Trump lacks perspective

Yes, Donald Trump, some countries in the world can be likened to sh*tholes, but if you had the smallest grasp of history you might not have made the statement you did.

Out of the mouths of babes or, maybe, the emotionally immature and intellectually bereft. Yes, Donald Trump, some countries in the world can be likened to sh*tholes, but if you had the smallest grasp of history you might not have made the statement you did, stirring up a hornet’s nest.

So, let’s go back, for your benefit, to November 1532. A Spanish explorer called Francisco Pizarro arrives in the expansive Inca empire, where Peru is today. As Jared Diamond outlines in his book, Guns, Germs and Steel, Pizarro and his 168 conquistadors, after encountering the Incas, slaughtered 7 000 of them. There’s a clue to how they did it in the book’s title, although the germs, in the form of smallpox and other Eurasian diseases, came later.

Capturing the Inca leader, Atahualpa, the conquistadors command him to order his people to gather 20 tons of gold and silver and after killing him, they ride off on their strong, welltrained horses. The riches they gathered were shipped off to Spain, where they were used to build the marvellous buildings we still see today, and to advance that civilisation. The Inca empire disappeared a generation later.

In the 1500s, Portugal, too, colonised large parts of South America, as well as Goa in India, and put the riches gleaned into its own imperialist project. This is not really a criticism, merely a statement of fact. It was a time of enrichment by conquest and King Shaka of the Zulus conquered other groups to expand his empire.

But, as Jeremy Paxman says in his BBC series, Empire, Europe should not pretend they have nothing to do with the state of previously colonised nations. During the heyday of trans-Atlantic slavery, millions of Africans were transported to the Americas to do the back-breaking work needed on the plantations. I’ll leave it to your imagination, Mr Trump, to imagine how they were persuaded to carry out this labour. This was so that Europeans and, later, Americans could enjoy their newfound addiction to sugar, tobacco, coffee and other New World products. Getting tea was another story, leading to the opium wars that left millions of Chinese hooked on the poison.

The prime reason for the Raj in India was profit and again, British administrators used bribery and corruption as their weapon, resorting to violence when their supremacy as white men was questioned. As Paxman says: “It was the empire on which the sun never set on. Or, as some have said, the blood never dried.” The South African War, chiefly fought over the goldfields, and the Natives Land Act of 1913, planted seeds of destruction in the South African soil.

You won’t run out of examples of European culpability: the Herero genocide carried out by the Germans, the infamous baskets of hands the Belgians gathered in the Congo. The fabric of these communities was destroyed.

The US has, in more recent times, been complicit in sowing chaos in South America’s drug wars, in the Middle East and in African countries like Somalia.

Unfortunately, history doesn’t just go away, no matter how many aid parcels you throw at it. If the so-called developed nations want to make some reparation to previously colonised nations, they could start with funding education. It was on the backs of millions of individuals from so-called undeveloped nations that they were able to build their admirable learning institutions and even, in some cases, for many decades offer their citizens free education.