₦airaland Forum

musiwa7: [img]http://4.bp..com/-v49kMBT8yck/TahQaMGXoxI/AAAAAAAAAgU/zS_YVfyVKQs/s1600/emmanual+obama+dancing1.jpg[/img]

https://media.onsugar.com/files/2011/05/19/2/192/1922729/a5951de3bb725aaa_michelle_obama_dancing_.jpg

yoji: See, if a movie is overhyped, after the first impresssive opening weekend, it then starts to fall down the charts cos by then the audience wud hv realised that it was overhyped and fewer pple will go back to see it. Now as as am postin this, skyfall has gone back to no. 1 after being earlier pushed down by newer films.
Now wat this means is dat more pple are going back to see it after bein really impressed. So if its not that good y are pple going back to see it. For a former no.1 to go back to no.1 in d presence of other impresive new movies speaks volumes of its quality.

Ok, but it still didn't impress me like I had hoped based on all the hype it was getting.

Tony Spike: The SKYFALL movie, to me, is like any action thriller with very poor suspense. I could predict the movie after watching the first 30 minutes. The Gizmos were conspicuously absent and the conclusion was illogical. My opinion though...

Did you really predict that Bardem's character was going to escape and head to the courthouse to try and finish M, or that a train was going to break through the wall underground to destroy anyone following him on his way there?

And how was the conclusion illogical?

I am now waiting for the upcoming movie of the year, THE HOBBIT.

The book was great when I read it several years ago, but movie adaptations of books often don't live up to the quality of the books.

I think Django Unchained is going to be the real next hit of the year. Hopefully in that film Tarantino can match what he did with Inglourious Basterds.

alanmwene: in terms of natural ressources,central africa is 1000times richer than west africa and bantus are the most ingenious and smartest people in africa.with the right leadership,centrak africa will be the richest region in africa.the problems in central africa originated in colonization:we were colonized by the wrong people!Frenchs and belgians brought their wrong ethos(laziness,clientelism,lack of economic dynamism,etc,,,) to central africa.Had congo been colonized by england,congo would ways ways above nigeria today. it is also a fact that white people like west africans more than bantus.The reason being that west africans are easy to manipulate.100% of africans who were used as mercenaries,henchmen,killers,etc...by whites during colonization were west africans.West africans were liked for their lack of morals!99.9% of africans who fought the white man were of bantu origin!Even today in france and belgium,a west african(senegalese,malian,...) has 10times more chances to make it big in the public service than a bantu.But, we shall overcome!

You can't be serious. This entire paragraph is so absurd.

lol, you guys have started with the West Africa vs. Central Africa nonsense again. . .

It was good, but somewhat over hyped. I do think Javier Bardem's acting was great in it though.

tpia1: ^ your last sentence is debatable, unless you're not referring to peoples from around the chad basin, many of who are araboid

Actually, after (re)checking I found both sentences are only partially true. There are some groups with heavier amounts of Eurasian DNA than others and there is even some R1b DNA found in a few non-Chadic language speakers. But none has been found among the two non-Chadic speaking peoples shymmex was referring to, and anyways, that R1b DNA has nothing to do with mixing in recent colonial times (I think he knows this, but was just looking for something to argue with ezeagu about.)

comnsense: Come on man, I must say, you are too 'scientific' to the point of hogwash. Deepsight is making more sense here. Don't tell me that there is no evidence that there is anything outside the universe. This is simple logic; we don't need evidence for this. Because if there isn't anything outside the Universe (as we rightly don't know), what then is there - nothing? Fair enough. Was this 'nothing' there before the Big Bang? Obviously. Well, did this 'nothing' negate the existence of Time. This is where definitions of Time get ridiculous.
Let's not get scientific to the point we don't make simple sense. You have been arguing that Time couldn't have existed before the Big Bang - Claptrap. This is like the 'If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound?' riddle.
Because the Universe didn't exist then, doesn't mean that that metaphysical entity in which events unfold at some point (Time) didn't exist. Because Light, matter or scientists were not there to observe or measure it doesn't negate its existence. That, I think is Deepsight's idea of Layman's time.
So, no. There obviously was either Something or Nothing before the Big Bang..common sense and logic tells us that. If there was something, what was it? If there was nothing? From whence did all the matter in that singularity spring from? These are the valid points to debate and not the 'no Time before the big bang' hogwash.

Everything you wrote here has already been addressed by me. I do not intend to repeat myself on a thread where my positions on this issue are already there to be read just a few posts above. It would be a waste of time. Clearly what I wrote went way over your head. Anyway, a discussion on the origin of the universe and the nature of time is not a mere "ordinary common sense" discussion but one of the most significant questions about existence that a person can ponder over. A person might have to do some actual hard thinking and discard some unsupported assumptions when discussing that issue instead of just relying on naive assumptions. Later.

shymexx: R1b DNA already proved that Edos and Igbos have a significant amount of people with European ancestry - you just can't argue against that...

R1b DNA is found in Chadic speakers in Africa, not in speakers of languages classified in the larger language group that Edo or Igbo is classified in.

And even then it seems that this probably Eurasian DNA in Chadic speakers is slight.

bokohalal: Sorry,origin is unknown to me. But with the family I mentioned living very close by,I have concluded that Europeans lived on that street.

Alright, I see. Thanks.

bokohalal: @ PhysicsQED,there is only one 'Aybo'street by Isekhere/Ibiwe.You could even ask any driver or Okada to drop you there. The same pronunciation applies to the Bazuaye appellation not the 'e' as in 'Edward' which is for divinity.

Thanks for clearing that up. Could you explain the origin of that street's name to me then?

I've read about some Europeans lodging in some houses in Benin in past centuries and I posted one source in another thread from a Dutchman who gave a description of the city and said that he and another Dutchman were lodged in the same house. Was Ebo street a specific area of the city that most or all of the European traders stayed at in the past? Or does it have no such association?

No one is saying that there was large-scale admixture of races but to deny that there was none at all, would be fantastic.

You're right. I guess what I'm against is not really the claim that there was some admixture here and there in a few places, but some claims that something (skin tone variation) that happens naturally between and within different human groups everywhere else has to be due to admixture when it occurs among Africans.

bokohalal: Europeans mixed with Binis,no doubt.

I think this statement should be qualified significantly. There really isn't much to support the idea that there was any large scale mixing between Binis and Europeans and a few families here or there claiming or actually having European ancestry is not the same thing as a whole group mixing to some significant degree. There are mixed couples and mixed children in the UK in modern times, but years from now people wouldn't say about this era, "this is when the British mixed with black Africans" because the statement could be misinterpreted without qualifying it by pointing out that it's just a few people out of the huge whole.

There is a small house right by the moat at Isekhere/Ibiwe opposite Ebo (that says a lot)Street where a Bini family lives. Their features are Afro-European.They have relevance in some aspect of Bini tradition though I do not know exactly what their function is.

How are you sure that you're interpreting "Ebo" the right way there?

The appellation of the Bazuaye family is 'Ogie n Ebo'. We know what Bini tradition demands to become a chief.

I am also not sure this is a right interpretation of "Ebo." I think the appellation might have something to do with deities or diviners. Maybe one of their ancestors was considered a great diviner and they gained a reputation for that.

It is on record that some Portuguese mercenaries fought alongside Edo warriors to defeat the Igalas. Idah is north east of Benin city. Esan and Afenmai are on the way.We sabi sojas nau.Then and now!

Saying there are more lighter skinned Esan and Afenmai because of randy Portuguese mercenaries in the 16th century would be more plausible if there weren't so many of them (lighter skinned people) frequently found among the populations and they didn't all seem to have wholly African features. Until I see DNA evidence, I'm skeptical of this claim about Esan and Portuguese. . .I have yet to see even one Esan person with really "mixed" facial features that isn't actually a child of a black and white couple. The light skinned ones have features that are just as African as the darkest ones, which seems to me to be a big clue that the lighter skin tone is really due to natural variation within the population rather than outside admixture.

This is just in response to those that posit that the Europeans were 'celibate' in ancient Benin.

It's not that they were all "celibate" - probably a few did hook up with a few of the people over the centuries - it's just that there's little evidence to suggest that there was any really significant mixing in Benin or the surrounding areas, especially considering how foreigners were strictly supervised. Even in the mid 1600s, this is what at least one visitor claimed about sexual relations with foreigners in Benin:

"Each man marries as many wives as he wishes and can feed, and he has a great number of concubines over and above these. They wallow in lust and voluptuousness, but a white man or a Christian has difficulty in finding a wh0re, for fear of punishment, because it is forbidden on pain of death." (This is from Olfert Dapper - his sources were from eyewitness accounts of visitors. The part about "lust and voluptuousness" is probably what polygamy would look like to a prudish Christian of that time - similar stereotypes about being "lustful" were applied to other polygamous peoples like Arabs and Turks by other European writers.)

(Side note: this quote is kind of ironic in light of Benin's current foreign prost1tution problem.)

Maybe at another time in Benin, things were different, but the idea of mixing being significant (more than a few families) or widespread anywhere in southern Nigeria in the past doesn't seem to be supported by any kind of strong evidence. Anywhere you go in southern Nigeria, there are just those few families in a few places that people know about that have European ancestry or were descendants of former slaves who moved back to Nigeria and who might have had some European ancestry from that, but it's not like there are groups with significant amounts of European admixture or groups who, on average, have even slight European admixture. I doubt that even the Ijaws would show slight European ancestry on average if large scale DNA testing was carried out among them.

I'd bet that there are probably more southern Europeans (Portuguese included) with some slight west African DNA (studies have shown that there are some Southern Europeans with slight West African DNA) inherited from population movements from some centuries or millennia ago than there are West Africans with slight European DNA.

[Sorry about the long post.]

michisdo: Wow. There are so many ignorant people here, its ridiculous.
Just because you see it as an insult that one of yourr fesatures has been inherited from the white man, you dismiss and insult the possibility? No.
Firstly about the Hausas, traditional hausas were black like all other west africans, until the Usman dam fodio jihad, during which the two cultures of fulani and Hausa intertwined.
The fulanis are light skinned because they are descendant of the Barbars, which have numerous european linkages via relations with the roman empire.
The Igbos are light skinned because they interacted with the portuguese and dutch traders. Please tell me where you have found that people came to trade and no sex occured to produce numerous fatherless children.
Someone said there are many europeans of different colours and noone says they are different tribes? WRONG!! The Viking tribes who forcefully migrated to areas like britain were blond haired, blue eyed tall Scandanavians. The indigenous british were dark haired. The Romans who then conquered europe and britain etc were dark, curly haired shorter people, with mediterranian roots. Gingers for God's sake are the white version of albinos. They are a result like albinos, of a genetic mutation not a particular race, people.
There are many results in history of intermixing forming distinct races with different characteristics:
The fact that many asian similarities are attributed to Ghengis Khan, as something like 1 in 5 asians are his descendents, due to his ritual of fucking the first 'picks' in his vast conquered lands.
The fact that the Roman influenced town of Liquian in China, where blond, blue-eyed people are born everyday is different from the rest of the country.

However, i would like to say that it has been discovered that every human being not from sub-saharan africa actually has genetic sub-saharan african roots due to a genetic connection they all share. This is explained as they are all descendents of an african mother and have over tens of thousands of years migrated and developed genetic mutations which changed their appearance like skin colour, hair colour, etc. Since they went through a mini ice-age amongst other things, which we africans never went through. How would we be light, with all this lack of winter.
They then came back and tried to colonise us. Imagine the irony.

So yes, it is very possible we light nigerians have foreign ancestors, but those ancestors have nigerian ancestors, so its still all from Africa. lol

I was going to respond to this in detail until I read the part in bold. It would probably be a waste of time to respond if you can say something like that. I don't intend to explain how you misunderstood and distorted the meaning of some of the things I wrote nor do I intend to ask you to provide references for some of your specific claims, but I think you should know that you are contradicting the basic premise of your post by admitting that there are naturally occurring different physical features, hair, skin tones, etc. among different groups of Europeans. I don't understand how you can't see that similar kinds of variation happened among Africans. Yes there are some groups like Fulani that have some non-black ancestry, but mixing with non-Africans like that is not the reason for the vast majority of the variation in skin tone and features across Africa.

No, I don't read the comics. I glanced through one of the comics in a store once, but I've never even read a full episode. I honestly prefer watching the TV and movie adaptations of comics, graphic novels or manga to actually reading them (except for a few series like Asterix and Tintin).

Another good thing about this show is that according to Kirkman, and according to the host of the "Talking Dead" interview show, the TV show actually diverges in some significant ways from the comic in terms of plot and characters - for example, the characters Merle and Darryl (who are the favorite characters of a lot of viewers) aren't actually in the comics but they're in the TV show. So even the readers of the comics wouldn't know exactly what is going to happen next.

The governor told Andrea that he collects and stores the heads so that he can look at them to prepare for the horrors of the outside world. But he was so disappointed when Merle told him in an earlier episode that he had killed Michonne but had failed to get her head that I still think it's more likely that the governor was keeping the heads as some kind of trophies or as a visual record of his kill count. He could have been telling Andrea the truth about the heads, but I don't think that's very likely.

Wow. . .wish I had seen the fight.

burkutu: e8.....finally a cool black chick is part of the show.wished she wasnt hitched to the bearded brother.looking forward to new episodes next year

Michonne is THE cool black chick on the show. She's a total badass. This new girl doesn't really compare so far.

Now the mid-season finale was really great. And my prediction about the governor killing Merle was half-right: he is at least going to try and have Merle killed, although I don't think he will succeed, even in a situation that looks like Merle and Darryl are cornered. I think the two of them are going to make a quick dash towards the crowd of angry onlookers before the governor's henchmen can get their guns up and in position to fire, knowing that the people in the crowd would be too scared to fight them or attack them, and knowing that the governor can't shoot them if they are in the crowd of bystanders. From there the two of them will probably make some kind of mad sprint into the zombie infested wilderness to try and escape.

But my explanation for why the governor would want to have Merle killed was completely right. The creator of the Walking Dead comic, Robert Kirkman, who wrote the mid-season finale, basically gave the exact same reasons I did for why the governor would want to have Merle killed when he appeared on the "Talking Dead" interview show. However, the additional thing Kirkman pointed out was that in failing to kill Michonne, Merle not only failed, but failed in a way that let Michonne know that the governor had sent Merle and some goons there to kill her - and that's the reason that she went to the governor's room to wait for him so she could kill him. If Merle had failed to kill her without being detected (not that that was really possible though, Michonne is too alert) and had just told the truth, the governor's daughter would still be walking around, the governor would have his eye still, and Merle would be just fine.

Negro_Ntns: yo dude, which one u dey.

nobody talk bout bini here. we dey enjoy here...why u want shut down the playground?

I wasn't going to post on the thread except to clear up that picture bittyend posted about washing of feet - to point out its origin and the actual significance of the ceremony. But then I saw how ugly the thread was getting so I made a suggestion to the mod.

bittyend: STFU!

Where were you when ibos were mocking yoruba culture? GTFOH and go find something else to do.

They started it and they got served, end of story!

STFU yourself. What makes you think I was only referring to you or to those mocking Igbo culture when I said "various people"? If I meant to reference the mocking of Igbo culture alone, I would have said that. You and those you're arguing with are mocking each other's cultures, pasts, etc. and dragging each other into the mud. . .and for what? It's pointless.

Anyway, if you want to continue the sh1t slinging fest, go right ahead, but I wrote what I wrote only because I saw that Jarus had been viewing the thread, not to address you or anything.

If this thread is just going to become an avenue for various people to mock the culture of other groups, then perhaps the mods should lock it.

bittyend: Keep trying to big up your ego, you just said you did.

I think it's more likely that they got some of the blue and the white and blue striped cloth they were selling from the Yoruba in the hinterland that they had established trade routes with rather than from the coast, although it's possible that some of that cloth in the hinterland could have actually originated in the Yoruba coastal areas. But I'm not any kind of expert on West African textiles or anything. I just said no because you said you wanted a straight answer with regard to Ijebu. The longer answer is, "no, there's no specific evidence that they did, but scholars assume that they probably did, so let's go along with that."

bittyend: Be precise, I don't have time for verbosity. Simple yes, or no.

No, I don't think they did.

bittyend: But did the Benin's buy clothes from the Ijebu's? That's the question, answer that and stop posting epistles. Dammit!

Well, there is no pre-colonial or colonial era written or traditional evidence that suggests they did, but modern historians would like to assume that Benin did get some cloth from Ijebu, since both Benin and Ijebu were major centers of cloth production for export (among other places in West Africa) at one time. I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption since cloth from Ijebu was sold to other places as well, so I'm going along with their claim, but if you must know, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that the cloth Benin was selling (not to talk of wearing) was actually obtained specifically from Ijebu.

bittyend: The clothes the Benins wore back then were sold to them by the Ijebu's. I doubt the Benin guy on the thread will dispute that.

Some of the clothing that they exported to other parts of Africa or to Europeans originated from Ijebu areas, but some was also from the hinterland (the interior), not the areas nearer to the coast like the Ijebu area, and some of it was from the Benin kingdom itself. If people in Benin were even weaving for export (which they were) as well as reselling cloth that they had bought from other traders in the interior or on the coast, then it's not likely that they would have needed to go all the way to Ijebu or to wait for other traders to arrive just to get clothing for themselves.

Different people wore different kinds of clothing in Benin depending on their station and there are numerous written references to weaving going on in Benin itself. As for the Benin people of the past, if the pre-colonial written descriptions and the surviving photographs are to be relied upon, it seems that they had their own varied dress styles and weaving, regardless of whether they were reselling cloth that they had obtained from the interior or the coast.

bittyend: Ibos worshipping oyinbos after their women were raped; circa 1945.

[img]http://driwancybermuseum.files./2010/12/nigeria-britsh-soldier-arogan-pic.jpg[/img]

These are not intended to be depictions of Igbos, but are meant to be depictions of Binis at Ughoton ('Gwato'), except for the colonial soldier or carrier standing by the British man, who would have been a Hausa and except for the black man with the European hat, who was probably meant to be a guide from an Itsekiri or Ijaw area. As you can see in the image, the black faces, including that of the black soldier or carrier who is with the British, look like unpleasant caricatures. The drawing is from a British illustrated weekly newspaper called The Graphic and is from 1897, following the aftermath of the Benin massacre. The illustrator that drew this particular image, according to the newspaper, was C.J. Staniland, a popular illustrator of the time who never went to Benin and drew the images basically from his imagination. Ironically, many of the written accounts from visitors to Benin over the centuries have positive comments about the appearance of the people both in terms of physiognomy and clothing. Even Alan Boisragon, one of the British survivors of the "Benin massacre" of 1897, described the son of the chief of Ughoton who received him and his group when they got there as "rather a nice-looking youth."

The washing of feet was ceremonial and seemed to have something to do with both welcoming/purifying strangers and paying homage to Oba Esigie, the king of Benin who was most fond of Europeans and European ways:

'On entering the country or the town, there was the curious custom which compelled a stranger to have his feet washed. Before entering the city, Legroing and Balon had to visit the captain of war, and have their feet washed. (Landolphe, I., p. 332). Similarly, Mr. C. Punch writes me: "On landing at Guaton, we were received on the top of the bluff by the Ahuraku and his suite, and a great point was made of our having our feet washed by them at a place sacred to the memory of Assigie, or Asije, the king of long-ago, first connected with Europeans. A very ancient brass bowl was produced for the purpose. This appeared to me to have been a bit of old Portuguese repousse work, and was always left lying about in this place devoted to Assigie pending the arrival of some European." It will be remembered that all the members of Phillips' party had their feet washed at Gwato.' - H. Ling Roth, Great Benin, p. 123

[Whether the brass bowl was actually Portuguese or not is questionable, as it's not clear if the Portuguese were making and exporting repoussé brass bowls for trade. It seems to only have been Cyril Punch's opinion that it was Portuguese, though it could easily have had another African or European origin.]

It does not seem to have been about "worshipping oyinbos."

Obviously most of those going through the desert to try and get to Europe and especially to Italy were and are from Edo state and are from the ethnic groups of that state (particularly Bini) based on the trafficking statistics and the news reports, however, I don't see how someone (Baby mama) can have such difficulty accepting that there would be some other non-Edo state or non-Bini people going through the desert from other areas:

http://www.asafeworldforwomen.org/trafficking/ht-middle-east/ht-libya.html

http://www.transparencyng.com/index.php/news-categories/40-diaspora/5507-nigerians-in-libya-duped-raped-and-killed

http://www.thisdaylive.com/articles/desperate-for-wealth/128487/

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that those who are convincing some people from Edo state to travel through the desert to Europe could do the same in other states or to people from other states in Nigeria that are living in Edo state. Anyway, this ethnic question isn't even what should matter.

₱®ÌИСΞ:
i would have really love to see how the guv survived the apocalypse....the struggle he went through and all that, but he just popped out of nowhere

Same here. I would also have loved to see that, but I think they wanted to have some more leeway as to what his character's past is and what his motivations are so they didn't want to give him a fixed back-story. But I do think that they'll at least reveal how his daughter got turned into a walker. Maybe not immediately, but at least before his character leaves or dies.

Baby mama: So why on earth did this used up Bini retired prost.stitute decide to give them an Igbo name as her name
How annoying
She looks like a typical Bini girl from head to her hammer toes
Speaks with Bini area accent
Pronounces how as ow,husband as usband and have as ave like Bini ,some Ijaws and Yorubas do
Igbos don't have that H/non H speech defect
It is quite annoying that she will give a fake ID and an Igbo one at that
Is that the new method now,Women turning tricks in Italy and france from the land that exports Prost.itutes to Europe now claiming Igbo names?when I read the story and saw the name I said no way,then saw the clip and heard her speak and confirmed it.God punish her!
Amaka Chinye indeed

They know exactly what they are going for before setting off,some are sponsored by family members with the blessings of their family including husbands.these are no naive women

If she was faking her identity there would be no particular reason to choose an Igbo one - she could choose any other ethnic group. She could even choose a first and last name with purely Christian or English names rather than that of any ethnic group. Also, if that woman had any interest whatsoever in hiding who she really was, she certainly wouldn't show her face for the camera while sharing what she went through. No amount of name changing would hide her face, by which she can still be identified so the 'fake name' idea doesn't make sense - she should have asked the camera person not to show her face or have covered her face herself if she was even concerned about that stuff. I'm sure you'll tell us that Anthonia Egbuna was also using a fake ID even though foreign police had to identify who she was. I also see that you started a whole thread a while back trying to disclaim the ethnicity of some robbers, even claiming that one Ogbole (someone with an Idoma name) was somehow Edo. People from any group can commit crimes or get into shady practices, including your own. Get over it.

edited: Not going to get into a debate about who speaks the best "Engrissh" and how. Not worth the time.

pro01: In any case, assuming (but not conceding) that colonialism did more harm than good for Africa, should the same not be said about Asia and the Americas? If so, why has Africa refused to move on like the rest of the colonised world have done? The case of the United States is trite, so no need to talk about that. What about Brazil, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, India, etc.? These countries were colonised - just like most countries in Africa. However, they have shrugged off the "negative" effects of colonialism, started from scratch, and proceeded to attain levels of progress, development and prosperity comparable to their erstwhile colonial masters'. Unfortunately, rather than emulate these shining paradigms, Black Africans have continuously preferred to whine about how great Africa would have been without colonialism, and how colonialism made development impossible to achieve! More ridiculously, these ideas are based on 'evidence' in obscure books - books that are little more than wild postulations and personal opinions/fabrications of the authors. Some prefer to swallow defensive and defeatist rationalisations spewed by pseudo-intellectuals such as Walter Rodney.

Well, colonization was actually devastating to the Americas and I don't think they ever recovered from it. Even apart from the issue of the genocides and the cultural devastation, which is a whole other topic of discussion itself, the descendants of the indigenous peoples of America, especially in central and southern America (Brazil included) but also in North America, suffered through oppression and discrimination over centuries and today many in south America (and even many in North America) live poor or impoverished lives and are certainly poorer on average than those people in the Americas that are descended mostly or almost entirely from European settlers, colonizers, and immigrants. On Asia, the question of whether the parts of Asia that were colonized are not worse off than the parts that were not colonized is also a legitimate question. We don't know what they could have done and achieved without foreign exploitation. I agree that Africans need to move forward, develop and face our problems head on as some Asian and Latin American countries have done instead of dwelling too much on our past and on colonization, but the question of "what if this or that hadn't happened in Africa's history" will always be there.

Many parts of Africa may not have been full of complex urban societies with cities and most of Africa was politically and ethnically fragmented, but in some of those areas where large urban centers were not developing, there were also not very large populations. So it's not as if all of Africa (population wise) was just one way - either all in small and very basic villages with simpler technology, art or architecture or all in large, complex cities. The picture is not so black and white and is more grey than that. Also, that kind of non-urban lifestyle is not so bad or contemptible just because it doesn't meet the criteria for civilization. It is really modern conventions and views about being civilized or uncivilized that make people think that groups around the world who did not develop such urban centers or lived a simpler lifestyle are inherently inferior or less capable of modern development in some way than those that did. But really if you look at history, every group of people lived like that at some point and anyway it is basically the natural lifestyle of man.

Concerning "evidence" about how great Africa could have been if not for colonization, except for the most extreme theories and claims from a few unprincipled or dishonest writers, the idea of Africa as having some degree of significant development in several places prior to colonization is definitely not merely "wild postulation" or someone's "personal opinions/fabrications." As just one example, the original capital of the kingdom of Kongo, Mbanza Kongo, was said in a letter written by the ambassador of Milan to Portugal in 1491 to be as big as the city of Évora (in Portugal), and to have impressive houses, and there is later evidence from other observers that the kingdom was essentially large and organized. Evora was one of the largest cities in Portugal at that time. It is only the twenty-first largest today, but at that time it really was one of the most prominent cities of Portugal. There is a 1501 Portuguese drawing of the city of Evora here if you want to get some idea of what that city was like back then for comparison. In other words, when Europeans met the people of the kingdom of Kongo, they found an already great capital city in the heart of the kingdom. Similar things were written about some other African kingdoms that Europeans and Arabs and North Africans visited at various times, and there are other places further in the interior of which such specific things were not written but which we know were significant centralized centers of development from archaeology and other sources of evidence. In southern Africa, Mapungubwe, Zimbabwe, Mutapa, Butua, and Thulamela were all important centers of centralized development yet the fact that there were ancient kingdoms there with people who were capable of creating impressive art or physical structures would probably be obscure to most people. Some Africans on the continent and Africans abroad might know about some of the famous art from parts of West Africa that is undeniable evidence of centralized development and complexity (and it is not only the places that had such art that were organized and developing in some way or another), but they may not know that such places were found all across black Africa - southern, central, western, and eastern Africa. When it eventually dawns on one that these different societies separated by culture, environment and by huge distances had developed cities and different civilizations, and that civilizations rose and fell or prospered at various points in Africa's history rather than the continent just being one big land of "darkness" and "ignorance" south of the Sahara desert, the natural reaction is to question whether colonization was really necessary. Of course colonization had its negatives and some positives, but if the ultimate goal is to be civilized and Africans were capable of creating civilizations themselves, was it really necessary? I don't think so.

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ur right lol...he does have a few mad scientist tricks up his sleeves ....he can live....for now tho......i dont think the guv luks hardcore enof to take down merle....maybe its his looks, but he strikes me as a wannabe paramilitary / politician...maybe they would have used another character for the role...well the show has a way of suprising us.....

The governor strikes me as an ambitious psychopath who is ruthlessly exploiting his position in order to enjoy women and amass as much power as possible in the midst of the chaos around him. Also, he collects and stores the severed heads of those he has killed as if he were some kind of warlord from ancient times - he even meant for Merle to bring back Michonne's head. He comes off as being more sinister than Merle to me, and in a few of their interactions you can tell that Merle seems to be a little scared of him (or maybe that's just what it looks like to me). But even if Merle doesn't fear what the governor is capable of, he at least respects him and this is obvious from Merle's expression whenever he's around the governor.

@ shymmexx, I don't think the article you posted actually supports the idea in the title of the thread and the title that the BBC has used to label the article. He is just admitting that communication is much easier between a random African and a random Indian because of the spread of the English language and that business opportunities are greater for countries where many people have proficiency in English. I'm not sure the author (Joel Kibazo), who says in the article "there is little that I admire about the colonial era" actually chose that title.