Why Primitives Are Primitive

I recently found the YouTube channel of Franck Zanu. He is a native of Benin who has spent a good deal of time researching, studying and thinking about the plight of blacks around the world. I'm not sure I agree with all of his conclusions, but he has interesting and relatively defensible positions. Since he comes from Benin and I do not, at the very least I must respect his vastly superior experience.

Here is his conversation with a woman from the Caribbean about why he thinks Haitians will never be able to fix Haiti. I have queued it up to a relevant part of the discussion.

His assertion, which he lays out thoroughly if you watch the whole video, which I recommend, is that the Africans had never seen a functioning country. Prior to colonial rule, they'd never experienced anything other than primitive, tribal society. Here's an excerpt. I have edited this transcript for clarity. Her dialog is in italics.

We had tribal wars. And you must understand, even though the only thing African tribes have in common is skin color. Once we go to this tribe is a different language, different religion, different everything. Food, everything. It's like you've been to China, in France, except the way in the same region. Let people get this picture clear. It was a continent with only tribes.

(When the Europeans arrived in Africa) there was no republics. There were no countries. No modern day concept of what country means. There were no formal boundaries and borders. So let's talk about Benin itself. How many tribes were in Benin at that time? About 50. 50 different tribes or more... But you can't say Benin because there was no Benin. You can say the region. You see what I mean? It was a region that stretched all the way from the Nile River in Nigeria, all the way to Ghana, just a region. That's no name for anybody. There was nothing like Benin, Nigeria, Ghana. 

No. But there was a concept of Dahomey.

That's correct. That's a tribe ... That's one tribe of very brutal guys. Guys with potbelly married 200 wives, and they call them chiefs. And the foreigners named them kingdoms, because that is the only way they know from where they were coming from Europe. But there was no kingdom. We are not kingdoms.

It's any pot belly guy married to many women with his family making war on the other small tribes, and they were describing them based only on the word they know. The Europeans say, oh, this people's kingdom. It was only chiefs. We never had kings in Africa.

When he made these points, it really hit me that without the experience of being a meaningful part of a functioning, modern country, even if it was modern in the 18th Century sense, you would have no idea how to organize such a country. You could take it over, but you would then revert to mean and become a really big, primitive tribe. More likely, you would devolve into many smaller tribes and go to war with each other.

More than 200 years later, they're still at the starting line.

Franck, who has appropriated an extra c for his name, possibly by nefarious means, has this terrific analogy explaining what happened to African and Caribbean countries after independence.

Now what I am explaining about Haiti goes for every single black Caribbean country. They also did the same thing. They ask for countries to run. They have never run before. What I'm explaining about Haiti has to do with every single African country. Nobody in Africa, at least sub-Saharan Africa, who's great great great great great grandfathers have ever seen a country with their eyes, let alone manage, administer, run it.

None has ever created a political system that is authentic to the people who live in it. None. None. We don't have the concept of political systems we have. We don't have the concept of economic systems yet colonialists came to build a country within a short time, install it the same way they know from where they came from, the busses, the bus stops, the roads, clinics, schools, churches, all these they build.

But you foolishly ask them to give you something you don't know how to run. It reminds me of an analogy I have created and I keep using, and that is, a guy came with an airplane big enough to take 400 people. Okay, took natives from a land into the plane. Okay? The people managed to jump the pilot, the copilot, and the junior engineer and killed them all.

...Okay, so now they've killed the pilot, the copilot and the engineer. Only then did they turn around and ask, "Does anybody know how to fly this thing?" Nobody knows how to fly that thing.

...So African leaders got independence within three years. They recognize, oh, shoot, we don't know how to fly this plane. But as it is about Africans, ego is far bigger than intellect. They couldn't confess to the masses. So do you know what they did. They coined a term immediately and say guess what. We got independence from colonials.

It's worth thinking about. I confess, I never considered this and now realize how I've taken civilization for granted. It makes me see the evolution of the West in a whole new light.