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How Europe Drew Africa's Borders in a Room — The 1884 Berlin Conference Still Bleeds Today
How Europe Drew Africa's Borders in a Room — The 1884 Berlin Conference Still Bleeds Today Kwabena Ofori Osei 5 Views • 4 days ago

In 1884, fourteen nations sat around a table in Berlin to divide a continent none of them owned. No African leader was invited. No African voice was heard. The borders they drew — through kingdoms, communities, and cultures — still define the map of Africa today. And they are still bleeding.
This is the story of the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, the room where Europe carved up Africa like a piece of property. From Otto von Bismarck's power plays to King Leopold's private horror state in the Congo, from the doctrine of "effective occupation" that launched the fastest land grab in history to the colonial identity cards that helped fuel the Rwandan genocide a century later — this video traces the full, devastating arc of how a few months of European diplomacy condemned an entire continent to generations of conflict, exploitation, and artificial nationhood.
Before Berlin, Africa was home to empires that rivaled anything in Europe. The Mali Empire, Great Zimbabwe, the Kingdom of Benin, the Ethiopian dynasty — these were not empty lands waiting to be claimed. They were civilizations with histories stretching back centuries. What happened in that room on Wilhelmstrasse was not development. It was theft on a continental scale.
The consequences are not history. They are headlines. Nigeria. Congo. Sudan. Somalia. Rwanda. The borders drawn by men who never set foot in Africa are still shaping who lives, who dies, and who profits.
If you want to understand why the modern world looks the way it does, you have to understand what happened in that room.
Sources and further reading:
— King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild
— The Scramble for Africa by Thomas Pakenham
— General Act of the Berlin Conference, 1885
— Michalopoulos & Papaioannou, "The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa" (American Economic Review)
#berlinconference #scrambleforafrica #colonialism #africanhistory #kingleopold #congofreestate #europeanimperialism #bismarck #africaborders #decolonization #panafricanism #coloniallegacy #hiddenhistory #geopolitics #rwandagenocide #africanempires #worldhistory #documentaryhistory #powerandcapital #colonialborders

Nigeria and Biafra (1968)
Nigeria and Biafra (1968) Ambakisye-Okang Dukuzumurenyi 45 Views • 5 years ago

TV special report from 1968 of the Biafran War.from WikipediaThe Nigerian Civil War, commonly known as the Biafran War (6 July 1967 – 15 January 1970), was a war fought between the government of Nigeria and the secessionist state of Biafra. Biafra represented nationalist aspirations of the Igbo people, whose leadership felt they could no longer coexist with the Northern-dominated federal government. The conflict resulted from political, economic, ethnic, cultural and religious tensions which preceded Britain's formal decolonization of Nigeria from 1960 to 1963. Immediate causes of the war in 1966 included a military coup, a counter-coup and persecution of Igbo living in Northern Nigeria. Control over the lucrative oil production in the Niger Delta played a vital strategic role.Within a year, the Federal Government troops surrounded Biafra, capturing coastal oil facilities and the city of Port Harcourt. The blockade imposed during the ensuing stalemate led to severe famine. During the two and half years of the war, there were about 100,000 overall military casualties, while between 500,000 and 2 million Biafran civilians died of starvation.[31]In mid-1968, images of malnourished and starving Biafran children saturated the mass media of Western countries. The plight of the starving Biafrans became a cause célèbre in foreign countries, enabling a significant rise in the funding and prominence of international non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Britain and the Soviet Union were the main supporters of the Nigerian government in Lagos, while France, Israel and some other countries supported Biafra. France and Israel provided weapons to both combatants.

Dr. Obadele Kambon 2013 UG-Legon Vice Chancellor's Award for Outstanding Thesis - Humanities
Dr. Obadele Kambon 2013 UG-Legon Vice Chancellor's Award for Outstanding Thesis - Humanities Ọbádélé Kambon Subscription 14 Views • 5 years ago

Dr. Obadele Kambon 2013 UG-Legon Vice Chancellor's Award for Outstanding Thesis - Humanities

Comments from the external examiner:
The main findings of the research point to the fact that (a) An overwhelming majority (98%) of Full Lexicalized-Integrated SVCs have nominal counterparts; 2% do not; (b) Only 3% of Partial Lexicalized-Integrated SVCs have nominal counterparts; 97% do not; (c) Clause Chaining Serial Constructions appear to nominalize haphazardly and/or unsystematically as frozen sentences or figures of speech (idioms, proverbs, etc.; (d) The primary function of such forms, he identified, were what Charles Morris (1971) calls denotata and designata; Full Lexicalized-Integrated SVCs behave as lexicalized idioms and because of this, four criteria of idiomaticity namely -- collocability, familiarity, flexibility and compositionality -- are applied to them; and (g) There is systematicity in the pattern of nominalization behavior of serial verb nominals across the main Akan dialects.
This work recapitulates and substantially extends work already done on Akan SVCs by Osam (1994), Agyeman (2002) and others. A major contribution of the dissertation is the detailed discussion and exemplification of issues relating to nominalization of SVCs. This is the first attempt at such a detailed discussion and exemplification and the candidate deserves commendation. His categorizations are original as is his attention to scholarly detail and to showing the relationship between and among the three major Akan dialects. One could conveniently argue that this is one of the strongest points of the dissertation.
Very little has been done on Akan nominalization in general and little to nothing on SVC nominalization in particular, so this study is a trailblazer or a path-finder! Syntacticians and semanticists will cite this work and continue with the discussion and issues it raises for the next couple of decades. I am impressed with the details and both the candidate and his advisors must be commended for the high degree of systematicity employed in the synthesis and analyses done in the study.
The candidate drew his conclusions based on the actual data collected and on the results (synthesis and analysis of the data) thereby making the analytical claims have functional validity and protecting them from standing insulated from public scrutiny. This is, again, commendable.
The recommendations for future research, especially, his call for comparing SVNs with other types of nominalizations, is in the right direction more especially due to the scantiness and dearth of knowledge about nominalizations in general about Akan and other West African languages in particular.
The dissertation is very well written and I am willing to pass it without any reservation whatsoever. The content is excellent as is its rendition.

Comments from the internal examiner:

The study does a good job of relating the data and findings to broader theoretical debates in the Functional/cognitive linguistic literature. For example, study results suggest that, at least in the Akan data examined, higher degrees of semantic integration in complex forms correlate with lower degrees of iconicity. Further, the subtype categories of serial verb constructions identified by Osam (1994) are "fuzzy" categories in terms of ability to undergo nominalization. This supports the prototype approach to categorization, rather than a classical "sharp-boundary" approach to categorization.
Though the author does not particularly draw it out rhetorically, the study sits squarely within the linguistic sub-field of Lexicography: the study is a detailed investigation of speakers' lexical knowledge of nouns formed (either historically or productively possibly in the moment of speaking) from serial verb constructions. In my view, the lexicographic work, bringing out native-speaker knowledge about the complex forms including in some cases how this may have changed across time and may vary by dialect, may be one of the most enduring contributions of the study. Many of the item-by-item findings could, for example, largely be incorporated into an etymological dictionary of Akan.
The study contributes new information to understanding the cross-linguistic and Akan-internal typology of nominalizations of serial verb constructions. The minute detail on dialect variation is valuable for sociolinguistic variationist studies.

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