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Klein has managed to accuse me of having "very ahistorical views" but has not mentioned a single thing that I have said that is at all ahistorical. The bulk of his last post however is thoroughly ahistorical. He criticizes "the notion that back there at some point in time, there is an authentic tribal Africa." Of course there is an authentic indigenous- pre-Islamic, pre-Christian- Africa. Neither Islam nor Christianity are endemic to Africa, Bantu-speaking people are. Further, for whatever can be said of conquests on the parts of Bantu-speaking people, the cultures and ideologies of at least some Bantu-speaking factions, according to the works of Placide Tempels, Jahnheinz Jahn, etc., are profoundly different from those of historical Islamic and Christian factions. Did the "Mande-speakers" or the "warriors from the 'northeast'" that Klein writes about have slavery- as earlier defined- in the wake of their conquests? In terms of China, for example, the first map of the continent of Africa was created by the Chinese in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. The Chinese travelled as far into Africa as Tanzania by the eleventh century. From what I understand the Chinese never colonized any area of Africa during these expeditions. The Chinese invented the abacus, rocketry, gunpowder (and, according to some sources, guns), the magnetic compass, the printing press, et al., yet during the late nineteenth century when there were mining prospects in China the Chinese were concerned about offending the feng shui spirits, the spirits of wind and water. In China shamanism and divination are considered to be forms of folk psychology to this day, and so on. In '00 there was a holocaust being committed against 300 million indigenous people. Indigenous land continues to be raped globally, and so on and so on. In regard to Klein's statement about "societies in the middle rnages of complexity," I don't know what he means by this. Is he talking about societies that are "complex" enough to invent nuclear war heads, human cloning and so on? I don't see how Klein can rationally claim to be able to decipher what a complex versus a non-complex society is. Certain statements of Kleins mentioned in this post and my previous post are, in my view, not even legitimate. Mike Loutzenhiser Independent Scholar
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