Kayla > Recent Status Updates

“…Afrikaans – the version of Dutch spoken by the Boer settlers. They were self-sufficient and isolationist, with a narrow view of the world. They held austere Protestant Calvinist beliefs and thought they had a duty to ‘civilise’ their black neighbours, just like Christians in the Confederate states of the US used a ‘religious’ imperative to justify their dominance over and enslavement of black people.

“The tight political grip of white settlers was maintained until relatively recently: Zimbabweans and South Africans had to wait until 1980 and 1994 respectively to enjoy full citizen rights and black majority rule.”

Read an article today that the Trump admin has a refugee program designated for white South Africans because of “racial discrimination” caused by black majority rule. The lack of knowledge…

“The advocates for abolition had argued that if there were no buyers then the trade would immediately cease to exist. The slavers on the other hand insisted that it was the regular supply of enslaved people from Africa that sustained the external demand for them, so according to this counterintuitive argument the Africans themselves were primarily to blame for the persistence of the trade…”

“Yaa Asantewaa… being in her late sixties (elderly by the standards of the time), gathered Asante men around her and admonished them… ‘I will not pay one predawn [8£] to the governor. If you, the chiefs of Asante, are going to behave like cowards and not fight, you should exchange your loincloths for my undergarments…if you the men of Asante, will not go forward, then we will. We, the women, will.’”

“But the Anglo–Asante Wars continued for decades and although the Asante emerged victorious in some of these conflicts, the wars eventually reached a horrific conclusion in February 1874 when British troops marched into Kumasi and sacked the city. The treasury in the king’s stone-built palace was emptied, after which the royal compound was blown up. The remainder of the city was burned to the ground.”

“Father Conceição called Dombo a ‘most skilled wizard’ and wrote: ‘He was so wily and cunning that after being defeated by our arms he vanquished us with stratagems.’Changamire Dombo forced the Portuguese to acknowledge him as the ruler of Rozvi and pay him tributes, and his control of his mineral-rich lands became absolute.”

“The Rhodesian Front Party, an all-white party led by Prime Minister Ian Smith, censored all books and material on Great Zimbabwe from 1965 to 1980… Ian Smith’s government instructed its employees ‘that no official publication may state unequivocally that Great Zimbabwe was an African creation.’”

“…study commissioned by the French government in 2018. Its authors… estimated that a colossal 90 per cent of Africa’s cultural heritage is in the West, and they added their voices to calls for France to return objects it had acquired during the colonial era.”

“African elephants were larger… and provided ivory of a softer quality, which was more suitable for carving and making jewelry. Elephants had become extinct in China around 200 CE, so the Chinese were also keen to get their hands on ivory.”

There were originally elephants in China?? :ooo

“The only museum in an Arab state that examines the Arab slave trade is Bin Jelmood House in Qatar, where incidentally slavery was only abolished officially in 1952, and where the continual reliance on migrant labor in a system open to abuse has attracted much international criticism. The museum… opened in 2015…”

Okay this whole section on jihadism is interesting but this maybe is the best quote: “As the emir put it to me: ‘Certain social and economic conditions are fertile ground for breeding violent movements — be they religious extremists, ethnic militias or just criminal gangs. Religion simply becomes a rallying point and ideology, but the real discontent lies in politics.’”

“The terror group Boko Haram, based in northern Nigeria, made international headlines when in April 2014 militants stole into a boarding school in Chibok and kidnapped nearly 300 teenage girls in the Christian community. Dozens remain unaccounted for.”

So before the divide of Africa by Europeans Islam and Non-Muslim could mostly coexist but later the rise of jihadism changed all of that…

Mansa Musa, worth the equivalent of 400 billion today, who spent so much he destabilized economies and took decades to repair… his spending caught the attention of Europeans and his image — “maps like this one [1375 Catalan Atlas] may well have encouraged later Europeans to invade Africa in pursuit of the riches they depicted.”

Getting the sense that Timbuktu of the Mali Empire was like the Arabic Library of Alexandria for its fame and renown. Super cool!

“They [The Capsians] ate enormous quantities of land snail and built large structures formed from thousands of snail shells — a unique form of prehistoric shelter, hence the Capsians are sometimes referred to as the escargotières… Today, land snails are still consumed throughout North Africa even though many Muslims elsewhere prefer not to eat them.”

That’s a lot of snails to eat to make a house! So cool!

“According to legend, he was marked out for greatness when a swarm of bees surrounded him at his birth around 1162. This was an omen that he would one day be a strong and prosperous king. The name Lalibela means ‘bees obey him’ in the local language.”

“The three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have historic roots in this region and until the last century all three communities lived in Ethiopia. The last of the Jews of Ethiopia, known as the Beit (or Beta) Israel community or Falasha, were airlifted en masse to Israel in the 1970s. People… were ethnically alike, enjoyed similar cultures and spoke the same languages.”

“The Ethiopian account of Sheba and Solomon is set out in the Kebra Nagast: the book of the ‘Glory of the Kings’. The Kebra Nagast is a compilation of legends, folklore, and traditions relating the heroic deeds and victories of Aksum’s king and queens. It was written in the Ethiopic language Ge’ez in the thirteenth century, possibly by monks, and plays a central role in Ethiopian culture to this day.”

“The veteran Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet… believes that much has yet to be discovered and excavated there. He said in 2017: ‘We have here [in Sudan] an extraordinary history of the world; maybe after some years we will have Sudanology as strong as Egyptology.’ Few people today realize that a substantial number of Egypt’s monuments were built by the Kushite kings.”

“The Kushites spoke their own language, and their writing system differed from the Egyptian one. ‘Meroitic hieroglyphics’, as they are known, cannot be understood; experts have an idea of how words might have sounded but not their meaning. Until we can decipher the script, inscriptions on Kushite monuments remain a mystery…”

Cleopatra and Julius Caesar sidetracked me to looking up when the Julian calendar was invented — proposed in 46 BC and put into effect Jan 1, 45 BC — and subsequently learned that the calendar we use currently is not the Julian one but the Gregorian Calendar proposed in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII which is kinda interesting!

Reading the span of the Egyptian dynasties— 445 years, 380 years, 800 years—it’s a reminder that our own country, 249 years old currently, is nothing in the grand history of the world. We’ve had this country for next to no time at all. It’s wild to think about.

“Modern-day tensions between Egypt and Ethiopia, where 85 per cent of the Blue Nile flows, are centered on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which opened in 2020 and uses the Blue Nile to provide hydroelectric power, leading to anxiety among Egyptians that this will reduce their own water capacity.”

“In this way, traditional African religions are often less about the individual and more about the community. Many readers are familiar with the southern African word ubuntu which means “humanity to others” or “I am what I am, because of who we all are”, which captures the essence of Africa’s indigenous beliefs.”

“This practice, called alloparenting by anthropologists, is not unusual in Africa. Among the Kung of Botswana, for instance, each child is looked after by many adults and older children also contribute to the care of the younger ones. One study of the Efe people… infants had an average of 14 alloparents a day by the time they were 18 weeks old.”

This was written in 2025. Wooo, yay, Bernie predicted the future in the worst way ;-;

“Let’s understand what the Democratic Party leadership does not care to understand. In America today, there is an enormous amount of pain. There is anger. There is frustration. There is fear. There is disappointment. People vote every two years or every four years. Candidates make promises. Nothing happens. Life does not get better. It often gets worse.”

“We learned to say that there was “no alternative” to the basic order of things, a sensibility that the Lithuanian political theorist Leonidas Donskis called “liquid evil.”…criticism became slippery. What appeared to be critical analysis often assumed that the status quo could not actually change, and thereby indirectly reinforced it.”

I had never heard about the Reichstag fire before now. Why do we study the Holocaust so hard but not how he came to power so that those things can never happen again?? We say it was the treaty from WWI and that’s all we learn but…! The gaps in US history and more will radicalize you.

“In the year before the president was elected, American journalists were often mistaken about his campaign. As he… accumulated victory after victory, our commentariat assured us that at the next stage he would be stopped… one group of observers who took a different position: east Europe. To them, much about the president’s campaign was familiar…”