Letter to Mark Zuckerberg: The Deeper Ramifications and Implications of Selective Social Media Censorship

Exploitation in Africa: French Colonial Tax Larceny in FranceAfrique: Part 1

Côte d'Ivoire, Laurent Gbagbo and Cocoa

Understand that the most benign jungle cat someday will be hungry enough to attack you one day....and if you supply a steady diet of what they like, they will attack you over, and over and over. Beasts are natural predators, bereft of humanity, and thus will always act in a predatory fashion....it is their innate nature. The U.S., France and Great Britain are predatory nations. They built the cumulative wealth of their nations on the backs of genocidal policies that exterminate millions of lives of people of color. Every aspect of these European nations, all the glamor, all the industries, all the powerful militaries, all the nuclear arsenals were not built by resources they have in their own respective nations. No. They had to go somewhere else and acquire it, usually at the point of the bayonet, the barrel of a gun, or the bomb.

I will dissect here, a microcosm of what transpires in Africa, particularly French Africa, or Francophone Afrique as we know it, pertinent to our perceived realities.

The patterns are always the same. Only the names, places and the numbers and identities of millions of deceased human lives vary. The victims are almost always invariably African, and the perpetrators.....white. Be it by proxy, when they arm varying groups and pit them against each other, or when they invade and attack directly, European mercenaries and/or standing armies, obeying the orders of their respective governments, who in turn take their marching orders from the Rothschild international banking conglomerate cabal, are directly responsible for the rampant murder and senseless mayhem that has come to define all of post-independent Africa.....a perverted form of neocolonialism.

As long as the zone/region/nation/country/ has a mineral resource, a food crop, a cash crop, or anything that predatory european societies desire, anything that represents obscene global profits to them, or anything that gives them an advantage over other nations.......then nobody is safe.
Allow me to illustrate using the example of Côte d'Ivoire, formerly known as Ivory Coast. Let's put aside the centuries of genocide, ethnic cleansing invasions and infiltration which, as the name suggests, the greedy hunger for ivory profits (masquerading for centuries, as a need to produce grand pianos and other ivory-related products....check your histories), led France, Great Britain and America to decimate the lives of hundreds of thousands. Let's also temporarily put aside the most under-acknowledged, evil, worst Holocaust in the history of the planet, the insidious Slave Trade which ravished Africa and took the lives of over 100 million Africans worldwide.
Let's just take one Francophone-African nation, and to keep it simple, one commodity. Just one. (Bear in mind, in almost every one of the 54 African countries there are multiple commodities, mineral resources and cash/food crops which capture the dubious attention and unwelcome violence of predatory european nations).

So, Côte d'Ivoire it is then......(formerly known as Ivory Coast, a name that brings the taste of sulphur and brimstone to my palette)

Laurent Gbagbo, 67, is the first former Head of State brought before the I.C.C., the International Court of the Hague, which has been severely, and severally criticized for only arresting, extraditing, and imprisoning African Heads of State, and where he stands accused of masterminding a campaign of violence during the presidential vote standoff in the world’s largest cocoa producer.....yes, let that sink in for a moment. Côte d'Ivoire, (did I mention that I hate the name "Ivory Coast"), is the world's largest cocoa producer.

West Africa collectively supplies two thirds of the world's cocoa crop, with Côte d'Ivoire leading production at 1.65 million tonnes, and nearby Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon and Togo producing an additional 1.55 million tonnes. Côte d'Ivoire overtook Ghana as the world's leading producer of cocoa beans in 1978.

The report: "Global Chocolate, Cocoa Beans, Lecithin, Sugar and Vanilla Market By Market Share, Trade, Prices, Geography Trend and Forecast (2011-2016)" analyzes the chocolate market by products, sales category, and geography and studies the major market drivers, restraints, and opportunities for the chocolate market in North America, Europe, and Asia. The global chocolate market is expected to grow from $83.2 billion in 2010.to $98.3 billion in 2016 at an estimated CAGR of 2.7% from 2011 to 2016.

Mars, Incorporated, is an American global manufacturer of confectionery, pet food, and other food products with US$ 33 billion in annual sales in 2015, and is ranked as the 6th largest privately held company in the United States by Forbes. Mars, Inc. alone profits to the tune of $33 Billion every year......(does Congolese Coltan➡️American precision bombing manufacturers, avionics, smart phone technology, and computers ring a bell, anyone? Yes, I could go on and on, country by country, mineral resource by mineral resource, invasion by invasion, but let's keep it simple).

Slave traders are trafficking boys ranging from the age of 12 to 16 from their home countries and are selling them to cocoa farmers in Cote d'Ivoire. They work on small farms across the country, harvesting the cocoa beans day and night, under inhumane conditions. Most of the boys come from neighboring Mali, where agents hang around bus stations looking for children that are alone or are begging for food. They lure the kids to travel to Cote d'Ivoire with them, and then the traffickers sell the children to farmers in need of cheap labor (taken from Raghavan, "Lured...").

There are about 600,000 cocoa farms in Cote d'Ivoire (Child Labor Coalition). Estimates of the number of children forced to work as slaves on these farms are as high as 15,000. In addition to the very illegality of trafficking and hiring children workers, the implicated cocoa farmers subject the children to inhuman living conditions. Besides overworking them, the farmers do not pay the children nor feed them properly-often times they are allowed to eat corn paste as their only meal. The denigration also includes locking the children up at night to prevent escape.

There was an attempt by a few concerned U.S. Senators to add an amendment to the 2001 Agricultural Appropriations bill that would require chocolate products to carry the label confirming that slaves were not used in cocoa production. However, the chocolate industry protested that the action would cause consumers to boycott the chocolate products, which would then hurt the cocoa producers even more. The bill never reached the House-Senate conference committee though, as the chocolate industry joined together to "take action" regarding eliminating child labor on cocoa farms to preclude official government action (taken from Chatterjee, "House...").

So what are we talking about here? A nearly $100 billion a year industry. Is anyone surprised that the Rothschild banking cartel, American and French military footprints are all over this? Does it really surprise anyone that other acquiescent european nations silently fall in line, as long as they get crumbs off the table of this lucrative enterprise? Is it surprising that the profits of this trade are used to destabilize the democratically-elected governments that govern places such as this in Africa, used to purchase weapons of war, and mobilized to encourage the mass scale massacres of African against African? Well, it shouldn't surprise you...like I said, they are beasts of burden, predators, and lack human conscience or empathy.

In the 1970s and 1980s Côte d'Ivoire was praised for its “Ivorian miracle’’ in avoiding the chaos that plagued the rest of Africa, the question is: what on earth went wrong? The reasons for the "forked-tongue" praise will soon be abundantly clear. In reality, the mess in Côte d'Ivoire today goes far beyond one man. It dates from the era when the world turned a blind eye to corrupt, unrepresentative, dictatorial regimes; when stability counted more than transparency; when the unseen hands of evil men in positions of immense power in Tel Aviv, New York and Paris were responsible for hundreds of thousands of African deaths.....as it still does today.

The answer has its roots in the country’s colonial past and, most importantly, its development after the supposed end of French rule. When the “wind of change” blew through Africa ending European power in the 1950s and 1960s, Paris was mealy-mouthed in granting independence to any of its previous colonies (the attached video will explain why). Anxious to retain ties, it gave its former territories a choice when setting them “free”: either accept, after independence, continued de facto French control with Paris-appointed administrators still in place and France still profiting, or be cut adrift.

Guinea went for the latter option and, many would argue, is still paying the price for the economic disaster heaped upon it for what France regard as an insufferable snub.

Ivory Coast went the other way, thanks, almost entirely, to the efforts of its compliant Francophile political leader, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the sort of dictator many western nations dream of....or what we refer to as a "coon", a "Negropean"...a bootlicking traitor to his own people.

On independence in 1960, he did economically exactly what he was told, like a toadie, allowing French companies to benefit immensely from the country’s burgeoning cocoa and coffee sectors. And diplomatically he could be relied on to do the West’s bidding, holding the line in the Cold War by, for example, helping conspirators who ousted Kwame Nkrumah from power in neighbouring Ghana when he, Nkrumah, went off-message.

[I digress briefly to insert another historical note. In neighboring Burkina Faso, meaning ‘Land of Honourable/Incorruptible Men’, previously known as the Republic of Upper Volta, another colonial name I detest, Africa's Che Guevara' President Thomas Sankara, a determined pan-Africanist, whose foreign policies were largely centred on anti-imperialism was assassinated, by former leader Blaise Compaore (now wanted in Burkina Faso), in 1987, some say on behalf of the French government. His government had spurned foreign aid, and tried to stamp out the influence of the Rothschild-controlled International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.), and the World Bank in the country by adopting debt reduction policies and nationalising all land and mineral wealth. After the killing, Blaise Compaore was given sanctuary in Côte d'Ivoire by President Félix Houphouët-Boigny.....can you connect the dots now?]

Okay, now back to the original thread......

For his loyalty to Paris, Houphouët-Boigny was repaid handsomely. France happily accepted one-party rule in Ivory Coast, as long as Houphouët-Boigny ran that party, and it tolerated his Big Man affectations.....there were no screams in Paris of "dictatorship"...or an undemocratic fascism, as long a their pilfered profits were being nicely siphoned, without pesky obstruction.
Houphouët-Boigny frittered away billions on a tropical 1970s Versailles, transforming the tumbleweed town, dusty nothing-of-a-place where he was born, Yamoussoukro, into a brand new capital city. The scale both of the project and its folly really must be seen to be believed. The largest church in the world, the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, was designed to outdo St Peter’s in Rome, looming skywards out of the tropical heat like some sort of messianic architect’s fantasy. Nearby, six-lane highways cut through the same jungle, connecting nothing to nowhere.

I once took a photograph of myself walking in the fast lane.....it was quite safe as there was no traffic.

Houphouët-Boigny’s obsession with Mother France meant he copied almost everything. The city has rugby pitches, although they are seldom used. The one I visited had elephant grass reaching up almost to the crossbar between the posts. The Grandes Écoles of France were replicated in clearings hacked out of the bush near Yamoussoukro, supposedly to produce a new generation of technocrats, administrators and functionaries. In reality, they produced little except for a perpetual headache for caretakers struggling, in vain, to keep at bay tropical rain damage, rust and decay.
The vanity did not end when Houphouët-Boigny died in 1993. His body was laid to rest, as he had instructed, in a mausoleum surrounded by a moat guarded by large crocodiles. If only the same attention to detail had been paid to his political legacy.

Without any heir-apparent, and with a body politic atrophied after so many years of one-man rule, succession became a bitter business. The first coup came in 1999.

Cocoa, the agricultural product that had underwritten the country’s economic growth and attracted millions of foreign workers, suffered a collapse and with it the national economy. Foreigners became an easy target for small-minded politicians playing the race card. Suddenly, Ivorian-ness became an issue and foreigners were explicitly banned from running for election. Uh-oh!!!!! France's radar was activated, and by extension, America's as well.....

Under Houphouët-Boigny, Alassane Ouattara, a politician from the north, home of many itinerant workers, was enough of an Ivorian to serve as Prime Minister. In the xenophobia of the late 1990s, he was not.
Ivory Coast followed the route of political chaos made all too familiar by its war-torn neighbours in West Africa: economic collapse, military takeover, disputed elections and, ultimately, Civil war.

It broke out in September 2002 when soldiers and people in the north "rose" (or rather, were armed, and instigated at the behest of foreign powers aghast at, and against, the rule of Laurent Gbagbo who, with great irony given the current situation, had come to power after an election victory his rival had refused to recognize. The same pattern repeats itself in almost all the Civil wars in every country in Africa. Certain tribes are sought out, and armed, encouraged to "rebel" against the prevailing authority that does not co-operate with western nations.

The population of Côte d'Ivoire is ethnically diverse. More than sixty indigenous ethnic groups are often cited, although this number may be reduced to seven clusters of ethnic groups by classifying small units together on the basis of common cultural and historical characteristics. These may be reduced to four major cultural regions, the East Atlantic (primarily Akan), West Atlantic (primarily Kru), Voltaic, and Mandé, differentiated in terms of environment, economic activity, language, and overall cultural characteristics.

Although not as cataclysmic as the chaos in Liberia, the war rumbled on, doing irreparable damage to the Ivory Coast’s economy and standing. Journalists based in Abidjan to cover West Africa, in part because it provided the best coffee, pastries and life support in the region, upped and left. The African Investment Bank, supposedly the underwriter of development in the continent, had to move from Abidjan because of the security situation. Gbagbo clung to power, establishing his reputation for diplomatic stonewalling and manipulation.

“They called him the baker because, figuratively speaking, he would blind you with clouds of flour and bend you to his will,’’ a top UN diplomat said. “It was a worthy name. In all my years of dealing with difficult, manipulative negotiators, I have never met his equal.’’

The conflict, in effect, split the country in two, with Gbagbo loyalists holding the coast and the south, while rebels held the north, French troops occasionally wedged in between. Any chance of regaining Paris backing was blown by Gbagbo in 2004 when his Air force bombed a French military position in the de facto rebel capital of Bouaké, killing nine French personnel. Retribution was swift, but the ramifications serious. The real question remains unanswered. What was a French military camp doing amidst the rebels?

Within hours French warplanes had destroyed much of Gbagbo’s air force but, in retaliation, Gbagbo supporters attacked any white person found on the streets of Abidjan and in their zone of control.

Attempts at peace-building drew in luminaries such as Didier Drogba, the Ivorian footballer who plays for Chelsea. In 2007, Drogba suggested, and took part in, a match in Bouaké involving the national team, Les Éléphants, as a gesture of reconciliation between the two halves of the country.
It worked and is widely credited with helping to lead to a slow (made all the slower by the baker’s manipulations) move towards elections intended to end the civil war for good. Delayed for five years, they finally took place and resulted in a 54 per cent to 46 per cent victory for Ouattara over Gbagbo, a result accepted by almost everyone except the incumbent and his supporters.

Emboldened by international support for their man, Ouattara’s supporters launched attacks far into Abidjan, forcing Gbagbo deep inside his bunker.
Eventually captured and evicted in favour of his rival, current President Alassane Ouattara, thanks to a plot led by former colonial ruler France, Gbagbo was arrested by backers of Alassane Ouattara, supported by French Forces of "Operation Unicorn". In November 2011, he was extradited to the International Criminal Court, becoming the first African Head of State to be taken into the court's custody.

As we speak, the supply of Cocoa from Côte d'Ivoire continues smoothly, and unencumbered.....under new whipping boy, President Alassane Ouattara.

#EyesWideShut 🔛 #EyesWideOpen....there can only be one. 😇

* [In the interests of full disclosure, I have taken the liberty of amalgamating my own comments and narrative and added certain select passages taken from a Tim Butcher article in The Telegraph].

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　黒人浪人