Nigeria: Monday Column - Smart Alecs, Them Whites

Source from:  Daily Trust (Abuja) 29 October 2007 10/30/2007

I first heard of the eminent American molecular biologist James D. Watson in January 1978, as a pre-degree science student at the then brand-new University of Sokoto. The Biology course that year was broken into parts-taxonomy, anatomy, morphology, physiology, ecology, genetics and evolution-each handled by a different lecturer. The Polish professor Robert Miodonski handled genetics, and he taught us about somatic cells, gametes, chromosomes, spindles, mitosis, meiosis, genes, nucleic acids, RNA and DNA before he arrived at the mention of the DNA's double-helix structure, first discovered by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1952. It was called the "Watson-Crick" DNA model, and Miodonski must have mentioned it 100 times in one month. He said, "The DNA double helix has these features. Two polynucleotide strands wound around each other, the backbone of each consists of alternating deoxyribose and phosphate groups, the phosphate group bonded to the 5' carbon atom of one deoxyribose is covalently bonded to the 3' carbon of the next, the two strands are antiparalel, that is, one strand runs 5' to 3' while the other runs 3' to 5'....". You don't forget such great teaching. For their brilliant discovery of "the secret of life", Watson and Crick, together with Maurice Wilkins, were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology in 1962. You will therefore excuse me if, in the next 30 years, I thought of Professor Watson as infallible, and I am yet to see the evidence that he is not. In recent weeks, a storm of controversy was raised around Watson's statement that he is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as our's, whereas all the testing says, not really. While I hope that everyone is equal, people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true". Now, howls of protest from fellow Whites notwithstanding, Watson has found much support from my friend Mr. Idang Alibi, who adduced much proof last week to show that blacks are inherently inferior to Whites. I cannot agree more, and today I wish to come to his and Watson's aid by showing many more areas in which Whites have historically proved to be more intelligent than us blacks. Many black political leaders are today accused of witch-hunting their opponents, but it was the great White man who first invented the Witch Hunt. For three centuries, from 1450 to 1750 AD, societies all over Europe were consumed with panic over the presence of witches in their midst. An estimated 100,000 alleged witches, most of them old women, were caught, tortured, tried and executed by burning on stakes. All that Africans ever invented was parading suspected grain thieves naked in the markets, a poor patent compared to the Witch Hunts. It was a very intelligent White man, most certainly a Portuguese marine merchant, who invented the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This was no small invention. It was a triangular system by which European goods such as beads, cowrie shells, textiles, brandy, horses and guns were brought to Africa and exchanged for slaves. Then, between 1450 and 1900, an estimated 10.2 million African slaves were shipped to the Americas, 4 million of them to Brazil alone, 2.5 million to the Spanish Empire and another 2 million to the British West Indies. Although the Portuguese started it, by the 19th century, when the trade was at its peak, the even more intelligent British marine merchants dominated it, never mind old man William Wilberforce's call for abolishing the slave trade. The choice of Africans as cannon fodder for this trade was a very intelligent decision, because as one writer put it, "Expanding European empires in the New World lacked one major resource-a work force. The indigenous peoples had proved to be unreliable, and Europeans were unsuited to the climate and suffered under tropical diseases. Africans, on the other hand, were excellent workers; they had experience of agriculture and keeping cattle, they were used to a tropical climate, were resistant to tropical diseases, and they could be worked very hard on plantations". The final leg of the triangular Atlantic trade was that the cotton, sugar, tobacco, molasses and rum grown in the New World by black slave labour was then shipped to Europe and greatly aided its rapid economic progress in the next four centuries. Why didn't any African first think up the idea of capturing millions of Europeans and shipping them off to conquered territories in Asia, for them to produce wheat, oats, barley and hay for re-export to Africa? We would have been a super power by now! It was the White man who had the great sense to exterminate the American Red Indians and seize millions of hectares of rich land on two continents. In 1492, when Christopher Columbus first reached the Americas and opened the way for sneak European entry, there were an estimated 50 million native Indians all over North and South America, 25 million in the Aztec Empire alone and another 12 million in the Inca Empire. 150 years later, 80 percent of them were dead. Brazil's native Indians, who numbered 4 million in 1492, number 300,000 today, all due to the intelligent activities of the White man. Even the wild bison herds, of which an estimated 100 million roamed the North American plains in the 15th century and sustained the Red Indian civilisation, are down to 200,000 today. Have Africans been able to exterminate elephants, lions, rhinos or even rats and hedgehogs? It was a very intelligent White man who invented colonialism, capturing whole lands and civilisations, with all the people therein, and subjecting them to his own economic designs. The very intelligent old Belgian King Leopold said everyone should go to the Berlin Conference of 1884 with a pencil and ruler, so that Africa could be shared out among the White men. Why didn't blacks arrange any conference at the Kariba Falls, which is more picturesque than Berlin, and draw lines on a European map from the English Channel all through the Dutch canals, French vineyards, Swiss watch foundries and Ukrainian wheat fields all the way to the Siberian steppes? Blacks couldn't even invent a small thing such as concentration camps. Many blacks think Kirikiri is a great invention, because they never heard of the concentration camps opened in South Africa by the British Army during the Boer Wars of the late 1890s. Not to talk of the improvements added to the concentration camp idea by the innovative Germans at Auschwitz, Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthuasen-Gusen, Sobibor and Treblinka. Did the blacks invent any gas chamber? Intelligent White Americans have been executing people in them since 1924, placing a condemned man into a sealed chamber, then dropping potassium cyanide pellets into a bowl of concentrated sulphuric acid to generate a chemical reaction that produces the deadly gas hydrogen cyanide. Again the brilliant white German Nazis improved on this, using carbon monoxide, Zyklon B and other deadly gasses to execute millions of people during the "Public Euthanasia Program" of the early 1940s, better known as the Holocaust. Blacks can't measure up to Whites in anything. All the Lilliputians that blacks parade as famous "war criminals", what did they ever achieve? Charles Taylor, Yormie Johnson, Foday Sankoh, Mohamed Farah Aideed, Joseph Kony, Jonas Savimbi and even Idi Amin, combined together, do they measure up to Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsfuhrer of the SS, or even to his assistant Reinhard Heydrich, intelligent White men both? Which wars did blacks ever organise that killed more than a few hundred thousand people? Compare that to the great achievement of the White man, such as World War Two. The Angolan civil war that lasted 25 years killed no more than a million people. Look, within 6 short years of World War Two, the Whites chucked up a casualty figure of 72 million; the dead included 25 million soldiers and 47 million civilians, half of whom died of war-related famine and disease. The USSR alone lost 26.6 million people, while Germany, the great White nation that started it, lost 5.3 million soldiers alone. Do the blacks have any comparable intelligent war? I once saw a dollar calculation of the material damage suffered by all White nations in World War Two; there were 26 zeros in front of the $1! What was the cost of all African wars combined, from the Songhai, Mali and Kanem Bornu wars all the way to the Gobir and Zulu campaigns and the anti-colonial wars of the 1960s? Did blacks ever invent a sensible and very intelligent political system such as Apartheid? If they did, where are the Bantustans, the passes, the sjamboks, the rubber bullets, the hot water sprays, the attack dogs, the segregated schools, stadiums, beaches and toilets? Why didn't the blacks ever invent "ethnic cleansing", despite very good historical reasons to do so, and instead waited for a very small White nation, the Bosnian extension of Serbia, to do so? Has the black race any answer to Radovan Karadjic and General Radtko Mladjic, two intelligent White men who made a revolutionary political invention? Look, what is our answer to the Whites' very brilliant invention of nuclear bombs? The White man found out how to split the nuclei of atoms, and to do nuclear fission that drives the explosion of nuclear weapons. The most deadly weapon we blacks ever invented was the Zulu short spear, the assegai, and possibly the two-headed spear tagwayen masu that Muhammadu Kanta invented in the 14th century. The very intelligent Whites however produced the fission bomb "Thin Boy". Weighing only 4 tons, it generated an explosion equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT and levelled the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in an instant. Not satisfied, they went ahead and produced thermonuclear fusion bombs, weighing far less than Thin Boy, but packing 1,000 times more explosive power. How can the 1804 siege of Alkalawa be compared, in terms of intelligent military planning, to the instant obliteration of Hiroshima in 1945? You hear many dim-witted blacks boasting about the power of the ogbunigwe gun produced in Biafra, or the lethal agility of the Janjaweed horseman riding through the Darfur desert. Can the ogbunigwe deliver a nuclear warhead to a city 5,000 kilometres away, as do the Whites' intercontinental ballistic missiles [ICBMs]? What is our own answer to the Atlas, Titan, Minuteman, Midgetman, Polaris, Poseidon and Trident ICBMs? Even the Russian SS-20 three headed missile, an "independently targetable re-entry vehicle", can hit and obliterate three cities simultaneously, in great testimony to White intelligence, while we here are still using daggers and machetes in ethnic wars. The White man also invented the neutron bomb, an "enhanced radiation warhead" that can kill all the people and leave buildings still standing, a very intelligent idea if ever there is one. We blacks cannot even pollute the Earth properly. Our biggest contribution to pollution is polythene bags swirling in farmlands. Compare that to the great White invention of acid rain, radioactive waste and of ozone-depleting gases. Why, the intelligent White man has even created rising Earth temperatures, melting ice sheets and rising sea levels, thereby guaranteeing that we won't be sitting around this place for much longer. When the Almighty created the oceans and made them very deep, up to 11 kilometres deep in some places, we blacks thought it was just one big home for the fish, but White Smart Alecs have figured out that they could store Sea Launched Ballistic Missiles [SLBMs] in there, could wash their oil tankers at sea and could dispose off nuclear waste on the seafloor. You see, in the past week, I have even heard some people questioning the intelligence of the Oslo-based Nobel Institute, which awards the Whites' most prestigious prize for intelligent deeds, the Nobel Prize. One man even said that since dim-witted black sprinter Marion Jones returned her Sydney Olympics medals to IOC for confessed drug abuse, great White scientist Watson should return his Nobel Prize to Oslo. Why? Instead, I urge the Nobel Institute to award to him this year's Nobel Peace Prize for promoting inter-racial harmony and clearer understanding. For being the first to support him, my friend Idang Alibi should at least get a CFR. As for me, if I can get an aluminium alloy medal, I will be most gratified. Enditem