Anyway, what do I know? I watched Roots last night instead.

[Ganpati's Goonerz--AFC's Aboriginal Fertility Cult]

Yeah, the first episode with the supposedly idyllic life in Islamic Africa was pretty risible, mind. Apparently, black people just ate and drank, sang, danced and uttered cod philosophy all day before we turned up.

I have to admit, as a good lefty I was shocked when I did my final OU course. (It was arts, not history, on the Enlightenment to Romanticism, 1780-1830.) Read the book by the first whitey into the middle of Africa, Mungo Park's Travels in the Interior of Africa (1799.)

Apparently, 3 in every 4 black sub-Saharan Africans was a slave. Their economy was pre-feudal, based on labour, not land. And all but 2 jobs (leather tanning and metal work) were done by slaves. So wars were fought to capture PoWs (for slaves) not for territory. {They reckon it was the underpopulation due to the harsh climate which caused this need for labour not land.}

They had 2 classes of slaves. The PoWs had no rights and could be killed on a whim. But a PoW could be made a house-slave, and the descendants of house slaves were also house slaves, and they could only be punished by a court, called a palaver.

{This is also where the word Mumbo Jumbo enters the English lingo. It was a sort of masque, where a guy in a funny head-garb would use his stick to beat wives that had got too moany.}

So basically, all they did was fight wars to get more slaves. And it had always been like this, before whitey in the C16th, before the Arabs in the C8th, cos they'd always needed labour, not land. Prob no different before the Wops civilised us.

Mungo said there were 3 groups. Muslim moors, Muslim blacks and Pagan blacks. (Bit like Soudan). He hated the Muslim moors (who seem to do what the Janjawid do) cos he was kidnapped by them for months. But after getting free, a black muslim slave trader saved his life by getting him back to the coast and safety.

He died on the next mission, min you. Mungo, that is.

He got Britannica changed, to show that the blacks were not sub-human, just that slavery was what held them back. But I, too, like the Beeb, always used to think that they lived in hippy communes until the slavers arrived, but it wasn't like that at all.

The book is really worth redaing. Think you can get it free online.

[Ganpati's Goonerz--AFC's Aboriginal Fertility Cult]

Well clearly there's a ways to go yet. But what I mean is that it's heartening to see a guy trying to sell shoelaces on the street rather than sitting staring blankly into the middle distance.

Yeah, cos it's not like you ever see loads of poor Indians getting on the train at each stop flogging stuff, is it? Kids with deformed legs sweeping up the carriages in the hope of a few rupees. Or at every set of traffic lights. No. They're fücking useless, which explains why Africa broke the world record last week for 100+ satellites launched on one rocket, while India just has the big boss man and his family robbing the primary produce of the country for his own benefit.