Lupita Partners With Historical Racists?! Say It Ain't So!!

MBwebe Ishangi avatar   
MBwebe Ishangi
As a historian focusing on the effects colonialism continues to have on Diasporic Afrikans, I was disheartened when I saw Academy Award-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o appear in an ad for De Beers Diam..

 

“I’m honored to be the first Global Ambassador for De Beers. This campaign brings to life the transformative power that I feel when I wear De Beers’ diamond creations, and the pride in knowing where they come from and the good they do. Even more importantly, my partnership with De Beers allows me to extend my advocacy for women and girls around the world.” 

~ Lupita Nyong’o

We all fell in love with Academy Award-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o in the movie ‘Black Panther’. Her presence and skill as an ass-kicking spy was highlighted even more in ‘Wakanda Forever’. 

Off-screen, her humanitarian efforts made news this past October when it was revealed she turned down a role to play an Agojie warrior in the box office hit ‘The Woman King’, although the decision was actually made back in 2020.

October 19, 2022, Bre Williams of Yahoo! News reported after being cast in the film, she made a short documentary about the Dohemy and Agojie tribe of Benin called ‘Warrior Women With Lupita Nyong’o’, after which the Hollywood Reporter cited she was grappling “uncomfortably with the tribe’s legacy of violence,” after learning their role in the capture of Afrikans who were later sold into the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade.

After the documentary was complete she decided to leave the film merely  stating she felt it wasn’t the role for her to play.

Never going into specifics, she departed showing no shade toward the movie after her new found knowledge, but once it was released and the critiques came in, her documentary challenged the validity of how the Agojie were portrayed versus who they actually were historically. And rightfully so! 

For this act, she is to be commended for bringing this to the public, righting OUR-story. UNTIL… (record skip)

It now seems Lupita’s cultural loyalties are at a cross road yet again. How so? I recently saw a print ad of Lupita and De Beers Diamond Mining Company. Wait… What?!

October 24, 2022, just 5 days after news broke on why she left ‘The Woman King’, De Beers announces her as the First Global Ambassador in their new ad campaign titled, “‘De Beers: Where It Begins,’ which tells the story of the only global luxury brand that starts at the source”… that start being in Afrika! 

De Beers seem to be beating their chest gloating as the leading diamond distributor in the world since 1888, yet this etymological story calculatedly omits its key founder, Cecil John Rhodes.

According to their website, debeersgroup.com, Nyong’o will support De Beers’ Building Forever commitment, which aims to advance 10,000 women entrepreneurs, another 10,000 girls in the field of STEM, and invest at least $10 million across southern Afrika, and to achieve these goals by 2030.

And although De Beers has the financial means to fund this—again, made from stolen diamond resources—what’s oxymoronic about this is it’s a mere decimal of what De Beers is actually worth. 

Rhodes said it himself back in the late 1890s his company “will be worth as much as the balance of Africa.” He wasn’t wrong. The revenue made in 2021 alone was $5.6 Billion!

De Beers is currently the world’s largest diamond producer by value, controlling 60-80% of the world’s diamond production while also controlling 60% of global diamond sales.

So that $10 million they’re throwing to Lupita’s cause is mere chump change. They owe the people of that region much much more!

Back to their website, they have a timeline from their origin to the present, yet they no where do they disclose the name of Rhodes nor his role in the founding of De Beers. 

Today 85% of the company is owned by Anglo American (which was co-founded by J. P. Morgan) aka Oppenheimer Trust, who inherited Rhode’s trust when he died. So it should be known they are the key conductors of the elite racism we feel throughout the world. 

Along with Morgan, De Beers was financed by South African diamond pirate Alfred Beit and Nathan Mayer Rothschild & Sons bank. If you are not familiar with the Rothschild banking dynasty, click here. 

So it’s obvious in today’s “cancel culture”, when you click the ‘Our Story’ tab on debeers.com, it makes no mention of Rhodes! 

CECIL RHODES…
So who is Cecil John Rhodes? He was a serial rapist and killer, practiced pederasty aka pedophilia with Afrikan boys, and played a pivotal role in the founding of the oldest and wealthiest group of white supremacists, ‘The Round Table Group’, aka the Illuminati.

He founded De Beers after stealing South Afrikan Diamond mines in 1888 from the Matabele tribe in the name of Great Britain, that was later changed to be named after himself, Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe & Zambia), Bechaunaland (now Botswana), and Kenya (both British colonial protectorates in 1885 and 1888). 

His colonizing grip stretched across nearly the entire landscape of Afrika. He made it clear is goal was to “colonize Afrika from Cape Town to Cairo.”

He once noted,

“We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus of goods produced in our factories.” 

You see he didn't shy away from stating the kind of cheap labor he wanted... SLAVES or more accurately called, kidnapped Afrikans. In 1893, he tactfully devised a diabolical plan of indentured servitude, stating:

“Nine-tenths of them will have to spend their lives in manual labor, and the sooner that is brought home to them, the better.” 

His Venetia diamond mine is a massive hole that's mined to a depth of roughly 1500 feet, a surface area of 42 acres and a perimeter of just under a mile. It’s here vast amounts of alluvial deposits—clay, silt, sand, and gravel left by flowing streams in a river valley or delta, typically producing fertile soil—blood diamonds were found. 

Today, De Beers is spending $2 billion to continue tunneling at Venetia beneath this vast open-pit mine where a whole new underground mine is being constructed underneath to reach diamonds more than 3,300 feet below ground. It became one of the world’s five biggest diamond mines after its conversion to underground operations was completed in 2021, increasing the life of the mine to the year 2046.

The reverence of his name even reached the shores of North America, with the state of Rhode Island, as well as the scholastic ranks of Rhodes Scholar, an international postgraduate award for elite students to study at Oxford in the United Kingdom which serves as a incubator for future white supremacists or aids to them.

Why isn’t this criminal and his deeds brought to mainstream? Why is he still celebrated in academia and geographical makeups of domestic and international lands? If this were brought to light, it would definitely damage De Beers reputation. So trust, the folks at De Beers are fully aware, hence why you see no mention of him on any of their websites, yet they still brag about being world's diamond King while refraining from the mention of how their come-up came about!

After her documentary, Lupita spoke of not being sure how she sees the Agojie. I’d like to ask how she sees De Beers now after learning Rhodes was obsessed with colonizing our homeland that included him satisfying his salacious appetite sodomizing young Afrikan boys then pushing them over a cliff to their death simply because he didn’t want to rape the same boy twice!

SENDING A DIRECT PLEA…
SiStar Lupita. I know. This. Is. A. Lot! The intent of this piece is in hopes that this reaches you, for it is a topic I think you owe yourself and those of us who want to continue to support you.

Before writing this, I visited your Twitter and Instagram pages (of which I follow) and found it interesting you haven’t posted anything about your partnership with De Beers. This begs the question, are you aware of their history or not?

At first I thought perhaps you hadn’t done your diligence on De Beers as you did on the Agojie. And although I am giving you the benefit of the doubt, this doesn’t seem to be your character.

In the spirit of kinship and luv of our diasporic connection, I ask that you do or redo your research and then revisit your affiliation with them. Most of the diamonds they “own” come from the largest hand-dug excavation on the planet—still quarried by captive Afrikans. From 1885-1900, Rhodes worked to death 20 million of our kinfolk mining for diamonds close to the border of Zimbabwe and Botswana. That’s an average of 1.34 million deaths a year during the first 15-years! 

It is my hope you will revise your words I opened this article with, for I question your meaning of “the good they do.” I’m sure you are not in support of the raping, amputation, killing, and stealing of our kinfolk. 

In case you didn’t do your diligence, https://twitter.com/Lupita_Nyongo (Twitter: @Lupita_Nyongo)/https://www.instagram.com/lupitanyongo/ (IG: @lupitanyongo), I invite you to use the following sources. 

Abibifahodie!

_________

SOURCES:

Ọbádélé Kambon
Ọbádélé Kambon 1 年 前に
This came up on Abibitumi when the de beers ads first appeared. I remember guerrilla news network put out The Diamond Life years ago that went into the role of de beers and the diamond cartel in the brutal Sierra Leone/Liberia civil war. Let's see what she has to say about it all.
0 0 返事
AfroN8V
AfroN8V 1 年 前に
asante for writing!
0 0 返事
もっと見せる