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There is nothing ahistorical about any of my arguments. Klein has grossly, if in some ways subtly, distorted my arguments. In regard to the Yoruba, I wrote that they never had slavery (as defined earlier on the thread) _to my knowledge_. I have mentioned explicitly on this thread that I write transpersonal psychology, history of consciousness, etc. I consider, for example, the fact that in both Christianity and Islam the view is held that God is a male who lives above us and if you don’t do what he says you will be eternally damned. In terms of Islam corrupting people, see, for example, Surah 4:34. There are other clearly severely misogynist Surahs in the Quran. Mali and Senegal are both particularly Islamicized countries. I realize that Africans in areas like those, like Klein, consider Islam to be “as African as the river Niger.” But this, unlike anything I have said, is inarguably dogma and thoroughly ahistorical. I believe in the essential goodness of human nature, in the natural inclination of people to express this by way of logos, and so on. I have read in different sources that Bantu-speaking people colonized other Africans, etc. I assume that different African societies prior to Islamic and Christian influence did conquer other societies. I don’t know whether or not any of these societies had slavery as earlier defined. _My original post was a query._ There have inarguably been many very notable societies pan-geographically that never had slaves- the Hopi, Australian aborigines, African ones that have been mentioned on this thread, and so on and so on. Does Klein think that any society has ever been “in some sense pure”? Obviously change has been taking place since the emergence of the human species, but there have undoubtedly been many indigenous societies in which there was a pervasive authentic, conscious regard for harmony with natural resources, children, elders, and so on. One of my underlying arguments is that before Islamic and Christian colonialism there were _many_ indigenous societies in which attunement to what Aristotle calls “first science” and what Plotinus calls the “Virtue of Wisdom” was considered to be infinitely more important than dissociated strictly empirical/materialist developments. In any case, regardless of how many texts on the history of Africa an individual has read statements like “…Islam is as African as the river Niger.” _Etc._ Lessen a scholar’s credibility profoundly. I am fairly familiar with the earliest first-hand accounts of Africa by British explorers (See, for example, African Discovery: An Anthology of Exploration, even the preface (though is clear that the author is racist), which is edited by, I think, Margery Perham and J. Simmons.), etc. I have read some of Ibn Battuta’s writings, etc. But I am not that familiar with the earliest first-hand accounts of Africa by Muslims. Libraries are full of books- anthropological, and so on- in which indigenous Africans are considered to be pre-monotheistic, and so on and so on. To obtain an idea of the degree to which classical European and Euro-American academic preconceptions of traditional Africa are currently being dismantled one can read, to give one example, the anthology African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood (2003), edited by Oyeronke Oyewumi. I have referred to the Maasai, etc., Pool has referred to Walter Rodney’s apparently academically grounded arguments, Kawanga has referred to his own ancestors, and so on. Mike Loutzenhiser Independent Scholar
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