Posted on 07/18/2008 10:15:55 AM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
On June 5, 1873, in a letter to The Times, Sir Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin and a distinguished African explorer in his own right, outlined a daring (if by today's standards utterly offensive) new method to 'tame' and colonise what was then known as the Dark Continent.
'My proposal is to make the encouragement of Chinese settlements of Africa a part of our national policy, in the belief that the Chinese immigrants would not only maintain their position, but that they would multiply and their descendants supplant the inferior Negro race,' wrote Galton.
'I should expect that the African seaboard, now sparsely occupied by lazy, palavering savages, might in a few years be tenanted by industrious, order-loving Chinese, living either as a semidetached dependency of China, or else in perfect freedom under their own law.'
Despite an outcry in Parliament and heated debate in the august salons of the Royal Geographic Society, Galton insisted that 'the history of the world tells the tale of the continual displacement of populations, each by a worthier successor, and humanity gains thereby'.
A controversial figure, Galton was also the pioneer of eugenics, the theory that was used by Hitler to try to fulfil his mad dreams of a German Master Race.
Eventually, Galton's grand resettlement plans fizzled out because there were much more exciting things going on in Africa.
But that was more than 100 years ago, and with legendary explorers such as Livingstone, Speke, Burton still battling to find the source of the Nile - and new discoveries of exotic species of birds and animals featuring regularly on newspaper front pages - vast swathes of the continent had not even been 'discovered'.
Yet Sir Francis Galton, it now appears, was ahead of his time. His vision is coming true -
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Excellent observation.
By the way, the more recent history of the Chinese in Africa includes building the East Africa Highway in the 1960s (which later beame a major conduit for HIV transmission). Crews of Chinese men built it: it would be interesting to find out if they left any genetic imprint in the population along that route.
The President is sending Billions of dollars to Africa.
>>Its costing us 10 billion a month to stay in Iraq.
That’s because the U.S. has a moral conscience which prevents it from leveling the urban areas utilized by the insurgency to make mischief on the economic assets we’re there to secure.
China is not so encumbered.
Thanks for the ping, Tigers Eye.
“The only people who would stand in the way of the Chinese are the Afrikaners in South Africa”.
You’re kidding, right? They have long since lost power and are just deperately trying to survive in the “New” South Africa.
My point is that Afrikaners are down at this point but don't count them out. After an unjust system also known as Apartheid, South Africa is going through a period of adjustment to inexperienced black majority rule.
Anyway, the Afrikaners own a majority of economic interests in South Africa and I don't think they'll allow the Chinese to come in and exploit raw materials of the country.
I hope you’re right!
You are right. Oil was just found in Ghana, which will raise that country’s fortunes considerably (and it is currently democratic and friendly toward the U) but guess who is funding the vast majority of roads and development there? Not us!
I’d watch out for China anywhere, anyhow!
Not necessarily. First off, they would not be "occupying", they would be colonizing. "Occupation" involves the idea of having the native population remain and continue to perform their jobs
Think about how the early British colonies in America dealt with the natives (and remember that Britain in the 17th and 18th Centuries was MUCH further away in terms of travel time and travel expense than 21st Century China is to Africa).
The colonists after a while greatly outnumbered the Indians, and displaced the natives.
How well would an African insurgency work if the Africans were outnumbered by Chinese colonists, Africans were forbidden to come near Chinese settlements, and any African violating the ban was shot on sight?
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