Posts about Indian students stealing from Food Banks by people like @slatzism and I apparently upset some very vindictive Indian Users for being ‘Anti-Indian’. They are so upset they are coordinating in chats like ‘Indian Cyber Defenders’ Telegram for mass reporting and doxxing!

https://twitter.com/libconservative/status/1782630950012154213

These people really hold grudges even when they know they’re in the wrong!

The fetishisation of foreign groups alongside a complete lack of Theory of Mind for or non-surface level knowledge about their countries has been called ‘Provincial Cosmopolitanism’. Cultural and ethnic background have no bearing on behaviour and are only aesthetic differences

https://twitter.com/mythploughman/status/1781669850177225158

‘Bastani Syndrome’ is a variant of this phenomenon

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1769004480933036218

Lee Kuan Yew on his political philosophy - a non-ideological commitment to Pragmatism and what actually works instead of theory #Pragmatism

I obviously really like Bukele but El Salvador is a very illustrative case of elite capture, a third world Guatelombia with Guatelombian social mores taken over by NrX blog-reading Moldbugian Bay Area Dark Elves with a great social media game, a kind of Club Tropical Excellente

Lindy in a very Laws of Manu way though. I visited El Salvador recently and drove around a bit, country and people look mostly indistinguishable from other parts of (provincial) Central and South America. Very dilapidated in many places, slum-like in others, lots of people with very precolumbian physiognomies in combat get-up holding guns… if you go in bars a lot of them will pat you down for weapons etc. What there is however are little very first world pockets which would be very nice to live in. There’s a whole upmarket surf and party area for the tech bro castizos that’s a real standout called El Tunco which is very much ‘my conscious community in the Guatemalan Hills’, you can pay for everything in Bitcoin. Lots of ‘beautiful people’ there you’ll only ever see in the gated communities, not on the street. Qualifier is it’s guarded by a bunch of gruff-looking nahua men with assault rifles who ‘discourage’ beggars from the local villages trying to get in, but it’s otherwise a really nice place

In all, the recent changes are an encouraging sign that with enough capture of the right kind of cool elite demographics you can restore competent government fairly quickly, some vindication there for our friends the elite theorists maybe


Repost because of locked quoted account

Genuine passion and love for ‘The Other’ but only for 130IQ+ Anglos

https://twitter.com/oblombo/status/1779556320431022089

Being WEIRD even by Hajnal Line standards likely goes some way towards explaining the apparent fetish Anglosphere countries have for mass immigration and elevating minorities in their countries - in a far more obsessive way than on the continent

https://twitter.com/smnhmd/status/1779571488560947666

MUSEUMS IN THE THIRD WORLD

How are historical artefacts looked after in the Third World? It’s true that they don’t get destroyed but very often they’re left to rot in sparse, run-down museums with flickering lights that nobody visits. On what many Third World Museums are like 🧵

https://twitter.com/mkatorin/status/1775180121256628319

Moving past the question of ‘should they be returned?’, many Westerners and Diaspora Groups agitating for returns have an skewed idea of what the Third World museums these artefacts would be returned to are actually like. They are not the same kind of museum you find in the west

COMPILATION THREAD of Africans tweeting about fraudulently completing family members’ medical degrees

After a now deleted tweet about Africans completing medical degrees for relatives went viral, some Africans began jokingly sharing their own experiences with degree fraud 🧵

Compilation Thread of the Worst Parts of Travel Vlogger Bald and Bankrupt’s New Video Exploring British Cities in 2024 🧵

Bald walks down a main road in Birmingham and finds that everyone is Indian Bald finds a ‘Weapon Surrender Bin’ and meets a woman with a black eye because of domestic abuse who then offers him sex

COMPILATION THREAD of Immigrants aggressively gloating about how they’re taking over Britain - Multicultural Democracy in action 🧵

https://twitter.com/khartoum_of/status/1747603170644127806

AFRICA AND THE AFRICAN MINDSET - A Compilation RESOURCE MASTERTHREAD of Posts about Africa and the African diaspora that try to help explain the African Mindset and the reasons for the ways that many Africans engage with the World - read this if you want to understand AFRICA 🧵🌍 Dysfunction in the Congo - from ‘Empire of Dust’

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1706448989493583881

THE BEST MOVIES OF 2023

2023 was a big year in film. Studios began re-centring ‘fun’ and Big Directors released new films. Here are The New York Times’ Best Movies of 2023: Movies that entertained and awed, but that also pushed boundaries and championed social justice causes 🧵 Jordan Peele’s SILENCE

A Black Man moves into newly-built affordable housing in a quiet White Suburb. However, he starts to find the silence driving him insane - and soon discovers the Whites are aliens harvesting the energy of POC with the mind-destroying lack of constant noise

Henry Kissinger is Finally Dead - Here Are His Top 10 Most Ghoulish Quotes:

1. Soviet Jews: “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

2.  Bombing Cambodia: “[Nixon] wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn't want to hear anything about it. It's an order, to be done. Anything that flies or anything that moves.”

3. Bombing Vietnam: "It's wave after wave of planes. You see, they can't see the B-52 and they dropped a million pounds of bombs ... I bet you we will have had more planes over there in one day than Johnson had in a month ... each plane can carry about 10 times the load of World War II plane could carry."

4. Khmer Rouge: “How many people did (Khmer Rouge Foreign Minister Ieng Sary) kill? Tens of thousands? You should tell the Cambodians (i.e., Khmer Rouge) that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in the way. We are prepared to improve relations with them. Tell them the latter part, but don’t tell them what I said before.” (Nov. 26, 1975 meeting with Thai foreign minister)

5. Dan Ellsberg: “Because that son-of-a-bitch—First of all, I would expect—I know him well—I am sure he has some more information---I would bet that he has more information that he’s saving for the trial.  Examples of American war crimes that triggered him into it…It’s the way he’d operate….Because he is a despicable bastard.” (Oval Office tape, July 27, 1971)

6. Robert McNamara: “Boohoo, boohoo … He’s still beating his breast, right? Still feeling guilty. ” (Pretending to cry, rubbing his eyes.)

7. Assassination:  “It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination.” (Statement at a National Security Council meeting, 1975)

8. Chile: “I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”

9. Illegality-Unconstitutionality: “The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.” (from March 10, 1975 meeting with Turkish foreign minister Melih Esenbel in Ankara, Turkey)

10. On His Own Character: “Americans like the cowboy … who rides all alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else … This amazing, romantic character suits me precisely because to be alone has always been part of my style or, if you like, my technique.” (November 1972 interview with Oriana Fallaci)

https://twitter.com/newswire_us/status/1730039631431782877

His last interview - and what a set of comments to go out on!

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1712441794766528699

CROSSING AN AFRICAN BORDER - NAMIBIA TO ANGOLA 🇳🇦🇦🇴

Short Story from Travel Author Paul Theroux’s Book ‘LAST TRAIN TO ZONA VERDE’ about travel in Africa and his impressions of the chaos at the Angolan Border as he crossed it:

“People milled around the stalled vehicles, shouting, selling food out of baskets - small bread rolls, fried cakes, cold drinks, wilted vegetables, and trays of chewing gum and candy. Beyond the crush of these vendors I could see another large crowd pressing toward an open shed with a high roof. Some of those people, mostly teenage boys, the Artful Dodgers that haunt frontiers, hurried toward us. In such circumstances, you sense being singled out and stalked like a lamed prey animal.

All of it because of the proximity to Angola, most of the goods sold to people who traveled across the border. I asked Stephen if this assumption was correct.

"They have nothing in Angola," he said. He thought again. "But they have money. "

The shop fronts and businesses became denser, closer together, as we approached the border town of Oshikango, but of course, being a frontier, it was only half a town, walled off from its other side by a high chainlink fence running at a right angle across the main street. Parked on that street, waiting to go through Namibian customs, was a long line of trucks, several cars, even some loaded pushcarts and wheelbarrows. They looked as though they had been sitting there for a year, and the scene was of great, almost riotous disorder.

"Be careful." Stephen said. "There are thieves here - and on the other side, many thieves. Don't get out of the car until I give you a signal. I will find someone to help you."

He slipped out of the car and was accosted by a group of boys. He made a circuit of the blocked-off street, returned to the car, and opened the door.

"Lock the door. Don't talk to these bovs. Don't look at them." ” Then he was gone, hurrying through the mass of people pushing into the shed.

Outside the car (my door fastened by the coat hanger), the boys were pressed against the windows, some calling out, others pleading, "Mynheer! Mynheer!" Stephen returned with a girl of about nineteen or twenty, hardly more than five feet tall. She had a serious face set in a scowl, her jaw thrust out, and wore a blue blouse and a pink skirt, and on her head a floppy-brimmed knitted hat of white wool, like a picturesque peasant in a folktale or nursery rhyme.

"This is Vickie," Stephen said. "She will help you."

Seeing her, hearing this, the crowd of boys began to laugh, provoking Vickie to say something sharp to them, which shut them up.

"How much do I owe you?"

"Don't show any money," Stephen said. He palmed the payment - in gratitude for shepherding me, I had given him twice what he asked. He handed Vickie my canvas duffel.

She hoisted my bag onto her head and hung on to it with both hands. I clung to my briefcase. As we walked down the hot street and fought through the crowd to the customs shed, the boys snatched at my shirtsleeves. "Mynheer!"

Apart from the pestering boys - and more joined them as we went along - the formalities on the Namibian side were straightforward: presentation of signed forms and passport and the usual bag search, with the singular diversion of a Namibian customs inspector lifting my copy of Benito Cereno, squinting at it, then paging through it, his dancing eyes indicating that his head was a hive of subtlety, as if he were looking for an offensive passage.

"You can go." He directed me to the back of the shed, where a narrow walkway with high sides led into a maze.

The same boys followed, about ten of them. I knew their faces by now: the one in the soccer jersey, the one with the woolly Rasta hat, the one with the Emporio Armani T-shirt, the one with the wicked face and broken teeth, the one who kept bumping up against me - his plastic sandals were cracked and his feet were bumped and bruised; several boys had their hats turned backward in the gangbanger style. Customs and immigration did not apply to them, apparently; they pushed and jostled along the narrow passageway, which, I saw afterward, represented no man's land.

At the end of the passageway, Angola was another shed, with a wooden window flap propped open, more people in line, all of it enclosed by chainlink fences and razor wire.
Vickie, surrounded by the mocking boys, pointed to the window and indicated that I should hand in my passport. As I did so, I heard a howl.

THIRD WORLD BRITAIN AESTHETICS THREAD - “Britain, 2100” 🧵





Britain, 2100

ON CHINA AND THE CHINESE - “Ways That Are Dark” - Extracts from a 1933 Travelogue about China 🇨🇳

🧵 “Ways That Are Dark” is a 1933 book by Ralph Townsend, a US Consul in China, in which he presents his observations on the state of then-contemporary China. The book has been called exaggerated, sinophobic and racist and was banned by the Chinese Government.

Townsend asserts that the cause of China's miseries lie in the fundamental defects that exist in the Chinese people - and goes to great lengths to explain what he believes these defects are.

Townsend claims dishonesty is the most prominent characteristic in the Chinese mentality and gives many examples of being lied to by Chinese employees, coolies, shopkeepers, and government officials, and notes that many other consuls were driven out of the service by this relentless and “aimless lying”, with each lie merely a pretext for another. The other highly salient trait of the Chinese is their “indifference to fellow suffering”. Through a large number of personal and second-hand anecdotes, Townsend argues that the Chinese may be the only people in the world who are close to unable to comprehend the basic human impulses of sympathy or gratitude towards other people. He claims the Chinese struggle to feel empathy toward others and sometimes behave in sadistic and cruel fashions towards one another -
and they view altruistic foreigners as targets to be mercilessly taken advantage of.

Other traits Townsend identifies as being typically Chinese are cowardice, lust for money, lack of a sense of personal hygiene, lack of critical thinking skills, insincerity, and obsession with hollow rites. Townsend believes that these traits are as notable among China's leaders and educated strata as much as they are in the poor masses, and his analysis of historical documents leads him to believe that they are not a recent product of the chaos in 1930’s China, but rather are deeply ingrained traits of China's national character. He concludes that the “outstanding characteristics” of the Chinese people “neither enable other peoples to deal satisfactorily with them, nor enable the Chinese to deal satisfactorily with themselves”.

This thread is a compilation of passages from the book and is not intended to be an uncritical endorsement of the claims Townsend makes 🧵
China is not built for permanence and is always falling apart

REASONING, MAGICAL THINKING AND EVIL WIZARDS IN AFRICA

From Polish Author Ryszard Kapuściński’s Book ‘The Shadow of the Sun’, about Reasoning and Magical Thinking in Africa:

“Suddenly, I heard murmurs, steps, then the rapid patter of bare feet. Then silence once more. I looked around, but at first saw nothing. After a moment, the murmurs and steps again. Then silence again. I began to study the features of the landscape--a clump of thin shrubs, several umbrella-shaped acacias in the distance, some rocks protruding from the ground. At last, I spied a group of eight men, carrying, on a simple stretcher made of branches, another man covered with a piece of cloth. They moved in a peculiar fashion. They did not walk in a straight line, but advanced furtively, creeping in one direction, then in another, maneuvering. They crouched down behind a shrub, looked about cautiously, and then scurried to the next hiding place. They circled, swerved, stopped, and started, as if they were children playing some elaborate game of espionage. I observed their bent, half-naked silhouettes, their nervous gestures, the queer, stealthful behavior, until finally they disappeared for good behind a ridge, and the only thing around me again was the silent, clear, inviolate night.

At dawn we drove on. I asked Sebuya if he knew the name of the people in whose village we had spent the night. "They are called Amba," he said. Then, after a moment, added: "Kabila mbaya" (this means, roughly, "bad people"). He did not want to tell me any more--here, one avoids evil even as a subject of conversation, preferring not to step into that territory, careful not to call the wolf out of the forest. As we drove, I reflected upon the event I had inadvertently witnessed. The nocturnal drama, those puzzling zigzags and twists of the bearers, their haste and anxiety, concealed a mystery to which I had no key. Something was going on here. But what?

People like the Amba and their kinsmen believe profoundly that the world is ruled by supernatural forces. These forces are particular--spirits that have names, spells that can be defined. It is they that inform the course of events and imbue them with meaning, decide our fate, determine everything. For this reason nothing happens by chance; chance simply does not exist. Let us consider this example: Sebuya is driving his car, has an accident, and dies. Why exactly did Sebuya have an accident? That very same day, all over the world, millions of cars reached their destinations safely--but Sebuya had an accident and died. White people will search for various causes. For instance, his brakes malfunctioned. But this kind of thinking leads nowhere, explains nothing. Because why was it precisely Sebuya's brakes that malfunctioned? That very same day, all over the world, millions of cars were on the road and their brakes were working just fine--but Sebuya's were not. Why? White people, whose way of thinking is the height of naivete, will say that Sebuya's brakes malfunctioned because he failed to have them inspected and repaired in good time. But why was it precisely Sebuya who failed to do this? Why, that very same day, a million . . . etc., etc.

We have now established that the white man's way of reasoning is quite unhelpful. But it gets worse! The white man, having determined that the cause of Sebuya's accident and death was bad brakes, prepares a report and closes the case. Closes it!? But it is precisely now that the case should begin! Sebuya died because someone cast a spell on him. This is simple and self-evident. What we do not know, however, is the identity of the perpetrator, and that is what we must now ascertain.

Speaking in the most general terms, a wizard did it. A wizard is a bad man, always acting with evil intent. There are two types of wizards (although our Western languages do not differentiate adequately between them). The first is more dangerous, for he is the devil in human form. The English call him witch”
The witch is a dangerous person. Neither his appearance nor his behavior betray his satanic nature. He does not wear special clothing, he does not have magical instruments. He does not boil potions, does not prepare poisons, does not fall into a trance, and does not perform incantations. He acts by means of the psychic power with which he was born. Malefaction is a congenital trait of his personality. The fact that he does evil and brings misfortune owes nothing to his predilections; it brings him no special pleasure. He simply is that way.

If you are near him, he need only look at you. Sometimes, you will catch someone watching you carefully, piercingly, and at length. It might be a witch, just then casting a spell on you. Still, distance is no obstacle for him. He can cast a spell from one side of Africa to the other, or even farther.

The second type of wizard is gentler, weaker, less demonic. Whereas the witch was born as evil incarnate, the sorcerer (for that is what this weaker sort is called in English) is a career wizard, for whom the casting of spells is a learned profession, a craft, a source of livelihood.

To condemn you to illness or bring some other misfortune down on you, or even kill you, the witch has no need of props or aids. All he need do is direct his infernal, devastating will to wound and annihilate you. Before long, illness will fell you, and death will not be far behind. The sorcerer does not have such destructive powers within himself. To destroy you, he must resort to various magical procedures, mysterious rites, ritual gestures. For example, if you are walking at night through thick bush and lose an eye, it is not because you accidentally impaled yourself on a protruding yet invisible branch. Nothing, after all, happens by accident! It is simply that an enemy of yours wanted to exact vengeance and went to see a sorcerer. The sorcerer fashioned a little clay figure--your likeness--and, with the tip of a juniper branch dipped in hen's blood, gouged out its eye. In this way he issued a verdict on your eye, cast a spell on it. If one night you are wending your way through dense bush and a branch pokes out your eye, it will be proof positive that an enemy of yours wanted to avenge himself, went to see a sorcerer, etc. Now it is up to you to uncover who this enemy is, go visit a sorcerer and in turn order your own revenge.

If Sebuya dies in a car crash, then the most important thing for his family now is to ascertain not whether his brakes were bad, for that is of no consequence, but whether the spells that caused this death were cast by a wizard-devil (witch) or an ordinary wizard-craftsman (sorcerer). It is a critical question, entailing a long and intricate investigation, into which will be pressed various fortune-tellers, elders, medicine men, and so forth. The outcome of this detective work is of utmost significance! If Sebuya died as a result of spells cast by a wizard-devil, then tragedy has befallen the entire family and clan, because a curse like that affects the whole community, and Sebuya's death is merely a foretoken, the tip of the iceberg: there is nothing to do but await more illnesses and deaths. But if Sebuya perished because a wizard-craftsman wanted it thus, then the situation is far less dire. The craftsman can strike and destroy only individuals, isolated targets: the family and the clan can sleep in peace!

Evil is the curse of the world, and that is why I must keep wizards, who are its agents, carriers, and propagators, as far away from myself and my clan as possible; their presence poisons the air, spreads disease, and makes life impossible, turning it into its opposite-death. The wizard, by definition, lives and practices among others, in another village, in another clan or tribe. Our contemporary suspicion of and antipathy for the Other, the Stranger, goes back to the fear our tribal ancestors felt toward the Outsider, seeing him as the carrier of evil, the source of misfortune

AFRICAN CITIES - ON ANGOLA’S CAPITAL

A Short Story from Travel Author Paul Theroux’s Book ‘LAST TRAIN TO ZONA VERDE’ about his travels in Africa and his first impressions of Luanda, 🇦🇴 Angola’s Capital, and of its ‘awfulness’, as he entered it:

“In the afternoon we crossed the Kwanza, a wide river for which the Angolan unit of currency is named. The bridge over the Kwanza had been blown up many times and was being improved again - Chinese design, Chinese laborers, Chinese money.

Though I didn't know it at the time, this was a significant boundary, the river somewhat mystical for Angolans, a setting of myths and folktales and many battles. The land surrounding the Kwanza seemed almost idyllic. But not long after we passed it - thirty miles from the capital - the Luanda blight began.

Soon there were no trees, only shacks and people and bare soil. The blight was not simply the small shacks, cement-block houses, roadside dumps, and stricken villages sitting in a sea of mud; blight was also evident in the new, larger cement structures, unfinished or abandoned or vandalized and sitting in seas of mud.

What appeared to be a modest building boom was in reality cutthroat opportunism, random and shoddily put-together real estate ventures - ugly houses and grotesque skeletal structures projected to be hotels. Why would anyone stay in these hideous buildings surrounded by slum huts? The building boom had been outstripped by the growth of squatter camps, hillsides of shacks.

Buildings were rising, but slums were also growing - the buildings vertically, the slums horizontally. Like the South African pattern of migration, people from rural areas kept coming - the burgeoning shantytowns outstripping any slum improvements, the low mean city of new arrivals visibly sprawling.
In a bus that stopped in traffic for twenty minutes at a time, and with the continual dropping off of passengers, I thought I must be near the center of Luanda, so I got off with some other riders. The place was called Benfica, a district of heavy traffic and ugly buildings, stinking of dust and diesel fumes.

Africa, yes, but it was also a version of Chechnya and North Korea and coastal derelict Brazil, places without a single redeeming feature, places to escape from. As I stood at the roadside, tasting the grit, a small car intending to avoid the clogged traffic sped past, banged into a road divider, flew sideways, and, deformed by the crash, swerved off the road. A man with a bloody face and hands pushed the driver's side door open and, seeing him, bystanders laughed. The bloody-faced man staggered, his arms limp, his mouth agape, like a zombie released from a coffin. He was barefoot. No one went to his aid. He dropped to his knees and howled.

"Idiota," a man next to me said, and spat in the dust.

I became conscious of entering a zone of irrationality. Going deeper into Luanda meant traveling into madness. Everything looked crooked or improvisational, with a vibration of doomsday looming. I would have been happy to get on a bus going in the opposite direction, but I had a dutiful sense of needing to follow through on my plans, continuing north into the insanity.

Many places I'd been in the bush - Tsumkwe or Grootfontein or Springbok - had been described as "nowhere." Yet that was not how I saw them. They were distinctly themselves, isolated though they might be, settlements with a peculiar look-the look of home. But this Benfica was the very embodiment of nowhere, and on the way to nowhere, the twitching decrepitude of urban Africa. Standing next to the sheet-metal shop, the blowing dust, the big trucks and fumes, the noise and the heat, I thought how this was in microcosm the whole of the city experience in most of Africa, though up to now I had avoided facing the fact. And at that point I hadn't yet seen the full extent of Luanda's awfulness.”
From the immensity of the slums, the disrepair of the roads, and the randomness of the building, I could tell that the government was corrupt, predatory, tyrannical, unjust, and utterly uninterested in its people - fearing them for what they saw, hating them for what they said or wrote. Though the regime was guilty of numerous human rights violations, it was not outwardly a politically oppressive place. The police were corrupt, but casually so - Angola was too busy with its commercial extortions to be a police state. It was a government of greed and thievery, determined to exclude anyone else from sharing, and Angolan officialdom had an obsession with controlling information.

I knew of many instances when investigative journalists were arrested for doing their jobs - two of them around the time I was in Luanda. In one case, a print journalist, Koqui Mukuta, was beaten and locked up for reporting on a peaceful demonstration, and twenty of the activists were also arrested. In another example, a radio journalist, Adão Tiago, was jailed for reporting episodes of
"mass fainting," possibly caused by the release of toxic industrial fumes. But the Angolan government does not actively persecute the majority of its people; it is a bureaucracy that impoverishes them by ignoring them, and is indifferent to their destitution and inhuman living conditions.

A society of shakedowns and opportunism is inevitably a society of improvisation. That came across vividly in Luanda: the improvised bridge or road, the improvised hut or shelter, the improvised government, the improvised excuse. Angola was a country without a plan, a free-for-all driven by greed. It was hard to travel through the country and not feel that the place was cursed - not cursed by its history, as observers often said, but cursed by its immense [oil] wealth.

A sense of hopelessness had weighed me down like a fever since I'd stepped across the border weeks before. And with this fever came a vision that had sharpened, coming into greater focus, as if inviting me to look closer. My first reaction was a laugh of disgust at the ugliness around me, like the reek of a latrine that makes you howl or the sight of a dirty bucket of chicken pieces covered with flies. After the moment of helpless hilarity passed, what remained was the vow that I never wanted to see another place like this.

The xenophobia that characterizes Angolan officialdom in the remote provinces, small towns, and coastal cities is the prevailing mood in the capital, where hatred of outsiders seemed intense. Individually Luandans were friendly enough, sometimes crazily so, screeching their meaningless hellos. Nancy Gottlieb, in Benguela, saw this as "happy, laughing, energetic, smiling," but it seemed to me nearer to frenzy. In crowds they pushed and jostled with the mercilessness of a mob, and anyone with a uniform or a badge or any scrap of authority was unambiguously rude or downright menacing.

Friendliness is helpful to a stranger, yet I could manage without it. Being frowned upon or belittled is unpleasant, but not a serious inconvenience - no writer or traveler is a stranger to hostile or unwarranted criticism. But xenophobia of the sort I found in Luanda, and on an official scale, institutionalized alien-hating, was something new to me. It seemed odd to be disliked for being a stranger, and while the foreigners I met in the capital had their own explanations for this behavior (slavery, colonialism, civil war, the class system, tribalism, poverty, the cold-hearted oil companies) and had ways to cope with it, I found it inconvenient to be so conspicuous and developed a general aversion to being despised.”

TIME AND FORGETTING IN AFRICA 🧵

A Short Story from Author Paul Theroux’s Book ‘DARK STAR SAFARI’ about his travels in Africa, on his visit to a School he used to work in as a younger volunteer in Malawi 🇲🇼 established by a charitable, well-meaning older British Couple to educate the local African children. After retiring, they had decided to devote their lives to uplifting the Malawian Community there. Returning decades later, Theroux finds the elderly couple dead and their graves overgrown and abandoned. Very few people in the town remember them. The school itself is still functioning but is falling apart and has nearly been stripped bare. Theroux remarks on the lack of a sense of the past in Africa and how quickly things are forgotten there 🧵
On his retirement from the British civil service in 1962, Sir Martin had come to Nyasaland to run a teachers' college. The frugality that World War II had imposed on the British people had made many of them misers and cheese-parers but had inspired in others an incomparable ingenuity, turning them into inventors and self-helpers. He was of the old breed, an educator, not an evangelist, someone who had come to Africa to serve, to call it home, and to die in the bush.

His wife, Lady Margaret, was the same: sporty, intelligent, resourceful, and able to mend the water-driven stirrup pump that generated their electricity. I would sometimes see her bent over a greasy machine tweed skirt, hair in a bun, argyle socks and muddy sandals, waving a socket wrench and saying, "Crikey!" Sir Martin had died in his nineties, Lady Margaret lived on, and in her widowhood she ran Viphya Secondary School in Malawi. I had always seen these people as admirable, even as role models, vigorous retirees I might emulate in my own later years.

"Lady Margaret, she is dead," an African girl told me at the school. The place was looking rundown in a way that would not have pleased its scrupulous late headmistress. She had passed away two years before, at the age of eighty-seven.

ANGLOFUTURISM AESTHETICS THREAD - “A Better Future IS Possible!” 🧵





Glistening Spires Amidst Pristine Natural Beauty - Industry and Nature in Perfect Harmony

THE HOLE IN ONITSHA

One day, a large hole opens up in the main road into Onitsha, a major city in Nigeria. Instead of simply repairing it, the Nigerians start to adjust to the new reality of the giant hole at the city’s entrance. The Short-Termism quickly becomes established 🧵 The Story in this thread is from Polish Author Ryszard Kapuściński’s Book ‘The Shadow of the Sun’, about his real experiences during his time in Africa. In the Story, the Author has hired a car to drive to Onitsha to visit the city’s famous market when, arriving at the edge of the city, he finds traffic has stopped completely. The consequences of the lack of maintenance have create a bizarre spectacle at the city’s entrance. The Nigerians have adjusted their lives around the giant hole - and do not seem to want to repair it.

AMERICAN MEDICAL STUDENT IN HAITI DESCRIBES WORKING WITH HAITIANS - A Thread 🧵

A Short Thread sharing the Infamous Blog Post of a Medical Student’s Experience in Haiti about ‘How Haitians Think’ 🇭🇹 It has proven hard for me to appreciate exactly how confused the Haitians are about some things. Gail, our program director, explained that she has a lot of trouble with her Haitian office staff because they don't understand the concept of sorting numerically. Not just "they don't want to do it" or "it never occurred to them", but after months and months of attempted explanation they don't understand that sorting alphabetically or numerically is even a thing. Not only has this messed up her office work, but it makes dealing with the Haitian bureaucracy - harrowing at the best of times - positively unbearable.