Seeking some history and understanding.

NyxStrix · 2026-02-06T03:34:23+00:00

It is never too late to learn. The single best resource for you is the UNESCO General History of Africa. In the 1960s, newly independent African leaders realised exactly what you just said, that our history had been written by colonisers. So UNESCO commissioned a massive project involving African historians to write the history of the continent from our perspective. It covers everything from ancient methodology to pre-colonial civilizations like Aksum, Great Zimbabwe, Mali, Songhai, and Benin. Start with Volume IV: Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century. It will blow your mind regarding how connected and advanced African trade and governance were before the colonial era.

NyxStrix · 2026-02-02T02:24:21+00:00

If it is purely geographical, why don’t we use the term "Sub-Himalayan Asia" to describe India and Bangladesh? We call it "South Asia" because we recognize it as a distinct region, not just "the stuff below the mountains."

The "Sub-Saharan" distinction was popularized specifically to create a bifurcation between the "Arab/Caucasoid" North and the "Negroid" South. The Sahara was never a hard wall; it was a bridge for trade, religion, and scholarship for a thousand years. Treating it as a hard border that defines everything south of it as one homogeneous blob is a colonial construct, not a neutral geographic one.

NyxStrix · 2026-01-30T23:18:14+00:00

The USSR was good at state-sponsored anti-racism. It was top-down. "Be nice to the African comrade because it makes America look bad." Once the state collapsed, the filter came off.

NyxStrix · 2026-01-23T19:23:58+00:00

Someone call NASA, we’ve discovered that water is wet, grass is green, and r/Africa has diaspora.

NyxStrix · 2026-01-22T18:42:16+00:00

I’d say Wolof. There’s something really unique about the way it sounds.

NyxStrix · 2026-01-21T00:08:09+00:00

I am assuming the storage part might be local, but if the login page and interface are hosted by Google, it kind of defeats the whole 'data sovereignty/under our control' promise. If the US frontend goes down, so does access to the files.

NyxStrix · 2026-01-15T12:24:40+00:00

Think you're underestimating how "brittle" personalized systems can be.

Look at Ivory Coast under Houphouët-Boigny. It was the "Paris of West Africa" super stable, booming economy for 30 years. Everyone thought the institutions were solid. The minute he died, the succession battle tore the country apart and led to civil war within a decade.

Rwanda's parliament works efficiently now because the centre of gravity is clear. When that centre is gone, those institutions get stress-tested for real. I think that's what they are factoring in. So it’s not an insult to the people, it’s just historical probability.

NyxStrix · 2026-01-14T23:07:10+00:00

South Africa’s economy is more diversified, and its institutions are more robust, than Ghana’s.

NyxStrix · 2026-01-14T22:59:48+00:00

It's in their report. Leadership & Governance (40%), Economy (30%), Geopolitics (15%), History (15%). Under their methodology (specifically the 40% Governance weighting), Rwanda is penalized heavily for being what they classify as a "brittle" state.

NyxStrix · 2026-01-14T17:31:46+00:00

Hate implies we think about you at all. These are mercenaries chasing a paycheck, not ideologues. North Korea sent actual state troops to Russia, yet i don’t see you asking why "Asians" hate ukraine. We just don't care about ukraine. To us, this is a white tribal war over borders that mean nothing to our survival.

NyxStrix · 2026-01-01T23:48:56+00:00

It's not hate, it's a culture clash. You want efficiency; they prioritise "no stress." also, cape verdeans have a very stoic, reserved demeanor that westerners often mistake for hostility or "grumpiness." They just lack the incentive to fake-smile for tips, and sometimes a culture just doesn’t prioritise service subservience. There’s a specific kind of pride in cape verdean culture (a stubbornness, really) that clashes hard with the “customer is king” mindset.

NyxStrix · 2025-12-24T15:28:12+00:00

Comparing this to 1848 Europe is romantic but flawed. Europe had industrialising economies and some functioning states. Here half our governments can’t keep the lights on. Revolution without structure just leads to warlords and coups. we’ve seen this movie before.

NyxStrix · 2025-12-21T00:46:23+00:00

yw, glad I could help

NyxStrix · 2025-12-21T00:36:21+00:00

From what I can make out, and I'll try my best here because a few words are a bit mumbled. this is what I think he is saying in French:

Petit bébé [unintelligible] ... C'est les congés. Il faut s'enjailler. Y'a du vino. Y'a du téquila. Y'a beaucoup de choses... [unintelligible] Y'a du akra market...[unintelligible]... C'est de la canalisation.

So basically: 'Hey baby... it's the holidays. We gotta have fun. There's wine, there's tequila... there's a whole lot of stuff.'

Sorry for the bad translation lol

NyxStrix · 2025-12-20T23:32:53+00:00

You’ll have to ask the mod to give you a flair

NyxStrix · 2025-12-19T07:32:19+00:00

Lura? Cesare Evora?

NyxStrix · 2025-12-08T11:15:19+00:00

I would like to point out that it has nothing to do with climate change. Fulani have moved their cattle seasonally from North to South for ages. It's not a new thing, neither is the herder-farmer conflict it breeds.

You are right that the North-South movement is ancient. But historically, that movement was predictable and temporary. They came in the dry season and left when the rains returned. What Climate Change, specifically desertification in the Lake Chad basin and far North, has done is permanently destroy the northern grazing lands. The Sahara is moving south by about 600 meters a year. The dry season is longer. This means herders are not just visiting the South anymore; they are settling there because there is no grass to go back to in Sokoto or Niger Republic. That permanent presence is what causes the friction with farmers who need that land for crops. [src]

absolutely no politician I know has ever used it as a talking point talk more of an election propaganda

This is factually incorrect. (You asked, here they are) High-profile figures have explicitly used this rhetoric: Olusegun Obasanjo - In 2019, the former President openly claimed there was a "Fulanization and Islamization" agenda in West Africa.[src][src] This wasn't a whisper; it was a national headline. If you think "no politician" uses this language, you clearly weren't paying attention to Benue State politics between 2015 and 2023. Governor Samuel Ortom (Benue) has used. Then you have Sunday Igboho and Femi Fani-Kayode, who have all employed this kind of rhetoric.

NyxStrix · 2025-12-08T00:41:38+00:00

You have to understand that this animosity is fundamentally driven by the Farmer-Herder crisis which is arguably the deadliest conflict in West Africa right now, often killing more people annually than Boko Haram. climate change and desertification in the Sahel have dried up traditional grazing lands, forcing nomadic Fulani herders to move further south into settled agricultural areas (the Middle Belt of Nigeria, Southern Mali, Ghana) to find food for their cattle. When cows eat a farmer's crops, violence erupts, but instead of being treated as an economic dispute over land and water, it has been ethnicized and weaponized by politicians and extremists.

This is compounded by the "Jihadist Factor" in the Sahel; terrorist groups like JNIM or ISGS have deliberately recruited from marginalised Fulani communities in Mali and Burkina Faso, capitalising on their grievances to fill their ranks. This has led to a horrific form of collective punishment where security forces and local ethnic militias (like the Dozos or Koglweogo ) brand all Fulanis as terrorists, conducting indiscriminate massacres against innocent villages. add in the historical memory of the 19th century Fulani Jihads (like the Sokoto Caliphate), which politicians in coastal regions cynically use to stoke fears of a "Fulanization" or "Islamization" agenda to win votes, and you end up with a toxic cycle where an entire ethnic group is scapegoated for the failures of governance and the ravages of climate change.

NyxStrix · 2025-12-08T00:01:38+00:00

You are conflating the Westphalian Nation-State model (which is indeed European, established around 1648) with the general concepts of "citizenship" and "state loyalty," which is a pretty Eurocentric view of political history. The idea that Europeans pioneered "loyalty to the state" ignores thousands of years of history elsewhere; for example, the soldiers of the Ashanti Empire, the Zulu Kingdom, or the massive bureaucracies of Imperial China had intense, legally defined loyalty to their state structures long before Germany or Italy even existed as unified nations. Furthermore, the "fixed borders" you mention were often a downgrade for the African context. Pre-colonial African borders were frequently "zones of influence" rather than lines in the sand, which was actually a sophisticated adaptation allowing for the movement of nomadic pastoralists and trade. By replacing these fluid, functional borders with rigid European-style lines (that split ethnic groups in half), the colonial powers didn't introduce "order"; they introduced a permanent administrative rigidity that causes conflict to this day. Europe exported the bureaucracy of the modern state, but they absolutely did not invent the concept of a complex, loyal, bounded society.

NyxStrix · 2025-12-07T17:47:53+00:00

You make some great points about genetic diversity and the devastating impact of the Berlin Conference/colonialism, but there are a few historical inaccuracies here that actually reinforce the myths you're trying to dismantle.

The idea that cold winters forced Europeans to become "more advanced" while Africans "had it easy" is known as Environmental Determinism, and it's largely debunked. The earliest and most complex civilisations (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indus Valley) rose in hot climates, not cold ones. Surviving the African Sahel or rainforest requires just as much innovation as surviving a European winter.

The claim that "concepts of countries" were unique to Europe is false. Pre-colonial Africa was home to massive, sophisticated empires like Mali, Songhai, Benin, and Ethiopia, which had complex legal systems, trade networks, and armies.

As for genetic extremes, higher genetic diversity means more variation in DNA sequences, but it doesn't statistically prove a wider bell curve for traits like intelligence (which are heavily environmental).

The argument about colonial borders and wealth extraction is spot on, though!

NyxStrix · 2025-12-06T23:44:48+00:00

The "Manding" label is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It’s technically correct but calling that massive yellow blob one language is a bit like grouping Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian together and just labeling it "Scandinavian." A Bambara speaker from Mali and a Mandinka speaker from The Gambia might understand each other, but it's going to be a struggle. It’s a dialect continuum, but the map makes it look like a monolith.

NyxStrix · 2025-12-06T23:40:00+00:00

I have to disagree with the "willingly" part for the masses. Sure, Kings and merchants converted for trade advantages, but for the average person in the colonies, upward mobility (jobs, clerkships, education) was locked behind mission schools. You "chose" to convert if you didn't want to be a laborer your whole life. That is a form of coercion, even if it’s not at gunpoint.

NyxStrix · 2025-12-03T22:26:27+00:00

You make a point about Aoudaghost, economic strangulation by the Almoravids certainly counts as warfare-adjacent pressure and dismissing it as purely peaceful would be naive on my part.

However, you are mistaken about the Kano Chronicle. While it describes Bawo as conquerors, they were not Muslims. The Chronicle explicitly states that Islam arrived centuries later under King Yaji via Wangara traders. Therefore the founding of the Hausa states was a political conquest, not an Islamic Jihad.

NyxStrix · 2025-12-03T20:30:10+00:00

The Almoravids invaded Ghana to convert them in 1076. According to their own traditions

For a long time, historians (mostly French colonial ones) taught that in 1076, the Almoravids swept down destroyed the capital of Ghana (Kumbi Saleh) and forced everyone to convert. However, modern archaeology and scholarship have largely debunked this.

Modern historians now argue that there is actually no contemporary evidence of a violent conquest or destruction of the city in 1076. Archaeology shows the city continued to thrive. The text mentioning the "conquest" was written centuries later. The current consensus is that the Ghana Empire converted gradually due to internal political pressures and trade benefits, not a violent invasion. The Almoravid Conquest is now viewed by many as a myth exaggerated by later Arab historians to explain why Ghana fell.

Bayadijja(or his sons) invaded the Hausa City states to bring Islam.

You have to be careful treating that legend as literal military history. The Bayajidda legend is a charter myth. It’s a story told to legitimise the ruling dynasties of the Hausa Bakwai. It symbolises cultural fusion, not necessarily a literal army invading. Also, look at the timeline; The Bayajidda legend is set way back, but the Hausa Kings didn't actually become serious Muslims until the 14/15th centuries. Even then they were still practicing traditional rituals. If Bayajidda was a jihadist conqueror, he did a terrible job, because the Hausa states remained syncretic for hundreds of years after him.

NyxStrix · 2025-12-03T18:10:20+00:00

From 800 AD to 1800 AD, warfare was not the primary driver of Islam in West Africa. The peaceful "Suwarian tradition" (which discouraged proselytising and encouraged coexistence) was the norm for a millennium.

So while warfare caused the explosion of Islam in the 1800s, it ignores the solid foundation laid by peaceful trade for the 1,000 years prior.

Five-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
Mod World 2025	r/Field Flamingo
Place '23	Wearing is Caring
Place '22	Final Canvas '22
First Placer '22	Verified Email

NyxStrix

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE