also coming from the northern and from the
00:03:36of eastern, of and that begins to affect
00:03:40how Africa operated before the
00:03:43advent of slavery, before the advent
00:03:47of colonization. In fact, I remember as a
00:03:51student of history, it being said, that the
00:03:55in flag always followed the cross, and this is
00:03:59significant. because when the church
00:04:02came,
00:04:03it is the church that came and said, we want to
00:04:07educate the young Africans, the French
00:04:11were
00:04:11of more blatant, they were saying this was a
00:04:14civilization basis, so it started very
00:04:18humbly with the Christian saying, you have to come to
00:04:22church, and when you have to come to church, we've got to take
00:04:26you through education, we've got to civilize you, 'we've
00:04:30got to change your name, you've got to learn the lord's
00:04:33prayer, you've got to learn the 10 commandments and in
00:04:37order to do these, you've got to abandon your
00:04:41uncivilized and heathen ways. this is how it began,
00:04:45and in those early days, when the Christians, whether they were
00:04:48of the catholic extraction or the anglican extraction
00:04:52who came under the church, missionary
00:04:54in society, or they were the presbiterian or the
00:04:57lutherans or the method'. the seventh day
00:05:01adventist, the whole idea was a civilizing
00:05:05mission, and civilization meant among other
00:05:08things that you had to teach people to abandon.
00:05:13the things that they knew, so the boy or the
00:05:16girl who would have been trained on the basis of
00:05:20African ways was being told that is not the
00:05:24way, you've got to be taught differently, and it
00:05:28depended on who colonized you, if it was the
00:05:32French, they were treating you differently, they were
00:05:35saying that you've got to go to school, and how was that
00:05:39school organized, organized, on the basis
00:05:43of how schools were organized in Paris
00:05:47and in France, they taught you their national
00:05:50anthem, they told you that your ancestors were
00:05:54the girls, if they were the Germans, they did
00:05:57the same, if they were the Italians, they did the same,
00:06:01if they were the Belgians, they did the same, if they were the Portuguese,
00:06:05they did the same, and as this was
00:06:08happening, the Muslims were also...
00:06:12not only islamizing parts of Africa, but
00:06:16also arabizing parts of Africa, by
00:06:20telling you that Allah could only be addressed in
00:06:23Arabic, and this you see in the
00:06:26early interaction, particularly in the
00:06:30Sahel region with people who embrace Islam
00:06:34such as Uthman Danfodio, or people like Mansa
00:06:38Musa, and in that particular
00:06:42area. you see the madrasses so that
00:06:45when they come in, the people who trained
00:06:49their children differently, whether they were the houser or
00:06:53the fulani or the wolof or the
00:06:56mandinka, they are now institutionalized into
00:06:59madrasses, you are no longer trained in the
00:07:03manner that a usa child was trained or a fulani child was
00:07:07trained or a mandinka child was trained
00:07:11or t child was trained, you are
00:07:14institutionalized, but the colonialists are more
00:07:18blatant, they create schools and th
00:07:22schools were largely missionary schools, they
00:07:25begin to teach you in their language, they teach you their
00:07:29mathematics and
00:07:30is instructive that in quite
00:07:31a number of African countries, those who are
00:07:35wealthy Africans did not send
00:07:39their children to the missionary schools, they said the
00:07:43children of people who are poorer,
00:07:46and I think there are quite a number of writers who dramatize
00:07:50this kind of interaction. Chinua Cebe
00:07:54dramatizes it very well in his two books,
00:07:57things fall apart and no longer at is, so that
00:08:01when your child is going to interact with the missionaries,
00:08:05you know that the things that linked him or her
00:08:09with the society have been cut, and that is... the essence of
00:08:13Chinua, Chebes, things fall apart, so the
00:08:17training that an African child
00:08:20received as result the interaction with the
00:08:24colonialist changed, and let us characterize the
00:08:28change, which was midwived by the
00:08:30missionaries. Number one, they
00:08:34changed your name, they told you that in order to be a good servant of
00:08:38Christ, if you are Kamau, you became John.
00:08:42If you are nyambura, you became Jane, if you are
00:08:46Ture, you became Samuel, that the god
00:08:50required you to acquire another name. Number two,
00:08:54they told you to go to school, and the school was from
00:08:57grade one, grade two, later standard
00:09:01one, standard two, and then you are subjected to an
00:09:05examination, and that examination is not
00:09:09administered by the locals in Kenya. "It
00:09:13was actually the Cambridge University that did it. If you
00:09:16are colonized by the French is the University by Sobon. If
00:09:20you are colonized by the Portuguese and you are in Luanda,
00:09:24Angola, or you are in Pry in
00:09:28Cabo Verde, the examination is administered from
00:09:31Lisbon. If you are in the Democratic Republic of
00:09:34Congo and you are administered by the Belgian, the
00:09:38examination is set in Brussel's before they
00:09:42left. "if you are in Namibia in Vindhawk, the
00:09:45examination is set in Berlin. In other
00:09:49words, you are programmed to be a little German boy,
00:09:53a little British boy, a little French boy, a little Portuguese
00:09:57boy and a little Italian boy, if you are in
00:10:00Mughadish. That is how our
00:10:04childhood changed, they then told you
00:10:08that your customs were bad, that
00:10:11everything that..." you are doing was wrong, your
00:10:14education system was wrong, your circumcision
00:10:18rights, if you are baganda or if you are kikoyo, if you
00:10:22are vanyankore, all those things you are bad, if
00:10:26you are girls, you are now even taken away from your home
00:10:30and taken to boarding schools, boys only
00:10:33boarding schools, girls only boarding schools,
00:10:37and if you did well, we took you to England, if
00:10:41you went to the university or took you overseas,
00:10:45it changed how the African thought, and I
00:10:49think the person who captured it very well was
00:10:53Carter G. Woodson, he's... not talking about the continent of
00:10:57Africa, but is telling us that the same thing
00:11:00is being done to Africansw have been taken away
00:11:04as slaves. That is why in
00:11:061933 he writes a book called
00:11:10Miss Education the negro, and you also
00:11:14understand individuals who are rebelling against it,
00:11:18like Marcus, Mossas Gav in Jamaica or George
00:11:21Padmo in Frinidad, all these. tell
00:11:25us that the colonial education
00:11:29system was designed to produce labor,
00:11:32which was meant to
00:11:36service the colonial state,
00:11:39and in Kenya, for example, they
00:11:43were those who did not want to take their children to school,
00:11:47so what did the white man do? they created a poll
00:11:50tax, and when they created the poll tax, they say, you've
00:11:54got to check. and send your children to school, they even created something called the
00:11:58heart tacks, you had to work, once you've been
00:12:02trained, you've got to serve as clark in the railways, in the
00:12:05ports, in the mines, in the farms, and when you
00:12:09do that, you've got to be educated because you've got to know how to
00:12:13write, you've got to know how to keep books,
00:12:17so the childhood the colonial
00:12:20African was disrupted through these
00:12:23education. Is that to say that we
00:12:27condemn it wholesale? I think that would be naive. There
00:12:31is a sense in which there are certain advantages that
00:12:35then are crude to Africans by dint their
00:12:38having interacted with this kind of education, but
00:12:42I think the disruption has remained largely
00:12:46alive with the consequence that African culture was
00:12:49condemned and condemned in many ways with
00:12:53the consequence. that the African
00:12:56self-confidence was undermined with the
00:13:00consequence that Africans were made to feel that they were
00:13:04inferior and that the superiority conflict
00:13:08complex the colonizer was given its pride of
00:13:11place, so when one talks about
00:13:15colonial governments, colonial
00:13:18education, colonial religion in the
00:13:22manner in which it was midwife to us "it was always
00:13:26designed to produce a new kind of
00:13:29African, an African who
00:13:31thinks like a
00:13:34Frenchman, like an Englishman, like a
00:13:38Portuguese, like a German, like an
00:13:41Italian, and is not lost on me that even up to
00:13:45today Africa finds herself in that space, we are the
00:13:49only continent in the world which is referred to as
00:13:53anglophone, francophone. lusophone
00:13:57by dint the language the colonizer and by
00:14:00dent the education system that
00:14:03disrupted our mode of education so that we have
00:14:07to go back to history to talk about African
00:14:11childhoods. It was an
00:14:14education whose impact remains
00:14:17today, sometimes a very diabolical
00:14:21way, but the beauty is, people
00:14:25are beginning to unlearn and to relearn and that is the
00:14:29beauty of human progression. Ladies and gentlemen, we
00:14:33continue with our discussion the
00:14:36continent of Africa. We will continue this debate.
00:14:40Let us see you next time as the
00:14:43conversation
00:14:45continues.
00:15:28Trump praises the cooperation shown by Moscow and Kiev
00:15:31during humanitarian operation. She brokered for the
00:15:35embattled city of Olyosski. Russia's envoy will pass
00:15:39a letter from her to Vladimir Putin.
00:15:43I apologize for being there and for speaking on
00:15:45impulse. Ukrainians who protested
00:15:49against a torture house that was run by the military are targeted by
00:15:53authorities.