Major Casualties

society is holistic. This means we are an organism. The individual is an organism that is part of a greater being, similar to how a cell is part of a body. If this were not so then there would be no need for the unity of male and female to bring forth a new life. Human sex is organ specialization. The design of each individual is limited. Each can only be good at a few things. It is not everyone who can become a carpenter, a rocket scientist, a musician. It is only when these talents combine in a community that the magic happens ... the whole can do much more. If, due to one thing or another, a type of individual in a community is lost, then the community becomes lame. There are some things it cannot do.
If we look at our lives today, at the tools and implements we use that have revolutionized the way we live, we discover that those who made the inventions and discoveries were a mere handful. It is not all Europeans who had the brains to think up the light bulb. Yet, because there were a few with the brains for this, the talent to do this, we have all benefited.

Dedicated to Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president/CIA spy (enjoying a pampered retirement in Holland) who, in an indirect reaction to an article I wrote, published by The Perspective, an Online Liberian Journal, correctly predicted I would not be able to hide from "them", not even in my own mother's womb ... and his ilk among Africans worldwide.

Have you ever wondered just why African Americans, Caribbeans and other diaspora Africans are so much better than continental Africans at specific athletic sports? This is the case even where the two are brought up under similar circumstances, on similar diets, lifestyles and so on. Recently, a scientist who spent a considerable amount of time researching the issue of why Jamaicans are such good sprinters concluded that it had to do with knee symetry. In this system we live in, it is prudent for me to first dispel racist or colonialistic propaganda before commenting on such a find.

Let us agree that, because this talent is not mirrored in other races, its rightful origin is Africa, even when it has become scanty here. It is therefore not correct to allude to the rapes that happened on the cotton fields as the source of the blood when north American Africans are the topic. Descendants of white Americans do not display the trait. The talent cannot be a product of reactions made to slavery in the Caribbean and other parts of the Diaspora. It cannot, for instance, be a product of a heightened need for speed as a necessity for escape from a chained existence (someone I knew in the past actually suggested this). The need to run away is part and parcel of every milleau Africans live in. It is always essential to run away from something in this life, to have speed, the more the better. In the past, speed made one out-run a speeding Black Mamba. It made one outmaneuvre and get away from a clumsy elephant, a warring tribe, slave traders, etc. Today, one might need to run from a fight, a dog, robbers, or, like me on a farm in Africa, from a Black Mamba. The need for speed could not have become more immediate for those who spent months chained on a ship or working to death on a plantation than it would for those left in nothing better than thatched huts to protect them from the wild at night, days spent looking for sustenance in thickly grown bushes and forests where danger always lurked.

The scientist may have correctly pointed at the explanation for the better performance of some where speed on two human legs is concerned, but it cannot be doubted that the physical characteristic that makes it possible has its origin in Africa. The cause of the difference in performance between continental and diaspora Africans, or the lack of the adaptational change to the knees has to be in the slave selection process. While it is true that entire tribes, usually new migrants to an area, were sold off, most of the selection was done within groups. This means that members of tribes and families would often be selected out of many by their physical appearance. The more robust of body and health the more the chances of being sold down river. Surprise raids by slave traders could not have paid off if they were not selective. The fact slave traders knew what they were doing when it came to selection cannot be disputed. The market demanded a quality that they had to meet if they hoped to make profit out of their trade.

In all of this, the only participants who appear not to have known what they were doing and got the shorter end of the stick as a result were African individuals who sold family members, chiefs or kings who engaged in the trade who sold members of their own tribe or others from groups they conquered. They did not see anything wrong with supplying the best human exemplars available. Parents no doubt agreed to let go their healthiest children secure in the knowledge what they got in return, for example guns, would make them get rich quick. Males would have been secure in the assumption they would thus be able to marry many wives and recreate their loss tenfold or so.

They were so wrong, so foolish, so outwitted.

The factor that made for this result is what is known about inheritance and genes. For Africans, while it is known that we are the most genetically diverse, it is also known that we are the most different when related. Though pertinent findings from research on quantified intelligence are contentious, considered culturally biased by some, they are a very relevant example to give here, I think, if the results speak of a system and a state restricted to this. The capacity to cope in the environment should be considered heritable, ie. genetic. The "regression to the mean" phenomenon is pretty well established today. Where adjustment to this system is the measure, we can conclude that high-octane intelligence is barely repeated in more than one sibling among Africans, irrespective of number. Brothers and sisters of high-octane intelligence Africans or even children of high IQ parents will usually gravitate towards other IQ means than will children or siblings of whites.

This is a fact that applies worldwide among Africans.

If an oppressor were to embark on a holistic purge of intelligence among Africans, and indicators are that this has been happening for quite some time, Africans left behind would not be able to quite replace these lost genes. Intelligence would effectively get bred out of the race in a shorter period and with less effort than it would from caucasians or mongoloids given their bright do not stand out like sore thumbs among those they are closest to genetically.

The clear evidence of loss of a gene that the international athletic ability divide among Africans reveals should remind us Africans of this fact. We should also realize that society is holistic. This means we are an organism. The individual is an organism that is part of a greater being, similar to how a cell is part of a body. If this were not so then there would be no need for the unity of male and female to bring forth a new life. This is like organ specialization. In the same vein, talents are conveniently spread out among members to enhance the viability of the whole group. Never will there be an individual who is good at everything. The design of the creature man is limited. Each can only be good at a few things. It is not everyone who can become a carpenter, a rocket scientist, a musician. It is only when these talents combine in a community that the magic happens ... the whole can do much more. If, due to one thing or another, a type in a community is lost, then the community becomes lame, obviously. There will be those things it cannot do.

To stress this point: it is not everyone who can do everything. If we look at our lives today, at the tools and implements we use that have revolutionized the way we live, we discover that those who made the inventions and discoveries are a mere handful. It is not all Europeans who had the brains to think up the light bulb. Yet, because there were a few with the brains for this, the talent to do this, we have all benefited.
Clearly, we Africans have lost a lot as a result of the many negative episodes we have been through, and it shows. We have lost more than just manpower, as history books insist, or people with more symetrical knees, as modern scientists suggest ... kind of. Talk of chaff may in fact be correct. You see, athletic ability can be seen, but not forms of intelligence, for example musical ability. Can anyone see, just by looking at another, that they have the talent to play the guitar? Another reality exposed by this knowledge is the fact we may have lost qualities that we had, that we will never know about because they did not survive somewhere else as did the symetrical knees. Imagine there had been no Husein Bolts in Jamaica if all Africans shipped abroad during the slave trade had later been wiped out in some kind of final solution. Would Africans have known they had once had people who could run as fast?

What is worrying is that the same ignorance seen in our ancestors that cost the race dearly in terms of genes is still with us today. The same lack of fear or at least thought of an irrevocable alteration to our corporate being still haunts the black world today. Would you believe the people who administered the syphilis to the poor sharecroppers from Macon county in Alabama, USA, in the infamous Tuskegee experiments were hired black people (African Americans) who were not kept ignorant of the objectives of the experiment? In Africa today it is Africans themselves who lead teams that experiment on locals with dangerous and often deliberately contaminated medications with the potential to damage genes on the germ-line level, meaning the defect can be inherited, or they can cause infertility, infect with incurable diseases, and so on.

There are too many Africans who care about nothing more than getting paid, believing, if they are aware of the harm those paying them are doing, that all will work out fine for them and the children they are raising in the end. Evidence from our history and science clearly reveals to us that we are not invincible, especially not genetically. It matters who we lose. It matters because we do not know by merely looking what their role in our organism is and are never guaranteed that their type can be replaced. Whereas guns and other treats and trinkets is the way much backwardness, suffering, tragedies and miseries we see in the present were sown, it is cars, homes, land, and, of course, cash that is going to make the lives of our descendants hard. We could get extinct. All the signs are there. We could go the same way Amerindians went, all because some among them were too keen on 12 dollars to betray their own kind, an amount that may have meant the world to some kinds of people at the time, but is as ridiculous and as much a cheap treat or trinket as cars and such will be to survivors who will look back to today and wonder how someone could be so ignorant to think a car is worth the destruction and suffering that will have been caused by then. These items will be seen to be worth as much as the $12 that got some Indians drooling ... too worthless for the destruction they suffered as a people ... so it was in the day, and so it remains today that nary an oppressor gives the money's worth of what is being exchanged to cheap sellouts. Problem here is the rest of us Africans cannot easily detach ourselves from such stupidity. All of us, not just the sellouts, will be seen as fools, people who cannot see or plan long-term. On top of that, melanated people who will be alive in this future will be actual fools incapable of reaching intellectual heights that could see them maintain a modern country, defend it successfully if attacked, see their way to freedom if oppressed, or avoid accepting freedom at all costs, etc.

We as a people are in dire straits, in need of rescue. We have been places, been to the whale's belly and ... got stuck there. We need to see a way out of where we are. We can not expect what has gone wrong to get right of its own accord. Things fell apart, Chinua Achebe told us. They have fallen further apart as the years have rolled by, I tell you. I also add that the worsening of the state has the initial falling apart to thank. What this means is we can only expect things to get worse, with increasing speed to boot. Only by our artificial input, by for example the re-breading of genetic qualities we identify to be rare, or lost, can we ever hope to correct matters in future.