As we almost finish the first week of Ramadan, I don’t have the same sense of awe I usually do every year. Generally, I feel so in love with the world, full of humility and belief in God… but this year I just feel angry. At people. Which is not a normal state of being for me. I would say I’m quite a happy person (despite seeing plenty of devastations & betrayals) and this is a product of a toxic positivity that I absorbed as a child, that was introduced to me via my sister and her interpretation of Islam and Allah.
In many ways, it’s beautiful to find this connection to God so that no matter what happens to you, you read it as some divine blessing. I do think this was largely why I survived my early life, I believed the abuse had been ordained by God. Therefore it was my duty to accept it. I still believe in this concept, and it’s something I’ve had to confront in my own spiritual life… but watching the world around us, and the brutality of everything, it’s been hard not to feel anger at the injustice of it all. Does anybody choose their oppression? Does anybody deserve genocide?
I watch people do so much mental gymnastics to justify the state of the world and I can’t fathom it. It makes me fucking furious that we are here, at this culmination point. I don’t want to accept it. How do you turn to God when you are filled with rage?
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I’m devastated and enraged that a U.S. court absolved top tech companies in Congo's child labor case a week ago… Do you understand what this means? The U.S, but really all of the Global North, these pundits and imperialists who have decided they are the “free world,” (when their legacy is this; protracted colonization) mine these natural resources - primarily Colton and cobalt in Congo for our use: for our overwhelming need for electric cars, laptops, computers, vapes - but here’s the gag! We are sold these products as if they are abundant, as if there is no moral cost, as if there is no cost, period. Yet the cost is great—even though the Democratic Republic of Congo is RESOURCE RICH (I recently found out that it is, in fact, the richest country in the world, due to these resources! Read that again!), why is that the DRC is among the five poorest nations in the world? According to the World Bank, in 2022, nearly 62% of Congolese, around 60 million people, lived on less than $2.15 a day…
If these U.S. companies are mining all of these expensive resources from the richest country in the world… why aren’t the Congolese benefiting from any of the benefits of the billion-dollar tech industry, as just one example of the many different billion-dollar companies that are siphoning resources out of the Congo??????
If you are like me, you may also ask: why are the Congolese then enslaved, and I mean children (hence the child labor case!), why are these children being forced to mine these precious minerals, minerals that are theirs … for the sake of a foreign actor’s benefit? Do you think the U.S. would allow any country to come in and mine it for their gain? What if we enslaved white Americans to mine our precious minerals for the sake of another country… do you think that would ever happen? Be serious.
Yet here we are participating (as I type this on my iMac) in this vicious cycle where the Congolese are not living the benefits of their natural resources because they are again decade after decade, century after century, enslaved. They have not been able to enjoy their own riches for centuries. This is what the West is built on - the bones, blood and resources of the countries of the Global South. If it wasn’t for the Global North’s greed siphoning everything, then countries in the Global South could just be, they could also be “developed” and not indebted to their colonizers… I don’t think Wakanda is a fantasy. I think for a long time people have known the ultimate power and profundity that exists in the Congo. Don’t the Congolese deserve to figure that out for themselves? Don’t they deserve to be a nation that also benefits from their natural God-given resources? How does the Global North create such a world order… and then call themselves the good guys?
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In the 1960s, Patrice Lumumba was elected as the prime minister of the DRC. Malcolm X once called him “the greatest Black man who ever walked the African continent,” so I think this distinctly reflects the character of Lumumba. He was a great man of significance because ideologically, Lumumba was an African nationalist and pan-Africanist, he believed in the coalition of all African nations and strongly advocated for a free Congo. He had a significant role in extricating Congo from Belgium, its former colonizer, and helped Congo become an independent republic. If you don’t know the history of King Leopold then you should, but basically, he is probably one of the worst people in history, and it says a lot about whose death we prioritize that we don’t know more about his terror. The BBC in 2020 published that he had killed more than 10 million Africans, but we know that’s a colonial estimate, so it’s probably far more. This only happened in the late 1880s, only about 50 or so years before the Holocaust in Germany. So again, it’s always interesting whose memory is remembered. We’re seeing this right now happen in real time. Where human deaths, side by side, are not all seen as the same.
This resource extraction from Congo - and genocide of the Congolese people - for the sick fantasy of white men is just so long and so filled with cruelty. I’ve been meaning to read this book “King Leopold's Ghost” for a very long time, and it’s always surprised me that we haven’t remembered or memorialized him the same way we have feared and memorialized the terror of Hitler.
Learning about King Leopold’s atrocity should be one of the main things we are taught about European world history. We’ve been denied knowing about the death of the colonized because they’re too gruesome, too bloody, and frankly too current. Nothing has changed. Those of us in the diaspora may have received many of the privileges of the global North - but not entirely. Though we participate in the continuation of these unsustainable and inhumane ways the Global North aka imperialists have enslaved the vast majority of the Global South, we also don’t inherit their stolen riches and for the most part, we pay the cost of living in whiteness, that never factors us in. But all of us now have the responsibility to start putting the dots together and saying we no longer want to participate in these violent relationships that are based on extraction.
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