We dissect the ideology and political ambitions of Aimé Césaire and scrutinise his revolutionary approach, how his ambitions were shaped by the class system of his time, and his controversial decision to departmentalise. Was this decision driven by a need for societal acceptance?
We also unpack the evolution of the African diaspora as it navigates the preservation of its cultural heritage in a modern world. Sean shares his comprehensive analysis of black movements at their core, specifically Pan-Africanism, and its impact on black liberation.
This episode is not just a historical review; it's a challenging discussion on the echoes of colonialism in the black experience.
Host:
Fungai Mutsiwa
Instagram: @ blackfor30
Co-host:
Sean Solole
BlackFor30 is a place for your voice to be heard. DM us your thoughts and questions @blackfor30 or via email at admin@blackfor30.com.
We dissect the ideology and political ambitions of Aimé Césaire and scrutinise his revolutionary approach, how his ambitions were shaped by the class system of his time, and his controversial decision to departmentalise. Was this decision driven by a need for societal acceptance?
We also unpack the evolution of the African diaspora as it navigates the preservation of its cultural heritage in a modern world. Sean shares his comprehensive analysis of black movements at their core, specifically Pan-Africanism, and its impact on black liberation.
This episode is not just a historical review; it's a challenging discussion on the echoes of colonialism in the black experience.
Host:
Fungai Mutsiwa
Instagram: @ blackfor30
Co-host:
Sean Solole
BlackFor30 is a place for your voice to be heard. DM us your thoughts and questions @blackfor30 or via email at admin@blackfor30.com.
This is Black in Time, which is a series on the influence of some of the great figures we have in our history. So, if you hadn't already caught it, part one is already out, with Sean, and so this is a continuation of it, and I hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 2:I have a dream today. Is it too much to ask you to grant us human dignity? Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin to such extent that you bleach?
Speaker 1:For so many, many years, we were told that only white people were beautiful.
Speaker 1:You're afraid that if you give us equal ground, that we will match you and we will override you. Black is beautiful. Green hood Say it. I want a free freedom. Usaka ngone duum po pa wakachero, which means don't forget who you are or where you came from. Welcome to Black for 30.
Speaker 1:We should look at life from an Afrocentric point of view, because when you do and I guess a big part of me is speaking from personal experience right now, because when you do, it shifts the way you begin to understand how the world is set up and it changes how you then navigate the world as well, because there's a difference between us talking about equality and to what you were saying people being entitled to their rights and what actually goes down on the ground.
Speaker 1:History repeatedly tells us in Sodo's present day that those two are misaligned, which leads us into the second part of what the Negritude movement was really pushing for, because they were emphasizing, above all, the value and pride of African traditions and people, asserting their Africanness, so to speak.
Speaker 1:Because, according to Ceze, western imperialism was responsible for the inferiority of Black people, and I know you usually use that quote where you say peer pressure. So tradition is peer pressure from their people, which I understand where, obviously where you're coming from, because some traditions are antiquated. In the same breath, I see the value in some of those traditions, though, because they help orient us to our culture, and which in turn then reinforces our identity and who we are. So I believe that our cultural identity appears to weaken with each generation as we fail to preserve some of those core traditions. I'm not implying that we become conservative and stay rooted in old traditions. Speaking mainly to African diaspora here, I wonder, like how can we build from our own cultural heritage to adapt to the modern world? What does that look like for you?
Speaker 2:Well, I think the main thing is just to recognize, obviously society is ever evolving. Now the issue here is that with the pan-Africanist movement, the negritude movement, these are all, I guess they're things that are sort of specific to certain people. So Ceze was talking a lot about this whole idea of African ideas, showcasing who you are being proud of that, but again it lacks the depths that would have carried, I guess, a movement proper, considering the fact that, again, he never really visited Africa or publicized a want or a need to ever do so. So I think that's where that disconnect is, because if you look at any other sort of liberation or black liberation or African Afrocentric movement, they all say the same thing we need to go back to the motherland, the main proponents have all been to the motherland at some point.
Speaker 2:Here, that's something that they're all sharing in common is that they've all been there and yet, you know, they've been able to gain traction because what you're doing is you're trying to unite, you know, the Africans who are in Africa versus the rest, the diaspora, the ones who are, you know, overseas, by choice or by not, you know. So that's what they're trying to do, is trying to unite those ideologies and say, look, we are after one and the same thing. It just so happens to be some of us who are overseas and are being mistreated, and generally, for the most part, africans, were, you know, happy to get behind the movement, but what you find is that there's generally little to no reciprocation going the other way, because those African hyphen whatever American, australian, european, wherever you are living the laws made by the same people who are causing the strife over in Africa. So again, the liberation struggle was the same, same opponents, just different location.
Speaker 2:Right, but the ideology was there, césar, never really quite wanted to push that and that's where you know that movement sort of likes and going forward. I guess that sort of seclusion doesn't really help you, because it's not a very well known movement outside of. You know the whole Francophile culture or you know that Afro-Franco intellectual circle. You know what I mean. It's not something that is widely spoken, and part and parcel, I think, is also due to the fact that, like most of these African or Afrocentric movements, they were also very much left leaning in that.
Speaker 2:So now we are being put onto a political spectrum again which is created by who? By the same oppressors, the colonizers. These are the same sort of spectrums that have nothing to do with Africans at large, you know, in Africa in general, because we never had to worry about those things. This is a system made by white people for white people, and then, in the search for black liberation, we have now been impending into this white system yet again. Right, cisse was a very. He was very much in his early days influenced by the Marxist teachings, right, so he was very much a big fan of the Soviet Union.
Speaker 1:Just more white people Now the only difference is with those white people is that they were never outwardly imperial in terms of colonizing Africa.
Speaker 2:Right, that's one thing they can be like, hey, we never did that, okay. But let's not say that that doesn't mean that none of those people were racist, because, again, communists had their own ideals that they wanted to push. That's why the Soviets helped a lot of African countries during their liberation struggles, inserting the Chinese but again it was because they wanted to just spread their ideology. For them, their ideology mattered more than race Right.
Speaker 1:But at the end of the day, for them it was you are taking our system and you're going to push it amongst your people, so that's where you find that sort of comparison, and I guess that highlights the importance where, of course, we can look at Marxism and so many other ideologies and then figure out how to cater to our context, our African context, right and in the same. So in the sense that all these different ideologies, right, have their goods and bads and that works with any ideology right.
Speaker 1:So the idea is not for us to take something that's applicable in the Western society context and try to plug that into the African context, because they will not fit, because we are different people, right, exactly. So I'll tell you a little bit about how Asor I think it was the president of Uganda, I think and he he was challenging the French president, I believe so around the LGBTIQ movement, right, and he was just basically saying we have two different cultures, so how can you come and tell us what's right and what's wrong when our definitions of what's right and what's wrong are really different? So this is not to say that I believe that people should be persecuted because of their choices, their sexuality, right, or whether it's an issue to do with their gender. I don't think people should be persecuted or discriminated, vilified, whatever the case is, because of that. However, at the same time, I think he does raise a really valid point in as far as that goes.
Speaker 1:So the third thing I want us to touch on on the negative movement before we start to talk about some of his books, right? More specifically, one book I'd love for us to touch on yeah, he works around trying to get intellectuals and artists to start to push out Afrocentric literature to bring about the mental freedom of the people from Martinique and all the other French plantations that we're around right. Yeah, so Damos was one of the people who I guess he was more right versus left using your explanation earlier when you're saying how César was a little bit more softer in his approach, whereas Damos, I guess, would have been almost on the other side of that because he believed that writers and storytellers should be aware of their duties to the people to elevate the image of Blackness, to denounce this notion of reconciling, to assimilate with other cultures.
Speaker 1:That's where he was at right. So do you see a way to promote African literature and drive artists from purely being a source of entertainment but also being this conduit to inform the masses?
Speaker 2:For me, I think, and I feel like you agree but our artists are more than just entertainers. I think we are able to separate those ones who are there purely for entertainment and those who are there to actually pass on a message. We're generally able to discern where one person's talking about something that you agree with and someone is just there for the pageant, right. So I feel like we are at a stage where we have enough of those people. What we need to do is then elevate those people and say this is the message that we have, but we have to agree on said message. That is first and foremost. I think, across every sort of question that you've discussed today, the underlying message is that we all need to be one in terms of what the goal should be. There should be a step one, then a step two, then a step three, right. But until that's the case, we will not really get far, because what we'll be doing is fragmenting ourselves.
Speaker 2:That's the issue is that these movements, they sort of cater to different groups larger, small Negretude caters to your Francophile Caribbean colonies, right. Pan-africanism tries to sort of skip all of that and it attempts to bridge a larger collection of black people. Yeah, it's a bit more. I think, when you look at all these black movements, that is probably the more universal out of everything. So Pan-Africanism is at the base of most of these movements, but then the issue then becomes what about those that do not want to return to Africa or that feel there's no connection? How do you then get those people on board?
Speaker 1:or what is it that?
Speaker 2:they're after that we are after, which is black liberation. So, if we start to look at it from that perspective, rather than you have this message and it disagrees with my message, because Part B states this and your Part B states that that's where the issue lies the experience for one is not the experience for the other, but what we do have is this commonality, which is blackness.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like that's, if we sorry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if we start to sort of limit that to like, if we start sort of limiting it to that being the main message, I feel like we can all have our own system because, again, we are allowed to disagree, but that should not get in the way of the message being put across. Once we get to that point, that movement then becomes a bit, that it gains more traction and it's a lot harder to do rail, because essentially we all understand the fact that we have this same underlying message and anything else that comes is for later. We're not all going to agree on the same thing, because that's impossible, but what we should agree on is that at least we are after this one thing and then from there we'll decide okay, if you want to go do this, then you separate and go there and then you start to fragment. But until then, once until we have that cohesive movement, we'll always be, I guess, just left wondering of what could have been uncertain movements.
Speaker 1:And I don't necessarily see it as we should all kumbaya and move back to Africa. Yeah, that is your decision to make. I think. For me it's the idea that, especially when you look at African Americans, they don't have a home, and when I say home I mean in the, and the cultural context and, and, and by that you know they obviously have the American culture that they did adopt. But if we look at the, I guess before that right for the transatlantic context.
Speaker 2:yes, yeah.
Speaker 1:So they were African first before they became Americans. So of course, for me it's that, that idea about let's we have a common place which is the continent, let's fix that you don't have to live there, but by fixing it, you have a base and it also changes how the rest of the world treats us, Because the thing is, unfortunately people will. For a really long time, I believe people will still see in color Right.
Speaker 1:And until that changes, right, we have to adapt to what the present date is basically giving to us, and for us that means that we should come together towards developing Africa, and then we can talk about what that looks like, because you know, the experience of Caribbean to someone who's black, european to American are all different. But so it's not to dismiss them. But then it's to what you're saying there is a shared or common goal, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so let's move on to, like, talk about his actual work, like some of his books, right, like because he was, he was a poet and author, right? So he wrote the book the tragedy of King Christoph I think it's Christoph the which was about the Haitian Revolution right in 1791, which I'm really keen to learn more about Because, you know, that's not well known, but it was really interesting because obviously that was the one of the first times noted where the French were defeated by black people and that was led by was that too soft, or am I?
Speaker 2:am I got an head?
Speaker 1:I think it's Henry Christoph, I think Okay.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, as far as Haitian history, I am ashamed to say that I am familiar with Tucson at the moment, and Haitian history is something that I'm aiming to wanting to pronounce that better, so I need to find out what's you know. Is it Haitian still, or is it pronounced something else? But as far as my understanding of Haitian culture at the moment, I am limited to Tucson. He is quite an admirable figure and that's like we definitely need to explore it later on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, bro, yeah, so you need to, I guess for myself, and others listening.
Speaker 2:Just a bit of a background, I guess, on this on Christoph was it on re Christoph yeah, henry, christoph yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And the other book that he wrote as well, césaire, right, this again, another one I'd love to read. So, it's called a season in the Congo, and so this one, he focuses on the last few months of Patrice Lumumba's life, oh yeah, which was obviously marked by the, you know, the secession of the Katanga, and you also get to. He talks about the Belgians influence, together with the British, you know, forming companies to mine copper within that region and obviously how the company then influenced political affairs, and that's typical of most regions in Africa. Right, it was a company that came, but then, yeah, yeah, exactly. And then the other, the other one he wrote, or this was these were actually like journals or like publications, right, so, like this magazine where he used to bring together different Black authors, almost like a newsletter, which I thought was really cool.
Speaker 1:But the book I'd love for us to talk about is discourse on colonialism Really dope book.
Speaker 1:And so he's essentially you know, to give everyone context, right, he's essentially arguing that colonialism was not and had never been a benevolent exercise or movement with the goal to improve our lives. Instead, it was this expedition entirely for Europe's self interest and to expand their economies, yeah, right. So within that book he talks about. You know, an interesting condition, which is the progressive dehumanization, so this process, you know, by which individuals or groups are gradually stripped of their human qualities or rights. So it's like this gradual erosion of dignity and recognition of your inherent worth, and you know, obviously, that then leads to the denial of our basic rights, exclusion from society and acts of violence or genocide because we're not seen as humans. So, acknowledging that the African and European cultures are different, how can we definitively define someone's inherent value right? Which that's my first question, because if our value systems are clearly different, how can you then tell me that I'm inferior to you? How can you then tell me that I am not civilized when your God is not my God?
Speaker 1:Well, that's where the problem lies, isn't it? Why should you be doing that in this place?
Speaker 2:Like that's.
Speaker 2:I think also that, well, that is the main problem here is that somehow certain groups are able to convince themselves that that's an acceptable reason, purely because either one it's you know, whatever's driving you is either the search for some sort of you know financial reward, or, if you are like some of the simple-minded folk you genuinely have been and you believe like you've been told and you believe that these people are inferior and they deserve to be, I guess, civilized, you know, and that's more for the, for the zealots, because, upside of that, to be honest with you, that whole system screams of mental illness.
Speaker 2:To me it's just ridiculous how you can base a whole system off of complete nonsense. By the way, you don't know these people, you've never met them. You've you know very little about their society and culture, except for what you can translate and also make sense of. Basically, you're seeing just these things and you've just made an assessment just off the top of your head and said no, because they're semi-naked and they don't write they're. Therefore, I mean, you know they're not intelligent. So if someone really needs a reason to do something, they will create one, and then the easy part is convincing yourself that you need to do. The hard part is finding that reason, but once you do everything, after that is a smooth save.
Speaker 1:It's like ignorance breeds fear, you know, and people then react off that because and that's one of the things when people obviously say we were uncivilized, you know, because, for example, they had guns and all of these other fancy stuff, and or they had these military taxes, or whatever the case may be. But people also forget that they came to us right. So the imperialists landed on our continent and we never had any intention of anything else outside of trade, because we had always been trading with people from different parts of the world. We had Arabs, we had, you know, we had Persians. People would come to Africa for trade. So that was never a foreign thing way before the war, way before colonization happened. So they were just the first lot that decided to come and they had ill intent, ill intent.
Speaker 2:Yes, right, yes.
Speaker 1:You were talking about the comparison to Nazismalia right, which is what. Zezer does in his book and that part of the book I quite enjoyed.
Speaker 2:It's interesting, isn't it? Yeah?
Speaker 1:because the thing is, it is a similar model, right? So he questions and this is for the audience, right? So he questions whether Hitler was hated because of his crimes alone or because those crimes were committed against Europeans.
Speaker 1:Because those are two different things right Before Europeans were victims of Nazism, they were accomplices to a similar way of thinking, which is colonialism. So they chose to legitimize and absolve colonialism because then it was strictly reserved for Africans and also, I guess in part also it benefited the European societies, because their economies boomed because of that, exactly. So the thing for me that really irks me to the core is this moral relativism and justification of humanity, where we apply one lens for a particular group of people, but then that changes for a particular group of people, right, yeah, because we care about things that mean something to us and ignore those that don't affect us. Exactly so we could talk about other races in terms of why they don't give a shit about the things that we go through or the pains that we go through, but that's for another time. What I'm curious about is for us, as black people, what else is preoccupying our thoughts and efforts? For us? Because if you're saying that for me to want to change something, right, I need to give a shit about it.
Speaker 1:Essentially because it's affecting me either directly or indirectly. But then, when you look at the current landscape, I question even let's take the Australian context right I don't believe there's a black consciousness, so to speak. It is there, but especially in comparison to other regions, it's almost next to nonexistent right. So, which then makes me wonder so what are we so busy doing that we can't see these things that we should clearly and obviously care about?
Speaker 2:Well, here, the difference is that we don't have much to struggle about. You see, it's for us to do what we're doing. That's an active choice, to be able to search for these things, because what we're understanding is that our experience is not limited to us. We are able to look and say look, it's, being black is something that affects everyone on this planet, doesn't matter where you are. We are the effect of colonialism, racism, blah, blah, so on and so forth. There's so many things that have put us in the places that we are now, whether it's recently or historically right. So the black experience is one that's unique because, for the most part where you are.
Speaker 2:For certain people it was not because your ancestors had a choice there.
Speaker 2:They were taken from A and taken to B and then had to learn or basically either had the culture beaten out of them or create a new culture right.
Speaker 2:So when you fast forward to now, it's not necessarily that it's a distraction, but here in Australia we just there's nothing to be struggling for, because society as a whole is sort of or is trying to move away from this whole race thing. The issue with Australia is that they're doing that badly because they're not consulting the main people who were the victims of it here. But they did such and it's a poor choice of words but they did such a great job in almost destroying a single group of people that the remnants are still reeling from so much institutional just rape is the term that I would use, I think, because the indigenous people were, and the indigenous people of Australia, of places like Canada, they in America, they were just absolutely brutalized. If you look at any of those countries that have First Nations people, the First Nations suffered greatly in Mexico. There's indigenous people in Mexico all the way through South America, right From top to bottom.
Speaker 2:Those people suffered similar fate to the indigenous here, and it is just comprehensive just how badly they were mistreated, that they're still reeling from those things. They haven't even gotten a foothold, whereas with black people in certain places we've gotten our independence, so to speak. But the interference now comes in the form of diplomacy or covert operations, depending on how you're looking at things, with things like political assassinations and funding the opposition. It's just change tactic. But those are real life distractions, as one might call them, because what it is is this political power that is now in neither region is actively conspiring to create and destabilize, you know, countries, regions, the whole continent, essentially, just so that we stop from actually being organized because we are the richest continent. If we actually had a say in how we distribute those resources, yeah, economy is potopo in the Western world, wouldn't it?
Speaker 2:So it's beneficial for them to be able to create destabilization, and until we are smart enough to see that we will always be stuck in this rut. These are all those distractions that you're talking about.
Speaker 1:They come in many forms, and it was interesting when you, when you use the word brutes right, because that's I remember watching this documentary I don't know if you've watched it Exterminate the Brutes, no no. It's such a good documentary and it basically depicts when the indigenous people of America when they were being brutalized by white settlers. You know, and it's what was ironic about it for me, even from the title, is that they would obviously the white settlers would obviously call the indigenous Americans brutes. Yeah, by doing brutal things.
Speaker 1:The irony is that literally by definition the irony.
Speaker 2:You've come to where I live and call me a brute yeah. And then you brutalize me and I'm still the brute, yeah, yeah, makes sense right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and also one of the things you mentioned, right, it's that level of complacency, right? Bringing it back to the Australian context where, because we have good jobs, we have a roof of our heads, we don't have to worry about whether the bread's going to be in the kitchen or not, right? So we have all the basics covered. So, because we do, it's so easy to become complacent, it's so easy to forget that the reason we're here is not because we chose to, but because we had to.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Right, and it may not be us directly, but our parents or our parents parents right and this is not to say that I'm ungrateful of what Australia's offered me. I'm definitely grateful. I mean to be here, and speaking right now is because I am here in Australia yes, sydney to be exact. However, that in no way should make me lose focus or lose sight of the true reason as to why I'm here.
Speaker 2:That's right and that's. I think we're too busy worrying about inflation and when it comes to money, the black experience will take it back to you. Yes, so there's just the distractions have just expanded, I guess, recently, when you look at the pandemic and so on and so forth. There's just so many other things that would just take front and center, because this was during the Black Lives Matter movement. Right, the pandemic magically just came in and put a stop to all these protests. So you know, there's things like that, where you great game traction and then something happens.
Speaker 2:You can't kill a leader now, because it's this, it's. These movements are not leaderless, but they're a lot more spread out.
Speaker 1:I thought you got to say because of social distancing.
Speaker 2:Well, they made us do that which you know only made it I guess it just sort of cemented it a little bit longer, but that would have been quite the joke Because you know the protests were happening, they were tearing apart, you know cities and they were now government free zones in places like America. It was crazy, but it was just something else that just sort of took the steam away from those movements and now you know the protests are rare because, you know again, people are still recovering and so on and so forth.
Speaker 2:But, unless you know, you're white and you storm the capital, in which case you're called a patriot. But you know, when you're on a tour of our racial equality, then now you're a thug and you're destroying property. So, and it's all about perception too. So, yeah, there is these distractions that are happening, and until we just sort of say enough's enough, I think we're just going to keep going round and round, and that's the thing, right, because life doesn't stop.
Speaker 1:So today it's COVID, tomorrow it's something else, right?
Speaker 2:So Aliens are finally this week, yeah, so there's always something right.
Speaker 1:So it really is up to us, in terms of how much we really care, to want to move that needle in the dial.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So you know, to kind of wrap up his bio, I'd love to talk a bit about AIM as the politician right. So he founded the Martinican Progressive Party, which was back in 1938, or no, no, it can't be 38. No way.
Speaker 2:No, he was still in France, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the party's ideology is I'm not sure if that's changed now, but at least then, when he started it, it was rooted in the pursuit of greater autonomy for Martinique within the French Republic, right, that whole departmentalization. So it's not full independence and self-governance, but an integration into French society. Yeah, and the justification that he used may have been due to and so this is me kind of drawing an inference based off the pieces of information from different sources that I was reading right, that he was concerned about economic security because he, although he understood that Black people or Martinicans needed to be free of the French, he didn't believe that Martinican itself was equipped institutionally to be able to survive, right, right, so he still wanted to be a part of the EU. And then the second piece to it was, how you know, there was the argument that integration over independence would raise living standards without some of the complications that come with, you know, building a nation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because you know so, while France saw departmentalization as an opportunity to democratize colonial political structures. That's kind of how I saw it, right, because for Césaire and what he wanted for Martinikens and what the French wanted were two different things, and for me it almost felt as if he was playing into their hands, so to speak. So what do you think about that? I guess, like as the political ideologies of his party, considering that to what we said at the beginning of the conversation, right, they seem to contradict the ideas of his other work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, look, like I said before, it seems like he was a soft revolutionary, and I guess, if you're a colonial power and this is your opponent, I'd be happy as fuck To be honest with you, because basically all he worked to do was to tear down that class system that he was born into. So his father was a tax inspector and his mother was, I think, a school teacher or something like that. I'm not too sure, but he was only allowed to experience certain things of Martinikens society at the time, right. So, and him being an intelligent person.
Speaker 2:It means that because of who he was as a person, who his parents were, he was limited in his life choices.
Speaker 2:And I think that's what's earned, or that's what's earned his decision to do the whole departmentalization. And I feel like for him, I guess maybe growing up over there they probably didn't experience as much racism as I'd say other colonies would have experienced, right? So, and again, this is me inferring this, given how most of his criticisms were aimed at society rather than at French people's racism in general, which is what other people were talking about. They will directly speak about. You say this is and this because I'm black and you limit me because I'm black. He was more of saying I just want to be able to live in Martinik without having to justify my class or because my race has limited me to this. I just want to be able to be treated like any other regular citizen of Martinik.
Speaker 2:So this may sound a bit patronizing, but it seems like his ambitions were quite small, I guess, if we're trying to put it into certain things, because his worldview was very much France and Martinik. So there is this. I guess his was more coming from a need to be accepted into that society. He didn't want to change it too much. Just treat me as you would anyone else, and I'm happy, I guess, if that was his intent. He said he succeeded, but I feel as though he was a very. It almost seems as though his ideology was lazy at times.
Speaker 1:If that's making sense. I feel like lazy would be harsh. I get where you're coming from. Like there's a line from Matt Miller, I can't remember and he says something along the lines of sometimes for us to rebuild we have to scorch the earth, yeah, right. So, yes, that his approach was one alternative, right, and I guess the more revolutionary Malcolm X kind of approach would have been fuck him, we're just gonna start from scratch, right, whereas I think, especially when he then raises a point about the economic security, and that really made sense for me in the sense of, okay, cool, so he still wanted to be part of the EU because he still wanted to maintain the same standards of living that they had been accustomed to, yeah, however, at the same time, it's like well, you will. At least history tells us this. You will never really acquire self-determination or autonomy if you are still tethered to your colonizers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's what for me. To me again it seems harsh, but yeah, lazy does definitely come across because it sounds like he was just like look, I just want enough to be able to still live comfortably without ruffling feathers. So treat me equally, but just don't take away the support. Essentially, so it just sounds like he just wanted to keep his nice little plot of land, just so that the masters are like you're doing a good job, you're not ruffling any feathers. But just here's your little stipend. We'll look after you still, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like you know, I generally do. Hope this at least strikes some curiosity for other people to read more about this dude And-.
Speaker 2:Is it an interesting fella?
Speaker 1:Definitely, and you know usually what happens. When you read about these figures in our history, you also find that you know they are influenced by other people as well. So you get to come across other people who are, you know, as interesting, as great, and it just, you know, pushes in our knowledge in this space, which I think we all can do with, because you know we obviously can, or at least a lot of us can, agree that what we were taught was quite lacking. So, that being said, thanks again for dropping in. This has been a really dope convo. There's always a statement.
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